Bonus Heroes 2.0

WelcomeDeath

So, bonus heroes dropped today, great feature, but it was met with a lot of anger. I believe this is mostly due to forced vaulting of characters, as players saw many characters they had already sunk iso into vanish from stores. You can get them as bonus heroes still, yes. However, using 4s as an example...if you pick just one, your rate of drops in the legendary store double from what it would have been with all 42 in the pool. If you pick two, it goes to about the same as before for those 2. 3 or more and your rates go down. 3s are more forgiving, and the rates on 5s are such a small difference its almost nil. Players want to cover who they want, and bonus heroes was a step in that direction. Furthermore, dilution was very real and needed to be addressed in general.

As stated above, players want to cover their favorites, and likely more than one at a time at a reasonable rate. Many want to "catch 'em all". The devs stated that part of their goal in this system was to make newer characters more prominent, which is understandable because that seems to be what makes them money, and youve got to pay the bills. I propose a compromise.

Keep the latest 12 4s in all stores, mandatory. They get rotated out as needed, same with the 3s. This allows the newer characters to be more prominent. However, set the stores up to house x amount of characters, the mandated list plus a certain amount of characters the player decides they want. This is different from the current vaulting because they would all go into the same pool. So for the LT store, for example, say it's a 20 person max. 12 mandatory plus 8 the players choose. Thatd be a rate of 4.25% for all 20. With the current bonus hero system its 7.08% for latests and it would be a rate of 0.53% effectively if you picked 8 older 4s as favorites. The flat 4.25% smooths it out and lets players choose who they really want while keeping newer ones in there. You could do the same with 5s. 3 mandatory in latests and x amount in classics. 3 at 5% 5 at 3%, 4 at 3.75%, whatever makes the most sense. This would help dilution much more in this tier and would be a real difference compared to a 0.75% increase on all 5s combined that you set as favorites. Heroics and event tokens could function the same, with rates appropriate for their stores.

With this set up, it would not be necessary to create a new UI, just use favorites to let players pick who they want in their stores, lock out any newest ones. This would also put most stores at about what they were a year ago as far as drop rates. It would mean static rates, permanently, in all stores, and no need for further systems to address dilution, which would otherwise increase forever with every new release.

Who does this help? It helps the devs by allowing new characters to remain features. It would help anyone transitioning to any rarity enjoy rates like vets had a year ago. It would help established whales by still allowing them to shut off anyone other than most recent they have max champed. It would also help newer whales that will want to cover/champ/max champ older cĺharacters to get to the level of older whales without having to spend even more insane rates to cover all the vaulted characters one by one. It would help softcappers by allowing them to keep everyone at the same level while maintaining progress by turning characters off and on. It would help pvp players by allowing them to build up teams much quicker, instead of one at a time from the older ones or having to pick the latest, even if they dont necessarily compliment each other. Progress would feel like progress again, rather than months and months of waiting and hoarding in the hopes that your hoard pays off somehow. I really believe this system would be far better for everyone involved.