Actually Liking Bonus Heroes and Vaulting

AtlasAxe

I'll start by saying since the death of cupcakes, I've moved from getting an Asgard a season to VIP with an occasional Logan's. The changes in rewards and my roster growth have made roughly F2P an option, and there is not really the incentive for me to go all out. I have never bought a Stark and am not a whale. I have 21 4* champed, so a reasonably strong roster.

This might be somewhat contrary to the general feelings I've seen out there, but I actually like vaulting and the bonus heroes, at least for 4*. This may be in part due to my current roster development. Here's what I see:

1. New 4* at a rate of 2/season, or 2 per 5 week period. That means a new character will cycle out after about 30 weeks
2. I can get enough ISO from play to champ a 4* about once per week without much of a stretch. Given I have to occasionally replant the 2* farm, I can call it 4 per 5 week period.
3. Limiting to 12 recent characters means it is highly likely I will be able to cover those characters in less than the 30 weeks.

Put it all together and it means that by the time Coulson and Mordo are ready to leave, any LT, classic or latest, is likely to give me something i need, and most or all of those characters will be champed. In the meanwhile, I can manage the flow of covers while I champ what is ready through some hoarding.

Just not sure what's not to like about this.

JHawkInc

Go read the Bonus Heroes thread. There are pages and pages and pages and pages of all of the problems with Vaulting. (nothing wrong with Bonus Heroes, but vaulting is literally antithesis to the core design of the collecting nature of the game)

vinsensual

Atlas Axe wrote:

This may be in part due to my current roster development.

Not everyone has 21 4 stars champed. If you read the bonus heroes thread, there's people who are in your position or higher, and they've explained that the current system will only have you treading water.

DFiPL

I have 10 4* champions.

I'm kinda in the middle. I like the idea of Bonus Heroes (though so far the only ones I've gotten have been 3* from standard tokens, 2 or 3 of those), but I'm on the fence about the vaulting. On the one hand, Cyclops, Iceman, Kingpin, PunMax, and Winter Soldier are all 4* I'd like to have maxed/championed, but that isn't happening soon with this change.

On the other hand? This is probably the best chance I'm going to have to cover Peggy anytime soon. I've gotten a couple covers for her from LTs since the new system, bringing her from 3 to 5; I just wish I was going to have more time so I'd be confident of getting her into double digits.

And Peggy is the 4* I want to champion above all the others. So I guess my ultimate feeling on Bonus Heroes and vaulting depends on whether I get there before she exits tokens, or at least whether they take a different approach on vaulting so I still have a reasonable path even if she isn't covered a month from now.

Magic

I am not paying player but still I can't see how just VIP can allow you to champion a 4* a week. This sounds hard to believe as it would require 55k ISO per day (more or less). One every 2 weeks is closer to reality for most players.

Still - you will be able to champion all 12 in time they rotate - sure (enjoy your championed Agent Venom). However you will not get them to max championed level (370) so they will never help you compete against developed 5* rosters. As somebody said - threading water. You get a new champion and a new champion and a new champion and you never go anywhere with the roster.

Wumpushunter

Vaulting has caused me to temporarily suspend play. I look at PVP and I face red hulk, ice man and the character that is currently in favor for the event. How can I ever face those 2 with the likes of Riri Williams and Agent Venom? If there can not be a somewhat balanced field of play then I do not wish to play. The entire game is competition for leader boards and now the whales and those with good four star champ roster will always defeat the new people.

I am saddened that they have unstickied the topic for vaulting, it seems they are trying to make people forget about it. Out of sight out of mind.

JHawkInc

Wumpushunter wrote:

I am saddened that they have unstickied the topic for vaulting, it seems they are trying to make people forget about it. Out of sight out of mind.

When they sticky something, it's on a timer, then it automatically unstickies and becomes a regular thread. They probably didn't do anything to actively make people stop talking about it, but they didn't re-sticky it to promote continued discussion, either.

Crowl

Atlas Axe wrote:

1. New 4* at a rate of 2/season, or 2 per 5 week period. That means a new character will cycle out after about 30 weeks
2. I can get enough ISO from play to champ a 4* about once per week without much of a stretch. Given I have to occasionally replant the 2* farm, I can call it 4 per 5 week period.
3. Limiting to 12 recent characters means it is highly likely I will be able to cover those characters in less than the 30 weeks.

Put it all together and it means that by the time Coulson and Mordo are ready to leave, any LT, classic or latest, is likely to give me something i need, and most or all of those characters will be champed. In the meanwhile, I can manage the flow of covers while I champ what is ready through some hoarding.

Just not sure what's not to like about this.

I have a slightly more developed roster than yours and the obvious drawbacks to the system for me would be:

Higher champion levels (and rewards) basically grind to a halt and will be replaced with less valuable earlier ones, might make your somewhat optimistic once per week claim trickier.

More covers will end up being wasted, with a much smaller pool to spread out covers you will either have to hoard more or sell more covers as you max-cover more than one character at the same time, you will also be more likely to get on streaks that lead to lopsided (0/0/5 etc) characters who then waste more covers.

You are at the mercy of the quality of the new releases, we all like characters like a Peggy, Medusa etc. but it is much harder to just leave the lesser characters at a crash-completeable level if they are one of the few that you will be drawing.

SleepingKoala

Bonus heroes sure, but the only good thing about vaulting is that it discourages one from playing this game and thus frees time to spend on other activities (I have personally spent this past week on the open beta of Eternal Card Game).

With progress on 12 champs and 20 or so other 4* stagnating, there's very little incentive to grind for those CP.

AtlasAxe

1. I have seen the main thread. In fact, that means this thread will get shut down in 3...2...1...

2. The combination of vaulting and bonus heroes increases individual character odds. Considering only 4*, under old LTs, if we had the same 43 regular characters we have now, you would have had a 1.97% chance (85%/43) of getting a character you wanted. So now there is an ~86% (6/7) chance of a 4* in an LT, which means a 7.1% chance of an individual new 4*. Add to that, there is now an 4.3% (86%/20) chance of getting a specific 4* character of your choosing, or 2.15% chance each for 2 characters. Instead of old characters being random, you pick them. If you can get LTs, 4* transition will be faster, and ISO will be the limit.

3. The comic collector analogy is an apt one. If you go to a comic store, you can get anything new you want. If you want a specific old comic you have to be lucky. Bonus heroes are like being on a list of people the store has to call when they get a particular item. If you want champ levels for Rhulk, set him as a bonus. (I am actually doing this specifically at the 3* level with Storm, my highest 3*). Want Ice and Rhulk because you don't have them? Set them and you will have a higher chance of getting them than you did before. Want to build a broad roster? Bonus hero a pair at a time and get a few covers, and you will get there faster than before, with less wastage.

4. By and large the newer characters are pretty darned good. Yeah, you can point to clunkers like Riri and Agent Venom, and maybe Mordo. But the other 9 are pretty decent (Gwenpool is borderline for some, but she's good in PVE). D3 also seems to be fixing clunkers. The improvements to Wasp pull her out of the bad character bin, for example.

5. I had to hoard some before. I will have to hoard some now. Really not much change there. ISO will always be the limit.

6. If you are a 4* player, ISO shouldn't be too hard to come by. PVE/DDQ, (provided no gauntlet or other weird PVE) give a lot. 3* all champed and 2* farm helps a lot getting ISO. Play the lightning rounds. I'm close to that 55k/day, but I'm not a counter. I do know I've champed 3 since Feb 16 and will have another two champed shortly. Then I will have to refresh my 2* farm, so will take a breather.

7. Don't forget covers from PVP and PVE progression, and event vaults. Those don't change, and were a large source of covers for my 4* transition. They were more reliable than LTs for most of my transition.

8. I think the one area where vaulting is going make challenges is for 3* transitioners. I think there was no reason to vault the 3*, and it hurts that group. That should be a concern to all of us as it means the upcoming player base may shrink.

All this does is force us to change strategy. Working the new odds, you should be able to get any specific thing you want faster, if LTs are your primary source.

Fightmastermpq

JHawkInc wrote:

Go read the Bonus Heroes thread. There are pages and pages and pages and pages of all of the problems with Vaulting. (nothing wrong with Bonus Heroes, but vaulting is literally antithesis to the core design of the collecting nature of the game)

When I started there were something like twenty 3* characters, and I found collecting them all to be overwhelming, and also frustrating having them sit on my roster useless until I was able to cover them. I can only imagine the struggle of players trying to get just 1 of the 43 current 4*s to a usable level. There comes a point where there are so many characters that collecting them all interferes with the ability to actually use them in the game.

GurlBYE

That's great to hear but people who had a wealth of 4 champs in the stable already aren't too adversely effected. THe biggest lost is higher leveled champ rewards, which slows your 5 star trip depending on how along you were.

The brunt of the effect is on people transitioning who avoided new characters and focused on the well covered old 4's they had been collecting for months.

firethorne

Problem in a nutshell: Since it began, I've added zero champion levels to my existing 4* champs. Sure, I've made some progress on the new crop. My Wasp and Gwenpool can probably get past their Titan mach now. And if you want to argue that there is some merit to tilting the odds more toward the new, I might agree with some of the reasoning. But, if your hand is swollen, the solution usually isn't to amputate the entire arm. Yet, this is exactly what they've done. They felt too many draws were old characters, so they got rid of them entirely.

smkspy

Bonus heroes are fun, when they drop...problem is them dropping. I've actually gotten more BH from the mandatory standard token 3 star than the regular BH in elite, heroic, and LT.

Likewise the favorite system is fun until you figure out that it breaks down once you select more than one character from each tier.

Finally, yeah, vaulting works great for use people with 10+ champed 4s, but then it hurts so many that aren't us. And then I look at my poor 6 cover WS or 4 cover Drax. It's pretty pointless to favor those guys when bonus heroes are not a dependable system for building up vaulted characters.

mpqr7

The real challenge is that if you have no 4* with 13 covers yet and you want to get some, then you pretty much need to pick from the Latest 12 and hope that one of them is very good. Because otherwise you won't win enough covers to be able to champion them soon, and you'll probably get a lot of dupes, which is sad when you get them only from BHs.

Matt Murdock

Everyone just stop saying it works great for this person or this type of player. You don't need to play the victim. Players from all walks have spoken out against this.

-noobs: probably makes transitioning easier, but even so, at any given time the majority of the top tier characters are vaulted. This means they have to wait for a new top tier to come along, and hope it stands up to the old one when they're boosted in the same week. Also, who knows, maybe they were drawn to this game by spiderman, and now are forced to work on Riri, Agent Venom, Medusa, etc (characters they may not have even heard of before this), with little hope of getting their beloved characters. Also collecting/rostering all the characters in order to complete DDQ, essentials, etc will be difficult. Granted, it was difficult before. But now it will take significantly longer to target the characters one by one.
-transitioners: while this may make their progress into the 4* tier slightly quicker from now on, it also invalidates all the effort they put into covering those old characters. Some of their favorite characters may have been pretty close, but now they are forced to decide which two are really worth it, and give up on the rest of their efforts for the past year or more.
-mid to late 4* players: this change causes champ levels on all their top tier characters, with the exception of two (and they most certainly have more than two top-tiers that are now vaulted), to grind to a halt. This slows their progress in the 4* tier, but also invalidates what is most likely a fairly large investment into lower tier characters. In fact, you could argue that vaulting has entirely destroyed the late 4* game. If people don't already have a set of 10 or so lv370 4s, they never will, except by whaling the hell out of new characters. Heck, a reasonable goal was to have a good set of 10 4*s around 300-330. Well, now you are limited by how many covers you can get while they're new.
-5* players: mostly the same as above. They had hoped to get a set of high level 4s to be able to use with their 5* roster, but in this case they needed to get those levels to even make the 4*s worthwhile. Otherwise, they will not be able to beat their usual opponents with their 4*s, and thus are pigeonholed into using only their 5*s, which in all likelihood represents a very small portion of the roster they have spent years building up. I don't know about you, but I would hate being forced into such roster restrictions. To the point where I'd get bored and quit. Unfortunately this may become a very real problem for me shortly.
-super whales: okay, to be honest this is the group least negatively affected by this change. They should be getting all the 4*s to 370 fairly quickly, and all their vaulted characters are likely at 370 as well. In fact they probably had duplicates. That's the only negative effect I can think of. They probably had quite a bit of resources invested in duplicates, and now that will go to waste. However, in terms of 4* strength they really have no concerns. In any case there are *very* few of these, so vaulting negatively affects 99% of the player base in some way.

So stop playing the victim, and look outside your own bubble.

broll

smkspy wrote:

Bonus heroes are fun, when they drop...problem is them dropping. I've actually gotten more BH from the mandatory standard token 3 star than the regular BH in elite, heroic, and LT.

My luck has been abysmal in all categories. I've gotten 1 4* and 1 5* from 72 CP pulls (almost half the advertised 5%). I've gotten 2 3*s from LT/HT, not sure how many total pulls. I've gotten 0 from STs.

ZootSax

broll wrote:

smkspy wrote:

Bonus heroes are fun, when they drop...problem is them dropping. I've actually gotten more BH from the mandatory standard token 3 star than the regular BH in elite, heroic, and LT.

My luck has been abysmal in all categories. I've gotten 1 4* and 1 5* from 72 CP pulls (almost half the advertised 5%). I've gotten 2 3*s from LT/HT, not sure how many total pulls. I've gotten 0 from STs.

Yeah, I'm in a similar boat. I'll probably really enjoy it once my luck normalizes, but so far I've had zero bonus heroes from all sources. (I had an image of Rocket & Groot cover flash up after I pulled a Moonstone from a heroic token, but no actual covers were rewarded...nor should they have been, as R&G wasn't favorited, but it was really odd to see...).

Vaulting will likely keep me with quite a few 4* characters in the 9-11 cover range (I have 7-8 around there, but none of them are currently out of the vault), but I guess the increased draws of newer 4*'s will let me have a larger group of 4*'s to supplement my champed 3*'s, so it may not be as negative as it could be. I'll just not be a 4* player for quite some time, if ever.