Vintage Heroic Packs (3/30/17)

Frustrated1

No 2 star? Fine.

Mostly 2 star? Completely insulting.

ClydeFrog76

pheregas wrote:

It's nonsense like this that led me to not renew my VIP.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt and renewed a couple of days ago.

Won't be happening again unless they actually fix this mess.

Zeln

3 to 4 transitioner here

I've benefitted from the vaulting due to just having got to 13/13 with my peggy and had a lot of luck getting her covers. At the same time, 7 gwenpool covers went to waste.

While before the transition was slow, the change has given me 1 well positioned 4* and... that's pretty much it. The rest of my 4 stars are stale.

I don't see how this change helps me, except in a few months when newer players don't have the 4 stars for the events either.

I take part in every survey, and my response to would you recommend pad to a friend had trended upward (it had tanked after boss rush) a little but the changes of late have tanked it once again.

Uthgarprime

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, lolololololololololololol.
This is about what I expected. Lets screw lots of people and then try to get money out of it.
I have a ton of money I could spend on any game. This game will not be getting any of it. It still feeds my collection addiction, but I sure don't need to spend on it.
I so want to support this game, but for everything they do to help the players, its like they feel the need to stab them in the kidney too.
The whole vaulting thing was all about money and whales.
First the whales have an easier time max championing the newest 4*. They also get special snow flake status since no one else will get a max champioined 4* for years. Double bonus for the whales.
For the record I have no animosity against whales, my animosity is against the constant insults from the devs that they act like are helping us.

Hadronic

I got a couple of ideas to attempt to fix everything:


Option 1 (The Draft)
Gonna start off with something most will probably disagree with but lets get rid of bonus heroes. In the past few weeks since it was implemented i have gained maybe a dozen or so extra 3* and one bonus 4*. It just doesn't trigger enough to do what its designed for.

Now I like the idea of giving the player choice on which characters to level, but I think they went about it wrong. They went for total control and decided to limit how often you benefit from it to almost nothing. My approach gives you just a little bit of control but you benefit from it on every token. Instead when you open a token it should just generate multiple covers (same rarity, no duplicates) and the player selects one. I'm thinking 3 is a good amount, but more would work.

How you split the selections up could be creative. Currently they seem to like the latest/vintage angle so I will go with that in the example.

One selection could be a latest character
The other two selections would be vintage

PROS

Players that want to focus on new characters still can Players that still have vintage characters they want to cover can Reduces the amount of unused covers (Does not eliminate the problem, but addresses it) Give the player the option to purchase the other covers. (Price TBD, businesses like when you add in potential money making things)

CONS

5% less covers cause I sacrificed bonus heroes for something better

Option 2 (Boatloads of new Tokens)
Put in tons of new tokens that have very focused pulls for specific franchises and sell them all separately, in addition to allowing people to win them in game (details to be worked out). Examples include

Spider verse tokens (It has every spiderman related character in it and nothing else, 3* and up) Xmen tokens Guardians tokens Team IronMan tokens Team Cap tokens Villain tokens Avenger tokens

This seems like the type of thing that certain fans would buy a lot of. I know I personally have a buddy obsessed with spiderman and if he could buy just the spiderman related characters and nothing else, he probably would.
Maybe change the elite token so that it can be used to open any of the above stores.


Option 3 (?????)
Profit!

DalekGAF

smkspy

pheregas wrote:

It's nonsense like this that led me to not renew my VIP.

All you guys had to do was rotate the vaulted characters into tokens every season. 50% newest, 50% vintage. That's it, 24 4*s in each pack. Dilution addressed, problem solved. Everybody happy.

But no. We get another RnG driven cash grab.

Nope. Not a fan.

Yeah, this seems like the easiest solution to not only dilution but oversaturation that the latest twelve is already experiencing. I look at my progress and that of the latest twelve I have 8 characters already 10-to-maxed cover. The remaining 4 are respectively 9, 8, 7, and 5 (Coulson) covers. If my carol wasn't at 7 covers, I'd probably start hoarding.

That's in just a month for a above average player. Hardcore players must be even worse.

Jexman

This is a horrible "solution". Not spending any money until there's a more reasonable path to champing older 4 stars. I guess I'll keep playing for now but the current setup just means that I'm again pulling wasted covers, e.g. my 6th Wasp blue when I only have 3 in her other 2 colors together. What a drag.

zulux21

Brigby wrote:

Hi Everyone. I want to inform you all that this is not necessarily the final iteration nor is it necessarily the only solution that will be presented.

Data evaluation is needed in order to determine how the store affects the entirety of the game and its players before being able to make adjustments, or even presenting an entirely new idea. We know it's not something that can be immediately ascertained, and I apologize for the delay, but it really is something that the developers will monitor and factor into whatever the eventual permanent solution may be.

while I fully understand this is just a trial from you guys...
2* should not be involved in any solution you come up with period.
the idea of having 2* involved should have been the first thing the developers thought was a dumb idea.

none of the 2* are vaulted, they shouldn't be anywhere near a vault solution.

if you were dead set on a HP based vault then you should have just made it a 3+4 star vault and charged a decent chunk of HP per pull.

Really though while I like the vaulting personally, I understand people's frustrations, and really don't get what is such a big problem to fix.

you get enough 3* from elite tokens and deadpool tokens ect that they aren't really needed to be vaulted even if we continue to get one a month from here on out. so undo their vault, it's not really needed. if you are deadset on having some 3* vaulted, why not only apply the vaulting to elite tokens?

as for 4* that was needed (badly as it was becoming impossible to cover characters if you played more casually), but what is so hard about just making a vintage classics pack that costs 20 cp like the current classics, that merely contains all of the vaulted 4* and the same chance of a 5*.

dilution will still be a huge issue with that vault, but people who want a chance to get all of the characters could still take their chances and use the nice new bonus hero system you put in place to help fill in gaps.

it's a far simpler solution that what ever the heck you guys are trying, and it wouldn't require any major testing as it's the same system that was in place forever.

why make it more complicated then it needs to be.

either way, I hope there are other steps to come, as if I wanted to get a bunch of vaulted characters I know I wouldn't support this one.

btw still thanks for the bonus hero system that one was still a good addition.

carrion_pigeons

Okay, seriously. This is exactly the sort of thing we were looking to prevent when we were begging for dialogue with the devs. This feature is a product of complete tone-deafness on the part of one side of that fence, as a direct result of choosing to implement it before actually looking for a single ounce of feedback.

Changes that make the game feel unfair are bad for player morale. This is a bad thing...right? Could you guys at least try to disguise your money-grubbing enough so that people can pretend like they're playing a game for their own sake and not for yours?

When you just get done draining away all the good will left in the playerbase, you have to do something to restore it. This does not do that. This is the worst of all possible worlds. Now the people who wanted to keep leveling their highest 4*s get to buy their way into them, which they will do, thereby permanently cementing their position at the top of the 4* tier, regardless of how the meta changes. Now all the supposed benefits of reducing RNG and speeding up progression to 4* champs is just so much ashes in the mouths of newer players. Now CP is even more useless for even longer in the progression path, and HP makes a big jump, meaning that if someone wants to buy their way into 4* play, they'll be doing it with all older characters, completely destroying any chance of the metagame avolving.

Nothing about this change makes anything better. You made a change and instead of going "oh hey, this change has flaws; I wonder if we can fix the flaws by analyzing our design and observing emergent behavior" you instead went "oh hey, this change has detractors. I wonder if we can shut up the detractors by giving them a tiny fraction of what they used to have, without addressing any of the design flaws that actually has them complaining. Maybe they'll throw some more money at the screen if we do".

Nick441234

Brigby wrote:

Hi Everyone. I want to inform you all that this is not necessarily the final iteration nor is it necessarily the only solution that will be presented.

Data evaluation is needed in order to determine how the store affects the entirety of the game and its players before being able to make adjustments, or even presenting an entirely new idea. We know it's not something that can be immediately ascertained, and I apologize for the delay, but it really is something that the developers will monitor and factor into whatever the eventual permanent solution may be.

Oh, c'mon Brigby. We aren't stupid here. This is no dig at you as you come across as a stand up guy but this store has been created to milk the whales. 100%, no doubt whatsoever, to milk the whales. Sure it might become a store like the heroics store in time but for now its designed to milk the whales and leave everyone else with 3 quarters of a roster that is largely useless.

WEBGAS

Yoik

If this is being instigated as a bridge between the vaulting of the 3 and 4 stars and the general uproar on how it has effected people then why are there 2 stars in there? Take the 2 stars out.

Alsmir

What the...?

So you managed to make it worse. That's unbelieveable. First you drop vaulting on us, then after countless posts, about how to fix it, you introduce the worst solution, that nobody wanted.
Not only vaulted characters are now behind a pay wall (90% of my hp still goes towards character slots, even though I'm missing just a few more), and on top of that we get the disguisting odds of heroic tokens.
How is pulling Moonstone going to help me cover 4* Cyclops?


Vaulting was a horrible change, but maybe, just maybe I could live with it. Ignoring every single piece of feedback from the last month is a whole new level of disguisting.

AXP_isme

There's a lot of vitriol flying in this thread and I understand people's frustration, I'm in the same boat. But seriously what did you expect? There's a track record of RNG gating content right from the lowest level. Almost every change in the history of the game has followed the same pattern. We need to recognise that the business model is built on this probabilistic distribution of certain reward types since it encourages or heightens behavioural characteristics that are probably more rewarding (not for the players of course) and predictable over the lifecycle of the game.

tldr: same old RNG. Nothing to see here, move along

D4Ni13

Hadronic wrote:

I got a couple of ideas to attempt to fix everything:


Option 1 (The Draft)
...
My approach gives you just a little bit of control but you benefit from it on every token. Instead when you open a token it should just generate multiple covers (same rarity, no duplicates) and the player selects one. I'm thinking 3 is a good amount, but more would work.

How you split the selections up could be creative. Currently they seem to like the latest/vintage angle so I will go with that in the example.

One selection could be a latest character
The other two selections would be vintage
....

I actually like this idea a lot. It would be similar to a Loot Box in MMOs, or a Pink Slip in NFS. I would vote for this change.

Imagine you have an Elite token and you get a 2* rarity. You can be presented with 3 choices (I also think this number is enough), and you could pick 1 of them.

Since this was your idea, please post it in a separate threat so we can make it more visible.

OneLastGambit

hodayathink wrote:

OneLastGambit wrote:

The forum debated vaulting. Provided pages and pages of suggestions. Debated those suggestions.

Came up with some which were well accepted.

The devs read those 40 odd pages of suggestions and then went with the only idea that nobody suggested or wanted.

Not making a great case for reading customer feedback here

That assumes the hundred or so people on these forums are the only customers at all, or the only customers worth caring about. Which, to be fair, is an assumption I've seen made on a lot of forums in my day, so it's not like it's specific to this one. They have to balance what these forums want with what they think the rest of the playerbase wants. Which is a task that sits somewhere between really difficult and impossible.

And again, this isn't saying I think what they've come up with for this specific problem is a good solution. But the idea that if they aren't listening to the forums, then they aren't listening to the player based at large is short-sighted at best and completely wrong at worst. The metrics of the entire player base, if being read correctly, should tell them a lot more than the group of hardcore players that post here when it comes to general trends in the game (what this base would be more knowledgeable about, for the most part, are the specific issues that the more hardcore section of the player base deals with, and even then this forum doesn't contain the entirety of the hardcore player base either).

I see what you're saying here but lets look at it sensibly.

You correctly state that the devs are trying to balance what the forum wants (a metric that they know) with what the rest of the playerbase wants (which at best is an educated guess). Given those two sets of information I would be far more inclined to go with the metric that we know for sure (what the forum suggests) as you can reliably predict the outcome of that change as you are starting with definite information.

TL:DR Why go with what you think people want, when you can go with what you know they want?

It's not as though the pages and pages of suggestions and debates presented loads of wild crazy ideas heavily weighted in the players favour. Many of them were sensible and mutually beneficial for both parties (devs and players). This change seems only beneficial for devs as they basically telling people to pay for old merchandise at the same price as new merchandise.

Now if you make the vintage heroic tokens available all the time and reduce the price of a token to 10hp you might find maybe people are a bit more accepting of this idea. At present it's not even a band aid for a broken leg, it's someone standing over your broken leg saying "that looks broken mate"

OneLastGambit

Hadronic wrote:

I got a couple of ideas to attempt to fix everything:


Option 1 (The Draft)
.

Now I like the idea of giving the player choice on which characters to level, but I think they went about it wrong. They went for total control and decided to limit how often you benefit from it to almost nothing. My approach gives you just a little bit of control but you benefit from it on every token. Instead when you open a token it should just generate multiple covers (same rarity, no duplicates) and the player selects one. I'm Gonna start off with something most will probably disagree with but lets get rid of bonus heroes. In the past few weeks since it was implemented i have gained maybe a dozen or so extra 3* and one bonus 4*. It just doesn't trigger enough to do what its designed forthinking 3 is a good amount, but more would work.

How you split the selections up could be creative. Currently they seem to like the latest/vintage angle so I will go with that in the example.

One selection could be a latest character
The other two selections would be vintage

PROS

Players that want to focus on new characters still can Players that still have vintage characters they want to cover can Reduces the amount of unused covers (Does not eliminate the problem, but addresses it) Give the player the option to purchase the other covers. (Price TBD, businesses like when you add in potential money making things)

CONS

5% less covers cause I sacrificed bonus heroes for something better

Option 2 (Boatloads of new Tokens)
Put in tons of new tokens that have very focused pulls for specific franchises and sell them all separately, in addition to allowing people to win them in game (details to be worked out). Examples include

Spider verse tokens (It has every spiderman related character in it and nothing else, 3* and up) Xmen tokens Guardians tokens Team IronMan tokens Team Cap tokens Villain tokens Avenger tokens

This seems like the type of thing that certain fans would buy a lot of. I know I personally have a buddy obsessed with spiderman and if he could buy just the spiderman related characters and nothing else, he probably would.
Maybe change the elite token so that it can be used to open any of the above stores.


Option 3 (?????)
Profit!

The problem isn't bonus heroes its the lack of bonus heroes. the uncertainty behind getting one. Make it so that every x pulls you get a bonus and hey presto! you have a system that everyone loves and makes people play more just to get to that magical pull that grants a bonus.

Pessi

Well, that was a good title with a disappointing thread.

Another half fix.

Ayasugi-san

OneLastGambit wrote:

You correctly state that the devs are trying to balance what the forum wants (a metric that they know) with what the rest of the playerbase wants (which at best is an educated guess). Given those two sets of information I would be far more inclined to go with the metric that we know for sure (what the forum suggests) as you can reliably predict the outcome of that change as you are starting with definite information.

You're forgetting a group: the megawhales that have a direct line to the devs. They know that one for sure, and it's probably far less diverse and debated than the myriad suggestions the forums come up with. And the megawhales probably didn't see anything wrong with the store, because how they play is very different from how everyone else plays. So the devs come up with a solution that they think will placate the masses while generating max profits, the megawhales take a look and nod and say they'd use it, and the devs think that means the problem is solved.

Of course, they do give lip service to taking our opinions into account. They give the forum liaison a little information about what they're planning, and because we're desperate for any sign that they're listening, we respond with mostly approval. But either by oversight or intention, they don't tell Brigby key pieces of information (that the new store is only once a month with very limited chances to earn tokens, and that it also contains more 2 s than vaulted characters), so we don't know what we're implicitly approving of.