Should vaulted characters be essential in pve?

Wumpushunter

The point of vaulting is to stop roster dilution but making these characters much harder to obtain should you then demand people have those same chacters to truly compete in pve placement?  I for one believe they should remove all vaulted characters from essential lists for pve.

bbigler

I disagree.  Even without the required 4*, you are still able to play the PVE and win their progression reward cover.  If you don't have all 4*s rostered, then you can't expect to compete at a high level in PVE.

Also, the point of vaulting is to stop dilution in the legendary pool.  The devs want you to roster all characters.

snlf25

No. They shouldn't be removed. They shouldn't be vaulted in the first place. Its a horrifically bad solution to the dilution problem. If you remove the vaulted characters all you have left is 12 duds in every sub event. Only the whales will be competitive and it'll make PvE brutally difficult for everybody else who only has 0 to 2 covers of the new characters. If they would unpucker their stingy buttholes and stop awarding covers to only the top 1% a strong case could be made for your solution.

Daredevil217

Absolutely.  If they are not essential then they won't be rewards.  And, PVE progression is about the only way I can reliably get older 4s.  I actually would like exclusively vaulted 4s (with the exception of new releases) as PVE rewards! I don't want to grind for two Agent Venom covers when I already have 3 dying on the vine and have a 1 in 12 chance of pulling him.

DFiPL

Of course not. You can reach max progression without the 4* if you have the other two and green check the nodes, and you can get that 4* from the next event in progression. It may be way slower, but to the extent that vaulting hurts development, removing vaulted 4* from PvE doubles down on that.

whycantwesyncpc

bbigler said:

I disagree.  Even without the required 4*, you are still able to play the PVE and win their progression reward cover.  If you don't have all 4*s rostered, then you can't expect to compete at a high level in PVE.

Also, the point of vaulting is to stop dilution in the legendary pool.  The devs want you to roster all characters.

If they want us to roster them all then they should give us access to all of them.  If they want to vault them, they should just get rid of them period.  At least then it would some sense.  Collect them all when they are not available is just pure stupid.  Maybe the Dev team should be required to take an IQ and sanity test.  If they really think what they are doing here is a good idea there is a good chance they fail both.

Punisher5784

I would love some vaulted 4*s as essentials so I can actually earn their covers in progression, but instead we keep getting the current 12 4*s that we don't need cause I can still pull them from tokens. Next should be Ant-Man but of course he'll get pushed aside because we'll likely get a new GotG event instead.

Quebbster

Two-stars aren't vaulted, so they are irrelevant.
Three-stars are available through the DDQ, so it's not a huge problem.
So it's really just the fourstar node that poses a potential problem. And lets face it, you can still get decent rewards even if you only roster that character halfway through the event.
So no, I think all characters should be PvE essentials at some point.

iron-n-wine

that would be a shame, my 2/1/2 Ant-Man would love whatever cover he could get

Jaedenkaal

It's easy enough to get enough points in a story event to win the 4* cover (once you're at the right SCL), and in theory after 50 or so story events you'll have had the opportunity to roster all the 4*s you want. I know it might not quite work out that way in practice but in general that will be true.

I suppose that's not very comforting for players who can't afford to roster 4*s that fast (and I can't blame them) but that particular problem isn't unique to vaulting nor caused by vaulting.

@Wumpushunter what tier of characters are you mostly using/rostering these days? 

MarkersMake

So... Maybe I don't understand the logic, but why are the essential characters for a PVE also the rewards for THAT PvE?

Wouldn't it make more sense for the reward covers in the current PvE be the essentials for the next PvE? 

morph3us

MarkersMake said:

So... Maybe I don't understand the logic, but why are the essential characters for a PVE also the rewards for THAT PvE?

Wouldn't it make more sense for the reward covers in the current PvE be the essentials for the next PvE? 

They're placement rewards for the previous PvE, and progression rewards for the current PvE.

Wumpushunter

All that disagreed basically said one of 2 things, I have the 4s already heck with those that don't or well you can still get progression. My topic was about placement not progression. 

udonomefoo

Wumpushunter said:

All that disagreed basically said one of 2 things, I have the 4s already heck with those that don't or well you can still get progression. My topic was about placement not progression. 

I think you're projecting.  I didn't see anyone say that first one.  

If you can't place top 10 & don't already have that 4 then you're certainly not placing top 10 in the next one and so on.  That sucks.  BUT, removing them completely then eliminates any chance of ever getting them.  That also sucks.  Maybe even sucks more.  

MarkersMake

morph3us said:

MarkersMake said:

So... Maybe I don't understand the logic, but why are the essential characters for a PVE also the rewards for THAT PvE?

Wouldn't it make more sense for the reward covers in the current PvE be the essentials for the next PvE? 

They're placement rewards for the previous PvE, and progression rewards for the current PvE.

Yes, I know. (EDIT - you're right, I wasn't clear which rewards I was referring to)  But shouldn't it be the other way around? 

Look, if you don't already have the 4* character for the current PvE then you cannot win the 4* placement reward. You just can't. By the time you reach that 4* progression reward you are well out of the running.

So that means that for the NEXT PvE you also cannot win the 4* placement award, for the same reason, (unless you happen to already have it rostered). Vaulting makes that much less likely, particularly for newer players. 

Stop me when you see a pattern here. 

What would be the harm in reversing the placement and progression rewards? ie Current progression reward = next essential. Current essential = current placement reward. 

beyonderbub

Wumpushunter said:

The point of vaulting is to stop roster dilution but making these characters much harder to obtain should you then demand people have those same chacters to truly compete in pve placement?  I for one believe they should remove all vaulted characters from essential lists for pve.

I disagree completely. This has nothing to do with vaulting. To address your true point of the post (fair competition in regards to whether or not you have essential characters), there are a multitude of reasons not related to vaulting why a player does not have an essential. Even before vaulting, players have been expected to compete in Story mode on the same playing field whether or not they had all or were missing essentials. There is no reason why this has to change. People mention progression because  you can still place high without essentials at the start of the event but earn them thru progression and earn enough afterwards to place higher by event end.  Just play the other available nodes more than usual. But you don't want an adaptive solution; you seem to be looking to vaulting as a scapegoat for your placement inadequacies and your inability to grind with the best of them. 

broll

The better answer is to fix the vaulting problem.

However if they aren't going to do that, then yeah they probably should.  Right now vaulting disproportionately hurts newer players because they will have a huge uphill battle to get those essentials to useful (if they ever do), which will hurt their ability to get other rewards and it widens the gap drastically between old and new players and hurts the games longevity.

morph3us

MarkersMake said:

morph3us said:

MarkersMake said:

So... Maybe I don't understand the logic, but why are the essential characters for a PVE also the rewards for THAT PvE?

Wouldn't it make more sense for the reward covers in the current PvE be the essentials for the next PvE? 

They're placement rewards for the previous PvE, and progression rewards for the current PvE.

Yes, I know. (EDIT - you're right, I wasn't clear which rewards I was referring to)  But shouldn't it be the other way around? 

Look, if you don't already have the 4* character for the current PvE then you cannot win the 4* placement reward. You just can't. By the time you reach that 4* progression reward you are well out of the running.

So that means that for the NEXT PvE you also cannot win the 4* placement award, for the same reason, (unless you happen to already have it rostered). Vaulting makes that much less likely, particularly for newer players. 

Stop me when you see a pattern here. 

What would be the harm in reversing the placement and progression rewards? ie Current progression reward = next essential. Current essential = current placement reward. 

That would actually be sensible.  I guess the question is whether Demiurge place quality of life or player engagement as a higher priority.  Reversing the placement and progression rewards would be a great quality of life change.  I'd imagine that having a limited number of covers available via placement as currently exists increases player engagement in terms of trying to get that essential 4* cover, though.

I must confess, it baffles me why we're having a discussion about vaulting again.  It was a terrible idea when they first tried it with 3*s, when it was a temporary fix for token dilution (before DDQ turned up), which is why they removed 3* vaulting back then.  I'm not sure why they think it's a good idea the second time around.

carrion_pigeons

I don't have anything like all the fours, and I think it would be an awful idea to remove them.  Can you imagine how that would go for newer players?  "Hey, I opened a 4* cover!  I think I'll delete a usable 1* to roster that."  Six months later, the same cover is sitting on their roster, unused and impossible to use, because they can't get any more covers for that character since it rotated out.  Oh wait, no, because they will have quit long before that.

MaxxPowerz

It's a fair question and I'm not sure if there is a right answer.

smkspy

Wumpushunter said:

All that disagreed basically said one of 2 things, I have the 4s already heck with those that don't or well you can still get progression. My topic was about placement not progression. 

Even with that 4, even a champed essential 4, it is still crazy hard to get top 10. So the problem isn't vaulting, it is placement rewards.