sh81 said:To get a better roster I need to finish top 10, but to finish top 10 I need a better roster..Its like a vicious cycle. People talk on here as though its easy to get top 10, its not.When I play it is thus:Slice opens, do initial 4 clears for max points.About 12 hours in nodes are almost at full again, do another clear.1 hour(ish) before end of slice do another couple of clears to get nodes down to 0.= finish top 50 comfortably.I can only ever finish top 10 on very rare occasions when, I think, Im lucky enough to end up in a slice of genuinely casual players.What can I do differently? Well I can not do that 12 hour clear, and do 3 clears at the end of the slice. Problem is, without a decent 4 star roster I use all my health packs in doing so. And then the next slice is impossible to do the initial 4 clears, so it seems like a net negative rather than positive.
sh81 said: BoyWonder1914 said: Went through the same thing myself for a time period, but your roster will eventually catch up to allow you to do so. Just telling it like it is, that's what all the people who make t10 consistently do. To me, it wasn't out of the question to spend some HP on health packs, the game isn't super generous with it, but it gives it out at a reasonable enough rate that 200 HP can't be recovered in a day's work. Ive been at that stage for at least a year. With very slight progress in that time. Feels like probably another year before Ill get to a point of being able to leave my clears until the end.That is a hell of a stall, especially as the 1-2 and 2-3 transitions felt nice and steady.Yes, I had ISO shortages and had to manage things accordingly, but I never felt like I was peddling like mad just to stay in the same position - which is exactly what it is like now.I generally get enough HP to roster covers as they are released. There is a slight surplus I could look to use on health packs, but that would be an occasional, not daily thing. And I dont like the idea of having to do that - could easily slip into pay to play territory.
BoyWonder1914 said: Went through the same thing myself for a time period, but your roster will eventually catch up to allow you to do so. Just telling it like it is, that's what all the people who make t10 consistently do. To me, it wasn't out of the question to spend some HP on health packs, the game isn't super generous with it, but it gives it out at a reasonable enough rate that 200 HP can't be recovered in a day's work.
broll said: Fightmastermpq said:I have a dozen older 4s that are max covered but need about 3 months of ISO - similar to your older 3s. So what is the solution? You forget about the vaulted characters. Those older 4s aren't going to add hardly any value to my roster, just like older 3s won't for you. That's easy to say when those dozen are probably bottom of the barrel 4*s like Mr. F, Venom, Spider-Gwen, etc. For those of us who are struggling go get the covers for Iceman, Teen Jean, Thoress, etc. those characters will make a very big difference.
Fightmastermpq said:I have a dozen older 4s that are max covered but need about 3 months of ISO - similar to your older 3s. So what is the solution? You forget about the vaulted characters. Those older 4s aren't going to add hardly any value to my roster, just like older 3s won't for you.
philosorapt0r said: Suggestions to help those who (a) prefer to get more champion levels for their older 4*s, or (b) want to cover various older 4*s:* Have rotating CP cover stores that highlight different groups of 4*s (either groups of 6-12 by age, or by theme---Spiderverse, X-men, Inhumans, Guardians, Avengers....) so people who want to build up certain teams of 4*s to high-champion level have a means to do so. The players who are collecting tons of CP and have specific desires for their roster are willing to wait for something to come around in rotation (ala saving Tacos for specific 3*s in the vault at an earlier roster stage), as long as every couple months we can have a method of raising a given cluster of our roster.
Daredevil217 said: As for the answers you provided, I am glad you were able to see at least some of the drawbacks to vaulting (very cool you called it what it is too), are well aware of the negative feedback with regards to vaulting, and SAY you are open to change/willing to listen to players feedback in making changes. I think most players can agree that dilution was a problem. So you pointing out the ways in which vaulting helped with dilution is kind of a no-brainer. Just like people don't have a problem with Bonus Heroes, people don't have a problem with you tackling dilution. Our problems lie in the heavy-handed way in which dilution was "fixed" and all of the negative side-effects that go along with your solution. You acknowledge some of these, others not so much, but they are indeed there. For example, there is no acknowledgement that dilution is far, FAR worse for any cover not in the latest 12. And that there are some of us who want those older characters for a variety of reasons (maybe I am just a big fan of the Fantastic 4?), not to mention all characters are necessary. You also do not acknowledge how hoarding has seen a serious increase with this change almost universally (I'm sure there are some exceptions).
sh81 said: Given the number of covers, that vault selection could switch very regularly, there would be no need to hoard but for a couple of weeks until the selection you want comes around.And if it keeps coming around, you wont hoarde any longer than that cycle.Compared to now, where people hoard for months and months at a time, I would say that is an improvement.
Fightmastermpq said: Daredevil217 said: As for the answers you provided, I am glad you were able to see at least some of the drawbacks to vaulting (very cool you called it what it is too), are well aware of the negative feedback with regards to vaulting, and SAY you are open to change/willing to listen to players feedback in making changes. I think most players can agree that dilution was a problem. So you pointing out the ways in which vaulting helped with dilution is kind of a no-brainer. Just like people don't have a problem with Bonus Heroes, people don't have a problem with you tackling dilution. Our problems lie in the heavy-handed way in which dilution was "fixed" and all of the negative side-effects that go along with your solution. You acknowledge some of these, others not so much, but they are indeed there. For example, there is no acknowledgement that dilution is far, FAR worse for any cover not in the latest 12. And that there are some of us who want those older characters for a variety of reasons (maybe I am just a big fan of the Fantastic 4?), not to mention all characters are necessary. You also do not acknowledge how hoarding has seen a serious increase with this change almost universally (I'm sure there are some exceptions). I think the biggest problem with vaulting is that people seem to near universally agree that dilution is bad without really having a clue what dilution really is, or comprehend how bad it would have gotten had there been no change.Statements like "dilution is far far worse for vaulted characters" are good indicators of this. Another common complaint I see is "their solution to dilution doesn't allow me to progress on all characters at once!" No, dilution itself is what prevents you from progressing on everything at once.Dilution is best represented in average covers per character per pull. This number was very low and getting lower (1/43 I think when vaulting began) which means you would need an average of 559 pulls to cover a 4*, and if we measure success in # of champed 4*s it means that someone who earns 2 LTs/day needs nearly a years worth of pulls to cover a 4*. The bigger problem though is if you started at Day 1 over the course of that year something like 17 more characters would be added to the pool lowering your 1/43 dilution rate to 1/60 and so the time required to make any progress just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. I think most people get that but it's important to note that progress was taking a REALLY long time under the old system.Now. One way to raise the number of covers people are able to earn is to just award more covers. Obviously this is not in the devs best interest as it would upset the game economy, so if we are holding total number of pulls close to constant, and continually releasing new characters - how do we prevent the average number of covers/pull (the dilution) from decreasing with every new release. You do it by limiting the number of characters available to be pulled from the tokens - by vaulting all but the newest 12 you fix the dilution at 1/12. So given no change to pull rate the average number of characters per pull increases nearly 4x with vaulting today, and 5x what it would have been a year from now. To do this requires sacrifice. By necessity.They gave us BH to partially help address the issue of accessing older characters, but to claim that not having access to ALL of the older characters is some massive failure of vaulting doesn't make any sense. Having access to ALL of the other characters IS dilution - the very thing vaulting was trying to fix.
Ughlah said: I am the new player, well 6 month into the game, playing very active and this is where i'm totally stuck at the moment.I have all 2* and all 3* characters, most are covered, about half in each group are champed, from the 3* currently vaulted 4 are missing, so they progress. No major problem till this point, but there was no problem with 2* and 3* before, since you have a nice pull rate of 3-4 when you play very active. Bonus heroes is an awesome feature to get those last missing covers in 3* land. Now to my 4* progression. I have 4 characters in the current vault covered, 7 are at 10 or above covers, the newest 4* is at 5 covers. My chance of pulling a dupe cover are 19/36. I pull around 3 bonus hero covers per month for my 4*. 90% of my remaining 4* are at 1-4 covers, and I still miss 6 of them altogether.Now the problem of vaulting kicks in: ISO. I average at 34000 iso per day. Champing the remaining 3* in the vault will cost me 2 weeks, champing the remaining 3* and 2* will cost me around 3 month. Till I have done so I can keep pulling all tokens and will get more and more 4* dupes which i will have to sell cause I lack iso. So I rather wait 3-4 month, hoard for the entire time, till chances of dupes have gone down a little bit. My progress in 3* land goes down a lot, since I will stop pulling heroic tokens as well.Ok, I'm doing something wrong, so let's play through the next option, just champ the current 3* and champ the 4* I can. I save up iso for 2 month, champ them and hoarded in the meantime. I pull my tokens, get my top 3 4* to around level 271 and i'm happy till the next pve event starts. Enemies are superhard for my 3* roster, one of my 4* is even boosted, but totally useless without synergy and I have no chance of getting any 4* rewards from here on. i'm totally frustrated, sell the champed 4* and i'm stuck at my original situation. So what do you want me to do? Hoard for 6 month, then pull, hoard for another 6 month? Try to get to the 4* reward ranks with my 3* roster to fill the gaps?This vaulting works perfectly, if you just plan ahead 2-3 month. It is a total mess after that.
I despise vaulting, I think its unnecessary, the justification wildly exaggerates what happens if the 4* pool increases from 40-50 characters to 80+ characters and beyond, to top that off its roll out was horrifically done...
That said, with a rate (as others stated many times) of new 4*s being introduced at 2 every 6 weeks, you have 21 days between new 4* releases on average. ISO cost to champion a 4* from 70 is about 368K or so... if you spread that out over 21 days you will need to average about 17.5k ISO per day to tread water (if your goal is to champ everything), anything above that is progress you're making on the backlog.
Calculating CP needed to stay afloat is a little more tricky... 6 out of every 7 LT pulls will (on average) be a 4*, discount completely the bonus heroes, as its pure lunacy, given the current mechanics, to use your bonus hero on a character that ISNT vaulted.
In the perfect case of cover distribution the minimum number of CP you need to earn per day is:
X * 21 days * 6/7 = 20 * 13
X=14.4CP per day
That's pulling from classics, so you're basically throwing in the towel on 5* land if you do it that way.
If you do choose to go with the treading water approach, you can save when you've got the oldest feature 4* (wasp now for the next few hours I think) at 13 covers... stop pulling and stop spending ISO. You reserve the right to champion that hero, but by waiting until they are retired you never place yourself behind the 8 ball (I think its more sensible to save the ISO for the case that you get a 14th cover for another hero before hitting 13 on the next one to leave)
So in short if you average over 17.5K ISO/day and at least 14.4CP per day theres a chance that you can tread water with vaulting (if you don't you're screwed)
There are PLENTY of reasons to complain about vaulting, but complaining about required ISO without knowing the cost just makes those arguments sound frivolous and/or completely lacking credibility, undermining the anti-vaulting argument.
That said, its a completely self created problem, nonsensical in the extreme to introduce without keeping the option to pull from the whole tier... I do hope they stick to their guns and remove the ability to pull 5*s from a diluted pool and change the classics token to only include the 3 latest 5*s, because you can always get the rest through bonus heroes. If for no other reason than to illustrate the silliness of the proposed solution.
BatteryHorse said: philosorapt0r said: Suggestions to help those who (a) prefer to get more champion levels for their older 4*s, or (b) want to cover various older 4*s:* Have rotating CP cover stores that highlight different groups of 4*s (either groups of 6-12 by age, or by theme---Spiderverse, X-men, Inhumans, Guardians, Avengers....) so people who want to build up certain teams of 4*s to high-champion level have a means to do so. The players who are collecting tons of CP and have specific desires for their roster are willing to wait for something to come around in rotation (ala saving Tacos for specific 3*s in the vault at an earlier roster stage), as long as every couple months we can have a method of raising a given cluster of our roster. I've seen this recommended a few times, but the developers have repeatedly stated that they don't want players to horde, they prefer that you use tokens and rewards as you get them to progressively grow your roster. If there was a rotation of 4's in a particular vault, players would only horde more. If you don't like the selection of 4's you'd be strongly encouraged to save your CP and LTs until you get a more favorable vault, and then you're back to what people were doing with DDQ tokens, saving up hundreds of them until you get a vault you like or need.Regardless of whether this is to the player's benefit, the devs are unlikely to consider a solution that so strongly incentivizes stockpiling your resources. Assuming they're not going to change vaulting and they seem unwilling to consider a classic vault with the other 30+ 4's, a daily 4* DDQ would really help.
Fightmastermpq said: broll said: Fightmastermpq said:I have a dozen older 4s that are max covered but need about 3 months of ISO - similar to your older 3s. So what is the solution? You forget about the vaulted characters. Those older 4s aren't going to add hardly any value to my roster, just like older 3s won't for you. That's easy to say when those dozen are probably bottom of the barrel 4*s like Mr. F, Venom, Spider-Gwen, etc. For those of us who are struggling go get the covers for Iceman, Teen Jean, Thoress, etc. those characters will make a very big difference. No, they really won't. There are plenty of characters in the newest pool that are as good or better than the vaulted characters. Maybe there are 1 or 2 vaulted characters that actually would make a "very big difference" in your ability to compete, but BH can take care of that. For the most part though the newest crop is good enough to get the job done.
New McG said: MarkersMake said: New McG said: Crowl said: New McG said: NMANOZ said: Bonus Legendary Vault (20 CP):Covers for the 4 star bonus heroes you have chosen ONLY. A wonderful idea from the player side of things. Until you realize you're letting people pick exactly what 4* they buy a cover for for 20 CP by selecting a single BH. Never gonna happen at that price. Specific character covers cost 120 for a 4*. This would need to be more like 100 CP to be similar. They could do something like that, but make you select a minimum amount of characters, this would also somewhat cover the complaint about BH's only being useful for at most one character too. I also don't think the programming side of things is being factored in with such an idea. The programming process for tokens is involved. Now you're talking about allowing for a completely different token, with its pool designed by the end user, for every single player in the game. They already have a list of bonus heroes for every player in the game. Keeping a custom token list isn't really that much more work <insert caveat about not having seen the actual code here>.I had an idea back in the original Bonus Heroes thread along the same lines, but letting the player choose only 3 of the 12 slots (because I'm not greedy, lol):MarkersMake said:There's a very easy solution to vaulting that makes everyone happy (I'm sure it must have been suggested already, but 46 pages is a lot to wade through): customizable tokens.Not fully custom tokens; customizable tokens.Take the current 4* token with the latest 12. Keep feeding new 4*s in, and removing the oldest. But give players control of 3 of those character slots. Want to replace Riri with Rulk? Go for it. Agent Venom with Venom (Eddie Brock)? Well, I won't stop you. Mordo with Iceman? Ha, so will I!This way, players get more control over who they pull, the effects of dilution are reduced, pull rates (of desired older characters) are increased (3 out of 12 chance - amazing!), and d3 still gets to push their newest characters without forcing the occasional dud on us. And if you want to farm champ levels on older characters, you can!Implementation issues aside, who loses? A popular definition of compromise is one in which nobody is happy, but who would honestly be unhappy with that, and why (aside from the obvious "everyone who champed their Rulk/Iceman/etc the normal way")?At an abstract programming level, you'd be randomly choosing one of the 12 slots, then doing a lookup to see which character is in that slot (and a second lookup if that slot is flagged as player-determined). Nothing too crazy to implement. My programming history is limited to some basic classes, over a decade ago, so I have no real insight to the true difficulty of it. Abstractly, sure, it may seem simple. In its simplest form it would be cross referencing a few tables of info against each other, but there's quite a few other factors that complicate it. If they used the BH table for it, then there would be people who would get the pitchforks out about how they are FORCING the player to use their BH in the tokens, and that's UNFAIR to take away the FREEDOM of the player. (Or something to that effect.) Then there's the situation of what to do if no heroes get selected for this theoretical token, the same way if no BH gets selected. In that case, everyone stays in the BH pool, but what in the case of no "favorites" or whatever you'd call this group in a theoretical custom token? Everyone goes in? Nobody goes in? Latest group? Oldest group? There's a lot of strange, complicated contingencies to consider, many of which would never occur to us, but would inevitably present themselves over the course of hundreds of thousands, up to possibly millions, of players (all with varying play styles and levels of engagement) being thrown into this theoretical system.I think a lot of it also has to do with keeping it as streamlined as possible. If a new player comes in and now on 3 and 4* characters, there's a Heart icon to assign a Bonus Hero, and, say, a Star for "put character in Custom Token X", that's one more possible confusion for someone new to the game. The less data points the better when it comes to user-friendliness. (And presumably programming. Adding a couple million new data tables worth of "user character preference data" to the server-side load is probably a pretty daunting task when it comes to making sure everything runs smoothly, all while still keeping the game up and running as they try to implement any broad changes.)
MarkersMake said: New McG said: Crowl said: New McG said: NMANOZ said: Bonus Legendary Vault (20 CP):Covers for the 4 star bonus heroes you have chosen ONLY. A wonderful idea from the player side of things. Until you realize you're letting people pick exactly what 4* they buy a cover for for 20 CP by selecting a single BH. Never gonna happen at that price. Specific character covers cost 120 for a 4*. This would need to be more like 100 CP to be similar. They could do something like that, but make you select a minimum amount of characters, this would also somewhat cover the complaint about BH's only being useful for at most one character too. I also don't think the programming side of things is being factored in with such an idea. The programming process for tokens is involved. Now you're talking about allowing for a completely different token, with its pool designed by the end user, for every single player in the game. They already have a list of bonus heroes for every player in the game. Keeping a custom token list isn't really that much more work <insert caveat about not having seen the actual code here>.I had an idea back in the original Bonus Heroes thread along the same lines, but letting the player choose only 3 of the 12 slots (because I'm not greedy, lol):MarkersMake said:There's a very easy solution to vaulting that makes everyone happy (I'm sure it must have been suggested already, but 46 pages is a lot to wade through): customizable tokens.Not fully custom tokens; customizable tokens.Take the current 4* token with the latest 12. Keep feeding new 4*s in, and removing the oldest. But give players control of 3 of those character slots. Want to replace Riri with Rulk? Go for it. Agent Venom with Venom (Eddie Brock)? Well, I won't stop you. Mordo with Iceman? Ha, so will I!This way, players get more control over who they pull, the effects of dilution are reduced, pull rates (of desired older characters) are increased (3 out of 12 chance - amazing!), and d3 still gets to push their newest characters without forcing the occasional dud on us. And if you want to farm champ levels on older characters, you can!Implementation issues aside, who loses? A popular definition of compromise is one in which nobody is happy, but who would honestly be unhappy with that, and why (aside from the obvious "everyone who champed their Rulk/Iceman/etc the normal way")?At an abstract programming level, you'd be randomly choosing one of the 12 slots, then doing a lookup to see which character is in that slot (and a second lookup if that slot is flagged as player-determined). Nothing too crazy to implement.
New McG said: Crowl said: New McG said: NMANOZ said: Bonus Legendary Vault (20 CP):Covers for the 4 star bonus heroes you have chosen ONLY. A wonderful idea from the player side of things. Until you realize you're letting people pick exactly what 4* they buy a cover for for 20 CP by selecting a single BH. Never gonna happen at that price. Specific character covers cost 120 for a 4*. This would need to be more like 100 CP to be similar. They could do something like that, but make you select a minimum amount of characters, this would also somewhat cover the complaint about BH's only being useful for at most one character too. I also don't think the programming side of things is being factored in with such an idea. The programming process for tokens is involved. Now you're talking about allowing for a completely different token, with its pool designed by the end user, for every single player in the game.
Crowl said: New McG said: NMANOZ said: Bonus Legendary Vault (20 CP):Covers for the 4 star bonus heroes you have chosen ONLY. A wonderful idea from the player side of things. Until you realize you're letting people pick exactly what 4* they buy a cover for for 20 CP by selecting a single BH. Never gonna happen at that price. Specific character covers cost 120 for a 4*. This would need to be more like 100 CP to be similar. They could do something like that, but make you select a minimum amount of characters, this would also somewhat cover the complaint about BH's only being useful for at most one character too.
New McG said: NMANOZ said: Bonus Legendary Vault (20 CP):Covers for the 4 star bonus heroes you have chosen ONLY. A wonderful idea from the player side of things. Until you realize you're letting people pick exactly what 4* they buy a cover for for 20 CP by selecting a single BH. Never gonna happen at that price. Specific character covers cost 120 for a 4*. This would need to be more like 100 CP to be similar.
NMANOZ said: Bonus Legendary Vault (20 CP):Covers for the 4 star bonus heroes you have chosen ONLY.
At an abstract programming level, you'd be randomly choosing one of the 12 slots, then doing a lookup to see which character is in that slot (and a second lookup if that slot is flagged as player-determined). Nothing too crazy to implement.
Average pulls to cover a specific character:
With 49 heroes in the 4* tier:
no vaulting, no bonus heroes: 637 pullsno vaulting, WITH bonus heros: 260 pullsWITH vaulting and WITH bonus heroes: 156 pulls
with 66 heroes in the 4* tier (approximately 1 year from now):
no vaulting, no bonus heroes: 858 pullsno vaulting, WITH bonus heros: 260 pullsWITH vaulting and WITH bonus heroes: 156 pulls
with 134 heroes in the 4* tier (approximately 5 years from now):
no vaulting, no bonus heroes: 1742 pullsno vaulting, WITH bonus heros: 260 pullsWITH vaulting and WITH bonus heroes: 156 pulls
So if they didnt vault, in a year, assuming there was zero progress made toward moving further up the tiers, this massive dilution problem would have amounted in a 34.6% longer time to cover a 4*... (food for thought: I know I'm certainly getting more than 34% more LT pulls now then I was a year ago)
If we go full crazy and look 5 years down the road and assume that we're still pumping out 4*s at this rate, and we havent moved past 5*s then you're looking at a 173% increase in time to cover a 4*... thats well over twice as long, but look what happened to token availability in the last year, let alone 5 years...
If we're going to base projections on what has happened, like everyone is doing when trying to justify their stance, then looking at all of them its clear that dilution has been dominated by token availability, and not only is this "MASSIVE DILUTION problem" insanely exaggerated, all indications point to it being easier to cover 4*s in the future even WITH dilution.
(two years ago when iso was at a trickle and tokens were few and far between the pool was less diluted, no one is going to say with a straight face that more people were successfully transitioning into the 4* tier then)
I'm giving the developers the benefit of the doubt (in that they are bound to do more analysis than the users) and figure this is a cash grab NOT the result of a profoundly ignorant dev team.
BatteryHorse said: I've seen this recommended a few times, but the developers have repeatedly stated that they don't want players to horde, they prefer that you use tokens and rewards as you get them to progressively grow your roster.
Fightmastermpq said: They gave us BH to partially help address the issue of accessing older characters, but to claim that not having access to ALL of the older characters is some massive failure of vaulting doesn't make any sense. Having access to ALL of the other characters IS dilution - the very thing vaulting was trying to fix.