Answers To The 8 Questions About Vaulting (5/2/17)

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  • BoyWonder1914
    BoyWonder1914 Posts: 884 Critical Contributor
    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.


    This is where you're shooting yourself in the foot. Do your 4 clears, and then don't touch those nodes again until your final grind (1.5 - 2 hours before sub end). Once you do that 5th clear only 12 hours in, you're killing the refresh value of the node, and those 6th and 7th clears are worth nowhere near as much points as they should be. Making t10 is all about doing clears 1-4 as soon as possible once the sub opens, and doing clears 5-7 as late as possible. 

    The amount of time you let those nodes refresh is what makes the difference between t1, t5, t10, and t20. The really savvy people in CL8 can sometimes even squeeze clears 5-7 in an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, but my roster isn't quite there yet. 
  • Coubii
    Coubii Posts: 133 Tile Toppler
    Nice post.

    For me Bonus hero is not enough to mitigate the unavailability of old characters. Let me choose the 12 characters I want (and not necessarily the 12 latest), that would be awesome.
  • BoyWonder1914
    BoyWonder1914 Posts: 884 Critical Contributor
    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. 
  • BoyWonder1914
    BoyWonder1914 Posts: 884 Critical Contributor
    edited May 2017
    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.


    Very true. When I'm feeling frugal with the HP, I dip into my taco tokens for health packs and HP. Now that they give us 3 a day instead of 2, you don't have to hoard as long if that's all you're really looking for out of there. 

    As far as your 4 stars go, is it more of a cover shortage, or an iso shortage? For ISO, I know it might not sound attractive if you haven't actually transitioned into some workable 4s yet, but chopping some max champed 2-stars can act as a nice Pay Day Loan store until you rechamp them. If it's covers, then yeah that'll be a much slower process. But even there, you can hoard CP at a reasonably nice rate. 

    2 PVE events per week = 50 CP Full progression + 14 CP (7 individual subs) = 64 CP
    3 PVP events per week = 30 CP (a 3* roster should def be able to hit 575)
    7 Behemoth Burritos/week = 14 CP

    That's about 108 CP/week, so hopefully the pulls can get one of the latest 12 covered for you kinda fast. I won't disrespect you by telling you to rely on Bonus Hero odds to cover one of your vaulted people lol. 
  • Fightmastermpq
    Fightmastermpq Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    edited May 2017
    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.

    But that wasn't even what I was talking about.  I'm a 5* player, so those older 4*s don't do much for me.....even the top tier ones.  Ughlah is transitioning to 4* play and has like half the 3*s champed.  You don't need ALL the 3*s champed before you can be successful in the 4* tier.  When champing went live I was able to champ about half the 3*s as well and it was months and months and months that went by before I was able to go back and champ the others - it just wasn't a valuable use of ISO when I had 4*s to champ.
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,759 Chairperson of the Boards
    Here is my idea for the vaulting system as it stand and how it can help with the 4* transition as well as the 5* transition.  First I would leave the Latest Legendaries alone, but with the classic tokens rather then making them classic make them favorite LT.  So for 4* you would need to have a min of  10 4* selected as favorites and 3 5* favorited.  So when you pulled from this pool of covers these would be the characters you would get.  This way you can select which characters you want to receive.  The only item to leave out that you could not favorite for these tokens would be the 5* in Latest packs.  You could still win bonus heroes where you could get a Latest 5*, but they would not be in the Pool.  I would also increase the odds of 5* in Latest LT to 17%-20% so you get something else from the extra from spending the extra 5 CP.  this would also incorporate a system they have already interstates into the game and allow people to focus on the characters they want
  • Xzasxz
    Xzasxz Posts: 124 Tile Toppler
    edited May 2017
    All this vaulting therory is complete ****.
    How getting Riri (one of the worst 4*) red covers all the time can make me progress faster? This several 1k ISO is really accelerating me...
    Bonus heroes? It's real tinykitty pleasure to have RH at 4/5/3 and keep getting green covers as a bonus and turn them to ISO.
    You wrote something about hoarding? Hoarding is the only way for me. It creates at least the slim chance to get something usefull. At least as long as Riri is vaulted I'm not going to open any tokens. But I'm afraid that You add more same tinykitty characters in the meantime.
    A a matter of fact hoardnig is really necessary for most of the people. The new 4* are mostly hardly usable below max covers. Read the posts wrote by paople that are not able to get 4* fully covered before they drop from the vault...
    I could write much more, but what's the point if you completely do not care of players opinions.

    **Removed profanity - Ducky
  • BatteryHorse
    BatteryHorse Posts: 124 Tile Toppler
    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
    Fightmastermpq Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    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.
  • Fightmastermpq
    Fightmastermpq Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    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.
    How do you expect to make any meaningful progress in 2 weeks though?  This is dilution all over again - you would ultimately end up progressing very slowly on all the characters that hoarded for.
  • Daredevil217
    Daredevil217 Posts: 3,965 Chairperson of the Boards
    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.
    You assume everyone wants to play like you and fast track to 5* land. That's not the end goal for everyone.  I want to collect everyone.  I want all characters usable because aside from just liking certain characters, the game also tells us that it is beneficial to have all characters usable.  No one is debating that we can't level certain characters faster, but older ones (that we still need) became much much harder.

    You can't imagine what it must have been like for a new player under the old system?  Imagine starting under this new system and wanting all characters.  Well... bonus heroes.  So I tag them all.  Under this new system, dilution is way worse for older characters (given your definition), because 19/20 will be the newest.  To cover my oldest I have a 1/20 shot at an old toon and then that one cover could be one of 30-40 characters.  Way way more diluted.

    So let me ask you, since a developer won't answer, what would be wrong with having a separate token that has all older 4s in it?  I'm guessing you'll say something like "people will still complain" or "you re-introduce dilution".  The first is a really shaky argument that is easily destroyed and the second isn't true.  Like I said in my last post, adding a completely different diluted token does not undo the fact that we have plenty of non-diluted options to pull from.  They are mutually exclusive.  So again, why wouldn't this work and allow the large majority who are outraged (and were happy with the old system) one avenue to pull old toons from?

  • MissChinch
    MissChinch Posts: 509 Critical Contributor
    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.

  • MissChinch
    MissChinch Posts: 509 Critical Contributor
    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.

    Holy undersizedfeline if this vaulting thing was some sly way of cutting down on hoarding just put a expiration timer on tokens and be done with it... it would minimize all the collateral damage done to everyone else while changes are pushed with the intention of making hoarders game experience suck bad enough to quit...
  • broll
    broll Posts: 4,732 Chairperson of the Boards
    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.

    Sure there are.  But when Iceman is boosted and those newer characters aren't, I get a handicap vs vets who already leveled him because he's great character i can't level effectively because the devs hate us and love money.
  • MarkersMake
    MarkersMake Posts: 392 Mover and Shaker
    edited May 2017
    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):


    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.)

    Those are all good questions - I'll try to clarify how it would work. 

    First, it wouldn't actually use the bonus heroes table. That was just a comparison, meaning that they have already shown that they can store and access reliably a custom table of chosen characters for each player, for the purposes of awarding the appropriate bonus hero. A similar approach (from a programming standpoint) could be used for customized tokens. 

    I'd have to think of where it would go, but the basic idea  was to take the listing that comes up when you view the token odds, and use that as your interface. Show all 12 latest, but have the ability to tap on any of them (up to 3) and replace that one with a 4* of your choice (no duplicates).

    If you make no changes, then you just get latest 12. And when characters are added or removed from tokens, you could update the list to make sure you have the characters you want. It's more work, yes. And if the casual player just doesn't care to take the time to do it, then they are no worse off than they are today. 

    The other nice thing about it is that you could also use it to deliberately dilute your latest 12. Got some latest 12 that are cover maxed, but don't have any iso to champ them? Replace them with other characters that DO need covers, and you can keep pulling tokens. 
  • MissChinch
    MissChinch Posts: 509 Critical Contributor

    Average pulls to cover a specific character:


    With 49 heroes in the 4* tier:

    no vaulting, no bonus heroes: 637 pulls
    no vaulting, WITH bonus heros: 260 pulls
    WITH 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 pulls
    no vaulting, WITH bonus heros: 260 pulls
    WITH 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 pulls
    no vaulting, WITH bonus heros: 260 pulls
    WITH 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.

  • MissChinch
    MissChinch Posts: 509 Critical Contributor
    from the numbers above, if covering characters and having the users feel like they make progress its clear to see that bonus heroes WITHOUT vaulting would achieve that regardless of 4* tier size...
  • Starfury
    Starfury Posts: 719 Critical Contributor
    edited May 2017
    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.
    Well, if they don't want me to hoard, they should either give me an avenue to earn the 3 million iso I need to champ the 12 characters they've limited me pulling or give me a way not to have to throw away the covers until I've gotten the iso the slow way.

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