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

Fightmastermpq

Starfury said:

Jaedenkaal said:

Yes, that's how it worked starting with championing and ending with vaulting. Before that, the strategy was different, and now it will have to be different again.

Demiurge studios, hard at work preparing for the next time they throw sand in everyone's works

You know, this is real and quite honestly I think they should have been more vocal about this right from the start.

I have been a strong supporter of Vaulting, and that's largely due to me not being married to my roster plans.  But that isn't the case for everyone, and I think if they had come right out at the start and said "look, we created this new system to try and help with dilution, and we are sorry but for many of you the plans you had for your roster are really not going to be realized under this new system........but have no fear - there is a clear path to success that might be painful at first but over the long run will have the vast majority of players up and running in the 4* tier much sooner!"  I don't think people would have been any more upset, and might have been able to divorce themselves from their roster plans a little more easily so that they could start taking advantage of what the new system has to offer.

BatteryHorse

Ryudoz said:

The problem with vaulting 4* comes from the fact that this game still relies on using older 3* and 4* for content. (...)

It doesn't make sense to create content for characters that are vaulted. Sure for PVE you can earn 2-3 4* covers over a single PVE event (depending on length) IF you have all 3 required characters, but by making any of those characters vaulted you send the message that yes, we have to collect them all if we want all the rewards (predominantly iso, which is badly needed). 

That's not even getting to the Crash DDQ node, where not only do you need a Vaulted 4* in many occasions, but a well covered (my Thing is 1/3/1 and has NO shot at winning, even if I snagged the useless yellow cover in the taco vault because why offer a cover other than his passive that relies on teammate damage intake to be useful in a 1 on 1 fight?!), appropriate leveled and vaulted character. So now for a majority of F2P vets like myself (1100 plus days and counting) are still struggling with these because of cover drip and the large iso investment in a single 4*.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that the boosted list doesn't favour the new characters.  The current PvE, for example, Deadpool vs MPQ has Iceman, Invisible Woman, Iron Man (Hulkbuster), Punisher Max and the new Iron Fist.  Four of those are vaulted characters, obviously, and looking forward if the boosted characters are still going to lean heavily towards vaulted characters then those people who are championing the newest 12 are going to be left out in the cold, facing uneven scaling without the tools needed.  And if the boosted characters start to lean towards the new 12 it further undermines the value of all those classic 4's.  

It's a mess, I tell ya.

Beer40

BatteryHorse said:

Brigby said:

#3 - What is in place for those who want to level evenly?

We think players who want to level more evenly will still have a vastly improved experience. You’ll find that token pulls reward more covers to the latest characters, so instead of leveling forty characters that have 1-5 covers, you'll be leveling twelve characters plus Bonus Heroes that have 10+ covers.

We understand that players have different play styles, and we want to support as many as we can. More fundamentally, we want players to always feel a sense of progress, especially week to week. By focusing on a narrower band of characters, players can still choose to level a lot of characters evenly, but will see more noticeable gains across those characters.

I still feel like this reasoning is flawed.  I know it's been talked about to death, but while the developers insist they implemented this change for the benefit of players they subsequently removed a lot of the choice about how we play and how we build our rosters.  

I think they genuinely feel that if they had a vault with the latest 12 and a vault with the classic 30+ that people would just continue to collect the classics and ignore the new characters, and I think that's at the heart of the change.  They're tired of people complaining that they have a 1/1/3 set of covers for whatever new character is out, that it'll take a year to cover them, and everyone goes right back to using their favorite handful of characters, so they just dramatically reduce those choices.

And to an extent I understand the motivation.  They work hard on these releases, they have a model where they have to release a new character every couple of weeks, and the game isn't going to flourish if every new character is met with a yawn.  But at the same time removing that much choice from the player, I think, betrays a stunning lack of faith in their new products.  

If vaulting really is to the player's benefit they should see people taking advantage of it in a fair system.  As an example, two vaults, one with the new 12 and the other with the remainder.  If vaulting really does help the player, the market would drive most players to the new vault to exploit the efficiency of the limited range of covers. 

That problem could also be mitigated by making the bonus hero drop rates better, or implementing streak-breakers.  For most players bonus 4*s drop so rarely that they're a nice surprise but not an actual strategy for building your roster.  There is no reason to create such scarcity in covers, especially since ISO rates are effectively limited (there's only so much ISO you can reasonably earn per day, and the conversion for purchases is terrible).  

They restricted choice unnecessarily, and I think it's because if they gave you an actual choice you wouldn't make the one they want you to.

I could have put more of this players point in bold, but this is what I've been saying from the start. Right or wrong, this is what many of us believe. The post from the lead developer did nothing to change my opinion in the matter.

Starfury

Fightmastermpq said:

Starfury said:

Jaedenkaal said:

Yes, that's how it worked starting with championing and ending with vaulting. Before that, the strategy was different, and now it will have to be different again.

Demiurge studios, hard at work preparing for the next time they throw sand in everyone's works

You know, this is real and quite honestly I think they should have been more vocal about this right from the start.

I have been a strong supporter of Vaulting, and that's largely due to me not being married to my roster plans.  But that isn't the case for everyone, and I think if they had come right out at the start and said "look, we created this new system to try and help with dilution, and we are sorry but for many of you the plans you had for your roster are really not going to be realized under this new system........but have no fear - there is a clear path to success that might be painful at first but over the long run will have the vast majority of players up and running in the 4* tier much sooner!"  I don't think people would have been any more upset, and might have been able to divorce themselves from their roster plans a little more easily so that they could start taking advantage of what the new system has to offer.

Agree.

It's one of my three main gripes I stated back on page 4.

On February 28, people are busy trying to get everyone champed.
On March 1 there's a post on the forums: Hey, look at this awesome new feature called "Bonus heroes", oh and by the way we removed 3/4 of all 4* from tokens.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with a worse way to introduce this to the community. It's the biggest freaking change to the game in more than a year and they just slip it into another feature.

MissChinch

Brigby said:

I’m Dave Guskin

...

#3 - What is in place for those who want to level evenly?

We think players who want to level more evenly will still have a vastly improved experience. You’ll find that token pulls reward more covers to the latest characters, so instead of leveling forty characters that have 1-5 covers, you'll be leveling twelve characters plus Bonus Heroes that have 10+ covers.

We understand that players have different play styles, and we want to support as many as we can. More fundamentally, we want players to always feel a sense of progress, especially week to week. By focusing on a narrower band of characters, players can still choose to level a lot of characters evenly, but will see more noticeable gains across those characters.

So, What is in place for those who want to level evenly?

 

#7 - Is this change meant to slow (or in some cases eliminate) champing?

We had, perhaps incorrectly, felt that we had provided enough opportunities to continue to collect covers for older (out of packs) 4-stars via event rewards. We’re evaluating this assumption and are open to feedback - we don’t think we’ve gotten it quite right yet. We’ve already been trying to find limited ways to make these characters more available, such as the off-season Vintage Heroic store. We’ve got more work to do here, so stay tuned.

I like that there is a recognition of more work required here, but I'm concerned both because it feels like we've got a 5 gallon bucket here and 2 table spoons have been dumped in and we're hearing "Wow, I'm spent, but we've got some more work to do" and because of the use of "limited ways to make these characters more available"

We get multiple heroic tokens per day, but 2-4 vintage heroic tokens per season, I'll pull more 5*s than I'll pull vaulted 3*s per season... I don't get a sense agreement on how far out of balance we are...

 

#8 - If enough people voice concern, would you be willing to end vaulting?

Yes.

Uhhh...  pants on fire?

Whats your threshold?  This single issue has dominated all forum traffic for months now.  Take a look at the forums before vaulting and then after vaulting...  its impacting your feedback mechanism to the point where its making it difficult to provide feedback WITHOUT it turning into another referendum on vaulting. 

I'm trying to figure out how this statement doesn't make it clear that the devs and designers are out of touch with the forum-going playerbase.

@Brigby are they getting accurate feedback that this dominates all forum discussion?

Jaedenkaal

MissChinch said:

  #8 - If enough people voice concern, would you be willing to end vaulting?

Yes.

Uhhh...  pants on fire?

Whats your threshold?  This single issue has dominated all forum traffic for months now.  Take a look at the forums before vaulting and then after vaulting...  its impacting your feedback mechanism to the point where its making it difficult to provide feedback WITHOUT it turning into another referendum on vaulting. 

I'm trying to figure out how this statement doesn't make it clear that the devs and designers are out of touch with the forum-going playerbase.

@Brigby are they getting accurate feedback that this dominates all forum discussion?

I suspect "everyone on this forum" is not a sufficient threshold even if 100% of users were against vaulting (which is not the case).

MissChinch

Jaedenkaal said:

MissChinch said:

  #8 - If enough people voice concern, would you be willing to end vaulting?

Yes.

Uhhh...  pants on fire?

Whats your threshold?  This single issue has dominated all forum traffic for months now.  Take a look at the forums before vaulting and then after vaulting...  its impacting your feedback mechanism to the point where its making it difficult to provide feedback WITHOUT it turning into another referendum on vaulting. 

I'm trying to figure out how this statement doesn't make it clear that the devs and designers are out of touch with the forum-going playerbase.

@Brigby are they getting accurate feedback that this dominates all forum discussion?

I suspect "everyone on this forum" is not a sufficient threshold even if 100% of users were against vaulting (which is not the case).

Agreed, they could ignore everything on the forum to no real ill effect, there just aren't that many people here...  I'm not arguing that point, I just noted how they specifically stated that if people voice their concern they would end it...

(I don't think that's a good policy to have regardless, and I don't like vaulting)

But I'm wondering what the threshold here is, clearly its been the most dramatic outcry from the forum in the last year+...  Are they looking for other users to send in self addressed envelopes or something?  I don't see their angle here by putting that in the post.

MissChinch

MissChinch said:

Jaedenkaal said:

MissChinch said:

  #8 - If enough people voice concern, would you be willing to end vaulting?

Yes.

Uhhh...  pants on fire?

Whats your threshold?  This single issue has dominated all forum traffic for months now.  Take a look at the forums before vaulting and then after vaulting...  its impacting your feedback mechanism to the point where its making it difficult to provide feedback WITHOUT it turning into another referendum on vaulting. 

I'm trying to figure out how this statement doesn't make it clear that the devs and designers are out of touch with the forum-going playerbase.

@Brigby are they getting accurate feedback that this dominates all forum discussion?

I suspect "everyone on this forum" is not a sufficient threshold even if 100% of users were against vaulting (which is not the case).

Agreed, they could ignore everything on the forum to no real ill effect, there just aren't that many people here...  I'm not arguing that point, I just noted how they specifically stated that if people voice their concern they would end it...

(I don't think that's a good policy to have regardless, and I don't like vaulting)

But I'm wondering what the threshold here is, clearly its been the most dramatic outcry from the forum in the last year+...  Are they looking for other users to send in self addressed envelopes or something?  I don't see their angle here by putting that in the post.

reposting with the quotes correct I hope...  I don't know how they got screwed up...

MissChinch

OK, I'm not trying to quote for my response...  I'm blaming a horrid browser at work, but its probably a good bit of user error (doesn't help that all the icons are invisible in this **** browser)

I agree the forum populate is insignificant, they're far under any rounding error in terms of total user base and worse they aren't a representative sampling either.  The response we got in the forum stated that if they had enough people voice their concern they would end vaulting.

Disregarding the fact that I think that's a silly statement to make, I'm wondering what the threshold is there, it was posted in their official forum for feedback and its inundated that system, so what would constitute "enough" Short of putting out an in game pop up survey are they just saying well if people didn't like it they would write us letters ?

Polares

This is all fantastic, getting these answers two months after Vaulting was released and they were originally posted, but I don't believe Devs anymore.

This change screwed A LOT of people, and created a big need for hoarding so we could get the iso to champ all these new chars that we were forced to champ independently of our plans/preferences. In all this time, to help with this transition Devs didn't add not even one double iso week, NOT EVEN ONE !!! Devs are sooooo cheap. And they say they don't want us to hoard, well you failed miserably!

Devs also don't address the MASSIVE difference in rewards in champion levels that we have lost.

I also don't believe them when they say they are listening for feedback. Vaulting feedback has been mostly negative. A LOT of different solutions have been proposed and Devs have completely ignored those solutions (much much better solutions than the useless vintage store they created)

I have no more confidence in these Devs, I am done, you have lost me completely, I won't spend money on this game ever again. 

MissChinch

Polares said:

This is all fantastic, getting these answers two months after Vaulting was released and they were originally posted, but I don't believe Devs anymore.

This change screwed A LOT of people, and created a big need for hoarding so we could get the iso to champ all these new chars that we were forced to champ independently of our plans/preferences. In all this time, to help with this transition Devs didn't add not even one double iso week, NOT EVEN ONE !!! Devs are sooooo cheap. And they say they don't want us to hoard, well you failed miserably!

Devs also don't address the MASSIVE difference in rewards in champion levels that we have lost.

I also don't believe them when they say they are listening for feedback. Vaulting feedback has been mostly negative. A LOT of different solutions have been proposed and Devs have completely ignored those solutions (much much better solutions than the useless vintage store they created)

I have no more confidence in these Devs, I am done, you have lost me completely, I won't spend money on this game ever again. 

Its pretty clear this isn't going to make a difference, forum-complaining is just cathartic...

app/play store rating is another form of feedback, but again no one will care about a handful of people...  you could talk to your alliance about organizing feedback if you're really annoyed...

Crowl

Tony Foot said:

A. Had a better drop rate, because I have had about 2 since it started.
B. Let me put a heart not only by a character but by a character colour. There's no way I can risk BH say Bucky at 5/5/2, not at the current BH drop rate.

To even suggest that as a work round is laughable. The only work around they are really interested in costs you thousands of HP. They might as well be honest and vault all but the latest character and give you a season before they vault it.

Realistically, with or without BH, the best bet for a 5/5/2 is to simply bite the bullet and spend the 120 cp on that last cover if you think the character is worth championing, set him as your bonus until you get one and if it is the wrong colour spend the cp and the dupe will be used to take him to 271 and an LT.

Desufnoc23

Thank you, devs, for giving us this feedback. It does help understand the choices you've made, whether or not everyone agrees with them. 

Change is scary and in a game like this, players have to make long term plans to be successful. This latest change moved the ball around for everyone and disrupted plans.

I don't think vaulting was a perfect solution, but having been a player during the previous vaulting of 3*, I recognize that:

A. There is a very bad dilution problem in the game that has/had to be addressed.
B. You learned from your previous mistakes and tried to make a better solution.

There are many on the boards that would disagree with me, I know, but I truly believe those two points.

Looking forward, I would ask that you communicate a message similar to this for any other future high impacting changes in a timely fashion. I think having the community understand your vision will help. It certainly does for me.

TxMoose

as a player that is transitioning to 5* play, I worked very hard as was very close to completing all the 4* champs when vaulting hit (currently 3 unchamped - Elektra, war machine, and venom).  I was looking forward to my boosted 4s approaching 450 as that transition was happening, giving me more options than the 1 or 2 5*s that I started with.  that never happens now and now 95% of my champ levels will be 270-300, which are far less rewarding than those beyond. 

count me as one in favor of a re-do on the vaulting mechanic.  there are many other options that would ease things, but 5% BH isn't really raising the level of my whole group like a large diluted pool was slowly doing.  instead of BH if we had a few custom slots in the pool (say 15 instead of 12 and 3 were custom chosen vaulted characters).  really there are so many possibilities. 

Khanwulf

Ducky said:

I think the problem with the way the forum sees vaulting versus how the devs see it is a matter of perspective.

The devs target audience for vaulting makes up a very small percentage of the forums, I think, as we mostly have developed rosters and vaulting wasn't made to directly benefit that demographic. Vaulting was made to benefit the very, very large portion of the player base that doesn't frequent the forums, that doesn't sniff the t100.

I think this is why there has been such an impasse on the subject between the two sides. We want to be able to continue to grow are nice and shinies while the devs want to give the vast majority of the player base a chance to even get a couple nice and shinies, which is why Dave mentioned that dilution in packs is bad for the longevity of the game.

Do I know of a way to make vaulting more palatable to the forumites? Nope, lol. But I don't think it is by basically repackaging dilution into a smaller form in more subsets of tokens. My hope is that the vintage heroics are just a stopgap solution while they work on something more dynamic to help alleviate the forum's concerns regarding vaulting. Only time will tell, though, and I hope in the end it all works out.

All right, but if that's the case @Ducky then Devs have very badly bungled in estimating flow of 4* characters into the "vast majority" player. And I can cite myself as I simply don't have the time to struggle for even T100 placement amid other life concerns.

Deep 3* champ roster? Check.
Extensive, shallowly covered 4* roster? Check.
No 4* fully covered let alone champed? Check.

So, there are only two reliable paths for obtaining 4* covers: CP and PvE event progression. Versus is too much to obtain the 4* progression, and PvE placement is far, far out of reach.

Random token rewards are possible, sure, but unlikely--there are a handful in a given month.

So, Bonus 4* heroes are a joke, because they happen so rarely it might as well not exist. So far I've observed one (1) bonus 4* since feature implementation, and that's with regularly hitting full progression during events.

So unless there happens to be a vaulted 4* in a progression, or I can advance a 3* far enough to generate a cover, I'm unlikely to ever see it.

I'd love to be able to spend CP on a 4*-only token with only the vaulted covers. That would be ideal and I'd gladly burn my supplies into that in the hopes of finishing heroes. And yes, that would mean I'm not spending CP on Latest Legends with the latest releases. Oh well. My choice.

--Khanwulf   

Edit, PS: And yes, even with my very limited, no-where-near-champed roster of the current 12, I can *still* get worthless dupes--at the moment TWO (2!!!) purple Coulson withering away; at nine covers he's not going to be champed in the next 8 days. This will only get worse. Keep in mind these two covers represents more than a week's CP saving.... 

n25philly

Glad to see it took 2 months to respond with all the bad logic and pure tinykitty.  This is why you can take your game and shove it.  I hope you guys are happy when you keep making all these changes that show how out of touch you are runs the game into the ground.  Nothing you accomplished with vaulting couldn't be addessed without taking most of the characters away from us, but whatever.  Run it into the ground if you want, I'm done.

**Removed profanity - Ducky

alphabeta

Utter claptrap 

while PVE needs a 4* essential not in packs only those finishing in t10 the event before in a high SCL level stand any chance of gaining a cover till after it is needed.

Vaulting was an utterly stupid decision to begin with and those answers seriously make me worry about how badly the lead developer understands the game play in the game he's developing.

My feedback - end vaulting 

Ducky

@Khanwulf I believe Dave admitted they missed the mark in their post regarding the flow of covers for 4* covers that are not currently in tokens. I commend them for doing so because to admit fault on this forum can be a dangerous thing as a dev.

I'm also hopeful as he says they are still working on ironing out the issue, so hopefully we see a new feature or avenue in the future to help mitigate the loss of cover flow for those characters out of the token pool. More tokens, however, are not really the answer. Ideally, it would be a dynamic, static solution so that RNG is mostly (completely?) taken out of the equation and it gives players a direct way to progress instead of hanging on the whims of RNGsus.

mohio

Man n25philly...I'll just skip all the parts that would get censored and leave me banned...is it really that hard to see the logic behind the changes? He laid it all out for you as several forumites have been doing for months now and you still call it "bad logic"? There were endless complaints about new releases being meaningless because we couldn't have them fully covered in a reasonable amount of time and even if we did they would be permanently stuck dozens of covers behind older characters and never used. So they make a change to address that complaint, it's not perfect (as admitted right here in this thread!) but they think it does a good job addressing some of OUR OWN COMPLAINTS, and on top of that they implement another change that is literally free covers (okay you still have to spend resources you bought or earned, but it's extra stuff you weren't getting before), but no, it's all just a huge slap in the face and will be the end of game...I just can't with you anymore...I hope you enjoy the next game you play much more than this one.

Starfury

Ducky said:

@Khanwulf I believe Dave admitted they missed the mark in their post regarding the flow of covers for 4* covers that are not currently in tokens. I commend them for doing so because to admit fault on this forum can be a dangerous thing as a dev.

Having to deal with unsatisfied customers?
Welcome to the business world where the customer is always right because he pays the bills.

I agree though, a dev doing anything on this board can be a dangerous thing. I for example almost had a heart attack this morning, when I see they actually talked to us.