An idea to fix the problem of cover oversaturation. Champion bank,

edgewriter

To me there is nothing for frustrating than having to throw away a four or five star cover.
I'm not talking about selling it because I don't want to buy an extra roster spot. I'm talking about about the four blue Iron Fist 4* covers I've had to toss this week because he is stuck at 5-1-1. I'm also talking about the four Agent Venom and two Mordo covers languishing in my rewards list because, though I have them fully covered I don't have the ISO to champ them.

Now I know this has been discussed verbatim because I'm not the only one with this issue. Lately it seems that I sell more 4 star covers than I use. I have a solution that I think works for D3 and the customer.

A Champion bank.

This would be for 4 and 5 stars. It is a third option for a cover. you can Sell it, recruit it, or bank it until you have a character championed.

When you put covers in your champion bank, they accumulate until the character has been champed. Then, for the cost of say 50 hero points, you can access your champion bank. This allows you to pull all the covers you have saved for an individual character.

That way when I finally get Danny Rand to a 5-5-3 or whatever and I have the Iso to max them, I can spend 50 hero points to access the bank and pick up the fifty blue covers that are sitting there.

This has the benefit of taking away the biggest reason for token hording and since you can only bank covers for characters that are already in your roster, D3 still gets to make money for roster spots.

Does anyone have a reason this shouldn't happen?

drayviper32

Here's an idea. Don't cash in CP or LTs until you have iso saved.

DFiPL

Honestly, 50 HP is trivial enough that Demiurge wouldn't make money, because nobody would spend to make that happen. If they were to implement that idea, it'd more likely cost along the lines of a HfH cover.

edgewriter

This is a proposed solution for hoarding. And Hoarding doesn't stop this from happening. Even if you wait until you have Iso saved you can hit that unusable cover after opening just a couple tokens. IE my 5-1-1 Danny Rand and the blue covers I've wasted.

smkspy

This has been proposed before...fact is they want us to have those wasted covers either to pursued us to champ thereby play/pay more or simply make the eventual usable cover feel like that much more of an achievement.

edgewriter

DFiPL said:

Honestly, 50 HP is trivial enough that Demiurge wouldn't make money, because nobody would spend to make that happen. If they were to implement that idea, it'd more likely cost along the lines of a HfH cover.

I might spend that much to buy a champion bank. Not to access it every time.

Ducky

*Off to Suggestions*

edgewriter

Thanks. For some reason, didn't think to put it there.

Punisher5784

I've said this since Day 1. We need a 'Comic Bin' for the extra covers we don't use. We can pay a monthly 'rent' or it can be free with VIP

JHawkInc

The way this game makes money is by putting players in tight spots with resource management, and providing options to buy your way out of it.

One of the ways this is done is by limiting the availability (rarity) and usefulness (color) of covers, with an added sense of urgency (covers expire) to put pressure on the player.

Being able to save covers takes that stress away, thus reducing the "need" to spend money on this problem.

In other words, this change is never going to happen because it goes directly against the business model.

Wumpushunter

Nothing ever will be done about wasted covers. Wasted covers keeps progression and slow progression keeps you playing and hopefully buying.  Why do you think you get wasted covers, certain colors have a higher chance of dropping.

jamesh

Wumpushunter said:

certain colors have a higher chance of dropping.

Is this actually true, or are you basing it on gut feeling?

If you receive 13 covers for a character, the chance that you'll receive 5 or less of each colour is about 30% assuming equal probabilities.  So you'd still be likely to get wasted covers without rigging the system.

Straycat

A similar solution I have seen proposed is to let us recruit a duplicate, then apply those covers after we champed the original. I think they used to do this for you at some point, long ago. Same basic idea to a champion bank, but 1000 hp per character. Helps D3 double charge for roster spots if you have bad luck. Maybe it would have to burn that spot after you use it to make you buy another roster spot for the next release.  1000hp much more affordable than a hfh price.

Crnch73

jamesh said:

Wumpushunter said:

certain colors have a higher chance of dropping.

Is this actually true, or are you basing it on gut feeling?

If you receive 13 covers for a character, the chance that you'll receive 5 or less of each colour is about 30% assuming equal probabilities.  So you'd still be likely to get wasted covers without rigging the system.

I can't say it's intentionally true, but for me it has definitely happened. 17 Gwenpool Greens, 23 Ghost Rider reds.

CNash

Whereas my Gwenpool is sitting at 5/5/0...

GrimSkald

It's definitely a good idea, the big question would be how difficult it would be to implement.  It's brand new code making the game do something that it doesn't do now, so it may be anywhere from a moderate investment in time and money to nigh-impossible to code it up, depending on how things are set up on the back end.

Daredevil217

Straycat said:

A similar solution I have seen proposed is to let us recruit a duplicate, then apply those covers after we champed the original. I think they used to do this for you at some point, long ago. Same basic idea to a champion bank, but 1000 hp per character. Helps D3 double charge for roster spots if you have bad luck. Maybe it would have to burn that spot after you use it to make you buy another roster spot for the next release.  1000hp much more affordable than a hfh price.

I like this idea much more, and I think it is more developer friendly, as you are still put in a tight spot resource wise and I imagine the coding to merge two heroes would be easier than making a new bank system but I really do not know.

Megdar

Wumpushunter said:

Nothing ever will be done about wasted covers. Wasted covers keeps progression and slow progression keeps you playing and hopefully buying.  Why do you think you get wasted covers, certain colors have a higher chance of dropping.

And yet there was thing done for wasted cover, they increased the time limit from 8 days (Or something like that) to 13 days.

And the game make more money right now they it was doing back 2 years ago.

Happy player put more money in a game then unhappy player.

No, some people will not put money into the game to buy more iso or CP so they don't waste cover, but they could put 500 HP to back up cover until Champ (And like he said, you could do it only for curently in roster hero, so you still buy roster slot)

I for one never put money in iso, but I would put money to buy a backstore.

Stop pretending you know how a game make money, and just try to see how it could even make more money so the dev see it also.


Edit: And no, some color don't have more chance to drop. In probability realm, you will always have outlier and cluter of data. Some in my alliance get all of 1 color and then other get all of another color. I have and OML 151 and one of my friend is at 502. This mean nothing.

jamesh

Straycat said:

A similar solution I have seen proposed is to let us recruit a duplicate, then apply those covers after we champed the original. I think they used to do this for you at some point, long ago. Same basic idea to a champion bank, but 1000 hp per character. Helps D3 double charge for roster spots if you have bad luck. Maybe it would have to burn that spot after you use it to make you buy another roster spot for the next release.  1000hp much more affordable than a hfh price.

IIRC, the conversion of duplicate heroes back into covers was a one-off offer they made when they introduced the champion mechanic.  People weren't rostering duplicates before this due to lack of Iso, or getting the wrong colours: it was simply the only option besides selling the covers.

I doubt they'll offer it again though.

edgewriter

Crnch73 said:

jamesh said:

Wumpushunter said:

certain colors have a higher chance of dropping.

Is this actually true, or are you basing it on gut feeling?

If you receive 13 covers for a character, the chance that you'll receive 5 or less of each colour is about 30% assuming equal probabilities.  So you'd still be likely to get wasted covers without rigging the system.

I can't say it's intentionally true, but for me it has definitely happened. 17 Gwenpool Greens, 23 Ghost Rider reds.

It certainly feels that way sometimes, but It's not consistent enough to prove anything like that. I would say it's just bad luck. As for saying that they will never change the system, that may be true, though if that is the case I don't think it is greed keeping them from doing so. It's just that it isn't a priority to them. If enough people complain or propose solutions, maybe it will become one.

jamesh

If anyone wants to explore the probabilities of fully covering a character, here's a few Python functions I wrote that calculate it via brute force:

def check(a, b, c, r):
    if r == 0:
        return min(a,5) + min(b,5) + min(c,5) >= 13
    return check(a+1,b,c, r-1) + check(a,b+1,c, r-1) + check(a,b,c+1, r-1)

def fully_covered(pulls):
    return float(check(0,0,0, pulls)) / 3**pulls

There are quicker ways to calculate this, but it was good enough for my needs. This gave me the 30% probability to fully cover a character with 13 covers. For 14 covers, it rises to 50%, and then 65% and 76% for 15 and 16 covers. I needed to go to pick 21 covers to get above 95% probability of fully covering the character.

95% might seem like pretty good odds, but it means that if you have 20 characters it wouldn't be unusual for one of them to require more than 21 covers to complete.  If you've got most of the 4* characters, you might expect this to happen to a few of them.

So I think this is just a case of bad luck rather than the results being rigged.