Vaulting and its fallout are still significant issues in the game. . .

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  • Jaedenkaal
    Jaedenkaal Posts: 3,357 Chairperson of the Boards
    In fairness, the other person is almost always saying something much closer to "But I want to champ iceman!", to which BH provides an answer, and a better answer than not vaulting (not vaulting + BH is the clear winner for calling out one character in particular, naturally, but that's not a system we've actually been given).
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2017
    Let's say you are a new-ish player who started playing mpq in january of this year.  How, exactly, are you supposed to cover and champ a 4* like iceman?
    ---------------------------
    So your solution, fight, is that a new player needs to build up a roster sufficient to compete at at least my level (which is far from the top of the mountain, but still offers multiple boosted 4*s each week and rewards that are largely dictated by my dedication to grinding rather than my roster), and THEN spend about 3 months opening LTs with a single target 4* set as the only favorite.  And at the end of all that they get a single 275 character.  Out of about 40 vaulted 4*s, with a vault that is growing all the time.

    Jaden:  these are both things that i wrote early in this thread.  I don't think it's fair to infer from either statement that i was just talking about iceman.
  • Jaedenkaal
    Jaedenkaal Posts: 3,357 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2017
    Vhailorx said:

    Lets say you are a new-ish player who started playing mpq in january of this year.  How, exactly, are you supposed to cover and champ a 4* like iceman?

    ---------------------------

    So your solution, fight, is that a new player needs to build up a roster sufficient to compete at at least my level (which is far from the top of the mountain, but still offers multiple boosted 4*s each week and rewards that are largely dictated by my dedication to grinding rather than my roster), and THEN spend about 3 months opening LTs with a single target 4* set as the only favorite.  And at the end of all that they get a single 275 character.  Out of about 40 vaulted 4*s, with a vault that is growing all the time.

    Jaden:  these are both thingd that i wrote early in this thread.  I dont think it's fair to infer from either statement that i was just talking about iceman.
    OK... walk us through how that would work with no vaulting or BH.

    I wasn't meaning you. I mean the argument in general from people specifically calls out a 4* character or two. I actually didn't remember that you'd used him in an example from earlier. He's just a very common part of this sort of argument.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2017
    Jaedenkaal said:
    Vhailorx said:

    Lets say you are a new-ish player who started playing mpq in january of this year.  How, exactly, are you supposed to cover and champ a 4* like iceman?

    ---------------------------

    So your solution, fight, is that a new player needs to build up a roster sufficient to compete at at least my level (which is far from the top of the mountain, but still offers multiple boosted 4*s each week and rewards that are largely dictated by my dedication to grinding rather than my roster), and THEN spend about 3 months opening LTs with a single target 4* set as the only favorite.  And at the end of all that they get a single 275 character.  Out of about 40 vaulted 4*s, with a vault that is growing all the time.

    Jaden:  these are both thingd that i wrote early in this thread.  I dont think it's fair to infer from either statement that i was just talking about iceman.
    OK... walk us through how that would work with no vaulting or BH.
    Do you even read what I write in my posts? [author's note: obviously not.  No one reads posts on the internet!  People just write passionate walls of text about how smart and awesome they are. . .]  Please direct me to the the statement in this thread where I said I wanted to go to a system with neither BH nor vaulting?

    That system might have been acceptable when there were 20 4*s.  Though at time cp and LT rates were noticeably lower for most players.  So in actuality 4* acquisition rates were too slow then too.  In fact, I am 100% certain that if you look at posts on the top ic of 4* acquisition rate by me in the early summer of 2015 you will see that I was concerned then that 4* build rates were too slow, and that demi would create long term problems for the health of the game if they persisted in treating 4*s as super rare prizes for which a player might get one cover if they finished in the top .5% of an event while simultaneously moving to a 4* meta. 

    There were plenty of problems with the old system and I have been pointing them out for a long time.  The problem with the vaulting + bh system is NOT that the old system was good.  It's that the vaulting + bh system has its own, different problems. 
  • Fightmastermpq
    Fightmastermpq Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    Vhailorx said:
    Let's say you are a new-ish player who started playing mpq in january of this year.  How, exactly, are you supposed to cover and champ a 4* like iceman?
    ---------------------------
    So your solution, fight, is that a new player needs to build up a roster sufficient to compete at at least my level (which is far from the top of the mountain, but still offers multiple boosted 4*s each week and rewards that are largely dictated by my dedication to grinding rather than my roster), and THEN spend about 3 months opening LTs with a single target 4* set as the only favorite.  And at the end of all that they get a single 275 character.  Out of about 40 vaulted 4*s, with a vault that is growing all the time.

    Jaden:  these are both things that i wrote early in this thread.  I don't think it's fair to infer from either statement that i was just talking about iceman.
    You said "A" 4* like Iceman.  One.  BH is perfect for that.

    If you are now trying to say that BH is bad because it doesn't let you champ ALL the vaulted 4*s, well......no ****.  You can't.  To do so would include a ton of dilution which we all agreed was bad.

    THIS is why we end up in the same argument over and over - because you still fail to comprehend that you simply cannot have equal access to all 4s without dilution.
  • NewMcG
    NewMcG Posts: 368 Mover and Shaker
    edited June 2017
    Vhailorx said:
    But honestly. The fact that you dont see the contradiction between (1) you pointing to BH as a response every time i say "how is someone supposed to cover vaulted 4*s"?, but (2) saying that "no-vaulting + bh" would be too slow.  Is the reason we end up in the same argument over and over again.  It's cool that BH + champ rewards + event rewards is sufficient to cover your vaulted 4* needs.  They arent enough to cover mine (and the vast majority of the playerbase that earns covers at or below my rate).  I dont know what your intent is, but your comments always rrad to me as if you are simply dismissing my concerns as trivial or based on bad math or stupid.  It gets irritating.
    If you live in a fantasy land where you believe you can finish and max champ every single 4* that has now been vaulted, then no amount of reason will make much sense. BH is an excellent way to focus fire when trying to finish old 4* characters. Having everyone still in the LT pool wouldn't make Iceman or any other of the decent old 4* show up at any reliable rate. People were annoyed when the 5* drop rate in classics went below 3% per character. 4*s would now be under 3% (and officially at 2% once Sandman enters) each in LT if vaulting hadn't happened.

    The big complaint seems to be "how do I cover the good 4*s?" when having 50 4*s in the LT pool keeps covering any specific character an exercise in finger-crossing, at best. For every Iceman, Jean, Peggy, etc, there's still going to be an equal number of Venom, Elektra, Fury, or any other of the mediocre at best 4*s. Undoing vaulting puts just as many, or more, undesirable 4*s back in the pool. It would take hundreds, (if not thousands) of 4* pulls and millions upon millions of iso to get anywhere close to the situation you can get to with the vaulting system, where you can come very close to assuring yourself of zero wasted covers. And the pool just gets bigger every few weeks.

    Would I like Iceman back so I can get his last few covers? Sure, in a perfect world. But if I can make his covers a 1 in 20 proposition (and hope it's not a blue), as opposed to a 1 in 50 proposition (also while hoping it isn't a blue) I'll take that any day of the week. Especially if it means there's zero chance I'll be drawing my 30th cover for a character that I'll never consider worth the iso to champ.  I've sold easily a dozen Elektra covers over the years and probably around the same number for Fury. If I never see them pop up again, I'll be fine with it.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    McG:

    I am just going to quote my earlier response to jadenkaal, but let me also compliment you on so expertly dispatching the strawman you substituted for me in your last post.  Well done sir or madam!

    My earlier reponse to someone else responding to an argument they pretended i had made:

    Do you even read what I write in my posts? [author's note: obviously not.  No one reads posts on the internet!  People just write passionate walls of text about how smart and awesome they are. . .]  Please direct me to the the statement in this thread where I said I wanted to go to a system with neither BH nor vaulting?

    That system might have been acceptable when there were 20 4*s.  Though at time cp and LT rates were noticeably lower for most players.  So in actuality 4* acquisition rates were too slow then too.  In fact, I am 100% certain that if you look at posts on the top ic of 4* acquisition rate by me in the early summer of 2015 you will see that I was concerned then that 4* build rates were too slow, and that demi would create long term problems for the health of the game if they persisted in treating 4*s as super rare prizes for which a player might get one cover if they finished in the top .5% of an event while simultaneously moving to a 4* meta.  

    There were plenty of problems with the old system and I have been pointing them out for a long time.  The problem with the vaulting + bh system is NOT that the old system was good.  It's that the vaulting + bh system has its own, different problems.  

  • NewMcG
    NewMcG Posts: 368 Mover and Shaker
    edited June 2017
    Vhailorx said:
    McG:

    I am just going to quote my earlier response to jadenkaal, but let me also compliment you on so expertly dispatching the strawman you substituted for me in your last post.  Well done sir or madam!

    My earlier reponse to someone else responding to an argument they pretended i had made:

    Do you even read what I write in my posts? [author's note: obviously not.  No one reads posts on the internet!  People just write passionate walls of text about how smart and awesome they are. . .]  Please direct me to the the statement in this thread where I said I wanted to go to a system with neither BH nor vaulting?

    That system might have been acceptable when there were 20 4*s.  Though at time cp and LT rates were noticeably lower for most players.  So in actuality 4* acquisition rates were too slow then too.  In fact, I am 100% certain that if you look at posts on the top ic of 4* acquisition rate by me in the early summer of 2015 you will see that I was concerned then that 4* build rates were too slow, and that demi would create long term problems for the health of the game if they persisted in treating 4*s as super rare prizes for which a player might get one cover if they finished in the top .5% of an event while simultaneously moving to a 4* meta.  

    There were plenty of problems with the old system and I have been pointing them out for a long time.  The problem with the vaulting + bh system is NOT that the old system was good.  It's that the vaulting + bh system has its own, different problems.  

    So, you want to be able to cover old characters, "like Iceman" (but not JUST Iceman). So, that means either throwing EVERYONE back into the mix, adding many, many unwanted characters to the fray. Or maybe some other way, like if you, I don't know, could pick and choose a few specific characters you wanted, and then every certain number of 4* pulls would give you, say, a cover that comes from that group you chose... Nah, let's get all 50 back in there. Then every theoretical new player we're using in this hypothetical (who definitely expects to catch up to people who have 1000+ days of gameplay under their belts) will have characters like Iceman covered in no time, just like how everyone easily covered every character before vaulting came in!

    Or, would you like to explain how exactly this theoretical player was supposed to cover characters like Iceman? Undo vaulting and just make a thousand LT pulls and hope that luck favors them? That sounds like it may take a while, too.
  • Jaedenkaal
    Jaedenkaal Posts: 3,357 Chairperson of the Boards
    Vhailorx said:
    Do you even read what I write in my posts? [author's note: obviously not.  No one reads posts on the internet!  People just write passionate walls of text about how smart and awesome they are. . .]  
    I do. I should obviously stop responding to these sorts of things from my phone on the train home on a Friday, though. Let me try that again when I can read this on a screen larger than 10 cm.

    Suffice it to say that I do not disagree with your observations as outlined in your latest posts. I am less sure about the solution,  although I am not opposed on principle.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    New McG said:
    So, you want to be able to cover old characters, "like Iceman" (but not JUST Iceman). So, that means either throwing EVERYONE back into the mix, adding many, many unwanted characters to the fray. Or maybe some other way, like if you, I don't know, could pick and choose a few specific characters you wanted, and then every certain number of 4* pulls would give you, say, a cover that comes from that group you chose... Nah, let's get all 50 back in there. Then every theoretical new player we're using in this hypothetical (who definitely expects to catch up to people who have 1000+ days of gameplay under their belts) will have characters like Iceman covered in no time, just like how everyone easily covered every character before vaulting came in!

    Or, would you like to explain how exactly this theoretical player was supposed to cover characters like Iceman? Undo vaulting and just make a thousand LT pulls and hope that luck favors them? That sounds like it may take a while, too.
    Umm, so last time you argued against a strawman version of me I quoted myself responding to Jaden's strawman version of me.  Now I am going to quote my earlier post responding to Fight:

    Fight that is just not correct.

    Behold, in one sentence, followed by a simple explanation, i shall outline a simple plan that would provide players with equal access to all 4*s without dilution.  

    Divide the whole 4* pool in multiple LTs with 10-16 4*s each; sell these LTs separately for cp.

    That's it! Let players choose which 4*s to chase by spending their cp on whichever batch of 4*s they like.  When necessary, add a new LT, thereby avoiding dilution.  Demi can adjust the pool size for these LTs and the cp cost as necessary to keep roster growth and revenue generation at target levels.  Practically speaking, i would suggest running a few tests with a limited time LT of this variety to get some data, but in principle this system would be both more scalable and easier to tweak than the current system.

    Where are you getting the impression that I am pining away for a return to the old system?  I literally responded to you by quoted myself saying that I don't just want a straight return to the old system.  And you then quoted me quoting myself saying i don't want to return to the old system in a post where you snarkily mock my foolish desire to return to the old system. 

    How clear that can I make myself?  I don't like the current vaulting + BH system for a variety of reasons.  I also DID NOT like the old system for a variety of different reasons.  disliking the one does not make me a proponent of the other.

  • kaelad
    kaelad Posts: 48 Just Dropped In
    Wumpushunter said:
    it would be my guess that most pro vault people have a great many old 4s champed and they have no negative impact on their game but removing them Is a great benefit to getting the new characters faster. And heck with anyone with no champed red hulk or peggy.
    This is what I thought when it first came out. I was just about to move into 4* land and didn't like it because it cut me off from finishing covering all the classic 4* I had 6-9 covers for. But for my friend, well into 4* land I figured he'd like it.

    My friend had over a dozen champed 4*s before vaulting and he likes it, for the most part. Now, he's run into the problem where he has the 12 newest well covered and is hoarding CP until more rotate in. In his case, keeping only the 12 newest in the tokens is too few since he covers them too quickly.
  • MaxxPowerz
    MaxxPowerz Posts: 276 Mover and Shaker
    edited June 2017
    I would like vaulting better if I could swap out a few characters. If they made it semi-customizeable it would be ideal. I get that the devs would never do this though.
  • revskip
    revskip Posts: 1,038 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2017
    Ruinate said:
    How are new players supposed to cover Iceman under the old system?  Since the day vaulting went live, how many Iceman covers do you realistically think you would have acquired through token pulls?  If 5* dilution is a problem, then so is 4* dilution, but Demi did something about it.  Vaulting.

    The question is why do something about 4* dilution, but not 5*'s??
    Through bonus heroes if Iceman was your only concern you would cover him at a quicker pace than you would have without vaulting.  A much higher rate actually.  I finished my Iceman who was at 1/2/4 at the start of the bonus heroes/vaulting age pretty quickly.  Haven't champed him yet because I want to finish all the characters in the vault first but he will be the first that gets done once I finish that group at the end of this season.  

    The caveat being that you can only make that kind of progress on one character at a time.  My bonus hero pulls since Iceman have mostly gone towards Peggy with some thrown in on Gamora and Coulson when I was close on covers with them.  Peggy has added 25 levels since bonus heroes were introduced.  The vast majority of those levels were bonus heroes.  Even with the worst possible pulls 25 covers would be more than enough to cover any 4* you wanted.  
  • NewMcG
    NewMcG Posts: 368 Mover and Shaker
    Vhailorx said:

    Where are you getting the impression that I am pining away for a return to the old system?  I literally responded to you by quoted myself saying that I don't just want a straight return to the old system.  And you then quoted me quoting myself saying i don't want to return to the old system in a post where you snarkily mock my foolish desire to return to the old system. 

    How clear that can I make myself?  I don't like the current vaulting + BH system for a variety of reasons.  I also DID NOT like the old system for a variety of different reasons.  disliking the one does not make me a proponent of the other.

    So, then I ask you, how should someone cover Iceman? Adding an extra 2-3 types of LTs by parsing them out into small groups? Take the smallest amount of foresight and just imagine the CS nightmare as people, by accident or stupidity, pick the wrong one of the, say, 3 (virtually identical besides the contents) "vintage legendary" tokens, waste a chunk of CP, and then get mad and insist upon a refund of their CP because it "wasn't clear" what characters were in what tokens, or just "hit the wrong one". That would be a wonderful new deluge of CS complaints that a basic amount of predictive reason can see coming.

    And then you get to add a new token every time you add, say, 10 characters? So 2 months from now we'd have 4 different, "vintage legendary" tokens, and in a year or so, 5? The K.I.S.S. "Keep it simple, stupid" goes a long way when it comes to dealing with the choices given to large groups of people. Given the choice between accepting that they somehow messed up if they buy the wrong LT and saying "aw, shucks, I goofed that up", or making a fuss and yelling at anyone who'll listen about how "the devs are con artists and won't practice good business, and compensate me for my own dumb mistake!", well, you read the forums. Which one of those do you think sounds like the more reasonable expected outcome?

    Making the system way more involved and convoluted wouldn't be any huge quality of life improvement for most people playing, and certainly would be more headaches for anyone involved in actually running the game, which we as customers tend to lose sight of. 
  • Starfury
    Starfury Posts: 719 Critical Contributor
    Fightmastermpq said:
    Vhailorx said:
    Didnt everyone who just said they prefer "vaulting + bh" over "no vaulting+bh" also argue that bh was a perfectly way of covering vaulted 4*s?  

    If so, then why is dilution a concern under the"no-vaulting+bh"?  You can just use bh to cover whoever you want?  

    It really seems like the people who like vaulting + bh are the one who dont care about vaulted 4*s, either because they dont need many more covers for older 4*s, or because they arent completionists, or because they like building newer 4*s faster.  That's all fine.  But why does it mean that I am wrong to care more about the vaulted characters?

    BH is great because it allows for meaningful progress on 1 or 2 characters in a reasonable amount of time to allow you to target a couple favorites or top tier characters to improve your roster to your liking.  But as a mechanism for making meaningful progress into the entirety of the 4* tier it falls short.  I never claimed that BH was a "perfectly way of covering [all] vaulted 4*s", it's not.

    Old tokens offering on average 1 cover in 40 pulls for every character => dilution, noone ever gets anywhere
    BH tokens offering on average 1 cover in 40 pulls for two bonus characters => meaningful progress.

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