Brand New Supports Feature! (4/5/18)

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Comments

  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 5,852 Chairperson of the Boards
    jamesh said:
    Question: one of the screenshots shows the user having 5/14 Supports.  Does this indicate that there were 14 total Supports at the time the screenshot was taken, or that the user had bought 14 Support slots?  If you have to buy slots for Supports, how much do they cost?
    You don’t have to buy any slots for supports. You just have to find/collect them.  The total number of supports at launch is 14, so the example shows that the user has collected 5 of the available supports.  The limiting factor is that you can only equip one support at a time on one character.
  • babinro
    babinro Posts: 771 Critical Contributor
    Can't wait to equip Xavier with web shooters!

  • Bzhai
    Bzhai Posts: 516 Critical Contributor
    Interesting feature. It's making the game closer to traditional TCG games.

    My only concern is that it will hamper the chances of some side characters being made into actual playable characters. For instance it's easy to make characters like Korg, Okoye and Agent May as support but I'm sure they would be well received if they got turned up as actual 4, 5 star character. 

    @Brigby if a character is introduced as a support does it mean we'll never be able recruit them as a starred character?
  • 11121
    11121 Posts: 4 Just Dropped In
    Will we be able to buy red ISO using the existing blue/purple ISO?
    (apologies if this has been already asked and answered in the previous 5 pages)
  • RedLion
    RedLion Posts: 70 Match Maker
    What’s the over/under on how many patches it will take to get Colossus’ fastball special to work well with the new feature?  :) 
  • Shintok17
    Shintok17 Posts: 620 Critical Contributor
    Dragon_Nexus said:
    I hope these don't evnuer come to PvP or it'll be just impossible to suitably guess at the power of your opponent.

    It's hard enough as it is not being able to see the cover distribution of a character, but not being able to see what support they have would be horrendous.

    I'm not overly excited about this so far, honestly. It feels like boosts but more permanent.

    Eh, I dunno. It doesn't feel like an exciting new feature but more like extra work and grind poured onto the existing work and grind.
    That's the same way I feel. More **** to grind for and deal with when picking a character. Which is already hard enough since we have so many characters now, but no drop down menu like in the cover queue. Not exciting at all. None of the issues were fixed or addressed that the community have been stating in the forums. Just another useless glorified character boost, like the ones that they replace our ISO in PVE progression with when ever a new 4* is released.

    Don't bring this stuff to PVP please. It's hard enough trying to determine if you can beat a team by their level or health for us to now have to get surprised when they have a strong support equipped. 


  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,471 Chairperson of the Boards
    If I sell a max champ character that has one equipped, does it auto-unequip or do I lose it?

  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    At a glance, I don’t relish the idea of having an eventual huge inventory of these things at various levels, equipped to my ever increasingly huge roster of characters that are already difficult to navigate when I want to build a team around the match. A feature like this will want some quality of life team management UI improvements to come with it, particularly if my perks can’t be removed from a character for 2 hours.

    +1,000. Or 1,000,000. Maybe more... The rest of what you said made sense, too, @ThaRoadWarrior... 
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    edited April 2018
    As a general matter, I appreciate and applaud the creative thinking that the dev team has applied in response to business drivers (pushed by their bosses who run the business). My worry, however, is with those business drivers. In sum, I am skeptical that this change will make the game more fun (due to increases in frustrations and complexity) -- but I'm absolutely certain it will make the game more expensive.

    As many have stated above, there are many flawed/incomplete core functionalities that have never been buttoned down. This change feels to me like the Louisiana Purchase of expanded functionality without ever having consolidated control over the original territory; a whole new universe of bugs and other unintended consequences will arise (which is to be expected in any expansion of functionality) that will scream for attention -- all the more loudly due to their newness. Not only will extant legacy bugs persist, and likely be exacerbated by this new overlay of expanded functionality, they will likely be crowded off the whiteboard by newer, flashier, more ugent "Support" bugs... LIFO will likely rule.

    This inevitable reality is, frankly, obvious and perfectly foreseeable. Which means that business drivers -- i.e. the push for greater revenue -- must have trumped these more practical, prosaic concerns. Put another way, more money is the point and any increase in "fun" will likely come at the cost of disproportionately greater increases in frustration and complexity. Do the bosses play the game or is it merely a rental property where any capital investment can only be justified by directly attributable ROI?

    I'll hope for the best. But this strikes me as a subtler variation on the Loot Box concept... Another angle on implementing "pay to win." There are so many ways that incremental but still interesting improvements could have been implemented to make the game more fun. But those types of improvements are much less likely to herd people into pack purchases than will big, flashy, unpredictable, and currently totally opaque paradigm shifts.
  • talleman
    talleman Posts: 445 Mover and Shaker
    Can a character have multiple supports active at the same time or is it max 1 per character? Sorry if this already have been mentioned.
  • jamesh
    jamesh Posts: 1,600 Chairperson of the Boards
    babinro said:
    Can't wait to equip Xavier with web shooters!

    Alas, web shooters are exclusive to Spider-Verse characters.

    I guess this explains all the new team affiliations that were added and have so far been unused.
  • acescracked
    acescracked Posts: 1,197 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited April 2018
    Will there be an athletic support I can apply to my Sentry?
  • Jonny1Punch
    Jonny1Punch Posts: 440 Mover and Shaker
    Can we apply all our supports & red iso to nerf gambit or completely get rid of him altogether ? Asking for a friend...
  • Daiches
    Daiches Posts: 1,252 Chairperson of the Boards
    Jonny1Punch said:
    Can we apply all our supports & red iso to nerf gambit or completely get rid of him altogether ? Asking for a friend...
    No, but there is a support that gives extra red AP on a red match to boost him :)
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited April 2018
    If I were to translate support to an RPG game equivalent, its effect would be similar to amulet/bracelet. We already have weapons (characters), shield in PvP, and amulets now (my view).

    I think the different supports shown already fired up some new ideas for me and some others. It seems the probability of certain category of perks are capped at 50%, which is fair.

    I was wondering how each level gained affects the effects of certain perks, particularly ap gains:

    Rank 2 ( capped at level 100)
    When the supported character make a red match, there's a 40% chance to gain 2 red ap extra.

    Rank 4 (capped at level 200)
    When the supported character make a purple match, there's a 45% chance to gain 2 purple ap extra.

    Again, I'm a little confused. I interpret that each different rank perks shown in post belong to the same support. So, if I unlocked 5 ranks, my supported character will enjoy the benefits of all perks in each rank? 

    My brief understanding is:

    Supports can be used by characters who can meet the requirement, for example heroes/villians. Inside each supports, there are at least 5 perks of different ranks (1 to 5). If you reach rank 5, your supported characters enjoy all 5 benefits. However some supports have more than 5 perks when equipped to certain characters, for example Deadpool.

    For some reason(s), the first character that I thought of when looking at the perks (Rank 1 to 5) shown, is 5* Gambit. If, and only if my interpretation is correct, 5* Gambit is going to receive a huge nerf, at least to his passive ability, if this were be implemented in PvP
  • carrion_pigeons
    carrion_pigeons Posts: 942 Critical Contributor
    Jarvind said:
    While this does look potentially nifty, I do feel like one of two scenarios is likely:

    1: We end up using the same supports 95% of the time because one or two are just clearly better than the rest

    2: Supports have such a minimal effect that they don't really matter most of the time
    Don't be silly. Supports will all be very strong, at high rank, and will also be very rare. So it won't be a lack of strategic decision-making that makes this unfun, but a tremendous amount of swinginess.  In two weeks, those lucky enough to have gotten high rank supports will be defining the meta and everyone else will be whining about it.
  • 0_efx_0
    0_efx_0 Posts: 236 Tile Toppler
    Real question, which player really requires these supports? I’m in 4* land and don’t really see myself wanting to utilize them AND have to “tap” more screens and icons to use them. 
    I can see 3* land players implementing them but I honestly don’t need them.
    Please to don’t remove any PVE progression reward ISO and substitute it for Red ISO. 
    I’m only curious to find out which game bugs and or glitches will arise from this new supposed support...
  • Bowgentle
    Bowgentle Posts: 7,926 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited April 2018
    0_efx_0 said:
    Real question, which player really requires these supports?
    Everyone who plays for T10 in PVE will require these.
    45% chance to get 2 extra AP to get a skill off one turn earlier = massive.

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