Are supports already dead?

marshall

It's impossible to win with forum people. If they launch something drastic and broken, it's because they haven't playtested enough. If they soft launch and iterate, they are being too conservative.

The reason there's no further details is because things are very much in the air. They are slowly testing, seeing the data on the impact on the lower level players. They don't want to launch a feature that'll make the 2*, 3* game completely broken. It's very hard to make big changes to supports if heaps of people have whaled and max leveled 4*, 5* supports, they'll feel scammed.

For us 4*, 5* players, it'll take a bit more patience to see some impact and higher resource availability. I can say that the Chimichanga for instances is *very* helpful for Gambit. Korg increases Thor damage with his tiles and they are converted to full strength strike tiles alongside others. I'd say these sound quite game changing.

Besides, we're about to receive a whole batch of new supports in the form of Infinity Stones and Thanos' Black Order.

***Removed personal attack - Ducky

jamesh

I suspect they'll eventually make master support tokens available in exchange for CP.  I wouldn't be surprised if they price them in the 100-200 CP range though, since you don't need to collect 13 copies of the support for it to be useful.

As for versus season rewards, I'd love to see some advanced support tokens for progression but feat it might just be one or two beginner support tokens.

DrDevilDinosaur

Supports didn't die, they were DOA.
Poorly designed, poorly implemented,
Introduction of character/faction specific supports ahead of a solid base of genetic supports,
can't review the attached supports one you're in battle,
No real incentive to level up low Star supports,
More RNG progression,
Can't be used in PvP,
Etc.

There's quite a bit that I like about the concept, but the execution is just mind boggling.

Spudgutter

HoundofShadow said:

First, there are 3 types of Support tokens:

1) Beginner pack contains a Rank 1, 2, or 3 Support. (~1:3 for Rank 2 and ~1:20 for Rank 3)

2) Advanced pack contains a Rank 2, 3, or 4 Support.

3) Master pack contains a Rank 4 or 5 Support

It looks similar to Standard Token, Heroic Token and LT /Classic Legends to me. Putting things into context:

Rank 1 dupe = 1,400 red iso

Rank 2 dupe = 7,000 red iso

Rank 3 dupe = 12,000 red iso

Rank 4 dupe = 16,000 red iso

Rank 5 dupe = 24,000 red iso

It's straightforward. It's either progression rewards, placement rewards or both. Based on the available information, it's not difficult to guess that if it's progression rewards, it's likely Beginner pack. If it's Advanced or Master pack, then it's placement rewards, alliance awards or progression reward at between 8000 to 12,000 points. 

As for vault, there is only 1 Beginner pack in PvE vault and its rarity is similar to 4* or LT. There is 1/80 probability of getting it.

As for bundles, it comes and goes. Again, it's likely one offer per month or every quarter or so for Advanced/Master pack.

If any of the pack appears too often, they either have to speed up the number of new supports each month or reduce the red iso from duplicates. 

As for currency, it's either using CP and/or HP. It's not difficult to guess. If they use red iso or introduce new resources specifically for Support tokens, we'll know what's going to happen next.

Looking at changes they made over the year, they did not ignore your game history. For example, extra Iso-8 when new shield ranks were created and feeders for 5* even if your level is way ahead of the first 5* cover from feeder. They said they will be experimenting with different ways of getting support tokens and red iso. Obviously by now, they are aware that top level players are not getting much earth-shattering benefits to their current PvE gameplay.

It's not difficult to see what the different ways could be:

1) through drops
2) champed level rewards
3) selling maxed champed characters
4) daily rewards
5) Shield Rank

And more. You don't need to be creative to tell what the different ways could be. 

Look, it's only the 10th day since the in-game existence of Support and we are about 10 days away from 3rd of May, a Thursday. This make it almost a month since the announcement of Support token. Chances are more info would be out this coming Thursday. I don't understand the obsession with wanting to know full details of future information months or weeks in advance. Is it distressing to discover changes in-game or to be a little surprise or patient?

you either can't see it or won't. 

you have this assurance of what will happen, but use the word "if" half a dozen times that post, and "guess" twice.  

the problem isn't that people aren't patient.  we have been patient for the months of lead up, with no changes to the game, assuming something was coming.  and now it is here, and we still don't have any answers.  all we have are your "guesses" of what it will be.  

it has been mentioned before, and bears repeating.  in the past, when they made large adjustments to the game, the results were instant.  the game before ddq and after are completely different.  the game before champing and after are completely different.  alliances, 5*, CP, SCL, the list goes on and on.  

10 days in and i can't tell the difference before and after.  i mean, i have a 5* character with 60k health with a boost of 165 health, so i guess i can see a little difference.

mega ghost

According to that Hollywood Reporter article, this Tuesday, 4/24 "New supports become available, including Children of Thanos and Infinity Stones." My guess is that we're either getting more Infinity War content around the movie or they couldn't get what they had planned together in time and gave us the re-hashed Thanos boss battle instead. In either case, it's likely they needed to have supports launched in time for this tie-in content, and in order to meet their deadlines ended up with an extremely lackluster launch. As of now, they're either finishing up their work or just being extremely prudish to see how much they need to offer to increase sales — naturally, they want to give the minimum amount possible as it's easier to offer more than it is to offer too much to start and then offer less.

LeaveMyCookies

mega ghost said:

According to that Hollywood Reporter article, this Tuesday, 4/24 "New supports become available, including Children of Thanos and Infinity Stones." My guess is that we're either getting more Infinity War content around the movie or they couldn't get what they had planned together in time and gave us the re-hashed Thanos boss battle instead. In either case, it's likely they needed to have supports launched in time for this tie-in content, and in order to meet their deadlines ended up with an extremely lackluster launch. As of now, they're either finishing up their work or just being extremely prudish to see how much they need to offer to increase sales — naturally, they want to give the minimum amount possible as it's easier to offer more than it is to offer too much to start and then offer less.

Sure, but when you're offering 100 times less new currency than what could be a reasonable income you have to start asking questions. The data is here. Did they not know that leveling a support to 250 would cost 620ish k red iso? I mean they developed the feature. One thing is to be cautious not to overflow the system with new currency, but the other is to be completely unaware of numbers. I talked about this on discord, at 10000 red iso a day it would take you 2 months to max level a 5* support. Just one support. At 10k Riso/day. 2 months. Right now we're getting what, 200-300 a day tops? You need to open your eyes and admit that the system is extremely flawed right now, stop looking for counter arguments because they will fall short every single time. 

Nick441234

Is 2 months considered a long time to take a support to level 250? If thats a long time, then maybe you are playing the wrong game. I'd be absolutely over the moon if I could take a support to level 250 in 2 months. You have to treat them like 5* characters and expect that same sort of time scale. 

LeaveMyCookies

Nick441234 said:

Is 2 months considered a long time to take a support to level 250? If thats a long time, then maybe you are playing the wrong game. I'd be absolutely over the moon if I could take a support to level 250 in 2 months. You have to treat them like 5* characters and expect that same sort of time scale. 

Did you even read my post? It would take 2 months if we were making 10k red iso daily. At current rates it will take over 2 years if not more for a single support

EDIT: my bad. If we were making 500 Riso daily (which we are not) it would take just over 3 years. So more likely 4 years instead of 2 for one support hero

spectator

You can gain enough iso to champ a 5 star in about 2 weeks

Nick441234

spectator said:

You can gain enough iso to champ a 5 star in about 2 weeks

If you magically gain 13 covers in a day, of course. 

Nick441234

LeaveMyCookies said:

Nick441234 said:

Is 2 months considered a long time to take a support to level 250? If thats a long time, then maybe you are playing the wrong game. I'd be absolutely over the moon if I could take a support to level 250 in 2 months. You have to treat them like 5* characters and expect that same sort of time scale. 

Did you even read my post? It would take 2 months if we were making 10k red iso daily. At current rates it will take over 2 years if not more for a single support

EDIT: my bad. If we were making 500 Riso daily (which we are not) it would take just over 3 years. So more likely 4 years instead of 2 for one support hero

They've already said this isn't the finished set of rewards. No doubt they will be boosted, just as CP and ISO were. 

Punter1

No support token in the new Taco vault.  There's been 3 or 4 since supports were released, surely an easy place to at least place a single token if nothing else.

The disenchanted in here are looking for something more from supports and unfortunately everything the devs have released so far with them has been on the less end of the scale. 

Supports may not be dead, but they certainly aren't flourishing and enhancing the game in ways the devs had been hoping.

bluewolf

As I consider what increase in Support resources might appear:

The biggest thing to me is no tokens that are truly earnable.  Red iso is something that can be tweaked easily, and maybe quickly.  But they are putting a token in a Vault that is otherwise full of specific covers (how likely you are to pull a cover aside, at least you know what you will get if you keep going).  The random Support token doesn't appeal to me much.

Now, there may be some Support tokens in the HfH this week with the new Supports coming.  And we know that some kind of token will be a Season reward for the next season - meaning you'll actually get it in about 5 weeks.  (Still a week left of this season, and the next one ends 4 weeks later).  But that's all we know.

I'm not going to pretend to know what kind of resource distribution makes sense to devs, but by playing PVE to progression, you end up with a lot of Standards, some Elites and Heroics, and can pull 1-2 Legendary store tokens.  Is it too much to give out one Support token every PVE?  Maybe one per week somehow (maybe the reward tables don't make that easy....)?  A one - off event to play and earn a token that is put up once every 1-2 weeks?  Something other than "keep playing and eventually you will get some kind of token."

I was unwilling to spend money on the initial HfH offers so I got my 6 1-level Supports.  I remain unenthused.

The devs have the job of selling us features and characters to increase interest/spending.  If that doesn't happen, then they should consider reassessing how they are presenting them.

broll

I wouldn't say supports are dead right now, I'd say they are duds right now.  They are clearly slow rolling out, which is probably for the best for not breaking the game, but bad for building hype.  I'll try to get them when I can but I'm not holding my breath on them being useful any time soon at the current rate.

Treras

Supports are great. In the meantime  more and more vets are playing another marvel licenced game.

mega ghost

LeaveMyCookies said:

mega ghost said:

According to that Hollywood Reporter article, this Tuesday, 4/24 "New supports become available, including Children of Thanos and Infinity Stones." My guess is that we're either getting more Infinity War content around the movie or they couldn't get what they had planned together in time and gave us the re-hashed Thanos boss battle instead. In either case, it's likely they needed to have supports launched in time for this tie-in content, and in order to meet their deadlines ended up with an extremely lackluster launch. As of now, they're either finishing up their work or just being extremely prudish to see how much they need to offer to increase sales — naturally, they want to give the minimum amount possible as it's easier to offer more than it is to offer too much to start and then offer less.

Sure, but when you're offering 100 times less new currency than what could be a reasonable income you have to start asking questions. The data is here. Did they not know that leveling a support to 250 would cost 620ish k red iso? I mean they developed the feature. One thing is to be cautious not to overflow the system with new currency, but the other is to be completely unaware of numbers. I talked about this on discord, at 10000 red iso a day it would take you 2 months to max level a 5* support. Just one support. At 10k Riso/day. 2 months. Right now we're getting what, 200-300 a day tops? You need to open your eyes and admit that the system is extremely flawed right now, stop looking for counter arguments because they will fall short every single time. 

You're obviously very emotionally invested in this, to the point in which you're doing a great deal of projecting. I wasn't presenting a counter argument to anything, nor was I defending anything, I was simply offering my hypothesis as to why supports had such a poor debut and continue to be poorly implemented. I agree completely that the amount of red ISO being awarded is terrible. I also think that the fact that there are no paths to earning supports (besides the 1/80 chance of pulling a token in a vault) is terrible. As things currently stand, supports might as well not exist and in their current state all they offer is less efficient UI.

JHawkInc

Supports cannot be dead yet because they have yet to finish arriving.

As more supports are introduced, it'll be easier for them to add more tokens and Red-ISO without overdoing things.

I agree that things are slow and we aren't seeing a lot from Supports right now, but it's still early. It took two months after 5*s were introduced to roll out Command Points as a way to acquire Legendary Tokens. And since then we've had upgrades (SCLs, PVP rewards, DDQ, Crash of the Titans, etc) to give out more and more CP over time (as well as going from 3 to... 24 5* characters.

We've got 14 supports now, with another 10 on the way (assuming we get all six stones and the "Children of Thanos" only refers to the Black Order and not others like Nebula), give it till summer, let us get up to 50 or so, and I bet both Support tokens and Red-ISO will both be easier to acquire. 

hopper1979

I like the idea behind them we just need to see the red iso issue tweaked and we need to have more possibilities for drops.  I have gotten 1 pack in 2 weeks.  None of my supports are past lvl 2 and I have 24 levels in one the others I have not touched.  I will say I have noticed the effects in game especially with the one I have slotted and I just wish I had a character it fit with better.  I am assuming that they will work out these bugs in the next month or 2 and then I will have a positive opinion on them, right now C+.

Jarvind

While they are currently irrelevant due both to extremely limited availability and being disabled in PVP, I think we can safely assume they will be incorporated into more event rewards and so on.

I'd rather they do it nice and slow like this, rather than just release an untested, full-blown, whale-able feature that both widens the gulf between the rich players and the normal ones, and gives us another Gambit-style gamebreaker that forces you to either use it or lose all the time.

mpqr7

It's a super slow roll-out. In a few months/years, it will be useful, and then we'll all laugh off all the fears people used to have.

I can tell that the devs/producers don't want to roll out something too powerful too quickly.

That being said, I have equipped a few but don't really notice their affects, and I don't gain enough riso to upgrade them in a way that matters, so it's been pretty minimal for me.