Seriously, though, why was 50/50 Vaulted 4* ended?
GrimSkald
Posts: 1,995 Chairperson of the Boards
I've been mulling this over since last week, and I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around it, to be honest. I'm not trying to be sarcastic or "sea-lion" about this, but I really don't get it. I will also preface this by saying that the ending of the 50/50 vault (or the division of "Latest" and "Vintage" 4* characters, if you prefer,) actually kind of benefits me more than it hurts me - I have all but the most recent 3 4*s champed and since the champ rewards get better the higher the character is, it means better rewards all in all. To me, though, it does make the game a lot less fun since a) it's going to take quite a lot longer to champ a 4* after it's introduced, probably six months or more, and b) even after the 4* is champed, they're going to be much lower than the rest of my 4* roster and won't advance quickly like they did before.
For those interested, I made an examination of how vaulting affected the time to complete a character and what level it became, that's here:
So anyway, at this point I'm really baffled as to why they ended the system - it seemed like a great compromise between full vaulting (which was pretty much universally despised, at least when it came out,) and full dilution. It allowed players to cover newer characters much more quickly, which in turn made new characters more exciting, and definitely made it easier for players to transition to the 4* tier. It did make older characters harder to cover, sure, but dilution is doing that every time they add a new character. The way I see it, there are three possible explanations:
1) From the game developers perspective, the vaulting system caused more problems than it resolved. I... really don't see this. Were we covering characters faster than they wanted us to? Is 2-3 months too fast? I know the more cynical of you will cry "money grab," but honestly it's really hard to buy a 4* out of vaults and, in general, not worth it to a 5* player. It seemed like a good solution to token dilution to me, but perhaps it was too good? Was it too much work to maintain, maybe?
2) From the player's perspective, the vaulting system caused more problems than it resolved. To me, this makes even less sense than 1. Sure, like I said above, higher level characters give better rewards, but with the 50/50 system I could regularly get new characters up to around 310 before they fell out of the "Latest" pool. That means they will actually have an impact on my roster, and may see some play when they're boosted. My Jubilee, for example, is 275. She seems like a pretty neat character, and not a bad one to try and build a team around, but why bother without that leg up? The system made it a lot easier to complete characters after they were introduced.
3) They needed to remove the vaulting system in preparation to another solution to dilution. This is what I hope is the answer, but I'd love some confirmation. Certainly the Saved Covers system does nothing for this. Sure, they upped the chance of pulling a 4* in general, but from what I can tell it's going to come out to, in practice, a vanishingly small amount.
Anyway, that's my question as well as my take on the former and current situation. I'd love to hear from a red name about this, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't chime in with your POV and your opinion as well.
Comments
My personal tinfoil-hat theory about why it was done is this: What if we aren't going to be getting new release 4* characters as often anymore, and the cadence starts to favor 5*s? That obviously comes with its own ecosystem of changes that will need to happen (I further suspect we'll see an accelerated announcement of 5* feeders), but if we aren't rotating 4*s out of "latest" as quickly (or at all, if you think that the tier is going to solidify altogether like the 1,2 and 3s have done), then it doesn't make sense to have an odds distinction for 12 arbitrarily released characters any longer.
But again, this is clearly a whole ecosystem of changes, being rolled out in stages. So if we only look at the draw rates out of the legendary stores it is probably going to feel punitive. But if you consider in aggregate all the ways to get 4*s, how attainable they are, I wouldn't be surprised if it at least balances out for the majority of players. Personally, i think this change to PVP progression is really going to make 4* transitioning much more attainable for most so long as the rotation happens in a way that makes it meaningful to grow a specific character on purpose. If we're looking at 1.5 years between runs, that is not great. But if you consider that 3* pvps have some arbitrarily chose 4*, and 4* pvps have a known 4* attached, the acquisition rates are likely going to be fairly healthy.
It's not a bad point, but I don't see the game economy supporting a 5* every other week, even every four weeks. They've done one 4* between 5s before, the 5* release averages something like 5 weeks but it's largely made up of 5445 releases.
Possibly they're gearing up for something, though.
I know it's awesome as an individual when you can get 4*s champed and ready to go in only a few months, but... maybe it's not good overall for PVP? Like, maybe the devs are aiming for a more gradual shift in the meta? I dunno. I feel like I'm grasping at straws now.
Only other theory I can come up with is that the Heroes for Hire or Shield Training offers weren't perceived as valuable enough because it just wasn't that hard to get covers for new characters.
*(fine, fine. Many people.)
But here's the thing no one has brought up: The Cover Bank feature has made it possible to avoid waste and would have gotten that timeframe even shorter. Instead of selling off the 6th Valkyrie black, you can now bank it as a champ level. 4's can drop pretty quickly (especially with Latest odds) and bonus heroes work pretty well. I, on a number of occasions, bonused 4's with covers on the vine and pulled enough of them (sometimes with rewards helping) to avoid selling off covers. Caveat: I did use HfH a few times too, but didn't need to on a number of occasions.
Anyway, I think that the first step to introducing the cover bank was to make all heroes equally likely to be pulled. Keeping the Latest 4X odds would have made it too easy with the cover bank to brute force your way through RNG and cover more 4's more quickly with less hiccups.
This may have been a way to incentivize players to spend more or crack into their hoards.
Or the devs realized people weren’t spending money to chase new 4’s because they were still too easy to cover in a month or two.
I remember back before vaulting when a Peggy Yellow came up people went nuts. Getting one was like hitting the jackpot.
If that’s the reasoning, I don’t think it will work though. Bonus Heroes just make it too easy to target the best characters and cover them relatively quickly.
As it is, most of my pulls now are champ levels -- which granted, are CP and ISO income -- but psychologically don't register as such. It's not "oh, sweet, I got 3 CP or 1K ISO", it's "tinykitty, still no Shuri cover". Since the Wiccan boss event, I've fallen well short of full progression in the couple of events that have run, and I'm a well-established 4* player slumming in SCL7 (so I'm already playing in low-effort EZmode).
event vaults weren't selling
Newly released 4-stars were quick and easy to fully cover through normal game play income, pulling out of Latest Legends. Hoarders could fully cover them as soon as they entered token pools. For everyone else, 13 covers were a certainty before the 4-star left the latest 12. So there was no urgency to spend in a vault and nab a cover or two during the release window/event. Vault sales = down.
So what's the answer? Go back to dilution. Now it's not so easy to get those characters covered in a reasonable amount of time. And look at this! You now have slightly better odds of pulling 4-stars out of event vaults! Doesn't that look attractive? Don't you want the new shiny?
No! I don't want the new shiny anymore! Rockett pointed out that anyone in the 5* tier barely looks at the latest 4* , much less using them for anything significant.
Sure, for people that are 4* tier and who don't want to go to the 5* tier this may be more interesting. But even for many of them, their highest level 4* from the vaulting period will have a significant level difference and be their go-to for a long, long while.
Regarding pack sales, it used to be that the new 4* could be found exclusively in 40 packs for their events. They were, in fact, the only 4* in there. The chances of actually getting one was pretty high for this game. (Probably why they killed it) By comparison, an 80 token vault with one cover, or 4x odds in a 40-pack with 65+ other 4* are a better example why people stopped buying them.