Support Tokens - a breakdown on their availability.

GrimSkald

I brought this up on Colog's guide to supports, but it really warrants its own topic, so I thought I'd post it here.  Someone brought up "how do I get supports?" and I answered how I did (by spending 100hp on every vault once a day, basically, and spending on some of the deals,) but that leads to the real issue - how does a new player get supports?

The basic answer, at this time, is they don't.  Supports add very little to the game at the lower levels, so even if a newer player is inclined to spend $$ or HP on supports, they really shouldn't because those resources would be much better spent elsewhere.  This leads to a very basic conclusion - support tokens are way too hard to get.

At this time, beginner support tokens are available as two items in every PVE Vault - an 80 item vault.  That basically makes them as rare as 4* covers - you will get them from time to time, but they are an extreme outlier pull.  Otherwise you can get one by playing at a higher SCL for the season and placing very high.  That's one, and you generally need to place T25 or better.  Otherwise, you can spend 300 HP when a new support comes out and get three chances to pull one of 15 tokens from a 120 item vault - about as common as a 3* cover in that vault.  Alternatively you can spend 4800 HP at that time for 5 tokens and a 4* cover, or 250 CP for 3 tokens and a 4* cover.  In both cases the price is extremely high relative to normal 4* covers - the HP cost is 1200 more than the "going rate" (3600 for a 4* cover, 8 2* tokens, and 3 CP,) and the CP offer is... well it's terrible really, considering you can get 10 "Latest" pulls (on average, 8.5 random 4* covers and 1.5 5* cover,) or 12 "Classic" pulls (10.2 4* covers and 1.8 5* cover.)

I think we can all agree that this availability is way too low.  I'd be interested in what other people have as suggestions, but here's my $.2.

Right now, support tokens, even the beginner ones, are harder to get than Legendary Tokens.  That's tinykitty - they're not nearly as integral to the game as LTs and not even remotely as valuable.  Making them as common as Heroic or Elite tokens is probably going too much the other way - that will flood the game with tokens and RIso.  As common as Event tokens is probably closer to "right," but it's still probably a shade too common.  So here's what I think would be ideal, keep in mind this is only my opinion and no better a plan than anyone else's:

- A beginner and advanced support token should be added to the progression rewards of both PVE and PVP.  One each, I think.

- Beginner tokens should be available from some other source - I would lean toward placement in the subs of PVE.  Top 50 is probably the right number there, since there's no top 25 in sub placement.

- Another Support Token should be available from Placement in PVE and PVP - here I think they should go all the way up to Master for sufficient placement.

- A Master token should be available from Season placement.  I honestly think it should be no harder to get than the LT.

So this way a person who plays a lot at the high level will get a fair number of beginner tokens, a few advanced tokens, and probably one Master Token a season.  This seems very reasonable, and it will mean that many people will start to cover some of the, at this point, many supports at a decent level.

Support distribution is another question - I'm not sure they want to fold in all the supports to the same token as that's already extremely diluted.  A potential solution there is to have a different "support store" for each event support token, but I think I've made this post long enough...

tiomono

I thought they should have put the tokens as progression rewards in place of the higher amounts of red iso. Better tokens for higher progression. That way people are actually getting supports. If they get a dupe they get a chunk of riso.

Jaedenkaal

OJSP said:

GrimSkald said:

I'd be interested in what other people have as suggestions, but here's my $.2.

A lot of good points.. worth 20 cents indeed.

I think eventually the tokens will be added to the reward ladders, but until then, the guaranteed way to get the tokens from the vaults without spending money would be through hoarding. 

Man, that's a long-term investment though just for a guaranteed token. Even at SCL 8 I'm getting maybe... 8? 10? vault tokens for a 3-day event. So you're talking about holding on to these things for 5-10 of that single event, and that's not including the times when it is run as a new character release where there's no vault at all. 

Yikes. 

ZeiramMR

First, I believe that the amount by which Red ISO was recently increased is to replace the amount we would be getting from duplicate supports if we had more tokens. So I am not expecting tokens to become more available soon.

That said, I think a lot of people are underestimating how frequently the Story Event Basic Supports should be rewarded under the current setup (all things being equal and not RNG spikes/dips). If a player is getting full progression, plays the 5* Essential, and is playing each sub as opposed to starting late, they should be getting a Basic Support about every 2 weeks. Call it closer to 3 weeks for people not playing the 5*, and neither of those lengths account for alliance sub-bracket vault tokens or Daily Deal purchases. Of course... the normal Support stores are missing a lot of supports that are from the purchase-only releases.

Twomp_thaDJ

Supports basically have guaranteed availability to those who pay for them.. or hoard.. plan and simple.. folks will say that they are in vaults but unless like was mentioned above you have to hoard to guarantee that you get one.. or spend HP (money) on the packs..  they aren’t in any progression rewards and no placement tiers other than being NUMBER ONE in a season.. and folks that rank that high in PvP seasons I’m willing to bet are typically whales so they probably spent money on the packs available and are in return getting supports already *shrug*

I don’t think the devs are really worried bout how we feel on this subject... being that this post isn’t the first post on the lack of availability for supports.. The one supposed fix they initiated about supports was to add more red iso.. which only helped those who already paid for supports and didn’t do anything for those still struggling to gain them.. but hey who am I to try and make sense of things 

Brigby

Hi @GrimSkald. Thanks for putting together this write up! You make some good points, and propose what I believe to be a very fair balance in availability. I'll be sure to pass this along to the team in my weekly report for review.

Dormammu

The thing I don't like about Support availability is that they're treated like character covers, except with another layer of RNG on top. Take your typical vault. You can see exactly what character covers are inside it. If there is one you covet you can get it - it's just a matter of how many pulls it will take you. A player can hoard or spend, but they have a direct path to the covers they want. It may be slow and frustrating at times, but with enough resources a character can be covered through various means.

A Support in a vault is just a token which gives you that second layer of RNG, as there's no way to predict or manipulate which Support you'll get out of it. It removes any direct path for the player to get what they want. A player can't chase after a specific support through placement, progression, HfH store, a vault, or buying it with resources (CP, HP, whatever).

I'd like to see the token aspect completely removed from Supports and treat them like character covers. Put them on a rotating schedule as progression prizes the same way character covers are. Put specific Supports into vaults. If they want to keep tokens involved, have vaults with a bunch of Supports in them and have a token for it that can be gained as a progression prize.

Of course, this creates a whole new problem of what rarity should be available and it leads to my second dislike about Supports - the way they handled rarity. What they should have done is make every Support have 5 levels like they do now, but every time a player gets that support it adds a perk level. So the first time a Support is gained you have it at  one star level. The next time you get it a new perk level is added - thus, you'd need to acquire that Support 5 times to max out its perk level. After that, any additional acquisitions of that Support are converted to red iso.

LeRoy1979

Brigby said:

Hi @GrimSkald. Thanks for putting together this write up! You make some good points, and propose what I believe to be a very fair balance in availability. I'll be sure to pass this along to the team in my weekly report for review.

Wait,...there is a weekly report to the Devs from the forum???

GrimSkald

Jaedenkaal said:

OJSP said:

GrimSkald said:

I'd be interested in what other people have as suggestions, but here's my $.2.

A lot of good points.. worth 20 cents indeed.

I think eventually the tokens will be added to the reward ladders, but until then, the guaranteed way to get the tokens from the vaults without spending money would be through hoarding. 

Man, that's a long-term investment though just for a guaranteed token. Even at SCL 8 I'm getting maybe... 8? 10? vault tokens for a 3-day event. So you're talking about holding on to these things for 5-10 of that single event, and that's not including the times when it is run as a new character release where there's no vault at all. 

Yikes. 

Heh, I made a lot of typos in my post I see.  I fixed most of them, but left the $.2 - it's ridiculous that the price for an opinion has not been adjusted for inflation. 

You could hoard tokens to better your chances for getting the beginner support tokens, but that's very, very much not worth it.  It's the support equivalent of a standard token.  Chances are you'll draw a Rank 1 something that is part of the original crop...

As I said, supports are almost unavailable to new players (one of reasons I have so many of them is they gave us a fair number of tokens on release and special events,) and the resources they'd need to spend to get them is not worth the cost.

Nick441234

LeRoy1979 said:

Brigby said:

Hi @GrimSkald. Thanks for putting together this write up! You make some good points, and propose what I believe to be a very fair balance in availability. I'll be sure to pass this along to the team in my weekly report for review.

Wait,...there is a weekly report to the Devs from the forum???

Yeah. Brigby has mentioned it a number of times. He goes into bat for us on a weekly basis. Obviously doesn't mean they listen to him. 

Brigby

Nick441234 said:

LeRoy1979 said:

Brigby said:

Hi @GrimSkald. Thanks for putting together this write up! You make some good points, and propose what I believe to be a very fair balance in availability. I'll be sure to pass this along to the team in my weekly report for review.

Wait,...there is a weekly report to the Devs from the forum???

Yeah. Brigby has mentioned it a number of times. He goes into bat for us on a weekly basis. Obviously doesn't mean they listen to him. 

I wouldn't say they don't listen to the feedback I present them. There have been many changes that were a direct result of community sentiment. (For example, the changes to Saved Covers)

I think most of the time it's just a matter of which topics can be addressed relatively soon, and which ones require more time to evaluate, in order to come up with a good solution.

GrimSkald

Brigby said:

Hi @GrimSkald. Thanks for putting together this write up! You make some good points, and propose what I believe to be a very fair balance in availability. I'll be sure to pass this along to the team in my weekly report for review.

This is what comes when you spend too much time writing a post, so that a bunch of other posts pop up between it and the last one you read.  

You're welcome!  It's been something I've been mulling over myself for a while - I figured availability was going to improve sooner or later, but I also thought some suggestions would be helpful.

Kahmon

Still hoping for a new 5* crash ddq node to award master support tokens.
The chimicanga challenge would be a great name for it.