Vaulting

bluewolf

My theory about why 50/50 odds were discontinued remains:

When they introduced saved covers, it became easier than ever to finish off characters (for the most part, discounting the swaps that used to exist for Latests).  So allowing people to still get 1/2 of their 4's concentrated among 12 people was going to be great for getting some 4's going without the HP pressure of needing to roster a bunch of people.  And bad for the devs who want characters to feel hard to finish.

Think about it this way:  With 80 characters but 50/50 Latest 12, you could argue pretty effectively for not bothering to roster somewhere around 50-60 of those characters for a while, and focus on the 12 plus the meta ones you want, since you'd rarely pull the 68 Vintage people.

Now we have a situation where you literally have no idea who will come out of your pulls, and no easy answer of exactly who you should focus on beyond the meta.

Every pull also has a much higher chance of being someone you don't have rostered if you are a newer player working on the tier vs a 50% chance of being 1/12 people.

So your need for roster slots became actually greater and the decision about who to roster became much harder (in general).

With 80 4's, a Classic or LT pull has a 1.06% chance of being one of the various 4's in the tier.  With weighted odds, you have a 3.54% chance of pulling one of the Latest 12 and a 0.63% of getting a certain one of the Vintage 4's in the game.

Obviously the old way was too advantageous for players.

Therealsmkspy

Personally, they could have left the 4x multiplier for 4-6 latest. Characters would rotate out faster, but we'd still have reasonable amount of time to cover them. 

The thing about full dilution that bothers me was the promise that we'd actually get more fours in return (slightly increased pvp odds) and my experience that hasn't been the case. 

tiomono

Therealsmkspy said:

The thing about full dilution that bothers me was the promise that we'd actually get more fours in return (slightly increased pvp odds) and my experience that hasn't been the case. 

This right here needs more attention. We had a pretty good surge of 4* events early on then they dialed it back to almost none besides release events. Vaults did not get the bonus 4*s. 4* event stores did. But the amount of tokens we actually get for these stores is pretty slim so it wasn't really helping much.

They know dillution is a problem. I just think they have no clear idea how to address it.

Therealsmkspy

Another solution is increasing the numbers of 4s in vaults. At 80 fours, having 3 per vault is laughable. Your normal 80 character won't break the game if they increased that number to say 9. Likewise Deadpool vaults could use way more 4s. Likewise a daily 4* in DDP.

These are all pretty easy to implement band aids. 

CT1888

I loved vaulting. Instead of new champs being 30 covers behind my front runners, so not being so appealing to use, I had the great new champs in @Therealsmkspy 's list who started leap frigging Jean and Hulkbuster, making the game more fun. 
The steady stream of improving champ rewards was an important part of my 5* transition (though I could make a case for the 50% of 3*s being vaulted being more important for that transition).

ZootSax

Twomp_thaDJ said:

But if I recall there was the latest store for 25 cp which you could get the three latest 5* and twelve latest 4* and still pull the vintage ones out of the classic 20 cp store? Or am I blending them into what we have now?

During full vaulting & the "Latest 12" vaulting, the 4* availability was identical between Latest & Classic LT's.  Only 5*'s were different between those tokens.

Personally, I would prefer a return to vaulting, but have it cycle each PVP season (similar to how the support tokens cycled, until they totally pulled the plug on supports) so the current LT's would have something like:
1) the latest "x" characters (probably 3-4)
2) all 4* essential characters for the PVE's during that season
3) all 4* featured characters from PVP during that season
4) characters who haven't been recently featured to reach a set minimum number of characters in the tokens (like ~12-20) - ideally this list would also be characters with boost weeks during that PVP season

I admit it's not flawless, but at least you'd have increased odds on the most relevant characters at that time, but no character would be forever banished as they were during the previous vaulting.  It would also allow for PVE to not need to favor the most recent characters so heavily, if at all.

tiomono

Therealsmkspy said:

Another solution is increasing the numbers of 4s in vaults. At 80 fours, having 3 per vault is laughable. Your normal 80 character won't break the game if they increased that number to say 9. Likewise Deadpool vaults could use way more 4s. Likewise a daily 4* in DDP.

These are all pretty easy to implement band aids. 

I dislike vaults because they have no chance of dropping bonus heros. If bonus heros are our best way of fighting dillution it would be great to have that percentage to draw one apply on any character earned.

Phumade

bluewolf said:

My theory about why 50/50 odds were discontinued remains:

When they introduced saved covers, it became easier than ever to finish off characters (for the most part, discounting the swaps that used to exist for Latests).  So allowing people to still get 1/2 of their 4's concentrated among 12 people was going to be great for getting some 4's going without the HP pressure of needing to roster a bunch of people.  And bad for the devs who want characters to feel hard to finish.

Think about it this way:  With 80 characters but 50/50 Latest 12, you could argue pretty effectively for not bothering to roster somewhere around 50-60 of those characters for a while, and focus on the 12 plus the meta ones you want, since you'd rarely pull the 68 Vintage people.

Now we have a situation where you literally have no idea who will come out of your pulls, and no easy answer of exactly who you should focus on beyond the meta.

Every pull also has a much higher chance of being someone you don't have rostered if you are a newer player working on the tier vs a 50% chance of being 1/12 people.

So your need for roster slots became actually greater and the decision about who to roster became much harder (in general).

With 80 4's, a Classic or LT pull has a 1.06% chance of being one of the various 4's in the tier.  With weighted odds, you have a 3.54% chance of pulling one of the Latest 12 and a 0.63% of getting a certain one of the Vintage 4's in the game.

Obviously the old way was too advantageous for players.

Fightmaster said this all years ago.    It was as oblivious then as it is now.  Obliviously there were things that could have been improved.   But I see the forum making the same mistake with respect to supports as they did when they complained about latest 12 vaulting.  Rest assured  I understand the pain of vaulting better than most.  My Black panther was stuck at 12 covers for over year while his covers were unobtainable.  So I know exactly what it feels like to have a crippled char that was at the top of the eras meta.  

however I came to the realization that In the end it doesn’t matter what the devs do or don’t do.      All that ultimately matters is how players approach the various leader boards and their style of play.  I would suggest learn how the big players in each bracket plays so you can adapt your style around them.

Pants1000

The worst part about the first 4* vaulting (for me) was the forced hoarding, or cover loss.  I remember I had half of the latest at 13 covers, and not enough ISO to champ them, so I either had to hoard or accept there was a 50% chance I’d have to sell the cover.  I ended up hoarding.

Saved covers would have fixed that, but that wasn’t a thing at the time.

Personally I liked the 2nd implementation best, with increased odds of latest, rather than full vaulting. I’m really not sure why they ditched that system.

PiMacleod

pheregas said:

Sm0keyJ0e said:

...or if they just let you pick your own custom vault.

I think we all know that BH is as close to that as we'll ever come.   

Well... I'm always one for putting the idea out there.  After all, if no one ever hears the idea, then there's NEVER a chance of it happening.

So as @Sm0keyJ0e said, the custom vault.

Basically, have a separate marker, much like the Bonus Heart.  You mark the 12 characters (or whatever the amount would be in this new theoretical vault)... Any amount of markers not used will be randomly assigned to unmarked characters.

When you use these tokens, they act like Heroic tokens for 2* and 3* odds, but the only 4*s that can be pulled are the ones you've marked.

Of course, Bonus Hearts still apply.

This way, you can aim for some new ones and any 'vintage' ones you wish to.  

This would also help with the complaints regarding using a newer 4* for Shield Training, as you could throw this mark on them AND Bonus Heart them.  

Feel free to tweak the idea as needed.  This is just my take on the thought.

jamesh

While the first implementation of vaulting (only the latest 12 available in tokens) and the subsequent modification (50% chance of receiving latest 12) seemed like genuine attempts to address the dilution problem, everything afterwards seems to have been done with monetisation in mind.

Switching back to full dilution seems like an attempt to get players to open more tokens to get new characters to high levels.  The increased frequency of featuring new characters was an attempt to make it possible to basically cover the character, but that is a fixed number of covers compared to what is potentially available through tokens.

I imagine that they stopped frequently featuring new characters because the token odds change wasn't delivering the desired sales increases.

The recent experiments with SHIELD Training in featuring Magik and now Thanos look like a continuation of those experiments.  Will people who could reliably complete the top section of SHIELD Training change their behaviour when availability of new character covers through event rewards dries up? How many will give up, and how many will open tokens to make up the short fall?

DAZ0273

The change to 4* dilution definitely feels monetised. If the desire was to have players take advantage of the increased 4* odds from PvP stores then an increase in the rewarding of tokens would have gone a long way to help, as would have lowering the cost to 100HP a day for single pulls. Or even a "super multiplier" on bonus heroes if drawing from the current PvP store. As it is you'll maybe get 2 tokens from PvP and they are normally 2*. So spend, spend spend if you want to make up for it.

abmoraz

The rockett said:

Vaulting was absolutely the best option for dilution that we have had presented to us.  Is it the best way to handle it, not sure because we haven’t seen anything else yet.  If they would have came up with a token or a way to get Vintage 4*, then this would have been the best solution.  

It seemed as @Therealsmkspy has said, they did not like us getting 370s so quick and getting all of these rewards.  Man that was a great time to get high levels on your 4*. Now it is mind numbing with no end in sight. 

The absolute best way is to offer more variations of packs.  Instead of a "latest" and "Vintage", there needs to be 4-5 packs.  They could be "2019 releases pack", "2018 releases pack", "2017 releases pack", etc...  or "latest 12 releases pack", "previous 12 releases", etc...

They could even split the packs up each season semi-randomly so that each pack-type had different heroes.  That way we could make some informed decisions on how to spend our HP/CP.

/It's not like Magic:The Gathering had different expansion packs where you knew what your odds of getting particular cards were... oh wait...

abmoraz

As long as they are going to require old characters in PvE/PvP and Shield Training, they have to have a way for people to get them.

My memory might be off, but I believe one of the issues with vaulting was that X-Force Wolverine was required for one of the first Shield Training events, but he was vaulted, so unless you had him covered already, you couldn't do the event.