The 5* dilution problem... are the developers purposely making it worse?

Daredevil217

I started thinking about this today and wanted to start a discussion to see if this is a trend other people are noticing or if it is just me.

Once you become a 5* player, progressing involves keeping up with Latest Legends and/or backtracking and collecting Classics (especially the meta ones). The way to progress is by collecting as many resources as possible to give you more “rolls of the dice” to try and champ characters. But even with an abundance of resources, each character released means it is harder to get anyone you missed. It seems that developers came up with some good solutions to help us out, but each one was taken away. 

1. 1:1 cover swaps were done away with and we were given 3:1 instead (So rather than needing ~300 pulls to finish three Latests, we need ~360)

2. Support Circuit was “put on the shelf” to be reworked, but the old version wasn’t left there while coming up with something new. The result? We are no longer getting the progression CP to help with dilution. 

3. Feeders were introduced with much fan fare and were a great way to finish off (or begin getting covers for) some older characters. But they’ve now been throttled back and are tied to “special events”. 

4. Special pop-up stores were another great way to combat dilution, as they gave us a way to target older characters without having to face dilution, if even for a few days. Now? Gone. 

5. At least we have new release stores right? Well as I’m writing this, I see that they are “trying something new” and doing away with new release stores as well??  And in its place  we get a 1:250 shot at the new 5*. I’m guessing this won’t go over well. 

[Edit: #5 is redacted]

6. With few deviations, we used to have a 445445445 release patten giving us some time to grind and collect resources before they piled on the releases. We now have an accelerated 4544545445 pattern making it even harder to finish characters off. 

7. With the most recent server outage they were less generous with rewards than in the past. Something small, but it shows that even when the mistake is on them they are throttling back resources.

8. Finally, this all culminates in them offering us a “resource bundle” for 75 bucks (USD). 

People can choose to do what they will, but I personally refuse to spend looking at this long list of recent trends and recognizing how the game is getting more and more P2W in the subtlest of ways. They know that players at our level are pretty much “hooked” and less likely to walk than a new player who has invested less. Dilution is not a problem for them that they are looking to solve. In fact they are subtly making it worse IMO. They manufacture the problem, then have you pay for the solution (pretty decent business tactic if I do say so myself, and really nothing new. It’s just being ramped up as of late). I’m not telling anyone how to spend their money, but just be aware. Or you can tell me I’m completely off with this one. Either way I thought it’s worth discussing. 

ThaRoadWarrior

This feels like what I predicted was ultimately going to happen when the 4* odds went flat. It's taken way longer than I thought it would to actually get here, but I figured it was the inevitable locking down of the 4* tier coming the same way the 3,2,1* tiers have been. We'll steadily get more 5s, and ideally some means to work on them more effectively. My read of the tea leaves back then was "odds are flat because Latest 12 is no longer meaningful when they aren't coming out that fast, or at all." 

I'm not really sure what the target ratio they're looking for is, but there are:

1* - 8 (1 limited)
2* - 14 (1 limited)
3* - 47 (0 limited)
4* - 87 (4 limited)
5* - 36 (0 limited)

I always imagined the 4* tier was going to harden up at some number 2-3x as large as the 3* tier, and 5*s would shift into high gear after that to catch up. I'm not really sure what economy needs to show up to support this. maybe some sort of higher-odds multi-pack LT like we have in other stores? More CP in the system? Multi-fed classics? There are a number of ways I can think of to balance things out, but it remains to be seen what, if anything, is going to be done to adjust the status quo to this seeming new normal.

Ed_Dragonrider

Oh good, another nail in the MPQ-coffin. I need to try and go get a life anyway...

peterdark

In all fairness, I don't think the devs are intentionally trying to make anyone's lives harder. I just think that they are dealing with a lot more than we can see. We could point out that there's a lack of communication but can you imagine what would happen if they gave out their road-map for the next 12 months? It would get pigeon-holed to death. Unfortunately you only have to go through a few posts on this forum to see that a lot of people will only look at the negatives and there's not enough positivity flowing throughout.

Positive thoughts people

 

DAZ0273

Even as a 4* player I feel the path to 5* land itself is getting harder. I couldn't cover new 5* on the old pace but I could at least rack up a few covers for future hope, so nothing really changes there except I'll probably end up with more 5* lower covered than what was my average before.

Without a feeder, my nearest 5* seems doomed to be stuck at 11 covers until HFH comes around unless we have some sort of Cable specific event coming up - we passed right by House of X without any stores for him, so I'm not holding my breath.

Although I guess removing the new release vault basically leaves me a straight choice between Classic & Latest for CP so maybe I will chuck some at Classic's in lieu of any better plan and hope for some sort of miracle.

ThaRoadWarrior

You can do alright (eventually) in Classic. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing a Classic token pop up in the near future, for the same reasons we saw Elites back when.

tiomono

DAZ0273 said:

Even as a 4* player I feel the path to 5* land itself is getting harder. I couldn't cover new 5* on the old pace but I could at least rack up a few covers for future hope, so nothing really changes there except I'll probably end up with more 5* lower covered than what was my average before.

Without a feeder, my nearest 5* seems doomed to be stuck at 11 covers until HFH comes around unless we have some sort of Cable specific event coming up - we passed right by House of X without any stores for him, so I'm not holding my breath.

Although I guess removing the new release vault basically leaves me a straight choice between Classic & Latest for CP so maybe I will chuck some at Classic's in lieu of any better plan and hope for some sort of miracle.

I only wish they would change every latest legend token reward into 25 cp. Then it would really open up player choice without actually giving out more rewards.

Classics are my preferred token since they have all the meta characters and give you more pulls. 25% more pulls is nothing to sneeze at. I occasionally switch to latest if a particular character piques my interest. Like iceman currently is. I'm actually kind of interested in prof x too. So I may end up doing my first bit of hoarding waiting for prof x to enter latest legends tokens.

peterdark

tiomono said:

Classics are my preferred token since they have all the meta characters and give you more pulls. 25% more pulls is nothing to sneeze at.

Is it 25% more pulls or 20%... My maths is terrible.

Either way, I only pull from classics too. My gut feeling is that CP will become more readily available and I think they will be 'tweaking' things to make it easier to make progress. But then my gut gives me lots of different feelings... 

PiMacleod

It's my fault guys.

I'm F2P as well, but have never been competitive in this game.  Only 6 new 5*s ago (or was it 7) did I finally start catching on how to hoard properly, when to spend, and so forth. 

Because of this, I finally have my first 5* champ, and a few more just one or two covers away.  My grinds are faster, and I don't even have Thor OR Okoye at a decent enough level to support this.

The devs (obviously) saw this and were all like "oh HELL no!  There's no way this casual F2P guy should be doing this well.  We gotta change up the formula!"

And that's why it's my fault.  I shouldn't have flown too close to the sun.

bluewolf

peterdark said:

tiomono said:

Classics are my preferred token since they have all the meta characters and give you more pulls. 25% more pulls is nothing to sneeze at.

Is it 25% more pulls or 20%... My maths is terrible.

Either way, I only pull from classics too. My gut feeling is that CP will become more readily available and I think they will be 'tweaking' things to make it easier to make progress. But then my gut gives me lots of different feelings... 

2 years.  September 2017 was the last time we saw a reward increase (other than Riso) in the game.

The player base is stagnant, not growing.

How do you make more revenue from a group of players that aren't getting bigger?  Hint:  NOT by giving them more stuff.

ThaRoadWarrior

bluewolf said:

peterdark said:

tiomono said:

Classics are my preferred token since they have all the meta characters and give you more pulls. 25% more pulls is nothing to sneeze at.

Is it 25% more pulls or 20%... My maths is terrible.

Either way, I only pull from classics too. My gut feeling is that CP will become more readily available and I think they will be 'tweaking' things to make it easier to make progress. But then my gut gives me lots of different feelings... 

2 years.  September 2017 was the last time we saw a reward increase (other than Riso) in the game.

The player base is stagnant, not growing.

How do you make more revenue from a group of players that aren't getting bigger?  Hint:  NOT by giving them more stuff.

that's not technically accurate - the Support Circuit threw an extra 10 cp into the economy for a brief moment. Of course now it's gone, so...

But you might also consider the wins-based option making that 15cp at the top of pvp progression more accessible as a soft increase in resources. Not a realistic one for me, but it's now there for people who can't hit 1200pts and have all the time in the world.

bluewolf

Making a reward more accessible is not equal to injecting more resources into the game, IMO.  The PVP rewards haven't been updated in I-don't-know-how-long.  Longer than 2 years.

I assume they hoped Support Circuit would inject more revenue via vault chasing while giving us more resources; when the revenue didn't show up, they removed those resources.

pheregas

Doesn't matter how much they increase the rewards.  With Supports DOA and being Post-Iso, there's only one resource of value and that's HP.  That's the most limiting resource out right now, IMHO. 

Having a new store for 5s that rely on HP is going to disrupt my ability to PVP as well as roster new characters (and the time of 2k/slot is growing closer every release.)