Does classic store need a boost?

ThaRoadWarrior

Inertia is a good word to use - since it can take weeks/months/years to achieve certain things in this game, people can be notably hesitant to rock the boat. If it doesn’t work out the way you thought it would, you may really find yourself in a pickle.

TheRiddler

entrailbucket said:

It's not just about shards.  4* champions are extremely significant reward factories that kick out a large amount of CP and tokens.  Over many years and thousands of pulls, a 20% increase in 4* pulls has allowed me to build a 4* dupe farm that spits out enough tokens to champion all the latest guys before they leave the latest pool.

This whole discussion is just bizarre to me.  Every time I bring up what I do people are like "oh nobody could ever do that it's impossible" and I'm like "no I actually did this, here's how" and they're like "impossible, nobody can do this, nobody has ever done it, terrible idea."

Well, I did it!  It actually happened!  There is evidence!

You can look up my roster in the alliance Clochards to see what it looks like when you only spend CP on classics for 5 or more years.  I've spent money over the years, but it's probably about 10% of what you think I've spent.  I don't think I've ever qualified as a whale. 

I've had 5* covers expire, when that was still a thing.  I've traded in 3 saved covers to get a guy championed plenty of times.  I've had guys where the covers fell like 13/0/5.  I've pulled lots of Banner and Wasp and Cable covers.  I didn't die!  My phone didn't explode!

All true.

But at the same time you have to say that your experience was vastly different than a newer player getting into the game today with a roster that features +150 4s and 5s. So what I'm guessing off the top of my head somebody starting today would be looking at needing 130-140k HP to roster those and then another 60 million ISO to level them up. That is assuming they also already have the 2s and 3s.

And then you have a new 4 and 5 come out every month as well.

A newer gamer now would take much longer to build a 4 and 5 star farm to get those rewards.

There needs to be something where this system works for both older and newer players. I'm sure the boosted characters is an attempt at something of this nature. They could do something about making a regular classic legends store that features a more targeted group or even just make it where the boosted characters have a higher rate on those weeks.

Srheer0

When I was filling out my 4s and 5s I pulled in classic until I had rostered all the 5s at the time. I started sometime when Th5r was in latest with Gh5strider and someone else. This was a few years ago. 

With my 2nd account, I don't think I have pulled a single classic. Just pulled latests when an interesting few 5s appear. Broke original horde for d5adpool as he gives tacos each day if you remember to use him. It felt like a no brainer . 

I only use my 2nd account for PVP and lazy pve snipes. Working on champing 4s and I will probably stay in 4starland for a while as it is more fun than 5star tier.

Having it being cheaper just isn't enough when you have a chance on getting things like w5sp in classic. In my opinion they should improve the pull rate of 5s through the classic store. Or leave it as it is and rebalance all the older 5s. Just boosting 3 or 4 of them per week feels bad for the newer players, but good for the older players.

Theghouse

The biggest con with this idea is that there is very rarely any kind of added rewards, mostly only traded rewards.  

I would not want to trade CP which I can spend anywhere in special stores or Latests, or Latest tokens i can save up for a good group of characters, or guaranteed 5* shards, for a classic token where the dilution is absolute garbage and have a very very very low chance of getting a worthwhile 5*.

I'm just over-the-moon ecstatic for the outspoken player(s?) who could pull classics for 5+ years - from the very beginning of the 4* and 5* tiers - and champ every character ever released in the game. To think that newer players can accomplish the same given the overwhelming dilution in 4* and 5* over the last 3 years of this constant release cycle is just a completely ridiculous idea and terrible advice for those who want to build a competitive roster.  It's like a lottery winner encouraging people to take money out of retirement funds and buy more lottery tickets because " look at me! I did it! There's your proof that it works! Just do exactly what I did! "

Jimsta_rooney

It's tempting for a returning player to blow the hoard on classics.
I may do that next time. 
1st week of boosted 5s was glorious but karma hit me the 2 following weeks. 

Sekilicious

Theghouse said:

The biggest con with this idea is that there is very rarely any kind of added rewards, mostly only traded rewards.  

I would not want to trade CP which I can spend anywhere in special stores or Latests, or Latest tokens i can save up for a good group of characters, or guaranteed 5* shards, for a classic token where the dilution is absolute garbage and have a very very very low chance of getting a worthwhile 5*.

I'm just over-the-moon ecstatic for the outspoken player(s?) who could pull classics for 5+ years - from the very beginning of the 4* and 5* tiers - and champ every character ever released in the game. To think that newer players can accomplish the same given the overwhelming dilution in 4* and 5* over the last 3 years of this constant release cycle is just a completely ridiculous idea and terrible advice for those who want to build a competitive roster.  It's like a lottery winner encouraging people to take money out of retirement funds and buy more lottery tickets because " look at me! I did it! There's your proof that it works! Just do exactly what I did! "

If you want to build a competitive roster, starting now, you need to spend ~$1000/month and drop 7500cp in every special store. Maybe more.  Especially with boosted 5* characters forming the top of the meta. That seems to be true in 4* and 5* land now. The lottery analogy is apt but applies to everyone, whether you only spend on the LL tokens or not. LL should not be considered an investment and the extra 20% you get from pulling CL should not be considered waste. 

entrailbucket

It would take much longer for a newer player to do what I did, because of dilution.  But we're talking about long-term goals. 

If your long-term goal is to get the meta characters to 550, you can follow the established strategy for that (hoard for 2 years or whatever), and in 5 years you'll have a couple meta 550s and nobody else.

If your long-term goal is to get every new character to 460ish, you can follow the established strategy for that, and in 5 years you'll have all the newer guys at 460ish.

If your goal is to get all 5* characters to 550, this strategy is the only one that will ever get you there without dropping an obscene amount of money.  Yes, it would take a really long time, but if you don't start, it would take an infinite amount of time.

People can have different goals.  If I wanted to win everything, I'd have hoarded and pulled for 550 meta characters like everyone else did.  I've won stuff in MPQ over the years, and honestly it's kind of boring to me and the effort generally outweighs the rewards.

Bad

It is a bit exagerate to say spending 1000 per month. I think no one will spend that.
In my case I went directly into 5* land growing up a 5* that I had several covers, paying 720 cp per power. I spent like 7 months like that. That stopped my roster to grow up with 4*s, and I didnt have the power to earn 4*s from pvp.
After that I hoarded for 280 pulls and I could champ 3 LL in time.
It went good for me. 
Obviously the experience is totally different depending the data in which any player downloaded the game.
A newcomer could have a hard time but taking advices and growing up polaris he could make it.

XandorXerxes

If you're a player who plays most every event, you might be able to make progress on classic tokens but a casual player who pulls classics will never get anywhere. Casuals only have one way to get into 5* land, and that's to hoard for ages. 5* Shards help casuals as much as someone bailing water out of a sunken ship.

Let a player's favorite 5*(s) always have a boosted chance of dropping in classics, excluding favorites of 5*s in latest tokens. That way when casuals pull their classics at a much-too-slow-to-keep-up pace they can at least target their favorite 5*s and make some progress. Latest can stay as-is, nothing needs to change. Older players can now target 5*s they missed before too if they're willing to invest the CP.

This is me speaking as a casual who had to hoard forever to get my first 5* champs - not because I was waiting for someone good in latest but instead actually getting 300 tokens took me ages.

entrailbucket

Should it be easy for casual players to get 5* champions?  In a game where every mode is competitive, how does that change things for everyone else?

entrailbucket

Theghouse said:

The biggest con with this idea is that there is very rarely any kind of added rewards, mostly only traded rewards.  

I would not want to trade CP which I can spend anywhere in special stores or Latests, or Latest tokens i can save up for a good group of characters, or guaranteed 5* shards, for a classic token where the dilution is absolute garbage and have a very very very low chance of getting a worthwhile 5*.

I'm just over-the-moon ecstatic for the outspoken player(s?) who could pull classics for 5+ years - from the very beginning of the 4* and 5* tiers - and champ every character ever released in the game. To think that newer players can accomplish the same given the overwhelming dilution in 4* and 5* over the last 3 years of this constant release cycle is just a completely ridiculous idea and terrible advice for those who want to build a competitive roster.  It's like a lottery winner encouraging people to take money out of retirement funds and buy more lottery tickets because " look at me! I did it! There's your proof that it works! Just do exactly what I did! "

I didn't win the lottery, in fact I did exactly the opposite of that.  I made extremely slow, steady progress over a period of many years.

If you're a weightlifter just starting today, and you can only lift 100lbs, but your goal is to lift 500lbs, there's only one way to get there.  You lift a little bit more each time you work out. 

You might never reach your goal of 500lbs, but if you make a small amount of progress every week, over a very, very long period of time, it adds up.  

One thing is for sure: you'll definitely never get there if you don't work out at all and never make any progress.


If your goal isn't "get all the 5* to 550" or you think that goal is stupid or worthless, that's fine!  It's my goal, not yours, and I couldn't care less what you think about it.  My strategy supports my goal.  If you have a different goal, use a different strategy.

primetime21

I would love to a separate classic vault that only had 5* but I'm not sure how they would handle the CP pricing on that.

TheRiddler

I think matchmaking is something that needs to be looked at on this issue.

We are talking about strategies for collecting 5s. The old method of pulling classics has become less valid as more and more characters enter the pool making it take much longer to reap the rewards. The new method has been to save for latest legends in order to champ a core group.

But an issue there is that somebody who has a handful of champ 5s is possibly being matched up with teams that have many champ 5s. If you had a good group of 5s that wasn't an issue in the past. But with the boosted 5s you could find yourself outgunned on a regular basis or having to constantly use health packs.

So in my case for example my highest character at the moment is Scarlett Witch at 453. I just looked in my pvp and 2 of my hits right now are Thanos/Black Panther in the 575 range. That is 120 levels higher than anybody I can use in this pvp. 

And this is really gonna be an issue when you start to see the meta characters boosted. If you don't have a high level Kitty, Okoye, Apocalypse etc. on those weeks then you really mind as well stay home. You are likely gonna have times where not having a single character at a high level could easily lock some from being competitive in pvp.

In short for newer players the old method is no longer viable because of the time, HP and ISO it takes to roster and level 250 or so characters from scratch. And on the flipside the new method of chasing LLs is seemingly now punished by the boosted 5s.

So what is the best strategy now for newer players looking to reasonably move into 5* land?

Bad

The best strategy is having one of the 4 damage boosters, wanda included.
Because if it is not possible to earn all rewards in pvp, it is possible pve scl10. 
And bit a bit streghtening the roster until comes the day when it is possible to be in ranks and be more comfortable in pvp.
My advise is to try to champ all 5*s.
A 5* level 550 can be easily beaten soo  or later by other newer 5*s.
But the experience of playing newer 5*s is a lot funnier. 
I dont regret at all champing 19 5*s.

entrailbucket

TheRiddler said:

I think matchmaking is something that needs to be looked at on this issue.

We are talking about strategies for collecting 5s. The old method of pulling classics has become less valid as more and more characters enter the pool making it take much longer to reap the rewards. The new method has been to save for latest legends in order to champ a core group.

But an issue there is that somebody who has a handful of champ 5s is possibly being matched up with teams that have many champ 5s. If you had a good group of 5s that wasn't an issue in the past. But with the boosted 5s you could find yourself outgunned on a regular basis or having to constantly use health packs.

So in my case for example my highest character at the moment is Scarlett Witch at 453. I just looked in my pvp and 2 of my hits right now are Thanos/Black Panther in the 575 range. That is 120 levels higher than anybody I can use in this pvp. 

And this is really gonna be an issue when you start to see the meta characters boosted. If you don't have a high level Kitty, Okoye, Apocalypse etc. on those weeks then you really mind as well stay home. You are likely gonna have times where not having a single character at a high level could easily lock some from being competitive in pvp.

In short for newer players the old method is no longer viable because of the time, HP and ISO it takes to roster and level 250 or so characters from scratch. And on the flipside the new method of chasing LLs is seemingly now punished by the boosted 5s.

So what is the best strategy now for newer players looking to reasonably move into 5* land?

I think the situation you're describing exists because the developers want it to exist.  They used to do stuff like this all the time to shake things up, but it's been awhile.  

To be clear, the "old" method you describe was never actually used by anybody, except maybe at the very start of the 5* tier.  Because certain characters are so much better than others, collecting and championing all the characters was a stupid thing to do, and nobody with any sense ever did it. 

Anyone who cared about competing targeted the good characters and ignored the bad/mediocre ones.  This was the efficient way to use your resources, and it enabled a lot of people to be successful with less resources.  There was no downside to doing things this way.

Now they've thrown a wrench into that.  You're asking the right question: "what's the best way to do it now?"  Things have changed enough that the current resource allocation strategy may not be the best, because they've introduced a downside to it.  I expect someone to solve it eventually, but right now it doesn't seem like anybody is thinking that way.

ThaRoadWarrior

That's pretty much why I decided to see if it was possible to spend as I go into just latest legends to stay current. Essentially I just said "from now on, everything i get goes into LL exclusively as I get it, let's see what happens." It took about 6 months to get my first champion 5* via bonus heroing and a special legends store (Ghost Rider), but I was able to champ GE Doom out of Latest like that, and then most everyone who has been released since then with just a few notable exceptions, and i've been working my way backward through the classics from best covered to least by chasing 4* feeders. The strategy I've been using is: pull till the next character out of latest is champable and then stop till they get pushed out, then do it again. Sometimes you champ the newest character first and have to push your luck on the older 2, so you end up with a Mr Sinister in the high 450s hypothetically. Across my time doing that, we went from Bonus Heroes to Shards, and then we went from a 4/4/5 release schedule to a 4/5/4/5 release schedule, and even then it's still possible for me to do it. But i have all the 4*s champed, so none of my pulls are "wasted" really. But what this means for my Classic growth is that I can at best chase a 5* directly with shards and then a second one or the same one via 4* feeders depending on how close to done they are. But I've never had a "hoard," even when I got started. Most I've ever saved up while waiting for somebody to leave latest was around 1000cp, and then I got tired of waiting and dumped it all into classic (this is why i lost out on Sighclops, he dropped out at 1/5/5)

HoundofShadow

It's not compulsory to champ all the characters, and majority of the players is not interested in that. They are focused on who's important to them. If you want things to change, you need to convince the dev that things have shifted and majority of the players wants to champ all the characters. Wanting to champ all characters is a personal goal, not a community goal. I'm not bothered to champ all 5* because I'm focused on interesting and meta characters. Having 1 cover for other characters is enough for me. 

Akoni

entrailbucket said:

I think most people would rather have the 20cp to use in Latest than be forced to pull a Classic token, because it either supports their chosen strategy, or they haven't thought about their strategy/goals and they're following "best practices."

If boosted 5* don't get people to reevaluate their strategy, I don't think anything else the devs can do will.  If they dropped the price or split the store I don't think it would move the needle at all -- the inertia is too strong.

You may be right that most people would rather use their CP in LL, however, that is not all players. There are still many players, like yourself, who pull from CL on a regular basis. In terms of inertia, highly competitive players will likely only pull from LL. There are still many players who are on the fence as to which they would pull from. Having CL tokens would encourage them to pull from that store. 

In the end, I think some would use a strategy similar to the one they use for the LL store. They would spend their CL tokens as they go and save their CP for special occasions. The majority would still spend their CP in the CL store. Having tokens for that store would just provide more opportunities.

Theghouse said:

The biggest con with this idea is that there is very rarely any kind of added rewards, mostly only traded rewards.  

I agree to some extent. Often there is a balance of resources that is calculated and monitored throughout the game. Devs may decide that they don't want to "add" any rewards and may instead replace another reward to include something like a CL token. As I mentioned before, we have no control over that. We can only discuss and suggest. That's why I started this thread. I think it's a good idea, but thus far, everyone's brought up some very good points of concern or skepticism.

My primary concern was that CL may be underutilized by the player base. LL has two resources available to it: tokens and CP. Other stores also have two resources: tokens and HP. CL, the store with the largest supply, only has one resource available to it: CP. 

Akoni

I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but HP could be added as a resource for CL purchases. If they did that, they could also provide deals, similar to what they do in the other stores.

entrailbucket

Akoni said:

I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but HP could be added as a resource for CL purchases. If they did that, they could also provide deals, similar to what they do in the other stores.

Obviously things have changed a lot since they introduced legendary tokens, but at that time they were against this because they didn't want 5* to be so obviously purchaseable.  They did kinda, sorta do it eventually anyway, so maybe they changed their minds.