3*s incubate for 9-10 covers. I am sad.

Unknown

Apologies if this has been brought up before - I don't remember seeing it.

Maybe there aren't that many players with 2* rosters who are working to their first 3* (or second, or fourth...), but I feel surrounded by them in PvP enough to think it's all about meeee.

Here's the thing.
First cover in a given 3* character: scramble for HP for another roster slot (or not, if you built up a stockpile). "And so it begins." A new level 15 parked in your roster.
Cover #2: it goes up 2-3 levels, 10 if you're lucky. Level 18-25 parked in your roster.
Cover #3: Same deal. Level 20-38 parked in your roster.
Cover #4: Same deal. Level 30-50 parked in your roster.
Cover #5: Same deal. Level 41-62 parked in your roster.
Cover #6: Same deal. Level 51-64 parked in your roster.
Cover #7: Same deal. Level 64-74 parked in your roster.
Cover #8: Same deal. Level 74-89(?) parked in your roster.
Cover #9: Same deal. Level 89-101(?) parked in your roster. "Hmm... I can sorta play him now..."
Cover #10: Level 101-111(?) parked in your roster. "Okay, now he finally feels like my 2*s."
Then there's 3-5 more covers to max him out, depending on whether you got the colors you wanted.

Given how long it takes to get a cover for a particular 3* (esp. one that's past the intro honeymoon), this is a long, long time for a character to be staring at you in your roster while you play your old 2* team again, and again, and again...

What if there were more venues to encourage you to play these otherwise benched characters? Like a tourney for the less trained (e.g. level 50 and under (by covers - ISO-starved wouldn't count)), that awarded covers for them specifically? The only time they come out otherwise is in their featured PvP, or selected PvE nodes.

Alternately, what if playing a specific char (it doesn't even have to be 3*, but we know this is the grind area) slowly earned some form of points toward a specific cover? Or even, using that power worked toward that color? Suppose you really want that yellow Steve Rogers ability, but it's months before his tourney comes around again, and that cover never seems to drop. Okay, that's fine, just put your level 38 Rogers in your PvP team and start playing, and save your yellow AP, and after he throws down about 100 Sentinels of Liberty, there's your third yellow cover. If Spidey Sense kicks in 100 times, there's your second purple Spidey.

Or perhaps playing with that character and making matches earns that character XP in that color. One XP per AP! (All three members get it of course, unless they're knocked out.) Then, say, 1000*(coverLevel^2) XP gets you that cover level if you want it.

I don't want it to rain 3* covers like it is for 2*s right now, because I don't want to drive D3 into bankruptcy, but this might give players a bit more of the control they crave that would cut down on the negativity (or at least diversify its flavor). It would also encourage playing the newer characters without artificially requiring them for certain matches and compensating for that by buffing them; in turn, making it more exciting when covers 2-8 appear. Now you want to play these, rather than putting the first 8 covers on a shelf so they can taunt you while you keep playing your ThOBW+1 or whatever.

[Edit: I just saw zenbrillig's comment in IceX's "AMA" thread, which kinda touches on this. This is a sort of common theme I've seen over the months, too.]

noobprime

someone else mentioned this in another forum, but i think adding an 'rpg' element to level up the chars covers via play would be most excellent. it would take a lot of play testing though since it needs to be laborious enough that most people will still simply buy covers. this would mostly help f2p players though.

i am sure more venues and game types are in the pipeline. sadly we just have to be patient, just like with the 2* -> 3* transition.

HailMary

9 covers grants you a L89 soft cap.
10 covers: L102.
11 covers: L115.
12 covers: L128.

I think the low-covered tourney is an interesting idea, though perhaps rewarding tokens for random 3* covers would be a better balance of value. I'm picturing a tourney that's more like a Lightning Round or a No Holds Barred event than a full 2.5-day PVP event.

While I think directly trading XP for covers undermines the "Iso is XP, HP is premium currency" system, granting an HP discount on a cover instead of directly granting the cover could be a very interesting idea. For example, a maximum discount of maybe 250 or 500 HP off a 3* cover that resets for every cover you buy.

Bowgentle

Since the Elder Scrolls style of levelling skills by simply using them is my favourite system, I love the idea of getting 'XP' through the use of skills.
Would need to be very well implemented though - if nothing prevents me from going into shield sim to suicide my squad over and over again while using Sentry's yellow to get another cover, well, I know what I'll do in bed for an hour every night.

noobprime

Bowgentle wrote:

well, I know what I'll do in bed for an hour every night.

is it sudoku?

Bowgentle

noobprime wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

well, I know what I'll do in bed for an hour every night.

is it sudoku?

It was 'yellow' that gave it away, right?

HailMary

noobprime wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

well, I know what I'll do in bed for an hour every night.

is it sudoku?

2048 is far more conducive to one-handed play.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

While I think directly trading XP for covers undermines the "Iso is XP, HP is premium currency" system, granting an HP discount on a cover instead of directly granting the cover could be a very interesting idea. For example, a maximum discount of maybe 250 or 500 HP off a 3* cover that resets for every cover you buy.

Hmm. Why is this XP/premium system a thing? In general, I mean - seems to have analogs in several MMOs I've seen.

I haven't exactly spent a huge amount of time thinking this through, but I don't see any glaring problems with D3 selling people XP for a certain character. They even have a yardstick: make it equal to the amount of HP needed to get that cover.

Nonce Equitaur 2

There could be a tourney called "Unmaxed", where maxed characters cannot be used, but all others are fair game.

HailMary

Mehhh wrote:

Hmm. Why is this XP/premium system a thing? In general, I mean - seems to have analogs in several MMOs I've seen.

I haven't exactly spent a huge amount of time thinking this through, but I don't see any glaring problems with D3 selling people XP for a certain character. They even have a yardstick: make it equal to the amount of HP needed to get that cover.

I don't know, concretely, why it's there, because I've played zero MMOs, and MPQ is the only game of its kind that I've played.

My guess is that it's a monetization strategy: you (the devs) want to reward playtime with XP and maybe a small amount of premium currency (the latter is just to give players a fairly regular taste). Then, require the premium currency for truly valuable durable goods in order to encourage players to spend money by giving their money compelling value.

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

There could be a tourney called "Unmaxed", where maxed characters cannot be used, but all others are fair game.

Lycra's L140 army would melt faces and take names.

Unknown

Mehhh wrote:

What if there were more venues to encourage you to play these otherwise benched characters? Like a tourney for the less trained (e.g. level 50 and under (by covers - ISO-starved wouldn't count)), that awarded covers for them specifically? The only time they come out otherwise is in their featured PvP, or selected PvE nodes.

This wouldn't work for multiple reasons.

For one, you would be giving players an incentive to not level their heroes or to keep a certain batch of heroes at a lower level. As soon as you do this, you cut into the potential progress people will want to make in the game, meaning many people will reach their goal quicker and get bored quicker, which translates into less money for D3. Less money for the makers = not a likely plan. Sure, there will be some people paying for more HP to buy extra slots so they can make extras of the same heroes just at lower levels for these tourneys, but those will be in the minority.

Secondly, this wont even achieve the goal you want of making those 3 stars more playable. If you just put a level cap of say 40 on a tournament, people will just play 1 star heroes because they're way more powerful. If you make the cap 80, people will just play 2 star heroes for the same reason. 3 Star characters wont be viable until you raise the cap higher than say 90 or 100, in which case, you're going to be benching them for the same amount of time anyway.

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Since the Elder Scrolls style of levelling skills by simply using them is my favourite system, I love the idea of getting 'XP' through the use of skills.
Would need to be very well implemented though - if nothing prevents me from going into shield sim to suicide my squad over and over again while using Sentry's yellow to get another cover, well, I know what I'll do in bed for an hour every night.

While I love Elder Scrolls as much as the next guy, this would cut into D3's monetization of the game as well. No matter how it's implemented, the result would be people doing exactly what you say and just going into the Sim and suiciding over and over again until they get their levels up. Sales for HP to buy covers is a big part of how D3 makes their money, so taking that away would be bad.

Plus it seems like it would just add another progress bar that we would have to worry about, complicating a game of which one of it's most brilliant features is simplicity.

HailMary

Deadpan wrote:

Secondly, this wont even achieve the goal you want of making those 3 stars more playable. If you just put a level cap of say 40 on a tournament, people will just play 1 star heroes because they're way more powerful. If you make the cap 80, people will just play 2 star heroes for the same reason. 3 Star characters wont be viable until you raise the cap higher than say 90 or 100, in which case, you're going to be benching them for the same amount of time anyway.

It may be workable if you require semi-covered 3*s only, as opposed to simply any character below a certain number of levels, but that does seem a bit needlessly convoluted.

Deadpan wrote:

Plus it seems like it would just add another progress bar that we would have to worry about, complicating a game of which one of it's most brilliant features is simplicity.

Indeed, playing Brave Frontier a bit has made me realize just how simple MPQ is. MPQ has Iso and HP. Brave Frontier has Energy, Zel, Karma, Arena Orbs, character XP, user XP, Honor Points, Gems, and probably a half-dozen other in-game "stuff units" that I have yet to discover.

Unknown

D3 already offers you a solution to wanting to use 3*'s more often before they are truly "viable", and that's the featured char tourneys. One of the benefits of the patch tourney right now is that lower tier players that maybe have a couple covers and some iso invested into patch will get a chance to play one of their previously benched characters in a viable way. They're trying to help those people who have benched heroes play them by boosting them for a tournament at a time.

Honestly, when I read you complaint about incubating char's, here is what I'm really getting:

It takes a long time to get up to that 3* level of play (which is true, after playing for months i've finally started getting maxed 3*s just recently). As it currently stands right now, it is boring and tedious to get up to that level of play because 3*'s are practically unusable for so long.

Your solution to this problem currently is to make the 3* level of play slightly easier to achieve or more viable earlier one which I think detracts from the sense of accomplishment when you finally get to that point. In my view the real solution to this is to make the transition from the 2* to the 3* level of play less tedious and more fun. D3 could do this easily by adding more 3* characters, making gameplay at the 2* level more fun by maybe accentuating the differences between environments, or other ways too.

What's important though is that the solution should be making the 2* to 3* transition more fun and not lower the standard for 3* level of play.

wade66

Here is a suggestion:

A three tiered tournament
Tier 1. Combined character levels can't exceed 200 with no character exceeding 40% of your team make-up. Reward a token for a random 3 star with appropriate Hp/Iso.
Tier 2. Combined levels can't exceed 300 with same rules and simar payout.
Tier 3. Combined levels can't exceed 400 with same rules and 2 tokens + Hp/Iso payout.

Each player can only enter one at a time.

Unknown

Deadpan wrote:

For one, you would be giving players an incentive to not level their heroes or to keep a certain batch of heroes at a lower level. As soon as you do this, you cut into the potential progress people will want to make in the game, meaning many people will reach their goal quicker and get bored quicker, which translates into less money for D3. Less money for the makers = not a likely plan. Sure, there will be some people paying for more HP to buy extra slots so they can make extras of the same heroes just at lower levels for these tourneys, but those will be in the minority.

That's why I said ISO-starved doesn't count - a 13-cover 3* ISO-pumped only to level 50 to pwn noobs would still count as a 141 for this purpose. Which would mean either you parked your 3*s permanently at around 5 covers, which would be probably boring since all you're getting in rewards is more covers in those specific 3*s, or you'd farm a 5-cover version to feed your 13-cover, which would (as you say) motivate having extra slots so Patch can farm for his twin brother Patch, which in turn might be more revenue but would look kinda silly lore-wise.

Deadpan wrote:

Secondly, this wont even achieve the goal you want of making those 3 stars more playable. If you just put a level cap of say 40 on a tournament, people will just play 1 star heroes because they're way more powerful. If you make the cap 80, people will just play 2 star heroes for the same reason. 3 Star characters wont be viable until you raise the cap higher than say 90 or 100, in which case, you're going to be benching them for the same amount of time anyway.

Good point, but I don't think it would be that bad at those levels. I have a level 37 IM35 sitting in my roster; he does 23/21/18. My level 41 Patch does 24/21/19. Normalize both to 40 and IM35 is beating Patch only by about 3-6 points per match where both are around 2k health and special abilities dominate. If it was a level 80 tourney, I might field my 66 Punisher (36/32/28), a 2* with 14 covers, and that 41 Patch, and make up the level difference with smart play against the AI. (Part of this idea would probably require not having a theme character needed on your team; think of it as a tiered No Holds Barred. Some Holds Barred?) Overall, my hope is that while a maxed 2* beats a 3* of equal level, a non-maxed 2* vs. a non-maxed 3* will present less of a difference, and that combined with the fact that they won't stay that way for long, plus the novelty of the thing, would draw players back into it and keep the game fresher.

The thing I would worry about in this case is that the current PvP playerbase for the 2-day tourneys would now split into (let's say) three tiers - 40, 80, and the current. (I thought about 50 and 85 being the tiers, but part of the point is to break the ability to just field your optimal teams and diversify.) D3's matchmaking algorithms for this new state of affairs might work worse for this than it currently does with everyone in one big pool - MMR would be harder to calculate, "death brackets" might be even wilder, etc.

Unknown

Deadpan wrote:

D3 already offers you a solution to wanting to use 3*'s more often before they are truly "viable", and that's the featured char tourneys. [...]

Honestly, when I read you complaint about incubating char's, here is what I'm really getting:

It takes a long time to get up to that 3* level of play (which is true, after playing for months i've finally started getting maxed 3*s just recently). As it currently stands right now, it is boring and tedious to get up to that level of play because 3*'s are practically unusable for so long.

Your solution to this problem currently is to make the 3* level of play slightly easier to achieve or more viable earlier one which I think detracts from the sense of accomplishment when you finally get to that point.

I think you have it about right, and I take your point about the sense of accomplishment. Part of my argument here is that that sense of accomplishment, epic as it is, isn't currently enough. You implied it yourself in the next sentence:

Deadpan wrote:

In my view the real solution to this is to make the transition from the 2* to the 3* level of play less tedious and more fun. [...] What's important though is that the solution should be making the 2* to 3* transition more fun and not lower the standard for 3* level of play.

If getting that 3* to 100 is so great, why all the complaints about the 2*-3* transition? Why isn't everyone saying "this transition is a PITA but wow, is that new 3* worth it, so in the end I'm satisfied with MPQ"? What if I'm not the only one staring at all his 1-8-cover 3*s, wishing he could play one just to get away from the maxed-2* grind, but knowing he can't without shooting his tourney progression in the foot unless that tourney artificially forces that one 3* on him? (Granted, maybe an easier solution might be to offer more tourneys at a time, so the rotation happens faster...)

It might feel reasonably epic to train your Psylocke's katana anyway, or your Spidey sense, or the rest. Hopefully a "mere" matter of setting the requirements reasonably high.

Unknown

Mehhh wrote:

If getting that 3* to 100 is so great, why all the complaints about the 2*-3* transition? Why isn't everyone saying "this transition is a PITA but wow, is that new 3* worth it, so in the end I'm satisfied with MPQ"?

Because people only come on the forums to complain.

Unknown

Really, once you get to 3* level, most don't stop to say "Wow, I've finally made it, this is awesome!" even though it is. They just start complaining about new 3* problems like how everyone is 141 and why do these 2* teams keep beating me and wow my shield was down for 3 minutes but i got beaten 5 times for 150 points. There's no satisfying people, which is how D3 makes its money.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Indeed, playing Brave Frontier a bit has made me realize just how simple MPQ is. MPQ has Iso and HP. Brave Frontier has Energy, Zel, Karma, Arena Orbs, character XP, user XP, Honor Points, Gems, and probably a half-dozen other in-game "stuff units" that I have yet to discover.

That is why BF rocks. Now stop moaning and send me Honor Drops you piss-ant.

HailMary

Mehhh wrote:

If getting that 3* to 100 is so great, why all the complaints about the 2*-3* transition? Why isn't everyone saying "this transition is a PITA but wow, is that new 3* worth it, so in the end I'm satisfied with MPQ"?

Satisfication is overwhelmingly passive, and some people just need to vent. I, for one, love my 141s.

Mehhh wrote:

What if I'm not the only one staring at all his 1-8-cover 3*s, wishing he could play one just to get away from the maxed-2* grind, but knowing he can't without shooting his tourney progression in the foot unless that tourney artificially forces that one 3* on him?

You're not, by a long shot. That's the typical 2*-3* transition. I think I spent about two months in that transition, and I didn't use any of my 3*s until they were L102.

Deadpan wrote:

Really, once you get to 3* level, most don't stop to say "Wow, I've finally made it, this is awesome!" even though it is. They just start complaining about new 3* problems like how everyone is 141 and why do these 2* teams keep beating me and wow my shield was down for 3 minutes but i got beaten 5 times for 150 points. There's no satisfying people, which is how D3 makes its money.

This.