What's your reaction to Champions 2.0?

fractalvisions

Are you excited? Confused? Tentatively trying it out?

SuperCarrot

Something else entirely.

Doesn’t seem like it was needed…and implementation seems convoluted. The previous champ system was streamlined…this one was designed to sell roster slots. I am all for the game making money (I spend on it because I enjoy it)…just seems like there might have been other avenues to explore instead of, well what we have now.

Phumade

Excited! I already had a load of max champs, have ascended the ones I can and am loving it so far.

technically, its the same champ system. You do exactly the same thing except you ascend vs sell you max champs. From a long term vets perspective, this is just elongating the reward train. Yes, there are some oddities in how the scaling translated, but that happened in Champ 1.

Overall this transition is adequate and relatively on par to the Champ 1 experience. The main issues I have is that the UI has not been helpful across all the Acess points. I agree that you do have fine tune control over when and who the covers are applied, but the process needs to be optimized. From a play perspective, its open up a ton more pairing combos at the 5* tier.

turbomoose

Some weird combination of all of the above.

Mostly excited because it’s something different, there’s a lot that’s broken at the moment but I thought it would be like that, coding is tricky and easy to get wrong

Hope we don’t have to wait too long for the next batch as all that iso is useless to me so I’m hoping for a lot of retro rewards once they fix the rewards bug

entrailbucket

Excited! I already had a load of max champs, have ascended the ones I can and am loving it so far.

It's absolute chaos and I love it. The metagame had stagnated to the point where everyone knew how to win everything forever, and this upsets everyone's plans. It's wonderful and hopefully they have more chaos planned for the future.

meadowsweet

Excited, but unprepared. It's going to be ages before I can ascend anything.

I'm happy that I have something useful to do with 1★ & 2★ covers again, but I have my quibbles:

1. I've always sold Max Champs as soon as I could re-roster them at 1 cover, so I had no Max Champs, no duplicates, no extra roster spots when this was announced. I was caught completely flat-footed compared to others and will spend months re-adjusting.

2. The exchange rates make no sense to me at all. Why does it cost 4 covers per level to Ascend either a 1★ or a 4★ character once they've reached the 5★ tier?

3. I still haven't seen a clear response from the Devs about the so-called "cover tax" if you're using two Max Champs as opposed to a Max Champ & a Max Level. Should they be the same, was that intentional, does it even make sense?

4. I wish they had made it simpler - instead of combining 16 different 1★ into 8 different 2★ into 4 different 3★ into 2 different 4★ into 1 single 5★... just let me champ the 1★ and start leveling up that one single character from level 50 to 550. You can charge different exchange rates at different levels, you can add a mechanic to combine duplicate copies, but they didn't have to make it so complicated (who am I applying this cover to? how many copies do I have right now? which two do I want to bind?)

5. The rumor swirl seems to be that a lot of the Ascended characters' powers scale wildly, unpredictably, and don't always make sense. It seems like the Devs have given themselves a whole new mountain of work needing to now constantly re-balance 300+ characters across 500+ levels, whereas before the characters just had to sorta make sense within their own tier - nobody used to care about 2★ balance once you moved on 3★ champs. And this game doesn't have a great track record of timely re-balances...

Vhailorx

A few thoughts:

(1) the game desperately needed a new prestige chase item. 5* characters lost their premium allure years ago, supports were mostly a failure, and even chasing 550s has become passe for the strongest rosters. So something like ascension (or 6*s) was necessary. Not sure if the system will be a success, but the attempt shows that BCS trying to address big problems.

(2) champs 2.0 definitely seems like an extension of BCS' direct-buy heavy monetization strategy. The 5* IM36 offer shows how selling different ascended versions of particular characters is attempting to monetize the extreme chase to raise, say, a 1* to a 5*.

(3) very curious to see the long term impact on the meta game. Something like 50 new 5*s were just added to the game, but many of them are prohibitively hard to build. So it will take a long time to actually learn if they have any impact on the winning strategies in the game. And that is without even considering additional points of failure where bugs could really screw things up (e.g. , the ascension rewards bug).

Omegased

Frustrated. This is so complicated, but I can't just ignore it as I'll have a constant FOMO. I might just go play something else instead. Couldn't they have just given us new PVEs instead?

There's some aspects of this implementation that doesn't sit well with me.

Aside from the multitude of bugs, and mistakes that already exist - I feel the use of roster slots to be awkward and unnecessary. If you wanted the acending to cost hp - put that in the accend cost.

Now, I'm juggling multiple slots, without saving covers. Ive got useless 1* dying on the vine because I need 1 yellow to ascend storm.

It's made my roster a mess. It's put artificial strain on my earnings that (while I appreciate will probably disappear over time) is annoying.

Also, having played for over 8 years, and solidly farm my 2s and 3s - I shudder to think how many resources I've lost by not saving them

Alfje17

Confused, but I guess it's worth while for the 1\* at least. Might just ignore it for everything else.

@Omegased said:
Also, having played for over 8 years, and solidly farm my 2s and 3s - I shudder to think how many resources I've lost by not saving them

If it makes you feel any better, I've been playing about 8 years and sold over 500 2* max champs and almost 150 3*. You can see that as a lot of lost resources or you could see it as 650 extra roster slots that I didn't have to buy (at old roster price as well!).

I'll definitely ascend my 1* (got 3 of them at lv100), but I'll leave the rest until it's more clear if it's really worth the time and effort.

entrailbucket

Excited! I already had a load of max champs, have ascended the ones I can and am loving it so far.

From what I've seen so far, the 4->5* guys are EXTREMELY worth it. I've been messing around with them in the class of... reruns, where they're getting the +100 level boost, and a bunch of these guys are really, really strong when boosted.

Vhailorx

@entrailbucket said:
From what I've seen so far, the 4->5* guys are EXTREMELY worth it. I've been messing around with them in the class of... reruns, where they're getting the +100 level boost, and a bunch of these guys are really, really strong when boosted.

No surprise there. The 4* tier has the most power diversity (largely by don't of being the largest tier by a wide margin), so even by dumb luck I would expect some 4s to play up very well in the 5 tier just because of new synergies. Plus there are several dozens (maybe even hundreds) of players with strong enough rosters to instantly ascend multiple 4* characrers on the first day, so I would expect us to get feedback on them pretty quickly.

Sadly, most players will never get any ascended 4*s because getting to 370 is still a LONG grind.

entrailbucket

Excited! I already had a load of max champs, have ascended the ones I can and am loving it so far.

Right, like...my boosted Alligator Loki (lvl459 pre boost) passive (do damage each time the enemy matches a charged tile) is about 20,000 damage per tile. I want to use this against Thor so badly.

Blob (lvl453 pre boost) has like 300,000 health, plus that jump in front ability, and he resists 90% of match damage.

KGB

Excited! I already had a load of max champs, have ascended the ones I can and am loving it so far.

@entrailbucket said:
Blob (lvl453 pre boost) has like 300,000 health, plus that jump in front ability, and he resists 90% of match damage.

He's one of the characters that virtually demands a stunner to defeat. He's always been incredibly annoying in 4* land and I often skip his teams even with Polaris/BrB because it's not worth the time/effort.

KGB

ThaRoadWarrior

Some weird combination of all of the above.

It’s largely positive, especially at the bottom tiers, but I believe the 4* tier may be juice not worth the squeeze to chase and I also feel like we will want or need to roster every version of every character if we want to be eligible for any possible event restriction that is now possible.

ThisisClemFandango

Some weird combination of all of the above.

Hhhhmm been trying to weigh this up and still undecided.
I can see getting some 4s promoted would open up the pvp but I fear this is beyond me a mere mortal.
I was excited to promote some 4s but it's more likely that I die before I jump through all of the hoops to get there.
Good for ppl who have got champs everywhere, bad for ppl who don't.
Might be the excuse I needed to back out once and for all.

Bad

I like this new system.
Spider 1 always has been a good character with cheap powers and right now you can play him in every tier.
Still this is a marathon race and the benefits for the majority of players will be seen in a good amount of time.
I used to sell 1 2 and 3 maxed characters so I only could ascend a 3 and a 4 character.
Still I had many many tokens hoarded of every class so I'll get a good benefit when I decide it's the right time.

Daredevil217

@ThisisClemFandango said:
Hhhhmm been trying to weigh this up and still undecided.
I can see getting some 4s promoted would open up the pvp but I fear this is beyond me a mere mortal.
I was excited to promote some 4s but it's more likely that I die before I jump through all of the hoops to get there.
Good for ppl who have got champs everywhere, bad for ppl who don't.
Might be the excuse I needed to back out once and for all.

A couple people in my alliance have this same sentiment which is sad. Here’s my review thus far.

As a business move:
It’s ambitious. I feel like it is a good concept in theory for both new players and vets, but for different reasons. For new players I really do think it will help them with transitioning. For vets in gives them something more to chase.

In practice, the roster slot issue actually makes this new player unfriendly. I freed up a TON of slots combining dupes. I imagine other vets did as well. I proceeded to fill said slots when I opened over 3,000 Mighty Tokens, but I could easily afford more slots without spending a dime. New players don’t have hundreds of thousands of HP to drop on slots like we do. So, many may ignore this feature and choose to roster new characters rather than dupes for ascending.

I just feel this could have been done in a less convoluted way. And on the vet side, a common complaint is that while new carrots are good, if they are too far out of reach to the point where they seem impossible, they might just give up altogether. I’m not talking the mega whales and day 1 vets. But the people who JUST entered or are starting to tread water in the 5* tier.

Roster Management:
I hate how this is implemented. I get that they have to make their money and they feel this is a way to do so, but it sucks having multiple versions at different tiers when trying to do something as simple as level a character. It’s just messy when it doesn’t have to be.

Rewards:
This is probably the best thing about this rollout. Being able to get more rewards for those early level covers make them more valuable. This is great for those that love the farming aspect of MPQ.

Bugs:
They really really need to get these together. Their track record with letting bugs hang around seemingly forever doesn’t inspire faith. Especially given the number that have dropped already. This creates a double edged sword. Part of me wants them to roll out more batches of characters because I want to start ascending and having use for every character I pull rather than sitting on tokens and rostering more useless dupes. But they have to show that they have a handle on the buggy glitchy first batch before I could be all in on a second.

Gameplay:
TBD. I’ve heard everything from 4s are the new meta to “these are nothing more than collectors trophies”. I think that limited 4s will be simply better than 5s level for level. I just think those that aren’t sweating it are still recovering from the Chasm meta. And anything that isn’t that seems like (and is) a walk in the park. So far none of the 4s are broken like he was, so it seems fine. But I believe they are better.

My level 504 Kitty buffs 5 tiles 990 each turn. My 475 Nico buffs ALL tiles 1079 as long as she has more than the opponent. If a special tile buff meta ever returns, Kitty has been dethroned. Now people aren’t crying about it because Chasm is a hard counter to that meta even with his nerf. Thoress also shuts down specials. Ascended Morbius would also take care of her. I think as long as the 5* tier has obtainable counters for the problematic 4s it’ll be mostly fine. 4 Vulture ascended is a problem. 5* Archangel is the solution. More of this is what’s needed. Moving forward these counters really need to be 5s, because getting 4s to max champ status can take YEARS, so it is important that the only solution to a meta not be locked behind that wall.

Overall:
At first I didn’t love it. I think now I’m more curious than anything else. Overall I feel it’s a mix of good and bad but still way too early to tell the overall impact.

bbigler

Hang on a minute, I'm furiously calculating the optimum strategy for all this.

Someone out there with a 475 Miles and 475 SM-2099 should play them with a boosted Gwenom. Add supports for yellow, purple and/or red AP and it should kill quickly.

I’m not saying it’s better than the current PVE meta, but it would be fun. Do we remember how to have fun?

EDIT: Nevermind, I have no idea when this is even possible.

DrClever

@Vhailorx said:
something like ascension (or 6*s) was necessary

Same thing, right?

I mean we can't ascend 5*s _yet_ but surely...

Bad

And how? Maxing a 5 and then binding it with another one at 13 covers? The concept sounds a bit insane to me.

Bowgentle

@Bad said:
And how? Maxing a 5 and then binding it with another one at 13 covers? The concept sounds a bit insane to me.

Why?
When you have 550s, every additional Cover goes to dupes.