2->3* Lightning Rounds as a way to help out transitioners

A long time ago, in the magical year of 2013, MPQ lighting rounds were structured such that top 10 were guaranteed covers for the featured villain (at the time, Loki / Rags / C. Mags / Doom / Hood), and more importantly, top 50 were given a diabolical token that had a guaranteed chance at a random 3*. As a lowly 2* thorverine user at the time, I fought my hardest for top 50 as much as I could, and was ecstatic every time I won and opened a token, hoping that I would get a critical rags cover that I needed to make the 2->3* transition.

Enter 2015. Hoards of new 3* covers are coming out, tokens are becoming increasingly diluted, making it far harder for players to get a single character covered, and the magical LRs that people depended on to complete their transition have become a wasteland of greedy veterans grinding for iso instead. Well, what if we could go back to the old days, where lightning rounds were an actual viable way for players to transition into 3* rosters? Stolen largely from mischiefmakers ideas, the rest of this post will describe exactly how to do that, with both the players and Demiurge coming out on top as a whole.

The idea is simple: Whenever a normal LR is run, a newbie LR will be run alongside it. This newbie LR will have significantly reduced rewards overall compared to the normal LRs, but instead will offer tokens that have an increased chance from a non-changing pool of 5 "starter" 3*s, which can be something like "Psylocke, IM40, Spidey, Doc Ock, Beast". The tokens would have say, an X% of getting ONLY one of these 5 covers, where X is some amount thats economically reasonable for Demiurge (30% if they want this to be a a more viable way to transition, the standard 15% otherwise), and a 100-X% to get a 2* cover.

Why Psylocke, IM40, Spidey, Doc Ock, Beast? Those characters suck.

Precisely! These lightning rounds are meant to be a stepping stone for someone to transition into 3* land. You don't want to give LazyThor covers out because then literally everyone will be grinding these lightning rounds, as opposed to the people who these are really meant for (2->3* transitioners), and it would make it too easy for people to complete the transition. Psylocke is the poster child for a character that should be in these tokens: useful enough that she's clearly better than 2* options, but not good enough to carry a team into 3* territory. Keeping it this way would make these characters simply a stepping stone into 3* territory, which gives players another avenue to progress and advance their rosters without propelling them into being a veteran.

Wouldn't this devalue the covers offered? Demiurge doesn't want to explicitly acknowledge that certain characters are bad.

On the contrary. I can't imagine that anyone is currently buying the covers right now since they are so bad. However, with these LRs in place, having one of these guys covered and leveled (say, that spidey sitting in your roster) is now a huge advantage in the LR that he is featured in, giving you access to play those LRs to earn more covers for all the other characters. Demiurge can also kill two birds with one stone by putting the old, previously useful, now mostly useless but still has a small niche characters such as Psylocke, IM40, and Spidey into these tokens, saving them a balancing pass and a future release like they are doing with some of the older, underpowered characters.

What's to prevent those greedy veterans from playing these LRs instead of the normal ones?
While there will always be that one evil troll whose life is to make everyone else's miserable, the vast majority of players are rational and will not play an event if there's nothing in it for them. Therefore, there is a simple solution to prevent people who don't need the covers from playing these LRs: make the awards so bad for them that it isn't worth it. Hosting it at the same time as normal LRs forces them to choose between the two (you can even use sharding to force players to pick between one or the other), and you can further disincentivize veterans from playing by greatly reduce the iso awards earned in this event (say, cut prog, placement, and average iso earned per match by 2/3rds), and removing all 4*s from these special LR tokens. This would make it so the only people who would join are the ones who actually need the covers.

All in all, this seems like it would be great for everyone involved. The technology is there for them to relatively trivially implement this, 2* players now have a more viable way to transition without devaluing existing covers/players, and Demiurge makes more money from increased sales and having these previously useless characters suddenly be useful.