Update to Heroes for Hire (6/23/17) *Updated (6/26/17)

Vhailorx · June 2017

I dont know that you are wrong about the monetary concerns chinch and sinner, but i think we should also remember that they made the 4* covers available to all ranks. That great availability may also explain the reduced rotation speed. They may have been concerned that guaranteed covers for 3.6k each would be too much of an early advantage for new whales. In 50 days they could roster the whole 4* tier and play every essential.

DapperChewie · June 2017

@Brigby why?

This is a terrible idea that benefits no one, especially compared to the previous system.

This game is quickly approaching its twilight, it's time for quality of life changes. Things that make it easier for players to reach endgame, and things that'll keep players around as long as possible so they're still paying into it.

But these recent changes are making long time players quit.

This decision doesn't make sense from a game perspective, it doesn't make sense from your players perspective, and I fail to see how it makes sense from a business perspective.

So again, I ask why? Who does this change benefit?

Frustrated1 · June 2017

Because they literally don't care about their players or their game.

@Brigby get someone on here to prove me wrong.

MissChinch · June 2017

Vhailorx said:

I dont know that you are wrong about the monetary concerns chinch and sinner, but i think we should also remember that they made the 4* covers available to all ranks. That great availability may also explain the reduced rotation speed. They may have been concerned that guaranteed covers for 3.6k each would be too much of an early advantage for new whales. In 50 days they could roster the whole 4* tier and play every essential.

I don't think I'm quite connecting all the dots with this just yet, not to say you might not be right...

It may also be that I haven't quite been able to twist my thinking around to sufficiently emulate whatever is going on in the designers brains... New whales could just use the shotgun approach to hit 7 classics per $100 on CP alone, which if repeated would do nicely for PvP... You're right about missing pve, but I thought of PvP to really be the domain of whales.

New non whales would be roster slot starved for so long that 3600 HP would be a nearly offensive price to waste on a single cover...

The only thing that's certain is they have no fear of taking a dump on the players, likely inconceivable to them that any player would have the audacity to stop playing their game.

MissChinch · June 2017

sinnerjfl said:

MissChinch said:

I don't think it's a money grab, it's more a move to preserve an exploitable scarcity of retired 4* covers. Covering them with 3600HP is somewhere between $25-$50. Covering them with CP is $100 with optimal buy clubs, around $1800 without buy clubs. Seems like someone didn't want to sell that scarcity away at ~$30 a pop as quickly as they were.

Ding ding ding! That's the only logical conclusion I can come up with as well.

3600 HP is too cheap for a single 4* cover in the eyes of D3/DU, you're reading that right.

Someone thought "omg were losing revenue with this incredible deal in the HfH store, we better slow down the flow of those insanely cheap covers so that people lose patience and spend even more to acquire CP instead!"

And let's disguise this change by saying its to help people complete the Crash... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

*SIGH*

Preserving the opportunity for new ways to squeeze the players for covers for which they've engineered a scarcity...

Looking forward to their next awful idea...
...Sadly that's not a sarcastic comment...

DarthDeVo · June 2017

Wow, I'm typically a rather reserved person and not prone to outbursts.

But good gravy, this has to be one of the DUMBEST decisions made for this game lately, and that's a pretty impressive feat.

Seriously, who was asking for this? Who concluded that this would be a good idea at all? More than two years to go from Hulkbuster red to Kate Bishop purple, with characters being added all the time? I absolutely cannot comprehend who came up with such a terrible idea. Although if you guys keep making decisions like this, I doubt the game will be around in two years, so it's kind of a moot point.

I've been patiently waiting for a Spider-Gwen red, then possibly a Peggy blue and a Drax red. I guess maybe I'll get the Spider-Gwen red, but looks like I'll be counting on 3* champ rewards for everything else.

Seriously, why do I still buy VIP when you guys constantly come up with more ways to poke us in the eye? Looks like I might be saving myself $10 a month soon.

orbitalint · June 2017

Vhailorx said:

i think we should also remember that they made the 4* covers available to all ranks.

This is the part that makes me SMH. SCL was supposed to be a way to help provide rewards to people proportionate to where they were I'm the game. While I didn't like HfH, it at least vaguely stuck to this mechanic.

This change implies to me that they need to convert newer players to the 4* transition because they never make it there naturally given how the game is constructed currently. And to do it, they have to ratchet down 4* the flow for everyone else above SCL6(?) that actually could use it as is. Guess the whale money it's drying up and there aren't enough active players at that level to justify it anymore, otherwise, this wouldn't have been done.

Another sign the wheels are falling off this one. If you have to throw design out the window to try and get more people hooked on your profitable tier of character, you did it wrong. Stop treating the symptom of your business woes, treat the cause...a poorly implemented shell of a formerly great idea of a game. That's why people have stopped paying for your product, not these gimmick stores.

MissChinch · June 2017

DarthDeVo said:

Wow, I'm typically a rather reserved person and not prone to outbursts. No

But good gravy, this has to be one of the DUMBEST decisions made for this game lately, and that's a pretty impressive feat.

Seriously, who was asking for this? Who concluded that this would be a good idea at all? More than two years to go from Hulkbuster red to Kate Bishop purple, with characters being added all the time? I absolutely cannot comprehend who came up with such a terrible idea. Although if you guys keep making decisions like this, I doubt the game will be around in two years, so it's kind of a moot point.

I've been patiently waiting for a Spider-Gwen red, then possibly a Peggy blue and a Drax red. I guess maybe I'll get the Spider-Gwen red, but looks like I'll be counting on 3* champ rewards for everything else.

Seriously, why do I still buy VIP when you guys constantly come up with more ways to poke us in the eye? Looks like I might be saving myself $10 a month soon.

Oh God stop VIP, unless you're some kinda masochist... (Really I'm just being overly dramatic, it's your money do what you want)

If you have to pay give the $2 a month thing a shot, you get the bonus node rewards (like intercepts) and it's a fifth the cost...

MissChinch · June 2017

orbitalint said:

Vhailorx said:

i think we should also remember that they made the 4* covers available to all ranks.

This is the part that makes me SMH. SCL was supposed to be a way to help provide rewards to people proportionate to where they were I'm the game. While I didn't like HfH, it at least vaguely stuck to this mechanic.

This change implies to me that they need to convert newer players to the 4* transition because they never make it there naturally given how the game is constructed currently. And to do it, they have to ratchet down 4* the flow for everyone else above SCL6(?) that actually could use it as is. Guess the whale money it's drying up and there aren't enough active players at that level to justify it anymore, otherwise, this wouldn't have been done.

Another sign the wheels are falling off this one. If you have to throw design out the window to try and get more people hooked on your profitable tier of character, you did it wrong. Stop treating the symptom of your business woes, treat the cause...a poorly implemented shell of a formerly great idea of a game. That's why people have stopped paying for your product, not these gimmick stores.

Eh, I see it as a complete non factor... It doesn't matter that they opened it up to everyone except maybe if they had a better option before and are now forced into the blanket party.

The early game up through 4* acquirement is pretty much defined by the constant roster slot defecit, no one in their right mind is gonna be dumping 3600HP on a single cover early on... By the time they even consider it they've already gotten CP and LTs to have pulled some 4*s, rendering it a moot point as no one is gonna get a strong 4* roster dumping 3600HP once a week for a single retired 4* cover, it's kinda laughable.

(The suggestion you made isn't laughable, this horrid store is laughable)

Style55 · June 2017

DarthDeVo said:

Wow, I'm typically a rather reserved person and not prone to outbursts.

But good gravy, this has to be one of the DUMBEST decisions made for this game lately, and that's a pretty impressive feat.

Seriously, who was asking for this? Who concluded that this would be a good idea at all? More than two years to go from Hulkbuster red to Kate Bishop purple, with characters being added all the time? I absolutely cannot comprehend who came up with such a terrible idea. Although if you guys keep making decisions like this, I doubt the game will be around in two years, so it's kind of a moot point.

I've been patiently waiting for a Spider-Gwen red, then possibly a Peggy blue and a Drax red. I guess maybe I'll get the Spider-Gwen red, but looks like I'll be counting on 3* champ rewards for everything else.

Seriously, why do I still buy VIP when you guys constantly come up with more ways to poke us in the eye? Looks like I might be saving myself $10 a month soon.

I know I've said it in some of my prior comments but this newest change has seriously made me consider stopping my VIP as well. At this point they're just snow balling the bad ideas.

tfcrazy1980 · June 2017

If you really wanna see where direction is going, check the other 2 forums....have yourself a good laugh

dramatist · June 2017

This is my first ever complaint on the forum. This is a bad idea, please don't implement.

animaniactoo · June 2017

MissChinch said:

Vhailorx said:

I dont know that you are wrong about the monetary concerns chinch and sinner, but i think we should also remember that they made the 4* covers available to all ranks. That great availability may also explain the reduced rotation speed. They may have been concerned that guaranteed covers for 3.6k each would be too much of an early advantage for new whales. In 50 days they could roster the whole 4* tier and play every essential.

I don't think I'm quite connecting all the dots with this just yet, not to say you might not be right...

It may also be that I haven't quite been able to twist my thinking around to sufficiently emulate whatever is going on in the designers brains... New whales could just use the shotgun approach to hit 7 classics per $100 on CP alone, which if repeated would do nicely for PvP... You're right about missing pve, but I thought of PvP to really be the domain of whales.

New non whales would be roster slot starved for so long that 3600 HP would be a nearly offensive price to waste on a single cover...

The only thing that's certain is they have no fear of taking a dump on the players, likely inconceivable to them that any player would have the audacity to stop playing their game.

I think this may be wildly undeserved. I work in PD, and I work with licensed artwork. My target user is much younger, but I have a pretty solid idea of what the devs are dealing with here, and where I think they're likely getting lost. I think they're scrambling to satisfy 3 wildly different groups here, and struggling to create an overall balance that works for all of them.

1) The licensor. Note that I'm going to talk about these as a certainty, but all of these are only strong possibilities.

• Contract: They have a minimum guaranty on their contract, and they need to keep their eye on that bottom line hard, because if they go below it, the licensor gets their MG money but all the profit the devs have made is wiped out and they've actually lost money. They have to forecast a few times a year, and if profits are down (or expected to be), they have to explain why they're down and what their plan is to bring them back up. Once profits are stable above a certain point, that point may become their new MG when the contract is renegotiated. Contract term is unlikely to be for longer than 2 years at a time.

• Licensor requests: As movies are released, they're asked to incorporate a tie-in for them. The tie-in needs to always be slightly newer and more exciting than what's been done before. As they've gotten on more of a regular studio release, it's likely that D3/demi has tried to stabilize the character release schedule by releasing more regularly so that they can roll those tie-ins in, rather than scrambling to develop against them as if every new request is coming out of the blue. Licensor is absolutely going to want those tie-ins to be accessible to new/early players as part of release excitement building.

2) Whales/longtime players:

• Keeping them interested: New character releases are extremely important here, as well as new types of events, in order to keep them from getting bored, feeling like they've achieved all the goals they initially had and are "done".

• Keeping them spending: You need to make the offerings attractive enough, without making too easy "buy the game". Finding things that are new for them to spend on is key.

3) Free/new players

• Keeping them competitive: You have to figure out how to get them to a point faster than those who came before them where they are so that they don't feel shutout of getting to that point "in time" for it to make a difference for them. At the same time, you have to figure out how to keep them from progressing too fast and getting bored with a game that provides little challenge for them.

• Getting them spending: The goal is to get every single player to spend some money at some point. Small amounts of money compound, and you want to make that buy in easy for those who don't have a lot of extra to spend.

-----------------

Among all of these they are also looking to make improvements for places where the game is turning off one of these groups, where things aren't working as intended, etc.

-----------------

Where I think they are fundamentally failing: They are not doing a good job of looking at worst case scenario and how likely it realistically is for whatever group(s) a proposed solution/incentive for another 1-2 groups is meant to help.

As long as vaulted characters are still being used for essential nodes and as weekly buffs, the lack of easy progress to build them is a serious issue for newer players, creating a kind of permanent elite among the mid4* rosters and above.

Attempting to give some of that access back via HFH creates too easy a path to buying the game.

And so on, and so on.

So I don't think the devs are trying to dump on the players. I think they need a really good big picture person to sort this out, I think the game will always have growing pains, and if someone sees a serious drawback to something that affects a significant number of people (very small subsets are always going to get hit, the issue is larger than that subsets), I think the best thing we as players can do is work to do the same kind of analysis: What can we see/suggest that provides a path out of that, while still achieving the intended goal? Including making money, which yes, they need to do.

Bloody_Marvel · June 2017

HfH just keeps getting worse. I liked the original Day 1 implementation at 2500 HP with 4 3*s, from Day 2 the 4 3*s were replaced by 4 Elite tokens, then it got bumped to 3600 with 8 Elite tokens, now it's gone from 7 day availability and 7 character colors to choose from at any time, to 1 character color being available for 5 days.

In its initial iteration I'd have made regular use of the option, from Day 2 on that desire dropped off significantly. At 3600 HP I was pretty much down to using it only for 5/5/2 characters if the correct color came into rotation. Now I can't see myself ever using this option. By the time the character rotates in once every 250+ days, there's only a 1 in 3 chance it'll be the cover I need, and it's more than likely that by that time I'll have the 4* champed already.

I was lucky I was able to buy the one cover I needed/wanted a few days ago.

Heroes for Hire is now officially completely useless.

MissChinch · June 2017

@animaniactoo

The best possible interpretation then involves a critical lack of foresight regarding this store they spent substantial time piloting.

If they were the least bit concerned about the reaction to this it would have come with a better explaination. Either that or perhaps they are so out of touch that they didn't think it would be poorly received.

Clearly none of the tantrums the forumites have had made much of a difference to D3/Demi, so I don't see why they would care about taking a dump on em, it hasn't been a problem yet and they haven't exactly slow rolled the dumps

If it were a matter of competing priorities and stakeholders being different from users it doesn't preclude decent PR and tact... We don't get it, either because we're not worth the time or because they're so out of touch as to not know if this is a positive or negative change for the users...

(...there's a whole buttload of whitespace here in my reply on my phone... Formatting could be just plain stupid, apologies in advance)

TheWerebison · June 2017

tfcrazy1980 said:

If you really wanna see where direction is going, check the other 2 forums....have yourself a good laugh

Oh wow. Look at all the angry comments in the MtG forum. Why does anyone still give these guys money? They don't exactly seem to work for the customer, do they? I don't know if it's them or their parent company, but either way, the time has come to show them the game isn't worth their miserly attitude.

Ayasugi-san · June 2017

Serious question, what's the difference between the new H4H and the old single 4* vaults, besides not having the option to pull less than the full amount and not knowing what the lesser covers bundled with the 4* will be? I was still building my 3*s when they were around, so I don't remember exactly what the deals were. But it seems like we've basically moved back to that, only (maybe) with a slightly shorter cycle.

animaniactoo · June 2017

MissChinch said:

@animaniactoo

The best possible interpretation then involves a critical lack of foresight regarding this store they spent substantial time piloting.

If they were the least bit concerned about the reaction to this it would have come with a better explaination. Either that or perhaps they are so out of touch that they didn't think it would be poorly received.

Clearly none of the tantrums the forumites have had made much of a difference to D3/Demi, so I don't see why they would care about taking a dump on em, it hasn't been a problem yet and they haven't exactly slow rolled the dumps

If it were a matter of competing priorities and stakeholders being different from users it doesn't preclude decent PR and tact... We don't get it, either because we're not worth the time or because they're so out of touch as to not know if this is a positive or negative change for the users...

(...there's a whole buttload of whitespace here in my reply on my phone... Formatting could be just plain stupid, apologies in advance)

Agreed on PR/tact/lack of foresight, etc. - all part of the need for a really good big picture person imo. Including the fact that I think that people would respect "This feature has had an unintended effect [describe bad effect], and we're pulling back from it because of that." a lot more than they respect some of what I would guess are cover explanations being given, trying to keep messaging "positive" in an attempt to always be positive with users and counter negawave.

I enjoy the game, but I see a lot of forum dissatisfaction, and I see crisis points upcoming based on some of the changes they're making, and that says to me that they're just not weighing risks and effects well for something that is a complex situation.

ETA: This is part of my pushback against just thinking the devs are looking to take a dump on users though, and trying to push for more positive solutions ourselves: If the devs feel like nothing they do is going to please the forumites, and we're just all up in arms all the time over every change and how it badly affects us (personally, and what we individually perceive to be most players), we're going to basically be ignored and dismissed. We'll get a lot further if we can also push out big picture arguments and solutions that respect their need to balance all of this.

orbitalint · June 2017

@MissChinch I agree that it's not a viable solution but they seem to need new lines of current user revenue and apparently have declining buying folks above SCL6. Otherwise, why bother doing this? If they can convert one in 1000 of these SCL5- people to a whale by doing it, maybe it buys them a few more weeks. That's how I'm thinking now.

It's the only major marvel game that isn't on the top 200 grossing of the play store and it's been like that for many months. I remember when it was rivaling Contest for top twenty status each month.

This thread would have been nine pages deep by now six months ago with this kind of bombshell change but people have moved on. I'm still here because I want to see what happens when they close up shop. Haven't played in six weeks. Stopped supporting the game (never a whale) over four months ago.

astrp3 · June 2017

MissChinch said:

I don't think it's a money grab, it's more a move to preserve an exploitable scarcity of retired 4* covers. Covering them with 3600HP is somewhere between $25-$50. Covering them with CP is $100 with optimal buy clubs, around $1800 without buy clubs. Seems like someone didn't want to sell that scarcity away at ~$30 a pop as quickly as they were.

I'm not sure it's a money grab either (at least not in the way some people seem to mean) mainly because I don't see how cutting the # of covers by a factor of five makes the devs more money. Are they going to sell MORE HfH by only offering a fifth as many? (I don't buy the whole forced rarity argument)

They did mention that now everybody could buy HfH, with no SCL requirement. I suppose one could suggest that they are hoping to sucker low-level players into buying a cover just to attempt the Crash, but this doesn't make any sense to me. We all know that one cover on a 4* is not nearly enough to win the Crash (except in the case of characters with invisibility). I imagine there may be some newbies that don't realize this and foolishly buy (with real money, since they probably aren't going to have 3600 HP lying around) HfH in an attempt to win an LT (I remember back when I thought LTs were the stuff), but I'd think they'd only do so once before they realized it was futile.

I normally avoid ridiculous flights of speculation, but I have to wonder if the problem was that too many people were buying HfH, especially with HP they earned rather than purchased (I've bought five HfH offers and didn't spend money for any of them). They DO seem to be making every effort (short of discontinuing them outright) to slow down the rate of vaulted 4* cover acquisition.

Another theory that I'm surprised no one has brought up again is that this was done because whales were complaining that players were getting their 4*s levelled up enough that they could compete with 5*s when boosted. On this theory, the devs are deliberately trying to limit the availability of 4*s to prevent people from levelling them to above ca level 330. I don't really buy this theory because even under the previous HfH system, adding enough levels to a 4* to significantly change their PvP performance would take months and month (there's also the complete lack of actual evidence) but who knows?

Update to Heroes for Hire (6/23/17) *Updated (6/26/17)

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