Our alliance of lazy vets went public for a bit and we saw an endless stream of 1*/2*/3* rosters with all their under-covered 5s level maxed.
Now I can see a new players thinking, the game has handed you a shiny rare cover why wouldn't you put ISO into it. It's surely the most powerful, so will be beneficial.
Possibly in the short-term yes, with CL scaling, PVE may be easier with that slightly more powerful 5*. Most likely also PVP may be relatively unaffected, at least initially.
The issues appear as players try to grow more and dip their toes into PVP. Now that 0/0/5 lvl 330 Doc Ock comes back to haunt you as they wonder why when they are playing with Doc Ock and some 2*s they are getting beaten up by 4* and 5* rosters. This could be pretty depressing and not a thing that would encourage you to play more.
Not only that it's a waste of ISO that could be better spent improving your relevant characters for the tier that will make you stronger. Getting 3s and 4s to champ status and steadily bringing in the champ rewards are key to progression.
Also, as we all know here, not all 5s are created equal so that 0/0/3 Wasp at 300 looks great but isn't going to do much.
So the crux of the suggestion is to have something in game that attempts to help focus players progression. I was "lucky" I started before 4s so had no choice but to slowly grow through the tiers as they were opened up. New players don't get that "benefit", gating leveling of 5s (and you could argue even 4s) at least would help.
TL,DR version, summarized for the current thread: 5stars are grossly out of line with the scaling paradigm existing on tiers 1 through 4. It would solve a lot of problems for the entire tier to be rebalanced to fall more in line with that existing paradigm. "Gating" mechanisms are often clumsy and badly implemented (see: restricting me to SCL7 in PvP because they won't fix the reward scaling to naturally draw me up to higher tiers when appropriate) so I'd prefer the actual scaling concerns be addressed.Sadly, that would take a lot of effort and probably annoy some high-end players who might feel that having 5stars that were less insanely stronger than all other tiers is a slap in the face, so it'll probably never happen.
Jwallyr said: Unnecessary snark aside, yes, gating 5* leveling would band-aid that specific problem while ignoring the underling disconnect in scaling that causes the problem in the first place. I would much prefer for 5stars to scale in keeping with the previous 4 tiers and gradually, gracefully become useful in PvP without arbitrary special-case mechanics to mitigate the MMR issue.But sure, address the symptom and not the cause. Shrug.
bbigler said: Limiting 5* leveling based on Rank or SCL still won't work because players can reach the top SCL very quickly. For example, I recently hit Rank 65 (qualifying for SCL 9) with a roster composed of 3*Champs alone, most being between levels 170 and 180. My best covered 4*s have 6 covers each, so they're not ready either. If I leveled a single 5* to let's say 315, my PVP MMR would be painful.
Rod5 said: If the devs had the option to go back and do it again they might, but it’s just not realistic to impose that sort of rebalance now.So we are where we are, and short of directing new players to the forums when they join (although that is not a bad idea either tbh), it would be tough to do it in-game any other way.
Jwallyr said: 2) I think that the impact to high-end 5star players might not be as big as you think, because if the entire 5star tier were to be thoughtfully retuned, the relative strength of 5star characters could remain pretty consistent to their current ranking.