Supports suggestions

It's been awhile since somebody has posted about supports here, so I am going to give my personal views and suggestions for improvements. Most have been "borrowed" from elsewhere. 
In my view, supports are a fantastic idea that have been limited by a limited roll-out and several issues with they way they operate. The supports themselves are interesting; they could made more powerful, but that won't really matter until the whole system is usable by players, which is my focus here. 

First, the UIs for supports need significant improvement. I can't list all of the issues here, but a few:
1. I should be able to tell which character has a support equipped from the support screen. At the moment, it's not even clear which supports are equipped at all from this screen which is directly linked from the main screen. This needs to change; ideally, there would be something like a character icon placed on the support card in the main support screen, but there are other ways to do this.
2. I should be able to un-equip a support from a character, without having to just equip it on a different character. 
3. I should be able to tell which support is equipped by a character without having to select the character, and move to the support tab of the character. Like above, just putting a little icon on the character would do it; for example if Dr. Strange has equipped Wong, a little Wong icon in the character roster would make it clear. The little "+" icon that was added is a start, but a same size icon with a picture would be much better. 
4. While in a battle, I should be able to tell which supports are equipped by which characters. This will be that much more important when they're introduced for PVP.
That's enough of the UI complaints for the moment, but essentially the entire presentation should be re-thought. The pictures for the support are awesome, but the interface is lacking.

Second, please, please, please do something about RISO accumulation. Other than a small amount of spend after the initial launch, I've spent no RISO since. I play a lot (7x clear PVE, T25 or 50 PVP season, etc.); not as much as some on the forums, but still hours per day plus VIP and some other spending (not close to whale levels). I currently have 156K RISO, which is enough to get ONE support to level 130. That's over months of play. I understand that one of the design goals is to make them difficult to level, but in the same amount of time I've champed 4 5* characters, and have enough ISO (or max-champed 3* that I can sell) to champ 3 more. This is crazy. Either RISO rewards should be significantly increased, or availability needs to be increased so that more duplicates are drawn.

Third, please, please, please do something about acquiring supports. It is not clear to me how to get them at this point; the ways to get them are almost laughably bad. Beginner supports in PVE vaults? OK, I guess as a start. Release vaults where I have a higher change of getting a 2* than even a beginner support? That's a bad deal for my HP. 250 CP for a 4* that I don't need and one pull that is most likely to get a 3* support that I probably already have? Please; that's 10 Latest Legend pulls. T25 season? That's the top 1/2 of 1 percent for one pull. And adding stones and making them only available to a season winner was an insult; "Hey, look at these really cool things! Too bad that you're never, never, never going to get them". At the very least they should be in all vaults including Deadpool, high awards at high PVE SCLs should reward higher level tokens than beginner, and they should be added to re-supply and champion level rewards. Would it kill anybody to add an advanced support token to VIP?

Like I said when I started this missive, supports have several positives. The art is cool. They still have the possibility of changing the way the game is played in a way that isn't completely game-breaking. I WANT them to work; they just need a refinement to achieve the goal the developers had in mind when they put in the work on the feature. 

Thanks; I hope the devs are already working on their ideas for improvements; who knows, since they were released with Infinity War, the plan may be to drop these kinds of improvements for the DVD release together with activating them for PVP. But, please do not release these for PVP until the more fundamental issues have been addressed.

Comments

  • pinoles
    pinoles Posts: 28 Just Dropped In
    I logged in to the forums wanting to post #1, and here I see Abominatrix has said what I wanted to, and far more, far better than I.

    Thank you and ++ please.
  • pinoles
    pinoles Posts: 28 Just Dropped In
    Dear Devs: 

    Please, please consider point #1: (to be able to tell which character has a support equipped from the support screen).  Even the character's tile-icon would be a huge help.  

    All the OP's points are really good ones but I am really desperate for #1.

    Thank you so much.
  • gentgeen
    gentgeen Posts: 99 Match Maker
    Came to the forum to post the same idea, but I see it has already been noted.  Give me some way to see which supports are assigned, and to who, from the support screen.  A little character icon would be great.  
  • JSP869
    JSP869 Posts: 820 Critical Contributor
    When viewing a Support on the Support's page/screen, I should be able to equip that Support to a character.

    I was scrolling through the Supports trying to find the best one to give to Thing for his Crash event, and when I finally found the most suitable one, could I equip it to Thing?

    No! I could not!

    I had to go back to my Roster, find Thing, tap on him to view him, scroll to his Supports page, tap the button to equip a Support, and then I had scroll through the Supports again to find the Support I was literally just looking at just minutes earlier.

    How fethed up is that, that I cannot just equip a Support directly from the Support's own page.
  • greenglove
    greenglove Posts: 110 Tile Toppler
    Supports are pretty much unavailable. I don’t even remember the last time I got a new one, and I have NEVER upgraded an old one. Why? Because supports tokens are nonexistent. They should be regular rewards in pve and pvp. They should rotate in the DDP. There ought to be other ways of upgrading as well. I couldn’t care less right now about new supports being released, because right now there is absolutely no way to get them. 
  • broll
    broll Posts: 4,732 Chairperson of the Boards

    Second, please, please, please do something about RISO accumulation. Other than a small amount of spend after the initial launch, I've spent no RISO since. I play a lot (7x clear PVE, T25 or 50 PVP season, etc.); not as much as some on the forums, but still hours per day plus VIP and some other spending (not close to whale levels). I currently have 156K RISO, which is enough to get ONE support to level 130. That's over months of play. I understand that one of the design goals is to make them difficult to level, but in the same amount of time I've champed 4 5* characters, and have enough ISO (or max-champed 3* that I can sell) to champ 3 more. This is crazy. Either RISO rewards should be significantly increased, or availability needs to be increased so that more duplicates are drawn.
    I have 1.5 million I'll probably never use. I'd trade it to you if I could lol.
  • limonade
    limonade Posts: 41 Just Dropped In
    edited February 2019
    Underwhelmed with these Supports after almost a year. 

    My coworker and I were discussing this, recently. And honestly, while those perks are nifty--the likelihood of getting a 5* support card is ridiculously rare that it's not in our interest to even begin upgrading any of them... like at all. So we let them red ISOs stack because even the lowest support perk is simply enough to tilt the battle already anyhow. I mean if, heaven forbid, the AIs started equipping support perks--maybe then, I'll consider using rISOs to spend on better tier Supports. But that much chaos in one game will get into Matchington Mansion territory... and that's where I'll be throwing in the towel on this game.

    Plus, we have no intention of putting any investment on any extra perks as they're not even being used in PvP! And even if the decision to use it for PvP comes around, it would simply dissuade me from heading over to PvP anyhow.

    I'm sure Supports are probably great for the average whale that drops money on these extra items consistently. But I've got other things currently that's grabbing my attention in this game and Support drops are waaaaay down my list of importance; Especially when a 5* drop has a 1 in 20 chance of dropping in the Master range and to get one Master token requires a bit of luck in a regular game play session. Even a blind man can see the math here is terrible skewed against the average player's game-time.

    And after seeing what some Supports do... they're not all that or a bag of chips. So I don't see why the devs are stingy with the drops or putting Supports in some sort of grandiose pedestal.
  • DeNappa
    DeNappa Posts: 1,368 Chairperson of the Boards
    limonade said:
    Underwhelmed with these Supports after almost a year. 

    My coworker and I were discussing this, recently. And honestly, while those perks are nifty--the likelihood of getting a 5* support card is ridiculously rare that it's not in our interest to even begin upgrading any of them... like at all. So we let them red ISOs stack because even the lowest support perk is simply enough to tilt the battle already anyhow. I mean if, heaven forbid, the AIs started equipping support perks--maybe then, I'll consider using rISOs to spend on better tier Supports. But that much chaos in one game will get into Matchington Mansion territory... and that's where I'll be throwing in the towel on this game.
    Basically you're saying it's not worth it to invest in just because it is very hard (if not impossible) to get a 5* perk. While I agree with the bad availability (though the recent changes has addressed this partly), I disagree with the conclusion. If, for example, an unleveled support has a 10% chance to fortify a friendly special tile at level 1, and you have it at rank 3 so you and the chance increases to 50% if leveled to 150, that is a difference you *will* notice.

    Plus, we have no intention of putting any investment on any extra perks as they're not even being used in PvP! And even if the decision to use it for PvP comes around, it would simply dissuade me from heading over to PvP anyhow.
    You don't want to invest in them if they're not being used in PVP, but you don't want to go play PVP if they're used there. Hmmm...

    I'm sure Supports are probably great for the average whale that drops money on these extra items consistently. But I've got other things currently that's grabbing my attention in this game and Support drops are waaaaay down my list of importance; Especially when a 5* drop has a 1 in 20 chance of dropping in the Master range and to get one Master token requires a bit of luck in a regular game play session. Even a blind man can see the math here is terrible skewed against the average player's game-time.
    I'm no whale by any means, but I've collected quite a bit of supports just by playing the game. Sure, only 1 rank 4 support, but still.

    And after seeing what some Supports do... they're not all that or a bag of chips. So I don't see why the devs are stingy with the drops or putting Supports in some sort of grandiose pedestal.
    I'm still in favor of some kind of leveling up system, where we can upgrade the rank of support gradually by applying 'duplicate supports' towards a higher level perk.
     
  • Rhipf
    Rhipf Posts: 294 Mover and Shaker
    I was going to make a new thread regarding the UI but realized the OP had already covered what I was going to say. Then I realized this was originally posted in August. Could we finally get an easy way to see which supports are being used by which characters? Going through all the characters in my roster with a plus icon (indicating some support is applied) just to see if a particular support is already in use is a bit much.
  • Koomikko
    Koomikko Posts: 1 Just Dropped In
    I registered into the forum to suggest more or less what was there regarding the UI improvements from OP. +1 to all of the points mentioned. The original post is now more than one year old, so perhaps I should not hold my breath though :/
  • Xair
    Xair Posts: 77 Match Maker
    edited October 2019
    i have another suggestion:
    remove the restrictions from supports only usable to specific chars.
    each player probably has few good supports, and those are usually limited to chars that aren't being used, thuse often the best supports are wasted.
    if all supports could be used by all champions, that would instantly be a positive upgrade to them.