DAZ0273 said: Ed_Dragonrider said: tiomono said: peterdark said: tiomono said: I agree the tiers should be able to mesh together. The problem comes in when a team with a 4* and 3* stomps all dual 4* teams. Or when a 5* and 4* team stomps all dual 5* teams. If you work hard to get to the 5* tier and have over 50% of that tier available to play you should not struggle with a team that has a 4* on it. There should be a level of risk in running one of your characters from the tier below the other not additional security. I generally agree with that but I can imagine IM40, Mags and Blackwidow 3* should have no problem competing against a Mysterio and Talos team So who is your 3rd 4* in this team? Im40 is a top 3 3* character easily on most people's list magneto is top 10 most likely. Give Talos and Mysterio (a wildly underrated character imo) any top 10 4* as a 3rd and it will stomp the 3*'s. You can have Namor for 3rd or Emma perhaps I sort of begrudgingly like Namor...that man can blow a horn.
Ed_Dragonrider said: tiomono said: peterdark said: tiomono said: I agree the tiers should be able to mesh together. The problem comes in when a team with a 4* and 3* stomps all dual 4* teams. Or when a 5* and 4* team stomps all dual 5* teams. If you work hard to get to the 5* tier and have over 50% of that tier available to play you should not struggle with a team that has a 4* on it. There should be a level of risk in running one of your characters from the tier below the other not additional security. I generally agree with that but I can imagine IM40, Mags and Blackwidow 3* should have no problem competing against a Mysterio and Talos team So who is your 3rd 4* in this team? Im40 is a top 3 3* character easily on most people's list magneto is top 10 most likely. Give Talos and Mysterio (a wildly underrated character imo) any top 10 4* as a 3rd and it will stomp the 3*'s. You can have Namor for 3rd or Emma perhaps
tiomono said: peterdark said: tiomono said: I agree the tiers should be able to mesh together. The problem comes in when a team with a 4* and 3* stomps all dual 4* teams. Or when a 5* and 4* team stomps all dual 5* teams. If you work hard to get to the 5* tier and have over 50% of that tier available to play you should not struggle with a team that has a 4* on it. There should be a level of risk in running one of your characters from the tier below the other not additional security. I generally agree with that but I can imagine IM40, Mags and Blackwidow 3* should have no problem competing against a Mysterio and Talos team So who is your 3rd 4* in this team? Im40 is a top 3 3* character easily on most people's list magneto is top 10 most likely. Give Talos and Mysterio (a wildly underrated character imo) any top 10 4* as a 3rd and it will stomp the 3*'s.
peterdark said: tiomono said: I agree the tiers should be able to mesh together. The problem comes in when a team with a 4* and 3* stomps all dual 4* teams. Or when a 5* and 4* team stomps all dual 5* teams. If you work hard to get to the 5* tier and have over 50% of that tier available to play you should not struggle with a team that has a 4* on it. There should be a level of risk in running one of your characters from the tier below the other not additional security. I generally agree with that but I can imagine IM40, Mags and Blackwidow 3* should have no problem competing against a Mysterio and Talos team
tiomono said: I agree the tiers should be able to mesh together. The problem comes in when a team with a 4* and 3* stomps all dual 4* teams. Or when a 5* and 4* team stomps all dual 5* teams. If you work hard to get to the 5* tier and have over 50% of that tier available to play you should not struggle with a team that has a 4* on it. There should be a level of risk in running one of your characters from the tier below the other not additional security.
tiomono said: DAZ0273 said: tiomono said: OJSP said: tiomono said:If there are combinations of 4* characters that can easily beat any combination of 5*'s, why progress your roster beyond 4* at all? It depends on what we want out of the game.If we play competitively, I think we need 5*s to be able to get top5-t10 placements in the highest SCLs in PvE and without coordination in PvP. It's not impossible using only 4*s, but generally speaking, it's quite rare. Even if we're able to compete with exclusively 4*s now, as other people grow their rosters, chances are we'd get left behind. There is also another problem when our 4*s get to around lvl 335 and they are considered the same as 5* champions for MMR purposes. That could make PvP much harder if the majority of our 4* roster is not appropriately developed.If we don't play competitively, there are 2 ways of looking at this: the 5*s are a hinderance due to MMR, so it's better to stay at the 4* tier. Or, there's more opportunity to find interesting combinations, because we're not pressured to score high. A lot of boosted 4*s (and some unboosted 4*s) could beat low level championed 5* teams.I think if we don't actually care about placements or even moving to 5* land, it's much better to stay as 4* players now. We could choose an appropriate SCL to play for PvE, we could still get top progression in PvP by getting 75 wins and we could still get 2000 in SHIELD Sim if we time our climb appropriately. I can definitely agree that what you want out of the game completely impacts this discussion. It just feels off to me that in versus events 90% of the 5* tier champed struggles against teams that include certain unboosted 4*'s. I suspect however that this is actually a 5* player caused problem. If you start with Champed 5* MMR then you might see the odd 4* roster if you are lucky but your opponent's are other 5* players. So it is 5* players who are using these characters in ways that is annoying because 4* players shouldn't be on your radar. If as a 4* player I use Bishop it is because I have no other weapons available to me. But I doubt you are seeing my roster which tops out at 360. So it is 5* players who need to ween themselves off of using 4* characters as far as I can work out this issue. It's absolutely 5* players doing it. But why is 90% of their high end roster a worse option than running unboosted 4*'s?
DAZ0273 said: tiomono said: OJSP said: tiomono said:If there are combinations of 4* characters that can easily beat any combination of 5*'s, why progress your roster beyond 4* at all? It depends on what we want out of the game.If we play competitively, I think we need 5*s to be able to get top5-t10 placements in the highest SCLs in PvE and without coordination in PvP. It's not impossible using only 4*s, but generally speaking, it's quite rare. Even if we're able to compete with exclusively 4*s now, as other people grow their rosters, chances are we'd get left behind. There is also another problem when our 4*s get to around lvl 335 and they are considered the same as 5* champions for MMR purposes. That could make PvP much harder if the majority of our 4* roster is not appropriately developed.If we don't play competitively, there are 2 ways of looking at this: the 5*s are a hinderance due to MMR, so it's better to stay at the 4* tier. Or, there's more opportunity to find interesting combinations, because we're not pressured to score high. A lot of boosted 4*s (and some unboosted 4*s) could beat low level championed 5* teams.I think if we don't actually care about placements or even moving to 5* land, it's much better to stay as 4* players now. We could choose an appropriate SCL to play for PvE, we could still get top progression in PvP by getting 75 wins and we could still get 2000 in SHIELD Sim if we time our climb appropriately. I can definitely agree that what you want out of the game completely impacts this discussion. It just feels off to me that in versus events 90% of the 5* tier champed struggles against teams that include certain unboosted 4*'s. I suspect however that this is actually a 5* player caused problem. If you start with Champed 5* MMR then you might see the odd 4* roster if you are lucky but your opponent's are other 5* players. So it is 5* players who are using these characters in ways that is annoying because 4* players shouldn't be on your radar. If as a 4* player I use Bishop it is because I have no other weapons available to me. But I doubt you are seeing my roster which tops out at 360. So it is 5* players who need to ween themselves off of using 4* characters as far as I can work out this issue.
tiomono said: OJSP said: tiomono said:If there are combinations of 4* characters that can easily beat any combination of 5*'s, why progress your roster beyond 4* at all? It depends on what we want out of the game.If we play competitively, I think we need 5*s to be able to get top5-t10 placements in the highest SCLs in PvE and without coordination in PvP. It's not impossible using only 4*s, but generally speaking, it's quite rare. Even if we're able to compete with exclusively 4*s now, as other people grow their rosters, chances are we'd get left behind. There is also another problem when our 4*s get to around lvl 335 and they are considered the same as 5* champions for MMR purposes. That could make PvP much harder if the majority of our 4* roster is not appropriately developed.If we don't play competitively, there are 2 ways of looking at this: the 5*s are a hinderance due to MMR, so it's better to stay at the 4* tier. Or, there's more opportunity to find interesting combinations, because we're not pressured to score high. A lot of boosted 4*s (and some unboosted 4*s) could beat low level championed 5* teams.I think if we don't actually care about placements or even moving to 5* land, it's much better to stay as 4* players now. We could choose an appropriate SCL to play for PvE, we could still get top progression in PvP by getting 75 wins and we could still get 2000 in SHIELD Sim if we time our climb appropriately. I can definitely agree that what you want out of the game completely impacts this discussion. It just feels off to me that in versus events 90% of the 5* tier champed struggles against teams that include certain unboosted 4*'s.
OJSP said: tiomono said:If there are combinations of 4* characters that can easily beat any combination of 5*'s, why progress your roster beyond 4* at all? It depends on what we want out of the game.If we play competitively, I think we need 5*s to be able to get top5-t10 placements in the highest SCLs in PvE and without coordination in PvP. It's not impossible using only 4*s, but generally speaking, it's quite rare. Even if we're able to compete with exclusively 4*s now, as other people grow their rosters, chances are we'd get left behind. There is also another problem when our 4*s get to around lvl 335 and they are considered the same as 5* champions for MMR purposes. That could make PvP much harder if the majority of our 4* roster is not appropriately developed.If we don't play competitively, there are 2 ways of looking at this: the 5*s are a hinderance due to MMR, so it's better to stay at the 4* tier. Or, there's more opportunity to find interesting combinations, because we're not pressured to score high. A lot of boosted 4*s (and some unboosted 4*s) could beat low level championed 5* teams.I think if we don't actually care about placements or even moving to 5* land, it's much better to stay as 4* players now. We could choose an appropriate SCL to play for PvE, we could still get top progression in PvP by getting 75 wins and we could still get 2000 in SHIELD Sim if we time our climb appropriately.
tiomono said:If there are combinations of 4* characters that can easily beat any combination of 5*'s, why progress your roster beyond 4* at all?
BriMan2222 said: DAZ0273 said: Ed_Dragonrider said: tiomono said: peterdark said: tiomono said: I agree the tiers should be able to mesh together. The problem comes in when a team with a 4* and 3* stomps all dual 4* teams. Or when a 5* and 4* team stomps all dual 5* teams. If you work hard to get to the 5* tier and have over 50% of that tier available to play you should not struggle with a team that has a 4* on it. There should be a level of risk in running one of your characters from the tier below the other not additional security. I generally agree with that but I can imagine IM40, Mags and Blackwidow 3* should have no problem competing against a Mysterio and Talos team So who is your 3rd 4* in this team? Im40 is a top 3 3* character easily on most people's list magneto is top 10 most likely. Give Talos and Mysterio (a wildly underrated character imo) any top 10 4* as a 3rd and it will stomp the 3*'s. You can have Namor for 3rd or Emma perhaps I sort of begrudgingly like Namor...that man can blow a horn. Except when Dr Doom steals his horn
Colognoisseur said: The 4* tier is dead!Long live the 4* tier!There has to be a time cycle to this topic. It feels like the third or fourth time 4* have been said to be dead.Diluted as heck. Heck yeah. Far from dead. I’ve used a number of the recent 4* because they are the answer to certain problem teams.The bigger issue is people declaring a new character “trash” before playing it. They have zero idea without trying it out. It’s fine to give an opinion but there have been a lot of “trash” characters Which have turned out to be pretty good.
tiomono said: Colognoisseur said: The 4* tier is dead!Long live the 4* tier!There has to be a time cycle to this topic. It feels like the third or fourth time 4* have been said to be dead.Diluted as heck. Heck yeah. Far from dead. I’ve used a number of the recent 4* because they are the answer to certain problem teams.The bigger issue is people declaring a new character “trash” before playing it. They have zero idea without trying it out. It’s fine to give an opinion but there have been a lot of “trash” characters Which have turned out to be pretty good. I remember a fair amount saying 5* thor looked like garbage because his passive only came online at 50% and below health.
Vhailorx said:My argument:"4* tier is dead* by which I mean that additional time/resources spent on the 4* tier (by both players and devs) is, by and large, no longer providing a good return on investment for anyone.
Vhailorx said: tiomono said: Colognoisseur said: The 4* tier is dead!Long live the 4* tier!There has to be a time cycle to this topic. It feels like the third or fourth time 4* have been said to be dead.Diluted as heck. Heck yeah. Far from dead. I’ve used a number of the recent 4* because they are the answer to certain problem teams.The bigger issue is people declaring a new character “trash” before playing it. They have zero idea without trying it out. It’s fine to give an opinion but there have been a lot of “trash” characters Which have turned out to be pretty good. I remember a fair amount saying 5* thor looked like garbage because his passive only came online at 50% and below health. I recall saying something like " if it activated at 90% health this would be the best power in the game, but will people really go through the hassle of running him at low health every time, especially when his match damage was so high?". At the time I thought not. But I was very wrong. (1) newer 5*s have made it much easier to tank for him, (2) I have learned never to underestimate an extremely good one-trick pony in mpq (from sentry/hood, to winfinity, to IM40 + 4* Thor, to 4* blade, to half-thor, etc, doubling down on a single very good power or synergy is almost always the best strategy in mpq.And there is not much cyclically to my opinion colog, I have been saying it with just about every new 4* release for the past 12-18 months.
DAZ0273 said: Vhailorx said: tiomono said: Colognoisseur said: The 4* tier is dead!Long live the 4* tier!There has to be a time cycle to this topic. It feels like the third or fourth time 4* have been said to be dead.Diluted as heck. Heck yeah. Far from dead. I’ve used a number of the recent 4* because they are the answer to certain problem teams.The bigger issue is people declaring a new character “trash” before playing it. They have zero idea without trying it out. It’s fine to give an opinion but there have been a lot of “trash” characters Which have turned out to be pretty good. I remember a fair amount saying 5* thor looked like garbage because his passive only came online at 50% and below health. I recall saying something like " if it activated at 90% health this would be the best power in the game, but will people really go through the hassle of running him at low health every time, especially when his match damage was so high?". At the time I thought not. But I was very wrong. (1) newer 5*s have made it much easier to tank for him, (2) I have learned never to underestimate an extremely good one-trick pony in mpq (from sentry/hood, to winfinity, to IM40 + 4* Thor, to 4* blade, to half-thor, etc, doubling down on a single very good power or synergy is almost always the best strategy in mpq.And there is not much cyclically to my opinion colog, I have been saying it with just about every new 4* release for the past 12-18 months. To be fair at this time players who had Gambit didn't really need to consider the alternatives and so didn't as the Gambit era was a solo meta and Thor never threatened it. Thor always seemed pretty great otherwise, I remember loving him day one based upon a few covers. And of course Okoye changed a lot. If you travel through Kitty's release thread you will find the same along with a few posters who pegged her as potentially meta (think Bbigler may have been one) with R4G from the get go. It is only with actual play that opinions become reality.
There are definitely parts of the game that are suffering as the size of the 4* tier grows.
I think we're so far gone on the above problems that each new character isn't making things noticeably worse though. I'm sure there are solutions to these problems that would let the character pool continue to grow though. I've enjoyed several of the recent new characters, so it's not clear freezing the tier would improve things.
As far as characters being "broken" for 5* players, I wonder if instead this points at the 5* tier itself being broken? Without their disproportionate match damage (relative to other tiers when boosted to the same levels), would Bishop and Cap be quite so much of a pain?
When 5* characters were introduced to the game, the devs said they wanted to make a single cover character feel like something you'd want to use. They did that by having that single cover let you achieve the same level of a (then) maxed out 4* character, and have high match damage to make up for the fact that none of the powers are going to be particularly competitive at one cover. It's not at all clear to me that this was healthy for the game.
Vhailorx said: (1) as with all of my mpq analysis, I am thinking about the game from an optimal roster progression perspective. Obviously there are lots of different ways to play and enjoy the game. That's fine, but also a very subjective, and thus very hard to quantify, discussion. It seems fair to me to analyze this game that is, at it's heart, a roster building game, through the lens of optimal roster progression as the closest thing we can get to an objective standard.
Vhailorx said: So for all these reasons, I think that adding more 4*s to the existing game is not beneficial. Lower end rosters are hurt by the added dilution, mid-end-rosters see very little impact because, even ignoring the difficulties of covering new 4*s, the champion system itself leaves new 4* permanently underpowered compared to yesterday's favorites. And high-end rosters suffer from a mixture of apathy (most new 4*s are entirely irrelevant), stasis (it is very easy to go many months without a meaningful change to one's play experience because of the difficulty of covering 5* characters), and broken metas (e.g., 4* 'jump-in-front' passives are a problem because of 5* match damage).
fight4thedream said: Are lower end rosters hurt by dilution? Only if their main priority is to champ everyone. But this isn't exclusively a 4* tier problem. The 5* tier also has this issue to a lesser extent but ironically the stakes are higher in the 5* tier as champing the "wrong" 5* characters will drastically make a player's experience less enjoyable, particularly in PvP. I don't know how true that is for the 4* tier. I agree the current state of affairs is not ideal for a new player looking to optimize their competitive edge but it's exactly for that reason that I think inter-tier 4*/5* pairings are good for the game since it allows for a greater amount of players to get their foot in the door of the highest tier of play.
jamesh said: When 5* characters were introduced to the game, the devs said they wanted to make a single cover character feel like something you'd want to use. They did that by having that single cover let you achieve the same level of a (then) maxed out 4* character, and have high match damage to make up for the fact that none of the powers are going to be particularly competitive at one cover. It's not at all clear to me that this was healthy for the game.
HoundofShadow said: "MPQ is about speed" because the best rewards are at the top placements. Getting the best rewards will help you to progress fast. In order to get the best rewards, you need the fastest characters who can accomplish this. Any characters that can't accomplish this is as good as useless. 5* should be automatically better than 4*, whether in PvE or PvP.