Is the 4* tier dead?

BriMan2222 · January 2020

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

Doctor Love and Doom DO NOT TOOT TOOT IT FOOL DOCTOR DOOM TOOTS AS HE PLEASESI love Dr Dooms ego

DAZ0273 · January 2020

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?

Definitely a fair question. I in somewhat connection to this touched upon the issues with rebalancing old 5's in the Sneak peak thread and why that is possibly problematic for the Devs. So that leaves nerfing Bishop and to a lesser extent his ilk. The problem with that is that it benefits the lower end champ 5 tier but hurts the 4-5 transisitioners who need Bishop to fight Gritty or other OP Combos like Hawk/Worthy who are overpowered even at lower levels (let's not go to that debate though!). Also Bishop is more limited overall outside of Shield Sim as Grittyshop needs pick 3. But he is clearly an issue that makes players who have slogged hard to reach the milk and nectar land of 5* Champs have a miserable time and the playerbase are not going to solve this.

Finding a solution where nobody loses out just seems impossible so they seem to be doing the classic fingers in ears la la la nothing to see here approach.

DAZ0273 · January 2020

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

If this forum had a super like button this post would be getting it!

spidyjedi84 · January 2020

I will say it has gotten easier in PVP play the more I've developed and champed my rosters for 4 star play, and I'll sometimes look at the boost list and refresh on powers to look at how they synergise to give me more rainbow coverage. If I ever get totally skunked on a PVP match, I can pull out another duo of boosted 4 stars to try doing some climbing with for a while before switching back to a better team for defense when I've burned through enough health packs on my climb. I don't win usually by points alone, but rather via wins in PVP. I tend to play to the 4 star cover if it's someone I want, like in a new release. As my 5 stars have been getting more covers, I find a few of them useful, but I'm not ready to champ any of them at the moment and move into that meta, as I've heard that's a different monster of this game.
I'm now six characters away from having the entire 4-star roster champed. I am slowly adding levels to my 5 stars with seven or more covers to the soft cap level of 315, with Kitty at 330. I don't think the 4 star roster is dead, just not as effective for 5 star and competitive players who are looking for the quickest clear time and quickest climbs. It's the rare 4 star that can even get them to take notice of them. If the character isn't doing high damage or offering synergies that are obvious looking at the sheets off the bat, it's easy to gloss over them.
But I agree with what another commenter said on page 1 that there are 4 stars who suck on defense, but in a player's hands are absolutely more effective. The longer you stay at the 4 star level, the more you get a scope of the synergies with some of these 4 stars that will work with your own play style and who you might be willing to rush to champ. For me, any Spider-Verse character is a no-brainer as someone I'll champ, because when their events roll around, it's easy for me to play trap and bomb. On defense, the computer is absolute bonkers in how they use most Spider-Verse teams. With a human player, though, collecting purple to hide Miles, using yellow to get more web tiles on the board and unleashing his nuke at the right time can really shift the entire tide of a battle.

Colognoisseur · January 2020

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 · January 2020

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 · January 2020

So since this topic begins with a quotation of me making an argument I have been making for quite some time, I suppose I should comment (sorry about the long post).

A few caveats:

(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.

(2) my perspective is, of course, limited. I am a 5+ player. I used to play more competitively, but am now fairly casual. I have rarely ever had access to the newest meta-teams, and never for more than a few months, so I am definitely behind the bleeding edge of roster strength. But I have everyone rostered, including many strong teams, and can get 1200+ in PvP or top 10 in pve more or less whenever I want (if I am willing to invest the time, which I rarely am).

(3) I don't think I spent at all in the last year, and was never a particularly big spender before that. But I am not f2p.

(4) each of the 3*, 4*, and 5* playerbases have a lot of individual variation (between serious and casual players, between f2p and big spending players, etc), and there is obviously a big gap between those *tiers, so there are a very large number of constituencies that could theoretically be served by mpq, and any status quo ante or proposed change will have disparate impacts on those different constituencies.

(5) I generally think most * tiers have ~4 bands of character strength. There's: (i) trash characters that have no value beyond essential nodes; (ii) fine characters that can be net contributors, particularly with synergies, but are surpassed by superior alternatives that fill similar roles; (iii) good characters who provide very good value and can even excel with the right synergies; and (iv) broken characters that circumvent some fundamental limitation of the game's design. Obviously, there is some blurring at the margins between the groups, but here is a 4* example of each category IMO: (i) Emma frost, (ii) star-lord, (iii) carol, and (iv) bishop.

(6) MPQ has a large number of design features that actively punish sub-optimal play. Winning matches almost always provides better rewards than losing matches (not a particularly surprising or problematic design feature on its own), but on top of that basic fact winning matches faster is almost always better than just winning matches. Additionally, winning 99.9% of your matches is exponentially better than winning 95% of your matches. Sub-optimal play in mpq requires players to accept significantly reduced rewards. And optimal play is a very significant obligation, in terms of both raw playing time and playing schedule (60-90 matches a day, all timed around sub-refreshes and peak slice activity windows).

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.

2019 was, indeed, a 'good' year for 4* development in that demi produced a lot of 4*s with solid powersets. No more "character X feels meh, BUT WAIT, here is a dedicated support to fix that problem!" and a lot more useful, low cost powers. But even so, I don't think those new, good characters have a significantly positive impact on the mpq experience for just about anyone (see my caveat #1 above. Obviously some people got their personal favorites and enjoyed that experience!).

For 3* and 4* players, new 4*s are just extending the transition. Good new 4*s are nice in principle, but 5 covers for each of 3 good new 4*s is almost always less useful in mpq than 13 covers for one 'fine' 4*. Dilution is a huge part of the problem here, but it's not the only one. let's assume it were easy to fully cover new 4*s in just a few weeks after release (rather than something that only 1-5% of the playerbase can actually afford in terms of time/money/available rewards): roster progression is still a major limiting factors on new 4*s. Carol and blade are my highest 4* champs, both right around 330. For a good new 4* to offer as much value to me as a level 330 4* champ, I have to acquire many dozens of covers, OR the new character has to be noticeably stronger (power creep). The very longevity of roster development in mpq has a negative impact on the viability of new 4*. and that would remain true even if I had no 5* champs at all.

For 5* players the scenario is even a bit bleaker. The 5* tier is less crowded, but also has a much higher variance in character strength from worst to best. Demi's endlessly perplexing decision to double/triple match damage (pnna per HP basis) at the 5* tier also asked 5* tier play much less forgiving than the lower tiers. and all of these problems are either completely unaffected by new 4*s OR wildly exacerbated by the addition of broken new 4*s that obviate the standard rules of mpq (eg. Forget about all the standard rules of AP collection, because if you build your team properly, bishop in 5* play WILL provide 10+ blue AP on turn 2, or turn 1 for the defensive team, full stop.)

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).

The game needs to fox it's PvP meta, democratize the 5* tier, and provide some new trophy/chase tier for high end players. These aren't easy problems to solve, and demi has historically been extremely reluctant to roll out 6*s. But ignoring difficult problems rarely makes them go away. And continuing to stuff more and more 4*s into the game while they twist the screws on monetization, first with supports/costumes and now with shards, is actively making the difficult problems worse.

That's why I say the 4* tier is dead; further development of that tier of play offers very little upside for demi/d3 or players, but does ha e a fair bit of downside risk.

Vhailorx · January 2020

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.

SnowcaTT · January 2020

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.

This. I play with a fair amount of players that have quite a few of the 4*'s max champed, I have a fair amount myself. This allows you to (often) play with different very good, very high level characters each week. It can be entertaining to try something else to run with - and challenge yourself to win with different teams.

However, I notice that almost everyone moves back to the same couple (usually mostly 5*) teams when it's time to go faster. By the time you have enough max-champ 4*'s to use multiples each week, you probably have a few 5*'s that are past the max-champ 4* level (479). You may have hoarded and chosen specific vaults to get very specific 5*'s that work well together.

My bigger issue is what Vhailorx says here: I can't even imagine max-champing that many more of the new 4*'s. They look great - but by 2022 (not counting for the slow-down that dilution brings) when I might have a chance to max-champ them I suspect my 5*'s will be bigger still - it will still give me a chance to "try something else" but they are unlikely to be better/faster/more reliable than the 5*'s. As they add more and more 4*'s, the likelihood that I have 'enough' of 'high enough' level that are 'good enough' to play on any given boosted week goes down.

The 4* tier is time-fodder to allow for players to have the possibility of champing 5*'s. I haven't played any alt accounts, curious how difficult it is to find 13 covers for them now - much less for all of them, or the specific few you might need. Might as well go back to adding 3*'s...or greatly accelerate the rate of 4* acquisition.

DAZ0273 · January 2020

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.

tiomono · January 2020

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.

I thought gambit was after thor. I know for sure daredevil and spiderman overlapped with spidey leaving first and thor and daredevil being together for some time. Daredevil was my first 5* champ Gambit was my 2nd.

Edit: daredevil, gambit, then thor.

fight4thedream · January 2020

***Mod note: Removed off topic posts. Please keep the thread on topic. Thanks!

HoundofShadow · January 2020

It seems that based on most of the comments, 4* tier is not dead yet. I think the perception behind MPQ plays an important part.

Perception 1:

"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. Because only a maximum of three characters can be brought into a match, this means that about 6-9 characters are utilised depending on where the players are. They are (in PvE):

5* land: Kitty Pryde, Okoye, Thor, Thanos
4* land: R4G, any other GotG, Juggernaut
3* land: Dr Strange, Thanos

There are 202 (?) characters right now, but only ~4.45% can be utilised for the fastest clears.

Players who have this perception are likely to think that 4* tier is dead once they got all or most of the meta 5*, or they have multiple champed 5*. Due to their 5* MMR, if they want to use 4* in PvP, they need to be at level 330 and above. Due to dilution, they can't get them high enough at the timeframe that they want. Therefore, the easiest solution is to kill 4* release. Overtime, they will be able to catch up to 330 and above more easily.

If those players can max champ all future 4* within 3 - 6 months depending on their patience, I doubt 4* tier will be dead to them. But, most of them can't.

Perception 2:

"I like to play with different team combinations because it is fun." Players who are in this group are unlikely to think that 4* tier is dead. Because fun is the more important factor, rather than speed, they are likely to enjoy the game more.

To summarise, it depends on how you approach MPQ. Are you looking for fun or looking to dominate? If you want to dominate, your choices of characters are limited to ~5% of the total characters. If you belong to the fun group, you are likely to look forward to new combinations when new characters are released.

For those players who want to stay in 4* tier because of the horrible stories about 5* tier, I think one way is for the dev to come up with different PvPs so that you still can use different 4* even when you are in 5* land, without getting match damage to death. The recent Evergreen and solo character PvPs seems to get a lot of positive reviews. As you can see, how PvPs are structured affects who the top and fun meta are. In PvE, speeds trump for those looking at top rewards.

jamesh · January 2020

There are definitely parts of the game that are suffering as the size of the 4* tier grows.

the odds of getting a cover for any particular character from a token keeps on going down.
This has also meant that shards/bonus heroes have changed to the only reliable way to cover particular characters in a reasonable amount of time. If you're trying to stay on the new character treadmill, then you're no longer using it to advance the characters you actually want to play as.
With soon to be 90 non-limited characters, any individual character will be buffed once every 18 weeks. In that time, you'd expect six more 4* characters to be released, so the next cycle will be a week longer. If you're a 4* player who sticks to the buffed characters, that could be an awful long time to wait after champing a new character.

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.

Mayo · January 2020

It does not matter what you think of how active the 4* tier is right now. The solution is simple to implement but will be difficult to digest for some intersted parties: program a league for only 4* and below characters to enable potencial playing players to develop their rosters. This league could give triple iso but could only be accesed / left every 3 months. Btw, not a new idea, i already play another game that uses a similar system. Bam, thank you very much!

fight4thedream · January 2020

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.

I appreciate your insight @Vhailorx but what do you mean by "optimal roster progression"? If you mean in terms of competitive advantage, then I think it's quite clear that 4* characters are still a significant factor in achieving competitive success for both PvE and PvP. For PvE, 4* Rocket and Groot still features prominently on many high end players A teams. I have recently heard discussion of Prof X/America Chavez/Thanos being a new potential alternative, but once again a 4* character is needed to achieve optimal speed.

In PvP, the most difficult team to face in standard PvP is Jessica Jones/Bishop. While perhaps not as fast as Okoye/Thor, it's still fast enough and provides a sufficient level of defensive value that running it is arguably the better option for a player whose JJ/Bishop is high enough to be a deterrent. And then there is Worthy Cap/Hawkeye which is slow but can pretty much beat any team and is also a decent defensive deterrent (in contrast to Coulson/Hawkeye)

If you have been paying attention to meta shifts, it seems the dev team has been very much working towards moving away from "the speed is king" mantra and focusing their efforts on fleshing out higher tier game play by introducing characters that intentionally make matches slower (Bishop/Worthy Cap in the 4* tier, Iceman/Carnage/Beta Ray in the 5* tier) . Even the best new 5* pairings from 2019, Iceman/Prof X or BRB/Prof X are not particularly fast teams but the intentional delay and offensive mechanics are meant to enhance their defensive value.

Essentially what you are calling a broken mechanic is intended to counteract the hegemonic influence of speed in top tier PvP game play. And by the looks of it, it seems the dev team has been successful in that regard as there are more competitively viable teams than ever before.

So I am curious what your "objective standard" is if it fails to account for these facets of high end meta play. Theoretically, even if a player had every character in the game maxed champed, the best options in terms of overall value for both PvP and PvE would still feature 4* characters.

Also by your own admission, there are roughly 4 bands of strength within each tier. So it behooves any player who wants to play optimally to focus on the highest bands of strength. Despite claims that it would take a player a rather long time to acquire a good 4* character, I see plenty of players with a maxed champ Bishop and he has only been in the game a little over a year. Obviously, this is the result of hoarding which is the best method (besides a significant financial investment) for optimal roster progression.

In fact, one could even argue the existence of such 4* characters that impact high end meta play add value to token pulls since they are easier to acquire than 5*s via shards and even if a player were to walk away from a bad pull rate in acquiring a 5* character they are still working towards building a 4* character that will improve their game play experience.

And that's only talking in terms of roster optimization for competitive play.

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).

There are some other points of your argument here that I find problematic:

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.

But you are operating under the assumption that all low-end rosters prioritize champing everyone which may not be the main goal for such players.

You say mid-end rosters see very little impact but I have heard many players in the 4* tier sing the praises of Sabertooth for giving them a decent counter against Kitty/Grocket which appears to be the bane of the mid-tier PvP play experience and I have seen plenty of mid-tier players in game rocking a low level champed Juggernaut because his power set meets their current needs.

Finally, I think your analysis of the high-end experience speaks more to your own personal experiences and biases than something that can be generalized as true for all. In the context of the relevancy of the 4* tier, I don't know how you can argue 4* are bad for high end play when it has expanded the available options for competitive play.

Consider the case of Jessica Jones. While generally held to be a strong, solid character, she was for the most part ignored in standard PvP meta play since Okoye/Thor was able to effectively nullify her damage output. That has changed with Bishop. A similar situation in the case of Hawkeye and Worthy Cap (who many players use even champed at a low level).

High end PvP meta is more interesting than ever before and this is in large part thanks to these 4*/5* pairings. Yes, there is a segment of the 5* player population that doesn't enjoy the current meta since they can no longer beat every team but I believe that to be a good thing. There should be an element of risk and strategy when battling in higher play.

The things you call broken are very much working as intended and for that very reason the 4* tier is something a competitive high end player would be wise not to ignore. It will be interesting to see this year what sort of anti-stun mechanics will be introduced this year to balance out the effects of the 4* stun brothers. I know the dev team does not have the best track record when it comes to introducing counter mechanics but anything that deals with the stun ability sufficiently whether it be from a 4* or 5* character will add yet another layer to high end PvP play.

Finally, one great solution to keeping characters relevant, whether they be 4* or 5* , and encouraging team variety is to provide a variety of events like we experienced over the winter holiday. Different conditions and limitations will break up normal pairings and more importantly allow different characters that are normally ignored to shine. I would definitely like for the dev team to incorporate more such events for both PvP and PvE.

With all that said, I don't mean to dismiss your analysis @Vhailorx. I am sure you are not the only player that feels that way and you do provide a lot of great insight. However, I found your broad stroke generalizations problematic as it runs counter to my own game experiences and observations. I wanted to provide a counter-argument to give a fuller picture of the current state of the game.

Also I want to thank everyone who has shared their insight and experiences in regards to the question posed. I think we all agree dilution is a problem that needs to be addressed in some manner or fashion but that is not exclusively a 4* problem. And the 5* tier is not without its own problems.

But at the end of the day I still very much enjoy playing the game and hope the dev team continues making improvements and finds good ways to address player concerns.

DAZ0273 · January 2020

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.

This is an interesting point.

I transistioned to a champion 4* player with X-Force Wolverine, Luke Cage, Mordo and then Wasp (pre-buff) during the period of "meta" Cap Marvel, Medusa, Gamora, R4G and Vulture. I am reasonably confident that the bad RNG handed to me slowed my progress but each of these characters (and especially Wasp post buff) could get me to at least 575 in PvP so you could argue the toss whether having the "meta" would have advanced me faster. Probably in PvE it would have but not enough to have an impact.

I am currently waiting to go to the 5* tier. So far I have Cable. That is NOT happening. There is no question however that a champed Kitty would massively influence my game strategies as I have the 4* assorted kit all ready to go.

Given that a new player need only really chase a champed 4* Juggernaut, R4G and Bishop to put out a "competetive" (I don't even think Worthy Cap is necessary) PvP team with just a non optimal Kitty Pryde who has a couple of yellow, dilution suddenly doesn't look like a problem.

However...each new 4* does make even getting those guys covered more difficult and as shards are glacial pace, I think new players may still struggle with dilution.

Vhailorx · January 2020

Fight4:

Respectfully, you definitely DO mean to dismiss my insight. In fact you actually did so multiple times, calling it problematic and biased.

But you did so very politely and this is an internet discussion forum, so that's fine!

"Optimal roster progression" means maximizing the efficacy one's time/money resources. So for given amount of playtime/spending, what is the best possible outcome (as measured by roster strength/completeness)? I happily concede that there are lots of other ways to enjoy the game. I can't tell you what to like in any meaningful way. But I can tell you the more or less optimal strategies for maximizing your roster strength and team selection (assuming my judgment is correct of course. That is what I mean by "as close as we can get to an objective standard").

Sure, some people want a different experience from the game. But an argument of "You like chocolate, but I like vanilla!" is not particularly helpful to anyone, imo. So while I am definitely making some assumptions and using them as the foundation of my opinion, I think it is a justifiable postulate for mpq analysis.

As for the rest of your argument, I think you are eliding some important elements of my position. You spend a great deal of time describing how 4*s still have value, but I did not actually argue that the 4* tier is without value. Instead, my argument is that further development of the 4* tier does not offer a good return on investment (in the same way that additional 1* or 2*, or even 3* development is just not a high marginal value activity at this point in MPQ's lifecycle). You might counter by saying "look at how many people like sabertooth (or 3* strange)!" But even the development of good new 4*s is not "worthwhile" if the commensurate costs are too high (and I think they are esepcially high in 4* land for the reasons I stated).

You also say that dilution isn't *just* a 4* problem. I didn't claim that it was. But the 4* tier is more than 2x larger than any other tier in the game, so if we want to talk about dilution as an issue, 4* land is where the issue shows up first. If the counter to my argument about roster growth taking too long as the 4* tier grows is "look at how many people have this 1 good character from 2018!", then I think my point is more or less made. (Also, do you REALLY see a lot of player's with Max champed bishops? Or do you just see the see same several dozen players who have max champed bishops all the time?. I know for me personally the game seems replete with 370 gritty + Juggs teams in PvP right up until I start tracking my opponents' names and discover it's just the same 10-15 people per slice leaving their defensive teams unshielded all the time. Mmr definitely warps my own perspective on what other people's rosters look like.)

You said nothing to address the power gap between a lvl 275 4* and lvl 340 4*, but that is a key part of my argument for mid-to-end rosters.

And perhaps I didn't explain myself adequately on broken characters. I don't think that the fact that a 4*/5* team is effective is broken. I think a few, very powerful abilities are broken because they totally obviate important design elements that keep mpq balanced. That would be true of they were on 4* or 5* characters. But that is a different, and fairly substantial topic of its own, so I don't want to get too in the weeds on that here.

As for demi working to end the "speed is king meta." I agree that they have been trying to do this for ages. But they continue to fail because they are always trying to pull on the wrong levers. Speed isn't king because the fastest characters are the best, or the most fun. Speed is king because the best rewards require us to play 60+ pve matches a day in under 90 minutes. Or 3-match shield hop in under 4 minutes. And the game punishes us quite brutally for an accidental loss (both directly via health packs, and indirectly via lost placement rewards). Until and unless demi changes those underlying (and admittedly difficult to change without fundamentally altering mpq) issues, there is no way to convince me that speed will become unimportant.

Tiomono:

IMO the distaste for shards is from a few factors:. (i) colorless covers, while still desirable, are less useful in the post-saved covers world, so the upside isn't quite as high as demi thought it would be; (ii) conversely, the downside of shards was more obvious than demi thought it would be, as the math clearly shows that shards produce less covers over the long term than BH did, and per character shards lock value down in a way that BH never did; (iii) the monetization was too aggressive and in-your-face, from the new store to the pig shards "give away"; and (iv) the champion rewards debacle was a huge misstepm (both the reduced iso/HP rewards and the decision to retroactively "punish" those character with high level 4* champs like prof x and cyclops).

Vhailorx · January 2020

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.

I agree that there were many confounding decisions about the implementation of 5*s in game, but that is sort of beside the point. 5*s are 4 years old now, and they have 2-3x more match damage per HP than the lower tiers. Changing that might solve some problems, but would also create other ones. Kind of like changing the placememt scoring systems.

Vhailorx · January 2020

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.

This statement conflates multiple, distinct things.

Speed = better rewards is a statement of fact. This is just objective truth in mpq given the current reward schemes.

"Any slow character is as good as useless" and "5*s must always be better than any 4* in all contexts" are just opinions (and fwiw, not opinions for which I would advocate).

Obviously, you are correct that perspective colors a lot of this argument. That's why I tried to state my own assumptions and biases before my argument to provide that context. And so far, frankly, all I am heading from other side are variations of "but I like variety and am enjoying myself! You just need to stop worrying about [insert straw man argument about chasing rewards or whatever here]!"

And that's great! It really is. I want people to enjoy themselves. But my argument isn't that no one has fun dabbling in 4* land. It's that continuing to add to 4* land while the various, systemic problems that have plagued mpq for years just grow worse is a bad use of time. It's bad for the devs because it just makes the task of fixing the underlying issues harder, and it's bad for players for all the reasons I listed above (dilution, power creep, broken PvP metas, apathy, stasis, etc). I think more stakeholders would get more benefit from dev time spent on other areas of the game.

Is the 4* tier dead?

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