Every so often a question pops up here (and on FB) saying “Why doesn’t so-and-so have a feeder?” or “Why are the vets so annoyed at the rate of feeder characters?” I’ve been playing the game for a long time (since before there were 5s, before viable 4s, really,) and I was there, Gandalf, but not everyone was, so to give everyone some context I thought I would go into the history of 4* characters feeding 5s, and why the vets expect all 5s to have a feeder eventually.
I had to look it up under announcements to get the actual dates, but this all started in November of 2017. In November of 2017 they announced that they would add 5* covers to the rewards of 3 4s. For those interested, these first three lucky 5s were Spider-Man (Peter Parker,) Black Bolt, and Thanos. It was also stated that anyone who had passed those rewards would still receive them retroactively - i.e. if you had, say, a level 301 Medusa you would get the first two Black Bolt covers (there were no Shards at the time,) because you had already gotten the alternate reward (LTs) for 280 and 300. Some players grumbled about this and called it “Double dipping” as these players got a LT and a cover.
From that point forward they announced a new 4 to 5* feeder at irregular intervals. It happened often enough that people came to expect these announcements. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it (there probably wasn’t,) most of it tied into things happening in the MCU or the comic book universe, but they kept adding feeders until, I believe, Captain Marvel in August of 2019 - this was to support the “Infinity War” movie.
After that - nothing for four months. This was a very long interval, people began to wonder what was up. Then in December of 2019, they made a big announcement - they basically announced feeders for all the 5* characters up to the oldest 5* still in the “Latest Legends” store (which was Professor X at the time.) This announcement was met with a certain amount of glee, but this time around they were not going to give people the full retroactive shards - instead they were going to give a different amount. It was complicated and the announcement was badly-worded enough that people didn’t quite understand how it was supposed to work before it happened. Honestly, it still makes me angry, so I don’t really want to do the math, but I think it was somewhere around a quarter of the shards you would have gotten if you had actually leveled the characters after this change went through.
Needless to say, the vets were really, really angry, myself included. We had already received full retroactive rewards for many 5s, this created an expectation that would receive it for these. What’s more, the difference between a LT and a full cover (shards or no,) is vast, a cover is much, much more valuable any way you look at it. Speaking for myself, I stopped giving any money to the game, and many others I know did as well.
I honestly don’t recall how long this went on, I believe a few weeks but I can’t find the information on the forums. Eventually the devs relented and retroactively rewarded the full shards for 4 characters who had passed them before the update. This made most of the vets happy, but newer players were upset about the “double dipping” I spoke about above. Did they change their spending habits? Probably not, but it was vocal enough that I believe it contributed to the current state of affairs.
And that current state of affairs, you may ask? Well, after December of 2019 no existing 4* character was made a feeder of a 5* character. For the longest time we had no new feeders at all, then with Red Guardian, released almost a year after that fateful December day, something changed - he was a feeder for 5* Yelena Belova. The next two 4* characters, Scorpion and Throg, were feeders as well. Silk was not, but she didn’t have anyone obvious to feed.
So that’s where we are now - it seems as if they will not retroactively make any 4* character a feeder, which is a shame since half of the new released characters are 5s and it means we’ll never catch up. In fact, since it seems likely that new 4s will not always feed 5s, we’ll keep falling behind, as it were, and there are so many 5s that don’t have feeders now. Most likely this was because of backlash against the “double dipping,” but of course I can’t say for sure.
Hopefully this explains why many of us have an expectation of every 5* getting a feeder. For a brief period time, there were only 2 5*s (Carnage and Beta Ray Bill,) that didn’t. I hope you find this interesting, or at least gives you a bit of context for some of the older arguments on the forum.