A Discussion About Better Ways to Distribute 5*s

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I’d like to have a discussion about what the issues with the current 5* distribution system are, and potential alternatives or solutions. I checked the first 7 or so pages of General and didn’t see any discussions about it, so I figured I’d make a new one.

So, what are people’s opinions?

Personally, I think that basing endgame progression on a distribution system that’s entirely determined by luck is a pretty poor idea. Here are some alternatives to start the chat going:

-They could make a small vault of around 20 4/5* covers that resets every day. Save up 20 tokens and guarantee yourself 2 5*s!

-They could increase your chance of drawing a 5* every time you don’t. 10% would act as a base. Oh, you didn’t draw a 5* in your first 10 tokens? Well that’s OK, at least the chance at a 5* has been increasing by 2% each time you didn’t draw one, so after 10 missed draws you have a 30% chance. Draw 10 more bad draws? Now you’re at a 50% chance to draw a 5*. Oh good, you finally drew one! Back to 10% to start again.

-How about spending 150-200 command points for a random 5*?

-Legendary tokens could give no 5s, but every time you open one you get a 5 point. Get 10 5* points and you can draw a random 5* token.

-You could trade in a certain number of Legendary Tokens for a guaranteed random 5* cover. It would be some number slightly less than 10 Legendary tokens to account for the 9 4* covers you’re giving up.

Some of these options could even come with an on/off button for drawing 5*s to help anyone that’s not ready to start getting them yet.

In my opinion, they don’t need to increase the rate of 5* distribution, they just need to make that distribution more certain. They need to make it so that your time and effort assures some sort of progress towards your goal, instead of allowing some players to be entirely left behind because of bad luck, despite great effort.

What does the community think?

2

Speaking completely personally? I don’t care. I really don’t care about 5*s right now.

I want to gather 4* covers, especially for characters I actually like, not just the good ones. If I get a 5* from a legendary I don’t think “WOOHOO!” I think “Ugh, great, I wanted a 4*. What a waste”. Because now I have a one cover level 255 characvter sat in my roster taking up space and screwing up my scaling. Assuming I was lucky enough to pull a silver surfer so I don’t feel obligated to spend yet another 1000HP on rostering another character I’ll never get to use.

3

I would like to see a tiered event/reward system put into place for PVE and/or PVP. Have different tiers of each event for the different roster makeups with appropriate rewards for that tier in both placement and progression.

4

Apart from mega whales and the freakishly lucky 5 stars aren’t ‘endgame progression’. They are still releasing new 4 stars to fill that role.

D3 arent looking to provide better access to 5 stars because they don’t see it as an issue at this stage. Once they get closer to finishing the 4 star tier they will adjust it, but they aren’t about to designs a system that allows you to bypass the 4 star tier without throwing money at them.

5

Make 4* covers more easily available, which will then have the knock-on effect of increasing the availability of 5* covers (cf. how 4s became easier to get when we got a consistent way of earning 3s).

6

I think we should earn 5s in

1: every 30 days beyond day 730 in daily drops

2: Season score at 12-14k

3: daily but harder clash of the titans (still give LT)

4: LT vault, I don’t care if they have to reset it with every release. At least we get the option to hoard for a sure thing

5: gauntlet event with increased scaling, or a min level of 300 so only 4 star transitioner can make it

7

I would like to hear from some people who already have some useful 5*. My worry is that if 5* covers become too plentiful, PvP will completely bog down into 5* vs. 5* and I have no idea whether those fights are any fun or just longer versions of regular fights. Selfishly I’d love to have more 5* covers, but I know that anything that could give me more covers would also give the hundreds of other players in my similar position just as many covers. Not that I want to keep others from having them too, but I’m just not sure I trust the devs ability to have crafted 5* in a way that they are fun in a 5* only world.

That aside, I have gotten really frustrated in the randomness of LTs, and not just with my abysmal 5* pull rate. I was a little skeptical of a vault originally. Mostly because I don’t trust d3 to be “generous” enough to make it useful. That 20 item vault is a great idea, but I worry they go the DDQ vault route and throw in way too many covers. Even balancing it out to 10%, I could totally see them throwing in 10 5* and 90 4*. Sure your odds still get better as you draw from the vault, but you could still save up 20 tokens and have rotten luck. Anyway, the proposed idea is not bad.

The last point I’ll bring up…fixing guaranteed 5* to LTs means they are 100% whale-able. Even at 1 per 10 exactly due to vaults or “5* points” or increasing pull rates until you get one (they will increase to 100% eventually). Sure there’s some large amount of money needed to buy them, but nonetheless, they can be had for the right amount of money. Maybe you guys are okay with that, maybe not. Just wanted to bring it up since the devs seemingly wanted to keep them as un-whale-able as possible (and then weirdly added CPs which are totally whale-able)

8

just wanted to point out they are already whalable as shown by several well-known names. over enough sample size, LTs give 10% 5*s as-is and with CPs, finishing them out to specific builds is now an option. vaults just takes out the bad luck side of it. guaranteed 1 of 10 takes out both luck sides and makes it basically a fixed cost.

9

As opposed to the 4* vs. 5^ direction it’s headed in now?

10

First, I think the discussion of how to make 4’s more available is the more important discussion. They’re still not as available as 3’s were back in the day before DDQ when there were more 3’s then 4’s released right now!

Second, 5’s aren’t meant to be gotten. They’re carrot whaling end game luck pulls. I’ll repeat. You are not supposed to have them, but you are supposed to want them. Looks like D3 was successful here. Lets just do some math. Assuming a 5% draw rate from tokens, you’ld need around 300 LT’s to get a fully covered 5* assuming you drew 2 repeat covers, on average.

You’re not supposed to have them, but you’re supposed to want them.

11

I pulled a SS blueflag.png
recently. To be honest, I don’t really care. It’s cool to have, but after the initial excitement over 5*, ahh. I’m more focused on my 4* roster and which cover I’m going to get next. I have no fully covered 4*'s. I haven’t really seen a difference in scaling (must have been the update) and I’m not seeing any difference in PVP. There really isn’t any “end” game to speak of either, unless I’m missing something. When I played WOW, there was “end” game content, until the new chapter started that is. There are no major boss fights or anything in MPQ to speak of as of yet. You compete in PVP during the season, grind through some PVE (if you want), get some new content from time to time. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. Having better access to 5*'s in order to cream people in PVP would be awesome, but you can still reach 10kin a season with a strong 3* roster. DDQ can help you get there. All in all, I’ve learned that D3 is a business and they must do things to make money. If income wasn’t an issue, I’m sure the cover system would work much differently, but they have to stick to the “chase the carrot” model. Eventually, like we’re about to see with the new PVE reward system, once that shiny class or character loses it’s luster, they’ll start popping up everywhere if you’re willing to work or pay for it.

12

I will say that seeing a maxed Surfer out there last season really took the wind from my 4* transition sails.

The future at the moment is looking rather grim.

13

Super terrified at what the bold would look like. icon_lol.gif
icon_lol.gif

14

Couldn’t agree more. I’m like halfway thru the 4* “transition” but I have to question what the point is. I find legendary tokens insanely frustrating, so I’ve stopped chasing them. Meanwhile, the lucky and the rich have been steadily building their 5* roster, and my semi solid 4* roster is a complete joke to them. I had a fully max-leveled team of Luke Cage, Hulkbuster (both of whom are boosted!) and Jean Grey and was walked all over by a team containing a nearly maxed Old Man Logan twice in quick succession during Sticks and Stones. Not a huge deal, grand scheme, but what bugs me is that I’m only at 650 in the event. Those hits were for 22 and 17 points. A lvl 290 cage, lvl 350 HB and a lvl 270 Jean Grey is so insignificant that 5* teams are hitting it for sub-30 point gains. Super disheartening, and it makes me wonder why should I bother with 4s? They’re apparently worthless and weak, a minor stepping stone for the 5 guys, which I will never be. I have no question the team that hit me was legit, so I’m not calling for ban hammers or anything, just wondering why I should bother to keep playing when I’m apparently WAAYYYYY behind the power curve. Maybe instead of discussing ways to make 5*s more accessible, we should be discussing ways to make them less whale-able before there’s no players left except for the very new, the very rich or the very lucky.

15

If you lost 22 and 17 @650 points, you were worth ~34 and 27 to him, respectively. Yeah, that’s a bit low, but targets can dry up and if you’re running a 5* roster, skipping a 34 isn’t worth the hassle.

As someone firmly in the 5* transition (I have some 4* to finish, but they’re mostly irrelevant like Mr. F), it’s certainly annoying not to run with the big boys, but I feel like 2 years of this game (for me) have been spent just that extra leg behind. I barely got Sentry up in time, never got 4Thor up in time, only now getting Jean up to speed. This is just another step. I feel like I’m progressing, and as long as I feel that way (and I’m enjoying playing), I’ll keep at it.

16

Thinking about the “elder game” it was supposed to be, I think 5* should ONLY be given:

  • Alliance T100 on pvp season
  • resupply day 730 and then every 30-45 days
  • a pve ‘season’, some progressive reward list for every 6 PvEs maybe? 7, 4, 3, 7, 4, 3 is 28 days, about a month

And thats it, NO WAY TO WHALE, remove LTs from any form of purchase.

17

I think the OP is on point and illustrates a general issue that probably causes the most current frustration in the game. EVERYTHING in this game is random:

all token pulls
selection of cover awards
selection of cover progressions (is this still true?)
vault awards
PVE node awards
even the most basic mechanic of the game is random - which tiles fall from the top and cause color patterns to form

even if each of your individual experiences fall within a normal distribution, you are subjected to so many microenvironments that you’re guaranteed to be unhappy about something. I guarantee none of us will be on the favorable end of every bell curve or every “roll”

maybe our game developers can look at this and try to take some randomness out of the game in general. LT is a good place to start, but IMO any of the above would be a victory for the player base (except for the last - can’t see how that can be changed). I’d accept that the trade-off might be that a sure reward would be harder to get. but people will try harder and not feel as cheated when the payoff is certain.

18

I’m a bit worried… There seems to be a lot of talk of this new system, probably called “championing”. From the bits I’ve heard about the system, it seems unlikely to help 5* distribution at all.

Does this mean we’ll be waiting months for some sort of fix to the currently broken 5* system?

19

I wish this game was better about stat tracking, like wins with certain characters, or damage dealt over a career. I’d wish that 5*s were built off these challenges, such as winning 1000 matches with a character, or dealing 1 million damage in your playtime or something.

Obviously, something that you couldn’t easily game, but that would reward faithful players for sticking with it this long and putting in the playtime.

20

Just came in looking to check-mark the box labeled either “anything other than what it is now” or “not relying on the RNG”