Dear D3: 8 questions that will help us understand vaulting

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So as you’ve probably noticed, the “bonus heroes” idea seems to have been met with resounding praise, but the idea to vault half the 3’s and almost all of the 4’s has been met with intense backlash. There has been a small percentage of players (about the same percentage as me pulling my fifth Red Hulk Red as a “bonus cover” when he’s 2/5/5) in support of this but it’s shocking to see almost all players except those in niche situations in support of this.

So, my hope is that by answering some simple questions and letting us know a little bit about what’s behind the decision, we can move from people throwing barbs and accusations to some reasonable discourse.

So a very little bit about me and my girlfriend as I will mention people “in my situation” and “in her situation” respectively.

Me: 4* transitioner. Four champs, mostly garbage tier (Wolverine, Falcap, Chulk and Hulkbuster). I invested in them and it rocked my scaling under the guise it will all be worth it in the long game with champ levels. Have every character except 5* Panther rostered. Of the vaulted 4’s I have: eight heroes at 12 covers, four at 11 covers, three at 10 covers, three at 9, six at 8, and four at 7.

My girlfriend: Been playing about 3 weeks. Currently has every 2* rostered (1-2 covers each) and about half are near level 94. She also has about 10 3* rostered that she pulled from tokens before this change.

Question 1: Why the change?
Forget bonus heroes. That’s a great feature. But why the decision to lock away a large majority of your characters? Is the hope to help fast track people to the 5* tier by giving them a smaller pool of characters to focus on? If bridging the gap is the intended focus, then I believe it’s short-sighted. So let’s assume I have the magnificent 12 rostered, covered and decently leveled. I’m still going up against boosted Red Hulks, Icemans, and Punishers. My only chance of competing is to get those boosted/featured characters too. But I can only get them one cover at a time at a glacial pace. See the problem? I might have 3 champed 4* faster under this new system, but I’m still gimped compared to my peers who have already champed the large majority of 4’s. So I’m still not competing like you want me to and the gap grows larger rather than smaller.

Question 2: Should new players be focusing on a smaller pool of heroes now?
Obviously, this change will create a smaller pool of characters for people to draw from and thus, the characters you deemed worthy will level up much faster. Every feature you have introduced prior to this one has SCREAMED roster diversity. Boosted characters, essentials, Dat Required Character, Behemoth Burrito, Crash of the Titans, and champions all promote having a diverse roster. Even a one-cover 3* is helping my girlfriend get extra tokens and characters in Deadpool’s Daily. How are people in her situation supposed to get resourced through DDQ or get essentials? How am I supposed to level up people to compete in Crash? It feels like this is a big brick wall where those who got over it before the change will be resourced much faster.

Question 3: What is in place for those who want to level evenly?
What if there are people like me who aren’t trying to race to 5* land and are fine with their roster getting better slowly but evenly over time? Is there a way for us to progress in the way we’d like? I never get 4* from placement or the 900 progressional (scaling, plus my roster limits me to about 600-700). So aside from the “bonus cover” that I’ll get 5% of the time if that, what is there in place for us?

Question 4: If vaulting didn’t work in the past, why bring it back?
Simple question really. What do you have in place this time around that will create different results than last time? If the answer is the occasional “bonus hero”, then I hope you see that this is not the answer for all of the problems people are voicing.

Question 5: Is this change designed to encourage hoarding?
With only 12 4* available in tokens, most people are going to have to hoard a lot of iso in order to champ these characters before they rotate out into obscurity and new hotness comes in. Otherwise, people will experience a lot of wasted covers as they pull their 23rd blue Mordo. Similarly, if I don’t have enough CP/LT to buy in bulk, I risk getting these new toons to 7-12 covers (like the rest of my toons), then being vaulted with new chance of progressing aside from the very occasional bonus for one toon only. Since the amount of CP and Iso needed to avoid this fate is immense, should I be hoarding?

Question 6: With older characters being more of a rarity, how are newcomers supposed to compete for these characters without having these essential characters in the first place?
The old method was mainly through tokens and the occasional progression award. Now, I’m hearing many people talking about selling off their now-vaulted characters who are undercovered because they will never get them covered at a rate that makes it worth it. To many it feels like a wasted roster spot. Those who were lucky to get in before the wall went up are saying no such thing so they reap the benefits of crash, essentials, etc. and the gap between the haves and have nots widens. Again, “bonus heroes” is not the answer to this newly created problem. And as I said in Q2, is it your goal that people give up/sell off/move on from the older characters altogether and gimp their progress?

Question 7: Is this change meant to slow (or in some cases eliminate) champing?
I thought the top tier players would love this change, and only the newbies like my girlfriend or transitioners like me would be screwed. But a lot of top tier players are outraged because they really liked champing. Now, unless you are part of the blessed 12, the only way to get champ levels is through the occasional bonus heroes, or through top placement. The former likely won’t happen because bonuses are so rare people will use them to max out their under-covered vaulted heroes, and the latter will be like a cover/champ level every 40/50 events if you can secure top 10. It feels we were encouraged to level our roster but now it is the exact opposite and we are being encouraged not to.

Question 8: If enough people voice concern, would you be willing to end vaulting?
For my own progression, I’d be MUCH better off pulling any of the TWENTY FOUR vaulted characters that I have at 7 to 12 covers a piece for than I would one of the new characters that I have at 1-3 covers. So while the people who have max-champed fours will be progressing by getting the newness covered faster in addition to their other max-champed 4’s, for me, I will be progressing much slower. If there’s even a chance you will listen to your player base and end vaulting I would like to know. Because right now I am hoarding with the hope that you would be willing to make changes based on the resounding feedback here.

2

I really hope they answer all of this even though you know it will be ignored as they won’t be able to think of a way to hide that is all about greed.

There is absolutely no reason why bonus heroes couldn’t have been implemented without taking away more than half the characters.

3

The only question I really have at this point is “What was the rush in deploying this immediately after announcing it?”

4

I wonder if due to the ‘leak’ it was pushed out right away since normally theres far bigger fan fare for big new features like this. Especially when everyone started hoarding during the build up to champ levels introduction.

Also OP - all excellent questions. Hope we get some answers

5

I think this could be accurately summed up with one question: “What problem(s) was vaulting the old characters meant to solve?”

Sadly, I’m guessing you’ll either get no answer (most likely) or a canned “We sure think this is fun for our players, because of reasons! This system is just aces! Thumbs up guys!”

6

This is easy to answer as it’s clear. They wanted to vault character to force everyone into the new ones. Since that would never go over well they made the bonus hero component to distract everyone with free covers. If they give notice of vaulting without people getting those covers right away the forums would be a lot angrier than they already are. You don’t give notice when you are going to mess with someone

7

To me, they tried to address a few complaints: the pool is diluted, it takes too long to cover new characters, we keep getting characters we don’t want, it relies on RNG too much. A lot of those complaints are related to each other, mainly that the pool was diluted. Provided you get bonus heroes often enough, this could accelerate how you cover an old 4* if you only have one favorite. Other people have posted some statistics on the odds or the time it takes if you rely only on pve progression, but in the end it might still be faster than the old system. It especially helps the 3* tier.

Another possibility is that they could have found that they were giving out 4s too quickly. Guaranteed covers in champ rewards, progression in pve, boss events, vaults, gauntlet was easier, cp flow if you just want to purchase it, and it being a little easier (for me at least, never did it before a few months ago and now do it fairly regularly) to hit 900 in pvp. Maybe they wanted to balance out the 4s.

It could also have been a way to make bonuses more appealing. It might have been less impactful without the vaulting. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think their thinking was that nefarious.

8

As far as hoarding is concerned, hoarding has always been a thing.

9

I think the answer to that question is “token dilution problem” Which in fairness it did actually solve…it just created a new problem at the same time. The solution should have been to separate into two tokens like they did with Legendaries.

10

They could have just split the new and old and accomplished the same thing without taking away so many characters.

Bonuses would have been better without vaulting. Too many characters now are hidden away behind more rng which is a terrible things. I shouldn’t have to deal with rng inside of rng to lvl my 3* characters or improve 4*'s I already rostered. There are absolutely 0 good reasons for vaulting.

11

Interestingly the in game annoucement must have been pretty unclear about it (I didn’t read it becuase I read about it here first) but until I explained it everyone in my alliance thought that they just split the 4*'s between them based on what they read in it.

12

I don’t work for D3, but I can answer all these questions for you…

Dilution was a problem, bonus heroes help. We complained of too much RNG, bonus heroes accelerate (slightly) progress on a few select characters.

Yes, the newest ones.

Friends don’t let friends softcap.

Dilution is a bigger problem now than it was then and something needed to be done, bonus heroes are a solution to much of the problems created by vaulting.

No.

Just like they did before - by acquiring them in their previous event when they are awarded, or through progression in the current event.

Maybe? Honestly I think this is maybe an unintended consequence of the devs really not having a good grasp of higher end play - the biggest negative of the change IMO.

No.

13

Sorry, but the idea that they concocted bonus heroes strictly as a cover story as part of a plot to force us to use the new characters seems pretty far-fetched to me - not to mention the lack of tangible evidence for it. I think it much more likely that the explanations they gave in the video and the Puzzle Warriors interview are correct (no, I don’t think they were a put-up job to dupe gullible dopes like me) and that they weren’t expecting so much backlash (if there really is so much backlash). I find it more plausible that they came up with the limited stores to address concerns that people weren’t able to get the new 4s covered (as they said in the video) and thought bonus heroes would allow people to concentrate on the specific older characters they wanted and give them more covers for the buck and simply didn’t fully consider the effect this would have on people who wanted to have a large number of older 4s covered or realize the difficulty of doing so by relying on event rewards because they are not hardcore players and don’t understand high-level play (not sure how many hardcore vs casual players there are or how much money each type spends).

14

Of course there are, and they’ve been mentioned in this thread already. You clearly don’t like them, and that is totally your right, but that doesn’t make them good reasons.

I definitely agree that it’s weird that this feature appears to remove a lot of player choice, while being designed to improve it, and I also think that that isn’t helped by the fact that even the bonus heroes system is deceptively complicated.

In terms of slowing champing, yes, I think that was intended, at least at an implied level. They’ve made it easier to get new characters up to the level of your highest characters both by increasing the rate of acquisition of new characters, and by slowing the overall rate of growth of older characters. If I had to speculate further on my speculation (must… go… deeper…) I’d guess that they’re attempting to prolong the 4* tier because the 5* tier still isn’t in a place they’re happy with.

15

I’d accept this as a possible reason.

That’s only true of here and now. In the future it should improve diversity and choice amongst usable roster options

16

Again, why do they need to take away the old characters to make it easier to gain the newer ones? All they would have to do is split them. You want to get the new characters then open the new ones and you get them. Those of us who want the old ones still can get them. It makes no sense to take the old ones away. This is forcing the new characters on us, not helping people get them. Bonus heroes is only say they can say there is still a way to get them to try and lessen complaints. The limit store does help people get the new ones and bonus heroes does help get specific ones, but again, why do they have to vault characters to accomplish that, both could accomplish this without taking away the older characters.,

17

I think this is exactly the case. In theory, it solves a lot of problems that are frequent complaints. However, it is just so ham-fisted, that it creates just as many new problems as it solved. The real question is, why didn’t that stop them? The new problems are pretty obvious, so the action is more than a bit disconcerting. I don’t get why they thought this was a good plan. Their apparent inability to create a clear path forward for their own game is puzzling.

Another possibility is that they could have found that they were giving out 4s too quickly. Guaranteed covers in champ rewards, progression in pve, boss events, vaults, gauntlet was easier, cp flow if you just want to purchase it, and it being a little easier (for me at least, never did it before a few months ago and now do it fairly regularly) to hit 900 in pvp. Maybe they wanted to balance out the 4s.
Rather than giving them out too quickly, I think it is as much a function of them creating new ones too quickly. I think they knew that 4* token rates were becoming too diluted, and would only to get worse. I think they understood the system would eventually collapse under its own weight. But, rather than the logical step to increase the odds for the 4* pool as a whole, they just axed the old 4*'s and let the new ones have the space. I think part of the motivation here was possibly greed, not wanting to give away too many 4’s, despite the fact that dozens of them exist, and they’re only making more. And part just in their exercise in futility, attempting to make the same rewards relevant to a player starting out this week and a player that’s been around for two years. They need to realize that simply doesn’t work. They need to up the rewards for long term players, or simply accept that the meta is where it is and speed new players up to it, a la quickly leveling a newcomer to a game like WoW.

It could also have been a way to make bonuses more appealing. It might have been less impactful without the vaulting. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think their thinking was that nefarious.

Same. How does the old saying go? Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

18

A few suggestions if you want to get these questions answered (and I would like to get more info too):

  1. post this in the Feedback and Suggestions thread (maybe you plan on doing this when you get more feedback)
  2. make it shorter
  3. adopt a more neutral tone - putting “bonus heroes” in sarcasm quotes (at least that’s the way I took them) could just antagonize people and make it less likely you’ll get an answer.

Also, I don’t know if it’s true that only a small percentage of players support this. First, a good number of people have posted in support of it. Second, people who are unhappy are probably much more likely to post than those who aren’t (which is why voluntary polls are inaccurate). Third, I don’t think the community that reads these forums is a good representation of the general player base (though it may be a good representation of the hardcore player base). So you might want to tone that line down lest they think you’re stacking the deck.

Also, did you watch the community video and/or listen to the Puzzle Warriors interview? They addressed some of these issues there (though they did not sufficiently address the various potential issues with trying to cover multiple older characters.

19

The root issue was whales with EVERY classic 4 star.png
already @370. They are the main financiers of the game and they were tossing 75% of their token draws and that is UNACCEPTABLE! With this vaulting they will now be able to use 100% of their token draws

20

Oh I agree with you that splitting the stores would be a much better implementation, I just don’t attribute their not doing so to deliberate malicious intent on their part. I just think they didn’t think through all the issues when they came up with this and thought they were solving problems and that players would actually like this. And I’m not sure that casual players will be so upset over it - though I also don’t know why a casual player would care if they got a new 4* or an old one - I’d think they just want to play their favorites (“Give me my Spidey!”)