Detailed Red Iso-8 Feedback - TLDR Summary - Need way more Red Iso-8 in the game

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Supports Discussion
1

I’ve done the math and the red iso gained per day needs a massive boost, or the cost to level needs to be taken dramatically down.

Red Iso per day (playing hybrid, and including season and sim) is approximately 752.

To level a support to 50 is 20822 red iso. That is about 27 days to max level a 1* support.
To level a support to 100 is about 90K red iso. That is about 119 days to max level a 2* support.
To level a support to 150 is about 210K red iso. That is about 281 days to max level a 3* support.
To level a support to 200 is about 387K red iso. That is about 514 days to max level a 4* support.
To level a support to 250 is about 620K red iso. That is about 824 days to max level a 5* support.

This is playing the highest level shield clearance for all events, and hitting the required progression for all rewards and placing high enough to get red iso.

14 supports have been added, and it would take about 378 days to level all of the current supports to 50. To level them all to 100 it would be 1,666 days.

Assuming we get 4-5 supports a season, we could easily have over 50 supports in a year.

I assumed supports are supposed to be a fun way to change how you play and add some strategy to how you play. Extremely limiting red iso 8 does not make it fun, as you have to be extremely careful with where you spend it, as it will take a month just to level one to 50.

Yes, I realize I did not account for duplicate supports. As more supports are added, it will be less likely to get duplicates, and tokens are rarely available. The increase of the availability of support tokens could help the situation as even a level 1 duplicate is almost double the amount of red iso gained in a day.

Lvl 1 duplicate: 1400 (1.86 days) X% chance in Beginner support token (showing up as 1/80 in vaults)
Lvl 2 duplicate: 7000 (9.3 days) X% chance in Beginner support token (showing up as 1/80 in vaults)
Lvl 3 duplicate: 12,000 (15.9 days) X% chance in Beginner support token (showing up as 1/80 in vaults) and Advanced support tokens
Lvl 4 duplicate: 16,000 (21.2 days) X% chance in Advanced support token (given at end of pvp season)
Lvl 5 duplicate: 24,000 (31.9 days) 10% chance in Master support token (no way to get yet outside of special HFH offer so far)

Duplicates help, but the supply of tokens if very small. It would take 25.8 level 5 duplicates to max level a 5* support, and considering it’s only a 10% chance to get one, this is highly unlikely to be a big help.

Developers and designers, please fix the costs sooner than later if you want us to really be able to play with this feature. It’s a fun idea, and a good concept, but the players are really handcuffed on what we can do with it with these incredibly low rates to gain red iso 8.

Suggestions - reduce cost to level by 25, or increase red iso income by 25 times. You made the cost of leveling supports close to on par with the cost of leveling a character (more expensive in all cases other than 1 and 4 star supports). A hybrid player that gets all the red iso 8 available is probably averaging 35-40K iso a day compared to 752 red iso, about 50 times less. I am suggesting 25 times as a good number since having to prioritize some would be fine, as we currently have to do with our characters, but having to wait 514 days to max 1 4* support is not acceptable for the small gain in how it would change the game for a player.

Red iso 8 lightning rounds - give iso 8 at 175, 300 and 400 to get players back into lightning rounds. Give out 1 support token to top 25 and 2 to top 8.

Add red iso 8 to intercepts, this could help renew interest in VIP. Also, add to VIP having it replace some of the 500 and 1000 iso rewards, and shifting some of the 1000 iso rewards to 1500 iso to keep the same amount of iso for VIP in a month.

Add support tokens to top 10 in PVP/PVE placement, and increase the rarity by SCL.

Add red iso 8 as a random drop in PvP, potentially replace the current 70 iso reward slot with some amount of red iso 8.

Some of these suggestions would give players a way to play more and earn addition red iso 8 and not be capped at 752 a day (over a season).

2

I think at the moment they are phasing the supports into the game very slowly and the numbers we see right now (Red Iso being fairly slow to be distributed, Support Tokens being almost non-existent,) is going to grow as they see how the supports affect the game. Thank you for crunching the numbers and showing the current numbers affects clearly, though.

3

It does make sense to start off low and increase later (because giving too much Res ISO and then pulling it away feels bad, man).

But I think they were far too conservative thus far with the red ISO output, to the point where I haven’t spent any red ISO yet. In fact I’ve barely touched the supports at all outside of the tutorial and the free tokens I got.

It’s hard to get data on something when the player base is afraid to squander what precious ISO they have.

4

Because of the way supports start and scale slowly, I imagine a new player gets far more benefit off of the supports today than a veteran. Some of the “benefits” are laughable for anyone in 4/5* tier. Oh, boy. 14 extra points for each purple match the equipped player makes. 32 extra health per yellow match. Yawn.

But, for a new player, that can be huge and the difference between playing PVE and not.

5

Give it time, introducing a new currency is tough. We are all figuring out this new economy together. That being said, I agree, there is not enough red iso available.
First they should increase the rewards on the 5th clear. 3 red iso is nothing. Maybe add it to DDQ too. They could also add it to resupply and tie it to shield rank, but then would they give us the backloaded rewards? If they did we might have a big payday coming.

6

Yeah, I’m super scared to use my red iso beyond playing around with a few low levels to see what rate the increases are.

I feel like maybe they should have phased in the star levels? But it would have been hard to build any excitement given the level 1 powers

7

This is exactly my concern with the trickle of red ISO 8 we can get. People are afraid to spend the red ISO 8 or open tokens because of the slow rate we currently have for getting new tokens or red ISO 8. I understand going slow, but give us enough to level at least 1 a week to 50, then you’ll see more people trying it and and getting excited about it.

8

Completely agree. Because it’s sooooo rare and soooo minimally helpful to most players at forum level it seems best to bury it in the sand and protect it till things improve. I’ve already all but forgotten about the system and will continue to keep it out of mind until there’s a compelling reason to do something with it.

9

Unfortunately it’s almost a joke that the supports are accessible in the same place as the old all-but-useless train button. I don’t know when I last clicked on that button, and the supports are going the same way.

The RISO total being invisible from the main screen also doesn’t help.

The only reminder I get of supports currently is the red-bar in PVP saying they’re aren’t in play.

10

It’ll get better with time, they’re just rolling things out so slowly that it doesn’t feel like they’ve actually launched the system. So far we have no guaranteed ways to earn tokens (like story progression or DDQ, where you could reasonably get a certain number of tokens every week), and the Master tokens haven’t been added at all (outside of the one in the limited Heroes for Hire bundle, they don’t exist). I suspect that as we add more supports, they’ll add more tokens, and the Red ISO we get for selling dupes will help the income feel more reasonable.

Still, Supports have a unique problem with resource management that Characters don’t have. Generally, you progress through Characters by tier. When you’re still covering 2s, you don’t put ISO into 4s and 5s. When you’re starting to champ 3s, you won’t put ISO into a 3* with only a few covers, you’ll wait until you can champ them. You go tier by tier, and outside of some key characters (most 3* players probably want to chase Doctor Strange for PVE, for example), you’re only going to level someone up when you have them covered enough to champ them.

You can’t do that type of management with Supports. You can’t work on the Rank 1s before moving onto the Rank 2s, because you might pull a new one and suddenly your Rank 1 is a Rank 3. Likewise, you don’t need to level up a low tier in order to start acquiring the next tier. Where you want to level and champ 3’s to help you earn 4* covers, right now you can earn all the Red ISO possible without “needing” Supports at all, so you don’t have to invest in them to advance in the game the way you do with characters.

That might change some over time (players with 3* characters might one day be able to gather enough Supports and Red ISO over their career to be able to “punch up” and earn greater rewards than would be possible with 3* characters alone), but it’s not necessary, and not visibly beneficial (especially for 4*-5* players, I would guess), so the only valid resource management tactic is “hoard all Red-ISO until you have a Rank 5 or a good Rank 4 to invest in”, which (as again, the only way to acquire ONE of those at all right now is via the Heroes for Hire bundle) means everyone is stuck in “sit and wait” mode.

11

I will probably wait until much later (and save all my riso in the meantime) before using them. As a 4* player with currently no real designs on the 5* tier the only major benchmark for the game I have in mind right now is cracking 1200 in PVP events and hopefully placing in the top 10…something that’s not generally realistic for 4* players. I hope supports end up being able to change that.

12

My initial post of this being an underwhelming feature still stands.

I don’t disagree with the attitude of playing the waiting game, the problem is just exasperated by the stats in this thread. It’s a loooong waiting game with no visible sight on the actual resources (tokens) needed to really make progress.

Supports are new, and if you were a new player these would be a good addition currently. An extra way to boost your limited 3s as you start the long slog to play catch up. I do think they missed a trick in locking out of 2s, as they could be useful there too.

Problem is, this is a mature game that’s had people growing their rosters for almost 5 years, who are now being handed a newbie feature and being told that the newbie feature will need another 5 years (slight exaggeration) to be on a par and useful with the roster as it exists today. Even for those a couple of years in, the supports are way behind what could be deemed as useful.

It would have been good to have at least opened the door a bit wider and got everyone started with a semi-useful 4* support at level 100+. Don’t see that as game breaking and at least would have made everyone somewhat engaged.

13

I think Supports are facing two huge problems:
1st- They are basically useless. Not by meaning they dont help you, but by meaning you need few of them… how many? 3, 4, maybe 5 should be enough for everyday need.
2nd - Once you have them, its done. To fully max out a character, you need to drop 13 of his covers, duplicates suck. Supports? Once is enough, duplicates give red ISO.

These two things combined actually pushed DEVs to this desperate measure - make supports rare, make them expensive, make red ISO rare. Naturally, they had to hide the best ones (4s, 5s) behind a “paywall”… but if you look at Hero for Hire with Legendary support token as a Meta “investment” where you sink HPs gained from promoting your roster, it actually makes sense and it feels like the best possible solution.

Its like 5* characters… you get one cover per month, and character is maxed after one year. Supports? 12 months nothing and then you get one single 5* (propably sooner).

I think we need accept the fact that Supports wont grow as fluidly as regular characters, especially when talking about rarity.
We, who want to wait for 4* or 5* support to spend red ISO… we may be waiting for months before we will actually use supports. Or we can spend red iso now, risking we wont get higher rarity of support we upgraded for…months, years, maybe decades if supports will be released often and bad luck will give us supports we dont want to get.

Sadly, i cant imagine how to avoid this… honestly, i think this very concept is flawed from the very beginning. Game could really use something else, than just parallel roster, that is way more based on RNG and luck, than the regular one with characters.

Maybe we could start with smaller things, like red ISO imballance, f.e. 3-10 ISO from PvE node versus 700+ ISO from progression reward pool. 3 Red ISO!!! :smiley: :smiley:

14

I was intrigued by Supports when announced and released. Right away I received upgraded Starlord-blasters (rank 4) along with Quinjet and Cap Shield (rank 2). I also got Sharon Carter (rank 2), Pizza Dog and Blackbird (rank 1).

But then I never attached them to anyone. Never put any riso into them. There they sit, unused and unleveled, almost completely forgotten and ignored.

15

Even if you attach them, at low levels you won’t notice them. The effects are so small and to top it off with bonus hero rates that it’s neglible for now. Bonus heroes on the other hand, has a huge impact every time one drops.

16

It’s hard to think about any aspect of the supports we have being exciting in the short term, largely because of the RISO rates.

The smart play seems to be to hoard RISO until we see where the chips fall in terms of pulling supports, which means that they don’t do anything significant in the short term.

I can see the reason for it, as it’s hard to create something that’ll shake up the game without causing its own issues. Gambit was a legitimate gamechanger (left to the reader to decide whether the change was positive or negative), and the fallout from that hasn’t been pretty.

17

I was trying to figure out why this didn’t feel as exciting as previous large updates and I’ve figured out the obvious answer. There’s no reward. When we got championing and you champed a 3*, what was the first thing you got? A legendary token. Costs 7,500 ISO to champ a 3* and most of us had most of our 3s at 166 already. How many of us saw our 4 rosters explode with 20-40 new 4* covers straight away as we champed our 3s? Not to mention knowing out 3 covers weren’t just 500 ISO any more.

And then later when shield levels showed up. Grandfathered ISO gave me something like 8 million ISO to play with. Immediately I could champ some 4*s i’d been wanting to use. Gave me a huge boost forwards. Felt good to gain EXP that trickled towards another ISO reward, too.

What has Supports given us out of the gate? Basically nothing. We’ve had no benefit from this system what-so-ever in the week since it launched. If they removed the whole thing I don’t know how long it would take me to even notice.

18

Beat me to it. This was exactly what was going through my head when they announced this. Past additions to the game were awesome and had instantaneous results.

Even before your two examples there was also ddq, which gave you more iso and tokens plus a 3* every day and helped a lot of us get to that 166 level for when champing did finally come along.

19

This is a non-event for 4* rosters and above. Maybe 2* and 3* rosters will notice. RISO needs to be ramped up by a factor of 10+ to make any of them meaningful and to have “fun” managing support progress.

If we step back, I don’t feel it was an efficient use of development time. The artwork, design, complexity is a large undertaking that resulted in minimal gains for the advanced player (so far).

In contrast, rebalancing existing characters to breathe new life into the duds would be much more efficient - less development time (tweak stats) that could have had much more impact.

Swamping us with a bunch of support after support, runs a real risk of overloading players. I am a completionist, and when I see a ton of new supports added with decades needed to collect and make relevent, i get turned off to the game I played 3 + years.

20

Supports would have been awesome right out of the gate for a one star player…

Oh, wait. Never mind.