Down on the 3* farm

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Howdy y’all. We got this lil’ ol’ farm going here where we keep the yung’uns ‘til they’re ready to be fattened up and sent out into that big ol’ world out there. Over yonder, beyond that fence, y’all can see a baby psylocke and a baby hood each with 50 or more saved covers. In th’ other paddock is a tiny beast and a miniature c’lossus with 40+ covers saved on each one.

OK, I’ve grown bored of this tortured analogy now. On to the serious business. This might be a bit long, sorry to those with short attention spans.

What happens when you get to 9999 shards and you get some more. If they’re wasted then we may just have found the unintentional secondary monetisation of shards. Welcome to ISO crunch, part II.

Until recently I could keep my 3* dupes at level 40 and rack up saved covers on them until they got to 100. Once I have another cover on the vine, I sell the 266 I have rostered, champ the baby version and roster a new 1 cover dupe at level 40. So far, so normal.

As sources of covers start switching to giving shards instead I won’t be able to carry on in the same way. When I’m close to 9999 shards (less than 40 covers) I’ll have to champ that 3* dupe or I’ll lose any shards over 9999. The maths here is a bit sketchy but hopefully it makes the point.

If we assume shards are going to start replacing covers in the ratio of 2:1 or higher (the ratio we see in the 2* and 3* reward replacements) that means you would expect to have ~16 saved covers by the time you get to max shards. That equates to about 50 champ levels. If I wait until I have 67 saved covers to go with those 9999 shards then I’ve lost out on 30k+ accumulated shards. If I champ the dupe then I either have to sell my max champed 3* or I take a hit on the ISO.

I get that this is a first world MPQ problem but the impact of saved covers was to significantly decrease the ISO crunch. I could defer spending ISO on my farm until I needed to. As shards get rolled out into the ecosystem in ever increasing numbers are we seeing the second coming of the ISO crunch? No more will we be able to sit on the dupes until they’re ready to jump up to max champ levels. Now I either need to sell my max champed 3*s sooner (and miss out on any possible retroactive rewards, hahahaha :joy:, painting a bigger target on my back in PvP in the process) or find a way to get even more iso (hint, :money_bag::money_bag::money_bag::money_bag::money_bag:).

Maybe my, oh-so-stylish, tin foil hat has started to slip a little, maybe not. What do you think? Not about the hat, I’m keeping the hat whatever you may think. What do you think about shards, monetisation and the reintroduction of the ISO crunch in 3* land?

2

This is true, but also only relevant to the small percentage of the playerbase that farms using that method (most don’t even farm, andany farmers just sell and re-roster right away, trading the value of a 266 for the roster flexibility of keeping only 1 copy of each 3*).

Definitely worth raising as another unintended(?) consequence of the way shards have been implemented.

3

It will also be true on 4s. While their covers are more scarce, 9999 shards would only amount to 22 covers you can save before they start being wasted. Any dreams people had of saving covers of 4s in case they become feeders in the future, so as not to miss out on retroactive rewards, wouldn’t be able to go much beyond potential level 300 before you start throwing away shards.

Another first world problem, granted, but a problem nonetheless.

4

I believe that shards start to be redistributed past 9999 onto either favorited characters in that tier or randomly.

They really need to address the question of what happens after 9999 since it makes little sense for the answer to be “too bad” when saved covers have such a large cap.

After they provide some solid information, you can figure out how it impacts this approach to 3* farming.

However, it seems to me that as already stated the edge case of saving 100 covers before flipping a 3 is pretty rare.

I realize the iso crunch is horrible for new players but you might be better off collecting all the rewards as the covers come in vs banking them all, especially when shards reward pulls a bit more to progress towards goals. And playing hard means you can probably completely champ a 3 within about 3-4 days of play at most anyway if needed.

5

What is the acquisition rate for shards relative to covers? If you can get 80 covers by the time you gather 10k shards, then it’s not problem. It only becomes an issue if you can’t get enough covers by the time you hit the shard cap.

6

I would think an easy solution would be to just increase the counter by one digit. 99999 would be enough that you would have enough shards to roll over a 5* almost twice (you would probably be able to get the other 27 elsewhere by the time you got 99999 shards). I don’t see any real reason why any one would need to save more than 50000 shards but I just figured adding another digit would be easier.

7

I wait til I can champ the 3* then sell the max, unless it’s Iron Man or Strange. I just don’t use the others enough to justify keeping duplicates of everything when HP is precious and I get closer to 300 roster slots.

8

We don’t know the answer to this yet but looking at the data points we have: 2, 3 and 4* character champion rewards then we can see that shards are replacing all but the first cover.

It’s difficult to qualify the impact of moving bonus heroes to shards as that depends very much on how you use shards. If you target a particular character with your shards then dilution suggest you’re likely to see covers from shards outnumbering those from tokens and vaults. The more characters you target the smaller the ratio would become. As more characters are added to the pool, the higher that ratio will become. You could probably do the maths for 3*s by looking at your average token earnings over a period of time but it would be quite tricky.

I’m just speculating here but I imagine there’s a target ratio. I think it’s probably safe to infer that ratio is 2:1 or more given what we’ve seen but we’ll have another data point when (if, perhaps) the PvP and PvE progression rewards are updated. Personally I would be surprised if all those covers weren’t replaced, primarily because you only get 1 cover each of a 3 and a 4 in PvP event and 1 cover of a 4* in PvE (assuming SCL 7+). We usually see rewards being swapped rather than added so some of those might stay as covers, maybe the first cover in PvE and PvP respectively, but shards will probably dominate. If you want to preserve a ratio of 2:1 (I know, conjecture) you would have to change almost all the cover rewards to shards. If we get any extra shards - it’s not totally beyond the realms of possibility - it would likely be a few extra but not enough for a whole cover of the existing rewards to encourage buying from the store.

Placement awards will probably change too. My guess would be along the same lines with all covers changing to shards outside of release events.

I appreciate this is extrapolating quite far from where we are today.