I try to be pretty even-handed when it comes to commenting on this game. I try to praise the devs when they make player-friendly or balance-minded changes (for example, the original roll out of DDQ was fantastic for us players). And I try to point out when I think they are being too unfriendly to the player (for example, I think the monetization model in this game is too aggressive, especially the prices for ISO, 4* covers, and putting legendary tokens only in the 40 packs).
But it’s really hard to find good things to say about today.
(1) the server crash: honestly, I don’t have a problem with this. Yes it sucks when it happens, and yes they should have better load balancing. But it’s not like MPQ is the only game that networking hiccups when new events roll out. Big events mean more traffic. And it’s not usually worth paying for the capacity to handle maximum spike traffic. better to just weather any network problems peak times and build a robust infrastructure that can handle normal traffic without problems. This was an improvement over ultron, though still predictably irritating.
(2) Anniversary tokens suck. Last year the anniversary tokens were awesome. At a time when total gold cover odds were something like 18%, the anniversaries offered around 40% gold covers. Including a 10% chance of Dino (15% in 10 packs). They also offered noticeably better odds of 3* pulls than contemporary regular heroics. Anniversary2 tokens have worse odds of 3s and worse odds of 4s (other than Dino) than do modern heroic tokens. Unless I have overlooked something, they have higher odds of 2s than current heroic tokens! Even accounting for Dino and the HP/ISO rewards they are actively worse than heroic tokens for players trying to build their 3 or 4* roster. And the odds of pulling a Dino are 3 times worse. Why would demiurge possibly do this? These anniversary tokens aren’t just worse than last year’s, they are arguably worse than regular heroics. Unbelievable.
(3) Galactus Hungers has terrible rewards (other than 4* Cyclops). Ultron had 3x 25HP rewards in each 8-hour cycle, plus 3x event tokens. It was possible (With some luck and serious grinding) to collect a really useful amount of tokens and HP. Galactus does not offer anything other than modest ISO rewards and standard tokens (except for the main node, which has a single event token reward and no HP). Additionally, each round of ultron offered 6 fixed cover prizes. 3 from the top progs, and 3 from the final 3 rounds. Galactus offers 3, plus a legendary token and some event tokens. Galactus event tokens suck. In ultron, the prize packs had better than standard odds of pulling useful prizes, and the featured character (Switch in run 1 and IMHB in run 2) had a significantly bumped drop rate. I think the rate for IMHB was over 2%. Galactus tokens offer a .8% chance at JG and a .6% chance at cyclops.
(4) Galactus’ difficulty curve seems broken. Rounds 1-2 were kinda fun. Rounds 3 and 4 seemed a bit more challenging. Round 5 is basically insta-death on round 7 for sure, and possible as early as the beginning of round 4 if Galactus gets lucky tile placement. This one is a bit early to call, but it seems like Ultron 2 all over again in terms of difficulty. Who designed this system? Who playtested it and thought that this difficulty curve was reasonable? Are players expected to use full AP boosts for each and every battle from Round 5 on (ie 5 or 6 times every 8 hours for 3 days?). I will admit that this complaint is a bit premature until we see the rest of the rounds. But so far it seems more than a bit absurd.
(5) There was very little communication from the devs ahead of time. They announced that the event was coming. They only gave any specific information about the format of the event in response to a player-created thread here on the forums. I feel that, for all its technical problems, the devs did a great job of explaining the ultron event before it started, so we players probably could have offered a moderately accurate description of it before we started playing. We got much much less information about this galactus event.
(6) No lightning rounds as far as we can tell. The 20-person rounds that introduced us to 4* thor were perhaps the #1 anniversary highlight last year. Why no return? why not unveil 5*s in those lightning rounds, so we could all play around with well covered SS or OML to whet our appetites?
As I said in one comment above, it is still early, so there is time to fix some or all of these issues. To date, however, the anniversary has been terribly disappointing.
Edited (poorly) for spelling and grammar
