After a week or so of intermittent “server troubles” I was ready to quit, but eventually talked myself around to a position of “just wait and see”. Then along came the rerun of Thick as Thieves, and it has well and truly served my transition back to casual player.
I now only play during my commute to and from work, and occasionally during lunch, and that was enough to net me all of the progression rewards. I didn’t need any of these covers, so they all went towards my ISO for The Hood fund. I’m still not getting anything higher than a 2* from Heroic or Event Tokens, but that’s okay because in the last week I’ve pulled a blue IW, a yellow Hood (my 5th!) and a green Hulk from Standard tokens.
I’m not going even close to getting a 3* Storm cover, so I’m not stressed about riding those 2.5 hour refreshes. In fact, since I already have the progression rewards, I’ve only cleared the pins on each sub once or twice. It means I can focus a lot more on PvP, where I can farm precious ISO.
I’ve decided to stick it out as a casual player. I’ve got a tonne of HP, and I still seem to earn a little bit here and there, and with cover slots being the only thing left to spend it on, I think I should be able to earn more than I need to spend. My plan now is to slowly and casually max out/soft cap all of my heroes. I’ll probably even manage to pick up some new covers along the way, since that’s a lot of ISO, but I figure sooner or later I’ll be able to “win” MPQ.
So with that in mind, I really hope that we see more PvP events that stick to this format where everyone - including casuals - can collect the points for the progression rewards, but the event rewards will go to the dedicated. Maybe 2.5 hour refreshes are a bit silly, but I’m sure the format can be tweaked just right.