The more I think about it the more vaulting seems to make sense for the long-term health of the game. Because of the over saturation of the 4* tier new releases were getting less and less attractive and the gap between new player and old player was getting more and more severe. Add to that the end game content for non-whales (the 4* tier) was with the increased champ rewards moving more quickly than perhaps the developers considered when they first set up the champing rewards.
Vaulting removes a lot of those problems. New releases are now much more important since they are the characters being pulled in packs. Newer players rather than having to slowly cover 40+ characters to max covers now can much more quickly move into the tier by only having 12 in packs at a time max covering those 12 much faster. And by vaulting a lot of the higher leveled 4s that vets had the rewards will slow down a bit giving a little more time for the tier to be relevant meaning they don’t have to move as quickly into the 5 tier and what would be an eventual 6* tier.
Vaulting might not be popular with everyone, certainly a big portion of the echo chamber in this forum has issues with it, but it may end up serving plenty of purposes development-wise. With just a couple of tweaks to placate some of the people who strongly dislike the system they could probably keep the vast of majority of the people playing longer.
I think this might be the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever read on here, and I don’t understand what you are even talking about when you claim to be looking at this “from a devs perspective.” Do you even know who the devs are? And how they differ from the publishers?
Increased value of vaults
This is a made up problem that I pointed out in punisher’s thread. The cause of the problem (lack of cover availability) eliminates the problem (need to cover characters so that new covers pulled don’t go to waste).
More time grinding
Just plain wrong. Now that characters are more readily available many people won’t play as hard for them as they will be easier to pull from tokens and cover after the fact.
The 120 CP debacle
Wrong again. With much higher draw rates you are far more likely to pull that final cover you need before you have to drop the 120 CP on it.
The race against time
I don’t think this is a real problem either, not in the long term at least. Once characters have been in the newest pool for 8 months people will have ample time to get them covered without needing to spend like hell before they get vaulted.
Race against time II: electric boogaloo.
Another short term problem. Eventually all players that earn ISO at better than 25k/day will never have to worry about champing a new 4*.
Whale chum
No. Just no. Comments like these make me wonder if you even play this game. MMR shields weaker rosters from the whales anyway. And this change has nothing to do with SCL so I’m not sure what the fuck you are even talking about with “getting propelled into brackets they can’t truly be competitive in.”
Health pack sales
What? No. Players will always have to transition at some point, and they will likely use more health packs during those transition periods sure, but having that transition period happen earlier does nothing for net health pack sales. Also, can we stop pretending like health pack sales are significant profit center? I’d bet the majority of players on here have never spent HP on health packs.
Champ drought
Short term problem again that only applies to vets with most or all of the older 4s champed.
Conclusion
Sorry, not everything the devs do is a money grab. Vaulting + BH was their best effort at the dilution problem while maintaining overall cover distribution rates. Remember most players don’t spend, and so their goal is rarely to try to get players to spend more, rather they want to try and attract as many new players as they can and get them to keep playing and hopefully spending regularly. Dilution was making progress too slow causing people to quit before they became regular spenders. So think like a dev - how do you fix that? Vaulting was their solution, targeted primarily at newer players to keep them engaged in the game by making meaningful progress in a shorter period of time but without just giving out covers like candy. The game falls apart without a broad playerbase, and so they are concerned with retaining players more than squeezing every last dime out of them.
So when it comes down to it you really just don’t trust the devs because you don’t understand what motivates them.
Actually, the effect on transitioners is one of the few ways I can see vaulting having a genuine negative effect on certain players: it’s entirely possible for a person to get stuck in transition now, forever.
Let’s say you’re a casual player who achieves, say, two 4* covers from tokens per week. You don’t spend more than a few minutes on the game, but up to now you’ve been making slow and steady progress towards a real roster. Now, over the course of a character’s lifetime in tokens, you will open ~70 such tokens. This is enough to get, on average, 8 covers for that character. Then that character falls out of tokens and you’re left with one more unusable waste of a roster slot, which will never help move you past the 3* tier. At the rate you’re going, you have no reason to expect that any 4* character will ever get fully covered, barring an extremely long-term plan based on Bonus Heroes.
That’s why we can’t have nice things. Any time that a new patch includes changes that are potentially game-breaking for a part of player base, we will have people defending developers, because those changes either benefit them or don’t affect them at all.
I find it mind-numbling how many people don’t realize that in those games we’re the part of the community. If a part of the community gets alienated and starts dying, it might not affect you at first, but it will have an impact on you eventually. That’s why it is important for example to cater to new players. They bring the fresh blood and keep the game healthy.
The moment we get a change, that makes players consider quitting, it’s not just their problem, but everyone else should acknowledge, that some action is needed in order to help them.
Stop just thinking about yourselves. Just because 5* acquiring rates don’t affect me, doesn’t mean that I don’t reckognize it as an important issue.
Yeah sure, they are going to be super happy when Peggy gets vaulted. At that moment, 6 out of the 7 top chars will be out of tokens, Peggy, Iceman, Rhulk, Cyclops, Jean, IMHB out of tokens. When those people get obliterated by a team formed of those 4s, with no chance at all of covering those chars themselves, they are going to be super happy! Yeah Carol is great, but she is just one of the chars in the top tier… And by definition you will always have more top tier chars out of vaulted tokens than inside.
Also what happens when you need someone out of tokens to complete your team, for example, Carol, Coulson, Starlord, this team is crazy good, but it requires and old char. There are a lot of combos that require new and old chars, and new players will not be able to use those teams!
Champion rewards have been reduced, that is a fact. Now is much harder for anybody that it is not a super whale to get the 320+ champion rewards that are the best ones. Every time you get close with one char it will be vaulted, so most people will never be able to get chars at that range. Then, also the percentage of championed chars is going to be smaller, so more covers will be wasted, and people will get less champion rewards in general. And of course you have lost the option of choosing who you should champ. Now you need to champ chars that are not vaulted.
I don’t see why the metagame will change. Some people, new players, might use more new chars, but the biggest userbase is still old players, and those will keep using buffed top chars. New chars that are great will be used, but the other ones will be easily forgotten, exactly the same as before. The only difference is that new top chars will be adopted faster, but as long as Devs don’t get crazy, and all new chars are super mega great, the change will be quite small (from 3-4 months to max a top tier char to maybe 1-2 month now?). Also you forget about 5s, which are the kings of the meta and currently unaffected by this change.
The worst part is that they have so many different tokens, it would have been SUPER easy to vault just latest LTs for example, and leave classic with all chars. Then people would have the choice to do whatever they wanted to do. Give choice to players is always a good thing! If they vaulted all LTs is for a reason (money or stupidity).
This chance is just good for super whales that already have old 4s at 370, they are the only people that will really benefit from this change, THE ONLY ONES, this chance as it stands right now is bad for everybody else.
Most of these f2p games want you playing them regularly in smaller bites throughout the day (more chances to tempt a purchase from you presumably) rather than in the larger chunks you see with mpq e.g. if you play pve optimally and don’t do much pvp you would do ddq in 15 mins or so and would not touch the game throughout the day other than the 2-3 hour block around your sub’s reset time.
Unless the weekly boosted characters are picked carefully to ensure a mix of top new and old then the people with both available to them will be at a clear advantage and even if they do manage to have a mix of both in the boosted list, any synergies between those old and new characters will also give an advantage.
Complaining about the complaining when you haven’t fully considered the implications is probably more short-sighted, the reality is that under the old system your champion rewards income would steadily increase over time, whereas under the new system you will see a drop-off when you have champs moving out of the newest 12 that will somewhat recover as you champ even newer heroes, but then it will drop off again once the next couple move out and so on. Ignoring the likely increase in wasted cover under the new system, we will get roughly the same amount of champ rewards, but they will continually be in the lower half of the champion levels which give lesser rewards than the later ones.
Of course, it goes without saying that every change in the game is made from the perspective of hoping to earn more money. And in that regard I can imagine some players might react the way the OP describes but my reaction is quite the opposite:
I feel stifled in my progress. That in turn makes me not want to invest money in the game.
buying vaults: I’ve never bought HP to buy vaults and I don’t do it now as well
Health Packs: never bought them and won’t start now
buying to race against the time: nope, as I just want to progress on my own steady pace
If anything, I’ve spent less money: before vaulting I would have bought in the 30% off HP sale and now I didn’t because I don’t see the point in spending more on this game who only caters to whales. Moreover, when my VIP expires, I won’t renew
I’m just one player, though. So perhaps due to this change they rake in more money. But it won’t be my money.
Not necessarily, you have no idea what power creep will bring. It’s possible that the 10 best characters are among the 12 newest.
Then set that old character as your bonus hero and finish them faster than you would otherwise.
This is just flat out wrong. If you make ISO at 25k/day (most serious players do I think) then you never waste another cover again. Ever.
Also wrong. Clearly this helps newer players get to the 3* and 4* tiers faster. Players with a solid group of 6-10+ 4* champs also benefit in that now they can focus on newer characters and have far less waste. The later champ rewards are an issue sure, but for many the additional champ rewards from all the newer characters might make up the gap.
Your claim simply isn’t true at all, except in the narrow case of you hoarding all your resources until you have the iso to champion people but when you spend those resources you don’t end up with a lopsided 0/5/5 character.
The chances of producing a lopsided character are drastically increased with a vastly reduced pool of possible covers and once you have one, wasted covers will be inevitable as you will need to continue drawing in the hope of getting the one you need so hoarding won’t be a viable approach, even if you find it at all acceptable that people are basically forced to hoard rewards to avoid wasting them in the first place, which seems like a fairly glaring flaw in a reward system as it is.
Just curious: what reasonable 4
teams for Versus mode could be formed out of heroes currently in the packs? Remember - Peggy is out of it pretty soon.
Should we expect some serious power creep with new heroes to be introduced?
So maybe ca 3/4 (at least in the 4
land) of the heroes should be just removed from the game? All the problems solved?
You are really projecting here. This change is mostly bad for me, and I’ve been vocal about that. But I’m open-minded and am one of the VERY few people on here that have recognized that this change is positive for the game as a whole, even if mostly negative for me. I’m by no means trying to defend the devs here, only pointing out all the logical inconsistencies that people use to try to hate this change because they are emotional.
THIS is why we can’t have nice things. People aren’t being honest with themselves at all. Sure, you will still waste covers for bad distribution, but your odds of getting shafted by RNGesus is exactly the same now as it was before - this change has nothing to do with it. In fact, you are 4x more likely to overcome poor cover distribution before your covers on the vine have to be sold because of the increased draw rates. To suggest that your chances are “drastically increased” is based in nothing other than an intense need to hate this change.
This very thing happened to me and I posted in the other thread. My Carol had 2 green covers since her release and I could draw nothing but yellow and black. Under the previous system I would have drawn those yellow and black covers over roughly 250 pulls and sold them all off as I failed to grab a green cover before they expired. But with the new system I just kept pulling and since the Carol draw rate is 4x what it was I managed to get my much needed green cover and immediately apply SEVEN champ levels (I had to sell 1 or 2 of them). By drastically increasing your odds at each character RNG is now slightly less of a factor as things are more likely to happen within the 2 week expiration window.
You clearly haven’t given this any thought at all. Yes, it absolutely does help you as you will now earn covers at nearly 4x the previous rate. So in the time it would have taken you to earn those last 5-9 covers you will now earn 18-32.
You’ll pull 13 covers for a new character under this new system before you would have pulled 4 covers for a character under the old system.
Its definitely amusing how people who are trying to start champing 4*'s are saying how they are now locked out and how this change has screwed them badly are now being told by people well into the 4* transition how it definitely “helps” them. It clearly does not despite what knots and excuses the vets try to make.
The usual crowd of “be happy about everything people” keep assuming that a person who isn’t on the forums will naturally hoard and get characters before they get out of tokens.
They also don’t earn as much as a higher player with a full roster.
You should understand the game mechanics more. Unless you hoard you will earn the same amount of covers you are just drawing from a much smaller pool. Unfortunately the weekly boosts DO NOT consist solely of this smaller pool. If they want to “help” new players and keep vaulting they must then edit the boost list. Maybe Wasp/Carol are good but against a boost Rulk/4clops its advantage older player. The excuse of “favourite older 4*” doesnt work either due to the minute chance of actually getting a bonus cover.
