Solution to D3's Vault idea and token pool dilution....

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

As most have heard, D3 mentoined storing old 3* heros in a “vault”. The main problem with this as I understand it is that the vaulted heros will no longer be accessible. So the players that don’t have all covers for that one are SOL.

Yet something must be done. The new characters coming in dilute the % pull rate. However, players still need a way to access the Vault if they wish to complete older characters.

So I had an idea and I was wondering if this would work or not. Why not use one problem to fix the other, kill 2 birds with one stone. I’ll explain…

What D3 does is, they take all old heros and put them in the vault. But then, they take the vault and use it to replace standard tokens. All other tokens, heroic, LR, and event are left the same. Just add a “Vault” token as a random reward instead of standard. But not as often. Make them only availabe in certain events or only as progression awards. Also have the option to buy a Vault token for 100Hp like a heroic Daily Deal. But the Vault will be the Only way to get those heros. Not in PvP or PvE. Not LR or the simulator. I even think the “Vault” is a good name for it. Being a game based on comic books and all. Once they get locked in the Vault they are out of circulation until their sentence is up. Or unless they just break out. Villians tend to escape the Vault faster than heros can lock them up. Then just let a character out every once in a while back into the general population for a bit before going back into the Vault.

That would leave Heroic, LR, and event packs to have fewer and newer characters at better %.

So, to sum up… there will be Vault tokens with older characters, and it’s the onlyway to aquire them.
Then there will be Heroic, LR, and event tokens that remain the same. Except they have fewer characters now.

Of course I’m sure there will be issues with something like this. Which is why I wanted to get other opinions on it before I suggested it to the devs. (unless they actually do read these posts, in which case I just did suggest it. icon_e_wink.gif
).

Also, the term “Vault” may have come from the Disney Vault idea, but it ties in great with Marvel comics too.
You can even have Steve Rogers as the warden for the artwork on the Vault Token screen. If i’m not mistaken, the first characters sent to the Vault were the Avengers, who later escaped of course. (see Avengers Annual #15, 1986)

Anyway, just an idea I had. So now tell if it would work or not. I imagine it would have be fine tuned of course. That and I’m not sure if I explained it properly, but you get the idea.

JJ

TL; DR,… putting characters in the Vault will help increase pull % s. They just need to offer Vault tokens, seperate from all other tokens, to still be able to get the older charadters.

2

unless the proposed vault tokens are in addition to normal tokens you aren’t really changing much overall probability wise.

The problem with token pools is how the various tokens are distributed. If tokens are split into pools (in your example vault and not-vault) and you get a vault token one day and a normal token the next then nothing has changed with probabilities.

The devs have a amount of time they think it should take the average player to finish any given character.
To keep this number stable while adding new characters they must do one of two things (or both). One way is to go with the shotgun method and just pass out more tokens than ever before or alternatively increase the odds on rare covers within each token. I can see why this is not the ideal plan for them because it raises the rate you progress all characters instead of ‘this’ character.

The other way to influence this would be to give the players some control over the system. Give the player choices. ASK if they want a vault token or a regular token. Or a red token or a blue token. Let players add people to a personal ‘do not want’ list and rejoice as they never pull another Steve Rodgers again. There are so many ways they could make it work but all of them require giving the players some control over their own personal RNG.

3

I like the path you are going down, but I would suggest an alternative system which may solve both this problem and the problem of the 2* → 3* Transition as well. I know this idea has been suggested by others as well, but I wanted to give my spin on it.

The Existing Problems:
-There are continuously new 3* characters added to the game, which makes it more and more difficult to reliably acquire a cover for an existing or new character out of tokens. This adds an additional frustration both to veterans and new players that it becomes drastically more difficult to get enough covers for a 3* character to make them worthwhile.
-It is extremely difficult and tedious to move from the 2* arena to the 3* arena. This discourages a great many players. It has been stated that D3 would prefer this transition to be more of a marathon than a sprint, but based upon the time table for transition from 1* to 2*, the 2* to 3* is vastly more frustrating. The difficulty in getting covers for any single 3* character is frustrating enough on its own, but even getting any 3* cover at all is extremely difficult to boot. Currently in a single heroic token, there is roughly a 14% chance of getting a 3* token, and in a 10 or 40 pack this increases to 18% (x10 or x40). This is a poor probability for something that costs effectively $2.00.

The solution to both problems:
Make a new type of token, call it a “Legacy Token”. In this legacy token, you put the following covers as the only 3* covers available:
Magneto (Classic), The Hood (Classic), Doctor Doom (Classic), Loki (Dark Reign), Ragnarok (Dark Avengers Thor), Black Widow (Grey Suit), Iron Man (Model 40), Spider-Man (Classic), The Hulk (Indestructible), and Wolverine (Patch)

As these are among the oldest 3* characters, most of which the veteran players already have maxed and have little interest in acquiring more, but would greatly help newer up and coming players to begin playing in the 3* arena.
-Then change the probability of pulling a 3* cover among these to about 20% (initially 2% per character) for a single token, or 30% (initially 3% per character) for 10 and 40 packs. The other 80% or 70% would be distributed between 2* characters.
-Distribute these packs in place of the 2* token at 500 point progression reward in PvP events, as well as sell them for Hero Points. Veteran players will have no problem getting either a 2* or 3* character that they already have, as it sells for at least as many ISO as this token would, but this would help new 2* players who frequently get to about 500 points a reliable way to get some of the older 3* characters.
-Newer players would have more motivation to purchase these legacy token packs, as they would have a much better chance at getting some of the older 3* characters, since mostly what they really want are just 3* characters in general, but the tokens still don’t have so high of a chance to pull them that they bypass the 2* arena all together. And if a player wanted to invest a couple hundred dollars to buy 2-3 40 packs of the legacy tokens, they would probably get 1 to 2 maxed 3* characters from the legacy packs. Which would be another potential moneymaker for D3 as well.
-Finally, remove these characters from the existing heroic and other tokens. As new characters are added, more waves of older characters could move over to the legacy tokens. Yes, eventually even with heroic and legacy tokens you will still potentially run into this issue again as more characters are added every month, it will be at least a couple years from now at that point, at which time tweaking the overall probability of 3* pulls in legacy tokens could be utilized (such as moving to 30% for single and 40% for packs) to kick that can a few more years down the road. It is not a permanent solution, but a long enough one that the playerbase would be happy and would solve the immediate issue for a very lengthy period of time.

4

I’d recommend 3 heroic screens per week (your 1 heroic token works on any of the three, its your choice which to use). General Heroic which is all the covers with a super low % due to dilution, then 2 flavor screens per week. Heroes and Villians, Men and Women, X-men/Avengers/Dark Avengers/Fantastic 4 etc. On the drop percentage screen, list at the top the covers that are NOT included in the drawing (rather than me having to go down the list and see what’s missing).

Now that I think about it I’d actually like to see 4 heroic screens a week. Standard, 2 specialized, and a fourth with 2-4 featured champions. Basically remove all other 3/4*'s from that set and give the heroes a 4-8% chance of dropping. For instance flavored Fantastic 4 could be 2% drop for torch, invis woman, doctor doom and 1% per remaining random 3* included on the list. Featured Fantastic 4 could be 5.33% drop on torch/invis/doom with no other 3/4*'s included. Could rotate that bi-weekly to give people a chance to invest in champs they want.

I could be wrong but I believe people are willing to straight buy covers for the champs that they want (/are op) but they are unable to get the missing color (I for instance was missing magneto’s purple for almost a year). If they had a token with a 5%+ drop rate on Magneto I’d consider gambling to get my final cover and then using hero points to max him out. 10%+ on a 10 pack and I would definitely consider doing it.

5

Why can’t they just make different categories for token draws??

Make the “heroic” option one only draw heroes, and then make a “diabolical” option to pull villians? Then just make each PVP alternate on the 300/900 pt reward (or have the PVP feature a villain and have that reward be diabolical tokens, and the next PVP feature a hero and heroic token at 300/900). PVEs could kind of do the same.

Simple. Locking up previously released content makes no sense. Even if I did want bagman, I rarely EVER see him being dropped in fights after they took him out of the token rotation.

6

I like that idea a lot. D3 loves their rotating featured-character tokens, and it’d encourage people to spend resources on heroic tokens who don’t consider them worth the expense right now.

I envision ending up with three “tiers” of two-star tokens:

Base Heroic tokens, with a slightly higher chance of 3* and 4* characters than any other, but an extremely diluted character pool. Useful for transitioning players who need a 3* cover, any 3* cover.

Specialized Heroic tokens, with a slightly lower chance of 3* and 4* characters but a much more limited pool of rare characters, so players who only need certain characters/colors will have an option that grants them a vaguely reasonable chance (i.e. more than 0.5%) at getting those characters through tokens. Under the current system, those players have no reason to spend HP on tokens ever - the odds of a reward are just too tiny to be worth it.

Event tokens, with a middling chance of 3* and 4* covers and an overall diluted pool, but substantially increased odds for a few featured characters.

7

2* tokens are so accessible they have no value as an event reward.

There are some 3* characters that just aren’t that good. They’re more like 2 and 1/2*, and there’s no signs of that being balanced out.

Demuirge’s goal is to have us level and play a wide variety of characters. They sell roster slots, maybe some ISO, and the game is fresher for us if we’re not using the same couple of moves all day.

So with all that in mind, I think the best solution would be to put those older characters in the 100-200 point tier for PvP events. The guys busting their a**es to win every event for their Alliance can keep on competing for the newer characters, instead of rewards they don’t need or even want. The guys like me just playing a couple hours here and there to kill a bit of time would still get a sense of rewarding progression by completing my covers for a few characters. Demuirge doesn’t lose anything, because I’m quite sure those Dr. Doom 40 packs aren’t flying off the shelves anyway. Win/win/win.

8

We have a bunch of coins (tokens) let us choose where to spend them.

Currently a heroic token is ~22% chance of a 3* and slightly less than 1% for a cover for a specific character, which ends up with close to a 0.3% chance of a specific cover on a specific character. (Or an average 300+ heroic tokens to get that one specific cover you ~NEED~)

If we have choices and we can pick from a groups of say 10 characters in a group the overall chance of a 3* may go down (18%?) but now the chance of a specific character in that group goes up to 1.8% which is 0.6% per specific cover (or on average 150+ tokens)
There could be even smaller groups yielding less chance of a 3* overall but more chance at getting the specific covers you want.
A group of 5 could have a 15% chance of a 3* with a decent 3% chance per character and 1% per specific cover (average of 100 tokens to get that one cover)
Even individuals could be offered with only a single 3* character available in the token but at a healthy 6-8%

Newbies can make a choice between having the best chance at any 3* and hit the general group. As people begin maxing characters they can actively avoid groups with covers they do not want duplicates of, or alternatively pick a specific set they want to concentrate on to build up a team during transition phase. Meanwhile the veterans who have almost everything can put all their tokens and token purchases into just the newest character to max it out as quickly as possible.

9

I would love if if you could actually try to focus your tokens on a specific character and give players themselves control.

For 3* and 4* characters, add a checkbox in the roster screen that says ‘Available in Packs’ and require at least one character in each tier to be checked. If you don’t want more of a particular character, you can uncheck this box and it will increase the relative percent of getting the others in that category. Say you have ~20% chance of getting a 3* on a heroic token and ~4.5% chance of getting a 4* – those percentages are then divided across everyone in your pool of available covers.

Problems this solves: no rotating pack availability to manage, no artificial cover scarcity, more power in the player’s hands, better chances for veterans to actually get something usable out of a token

If down the road you decide you need to respec your 5/3/5 Magneto (say after a pass of funbalancing) you can recheck the box to put him back into cover packs. If you have 10 characters maxed and are happy with their builds, uncheck them to remove them from all packs and increase your odds of getting something useful. If you really need sentry to start mega-grinding the top of the ladder, uncheck everyone but Sentry and all of a sudden Sentry is the only 3* you can get from cover packs.

my $.02

10

^I think that’s a good start, though, D3 will never allow us to choose exactly who we should be getting in a pack down to the individual character level. However, if they had a system like you described with some simple tiering (villains, heros, however you want to separte 3*'s) where you must choose X number of 3*'s from each tier, I think it could be viable.

If they want to keep it at about 15% draw chance for any 3* with 4* being a constant in any pack, choose the 15 3*'s that you want in your pack and let’s say 9 have to be heroes and 6 have to be villains. I didn’t check but feel like there are significantly more heroes than villains.

11

Craft standard tokens into a random Vault token that can open 1 of X themed Vaults. Let’s say Original, Wave 1, Avengers, X-Men, Villains.