About a year ago (June 2018), we saw the odds of pulling 4’s change where you no longer have weighted odd on the 12 Latest 4’s. Since then, we have been asking what could be done about dilution. There has been no response. (Other than some occasional stores offering 50/50 odds on select groups of 12 4*s.)
At the moment we have 77 4’s (including Talos) and there has been virtually no pause in the release schedule, with 11 non-Limited 4’s added since the change in June 2018. Soon we will have 80 4’s in game (plus the Limited 4). The sheer size of the tier is the biggest barrier in the game to new players, and significantly slows everyone’s roster advancement and needs some addressing. I feel like it is the biggest current issue facing the game.
In every category - getting, building, using 4’s - doubling the size of the tier has - perhaps obviously - made each cover and most characters (at least the non-meta ones) half as helpful to you (and made new player’s resource needs twice as high).
Past changes
While the number of 4’s and 5’s has gone steadily upward - and therefore the cover needs - the resource increases in the game have been the same for a while.
Feb 2017: Deadpool Daily Quest adds CP - 43 4’s in game
March 2017: Vaulting began, favoring Latest 12 4’s - 45 4’s in game
May 2017: Progression rewards increase along with play requirements - 48 4’s in game
Sept 2017: SCL9 added to PVE - 54 4’s in game
June 2018: PVP Hybrid make wins an option for players AND Full Dilution (no more Latest 4’s) begins - 66 4’s in game
Feb 2019: Support Circuit adds CP opportunities - 75 4’s in game
Acquiring 4*’s
There are a lot of individual differences here. A newer player will not get high end rewards from their roster, while vets will be getting LTs and CPs all the time from champ rewards. I came up with an approximate mid-range estimate of what you might expect to get.
If you played really hard in SCL9, you might be getting about one cover per month for each 4, maybe an extra for a dozen or so more. (On average of course).
I’ve been tracking my Heroic tokens as a measure of how many a high end player might receive and came up with an average of 174 tokens or about 12 4’s per month.
Looking at the CP you can receive in game from events, you can get 212 from progression in SCL 9 playing all events (including the new SC giving 10 CP/week, or 40 every 5 weeks). You’ll get some LT’s from the Crash, sometimes daily rewards, champ rewards. Let’s say you get 240 CP a week and 5 LT’s a week (possible) and you get 12 pulls by going after Classics with your CP. That’s 17 pulls a week. Over a month that’s 68, or about 9 5’s and 59 4’s. So we are at about 71 4’s a month. Adding 20 4’s from progression in all events and you have about 88 4’s, so about one and 1/10 cover per 4 per month. (Bonus on 68 is about 4 BH 4’s, maybe 5).
This model assumes someone hitting 1200/75 wins every PVP, and many players won’t do that or can’t if their roster isn’t big enough. So you might be closer to 80 covers per month and you’re adding one per character on average.
It also doesn’t include lucky vault pulls and player spending choices on bundles (which have become much less common lately), but chances are you’re averaging 1-2 a week from vaults, not impacting things much.
Final note: A Classic pull with 80 4’s would have about 112 possible character results (not including colors) and a Latest pull, about 83 possible results.
Resources Needed
Let’s look at the difference now between finishing 80 4’s vs 45 4’s (when Vaulting and an attempt to address dilution began). Note: I know that more resources are available, but I feel confident in saying the changes in September 2017 only increased them maybe 20-30 % and they certainly have not kept up with the constant stream of characters.
Covers:
If you happened to pull all the right colors for 80 4’s and finish them all with just 13 covers, you’d need 1,040 covers. Assuming you on average need 3 extra (I think that’s the general consensus) you get to 1,280 covers. You needed about 720 covers when vaulting began.
Iso-8:
If you started from scratch and wanted to level 80 4’s, you’d need about 29 million iso. My ballpark of good iso gain is 50K per day when playing high and getting lots of champ rewards, so that would be about 580 days of play. Back when vaulting began, you needed about 16.4 million iso to champ all the 4’s.
Roster Slots:
By the time you are rostering 4’s you are probably (assuming you rostered 1 1*, all the 2’s, and all the 3’s) about 16 slots from the 1000 HP cost. So you’d have about 64 4’s and 31 5’s to roster, currently, each one costing 1000 HP to roster or 95,000 HP. This need has gone up by 35,000 for 4’s.
Effects on play/access
4* Boost list
For every champed 4 you have, you get to see them boosted every 16 weeks with the current 5/week model. That means you’ll probably use the “OK when boosted” people only about 3.25 weeks of the year, if that.
Essentials
The PVE essentials have been rotating recently with an LLLVV pattern. The 3 Latest 4’s are featured, then 2 Vintage ones. With each cycle taking about 3 weeks (with new releases pushing back a person and boss events delaying the pattern) you will see each Vintage being essential every 2.3 years right now.
PVP
Sometimes you see a 4* PVP, but they still pretty uncommon. You might see one a year for some 4’s (Dino gets one, and maybe some of the 4’s that are more heavily featured in TV/movie properties). But most 4’s, you will probably need for a featured PVP about every 2 years or more.
Crash
As the Crash of the Titans takes 5 days to run, 80 4’s will run 400 days or over a year. Of course, the developers run certain people more frequently (like Dino every anniversary or special runs around movies/TV), so it’s really going to be even longer. You can, of course, win Crashes with some undercovered 4’s, but it certainly helps to have them well covered if not fully leveled. Anyway, each rostered 4 then gets you about 0.9 LTs a year from the crash.
Roster Growth
It’s a little hard to quantify how much each pull grows your roster and progress. But it’s easy to understand that when your pulls produce a smaller set of results, you end up with useable/champed 4’s faster and the champ rewards go up pretty more quickly. Conversely, the more possible results from one pull, the less each helps you. Currently each 4 you receive grows your overall roster baseline about half as much as it did in March 2017.
Back when Latest weighting began we had 45 characters in the game. Instead of your pulls being spread among all of them, you grew 12 characters rapidly. Each pull was then approximately 3.75X more effective in creating higher level characters and rewards. They scaled that back a bit a few months later to a 50/50 split; while my math is (I’m sure) off, let’s ballpark that your pulls were still about 1.8X as helpful for building up some 4’s, and getting some higher level champs on your roster.
Now we have 77 4’s (more coming, obviously) and each cover is about 0.58X - or half - as effective for roster growth than they were back in March 2017. So you need about twice as many pulls to see the same progress as you did back then. I’m certain we don’t have twice as much CP/LT’s earnable vs back then, even with the CP gains we got about 18 months ago.
Conclusion:
I know that the SCLs added rewards to play, but they haven’t gone up in a very long time in terms of the game’s overall life.
Progress is harder now than it was 2 years ago when it appeared that the developers wanted to help players deal with dilution. In addition, each champed 4 is dramatically less impactful to your play with the long cycles we see in each area where a champed 4 is boosted, essential, or both. Which makes the argument for actually champing a lot of 4’s less convincing in terms of using the resources, which works against the intent of the developers in my opinion.
At one point a player could come into the 4 tier with the realistic goal of champing them all, using them pretty often, and seeing a lot of play variety. With the volume of characters now, the goal for a lot of newer players is by necessity to focus on maybe the top third of the tier for champs (if that many) while trying to get the rest to 209 for Shield Training. The fun of finding ways to fit 4’s together and run different teams is much less possible in the current game. It just seems sad to me that the needs and resources have gotten so far away from the players and developers, but I suppose that is the natural result of the game being successful for so long.
Solutions?
I have been struggling with solutions - and maybe the developers are too. If you retire characters to make the remaining ones more relevant, new questions arise. What is your target, and when have you cut enough? Taking characters away would also be a poor choice because many players have favorites among the tier. And ultimately you would end up back where we are anyway.
Adding covers/pull resources is an obvious way to overcome dilution with volume, but the impact on players at different levels is a factor. Newer people would see more covers if they pull with those resources and feel more roster slot pressure which might make them frustrated. Longer term players would see a rise in their champ levels which would be great, but the developers might think injects too many resources into the game via champ rewards. Also, studies in game economies show that giving more resources to players (say, via a sale or in game rewards) makes players less likely - at least in the short term - to chase those resources via cash or play. So giving away more pulls would probably hurt the game’s revenue.
Using vaulting or special stores is a frequent suggestion and seems like a good compromise, but the developers have been unwilling to fully embrace that model beyond some short term stores. I think that they should seriously consider having ongoing stores so that people can make decisions about how to use their resources.