Spider-Man vs Venom Reward Values

I just wanted to make a quick post on the reward values for the Spider-man vs. Venom Event. Then I thought to myself...why? The prices fluctuate so much anyway and currently the economy is shifting quite a bit as players reach high power levels. But then, hell, why not.

UR Symbiote Venom:

Ultra Rare Venom meets a need that players have been waiting to be filled, an acceptably powerful UR Bruiser card. Although players might look at him and say 'hey, he's pretty much an Iron Man with less frequent proc rates!' he does allow bruisers to get rid of those UR+ Thors in the core of their deck. That and the fact he's Venom and extremely limited puts his price somewhere around 300+. Personally though, I wouldn't pay over 200 for him because lets face it, he's an Iron Man.

SSR Wall-Crawler Spider-Man:

Seriously...another Spider-Man? Don't have enough of those. And it does what? Oh, decreases Bruiser attack and defense...yeah...that's not useless at all. Lets face it...this card is just bad. It helps you defend against the weakest alignment offensively and defensively. I bet it will sell pretty solid for 10PP but lets be honest, it's worth 7PP at most.

SR Secret Veteran Arachne:

Actually she's really good for an SR card and possibly the best SR speed attack card now. Her pure boost to speed attack and her future wall breaker event ability makes her a pretty nice card. Unfortunately her abundance will bring down the price. Realistically 3-4 PP each would be a reasonable amount of PP.

R All Seeing Doctor Strange:

Lets be honest. He really has no value. Rares just are nice stepping stones for low level players but otherwise are used to skill up cards.


On a side note. Pretty much every SR quality card is worth 1-2PP each at this point and in a month will probably all just be worth 1PP each.

Finishing an Event

People are built differently. Some people will fight a losing battle to the end, others will cut their the losses and move on, but some people will always win.

Now, I have been that blind bull that pushes a losing battle until the very end...I don't like it. Generally, I only do that when I'm particularly angry or don't care. This is probably the worst case scenario for anybody who wants to profit off of an event. The reason is, when you push hundreds of PP into a losing battle, you're gimping yourself for the next one. It's a Pyrrhic Victory. People can literally 'win' themselves into the poor house.

Now, I've been the second type of person as well, that guy who cuts his losses. This will normally be the result of frustration and I compare it to flipping the monopoly board. Realistically, this is me throwing a hissy fit that I'm not going to get where I want and I've already invested X amount and I'm just done. I used to be more like this in games, and even now I will get this way for a short time. The key is to step back and look at everything, and this leads into the third type of people.

Always winning. Some people will finish every event with more than they put in. This is almost always accomplished by people who step back and look at all facets of the game and where they are at. It's accomplished when people look at the time tables of games and graph highs and lows. This is the type of gamer I am now. Although I'm always susceptible to one and two, I tend to end up at this point.

In MMOs I've graphed and tracked auction house data down to how certain times of day effected prices. I did this to the point I almost got banned in vanilla WoW for messing with the entire market on my server. In free to play MMOs I've identified needs of players and used that to get people to gift me cash shop items which I then sold for huge profit.

Now, I know, that appears like a huge waste of time for some, but I often find engaging in those activities more fun than talking politics in chat.

What's this have to do with Marvel?

Simple, we are at that point in the event where players are deciding whether they are going to be the bull, cut their losses, and some are looking at profiting.

During these last couple of days if you want to bull it, do it. It's awesome when you hit your target, but if you miss, it's infuriating. If you're going to quit frustrated at all the issues that occurred this event...that's your right. But I'm saying there's an alternative.

Some players are quitting and selling their event cards cheap, other players are intending to bull their way through and are picking up event cards. If you're smart you can clear about 10 PP as a middleman for trades. Look for people selling a card for a certain amount...let them know you might have a buyer, go into one of your other trade chats and ask if anybody wants to buy x card for (Their Price+5-10PP.) If you have somebody who says yes, tell the person you'll buy it and you clear the profit.

Not only that, there are people who are selling their solid non-raid cards at a discount to get that last bit of PP to push. One guy in my Alliance during the Dr. Doom Event Liquidated his entire deck during the last couple days to earn 2 Dooms. If you buy low at the end of the event, you can normally sell for a profit down the road.

Finally, have fun. Do what you think will result in the most fun for you. I find this type of thing fun, but if you'll have more fun blindly pushing, that's what you should do. If you're not having fun, it's fine to take a break.

The message I'm trying to push here is to look at the greater picture for this event and try to profit where you can. Whether you win or lose is entirely up to how active you are willing to be and how broad a view you can achieve. Yes, its a lot for an android TCG, but that's because this is how I have fun.

How I would Solve the Exploit Issue

There are different types of 'exploits'. Just because you wish to call it an 'exploit' doesn't mean it's not cheating. For example, exploiting knowledge you shouldn't have to buy/sell stock results in years in prison.

There is always an implied understanding in online games that there will be bugs and if you find them you should not exploit them for personal gain. World of Warcraft banned high end guilds for exploiting bosses, Guild Wars 2 banned players for exploiting bad pricing to make high end equipment, and Raiderz wiped a mammoth amount of items off all their servers as a result of a duping exploit.

The cold hard fact is:

No, you're not so stupid as to 'think it was okay'
'Everybody is doing it' is not an excuse
You don't get to fall back on 'well they should have programmed better'
And you really are a twat if you try to say 'I used it 40x on accident'

If you used it you know what you did, and you know what you did was wrong and actively chose to do it because your personal gain was more important than any semblance of sportsmanship or personal integrity. You truly are the twat of twats.

How I would deal with the problem if I were Mobage:

24 hour maintenance and extension of the event. I would use this time to figure out everybody who used the exploit.

When the event came back, every damn person who exploited the glitch...oh lets say five times to be fair...would happily find themselves with 0 raid points. 

This would move up the ranks of every honest person and send a message to people who think it's okay to exploit, and nobody would be banned. 

After all, when my teacher caught me 'exploiting' another persons test (they should have covered it if they didn't want me looking) I would have received a zero.

   

Raid Event Changes

So, today I woke up to find myself horribly annoyed that Mobage decided to change the raid to disallow players from not accepting boss rewards to keep their bosses low and farm green shards.

The first thing:
They claim that it is the result of 'server stability' but I can 100% assure you that is complete bullshit. I know it's complete bullshit because a huge number of players, myself included, are sitting on over 500 gifts of rally points from previous raid events in our mailboxes but that's never been a blip on their radar.

A few days into the event they realize that players have managed to figure out how to farm PP even though they removed the PP rewards from red and purple shards to prevent players from from farming PP.

This change is just annoying. It's another way to make the game unplayable if you don't spend money on it.

The second thing:
Really Mobage? Your number one priority is keeping people from farming PP? Not that wicked exploit that allows players to push bosses insane without using any PP? 

I am tempted to just announce the damn exploit to break their game.

But I'm bigger than that. Not much. But slightly. Not only did that not fix a SHIELD Training exploit that allowed players to attack without attack power, but they don't fix another exploit that top players are using to attack without using PP.

That's how you know that a game company is fail. Their primary focus is spent on punishing casuals, not punishing exploiters.

*Note on that last comment. The game designers of the game are not fail. They did a really damn good job. Their bosses, the guys who decide what to focus on and how to monetize are fail. Seriously, what a bunch of twats.*

Spider-Man vs. Venom Raid Event

Spider-Man vs. Venom Raid Event

Well, it looks like Mobage said...you know those things we did in Rage of Bahamut that cause 40% of our player base to jump ship? Lets do those things in Marvel War of Heroes.

So, the new Spider-Man vs. Venom Raid Event had some very unfortunate twists that people weren't really able to plan for.

Twist 1: Raider Cards

So, in previous events the Raider Cards that players received from previous events generally had an 'okay' buff to Raid Bosses. This was a brilliant system that allowed players to participate even if they didn't have a fortune to spend. It was also a nice consolation prize for players who scored in the mid range of a previous event.

Apparently this was unacceptable, so Mobage decided to drop down the effectiveness GREATLY of non-purchased Raider Cards.

Sentinel is doing 350% instead of the 600% that previous SRs did. The Hercules that people were spending a bunch of PP to try to earn out of card packs is only doing 200%...which is just sad considering that Black Cat does 250%. Of course not as sad as Sifs 150%...there's sure a point in fusing and maxing that...

Spider Woman, Thing, Scarlet Spider, and Iron Fist all do the normalized raid damage. I have no idea why they would have made this changes to Raider cards other than a blatant cash grab.

So, all those people who were purchasing Sentinels for 10PP each...sorry, you got screwed.

Twist 2: The Raid Deployment Points

So, what's pointless? Oh yeah, attack power. You have that energy heavy feeder account with only 10 Attack and Defense points? Congratulations, you're the raid event winner here.

This system completely changes the way players need to approach the raid event in order to do well. The reason is, previously a player could just use a single raider card, attack over and over, and slowly whittle away big enemies. Not anymore. A player could also simply tag every enemy once for shards using a single card to gain PP. They can still do it, but instead of costing 4-5% of their Attack Power, it's costing them 1/6 of it for each swat.

A player is given 6 Raid Deployment Points that recharge at a rate of once every 20 minutes. This means that a player can get a full set of attacks in once every two hours, or recharge the points using their PP.

Now, here's the bright/dark side of this system. No matter how powerful your deck is...it cost the same 1 RDP to attack. So, if you only have 1 Raider Card, you get screwed, if you have 5 good raider cards, you are benefiting.

So, with the new system it would be most beneficial to try to stack five raid cards.

So, what to do now?

Well, ideally you're going to want to stack five of the highest level Raider Cards you can get. The sooner you can get them the better. The way this event is set up costs pretty much everybody significantly more to do well in.

For example. Previously if you had five Silver Surfers the deck would cost about 75 Attack per Shot. This mean that a player with 300 attack (Standard for anybody stacking that kind of firepower during a Raid Event) would get 6 attacks in. A player like me would have had 50 attack power leftover for another mini attack as well.

Currently, if I had five Iron Fist the deck I would be able to get those same 6 shots in, but now I wouldn't be able to get that extra attack from my attack power.

Now, for the really bad part. If you did well in the previous event by using one Silver Surfer (A lot of people did this) you can't anymore. You could normally attack close to 20x with a Single Silver Surfer before needing to use a PP. Now you can attack....6.

In essence. Single card attacks have had the shit nerfed out of them. Why? Because Mobage thinks that if you HAVE to buy five UR IF to do well that you WILL buy five UR IF to do well. Of course, players like me see this for what it is, a blatant pay to win set up. Last I checked, I played games to challenge/enjoy myself, not buy my way to the top.

I'm not saying I'm leaving Marvel...but I am definitely eyeballing some of the prettier games out there.

SHIELD Combat Readiness Training

SHIELD Combat Readiness Training Marvel War of Heroes introduced a new 'mini event' to substitute for the previous 'assignment' mini events that normally prefaced the large Raid/Shield Events, and its pretty awesome.

Shield Combat Readiness Training allows players to engage in a mini combat free for all to gain shards that can be traded in for rally points, silver, cards for the upcoming event, and even Ability ISOs.

There are three different options for Trading in Shards; 5, 10, 100.

As you move up in number of shards, you gain access to better rewards. Of course the downside is that you still have a pretty substantial chance of getting Rally Points or Silver...neither of which are really sought after.

 

What's the Best Trade In?

I believe the 10 Shard Trade in is the best value, and here's why. Although 100 Shard trade in doubles the chance of getting Sif and Hercules as well as introduces the ability ISO-8, players still have almost the same chance of getting the rally points and silver as they did before.

So, lets say that you have a 2% Chance at Hercules on a 10 shard trade in. Now, you do that trade in 10 times. Since each time its calculated individually it isn't a 20% chance at getting him, but its something around 17% of getting him.

Now, lets say you have 2x the chances on the 100 shard trade in + the Ability ISO chance. So lets say Ability ISO is 2% and 4% Hercules. That's a 6% chance (although 1 of those chances is 2x Hercules) on 1 draw with 100 shards

The absence of Hercules in the 5 shard pack makes them pointless.

Now, if the chance is literally based on the reward selections (which I doubt, but hey, who knows?)

There is a 3/16 chance of getting Hercules or Ability ISO-8 out of the 100 Shard Exchange.
There is a 1/16 chance of getting Hercules out of the 10 Shard Exchange.
There is a 1/11 chance of getting Sif out of the 5 Shard Exchange. (No Hercules. There is a 1/16 chance of getting Sif out of 10 Shard Exchange and 2/16 chance of getting Sif out of 100 Shard Exchange)

This means that over 100 Shards you have 10 1/16 chances at Hercules using the 10 shard exchange, or 3/16 chances of Hercules or Ability ISO on the 100 Shard Exchange. Take your pick (the losing rewards are way better with the 100 Shard Packs unless you get 100k silver like me)

In the end, its your choice, but I prefer my odds with the 10 Shards.

Combat Grades

Interesting. But I fail to get the point of them. They don't give an increase to shards. In fact, as you increase your rank you will be pitted against people with higher rank as well meaning that winning will become more difficult.

If there was some final ranking reward or players were given more shards per attack when they increase in rank, I could see a purpose, but in the current inception I don't really see a point. Kind of nice to have a rank though.

Participate

In the end, this event gives you the ability to get free stuff for minimal effort. Whether you are a new player or a veteran, don't worry about losing, participate. The only way you could lose during this mini event is by not playing.

No Time No time

Alright readers! I gotta make this fast because today is just not a day I have time, but I HAVE to post on the updates.

Item 1:

Marvel War of Heroes just released a battling event that is currently running.  If you ran straight to your page instead of reading home you may have missed it. You gain ISO-Shards that can be traded for chances at personal resources and...drumroll....cards that are good for the next event.

PARTICIPATE. DO IT.

If you didn't see it, hit home, its on the menu there.

Item 2:

Despite the game not saying it before, Sentinel and Black Cat will both be raider cards. Your Sentinels are worth 10-15PP as a result. Don't get scammed on them. Black Cats you can probably skate by getting 2-3PP each for them depending on buyers.

Item 3:

If you had ULTIMATE CARD PACK TICKETS as rewards, hold onto them. If you thought raider cards for Fantastic Four were expensive, this event will hit higher. Not only is it a sought after UR for Bruiser which they are lacking in, but it's also VENOM, one of peoples favorite comic villains.

Item 4:

I will have proper updates tomorrow. Sorry, that's all I had time for today.

SHIELD Training 3 Reward Values

Because of the popularity of my post about the reward values for the Fantastic Four Event I decided to create one for the rewards of the SHIELD Training 3. Although many people were dissatisfied by the fact that once again rewards for being a top level Alliance are horribly lagging behind individual rewards, they are still better than what other TCG offer.

One thing to note is that no cards have mentioned whether or not they would be useful in the next event. 

Ferrous Hero Iron Man

Ferrous Hero Iron Man is a pretty solid SSR for people who are just starting into SSR on their decks, but substantially inferior to many other SSR. Because of his mammoth versatility his buff is substantially weaker than other cards. His final stats are predicted to be around 10700 attack and 10300 defense, making him a jack of all trades card. But, with the increasing popularity of Tactics cards in the game I wouldn't be surprised to see him going for 20PP.

Ability Boom ISO-8s

Rewards for top level players in addition to the Iron Man card these are the true reward for participating in the event. Ability Booms have traditionally sold for a steady 30PP each. Recently I've seen them going for as low as 25PP each in my trade chats. I assume they will drop and remain at 25PP for sometime, especially now that many high level players have skill 10d most of their cards already.

Mutant Hunter Sentinel

A solid SR offensive wing card Mutant Hunter Sentinal offers a nice boost to its own attack for a bruiser deck. There is always a possibility despite it not being mentioned that Sentinel can be used in the next raid event. I don't find it likely, but hold onto it until you know for sure. If it is usable in the next raid event, you will probably be able to sell it for 10-15PP each.

Fickle Fortune Black Cat

Did we really need another Black Cat card? Oh well. Much like Sentinel, if it's usable in the next event it will have SOME value. If it's not usable in the next event it will be a nice addition to some lowbies deck since it is a degrade to all ability.

Assault Cards SHIELD Enforcement Training 3

Assault Cards SHIELD Enforcement Training 3

In Marvel War of Heroes Assault Cards are the primary source of wall damage. Anybody who has attacked a wall notices that it takes a significant reduction in damage. Versus other card games where the assault card used is based on realm, Marvel War of Heroes actually has different rankings of Assault Cards based on Rarities. On top of this, the Assault cards change for each training. For this Training the assault cards are as follows:

Enemy Inside Incredible Hulk - 1000% Bonus Damage Base, 2500% Bonus Damage Fused.

Son of Chaos Wiccan - 500% Bonus Damage Base, 1200% Bonus Damage Fused.

Black Leopard Black Panther - 300% Bonus Damage Base, 1000% Bonus Damage Fused.

Black Widow - 250% Bonus Damage Base, 700% Bonus Damage Fused.

Starjammer Ms. Marvel - 200% Bonus Damage Base, 600% Bonus Damage Fused.