Not really. If you have 20 alt accounts, all FTP, and over time, you accumulate 3 non-S1 legendary heroes on each one, then trade them all to one account, did it cost you the same amount that it would have cost you to have one account and accumulate 60 non-S1 legendary heroes? By using 20 accounts to feed one, you essentially multiply the abysmal odds of getting anything good by 20… for free. That’s never gonna fly.
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That’s a good point, but that’s also a lot of work. I mean to duplicate the roster I have from a FTP perspective, it would take a lot of time considering how much grinding I already do for one account.
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Absolutely agree, but given that some people think it’s worth hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to build such a roster, do you doubt that there are an insignificant number who believe it’s worth 16 hours a day or something crazy to get it for free?
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Since we (meaning you) are discussing season 5 and I have no will whatsoever to discover new cumbersome design choices can you please inform the community if you start seeing weird values of enemy stats and/or stages where difficulty is basically the same for hard and normal?
Also, since we have accepted that difficulty progression is a thing of the past, it could be useful for the community to track the stats for enemies (normal and boss) in the various stages.
ALTHOUGH this should be done by the designers who operate amazing choices by showing enemy stats in the stage preview.
In any case your favourite Queen was able to obtain some reserved material from the Devs meeting that unequivocally proves it was by design:
[…]
- Next on the agenda… Random, it seems…
- Oh, yeah, we forgot!
- Right! No new random stuff? Our player base loves it…
- But we have used it basically everywhere
- Yup, it kinda seems we are running out of options…
- I got an idea!
- We are all ears…
- What if we make stages difficulty totally random?
- Woah, that’s nice!
- Even better… What if they go for a stage and they are thrown in a completely different one?
- Uhm… That might be pushing it a bit… Maybe next season.
- Yes! And we roll a dice over its implementation!
- Sounds fun!
- Such a shame these discussions can’t go public!
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I’m sure there are going to be some players like that. But there’s always going to be a select outlier. I’d like to think most people have lives. I mean there is a possibility of “abuse” if you get a bunch of casual friends/players to farm for you and they get some OP hero, but they don’t really play that much to care.
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I know for a fact that it would happen.
Also… If you are from a country where time is not particularly worthy you might end up making money out of it.
I’ve seen it happen quite a few times.
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Well if anything they would make more money on a FTP then. A FTP wouldn’t drop cash anyway, those 19 extra alts are 19 more MV views per day for ad revenue. Also someone’s eyes staring at your game however many hours.
It also increases active player numbers, etc. for their metrics.
P2P is a progress shortcut. If they’re willing to pay that much to shortcut the system they aren’t going to not pay and then start 20 accounts instead of paying if trading were opened.
More ads, more active players, more competition at the top as a player who wouldn’t normally be up there could then hang.
I am assume they’re single, live alone, and are independently wealthy. Not sure how else that works.
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That stands to reason, I guess, but SGG/Zynga/Take Two are the ones making gazillions of dollars on this game. I tend to think all of their decisions are based on increasing or maintaining the bottom line, which they are clearly good at. They must have some reason for believing that trading would make the game less profitable. If they thought it would make it more profitable, they’d have done it already. 
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There may be a metric saying it makes it more profitable. I think the issue for lots of player requests is the changes don’t increase profit. If they use developer time as their cost to make changes that bring in nothing it cost them money. You could say keep your player happy, but even when they’ve done something wrong there are still millions of active players.
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I too am of the school of thought that having alts is a lot of work. And I already thought managing one main account is chore enough already. Can’t even imagine having one alt, lest 20 of them. Time is valuable, even when I first started playing this game and loving every second of it (except the summoning odds, of course), I still couldn’t see myself managing more than just one account.
To me, my current profile is kind of an imprint or snapshot of my time (or maybe even a representation of myself) through the game, having alts, even if not used as frequently kind of cheapens or dilute the experiences through the game.
As far as trading is concerned, we likely won’t ever see it happening just because of the reasons you brought up because someone is probably going to (or are already doing it) to pump their odds, bolster alliance numbers, or just simply that they can’t get enough of the game and wants to spend every living moment through the game, one WE, one alt at a time. But I do wish that Soul Exchange can also start incorporating 3* and 4* heroes. But I can see why it might not ever fly because of the value and odds, even if they do increase the number of required heroes. 20 or even 50 Dawas will not be of equal value to say a Treevil, 20 or 30 Boldtusks will not be of equal value to say a Franz. While one can argue that’s essentially what Soul Exchange is doing for the 5*, but that’s when the difference in odds come into play.
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Agree. I tried doing E&P and Puzzle Combat for a while, and even that was too much.
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What also makes that harder is that because SG has been pushing 5’s so much, for example we never get a 4* HotM, 5* are the biggest class in the game. It’s harder to warrant a 20 hero trade out of a pool that much smaller. Most new events have more 5* heroes than 4’s too exacerbating that further.
The largest pool is the hardest to get…
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If you really want to know just ask.
Mind you: I know of people who ran more than a thousand alts and were able to multiplay some 50 of them at the same time. Meaning in the same game/party/quest.
It may take a lot of support code, but it can be done.
Contrary to what you might think they don’t all live alone, nor are single. They certainly have some form of income but they are not necessarily wealthy, although many of them are because…
The real common trait is above average intelligence and some form of mental health problem. As for more or less anything else their push is vanity-based but in a slightly different way from the usual “public recognition”. It’s more subtle in a sense that doesn’t necessarily exclude public recognition but is more intimate: a true multiplayer doesn’t want to be detected, nay they thrive in being undetectable, so smarter than others that they are the only ones to know.
Most of them have what they perceive as miserable lives and I would give you an example or two if that wouldn’t pose a serious threat to my privacy.
In case you wonder why I know:
I’ve been “police” in a few games. There are games that hire “cops” and run covert ops to detect unfair behaviors, bug exploitation, TOS violations and whatnot that can either damage the community or the game reputation. What you get to see is astonishing, let’s just say that when someone above wrote “16hrs” of play I’ve thought “It’s not that bad”. I’ve witnessed more than 50hours straight by the same account and, although I can’t totally exclude it was played by more than one person it didn’t look like that. But I also know of people killed over a limited item in a game, so… 
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And yet, some 4* remain very key. Franz comes to mind, I don’t think there’s a 5* yet that does what he does
Key word, yet - will probably happen sooner rather than later. Jackal and Falcon used to be the only EDD for Yellow and Red, then we got C-Marjana and C-Leo…
A lot of 4* are great substitutes for those difficult to get 5* (Sergei for Panther, Almur for Evelyn…) but remain also very hard to get. Probably why SG won’t add them to Hero Academy too… keep those summons flowing in
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I took out Cheshire Cat and brought back Malicna for our last holy titan. I relied on harpoons for defence down, and would hold off firing Malicna’s special. I think I scored better with that setup, and will stick with it when I use harpoons (once the harpoon threshold is reached, I’ll swap in bombs).
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I believe you but that sounds super crazy.
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Bombs drop A value, not D. What do those add in place of the harpoons D drop?
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Cheaper item which helps my team to survive.
I forgot to add I’ll swap Malicna with Cheshire Cat once I’m not using harpoons. 
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Absolutely, in particular new event 4’s. Given the amount of coins one earns playing through an entire season, the season 4’s are somewhat “common”. The issue with an SE for 4’s is there are so few 4’s the are desirable in trades ratios that heavy that making 3 tiers of 10 probably all but 5 or so wouldn’t be worth it. I think the overall pool of 4’s is too small. Maybe that’s just me though.
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Weekly lethargies on Raid Tourneys… Since I don’t raid, revenge raid, war, or w3k, this is about the only time when I get to deal with AI controlled player rosters. And the not really caring feeling is more amplified when it comes to 5* tourneys. Here is a bunch of “don’t cares” that I do.
- I set defense, but I rarely check to see how I do, A or E, doesn’t matter.
- I find an offensive set that I find that makes sense and easy for me to figure out. With so many 5* in this game than I care to count, I don’t really care nor do I bother checking out who I am facing, they are just figure heads that I need to kill before they kill me.
- Tile sucks and the game just wants me to lose the flag? No worries. Flee, you aren’t going to let me watch the non-skippable defeat burn burn burn
- Can I afford to feel ok to lose all my flags in one or two days (sometimes on purpose) because the tourney got boring and I can just collect my participation loot on Friday? You bet, and at least I don’t have to touch that skull icon for the rest of the week.
- Do I ever feel the need or want to buy back in for 75 gems because I feel I need to get into top percentage? Never.
- But how do I ever manage to finish the raid related challenges in POV? I don’t, and really don’t care about POV completion.
- But what about that shiny Quintus avatar I still don’t have for not winning 150 raids in Diamond? Honestly, I am more or less in a spot where I stay perpetually in Platinum without any raid activities, I already have the Domitia avatar for doing that. I am a little less than 100 raids away from the Quintus avatar because I managed to win some raid tourney battles while I somehow got squeezed into bottom Diamond before I got knocked back down into platinum. Trying to raid myself into Diamond and staying there is not worth the trouble for me.
Because loot generally sucks any way.
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