Boost rotation and ascension

entrailbucket
entrailbucket Posts: 8,367 Chairperson of the Boards
edited 25 February 2026, 16:59 in MPQ General Discussion

This one kind of hit me out of nowhere with all the talk about Hawkeye lately, but it makes so much sense that I had to suggest it. The boost rotation for ascended characters is messed up, and I think it can be fixed relatively easily.

Every week sees a number of different characters boosted. Tiers with more characters have a longer rotation, because everybody gets a turn. The problem is that these rotations work on the character's base rarity and not their ascended rarity.

So there are 7 1* characters, and 2 of them are boosted every week. This means they work through the rotation very quickly, and so 1* are boosted significantly more often than other characters, especially characters from the 4* tier (which is massive, I can't be bothered to count) or the 5* tier.

The effect of this is that a 5* ascended Hawkeye or Juggernaut is boosted, what, 5x (10x? More?) more often than, say, a 5* America Chavez or Civil War Cap. Why is that? If 5* ascended Hawkeye is a 5*, a point we keep making, why is he getting boosted SO much more often? Why are 4* characters in particular being disadvantaged so badly?

The fix is super simple. Put each 5* character in the 5* boost rotation, 4* in the 4* rotation, etc, and boost variants separately each week. I'd suggest doubling the size of the rotation (we get 4 boosted 5* every week now, make it 8), because right now we have a lot of options for boosted characters, even if they're the same 1* and 2* pretty often.

Comments

  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 7,111 Chairperson of the Boards

    Just to put the info out there:

    8 1s
    21 2s (plus Bagman, so 22, but Limited are never boosted)
    75 3s
    164 4s, now (plus 4 limited to a total of 168)
    117 5s
    (3 6s)

    Boost lists are currently:
    2 1s
    2 2s
    5 3s
    5 4s
    4 5s

    I agree they should double boost list sizes especially for the 4s and 5s. Or at least increase them. 4s take over 32 weeks or 8 months right now between boosts. 5s take over 29 weeks or basically a bit over 7 months.

    If you are trying to convince players to add characters because they'll be useful boosted, you need to make them come up much more frequently than basically once in a calendar year, or even twice for 1/2 of them.

    I don't know if the game has an easy way to tweak a boost list to only boost specific tiers of the characters. Like the idea of making Hawkeye only boosted every 29 weeks as a 5 seems ok but if you're an earlier player you might want to have him boosted every 4 weeks until that point, and I'm not sure the game has that level of nuance built into it since it currently boosts all tiers of him at once.

    I'm sure it would be a project of sorts to only move one of the tier versions to a 7 month boost cycle. There are definite risks as no one is very happy currently with the Descended character thing because they're too low, so doing it right is important.

    Also if you spent on the 1-5s thinking they'd be boosted every 4 weeks and suddenly they're only boosted 1/7 as often you might be mad especially if your normal 5 champ list is relatively small.

    I realize the answer can be "suck it up!" but the game is also down about 1/4 or so from a year ago as far as alliances in PVE and PVP, so they'd probably want to have some kind of QOL bump or tradeoff for players to try to defray making some additional % of folks mad and walk away.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,367 Chairperson of the Boards

    @DAZ0273 said:

    @entrailbucket said:
    This one kind of hit me out of nowhere with all the talk about Hawkeye lately, but it makes so much sense that I had to suggest it. The boost rotation for ascended characters is messed up, and I think it can be fixed relatively easily.

    Every week sees a number of different characters boosted. Tiers with more characters have a longer rotation, because everybody gets a turn. The problem is that these rotations work on the character's base rarity and not their ascended rarity.

    So there are 7 1* characters, and 2 of them are boosted every week. This means they work through the rotation very quickly, and so 1* are boosted significantly more often than other characters, especially characters from the 4* tier (which is massive, I can't be bothered to count) or the 5* tier.

    The effect of this is that a 5* ascended Hawkeye or Juggernaut is boosted, what, 5x (10x? More?) more often than, say, a 5* America Chavez or Civil War Cap. Why is that? If 5* ascended Hawkeye is a 5*, a point we keep making, why is he getting boosted SO much more often? Why are 4* characters in particular being disadvantaged so badly?

    The fix is super simple. Put each 5* character in the 5* boost rotation, 4* in the 4* rotation, etc, and boost variants separately each week. I'd suggest doubling the size of the rotation (we get 4 boosted 5* every week now, make it 8), because right now we have a lot of options for boosted characters, even if they're the same 1* and 2* pretty often.

    I did once bring up the issue of regularity of boosted 1* and how unfair it was and at that time you told me that was a perk of having them, especially for those who had bought them to punch up. Thank God you have come to your senses because now PvP is really nothing but boosted 1* and it makes the rest of the boost list a joke.

    I was wrong, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

    I think it was just less obvious to me at that time, but you saw it.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,367 Chairperson of the Boards

    @bluewolf said:
    Just to put the info out there:

    8 1s
    21 2s (plus Bagman, so 22, but Limited are never boosted)
    75 3s
    164 4s, now (plus 4 limited to a total of 168)
    117 5s
    (3 6s)

    Boost lists are currently:
    2 1s
    2 2s
    5 3s
    5 4s
    4 5s

    I agree they should double boost list sizes especially for the 4s and 5s. Or at least increase them. 4s take over 32 weeks or 8 months right now between boosts. 5s take over 29 weeks or basically a bit over 7 months.

    If you are trying to convince players to add characters because they'll be useful boosted, you need to make them come up much more frequently than basically once in a calendar year, or even twice for 1/2 of them.

    I don't know if the game has an easy way to tweak a boost list to only boost specific tiers of the characters. Like the idea of making Hawkeye only boosted every 29 weeks as a 5 seems ok but if you're an earlier player you might want to have him boosted every 4 weeks until that point, and I'm not sure the game has that level of nuance built into it since it currently boosts all tiers of him at once.

    I'm sure it would be a project of sorts to only move one of the tier versions to a 7 month boost cycle. There are definite risks as no one is very happy currently with the Descended character thing because they're too low, so doing it right is important.

    Also if you spent on the 1-5s thinking they'd be boosted every 4 weeks and suddenly they're only boosted 1/7 as often you might be mad especially if your normal 5 champ list is relatively small.

    I realize the answer can be "suck it up!" but the game is also down about 1/4 or so from a year ago as far as alliances in PVE and PVP, so they'd probably want to have some kind of QOL bump or tradeoff for players to try to defray making some additional % of folks mad and walk away.

    Thanks for doing the math, I had a feeling you would, and I didn't have the numbers.

  • BriMan2222
    BriMan2222 Posts: 2,026 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 25 February 2026, 18:24

    They can't even figure out how to get cosmic ghost rider out of the pve rewards. Maybe, they can work on updating the boost list once they figured everything out and have ironed out all the bugs in like 5 years.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,367 Chairperson of the Boards

    @BriMan2222 said:
    They can't even figure out how to get cosmic ghost rider out of the pve rewards. Maybe, they can work on updating the boost list once they figured everything out and have ironed out all the bugs in like 5 years.

    We don't know. They've actually done a bunch of stuff so far, but maybe it was all easy stuff and those other things are hard.

    Also, given what we know about the game's backend, I'd say it's 50/50 that they have to manually boost each variant of each character anyway -- the old devs had tons and tons of manual processes that they never bothered to automate.

  • kuntilanak
    kuntilanak Posts: 350 Mover and Shaker

    To me, there's nothing really wrong with the weekly boost list. The problem is the ascension feature that makes the VERY EASY TO GET 1* to 5* in record time AND can use support that make it an effing joke.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,367 Chairperson of the Boards

    @kuntilanak said:
    To me, there's nothing really wrong with the weekly boost list. The problem is the ascension feature that makes the VERY EASY TO GET 1* to 5* in record time AND can use support that make it an effing joke.

    Most of the 1* are decent at 550, and they can largely keep up with other 550s. I don't see any issue with players having 550s, max 5* are pretty devalued by this point.

    The problem is that the 1* are almost always 672!

  • Grantosium
    Grantosium Posts: 183 Tile Toppler

    For what it's worth, one of Hawkeye's best partners is Ghost Rider 2099 and you need GR99 to be doing the match damage so IMO Hawkeye is worse when boosted.

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