My wife spent shards on random heroes (only costs 175 shards for a random as opposed to 200/400/600 for a specific one, depending on which one). She got Thor, Rogue, Wolverine... and Thor again. So be aware that it is totally possible to get dupes with the random heroes.
Turns out, the effect of getting a dupe hero is that the hero's Ultimate power (the one that unlocks at level 52) has levels to it, and each dupe you get adds a level. So now, if my wife ever gets Thor to level 52, his Ultimate power will be more powerful than normal.
Not sure that's better than having gotten a different random hero for her 175 shards, but there it is.
Yeah, I figured I will probably do random for the first 5 or so and even if i get dupes I get that benefit, after that I will pick up heroes that I am interested in and almost certainly get one of the 600 ES chars with the free one this week. Thoguh I just started, I am thinking about just buying $10 worth of G's since they have a bonus on and I can buy an extra stash. I figure that's certainly a cheap price for a video game (simialr to buying in a Steam Sale)
They never asked me to pick a server, so I'm guessing everyone is on the same one. I'm "spiffworld" in the game if anyone wants to add me as a friend. I have a supergroup (guild) called the Pacific City Brawlers, though at the moment it's just me in there.
It's not really accurate to call this an MMO in the traditional sense. You pick one of the characters to play, you don't create your own, though you do level the characters up. There are no classes or races or that kind of thing. Picture Diablo but with Marvel superheroes instead of barbarians, monks, and witch doctors, and you've got it.
You have more powers at a time than you did with Ultimate Alliance. There, you had 4 abilities per character. Here, you have 24 max (8 per bar, 3 bars, if I recall correctly). But if you go for all 24, your character is going to be pretty weak. Also, there is equipment to collect with different rarities and abilities. There are a lot of ways to build each character depending on that equipment, the team-ups, Omega Points, Synergies, pets, etc. So it's like Ultimate Alliance on steroids.
About the ability bars, being a WoW guy who's used to having a million buttons, I was not digging only having 6 buttons plus right/left mouseclick per bar, as Donner says, so I looked up if there was a way to get more keybindings. Turns out there is, but you have to edit the game's user settings config file. You can google for how to do it ('cause I can't find the link at the moment) and it wasn't hard to do.
You can change keybindings in two ways -- you can just bind a new set of keys to buttons on your other bar (that's what I did, so that QWERTY are hotbuttons for me now just like ASDFGH are normally, giving me 12 in easy reach of my fingers) or you can make it so that if you hit a modifier key, your normal set of keybidings will work for the other bars temporarily instead (so, A is a certain power on bar 1 but if you hold down Alt and hit A, you get the power in that slot on bar 2 instead).
Not sure if you can do both methods at the same time.