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Hey folks! Here is the shiny new Changelog thread. We're including the archived patch notes from the old forums, so that they are preserved for anyone that would like to reference back to them. We will continue to update this thread with new notes as the patches are released.
Chat is now accessible from the quest board, upgrade screen, and many other menus.
Tapping on objects and menus may reveal helpful hints about that object.
Team PI is now colored red if lower than recommended for the quest.
Many text fixes and consistency improvements.
• A new Basic Catalyst found in Special Events is used in every recipe!
Several heroes have received improvements to their base stats.
The abilities of all Champions have increased in effectiveness.
A new Critical Boost buff has been introduced.
Iron Fist and Spiderman now have the ability to Armor Break with their Critical Hits.
Deadpool’s ability to Regenerate is more powerful, but only triggers once per fight.
Scarlet Witch now has a chance to trigger Nullify off of any Critical Hit.
Juggernaut and Rhino now have a layer of Armor.
Punisher and Winter Solider now may also trigger Fury in addition to Bleed.
Colossus now further increases his base Armor with the Armor Up ability.
Thor and Ronan no longer Armor Break; instead, base stats and Stun durations have improved.
We reduced the effectiveness of the Revive items in order to give away more as rewards.
A bonus of 50% for using ISO-8 matching your Champion’s Class can now be previewed on the Upgrade screen.
It’s now possible sell Champions in exchange for ISO-8 and Gold. The amount received increases proportionately to the Rank and Level of the sold Champion.
-You can now skip dialogue on the quest map by pressing ‘SKIP’.
-Added a ‘Quit’ button directly on the quest interface.
-The Back button on the Top Bar now returns the player to the Home screen.
-Various game balance and cosmetic improvements to the available quests.
• PVP energy has been replaced with Hero Stamina. Each Hero has their own Stamina values, meaning the more Heroes you have the more you can play in PVP.
• Each Hero has 1 Stamina and takes 2 hours to recharge.
We have removed the Next Quest button for a much more favorable and flavorful approach to teaching and informing people about Marvel : Contest of Champions. In the Main Menu(Bottom Right Corner) you will now see an image of the Collector showing you what the best or recommended actions that you should preform. This can be anything from opening Crystals, Continuing a Quest, Ranking Up Champions if the difficulty is too hard, Tips where to obtain items, and Playing Versus/Arenas.
• Adjusted the PI calculation for Power Burn and Power Drain abilities to improve accuracy.
• Significantly increased the Power Burn multiplier as well as the amount of Power burned. Prior to this change, Vision's Special Attack damage output was far below the curve. Vision's Special Damage is distinct from other heroes in that the dependency on opponents' Power levels cause the damage dealt to be highly variable, and sometimes quite low; however, when striking an opponent with high Power levels, Vision has the potential to deal very high amounts of direct, Armor-ignoring damage.
• Slightly adjusted the Armor Break trigger to be less punishing to opponents with the Armor Up ability without sacrificing PI or damage output.
• Slightly increased his base Health and, in turn, the amount of Health recovered by Regeneration. This improvement is reflected by an increase to PI of about 1%.
• Slightly reduced the damage from Bleeding, but slightly increased the amount of Power drained by E.M.P. Arrow to compensate. This added utility strengthens the choice between whether to offensively Bleed the enemy or defensively drain their Power. These changes may modify PI by +/-1%.
• Slightly reduced the frequency of Nullify for basic attacks, but slightly increased the chance a Special Attack is critical. Chaotic Bombardment no longer has a chance to critical, and instead has a 100% chance to Nullify the target. This is less punishing to opponents with beneficial effects, while providing a more reliable source of Nullify. Overall, her PI has decreased by about 2%.
• Decreased base Health and Attack by 2% each to bring his PI in line with other Champions without compromising Special Attack effectiveness.
• Slightly increased base Health by 2% to bring his PI in line with other Champions. This change may result in a PI increase of up to 1%.
• Fixed a bug with her Bleed ability scaling incorrectly. This has no effect on PI.
• User's on iPhone 4 devices will no longer encounter a progression blocker after fighting Iron Man in the tutorial.
• Fixed an issue where player's Hero would disappear after using a special move.
• Fixed an issue where very rarely a character would lose all functionality when dashing.
• Added additional Network support to better diagnose disconnects. The game should resolve and recover much more gracefully than in previous updates.
• Adjusted some of the touch sensitivity while fighting. Heroes moves should feel more responsive. This is something that is going to be an ongoing process. Please let us know how you think it feels.
• Fixed various issues with Chat.
• We have updated Open GL versions/drivers for iOS devices that support Open GL 3.0.
• User's will no longer receive delayed Game Center notifications. This caused some weirdness to occur while opening Crystals in the Crystal Vault.
• The Crystal Vault has received another polish pass and should now feel much more responsive, thank you for all your feedback on this feature!
• Many more minor bug fixes were included in this update.
• Special Attack 1 base damage increased by +25% Attack Rating.
• Heavy Attack base Power gained reduced to 63 points.
We recently improved the functionality of Heavy Attacks, so they’re easier to use. Their base Power has been reduced to normal levels – previously, they generated Power at a higher rate to compensate for their difficult execution. Special Attacks have been adjusted to give the unlucky recipients more of a fighting chance. These changes bring these attacks in line with existing damage-to-power ratios.
*NOTE: Special Attacks only generate Power for the target struck, not for the user; this prevents infinite loops and helps serve as a comeback mechanic.
Versus Crystal prizes have been adjusted due to the Champion Stamina changes.
Arena Crystal prizes have been increased to help balance the adjustments to the Versus Crystal.
Payouts have significantly increased when receiving a duplicate Champion with a Star rating of two or more. The boosted amount increases based on Star rating. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by delivering each reward individually, and are working to get a fix to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, using the “Skip” button avoids the inconvenience.
• We fixed a bug where finding a new match could cost a player Units.
• Spending Units to find a new opponent will now return opponents with lower ratings.
• Chapters 3 and 4 of Act 2 Story Quests are now available. A mysterious opponent awaits you at the end of Act 2!
*NOTE: This caused some players' progress to reset for a brief time, but that issue should now be corrected.
• Event Quest difficulty has been adjusted to match Catalyst availability.
• Rank-Up Recipes have been adjusted to be more accessible across all ranks.
• Bosses for the Monday through Saturday Daily Events now have a small chance to drop a Class Catalyst. This is in addition to the drop chance from Chests.
• Ambush Rates have been adjusted on all Event Quests.
• Increased Catalyst drops for the Collector Free-For-All Event Quest.
• Alpha Catalysts now have a chance to drop from Chests in Medium and Hard difficulties of The Collector Free-For-All event.
• The unobtainable chest in Act 1, Chapter 1, Quest 6 has been removed from the Battlerealm.
Increased the amount of Gold awarded by the Arena Crystal.
Slightly reduced the cost to level-up a 3-Star Champion at Rank 1 to cleanly align with ISO-8 chunk values.
Fixed a bug with Billion-Dollar Punch not triggering Armor Break.
• Duplicate 2-Star, 3-Star, and 4-Star Champions now awaken a brand new ability unique to that Champion in addition to the rare ISO8 they currently give. Duplicates thereafter continue to level-up this ability to make it stronger. When a Champion is awakened, their Stars turn bright and glow, making them easy to identify (and look pretty cool too). These new abilities can be quite powerful, so please fight responsibly!
• Various other improvements, including rank and level information for opponents, find match options in team select, and animation tuning.
• There is now a chance to encounter the elusive Treasure Adaptoid, who divulges his hoard of ISO8 and Gold to those able to defeat him in battle.
• Class Relationships can be viewed by tapping “Enemy Classes” before entering a quest, and preview the number of enemies in that quest for each class type.
• You can also now see rewards for completion and exploration on the Edit Team screen.
• Opponents are more aware of the distance between you and them, improving their interaction with knockback effects, such as that from Heavy Attacks.
Mutant Champions are now effective against Skill Champions.
• The high Special Attack damage and regenerative abilities of Mutant Champions are effective against Skill Champions, which typically rely on Bleed damage from their weaponry. We think of this relationship as if the X-Gene grants Mutant Champions superpowers that evolved to be stronger than Champions that are merely “Skilled”.
Skill Champions are now effective against Science Champions.
• While scientists fiddle in their cute little laboratories to create flasks full of serums to turn even frail young men into super-soldiers, Skill Champions were just born that way baby. Often donning sharp weaponry to make their opponents Bleed, Skill Champions enjoy watching the high base attributes of Science Champions just melt away.
Cosmic Champions are now effective against Tech Champions.
• Tech Champions construct durable robots and thick suits of Armor to outlast their opponents in battles of tank-the-nuke...which gives Cosmic Champions extra time to build up stacks of beneficial effects to overrun Tech Champions using their peculiar alien enhancements.
• Tech Champions are still effective against Mutant Champions.
Tech Champions typically excel at Armor, Resistance, and Power manipulation, which is effective against the high Special Attack damage of Mutant Champions. Think of the robotic Sentinels adapting for tactical advantages in the war against Mutantkind!
Science Champions are still effective against Mystic Champions.
• Science Champions – a Class of behemoths like Hulk and super-soldiers like Captain America – typically have above average base attributes like Health, Attack, and Armor. These raw stats cannot be affected by pesky Mystics and their removal abilities: Nullify and Purge.
Mystic Champions are still effective against Cosmic Champions.
• Cosmic Champions explore strange new beneficial effects to seek out new power and new abilities, to boldly take their attributes where no class has gone before. Well, not if Mystic Champions – who are fully capable of stripping Cosmic Champions of their beneficial effects – have anything to say about it! Maybe it’s the Mystic Agenda to protect the secrets of the universe?
These changes ensure that having a Class Bonus always gives you the advantage it promises, as it now also reflects ability trends for a particular Class. Please keep in mind that these are generalizations, and some Champions abilities may not always strictly align with these relationships. Learn more about Champions’ abilities by viewing their profiles and tapping on features for detailed information.
• When you attack someone, you charge up their Power in addition to yours. This meant they would reach a full three bars while you only reached one and a half. We've reduced the amount defenders receive such that you'll be at two bars when they're at three. This change maintains the underdog functionality to give defenders a chance to comeback while being less punishing to players earning high Combos.
New damage types for attacks now play a larger role in the abilities of Champions. For example, some heroes power-up by successfully blocking magical damage, while others’ abilities may harm anyone that makes physical contact with them.
New Resistances and Immunities have found their way to the Battlerealm. Some heroes are completely immune to specific status effects based on either lore from the comics or logic. For example, the android Vision has no blood, and is therefore fully immune to Bleed conditions. We’ve also strengthened the effectiveness of certain status effects, so be careful who you choose to bring into battle! Could you guess who might be immune to the new “Poison” condition?
• Poison: Inflicts damage over time and reduces healing and regeneration effectiveness.
• Unstoppable: A buff to shrug off the impact from attacks, but still take the damage.
• Weakness: A debuff that reduces Attack attributes.
• Heal Block: Fully prevents the target from gaining health in any way.
• Power Lock: Seals the target, preventing them from gaining any Power.
• When fighting, you may notice that many status effects are now able to stack. This also changes how certain beneficial “buffs” and detrimental “debuffs” interact with one another. For example, it's now possible to have both Armor Up and Armor Break effects on you simultaneously. Let the tug-o-war begin, and may the strongest effects win!
• Black Bolt's Corkscrew: +25% damage, but at the cost of minor recoil damage.
• Punisher's “Wrath” has been replaced by "Payback". Payback deals additional damage based on the total damage dealt to Frank.
• Colossus' “Unbreakable” now deal bonus damage based on his armor level at the time of activation.
• All of Black Panther’s special attacks now deal bonus damage based on the number of Bleeds on the target.
• Spider-Man’s Web-Slinger now has a chance to inflict Weakness.
• Vision’s Physical Disruption: Added a minor Power Burn effect due to “his” use of his Infrared Beam. “He” also now purges all status effects while phasing through the ground.
• Scarlet Witch: Increased the Critical Hit Chance for Hex Bolt and Hex Sphere.
• Many knockback effects have been adjusted to improve consistency.
We’ve tested the Signature Abilities quite extensively before releasing them, but there have been a few abilities that we have been keeping an eye on. We’ve compared our notes with the feedback you’ve been sending us and are making some balance changes to them. Thanks for your feedback!
Slightly reduced the frequency and duration of Juggernaut’s “Unstoppable” ability.
• He was indeed a bit too...unstoppable. We’ve toned down the frequency this ability triggers, as well as reduced the duration it’s active for when it does trigger. We feel Juggernaut is still a powerful Champion despite these revisions. Take care!
Slightly reduced the starting values of Wolverine's “Cellular Regeneration”.
• We found that Cellular Regeneration was too strong at lower levels where fewer counters to Regeneration exist.
Re-scaled Gamora's “Assassination” to start higher but scale slower.
• At lower levels, Special Attacks were used too infrequently, giving this powerful ability little visibility. We’ve adjusted the scaling to better match Special Attack usage at all levels.
Increased the frequency that Black Bolt’s “Provocation” triggers.
• Due to the varying Critical Hit rates across all Champions, in some cases Provocation would trigger rarely or not at all within a fight. We’ve increased the frequency to ensure you’ll see it every match – but especially so against opponents with high Critical Hit rates.
We’ll continue to follow the effect of these new abilities on gameplay. Please keep your feedback coming!
Hey everyone! We have been hard at work on improving the game and have prepared a big update inspired in part by your great community feedback. Please keep letting us know what you think!
• Fixed many Dash, Medium, Heavy and Special Attacks missing or failing to execute.
• Added Alliances and a new Alliance Crystal.
• Rocket Raccoon and Unstoppable Colossus join The Contest.
• Temporary Boosts to Attack, Health, and XP are now available from the Alliance Crystal.
• Rewards for completing and exploring Chapters and Acts. Earn a guaranteed 3-Star hero crystal for each fully explored Act! This is retroactive, just complete any quest to claim them.
• A new Fight Menu combines The Arenas, Story Quests and Event Quest menus.
• Updated Summoner Profiles with new information. Inspect other players’ Profiles and brag about your achievements!
• A list of blocked users has been added to Chat windows. The option to unblock these users is found in this new menu. The power is in your hands now!
• We fixed Dash and Medium Attack issues for many heroes that sometimes missed or did not activate.
• We fixed issues to Drax and Colossus Light and Medium Attacks where they would not connect.
• Fixed an issue where the camera would stop moving after a level 3 special sequence.
• Fixed an issue where the player’s heavy attack would get stuck in charge even after the player has released input.
• Fixed a rare bug where Champions were still able to deal damage after they died, resulting in tied fights.
Form Alliances with your Friends!
What is better than playing? Playing with your friends! Create a new Alliance or join an existing one through the new Alliance Menu.
• Invite other players to your Alliance.
• Search for an Alliance by name or join a Recommended Alliance.
• Receive rewards for entering your first Alliance.
• Alliance News Feed. The news feed celebrates your Alliance member’s achievements.
• Alliance Chat. Chat with other members of your Alliance in a private channel all to yourself.
• Help Allies. Players can ask for help when out of Energy or Stamina. Alliance members help each other as much as they can to earn Loyalty Points. Loyalty points have a daily limit to how many can be earned.
• Alliance Crystal. Access a new Alliance Crystal while part of any Alliance. Use new Loyalty Points for purchasing Alliance Crystals.
He may start out slow, but watch out for his immense power at high ranks!
• Adjusted the range of many Heavy Attacks, including Hulk and Drax, to ensure they correctly connect with enemies.
• Many Special Attacks, including those for Wolverine, Iron Fist, Winter Soldier, Punisher, Black Panther, and many others have had their range adjusted to ensure they correctly connect with enemies even if activated immediately after a combo that knocked the enemy back.
• Payback and Unbreakable now display their maximum potential damage bonus.
• Added detailed descriptions for Bleed Immunity and Poison Immunity.
• Gamora: We’ve adjusted the scaling of her base Special Attack damage to ensure they scale up more similarly to other heroes. This also makes Gamora more reliant on her high Bleed damage, and improves the chances of opponents able to deal with her high Bleed.
Vital Strike and Jade Assassin damage decreased by 10%.
Godslayer damage increased by 10%.
• Magik: Rewind is a game-changer for Magik that allows her to go up against foes like Gamora and Rewind off big Critical Hits and Bleed damage; however, the frequency of Rewind triggering was too low to be there when she needed it.
Increased the likelihood Rewind triggers by +20% at all levels.
Rewind now heals over one second instead of instantly.
Fixed a bug allowing Magik to break out of an enemy combo using Rewind. It now only removes Status Effects.
• Hulk: Given the riskiness of losing Health in certain game modes, Hulk’s anger-management provided too little help too late in the game. We’ve increased the Attack boost to ensure he’s appropriately scary in all game modes – as long as he’s angry!
Increased Hulk Rage by +20% Attack at all ability levels.
Arc Overload no longer causes Armor Break when it expires.
• Vision: Added Poison Immunity to our robot friend.
Arena tuning is an ongoing process. The team is continually making adjustments to Arenas to improve the experience.
Ultron has infected The Contest!
Many new Champions join the battle against Ultron.
Quest through the new Ultron’s Assault Event.
Wield new power with Summoner Masteries.
Grow your Friend’s List with the new Social Hub.
Team up with your Alliance in new Events, Arenas, and more!
Filter and sort your Stash.
Fights have been optimized for performance improvements on all devices.
Users can now filter through the items in their Stash.
Fixed several issues where Hero Rating would fluctuate.
Fixed a bug with Rhino and Juggernaut having 11-20% more Armor than intended.
Fixed a bug with Rocket Raccoon’s Dash attack being slower than intended.
Added a confirmation popup when spending Units on stamina recharges and unlocking arenas.
Regeneration no longer displays green Health values if you’re at full Health.
Several new improvements to how status effects are displayed.
AI opponents are no longer able to perform one unavoidable attack in response to a Special Attack 3.
A new and improved look for all Health Potions in the Battlerealm.
All Revive Potions now revive your Champions with +10% more Health.
We’re adding so many new Champions, they could form their own Alliance!
Some of your favourite heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe join The Contest!
Summoner Mastery is on the horizon!
Masteries provide beneficial effects for your Champions.
Access Masteries through your Summoner Profile.
Earn Mastery Points when you level up.
Choose your Masteries wisely and strategically customize your benefits.
Recover your points to try a new specialization as often as you’d like.
Keep an eye on in-game messaging for more information.
The daily loyalty limit has been set to refresh at 08:00UTC for all players.
A timer has been added to show when the daily loyalty limit resets.
Loyalty balance is now displayed in the Alliance menus.
Ask for Versus help with a single tap on the ‘Help’ icon in Team Select.
New Alliance Events are coming very soon!
Work together with your Alliance to complete objectives and receive rewards!
Muster your might, Alliance Arenas will soon open their gates!
Competing in Alliance Arenas shares your points across your whole Alliance; work together to reach milestones and top ranks!
Work together to amass a huge score, and defeat your competition in classic Arena combat! No slackers here either - if you don’t contribute to win the competition, you’re not eligible for the goods!
All social features (Chat, Mail, and Friends) can now be accessed through the new Social Hub.
Search for and add friends, and send private messages to Summoners on your Friends List.
Redesigned chat and mail screens.
Take on other Summoners’ top Champions for bragging rights and prizes in 1-on-1 Duels!
A new series of special Ultron quests are available, starting with the first Chapter. Fight back against Ultron’s infection alongside the Summoner, and team up with some of Marvel’s finest! New quests unlock each week!
The Spider-Man Champion gate has been removed from Act 1, Chapter 1, Quest 5.
• Fixed an issue where chat snapped to the most recent message.
• Fixed several issues where Hero Rating would fluctuate.
• Various improvements to the Summoner Mastery screens and descriptions.
• Increased the ISO8 awarded by duplicate 2-Star Champions.
Quest through the new single-player campaign, Ant-Man’s Adventure!
In addition to Ant-Man and Yellowjacket feuding throughout the Battlerealm, additional new Champions will be joining The Contest!
Access more Masteries in the new Utility Mastery tree!
Please note, these changes may result in a loss of Hero Rating as incorrect effects are restored back to normal levels.
Improved and polished combat mechanics to reduce the amount of stutters and lost input.
Fixed and optimized rendering related issues with Metal enabled devices.
Team up with Ant-Man, and put a stop to Yellowjacket’s mysterious mission!
All Alliance Quests only last for a specified amount of time, defeat the boss with your Alliance before it expires!
New Prestige System - A dynamic difficulty and score setting that adjusts as you and your Alliance succeed in harder quests. The better you do and the tougher your Alliance is, the higher the prestige. The higher the prestige, the better the rewards!
Choose your teams carefully as Champions within Alliance Quests cannot be used in other Story or Event Quests.
Act 4 has been released! Play Chapter 1 now!
Summoner level maximum has been increased to level 60!
5-Star Champions are coΩming to The Contest! These are the most powerful Champions yet!
Additional improvements have been made to the UI, Versus Arenas, Synergy Bonuses, the Stash & Items Store.
Act 4 - Chapter 1 released!
New challenges - more path variation and features to challenge the strongest Summoners!
Greater challenge means greater rewards! Earn 4 Star Crystals and Mastery Points!
The Summoner Level cap has been increased by ten levels to level 60!
Champion Items will be coming soon! These allow you to apply items and buffs to a specific Champion, keep an eye out for updates on these new Champion Items!
Synergy Bonuses have updated iconography and the calculation has been updated to a distinct, additive bonus - What you see is what you get!
Alliance class distribution is now displayed on team select - Choose the right class!
Your Catalysts now have their own inventory, and will no longer appear in the Upgrade Item inventory.
The Stash is now separated into three tabs: Catalysts, Rewards and ISO, allowing you to sort and view your Stash much faster!
The UI flow for both Quests and Arenas have been greatly improved. You can now skip through fight victory and reward animations!
Here is the rundown of patch 5.1.0, filled with various bug fixes and optimizations. The important ones to note are below.
New Champions, new theme, and a new arena!
To celebrate our one year anniversary AND the holidays, we’ll be running a special event quest! Battle through the history of The Contest, and test your mettle against familiar faces both old and new!
A special reward will be available to those who master every quest!
Our Anniversary Celebration will be happening very soon; stay tuned for more info!
More Act 4 quests are coming very soon!
Opponents in Story Quests now have the ability to use their Special 3 attack! Note that we are not changing previous quest opponents to have this special attack (Act 1-3, Proving Grounds, Realm of Legends will not change); this will be in effect starting with the soon-to-be-released Act 4 content.
As with our previous major build releases (3.0’s Ultron, 4.0’s Ant Man, and 5.0’s Battlerealm), the Contest has been reskinned with a new theme!
The Road to Knowhere map is here! Fight in a new level inspired by Guardians of the Galaxy!
A new button in your Alliance Chat to take you directly to Alliance Quests!
You can now collect Catalyst Fragments in Event Quests, Proving Grounds, and Alliance Quests; these can be pieced together into a Catalyst!
Selling Items is now a thing! Sell any items in your inventory for gold!
Level 3 and Level 4 Health Potions have arrived! These are powerful instruments to help you tackle all the new Act 4 content!
Over 400 bugs were fixed in this patch!
This patch is a fix for the missing Champions during the Special 3 animation on Android devices.
This issue occurred during our upload process to the Google Play Store. This was an odd edge case scenario that we could not have caught during our internal tests, as it began appearing once we uploaded to the Google Play Store. This hotfix will be out by tomorrow, and will put Android at version 6.0.1. As this issue does not occur on iOS devices, iOS will remain at version 6.0.
3:30pm PST: We have started slow-rolling this patch out to Android devices, beginning with about 20% of users. We expect this to be available for 100% of users within the next 24 hours.
We have a few new Champions that you will see within the next couple of months (including one of my personal favorites)!
Over 200 total bugs squashed in this patch!
An artifact left over from the early days of the contest was Black Panther’s ability to gain a Critical Hit Rate boost during Special 3 attacks. As many might know, Critical Hits aren’t possible during a Special 3 anymore, making this effect...unhelpful. We’ve switched it out with a new ability to stack up even more Bleed effects on the opponent based on how many Bleeds are already active.
Example: The opponent has 4 stacks (instances) of Bleed on them when you launch a Special 3. With this new ability, you have a chance to add an additional 0 - 4 more stacks (instances) of Bleed.
Previously, a bug existed that allowed champions with Evade to continue to dodge Black Widow’s attacks, even if her Signature Ability was maxed out. This issue has been fixed.
Captain America WW2 has started to become outpaced by his non-WW2 counterpart and while we want the two to feel different and each have their own specific uses, we also want to ensure they are kept within range of each other in terms of balance. To accomplish this, we’ve given WW2 Cap the ability to Stun with his Special 1 and Special 3 attacks, but kept his Bleed on Special 2 the same, giving him options during combat against non-bleeding champions.
A bug that prevented Daredevil from triggering Armor Breaks from Heavy Attacks has been fixed and is now working as intended.
Against non-bleeding champions: Critical Hits have a chance to Armor Break on Special Attacks.
Increase range of Signature to 25% from 20%.
Many players found Elektra’s signature ability lacked enough opportunities to use it. To remedy this, we’ve increased the range from 20% to 25%. Additionally, to help make Elektra unique from other skill champions, we’ve given her the ability to deal with naturally Bleed Immune champions. Note: This Armor Break only applies to champions naturally immune to bleed, such as Colossus and Ultron, and not to champions granted Bleed Immunity from Local or Link Nodes.
Guillotine’s Bleed effect used to have a chance to activate from any given attack, meaning that it had to be kept quite weak to compensate for the frequency of triggers. We’ve made the switch to have her Bleed behave closer to existing champions, and in doing so have boosted the strength of the Bleed and have allowed it to stack.
Norman Osborn overloads the Arc Reactor in his chest if Health drops below 10%, granting a large burst of power, with (18% - 48% ) Armor, Regeneration, and Power Gain. After that, his suit burns out and cannot trigger Armor Up, Armor Break or Stun and loses all base Armor.
Many players didn’t like Iron Patriot’s old signature ability, feeling that due to the lack of Regeneration, it was considerably weaker than Iron Man’s. While we agreed, we didn’t want to just copy and paste his signature ability, but rather give him his own unique twist on the ability. This “all or nothing version” feels more like Norman Osborn, pushing his suit to the limit to get a larger boost but at the cost of damaging the suit. The addition of Power Gain allows Iron Patriot a large attack before the suit burns out, if timed correctly.
Heavy Attacks: 90% chance to Stagger the enemy for 8 seconds. A Staggered enemy cannot gain their next beneficial effect.
All versions of Juggernaut, even those who haven’t been awakened, now gain the 2 second Unstoppable ability at the start of the fight when they hit Rank 2.
We wanted to add some new functionality to Juggernaut, while also keeping him true to his Mystic class assignment. To accomplish this, we added this “buff smasher” effect which keeps an opponent from gaining their next beneficial effect. Additionally, we wanted to make non-awakened versions of Juggernaut more fun to play, without adding more power to the awakened variations. As a result, we gave all versions of Juggernaut the ability to become Unstoppable at the start of the fight.
While many players liked the new functionality of Star-Lord’s Element Gun effect, they found it to be a little too random, specifically when it would Heal Block a champion incapable of Healing. We’ve now added in some contingencies that will make Heal Block appear less unless the opposing champion shows that he / she can Heal during the fight. This includes both activated healing effects, such as Wolverine or Ultron’s Heal, or passive healing effects gained from Masteries, such as Salve or Willpower.
It’s been a bit weird that Bucky wasn’t friends with his most famous friend. Well, he is now. This affects 3 Star and above versions.
We’ve increased the overall speed of this attack, allowing quick players to use this ability after a four or five hit combo.
It seems the Marvel’s have gotten tired of their beams being dodged so easily and have decided to angle it a little better, increasing the overall range of the attack and making it harder to dodge away from. We’ve also increased the speed of both special attacks to allow them to better flow into combat.
In order to allow this attack to better flow in combat, we’ve shaved off a few frames from the beginning, allowing players to chain this attack into 4 and 5 hit combos.
Alliance Wars have arrived! It’s Alliance versus Alliance in a war for Battlerealm supremacy!
Enter the NEW Loyalty Store to buy Alliance Potions, Mastery items, or other EXCLUSIVE items.
Gain Power back from Special Attacks, enhance or defend against Special Attacks, OR gain a temporary Arena Point Boosts with hoards of new Summoner Boost items!
Additional changes and improvements are listed below.
This patch will be released February 24th.
A new area of the Battlerealm has been opened! Compete with your Alliance-mates for pride, glory, and PRIZES!
Matchmake to find a rival Alliance, then combine strategy and teamwork to dominate them.
Setup the ultimate defensive team to fortify your Battlerealm, then take your offensive team on the assault!
Watch your War Rating skyrocket as your Alliance works together to defeat rivals!
Load up on Crystal Shards, Loyalty, and brand new exclusive rewards!
Note that this will be slow-rolled to Alliances in phases, similar to the introduction of Alliance Quests (to ensure server stability and gather your feedback on the new mode). Expect tuning changes throughout these phases, as well as into Season 1.
Use Loyalty instead of Units to obtain items for Alliance Quests & Wars!
Items will rotate daily, similar to how the Mastery cores in the current Store change.
Store contents will be randomly chosen from a pool of categories/items; a select few items will be persistent and always be available for purchase.
A 5-Star version of Unstoppable Colossus will be available in the Loyalty Store (keep in mind, this is an expensive Champion due to his exclusivity; this will require winning quite a few Alliance Wars and saving up!).
This is accessible from the “Store” section of the pop-down menu, and will be available at a later date after the initial 7.0 launch; there will be advance notice through forums and in-game before we release the Loyalty Store.
New Summoner Boosts have arrived in the Loyalty Store; NEW Boost types, purchasable with Loyalty Points.
Class specific Boosts, such as Mystic Champions restoring power after using Special Attacks 2 and 3, or Skill Champions boosting their Special Attack Damage.
Defensive Boosts, where your Champions take reduced incoming Special 3 Attack Damage.
Gain a temporary Arena Point boost with new Arena Boost items!
Fixed an issue where, after Parrying certain Champion’s Special Attacks, your Champion would be stuck in a blocking state until the Special Attack finished.
Fixed an issue where 90s Cyclops’ Armor Breaks would not remove Armor Ups.
Fixed an issue with Scarlet Witch’s Signature Ability proc rate (previously, the % chance displayed did not match in-game functionality; this is now fixed).
(Netflix) Daredevil’s Heavy Attack now has a chance to apply 2 stacks of Armor Break, instead of the previous 1 stack.
When spending Battlechips to enter an Arena (such as the Tier 4 Basic or Alpha Catalyst Arena), there is now a confirmation popup.
The Alliance Crystal now has a purchase limit that resets daily.
Permanently increased the Alliance Crystal’s points in Summoner Advancement (from 30 to 300).
Updates to Champion Special Attack animations, flow, and timing.
7.0.1 will be released within the next few days.
A celebration message is sent to the War Room when an Alliance War battlegroup is cleared.
Players can now tap directly on another node icon while the tile info popup is open (previously, the popup had to be closed before selecting another node).
Alliance’s reward tier position is now highlighted in the Alliance War tier breakdown.
In Attack Phase, players can view the score breakdown for both the battlegroup and overall.
The “Place Your Defenders” text now disappears much faster after tapping on the screen.
Mail messages now display the date they were sent.
It should be much harder to accidentally tap the Units Store when closing a screen.
Players can tap to skip the point animation in Versus mode again.
Resolved an issue with Class Masteries (specifically Mystic Dispersion) not functioning.
The Juggernaut issue with his linked nodes not appearing in Act 4, Chapter 3, Quest 3 (4.3.3) has been fixed.
Fixed a crash that occurs when a player who is not in an Alliance enters Alliance Wars through an outside link.
Fixed a text issue where Alliance War specific descriptions would appear on the Alliance Quest “Select a Battlegroup” screen.
Resolved ~20 various rare crashes and additional minor issues in different game modes.
Fixed and optimized performance on the new Samsung S7.
Fixed an Unknown Error that occurred rarely after a device was woken after going to sleep.
Improved Performance(Frames Per Second) tracking per fight to help diagnose hitches/pauses/lag spikes during gameplay.
Improved gesture tracking(Swipe, Tap, Hold) during low performance moments in combat.
Fixed a rare crash that would sometimes occur when receiving a phone call while in combat.
Tuned and updated many Champion Special Attack animations to improve timing and combat flow. Please see the expanded forum post HERE for a full list.
Fixed She-Hulk’s Special Attacks being marked as a projectile (allowing Daredevil to evade them).
Fixed an issue where the player would be stuck in place after parrying Captain America’s Special 1.
Fixed an issue where chaining 2 medium attacks into Old Man Logan’s Special 2 would cause the first 2 strikes to miss opponents.
Fixed an issue with Daredevil or Spider-man missing with a dash attack if Vision charges a heavy attack during the dash.
Fixed an issue where some hidden information in Alliance Wars was visible.
Fixed a display issue where Defender Placement percentage was not displaying all placed Alliance members.
Resolved minor issue with the total Alliance’s score being displayed on the War Progress widget (now only displays the score of the battlegroup being viewed).
Multiple minor Alliance War issues have also been fixed in this patch.
Fixed a display issue where Shard amounts provided by defeating a boss displayed as double.
Fixed a display issue where opponent PI values would display differently between the map, prefight screen, and in combat.
Boss power is now correctly displayed after removing Global and Linked boosts.
Fixed an issue where a player in Alliance Quests would lose input ability on the quest board after sleeping the device.
Fixed an issue where a player enters Alliance Quests and gets stuck after viewing the linked node or buff node tutorial.
Fixed an issue where sending an Alliance invite to a player would cause the “Add Friend” button to become greyed out.
Fixed a text issue that appears when viewing Featured Hero information from the Home Screen.
Join The Iron or fight for The Blue with new events, quests, Champions, and special Shards; inspired by Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War!
Solo Events: constantly-evolving events that vary in length, requirements, and prizes!
Compare statistics against other players and Alliances with the new Leaderboards!

Answer: Players can skip dialogue on the quest map by pressing the 'SKIP' button.


Input: What was the reason given by Governor Rick Scott for not implementing a prescription drug monitoring database in Florida?

Context:
How Oxycontin, Florida and the Sackler Family Created the Opioid Crisis In America
Why are the Sacklers worth $13 billion today? Answer: “The Oxy Express Explained”
(MASS TORT NEXUS MEDIA)
A COMPARISON OF OXYCODONE PRESCRIBING
In the first six months of 2010, Ohio doctors and health care practitioners bought the second-largest number of oxycodone doses in the country at just under 1 million pills.
Florida doctors bought 40.8 million in the same period, the comparison is astounding, yet it flew under the DEA, Opioid Big Pharma and everyone elses radar for years and years.
Of the country’s top 50 oxycodone-dispensing clinics, 49 were in Florida. From August 2008 to November 2009, a new pain clinic opened in Broward and Palm Beach counties on average of every three days.
Pharmacies and distributors are at fault as well, pharmacies ordered jaw-dropping numbers of pills from opioid drug distributors, the middlemen between manufacturers and pharmacies.
90 of 100 of the nation’s top 100 oxy-buying doctors in 2010, were in Florida. 49 of 50 of the country’s top oxy-dispensing clinics were in Florida. For some reason this didn’t raise an alarm or cause anyone to look further at the time.
Purdue Pharma New What Was Happening In Florida
Purdue and the Sacklers chose to ignore Florida, because apparently nobody there sued them or complained. In 2007, in other states, the infamous drug maker and three of its executives pled guilty in federal court and paid out $634.5 million in fines for purposefully misleading regulators, doctors, and patients about the addictiveness of their opioid painkiller. Around the same time, Purdue was also sued by several states, including Washington, over similar allegations. Purdue agreed to a $19.5 million multi-state settlement. And in 2015, Purdue settled a case with Kentucky, agreeing to pay $24 million.
As part of the state settlements, Purdue was supposed to set up monitoring programs to make sure that its opioid drug didn’t wind up in the wrong hands. It was supposed to watch out for shady pharmacies, unusually large orders, or suspiciously frequent orders. But on this front, Everett alleges that Purdue once again put profits over people.
Obviously, this was ignored as the Florida based “Oxy Expres”; rolled on for years and years with np input, comment or oversight by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family other than “show me the money” and enjoying a life of luxury on the misery created and managed in the Purdue Pharma boardroom. But, the Purdue boardroom isn’t the only guilty “Opioid Big Pharma” industry player who designed and supported the opioid prescribing crisis.
For the current status of efforts to make Opioid Big Pharma accept responsibility in litigation filed in federal and state courts across the country, see: https://www.masstortnexus.com/Briefcases/254/OPIOID-CRISIS-BRIEFCASE-INCLUDING-MDL-2804-OPIATE-PRESCRIPTION-LITIGATION
Why Distributors Are Liable
Cardinal Health, one of the nation’s biggest distributors, sold two CVS pharmacies in Sanford a combined 3 million doses of oxycodone, flooding the town of 54,000 with an average of 250,000 oxycodone pills every month.
West of Jupiter, a Walgreens drug distribution center sold 2.2 million tablets to a single Walgreens’ pharmacy in tiny Hudson, a roughly six-month supply for each of its 12,000 residents. It shipped more than 1.1 million pills to each of two Fort Pierce Walgreens pharmacies.
For 40 days starting in late 2010, the distribution center shipped 3,271 bottles of oxycodone — 327,100 doses of the drug — to a Port Richey Walgreens pharmacy, prompting a distribution manager to ask: “How can they even house this many bottles?”
There were 53 million oxycodone prescriptions filled in 2013 by US pharmacies, according to NIDA. This translates to approximately one bottle of this addictive drug for every 6 people in the country. How was this not noticed by those responsible for monitoring narcotics prescribing in the United States?
Charts and Data On Florida’s Oxycontin Gold Mine
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3936665-Purdue-Pharma-1-in-48-Study.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3534759-uS-Atty-on-Purdue-Settle.html#document/p2/a384323
A Boardroom Contrived Opioid Epidemic
This is the pain chart created by the “Opioid Big Pharma Industry” to support massive over-prescribing of opioids across the country to everyone who walked in to a medical treatment facility, this was an effort to increase narcotic prescribing practices in mainstream medical care–and it worked very very well! This chart became a standard treatment assessment protocol tool across the country.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3936646-DEA-NATL-DRUG-ASSESSMENT-2010.html#document/p51/a383739
HOW WEST VIRGINIA WAS TARGETED
It-Was-Raining-Opiates-How-drug-companies-submerged-West-Virginia-in-opioids-for-years
Reliably red on the political map, Huntington is a West Virginia town with a 182-year-old university, a storied football team and more than 100 churches.
It’s where Will Lockwood graduated from high school. It’s where he enrolled at Marshall University. It’s where he first tried OxyContin. By the time Lockwood entered Marshall, Detroit dealers were trickling into Huntington, selling OxyContin and pills with OxyContin’s active ingredient, oxycodone.
Even though Lockwood could step out his front door and get the drug, Detroit street dealers weren’t the preferred supplier, they were in Florida.
It may have been 1,000 miles away, but to Lockwood, getting OxyContin and oxycodone from Florida’s loosely regulated pain clinics “was legal, in a sense.”
Twice a month, different “crews” from Huntington crowded into vans and headed south to Palm Beach and Broward counties, home to more than 200 pill mills, the pain clinics where anyone with a fake ache and hard cash could walk out with pills and prescriptions.
After hitting a string of clinics, the Huntington crews drove back with “around 500 to 600 pills per person,” said Lockwood.
But it wasn’t just a few hundred pills. It was tens of thousands.
And it wasn’t just Huntington, The West Virginia vans were part of a nationwide caravan heading to South Florida. Cars bearing tags from Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia and Ohio crowded into one clinic parking lot after another, loading up on pills and prescriptions.
News stories and law enforcement focused on those “parking lot” states in Appalachia, where dealers and addicts with a tank of gas or a cheap plane ticket traveled the “Oxy Express” to Palm Beach and Broward.
But Florida’s pill pipeline reached far beyond those roadways.
By 2010, Florida was the oxycodone drug dealer of choice for drug users and dealers in the Great Lakes, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions as well as the Southeast, DEA records show, an area spanning virtually every state east of the Mississippi. It wasn’t just that Florida guaranteed a flow of cheap oxycodone. For 10 years, key lawmakers and agency heads repeatedly looked the other way as crooked doctors and bogus clinics flooded almost half the nation with the highly addictive drug.
In failing to crack down, Florida extended by years the amount of time highly addictive oxycodone would be available to both first-time experimenters and addicts. It gave criminals the raw materials for trafficking. It gave Will Lockwood the OxyContin needed to feed his growing habit, It paved the way for his eventual jump to heroin.
Jumping state lines
Teenage high-school wrestling buddies in New Port Richey ran oxycodone into Tennessee; they were paid with cash hidden in teddy bears. A Hillsborough County man mailed 17,000 pills to Glen Fork, W.Va., a month’s supply for every man woman and child in the tiny town.
A Boston Chinatown crime boss trafficked pills from Sunrise into Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and South Carolina. Wellington twins and pill mill kingpins Paul and Phil George, brothers who oversaw one of the largest operations in the country from their five Palm Beach and Broward clinics, pushing oxycodone into Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and South Carolina.
A husband and wife team operating out of a Forest Hill Boulevard clinic funneled pills to Delaware. At Palm Beach International Airport, two federal security agents accepted $500 a pop each time they waved through thousands of pillsbound for Connecticut and New York.
A Palm Bay man’s Puerto Rican family bought local pills destined for the working class town of Holyoke, Mass. In Rhode Island, police pulled over a Lauderhill man caught speeding through Providence. They found 903 oxycodone tablets and 56 morphine pills in the car.
Senior citizen and Tulane business graduate Joel Shumrak funneled more than 1 million pills into eastern Kentucky from his South Florida and Georgia clinics, much of it headed for street sales — an estimated 20 percent of the illicit oxycodone in the entire state.
Van loads of pill-seekers organized by “VIP buyers” traveled from Columbus, Ohio, to three Jacksonville clinics, where armed guards handled crowd control (federal indictment) and doctors generated prescriptions totaling 3.2 million pills in six months. In Miami, Vinny Colangelo created 1,500 internet website names to entice drug users throughout the nation to one of his six South Florida pain clinics or pharmacies.
Even the Mafia got in on the Florida oxy express action: A Bonanno crime family associate oversaw a local crew stocking up on Palm Beach and Broward pain clinic oxycodone, upstreaming profits to the New York family.
At times, it seemed almost no section of the country was free of Florida-supplied pills: When Olubenga Badamosi was arrested driving his Bentley Continental in Miami in 2011, the Oregon man was one of two traffickers overseeing a crew smuggling South Florida oxycodone to sell in Salt Lake City, Seattle and Denver as well as Oregon, Nevada, Texas and even Alaska.
Pharmacy delivers oxy ‘pot of gold’
It would be hard to overstate Florida’s role in feeding the country’s voracious appetite for oxycodone. Oxycodone 30-milligram tablets were favored by addicts. And in 2009 and 2010, roughly four of every 10 of those pills were sold in Florida. Small wonder: Of the nation’s top 100 oxycodone-buying doctors, 90 were in Florida.
Pharmacies, too, ordered jaw-dropping numbers of pills from drug distributors, the middlemen between manufacturers and pharmacies.
West of Jupiter, a Walgreens drug distribution center sold 2.2 million tablets to a single Walgreens’ pharmacy in tiny Hudson, a roughly six-month supply for each of its 12,000 residents. It shipped more than 1.1 million pills to each of two Fort Pierce Walgreens pharmacies. By contrast, a single Walgreens pharmacy in the Central Florida townOviedo bought 169,700 doses of oxycodone in 30 days.
People on both sides of the counter knew what was going on: In a letter to the chief executive of Walgreens, Oviedo’s police chief warned that people were walking out of the town’s two Walgreens stores and selling their drugs on the spot, crushing and snorting them, or — still in the pharmacy’s parking lot — injecting them.
Why Pharmacies are LIABLE
In Fort Pierce, a Walgreens pharmacist accidentally provided an extra 120 oxycodone pills to a customer. When the druggist called to ask that the man return the pills, the customer’s girlfriend bluntly responded that he was an addict, that he sold oxycodone and the 120 pills were “a pot of gold,” DEA records show.
That was in September. The same man came back to the same Walgreens in December and January with a prescription in hand, and the pharmacy filled his prescriptions every time.
‘Wild West of Oxycodone Prescribing’
Cincinnati-based Masters Pharmaceuticals Inc. was a middling-sized drug distributor selling oxycodone to Florida pharmacies.
It sold to other customers in other states. But mostly, it sold to Florida: Oxycodone made up more than 60 percent of its drug sales in 2009 and 2010, according to federal records. Of its top 55 oxycodone customers, 44 were in Florida.
Company CEO Dennis Smith worried that the Florida-bound oxycodone was getting in the wrong hands. A trip to Broward did nothing to ease his mind. “It was,” he later testified, “the Wild West of oxycodone prescribing.”
Bus and park benches touted pain clinics. When Smith picked up and thumbed through City Beat, a free magazine, he found pages of ads for pain clinics. “It would show young people sitting around a pool and it named the pain clinic and say (sic) ‘we dispense on site,’ and that really hit home hard.”
Smith stopped selling to pain clinics. But the company continued to shovel millions of oxycodone pills to Florida pharmacies. Masters executives figured the pharmacies would keep an eye out for excessive prescriptions written by pill mill doctors. But not all pharmacies were worrying about doctors at pain clinics, many pharmacies were courting the pill mills prescribers.
A Lake Worth Family Pharmacy
In 2009, the small pharmacy off Lucerne Avenue in Lake Worth had a history. It had been in business for 43 years. The owner and head pharmacist had been there for 32. It had shaded parking and a downtown location, a stone’s throw from the City Hall Annex.
When a Masters inspector visited, he was alarmed to find Tru-Valu Drugs bustling with a long line of young, thin, tattooed customers arriving in groups of 10 to pick up pills. There were signs in the pharmacy warning of limits on the number of oxycodone pills handed out. Even Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, an oxycodone manufacturer, was worried about the volume of its pill sales there.
Of the 300,000 doses of all drugs the small pharmacy dispensed in December 2008, 192,000 were for oxycodone 30 mg, the dosage preferred by traffickers and users alike.
The huge oxycodone volume was no accident. The owner and head pharmacist, unidentified in DEA records, told a Masters inspector that the pharmacy “has pushed for this (narcotic) business with many of the area pain doctors.”
And, despite the torrent of oxycodone going out the door, the pharmacy owner expressed frustration that drug distributors were limiting the amount of narcotics they would sell to his now-closed pharmacy.
Ohio to Florida and Back
Pharmacy after pharmacy benefited from the combination of Masters’ Ohio oxycodone business and Florida’s unregulated pill mills.
In Englewood, north of Fort Myers, the pharmacy owner filled prescriptions for six pain clinics — including clinics an hour’s drive away. A Masters inspector found cars from Tennessee and Kentucky in the parking lot and young men leaving the pharmacy carrying large trash bags.
Superior Pharmacy not only filled oxycodone prescriptions for pain clinics, it shared waiting room space with a pain clinic in a Temple Terrace strip mall outside Tampa. Neither Masters nor Superior had so much as Googled the background of pain clinic doctors writing those prescriptions, the DEA later said.
Had they done so, the DEA dryly noted, they “would likely have come across a press release” announcing one of the doctors had been arrested and charged with trafficking in prescription drugs.
Hundreds of thousands of oxycodone pills were sent from Ohio distributors to Florida pharmacies. Unknown thousands of pills headed right back up to Ohio.
When Ohio police burst into Christopher Thompson’s home outside Columbus, they found an assault rifle, $80,000 in cash and oxycodone from his Florida deals. A construction worker whose own pill habit started at age 14, Thompson oversaw a ring of 15 Ohio buyers who traveled to Florida to pick up oxycodone to resell in Central Ohio.
Two hours to the west in Martin’s Ferry, David L. Kidd orchestrated a ring of buyers traveling to West Palm Beach and Central Florida to pick up oxycodone for resale on the streets of eastern Ohio and West Virginia.
Doctors and pharmacies from Florida were complicit with Kidd’s ring in fueling Ohio’s opioid epidemic, wrote the U.S. attorney for West Virginia after Kidd’s 2011 arrest: “The steady flow of pain pills into the Ohio Valley from Florida must stop.”
Driving To Pick Up Death By Rx
With more drugs came more deaths, in January 2010, say police, Fort Lauderdale pathologist Dr. Lynn Averill started a seven-month oxycodone shopping spree, buying 437,880 oxycodone pills from drug distributors.
The same month, Matthew Koutouzis drove from Toms River, N.J., to see Averill in her Broward County pain clinic. The 26-year-old collected prescriptions for 390 pills and overdosed two days later. Brian Moore traveled 13 hours from his Laurel County, Ky., home to see Averill. He left with prescriptions for 600 pills and also overdosed within 48 hours.
Kenneth Hammond didn’t make it back to his Knoxville, Tenn., home. He had a seizure after picking up prescriptions for 540 pills and died in an Ocala gas station parking lot.
Keith Konkol didn’t make it back to Tennessee, either. His body was dumped on the side of a remote South Carolina road after he overdosed in the back seat of a car the same day of his clinic visit. He had collected eight prescriptions totaling 720 doses of oxycodone, methadone, Soma and Xanax. Konkol had every reason to believe he would get those prescriptions: In three previous visits to the Plantation clinic, he had picked up prescriptions for 1,890 pills.
An estimated 60 percent of her patients were from out of state, a former medical assistant told the DEA. In 2015, Averill pleaded not guilty to eight manslaughter charges. She is awaiting trial in Broward County. Averill was just one doctor at just one clinic. In 2010, the year Averill’s patients overdosed, Florida received applications to open 1,026 more pain clinics.
An online message board advising drug users summed it up: “Just go anywhere in South Florida and look for a ‘pain management clinic.’ It shouldn’t be too hard; you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one.” Complain about anything from a back injury to a hangnail, it advised, “and they’ll set you right up.”
By this time, Kentucky had reined in its pill mills. It didn’t matter, Ohio, Delaware, North Carolina, Connecticut acted as well, but other state’s efforts didn’t matter either, Florida continued ignoring the pill mills and rogue doctors feeding the nation’s oxycodone habit, the pills flowed.
“There were folks down there, where if I had an opportunity to, get my hands around their throat, I would have wrung their neck,” said Huntington Mayor Steve Williams. On Florida’s inaction he stated, “There was total evidence as to what was happening. It lays at the foot, in my opinion, of the public officials there that allowed it to continue on.”
Governor Jeb Bush Backed A Solution
One of the first dinners Florida Gov. Jeb Bush hosted after moving into the governor’s mansion in 1999 was a small one. Among those sitting at the table with Bush were Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, state Sen. Locke Burt and James McDonough, who would become the state’s hard-nosed drug czar. There was an urgent topic on the agenda that night: the explosion of prescription painkillers. For the state’s first family, it may have been personal. Bush had talked publicly about one of his children’s struggle with addiction.
By the time the meal ended, all had agreed on the need for establishing a prescription drug monitoring program that would collect information and track prescriptions written for controlled substances, such as oxycodone.
Absent a prescription drug monitoring database, there was no way to know whether someone was “doctor shopping,” going from doctor to doctor, getting more and more prescriptions to feed their habit.
And there was no way to know whether a doctor was overprescribing, key to pinpointing whether a pill mill was operating, and where. Similar databases had been adopted by more than a dozen states. It was being described as a “silver bullet” to curb overprescribing. Soon enough, $2 million to get the database up and running would be on the table — but it came with a catch.
Florida Attorney General Misfires Against Purdue
In 2001, OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma was fending off early criticism of its blockbuster painkiller. At issue was whether Purdue’s aggressive marketing campaign had misled doctors and patients alike. Purdue and three top executives later pleaded guilty to federal charges of illegally marketing the drug. Far from being safe and non-addictive, OxyContin carried the same addiction risk as morphine, and was every bit as potent.
But that was six years away. In 2001, towns in Maine reported an alarming uptick in crime tied to OxyContin. The first of several congressional hearings was ramping up. Critics and parents who lost children were piling on. Reporters were starting to write stories.
In November, Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth appeared poised to take on the company. Calling OxyContin street sales “a major threat to public health,” Butterworth told a state Board of Medicine committee that Purdue should consider temporarily taking the drug off the market. It wasn’t only traffickers concerning Butterworth. It was the sales pitch.
In late 2001, Butterworth called a young assistant attorney general into his office and gave him a magazine article on OxyContin and an assignment: Look into Purdue marketing. Former Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth and Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg. The young lawyer, now-Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, said he knew nothing about OxyContin. But he didn’t like what he read.
During the yearlong inquiry, 589 Floridians died after taking oxycodone. Nothing criminal was found, Aronberg later said. Instead, Butterworth and Purdue struck a settlement. As part of a $2 million deal, Purdue would pay to establish a prescription monitoring database, the same silver bullet sought by Bush. After Florida’s computerized system was up and running, the same system would be free to any other state. The entire country, not just Florida, would benefit.
It could have been a groundbreaking deal. There was one catch. State lawmakers had to vote to create the prescription monitoring program by 2004, or Purdue would keep its money.
Marco Rubio Kills The Anti-Oxy Rx Bill
A political gight killed the program. “And there was one person who was responsible,” said former state Sen. Burt, now an Ormond Beach insurance executive. “And it was Marco Rubio.”
A rising state lawmaker in 2002, now-U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio had the clout to make or break the legislation. He had been one of two state House majority whips and was on the fast track to becoming House speaker.
Rubio didn’t kill the 2002 bill out of opposition to prescription monitoring—it was politics “as usual” yet nobody blamed Rubio for the resulting opioid crisis that seems to have started in his political backyard and flourished beyond belief..
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was a leader in the Florida House in 2002 when he blocked a vote on prescription monitoring. That year, Rubio favored a bill changing the Miami-Dade County charter, which failed to pass because of a single “no” vote in the Senate. Burt cast the vote.
Angered by what he saw as Burt’s betrayal, Rubio killed the prescription drug monitoring bill. “When I found out he broke his word, it made the choice easy,” Rubio told The Miami Herald.
It’s not certain that the full Legislature would have passed the bill had it made it to a floor vote. Rubio was the first, not the last, in a line of state legislative leaders over years who would refuse to seriously consider the bill. Most cited privacy concerns.
But prescription monitoring databases in Florida and other states free to use Florida’s model would have pinpointed rogue doctors, would-be pill mills and doctor-shoppers across the country, just as all three were beginning to converge. In doing so, it could have curbed a national opioid epidemic when it was just an emerging problem, not the monster it would become.
Only weeks after the 2002 bill was killed, Bush suppressed a sob as he discussed his daughter’s arrest for forging a prescription. Court-ordered to drug treatment and then briefly to jail, Noelle Bush survived her pill addiction. The 2004 deadline for greenlighting a monitoring system passed. So did Purdue’s million-dollar obligation to pay for it.
Between 2002, the year Rubio killed the database that could have identified doctor-shoppers, and late 2011, when the database finally came online, more than 20,800 Floridians died after taking prescription opioids, including OxyContin, annual Florida Medical Examiners’ reports show. “Not getting that bill through the Legislature resulted in Florida becoming the pill mill capital of the United States,” said Burt.
“There was heartache for thousands of families beyond measure and it didn’t have to happen.”
Florida Officials Were Told Of The Oxy Express
The East Kentucky hills and valleys of Greenup County suit Keith Cooper, a long-haired undercover cop-turned-sheriff: “It’s a backwater. I tell people all the time I am a hick sheriff from a hick location, and by 2011, the rural county and its sheriff had big city problems.
Greenup is near the stretch of interstate highways that provided drug traffickers and users with a straight shot to Palm Beach and Broward pill mills. It’s less than an hour’s ride to Huntington Tri-State Airport, where a $27 flight to Fort Lauderdale was a popular draw for dealers hoping to stock up.
Arrests for Florida pills soon eclipsed local arrests for pot.
“When we locked ’em up, we take all their pill bottles and all their paperwork, and we found maps to the doctors offices and everything,” recalled Cooper.
“I called the (Florida) medical board and gave them a big list of doctors,” Cooper said. He called the state pharmacy board, too. He got no response.
“So then I called the Attorney General’s Office and the Governor’s Office. I was calling them all, the whole state. Of course, I was talking to the state police the entire time. “I told them, all of the profits were down there. And all of the pain’s up here.” Nothing happened. Florida’s oxycodone pipeline continued to flow.
On the other side of the law in Greenup, Mikey Frazier was banking on it.
The Oxy Express
Frazier was on a scholarship to play baseball at his junior college in Chicago when he suffered a torn rotator cuff. Doctors prescribed Percocet, a pill containing oxycodone, in 2002. When doctors cut him off, he bought it on the street. In 2006, he moved to OxyContin, nearly pure oxycodone. In 2007, he gave his friends money to go to Florida and bring him back pills.
“My buddy had a minivan and he would actually go down one week and take two to three people with him, and then the following week I’d go,” said Frazier. He still remembers the route: “I’d take 64 East to 77 South to 95 South. And it’s just a straight shot.”
Others followed suit. “What got everyone started was because the doctors around here won’t write a strong enough prescription,” he recalled. OxyContin and generic oxycodone still could be had — just not in Kentucky, which had a prescription drug monitoring database.
In Florida, “there was none of that … stuff that they check and find out what doctor you’ve been to,” said Frazier.
“And one person does it, and then they tell a friend, and then they go do it, and that’s how it all really got started here.”
MEDICAID-MEDICAIRE PAID MILLIONS FOR OXY
Tallahassee wasn’t just ignoring the epidemic, It was financing it.
Before her office was raided by law enforcement in December 2001, Asuncion M. Luyao’s patients would wait in a line in the rain to get prescriptions from the Port St. Lucie internist and acupuncturist. She was one of the most prolific prescribers of OxyContin in the state.
And hundreds of thousands of those pills were being paid for by Medicaid, Florida’s taxpayer-financed health program for the state’s poorest and sickest citizens. Between 1999 and 2001, Medicaid shelled out $935,634 for OxyContin prescriptions written by Luyao. That was just OxyContin. Luyao was prescribing an array of addictive drugs. In the 12 months leading up to the clinic raid, Medicaid paid roughly $1 million for 7,000 prescriptions, only about 17 percent of them for OxyContin.
Nor did the raid slow her down. Between the raid and her arrest on trafficking charges four months later, Luyao wrote another 282 OxyContin prescriptions billed to Medicaid. She was not an outlier. In 24 months, taxpayers footed the bill for more than 49 million doses of pills containing oxycodone, even though there were only 1.36 million Medicaid patients. Half were children.
The sheer volume of pills might have been a tipoff that the drugs were not all intended for legitimate use. So were arrest reports dating to 2001. One man had used his 7-year-old son’s Medicaid number to doctor-shop for OxyContin. A Miramar pharmacist who billed Medicaid $3.7 million for OxyContin pills was charged with paying Medicaid patients $150 each to use their IDs.
Medicaid paid for more than $300,000 to fill Dr. James Graves’ OxyContin prescriptions. The Florida Panhandle physician was the first doctor in the nation convicted of killing patients by overprescribing OxyContin.
Addiction risk for people taking high doses of oxycodone begins climbing after just three days, a recent study concluded. And most people on Florida Medicaid getting oxycodone prescriptions in 2011 were getting much more than a few days worth. They were getting an average of nine months worth of pills, state officials said.
Pill mill doctors prescribed 1 million of those pills:
Doctors working for the George twins’ trafficking empire prescribed at least 102,081 oxycodone pills billed to Medicaid before the ring collapsed in 2010.
Working out of a Delray Beach pain clinic founded by a convicted drug smuggler, Zvi Harry Perper, son of the Broward County medical examiner, was arrested on trafficking charges, but not before he wrote prescriptions to Medicaid patients for 115,977 doses of oxycodone in 90 days.
In Lake Worth, Cesar Deleon was arrestedas part of a DEA pill mill sweep and charged with 55 counts of illegally distributing drugs. Deleon wrote orders for 20,302 oxycodone pills for Medicaid patients.
Miami internist Dr. Selwyn Carrington authorized 32,411 doses of oxycodone for Medicaid patients in just two years. He was busted for signing his name to hundreds of prescriptions.
Further, Florida wasn’t in any hurry to stop doctors linked to pill mills.
Carrington was arrested for overprescribing in March 2011. The state’s emergency order to suspend his license was signed months after he had pleaded guilty in 2012.
Perper was busted at a Delray Beach pill mill operated by a former felon in 2011. The state did not act against his license until 2014.
Joseph M. Hernandez was writing prescriptions from his car, a veritable pill mill on wheels, when he was busted in February 2010 on one count of trafficking in oxycodone.
.Florida’s Department of Health didn’t file paperwork to restrict his license for almost 18 months.
During that time, Hernandez wrote oxycodone prescriptions for Medicaid patients totaling 258,940 doses representing a taxpayer-footed bill of $130,165.
Purdue Pharma’s Profits Before Patients Creed
Kelly Skidmore is exactly the type of person Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin marketing was intended to reach: Diagnosed with juvenile arthritis, the former state legislator’s struggle with chronic pain began at age 4.
Skidmore was wary of opioid painkillers, though, one reason her willingness in 2009 to work with Purdue was surprising. But she did it to get Florida’s dormant drug monitoring database up and running.
Then a state representative in a district straddling Palm Beach and Broward counties, Skidmore recalled that, “They came to me and said, ‘Could you help get it across the finish line?’ ”
OxyContin and prescription opioids, a serious problem in 2002, had evolved into a full-blown crisis in the ensuing seven years. Broward alone had more pain clinics than it had McDonald’s. Deaths tied to oxycodone had exploded, up by 263 percent since the prescription monitoring database had first been proposed and killed. Overdoses from prescription opioids were claiming more than seven lives a day.
“By God, if we had had seven dolphins a day dying and washing up on Florida beaches, we would have been appropriating money and solving it,” Skidmore said.
Skidmore believed a database wasn’t going to resolve the underlying addiction crisis. Still, it was a start. Not a silver bullet, but “maybe silver buckshot,” she said. The database law passed with gaping loopholes. No health care professional would have to report opioid prescriptions or check the database before prescribing more, and the state refused to pay for it.
“Just to get that one little piece … took nine years of filing bills and then it had no teeth,” Skidmore said. “And it should have been the easiest piece.”
Where Was The DEA and Everyone Else?
The DEA all but wrung its hands over Florida’s lethal inaction. The agency ticked off a devil’s brew of regulatory loopholes: Florida’s Health Department regulated health care professionals but not pain clinics. The state’s Agency for Health Care Administration regulated pain clinics that accepted insurance, but pill mills were most often on a cash-only basis. And the prescription monitoring database, mired in a vendor dispute, remained stalled.
In early 2011, when Gov. Rick Scott took office, just one drug — oxycodone — was tied to six fatal overdoses a day. Deaths tied to all drugs claimed 25 a day. In the handful of Appalachian states where traffickers were bringing back South Florida pills, it was worse.
Ohio’s death rate for oxycodone and similar opioids had doubled in 24 months, federal records show. Kentucky’s was up by more than 50 percent. And in West Virginia, home to hard-hit Huntington, death rates tied to pill mill drugs such as oxycodone and Opana had climbed by 341 percent.
The DEA formally pinpointed Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties as the nation’s single biggest hub for trafficking pills across state lines. Within weeks of being sworn in, Scott abolished Florida’s Office of Drug Control, eliminating the state drug czar position, announced plans to drive a final stake in the heart of the database and rebuffed Purdue Pharma’s renewed offer to help pay for it.
Scott, a tea party conservative, cited privacy concerns, expressed skepticism the monitoring program would work and raised the possibility taxpayers would be left with a $500,000-a-year bill to operate it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi had also ridden the tea party wave to her position. She shared many of Scott’s conservative convictions. Unlike Scott, the former prosecutor relentlessly lobbied to keep the database alive. Florida’s failure to adopt the drug monitoring database was so out of step with the rest of the country that it began spawning conspiracy theories on both sides of the law.
Everyone knew prescription monitoring was going to kill the pill smuggling business, said a corrupt Florida Highway Patrol trooper as he drove a load of pills out of Florida, according to a federal lawsuit. Talking to the confidential informant in the seat next to him, the trooper speculated someone in Tallahassee must have a piece of the action, “because (Scott) was so adamant about not putting that system in place. Right?”
In Greenup, an infuriated Cooper told a reporter, “In my opinion, (Scott’s) getting money from somewhere. He has to be.” A few days later, recalled Cooper, “A lieutenant with the state police I’d been talking to down there called me, said, ‘Man, just a head’s up: I wouldn’t come to Florida.’” In states on the receiving end of the Florida pill pipeline and among federal officials, Scott’s resistance triggered outrage.
In Kentucky, where as much as 60 percent of the illicit oxycodone in that state flowed from Florida, Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo proposed erecting billboards at the Florida line: “Welcome to the Oxy Tourism Capital of the World.”
U.S. House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, also from Kentucky, twice wrote Scott. “Canceling Florida’s prescription drug monitoring program is equal to firing firefighters while your house is ablaze,” he wrote.
Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, asked to meet with Scott. So did DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart.
Three U.S. senators — New York’s Chuck Schumer, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse — joined Florida’s Bill Nelson in pointing out that the pills weren’t just a Florida problem: There were “serious ramifications for the rest of the country,” wrote Nelson of Scott’s reluctance to crack down. This is a perfect example of how political rhetoric, in-fighting and contrived agendas prevented an early stop to the emerging opioid crisis many years ago.
WHY DIDN’T THE DEA, DRUG DISTRIBUTORS AND PHARMACIES TAKE NOTICE BEFORE THE OPIOID CRISIS SPREAD ACROSS THE COUNTRY LIKE WILDFIRE? WAS IT BECAUSE OF THE BILLIONS IN PROFITS, QUARTERLY BONUSES AND DIVIDENDS? STOCK OPTIONS CASHED IN BY BOARDROOMS AT EVERY OPIOID BIG PHARMA COMPANY? STAY TUNED FOR HOW “PROFITS BEFORE PATIENTS” BECAME THE NORM
(article excerpts and quotes have been taken from publicly available media sources and court records)

Answer: Privacy concerns and skepticism about its effectiveness.