True Healing Discussion (Live 6/25)

Vinmarc43

ok, could be ok not to go to prologue to heal, it`s time consuming and boring, so if they are going to do this, cut down on healing and reviving drastically, say 30-45 minutes, then I could use another character for a few battles and go back with my regular roster faster, I could rebalance the game as far as battle variety, but for smaller roster, could still be a problem picking a fair fight.
So many changes needed for this game, I mean everything.

Bacon Pants

Bugpop wrote:

I really don't like the way this forum has turned into a hate frenzy directed at IceIX. This used to be a civil community. Occasionally one of us would step out of line but simple reminder from another forumite was sufficient for the forum to become civil.

I'm disgusted with the lack of community here right now. Be civil.

I agree with you Bugpop. I have nothing against IceIX...I don't believe I've ever directed any vitriol towards him either. The anger is misplaced, don't be mad at IceIX, he is in the unfortunate position of being the bearer of bad news. That is not fair to him or to us. Maybe some of the folks behind these changes should have a more active presence on here? Honestly, I think the USA has a better shot of winning the World Cup before that happens.

However, when you're the messenger, you're gonna get shot.

Dirchicake

I think all in all this decreases overall play of the game and overall sales IMO.

As more and more people turn away, the competition, which drives sales, decreases.

Unknown

This REALLY smacks of contempt for the playerbase. If they truly want to encourage roster diversity, there would be a ton of ways they could go about that, and I think people would be very upfront and we could have a civil discussion about it. If that isn't why they're doing this, and it's simply that there's a mandate to increase health pack sales, then they're not only tk'ing us, but they're lying to us about it.

The lack of engagement with the players the last few weeks, followed by a change as huge and, quite frankly, terrible, as this is, really says a lot about how they view us. It's almost like they've been given a suggestion not to get too close to us, or they'll start thinking of us as human beings.

Unknown

People will simply use patch + lazy daken in EVERY SINGLE MATCH
and you say this was to make people use different chars too ...
get real ...

Unknown

I've lost count of the amount of otherwise great games I've quit due to time restrictions put forth by developers completely disconnected from reality. Be it stamina, energy, health packs, death timers, (whatever name they slap on it) they limit how and when I can play. I tend to tolerate it for a while (until I ultimately quit), but will never enable such greed by paying for it. I pay money for things that serve a purpose, not obvious cash grabs.

So, I guess expect a major shift in who actually gets to play this game. Those who started the game early enough to have an extensive roster of 3*s leveled enough to be useful. Those of us who did not can apparently slink away and die. Or we can cave to the greed and buy a few hundred health packs each...

Unknown

So since you've been taking away all our methods of dealing with the **** MMR in the game, I assume you've spent equal time attempting to fix the actual MMR problem?

No?

Cuz if not, then I really can't see how you can deny that this is anything but a cash grab.

Unknown

I just wish to hell that the devs would actually get on this forum and *talk* to us once in awhile. I'd be 85% less angry about this whole deal if we had an active red answering questions and explaining their reasoning.

Unknown

I think it's reasonably clear that IceIX isn't responsible for designing changes to the game's mechanics, nor is he the one who signs off on implementing them. He is the public face of Demiurge's *remarkably* bad PR department, though I'm willing to take his explanation ("I have many hats, and communicating on the forums is only one of them") at face value. In other words, it's not his fault; it's just that doing a borderline-competent job of PR/communications simply isn't possible for reasons beyond his control.

Unknown

NightsReign wrote:

I've lost count of the amount of otherwise great games I've quit due to time restrictions put forth by developers completely disconnected from reality. Be it stamina, energy, health packs, death timers, (whatever name they slap on it) they limit how and when I can play. I tend to tolerate it for a while (until I ultimately quit), but will never enable such greed by paying for it. I pay money for things that serve a purpose, not obvious cash grabs.

Yeah, the devs don't actually play the game. Nor do they listen to the people that do. Definitely a disconnect.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

I really don't like the way this forum has turned into a hate frenzy directed at IceIX. This used to be a civil community. Occasionally one of us would step out of line but simple reminder from another forumite was sufficient for the forum to become civil.

I'm disgusted with the lack of community here right now. Be civil.

Sadly, this is what I see in most forums over time. Helpful players leave or go quiet when the subject of discussion starts to shift (which naturally happens as the game gets more fleshed out and is around longer). Devs start to push iap more over time once they feel.they created a strong enough bedrock of a playerbase....most aps are lucky to be relevant for a year, 1 1/2. Changes come ppl.don't like and prefer to try and disallow change rather than slog through tweaking something new to work well (see all politics since ever).

Ice isn't around much anymore (and they have never been around on weekends) but I don't blame him to some extent. They have had a lot of questionable changes recently (I don't think this is one of them personally if they make some other tweeks with it) and so ppl are angry, or talking about leaving in every other thread (sometimes cordially...others not). Some ppl just don't know how to ask for things...but there is only so much good will before no response can grate on the best of ppl. That doesn't mean vitriol is acceptable though (more importantly...it makes ppl ignore you usually...at least the problem solves ignore you mostly).

Personally...if I had the wherewithal for game design id consider dropping the game utterly and spending the free time creating my own match 3 in a similar fashion using the dc lp (as right now I am sure dc would love as many competing similar games to marvel as possible since they are so far behind on the movie front atm...and while expensive, a well known lp can get your game in the door and pay for itself). I have always liked marvel more, but you work with what you got. That is how far .off the game has gotten from where if was in December for me. It's not a bad game all of a sudden or anything...but I feel it could be so much more. And I am not sure where all of thier work time goes (I am sure there are .ideas they are working on...but it would GREATLY help them and us if they had some sort of blog style post on some of what they are working on at a regular interval...so we can look forward to things as well as brace for unwanted changes.

Sometimes evolution is born of anger or malcontent. Most ppl just don't know how to turn thier feelings into useful action.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

I think it's reasonably clear that IceIX isn't responsible for designing changes to the game's mechanics, nor is he the one who signs off on implementing them. He is the public face of Demiurge's *remarkably* bad PR department, though I'm willing to take his explanation ("I have many hats, and communicating on the forums is only one of them") at face value. In other words, it's not his fault; it's just that doing a borderline-competent job of PR/communications simply isn't possible for reasons beyond his control.

Ice isn't responsible for all the changes, but he's a representative of the devs. It's not like any of us are personally mad at Ice; we're mad insofar as he represents the developers. Also, the explanation he gave is terribly convoluted and evasive.

Unknown

Long time forum lurker. If they decide to implement these changes as is, they have to reward more "diverse" roster usage in pvp and pve. Maybe extra score bonuses for winning a match with a damaged character or maybe even a health pack for every victory won with a certain hp damage threshold for your characters. Hopefully add something in addition to the propose changes or there will be a lot less activity in the game.

Spoit

Regalis wrote:

They've been tanking their Steam rating for the past 6 months.

http://steamcharts.com/app/234330

Clearly it's still too high, so they have to roll out more tinykitty like this.

Like prologue healing, tanking is sometimes a necessary evil

Unknown

Dirchicake wrote:

I think all in all this decreases overall play of the game and overall sales IMO.

As more and more people turn away, the competition, which drives sales, decreases.

Yes, this is correct. As player population decreases, payer population decreases until eventually, bye-bye revenue stream. Bye-bye MPQ. Bye-bye everybody.

However, in addition: MPQ's strongest competitive advantage over other mobile games right now is its user engagement.

People play this game for hours and hours.

People do not play Candy Crush or other casual Match-3 games for hours and hours.

Why? They can't because in other casual Match-3 games, players are limited by energy/hearts. Once you run out of hearts in Candy Crush for today, you either:
- Wait hours and hours for hearts to refill
- Spam your FB friends for more hearts (something that Apple is now cracking down on)
- Pay real-world money for more hearts

For games like Candy Crush, this causes most people (free players who don't spend money) to pick up the game, play it for a bit, then put it down and wait for hours until they have more hearts.

MPQ, unlike other Match-3 games, does not have a limiting energy/hearts mechanic that prevents you from playing another battle.

As long as your team isn't dead or too injured, you can play as many additional battles as you want. OBW & Spidey [& She-Hulk]-style healing let you play for hours.

If OBW/Spidey/She-Hulk healing goes away, user engagement will drop as more players refuse to buy health packs and instead put down the game and wait for their free health packs to regenerate. (And eventually, more and more people just won't bother to pick the game back up again.)

Without the game's significant user engagement, MPQ loses its most important competitive advantage in the mobile gaming market.

Without this competitive advantage, the game will be left to fend for itself against Candy Crush, Puzzle & Dragons, Clash of Clans, and other mobile games that have been proven to monetize much better and at much larger scale.

Given the competing games that are out there just waiting to eat MPQ's lunch, things will not be looking good for MPQ and D3P at that point.

Unknown

Regalis wrote:

They've been tanking their Steam rating for the past 6 months.

http://steamcharts.com/app/234330

Clearly it's still too high, so they have to roll out more tinykitty like this.

lol this is awesome xD
Perhaps they just want to go out of steam once and for all xD and make the game mobile only
limiting the playtime for pc users is like a great idea too... xD

Unknown

After reading 10 pages of comments and responses I am rather numb and dumbfounded.
The Spider-Man nerf now is a moot point. I am in the minority but I thought you actually made Spider-Man stronger.
It will increase health pack spending.
The game will decrease in diversity not increase as you continue your love crush on Daken and patch. You move the op meter from obw to ares. 2 Star get healing while 3 star get punished. I truly need explanation as I can't grasp your thinking at all with your strategy.
This change hurts those in higher brackets. I basically get royally hosed now as every Opponent I face is 141 across the board when I have 100's not max. Fix this issue.

ISO value has been disproportionate. I don 't buy ISO because I get more value from character buys.

The only way this helps diversity is those who maxed all players get a higher increase advantage in top prizes. This is short sighted.Essential skill of play decreases.

Unknown

So have they made a videogame about someone trying to go back in time terminator style to kill the ppl responsible for the creation of iap and dlc (not expansions...but actual "dlc"?). would make for an interesting premise for a simple indie game.

Id name it "Kill the Download" ...kinda catchy. Since the acronym is KtD ..or KD..it could even have your kill/death ratio for the game despite being a platformer or a text rpg or something. So the actual title screen would say Killthe/Download: and after the colon would be your in game k/d ratio.

Tell me, would you consider downloading a game with that name and premise?

I think I might just on principle lol.

kidicarus

If you wanted to remove prologue healing, wouldn't it have made more sense to just remove prologue healing - ie healing not carrying over from the prologue - I'm sure that's not too difficult to do.

As a result of these changes, basically the most effective and efficient characters are going to be the characters with self heals. Apart from x-force those are characters that you will be running.

My feeling of the 3 group healers that we have
OBW still provides espionage and aggressive recon which is still a dangerous combo in the right hands, If I was still making a 2*->3* transition I would still use her - her countdown reduction would still be useful but if you're using obw like this against sentry you're probably doing it wrong. With her low health though and no ability to heal her you'd get maybe 2 or 3 games with her before using a health pack.

I was using spider-man and enjoying his changes recently (I'm serious about this - seeing all ragnarok's abilities translate to 1 damage is really satisfying) in pve, but now it's become really difficult to justify using him in pve if all he's bringing to the table is (4) protect tiles. Well this is a 33% nerf to a character that was already nerfed by 33%. You can still get away with minimal health loss if you pair him with falcon but otherwise he's now effectively a 1 ability hero.

She-Hulk, her heal numbers are basically hot dog cart equivalents already and if we're only talking 787 health at max level, 4 turns of match damage worth at 141, so only the AP reduction is useful. And now you're saying that this healing doesn't really count either. What you're left with is situational strike tiles (around BP strength?)which have a possibility of getting rid of any useful tiles that you generate if I'm reading the tooltip right and a red AOE ability that does 1401 damage - 4200 damage (putting that into perspective you'd need 5 of these to down lazy thor?) - but really you're be better of just using lazy thor (even sentry!)- his powers are just more useful - if you use a character like she-hulk you're just prolonging the match and getting more damage done to you and your team.

Now that the effects of these heals are made up, It will be very difficult to justify bringing them into any battle especially when bringing any higher dps hero would be better at reducing effective health loss.

The Finn

Regalis wrote:

They've been tanking their Steam rating for the past 6 months.

http://steamcharts.com/app/234330

Clearly it's still too high, so they have to roll out more tinykitty like this.

Wow interesting page thanks for sharing! Usage peaked in Feb and has been cratering ever since. Of course you could make the case that steam users were a small part of their player base to begin with but i don't see why the trend wouldn't apply to other clients.