True Healing Discussion (Live 6/25)

Unknown

I wonder if a mod can just edit his post like they can with everyone else's?

Unknown

Bloody Sky

This will hurt my interests in playing this game a lot. When I first started this game I loved everything about it except for the health packs/waiting around for my heroes to recover. Of course that was before I ran into other annoying things, such as MMR, extreme scaling ("Got a 3* character to 86? Congrats! Here are some 141s to fight!!"), and losing fights/boosts when my game crashes, like it was my fault. But I was willing to overlook those issues since I enjoyed the game enough.

But here is why I don't like this change:
I get very few chances to play the game (once a day, if I'm lucky, and only for about 15-45 minutes), so I would rather just play all at once, while I can. Instead of playing for my little bit and then having to quit, before I have to, because my characters are hurt/knocked out and I am out of medpacks. It's the same reason I hate playing those games on Facebook that have that whole Energy system. When I want to play a game, I want to play it. Not play it for a few minutes and then wait around staring at the screen.

You will either need to decrease the amount of time that medpacks replenish, or maybe increase the amount of medpacks one can have before they stop refilling. Give more chances to win medpacks (other than in the daily resupply). Or give us some "true healers" who's sole purpose is to heal the team (very little, if any, offense). Maybe make heroes regen faster? Something.
I hate to be one of those people who threaten to quit the game, but I honestly feel I probably would stop playing it if this "true healing" goes through in the way that everyone is thinking it will.

EDIT:
It seems the developers reasoning behind this change is to spice up PvP events. Which is all well and good, except I rarely even do the PvP events. I like the PvE events. I don't think I EVER used "Prologue healing" to continue playing in a PvP event. Once my characters were hurt, I stopped and logged off for the day. Given, I usually have Original Black Widow on my team (I don't have any max level 3* characters yet), but I have never got hurt bad in PvP, went into the Prologue, healed my team, and then went back into PvP. So all this change does for me is make me not play the PvE events as long. Which, like I said, is what I like doing in this game. So, again, like I said, I feel that I would probably stop playing this game once this change hits, if other things aren't changed along with it.

IceIX wrote:

Also: money.

I hate to also be one of these people, but I was honestly considering buying the $50 Hero Points to support the developers (since I do love the game despite the annoyances) and to expand my roster and Alliance. But now that I have read about this change, I am going to wait until it's implanted before I see what I'm going to do. You'll be lucky if I stick around, let alone spend any kind of money. I prefer video games that I can actually play when I want to play them. I understand this game is Free-to-Play, but there are plenty of F2P games out there that do not make you wait around for timers (Path of Exile, Planetside, Hearthstone, Dwarfs, Marvel Heroes, most games on Kongregate, etc., etc.). And those are the F2P games that are most likely to get some money out of my pocket for pure dev support, if nothing else.

Unknown

The proposed True Healing idea will have three effects.
1. It will make you buy heal packs if you want to fight for top places in longer events
2. It makes the only two active healers in the game almost useless
3. It removes the tactical thinking required to get in last heals to keep your characters as strong as possible for sustained fighting. Thus making fights generally boring "deal as much damage as quick as you can"

Simply put, It's just another example of greed that is making the game less fun to play.
So what is my "suggestion"? Don't do it.

Nonce Equitaur 2

IceIX wrote:

What we intend, and continue to drill in on is that we want players to have a broad mix of characters instead of a Top 3 that is their sole team to play with. In Versus this is a bit rougher of a prospect as players that battle have their last winning team placed on defense. So it's not always the best idea to fight with a less powerful defensive team in order to make up more points. That's something that we're always thinking about. We've discussed allowing players to set a defensive team, but with many other games out with similar versus situations this results in a very precise meta-game where an extremely large percentage of the user base chooses the same defenders. That's not a very fun time for most players.

However, in Events, we continually buff different characters, and outside of Heroics, still allow for characters to be used that aren't buffed. What we want players to do is to play with the breadth of their roster instead of using Spider-Man or Black Widow as necessary crutches and only building 3 other characters. This change is intended to result in exactly this as players see that they can't just rely on in-battle healing and look for other ways besides spending Health Packs to continue playing. We want you to keep playing on your own schedule. We want you to play with multiple characters. Doing so keeps players on their toes and making them think of character combinations that they wouldn't otherwise go with if they weren't forced out of their single set of heroes.

If you want to reward a diverse roster, that's easy. First, there is the problem of keeping a diverse roster healthy. It takes Hulk up to 13 hours to heal. It's weird to play at night, and to find a roster full of character that still need 5 hours to heal from a game I played the previous day.

1. IN THE FIELD teams and AT BASE teams. I use Hulk/Thor/Torch in a PvP and win. I use Hood/Cap/Patch in a PvE and win. These characters are considered IN THE FIELD, and their healing rate is halved. All other character are considered to be AT BASE, and their healing rate is doubled. Putting up a shield automatically puts that team AT BASE. If a character does double or triple duty in multiple events, then they don't heal at all. Even the true healers wouldn't heal if doing double duty-- they're too busy fighting.

2. Buff the weaker characters. There are many threads and great suggestions for this. Buffs for xforce and mhawk were promised 6 months ago. If D3 is up for a discussion, just look at the character threads and discussion threads.

3. Scaling. Don't toss level 395 characters at people unless it's a one time challenge with a good reward. The current Juggs event happens to have good scaling at the moment -- the level 60-110 enemy teams are able to inflict pretty good damage upon the poor roster offered. When scaling gets high, there are often just a few teams that can conquer a high level opponent.

4. +1 Tournament. Have a month long seasonal tournament of a Simulator-like board. Each time a player wins a node, levels of all event opponents go up by 1. No player can use the same team twice. With each win, they get 1 point. The winners are the one who successfully field the most teams. Could I win with 300 different teams? Would I be able to plan for the end game well enough? I dunno, but it would be interesting.

MaxCavalera

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

IceIX wrote:

What we intend, and continue to drill in on is that we want players to have a broad mix of characters instead of a Top 3 that is their sole team to play with. In Versus this is a bit rougher of a prospect as players that battle have their last winning team placed on defense. So it's not always the best idea to fight with a less powerful defensive team in order to make up more points. That's something that we're always thinking about. We've discussed allowing players to set a defensive team, but with many other games out with similar versus situations this results in a very precise meta-game where an extremely large percentage of the user base chooses the same defenders. That's not a very fun time for most players.

However, in Events, we continually buff different characters, and outside of Heroics, still allow for characters to be used that aren't buffed. What we want players to do is to play with the breadth of their roster instead of using Spider-Man or Black Widow as necessary crutches and only building 3 other characters. This change is intended to result in exactly this as players see that they can't just rely on in-battle healing and look for other ways besides spending Health Packs to continue playing. We want you to keep playing on your own schedule. We want you to play with multiple characters. Doing so keeps players on their toes and making them think of character combinations that they wouldn't otherwise go with if they weren't forced out of their single set of heroes.

If you want to reward a diverse roster, that's easy. First, there is the problem of keeping a diverse roster healthy. It takes Hulk up to 13 hours to heal. It's weird to play at night, and to find a roster full of character that still need 5 hours to heal from a game I played the previous day.

1. IN THE FIELD teams and AT BASE teams. I use Hulk/Thor/Torch in a PvP and win. I use Hood/Cap/Patch in a PvE and win. These characters are considered IN THE FIELD, and their healing rate is halved. All other character are considered to be AT BASE, and their healing rate is doubled. Putting up a shield automatically puts that team AT BASE. If a character does double or triple duty in multiple events, then they don't heal at all. Even the true healers wouldn't heal if doing double duty-- they're too busy fighting.

2. Buff the weaker characters. There are many threads and great suggestions for this. Buffs for xforce and mhawk were promised 6 months ago. If D3 is up for a discussion, just look at the character threads and discussion threads.

3. Scaling. Don't toss level 395 characters at people unless it's a one time challenge with a good reward. The current Juggs event happens to have good scaling at the moment -- the level 60-110 enemy teams are able to inflict pretty good damage upon the poor roster offered. When scaling gets high, there are often just a few teams that can conquer a high level opponent.

4. +1 Tournament. Have a month long seasonal tournament of a Simulator-like board. Each time a player wins a node, levels of all event opponents go up by 1. No-one can use the same team twice. With each win, they get 1 point. The winners are the one who successfully field the most teams. Could I win with 300 different teams? Would I be able to plan for the end game well enough? I dunno, but it would be interesting.

I like this tournament idea but i would like to tweak it so that if you use a character on your team he goes down in levels but not eliminated from that team in the future. Having an event where the best chance to win would require me carrying a full roster of 1 & 2* teams sounds aweful.

Leugenesmiff

MONEY should be moved from the bottom of "reasoning" to the top and then repeated 10 times because what's also "not any fun" is reading all the other **** reasons.

This is a true FU move from the devs. Please stop pretending changes like this are to allow me to have more fun. What's fun is to be able to play this game when I want to, when it fits my schedule, and not either just for short bursts in between healing time, or by having to spend a fortune.

I came to the forums today and went to the news section hoping to see an announcement that the devs have taken notice of all the buggy issues happening in the game and are working on making it a better experience for players. Wow. I don't know what else to say.

Unknown

Leugenesmiff wrote:

MONEY should be moved from the bottom of "reasoning" to the top and then repeated 10 times because what's also "not any fun" is reading all the other **** reasons.

This is a true FU move from the devs. Please stop pretending changes like this are to allow me to have more fun. What's fun is to be able to play this game when I want to, when it fits my schedule, and not either just for short bursts in between healing time, or by having to spend a fortune.

I came to the forums today and went to the news section hoping to see an announcement that the devs have taken notice of all the buggy issues happening in the game and are working on making it a better experience for players. Wow. I don't know what else to say.

That is one of my biggest issues right now. A severe bug and server issue over the weekend crippled 2 PVP's and the Sim and NOT A SINGLE **** WAS GIVEN. No explanation. No Apologies. No notice that they are working on it. But they did have time to roll out a notice that they are nerfing all healers.

Not to mention: MMR, Scaling, Ruberbanding, Ares Bug, Hood Bug, Juggs Bug, on top of server issues and random connectivity bugs. etc...

Nonce Equitaur 2

MaxCavalera wrote:

I like this tournament idea but i would like to tweak it so that if you use a character on your team he goes down in levels but not eliminated from that team in the future. Having an event where the best chance to win would require me carrying a full roster of 1 & 2* teams sounds aweful.

Just from the 22 3* characters there are 1540 possible teams. From the 12 2* characters there are 220 possible teams. Because of character overlap, some of the 13244 possible teams of the full 44 character roster aren't playable. I'm pretty sure I could field 300+ good teams. The hardest part for me would be the beginning of the tournament where I'm facing level 50-100 opponents and I'm trying to stick to mid-tier characters.

Unknown

delita007 wrote:

You have a large enough player base where if you said we aren't selling enough hp and iso and we won't be able to keep the game running if we don't bring up our revenues I bet people would respond by buying hp and iso.

This is a bad business decision. Never rely on the consumer to choose to do the right thing for your company over himself. If anyone in here is in a position to do this, I suggest you don't.


What I noticed about MPQ compared to other ingame stores is how ridiculously expensive everything is. They reiterate that they wan't the game to be a marathon and not have people pay to have everything but in the end it equates to people having to pay A LOT to have everything. The ISO to Dollar conversion rate is mindboggling. It's telling me I have about 100 Dollar worth of ISO in my game when it in fact should be maybe 5 Dollars.

People don't spend a lot because they are getting a bad deal. How much is it for 1 single 3* cover? How much for 13?

D3 is afraid that everybody will buy themselves a 141 Roster and then not spend any more money if it was cheaper. If I were in charge of monetizing MPQ I would make the characters cheaper and look into other ways of making money. People like buying Hats for their maxed out Characters. People want to spend a Dollar or at most Five on a mobile game. They aren't looking to spend 100 Bucks in one swing.
Let's be honest, who is buying 500 Iso or the lowest HP in the store?
I believe D3 right now is only skimming money from the whales. If people could buy a single Cover for 1 Dollar I bet they would. 2* Covers 1 Buck and 3* Covers for 2 Bucks. Or even 3* Covers for 1 Buck. Right now a single patch cover costs me about 10 Dollars. I don't have their business plan but i don't see how letting somebody buy 13 Covers for 13 Dollars is bad for them. They still need to level them and even after Levelling its just 1 Character. They might buy 2,3,4,5 or more over time. Considering how difficult it is to get specific 3* a lot of people would do that. 20-60 Dollars from a single customer over the lifetime of the game should be more than enough. Mind you the whales will want to max out everything, which will probably cost them 500+.

After somebody has maxed out their favorites you can offer other premium options for them. Different skins, costumes, hats. People would buy boosts if they were cheap. Give people other silly things they can pay for.

This would be pay to progress faster instead of necessarily pay to win. I play to play, so I wouldn't mind if people who spent 50 Bucks on Characters left me behind in the dust. As long as I am bracketed with lots of fellow 2 Star f2p people I am happy. If you want to buy 3 141s and duke it out with the veterans, be my guest.

tl;dr: People like to spend small amounts a lot of time rather than to spend a huge amount at once. Pay a Dollar, look at a duck.

(If they decide to do something like this i am awaiting my paycheck in the mail)

As a sidenote I assume the edit was made in jest, but it is in poor taste anyway. I don't know about the work culture there but my Boss would have a stern talk with me if i antagonized the player base any more.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

I wonder if a mod can just edit his post like they can with everyone else's?

Yes

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

New feature: True Healing

Characters receive true healing if their powers heal their wounds. Character powers that ease combat but don't heal wounds provide temporary health. - The following abilities are considered true healing:

- Ares (Dark Avengers): Sunder - This ability is more a moment of weakness than actual damage, so Ares gains health back when the weakness passes. - Daken (Classic) and (Dark Avengers Wolverine): Healing & Heat - Wolverine (Patch) and (Astonishing X-Men): Healing Factor - Wolverine (X-Force): Recovery

- The following abilities are considered temporary healing:

- Black Widow (Original): Anti-Gravity Device - This ability uses gravitic fields that lets heroes fight more easily despite injuries. It doesn't heal them of these injuries however. - Spider-Man (Classic): Web Bandages - These bandages help heroes fight through pain but do not provide actual healing. - She-Hulk (Modern): Reprieve – She-Hulk allows for the team to take a rest from combat for a moment and gather their strength but does not heal any wounds.

Edit: Added some reasoning from further in the thread
One of the intentions with this change is to cut down on things like Prologue Healing, which prolongs play time through something that is pretty obviously just a time intensive process that doesn't involve actual strong gameplay. It's something people do because it's there, much like tanking. It's not something that's fun. It's not something that's enjoyable. It's something that exists and is taken advantage of because of pure efficiency.

What we intend, and continue to drill in on is that we want players to have a broad mix of characters instead of a Top 3 that is their sole team to play with. In Versus this is a bit rougher of a prospect as players that battle have their last winning team placed on defense. So it's not always the best idea to fight with a less powerful defensive team in order to make up more points. That's something that we're always thinking about. We've discussed allowing players to set a defensive team, but with many other games out with similar versus situations this results in a very precise meta-game where an extremely large percentage of the user base chooses the same defenders. That's not a very fun time for most players.

However, in Events, we continually buff different characters, and outside of Heroics, still allow for characters to be used that aren't buffed. What we want players to do is to play with the breadth of their roster instead of using Spider-Man or Black Widow as necessary crutches and only building 3 other characters. This change is intended to result in exactly this as players see that they can't just rely on in-battle healing and look for other ways besides spending Health Packs to continue playing. We want you to keep playing on your own schedule. We want you to play with multiple characters. Doing so keeps players on their toes and making them think of character combinations that they wouldn't otherwise go with if they weren't forced out of their single set of heroes.

Also: money.

...

killerkoala

People who have more than 4 141's is for them to have health packs regeneration turned off and to have all their iso and hero points to be taken away, and iso and hero points removed from prizes both individually and alliance. then D3 will have a so much of a money grab that they won't know what to do with it. if you are not willing to pay to win, you are not the players they want on their game anywhoo.

Unknown

What worries me most about this change has nothing to do with healing, health packs, monetization or any of the stuff being raised on the forums. At the end of the day, I think forum users will either adapt or quit.

What worries me is what the casual user who doesn't go to the forums is going to think. Temporary hit points are a fairly advanced mechanic, and I can easily see a casual player healing in a match, seeing that the healing doesn't last, and quitting because he decides the game is buggy. While this move may make sense to D3 on any number of technical levels, I think they're going to have a huge failure when it comes to user expectations, and that will cause them no end of heartburn.

MarvelMan

killerkoala wrote:

People who have more than 4 141's is for them to have health packs regeneration turned off and to have all their iso and hero points to be taken away, and iso and hero points removed from prizes both individually and alliance. then D3 will have a so much of a money grab that they won't know what to do with it. if you are not willing to pay to win, you are not the players they want on their game anywhoo.

Did you get their secret memo? This is their next "feature"

SnowcaTT

flippickle wrote:

You guys are being absolutely ridiculous. How about instead of worrying about healing you balance the characters and make them all playable.

This. I have almost every 2* character maxed out, and there is a reason I never take Moonstone/Cap/Hawkeye into battle. There is a reason I (and most) haven't even bothered keeping bagman on my roster. More balance would equivocate to more characters played, it seems this is the biggest problem for not having characters played in PVP.

Heroic events only certain characters are playable. Other PVE events have buffed characters which are by far the best playables. The highest point nodes are almost always the essentials, which require a specific characters. It seems these events themselves are limiting which characters will see play in PVE.

Without prologue healing on a 2* roster, I would have maybe a quarter of the score in any given PVE event, where it is tough to crack the top 100. Which means I would never get any 3* covers. Which means I could never advance in this game. PVP is similar--say I run three different rosters in three matches. That gets maybe 80 points? Of course, two of those rosters are weak, so that means -50 points right away. And now all the rosters are beat up, no more playing for eight or so hours. I don't see how I'll ever hit 300 points again, which means I'll never get any 3* covers, which means I can never advance in this game.

Except everyone will be on the same playing field, right? Yeah, right. As mentioned several times, any whales/cheaters won't be held down by this change.

I'll hold final judgement until I see implementation. Then we'll see if this works well for players (enjoyment of game), or for developers (money), or both. At that time I'm sure many people will decide if it is worth it to continue playing or not.

Unknown

malfunkshen wrote:

If cheating really is as wide spread as it seems, for me it seems it is, this will really destroy legit players. I did a search for MPQ steam hacks, and a bunch came up in a few minutes; it's not hard to find. Until they can stop cheating, I'd be VERY cautious about spending money.

The problem I find with MPQ though is that the forums are for hardcore players. At MPQs core, it's a casual game. The majority of people play it casually, so if they screw over the veterans and everyone on this forum, they don't care because they still have a 4 out of 5 star rating on all the stores which means they still get a huge amount of people joining. Heck, every so often I google reviews on MPQ and it's highly rated because people play it for maybe a couple of hours and say, "wow, this is great", and that's where it ends. The hardcore games, like the ones on this site, may only make up for 25% max of the population, and that's nothing.

And herein lies the problem. Many voicing their concern on here are veterans who are past the 2* -> 3* stage. This nerf doesn't really affect them, as they likely don't use Spidey or OBW much anymore. No, this nerf really screws over the casual. The situation will worsen with each new 3* release.

Beginners, non-forumgoers, mid-tier players. If this part of the playerbase is the wildlings, then True Healing is the Wall. And each new 3* is a White Walker.

Unknown

I think the simplest fix for D3 here is:

1 - Cancel True Healing Initiative.

2 - Delete all posts relevant to true healing.

3 - Create a plaque on the developer wall in the lunch room at D3 that list it as the worst idea for 2014.

4 - Begin putting more time into fixing the useless characters.

5 - Profit (In a less greedy fashion).

Unknown

malfunkshen wrote:

The hardcore gamers, like the ones on this site, may only make up for 25% max of the population, and that's nothing.

Much less, actually. There are 6494 registered users on this site. Last time we were able to see numbers (S1 Shield), there were over 100,000 players.

Unknown

Grenosh wrote:

I think the simplest fix for D3 here is:

1 - Cancel True Healing Initiative.

2 - Delete all posts relevant to true healing.

3 - Create a plaque on the developer wall in the lunch room at D3 that list it as the worst idea for 2014.

4 - Begin putting more time into fixing the useless characters.

5 - Profit (In a less greedy fashion).

If they fix the old characters, you will not need to buy covers for the new characters that are vast improvements over the old...