True Healing Discussion (Live 6/25)

MajinDavid

So basically what this is doing is making my hulk, hood team a little more scary on defense?

Unknown

Newsflash: Prologue healing is not gone... now only Patch/Laken do it effectively.. (why none of the other wolvies... beats me! you'd if one others would as well). They didn't consider that Patch/wolvies already have double healing rate compared to other chars. And could easily use the temp heal mechanic like everyone else.


Why do people feel the need to prologue heal constantly... simple the matching system. People regularly get matched up against the 141 'whales'. And I think it's intentional... make the big spenders feel good by constantly feeding them grist for the bully mill. God forbid they actually have to play against other guys with maxed out rosters as well for their awards.

It's only going to make the people 'skip matching' problem even worse... people will skip match beat up on the transitioning players even more rather than risk having their stars get benched for a few hours (or health packed). For those running patch/laken... a quick run to PvE will heal them up right quick with a few turns of smashing low level goons... no need to collect 3 or 4 matches worth of pesky yellows or blues to spot off a heal even. So simply doing the 2* starting newbies works. (used to do this with 2* wolvie... he'd go down... 10min later he's awake with 1 HP hop into the very first or second PvE mission... 3 or 4 yellow matches later he's half health with only a hour or so to go on the heal. Or only a single OBW heal away from effectiveness).


The problem is this... there is not enough healers to support diversity. If they had 2 healers in the 2* bracket, and 2 in the 3* USING DIFFERENT COLORS! You'd see a good bit more diversity. I thought she-hulk was a great addition... went nuts playing the event for her. Then was told by an alliance member about this travesty. I figured she would open up a ton of alternate builds... but she's now stillborn.


Healers are the only viable way to play a 'long ball'.. control game. You either need to get good defensive tiles up and a strong heal to spike health back up after skill uses... or you need to deny them the ability to use their nukes in the first place (spidey does the former and the latter... blue stun-buys time to off the offender before he can nuke you & protect tiles... OBW relies entirely on the denial game.. uhoh thor just got 14 green.... pow there goes 3 or 4 of them back into my kitty).

For everyone in the 1* going to 2* brackets... OBW is the only game in town.

For everyone who started 'late' (such as with the steam release)... spidey is a pipe dream. Why? They've kept adding more chars... kept featuring other chars. For the last 'spidey' event it was sickening... it was the first time I've seen spiderman covers offered as rewards since the game released on steam. (my spidey til this point only has 2 yellow and 1 purple... I couldn't get a blue drop to save his life... in event I win one blue'. Go into event and see nothing except people with 141 up to 212 featured... spideys...

With every new char the chance of getting the required covers to make a viable 3* healer went down... so the game devolved into a have & have nots. (with only lucky random drops).


Quite frankly... if they wanted to fix the game and keep players playing and paying. They would do much better to address the matching system. I only have a single 141 w/ 13 non-optimal covers... yet I keep seeing nothing except 212/141/141 squads. The only thing which enabled me with an understrength squad to earn any points at all in PvP was to risk beating high point teams for 40-50 points each.. prologue heal the battered and beaten suckers who pulled it off. Then try again... normally in the time it took to prologue heal get mauled by 1to3 other players taking a large chunk out of whatever hard run points I earned.


Anyhow... think it's time to take a long break from the game. Show up daily to see if anything is changed (hey a full day to have guys heal can't hurt, & maybe a daily reward if that doesn't get nixed) and poke my head in. See if whoever came up with this change is *FIRED*... employment terminated... and things changed for the better. Seriously whoever came up with the change will have cost MPQ far more customer base in this one move than anything else.

MisanOne

IceIX wrote:

we don't buff or nerf an ability because we want it to bring in revenue. We do it because we believe it will be in the best long term benefit for the game and for the users.

I'm honestly curious as to how severely limiting players game time is beneficial? How could having people play less benefit the game?
This leads only to having customers seek out other games to occupy their time.. which I and, i'm assuming, many more customers will do.

A significant gameplay mechanic was changed during an active event which was extremely poor in timing and judgement. It is my understanding the mechanic was changed due to the developers being unhappy with how customers were utilizing the healing mechanics and limited variety in rosters. Many viable alternatives could have been sought out to rectify the lack of variety.. adding an incentive to using different characters each round could have been one. Separating prologue healing from versus could have been another solution.

I've spent over 560 hours playing Marvel Puzzle Quest and I enjoyed it immensely until the recent change. Due to the limiting effect on play time the recent changes have brought about I doubt I will continue playing as I prefer to play a few hours at a time rather than 30-40 minute blocks every few hours.

I sincerely hope that in the near future the recent changes to healing are rolled back and a viable alternative is found.

Phaserhawk

So downvote me if you want, I think the long haul of this is going to be beneficial, but the implementation was poor. I'm going to look at this with 100% logic and nothing else.

Take away, purchases, health packs etc, MMR scores, everything lets just assume the only way to get things is to play. In fact take away PvP, it's all PvE Prolgue stuff. Those who play more in theory get more ISO to level up but short of that everyone's on equal footing. Okay, so now we implement the new healing. Who has the advantage in this situation?

Well in short no one the player who has the most characters at the highest levels because they just have a deeper bench to play the prolgue. In this scenario the only thing that seperates players is their time devoation and a little luck. I could easily play in this enviornment and i think most people would agree that only the player limits their potential.

Now lets add things to this enviornment.

Health Packs. Well, that doesn't change much, it just lets you play a bit longer, or recover from a bad match. People who have the most developed rosters still can play longer and have an advantage because they can rotate champs before needing the packs, but that's because they have been playing longer. I'm cool.

Boosts. Well, that just makes the games go faster, we all have access to it, in this situation, deeper roster or not, it's about luck on how many you get, so no advantage. We are cool.

PvE. Problems begin to arise. Veterans of the game have a clear advantage, due to their higher rosters they will be able to completly keep newer players in dark on covers, in addition grinders and bot programers can dominate these enviornments for even more advantages, this time our little world would require a fix.

Rubberbanding and scaling. While we all hate it, this is necessary and with tweaks and fixes it controls the problems. This brings into line all the grinders, programers and veterans closer to the underdeveoped guys and we get a more competitive enviornment. Okay while never perfect it makes sense.

PvP. Same with PvE others will have an initial advantage that locks newer players out. People that can play longer and more will get more points, making catching them impossible. This would require a fix

MMR and point Scaling. This in theory does what rubberbanding and scaling does in PvE, it asigns me a ranking based on an ever changing algorithm. annoying, frustrating, but unless you want a pure Prologue agains the computer than play Candy Crush because its hard to find another solution.

So there is a pretty decent game. There are holes to be sure, MMR tanking, PvE scaling which are hard to balance, but as we know from the painful to pleasurable, they do change these trying to find the optimum.

So where does the game begin to break? Purchases. But what kind of purchases?

Purchasing ISO or Covers, it just accelerates him or her to veteran status faster, okay if someone wants to pay to get to the same end point faster than someone else they should, I'm cool.

Purchasing Boosts. Um now we have some issues, because if I can't afford to purchase as many boosts as you scaling can't factor in that as fast. However, perhaps that just accelerates your MMR ranking past your deck so while you do well in one tourney you might not do as well in the next if you don't keep purchasing. Unsure about this but I can live with it if that ends up being the result.

Purchasing Health Packs. woah, hang on. So now not only do you have a deeper roster, but purchasing these doesnt' accelerate your wins and thus affect your MMR. YOu just get to play for longer due to your cash and push longer than anyone else, without fear of increased difficulty. I can push more in PvE because I can heal. So the only recourse a non-paying player has is none.

Health Pack purchases are bad for the game. It circumvents all the checks and balances the Devs put into the game to keep it balanced. Prologue healing or healing in mathes allowed the less finiancially well off player to stay competive. So what to do?

D3 if you value your player base and that this is not about money is to remove Health Pack purchases. If you do this, then you have my utmost respect. If you don't, then you officially prove to everyone that all the claims to balance are false when you allow a mechanic that circumvents all the work you do.

Shields also fall into the same category as health packs, in that in destroys the balance. I only hope they realize they are their own worst enemies. Work to create a balanced game, but unbalance it by allowing purchases.

Unknown

The only thing I'm upset about is that I had my obw at Lvl 30 and I maxed her out all the way to 85 and I didn't understand what they did with healing so I leveled her up and now she is somewhat useless I wish they would have explained it more you know before I did that 61000 something ISO 8

Pylgrim

Is IceX reading all this? Is it worth it to post our fair grievance with this, or is this going to be set in stone?

In case someone is listening...

I'm not a prologue-healer. I agree it is a boring and tedious alternative to health packs and when it has got to the point where I couldn't continue without prologue healing, I take it as a cue to take a break. That's fine. But I managed to get to that point after putting in a fair amount of effort, half an hour at least. How did I do that? By recovering a bit of HP with OBW right before the battle ended, so I could risk playing the next with my characters at 70% or so of their life (counting on being able to make an early healing as well.) That allowed me to use health packs only every 3 or 4 battles, and only 1-2 each time. New version? Well since a couple months ago I'm always battling 212/141/141 teams of the strongest characters in spite of having a single 141, one 120 and no other character above 85 and since tanking is no longer working, I'm already resigned to this being the case forever. The difference is that now, after each match, my characters will be left with a fraction of HP. That means 2-3 health packs PER MATCH. I can only play TWO matches before running out of them, and then wait unless I spend 200 HP for other measly 2 matches.

How are we supposed to be competitive like this? Do you truly expect us to spend 10-20 dollars per day in health packs? How else I'm supposed to finish in top places which is the only reasonable way of ever build a team that will not rely so much in healing? "Ah, but what you are supposed to do is use another team of 3 after your favourite is downed! Stop being so reliant in the same three characters!" you say. The only way I can imagine you guys coming with such ridiculous statement is that you playtest with a full roster of fully levelled up characters and believe that with almost 40 characters, we can swap around over 10 teams. The reality is that after my 141/120/85 team barely managed to defeat that 212/141/141 team and was left with a 5% of their hp, my next best team, 85/85/70, has NO chance of scratching the next 212/141/141 team.

This is no speculation, I already had the chance to experience it in the GSBW event and it's been extremely frustrating. First game: I won but got Sniper Rifle'd. Had to spend 3 health packs. Second game: I won but got Rage of the Panther + Magnetic Translocation'd and was left with one character standing at 300 life. Had to spend 3 health pa... wait I only have 2 left... I had to play my third game using one subpar character. I lost. I cannot play anymore unless I pay you $2.99 for 200 hp. I bought 3000 hp just the past week, I simple cannot afford spending more money in this for a while, so I'll have to wait for hours before being able to play... other two matches. At the end of the day, I'll have collected around 100 points. Can you tell I'm having fun already?

This is an extremely short-sighted change as it hits squarely the people trying to move from 2* to 3*. People with 3* teams not only have fully levelled characters that can end fights quicker, before taking much damage, but also can swap with other 141's once they're eventually downed. Beginners, are not yet in MMR hell seeing deathly opponents every single match. Paradoxically, the 2-to-3 players are the lifeblood of the game! Those at the top are very likely to drop, as they have achieved everything and there's not much challenge left in the game. Beginners might get bored or sidetracked by other games. It is us who are already hooked up and who have clear goals to achieve, who play every day, who spend money acquiring covers or shielding up. I, for first time in the months I've been playing feel like quitting and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Unknown

Phaserhawk wrote:

... I think the long haul of this is going to be beneficial ... I'm going to look at this with 100% logic and nothing else.

You wrote a big deal of text but I don't see what supports the statement. It will be beneficial to server load by cutting player base and play by much, also probably spread out play more evenly over time.

It will benefit a subset of players: those having the more broken characters already evolved. Also those who play in small bursts every few hours.

I don't see the benefit to anyone else not fitting Prokrustes' bed.

Okay it will be beneficial to those leaving now due to this change and would drag on with diminishing fun otherwise.

Unknown

Ok, so I think I'm up to speed on this health nerf, and two things immediately spring to mind:

1. Everyone who can, will start using Lazy Daken and Patch teams. Those who can't are screwed... Diversity is out the window!

2. Instead of wasting time prologue healing, everyone will waste considerably more time tanking! This is so that we will face easier opponents, and as a result are less likely to lose valuable health. So, this in fact means that if we want to compete in the pvp events, we will have to waste a hell of a lot more of our time with soul destroying endless tanking!

Two of the reasons stated for making this change were A. Save our time, and B. Encourage diversity. I'm not sure they have thought this through...

One thing I will add, that may appease the masses, is why not increase the number of free regenerative health packs a little, and chuck in a 3 health pack bundle as a 500 point progression reward or something like that? Or even better, as others have suggested, restore surviving characters health to full after every match? That way you are more likely to take on a tough opponent if you think you can come out unscathed. This will reduce the necessity to tank, good for us, and stop people using "true healers" all the time, good for diversity. The game will be so much more enjoyable to play if they did this. There is one downside however... D3 will make no money on health packs...

spccrain

Basically the people still in the 2* transition period who rely heavily on OBW to climb the leaderboards are going to be hit the hardest. Those of us with Patch/Daken aren't really going to be affected except we may see a few less OBW/Thor or Ares combos as we climb. I don't understand the point of all this. They say it's to diversify the rosters but now everyone is just going to play the quick healers or P/D. Basically all that was accomplished is the characters being overplayed have been changed so mission failed.

Unknown

I feel this change will bring tanking from a luxury for 2* players to an absolute necessity to compete at all

Unknown

BIGTOE wrote:

One thing I will add, that may appease the masses, is why not increase the number of free regenerative health packs a little, and chuck in a 3 health pack bundle as a 500 point progression reward or something like that?

Now for that I'm pretty sure WILL happen, health packs will be added left and right to progression as happened with HP boosts after the change.

With some luck they will also be one of regular node prize on pve. And might even be dropped from standard or heroic tokens. (Those who would like that may consider a post in suggestions group for attention).

Unknown

Pjoe0211 wrote:

I feel this change will bring tanking from a luxury for 2* players to an absolute necessity to compete at all

And as soon as it will take over a noticable amount of play will get hosed by devs under the hood.

SnakesArrows

Been viewing forum for several months, but first post. Thank you all for the good advice in the game. I have found many good tips, tricks and ideas on character builds.

I read much of this thread, but missed the last ten pages or so. First i believe that the true healing change overall is a mistake. I am as guilty as anyone of running 98% Thor/ares and OBW and i was tired of fighting the same. However, in my opinion the game has far more important problems that should have been addressed. Further, the removal of options should be a last resort to a perceived problem (carrot instead of a stick). If the story healing was really a problem there are better solutions (many of them found in the prior 49 pages of this thread!). I also believe this was mostly a money grab and not a concern about game play. This is evidenced by making this change just after their "sale" over the weekend and the rush to get the change in place. I could go on how in my opinion it is not primarily about health pack sales, but really about sales of roster spots, additional shields and even ISO purchases, but that really does not matter.

If the change must take place i would suggest the following: (i apologize if this has been suggested, but this thread is long!). If they wish to increase diversity add some carrot to the stick they hit us with. Have a post fight healing system that if you win a fight with a character for the first time in a day (or whatever X time period is set) you heal up to 20% of your max health (so if have 5000 health max and take 2500 damage in the fight you would heal to 3500 before the next fight) . The second fight of the day with the same character you would heal 15% of max health. The third 10%. This would allow people longer play than the current "true health" system, but still not allow the perceived problems of story healing by OBW and Spiderman. I would also suggest that this 20% first time use be per mission type. So someone could use Hulk in a PVP event and get the 20% heal the first time. Then go play a concurrent PVE event and after the first successful battle in that node they would heal upto 20% of the max health there also. I would of course prefer they keep the increased health regen rates in addition to this heal system.

Just my two cents.

mhorham

First of all I would like to think that dp3's intentions are honorable with their talk of wanting players to start using their full rosters in different combinations, but let's face it the bottom line is that there will be more need for people to purchase med packs instead of using the healing abilities of certain characters to restore their health. This is probably the real reason. While I am not adverse to dp3 making a buck(I've made in game purchases myself) it seems the considerable investment that people made in these characters to take advantage of true healing has been urinated down the drain by this callous decision. This decision has effectively neutered the most popular hero in the marvel universe, and essentially rendered the black widow as an annoyance rather than the tactical threat she represented. If dp3 is going to stick to its guns on this change I would like to make two recommendations to make this more palatable. First give these characters an offensive power to make them at least usable, and second change the cost of med packs so that they are purchasable using iso 8 instead of precious hero points which people use for covers, and alliance and personal roster spots.

yogi_

I wonder if the devs are just sitting here scanning over these pages and going, "Yeah, it kinda sucks for them, but we'll just let this one ride out, they'll stop talking about it eventually. At the end of the day, it's our game".

Also the main screen now says Hulk and Spider get double healing, notes on here say more. Did that change?

So... double healing for 2 out of 40 something characters, why bother at all. Is there any planning in this?

And devs, 50 pages of posts should give you an indication that something is up and there are bigger issues with the game than just a half-attempt to get rid of prologue healing.

abmoraz

(cross posted to the correct thread)

I put $20** into the game last week for hero points that I'll no longer need after this god awful "We didn't actually think our changes through and they don't actually effect the issues we identified" TrueHealing change. I bought the HP to open up additional roster slots, but that's not gonna be an issue any more since I can no longer grind to get the reward covers. Any chance of a refund?

I have 41 unique characters: Doesn't matter. 5 are level 85, another 5 between 50 and 84, 6 more from 40-49. The rest I don't have the ISO-8 or covers to raise. Besides, You only let me use 8 of them for the Juggernaut event and the PvP events only let you choose 2.
Healing is boring: yes it is. Grinding is boring in any RPG game, but it is a necessary part, or else everyone who starts is at the same level as people who spent months playing and that is less fair.
Ares/Juggernaut are now OP: want to win PvP? Just make a team with those 2 on it. Their powers are so cheap and hit hard enough that you'll get skipped everytime because no one wants to wait an hour to heal 3000 HP. And since the damage they take when the computer is using them on your behalf, they are always at full health, so they can headbutt and sunder indefinitely.
Spider-man, Black Widow, and the Jungle board are now pointless characters/levels: OBW's aggressive recon still has some merit, but the other 2 are like a urinal at an Indigo Girls concert: never gonna get used. The jungle board used to be worth it if you could take the 100 damage for the AP, then heal it back. Now you can't heal it. You have to wait 10-15 minutes to get it back.

To highlight exactly how attrocious this is: Let's look at my playing yesterday vs today:

Tuesday (before work): played 6 Juggernaut stages (top 10 rank when done), about 12 PvP/lightning round (elapsed time: 1hr)
Wed: About the same (more juggernaut, less pvp, but same # battles) (1hr) (#1 rank when done)

Tues (during lunch): played 8 juggernaut stages (#2 rank when finished), 4-5 Pvp (Human Torch event to get top 50), 2 prologue heals (1hr)
Wed: (TrueHealing implemented) 3 Juggernaut stages (2 were losses), 5 pvp. All my characters over lvl 40 were dead or so low it wasn't worth putting them in (20 minutes) (#40 rank)

Tues (after work): do 10 juggernaut runs (#1 rank), handful of lightning rounds (1.5hrs)
Wed: 4 juggernaut stages (used 5 health packs, still 2 losses), 2 pvp, rage quit in frustration. Sit around for 2.5hrs while characters heal, try another juggernaut, get a bad board, die, sit 2.5hrs again, (#100 rank)

Tues (before bed): do 10-12 juggernaut runs (#1 ranking again), a few lightning rounds for ISO (1.5hrs)
Wed: try to rush at the end (use 6 more health packs). get 2 boards cleared, die on 2 more. Final ranking: 140. No She-hulk cards. I get a **** M.Hawkeye that I already have maxxed.

Totals:
Yesterday: did roughly 75 battles. Actively played for about 4 hours. Saw real progress. Enjoyed the game.
Today: did roughly half as many battles, actively played for about 2.5hrs. Spent 1.5hrs watching health bars tick up. Raged several times. My dog even got scared I was yelling and swearing in anger so much.

All this TrueHealing is doing is making it so that those of us who aren't at the top and don't have a full collection of level 141 and above cards can't play competatively, enjoyably, or improve. The time I used to spend playing and enjoying the game is now spent watching my top 10 to 15 heroes' lives tick up 1 hp at a time waiting for them to heal. If you thought grinding and heal runs were boring, I can't imagine why you think watching health bars tick up at 10hp per minute is exciting. At least grinding and prologue healing is actually PLAYING, not sitting around watching paint dry. You just effectively eliminated the middle class. Those that were willing to work hard at the game. The gap between the top players and those in the middle just widened immensly.

**I've put $70 total into the game. That's more than I've spent in any android app ever. Only asking for the $20 I put in right before you changed the rules on me. I really liked the grinding and collecting aspect. You've essentially killed that. It was pokemon, but for comic book nerds. Until today, I was missing 2 covers (Nick Fury & ***Daken). After this fiasco trying to get she-hulk, I'm not sure if I'm gonna play any more. I've already told my alliance (all friends in real life), to go ahead and boot me for now if they want an active player.

Nightglider1

I still don't understand tanking, so I'm not sure whether I should be doing it or not.

renfox

I'm with Abmoraz in experience. Felt cheated on She-hulk contest. I put a lot of time into it and ended up getting screwed on that one; some warning would have been nice. Like a five day lead. So far the game meta is totally different and enjoyable in some respects. Some characters are much more valuable now, others not as much, but in general I started dumping exp into all my roster and diversifying to use my whole roster. This allows for more play time and more variety in teams. Ranking seems to have stabalazed a bit from the changes. It will be interesting to see how contests go in the near future. I've spent money on roster slots but I'm not willing to pay for healing so I might end up playing a lot less (and spending a lot less) with these changes. I love the game, but I guess this change is forcing me to spend more time in the real world, which is a good thing. Not sure if that's good for business on their end tho.

killerkoala

are they going to nerf lazy daken and patch prologue healing, matching colors until they are full healed and get back to pvp?????

awood227

I agree with the point of having them cost ISO, but I have a bigger issue with the whole thing. First of all they announce the details of this AFTER a huge sale on HP and ISO, which I know they made a boatload of $$ on. Secondly, they are almost always running a PVP and PVE event and then throw in the Lightning Rounds too, some of which have the same buffed characters. The only way to be competitive in both or all three is to buy Health Packs. I would rarely prologue heal if it wasn't the last couple of hours of a tourney or it wasn't for required heroes in PVE and PVP.

Does anyone know how long it takes for a 141 character who is downed to fully reheal? IIRC, my lvl 100 punisher took roughly 8 hours before. If they are going to stand by this nonsense, and it seems like they are, they should go to independant health rates for characters. For example, I can loose my Punisher in the featured PVP, but then immediately go play with him in the LRs and if he gets downed there, I can still use him in PVE and he heals for each one based on the damage/downed time. There are so many viable solutions, but they opted for the cash grab.