Reasons I'm quiting

Unknown

Well it's been fun... or if not totally fun, at least fun to be frustrated with this game, but it's high time I quit. I've been on the verge of quitting for a long time.

At the start of the game, prologue was nearly impossible. The only character I had decent covers for was MBW, and unfortunately she can't take any damage without being insta-downed, which made it hard for me to win (in part because prologue rewards are calculated based on difficulty of the match so I got ISO 20 almost every time). I started playing PvE and PvP and started building my roster that way, returning to prologue as I was able to win matches. It was grueling, and I didn't enjoy the PvP format. I tend to be a offline single-player or offline co-op type player, and not someone who goes for MMO's. This really is the core problem with the game and why it's broken. Everything is a competition (not good for a casual game), but I'll get back to that. I finally started being able to win with my 2* / transitioning 3* roster, and then they instituted death brackets / sharding. This made it much more difficult to play PvE casually since it means you have to grind from the start of the event to win rewards (which should be an option for people who want to grind that much, not a requirement), and it made PvP a lot harder to win. I finally started filling out my 3* roster and being able to play casually again and they decided to muck things up yet again.

So maybe some people who've played from the start have managed to play the game and progress casually ( I'm reluctant to use the term win here because I think it's stupid for this game to make everything a competition, and think this is one of its core problems), but for me the course of the game has been a relentless grind interspersed with brief periods of feeling that I was actually making progress in the game, followed by D3 mucking everything up to make it a relentless grind again. Their customer service is friendly, but terrible, and the devs seem as interested in pissing off their player population as making the game enjoyable, but overall only seem to care about milking more money out of it.

The immediate things that have made me decide to quite are:
1) the greyed out PvP issue. During Category-5 it was an issue, but fixed itself. In Webslinger, I had the problem most of the tournament. I intentionally lost a match with a junk team since people said that would fix it and bring back nodes, but it didn't and resulted in losing 450+ points in about 5 minutes. I barely was able to place, and had to baby the game to get back to decent standings.
2) sharding, especially in PvE. It's not fun to join a PvE bracket and be thousands points behind and know there's no chance of catching up. In the past, this was a good method to be able to play casually and still progress, but no more with sharding.
3) True Healing - this looks to completely change the face of PvE and PvP. Also, it paves the way for Patch / Daken healing nerfs. No more being able to reliably win rounds in PvE, and no more of those fun easy to beat teams in PvP.

4) The core problem of the game (and this is why I'm quitting) has never been fixed, and they're eliminating all the band-aids. The core problem is that the game is a competition - every aspect of it. This means that players are encouraged to play to win instead of playing for challenge. It means always seeking weaker teams and maximizing ranking increase per time spent. It almost never means picking a harder match that you might find fun or challenging like it was in previous Puzzle Quest games.Tanking, healing, etc.. we band-aids that distracted from this fact. The only way to progress in this game is to regularly win, and the only way to regularly win is to avoid challenge. They keep making changes to make it harder to regularly win / progress. So yes, they're making the game more difficult, which in theory is good, but without fixing the core problem of its competitive nature, all these changes just make the game a waste of time. It means a lot more grind, a lot more having to schedule your day around MPQ to keep progressing / "winning" (which isn't really even that since you're playing AI's not real people), and generally less guarantee of being able to progress (win).

I've generally been in favor of tougher, more rewarding matches, but D3 never seems to actually opt for that. Instead they seem to always go for tougher, more grindy matches that make it hard for you to keep playing or progress with the use of health packs.

5) Finally, I recently bought some Hood covers, and rebuilt my OBW. I put a fair number of levels into them (literally just put 70 levels into my second OBW before this was announced). These characters are band-aid characters, like Spidey and to a degree CMags. They make the game playable. They don't make it fun because nothing makes relentless grind and having to play the game all the time fun. A casual game is dependent on being able to pick up and play, and put down and come back to later without feeling like you're missing out on anything. I was just starting to feel I could play the game this way. I was even considering buying some extra Hero Points (before the grey out PvP issues), but now I'm just quitting. I want difficult matches, like previous PQ games, but this only works if the game legit allows you to pick up and play instead of playing it like an MMO. If every match is difficult, and you have to win a ton in order to progress (placing in events), then it no longer becomes rewarding, it just becomes a colossal grind and time-sink.

So long story short, I've decided to move on from MPQ. Much love to my alliance Chaos League. They're all awesome folks and it's been fun chatting with you guys and earning rewards together, but this is the end of MPQ for me. I may still play a few matches occasionally when I'm bored, or feel that I want to play some match-3, but no more grinding from me just to progress, and no more money going to these devs.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR PEOPLE USING MY MPQ PLAYER TOOLS (in Tips & Guides section): I may still update roster tools occasionally, but I'll be making changes soon and some additional instructions to make the spreadsheets community-maintainable. So you won't be left in the lurch if you still want to use those.

Thanks again to my alliance, and for a lot of the awesome people here on the forums who bring a very positive vibe to this game, even D3 consistently seems to want to do everything in their power to shrink their kitties to microscopic levels.

Unknown

Sorry to see you go, your contributions will be missed. Can't argue against your reasoning either. Far thee well.

Der_Lex

Sorry to see you go as well, Happy. Thanks for all your contributions, and for being an awesome alliance-mate back in the day.

Unknown

Just a follow-up for you all. I haven't changed my mind about quitting, however I have updated my roster sheet tools now [in Tips & Guides] so it can be maintained by the MPQ community going forward. Also, She-Hulk's stats data has been added.