Seriously IceIX ?

Unknown

To mods : please stick this thread.

IceIx, there are so many contradictions in what you say I would like you to explain yourself about some decisions. I now feel insulted by your recent announcements, and you are taking the whole community for a fool.

Preamble : my roster is maxed except for X-Farce, so one can consider my situation to be the "best as can be" so I should know what I am talking about, right ? For the sake of decency, I will not disclose here how much I put on MPQ, just check my PlayStore account and you'll be able to calculate how many devs salary I could finance with that.

Please talk to me as if I had brains and avoid all kind of marketing stupidity. It does not work on me, I'm a strategic marketing manager.

1) Why are you unable to make this app a "subscription based" app (if people wish to), so that you can get your $1/day and stop screwing our playing experience ?
2) Do you really know how much a complete roster cost ? I did the math for you : $12,150. Do you HONESTLY think MPQ, at this stage is worth that ? Don't tell me one good player can earn ISO and covers. Even the best F2P don't have half of the roster maxed even if they are veterans and in Top Alliances. Your True Healing explanation tells us we should have a complete roster so as to make a better experience. Incomplete/unlevelled characters are just **** when scaling or MMR are too high. You should know that since you play your own game (not much though).
3) Tell me about your view of the player's experience so as to explain your "true healing" update. Even if I have a full roster, I still have to buy Health Packs because MMR or Scaling are hell for me. Is this normal to you ?
4) Please be honest : considering the above statements : HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK I SHOULD PAY TO PLAY MPQ AS MUCH AS I WANT WITHOUT PAYING MORE THAN WHAT I ALREADY DID ? Because, as for now, it's far more than $1/day.
5) What's the fair figure you think would be enough to finance this game so that we can JUST enjoy playing it without having constant second thought you just want to milk us and don't care about the rest ?

Thank you for your time. I'm sure we are all interested to know your point of view.

Unknown

I agree.

I'm at $1.42 per day on this game. I have never in my life spent this much on a game. And I regret it most of the time. I have only ever bought 1 cover. All the rest of my HP was poured into roster slots and shields. And a few boost until I realized just how bad of an investment they really were.

thedarkphoenix

Tagged hopefully for a realistic response.

HailMary

arktos1971 wrote:

To mods : please stick this thread.

IceIx, there are so many contradictions in what you say I would like you to explain yourself about some decisions. I now feel insulted by your recent announcements, and you are taking the whole community for a fool.

Preamble : my roster is maxed except for X-Farce, so one can consider my situation to be the "best as can be" so I should know what I am talking about, right ? For the sake of decency, I will not disclose here how much I put on MPQ, just check my PlayStore account and you'll be able to calculate how many devs salary I could finance with that.

Please talk to me as if I had brains and avoid all kind of marketing stupidity. It does not work on me, I'm a strategic marketing manager.

You do realize that "Hey Ice, f--- you, you f---er, and by the way, f--- you harder. Oh, and can you nicely explain things to me personally, you ****?" is probably not a good way to solicit an actual response, right? As an extremely important and inordinately intelligent strategic marketing manager, surely you must realize this simple fact of human interaction.

I mean, rant if you want (many others do), but don't pretend that you actually want any serious responses from Ice or anyone else who matters.

arktos1971 wrote:

2) Do you really know how much a complete roster cost ? I did the math for you : $12,150. Do you HONESTLY think MPQ, at this stage is worth that ? Don't tell me one good player can earn ISO and covers. Even the best F2P don't have half of the roster maxed even if they are veterans and in Top Alliances. Your True Healing explanation tells us we should have a complete roster so as to make a better experience. Incomplete/unlevelled characters are just **** when scaling or MMR are too high. You should know that since you play your own game (not much though).

Underleveled characters can get you quite far. Even without X-men-style buddy-boosting, Twysta dominated LRs (and PVP in general) with a roster led by a half-dozen L100s back in the pre-Alliance days. Noob did the same with even weaker characters. Sure, MMR has changed since then, but not to the point where 3* "utter domination" has been downgraded to "just ****."

Also, my L75 Rogers does quite well in PVE. I have him at 3/5/5, and I have the Iso to max him, but I don't need to max him. I'm no fan of true healing, esp. since I regularly prologue-heal for PVE, but "have roster diversity" is not at all equivalent to "have a complete roster."

Your oft-repeated declaration that D3 should make it not-too-difficult for a player to max out every single character in existence is, ahem, strange.

arktos1971 wrote:

Thank you for your time. I'm sure we are all interested to know your point of view.

Hahaha, that's a cute throwaway line.

Unknown

Hail : If it is not necessary/helpful/cool/(whatever word you choose here) to max a 3* character and if you can enjoy playing them at much lower levels, why on earth do 3* characters exist ?

As an extremely important and inordinately intelligent free to play player I'm sure you will have a good answer to this. (this being said with humour and no sarcasm).

Unknown

How can you be a marketing manager and not understand the decisions the developers are making? I mean, these questions are easily answered. Here, I'll pretend to be IceIX.

1) There is no subscription because games like these are designed appeal to a wide player base. With a subscription service, You would alienate whales that spend a lot and free to play players that might put money in after playing a long time.

2) No one thinks it is worth it to spend all that cash to max out your roster. If it were easy/cheap to max out your roster everyone would stop playing. It's that carrot-on-a-stick mentality.

3) As posted by Nemek, this change is a net benefit because prologue healing is a boring mechanic that if endorsed by the game would probably drive away players for being grindy.

4) Play however much you want, no one is telling you how much to play. Personally I like the changes that make me feel like I need to play less but that is just my opinion.

5) There is no fair figure. This is like any other cell phone game with high priced ingame currency - they are driven by money. I mean, it's a match 3 game for Chrissakes, are you expecting "artistic integrity" and "depth"?

At the end of the day it's cool to collect cards of x-men and **** and it's fun to play while pooping. Why put money into something as simple as that?

HailMary

arktos1971 wrote:

Hail : If it is not necessary/helpful/cool/(whatever word you choose here) to max a 3* character and if you can enjoy playing them at much lower levels, why on earth do 3* characters exist ?

I choose "necessary," and there's no sane debate about that, noting the top-end players I mentioned above.

The question itself is a non sequitur. 3* characters exist because they are the next/last major progression/collection phase beyond 2* characters. Their existence is not contingent upon making it necessary to max out all of them, just as the existence of 2*s is not contingent upon making players max out Moonstone, MHawkeye, and Bagman.

Just for fun, I'm gonna answer a sensible variation on your question: can under-leveled 3*s be perfectly viable, or even optimal? Yes and yes. Some players intentionally under-level Hood so that beefy hitters can tank colors for him, some keep IM40 at 5/5/2 to reduce his Recharge cost, and some under-level CMags for Patchneto (IIRC, to make Patch tank colors for CMags). There are even solid arguments for under-covering MBW at 2/5.

That said, I 141'd certain characters in order to maximize the health and damage of characters I often use (save for Punisher -- he barely gets any use, sigh), and because I'm too lazy to care about color-tanking synergy. Is it generally helpful to pump Iso into a character? Yes. Does that somehow mean that people absolutely should be able to collect a full fleet of 141s within a few months? No.

Unknown

Roster diversity is a design issue. In PvE I use all kinds of random teams just for fun. I can use Magneto (except where he can' be used) in all events and plow through everything but I don't have to. Of course in PvE you don't have to worry about losing half of your PvE points because some level 395 goons decided to secretly attack your Daredevil + Invisible Woman team that you used earlier. I'm more than comfortable with using my B-team in defeating even top tier teams in PvP. I don't do it because I don't want everyone else to pounce on me when that team shows up on everyone's queue, but this issue has nothing to do with healing or not, and even if characters are more balanced there is still going to be a 'top 5' team no matter what and there's obviously no incentive to ever let your opponents see anything weaker than that assuming you have a top team to field. It doesn't matter if my characters always healed to full or never healed. It wouldn't change the fact that I would never want anyone to see my weaker teams in PvP unless I want to lose a lot of points for no reason.

Unknown

[quote="mcheath"

Quote (..)

At the end of the day it's cool to collect cards of x-men and tinykitty and it's fun to play while pooping. Why put money into something as simple as that?[/quote]

I too think that Prologue Healing is boring, and so is tanking, I agree.

But True Healing does not affect the Prologue Healing only, it affects the whole game while "Life/Heal" has to be paid for.

If Health Packs account for only 5 % of the whole turnover, why is there a limit of 5 Heals at once ? Why is there a heal system at all ? Why do we have to pay for Heal/Life if that does not matter ?

Thank you for your question, I do understand why they are doing this, and everybody does.

As a Marketing Manager, I am paid to make money (and more money) and make the customers satisfied so that they return and are loyal. I'm not paid to milk the cow so I can kill the hen that lays the golden egg

Do you see any similar situation in MPQ ? I don't. I see people writing on the forum about why they leave while they loved the game so much. I never saw anything similar in the past.

Moreover, we've spent some days with nice improvements, people were getting confidence again in the game. We even had sales.

1 day after the end of the sales, we get the announcement of True Healing. What do you call that ? The word is too strong, I call that a stab in the back (or slap in the face).

The main thing is :

You can have people pay for life OR pay for the roster OR pay for the boosts OR pay to get shielded. BUT ALL OF THAT IS WAY TOO MUCH.

Now, we'll have more truckloads of people leaving, Alliances recruiting.

So, what's the next thing they will think about to make us pay/enjoy the game less.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Underleveled characters can get you quite far. Even without X-men-style buddy-boosting, Twysta dominated LRs (and PVP in general) with a roster led by a half-dozen L100s back in the pre-Alliance days. Noob did the same with even weaker characters. Sure, MMR has changed since then, but not to the point where 3* "utter domination" has been downgraded to "just ****."

I mostly agree with your post but not with this part. What was in the past stays in the past. Even during S1 I could see 1-2 people with 141 in top10, 3-4 tops. On intro of "shards" I had multi-141 owners down to at least 25th. Go dominate that with your pack of 100s. A ton of covers and ISO was issued in the time between and bracketing concentrated people. A 3x141 team is no deterrent for quite some time and if you just play naturally it will collect hits regularly unshielded.

Guess it gets a deal of skips but enough people will go for it. And if you defend with sub-141 it will be picked out first and act as attack magnet.

Most characters at L100 and missing 2-3 covers are pretty much in the "****" category play-wise, I found most of my characters not play worthy with 11 covers at 115 softcap. (individual exceptions apply). You really need to have 12 covers with the good build and 125ish levels to be content.

Sure it's still some 40-50k ISO to 141 and with all covers from there the improvement may be really minor. i myself only pushed patch, LT and BP all the way the others deliberately left under by various amount.

The full-playable diverse roster may "cost" considerably less than the 12k but probably still well over half of that figure that is exactly as insane as spending -- even 10% of it would be.

HailMary

pasa_ wrote:

I mostly agree with your post but not with this part. What was in the past stays in the past. Even during S1 I could see 1-2 people with 141 in top10, 3-4 tops. On intro of "shards" I had multi-141 owners down to at least 25th. Go dominate that with your pack of 100s. A ton of covers and ISO was issued in the time between and bracketing concentrated people. A 3x141 team is no deterrent for quite some time and if you just play naturally it will collect hits regularly unshielded.

Guess it gets a deal of skips but enough people will go for it. And if you defend with sub-141 it will be picked out first and act as attack magnet.

Most characters at L100 and missing 2-3 covers are pretty much in the "****" category play-wise, I found most of my characters not play worthy with 11 covers at 115 softcap. (individual exceptions apply). You really need to have 12 covers with the good build and 125ish levels to be content.

Fair enough. Sharding dramatically changed PVP for a lot of people. S1 was simply brutal, and while S2 was better, it was still harder than pre-sharding days. In S3, while no unmaxed 3* players have taken top 5 in my harder brackets, I've seen a few here and there in T10. So, the situation seems to be getting somewhat better.

Also, early in Season 1, my 3xL102 (or maybe L115 by that point?) team consistently got me T10 finishes.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

The full-playable diverse roster may "cost" considerably less than the 12k but probably still well over half of that figure that is exactly as insane as spending -- even 10% of it would be.

It's way more than half, believe me...

And I bought some covers when the Packs were character guaranteed.

Unknown

Any comment on this HM ?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10333&p=172979#p172979

Unknown

arktos1971 wrote:

Any comment on this HM ?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10333&p=172979#p172979

What's to comment on? Classic rage-quit.

Unknown

An ex Moderator here.

Do you think that is normal ?

Last week-end everybody seemed to be happy. The She-Hulk PvE was a good surprise also.

I maxed my last chars, and was saying to myself : that's cool, they understood how to make us happy.

And all of the sudden, here we go again with the downfall...

Unknown

Been a Mod has nothing to do with. It's the same with anyone else who quit the game, this game, ANY GAME. while it's not nice seeing people leave, although i do wish some would, it's a part of life. The game won't last forever. If you fall out of love with it, you move on to something new. D3 don't care that he has left, as long as they make money. THAT'S WHY YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE

HailMary

arktos1971 wrote:

Any comment on this HM ?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10333&p=172979#p172979

Emeryt being Emeryt.

MarvelMan

HailMary wrote:

Emeryt being Emeryt.

The terrible thing is that they gave him valid reason to be himself.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

HailMary wrote:

Emeryt being Emeryt.

The terrible thing is that they gave him valid reason to be himself.

Sure thing.

_RiO_

arktos1971 wrote:

And all of the sudden, here we go again with the downfall...

It's a classic strategy often referred to as "softening the blow".

Personally; I already dove for my hard hat when I became aware that the progression ladder was updated to reintegrate the old 50 HP reward as a split 2x 25HP reward. I've seen this particular pattern occur one too many times with this game.

Unknown

Of course. I just wanted to believe that they finally had good intentions.

I was wrong.