Obligatory Ragequit Rant

Unknown

I'm putting my phone down with the new patch. I was an avid healer, in and out of combat. I do it not to gain an advantage over players, I do it to keep playing. Sometimes to enjoy the joys of matching-3 with my favorite Marvel heroes, sometimes to reach that rare 3-star cover at the end of the progression rewards table. I did not use medikits often, I hoard them. The principle was that I did not like how D3P was releasing suicidal characters (self-damage, two-sided strikes, feeding enemies), so I try not to gain a reliance on them. I guess you can say I was nerfing myself. That and by the fact that I do not like competing in general, made the game very tedious. The progression rewards (where I compete with myself) give too little returns for the effort needed, it made more sense to just pay for that cover, but I will not be held hostage by the game.

That being said, there is more to be said but I would rather be constructive.

D3P, if you are reading this, this is what I think you can do to save the game

To make this work, you got to reconsider your business model or throw the current model out the window. I know you have made good money out of the game so far, but your heavy-handed ways to exploit your revenue streams have made the game tedious and not fun. I put in about $120 into the game, all within the end of 2013. That was because the game was fun. The heroes were fun. I paid the cash for Magneto Blue and Ragnarok Red. Yes, I could use them to win covers, but the mentality was that they were truly fun to play with. They felt powerful. They felt like real villians. Have you seen Ragnarok lately? He is a pale shadow in the burgeoning roster of 3-star characters.

Profit - First of all, you need to ask yourself, how much you want to earn from each player? Let's put all of that free-to-play nonsense aside. We all know you put a 500HP three roster slot paywall for the new players. That was devious of you. But honestly, how much will you be satisfied with, that anything else earned from the player is icing on the cake?

After you decided on that, can I suggest that you implement some nice support systems that can only be cash purchased, that will not intrude too much on the core of the game which is match-3 with Marvel powers? Off my mind, why not sell players something like Avengers Tower? Here's how it works. It can only be unlocked by cash (say $30, is that the minimum that we can say each player should pay?). It gives the player unlimited roster (and to be fair to older players, a refund in HP for each slot that they have already unlocked). Also, to sweeten the deal, and to ensure that you get that $30 from all but the most stubborn of players, let's just give each hero in the Avengers Tower 100 XP every day (because, you know, training and stuff). This will lead to more players having the great big roster you want them to have. To be honest, players are just buying roster space using their HP earnings, not cash that they paid for anyway.

Other cash only items I can suggest would be, something to remove the skip tax (like an enemy detection system, $10), a daily standard token generator (recruitment center, $10), weekly heroic token generator (advanced recruitment center?, $15), etc.

Key point - stop trying to make money off the core gameplay which leads to the game being less fun.

Once you figure out where your base revenue will be, you can tweak down some of the other costs ($12.50 for 1/13th of a hero is a ridiculous price for a game). Then with the lowering of costs of rosters, you would feel more liberated to reward players more for their time, instead of working for hours for that one or two covers.

Balancing - Also, roster diversity. Could I suggest you fix up existing characters first? Players have been complaining about unusable characters like Bagman and Moonstone for ages, and you have not gone around to do anything about it. Instead you introduce suicidal monsters that hurt themselves and would only get worse with the advent of True Healing. Characters like Doom, Loki and Ragnarok that once held their 3-star position with pride now pale in comparison with the newer batch of 3-star characters. I think you cannot argue roster diversity until you are proud of your existing roster.

Rest Bonus / Fatigue Penalty - Some brilliant players also suggested things like rest bonus and fatigue penalty. How is that not a thing? Give heroes a 1-level temporary bonus per day of unuse, and impose a 1-level penalty for every battle any hero goes into. These bonuses and penalties will not be imposed on the defense, otherwise it will be unfair to other attackers. But then since the existing roster is already skewed to a select few of workable characters, this idea must hold until the previous point about balancing characters actually happens.

Resting - With the introduction of True Healing, I am guessing it will not be leaving anytime soon. Your idea is that True Healing will remove the rampant use of a select few of characters because players will need to rest those characters some time. Let us just assume that True Healing will only create an environment where Patch and Daken competes continuously, can I suggest something that might placate existing players, and give an appearance that the motivation was not about selling more medikits? We know heroes get injured when they run away from combat. Could I suggest (surviving) heroes take a breather and regenerate 10% or 25% of their health when they win? This will not eliminate the risk, but mitigate the downtime created by the removal of True Healing. It will also cut your medikits sales, but it never was about the sales of medikits, right ? Oh, remember to only implement Resting for events, otherwise players will exploit it by going to Prologue Resting.

True PvE - Part of the reason I am putting down my phone is because I do not really enjoy competing. I like Marvel and I enjoy Match-3, but competing is tedious to me. Couldn't "tinykittying casuals" have a PvE option where we can grind a certain set of missions daily for a restricted set of rewards (that can even be random with a chance of a 3-star cover). Or something like a gauntlet like a series of Advance Simulator missions with increasing rewards. It gets tiring when even in PvE, the only way I can get rewarded is to be better, and put in more time (hence heal more) than other players. The progression rewards kind of suck.

Special Tokens - Lastly, can I suggest a greater range of tokens with limited set of heroes in the draw table? Something that essentially allow players to aim for certain heroes, without having a mad scramble for every available standard and heroic token out there (yeah, I know players will still grind every single token out there).

In summary, a lot of these idea might seems to hurt profitability, but just wanted to remind you guys at the end of this that the assumption is that you guys rethink your business model. Find a core revenue stream, and treat everything else as icing on the cake. Players will like the idea of your premium product, and some will favor your goodwill with a monthly contribution that they spend on covers, boost and (urgh) medikits.

Unknown

I like a lot of the ideas here, especially the cash for durable items. I believe IceIX mentioned he was interested in seeing more durables other than just roster slots.

If some of these really nice perks were only available through a cash purchase, that would slant the game more to P2W, but depending on the perk maybe not too much. If the price point is set correctly (i.e. fairly low for each item) you would easily get a lot of buy in. For example, health pack slots. Each additional slot costs something like $1.99. For about $20 you can increase your total available health packs to 15. This makes it feel like we get something for our money rather than one time use health packs which no one really wants to buy. People are more likely to spend on something that provides long term benefit.

A guaranteed 3* token every week/10 days or something would also be welcome. Sort of a boost to the resupply mechanism.

I'm sure if you were willing to engage the community on this, you would get all kinds of great ideas and feedback.

We really do want you to make money and be able to put food on the table for your families. If you are making money, that means support and new content for the game will likely continue and we all want that. Help us help you. Stop using your stick to bash us with things we don't want and tie a carrot to the end of it and make us excited to follow you along.

Unknown

I could get behind being able to buy more slots.

Health pack slots, Buff slots (it is easy to replenish them) for both storage, and use.

Add in another buff, true healing / healing multiplyer.

Gear atachments (can add in additional stat bonuses for the matching.)

etc...