It's getting so hard to be positive about MPQ

Nonce Equitaur 2

It's relentless.

The True Healing nerf no-one asked for.
The nerf to 1* Storm, unannounced. (turns out it was a mistake, and got reverted)
Changes used to be phrased as SHIELD announcements, but that's long gone.
Promised buffs to Hawkeye and X-force, still undelivered 6 months later.
Delivery of the overpowered Sentry, which allows 2-turn kills.
The Level Shift change that no-one asked for.
Spiderman's double nerf.
Endless repetitive rehash tournaments that are mandatory for all alliance members.
Server problems all the time.
Horrifying amounts of scaling to punish good play or good luck.
Devs missing from the forums for weeks at a time.
400+ spam messages a week from China.
Almost every new character gets nerfed while being launched.
Spreadsheet errors to justify character changes.
Change after change to support "roster diversity".
The rare improvements, such as faster healing, always seem to be tacked on afterthoughts.
Zero 3* covers yielded from 10packs
Getting a 6th 3* cover ability when none of your 3* characters are even playable
Lowering the probability of getting wanted 3* covers from packs and lobbing it off as "it makes them want it more because it's a gamble"
Roster slots need to be bought 3 at a time.
The comic book game used to have new stories once a month, now once every 3 months: Thick as Thieves (Jan 24), Iso-8 Brotherhood (Feb 25), .... Prodigal Sun (May 16).
Seven new characters brought in without a story, when it used to be that all new characters got a story to introduce them.
Either allowing or being oblivious to the shield-hopping exploit.
Lazy characters -- but you still need to keep the inferior versions for tournaments.
22 hard-to-get Rare characters, 19 that are viable only with all 3 covers, and 3 that should have a 3rd cover to make them viable.
Rubberbanding to make the last hour vital, and European end times so that hour is 5 AM.
Poor color distributions.

Meanwhile, the userbase is begging for buffs that never arrive. Even the buffs that are promised never arrive. Many of the justifications for various decisions use provably faulty logic, yet the faulty metrics are allowed to overrule any objection. Hundreds of worthwhile suggestions that would make the game better are ignored.

Can't there be a release to make the game better? To add buffs to all the characters that really need them? What is there left to be positive about when the game is degraded so arbitrarily without warning, despite promises that arbitrary unannounced nerfs would never happen again?

EDIT: Some new items D3 has used to hurt player positivity
They used this very post as an excuse to remove me as a moderator.
They've allowed the forums to fill with more spam.
They introduced Team-Ups, to which I dedicated a sonnet
A multiday bug where opponent teams attack at base level, trivializing the game.
Promises of more dev involvement, then they go silent for weeks.

EDIT 2 -- Wow, +100. Streisand effect has kicked in.

Unknown

Sticky! Sticky!

Unknown

and its a wonder why so many of us are leaving the game :-/

mjh

add to the list:

ZERO or ONE 3* covers yielded from 10packs
Getting your 6th 3* cover ability when none of your 3* characters are even playable
lowering the probability of getting wanted 3* covers from packs and lobbing it off as "it makes them want it more because it's a gamble"

Unknown

That's pretty much where I'm at with this game. That's why I chose to step down from alliance play (today) and just become a super-casual. I was going to try and gut it out for season 3, but it hardly seems worth it any more.

If you take a step back and actually look at the amount of (original) content that has been released in the past 2 months, it's pretty staggeringly sparse. Almost every 'update' has been non-user facing or small meta-game tweaks intended to put more and more users up against a paywall. The cover slot bundling being the most egregious.

Unknown

Absolutely no sign of anything resembling progress on these issues. There's one.

Unknown

I'm at 61 days played. In two months, I thought I had put together a decent roster that let me scrape out the odd high placement here or there to start building a collection of three star characters.

In the last few weeks, they've done nothing but **** on me for playing. Every week, I log in to discover they've found a novel way to **** on me. Next week is the soft serve double decker. It's becoming impossible to play without a roster of 3* characters that they're making harder and harder for new players like me to assemble.

And every time I get a heroic recuit token, it's Spooderbag.

Unknown

As I've said in other threads, it's quite unbelievable how many bad decisions are being made by Demiurge lately.
It boggles the mind that many poor, negative decisions are constantly made and approved by the management, which could prove to be ultimately detrimental to the game's longevity.

It's either incompetence or bastardry that Demiurge makes so many undocumented changes. So either they are lazy and stupid or they hope to escape scrutiny from what they must know will be unpopular decisions.

I don't think I've ever seen a game developer treat its playerbase with such open contempt.
They are quite literally driving the game into the ground while simultaneously flipping us the bird.

Kiamodo

I would also add to this list community problems: alliance hoppers who make recruiting very hard. Deep pockets and no strategy, uncivility to one another. To seems D3 changes are souring the group as a whole. Sad fact is they must be making enough money that customer service doesn't matter to them any more.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

The rare improvements, such as faster healing, always seem to be tacked on afterthoughts.

I hate to be the one to bring this up and destroy your opinion of the one and only improvement you could even think of, but smart money is that this is going away.

Think about it - Level shift means higher levels for 2/3/4* characters. Higher levels means more hit points. More hit points means longer wait times until fully healed. Yes the health per second rate will still be at the higher level, but I'll put money down that it's now going to take just as long to top off as it used to.

Unknown

Just looking at the Steam Charts. I would have to venture a guess that the Devs are starting to struggle financially. I think they are starting to have problems figuring out how to get a constant cash supply. That with the drop in players over the last 3-4 months is a very bad sign that the ship is sinking. That really is the only prism where the true healing change makes sense...their losing players and money, and they need to create new revenue streams. Its sad and unfortunate that I, being a new player, dropped cash on them. Really wish I hadn't. But, I think for me its time to move on to another game.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Expalphalog wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

The rare improvements, such as faster healing, always seem to be tacked on afterthoughts.

I hate to be the one to bring this up and destroy your opinion of the one and only improvement you could even think of, but smart money is that this is going away.

Think about it - Level shift means higher levels for 2/3/4* characters. Higher levels means more hit points. More hit points means longer wait times until fully healed. Yes the health per second rate will still be at the higher level, but I'll put money down that it's now going to take just as long to top off as it used to.

Hulk 9788 -> 11475. That's a 17% increase. His healing rate was improved by 500%, while other 3* got a 250% healing rate increase. This isn't all that comparable.

Unknown

Kiamodo wrote:

I would also add to this list community problems: alliance hoppers who make recruiting very hard. Deep pockets and no strategy, uncivility to one another. To seems D3 changes are souring the group as a whole. Sad fact is they must be making enough money that customer service doesn't matter to them any more.

We shouldn't pretend that their customer service ever mattered anyway. It was, and remains, god awful.

Unknown

Personally, the level change actually seems like a good idea. A shiny new 3 star character is much more of a load costing a new slot than an immediate reward, and it can continue to be that way for months if someone isn't paying gold for skills. Even 4 covers later, the character is still probably worse than decent one stars unless boosted. At 6 covers, my Hulk can just barely tank for mStorm. And it's what, like 9 or 10 covers on a character before they can overpower maxed 2 stars? That seems like a long time for a character to be in a larval state.

Yeah, it seems likely that the motivation for the change is to encourage people to buy more slots. OTOH, unlike some of the changes, this one seems to be increasing the value to players, instead of decreasing the value of alternatives to spending money. It also seems to align short and long term goals. Back when I first started playing, I sold a lot of covers I'd kind of like to have now, because I didn't have the resources to keep guys that wouldn't be able to help out soon.

But yeah, for every change like that or bumping up the availability of 3 star covers in pvp by a full bracket, there seem to be several changes that seem somewhat ill-conceived.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Huh .. the Storm change was apparently a bug instead of a nerf. She just got changed back to her Red costing 5 again. It was a mistake instead of malevolence, so I guess that makes me feel slightly better.

Unknown

NCSTL wrote:

Just looking at the Steam Charts. I would have to venture a guess that the Devs are starting to struggle financially. I think they are starting to have problems figuring out how to get a constant cash supply. That with the drop in players over the last 3-4 months is a very bad sign that the ship is sinking. That really is the only prism where the true healing change makes sense...their losing players and money, and they need to create new revenue streams. Its sad and unfortunate that I, being a new player, dropped cash on them. Really wish I hadn't. But, I think for me its time to move on to another game.

Steam may be suffering considerably, but I don't believe mobile is at all.

On the US Google Play store, MPQ has been ranking in the top 50 grossing apps (usually steadily hanging in the 30s) for at least the last several months. During the last sale, MPQ broke the top 30 briefly, and right now is in the low 40s (likely as the fallout from after the sale, as would be expected).

In any event, a ranking in the 40's for top grossing apps is NOT a sinking ship by any stretch of the imagination, especially with the lean operation Demiurge is running.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

It's relentless.

The True Healing nerf no-one asked for.
The nerf to 1* Storm, unannounced.
Changes used to be phrased as SHIELD announcements, but that's long gone.
Promised buffs to Hawkeye and X-force, still undelivered 6 months later.
Delivery of the overpowered Sentry, which allows 2-turn kills.
The Level Shift change that no-one asked for.
Spiderman's double nerf.
Endless repetitive rehash tournaments that are mandatory for all alliance members.
Server problems all the time.
Horrifying amounts of scaling to punish good play or good luck.
Devs missing from the forums for weeks at a time.
400+ spam messages a week from China.
Almost every new character gets nerfed while being launched.
Spreadsheet errors to justify character changes.
Change after change to support "roster diversity".
The rare improvements, such as faster healing, always seem to be tacked on afterthoughts.
Zero 3* covers yielded from 10packs
Getting a 6th 3* cover ability when none of your 3* characters are even playable
Lowering the probability of getting wanted 3* covers from packs and lobbing it off as "it makes them want it more because it's a gamble"
Roster slots need to be bought 3 at a time.
A comic book game with only 2 chapters released this year: Iso-8 Brotherhood (Feb 25) and Prodigal Sun (May 16).
Seven new characters brought in without a story, when it used to be that all new characters got a story to introduce them.
Either allowing or being oblivious to the shield-hopping exploit.
Lazy characters -- but you still need to keep the inferior versions for tournaments.
22 hard-to-get Rare characters, 19 that are viable only with all 3 covers, and 3 that should have a 3rd cover to make them viable.
Poor color distributions.

Meanwhile, the userbase is begging for buffs that never arrive. Even the buffs that are promised never arrive. Many of the justifications for various decisions use provably faulty logic, yet the faulty metrics are allowed to overrule any objection. Hundreds of worthwhile suggestions that would make the game better are ignored.

Can't there be a release to make the game better? To add buffs to all the characters that really need them? What is their left to be positive about when the game is degraded so arbitrarily without warning, despite promises that arbitrary unannounced nerfs would never happen again?

I'm positive that Demiurge/D3 sucks.

See how positive I am!

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Huh .. the Storm change was apparently a bug instead of a nerf. She just got changed back to her Red costing 5 again. It was a mistake instead of malevolence, so I guess that makes me feel slightly better.

I wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally tipped their hand to an upcoming change.

Unknown

Playing devil's advocate but... Forum posters are not always a representative sample of the player base. If you look at games like WoW or LoL... you'd swear those games didn't even exist anymore with how negative their feedback is... yet somehow.. they're juggernauts of the gaming industry.

NighteyesGrisu

am I strange if thes two are the ones that bother me most?

Changes used to be phrased as SHIELD announcements, but that's long gone.
Promised buffs to Hawkeye and X-force, still undelivered 6 months later.

DD-The-Mighty

The non Shield based (in character) announcements is one of the better things.
Were not agents, were players, and all it ever did was sound needlessly convoluted and cause more confusion as to what exactly half the verbiage meant. good riddance to it.

The rest? Spot F***king on.