Healing Compromise [With D3 Q&A]

wymtime

Demiurge_Will wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

To add some constructivity, Will, could you please drop a line on Season4 -- when it starts or is it canceled for good?

Season 4 starts later this week. We're experimenting with some downtime between seasons where we can run more varied/experimental PvP events.

So will thanks for the update on Season 4. Any hints on what the experimental PVP events will be this week?

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

To add some constructivity, Will, could you please drop a line on Season4 -- when it starts or is it canceled for good?

Season 4 starts later this week. We're experimenting with some downtime between seasons where we can run more varied/experimental PvP events.

I appreciate the downtime, though I think I'd appreciate it more with lower-demand covers. That might give some of the newer players a chance to get an older 3* more fully covered and not have to compete with us olds, who are much more likely to take an event awarding, say, Patch covers off if it doesn't count for the season.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

To add some constructivity, Will, could you please drop a line on Season4 -- when it starts or is it canceled for good?

Season 4 starts later this week. We're experimenting with some downtime between seasons where we can run more varied/experimental PvP events.

So we're not just going to see a Fatal Attraction rerun tomorrow?

Demiurge_Will

_RiO_ wrote:

As the PC game has currently plummeted to a point where you have barely enough daily average PC players to fill a single 1000 player bracket

Sorry to nitpick, but you're looking at a chart of simultaneous players, not players per day (much larger).

Unknown

A reply on the Euro time zone sucky finishes would be really, really lovely. Just to help Dr Unpleasant out as he must keep coming into here, seeing no response and Will is no longer online, and crying quietly to himself.

Kiamodo

I miss the in game announcements of what was coming next in game. Most people know the rewards will be the next PVP event but it was still nice to see in game communication. Any plans on bringing this feature back? Thanks Will!

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

For what it's worth, we still see PC players having significantly more success on the leaderboards than mobile players, on average.

Gosh, I wonder why?

A simple entry of Marvel Puzzle quest r56 cheat" into the Google machine should provide ample answers.

There ya go, Riggy.

Bowgentle

Demiurge_Will wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

To add some constructivity, Will, could you please drop a line on Season4 -- when it starts or is it canceled for good?

Season 4 starts later this week. We're experimenting with some downtime between seasons where we can run more varied/experimental PvP events.

Will, please tell me you're not trying to base a decision on whether to run more varied PVP on the comparison between
a) a featured + 2 tourney where the rewards are one of the most sought after covers (the current UDaken rewards) and
b) a variety PVP for rewards nobody wants, say... Daredevil?

Why not run _two_ experimental PVPs in the 5 days of downtime instead of 'wasting' half of that time doing one of the same old PVP tourneys?

kidicarus

_RiO_ wrote:

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ADDRESS THE INBUILT HANDICAP THAT TRUE HEALING FORCES ON PLAYERS OF THE GAME'S PC/STEAM EDITION?

Huh?

I just had a 90 minute session of MPQ, taking my time and scoring 9518 in Alaska clearing all non essential nodes once and the essential nodes twice. I have 3 health packs left. I did not use any Truehealing characters and instead used my not so true-healing OBW and non healing thor for pretty much everything. M storm made an appearance as did falcon and my high levelled BP.

So what handicap are you talking about? As a representative of the master race I offer thanks to Gabe daily so that I don't have to stare at that godawful fisher price UI that mobile users have to deal with! I truly resent this assertion that we somehow qualify to park in those parking bays with a picture of a wheelchair bound stick figure.

_RiO_

kidicarus wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ADDRESS THE INBUILT HANDICAP THAT TRUE HEALING FORCES ON PLAYERS OF THE GAME'S PC/STEAM EDITION?

Huh?

I just had a 90 minute session of MPQ, taking my time and scoring 9518 in Alaska clearing all non essential nodes once and the essential nodes twice. I have 3 health packs left. I did not use any Truehealing characters and instead used my not so true-healing OBW and non healing thor for pretty much everything. M storm made an appearance as did falcon and my high levelled BP.

What you are describing is not exactly the norm.

This PvE allowed you to use a few very powerful 2* characters boosted to 3* levels (i.e. OBW & Thor) and you had the luck of having a high-level boosted 3* BP available to you. You were capable of playing the essential nodes (and probably got most of your 9.5k points from them, seeing as they give out up to 5x what most normal nodes give), which naturally feature a lower level of opposition thanks to reduced impact from community scaling.

Also, you probably had enough luck to not get screwed by an unlucky board setup or (near-)fatal enemy cascade, which tends to eat 3 health packs outright if it even occurs once.

GrumpySmurf1002

_RiO_ wrote:

Also, you probably had enough luck to not get screwed by an unlucky board setup or (near-)fatal enemy cascade, which tends to eat 3 health packs outright if it even occurs once.

Unless this literally happens at the end of the match, there's no reason either scenario should cost you 3 health packs. If it happens at the beginning, jump ship before any real damage is done and you still have 3 characters at 66%, which is plenty viable. Realistically, you can put those 3 on the sidelines and switch to a B/C team for a bit.

cStorm/Mags work fine against the goons, Ares/Daken are fine as long as they're available. mStorm is almost mandatory for a 2* roster w/ forest environment.

There's plenty of stuff that can be done. Granted, there's nothing that can be done about not having Johnny, but that's the only real problem.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

As the PC game has currently plummeted to a point where you have barely enough daily average PC players to fill a single 1000 player bracket

Sorry to nitpick, but you're looking at a chart of simultaneous players, not players per day (much larger).

So would we be looking at 90 min average play time, with an average of 700 users at any given moment during a 24 hour period? That's over 10,000 players. Is that about right?

kidicarus

_RiO_ wrote:

kidicarus wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ADDRESS THE INBUILT HANDICAP THAT TRUE HEALING FORCES ON PLAYERS OF THE GAME'S PC/STEAM EDITION?

Huh?

I just had a 90 minute session of MPQ, taking my time and scoring 9518 in Alaska clearing all non essential nodes once and the essential nodes twice. I have 3 health packs left. I did not use any Truehealing characters and instead used my not so true-healing OBW and non healing thor for pretty much everything. M storm made an appearance as did falcon and my high levelled BP.

What you are describing is not exactly the norm.

This PvE allowed you to use a few very powerful 2* characters boosted to 3* levels (i.e. OBW & Thor) and you had the luck of having a high-level boosted 3* BP available to you. You were capable of playing the essential nodes (and probably got most of your 9.5k points from them, seeing as they give out up to 5x what most normal nodes give), which naturally feature a lower level of opposition thanks to reduced impact from community scaling.

Also, you probably had enough luck to not get screwed by an unlucky board setup or (near-)fatal enemy cascade, which tends to eat 3 health packs outright if it even occurs once.

I'm an MPQ Vet and I have every hero (except for Yelena and classic hawkeye) on a mostly f2p budget (yes us steam users are sale watchers and are mostly cheap). I have maxed out quite a few characters however for pve, I never use my strongest heroes to manage my personal scaling - if I can complete a node with a 1 star team, I'll do it - if the difficulty calls for 2**s then it's 2**s.

Extended periods of play are the norm for me and it can be for you. Truehealing rewards a broad roster. Trying different team combos extends your playtime and enjoyment of the game. I could probably complete every PVE node by using patchneto without taking damage but I don't do that as it's boring and not fun. It probably increases your scaling beyond your actual roster strength.

Every PVE always gives you the opportunity to use at least 2 superbuffed 2** heroes, and unless you've scaled yourself to oblivion, these heroes (unless it's bagman) are usually good enough to see you through the pve events. If you're talking pvp, I climbed 2000 points in shield training on the last day just by using different heroes on my climb up.

While there is some random **** going on in the game, and I do occasionally get unlucky cascades but most of the time through prudent and careful play, you can avoid giving the AI opportunities to get cascades. I can't give you any tips on how to do that but it comes from years of playing match 3 games. Spending time writing verbose walls of text on the forums will probably eat into your MPQ time more than truehealing.

_RiO_

Bugpop wrote:

Demiurge_Will wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

As the PC game has currently plummeted to a point where you have barely enough daily average PC players to fill a single 1000 player bracket

Sorry to nitpick, but you're looking at a chart of simultaneous players, not players per day (much larger).

So would we be looking at 90 min average play time, with an average of 700 users at any given moment during a 24 hour period? That's over 10,000 players. Is that about right?

No, because PC players are not spread over the full 24hr period. The spread of population across timezones amounts to about 3 reasonably large periods in a full day where players are competing and these are also where the peak of simultaneous players will originate from. So in reality, the amount of total players per day should not be able to exceed 3 times the daily peak value by any significant amount. That means the total amount of daily players will probably sit at roughly 3.9k players, which is 3 times the current 1.3k peak value.

'Much larger' indeed.

BearVenger

Oops. Ba-leted.

Unknown

maybe we can do a poll on the forums to try to get some better data, couple that with mischief's work on an estimate for total number of players based on #of 5k person season brackets. True the forum is not a robust sample size but if we are being honest there is a large bias in that the forum cares more about what other forum goers think than the rest of MPQ population.

BearVenger

I haven't read a lot of this thread, but as a former OBW/Ares and OBW/2*Thor player, I really like the elimination of Prologue Healing, despite my absolute dread of its coming.

I find I've kept my sanity and don't waste my time on tedious play that doesn't help me. I have shorter play sessions (like 90 minutes or so). I don't do the "penalty laps" in Prologue Healing. I cycle through my 3*s and look to make good team combinations. I use my health packs daily and have only once spent any HP on them. I've increased my roster to 45 characters and have spent $5 in the 7 months I've played MPQ.

(It helps that I decided a long time back to equally level 6-8 characters, rather than shoot 1-2 to the moon and leave the rest behind.)

I'm not entirely sure about the True Healing given to some characters (it seems like a gimmick to promote a few new 3*s), but I do like the change to eliminate prologue healing.

There are other areas that could be improved (communication!), but for healing, good on ya, d3!

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

As the PC game has currently plummeted to a point where you have barely enough daily average PC players to fill a single 1000 player bracket

Sorry to nitpick, but you're looking at a chart of simultaneous players, not players per day (much larger).

Come on, Will, instead of nitpicky comment just insert the info, I'm sure you have all kind of numbers including the count of average pick of daily rewards per platform.

Unknown

_RiO_ wrote:

kidicarus wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ADDRESS THE INBUILT HANDICAP THAT TRUE HEALING FORCES ON PLAYERS OF THE GAME'S PC/STEAM EDITION?

Huh?

I just had a 90 minute session of MPQ, taking my time and scoring 9518 in Alaska clearing all non essential nodes once and the essential nodes twice. I have 3 health packs left. I did not use any Truehealing characters and instead used my not so true-healing OBW and non healing thor for pretty much everything. M storm made an appearance as did falcon and my high levelled BP.

What you are describing is not exactly the norm.

This PvE allowed you to use a few very powerful 2* characters boosted to 3* levels (i.e. OBW & Thor) and you had the luck of having a high-level boosted 3* BP available to you. You were capable of playing the essential nodes (and probably got most of your 9.5k points from them, seeing as they give out up to 5x what most normal nodes give), which naturally feature a lower level of opposition thanks to reduced impact from community scaling.

Also, you probably had enough luck to not get screwed by an unlucky board setup or (near-)fatal enemy cascade, which tends to eat 3 health packs outright if it even occurs once.

I'm a fairly new steam player, I've been playing for 43 days (get my first Dr Doom cover tomorrow, yay! ) so I don't have a particularly high powered roster (working on it!). Since I started playing I have come first in my main for the Iso 8 Brotherhood event, 39th in the Juggernaut Heroic, 2nd in the Dark Avengers Heroic and I'm currently hovering in the top 20 in mysubs and main in The Hunt - at the start of The Hunt, Thor was trained up to about level 35. I didn't even know that prologue healing was a thing so I guess i won't miss what I've never knowingly used.

I try to conserve my heals - if a hero is injured they either get subbed out for someone else or I wait for them to heal or play with them injured and I take my time playing the nodes - I also use all of the Iso that I get while playing to train the powered up heroes whenever I can .

I'm lucky in that I have no responsibilities besides my two dogs and my husband so I have the free time to play when I feel like it, I'm also a bit of an insomniac. Games like MPQ help keep me sane when I'm wide awake at 3am.

I've spent about £40 altogether - I bought the Avengers Battle Kit during the Steam summer sale and I've paid a few £ here and there for HP to expand my roster and some Iso to train up one hero because I felt too lazy at the time to farm for it.

My Steam ID -> http://steamcommunity.com/id/kiya/

BTW - hours played in my profile has no bearing on how much I actually play, I just tend to leave the game open while I do other stuff and rarely bother exiting the game. I do the same with several other games which can be easily picked up and put down

_RiO_

Kiya-Elle wrote:

I'm lucky in that I have no responsibilities besides my two dogs and my husband so I have the free time to play when I feel like it, I'm also a bit of an insomniac. Games like MPQ help keep me sane when I'm wide awake at 3am.

Those personal conditions means you are not subjected to the original play-time handicap I posed. At 40 days you're also pretty far away from the more painful progression periods of the game and are still pretty much cruising easy street. No offense, but your personal story fails to provide a compelling counter example.