Happiness with the game

Unknown

I'm not sure if I'm a pessimist or realist but I voted that the game will stay pretty much the same. Past year has been slow downward spiral for MPQ as a gaming experience and recent huge changes (true healing, team ups) have been somewhat mind boggling for me as a player. Why these changes? Why delay buffs/nerfs? It can't be testing reasons because they seemed to release team ups without any proper testing! What the heck are the devs doing all this time since all we seem to get is copy/pasted events and odd tweaks to game system that don't necessarily feel wanted or needed by players. It's great that they get more active at the forums but their past actions speak so loud that I don't believe we will see drastic or interesting changes coming for MPQ in many, many months. Just variations of same ol' stuff.

It's not that I don't trust the devs. I just don't trust them.

Unknown

ZenMonkey wrote:

The team up concept could have been great if it was based on the team you selected and nothing else. You put Capt America and Falcon on a team you get a special power. This encourages mixing up the teams and using lesser chars.

Sounds familiar. The more I think about fusions - team up Hulk and Wolverine to get the Fastball Special, Cap shattering Iron Man's freon beam off his shield for AoE - the more I'd like it as a separate feature.

HailMary

I think things are generally a bit better than a month ago, but maybe about the same as S1. I'll probably feel the same level of satisfaction with the game in the coming months.

I'm alright with True Healing. I really like the BP buff. Marv is decent. Deadpool's powers look interesting. I hope the upcoming intra-alliance "lend a character to your homie" feature will be as cool as it sounds. They seem to have fixed their rampant server outage issues, which is very good (albeit a low bar to set).

I think Team-Ups are a great concept, but they really, really need to test things more before release -- besides the bugs, a delete button seems like a no-brainer. I don't like "nudged" death brackets -- I understand the reasoning behind them, but I think it's a bit much. Nearly 1300+ for T5 and/or 1100+ for T10, while some brackets can presumably be won with a sub-800 score, is just crazy.

Generally, things in MPQ-land feel alright.

over_clocked

I'm not unhappy with MPQ either. Most of my gripes come from worrying about my alliance. I would love to rent out my maxed HT, or Psylocke, or Hulk, or lazyCap, as I don't run them as often, but everyone else while I sleep, too, because I have a timezone that is conveniently different from my mates'.

Unknown

I really want to be positive, and note the increased "awareness" from the developers on the forum, but pretty much every major change they make results in me playing for less time and having less fun. I stay on, in hope, but really starting to wonder

Nonce Equitaur 2

So much for the devs sticking around.

Spoit

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

So much for the devs sticking around.

Never would have seen that coming

Unknown

Seriously unhappy with the dead pool vs MPQ pve. Dead pool was your huge announcement at comic-con. You would think you would make him more accessible to everyone because of that. But no, only the top players in the bracket and the top alliances.

There is going to be no way for me as a transitional 2*-3* player to get him, especially when you put in "essential" nodes with a character not everyone has.

I guess I expected to much when I read deadpool vs. MPQ, like you would actually be using deadpool in every single match.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Mrbean75 wrote:

There is going to be no way for me as a transitional 2*-3* player to get him, especially when you put in "essential" nodes with a character not everyone has.

Are you able to get to the Fury node? I see 12 nodes, 2 of them requiring Hood.

SnowcaTT

I've played for about three months, and very few things made the game explicitly "better". Fool me once, shame on me....I'm not holding out hope for "better".

If the 3* every other week release continues, I don't see how it can be anything but worse.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Mrbean75 wrote:

There is going to be no way for me as a transitional 2*-3* player to get him, especially when you put in "essential" nodes with a character not everyone has.

Are you able to get to the Fury node? I see 12 nodes, 2 of them requiring Hood.

Yep, got to fury. But without the points from essential nodes, I will be hard pressed to keep up with those that can get them. Hell, the Capt. Marvel event I placed 48th by playing the essential nodes 6:1 the normal ones. They don't seem to jump up in difficulty as fast as normal nodes, and the points are south greater than standard nodes.

Unknown

Double post.

babinro

I'm optimistic that the game will get better.

I felt the true healing changes were a major positive for this game which I guess places me against the forum majority. My issues are with the amazingly slow class balance changes. Mags blue in particular but Sentry's green and X-Force buff will be nice as well.

As for the team up changes...I feel they actually hurt the game so far.

My reasoning for this is that TU's kill the tactical planning part of this game that I love. Suppose for example I'm facing a team of Patch / Mags / Thor. I'll likely counter this team with Hood / (insert green char) / other. My tactic being that Hood will help deny Thor's/Mags high cost powers while I focus on green matches to stop Patch's ultra threatening Green.

TU's takes this tactic and counter aspect of the game and ruins it. You can't see enemy TU's and you can't counter it in a reasonable way. You're pretty much victim to excessive RNG to the point where it hurts the endgame.

I'm looking forward to seeing the changes to the TU system.

There are a lot of possible fixes and I really don't know what would be best. If I had to make a change right now I'd do the following. Show players what boosts are given to AI through info button. Make it so a TU power cannot be cast until the team also has enough of the coloured AP cost as well. For example: Aggressive Recon at 11 TU would require 11 purple AP to actually cast. The AP cost of the skill is only the 11 TU AP.

atomzed

SnowcaTT wrote:

If the 3* every other week release continues, I don't see how it can be anything but worse.

I never could comprehend this sentiment.

Why should people be upset with the release of new characters? If they don't release new characters, it will get stale and top players would stop playing (cos there's nothing else to do).

The game *needs* new characters. You may not be able to get them, but that's fine. You can always compete with whatever characters you have. Yes, 2* characters have it tougher, but that's the same for all players who have went through the 2* transition.

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

SnowcaTT wrote:

If the 3* every other week release continues, I don't see how it can be anything but worse.

I never could comprehend this sentiment.

Why should people be upset with the release of new characters? If they don't release new characters, it will get stale and top players would stop playing (cos there's nothing else to do).

The game *needs* new characters. You may not be able to get them, but that's fine. You can always compete with whatever characters you have. Yes, 2* characters have it tougher, but that's the same for all players who have went through the 2* transition.

The game doesn't get worse for having more 3* but it also doesn't improve in any meaningful capacity because you can only have 2 characters to use in PvP about 95% of the time. It's only somewhat workable in PvE because of the ability to limit rosters and you get one more character to use there. To be fair you could just apply the same thing to PvP but that's rarely done for whatever reason. If you could have 5 guys on your team maybe it might sense to use 4 random level 120 3*s instead of Punisher at 166 + 3 2*s, but currently that kind of scenario isn't even possible. Getting 2 3*s just isn't that hard and once you've them you're either done or you wait for the better guy to come along.

atomzed

Phantron wrote:

The game doesn't get worse for having more 3* but it also doesn't improve in any meaningful capacity because you can only have 2 characters to use in PvP about 95% of the time. It's only somewhat workable in PvE because of the ability to limit rosters and you get one more character to use there. To be fair you could just apply the same thing to PvP but that's rarely done for whatever reason. If you could have 5 guys on your team maybe it might sense to use 4 random level 120 3*s instead of Punisher at 166 + 3 2*s, but currently that kind of scenario isn't even possible.

Exactly as you said in bold. The game doesn't get any worse with more 3*. Thats why i don't understand why people want D3 to stop releasing new characters. It doesn't make sense.

Phantron wrote:

Getting 2 3*s just isn't that hard and once you've them you're either done or you wait for the better guy to come along.

Fully agree with this too. After i get my first max 3* (Lcap and Pun), the foundation was set. I could now 'choose' character covers i want to prioritise on.

Which is currently a problem for this game. Besides collecting covers, that's pretty much nothing else to do. Levelling them with ISO is one thing to do, but you can always slowly grind ISO. Which is why D3 *have* to keep releasing characters, because if they don't, there's nothing else for veterans to do.

The 1 thing i am most worried about MPQ is the lack of end-game content. This game really need a 'raid' mode, or a campaign which allows you to earn trophies (aka shiny bling bling) for people to feel a sense of progression.

Unknown

I'm not sure I agree that adding new 3*s doesn't make the game worse.

The more characters there are, the less chance you have of pulling a particular one. Thus the more 3*s you add to the game, the longer you are forced to stay in the transition phase, which everyone seems to agree is the worst part of the game.

I don't think anybody wants to stop them from releasing characters completely, but it might be a nice change to have them spend a month here and there fixing the broken ones we already have instead.

Leugenesmiff

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

EDIT: Sheesh -- Polls and Positive posts almost never get upvotes.

You got my up vote. I admit I play games a lot, but I can't imagine the level of devotion to a video game a person must have to have to spend so much free time writing so many different posts on the state of a game he's not paid to talk about. I know I wouldn't have the time to, even if the game was that important to me, so I appreciate it.

Unknown

While adding more characters dilutes the pool of available characters and makes it harder to get the best ones, we've seen in the recent changes that they could take certain characters (Bagman) out of the pool. Although retiring useless 3* character wouldn't be super popular it's hardly an impossible problem to fix.

Adding new 3* doesn't really harm the game but I think people may feel that given all the other problems, we could really could use something like a new mode over yet another 3* character. I don't want to say game design is easy, but some of this stuff can be quite easy. Let's say you're given the job to design a new 3* which must adhere to these guidelines:

1. The character cannot be more powerful than lazy Daken.
2. The character cannot be weaker than Daredevil.
3. At least one of the character's ability must do something moderately interesting (this prevents you from designing someone with 3 abilities that do just damage).
4. You get to blackmail any one alliance in the game for their help with your design because if you fail that alliance will have all their account deleted from the game (and yours too). This is to ensure you can find someone to help you test your character.

I'd say that most people can come up with a perfectly satisfactory character given these requirement. Yes most of the character you come up with won't be good or interesting. You'll probably just get a lot of Psylockes (Bewilderment does something moderately interesting + 2 boring abilities).

I know game design doesn't actually work like this, as in you can't just outsource the creation of another boring 3* to some random guy on the message board even if that's what the result looks like, but I think it's within our rights to expect dev time to be put into the problems that are actually hard as opposed to things that can be outsourced to the message board. I think most of us will be fine if the next Psylocke clone gets delayed or is slightly lower quality than the average 3* you use in two events and never again if this means some of the more pressing issues gets addressed first.

Tharos

Phantron wrote:

While adding more characters dilutes the pool of available characters and makes it harder to get the best ones, we've seen in the recent changes that they could take certain characters (Bagman) out of the pool. Although retiring useless 3* character wouldn't be super popular it's hardly an impossible problem to fix.

They could definitly do something like what they did with bagman: remove some "lesser" 3* (daredevil, spiderman, all the 2-power chars, ...) from the pool, and add them as a reward from pvp games. It should be more difficult to obtain than the occasional "250 iso", but doable. With a change like this:
- transitionning players will have some 3* characters to play with, or to swap (is is really usefull to have more than 2 characters in current pvp post true-healing)
- top-roster players should not get mad, because they will be given only the lesser 3*
- tokens will become more usefull for end game players: if you have a 3* from it, you have greater chance to have a "nice" character that another daredevil