Losing interest..... work/reward ratio unfulfilling

action711

Been a big fan of this game, daily player, nice roster, level 3's building up nicely.

But I am losing interest. I'm finding the work/reward ratio unfulfilling.

I never manage to get a 1-25 placement in the PvP events, despite trying and shielding always get knocked down, and that's after a lot of gameplay.

Now trying to get up to 2400 points in Season 4 Simulator, but stuck at 1500-1600. I fight, I get points, I get attacked, I lose points, then the teams I am up against I have no chance (mainly 166 lv3's) so have given up.

Not keen on the way the rewards are scaled. If you have a good team they come easy, if you don't then you really struggle to get rewards.

So how to progress? All my level 2s are maxed out, so no rewards from all the **** cards I constantly receive. How to get a good team on lv3 cards???

There seems to be a difficult area between a good lv2 team and a good lv3 team, and I find my efforts are constantly wasted.

Struggling.

Unknown

Are you in a good alliance? Alliance cover rewards help compensate a bit for any loss rewards for not scoring as well as you like. It also improves your rewards more if ypu get i to a placement you like.

And Shield Sim is really IMO be used to boost your Season score for end of Season placement. Your efforts are really not worth the time trying for the too rewards. You can probably get them
in a PvP or PvE somewhere down the line. If anythig, I would just stay at the 1500 as you grabbed the HP rewards and call it a day.

Unknown

People will tell you a dozen different strategies as far as the best time for starting pvp so you'll have to figure your own style for that, but probably the most important thing to do that everyone will agree on is that you have to only hit high point targets. That way you get the maximum point gain for the minimum amount of matches and the minimum amount of retaliations. You want to be going for those 30 pointers and above as much as possible. Maybe drop down to the 27-29 range if you can't find anything better (mayyyybe 25-26 at the very least if you absolutely can't find anything better). Never ever waste time on matches below 25 points until the very end when you're about to shield. At that point it will be ok to just burn through as many 20-25s as you can as fast as possible before popping the shield on (or higher point ones if you can find em, but once you're up in the top 25 there won't be many more 30s).

Time your shield use well too. Don't bother using a shield unless you plan to be there to do more fighting/shielding right when it ends or unless its going to last you until the event ends and you're where you want to be in rank.

Also you'll want to get in an alliance. Besides the extra cover rewards you'll also get an extra trickle of HP coming in, which you will need for using more shields. Eventually, once you get an HP stash built up, you will be able to (and need to) use more/better shields and then place even higher.

Be warned though...even if you are in an alliance that's doing top 100 or better every time and you're doing top 25 every time, you've still got a looooong way to go before you'll have any maxed 3 stars (at least if you're not blowing a bunch of money).

over_clocked

there is no strategy there is only tanking!

Unknown

It's simple. You are focusing exclusively on pvp's where you ate at a disadvantage since it's an event where the best roster wins.

You should be focusing just as much (or more) on pve's. The reason is that due to character buffs and scaling, you are on equal (or better) footing than higher rosters. Of you do well in pve's you should be getting 10-15 3* covers pretty month. Even of you were only able to get 1 3* cover per a PvP, you would be getting 22-27 3* covers a month not counting tokens or season rewards.

Almost no one gets top shield training rewards.

DrNitroman

locked wrote:

there is no strategy there is only tanking!

Sad but true.
A bit exaggerated because relevant strategic advices have been given in this thread but still true

Even once you know how to play to earn some reward, the question raised by the OP remains:
is the work/reward ratio unfulfilling?
The answer is probably debatable but I think it's a matter of fact that winning top tier prizes in this game requires a level of involvment higher than expected for a 'casual' play

Nonce Equitaur 2

Team-up management is a true chore -- the powers to get rid of are ranked last ... so for every game its
Tap - scroll scroll scroll - Tap
Tap - scroll scroll scroll - Tap
Tap - scroll scroll scroll - Tap

Then half the battle goes to collecting Team Up AP to trigger the useless powers. That, or Prologue Peeling. Meanwhile, the opponent team likely has World Rupture or some of the other best powers of the game.

All too often, I forget to select the team up powers. Almost every match against weaker enemies comes with a bad TeamUp penalty. They use World Rupture and Supernova against me, then give me a Control Shift.

Half my Team-Ups right now are Level 60 powers from Storm Mohawk, since I'm competing in Category 5.

What a useless chore.

Unknown

I've been in the Losing Interest boat for a while, pretty much since the first Thick as Thieves

I liked Season 1, but Season 2 pissed me off so much I largely sat out Season 3 and dedicated my time to PVE ever since. Now, I find I can get Top 50 in PVP with only ~200 points and Top 25 with ~300 points. So I shoot for those to ensure I still get a steady supply of new covers while banking all the HP I used to spend on shields until I can buy covers I want.

That's working pretty well for me, but the start of Deadpool made me question why I still play this game. Having just come off grinding a PVE, the thought of doing it again for Deadpool made me seriously question whether I should just throw in the towel and uninstall. Fortunately, the Progression Rewards were easy to reach, so I grabbed all those and just maintained a presence after that to collect more ISO.

yogi_

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Team-up management is a true chore -- the powers to get rid of are ranked last ... so for every game its
Tap - scroll scroll scroll - Tap
Tap - scroll scroll scroll - Tap
Tap - scroll scroll scroll - Tap

Then half the battle goes to collecting Team Up AP to trigger the useless powers. That, or Prologue Peeling. Meanwhile, the opponent team likely has World Rupture or some of the other best powers of the game.

All too often, I forget to select the team up powers. Almost every match against weaker enemies comes with a bad TeamUp penalty. They use World Rupture and Supernova against me, then give me a Control Shift.

Half my Team-Ups right now are Level 60 powers from Storm Mohawk, since I'm competing in Category 5.

What a useless chore.

Largely agree with this sentiment. I don't bother with collecting the stuff in game because then I only get another one of the same thing and often I don't even get enough AP to use one of them. I would rather actually be collecting colours. Not doing prologue nonsense - what a waste of my freaking time that is. Effective way of devs getting us to hate True anything... (what a stupid name that was...).

Speaking of related things... the devs have been very quiet of late (excluding server downtime).

Unknown

I agree with the above opinions and feelings. My sense is that without further developments in the game either in the form of innovation or greater rewards, the time and energy investment is becoming too burdensome for new players and too draining for seasoned players.

In example: PVE nodes that reset every 2.5 hours? One word for you: BURNOUT.

Unknown

There isn't much to play for if you've an established roster at the moment but if there's not much to play for then you can also just play less.

On one hand an event like Thick as Thieves probably isn't going to win anybody on its design, but on the other hand all you have to do is shoot for 40K (which is either really easy or impossible depending on how the points turn out and either requires very little effort since it's easy to give up) for any relevent gains. These thread boils down to 'why does everyone else keep on play this game for no gain' and I cannot answer that. If people are really as frustrated with the game as they claim, you wouldn't have the death brackets or the crazy grinds in the first place, because the game is inherently competitive and eventually you got to run out of crazies no matter how you're pairing people up if they're actually quitting. The fact that these problems persist shows the crazies aren't going anywhere.

MarvelMan

Im concerned with the burn out we are seeing. S4 rewards are pretty much tinykitty but the grind is only minimally less. TUs are a chore to dump (peel) that is even LESS fun than prologue healing was. I think it can largely be attributed to the sunk cost fallacy, and once people are able to overcome the blinders of their addiction they leave.

Even more scary is that they keep increasing the cost for new players to get hooked. For every 3* that gets added it forces the new player who pulls one of those covers to decide whether to sell it or fork over the minimal HP they have, neither a rewarding scenario since they probably know they need at least 10 more for the char to be viable. They are pushing out the established players without a mechanism for adding more.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

Im concerned with the burn out we are seeing. S4 rewards are pretty much tinykitty but the grind is only minimally less. TUs are a chore to dump (peel) that is even LESS fun than prologue healing was. I think it can largely be attributed to the sunk cost fallacy, and once people are able to overcome the blinders of their addiction they leave.

Even more scary is that they keep increasing the cost for new players to get hooked. For every 3* that gets added it forces the new player who pulls one of those covers to decide whether to sell it or fork over the minimal HP they have, neither a rewarding scenario since they probably know they need at least 10 more for the char to be viable. They are pushing out the established players without a mechanism for adding more.

Most games like this survive on the 'but I already put in so much time/money' but that's really not the game's fault that people can't pack up and quit.

The size of the roster isn't a problem. If you have enough knowledge of the game you only need very few characters, and ignorance will always cost you more money. Although having more 3*s makes it slightly harder to get started, you're never going to build a max cover Daken and Sentry by keep on opening heroic tokens in the first place. As far as I can tell most people hoard roster space meaninglessly (I do too) and keep on giving bad advice to everyone else as a justification for their hoarding. I guess you can say D3 takes advantage of this but they're not paying people to post 'buy more roster slots with all your HP' that you see so often, which is really a dumb thing to do with your HP. Just look at the XMen thread with the guy who PvP with only Sentry and Daken. Why would you need more than those two characters if you're only interested in PvP? PvE generally requires more characters, though you can generally guess who the next required character is because there's a rather obvious pattern of upcoming featured character will be offered as a prize. That is, you can get rid of say, Ragnarok, and if you see him show up in PvP and PvE at the same time it's a good bet he'll be featured in the next PvE event so make sure you finish at least top 100 in a PvP so you can do the PvE essential nodes, and then get rid of him when you're done because you sure won't be using him for anything else. It's probably a pain to do but laziness is always going to cost you more money.

Unknown

And here is the real problem with MPQ - there is no endgame, no long-term vision. The grind will just get worse and worse as the population of max 10k-health/annoying/long-animation characters grows. Even if they miraculously fix MMR, it doesn't matter when everyone that still plays the game has max characters. So the work/reward ratio in this game is at a perpetual decay.

Then on the opposite side of the spectrum, the gap between people with maxed characters and new players will continue to grow as each new 3* release makes it that much more difficult for someone to realistically attain a 3* line-up of their choosing. Devs have been trying to address this through scaling and sharding, but the gameplan seems flawed since you have to alienate loyal customers to try to attract new ones.

Call me disillusioned, but I can't remember the last dev-initiated change that was player-friendly and not a monetization effort. Quicker healing times and the coming-soon? option to delete team-ups - things that improve UX are pure afterthoughts.

Is there even a long-term vision?

Unknown

action711 wrote:

Been a big fan of this game, daily player, nice roster, level 3's building up nicely.

But I am losing interest. I'm finding the work/reward ratio unfulfilling.

I never manage to get a 1-25 placement in the PvP events, despite trying and shielding always get knocked down, and that's after a lot of gameplay.

Now trying to get up to 2400 points in Season 4 Simulator, but stuck at 1500-1600. I fight, I get points, I get attacked, I lose points, then the teams I am up against I have no chance (mainly 166 lv3's) so have given up.

Not keen on the way the rewards are scaled. If you have a good team they come easy, if you don't then you really struggle to get rewards.

So how to progress? All my level 2s are maxed out, so no rewards from all the **** cards I constantly receive. How to get a good team on lv3 cards???

There seems to be a difficult area between a good lv2 team and a good lv3 team, and I find my efforts are constantly wasted.

Struggling.

You'll be spending the next year trying to score those 3* covers and the ISO needed to level them. I stopped playing two months ago cuz I reached a point where I could no longer progress. I came back recently and am ready to given up again. Give up now or you're In for more disappointment and frustration.

action711

Very interesting reading from everyone - I'm not the only one out there losing interest with the game.

I think the best thing they could do would be to Infinity Blade it. As in, endless level ups for characters! Otherwise, where is the game going? Not everyone can win the lv3+ cards, and at a certain level battles become so one sided it's not fair, due to insufficient lv3s and maxed out lv2s.

Or create more instances of PvP events, max 250 players maybe, or increase the lv3 card win to <200 players, especially the 2xlv3 card win which should maybe rise to <50.

They need to do something to bridge the gap between maxed lv2 and **** lv3, and something about the work/reward ratio.

zeeke

Well an easy fix would be to scale up the 3* ratio on heroic tokens when they add new characters. 7,4% for most 2* could go down to 6,5-7 and make a big difference in drop rates we see. This would ease the 2-3* transition as well not counting ISO reqs.

action711

zeeke wrote:

Well an easy fix would be to scale up the 3* ratio on heroic tokens when they add new characters. 7,4% for most 2* could go down to 6,5-7 and make a big difference in drop rates we see. This would ease the 2-3* transition as well not counting ISO reqs.

Good point. Maybe they could introduce that depending on how your roster is, so the better your roster gets the higher the chance of a lv3+ card from heroic.

Or maybe swap 5 standards for a heroic, 10 heroics for an uber heroic (lv4!!!)

Unknown

Chaotic Ryu wrote:

Are you in a good alliance? Alliance cover rewards help compensate a bit for any loss rewards for not scoring as well as you like. It also improves your rewards more if ypu get i to a placement you like.

Uh, what would be reason for "good Alliance" to give a free ride?
Not to mention that it would also directly compromise chance of getting said rewards.

Unknown

action711 wrote:

Very interesting reading from everyone - I'm not the only one out there losing interest with the game.

I think the best thing they could do would be to Infinity Blade it. As in, endless level ups for characters! Otherwise, where is the game going? Not everyone can win the lv3+ cards, and at a certain level battles become so one sided it's not fair, due to insufficient lv3s and maxed out lv2s.

Or create more instances of PvP events, max 250 players maybe, or increase the lv3 card win to <200 players, especially the 2xlv3 card win which should maybe rise to <50.

They need to do something to bridge the gap between maxed lv2 and **** lv3, and something about the work/reward ratio.

where would the game go with these options though? infinite levels would make just mean an eternal, pointless grind and give the oldest vets and pay to win people an even more insurmountable advantage over everyone else and the majority of players would become completely locked out of anything close to a top ranking. and making 3 stars as easy to get as 2 stars would just mean everyone in the game would soon have all maxed 3 star teams...and then what do we all do? just all fight for first prize to get 4 stars no one wants to use anyway?