Why should someone win?

Unknown
edited September 2014 in MPQ General Discussion
The forum regularly cycles through posts and topics saying how players hate the game to be too pay to win or reliant on certain heroes or grindy or dependent on end times or all of the above so I was just wondering what people think should be the reason that one player comes first/top5/top10/etc. in an event over every other player in their bracket.....

In my opinion currently winning is determined by:

PvP is mainly pay to win with shields and boosts with some consideration to your roster (need a high level sentry + hood (or Daken)) and being able to play late enough to find scores to feed off (although the window is pretty big) and finally luck on your bracket.

PvE depends a lot on the specific PvE in question but generally relies most heavily on being able to play at the end and a number of hours before the end (either of each sub or the whole event), secondly on grinding and finally somewhat on your roster and willingness to buy health packs (P2W aspect) although i've placed highly in plenty of PvEs without buying a single health pack.

So when people complain the game is P2W I totally agree. When you bear in mind any time I mentioned rosters you can add P2W in brackets because you can buy a better roster for cash.
When people complain about end times, again totally agree. Matters more so in PvE but if you are in a tight PvP bracket and the guy you're up against is on at the end and you aren't they can do that one extra hop to victory and you aren't even awake to compete.
Again, when people complain about grinding I can't argue it's needed in PvE although you can adjust the way you play to mitigate it.

So this brings me to my main question.... what do people think SHOULD be the reason that one player does better than another? The match 3 aspect of MPQ is a bit too simple to aim for "skill" as the determining factor so what exactly are we hoping, in an ideal world, will determine who's going to come out on top if we eliminate all the determining factors that people don't seem to like?
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Comments

  • I'm not sure there are any real solutions, unless D3 is willing to split the server. To some extent winning in MPQ now is a question of resource, whether it's time to spend grinding the nodes every refresh, spending money to develop a well balanced roster, and spending money again on heal packs/boosts in an event. The game is set up so that someone willing to spend all three will be able to "win" the coveted shiny new covers. And a person unable/unwilling to spend all 3 will not be able to compete for the top prizes.
  • h4n1s
    h4n1s Posts: 427 Mover and Shaker
    bonfire01 wrote:
    The forum regularly cycles through posts and topics saying how players hate the game to be too pay to win or reliant on certain heroes or grindy or dependent on end times or all of the above so I was just wondering what people think should be the reason that one player comes first/top5/top10/etc. in an event over every other player in their bracket.....

    In my opinion currently winning is determined by:

    PvP is mainly pay to win with shields and boosts with some consideration to your roster (need a high level sentry + hood (or Daken)) and being able to play late enough to find scores to feed off (although the window is pretty big) and finally luck on your bracket.

    PvE depends a lot on the specific PvE in question but generally relies most heavily on being able to play at the end and a number of hours before the end (either of each sub or the whole event), secondly on grinding and finally somewhat on your roster and willingness to buy health packs (P2W aspect) although i've placed highly in plenty of PvEs without buying a single health pack.

    So when people complain the game is P2W I totally agree. When you bear in mind any time I mentioned rosters you can add P2W in brackets because you can buy a better roster for cash.
    When people complain about end times, again totally agree. Matters more so in PvE but if you are in a tight PvP bracket and the guy you're up against is on at the end and you aren't they can do that one extra hop to victory and you aren't even awake to compete.
    Again, when people complain about grinding I can't argue it's needed in PvE although you can adjust the way you play to mitigate it.

    So this brings me to my main question.... what do people think SHOULD be the reason that one player does better than another? The match 3 aspect of MPQ is a bit too simple to aim for "skill" as the determining factor so what exactly are we hoping, in an ideal world, will determine who's going to come out on top if we eliminate all the determining factors that people don't seem to like?


    Thinking out loud - that would require completely different game model. More puzzles (well isn't this Puzzle Quest?) - and by puzzle I mean different challenges requiring logic, maths, speed, quick & good judgement, more strategic concept, and significantly less random. As well as scoring shouldn't be just TRUE / FALSE approach (you win you get xy points, you lose you get zip ), scoring may be influenced by multiple factors like amount of rounds use to defeat opponent, amount of health at the end of battle, strength of last combo (you hit the opponent who has 1000 hp left with powerful cascade of 5000 hp to finish him)... etc
  • Remember when we had 3 attempts to win against an opponent, with points depending on the number of attempts it took you? Of course, that way there barely were any defensive wins. But then again, you didn't lose nearly as many points back then.
  • Rico Dredd wrote:
    Remember when we had 3 attempts to win against an opponent, with points depending on the number of attempts it took you? Of course, that way there barely were any defensive wins. But then again, you didn't lose nearly as many points back then.

    But it's the same if they won on the first try, and if they needed more than one try, under the current system you wouldn't lose any points at all instead of 1/2 or 1/4.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    My ideal vision is that players should win based off of a combination of how good their overall roster is, how well they use their roster in terms of selecting the right team to combat the right opposing opponents team, how good they are at the match-3 aspect of the game, and how efficient they are at playing the game time-management wise. This is impossible to do with the current way the game is set up since boosts / health packs /shields obviously give you a distinct advantage over the rest of the field, but that's fine since the developers have sunk too much time and effort into creating what currently exists to completely scrap it and start anew, especially since it works to some degree (otherwise none of us would be playing). I think the most reasonable solution they can do to introduce these aspects is to create an entirely new game mode that is modeled off of some sort of endless survival mode:
    The idea would be that when you enter this mode, your current roster is snapshotted and frozen in time: any levels that you pump into your characters afterwards doesn't apply to the current session you are in of this mode. The main goal of the mode would be to see how long you can survive a series of increasingly difficult battles under the following conditions:
    1. Your team's health does NOT regenerate after battle. Any damage you take is there for the rest of the session. If a character dies, he dies for the rest of the session.
    2. True healing doesn't work in this mode, since otherwise you'd just Daken/Patch regen tank everything to death.
    3. No boosts. No health packs. You can earn TUs in the mode, but can't bring previously gained ones into the mode.

    This would be a really interesting way to introduce actual skill into the game as opposed to the mindless shieldhopping and sentry bombing that we've been seeing. Of course you'd get the complaints of "zomg why doesn't true healing work I spent all this iso into Patch and he does nothing" and conspiracy theories of the AI cheating and causing endless cascades would be exacerbated when every single hp matters, but that mode is probably as close to defining skill in this game as it can get.
  • My ideal vision is that players should win based off of a combination of how good their overall roster is, how well they use their roster in terms of selecting the right team to combat the right opposing opponents team, how good they are at the match-3 aspect of the game, and how efficient they are at playing the game time-management wise. This is impossible to do with the current way the game is set up since boosts / health packs /shields obviously give you a distinct advantage over the rest of the field, but that's fine since the developers have sunk too much time and effort into creating what currently exists to completely scrap it and start anew, especially since it works to some degree (otherwise none of us would be playing). I think the most reasonable solution they can do to introduce these aspects is to create an entirely new game mode that is modeled off of some sort of endless survival mode:
    The idea would be that when you enter this mode, your current roster is snapshotted and frozen in time: any levels that you pump into your characters afterwards doesn't apply to the current session you are in of this mode. The main goal of the mode would be to see how long you can survive a series of increasingly difficult battles under the following conditions:
    1. Your team's health does NOT regenerate after battle. Any damage you take is there for the rest of the session. If a character dies, he dies for the rest of the session.
    2. True healing doesn't work in this mode, since otherwise you'd just Daken/Patch regen tank everything to death.
    3. No boosts. No health packs. You can earn TUs in the mode, but can't bring previously gained ones into the mode.

    This would be a really interesting way to introduce actual skill into the game as opposed to the mindless shieldhopping and sentry bombing that we've been seeing. Of course you'd get the complaints of "zomg why doesn't true healing work I spent all this iso into Patch and he does nothing" and conspiracy theories of the AI cheating and causing endless cascades would be exacerbated when every single hp matters, but that mode is probably as close to defining skill in this game as it can get.

    I had similar ideas with your team basically running some kind of gauntlet. You can also just allow unlimited healing but the number of health packs you used would decrease your final score in some way.

    There seems to be effort to replace boosts with TU though that hasn't exactly gone well. The boosts didn't stop dropping from all PvP/PvE matches on accident, though. For PvP/PvE, although health pack is a significant advantage it's probably the least advantage and most cost prohibitive. One easy way to look at it is 3 health pack = 150 HP = double the chance of winning a fight in PvE, and merely resets your winning % to what it'd be under max health team. In the absence of boosts, there are many PvE encounters where your chance of winning is a depressingly low number so doubling a 10% chance to win fight against 3 level 250 strong characters isn't much. In PvP, a mirror match is fairly close to 50% so restoring your odds to 50% with 150 HP is quite expensive. Shields, in the absence of boosts (and Sentry), wasn't super effective as we can see the scores prior to Sentry never got to their current range because even winning 2 games on a shield break was risky when Sentry isn't around, and I'd say missing boosts would haev an even bigger impact than missing Sentry. So the big culprit is boosts and nobody should be surprised the ability to start a game with the equivalent of taking 10+ turns in a row before the opponent did anything wouldn't be completely broken. There are many games where the board state is bad enough that you won't have 2 matches of a given color even if you're given 10 free turns in a row.
  • Katai
    Katai Posts: 278 Mover and Shaker
    The "more than one try" doesn't really solve any problems. Sure, you beat the guy with multiple attempts, but you still wiped your primary attack team. This just rolls back into "BUY MORE HEALTHPACKS".
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
    Phantron wrote:
    nobody should be surprised the ability to start a game with the equivalent of taking 10+ turns in a row before the opponent did anything wouldn't be completely broken.
    Yes, but if I'm facing a juggs with 17k health (and friends) who's going to spam me with his green every turn, even 10+ turns in a row isn't enough.

    And no, I'm not going to believe anyone who says that scaling will be way friendlier if they eliminate boosts. We heard the same thing when cmag was getting nerfed, and I sure haven't seen any difference yet.
  • mjh
    mjh Posts: 708 Critical Contributor
    2 people in my alliance got top1-2 in the Juggernaut: Heroic PVE and they started on the first day.

    I do notice that people with lower tier rosters who are willing to play a lot do better in PVE so your point is moot on that front. PVP is pretty accurate though.
  • simonsez wrote:
    Phantron wrote:
    nobody should be surprised the ability to start a game with the equivalent of taking 10+ turns in a row before the opponent did anything wouldn't be completely broken.
    Yes, but if I'm facing a juggs with 17k health (and friends) who's going to spam me with his green every turn, even 10+ turns in a row isn't enough.

    And no, I'm not going to believe anyone who says that scaling will be way friendlier if they eliminate boosts. We heard the same thing when cmag was getting nerfed, and I sure haven't seen any difference yet.

    So if there are no boosts you can't beat those encounters but other people sure can? And if no one can beat the encounter why do you need to be able to beat it in terms of placement?
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    simonsez wrote:
    Phantron wrote:
    nobody should be surprised the ability to start a game with the equivalent of taking 10+ turns in a row before the opponent did anything wouldn't be completely broken.
    Yes, but if I'm facing a juggs with 17k health (and friends) who's going to spam me with his green every turn, even 10+ turns in a row isn't enough.

    And no, I'm not going to believe anyone who says that scaling will be way friendlier if they eliminate boosts. We heard the same thing when cmag was getting nerfed, and I sure haven't seen any difference yet.

    But we don't want friendly scaling. I thought that the difficulty of the last heroic was pretty reasonable: you had a couple of nodes that were extremely high risk, high reward, a lot that were reasonable difficulty and some that were easy. I was actually able to secure top 10 fairly easily by grinding to 1st before the last refresh and doing some easy/medium missions for the last refresh. The interesting thing about this harder difficulty is that PvEs are now a lot more about "how many times can you beat this hard mission before you die" as opposed to "how many times can you grind this trivial mission with cmags before time runs out because you never die with cmags", and thats a pretty good place to be. Remember that if you see difficult scaling, other people will as well. The whole "but newbies get trivial scaling" thing doesnt apply 100% anymore either: of the top 10 in my bracket, 8 had 166 rosters, so that looks like it's improving as well. I see a lot of talk about scaling being the enemy here, but if the game is balanced such that you can't trivially win PvE matches anymore, that might actually not be a bad thing as it encourages less grinding and more smart play.
  • simonsez wrote:
    Phantron wrote:
    nobody should be surprised the ability to start a game with the equivalent of taking 10+ turns in a row before the opponent did anything wouldn't be completely broken.
    Yes, but if I'm facing a juggs with 17k health (and friends) who's going to spam me with his green every turn, even 10+ turns in a row isn't enough.

    And no, I'm not going to believe anyone who says that scaling will be way friendlier if they eliminate boosts. We heard the same thing when cmag was getting nerfed, and I sure haven't seen any difference yet.

    But we don't want friendly scaling. I thought that the difficulty of the last heroic was pretty reasonable: you had a couple of nodes that were extremely high risk, high reward, a lot that were reasonable difficulty and some that were easy. I was actually able to secure top 10 fairly easily by grinding to 1st before the last refresh and doing some easy/medium missions for the last refresh. The interesting thing about this harder difficulty is that PvEs are now a lot more about "how many times can you beat this hard mission before you die" as opposed to "how many times can you grind this trivial mission with cmags before time runs out because you never die with cmags", and thats a pretty good place to be. Remember that if you see difficult scaling, other people will as well. The whole "but newbies get trivial scaling" thing doesnt apply 100% anymore either: of the top 10 in my bracket, 8 had 166 rosters, so that looks like it's improving as well. I see a lot of talk about scaling being the enemy here, but if the game is balanced such that you can't trivially win PvE matches anymore, that might actually not be a bad thing as it encourages less grinding and more smart play.

    The 'newbie gets easy scaling' is in heavy effect in this event because the 3* you get for this event, aside from Thor, totally sucks. Falcon has no one that can work with him, and Hulk can't tank if Thor is there. While weak rosters benefit more from the major boosts, normally your other 2 3*s aren't total deadweights like this event.

    The high risk high reward nodes would've led to many spectucular wipeouts if you're not allowed to use boosts on them. They keep going up because people did use boosts. Do people think the rest of the world somehow isn't aware of basic concepts like boosting? If something is too hard for you to beat without boosts, what makes you think no one else would be doing exactly the same thing? And if everyone can beat it with boosts, then the scaling is just going to keep on go up until it hits a point where most people can't beat even with boosts, because that's what it's designed to do.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Phantron wrote:
    simonsez wrote:
    Phantron wrote:
    nobody should be surprised the ability to start a game with the equivalent of taking 10+ turns in a row before the opponent did anything wouldn't be completely broken.
    Yes, but if I'm facing a juggs with 17k health (and friends) who's going to spam me with his green every turn, even 10+ turns in a row isn't enough.

    And no, I'm not going to believe anyone who says that scaling will be way friendlier if they eliminate boosts. We heard the same thing when cmag was getting nerfed, and I sure haven't seen any difference yet.

    But we don't want friendly scaling. I thought that the difficulty of the last heroic was pretty reasonable: you had a couple of nodes that were extremely high risk, high reward, a lot that were reasonable difficulty and some that were easy. I was actually able to secure top 10 fairly easily by grinding to 1st before the last refresh and doing some easy/medium missions for the last refresh. The interesting thing about this harder difficulty is that PvEs are now a lot more about "how many times can you beat this hard mission before you die" as opposed to "how many times can you grind this trivial mission with cmags before time runs out because you never die with cmags", and thats a pretty good place to be. Remember that if you see difficult scaling, other people will as well. The whole "but newbies get trivial scaling" thing doesnt apply 100% anymore either: of the top 10 in my bracket, 8 had 166 rosters, so that looks like it's improving as well. I see a lot of talk about scaling being the enemy here, but if the game is balanced such that you can't trivially win PvE matches anymore, that might actually not be a bad thing as it encourages less grinding and more smart play.

    The 'newbie gets easy scaling' is in heavy effect in this event because the 3* you get for this event, aside from Thor, totally sucks. Falcon has no one that can work with him, and Hulk can't tank if Thor is there. While weak rosters benefit more from the major boosts, normally your other 2 3*s aren't total deadweights like this event.

    The high risk high reward nodes would've led to many spectucular wipeouts if you're not allowed to use boosts on them. They keep going up because people did use boosts. Do people think the rest of the world somehow isn't aware of basic concepts like boosting? If something is too hard for you to beat without boosts, what makes you think no one else would be doing exactly the same thing? And if everyone can beat it with boosts, then the scaling is just going to keep on go up until it hits a point where most people can't beat even with boosts, because that's what it's designed to do.

    Even so, I haven't seen a single newbie with 1 lazythor cover or whatever in the top 10, so the effect can't be that pronounced: I saw a couple in the top 10 before the final push, but given as how they're all gone in the final standings, this signifies to me that a veteran roster will beat out those newbies pretty easily. For the other point, yeah. I think it's clear that a lot of people are just in their own little bubble. Exact same thing for the Sentry issue: I'm still hearing arguments of "But I can beat Sentry on defense easily, so I don't care since I'm using Sentry and owning with him", without the realization that everyone else is literally doing the same thing.
  • Wonko33
    Wonko33 Posts: 985 Critical Contributor
    Phantron wrote:

    re to Phantron suggestions

    .

    So basically this company should make a game mode where they would make no money. Don't hold your breath. Interesting though- Maybe with a high entrance fee they could do it.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Wonko33 wrote:
    Phantron wrote:

    re to Phantron suggestions

    .

    So basically this company should make a game mode where they would make no money. Don't hold your breath. Interesting though- Maybe with a high entrance fee they could do it.

    If anything, a mode like this has the potential to make them even MORE money. Health packs / shields are a very small % of sales compared to tokens / cover upgrades, and guess what people are going to want to do when you introduce a mode where every single character on their roster matters. inb4 people call this mode p2w because you can't compete in it without a deep roster.
  • Wonko33
    Wonko33 Posts: 985 Critical Contributor
    Wonko33 wrote:
    Phantron wrote:

    re to Phantron suggestions

    .

    So basically this company should make a game mode where they would make no money. Don't hold your breath. Interesting though- Maybe with a high entrance fee they could do it.

    If anything, a mode like this has the potential to make them even MORE money. Health packs / shields are a very small % of sales compared to tokens / cover upgrades, and guess what people are going to want to do when you introduce a mode where every single character on their roster matters. inb4 people call this mode p2w because you can't compete in it without a deep roster.

    people buy those anyway - the mode won't help. Also I hate the expression pay to win, it's more "save money to lose" the people who buy stuff are their clients, us grinders are just fodder for the paying customers.
  • Phaserhawk
    Phaserhawk Posts: 2,676 Chairperson of the Boards
    Wonko33 wrote:
    Phantron wrote:

    re to Phantron suggestions

    .

    So basically this company should make a game mode where they would make no money. Don't hold your breath. Interesting though- Maybe with a high entrance fee they could do it.

    If anything, a mode like this has the potential to make them even MORE money. Health packs / shields are a very small % of sales compared to tokens / cover upgrades, and guess what people are going to want to do when you introduce a mode where every single character on their roster matters. inb4 people call this mode p2w because you can't compete in it without a deep roster.

    yet I'm okay with people wanting to spend money to max covers and characters or buy tokens. Why? Well all it does is accelerate them, it doesn't necessiairly give them an advantage. Take Colossus, if I get the 3 covers from the PvE, then enough $ to max him out, well I just saved myself months of grinding, but I had to give up $ to do this, but me having Colossus in theory doesn't give me a better chance to win, except maybe in a featured event, and even so this isn't as bad. But when you have boosts and Health Packs, and people spend $, this does give them a very large advantage because I cannot compete with that without spending $. You boosting your character that helps you win fater than me, is a problem vs you just having another character other than me. I agree that boosts really need to go. I'm okay with the event boosts they use to hand out.

    I would like to see TU's become boots. For example the +3 Green/Black Boost. You could lock that in, and say it costs 10 TU. Once you hit 10 TU you can activate the boost and turn the 10 TU into 3 Green and 3 Black AP. This I would love. It doesn't give you an unfair start it just converst 1 resource into another you can use more. Same with Dmg % increases. Maybe you have to gather 12TU to get a 30% dmg increase for the rest of the match. I think those would offer so much more in terms of game play and balance, as well as really increase the value of TU's.
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
    Phantron wrote:
    So if there are no boosts you can't beat those encounters but other people sure can? And if no one can beat the encounter why do you need to be able to beat it in terms of placement?
    It's not about being able to beat it or not beat it; it's about being able to beat it and retain enough health to continue to grind without spending a fortune on health packs. Scaling will be driven by those who don't mind using a ton of them.
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
    Remember that if you see difficult scaling, other people will as well.
    Not entirely true. Comparing notes with alliance mates with similar rosters, my highest node was 50 levels higher for most of the event. My personal scaling shouldn't be a function of events I played last month in a manner that's no longer possible, and yet it is. In fact, the algorithm shouldn't be penalizing success at all. Why not just base it solely on strength of roster?
  • Wonko33
    Wonko33 Posts: 985 Critical Contributor
    Phaserhawk wrote:
    Wonko33 wrote:
    Phantron wrote:

    re to Phantron suggestions

    .

    So basically this company should make a game mode where they would make no money. Don't hold your breath. Interesting though- Maybe with a high entrance fee they could do it.

    If anything, a mode like this has the potential to make them even MORE money. Health packs / shields are a very small % of sales compared to tokens / cover upgrades, and guess what people are going to want to do when you introduce a mode where every single character on their roster matters. inb4 people call this mode p2w because you can't compete in it without a deep roster.

    yet I'm okay with people wanting to spend money to max covers and characters or buy tokens. Why? Well all it does is accelerate them, it doesn't necessiairly give them an advantage. Take Colossus, if I get the 3 covers from the PvE, then enough $ to max him out, well I just saved myself months of grinding, but I had to give up $ to do this, but me having Colossus in theory doesn't give me a better chance to win, except maybe in a featured event, and even so this isn't as bad. But when you have boosts and Health Packs, and people spend $, this does give them a very large advantage because I cannot compete with that without spending $. You boosting your character that helps you win fater than me, is a problem vs you just having another character other than me. I agree that boosts really need to go. I'm okay with the event boosts they use to hand out.

    I would like to see TU's become boots. For example the +3 Green/Black Boost. You could lock that in, and say it costs 10 TU. Once you hit 10 TU you can activate the boost and turn the 10 TU into 3 Green and 3 Black AP. This I would love. It doesn't give you an unfair start it just converst 1 resource into another you can use more. Same with Dmg % increases. Maybe you have to gather 12TU to get a 30% dmg increase for the rest of the match. I think those would offer so much more in terms of game play and balance, as well as really increase the value of TU's.


    with a free game like this, game balance only goes so far as not to make too many people quit if too unbalanced, the main goal being to maximize profits. They are not super enthusiastic indie board game makers that try to make the best game ever, they are just doing enough to keep us on the hook and make us buy stuff, sad but this is the model for these games. People need to accept that or move on, they would rather have a **** game with big earnings that a great one with average profit.