MPQ Developer Q&A #1 October - Answer Time!

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Welcome to the first Marvel Puzzle Quest Community-Developer Q&A!

Members of the MPQ community had many insightful questions for the development team at Demiurge. Here now are the answers to a hearty batch of questions. We hope you enjoy reading and that you find many interesting bits of information below. If your exact question wasn't addressed - please remember that we'll be holding these Question and Answer sessions on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future. You'll have the opportunity to make further inquiries for our November session very soon.

Thanks to everyone in the community who submitted questions and thanks to the team at Demiurge for taking time out of their busy schedules to let us probe their minds. Read on!

Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?

A:

“When” questions are super tough question to answer because they’re often out of our hands. We have first parties that need to approve our game, we have external events that pop up, and many other things that will constantly force us to shift priorities around. We love being able to directly answer questions, but “When” is a hard thing to stick a pin on, and we hate to disappoint.

To go back to the original question, they are on the list, but we’d rather make new characters instead of adding to old ones. Adding third abilities is difficult because it often requires reducing the effectiveness of the character in some other way to compensate for the improvements, and that’s not fun for the character.
Q: When will there be an event with times more fair for EU players?

A:

We have a feature in the works that will hopefully address EU players’ concerns, and go even further than that to help out all players. Stay tuned.
Q: Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? Some powers in the game are almost impossible to use.

A:

Part of the fun of making a live game is that you learn a lot about the game as you are still making it. Back when we were designing characters before the game went live, we thought that truly powerful characters like Iron Man (Model 40) would benefit fictionally and strategically from having expensive abilities that could turn the tide of battle even if they were used once per fight. Over time, we’ve learned that’s it’s not as fun to have to save up large amounts of AP to use a power compared to faster, more interesting powers. However, we think that there’s a place for “overpriced” powers, though we’d like them to be more spread out.

Rest assured that these lessons learned are taken into consideration when designing new characters and powers, and when considering which characters needs adjustments. As always, we appreciate hearing from our players which powers they think are over- and under-costed.
Q: Will Daredevil get a buff? I really liked the X-Force buff. When can we expect to see the same treatment for Invisible Woman? Will the characters that most need a buff get any help?

A:

We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on characters people think are over and under powered. When we’re making characters we try our best to ensure they’re all about the same power-level, but there’s no way to tell 100% for sure until it’s released to the players.

Right now we’re prioritizing making new characters, new events, and other new content for the game. But yes, we’re aware that certain characters could use some attention and we’ll try to get to them soon.
Q: Are there any new game modes planned for the future?

A:

Yup

Fine, fine, we’re not going to spill the beans but we’ll provide a few more details. Our next game mode will premiere alongside a new storyline this year, and it’ll really test your mettle.
Q: Is there any plans on the table for a Windows Phone version of MPQ?/Will MPQ ever be available on the Amazon app-store? I'd love to play this on my Kindle.

A:

There are all kinds of considerations here. Each first party has their own certification process. We like everybody to be on the same server, which means that everybody needs to have access to new versions at the same time. Adding new platforms makes that more complicated; it’s a shame to have to hold up platforms X and Y because platform Z hasn’t been approved by its first party. This is not a great reason to withhold the game from players on certain platforms, but it’s an unfortunate reality of the industry. We’re doing our best to bring the game to the most people.
Q: Is there landscape mode or more tablet friendly option on the horizon?

A:

Making video games is really hard, and sometimes, it’s for stupid reasons. You may think that a tablet landscape mode would be easy because we have landscape mode working on PC. But there are some tricky problems. For one, making a game for mice is very different from making a game for touch. We rely on mouseover tool tips on the PC version; how do you do that with touch? For another, most people who play tablet games expect the UI to flip from portrait to landscape orientations on the fly. Our screens can be initialized to one or the other, but they aren’t designed to flip between them on the fly. It would take a considerable amount of engineering effort to reprogram all of our screens to do this.

I, myself, am an avid tablet user, but the amount of developer effort into making a tablet friendly version of the game is frustratingly great. Frankly, we’d rather give our players a new game mode or a new play mechanic. So, it is on our giant list of things we’d like to do, but there are other really cool things ahead of it.
Q: How do you determine which characters you plan on creating and releasing? What factors go into deciding which character the development staff chooses to focus their work on?

A:

We look at a number of things: fan demand, current events, and what we think would be most fun to play. Everyone on the team here loves Marvel so it’s always a mix of those things that informs which characters get selected.
Q: I'd like to hear the developers' thoughts about characters with only two powers. Were they intended to be less powerful than characters with three powers, or just different? Most of them are villains. Is there a thematic reason for this?

A:

They were intended to be just different.

In the early phases of the game’s design, before we ran our first events in internal testing and discovered how much more fun they made everything, we were building a more linear experience. We gave some characters, mostly ones who were slated to appear regularly as enemies earlier in the game, fewer abilities as part of tuning the game’s learning curve.

Even as the game shifted toward being more event-driven and open-ended, and we relinquished control over exactly when you’d first encounter a character, we thought that this could be an interesting wrinkle - some characters with a lower level cap and fewer, typically somewhat stronger abilities alongside other characters with three somewhat weaker abilities and a higher level cap.

Our opinion after playing the game this way for a year and a half, and watching others do so, is that this wrinkle adds more confusion and complication than it adds awesomeness. So when we have the opportunity to, we’ve been very slowly adding third powers to characters.

This is slow going because, for many of these characters, like we saw with Daken, the two existing abilities often need to be rebalanced in order to make room for a third, and we want to be cautious when we’re changing things that players have already earned. And when deciding how to spend our development time, it’s often the case that putting effort into a new character or feature adds more to the game than revisiting an existing character.
Q: Will you revisit the trap mechanism?/ Any thoughts to reworking traps?

A:

Yeah, Trap tiles are one of those features that we think have unrealized potential. We’re in the paper design phase for a new character, coming out in December, who uses traps in a fresh way (though that design isn’t final).

We’re also hoping to revisit Daredevil and his traps while he’s out of rotation. (All the usual caveats about schedules being hard to predict apply here - it’s not the change on our to-do list that does the most to make the game better, so we can’t 100% predict the timing at this point.)

There’s an implied question here about whether the way Trap tiles work will change in order to improve their balance and feel. We usually try to adjust numbers first, the behavior of powers second, and fundamental mechanics last - it’s very hard to effectively communicate to players that the way a tile type works has fundamentally changed, and the engineering necessary to change the behavior of a tile type is more risky and requires more lead time than changing the data that drives powers. We’re hopeful that it’s possible to use numbers and changes to powers to make Daredevil’s traps more satisfying without changing the way Trap tiles work, but since we haven’t actually done the work yet, we’re not 100% sure of that.
Q: Are there any plans to change the mechanics of PvP so that it's not all about who can repeatedly win 2-3 battles in the shortest amount of time? Instead of it being all about speed, speed, speed, I'd prefer to see you put the "puzzle" back into Puzzle Quest.

A:

It’s really difficult to make games for people who can only afford to spend a little bit of time, and people who can play all the time. We don’t think we have this balance perfected; we’ve tried a lot of different methods to make it fair, from matchmaking to “rubber banding” to instanced leaderboards. We know it doesn’t work for everybody, but we think it works for most people. We pay a lot of attention to the reports from players who aren’t happy with the current situation, but there are no easy fixes out there. Suffice it to say that we know it’s not perfect, and we always want to make it better.
Q: Has there been any thought given to forming a test group on a dedicated test server of players to playtest changes before they go live?

A:

Yes, we’d love to do that! Being able to harness the enthusiasm and feedback of the community would be a great help to our development efforts. However, anything that involves server work raises a big red flag in our risk-aversive brains. It’s hard enough keeping a live game running without adding complexities like a test server. We’re a small, agile team, and we’d rather focus our efforts on adding value to the game for all players. It’s true that the added benefits of playtesting are great, but it’s a hard tradeoff to make when we can spend that developer effort in making the next game mode or feature.

If ever comes the time when our servers are running perfectly and we feel that our players are totally happy with the game as it is, we will start building the infrastructure needed for a test server. Until then, we’re going to be taking creative risk to try to make the game better, even if it means we try things that might not work out. And if it doesn’t work out (trap tiles), we’ll try to make them better on the next go around!

Trisul

Wow, thanks for this. IceIX wasn't kidding when he said "soon". In-depth answers too.

I'm assuming these are separated into batches. How often are these Q&A batches planned to be released?

Nonce Equitaur 2

A few too many of these answers are of the form "We'd rather work on new characters than change existing characters."

Bagman's Switcheroo costs Purple 13 AP or 18 AP (at level 5).

Would it be a tremendous amount of work to change Switcheroo's costs to Purple 10 AP or 15 AP (at level 5)?

Unknown

It's a pretty by-the-book response but seeing the issues being acknowledged is still better than hearing nothing instead.

Reading these responses makes me wonder if they're just somehow really manpower-restrained, because it seems like they have a good idea of what's supposed to happen and most of these problems are things you can solve by just throwing people at it, and I'm not talking about an outrageous amount of manpower either.

Pylgrim

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

A few too many of these answers are of the form "We'd rather work on new characters than change existing characters."

Bagman's Switcheroo costs Purple 13 AP or 18 AP (at level 5).

Would it be a tremendous amount of work to change Switcheroo's costs to Purple 10 AP or 15 AP (at level 5)?

The amount of work would be in testing the new values extensively to make sure they are not now broken (or still useless) to avoid the necessity of a second retooling. I can understand that.

What I don't understand very well is postponing rebalance to favour novelty. Sure, new characters are great and all, but remember, characters already released were released for a reason! Either they serve a purpose or are loved by a segment of the community. And it's not like the characters that need retooling are all old mistakes that can be fixed sparingly since all new characters are and will be perfect. (see, Beast.) I believe that if you made a big event of it to make sure the community at large knows what to expect, you could have a "funbalancing month". A whole month when there will be no new characters but work will have been redirected to make sure that all the current ones are up to scratch.

As with always, there will be a segment that will be outraged by the lack of new characters, but I strongly believe that most people will be happy about being able to finally play with that max-covered Daredevil or Invisible Woman that are sitting uselessly in their roosters. There are so many completely unplayed characters that making them usable will be almost akin to release new characters! Moreover, a month without new characters means that we will be able to focus that month's in-game resources into upgrading what e already have instead of keep spreading them thin among the ever-increasing amount of characters.

Unknown

There's not much point in making the safe changes that just amounts to shuffling numbers while pretending to do work. For example if I changed Sniper Rifle from 19 green to 17 green it's pretty safe this isn't going to cause any problems but it's also not going to make GSBW competitive with the top green characters either. But of course if you're changing Sniper Rifle to something like 10 green AP that'd be a rather significant change. I guess there's this sentiment that why don't they take just the very safe changes, like say drop Ballistc Salvo from 20 AP to 12 AP. You don't even need to test that because Ballistic Salvo is weaker than Rage of the Panther so it's pretty safe to put it at 12 blue AP, but that's unlikely to make people want to use IM40 instead so it's just busy work.

IceIX

Trisul wrote:

Wow, thanks for this. IceIX wasn't kidding when he said "soon". In-depth answers too.

I'm assuming these are separated into batches. How often are these Q&A batches planned to be released?

Our current idea is to do monthly gatherings of questions and postings of answers. Of course, that's separate from the tidbits that me, Will, and others drop on the forums every now and then too.

yogi_

Good to read some insights here but have to agree with a lot of the initial responses - there's a bit of skirting around some of the questions and a lot of the responses come down to "we're just working on new stuff, not so worried about old stuff, but we'll get to it at some point probably".

There are some people who put a lot of time and effort into some of their work here, Nonce and Polarity come first to mind. At what point does this sort of stuff start to become a waste of the poster's time and effort if it's not realistically going to be actioned on in any forseeable future.

Unknown

"David wrote:

Moore"]
Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?

A: “When” questions are super tough question to answer because they’re often out of our hands. We have first parties that need to approve our game, we have external events that pop up, and many other things that will constantly force us to shift priorities around. We love being able to directly answer questions, but “When” is a hard thing to stick a pin on, and we hate to disappoint.

To go back to the original question, they are on the list, but we’d rather make new characters instead of adding to old ones. Adding third abilities is difficult because it often requires reducing the effectiveness of the character in some other way to compensate for the improvements, and that’s not fun for the character.

This answer worries me somewhat, as it seems to imply that you guys don't know that a large part of why we want third covers is because these characters all suck. The only one of that list who is even remotely playable is Doom, and even he is low tier. Loki, Ragnarok, and Bullseye are all complete garbage. If your third ability would lead you to require toning them down, then that third ability would have to be pretty amazing.

Q: Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? Some powers in the game are almost impossible to use.

A: Part of the fun of making a live game is that you learn a lot about the game as you are still making it. Back when we were designing characters before the game went live, we thought that truly powerful characters like Iron Man (Model 40) would benefit fictionally and strategically from having expensive abilities that could turn the tide of battle even if they were used once per fight. Over time, we’ve learned that’s it’s not as fun to have to save up large amounts of AP to use a power compared to faster, more interesting powers. However, we think that there’s a place for “overpriced” powers, though we’d like them to be more spread out.

Rest assured that these lessons learned are taken into consideration when designing new characters and powers, and when considering which characters needs adjustments. As always, we appreciate hearing from our players which powers they think are over- and under-costed.

But the problem isn't "Ballistic Salvo is expensive and cannot be used often". The problem is "Ballistic salvo costs 20 AP and does 2.7k AOE; Whales costs 14 AP and does 4k AOE". Ballistic Salvo isn't just prohibitively expensive to the point where getting it off once in a match is unlikely; it's also bad when you do get it off. It's pathetically underpowered. There's nothing wrong with a 20-cost skill. But it has to actually turn the tide of battle. It needs to be a spectacular AOE, it needs to turn half the field into powerful strike tiles, it needs to straight-up down an enemy character... If you can hit 20AP, this skill should make it hard for you to lose. Sniper Rifle is going in the right direction... Ballistic Salvo is just garbage compared with virtually any other expensive AOE skill. Same thing with Unibeam! 13AP for 3.8k damage might have been impressive back in the day. But now? Torch is doing most of that off of 6AP. LCap is doing way more than that every 3 turns for 12 AP. Colossus is doing something like three times as much for 11AP. It just no longer stacks up at all.

There is absolutely a place for "overpriced" powers. You scale them up until a player thinks, "Yeah, I'd pay 20AP for that". I might pay 12AP for Ballistic Salvo.

Q: Has there been any thought given to forming a test group on a dedicated test server of players to playtest changes before they go live?

A: Yes, we’d love to do that! Being able to harness the enthusiasm and feedback of the community would be a great help to our development efforts. However, anything that involves server work raises a big red flag in our risk-aversive brains. It’s hard enough keeping a live game running without adding complexities like a test server. We’re a small, agile team, and we’d rather focus our efforts on adding value to the game for all players. It’s true that the added benefits of playtesting are great, but it’s a hard tradeoff to make when we can spend that developer effort in making the next game mode or feature.

If ever comes the time when our servers are running perfectly and we feel that our players are totally happy with the game as it is, we will start building the infrastructure needed for a test server. Until then, we’re going to be taking creative risk to try to make the game better, even if it means we try things that might not work out. And if it doesn’t work out (trap tiles), we’ll try to make them better on the next go around!

Risky? Maybe. But let me give you an example of risky: taking one of the most well-liked characters in the game who happens to be a massive powerhouse in-game and nerfing him so hard that people no longer consider him worth the roster space. This has happened twice. Anyone who spent money to max out their Ragnarok or Spider-Man is probably feeling pretty mad right now. Or, more realistically, many of them stopped playing. With a lack of testing comes a different inherent risk. I mean, was the new Spider-Man tested? It doesn't feel like there was much thought given to him, because now his stun power (his former bread and butter) is virtually useless, his healing is almost completely useless (just like almost all healing), and the nerf coincidentally came at the same time as a new character who eats protect tiles for breakfast. Same thing with Ragnarok - sure, he was overpowered, but the new Ragnarok has been out for a while and it's pretty clear that he's just downright terrible. Godlike Power is a complete waste of time, and Thunderclap compares poorly to virtually any other red power.

Or a more prescient example - Sentry. I refuse to believe that you didn't see the interactions between World Rupture and Sacrifice (indeed, why else would you put the two skills on the same character?). What I believe instead is that you didn't know how the playerbase was playing matches. After all, for that you'd need to know an awful lot about the metagame and how people play the game, and how the upper end works. I can believe that that wasn't widespread knowledge. But the fact that it wasn't turned Sentry into the most meta-warping thing since Thunderclap cost 2AP. You guys can't afford not to playtest this stuff more carefully.


(As critical as this all may sound, I'm really pleased that this is a thing, and it's really good to get a view into how you guys work. The trap idea, for example, sounds wonderful and I await it excitedly. )

DD-The-Mighty

Seems like most of the existing things (characters, moves, etc) are locked in and will most likely not be changed. As the big emphasis seems to be on moving forward (ie: Learning from past mistakes?)

So in light of that, what is the (loosely) foreseeable long term goal? will we be eventually hitting roster and character levels akin to your sister game Avengers Alliance?
(Large roster of available heroes, frequent events, etc etc.)

GothicKratos

Thank you very much to IceIX, HiFi, and everyone at the studio that helped answer these questions.

While they are somewhat boiler-plate, there was enough recognition and enough explanations (and enough examples, i.e. server issues) to put it into reasonable perspective.

I personally appropriate the effort.

I'm also glad to hear we'll be seeing a new game mode and a new storyline - in addition to new PvPs that have been enjoyable (Combined Arms), PvEs that were interesting (DPvMPQ, The Gauntlet) - the coming year of MPQ seems promising on the back of recent changes and efforts.

Thank you for your time and your diligence.

GuntherBlobel

Thank you for this!

I know you can't give away surprises or promise dates for fixes, but I really enjoy hearing about what you all are thinking about. Thanks again.

HailMary

This is great!

Within the probable bounds of what you're allowed to reveal regarding timelines, metrics, alt character designs, etc., this went into more detail than I'd expected. Thanks!

Lystrata

This is... actually pretty poor, for something that was given so much time. In effect, this is what's been said:


Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?
A: We don't know.

Q: When will there be an event with times more fair for EU players?
A: We're not actually going to answer that.

Q: Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? Some powers in the game are almost impossible to use.
A: No. We think overpriced is good.
(The concerning part about this being that it's blatantly clear that no one is going to use a power that costs 20, if there's one that does equal/better damage for roughly 12 at hand - so you're effectively keeping a character from being played.)

Q: Will Daredevil get a buff? I really liked the X-Force buff. When can we expect to see the same treatment for Invisible Woman? Will the characters that most need a buff get any help?
A: Current characters don't interest us, we don't want to improve what's already there.
(The concerning part about this being that while you're forcing out new characters, pushing players to buy more roster space, you're intentionally letting bad characters slide. Read as: We prefer cash grabs on iso/HP, than improving existing character quality.)

Q: Are there any new game modes planned for the future?
A: We're not actually going to answer that.

Q: Is there any plans on the table for a Windows Phone version of MPQ?/Will MPQ ever be available on the Amazon app-store? I'd love to play this on my Kindle.
A: Long-winded no.

Q: Is there landscape mode or more tablet friendly option on the horizon?
A: Long-winded no.


And the others... are pretty much just filler, imo. So essentially, everything the player base is asking about - I presume because they would like to see it implemented - is either avoided or replied in the negative.

To be fair, I understand the whole 'third party, can't make executive decisions by ourselves' stuff. But... wasn't there a single question in the multitude of posts and queries, that you could have given a positive and informative response to? This effectively could have been summed up with 'here are some questions you asked - we either can't or won't do anything about it'.

Which is fine, no one can do everything on demand. But... maybe temper that somewhat with some information about what you can do?

Nonce Equitaur 2

Four answers are essentially the same.

"David wrote:

Moore"]To go back to the original question, they are on the list, but we’d rather make new characters instead of adding to old ones. Adding third abilities is difficult because it often requires reducing the effectiveness of the character in some other way to compensate for the improvements, and that’s not fun for the character.

However, we think that there’s a place for “overpriced” powers, though we’d like them to be more spread out.

We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on characters people think are over and under powered. When we’re making characters we try our best to ensure they’re all about the same power-level, but there’s no way to tell 100% for sure until it’s released to the players. Right now we’re prioritizing making new characters, new events, and other new content for the game. But yes, we’re aware that certain characters could use some attention and we’ll try to get to them soon

We gave some characters, mostly ones who were slated to appear regularly as enemies earlier in the game, fewer abilities as part of tuning the game’s learning curve. Even as the game shifted toward being more event-driven and open-ended, and we relinquished control over exactly when you’d first encounter a character, we thought that this could be an interesting wrinkle - some characters with a lower level cap and fewer, typically somewhat stronger abilities alongside other characters with three somewhat weaker abilities and a higher level cap. This is slow going because, for many of these characters, like we saw with Daken, the two existing abilities often need to be rebalanced in order to make room for a third, and we want to be cautious when we’re changing things that players have already earned. And when deciding how to spend our development time, it’s often the case that putting effort into a new character or feature adds more to the game than revisiting an existing character.

Let's boil that down to a single answer, then dissect it.

"David wrote:

Moore"]"Putting effort into a new character or feature adds more to the game than revisiting an existing character."

Let's consider: Beast, Invisible Woman, Ragnarok, Doctor Doom, Falcon, Octopus, She-Hulk, Spider-Man, IM40, Loki, Storm (Mohawk), Bullseye, Bagman, Colossus, and Daredevil. The Barely Used Fifteen Facing Nefariously Overcosted Weakness (BUFFNOW). Or BIRD FOSSILS if you take their initials and ignore the last four.



Many of these characters have powers that can affect the board in strange ways. They are already being revisited by the developers every day. Every new character needs to work with these Barely Used Fifteen Facing Nefariously Overcosted Weakness (BUFFNOW). You might be working on Gambit or Nightcrawler -- but getting their powers to work with Bagman's and Invisible Woman's has added a few extra days of development time.

On the other hand, changing the cost of a power can be accomplished in minutes, as was demonstrated on Jun 30 when Storm had the cost of one of her powers changed from 5 AP to 9 AP and then back to 5 AP within two hours (Later changed to 9 AP again). Many of these characters could be made much more playable by changing costs.

Go ahead and expend the minutes necessary to make these characters more playable. You're already expending the days of work needed for the new characters to work with BUFFNOW, so you might as well make those characters more usable.

EDIT -- Found a better acronym.

IceIX

Lystrata wrote:

This is... actually pretty poor, for something that was given so much time. In effect, this is what's been said:

Q: Q: When will there be an event with times more fair for EU players?
A: We're not actually going to answer that.

Q: Are there any new game modes planned for the future?
A: We're not actually going to answer that.

Answering this since it's actually off from what we said with several answers restated to more negative than they were. People are actually rep'ing the post up as if it *is* what we said. Which means that multiple people have obviously mis-read things. Either through vague text or just honest mis-reading.

In answer to these couple in particular: These are both yeses, not non-answers at all. We simply didn't dump the feature set/exact timing on you with the answer itself is all. We'll have news for you on both when they're ready to be revealed.

Lystrata

IceIX wrote:

Lystrata wrote:

This is... actually pretty poor, for something that was given so much time. In effect, this is what's been said:

Q: Q: When will there be an event with times more fair for EU players?
A: We're not actually going to answer that.

Q: Are there any new game modes planned for the future?
A: We're not actually going to answer that.

Answering this since it's actually off from what we said with several answers restated to more negative than they were. People are actually rep'ing the post up as if it *is* what we said. Which means that multiple people have obviously mis-read things. Either through vague text or just honest mis-reading.

In answer to these couple in particular: These are both yeses, not non-answers at all. We simply didn't dump the feature set/exact timing on you with the answer itself is all. We'll have news for you on both when they're ready to be revealed.

Sorry, but in regard to the EU event time "a feature in the works" and "stay tuned" are not what I consider 'yes' answers. And definitely not informative. To me, this is simply another variation of the 'we're aware of the problem and looking at ways to fix it' responses that I've seen posted going back many, many months.

New game mode - fair enough, it's a general 'yup', and I may have been a bit hasty in lumping it in with all the other 'no' responses. I suppose the vague generality of the reply is what caused me to dismiss it.

As said, surely there was something that you could have answered positively and informatively. That's really my main concern about this Q&A - the vague, 'check back in the future, anything we can do, we'll be doing there' responses.

Believe it or not, I'm not actually trying to be 'negative'. I really, really like the Q&A idea, I do like that there are at least explanations for the negative replies, and that it's the start of what could be some great back and forth between devs and the community. I also appreciate that as this is the first Q&A, and couldn't include all questions, there might be more positive answers in the future.

Just seemed overwhelmingly negative, and the apparent positives were too vague in reply for me to acknowledge as 'yes' answers. But, that could well be an issue at this end. I've been wrong before. That one time.

Ludaa

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Let's consider: Invisible Woman, Beast, Colossus, Falcon, Iron Man (Model 40), She-Hulk, Spider-Man, Storm (Mohawk), Doctor Doom, Loki, Ragnarok, Bullseye, and Bagman. The Barely-used Overcosted Thirteen Characters of Neglectedness (BOTCON).

It's really disheartening that they're not very interested tweaking characters after release. I can appreciate the desire to give us new content, but the aforementioned list represents a big chunk of unusable content (maybe only for veterans?). A chunk which they still want us to fight tooth and nail for in events and then spend our resources on. I will concede that the rotation of characters in tokens is a nice band-aid though.

Unknown

Hmm, this makes me very curious as to the rationale behind the developers' priorities. As noted by everyone else, a lot of the answers boiled down to, "Yes, we know this is an issue but we're more interested in building new characters than addressing current problems." But...why?

And this could be completely because I'm not part of their targeted player base but I for one have feel zero excitement for a new 2* Captain Marvel, but I was super psyched when X-Force was getting buffed. We're still discussing the best new CMag build in my Alliance but we barely put in the effort to get the Doc Oct covers when he first came out. Granted, someone like GThor is big, but in between, I'm sure there will be a slew of other characters that are just there to fill roster slots.

So is it because most other players really want new characters? Do developing new characters generate more revenue versus spending time to mess with old ones? Maybe it's a way to move the game along in a sense? Or is it simply that it's more exciting to program haha? I mean, I'm sure they have a great reason, but please convince me too!

eidehua

I think the devs are afraid to make small balance chances to older characters. I think a few tweaking of numbers with explanations each R## patch would be nice, similar to how league of legends does it. Really there are not much sweeping set changes in league (unlike xforce/magneto/IW/ most balance changes in MPQ) until a character remake. I think players want these small tweaks to existing characters instead of long overhauls (unless they really need it).
Sure having frequent number tweaks is not going to solve everything, but it will definitely help bring characters closer in line.

Oldboy

I think it's great to have these Q&A as it helps us to know what's going on in a game most in this forum are heavily invested in (time and/or money).

I do agree with Nonce and the rest who replied that old/released characters should be tweaked/reworked and higher priority shld be given to this instead of developing more new characters. The whole point of us collecting these covers is that we want to play these characters, not collect and store them in our 'cupboards'. What's the point of playing pvp and pve to get character covers if we just need 6 (or so) of the usual characters to play? Released characters are there to be played and we WANT to play them but unless they're reworked they're just dead weight until they become 'Essential' in pve.

Releasing new characters such as 4* Thor is great but most wont be able to play her until months later. And even then if their abilities are terrible then it just becomes another wasted roster space. We want to play with the characters we have now not the ones that we may or may not get covered in 6 months time.