MPQ Developer Q&A #1 October - Answer Time!
Comments
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I thought Falcon was great too when I played against him and Daken in his featured PvPs (he was a pain. his blue sneaking up on you and converting your special tiles, his purple making enemies unkillable unless you have a good counter and his yellow constantly buffing strike tiles... it was not fun) but I don't know how good he is when he is in an all 3-4vudu3 wrote:
Wait ... why does Falcon need a buff? He's niche, but pretty awesome as-is.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).
meta. 0 -
I'd highly appreciate just an option that will allow me to put the game in Landscape in the settings for Tablets. Plenty of other games out there don't have the screen flip function and do just fine. Some are even landscape locked which I'd prefer for this title.0
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vudu3 wrote:
Wait ... why does Falcon need a buff? He's niche, but pretty awesome as-is.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).
Yeah, mine has been great in the current PVE. And I think we'll see a lot more Colossus once people get him covered; he may be a PVE specialist, but his yellow can allow him to soak up a ton of damage. Plus, he'll probably turn up in PVPs where a glass cannon is the featured character.0 -
I'm an iPhone user so I'm sure that makes a difference here, but the entire reason I downloaded this game 10 months ago instead of Puzzle Quest 2 is because I wanted portrait mode and PQ2 is landscape-only.OnesOwnGrief wrote:I'd highly appreciate just an option that will allow me to put the game in Landscape in the settings for Tablets. Plenty of other games out there don't have the screen flip function and do just fine. Some are even landscape locked which I'd prefer for this title.0 -
OnesOwnGrief wrote:I'd highly appreciate just an option that will allow me to put the game in Landscape in the settings for Tablets. Plenty of other games out there don't have the screen flip function and do just fine. Some are even landscape locked which I'd prefer for this title.
Man, that was like the one question that they really, really answered in depth. It is technically impossible for the software platform they are using to do it beyond a core reworking. It would be a huge amount of work for a trivial benefit that only a small segment of people would enjoy or care for.stephen43084 wrote:I agree with a large amount of what they said, I especially like that they're more interested in new content than fixing bagman's ap requirements. It's probably been long overdue to acknowledge our concerns as players, but also reinforce they can't fix or add new content overnight. As long as things continue to improve the way they have the past couple of months I'll be happy.
Sure, who cares about bagman. They could just as well erase him and almost no one would care, he doesn't even appear in packs any more. But what about Daredevil, IW, Ragnarok, IM40, etc? Characters that you open in your hard-earned/bought packs that are entirely useless and sit ineffectually in your rooster? Characters that are super weak unfun to play with when their compulsory events come around? Should they really keep focusing in churning out new content and leave them (and any future mistake, such as Beast) alone?Ben Grimm wrote:Pylgrim wrote:Unfortunately your belief that Dino will be not only a viable, but in fact, a required character to be competitive automatically makes harder to take seriously whatever else you are saying.
Wall of text aside, to be fair, it's reasonably likely we'll see either Devil Dinosaur essential nodes or a PVP featuring him at some point.
Read again my post. "Required to be competitive".0 -
KevinMark wrote:
I thought Falcon was great too when I played against him and Daken in his featured PvPs (he was a pain. his blue sneaking up on you and converting your special tiles, his purple making enemies unkillable unless you have a good counter and his yellow constantly buffing strike tiles... it was not fun) but I don't know how good he is when he is in an all 3-4vudu3 wrote:
Wait ... why does Falcon need a buff? He's niche, but pretty awesome as-is.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). meta.
The problem is that if you aren't running Falcon with Daken, hes near unplayable. No one cares about bird strike in an all offense meta, and redwing doesn't impact the game enough to warrant bringing him in PvE just for that ability. Even characters such as Punisher that theoretically work well with Falcon, if you've actually tried playing the team out, you'd find that it's just way too slow to get the strike tiles out, and then have the yellow matches needed to buff the strike tiles, while praying that none of them die since every tile dead cuts inspirations effectiveness by 33%. Falcon is do or die based off of how quickly you can inspire some attack / strike tiles, and Daken turns out to be the only character to get tiles down fast enough to be inspired at a reasonable rate.0 -
Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:"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.
Quoting myself because too many are quoting an older version of my post.0 -
NorthernPolarity wrote:
The problem is that if you aren't running Falcon with Daken, hes near unplayable. No one cares about bird strike in an all offense meta, and redwing doesn't impact the game enough to warrant bringing him in PvE just for that ability. Even characters such as Punisher that theoretically work well with Falcon, if you've actually tried playing the team out, you'd find that it's just way too slow to get the strike tiles out, and then have the yellow matches needed to buff the strike tiles, while praying that none of them die since every tile dead cuts inspirations effectiveness by 33%. Falcon is do or die based off of how quickly you can inspire some attack / strike tiles, and Daken turns out to be the only character to get tiles down fast enough to be inspired at a reasonable rate.
Falcon would still be a top 5 PvE character if Daken can only create 2 strike tiles of strength 1, but without Daken, Falcon is a pretty weak character. This is a character that's a walking balance disaster waiting to happen. He's both too strong and too weak at the same time. I don't think his lack of defensive power in PvP is that important because before you had guys who are good at both like Sentry people did ran teams that are either really good at offense or really good at defense but not both, so Falcon would be more of an offensive specialist. But he's way too dependent on Daken.0 -
I am the original poster of a very important concern about MPQ's future which might possibly affect possibly 25 out of every 26 Alliances in this game so Pylgrim's misunderstanding of what I meant is important to clear up. Put simply: Nick Fury was made necessary to score HIGHLY in the PVE Nodes of EVERY Subevent in the Event and if you didn't have him at all, which the vast majority of all of the people in these 26000+ Alliances did not, you had a ZERO percent chance of getting into the Top 10 in that PVE event unless some some miracle happened to you with a Miraculous lazy bracket. I said that they will likely do the same (4* character Node) PVE thing with 4* DEVIL DINOSAUR and 4* Lady Thor which is possible and it would be a troubling and expensive direction for most players who want to earn 3 and 4 star covers through PVE. Devil Dinosaur's % chance was likely higher only because of the Anniversary Event but do you expect the same % odds for 4 * Lady Thor? You would have to be very wealthy or a D3 worker to think that buying a 10 or 42 cover pack with a very low % chance of getting the 4 * character should be the future direction for the VAST majority of MPQ players to head in. There are other, more fair ways that the company could make revenue. So Pylgrim, I am sorry that you misunderstood what I meant by what I said and I hope you do not side with the great minority people that think buying the low percentage of 10 or 42 pack is a good direction to send us because it is the VERY RARE earned in the Game Token that drops these 4 Stars.0
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Which PVE required Fury for Essential nodes? I know there were a couple of PVEs a loooong time ago that had IW as one of their Essential characters, but I don't remember Fury being Essential in any PVE.ShomiTheMonkey wrote:Put simply: Nick Fury was made necessary to score HIGHLY in the PVE Nodes of EVERY Subevent in the Event and if you didn't have him at all, which the vast majority of all of the people in these 26000+ Alliances did not, you had a ZERO percent chance of getting into the Top 10 in that PVE event unless some some miracle happened to you with a Miraculous lazy bracket. I said that they will likely do the same (4* character Node) PVE thing with 4* DEVIL DINOSAUR and 4* Lady Thor which is possible and it would be a troubling and expensive direction for most players who want to earn 3 and 4 star covers through PVE.
Edit: Ah, Iso-8 Brotherhood. That does set a worrisome precedent, but I doubt Dino will be required for a PVE, since Fury was officially released, but Dino seems to be a joke character who was handed out as part of Anniversary celebrations. GT being required down the line, on the other hand, would be a very real possibility. Was grinding the Fury-required nodes pretty much required for high placement in Iso-8 Bros, though? I remember doing that Iso-8 Bros event quite lazily and getting something inside of T50. /edit
Event cover packs are, according to D3, quite popular among players at large. Personally, I don't buy them, but it seems a good number of players do.ShomiTheMonkey wrote:You would have to be very wealthy or a D3 worker to think that buying a 10 or 42 cover pack with a very low % chance of getting the 4 * character should be the future direction for the VAST majority of MPQ players to head in.
Examples, please.ShomiTheMonkey wrote:There are other, more fair ways that the company could make revenue.
P.S. - More line breaks would make your comments much easier to read. Also, stingier use of ALL-CAPS would make them look less like pharmaceutical enhancement advertisements.0 -
ShomiTheMonkey wrote:I am the original poster of a very important concern about MPQ's future which might possibly affect possibly 25 out of every 26 Alliances in this game so Pylgrim's misunderstanding of what I meant is important to clear up. Put simply: Nick Fury was made necessary to score HIGHLY in the PVE Nodes of EVERY Subevent in the Event and if you didn't have him at all, which the vast majority of all of the people in these 26000+ Alliances did not, you had a ZERO percent chance of getting into the Top 10 in that PVE event unless some some miracle happened to you with a Miraculous lazy bracket. I said that they will likely do the same (4* character Node) PVE thing with 4* DEVIL DINOSAUR and 4* Lady Thor which is possible and it would be a troubling and expensive direction for most players who want to earn 3 and 4 star covers through PVE. Devil Dinosaur's % chance was likely higher only because of the Anniversary Event but do you expect the same % odds for 4 * Lady Thor? You would have to be very wealthy or a D3 worker to think that buying a 10 or 42 cover pack with a very low % chance of getting the 4 * character should be the future direction for the VAST majority of MPQ players to head in. There are other, more fair ways that the company could make revenue. So Pylgrim, I am sorry that you misunderstood what I meant by what I said and I hope you do not side with the great minority people that think buying the low percentage of 10 or 42 pack is a good direction to send us because it is the VERY RARE earned in the Game Token that drops these 4 Stars.
I don't disagree with the part of your post addressing the % of alliances receiving awards. I posted this elsewhere, but I think they should look into expanding top 100 to maybe top 150.
There are two problems with your post though and I'll take them one at a time:
1) I don't mind being wrong about this but I would guess well over 95% of that alliance number are just 5 person alliances. Judging by the fact that my secondary alliance which is at least 80% transitioning players at best and maybe averages 4-500 per pvp is routinely right around rank 250, I'd be surprised if there were more than 400 full 20-man alliances. Anyway the point is, you could easily argue that most of these alliances could care less whether they are getting an extra cover, they are simply happy to be getting what they see as extra rewards.
2) the game has gone away from requiring the previous new character in order to get the next. So, missing out on a "release" of a 4* which they purposefully limit to only the very best scorers (and top alliances), will simply mean being less competitive in the next pve, which will give out covers for some other character that you probably have if you've been playing the game for a while. Then THAT character will (maybe, depending on event lengths, release schedule, etc) be the one you need to get the next new character. So missing out on these 4* is really not so bad in the long run.
Also this isn't in your post I quoted, but to address the issue of "needing" 4* at all, they are not at a power level where you absolutely need them, and that is on purpose, or else they might ruin the game. Even if they are the best characters in the game, or part of the best teams, all of those teams are easily beatable by 3* teams.0 -
4*s are very rarely the required character. It's only happened twice in all the events I can think of (IW once, maybe more than once, and Nick Fury once). They should make the 4*s easier to acquire because there's no way anybody's going to start randomly buying 200 heroic tokens to try to get 2 Thor covers and you'd have to have better than average luck to even pull that, let alone the 2 correct covers, so by making the first 3 covers too hard to get it's just a lost sale opportunity. Unless there's a major shakeup to the way this game is played it's hard to see an all 4* roster dominating. After all one of those 3 characters almost always has to be a 3* by the event requirement, and in PvE based on the scaling data I've collected each 4* would have to function at around a level 200+ 3* to make up for the additional levels and only X Force can make that claim, and even that is dubious as we're talking about better than ANY 3* at level 200. In general 4*s seems to be designed as conceptually sound which means despite their seemingly overpowering stats they all take a while to get going. And if the game does have a very significant shakeup that makes 4* favorable in all circumstance it'd be pointless to speculate what other effect such drastic changes can do at this point.0
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"David wrote:Moore"]
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.
http://marvel.wikia.com/Ken_Mack_%28Earth-616%29
Fear Itself storyline?0 -
Phantron wrote:NorthernPolarity wrote:
The problem is that if you aren't running Falcon with Daken, hes near unplayable. No one cares about bird strike in an all offense meta, and redwing doesn't impact the game enough to warrant bringing him in PvE just for that ability. Even characters such as Punisher that theoretically work well with Falcon, if you've actually tried playing the team out, you'd find that it's just way too slow to get the strike tiles out, and then have the yellow matches needed to buff the strike tiles, while praying that none of them die since every tile dead cuts inspirations effectiveness by 33%. Falcon is do or die based off of how quickly you can inspire some attack / strike tiles, and Daken turns out to be the only character to get tiles down fast enough to be inspired at a reasonable rate.
Falcon would still be a top 5 PvE character if Daken can only create 2 strike tiles of strength 1, but without Daken, Falcon is a pretty weak character. This is a character that's a walking balance disaster waiting to happen. He's both too strong and too weak at the same time. I don't think his lack of defensive power in PvP is that important because before you had guys who are good at both like Sentry people did ran teams that are either really good at offense or really good at defense but not both, so Falcon would be more of an offensive specialist. But he's way too dependent on Daken.
I use Falcon a lot in PVE in anti-goon missions. Now that my Doc Ock is getting up there in black (he's at 4) I'm trying the two together in goon missions, and - against someone like the Don - they're devastating together. Keep matching CD tiles, putting out an attack tile, match another yellow cd tile, raise the strength of the attack tile while putting another out... They feed each other's abilities in PVE really, really well.
In PVP, granted, Falcon probably needs Daken. He also can combo well with Patch (helping strike tiles, redwing takes out the enemy strike tiles, protect tiles keep him safe) or someone like Dr. Doom, if he's featured.0 -
Thank you, as always, for the effort in communicating to the playerbase. More is better, and we appreciate you doing more.
Key takeaways for me:
1. Devs value new characters way, WAY higher than the playerbase does. And it makes sense on both counts: new characters are pure profit for them - and pure headache for us. While it's cool in a meta sense, actually playing the game makes me hate new character announcements. This game isn't like Marvel Heroes 2015, where you can just pick your favorite character and play with them forever, and a large roster means more people get their favorite character to play with. In this game you have to have tons and tons of characters to do well, and it's just more and more of your already thin time and resources to develop them all.
It's WAY better for players to have the characters they already have get better (like the 2-power characters); it's way better for devs for us to have an ever-expanding roster. I doubt we'll get what we want on this front, though, because it's easier and more "fun" for them to just make new characters. But the playerbase ends up with lots of semi-useless characters wasting resources - which is the opposite of fun for us.
I wish there were a way to make it so that new players could focus on only certain characters and long-time players could focus on only the newer characters they actually wanted. In any case, I agree with the sentiment in this thread that dev priorities are not aligned with players' priorities. But I'm not a marketing guy and I'm not watching their bottom line, so who knows.
2. Devs have no idea how to balance high-end concepts that are just as hard for the players to get their heads around, like the fact that the last 30 minutes in PvP > all previous 59 hours, how trap tiles should work, how to balance existing characters, how the expanding roster affects token chances - basically all the big questions. They're working on it, but they don't have any secret answers coming anytime soon. And they'd rather spend their time on new game modes and characters (which the players don't really care about as much).
ps. That quote about Spiderman is RICH. "Trust us, this nerf will be ok!" has proven 100% wrong in hindsight. But even with this glaring error, I'd still rather they spend more time fixing existing characters than giving us new ones.0 -
Thank you all for your opinions to my posts about the the way the Future of MPQ might affect the vast majority of its players and I really look forward to more feedback from players and I hope that I'm bringing across their concerns. Most of the people who have replied so far are from top 100 Alliances and while I respect your different perspective, I'm going to throw out some numbers and thoughts and I feel that I need to explain some unfairness to you as well here.
1) MPQ officially has had over 2 Million Downloads. The top 100 Alliances represent 2000 people since 20 is the member limit to each Alliance so if 95% of Alliances in the game only had 5 people in them then only 40000 people now play this game. That is the math Mohio suggested and I would hope that 38000 people is FAR less than the number of people I represent or this math equals a serious user loss for this game from people who no longer play this game from unfairness or perhaps loss of interest in the game.
2) MPQ rewards the top 50 or 100 Alliances with rewards that FAR exceed what all of the other 2500 Alliances get. Characters given to them such as Fury were not available from packs at first so a very limited number of people got them and lvled him getting a large advantage in events and over other people so in your opinion do you think that was fair to the Vast majority of the userbase? What if that same situation happens with 4 * Lady Thor, as she is harder to stop than Fury is and what if she is used on the nodes in a PVE event that gives away a character that then becomes needed for nodes in the future?
3) This topic is about the Future concerns and questions of the players and if the vast majority of players might think they'll HAVE to pay more to get the same Rewards as the top 100 Alliances in most of the games current modes, they will feel that the game is unfair sooner or later they will stop playing and D3 will lose money this way.
I would really like to talk to you all more about this and I really appreciate already hearing back from some of the best opinion givers on the Forums so thanks again and I look forward to hearing from everyone!
I hope I have given everyone a partial perspective of the vast majority of the MPQ community players and I thank D3 for starting to look into things like new game modes that could potentially give players that can't compete as well some fairer playfield modes in the future for starters! 0 -
Many, many players are not in any alliance. Further, many people who download the game fiddle with it a bit and completely abandon it. A true measure of active usage would be to count the number of players with usable 2*s currently active in the game. We don't have those numbers, but I'm betting that number is, at best, an order of magnitude smaller than 2 million.ShomiTheMonkey wrote:1) MPQ officially has had over 2 Million Downloads. The top 100 Alliances represent 2000 people since 20 is the member limit to each Alliance so if 95% of Alliances in the game only had 5 people in them then only 40000 people now play this game. That is the math Mohio suggested and I would hope that 38000 people is FAR less than the number of people I represent or this math equals a serious user loss for this game from people who no longer play this game from unfairness or perhaps loss of interest in the game.
There should be rewards for greater investments of time/energy/money into the game. What do you think would be a "fair" reward to give to T100 alliances -- alliances which overwhelmingly require active management and coordination?ShomiTheMonkey wrote:2) MPQ rewards the top 50 or 100 Alliances with rewards that FAR exceed what all of the other 2500 Alliances get. Characters given to them such as Fury were not available from packs at first so a very limited number of people got them and lvled him getting a large advantage in events and over other people so in your opinion do you think that was fair to the Vast majority of the userbase? What if that same situation happens with 4 * Lady Thor, as she is harder to stop than Fury is and what if she is used on the nodes in a PVE event that gives away a character that then becomes needed for nodes in the future?
T100 alliance Season rewards only gave out a 1/1/1 Fury. Unless you don't even have L94s, that's not at all a useful Fury. Yes, he was one of the Essential characters in a single PVE (that rewarded an old character's covers), but being a one-time occurrence to get a character that wasn't new, it matters very little.
Why the assumption that all players absolutely want T100 alliance prizes to the point where they'll quit the game if they don't get them? This is a completely unfounded assumption. A huge number of players are quite casual (including several known whales). Even though the forum generally represents a small top-end set of players (if you're in the midst of the 2*-3* transition and know basic MPQ metagame, you're top-end), there are forum alliances casual enough that they maintain a ranking outside of T100.ShomiTheMonkey wrote:3) This topic is about the Future concerns and questions of the players and if the vast majority of players might think they'll HAVE to pay more to get the same Rewards as the top 100 Alliances in most of the games current modes, they will feel that the game is unfair sooner or later they will stop playing and D3 will lose money this way.
You haven't at all justified why the perspective you're providing legitimately represents "the vast majority of the MPQ community players." There was a raffle winner at NY Comic-Con who were crowing about how they could buy a lot of 2* covers now -- not 3*, but 2*.ShomiTheMonkey wrote:I hope I have given everyone a partial perspective of the vast majority of the MPQ community players and I thank D3 for starting to look into things like new game modes that could potentially give players that can't compete as well some fairer playfield modes in the future for starters!0 -
Ben Grimm wrote:
I use Falcon a lot in PVE in anti-goon missions. Now that my Doc Ock is getting up there in black (he's at 4) I'm trying the two together in goon missions, and - against someone like the Don - they're devastating together. Keep matching CD tiles, putting out an attack tile, match another yellow cd tile, raise the strength of the attack tile while putting another out... They feed each other's abilities in PVE really, really well.
In PVP, granted, Falcon probably needs Daken. He also can combo well with Patch (helping strike tiles, redwing takes out the enemy strike tiles, protect tiles keep him safe) or someone like Dr. Doom, if he's featured.
Overall I think Falcon is okay but his usefulness swings way too much depending on who else is available on your team. For example in the heroic event that features no usable 3* with special tiles Falcon was fairly useless (though Redwing is still useful). There's a huge change in his effectiveness from being paired with Daken to Punisher/Black Panther, and then to everyone else. Patch works if you only have 3 in Berserker Rage (though in that case BP/Punisher might be better), because otherwise it's too many strike tiles to get rid of, not to mention almost nothing is going to survive having 6 Berserker Rage strike tiles out for any period of time to begin with. You can run Falcon + Daken without a green power on the team for PvE and it's still a top tier team because of how strong they are, but as soon as Daken isn't around Falcon comes back down to earth and from a balance point of view, it just can't be a good thing when one character's playability is totally dependent on another.0 -
"David wrote:Moore"]
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:
Can't this just be done during a week long off season? The entire player base can play test every little change at once. Extend the prizes lower for thanks for helping with research. Then you gather metrics and player feedback and have a great idea of what to implement and what needs to go back to the drawing board.0
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