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

ShomiTheMonkey

To everyone out there, this concerns you as well so please read this response to HailMary,

Thank you for representing a top 100 Alliance player and the perspective they may see of the other 2500 Alliances and all of the players that are not even in Alliances as you said. Instead of respecting the opinions that I had put forward or trying to understand a less fortunate person's perspective, you picked apart my comments and drown out the opinions of all the people who have less time to play the game, have had worse luck with tokens or maybe can't afford to buy 4 * characters that gave a huge advantage in certain events and could be bought entirely to 13 skill points if you had these characters from your time, effort, and the Coordination of shield-hopping techniques like the Sentry one that elevates the fewer fortunate over the many unfortunate. I am not saying that there isn't anybody in this game does not work hard, I am just saying that they should come up with new and different modes to earn characters in the game besides buying low chance lottery tickets if you happen to want certain 4 * characters as an example. I was trying to speak for the less fortunate people and would like to hear from more of them so while I respect your opinions I would like to hear more from less fortunate players that might have hopeful solutions for perhaps 2 to 3 different types of player to find more hope and fun in this game in the future. I hope to hear some more hopeful thoughts about the future of this game from all lvl's and types of players!

HailMary

I don't presume to represent the Top 100 alliances, or any of their hypothetically common views about the other 2500 Alliances. I have not your arrogance.

ShomiTheMonkey wrote:

Instead of respecting the opinions that I had put forward or trying to understand a less fortunate person's perspective, you picked apart my comments and drown out the opinions of all the people who have less time to play the game, have had worse luck with tokens or maybe can't afford to buy 4 * characters that gave a huge advantage in certain events and could be bought entirely to 13 skill points if you had these characters from your time, effort, and the Coordination of shield-hopping techniques like the Sentry one that elevates the fewer fortunate over the many unfortunate.

I respected your opinions enough to concretely address them, as opposed to idly dismissing them with a class-warfare charade the way you just did to mine. Don't confuse "respect" with "agreement." They are very different concepts.

You keep pretending to personally represent "all the people who [are less fortunate]." This presumptuous declaration is completely baseless.

ShomiTheMonkey wrote:

I am not saying that there isn't anybody in this game does not work hard, I am just saying that they should come up with new and different modes to earn characters in the game besides buying low chance lottery tickets if you happen to want certain 4 * characters as an example.

Any examples of concrete ideas you have in this regard? I saw someone else propose giving out Fury covers as PVE progression rewards, which is an interesting idea, albeit one that interacts rather messily with D3's goal of controlling cover outflow rate.

I hope you're saying something (anything) more than "I want more stuff, so just give me more stuff! Oh, and fairness! Yeah!"? 4* characters are MPQ's end-game. Multiple PVEs, which generally favor non-top-end players, have awarded Fury for good placement (one gave you 1+ Fury covers for T25 placement, I believe). Many more have awarded X-Force covers for top placement.

If you want constant top PVE placement badly enough to cry foul about Fury being one of several Essential characters in 1 PVE, you aren't representing most MPQ players. If you use "work hard" in the context of MPQ, you almost certainly do not represent most MPQ players. You represent a level of commitment that's quite suited to doing well in the alliance system. There are, after all, PVE-focused alliances that do quite well for themselves (e.g. "Hatsune Miku", "immortal rage" from a couple of Seasons ago).

ShomiTheMonkey wrote:

I was trying to speak for the less fortunate people and would like to hear from more of them so while I respect your opinions I would like to hear more from less fortunate players that might have hopeful solutions for perhaps 2 to 3 different types of player to find more hope and fun in this game in the future. I hope to hear some more hopeful thoughts about the future of this game from all lvl's and types of players!

That's fair, though I'll note that if you want to convincingly look like you're asking for the opinions of "the less fortunate," you should probably avoid prematurely appointing yourself their spokesperson.

Unknown

I went through season 1-3 watching people getting burned out trying to get Nick Fury cover and it's not worth it to do it again if you care at all about your sanity, and if you don't care about your sanity it's not particularly hard to get into one of those alliances as long as you're crazy enough. I think there are close to 100K daily players based on the game and the top 100 alliances accounts for 2% of the population at most (100 * 20 = 2000) and that doesn't factor the significant burnout in the said alliances, so it should take a lot of effort to get there. 4*s thus far have never been crucial to do well in this game (Sentry is still better than X Force even if X Force is infinitely more interesting to play than Sentry bombing) so it'd take an incredible shakeup to the current game for there to be a power based argument to make 4*s more available. The only entity that should care about the availability of Thor 4* cover is D3 because nobody in their right mind's going to start buying a few hundred tokens just hoping for Thor to show up if they can't get her covers, and as long as she's not the most powerful character in the game (and she's not by a nontrivial margin) that just means people fall back to X Force or Sentry or whoever instead of wasting their money, so D3 should care but that's not something we can influence.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

I hope you're saying something (anything) more than "I want more stuff, so just give me more stuff! Oh, and fairness! Yeah!"? 4* characters are MPQ's end-game. Multiple PVEs, which generally favor non-top-end players, have awarded Fury for good placement (one gave you 1+ Fury covers for T25 placement, I believe). Many more have awarded X-Force covers for top placement.

I don't disagree with what you said but I sure don't remember Nick Fury was given out for anything less than #2 in a standard 1000 person PvE bracket. There was an event where the event tokens had like 3% chance of pulling him that could've resulted in getting a Nick Fury cover for a merely decent finish if luck is on your side, but otherwise the 4*s have been always been top 2 territory in PvE. PvE lacks the 4* for placement mostly because it's practically impossible to set the progression at a level where this would even make sense. I doubt D3 even wants to be giving away as many 4* for 1300 PvP rating but let's just say that they're totally okay with the same % of people getting a 4* in PvE as well, it'd still be awfully hard to come up with a threshold limit that wouldn't just be a total random guess because trying to predict the likely number of cycles someone will do with a 4* on the line is just not that easy.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

HailMary wrote:

I hope you're saying something (anything) more than "I want more stuff, so just give me more stuff! Oh, and fairness! Yeah!"? 4* characters are MPQ's end-game. Multiple PVEs, which generally favor non-top-end players, have awarded Fury for good placement (one gave you 1+ Fury covers for T25 placement, I believe). Many more have awarded X-Force covers for top placement.

I don't disagree with what you said but I sure don't remember Nick Fury was given out for anything less than #2 in a standard 1000 person PvE bracket. There was an event where the event tokens had like 3% chance of pulling him that could've resulted in getting a Nick Fury cover for a merely decent finish if luck is on your side, but otherwise the 4*s have been always been top 2 territory in PvE. PvE lacks the 4* for placement mostly because it's practically impossible to set the progression at a level where this would even make sense. I doubt D3 even wants to be giving away as many 4* for 1300 PvP rating but let's just say that they're totally okay with the same % of people getting a 4* in PvE as well, it'd still be awfully hard to come up with a threshold limit that wouldn't just be a total random guess because trying to predict the likely number of cycles someone will do with a 4* on the line is just not that easy.

I'm too lazy to look up which pve, but I'm quite sure you'll remember this when I mention it. There was a pve for fury's release where he was more than just t2 rewards. The alliance reward and player rewards for wherever the fury rewards ended were for psylocke covers.

mohio

Also too lazy, but it was something like top 2 get all 3, top 5 get 2, top 10 got 1 or something else equally/more stingy. After joining at the wrong time I pretty much gave up hope of winning one.

ShomiTheMonkey

To everyone that has followed my posts within this topic I apologize especially Hailmary.

I never intended to be arrogant and I am confused by the class warfare comment honestly because we should all be equals or at least D3 could try more to create some modes that enable us to play most of our favorite characters without so much PVP focus because there are many types of players they could bring in or bring back to the game if they tried and yes, a player progression system could work if done properly.

I never wanted to be the only representative of the less fortunate, I, and many others, had put forward some ideas in the Submit your questions to the Dev Topic and my questions were mostly disregarded or unanswered.

I took this topic's opportunity to voice concern about some of the ideas they did not answer.

I wanted concerns to be heard and answered by D3 so now I just want to restate these concerns in this topic and I just wanted to join conversation with people that I did have respect for so I'm very sorry if what I wrote in my last post came out sounding arrogant at all as I think I was actually upset with D3 for not addressing so much of many people's concerns.

Sincerely I apologize again to everyone, I wanted start up a conversation with you all and I really would just like to hear what other people might have to say about what would make the game better for every different type of player. I look forward to talking to you all again in the future.

Unknown

stephen43084 wrote:

I'm too lazy to look up which pve, but I'm quite sure you'll remember this when I mention it. There was a pve for fury's release where he was more than just t2 rewards. The alliance reward and player rewards for wherever the fury rewards ended were for psylocke covers.

There might have been an event where he went as low as top 10 because I remember there was an event where top 2 got 2 Fury covers, but that's the only exception I can think of.

Pylgrim

ShomiTheMonkey wrote:

To everyone that has followed my posts within this topic I apologize especially Hailmary.

I never intended to be arrogant and I am confused by the class warfare comment honestly because we should all be equals or at least D3 could try more to create some modes that enable us to play most of our favorite characters without so much PVP focus because there are many types of players they could bring in or bring back to the game if they tried and yes, a player progression system could work if done properly.

I never wanted to be the only representative of the less fortunate, I, and many others, had put forward some ideas in the Submit your questions to the Dev Topic and my questions were mostly disregarded or unanswered.

I took this topic's opportunity to voice concern about some of the ideas they did not answer.

I wanted concerns to be heard and answered by D3 so now I just want to restate these concerns in this topic and I just wanted to join conversation with people that I did have respect for so I'm very sorry if what I wrote in my last post came out sounding arrogant at all as I think I was actually upset with D3 for not addressing so much of many people's concerns.

Sincerely I apologize again to everyone, I wanted start up a conversation with you all and I really would just like to hear what other people might have to say about what would make the game better for every different type of player. I look forward to talking to you all again in the future.

Shomi, you surely have noticed by now that no one is helping you raise this banner that you are touting, even though you allege that there are thousands if no millions of people in your position. Where are they, though? Why aren't all of them supporting you and rallying at your call to (voting) arms? Truth is that as inaccessible as 4 characters are they are not a huge concern to anyone like, say, Sentry. Being inaccessible is part of what makes them special. If everybody and their grandmas had maxed 4 s what would be the point of having a superior tier of rarity? Might as well make them all 3 . And if they are going to be scarce, it follows logic that they are given them to the ones that play hardest or pay hardest, not to some random guy claiming that it's unfair that he doesn't get any.

Moreover and more importantly, they are not required to be competitive. Yes, Fury was required ONCE in a few nodes in ONE pve. It may happen again but it hasn't shown signs of becoming a worrying trend to expect in the future. For the rest of the game, and excepting random spikes in your MMR you should usually see people in your roster category, i.e. 4 -less. A decent maxed 2 is way stronger than a 4 of levels up to 140, so even if a few lucky people in your circle have some covers, you should still be able to compete.

This is why your cause has got no support even though the way you put it, it should be gathering the disenfranchised army of the 99% around you to camp on our virtual Wall Street. You are wasting your energies here, there are far more pressing concerns that you should be adding your voice to rather than trying to become the chief activist of the lost cause of putting 4 s in everybody's hands.

HailMary

ShomiTheMonkey wrote:

I wanted concerns to be heard and answered by D3 so now I just want to restate these concerns in this topic and I just wanted to join conversation with people that I did have respect for so I'm very sorry if what I wrote in my last post came out sounding arrogant at all as I think I was actually upset with D3 for not addressing so much of many people's concerns.

Sincerely I apologize again to everyone, I wanted start up a conversation with you all and I really would just like to hear what other people might have to say about what would make the game better for every different type of player. I look forward to talking to you all again in the future.

Wow, sincere kudos for the awesome apology.

I think there are progression-balancing issues that the devs could improve, such as the very slow 2*-3* transition at present. But, I think focusing on 4*s isn't very meaningful, since they're end-game characters designed to be extremely rare -- you literally cannot get anything better/more prestigious in your roster than 4*s at this moment. Before Fury and the X-Force buff, there were 2 4* characters, and they were both jokes in terms of actual strength: 4*s were nothing more than trophies. Now that 4*s are starting to deserve their designation, they're becoming a more meaningful part of the game, but within the 1*->2*->3*->4* progression model of the game, it's like that most daily active players aren't even trying for them.

As for alliances, the devs clearly meant for alliances to be a core part of serious gameplay, and it shows in their reward structure. They've slowly balanced certain things to the benefit of unallied/weaker players: allowing players to earn 3 3* covers in a PVP without being in alliance, shifting the HP progression thresholds to make accumulating HP a bit easier for weaker players, etc. Sure, the alliance reward tiers can be expanded, contingent upon maintaining the resource-outflow rates that D3 wants. But, admittedly as a biased T10 alliance member, I think the alliance reward system itself is sound. People put energy/money into alliances, and they get greater rewards for doing so.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

As for alliances, the devs clearly meant for alliances to be a core part of serious gameplay, and it shows in their reward structure. They've slowly balanced certain things to the benefit of unallied/weaker players: allowing players to earn 3 3* covers in a PVP without being in alliance, shifting the HP progression thresholds to make accumulating HP a bit easier for weaker players, etc. Sure, the alliance reward tiers can be expanded, contingent upon maintaining the resource-outflow rates that D3 wants. But, admittedly as a biased T10 alliance member, I think the alliance reward system itself is sound. People put energy/money into alliances, and they get greater rewards for doing so.

The alliance system is not sound. You can easily find posts in S1-S3 where people were burning themselves out in seasons matches because of obligation. If alliances are so stable why is there never a shortage of 'top 50 alliance needs more people' recruiting threads? In particular whether intended or by accident the new 4* didn't have much of an impact on the game which is the primary advantage of being in an alliance. In general the only reason people would put up with other people is if there's some kind of common goal to work toward, but in MPQ an alliance is really just a group of 20 guys who happen to have the same label. Aside from obvious things like don't attack your own alliance members there is nothing you can work together toward and you need more than 20 people to pull stuff that involves attacking your own alliance members because the game determines who you play and 20 people is usually not enough to ensure you get the matchup you want.

The system sort of works right now because there are more pressing issues and alliance reward is generally irrelevent enough for people to not care too much about it. Although you can argue a lot of the guys who burned out on S1-S3 probably were already on the way of leaving the game, it sure doesn't help to accelerate the process.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

I'm too lazy to look up which pve, but I'm quite sure you'll remember this when I mention it. There was a pve for fury's release where he was more than just t2 rewards. The alliance reward and player rewards for wherever the fury rewards ended were for psylocke covers.

There might have been an event where he went as low as top 10 because I remember there was an event where top 2 got 2 Fury covers, but that's the only exception I can think of.

That's the one, although I don't know the bracket size or percentages. I don't really worry about fury, he's not the best, very slow. I do think of players go through the process of 1*, 2*, and 3*, by the time they're ready to move on to 4* they'll have the covers by then. At least that was my experience for xforce and iw. Fury hasn't been that way BC he's new. But, it won't be long till he's like xforce and iw as far obtaining his covers go. It's just weird, the more characters there are, the less patience players seem to have.

The developers may need to take a look at figuring a mechanism so new players have a better chance of getting sufficient 3* covers to make s character playable. But for 4*, transitioning players need to focus more on their 3*rosters. They could max 3 3* for the price of one 4* after all.

GothicKratos

emaker27 wrote:

"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:

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.<snip>

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.

Honestly, this is somewhat feasible, however, you're neglecting to keep in mind the persistent upkeep of another server.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

Honestly, this is somewhat feasible, however, you're neglecting to keep in mind the persistent upkeep of another server.

While hardware isn't free, I have never heard of a game that failed because hardware cost too much money to maintain.

yogi_

You don't even have to set anything that special up.

Just set up any type of game mode (call it The Sandbox or SHIELD Training or Danger Room or whatever you want) with one or more variations or rotations of a beta character (say a 4/4/4 and/or a 1/1/1 version), give some small rewards to say thanks and people can play the **** out of them for X days and give feedback and then they also have their metrics. Do it once or twice or as often as you need per character and then shortly after, you release it.

HailMary

Phantron wrote:

The alliance system is not sound. You can easily find posts in S1-S3 where people were burning themselves out in seasons matches because of obligation.

People were burning themselves out because there was suddenly a new leaderboard to compete in and exclusive access to the first viable 4* character ever. People also overestimated their own zeal and willingness to commit time/energy to the game. Things have calmed down since then.

Phantron wrote:

If alliances are so stable why is there never a shortage of 'top 50 alliance needs more people' recruiting threads? In particular whether intended or by accident the new 4* didn't have much of an impact on the game which is the primary advantage of being in an alliance. In general the only reason people would put up with other people is if there's some kind of common goal to work toward, but in MPQ an alliance is really just a group of 20 guys who happen to have the same label. Aside from obvious things like don't attack your own alliance members there is nothing you can work together toward and you need more than 20 people to pull stuff that involves attacking your own alliance members because the game determines who you play and 20 people is usually not enough to ensure you get the matchup you want.

First off, "there [is] never a shortage of 'top 50 alliance needs more people' recruiting threads" directly contradicts "in MPQ an alliance is really just a group of 20 guys who happen to have the same label."

Whether or not specific alliances are stable probably isn't the sole measure of whether the alliance system is sound. Sure, there are a lot of potential features that can be added which mandate alliance membership and directly leverage teamwork, but to dismiss alliances in general as merely 20 people who happen to have the same bumper sticker is utterly ridiculous. There are PVP-focused alliances, PVE-focused alliances, alliances based on fandoms, etc. The average 5-person throwaway alliance is meaningless (because it's a throwaway), but alliance rewards promote actual coordination within (and between) alliances.

I think creating alliance-exclusive events/game modes is and should be a good ways off, because the alliance system is an added layer that runs on top of individual play and enhances events that are fundamentally based upon individual play. It's not a separate system that sometimes overlaps with individual play and sometimes veers off in a different, exclusive direction. For the time being, I think that is a good thing.

GothicKratos

Phantron wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Honestly, this is somewhat feasible, however, you're neglecting to keep in mind the persistent upkeep of another server.

While hardware isn't free, I have never heard of a game that failed because hardware cost too much money to maintain.

I wasn't talking about hardware, I was talking about upkeep, like maintenance, which unlike a normal PC has to be done on a regular interval or things just stop working. You have to groom the hamsters man! That takes manhours, likely every day, not withholding actually setting up the server and configuring it to begin with. Though, now that you mention it, hardware is a concern for a smaller studio, I'm sure, but as you mentions, hardware is really the smaller part of the overhead.

yogi_ wrote:

You don't even have to set anything that special up.

Just set up any type of game mode (call it The Sandbox or SHIELD Training or Danger Room or whatever you want) with one or more variations or rotations of a beta character (say a 4/4/4 and/or a 1/1/1 version), give some small rewards to say thanks and people can play the **** out of them for X days and give feedback and then they also have their metrics. Do it once or twice or as often as you need per character and then shortly after, you release it.

Realistically, they could just use The Simulator. The "hard part" would be designing a way to allow players to easily respec and attain. In theory, they could just make Daily Rewards drop a couple million HP every week, after some thought, I guess. They would also need a way to hand out covers for new characters, but that would be easy enough by just making a Token for them and giving those Tokens away - I figure the easiest way would be to have them drop 100% of the time from battles.

From here they would just have to hardcode something to make people start with everything that is available at the time. It would need to be updated from time to time, though, or write something off of the skeleton code to make it update it's list automatically.

I'm not trying to say it's impossible, just slightly impractical, despite usefulness.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

Phantron wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Honestly, this is somewhat feasible, however, you're neglecting to keep in mind the persistent upkeep of another server.

While hardware isn't free, I have never heard of a game that failed because hardware cost too much money to maintain.

I wasn't talking about hardware, I was talking about upkeep, like maintenance, which unlike a normal PC has to be done on a regular interval or things just stop working. You have to groom the hamsters man! That takes manhours, likely every day, not withholding actually setting up the server and configuring it to begin with. Though, now that you mention it, hardware is a concern for a smaller studio, I'm sure, but as you mentions, hardware is really the smaller part of the overhead.

yogi_ wrote:

You don't even have to set anything that special up.

Just set up any type of game mode (call it The Sandbox or SHIELD Training or Danger Room or whatever you want) with one or more variations or rotations of a beta character (say a 4/4/4 and/or a 1/1/1 version), give some small rewards to say thanks and people can play the **** out of them for X days and give feedback and then they also have their metrics. Do it once or twice or as often as you need per character and then shortly after, you release it.

Realistically, they could just use The Simulator. The "hard part" would be designing a way to allow players to easily respec and attain. In theory, they could just make Daily Rewards drop a couple million HP every week, after some thought, I guess. They would also need a way to hand out covers for new characters, but that would be easy enough by just making a Token for them and giving those Tokens away - I figure the easiest way would be to have them drop 100% of the time from battles.

From here they would just have to hardcode something to make people start with everything that is available at the time. It would need to be updated from time to time, though, or write something off of the skeleton code to make it update it's list automatically.

I'm not trying to say it's impossible, just slightly impractical, despite usefulness.

The biggest recurring maintenance cost is usually the CS guys. You only need a few knowledgeable guys to take care of even a relatively large number of servers while one guy, no matter how knowledgeable, has a physical limit to how many email/phone call/tickets he can answer and yet the number of issues to resolve is expected to be linear to the number of players. For example I have heard of a lot of MMORPG that expanded too quickly and then failed due to having ghost town servers, but I never heard of a MMORPG failed because it cost too much money to keep the said ghost towns around. It's not like companies have a problem with sacking the extra staff/hardware that later turns out to be useless.

As long as there's a way to not mix up your progress in the real game compared to the testing mode, you can simply give people a few billion HP/iso. It might get annoying having to open 300 tokens before you had all 3 covers of Thor to test her out, but I'm sure most of us can put up with that if there's an incentive to help testing. Assuming a standard 6% chance to pull a certain 3* pack is available for 10/42 version, buying 100 tokens should be more than enough to build the said character and again that's no problem if you're just given a few billion HP/iso while in this mode. You can also just have test mode only tokens that have 100% chance of getting whatever character that's currently being tested. Now it'd be pretty dangerous if those modes get mixed up so it should definitely be on another server, but the detail sure doesn't seem to be very hard.

Dayv

loroku wrote:

ps. That quote about Spiderman is RICH. "Trust us, this nerf will be ok!" has proven 100% wrong in hindsight.

I disagree. It's certainly been wrong some of the time (Spider-Man and Ragnarok come to mind), but others have been handled well. Daken's nerf truly was a balancing, leaving him still quite useful. Classic Magneto was changed from a game-breaking character to one that is still in the upper third of 3* characters with a lot of power and variety to his moves.

Wolarsen

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?

I do not mind having characters with only 2 powers, you could consider them specialists, but then their speciality should be really worth;at least one of the powers should be among the best in its color.

I used Ragnarok more than usual, as it was one of my first 3* that got big (never player it pre-nerf). I find green ok (cheap and board shaker, but not reliable at all) but red is plain lame (even Thor's better!!!), and both are arguably the most competed colors. Buffing red to be as powerful as HT would be easiest solution; you can give green AP gain, or column choice, to get a superpower.

Loki purple is similar (cheap and board shaker, but not reliable) and Black is expensive and situational (Patch, Magneto and Falcon?). Should be easy to add a minor power to him without making him overpowered. (Or maybe tweak Trickery? make it cost 5-6 and affect only one tile? Affect attack and CD tiles too?).

Come on, do be imaginative!