devs: please fix the characters we already have...

GothicKratos

Paintsville wrote:

What about people who are paying 600+ HP for their next roster spot? How many **** characters should they have to hold on to because "Not every 3* needs to be good"? But you can't delete them, because they may be buffed or essential in a PvE, or maybe have a PvP centered around them. So my choices are cripple my future by deleting the **** characters, or spend resources to keep them around and level them?

Realistically, this is a completely separate issue from the whole discussion going on in OP's post.

I totally agree with you that every character that comes out should add something to the game; strength, strategy, fun, etc and a lot of the recent additions have not done that. There have been lately that have, however, execution on them has been slightly off; Colossus and Deadpool come to mind. How awesome would Colossus be if his Yellow only cost 5-6 AP? His Red was 9 AP? How awesome would Deadpool be if his healing was better? His Purple is already premier in a world without premier Purple abilities and his Red is frankly amazing, but I'd be willing to bet Deadpool'd be part of the new meta if his Red didn't have a damage cap.

Just to take a second here, I mentioned fun above - characters like Devil Dino are healthy for the community and for the economy. A break from the hubbub is good, as long as you know what you're getting into.

All that being said, the remaining misnomers here are Doc Oc and Beast, both of whom I think they had the right idea but their scaling and their overall usefulness is just overshadowed by other characters. I haven't played with either extensively, but on paper, both seem to be pretty solid support-types, but their scaling is just whack (as well as a few AP Costs). She-Hulk falls under this banner, too, because honestly, her abilities are good, but her AP Costs and scaling are way off.

After thinking about it, there's one more victim here; 3* Marvel. She kind of falls into both categories here. Her Red's ability to destroy all Protect Tiles at full covers is great on paper, but Protect Tiles just aren't that good and even then only two enemies really use them; Bullseye and Magneto. So you're basically looking at an ability that does about 1500 damage for for 7 AP, in the color class with a lot of the most damaging abilities (besides Green). It's mediocre. If it generated AP at full covers, or did scaling damage based on the amount of tiles it destroys, or even allowing it to destroy Strike Tiles, and it could be a good ability. Her black does a lot of things, and in hindsight could probably her best ability, dealing 2500 damage and stunning the target for two turns at full covers, but but placing a Strike Tile on the enemy team's board - this ability costs 9 AP. Considering it's color, it's a pretty solid skill, but let's be honest, for 9 AP, it could do a lot more. If they lowered the AP cost to say, 6 AP, you could scale the stun back to one turn and it'd still be a pretty good ability. Another alternative could be to allow her to make better scaling Strike Tiles or more of them so that an AP Cost lowering is "in order", but still counterable with Loki/She-Hulk/Etc. The other alternative would be to make it an AoE, akin to the 2* Marvel we're getting, and scale back the damage a little (2000 to target, 1000 to other teammates at 7 AP?), and it'd be marvelous. Then, then there's her passive...this is yet another one that's good in theory, but terrible in practice. The idea is that she can turn into a one-man army by easily fueling herself. Unfortunately, this requires her to take a minimum of 1300 damage over the course of two turns for her Red and a little under 2100 damage over the course of three turns for her Black. It's just a no go. It needs to generate more AP if it's only those colors, or generate more colors of AP, so she can be more of a support/tank. Maybe even scale the gained AP based on the amount of allies alive.

That being said, I do agree that more time needs to be taken in carefully analyzing what goes into new characters, and I even believe they they should be released in sort of a "beta" form, so to speak as that when first released, they should be tweaking numbers to actively balance them for the first week or two. This is good for the game. Balancing old characters would be good for the game. However, there is a stark realization you cannot logically argue; new characters make exponentially more money than an old one will/can/has/could. There is a balance to be had, absolutely, but let's sit down a second and realize they're just people, and it's not like their a huge company that's made a million zillion games and know everything there is to know about game balance. They've created a fun game for all of us to play and they are trying (very evident over the last two-ish months) to improve on all fronts. Lets give them some breathing room to do the things we want them to do in a timely fashion.

Unknown

Sorry not meaning to nitpick, but going to anyways.
Captain marvel's black stuns the enemy, not herself. The strike tile generated is also for the enemy team, not friendly. So it is a damaging stun, the drawback is the enemy strike tile it makes.
Strangely I would love her black to do self damage, just enough to set off energy absorption when you fire black.

SodaPopinski

Okin107 wrote:

Tharos wrote:

It is not as easy as "New characters means more income. Old characters are not that important". They can do a lot of money with old characters and a lot of frustration: XForce must be a huge money source now.

While XForce may have provided them with some extra bucks, what about Thoress? I bet everyone will go nuts on spending that HP for her covers. With XForce it was different as many people already had a few covers of him. But Thoress is something completely new and exciting. All big spenders will throw their wallets at D3's face after they get the three covers.

Both are true! We basically play for Iso to level the characters. I have fully covered 3 characters that I have not put any Iso into because there is no benefit of playing them until they have a PVP where we are stuck with them as a third wheel (ex: daredevil). There is dual benefit between revenue and players because we will play more if we have other characters that are "playable" by choice rather than necessity. It is all revenue and it does not have to happen all at once (ex: 2 Daken's third power)

That does not mean they should stop new characters form coming out or to to make existing characters all equal in strength, which will not and cannot happen, but make the existing options usefully competitive or at least reasonably complementary with the right combination of characters and maybe pace themselves on the new character introduction.

GothicKratos

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Sorry not meaning to nitpick, but going to anyways.
Captain marvel's black stuns the enemy, not herself. The strike tile generated is also for the enemy team, not friendly. So it is a damaging stun, the drawback is the enemy strike tile it makes.
Strangely I would love her black to do self damage, just enough to set off energy absorption when you fire black.

Ah, my bad, I misread the description, I don't actually have any Black covers for her yet. I fixed that and rewrote my assessment a little.

Also, I agree, I actually wouldn't mind self-damage from one of her abilities, if it also triggered her passive. That would make for a neat deficit/gain relationship, especially if it was her black, because you could use her as a battery for somebody's Red, while somewhat self-sustaining her Black.

Unknown

I'm a transitioning player. I want them to rework some of the weak 2* characters before they do it to 3* and 4*s. As much as you want the opposite, I think I have the right to this too. I have some balancing suggestions in my signature.

loroku

KevinMark wrote:

I'm a transitioning player. I want them to rework some of the weak 2* characters before they do it to 3* and 4*s. As much as you want the opposite, I think I have the right to this too. I have some balancing suggestions in my signature.

Oh I'm right there with you. I think starting with 2*s would positively affect way more people - honestly, the majority who play the game - and definitely include me. My original suggestion in the OP was more about the idea that 4*s REALLY shouldn't suck, and there are tons of 3*s that really need help. But I agree starting with 2*s and working up would help more people quicker. (Heck, I'd personally start with 1* Black Widow. The fact that her pink power gets worse as you increase it makes me sad.) Like I also said: order doesn't really matter. That's not the issue. NOT DOING IT is the issue.

Unknown

loroku wrote:

Kcwei83 wrote:

I think they already answer this in Q&A answer. Have a look there.

That is the point of this thread. It is a response to the Q&A.

Okin107 wrote:

First of all, they cannot afford to stop working on new characters.

Unless you're in the business office of their company, you honestly cannot make this statement, or anything like it. Disagreeing is fine; but please stick to actual counterpoints. (By contrast, I believe that fixing the existing characters and tightening up the game would be great for their bottom line. But neither of us can prove either statement so it's pointless to debate them.)

Also, I think making the bad characters easier to achieve would be a horrible idea, but thanks for making suggestions.

Pot meet kettle. Since by your own admission, unless you work in their business office you can't make statements like this thread; im guessing this will be the last one. Let me guess, you're going to make some kind of exception for yourself.

loroku

stephen43084 wrote:

Pot meet kettle. Since by your own admission, unless you work in their business office you can't make statements like this thread; im guessing this will be the last one. Let me guess, you're going to make some kind of exception for yourself.

...Huh?

The devs have openly stated they would rather / prefer / will work on new characters rather than fixing old ones. It's in the Q&A thread. Feel free to read it. This thread is trying to persuade them to change their priorities.

They have not stated this is because of their bottom line, or that the only way they can make money is prioritizing new characters. Therefore unless you work for their company you can't know if that's true. Either way it's a tangent and not the main discussion.

Thanks for trying.

Unknown

They should fix the 2* chars first - makes it easier for transitioning players, and I'm willing to wager that they make the most money on people getting into the realm of really needing 3* covers. Plus, more competition is always a good thing.

Then they should fix Invisible Woman because she's a glaring example of the inconsistency in the star system - there are some 2*'s that are better than some 3*'s, and a heck of a lot of 3*'s are better than poor Sue Storm.

Then they should get around to fixing whatever 3*'s they want - there's tons of 3* characters, so go nuts.

In fact - there are more 3* characters than 2* right now, right? That's ridiculous.

Unknown

loroku wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

Pot meet kettle. Since by your own admission, unless you work in their business office you can't make statements like this thread; im guessing this will be the last one. Let me guess, you're going to make some kind of exception for yourself.

...Huh?

The devs have openly stated they would rather / prefer / will work on new characters rather than fixing old ones. It's in the Q&A thread. Feel free to read it. This thread is trying to persuade them to change their priorities.

They have not stated this is because of their bottom line, or that the only way they can make money is prioritizing new characters. Therefore unless you work for their company you can't know if that's true. Either way it's a tangent and not the main discussion.

Thanks for trying.

Hey, I'm psychic! I said, "Let me guess, you're going to make some kind of exception for yourself." And what do you know, you did!

I'm beginning to get a good understanding of your "logic" that leads to many of your posts, but I'll go with the principle of charity any way and give you the benefit of the doubt.

Let's try this again. I"m saying you cannot have it both ways. You cannot say the developers should work on fixing characters and it will not hurt the company without knowing the business details of the company; then, at the same time tell someone else that they cannot say the developers are making new characters a priority to benefit the company without knowing the business detail fo the company.

I wish I could remember the name of the logical fallacy so you could look it up because I'm sure anyone could explain it better than me.

The gist is that you're argument against the poster saying that they cannot argue on behalf of the company is the same argument that undermines your own original position. This does not mean your original argument that they should fix characters is incorrect. It does mean, however, that you cannot dispute others' arguments who have much knowledge of the company's inner workings as you.

I will say this. Large, successful companies typically do not hire inept people to operate said company. This means, those who work at the company with the "business knowledge" you refer to that have access to the financial information, have made a determination of the best way to run the company and make it successful. Therefore, based on the actions of the company, we can logically infer that new characters make short and/or long term financial sense to the company. Furthermore, we can then deduce from that inference that fixing characters is not AS financially important to the short and/or long term success of the company.

Now, based on what I understand of your logice, I'm pretty sure once again, you will find another exception for yourself. I'm guess by misrepresenting what I wrote.

Unknown

Of course we can't know whether it'd be better financially to fix already released characters but I don't really care. Right now I'm having fun but I might stop playing at a point due to playing with same characters all the time. It gets boring you know.

IlDuderino

KevinMark wrote:

Of course we can't know whether it'd be better financially to fix already released characters but I don't really care. Right now I'm having fun but I might stop playing at a point due to playing with same characters all the time. It gets boring you know.

I would speculate that people leaving the game is bad for the developers financially - though I am nervous of stating anything about the developer's intentions or financial objectives in case someone tells me I can't know this

loroku

stephen43084 wrote:

Hey, I'm psychic! I said, "Let me guess, you're going to make some kind of exception for yourself." And what do you know, you did!

Well, I didn't, but I guess either me or you are completely not understanding what the other is saying. Maybe both?

stephen43084 wrote:

You cannot say the developers should work on fixing characters and it will not hurt the company without knowing the business details of the company; then, at the same time tell someone else that they cannot say the developers are making new characters a priority to benefit the company without knowing the business detail fo the company.

For what it's worth, I never said it won't hurt the company. I'm saying we can't say one way or the other, because we don't know (I don't, either, as I said), and it's not worth arguing. The part where you said, "you cannot dispute others' arguments who have much knowledge of the company's inner workings as you?" That was my original point. Glad we agree.

But go ahead and keep insulting me; it's cool. Your trolling keeps this thread bumped so it's ultimately a win.

loroku

So, recapping after 2 pages, we have several voices who agree, and so far only one person has disagreed, or even given a reason for disagreeing (Okin107). Here are what I think are the valid reasons given so far for disagreeing, with some light paraphrasing:

- Disagree because all characters "should not be treated" equal. Some should always be significantly better or worse because it adds depth to the gameplay.

- Disagree because it's better to "move forward instead of tweaking what we already have until we minimize the whining on this forum" (presumably the point being that it's impossible to please everyone anyway, so why waste time trying).

- Disagree because "I don't care about characters already released."

I disagree with them, but these are all valid points. Otherwise I'm not seeing a lot of dissent on the idea that dev time would be better spent on tweaking existing characters (even just a little!) than continuously rolling out new ones.

Unknown

1) I'm not trolling you. I already told you once that I was going to interpret your prior response in a charitable way. If it seems like trolling, no offense, that tells me that you were not familiar with the terms I used. Which also tells me, you have no background in logic. This does not mean you are not logical, but if you had a background in the rules of numeric logic, predicate logic, or even basic logic, what I said would obviously not come across as trolling.

2) I'll put it very simple. Without working in the company's business office, we can logically infer (meaning we can know) that producing new characters is more financially successful than focusing on fixing characters. I am also saying that you are just as guilty as the other person....you know what....writing this...yea...waste of my time. If I have to really break it down like this, you either do not get or you're not capable of getting it. It's not an indictment of you. It does not mean you are not a brilliant person. It just means that I no longer care enought to try and help you out on this one. If someone else wants to be nice they can try to explain it better than me, but this no longer my concern.

babinro

How I view the balance of MPQ:

The Punisher is pretty much the 'Mario' in terms of balanced characters in this game from my perspective. He feels perfect to me in that he's powerful and flawed. Many other characters follow his power level as well including Psylocke, Mohawk, Captain America, GSBW, Captain Marvel, Human Torch, etc.

This game feels like it's closely balanced with only a couple of problematic standouts. I'll talk about others as well just because it seems appropriate for this post.

1) Sentry - His green is clearly out of hand. The other 2 abilities are 'okay' given their drawbacks. Make the green ability trigger as one instance triggering strike tiles only once. Odds are it'll cascade other matches anyways.

2) X-Force - His black is clearly out of hand. I LOVE X-force. He's crazy fun to play with and not that bad to play against. But his black deals GREAT damage, drains AP and gains AP allowing an easy follow up of one or more skills. It's just flat out too strong as evidenced by his popularity in all modes of play. You could balance this skill many different ways given that it does 4 powerful things (high damage, board shake, AP drain, AP gain). Maybe nerf the damage per tile. Maybe remove the AP gain. Maybe limit the number of tiles that can be destroyed lowering all of these things. Something. This character is not game breaking like Sentry but he's not remotely balanced and needs fixing.

3) Black Panther - Compare this character to Punisher and you'll instantly see why he's unbalanced. It's worth stating that I don't feel BP is actually overpowered. You can be unbalanced and not harmful for the game. But in BP's case his strike tiles are strictly better even before the optional buff and the black completely blows away Punishers black. BP's damage numbers need to be scaled back but only a bit.

4) Thor - I'm probably among the minority here whose actually fine with Thor ever since the level shifting buffed character HP. That said...I acknowledge that people still view Thor as overpowered. The easiest change here is to keep damage the same but reduce the number of tiles generated from his yellow from 9 to 5. This greatly reduces the impact of his skills chaining.

5) Remove True Healing - There's no reason for this to exist anymore and it just makes certain characters too good for prolonged play. Patch and Daken can just heal their wounds throughout the next battle but their starting hp will always be from it's lowest point. Eventually you'll have to use a health pack on them. Right now I can milk patch/daken/x-force and heal them in prologue if I wanted to in order to give them 20x the lasting power of someone like Black Panther or even Devil Dino. It makes these character amazing for meta gaming reasons.

6) Fury - Drop demolition down to about 1000 per trap. This isn't instant guaranteed damage so I understand that it deserves to be stronger than mags blue. That said, the damage of demo is nuts at five covers especially since it's his lowest AP skill. Have it optimally deal 7000 damage with the very real potential that a trap may get disarmed or be matched by the player or Fury knocked out in the process. 7k damage is nothing to scoff at...Fury will still be good.

7) IM40 - You've got a skill that costs 20 AP....make it feel worthy of this. This ability should down the target it strikes regardless of hp. Other missiles could stun the remaining team and sap AP accordingly. This ability goes off so rarely that I can't see people genuinely complaining if it one shots a character. Also either buff the damage or unibeam or drop the cost of the skill or both. It doesn't match the power level of red skills anymore especially with the built in thematic drawback (which should remain).

8) Daredevil - I've made my opinions known in the trap change thread. To sum it up...traps should trigger whenever they are tinkered with. Translation, if a trap tile is overwritten , moved, or blown up as part of a board shake it should activate.

9) Loki - Given that they plan to keep these guys with two skills....reduce his black to 8 AP - This puts it in line with the cost of most strike tile generators. When casting his purple, let the tiles 'lock' in place whenever they would match 5 of a kind.

10) Rags - Give us the luck the AI has with him? When the AI plays this guy he's insane. When I use him he's terrible. No actual suggestions here.

11) Doom - Scale up the damage on summon demons to better reflect the powers of black skills currently in the game. I'd go as far as the normal version of the damage almost equal to his boosted form. He's actually a pretty great character given how his skill synergy but he just lacks a bit more kick. I shouldn't want to run him just so I can trigger BP's or X-Forces black.

12) Invisible Woman - Lower the cost of her yellow to something like 10. Alternatively make it cost like 12 and have us select the target for invisibility. Drastically increase the damage of her Green. Reduce cost of blue by maybe 1 or 2.

13) Doctor Octopus - His blue is completely based on RNG and is useless. Have it deal damage for every tile swapped similar to mags. The damage per tile can be lowered since it has additional benefits. Reduce green AP cost or increase damage.

Note: I don't have enough hands on to comment about beast or colossus. I know that beast felt very weak even when playing the boosted version of him in PvE. As to what he specifically needs tweaked I'm not sure. He's easily one of the weakest characters in the game right now. His blue should provide stronger strike tiles than BP given the CD tile drawback. His green needs to be more powerful given that it practically requires blue to have been cast. The values on both the protect tiles and healing need to be boosted to the point where people might actually consider 5 yellow in a build.

NorthernPolarity

babinro wrote:

How I view the balance of MPQ:

The Punisher is pretty much the 'Mario' in terms of balanced characters in this game from my perspective. He feels perfect to me in that he's powerful and flawed. Many other characters follow his power level as well including Psylocke, Mohawk, Captain America, GSBW, Captain Marvel, Human Torch, etc.

This game feels like it's closely balanced with only a couple of problematic standouts. I'll talk about others as well just because it seems appropriate for this post.

1) Sentry - His green is clearly out of hand. The other 2 abilities are 'okay' given their drawbacks. Make the green ability trigger as one instance triggering strike tiles only once. Odds are it'll cascade other matches anyways.

2) X-Force - His black is clearly out of hand. I LOVE X-force. He's crazy fun to play with and not that bad to play against. But his black deals GREAT damage, drains AP and gains AP allowing an easy follow up of one or more skills. It's just flat out too strong as evidenced by his popularity in all modes of play. You could balance this skill many different ways given that it does 4 powerful things (high damage, board shake, AP drain, AP gain). Maybe nerf the damage per tile. Maybe remove the AP gain. Maybe limit the number of tiles that can be destroyed lowering all of these things. Something. This character is not game breaking like Sentry but he's not remotely balanced and needs fixing.

3) Black Panther - Compare this character to Punisher and you'll instantly see why he's unbalanced. It's worth stating that I don't feel BP is actually overpowered. You can be unbalanced and not harmful for the game. But in BP's case his strike tiles are strictly better even before the optional buff and the black completely blows away Punishers black. BP's damage numbers need to be scaled back but only a bit.

4) Thor - I'm probably among the minority here whose actually fine with Thor ever since the level shifting buffed character HP. That said...I acknowledge that people still view Thor as overpowered. The easiest change here is to keep damage the same but reduce the number of tiles generated from his yellow from 9 to 5. This greatly reduces the impact of his skills chaining.

5) Remove True Healing - There's no reason for this to exist anymore and it just makes certain characters too good for prolonged play. Patch and Daken can just heal their wounds throughout the next battle but their starting hp will always be from it's lowest point. Eventually you'll have to use a health pack on them. Right now I can milk patch/daken/x-force and heal them in prologue if I wanted to in order to give them 20x the lasting power of someone like Black Panther or even Devil Dino. It makes these character amazing for meta gaming reasons.

6) Fury - Drop demolition down to about 1000 per trap. This isn't instant guaranteed damage so I understand that it deserves to be stronger than mags blue. That said, the damage of demo is nuts at five covers especially since it's his lowest AP skill. Have it optimally deal 7000 damage with the very real potential that a trap may get disarmed or be matched by the player or Fury knocked out in the process. 7k damage is nothing to scoff at...Fury will still be good.

7) IM40 - You've got a skill that costs 20 AP....make it feel worthy of this. This ability should down the target it strikes regardless of hp. Other missiles could stun the remaining team and sap AP accordingly. This ability goes off so rarely that I can't see people genuinely complaining if it one shots a character. Also either buff the damage or unibeam or drop the cost of the skill or both. It doesn't match the power level of red skills anymore especially with the built in thematic drawback (which should remain).

8) Daredevil - I've made my opinions known in the trap change thread. To sum it up...traps should trigger whenever they are tinkered with. Translation, if a trap tile is overwritten , moved, or blown up as part of a board shake it should activate.

9) Loki - Given that they plan to keep these guys with two skills....reduce his black to 8 AP - This puts it in line with the cost of most strike tile generators. When casting his purple, let the tiles 'lock' in place whenever they would match 5 of a kind.

10) Rags - Give us the luck the AI has with him? When the AI plays this guy he's insane. When I use him he's terrible. No actual suggestions here.

11) Doom - Scale up the damage on summon demons to better reflect the powers of black skills currently in the game. I'd go as far as the normal version of the damage almost equal to his boosted form. He's actually a pretty great character given how his skill synergy but he just lacks a bit more kick. I shouldn't want to run him just so I can trigger BP's or X-Forces black.

12) Invisible Woman - Lower the cost of her yellow to something like 10. Alternatively make it cost like 12 and have us select the target for invisibility. Drastically increase the damage of her Green. Reduce cost of blue by maybe 1 or 2.

13) Doctor Octopus - His blue is completely based on RNG and is useless. Have it deal damage for every tile swapped similar to mags. The damage per tile can be lowered since it has additional benefits. Reduce green AP cost or increase damage.

Note: I don't have enough hands on to comment about beast or colossus. I know that beast felt very weak even when playing the boosted version of him in PvE. As to what he specifically needs tweaked I'm not sure. He's easily one of the weakest characters in the game right now. His blue should provide stronger strike tiles than BP given the CD tile drawback. His green needs to be more powerful given that it practically requires blue to have been cast. The values on both the protect tiles and healing need to be boosted to the point where people might actually consider 5 yellow in a build.

I don't think 5 yellow is ever an option. Beast can be made a lot better by just having his blue change 4 random blue tiles as opposed to spawning the tiles so close to each other: most of the heartbreak comes from the blue tiles being matched away instantly and being useless. Green is actually very good dmg/ap if blue was actually worth casting. Colossus is far from underpowered, and doesn't need help.

loroku

I appreciate the replies and suggestions for how to fix things but this thread is really trying to be about asking the devs to fix things. I don't even really care how they fix them; I just want them to shift their priorities to fixing the existing characters before introducing new ones.

Of course, I just saw that this thread is already too late in that Blade is being released moments after the latest 2* which was moments after two new characters in the anniversary week which was right after... well, you get the idea. Obviously these characters were already in the pipeline but it'd be AWESOME if they could focus back on fixes / balances / tweaks after all these new characters drop.

MaskedMan

I am sure some new characters pull in people who want those characters. On the other hand I can't imagine anyone gets really excited about another new 2* character or fixing an existing one, but they have time to do that.

So either they aren't strictly profit driven or they have no idea how people play the game.

ONE THING I absolutely object to is increasing the odds of getting bad characters from gold cards. Getting what I need is hard enough without decreasing the odds so I can get 20 Loki's.

Most of the bad characters really aren't that hard to fix anyway. For example:
- If you think Loki's shuffle power is too weak, add a low to moderate direct damage number to it and BANG it is much better without reworking it completely. Plus it is still unique and some will like it for the random damage and some won't.
- Other characters just need AP costs reduced. 17 Black for a one turn stun for Moonstone is ridiculous. Any power over 15 should be seriously looked at as it better be pretty kick-**** to cost that much.

This isn't a huge FPS or something. Maintaining/updating it shouldn't be all that hard. Personally I compare it to Marvel Heros. That game has more servers, code and maintenance and yet it is much less demanding for $. In Puzzle Quest most people definitely feel pressured to spend money, shielding being the most extreme example of that. They are in no danger of going broke if they spend some time fixing characters, if they fold it will be because people got tired of the grind, found something better or got fed up with the system.