Dissatisfaction factors

h4n1s

As long as I am reading/contributing to these forums I understand there are few factors that impact satisfaction of MPQ players.

1. Expectations
All players have expectations on return on investment. There's no exact formula to wrap this, but generally there's always an expectation to get something back as long as you invest time, energy and money. Expectations may vary, but the general ones are:
- soft - good mood, experience, learning, brain training, feeling of accomplishment
- hard - rewards, progression, unlocked content

2. Ambitions
Each and every player has certain level of ambition and it's not necessarily tied with rewards expectations. Basically I would define following levels of ambitions:
- low - rather casual player, who doesn't care much what's his rank in tournament, those guys play more for progression rewards and gauntlet, prologue type of events are the most interesting for them
- medium - a player that cares for rank but is completely OK to end up within top 50% - top 30% finishers; being top 25 finisher in his/her bracket is nice achievement but not a goal for them
- high - a player that aims for top ranks

3. Capability
Each and every player has specific capability in regards of playing this game. I would make following highlights:
- time restrictions - play whenever the player is able to with respect to other time constraints (work, family, night, day etc.)
- IQ - by that I mean ability to make good moves, build team with good synergy, effectively win fights and wisely choose opponents
- financial restrictions - amount of money the player can/wants to spend on this game (not only personal situation but also market situation of his region)

How this can be used for benefit of D3/Demiurge?

Expectations - can be (actually must be) managed. To do that you need to listen and openly communicate. You need to seek for consensus where possible, compromise where needed. Clearly state what is and what is not your intention with this game, state what people should expect and where is the border. Don't create false hopes, if you promise something give it a timeline, else you're gonna frustrate a lot people with high expectations and passion.
Ambitions - you can't influence this but you can work with this. I can immediately think of bracketing system - if you create brackets which will group high achieving players and separate bracket of low achieving players (take amount of fights per individual as a baseline), you are not doing a good job. Players with low ambitions don't care, players with high ambitions will be angry as they cannot achieve.
Capability - can be addressed. As an example: besides time zones, which are currently being addressed by different ending times, keep in mind that certain locations and significant part of player baseline will not participate in HP sales (30%) if that discounted price is still high enough for their region and that benefit of paying that price is rather low.

Bottomline - nerfing single character or releasing new characters is not the only way of addressing the main dissatisfaction factors. Take broader look and analyse your market and potential or existing customers, this may shift the game to whole new level and may reduce the dissatisfaction level on the forum and negative ratings on vendor sites.

Unknown

Excellent analysis.

Here is mine :

In order to succeed in any company you need the following :

Capacity to listen
Capacity to analyse quickly
Capacity to be pro-active regarding your customers' expectations
Capacity to adapt
Capacity to communicate
Make sure your product is mature enough or good enough to get tons of cash out of it, if that's your goal

D3P has failed in many of the above requirements.

Most probably because some or many guys in there are psychorigid (the time it took them to take some decisions is amazing) and/or binary because they come from the computer industry/development.

Some examples :

During the Google sales, they did not consider offering the discount to other platform "because it was a Google sales for God sake"
Team Up : Much ado about nothing that is still not as useful as it should be considering the time it took to make it what it is now and the other priorities to be addressed
Buff/balance characters : They keep on releasing characters that most of the players will not keep because they are lame. Therefore, they don't get as much money as they should with the most basic thing : roster slots
The forum : they lead the customers to the forum (where the forumites express all kinds of disatisfaction) and don't even have a cool website to promote the game, when graphic design is the key thing in the Marvel Universe.

They focus too much on "quick return to investment" and are "shareholders" focused. But because they don't have the required skills, they fail in making the game as good as it deserves.

The Marvel license is the key to the current success of the game. They have marvel.com to promote new characters.

MPQ is quite an interesting case to study. We'll see what the future brings.