Advice for somebody trying to go casual

russreid91

Hi everybody,

As many members of the MPQ community are finding, the last few weeks have just burned them out. You can now count me into that group as well, this game is taking up too much of my time and the stress involved is making it not enjoyable at all. I do however think that MPQ is moving in the right direction (aside from the speed of new character releases) so I don't want to quit completely.

To begin with I am stepping away from the Dark Saviors the top 50 Alliance I have been a part of since season 2, as we have accomplished so much together I don't want to drag their scores down. I am also planning on taking next week completely off and putting the game down completely. Hopefully I will pick it up again after that but we'll see.

I am also planning on only playing for the covers that I really want and becoming a merc for an alliance that needs that last little push for those same covers.

What I'm wondering is for those of you that have stepped back how did it work for you? Did you actually step back or have you started playing at the same competitive levels again after a little break. How have you managed PvE's, are you still pushing for the new covers or do you just not care anymore? How did you get your self to accept that you didn't need top 10 in everything and settle for top 100?

Any advice for how to make the transition and then keep the game in perspective moving forward would be greatly appreciated.

Maybe we could get NorthernPolarity to write a post on the 3/4* to semi retired transition

Thank you in advance for your help,

Russ91

scottee

Once you realize the season heroic packs are all not really worth that much, it becomes much easier. Is 5 heroic tokens that different from 20 after a month? You're going to get maybe one useful cover out of them.

In PVE, I only play for 1 cover of new characters. That's all that's needed for the next PVE, and it's usually enough to help the alliance make top 100. If a new character I need is in the progressions, I'll play til around then and stop.

For PVP, play casually up to 800-900 with no shields. Push hard if there's covers you want. Lately, that's only really 4* Thor for me. No one else really excites me.

mohio

scottee wrote:

Once you realize the season heroic packs are all not really worth that much, it becomes much easier. Is 5 heroic tokens that different from 20 after a month? You're going to get maybe one useful cover out of them.

In PVE, I only play for 1 cover of new characters. That's all that's needed for the next PVE, and it's usually enough to help the alliance make top 100. If a new character I need is in the progressions, I'll play til around then and stop.

For PVP, play casually up to 800-900 with no shields. Push hard if there's covers you want. Lately, that's only really 4* Thor for me. No one else really excites me.

This has been almost my exact playstyle too over the past two months except I've maybe pushed a little harder in pve for 2 and sometimes even 3 covers for the new characters. Thankfully my alliance has a secondary one we set up several months ago so I can hang out there and move back for any rewards I especially want (which as scottee said, has been only Thor).

russreid91

I wasn't worried about the Heroic tokens from the end of the season, I think I realized after season 3 that they really weren't giving me much if anything at all. I was always just putting up the points for the alliance season reward.

Thank you for the input on PvE, that makes sense as most of those characters haven't been that great anyways. With the more casual alliances that you guys are in where are they normally finishing. Still in the top 100?

_M4ru_

russreid91 wrote:

What I'm wondering is for those of you that have stepped back how did it work for you? Did you actually step back or have you started playing at the same competitive levels again after a little break. How have you managed PvE's, are you still pushing for the new covers or do you just not care anymore? How did you get your self to accept that you didn't need top 10 in everything and settle for top 100?

How did it work? GREAT! It's like a new game for me.

- Bag man covers in pvp? I don't have to play!
- 600pts in pvp gives me top100 and sometimes top50 WITHOUT shielding? Fantastic!
- Another pve that ends in the middle of the night? Yolo - i don't have to play
- I don't have the featured character? Whatever! I'll get to 600 when it's featured in the next pvp! Yay!

I have time to do other stuff. There are days when i just log in to collect my daily reward and have no need to play at all. I don't feel the urge for newly released covers because i know i will eventually get them one day or another. It finally got to me that i don't need to try to "beat/win this game", i'm more relaxed when i read devs "patch/upgrade/new fantastic stuff we do to please You" announcements. Since there's no need for shielding i have more HP for slots (if i decide to buy the slot that is and not kick some useless 1/0/0 3* beast/mohawk/colossuss/etc.)

BEST decision ever

Unknown

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Unknown

I had 100% decided to quit and was just playing "casual style" while waiting for my alliance to replace me when I realized how little I lost by being casual. For pvp I go to 600, 900 if i feel like playing more, or top 5 if I really want the covers. PvE I generally play twice a day and then hit the last three refreshes when a sub/event ends.

In general (admittedly not always) I score two covers instead of three, get just as much HP and maybe 1 or 2k less iso, and it takes 40% of the time and 0% of the stress while barely slowing my collection of covers

Konman

russreid91 wrote:

Hi everybody,

As many members of the MPQ community are finding, the last few weeks have just burned them out. You can now count me into that group as well, this game is taking up too much of my time and the stress involved is making it not enjoyable at all. I do however think that MPQ is moving in the right direction (aside from the speed of new character releases) so I don't want to quit completely.

To begin with I am stepping away from the Dark Saviors the top 50 Alliance I have been a part of since season 2, as we have accomplished so much together I don't want to drag their scores down. I am also planning on taking next week completely off and putting the game down completely. Hopefully I will pick it up again after that but we'll see.

I am also planning on only playing for the covers that I really want and becoming a merc for an alliance that needs that last little push for those same covers.

What I'm wondering is for those of you that have stepped back how did it work for you? Did you actually step back or have you started playing at the same competitive levels again after a little break. How have you managed PvE's, are you still pushing for the new covers or do you just not care anymore? How did you get your self to accept that you didn't need top 10 in everything and settle for top 100?

Any advice for how to make the transition and then keep the game in perspective moving forward would be greatly appreciated.

Maybe we could get NorthernPolarity to write a post on the 3/4* to semi retired transition

Thank you in advance for your help,

Russ91

Five, count 'em, Five easy steps to regain control of your life...

Step #1. Ignore alliances, except for their snazzy logos.
Step #2. In PVE only play a node once, after that who cares, you hate grinding, and you're likely to only get a 20 ISO reward anyway
Step #3. In PVP, play enough to get the 10-pack of tokens before the season ends.
Step #4. Never buy a health pack, no matter what. If you run out, that's a good enough reason to take a break.
Step #5. Don't buy any more roster slots, you have enough already, and I have no idea how many you actually have, but its plenty

J.U.I.C.E. by Russ!

mohio

russreid91 wrote:

I wasn't worried about the Heroic tokens from the end of the season, I think I realized after season 3 that they really weren't giving me much if anything at all. I was always just putting up the points for the alliance season reward.

Thank you for the input on PvE, that makes sense as most of those characters haven't been that great anyways. With the more casual alliances that you guys are in where are they normally finishing. Still in the top 100?

I am really lucky that my alliance is a very cool group of guys (and gals). Without going into too much detail we essentially have a 18 or 19-person "main" alliance (some guys left and we never officially replaced them), and therefore a 21-22 person "secondary" alliance. We rotate guys around a lot since obviously some people don't really need covers, but we never really have a problem coming in top 100, but maybe rank 45 or so is usually our ceiling. Anyway, being a member of the main alliance I could easily sit there and rack up rewards if I chose to. With minimal effort I can score 700-900 points and that might put me in the middle of our alliance score-wise, but it wouldn't keep us from top 100. Anyway, as I mentioned before I mostly hang out in the secondary alliance and let my spot rotate to others who especially need the cover or have earned it by scoring a lot in that pvp/pve. It takes off a lot of pressure (especially in PvE, since I can wait to join if I want and not worry about my score hurting the alliance). The secondary alliance generally comes right around 250 (there are a few beginners, and the rest are almost entirely 2* only), sometimes above and sometimes below.

It might be difficult to back your way into this situation (although we'd take you next time we have an opening if you were interested), but if your current alliance had something like this, it would be a good solution for you (and perhaps some others who are feeling similarly might realize they really want it to).

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

GothicKratos

I posted this a little while back;

GothicKratos wrote:

What I would offer is some advice based on my own experiences; do just play when you want to and how you want to. I quit playing for about three months after the initial DPvMPQ event after not placing well enough to get covers, but my girlfriend whom had been playing for about three weeks at the time, got two. Infuriated would not even capture my feelings. The feeling of wasted time and frustration was only exasperated by the fact Deadpool is easily my favorite comic book character. After a little while, while Kyla was still playing and talking about it a lot with her and helping her, I found myself wanting to play again, but I didn't want to fall into the trap again. So, basically, I started gaming the system.

I know that 500 is my peak in PvP, so, when a PvP starts that is giving away something I want in 3* land, I just join as late as humanly possible (one hour seems to be the magic number), but if it's a 2* prize I need, I just play casually whenever I want and as long as I get a decent amount of matches in each day, I snag the cover. I've gotten ranked for two 3* cover rewards four times now (just got two 3* Thor covers today, even, by playing for an hour with Daken and Wolverine) and one cover rewards endless times.

For PvE, if I need something in the high end of the Progression Rewards, you need to be able to play, at least each node once, and each Essential Node down to around 500 point value (usually three plays) every three hours. If you only need rank rewards, then join each sub six hours before the node ends and play each node once and each Essential down as far as you can for both refreshes. You'll need to do this for each sub, though. This seems to maximize banding and bracketing.

It's slow, of course, but it's a good reward versus effort.

lukewin

Spoit wrote:

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

Clarify, if you have a strong roster. I don't have any max 3*s, so 800 isn't getting hit at all. 600 without shielding is possible, if not for last min attacks. 500 without shielding is more realistic to finish if you have max 2*s.

homeinvasion

So glad for this post, I thought it was just me, I feel I can't even turn on the game I love. I agree absolutely the PVE train has left me wrecked.

My biggest hesitation atm is the meta. PVE is this unrelenting grind fest where you need a wide roster to have options on attacking an oft unfair node. But, conversely PVP is now firmly in the hands of the 4 star characters and you can't compete without At least an xforce and in the coming months a Thor as well. So where does that leave most players? You have to chose one or the other. I actually can't decide what to do with my roster, spend my increasingly sparse iso on my 4 stars for PVP or spend it on a wide 3 star roster base.

Does anyone know a rough guide of what is coming in the next 6 months - 1 year so I can roughly make a decision? Like if there is a whole bunch more 4 stars coming out I will start that thousand mile journey. If there is no more 4 stars coming up I would prefer to focus PVE and spend my iso on all those 3 stars I never got a chance to play.

Anyway, yes I like all the new characters, I wish there was a wider variety of actual content rather than these cosmetic additions. But ultimately it is not knowing what direction to take my roster that is making me not want to play.

Spoit

lukewin wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

Clarify, if you have a strong roster. I don't have any max 3*s, so 800 isn't getting hit at all. 600 without shielding is possible, if not for last min attacks. 500 without shielding is more realistic to finish if you have max 2*s.

Sure, but phantron has a great roster that he could win fairly trivially with

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

True, on slice #1 and #2, 700-900 is actually top 10 on several pvp i attend (depends on x-factor tho) and lot of players practicing "last hour push and shield once" or i would say "smart casual top 10 gameplay".
Sometimes not shielding at all (of course supported with scarecrows char) by maintaining score range and retaliations in the last 30 mins.
Shield for the rest of the event is a bad idea (except ur not able to play on last 3 hour), never climb up to 700 or more when ur not ready to shield.

Spoit

tobi69 wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

True, on slice #1 and #2, 700-900 is actually top 10 on several pvp i attend (depends on x-factor tho) and lot of players practicing "last hour push and shield once" or i would say "smart casual top 10 gameplay".
Sometimes not shielding at all (of course supported with scarecrows char) by maintaining score range and retaliations in the last 30 mins.
Shield for the rest of the event is a bad idea (except ur not able to play on last 3 hour), never climb up to 700 or more when ur not ready to shield.

Nah, you can climb higher, as long as you're willing to climb back up from like 500 or so. Usually there are at least a few high value targets in your retal nodes, which makes it easier than the inital climb

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Nah, you can climb higher, as long as you're willing to climb back up from like 500 or so. Usually there are at least a few high value targets in your retal nodes, which makes it easier than the inital climb

lol, thx for confirming.. this is exactly what i meant with "maintain retaliations in last 30min".

Unknown

russreid91 wrote:

I wasn't worried about the Heroic tokens from the end of the season, I think I realized after season 3 that they really weren't giving me much if anything at all. I was always just putting up the points for the alliance season reward.

Thank you for the input on PvE, that makes sense as most of those characters haven't been that great anyways. With the more casual alliances that you guys are in where are they normally finishing. Still in the top 100?

Phantron wrote:

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Our alliance lost a lot of top players all at once a couple of seasons ago and has been slowly building back up. We're trying to get back into top 100 status and our goal is for every member to be able to consistently put up 600 points... we've been around top 110 for the past half dozen PVPs with only 13-15 of our members hitting 600 points. I think if you can reliably get 600 points in every PVP you'll be able to find a spot in some top 100 alliance.

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

No what I mean is I assume if you're going casual you're not going to make arrangement to have an 8 hour block of time before some event ends. If you hit 800 a day before the event ends, well that's 300 HP to preserve that score until the end. Of course if you're still able to make schedule arrangement to play toward the end of the event that's no problem, but that doesn't strike me as very casual.

GothicKratos

I'd just like to point out I attained #8 place by earning 316 points over the course of an hour and fifteen minutes. Squeaked out about 4000 ISO between everything, got two Ock covers (which I will likely sell tbh -- building new characters seems unproductive), and was lucky enough to pull a 4* Thor cover form the event token. It was a good day.

If I had started maybe twenty minutes earlier, it's probable I would have gotten three covers (which at that point I probably would had tried to keep them ).

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

You can't be casual and still be worried about alliance top 100 unless you're just so cool that people are willing to let you in while you're doing nothing useful. With the advantage of the 20 man alliance gone, there's just no way you can play casually and still contribute meaningfully in PvE. PvP you might be able to get away with it if you shield a lot (play to 800-900 casually and then shield for the rest of the event), but you'd likely be losing a lot of HP. Yes every top 100 alliance you can find a guy with inexplicably low score and say "My score was better than that guy" but that guy probably scores much higher normally, or he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Unless you're in a complete desert slice, 800 isn't that hard to hit in pvp without shielding (or just shielding once), and you can use up to 4 3 hour shields (or 2 8 hour ones) before you start losing HP

No what I mean is I assume if you're going casual you're not going to make arrangement to have an 8 hour block of time before some event ends. If you hit 800 a day before the event ends, well that's 300 HP to preserve that score until the end. Of course if you're still able to make schedule arrangement to play toward the end of the event that's no problem, but that doesn't strike me as very casual.

Nah, I know plenty of people who went casual by joining and just doing 8-1k in the last 8 or even 3 hours of the event