Planned Updates To Shields - New Start Date

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

**** Update ****
This is Will over at Demiurge. Thanks for all the feedback.

We had hoped to make this change during the off-season, before Season IX, but we couldn't get the latest update through first-party certification in time. We initially made the decision to get cooldowns into the game as soon as possible because the negative feedback about the very high scores that repeated shield use allows was so strong.

But we're hearing that you'd rather not have this change land in the middle of a season, so we've decided not to introduce shield cooldowns until the end of Season IX. The off-season events between Season IX and X will be their first appearance, to give you a chance to play with them and work out new strategies before the start of the next season. (This will mean we wait a little longer before recalibrating the progression rewards, since the off-season events often have unusual scoring patterns.)

I also wanted to respond to some of the questions & concerns you've raised.

* Some folks have asked why the cooldown on the 3 hour shield is 8 hours instead of 3 (or less). A cooldown that short would mean that the best way to get the most shields for the fewest Hero Points is to come back and play every 3 (or less) hours, through the night. That's not an ideal situation.

* Some suggestions involve getting rid of shields or the reasons why they exist. Our aim isn't to get rid of shields - the experience of breaking a shield, biting your nails as you beat a fight as fast as you can, and deciding whether to dare go for another win or shield up is the source of the best adrenaline rush in MPQ for many folks. The thing we're putting a lid on is the number of points that can come from using shields over and over. We still expect that players that use shields well will have an advantage over those who don't - but we're aiming for things to be more about the strategy of when to break a shield, when to re-shield, and how long to stay vulnerable, instead of the top of the leaderboards being decided by the raw number of shields you're willing to use.

* Sorry for the ambiguity of the term "shield hopping" in the original post. Different folks here on the forums, and even different folks on the Marvel Puzzle Quest team, mean different things by it. The kind of thing I think of when I hear the term doesn't rely on any out-of-game communication - for other folks, it brings to mind the strategies that have let players break 3000 points, which do require coordination. We shouldn't have used the term in the announcement; sorry about that.

* I've heard some questions in the thread about how this change will interact with the ability to choose your end time. Folks are concerned that, depending on the end time, the number of high-scoring players around makes it easier or harder to score points. While some end times tend to have much higher top scores than others, the differences in how hard it is to earn points are pretty modest for most players. The difference in scores at the top of the leaderboards is mostly from a greater proportion of high-scoring players choosing particular end times. I want to share with you some of the data that shows that.

One of the ways to measure the difficulty of getting a particular score is how many battles it takes to get there. Here are the average number of battles that people fought to end a recent event with particular scores, arranged in order of end time:

600-700: 35 / 33 / 32 / 32 / 33
700-800: 37 / 35 / 35 / 36 / 35
800-900: 38 / 41 / 37 / 37 / 37

From here on out the sample sizes can get small, and bounce around a lot depending on what event you're looking at. We also start to see a difference in the makeup of the players reaching these scores - in the last end time, the top scorers are significantly better coordinated, with better teams, allowing them to get to the top in fewer battles and stay there.

900-1000: 43 / 42 / 43 / 40 / 37
1000-1100: 47 / 46 / 42 / 45 / 40
1100-1200: 46 / 51 / 43 / 48 / 39
1200-1300: 50 / 65 / 40 / 55 / 48

Note that people are getting better progression rewards than these numbers might indicate for fighting this many matches - this is the score players ended with, not their peak score.

The average scores for each of the end times:

348 / 358 / 355 / 356 / 333

and the average score required to break the top 5:

951 / 864 / 1057 / 1050 / 1249

Much higher top scores in that last end time (though the average is lower due to people joining close to the end of the event), but not until somewhere around the 950-1000 mark do we see a difference in how many battles it takes to get a particular score. It's possible that picking the right end time could be helpful to the highest scorers in the most competitive alliances (it's hard to control for their other advantages enough to be sure), but it's not making a difference outside of the top ~10 alliances.

* To restate something that was in the announcement: the proportion of people reaching various progression rewards in Versus is about right currently, and if it's necessary to change the point at which rewards are given out to keep that the same (there are good odds it will be, but it's impossible to predict exactly how behavior will change as a result of cooldowns), we plan to do that.


**** Original message from Hi-Fi (with the start date updated) ****

Greetings,

Coming up at the end of the current season, we are planning to make some changes to Shields.

Shields may now have cooldowns depending on the Event. The cooldown is displayed below the amount of time the Shield lasts. Specifically, after you purchase a Shield, there's a cooldown period (8 hours) before you can buy another Shield of the same duration in the same Event.

The plan is for this change to go live during the off-season between Season IX and Season X, on January 5.

Some of the thinking behind this change:
• "Shield hopping" is still possible but very limited. High-scoring is fun, but Shield hopping generally requires a large amount of out-of-game communication that not all players have access to. We asked ourselves this question: "Would you Shield hop if you didn't need to in order to reach a high score? If not, that's a sign that a change is probably needed."

• This change helps level the playing field. Players that don't have the Hero Points to spend on Shields, either through being in a top 100 Alliance or purchasing currency, will not need to worry about someone simply outspending them by using hundreds of Hero Points to Shield hop for a win.

• Initially, we'll be keeping the scores needed to earn progression rewards the same while we test a few Versus Events and gather data. Over the last few months, we've seen a lot of variation in the number of players using lots of Shields in a single Event, and a lot of variation in the highest scores players reach, but very little variation in how much effort it takes to reach a particular progression reward. It's not clear at this point how much this change will affect the difficulty of earning progression rewards; it'll depend on what strategies people adopt in response to the change. We'll be watching how the difficulty changes and will make adjustments to the rewards after a few Events if necessary.

Thanks for reading. Your feedback is welcomed.