MPQ Community Q&A #3 – December - Answer Time!

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Hi folks – it’s time for the December Marvel Puzzle Quest Community Q&A!

Grab yourselves a hot mug of cocoa and cozy up beside the fireplace for a heartwarming holiday chat. (Did I go too far there with the whole seasonal thing?)
Quick notes: The Q&A title has been changed from “Dev Q&A” to “Community Q&A.” Some questions have been combined and some have been re-worded for clarity and brevity. Now, let’s get right to it!

Q(a): Each new character needs a Roster Slot. Resources are needed to purchase Roster Slots. Over time, resources are not increasing, but Roster Slot prices are./What are your plans for addressing the high costs of Roster Slots with so many characters?

Q(b): Obtaining enough Iso can be difficult. Any plans to help with this?/Have you thought about giving out more Hero Points for progressions or rewards?

A: Hey everyone, we’d like to group these first few questions because the answers are closely related. Kicking off Year 2 of MPQ, we’ve run into a few issues that we always knew we’d encounter (should we be lucky enough to be as successful as we have been), related to what happens when we introduce a much larger roster and increasingly rare characters. Our goal has always been to preserve the things that make MPQ awesome, and keep players engaged, challenged, and loving every match. In order to do this, we have to continue evolving the design and some of this will change what players have come to expect as the status quo. For starters, we’ll be releasing more 4*s this year, a lot more. We’re currently devoting a lot of thought to making that transition smoother than it was from 2*s to 3*s. We’ve debated internally about how much to increase the inflow of Iso-8 and Hero Points, and how (to go about it). 56% of MPQ players this month started playing after September, more than half in the last two months. A lot of these players have 2* rosters, and increasing rewards for them too much would throw off the balance of the game this early, making it too easy. It’s a problem when the game is too challenging, but the reverse is also bad, as a lack of challenge will quickly bore you. Progression in any RPG eventually slows down, and speeding things up in one place often just hastens the moment when things get slow. On the other hand, increasing rewards just for more advanced players contributes to a widening gap between veterans and newer players. We’ve steadily increased the rate at which players earn Iso-8 over the past year (it’s almost three times as high as when we launched), and we expect that to continue. The inflow of Hero Points has also increased, though to a lesser extent. We do expect that most players will have to make choices about which characters join their roster and which they spend their Iso-8 on, just as you have to make choices about which of a character’s powers get upgraded to level 5. We’re finding a balance point between a world in which those decisions are uninteresting and a world where the constraints mean that you can’t meaningfully progress. One thing that makes that difficult is that the balance point is in a different place for different players: some enjoy very difficult decisions about who to keep and level, some expect to be able to acquire and max everything, and most are somewhere in between. In short, there’s no easy answers to this problem; it’s a complex issue with a lot of edge cases at our current scale. We’re devoting a lot of thought to improving this transition right now, and we appreciate hearing about your experiences to help us make better decisions. MPQ needs to evolve in the coming year and we at Demiurge are extremely excited for what 2015 has in store for Marvel Puzzle Quest and our community.

Q: At the top of the leaderboards, Versus is geared towards playing fast (to avoid being hit while unshielded) rather than playing creatively with diverse rosters. The 'fastest' teams dominate. Are you comfortable with this element of the game?

A: Yes and no: In any multiplayer game, high-end competition is going to be a somewhat different game than what most people are playing. There are fewer viable strategies and they’re typically a little less expressive and creative. We’re comfortable with the fact that some of the characters we release won’t find a role in that environment and are just there to be fun and interesting for folks that are less focused on being at the top. We do want the top of the leaderboards to be an interesting place to be, and intend to continue shaking things up with new characters and balance changes when we see a single team composition dominating. But speed will probably always be more important at the top than it is for most players.

Q: Can we get an ETA on characters like The Hood and Black Widow being able to steal Team-Up AP?

A: We think Dormammu’s Aid is strong enough as it is; no plans for it to affect Team-Up AP. We just clarified the text of the power to reflect that it only affects Red/Blue/Yellow/Green/Purple/Black AP. We’ve started the process of examining character powers that steal/destroy AP and destroy tiles, and determining which powers that aren’t currently targeting Team-Up tiles or AP should, and how that should affect their cost or other aspects of the power. We don’t do ETAs for this kind of change until we’re happy with the results, though, sorry.

Q: What do you think of the current state of healing powers? Black Widow (Original), Spider-Man (Classic), Beast, She-Hulk?

A: Here’s our take on where things are at: Direct, offensive strategies are currently more effective in general than ones focused on defense, control, or utility. This is shifting a bit with some recent character additions and changes, but not a whole lot. Healing is currently roughly on par with Protect tiles and damage reduction (like Immovable Object) - so, underpowered relative to direct damage, but not so much relative to everything else. (Something that may be making healing look less effective than it is: Web Bandages is the only pure team healing power we have. Reprieve and Medical Marvel are both spending a significant portion of their budget on their other effects. Anti-Gravity Device is a unique case because of its “either-or” nature - it’s as effective as a pure healing power in the cases where it heals.) The effect of offense being more powerful than defense varies depending on where you’re at in the game: it has a more pronounced effect in highly competitive play where speed matters more. We’ve talked about how to make defensive powers more interesting and effective without them stalling the game too much, and you’re seeing the results of some of that thinking in Elektra, Rocket & Groot, and Loki’s Mischief. While high-end play could be slowed down a bit, we’re pretty happy with the length of the average fight for intermediate players, and we don’t want to slow that down much. That complicates a large-scale change to defensive powers. But it’s something we’ve talked about. Even so, as total character packages, Black Widow (Original) and Spider-Man (Classic) are in pretty good places right now. Spider-Man sees the amount of use we’d expect for a 3* character of average strength, and Black Widow sees significantly more than the average 2*. Beast and She-Hulk could use a boost.

Q: Beast’s Blue power, Mutagenic Breakthrough, is incredibly inconsistent because it has a high probability of having its special tiles matched right away, or in the following turns, because they're so close to each other. Do you have any plans of redesigning it?

A: Yeah, Beast is a character we’d like to revisit, balance-wise.

Q: Since you feature actual covers with actual artists, any chance of future versions like "McFarlane Spider-Man" or something?

A: We’d want the character to be different enough visually that even folks who aren’t Marvel experts can readily tell them apart. We also prefer to release characters that play differently from existing characters when we can, and it’s easier to do that well when a character’s powers or personality is significantly different.

Q: What do you think of making all Story Events non-competitive, with progress rewards only, like The Gauntlet? The Gauntlet can be difficult, but it brings the players together as we discuss the characters and strategies we used to get through it.

A: Dev 1 - The Gauntlet is a break from our normal Story Event structure. It’s a lot of fun to put together a Gauntlet, and we’re glad that it’s just as fun to play it. We don’t have a definite timeline, but we’re definitely looking at new twists on Story Events. Dev 2: That said, most Story Events will continue to have leaderboards and placement rewards. Some folks engage with the leaderboards, and lots of people play those Events as if the placement rewards didn’t exist. Totally non-competitive gameplay is more likely to show up outside of the Event format.

Q: Character queue -- Why isn't it possible to sort characters by ways other than by level? Sort by; max health, current health, color (pick a color), levelability.

A: Dev 1: It really comes down to a question of priority. We have only so much development time each week to make new things and add new features. Being able to sort your characters in a variety of ways requires new code, new UI, new design and lots of testing. We think that creating new Events and working on features like Event offsets (aka shards or slices) provide a larger benefit to a larger number of players. In a perfect world we’d be able to do all the features, but unfortunately we have to pick and choose. Dev 2: Also, when deciding whether to add a new feature like this, we’re often looking at something that will make the game more convenient for some players and more overwhelming for others. Marvel Puzzle Quest’s UI is already very complex, more so than most of our competitors (mainly because the game itself is deeper). In some cases, a game can introduce this type of convenience feature as an option, but when something needs to be turned on in an options menu, only a tiny fraction of players find it. At Demiurge, we often use “awesomeness-per-person-day” to decide what we should be working on. We understand awesomeness as the number of people who have more fun, multiplied by how much more fun they have. So, the more players a new feature benefits, and the fewer players whose fun might actually decrease because of a change, the more likely we are to prioritize it.

Q: Can we get some sort of superficial rewards beyond the max progression reward? 200 Iso every 5k beyond the max progression reward?

A: No plans for this. We want to make sure it’s possible (if challenging) for completionists to get every checkmark.

Q: Have you thought about adding more permanent single-player content, either by adding the existing episodes to the prologue or allowing us to repeat the prologue with the levels increased? I'd really like some incentive to go there and farm them again.

A: We’ve got a couple of ideas for more permanent single-player missions that we’re exploring on paper at the moment, actually. Almost certainly new stuff, rather than a rework of episodes or the prologue.

- Thanks for joining us for this month’s Community Q&A! We’ll begin soliciting your questions for the January Q&A very soon. We hope you have a safe, warm and wonderful holiday season! -