MPQ is Whack-a-Mole

Nonce Equitaur 2

"David wrote:

Moore"]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.

There have been many great suggestions made that would make transitioning easier.

The 3* covers are usually prizes for events. Most of these events are part of seasons, and are mandatory to play for anyone in an alliance. The bulk of the people winning these event need the points, not the covers. Transitioning players don't have a chance. The event winners sell the covers they don't need for ISO. How to fix this?
1. Free shields for giving up covers. This protects points, at the cost of foregoing prizes.
2. The Scrapyard tourney, constantly giving away the discarded 3* covers.
3. For an event with a character prize, do sharding based on "fully covered" / "not fully covered".

I'm one of the whales of the game. I've spent hundreds of dollars on it, and won many events. Even so, I still haven't fully leveled up the following guys. I haven't had the ISO or the hero points. For Colossus, I don't have his red cover yet. Colognoisseur is one of the most diehard collectors of the game, but even he has mentioned being broken by Elektra. I got up to #10 in the event, but there is obvious cheating in it -- impossible scores by people with terrible rosters. If D3 isn't going to take cheating seriously when the prizes are that scarce, then the event isn't worthwhile. It's the first event I've truly given up on. They haven't even released Elektra's stats.


Still, I have a gigantic roster. I have Yelena. Why? Because I got tired of her being added to my roster. I got tired of indicating over and over again that I didn't want her. I don't like the Flashy Red or Yellow Roster Warning if I don't have 2 extra slots I don't need. Fine -- I'll get the extra roster slots to stop the pestering.

If there was a break that let me focus on characters that interest me, I'd work on leveling up Mystique, Rocket&Groot, 4* Thor, Fury, and Loki. I really liked the changes for Loki, and spent hoarded Hero Points to get his Green Mischief up to 5 covers. He's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, there is no break.

The game is becoming Whack-a-Mole. To be competitive, there's a different new character that's needed every few days.

Starting next year, Elektra will be that required character, owned by a tiny fraction of the players, and an even tinier fraction of the honest players. She'll be the required character in yet another broken event that D3 will work hard to fix, hours too late. The prize will be some other 4* character. A 50/50 chance at getting a few Elektra covers will be available for about $50, but you'll need to spend $100 more to get all her covers, and then another $200 to level her up enough to fight level 395 foes in the event. If there aren't too many cheaters in your bracket, then 7 days of around-the-clock grinding might get you the absurdly limited prize of the next 4*.

Put that on repeat -- yet another 4* character is the next prize. And on and on.

Meanwhile, there are still plenty of problems with the existing characters. Recent fixes for Daredevil and Loki are very welcome. But it's not necessary to do a complete design to buff a character. It could be done just by lowering some costs.

20 AP -- Ballistic Salvo -- IM40 (also drains 10AP from other colors, or 30 AP total)
14 AP -- Smash -- Hulk (often damages teammates, drains up to 10 green, for total cost 24 AP)
13 AP -- Unibeam -- IM40 (also drains 10AP from other colors, or 23 AP total)
19 AP -- Ultra-Freon Beam -- IM35
19 AP -- Sentinel of Liberty -- Captain America
18 AP -- Grant Invisibility -- Invisible Woman
18 AP -- Switcheroo -- Bagman
18 AP -- Murderous Aim -- Bullseye
17 AP -- Control Shift -- Moonstone
13 AP -- Force Bubbles -- Invisible Woman

When Lazy Cap, Daken, Thor came out, I sold those 2* characters, expecting that they wouldn't be needed any more. IceIX even mentioned that people with the higher level versions likely wouldn't need the lower level versions. Unfortunately, lots of limited roster events have made the 2* versions necessary. More character whack-a-mole.

I've posted dozens of outlines for improving the game. Some of these outlines have over 100 upvotes. Many others have also made great suggestions, and my compilations are mostly stolen from those guys. Because I read the forums and I recognize good ideas. If the devs are truly willing to listen, then I can put together a poll for them that lets people vote on what they'd most like to get changed. I've put many of these polls together.

The developers seem to have three fallback positions to any suggested change.
1. The fix wouldn't be awesome enough to enact it.
2. The fix would add complications to the game.
3. Things are fine as they are.

Popular suggestions for making the game more awesome have seemingly been ignored, such as the "What characters do you most want?" polls.
Popular suggestions for simplifying the game have seemingly been ignored, such as an indicator for the enemy's strongest color.

A few days ago, I posted it's easy to be positive about MPQ. I listed some of the recent improvements to the game.

I gave up on the Elektra event, though. Making her a 4* and throttling down the rewards that much is a step in the wrong direction. Even worse is forcing people to fight for a prize that's still under wraps. If Elektra is a terrible character, the people that fought the hardest for her will be upset.

D3 shouldn't encourage people to give up on them. Neverending whack-a-mole isn't awesome.

LordWill

I just want to say I do appreciate your posts. You are one of the most dedicated players I have ever seen.

And I also agree with a lot of what you say.

I think for me I saw where Demiurge was going, saw the end game (that there really wasn't an end game so to speak), saw how progressing just makes things harder for the sake of being challenged etc. So I "GET" it.
I just had to come to the conclusion that these things just aren't going to change. I think they have improved but I think everyone sees what they are doing and that's just their way of making money.

When I realized that this is going to be a never ending treadmill (like most games) and they were pretty set on what they wanted to do and how they do it, I just decided it wasn't worth getting frustrated over it.


I agree that its sad they have so much creative power at their fingertips but decide not to listen or work on issues that have been debatable for the betterment of the game.

I hope you find peace!

LordWill

I also just wanted to spell a few things out, especially for newer players:

The game will never get easier.

You will have to spend money on the game at some point.

If you do not spend money on the game, you shouldn't complain you don't get to have everything for nothing.

The development team has their own plans, ideas, and methodology for this game and they are going to do it how they want to, whether you like it or not.

If you choose to get off the treadmill you will be swept away with little chance of ever catching up.

The progression of the game is 1* -> 2* -> 3* -> 4* -> 5* and so on. So it will NEVER stop.

Bottom line is D3/Demiurge wants to make money as much money as they can and their views are if people are willing to spend, they will continue to sell. Just read Albert Reed's articles and see the attitude and tone.

Phaserhawk

I too am feeling the burn I've set a future date where if things don't start turning around for the better I'm out. I remember playing League of Legends when it first came out and it was very similar, too many characters being released, too little improvements to game, OP characters that make the game less fun etc. It was about their year and a half mark that they began to address some of the underlying issues, "btw D3 if you want to make wasy money just design skins for current characters that you could overlay, like instead of Patch in a tux it could be a regular Wolverine etc, it increases your revenue, because unlike LoL where it's free to play, pay to enhance, you guys are pushing the pay to play model" anyyway by that point they started to slow the character release and work on balance and guess what....their game got bigger and better with more players so they found that game improvement does increase traffic and revenue.

Positive steps I have seen
======================
1. Characters going out of rotation to be worked on. While this can be annoying it gives us hope that as characters cycle out they have a cance of being fixed. Look at the quality of life of Loki and DD and you can see that this works.

2. Stopping broken combos, while we all complained about C.Mags, Spidey, Sentry/Hood it really was bad for the game, while they are about 50/50 in terms of character fixes they do address glaring problems

3. Respec, remember when you couldn't do that?

4. True healing, I do think this was better for the game.

There are a few others, so while there have been steps forward there have been just as many steps back. Like I said I'll give them a few more months, but then I'll spend my time and $ elsewhere.

SnowcaTT

How about extending rewards FINALLY for anyone needing covers?

I have one of every character, and tons of 3*'s with 10 to 13 covers, none at 166. I am having great difficulty even making T-100 in PVP's: so many people have the 166 roster and the top 10 are usually 270 rosters. So many teams out there, unless all of your members can push their way a bit into the 166 "wall", you can't possibly get the alliance reward either.

The 2* PVP "reward" has been a slap in the face ever since they started dropping 2*'s as candy for winning rounds. I remember my 2* days trying to get that prize - I wouldn't have needed to when they are dropped regularly in lightning rounds against minimum 1* rosters. It should be replaced all the way down to 500 with a 3*, and top 100 should be getting two covers. Top 250 alliances should get one cover, top 100 should get two. Most of the Top50 now don't care about any of those rewards - all they are is ISO. If they are going the way of "lots more 4*'s", 3* drop rate needs to be incredibly boosted (like 10% chance in heroics).

I've seen OP complain about bad rosters high in PVE elsewhere - I really don't think that's cheating, it's scaling. They expect easy rosters not to compete in PVP so they let them have incredibly easy nodes in PVE. We've picked up temporary PVE helpers here and there that we then have to kick later when they can't keep the needed PVP/season score - many times they have that 94 or less roster, and they have easy nodes to grind with that roster, they can T-10 in PVE with it.