[SPOILER] Upcoming characters & contents /2505/

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

That's all fine and good, but most developers tend to work on /x/, /y/, /z/ when hey have the free time and work on the important things /a/, /b/, and /c/, so bits and pieces of things are left in code, but not active. We're talking about a company that does not have a playtesting server, so it's not like they have backups or developmental builds. They have one build and they continue to build on it.

I don't see how that's any different if Marvel made me sign an NDA where I promised to not tell anyone about Wolverine's hypothetical resurrection and then I immediately tell everyone about it here, versus some dev signing a NDA for the same hypothetical resurrection and then immediately put the stats of Wolverine (Resurrected Bad Guy) on the game files. In both cases, just don't do it.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

We're talking about a company that does not have a playtesting server

Which became hilariously evident in the goon ap banner patch. Clearly not a single person in the entire company sat down and played a match with that thing on.

GothicKratos

Phantron wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

That's all fine and good, but most developers tend to work on /x/, /y/, /z/ when hey have the free time and work on the important things /a/, /b/, and /c/, so bits and pieces of things are left in code, but not active. We're talking about a company that does not have a playtesting server, so it's not like they have backups or developmental builds. They have one build and they continue to build on it.

I don't see how that's any different if Marvel made me sign an NDA where I promised to not tell anyone about Wolverine's hypothetical resurrection and then I immediately tell everyone about it here, versus some dev signing a NDA for the same hypothetical resurrection and then immediately put the stats of Wolverine (Resurrected Bad Guy) on the game files. In both cases, just don't do it.

My point is they don't have sub-builds to work on "hypothetical bad guy Wolverine" whilst they work on the content that's being put out next week. Despite popular opinion, I highly doubt they put together a new PvE or a new character in a week, or even two weeks. Everything is all in one build. If people weren't nosing around, they would be free to just work on what they want to work on, but since there are people nosing around, they can't do that. It's restricting what they can and cannot do.

"Normally" a company has one or more "off-builds" that contain extra content that's being worked on, and it also contains any new content, so everything can be tested within the same environment (with things that are and are not out, or will be out sooner or later). It's blatantly obvious they don't do that, mostly I'm sure, because of resources. There's a lot of time, a lot of coordination, and overall, a lot more overhead doing it like this.

I also, personally, don't think that their project is big enough to really deem this necessary. I honestly feel like MPQ is basically a dozen guys pulling all the strings, and maybe another half a dozen throwing money into the pot. It's just not needed to do something like that with that small of a project team, until something like this comes up anyways.

ark123 wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

We're talking about a company that does not have a playtesting server

Which became hilariously evident in the goon ap banner patch. Clearly not a single person in the entire company sat down and played a match with that thing on.

There's definitely been some questionable choices and glaring overlooks in the past (the lack of deletion and denial of acquiring functionality in Team-Ups come to mind, as well), but I feel like the biggest gap here is play styles. The developers don't play like a lot of forumites. They can't. If they did, we would literally never get content. Hell, events would probably go up late because of end of event pushes lol.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

The developers don't play like a lot of forumites. They can't. If they did, we would literally never get content. Hell, events would probably go up late because of end of event pushes lol.

The answer seems pretty obvious to me. Start a beta program and maybe award people who find bugs/glaring problems with a low amount of HP. 50hp per bug/whatever would make no difference to anyone but I guarantee you'd fill up a server with people willing to do hard work for "free".

Blizzard has beta servers. Valve has beta servers.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

The developers don't play like a lot of forumites. They can't. If they did, we would literally never get content. Hell, events would probably go up late because of end of event pushes lol.

The answer seems pretty obvious to me. Start a beta program and maybe award people who find bugs/glaring problems with a low amount of HP. 50hp per bug/whatever would make no difference to anyone but I guarantee you'd fill up a server with people willing to do hard work for "free".

Blizzard has beta servers. Valve has beta servers.

Beta servers don't do anything if the guys running them isn't willing to listen. From the general perspective, most feedback from players is completely worthless. Suppose we have two issues you poll players on what they think about it:

1. AP banner delay.
2. X Force getting nerfed.

Both issues you'd likely get an overwhelming negative response, even though the first issue is something that pretty much unequivocally makes the gaming experience worse for everyone while the second might be something necessary for the long term health of the game. You have to assume the devs know the difference between those two, which they do not seem to at this point, and if they do not, no amount of feedback would matter to begin with. I see D3's devs have the 'ultra casual' problem I see in most games. Obviously, there's no way devs can play like the hardcores because otherwise nothing would ever get done. But just because hardcores aren't that important in general doesn't mean they're always wrong. They're still occasionally right especially on issues that are only obvious if you play a ton. I can't imagine a node like The Hood + 2X2 yellow AP pump would ever make it through development if there is at least one hardcore guy on the dev team. That guy should be like, "Wait a minute guys I had to do this node 8 times last time for Thor 4* and it totally sucked!" But they don't have that guy on the team.

GothicKratos

ark123 wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

The developers don't play like a lot of forumites. They can't. If they did, we would literally never get content. Hell, events would probably go up late because of end of event pushes lol.

The answer seems pretty obvious to me. Start a beta program and maybe award people who find bugs/glaring problems with a low amount of HP. 50hp per bug/whatever would make no difference to anyone but I guarantee you'd fill up a server with people willing to do hard work for "free".

Blizzard has beta servers. Valve has beta servers.

You wanna pay for them? I don't. Their price points are bad enough without adding more overhead to the mix. Besides that, if I were them, I wouldn't want to invest the time/money into that - mostly because I don't think this game nets as much as people think.

Phantron wrote:

Both issues you'd likely get an overwhelming negative response, even though the first issue is something that pretty much unequivocally makes the gaming experience worse for everyone while the second might be something necessary for the long term health of the game. You have to assume the devs know the difference between those two, which they do not seem to at this point, and if they do not, no amount of feedback would matter to begin with. I see D3's devs have the 'ultra casual' problem I see in most games. Obviously, there's no way devs can play like the hardcores because otherwise nothing would ever get done. But just because hardcores aren't that important in general doesn't mean they're always wrong.

I'd say this is a pretty jaded way to go about things. They fixed the AP banner promptly (even if it shouldn't have existed as it did in the first place). Overall, the last three months especially, they have promptly addressed pressing issues. The only "big picture" issue they have yet to address is roster slots, which I think we can all agree, if you're looking at the big picture is a bigger issue than most players give credit (and they have given some baby steps in the right decision). Arguably, there is the ISO-8 draught, but they are taking baby steps to address this issue as well.

hurcules

Well, if they don't want people mining data (let's face it, if Turul didn't do it, others would), they could, you know, encrypt the data instead of having those data in plain text.

turul

hurcules wrote:

Well, if they don't want people mining data (let's face it, if Turul didn't do it, others would), they could, you know, encrypt the data instead of having those data in plain text.

Encrypting everything would be painful.

But they could do:
[*]Use alternative fantasy names
[*]Not include contents 1 months early in the non-development version

Unknown

If they started calling character files Character_62.* instead of Rocket_Racer.* they could avoid this problem pretty easily.

jojeda654

Heck, Lazy Daken was debuted with "CLASSIFIED" ability descriptions. Of course, the upgrades were still visible, so we all figured out how his new skill worked.

Unknown

Regardless of how they could fix the spoiler bit I think what they were trying to say in the QnA was that having people pull the spoilers means they cant do anything secret with marvel. Like they could not have put spidergwen into the game before she showed up in the comics (so they would release simultaneously) because it would have been a spoiler for the comics if turul found it and that would ruin their relations with Marvel.

That being said they probably should just use codenames to falsify info till right before release if they don't want things spoiled.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

mostly because I don't think this game nets as much as people think.

I find that very hard to believe. I'm sure it's not WoW or LoL numbers but for a mobile game it has to net a pretty penny. Specially since they probably don't have that many mouths to feed - if they did, I'm sure someone would have raised their hand and said "Hey, is IW still in the game? Does anyone remember? Didn't she use to suck horribly?" by now

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

You wanna pay for them? I don't. Their price points are bad enough without adding more overhead to the mix. Besides that, if I were them, I wouldn't want to invest the time/money into that - mostly because I don't think this game nets as much as people think.

It was up to them to make this game more attractive in the long run, and give incentives to players so that they pay for their roster.

Instead of that, they made everything possible so that people quit, even though they were really enthusiastic about the game.

MPQ is far better than Contest of Champions, however it's far lower in the profitability charts on Google...

scottee

arktos1971 wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

You wanna pay for them? I don't. Their price points are bad enough without adding more overhead to the mix. Besides that, if I were them, I wouldn't want to invest the time/money into that - mostly because I don't think this game nets as much as people think.

It was up to them to make this game more attractive in the long run, and give incentives to players so that they pay for their roster.

Instead of that, they made everything possible so that people quit, even though they were really enthusiastic about the game.

MPQ is far better than Contest of Champions, however it's far lower in the profitability charts on Google...

Contest of Champions is also far newer, and is riding off the popularity of Injustice. MPQ was far more profitable during the year Contests of Champions didn't exist.

I actually do think they're building for the long run right now. Expand the 4* class so you can bring in 5*'s.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

I actually do think they're building for the long run right now. Expand the 4* class so you can bring in 5*'s.

Sure, you should try and make children so they can play day and night to grind the million Iso you will need to max one 5*

Unknown

scottee wrote:

arktos1971 wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

You wanna pay for them? I don't. Their price points are bad enough without adding more overhead to the mix. Besides that, if I were them, I wouldn't want to invest the time/money into that - mostly because I don't think this game nets as much as people think.

It was up to them to make this game more attractive in the long run, and give incentives to players so that they pay for their roster.

Instead of that, they made everything possible so that people quit, even though they were really enthusiastic about the game.

MPQ is far better than Contest of Champions, however it's far lower in the profitability charts on Google...

Contest of Champions is also far newer, and is riding off the popularity of Injustice. MPQ was far more profitable during the year Contests of Champions didn't exist.

I actually do think they're building for the long run right now. Expand the 4* class so you can bring in 5*'s.

Just curious, how is expanding 4*s and adding 5*s building for the long run? Are you assuming that they will fix progression before releasing these classes?

Unknown

gobstopper wrote:

scottee wrote:

arktos1971 wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

You wanna pay for them? I don't. Their price points are bad enough without adding more overhead to the mix. Besides that, if I were them, I wouldn't want to invest the time/money into that - mostly because I don't think this game nets as much as people think.

It was up to them to make this game more attractive in the long run, and give incentives to players so that they pay for their roster.

Instead of that, they made everything possible so that people quit, even though they were really enthusiastic about the game.

MPQ is far better than Contest of Champions, however it's far lower in the profitability charts on Google...

Contest of Champions is also far newer, and is riding off the popularity of Injustice. MPQ was far more profitable during the year Contests of Champions didn't exist.

I actually do think they're building for the long run right now. Expand the 4* class so you can bring in 5*'s.

Just curious, how is expanding 4*s and adding 5*s building for the long run? Are you assuming that they will fix progression before releasing these classes?

So they can build enough 5*s so they can bring in 6*s. Duh.

yogi_

ark123 wrote:

gobstopper wrote:

scottee wrote:

I actually do think they're building for the long run right now. Expand the 4* class so you can bring in 5*'s.

Just curious, how is expanding 4*s and adding 5*s building for the long run? Are you assuming that they will fix progression before releasing these classes?

So they can build enough 5*s so they can bring in 6*s. Duh.

It's like the common reasoning that exists about what the purpose of schooling is - to get kids ready for the next part of schooling.

The coming months will all be new 4*, new 3*, new 4*, updated gameplay feature, new 4*, new PvE content, new 3*, new 4*, new 2*, new 4*, new 3*, updated something else, new 4*, so on, so forth...

Unknown

yogi_ wrote:

ark123 wrote:

gobstopper wrote:

scottee wrote:

I actually do think they're building for the long run right now. Expand the 4* class so you can bring in 5*'s.

Just curious, how is expanding 4*s and adding 5*s building for the long run? Are you assuming that they will fix progression before releasing these classes?

So they can build enough 5*s so they can bring in 6*s. Duh.

It's like the common reasoning that exists about what the purpose of schooling is - to get kids ready for the next part of schooling.

The coming months will all be new 4*, new 3*, new 4*, updated gameplay feature, new 4*, new PvE content, new 3*, new 4*, new 2*, new 4*, new 3*, updated something else, new 4*, so on, so forth...

On the bright side, there's only around ten thousand characters in the marvel universe

Unknown

This game seems to be doing around $20K a day based on Thinkgaming's estimates and I see no reason to doubt it so that's still about $7 million an year. That said, from what I learned about gaming is that money inexplicably gets lost to reasons no one can understand. I remember when Capcom made Megaman 9/10 on the XBox Arcade, which looked worse than the stuff they had on the NES, the credit shows close to a hundred names and it wouldn't surprise me if that game cost millions and looked worse compared to games 5 guys could make in their garage back in the NES days. While as users we shouldn't care why this money is wasted, it is apparently quite real and does affect everything.