MPQ Community Q&A #4 – January - Video Answer Time

TheViceroy

Awesome format. They should do the rest this way.


Scrollable rankings is actually a pain in the **** to implement from a technical standpoint, so not surprised it's not really possible. They are also saving us from ourselves with this as well if it really hammer the battery/data plan like they claim it would.

Only drawback was there was no direct answer to the question about 2 to 3 star and 3 to 4 star transition.
The only possible hint at such was a vague reference to maybe possibly some new method to earning 3 stars in the future.
Hopefully it's something like my suggestion int he Suggestion of a Duel of Champions Altar of Wishes or Hearthstone Dust type system.
But if it doesn't help those the transition into 4 star territory, it's only a stop-gap solution.

They just confirmed they won't be fixing roster slots any time soon even though they know it's an issue, so I have to save what it for the inevitable new characters.
Slogging through countless X-Force/4hor teams shield hopping in PVP to try and get to 1000 Progression is not the way, and burns through too much HC.

I have 9+ maxed 3 stars, most of them the top tier ones too (only missing a truly playable Lazy Daken). And my best 4 star is a pathetic 1 3 5 X-Force.
I feel like I have no control over how to get more 4 star covers. Imagine how people with less than me feel.

I'm shocked they actually attempted to answer the Nonce's question about match damage VS character powers. Nice call out to one of the best posters on this forum as well.
Why is it so hard to just rearrange the power listing to match tile strength? They ARE over-thinking this.
Players won't "lose" covers. If a character was 1 4 2 and now becomes 1 2 4, the powers stay the same, and it should be pretty clear. Also, after a few days it will just become the norm and won't be a big deal. Devs often think their average player base is too stupid to handle something like this honestly, even though it will ultimately help them.
I was more pissed/confused when Classic Mags had his colors changed, and suddenly his old Blue was now yellow, and his old Purple became blue. That level of confusion wouldn't happen here cause the powers themselves don't change, just the order they arr listed in.
The real answer to that question was "it doesn't add anything to the game, would take a decent amount of time to fix (an ini change REALLY would take that long?!), so we don't necessarily care".

Unknown

turul wrote:

I think they are overthinking the difficulty of Nonce's strongest color problem.

It doesn't sound super difficult, but it isn't exactly trivial from what I gathered. The gist, if I follow, is that they do not store this for your X-Force (forgive me, I don't have the original question so I don't have an example character with the colors mixed up):

Green covers: 5, black covers: 5, yellow covers: 3

They store this

Cover 1: 5, cover 2: 5, cover 3: 3; where 1=green, 2=black, 3=yellow (stored in some config file)

So they can't simply update that config file to say "now power 1 = yellow and power 3 = black" as they will need to shuffle every player's cover totals to the correct new colors. While again this shouldn't be *too* bad it has the possibility to go really wrong and I would want them to QA the living daylights out of it. Could you imagine the "fun" that would erupt if everyone's X-Force suddenly had 3 blacks and 5 yellows?

turul

GothicKratos wrote:

Just to sidetrack a little;

turul wrote:

I think they are overthinking the difficulty of [...] the scrollable rankings.

I'm not really sure I agree here. For the information to be useful, it has to be up-to-date, which means your phone and the server have to be constantly communicating back and forth, making it a magnitude of a couple thousand when you add in every person playing. If just the server stress isn't a good enough reasoning, the data usage should be plausible enough. People already complain enough to node amounts aren't accurate enough, I don't think we need to add this to the list too.

The half-way point here would be to allow you to "snap" to certain segments of the leaderboard. So to speak, giving us the ability to "snap" up a pane or down a pane from our current ranking, and also being able to "snap" to the pane under the top ranking pane - and only have the server communicate that information when we "snap" to that specific pane. I feel like this is a good middle ground, but this would still have to be programmed, and the server stress issue is still potentially an issue. (Shout out to, I think, mohio, whom posted this idea before. I totally stole it, sorry.)

Full toplist has the upside of being cacheable for all players, does not need filtering, same amount of connection numbers. Also, they could ask the server for top10, asking full data on scroll.

Unknown

Personally I always liked the suggestion of adding an additional leader board that displays the people currently sitting at progression reward breakpoints. Not as informative for sure, but it at least provides the important information.

rixmith

It would be nice to have the current score for various reward tiers sent each time as well (for example 100th place = 502 points, 50th place = 698 points, 25th place = 805 points). That is really all the info that I think most players need to determine whether it is worth buying/spending boosts to try for the next reward level.

lukewin

cjkmpq wrote:

Personally I always liked the suggestion of adding an additional leader board that displays the people currently sitting at progression reward breakpoints. Not as informative for sure, but it at least provides the important information.

This, so much this. T10 is nice to know, but as someone that hit T25 a few times, but is now in the T50-T100 range, it would be so much more helpful to see a range like 21-30 (to know what is needed for T25), 45-54 (to know what is needed for T50), and 94-104 (to know what is needed for T100). Would give me an idea if it is even possible for me to get in those ranks by breaking shield, or if i should continue to play for a chance at a cover, or just call it a day, and try another mode, PVE/Simulator/PVP. They could be added tabs. It would probably be a lot more difficult to have, but more UI friendly, if we just had 1 tab up. So if I am below 100, I see what is needed for T100. If I am 51-100, I see what is needed for T50, etc, etc. Since I won't be breaking into the Top 10 anytime soon, I could care less who is in the Top Ranked tab. I'd rather see the next progression level ranks instead of the Top Ranked tab.

I do realize that coming up with ideas is 100% easier than implementing them, but I think this would be worth trying to do.

TheViceroy

cjkmpq wrote:

The gist, if I follow, is that they do not store this for your X-Force (forgive me, I don't have the original question so I don't have an example character with the colors mixed up):

Green covers: 5, black covers: 5, yellow covers: 3

They store this

Cover 1: 5, cover 2: 5, cover 3: 3; where 1=green, 2=black, 3=yellow (stored in some config file)

So they can't simply update that config file to say "now power 1 = yellow and power 3 = black" as they will need to shuffle every player's cover totals to the correct new colors. While again this shouldn't be *too* bad it has the possibility to go really wrong and I would want them to QA the living daylights out of it. Could you imagine the "fun" that would erupt if everyone's X-Force suddenly had 3 blacks and 5 yellows?

I would hope there is some amount of intelligence into how the player's save data stores cover totals for a given character. If it truly is just "how much does of cover 2 for Character X does the player have?" with no correlation tot he power itself, that doesn't seem very data secure, and would totally cause issues if done wrong.

Again, the real issue is amount of time it would take to fix against the perceived benefit. Their response indicated they just don't think it's that important to devote the resources it needs to fix.
They were "oh so close" in realizing the underlying problems of this when they mentioned strongest color mechanics, but then fizzled. Agreed that "Strongest Color" needs a very clear indicator, but this would help as well, and make the game simply more polished and consistent.
What I find shocking is how many relatively new characters are in Nonce's chart. You'd think they would learn, especially if they don't want to fix it in the immediate future.

SnowcaTT

lukewin wrote:

They did too good a job of answering. It takes the wind out of the sails of people that are harping on the same issues over and over.

Want to bet?

My crusade on HP and roster spots continues. If it is a "few months away", that means at least four characters (never less than 2 per season), which means you would have to be paying 800 for the fifth time to get your 65th character at the very least (and maybe 850 for more) before this fix is in, apparently.

Roster spots capped at 500 HP today would be great - fixed and done!

I did like their vague response to an alternate way to get 3*'s that doesn't include the standard tokens.

Unknown

I would rather have definitive answers to all of the questions instead of this half baked ****.

Spoit

It was promising to hear that they're at least somewhat open to reconsidering the reward schema.

Say, if their main concern for adjusting roster costs was effecting the early game people, why not change the later (pvp) progressions to offer a bit more, since presumably the people at that stage in progression are not hitting those later progression rewards in any degree of regularity? Or, why not leave the first, like 30 slots or so priced the same, and reducing the scaling on the higher slots.

yogi_

I guess the big thing that really sticks out now is that token rotation is not going away. If there is a solution coming in the future, it's still not any time soon.

They only want....X (20ish) or so 3* characters in the rotation. They won't do more because they don't want to dilute it. They also dismissed a lot of other various ideas, eg. Pack A, Pack B, etc. From this perspective, even my good idea falls down because they don't want you to have the opportunity to have all the 3*s at once.

So... the problem actually becomes that there are too many 3*s - if they only intend giving out X number of them at any one time, then X+1 is never going to work. (The actual long term answer to this is seperate the connection between covers and levelling, but that can't happen in the current structure).

So... if a token is never really meant to give you access to any more than X of any rank, then the only honest way to do it is once you fill the quota of characters per rank, that's it. Something roughly like this, but with another rank.

If nothing more structure is going to change with the game and they just keep releasing 4*'s en masse and rotating 3*'s, we are going to be stuck in the same cycle for a long time to come.

Shoddy. Acceptable, but shoddy and will eventually come back to bite.

[My personal preference: Use the aftermarth of Secret Wars (and the rebooted Marvel Universe) as a way to completely refresh the entire character covering / levelling system into individual, unranked, single base characters that can be independently levelled (to a max. of 100) with a single game currency. All characters are available at start, but you need to get abilities / vanity / progress by unlocking and levelling through winning / buying. I might write a post on this one day].

mjh

this format was great. It puts a human face on a game we all play. I thought the answers were better addressed than previously even though the answers all seem to be "we are or will be working on it very soon or not so soon", which sounds better when spoken than read.

Unknown

I like the video format - I think we get good information this way, and I like the presentation.

That being said, now that we're aware that there are actual human beings on the other end of the forums, it makes it that much harder to make cruel, ad hominem attacks against you every time we don't like a change to the game. It was easier when you were faceless, red-named monsters.

GothicKratos

Ben Grimm wrote:

I like the video format - I think we get good information this way, and I like the presentation.

That being said, now that we're aware that there are actual human beings on the other end of the forums, it makes it that much harder to make cruel, ad hominem attacks against you every time we don't like a change to the game. It was easier when you were faceless, red-named monsters.

This made me think of this;

Sword user

I thought the format was great! You gave both popular and unpopular answers, that's true. The question on roster slots must be more complicated than I'd thought, since I thought it was mostly for people 40+ slots, when cost exceeds ~$5 USD per slot that was the major concern. Does anyone have any insight on who else has a real grievance here? Is it truly so onerous to pop in $5-$15 bucks for 3-7 slots if covers start dropping like rain as a newbie?

Looking forward to seeing some of the various improvements that are on the horizon. The sooner that you can announce these improvements and what they might look like the better!

Unknown

turul wrote:

I think they are overthinking the difficulty of Nonce's strongest color problem

They probably made a database decision back in the day with the cover system where the strongest color didn't matter, and the covers of a character are probably stored as 3 separate columns without any tie to their color. To update it, they would have to do an update query on the entire cover database requiring downtime as well as a major forced update to ensure that people aren't facing enemies with completely different coverings. I'm sure they're adverse to any downtime.

Nonce Equitaur 2

This is the best set of Q&A's so far.

Previous sessions tended to to involve awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome without answering much. There was none of that here. This time, more of the answers were of the form "we'd really like to do that, here's some of the approaches we're trying."

Snowcatt's earlier summary of answers is excellent. The actual responses add a lot nuance, and it's excellent nuance.

They should treat these like the biker gang question -- "Why did you run over our line of bikes with your car?" If they can't get the biker gang to be almost crying along with them, they're gonna die. It's hard to give a satisfactory answer with a written sentence... but 30 seconds of video dialog will often work, and they pulled it off.

Oh, and between the lines, there was an answer to my color match question: No good reason for this, we'd like to fix it, we're well aware of it, and we won't make things worse.

fmftint

IDK, I didn't find this any more satisfying than the way they have been doing Q&A. Same questions, same evasive answers

yogi_

fmftint wrote:

IDK, I didn't find this any more satisfying than the way they have been doing Q&A. Same questions, same evasive answers

I think some people are confusing the format and the responses here - the video format works very well, but the actual responses are pretty close to the usual.

It was enjoyable to watch, but it was still a lot of words to say everything is on track to stay roughly the same as it always has been. And that's fine, it's completely their game, but are we getting our hopes up too much? In theory, we should stop asking any of the questions answered for a while because exactly the same responses are going to be given next month and each after, until they release something.

GuntherBlobel

Ben Grimm wrote:

I like the video format - I think we get good information this way, and I like the presentation.

That being said, now that we're aware that there are actual human beings on the other end of the forums, it makes it that much harder to make cruel, ad hominem attacks against you every time we don't like a change to the game. It was easier when you were faceless, red-named monsters.

Yep. And on the flip side, I think the Devs felt more free to chat about the game like we do on the forum. For once, we got to hear some of the thoughts and wishes of the Dev team even if there's not a patch on the way to make it so. I think a lot of the old Q&A failed because the Devs didn't want to write anything in stone, so they said nothing.

I think they should try this a few more times. I'd like to hear more about the process of making a fun video game. (I also liked the blog posts, but I think they are over).