lack of daily active players

Lidolas

simonsez wrote:

Phaserhawk wrote:

I think the best way to keep a larger player base is to increase the solo-player mode, like finishing the Prologue.

I'm pretty sure one of the devs once said that less than 5% of the players have finished the prologue. If people are pretty much ignoring the one we have, I don't know that stacking more on top is something a lot of people will care much about.

When they say 'finished' do they mean completed each node in every level or do they mean farmed each node until they've gotten every reward?

Unknown

I like the idea of soloplayer modes.

In fact why not have TWO versions of every PvE? One that is competitive and one that is not competitive.

And design the rewards such that given sufficient playthrough of the non-competitive cycle of stories will build up your roster to go into competitive. This is different from scaling in that the non-comp rewards would be mostly 2* covers with a greater probability of 3*. The competitive rewards would be where you fight for the Next Great Character (tm).

The vets wouldn't bother to waste their time on non-competitive PvE and the transitioning folks would get a much flatter trajectory into 3-Star Land.

Conceptually it's like the DDQ but with more nodes and richer rewards.

Additional play modes would be fun too but probably not worth the cost of developing. At the end of the day you want people to pay for your game.

DaveR4470

I think a very simple and positive thing that could be done right now, without too much effort, would be to expand the reward brackets on PvP.

Right now, your reward structure per slice is as follows:

#1 Son: Super-awesome 4* plus 3 covers for a 3*! YASSS!
#2-#25: Multiple 3* covers (at least 2)
#26-100: One 3* cover
101-300: One 2* cover
300-500: standard tokens


Which is reasonable, all things being equal. The top dog has to really earn it; the multiple 3*s are available to top teams; and the top 100 get a valuable prize.

But... things are not as equal as they were when this structure was designed and first operating. Even with sharding and multiple time slots and such, the total population of players with advanced (3*-4* level) teams is much greater now that it was, say, 6 months ago. And the top end players are (I'm sure) disproportionately represented within the total number of regular daily players.

In the end, I think this has -- to make a long story short -- alienated the "middle class" of the game; the 2*-3* transition-level players who would benefit the most from finishing in that 26-100 bracket, because there are a lot more 3* and 3*-4* transition level teams in a given bracket than there were before. It's difficult for a team with 3 94-level 2*s to place in the top 100 without lots of strategy and shielding, because there are simply more teams in a given bracket now that are "better" in absolute terms. And if you do at least try and play up to the top 100 but miss (which is the likely outcome), your reward is a 2* cover you don't need... which you, in turn, have now taken away from a 1-2* transitioner who could have really used it. So the odds are you don't bother...

... except you kinda have to, because you want that 4000-level progression 10-pack. So PvP becomes a necessary evil. Get your 400 point token, and get out.

It's not good for a game when your players feel like (a) they "have" to play it, or (b) that it's pointless to play it. So there's your problem.

The good news: the DDQ HUGELY improves this situation for the transitioner. (Explanation shouldn't be necessary here.) Which is great. But now there's even less of an incentive to play the PvP game for those people (full disclosure: I'm one) until you're pretty solid with your 3*s and can challenge for the 900 point level, except to grind that 4000 point 10-pack.

So, long story short -- why not just spread those brackets a little? The top end or the multiple 3*s should still be achievements of note and difficult to obtain. But how about stretching the multi-cover spots down to #50? And then push the single 3* cover rewards out to 150 or 200, and scale down accordingly. I think that would give everyone -- at every level -- additional incentive to play in the PvPs. How about a tier structure that looks like this:

#1: Super awesome super awesomeness.
#2-50: Multiple 3* covers with ISO and HP
#51-150: Single 3* cover
#151-250: Single 2* cover
#251-350: heroic token (1)
#351-500: standard token (1)

Wouldn't that give more people an incentive to participate in a given PvP event? Thoughts?

Edit -- Discussion and suggested bracket modified as nightmanflock correctly noted I screwed up the total players per bracket...

Unknown

Top 200 might be too generous? I think if they pushed it down to top 150 for a 3* cover it'd even be reasonable. There'd definitely be more of a bloodbath there, as opposed to the get 400 and go home mentality.

DaveR4470

daibar wrote:

Top 200 might be too generous? I think if they pushed it down to top 150 for a 3* cover it'd even be reasonable. There'd definitely be more of a bloodbath there, as opposed to the get 400 and go home mentality.

Probably. If they actually did something like this, it would likely be only to 150. I thought 200 would be a little better, in order to give 2*-level peeps (i.e. people not quite at the 2-3 transition phase yet) a realistic shot of squeaking in at the back end of the line.... Dangle a carrot and all that.

Unknown

PvP event brackets are only 500 people, not 1000, so that's slightly off, but expanding the reward structure slightly would probably help a little.

MarvelMan

Part of the problem with retaining casual players is that they need to be working on the 2* -> 3* transition from day one, making sure they save any HP, level only the "right" chars, etc. Once people get past the honeymoon and figure out how unforgiving the game is of "mis"spending the scare resources it can be demoralizing and they look to other games. Without reading the forums I can see that period lasting a few months so something else needs to keep those players interested after. Right now...there just isnt much. The DPDQ is a great help with that, and I am looking forward to other hooks as they will probably benefit everyone. As those above have said, there needs to be some sort of persistent non-competitive format that allows for continual progression at whatever pace is chosen.

Phaserhawk

rednailz wrote:

Every "app" game has a shelf life. Over 1 year isn't too bad at all. Even Angry Birds eventually died off, so will MPQ - it's just a question of when. Or maybe it will turn into one of those games that just has a very very small community for the last couple years of its life.

But then you have games like Clash of Clans, Simpsons Tapped out, Candy Crush that have been going on for years and years and are still turning large profit.

There are 2 things one must balance

Retaining old players while adding new ones as well as allowing the 2 to mingle without one having an advantage over the other.

Unknown

I don't think MPQ needs to grow significantly but something must be done to stop the bleeding. The game looks quite sustainable from revenue point of view despite a declining number of players, but due to the competitive nature of most events there's going to be a point where a lack of players (specificlaly, fodders that you beat up for your score) is going to hurt everyone. It's not unlike how when a MMORPG population drops below a certain threshold to sustain group play the game tends to collapse suddenly, and the competitive aspect of this game will definitely collapse if everyone you fight is at least a max 3* or even max 4* which is going to happen at some point if the transition guys continue to get discouraged at competing. And again even if the transition guys don't get discouraged, what happens if all of them do successfully transit to 4*? You'd still have an endgame where 80-90% of the people must lose so what's the motivation for sticking around through the painful period if everyone did stick around? That just means by the time you get there you'll still lose most of the time because the majority of the players are maxed if there isn't an ever increasing influx of fodder players, and we can tell from most estimates that we sure aren't getting new fodder players.

I don't think increasing the reward % is a good idea because if you make those rewards so easy to get despite the competition then you might as well just invest more resources in DDQ type non competitive content which I find to be far more interesting than PvP or PvE in general. I don't necessarily have a solution to this, since that's up to D3 to figure out, but I want D3 to know that their competitive model isn't going to last forever. It seems to be pretty close to the breaking point without an influx of new players and I don't see the new players anytime soon. If 5% of the players never finished Prologue, that's quite indicative of the problem. I know this game has a considerably higher learning curve than Candy Crush Saga but you can't just go elitist with a 'newbies don't bother apply' stance when the game is still dependent on having a large number of losers in any event.

rednailz

Phaserhawk wrote:

rednailz wrote:

Every "app" game has a shelf life. Over 1 year isn't too bad at all. Even Angry Birds eventually died off, so will MPQ - it's just a question of when. Or maybe it will turn into one of those games that just has a very very small community for the last couple years of its life.

But then you have games like Clash of Clans, Simpsons Tapped out, Candy Crush that have been going on for years and years and are still turning large profit.

There are 2 things one must balance

Retaining old players while adding new ones as well as allowing the 2 to mingle without one having an advantage over the other.

I think part of the deal with candy crush can be summed up by a simple example: I used to get 10 invites a day on FB to join it, and 90% of those invites were from relatives aged between 20 and 50, and most women. It's a large appeal easy to play game. Nothing wrong with that, just explains a larger demographic - a longer shelf life. People still play bejeweled too.

Yeah, there's the odd one, my point is even though angry birds lasted 5 years at the top of the world, it dies off. For every app game that lasts more than a year there's probably several thousand that die within months, even really popular great games. It's just such a saturated space, and usually attracts a flighty crowd. MPQ may hold on a little longer due to marvel fanboy love, but players just looking for a match 3 game or something to kill time here and there I could see falling off pretty quickly.

I think the basis of gameplay (match-3) is basic enough that it can last for some time, and technology won't really hamper it's life, but like you said - it needs a balance. I can't speak for the new players or how long they hang on for but I know there's been a massive exidous of vets in the last couple months, and it's going to take more than just a new 3* charecter every few weeks to keep me interested.

Unknown

As a recent-ish new player, I can confirm MPQ is not very appealing to new players (hopefully, DDQ will help change that). After the prologue is over, new players are left with a virtually insurmountable wall of higher-end rosters they can't compete with, and no real hope of ever catching up. DDQ is a nice addition to help address this problem because previously there was NO way for a new, casual gamer to have ANY chance of filling out a 3-star character (and that became obvious very quickly). Tokens are okay for building a 2-star roster, but we all know they are abysmal for getting 3-stars. I was ready to quit a bit after my 2-star roster was filled out because there was so little chance of advancing my roster enough to compete for anything. Then I fluked into a top 10 PVE alliance. Without that advantage, I would have quit months ago. -And the kind of time commitment that is required to do well in PVE is not appealing to casual gamers.

I think in the long run (if there is to be one) MPQ has to segment new and lower-tier rosters in some way that allows them to compete for stuff in a way that would be appealing to casual gamers. Maybe separate 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, and Any-star tournaments. (I kind of think a daily tournament for 'fastest' win with loaner characters would be fun, and even new players could compete from Day 1 without much time investment).

I like the game a lot, but if it doesn't become more appealing for new players in some way, the divide between top-end rosters and new players' rosters will just get worse and new players will have little reason to stick around.

Scoregasms

I dunno if you've played a level 400 Candy Crush Saga game, but it's downright wtfbbq crazy hard and super frustrating. It's literally so bad that it's enough to just say "I'm done with this game" and mean it since you literally have to play a perfect game even with paid boosts to win (along with a health dose of luck). There is no "out" like MPQ has with Token purchases along with competitive event play. In my mind, main reason why games like Candy Crush, Angry Birds and Bejeweled have such a long shelf life is because they are mindless play whenever you want type games. There was a slight penalty for missing a day, a week, even a month, but you could literally pick up where you left off with no worse for wear.

That isn't the case with MPQ and "burnout" in a Match-3 game is borderline ridiculous if you think about it. They've done quite a bit recently, luckily all when I started playing to appease the crowds, be it 8 hour refreshes, Time Slices and the new DDQ Daily PVE are all great steps in the right direction.

But as you state, is this enough? Your data and points are valid and I hope someone in MPQ Headquarters is reading your thoughts on the matter and think about changes to help evolve the game and not let it fall into "One of the top games of 2014" only categories and that's it.

One thing they can do to help with the "fodder" is to increase the mid-tier PVP rewards (101-300). Keep the bottom 2 tiers the same since folks are still just gonna auto join for the free ISO and standard token. But make folks want to get to that 101-300 tier a bit harder, maybe throw in a Heroic Token instead of a busted 2* cover and quadruple the ISO. 1-25 are gonna be battling each other regardless of what is below, but they do need to do something to entice the mid-tier players more.

There's an entire Marvel Cinematic Universe they can tie more closely into as well, Marvel can throw some movie tie-in events specific for MPQ to drive new customers to the game. These would be exclusive story bits to the movie, I bet that would be well received if MPQ players get to find out a semi-major plot point a week before a major movie hits the theaters and then watch it unfold. Not to mention the comics too, unfortunately, I haven't collected a comic since the 90's so this wouldn't be a factor for me, which is why I think the Movies and TV Shows (Netflix Shows, Agents of Shield, Agent Carter, etc) are a better play here to reach a bigger crowd.

The Marvel CU train seems to be going strong, if only they could do a better job of tying things together, there's some good synergy to be had there. Marvel seems to be all about expanding and tying all things Marvel together, so I could see it making sense to some exec. Especially if they start seeing Candy Crush Saga type player numbers (obviously, I doubt this would ever happen.. lol, but that doesn't mean it can't be pitched that way).

Anyway, I am rambling, I'm one of the "new" players they are talking about and I enjoy the game, but I can already see the validity to your points and wonder how long I'll actually continue playing at a competitive level without something more than just covers.

IceIX

Just wanted to chime in and say that while it's an interesting batch of numbers, those are very rough estimates. And looking at our historicals, not very close ones either. I wouldn't read much into any of those three metrics in our case.

scottee

IceIX wrote:

Just wanted to chime in and say that while it's an interesting batch of numbers, those are very rough estimates. And looking at our historicals, not very close ones either. I wouldn't read much into any of those three metrics in our case.

Wait, you mean random internet guys don't know more than the developers? Pfffft, like that's likely.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Just wanted to chime in and say that while it's an interesting batch of numbers, those are very rough estimates. And looking at our historicals, not very close ones either. I wouldn't read much into any of those three metrics in our case.

Guess it's back to reading the rabbit entrails again.

Unknown

In virtually every game I've seen when confronted with news that the game is doing poorly on numbers there's always denial with the standard 'only we know the real numbers'. Never mind that these numbers aren't nearly as hard as it appears to gather with a decent sampling method. Refer to the German tank problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem to see that it is not very hard to get very good data on anything where that is not actively hidden, and on something like gaming activity it'd be difficult to hide this from even a simplistic survey/census approach. My EotS bracket is still sitting at 774 players even though it started 12 hours after the event began. Given just the existence of time slices you'd need 5 times the players compared to pre time slices to achieve the same, and then multiply that by another 2 or 3 for the rather extensive sharding that goes on in PvP/PvE now. Are you telling me that the number of players actually went up by a factor of 10 while every attempt to discern the player base shows a negative result? Are the deserted time slices and sharding just figment of our imagination? Even if the player base is totally stable, it's not going to keep up with dilution caused by sharding/time slices.

Now the fragmentation of the player base doesn't matter, until it does. You can divide people up however you want into death brackets or casual brackets or whatever you want, and that works fine until people in some of those brackets quit. In the competitive portion of this game, your success is built on the failure of a lot of people. If you had an easy climb that means there are a lot of guys you ran over on the way up. The system works fine until the people you run over stops playing, and while sharding makes it difficult to see a clear overall picture, the number of guys you can run over has to go down if the overall population declined and there's a point where the system will not be able to sustain itself. For every guy with a maxed team that's doing well he's probably creating at least 10 guys wondering how on earth is he supposed to fight back against a guy with maxed 4*s. Now if the game is ever expanding then maybe that's okay because you always have new guys getting beaten up, but that'd conflict greatly with any metric players have, not to mention it's fairly counterintuitive to imagine why a player, prior to DDQ, would continue to play the game to get run over by superior teams with no hope of salvation in sight. I guess it is possible that a very large portion of the population simply doesn't care about losing, but that doesn't seem right and even if it's true, this certainly isn't something you can count on as a business model. Look, I know you guys have a good game here, but it's not so good for the new guys to repeatly get ran over with no apparent hope of salvation, especially before DDQ was out.

Unknown

MPQ dead gaem

Unknown

1) I agree with the talk of more non-competitive modes. Prologue was fun. There needs to be a play-at-your-own-pace area with slow but sure progression rewards. Not everyone can adjust their life around to compete in a match3 game.

3 hours in a night to get a 4*? 90% of significant others would not be happy about that, you're setting up your players for game/family time imbalances. A change needs to be made, like the 3 hour pve refresh was changed to 8.
In the prologue, I was not penalized for reading character dialogues. In PVE, if you clear slower, you're losing ground to competition.

Since creating more prologues was deemed unproductive and halted, at least give us a permanent PVE of a weekly rotating gauntlet. Got 5 minutes? give a crack at that hard node that can lead up to a nice 3* or 4*. Right now, all you're getting is 20 points in a pvp, which will be knocked back down. Awesome, you gained 150 iso... pve? 20 iso. Are you kidding me? With a 7 day gauntlet, you can shorten the grinding PVE too.

2) Phantron is right about pvp, it has a retention issue. Sure, there is a nice flow of new players now and making the numbers look pretty. But what happens when not every new initiative, too boost player inflows, is a success like the dailies?

There is very little game progression in pvp, unless you can T100. This is not happening for most people in 2-3* transition or lower, which is most of the userbase. People need to be incentivized to at least join pvp with 50-100hp before 500 points.

Getting 2 tokens at these horrible rates? Let's say it takes 8 tokens to get a 3*. At under 800, you need to play 4 PVPs for a random 3*, that you may not be leveling. There needs to be a consistent large amount of player for that pvp ranking and time slice system to make sense.

Unknown

Kriegerbot wrote:

1) I agree with the talk of more non-competitive modes. Prologue was fun. There needs to be a play-at-your-own-pace area with slow but sure progression rewards. Not everyone can adjust their life around to compete in a match3 game.

3 hours in a night to get a 4*? 90% of significant others would not be happy about that, you're setting up your players for game/family time imbalances. A change needs to be made, like the 3 hour pve refresh was changed to 8.
In the prologue, I was not penalized for reading character dialogues. In PVE, if you clear slower, you're losing ground to competition.

Since creating more prologues was deemed unproductive and halted, at least give us a permanent PVE of a weekly rotating gauntlet. Got 5 minutes? give a crack at that hard node that can lead up to a nice 3* or 4*. Right now, all you're getting is 20 points in a pvp, which will be knocked back down. Awesome, you gained 150 iso... pve? 20 iso. Are you kidding me? With a 7 day gauntlet, you can shorten the grinding PVE too.

2) Phantron is right about pvp, it has a retention issue. Sure, there is a nice flow of new players now and making the numbers look pretty. But what happens when not every new initiative, too boost player inflows, is a success like the dailies?

There is very little game progression in pvp, unless you can T100. This is not happening for most people in 2-3* transition or lower, which is most of the userbase. People need to be incentivized to at least join pvp with 50-100hp before 500 points.

Getting 2 tokens at these horrible rates? Let's say it takes 8 tokens to get a 3*. At under 800, you need to play 4 PVPs for a random 3*, that you may not be leveling. There needs to be a consistent large amount of player for that pvp ranking and time slice system to make sense.

I forgot about the 2H 24M -> 8H refresh, but that's another good example. Now we look back at the days of 2H 24M and it was probably too hardcore even for the hardcore guys, so are we supposed to believe all the casual guys totally didn't mind a system where they have absolutely no chance to compete against the guy hitting a refresh every 2H 24M? I'm not going to say the sky is falling. Maybe my EotS bracket at 780 guys in it (started 12H after event) with one day left doesn't mean anything bad about the game, but I certainly can't imagine why it can mean anything GOOD about the game, so I think I have reason to be alarmed. Until the DDQ which only came in recently, I have an awfully hard time thinking of how I can make a sales pitch to anybody that's remotely casual, since 'if you're hardcore like me it's awesome' isn't going to work as a sale pitch to a casual, so again I think there's a reason to be alarmed when I cannot think of anything that I can possibly recommend the game to anybody casual until DDQ came around.

No matter how you look at it, only 20% can finish T100 in PvP and only 10% can finish T100 in PvE. There's no way to disguise this because the odds are too heavily against the average player. If you're talking about say PvP in MMORPG where the expected win rate is 50%, it is actually possible to get the average guy to think he's doing better than winning 50%, because people can just block out certain losses (bad teammates, bad luck, whatever) and still feel like a winner, but when the expected win rate is 10-20%, there's no way you can fool yourself into thinking that. I don't think the solution means makes T300 all get 3*, but they absolutely need to recognize that the guys getting ran over and finishing #101-#500 needs a reason to continue playing this game too, and 'this game is so awesome that you should put up with the bad' is not good enough of a reason.

Unknown

As a new player I can confirm that I have absolutely no interest in PvP because the rewards I can get before I get knocked around are not worth it.

I usually fight against a few seed teams, collect my ISO then stop. PvP to me is a boring and rewardless affair in it's current state, and I realize that I won't be able to compete effectively for a long time and when that time does come I will most likely already have stopped playing.