A new outlook on MPQ and it's positive.

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atomzed wrote:

For (1), D3 has done this before where they reveal that certain characters will be rebalanced. Notably, Cmag and spidey and to some extent sentry were noted to need rebalance. In cmag case, they highlighted the rebalance 6 months in advance.... But the uproar when it happens remained essentially similar to GT. People claiming that their roster has been busted, they can't play the game anymore and they will quit. So does comms help? Definitely to some extent, but I think the uproar will be no less.

It's very possible indeed, but at least everything will have been done out of good faith.

atomzed wrote:

As for (2), well they are currently compensating people. But people are unhappy with the amount of compensation, which is understandable.

You say that the specifics are unimportant, but I respectfully disagree. The specifics are important, because they are doing the things which you have suggested... But clearly it's not enough to placate the masses (if it is ever possible).

Anyway, this should be my last post on this topic, but I enjoyed the levelled headed conversations I had with you.

Here we disagree, as I can't possibly call losing your character (by selling it) in exchange of a vile price a fair compensation. I was more referring to a compensation that doesn't cost something more to the player than the current predicament he's in.
And I can say I enjoyed our conversation too, thank you for the interesting and reasoned counter points you've been providing.

ronin_san

woopie wrote:

From the sounds of it, they don't want to see 2 4*s as the go-to team because it makes the game look too P2W. Instead, they give (or will give) us feeder characters to break up the current meta. IF for XFW and the eventual Gambit for 4or.

If they didn't want to make it seem so pay-to-win, they could raise the drop rates on covers, even at the 3* level. Heck, they should take a long hard look at the purchase model.

I can buy complete, GREAT games for less than a "chance" at a 3 or 4* character. And it's not a full character unlock eg Marvel Online. It's like a shade of that character, instead of the full color palate.

Don't tell me they don't want to make it look so "P2W".

Caveat. It isn't that I disagree with you. It's just that if there were diverse, GOOD characters at the top end, they wouldn't have to nerf to solve the problem. I've mentioned it before. Mole Man would be in everyone's group if he was good, and complemented others. And if he was properly play-tested, they wouldn't need to nerf him: either before release or within the first 2 weeks.

ronin_san

JCTthe3rd81 wrote:

Well said. +1 to OP and +1 to Miles for addressing this.

Regarding Thorette.....
It's pretty much what I thought. In another post I said they might have dropped Thorette's blue to 5 charge tiles to prepare for upcoming characters. I mentioned "Remy", AKA, Gambit. But it's rumored we will be getting a Spiderman villian soon. Maybe Electro?
(of course, I'd prefer a buff to C.Spidey instead of a new character. Spiderman is one of Marvel's most iconic characters, and one of my personal favorites).

For some of the others.....
It's like with C.Mags. Players were very upset by this, (myself included). The infinite blue was taken away, making Patchneto useless.

But then I actually tried C.Mag. Even though he has different powers now, he is still great. He even works really well with Patch. The Patchneto team might have changed, but I still use, and enjoy it. Casting a Berserker Rage followed by Magnetized Projectiles, then Polarizing Force and the following cascade is one of my favorite combos.

TL;DR... Miles is correct. They may be different now, but different does not always mean bad or worse. Just different.

Like that guy in that story. He refused to eat a green colored breakfast because he didn't think it would be any good. But when he actually tried it, he liked it.

2* Magneto existed almost solely as a blue battery; the only one of its type. And that got nerfed because of a lack of forethought from the development, eg play-testing side. THIS IS THE PROBLEM.

So was it the problem early-game with Spider-Man and 3* Magneto; continues to be the problem. IN. PLAIN. ENGLISH.

Characters are not developed and play-tested against the existing batch of ALL characters prior to release. But in a given character cycle, from concept through release, there are at least a dozen examples of nerfs, reworks, **** (engine-timing here, not mental faculty), and "wheel-chairing" that comes AFTER THE DEVELOPER HAS MADE MONEY .

They're a business. I get it. But they have zero legal responsibility to keep a character as-advertised, be it now or the future. I concede that Bagneto may serve as a red generator for the 2's, but given that it's random, it will not be functional. He'll sooner die than make his team stronger. You didn't remove the Magneto portion of the winfinite combo. You overreached on his nerf. He could have been the first blue charged tile generator. Let him drop 3-4 blue charged tiles. Let his blue ability get a much needed boost in damage. But there's little money to be made from a 2* other than a roster slot. So that idea is out.

Re: Mystique, Iron Fist. They're 3* and more rare as a result. So you release them broken knowing you'll see that money, son,

OR

You didn't play test and didn't have forethought. You didn't consider tuning (what I consider happened with IF) Mystique. You were so opposed to a loss of revenue from a lack of health pack loss that you overreached on the SECOND component of Winfinite, going back to Magneto, that was only exploitable because someone was willing to use boosts and a weaker character with a sole, great ability. No. Instead, you went lazy. You went Sentry.

Sentry. One of the strongest characters in Marvel, and he's now a wrist cutter that takes it out on his team.

Spider-Man. One of the most agile characters in Marvel, but in your iteration he's a corpsman with a riot shield. He can't web swing. he can't web sling a sewer lid. He can't passively dodge EG spider sense. Nope. bandages.

Invisible Woman. Omega class mutant. How do you release her? It's as though she was a grade-school project. You released her as a 4* knowing people would pay for the notoriety.

Thorverine. They were great, but showed you didn't expect the game to last. Why not raise the bar in 2* land? Or was that your intention with OBW and Ares before big wigs said, "Money's to be made with more ***'s next to characters names. Do it".

Psylocke. Bewilder was never broken. Now it's never used. NEVER. I'm sure if you poll your servers, live or during a maintenance window, you'd see it's one of the least used abilities in 3* land. It was bad to begin with, but at least it had a chance of landing due to timing or costs.

Doc Ock. The guy should be spectactular; maniacal even. No. He's bad. Give him a timer tile that lets his tentacles piggy-back an attack EG Widow. He's less able to stand on his own despite that he has 6 capable limbs. And it's not just a pun. He's a **** character. He's terrible, and so should you feel.

Beast. Oh, Beast. What can be said about Beast that hasn't already been said? I'd argue he's 1* bad; on par with IM35 but with extra health. You can't release him and R&G within a month-ish of each other, and have one Blue be SO good and the other so...............So he's a brilliant scientist. Right? Why can't he decide what *EXACTLY* happens? Why are the results of this ability - this experiment, SO RANDOM. IT IS THE OPPOSITE OF BRILLIANT SCIENTIST. And his green should have a passive retaliation if his blue countdown tile pops early, eg XFW. If you mess up Beast's lab, he's going to attack back. But seriously. Your animation depicts a lab. Labs are precise. Why can't we even place the countdown tile? It's not lab. It's not science. Beast's abilities are chaotic.

She-Hulk. 10k health and all she can do is hand out bandaids to scare the kiddies, and shin kick the enemy team. Her blue is pitiful, and needs a revisit something fierce.

All of these characters with 2 abilities deserve rework as well as the lazy treatment, ESPECIALLY the guys in that group. But that would mean balancing these chars at the 1 and 2 level, and that's not sexy to the whales. that means no money, so no bueno.




That's the problem; the biggest of all. MONEY. You're not interested in making the game better so much as you are interested in making money to substantiate your jobs. I don't fault you wanting to make money and keep jobs. I fault the beguiling approach that you're taking; that balance was the be-all, end-all. No. It's money. And you stand to lose it by constantly nerfing and reneging.


And it shows, MILES, when you are frightened such that you reach out to forumites and plead they keep their wallets open; available.


TL;DR angry rants but obvious points that you covet money gained over thorough play-testing, design, and implementation.

PPS. If you use Bagneto's new Purple ability (with the random 5 blues) to reinforce how powerful Moonstone can be, expect to see a literal ****-tonne of tinykitties

Heartburn

I am coming late to the disappointment dumping ground, and have some questions to the game designers: can you honestly say this was the only way to go, there was no other course of action to take or did you totally misjudge the reaction of the forum, again?

The game designers keep talking about fun like they know what it is. it is not fun to see 3* finally pop up only to have to sell it cause of roster slot prices, I call that a missed opportunity if i got that 3* i might of got a few more covers on him and found i really like this character and spent money trying to max him which is a far greater investment in the company then the roster slot that deterred the purchase because i probably won't be using a 1 covered 3* right off the bat.

it reminds me of the company i work at, always worried about pinching pennies to the point that it cost them dollars to fix. if this game was solely based on fun like the designers said wouldn't need health packs, you would just try again with your progress, i could pop a shield any time i was away from PVP, the point hits from an attack would be a fraction of what it is now so it could be nice for a change to get in a retaliation war and both players would benefit, only losing 27 points in the last hour unshielded would be fun instead of 270. there would be an area to develop your favorite character maybe once every 3 days logged in, or a week, maybe with a couple nodes fighting the chosen character as they gets stronger and culminates with a cover of your choice. But this isn't all fun it is a business and a business needs customers.

Like the picture said you keep using that word fun, i don't think it means what you think it means.

thanks for hearing my little rant but these changes just show how out of touch you are with your community you are, and you losing the trust of many high spending individuals on the forum that would love to support your game but don't like getting the rug pull out from under them. You haphazardly knock down one of the pillars of this game, one the rewards many people covet, one which many people thought were immune from change and many aren't sure she can still bare the weight of her previous role. Your changes may come a well thought out place, but to us it looks like you are rampaging in the dark. i don't mean to offend, but keep in mind that this is only a game, a game we choose to give our time and support, not our food or housing simply a diversion from our daily struggles. Will i miss it if i leave? most likely at first, but i will find something else to distract me.

The good news is that you can listen to our feedback and get better acquainted with the community through discussions and find out why we are mad about these changes. However, the trust issue won't be so easy to get back. it seems that there where other harsh lessons dealt with in the past i have might not have had the chance to see but the way you handle things really matters and can affect things down the road. I know many more people will be cautious with their spending, and you will need to ask if it was worth all the risk. Going forward I hope we can resolve this in a way that makes everyone happy or at least know why these changes were made and why so heavy handed as we had not have had good experiences with these types of actions in the past. I hope we can find some middle ground, or perhaps find some alternatives that may not have been thought of that can get us out of this quagmire.
I relinquish the remainder of my time to the forum.
~Heartburn

Phaserhawk

TLCstormz wrote:

I wish that more of you were STILL in 2* land and could see how big of a deal Mags' nerf is for us.....

Storm lost her best teammate.
As did Hawkeye.

And of course Mysti, too.

*sigh

2* Daken/OBW/(Torch,Ares or Thor)

Those three do more than the one trick pony that was Stormneto. (Btw, being playing only trying to use 3 blues and randomly throw away the others, you can generally get a mathc 5 a majority of the time, and almost always 6-8 AP if not, in addition the 5 random red AP is going to generate some cascades (about 45%) and you are probably going to be able to get a match 4 at worst out of it, which in turn is a buff to his red. I honestly think Magneto will be a stronger character

frostCoH

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

CNash wrote:

Miles, you say that you changed 2* Magneto's Polarity Shift in order to prevent the infinite turn combo with Mystique. But what are your feelings on the long-standing combo with Polarity Shift and 2* Storm's Wind Storm? Did you feel that this combo has always been "too powerful" for its initial cost? Is there a "sweet spot" with combinations of powers like this, where they would (in your estimation) feel "balanced"?

Secondly, and following on from this, since the Polarity Shift / Wind Storm combo is now a lot slower to get going, a lot of players will eschew it entirely in favour of their reliable Ares / Thor / Black Widow teams. Do you plan to address the diversity of the game at the 2* level, perhaps by making a character as powerful as Ares, so that PVP players don't end up seeing the same three faces over and over?

Ok, probably the last question I'll be able to field today, so here goes:

We had thought about tweaking the colors of both Magneto's and/or Mystique's powers but when given the option We'd rather make a numbers change first over a mechanics change. It keeps the character feeling and working the same and is less jarring. I think a lot of people on the forums forget that 90%+ of our players don't get these announcements ahead of time, so I'd rather have an ability do less or more of the same thing than do something else if possible. I know we have some precedence for changing character's colors around in the past, but that is literally the last thing when considering a change to a character since it's such a jarring change (even if the power is more or less the same).

Hi I haven't posted before but I did send a flurry of complaint tweets to the MPQ Twitter.

My biggest concern here is not the fact that when I introduce new players to the game I encourage them to work toward the cStorm and Magneto-Now (or as I call him "Roidneto") because it's a good legitimate way to survive hellish PVE's so you can earn better characters, that's not as much of a concern for me right now, I simply won't recruit friends to play the game until I see how this plays out.

My biggest concern is that y'all seem to have kneecapped Iron Hammer.

Consider this, with the new changes it will now take more than 2 Polarity Shifts to charge up a teir 5 Iron Hammer (please don't say nobody uses this power, I use it, I am a somebody, my IRL friends and husband use it, we love it). Now before the change the 4 turn count down was perfectly balanced. However now due to not being able to charge it after one Polarity Shift then having to wait 4 turns--that means 8 CHANCES FOR THE TILE TO BE DESTROYED either accidentally or on purpose. The length of time to charge it up, plus the wait to fire is now unacceptably long.

I repectfully request that you reduce it's timer to 2, or 3.


Finally, please consider allowing us to change basic, team up, and charged tiles for Polarity shift. ( I mean charged tiles should be obvious, HE IS MAGNETO,the power is "polarity shift"). The other reason is so often there will be so many TUTs on the board that even firing out a pre-change polarity shift could be iffy, now it will be hell. I'm not asking to change shields, swords, or fists, just charged and TUTs. That would soothe a lot of the burn from this change.