Stop being a Scrooge, Demiurge

Raffoon

I've been playing this game for more than 450 days. Over the course of that time, I've seen a lot of mistakes happen in the game and they all have one thing in common:

IF the developers even acknowledge the issue, you can be sure that any sort of tokens or compensation awarded will be the bare minimum.

The same is true for their reward structure.

Top 1-2 players in a PVE get a 4* cover?
Top 50 if it's a new character release? Ooh, 5% of people!
Top 1 in PVP, with a sometimes attainable progression reward, depending on how badly the developers have decided to change the PVP structure any given week?

I just started playing Puzzle and Dragons last week, and every day that I've logged in I've been greeted by heaps of free stuff.

When I used to play Marvel Heroes, they would just give loot away like a pinata. IT WAS GREAT, and I was happy to support them (and did so regularly)

Demiurge, you are in possession of digital goods that people want to acquire. It costs you nothing to give out more of these rewards to people. Stop acting like Scrooge, and give these out generously. The most important resource you can cultivate is the good will of your customers, and generous distribution of things that they want is the surest way to get it.

Unknown

Raffoon wrote:

I've been playing this game for more than 450 days. Over the course of that time, I've seen a lot of mistakes happen in the game and they all have one thing in common:



I just started playing Puzzle and Dragons last week, and every day that I've logged in I've been greeted by heaps of free stuff.

Same with Terra Battle. Daily in depth in game communication and tons of free stuff. Mistwalker really knows how to run a top notch game.

I'd recommend Terra Battle to anyone.

easy..marc

wymtime

via Imgflip Meme Maker

Unknown

Never gonna happen. Demiurge is tighter than a nun's tinykitty.

emaker27

Raffoon wrote:

The most important resource you can cultivate is the good will of your customers, and generous distribution of things that they want is the surest way to get it.

The problem is that this is not directly measureable with metrics. And metrics based companies, as they appear to be, can't say "good will = $2 per user". There's no way they are changing. I would love to wrong about this, but past behavior is a great indicator of the future.

Unknown

To be fair, DDQ is incredibly generous. We're still waiting for a 4* transition, but the 3* one is much smoother.

Vohnkar

Moon 17 wrote:

To be fair, DDQ is incredibly generous. We're still waiting for a 4* transition, but the 3* one is much smoother.

Agreed with DDQ being a good thing. Doable with 2*s if you happen to have the required 3* you can get an extra cover. We are on the 3rd run and I managed to finish covering a couple of chars, shame I forgot to log in the one day we got blue The Hood ><.

It's been stating a lot of times that as we progress in this game we are punished, I have a 40-50 day account on my phone just to get some matches to kill time and you can be top10 in any event just by playing some matches, I played 3 games and got a blue panther on one of the recent events. On the other han on my steam account with almost 1k hours played, quite some money spended and all of that I'm have a hard time killing the overscaling things, and obviously I'm matched against strong players in PvP.

I don't care much anymore about being matched against similar player, thats something "reassonable", the problem is that to get things done you need to invest an insane amount of time and you get almost nothing most of the time. Ultron requires a ton of time but at least you get some HPs, and with luck some 3*s, the rest of PvE suck in time/reward ratio unless you managed to get top 50.

DrStrange-616

All of the recent changes and shift toward new players makes me wonder if the beancounters haven't dictated that churn is okay, churn is good. The money is in new players. They will burn out, faster than ever before, but they will spend initially and be replaced quickly. Make them think the transition to 3* world is easy-peasy lemon squeezy, but they'll find that if they want to keep up the rapid ascent in the ranks, they have to pay. And they will, at first. Then they'll realize what a slog it is. Some will drop out, some will keep plugging away, but those players are no longer the focus. It's about getting new ones in. All. The. Time.

The retention, even in the face of all of the issues, is enough to satisfy their desired revenue from the "mature" player sector. But the longer a player plays, the smarter they become and the less likely they are to throw money at the roullette wheel. Keep the focus on the newbies, who haven't been burned out and are willing to spend on that shiny 10-pack.

Maybe I'm wrong, I am pulling this out of my patoot, but it does sort of feel this way. That they really and truly do not care what we think of the game, except perhaps on a personal level, the devs are people. But we are not their focus. We can rant and rave and even offer suggestions, but the people they want to please are those that don't know what it really takes to play the game.

Unknown

I don't mind the fairly scant rewards. What pisses me off is to see good rewards at, say, 800 points in a PvP, get close to it, then experience an update which puts me back at scrabbling for 300 points.

That is pure ****.

SnowcaTT

I agree with OP. Same deal, day 407, have seen lots of changes. When I started, it was pretty tough to get enough 2* covers to level your characters, now they rain like Candy. Then the 3* progression started getting impossible, and as the 3* release rate ramped up, DDQ and token drop rate has increased to help.

But 4* release rate has also drastically ramped up, and no similar way to progression. Similarly, very little has been done to address ISO/HP shortage (I have little faith that the next patch will help anyone who is well on their way to either 3* or 4* transition): with the vastly increased character release rate, something needs to be done there as well.

Raffoon

Well now, we've gotten some compensation! Quite frankly, I'm flabbergasted that we got 4 whole tokens and 100 HP for the server issues. That seems almost fair. A step in the right direction at least.

Aaaaannnnnndd........ Completely countered by the fact that Ultron Round 2 had the HP jacked up to over twice as much, so people didn't end up getting as many Hulkbusters as expected.

The effort to reward ratio in this game is so screwed up. Looks like I'll be directing the money that, given an alternate reality beginning 3 months ago would have been spent on Professor X and Kingpin, to Terra Battle instead. It's a really fun game and everyone should check it out.

Edit: By the way, thanks to djsquillz for the recommendation. I'd seen the game before and passed it over, thinking it was just a tactics turn based RPG. Very happy I checked it out.

Pylgrim

Raffoon wrote:

I've been playing this game for more than 450 days. Over the course of that time, I've seen a lot of mistakes happen in the game and they all have one thing in common:

IF the developers even acknowledge the issue, you can be sure that any sort of tokens or compensation awarded will be the bare minimum.

The same is true for their reward structure.

Top 1-2 players in a PVE get a 4* cover?
Top 50 if it's a new character release? Ooh, 5% of people!
Top 1 in PVP, with a sometimes attainable progression reward, depending on how badly the developers have decided to change the PVP structure any given week?

I just started playing Puzzle and Dragons last week, and every day that I've logged in I've been greeted by heaps of free stuff.

When I used to play Marvel Heroes, they would just give loot away like a pinata. IT WAS GREAT, and I was happy to support them (and did so regularly)

Demiurge, you are in possession of digital goods that people want to acquire. It costs you nothing to give out more of these rewards to people. Stop acting like Scrooge, and give these out generously. The most important resource you can cultivate is the good will of your customers, and generous distribution of things that they want is the surest way to get it.

You need to consider, though, that MPQ runs a tightly competitive meta. Give rewards too generously and everybody that has been playing for a few months would get a fully maxed and covered roster. Think of how people complain about having to fight 290/270/270 characters after certain score is achieved in PVP. Imagine if it was like that from the very beginning, all the time, simply because there would be no players with anything less than that!

Not to mention that it will kill the sense of progression and the malaise of having reached the top and having nowhere else to go would settle in much quicker (which is something that some hardcore veterans experience).

Unknown

I agree with this so much.

Nothing like collecting a dozen or so tokens and getting nothing out of them.

And to ease the dullness of getting nothing and turning nothing into iso by having to exit token screen, enter roster, enter recruit, choose sell repeatedly, why cant we just choose store this cover or iso at the point of token reveal?

Turning worthless covers into iso is as fun as taking out the trash.

On the flip side, seeing a cover you need in daily progression a few days away is neat. Its just that the gap between covers is vast. Why would every cover not be somewhere along the progression timeline?

Flipping it again, nothing like looking at pvp progression awards and thinking and knowing "that's not obtainable" before even starting the event.

Don't the devs view or know the pvp scores and know the majority never top 600-700 pts?

Oh one other thing, I hate pve progression when you get 10 decent things between say 0 and 3000, but then 250 iso at 4000, some 2* at 5000, 500 iso at 6000, etc

Just give out rewards every 500 or 1000 points. Even if its justs iso. I hate the higher the progression the lesser the rewards and more gap structure.

Raffoon

Pylgrim wrote:

Raffoon wrote:

I've been playing this game for more than 450 days. Over the course of that time, I've seen a lot of mistakes happen in the game and they all have one thing in common:

IF the developers even acknowledge the issue, you can be sure that any sort of tokens or compensation awarded will be the bare minimum.

The same is true for their reward structure.

Top 1-2 players in a PVE get a 4* cover?
Top 50 if it's a new character release? Ooh, 5% of people!
Top 1 in PVP, with a sometimes attainable progression reward, depending on how badly the developers have decided to change the PVP structure any given week?

I just started playing Puzzle and Dragons last week, and every day that I've logged in I've been greeted by heaps of free stuff.

When I used to play Marvel Heroes, they would just give loot away like a pinata. IT WAS GREAT, and I was happy to support them (and did so regularly)

Demiurge, you are in possession of digital goods that people want to acquire. It costs you nothing to give out more of these rewards to people. Stop acting like Scrooge, and give these out generously. The most important resource you can cultivate is the good will of your customers, and generous distribution of things that they want is the surest way to get it.

You need to consider, though, that MPQ runs a tightly competitive meta. Give rewards too generously and everybody that has been playing for a few months would get a fully maxed and covered roster. Think of how people complain about having to fight 290/270/270 characters after certain score is achieved in PVP. Imagine if it was like that from the very beginning, all the time, simply because there would be no players with anything less than that!

Not to mention that it will kill the sense of progression and the malaise of having reached the top and having nowhere else to go would settle in much quicker (which is something that some hardcore veterans experience).

That's certainly something worth considering. Unless someone spends hundreds of dollars on the game though, there are plenty of 4*s left to cover currently. Hell, I've spent hundreds of dollars on the game before and there are STILL plenty of 4*s left for me to cover. Add to that the release rate recently, and I think it's safe to say that there's no danger of people running out of ways to progress if the developers were more generous with their covers and rewards.

There's a middle ground between where we are now and completely maxing rosters after a few months, and it's a biiiiiig middle ground.

Ducky

Pylgrim wrote:

Think of how people complain about having to fight 290/270/270 characters after certain score is achieved in PVP. Imagine if it was like that from the very beginning, all the time, simply because there would be no players with anything less than that!

I already see that, so it wouldn't be a change for me, lol.

Pinko_McFly

I would not consider myself a vet but after almost a year I can see the problem that vets don't need to spend money. Hp is a lot easier to get with a better roster and they are fairly generous in giving out their premium currency. Without changing the amount of hp they give out, there has to be ways to encourage vets to spend money and they don't seem inclined to try anything except keeping roster cost high ( which doesn't bother me) and pushing out new characters.
When I started playing heavy I remember seeing the buy in tournaments and as a new player, yeah I was scared to try them. So i never joined but seeing them gave me something to strive for. Why did those go away? Put out some hp buy in tourneys with 4* any cover as the prize.
They give exclusive hp sales to new players to get them invested early. Why is that only new players. At 300 days, why not offer 3x the iso, at 400 4x and so on.
Limited time sales on 4* covers for vets, or even just flat out reduce the cost if you played xxx amount of days.
It seems there are things they could try to encourage vets to spend money but they have a why bother mentality.

tanis3303

The biggest issues I've been having lately is that the longer I play, the worse the risk vs reward factor becomes. MMR changes, increased health pools, inhuman scaling and the nerfs to both characters and AP boosts have all dramatically increased the risk associated with any given match, but the rewards remain the same. Before all the changes, the risk of trying for a 1,000 4* progression cover in PvP was reasonable, and generally worth the effort. Since the changes, I spend more resources, both HP for shields and ISO for boosts and skips, and now health packs by the truckload...and I have to fight tooth and nail just to hit 800. I don't want to put on my conspiracy hat, but it seems like all the changes were designed to make simply buying covers more attractive then earning them. Play for x hours slogging thru grueling matches, regardless of play format, to earn a cover for a character I'm working on or just throw money at it and save myself the headache. But I've been around long enough to know that the nerf cycle could invalidate any cover purchase I might make the second I make it, so...yea...

wymtime

tanis3303 wrote:

The biggest issues I've been having lately is that the longer I play, the worse the risk vs reward factor becomes. MMR changes, increased health pools, inhuman scaling and the nerfs to both characters and AP boosts have all dramatically increased the risk associated with any given match, but the rewards remain the same. Before all the changes, the risk of trying for a 1,000 4* progression cover in PvP was reasonable, and generally worth the effort. Since the changes, I spend more resources, both HP for shields and ISO for boosts and skips, and now health packs by the truckload...and I have to fight tooth and nail just to hit 800. I don't want to put on my conspiracy hat, but it seems like all the changes were designed to make simply buying covers more attractive then earning them. Play for x hours slogging thru grueling matches, regardless of play format, to earn a cover for a character I'm working on or just throw money at it and save myself the headache. But I've been around long enough to know that the nerf cycle could invalidate any cover purchase I might make the second I make it, so...yea...

With the boost to 5 characters I am surprised you are having to buy health packs. I climbed from the 500's to 940 and had health packs pact over. I rotated Groot, KK and with Cyclops IF. I hit 1000 with one shield hop and I am done for the event. The boosts to multiple characters makes longer battles, but it also allows for deeper rosters to play longer. Now if you want to talk about th fact,that if you want to win the event you have to buy 4-5 shields that is still a huge amount of HP to spend, but I am always surprised people spend money on health packs. I am 490 days in and I have never bought a health pack and am facing max teams from point one.

Unknown

The power of lower expectations keeps me motivated for tokens - I just assume they'll all be ****, regardless of the implied value, and if I get something worthwhile I'm happy. Otherwise it's just ISO in the bank.

Pylgrim

Raffoon wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

Raffoon wrote:

I've been playing this game for more than 450 days. Over the course of that time, I've seen a lot of mistakes happen in the game and they all have one thing in common:

IF the developers even acknowledge the issue, you can be sure that any sort of tokens or compensation awarded will be the bare minimum.

The same is true for their reward structure.

Top 1-2 players in a PVE get a 4* cover?
Top 50 if it's a new character release? Ooh, 5% of people!
Top 1 in PVP, with a sometimes attainable progression reward, depending on how badly the developers have decided to change the PVP structure any given week?

I just started playing Puzzle and Dragons last week, and every day that I've logged in I've been greeted by heaps of free stuff.

When I used to play Marvel Heroes, they would just give loot away like a pinata. IT WAS GREAT, and I was happy to support them (and did so regularly)

Demiurge, you are in possession of digital goods that people want to acquire. It costs you nothing to give out more of these rewards to people. Stop acting like Scrooge, and give these out generously. The most important resource you can cultivate is the good will of your customers, and generous distribution of things that they want is the surest way to get it.

You need to consider, though, that MPQ runs a tightly competitive meta. Give rewards too generously and everybody that has been playing for a few months would get a fully maxed and covered roster. Think of how people complain about having to fight 290/270/270 characters after certain score is achieved in PVP. Imagine if it was like that from the very beginning, all the time, simply because there would be no players with anything less than that!

Not to mention that it will kill the sense of progression and the malaise of having reached the top and having nowhere else to go would settle in much quicker (which is something that some hardcore veterans experience).

That's certainly something worth considering. Unless someone spends hundreds of dollars on the game though, there are plenty of 4*s left to cover currently. Hell, I've spent hundreds of dollars on the game before and there are STILL plenty of 4*s left for me to cover. Add to that the release rate recently, and I think it's safe to say that there's no danger of people running out of ways to progress if the developers were more generous with their covers and rewards.

There's a middle ground between where we are now and completely maxing rosters after a few months, and it's a biiiiiig middle ground.

I dunno about that. My Scarlet Witch has 11 covers. Quicksilver has 10, Kamala Khan has 12. Just from rewards, no buying, no tokens (my luck is abysmal). All those are recently released 3*s which are almost max-covered within weeks of their release. Waiting two weeks for the Iso reduction to hit, I amassed over 200k ISO. With the iso reduction in place I was able to max-level kamala from 70 (I bought the 5th purple cover) and I still had iso left to go around. Things like these were unheard of a year ago. Not even dared to be dreamed. 4*s are the only thing left in the game with a slow progression and I think that's very intentional. And even so, top players can score 1-2 4*s per PVP, that's at least 11 per month counting the season reward. Adding the 2-4 they can get in the release event, that's around a full character worth of covers per month

JamieMadrox

Compensation is a slippery slope. As someone that has worked in front-facing roles with clients for a long time I know how people can be. If we all got "good" compensation then next time people would cry for more. And more the next time. And more the next time. And so on. We already have people that had no chance of getting to round 6 in AvU run 1 asking for Hulkbuster covers because of run 2 issues. That's not even close to fair.

I really think though that the compensation for AvU run 1 was appropriate. Everyone got something for the inconvenience (4 tokens and some HP and ISO) and anyone that was close to getting a cover did. I'm fairly certain that if an alliance was close to getting a cover in run 2 that they'd be compensated. Compensation has actually gotten a LOT better. There is still work to be done (full refunds for changed characters), but overall it's been adequate IMHO.