D3 - Something to take note of

LXSandman

Hey Guys,

There is something you should be aware of ... The player base is fatigued. We are tired of the grind. We are tired of complaining.

I don't want to bad mouth anyone, call anyone names, etc etc... But I did want to tell you that your player base is getting so tired of the game that they are considering taking a break. I'm a pretty hardcore player, I play a lot for a match three game. I've put money into the game because I love it. But I'm considering taking a break... and you know what that means for a mobile game like this? It means that I might never come back to play again.

The first round of the Ultron event was alot of fun. Felt kinda grindy at the end, but all in all I was getting rewards and really enjoying my time. This second round has just felt like a horrible slog ... The only reason I'm still going is that I don't want to let my Alliance down. But then you run another PVE at the same time... . as well as starting another season of pvp. It's too much, it feels over whelming and it's just making me feel tired. I guess the rewards to work ratio just doesn't feel right.

You know what event doesn't feel grindy, is fun, and feels rewarding? DDQ. You get something that is useful, and most importantly it doesn't take a lot of time. So great job with that one!

I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Maybe go casual for a little while and see how that feels.

p.s. You guys could do alot better with the forum communication. Go take a look at the Marvel Heroes forums. The dev's are very active and will participate in conversations with players. I think that would really help with the hate around these parts.

LXSandman

GothicKratos

Extremely valid complaints. I can admit I'm on a break, and have been for a little bit.

I came back for this event, and found it to be a ton of fun, and I would definitely play it again, if they ran it again.

I think this event was a perfect in-between from their normal "grind" type events and the hands-off DDP. There's only one main node and five mini-nodes in the primary event - which refresh once every 8 hours as well as when you complete the five sub-nodes - then only eight in the sub-event. That's pretty laid back to me.

I do think they ran way too many concurrent events with both iterations of the Ultron event. In a perfect world, I'd like to see them design some kind of "mini simulator" PvE to run alongside this type of event, that is equally hands-off and offers kind of "casual rewards", like some good Tokens, Hero Points, and ISO-8 -maybe even some high demand cover prizes.

d0nk3y

The OP's post pretty well sums up my feelings about the current state of the game. I like DDQ, but it doesn't really have any rewards. I use the same teams to beat the nodes, I have the same result 99% of the time and I collect my (largely unneeded) rewards, sell them and move on. What I really want out of this game is some variety. I beat the entirety of the Prologue almost a year ago - there is not a single reward left to claim there. The PvP events are largely repetitive (with the exception of the mass character boost that all the 4* players hated) and the PvEs are the same grind for different garbage.

There have been a lot of ideas floated in various threads for solutions - I'd really REALLY like some solo-play solutions in the form of new story chapters. I don't want to always grind against the other 29k alliances in the game - sometimes I just wanna bash some heads in and collect some tokens. Each character has their own key story arcs in the comics - why not exploit those for story missions? If that's not likely, then give us something like an endless survival wave with round progression rewards where we can swap out one active character every 3 rounds. Give us something where we can fight against ourselves just to see how far we can go, like a mirror-match type fight series. Shake up the system - come out of left field with something crazy. Give us a color-inversion match, where a normal RYG character now feeds on Blue/Purple/Black. Give us something like a time-attack mode, where you have to beat a node in fewer than x rounds. Give us a power-disable match, where a certain color's powers are disabled randomly every few rounds or after every match-5. The whole system may break the first time we use it, but it'll at least be a change and maybe, just maybe, it'll bring back some of the thrill that's died off.

snlf25

Agree with all points above and would like to add, I already have a full time job. I don't need to play this damn game 40-60 hours a week to earn a slim shot at a tiny reward. Damn it people, I don't even want to play PvP anymore. Why don't you listen to the player base? are you deaf? Do any of you even play this game? What makes you think we want rotating buffed characters and health buffs and reducing of boosts that will only make an already asininely grindy game even grindier? We want to go faster, not be slowed to a crawl! And why is it that every time you guys screw up the compensation is so **** and slow? Every person in this game who played the first Ultron event should have got a free Scarlet Witch. You don't like that?

Don't screw up then.


Not only that you should have thrown several tokens and some iso and some hp at everybody too. Stop jerking off and recognize that doing what I suggested costs you not a damn thing and gains you enormous amounts of loyalty and gratitude. Pull your heads out of your butts and show some appreciation towards your customer base. Top 10k get a Scarlet two days after it'll do them any good? Pathetic. Contemptible. You've made a great game that I love. Stop wrecking it and your reputation.

Taganov

snlf25 wrote:

Not only that you should have thrown several tokens and some iso and some hp at everybody too. Stop jerking off and recognize that doing what I suggested costs you not a damn thing and gains you enormous amounts of loyalty and gratitude. Pull your heads out of your butts and show some appreciation towards your customer base. Top 10k get a Scarlet two days after it'll do them any good? Pathetic. Contemptible. You've made a great game that I love. Stop wrecking it and your reputation.

Agree with everything you said, but OMG, the above.

Seriously, Demi, how do you not understand this? Do none of you shop at Costco?

I have no problems opening my wallet, but I need to feel like I haven't been taken advantage of.

Guys, you really haven't been good at this lately. Please fix this.

Unknown

booooooooooooo.

poor job with everything. You suck.

signed your most loyal players.

not like you care

easy...marc et al

Unknown

I'm hating this game more and more. First you get no points for a node. Then the node somehow always deletes your placed tiles, either by cascade or getting magic 4/5 matches. Or by perfect swarms. (Don't get me started on the we have four goes to your one).

Ultron leaves me with nothing for any other part of the game. Stupid system. I feel I am letting my alliance down but I have nothing to give them.

If I had just joined this game. It would be getting deleted straight away. The joy has been drained from the game. The game should be something you pick up not be a full time job.

And yet. What did I do. I went straight back to playing a node. I think I must be as stupid as the game.

pizzaburger

They broke my game addiction for me.

I was obsessive about finishing DDQ every day. The servers crashed, I couldnt play it and I didn't get the character. The sun still rose, I still laughed at jokes, and my oatmeal still tastes delightful.

Their slow reaction and nonchalance in dealing with their issues has rubbed off on me. Now I'm feeling nonchalant about the game. I don't forsee myself playing much more into the future.

Unknown

I'm even bored of the Daily Deadpool. It's a great addition to the game but like all other things it becomes monotonous after a while.

Vohnkar

Agreed, they are obsesed on getting things dificult to veterans players so we have to "work" our **** to get anything. The recent changes on Ultron broke the event for a lot of alliance like mine. The event was already insanly grindy for the average casual player, my alliance got the 1st scarlet witch on first run, and we hoped to get at least the 1st Iron Man, and even the second if we played more.

The event gets really frustrating after so many days doing it, after getting to 620k I'm just tired, and I got here to try and get a chance for my alliance to get Iron Man, if not I would have stoped loooooong before that score. I now as a casual player I won't get my 4* IM usable for at least a year, my only 2 usuable 4* are wolverine and IW, the first because I bought covers for him to get him usable. Now they decided it was too powerful (agreed) and destroyed him, ok I can live with that, but then why bother on trying to get any 4*, they are unreachable for me. And fighting against 200+ with 150-166 is not fun sorry.

I really hope you decide to change the direction of the game. I really doubt you play the game, after 8-12 hours of working, I doubt you go home and play for 2-4 hours more every day of the week, moreso if the MMR and scaling is making your life miserable, I just can believe you play the game seriously outside of the office.

Yeah, making a new account to test things is awesome, the system is great you get covers all the time, but after the first 50-100 days?¿ what happens? I'm at 450+ I love the game and enjoy the marvel universe but right now the time/reward ratio sucks, except for DDQ, as everybody says that event has a reward/time=awesome. Go more in lane with that pls.

Unknown

Totally agree with the OP, I couldn't even continue to grind for Hulkbuster, as the scaling heal meant grind, grind, grind for even the first Hulkbuster cover.

I'm now full on casual, mostly only doing DDQ, with the occasional Ultron attack. Not sure when I'll get back into the game in a real way. On the bright side, Marvel Future Fight just came out, and it's proving to have some potential as a mobile action RPG.

Dragon_Nexus

My alliance complained of being burned out. No-one's ever said that before.
I don't know what the devs were thinking having a big event like Ultron, something that requires some time and health pack commitments to benefit from, especially the second run, and then put PvE in as well. AND have one of those PvEs give the new 4* away!

Usually I'd be beaten up from Ultron and try to scrap by in the PvE and then drag the remains of my heroes into PvP for a bit to try to score more Scarlet Witch tokens.

I spent nearly 3 hours playing this afternoon, doing Ultron, PvE, PvP, Ultron refresh, then I played something else for a bit, had a meal, came back at 8pm to finish off PvP, then did a couple of nodes of PvE before the refresh, did the new PvE node...then relaxed for an hour and came back for the final Ultron node.

If they'd just had it as Ultron I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. I think my alliance would have scored better, too. NO-ONE in my alliance played Oscorp Hardcore, not even those who really needed the Steve Rogers covers. But the rewards in Enemy of the State are too good to pass up, so we ended up spreading ourselves so thin the game started to feel more like work. And I'm not going to be *that* leader who cracks the whip and demands people put in the work or they're out, my alliance is casual. I urged them to do their best, and they did. We did more damage this time than before, but still not enough to break through round 6.

Just glad most of my guild were lucky enough to get a Hulkbuster or two from tokens.

Unknown

Agreed on all points.

While I've done Ultron, I have skipped the lightning rounds last week, skipped combined arms and the other off season pvp, skipped the pve event, haven't started on the current pve event, and just started on the BP event with an hour left to go. And yet I have played MPQ in every moment of my free time. The Ultron matches just took forever.

Between the extra events and the increased difficulty in matches through the new MMR, the extra health and longer matches, this game has turned into a grind fest that just takes so much more time than it used to.

My phone recently upgraded to Lollipop, which force-closes the game if the phone sleeps for more than a minute or so. With games taking as long as they do now, I often get interrupted mid game, unable to quickly finish, returning to having to use 3 health kits in order to restart the match I was halfway through before the interruption. It's an annoying design flaw in the game (and a feature in Lollipop I wish I could disable), but it is just one of the reasons I can't bring myself to participate in all events anymore.

Vinmarc43

Agreed also, what's not to agree on, I have a hard time with D3's decision makers state of mind when they setup events, so many decision they make is very very wrong and the worst is that they keep making the same thing over and over again. Why can't they see this ?!.
I'm over 500 days playing this nonsense because I am addicted to it probably, but I need to make a final decision on playing this game, tried a month ago to quit, but it's hard to do so. One thing is certain, i'm not putting money into this. That Ultron event just friggin killed me, was playing 8-10 hrs per day, this is mental for sure.
Anyway, Ultron would have been a better event without an end timer, everyone would have won the rewards eventually, big and small alliance alike and maybe and that's a big maybe, I would have bought covers for hulkbuster.
Probably would have been a better move for D3 $$$$.

TLCstormz

Honestly, they are just COMPLETELY out of touch with reality or greedy as all get out or not that smart or they just do not care / cannot be bothered.

I can't think of any other excuses / reasonings for this game to be the way it is, at this point in time. Which is completely disheartening, because we all CLEARLY love and appreciate it, so much.

:+/

Unknown

Agree on all points! It's only a shame that there is so much sense being wirtten in the forum about the game. D3, you should see this as pure magic. Completely free marketing feedback without you making any effort to gain it. And feedback needs to be recognised, and at times, acted upon.

There is passion here, from players that are loyal to the game, and would hate to feel they should walk away. You need to see this as £ and $ and € walking away. Lots and lots of £ and $ and €. All walking away from you, and to another company.
I thought businesses didn't like that happening. You shouldn't.

udonomefoo

Never seen a thread with so many posts that just start with the word "agree". Me too, me too. I'll admit once I realized the servers weren't coming back at the end of that first run it was kind of nice knowing that I couldn't play and neither could anyone else to leave me behind.

Especially agree on communication. Sure, there will be a couple keyboard warriors who will want to argue with anything you say, but the vast majority of us would be thankful for the interaction.

Unknown

Grinding is almost a necessary part of the game because there isn't a strong P2W element. That is, normally in a typical F2P game it doesn't matter how much you play, you won't come anywhere close to someone who pays money so you might as well not bother. A lot of them you flat out can't play more even if you wanted to because of various limitations unless you pay up. Although the health pack is somewhat limiting, you can go for a long time without needing more in both PvP and PvE with the right characters. Health pack usually only becomes a concern when you're trying to juggle multiple events with overlapping key characters (e.g. Captain America while he's in PvP, PvE, and likely heavily used on Ultron). It is certainly nowhere as limiting as an energy system where it doesn't matter who you have and you still only get your 10 games or whatever before it runs out. In the end, people might complain about the grind but it is easier to grind than come up with money. It is not clear to me how the game can be modified or even if it's a good idea, because we could be looking at something like characters go to level 9999 and need 100 covers in each color to max (I think it was somewhat like this initially and that wasn't exactly a good idea).

I think the limited attempts for Ultron over a period of time is not a bad idea though until scaling is fixed all such a mechanism would do is make those with favorable scaling even more dominant. If you're going to make an encounter that's based on total damage done, I'm not even sure why it needs scaling in the first place because it seems to me a level 200 team being able to do twice the damage as a level 100 team is the very definition of progress. It'd be weird if leveling up your team didn't achieve this kind of result and since progress is based on damage done you don't have to worry about an all-or-nothing situation as would be the case if a level 100 is normally facing say a level 250 encounter.

By the way, I don't think the devs purposely designed a grindy game. They're probably putting this stuff and say 'who would possibly be crazy enough to grind like this?' Obviously when they're testing for the Ultron event they didn't have the whole company stop doing work for the whole week to try to clear round 8 on part 2. When you're the developer of the game it's easy to say 'you don't need to get everything, I sure don't got everything' but that's because if the said developer really cared about that stuff he can already have everything. It's kind of like how the designer of a MMORPG encounter can almost never beat the hardest encounter he made, because his job isn't beating the encounters and he's not impacted by his inability to beat his own encounters, while the players who are invested in the game certainly feel impacted if an encounter is too hard.

areacode212

The first Ultron event was a lot of fun. Even when you decided to run the Oscorp Heroic at the same time, it was rough, but didn't feel THAT overwhelming. The second one was just pure sadism, especially since on top of having to grind nonstop for Ultron, you also ran Enemy of the State. Why would you run TWO PvE events simultaneously that feature survival nodes? Survival nodes can be fun, but having to do them over and over in two different events is overkill. On top of that, the BP PvP event featured Scarlet Witch as the placement rewards, so you basically had 3 extremely grindy and health pack-intensive events going at the same time with the 2 newest characters up for grabs.

I'm completely burnt out. Also, I heard there was some Marvel movie that came out this weekend? Would've been nice to be able to use some of my free time to see it...

Unknown

I jumped of the Ultron event after the first round, my alliance got all the rewards and i scored 1,4 millions. I told the commanders that i dident wanted/care to play for the Hulk buster. So i left the alliance and wished them god luck in the event. I played the osboren Corp and did get my Red cap cover and as a bonus i placed top 100 and got a she hulk cover also.

Instead of playing/grinding the Ultron event i played balance of power. Not even tried so hard, but i got a BP cover for the small effort( When i checked the score i was only 20 points from a second cover, if had know that i would have grindet the event a little). And in the BP PVP i placed top 100 without any trouble. Got an extra SW cover and im happy.

So a big thanks to all the players that looks them self blind on the 4* cover inn the ultron event, you have made all the other events inn this game the last week so much more easy.

DD-The-Mighty

Not much more to add that the OP didn't already address. I too am tired of arguing with fanboys and pointing out flaws in the game (aka "complaining").

The ugly truth is D3 is starting to push that line between a full legitimate RPG (and all the grind that comes with it) and the undeniable truth that, at its core, Marvel Puzzle Quest is just a simple mobile centric match-3 game.

They may be asking for too much commitment for what it essentially a time waster app.
I'm guessing only time will tell on that last point...