Save Phantron

Unknown

Well, it does make sense if the goal is to cater to gambling addicts, rather than people who want to just play a match-3 and have some reasonable progression, maybe occasionally dropping in some cash to support the devs.

If you run a casino, you don't actually want people to be able to reliably win, you want them to spend a lot of time at the tables and have the outcome basically be luck (and generally have that luck be bad so they spend more to make up for lost time / money), rather than skill. This reflects most of their design philosophy - catering either to gamblers or super-whales who're willing to spend thousands to place. It's incredibly hard to place reliably if you don't fall into one of those two categories (and if we're honest there's little reason to be grinding an RPG if not to achieve some reasonable progression).

They don't really seem to care all that much about those of us who'd like to play the game for fun.

I did a calculation, and the time commitments for this game are obscene.

For a 4*, the only way to reliably place for PvE is to play the game on avg. 3-5 hours a day, over 7 days. That's 21-35 hrs a week for reasonable placement, which won't even guarantee you 2 covers in my experience.

For a 3*, it's slightly better, but still pretty bad. Over 4 days, that's 12-20 hours. So either way, you're working a part time job with very marginal benefits in or out of this game, and some very tangible real life detriments in the form of time spent. And yeah, I think it's safe to call it a job because the amount of grind in the game rises far above the level that can be considered fun, to the point of simply being a chore.

A game is not a game if you're required to play it on a schedule and potentially rework yours around it in any capacity. So yeah, do I play this game as a part-time job and forsake other things I should / would like to be doing, or play other single-player games / devote that amount of time to other activities with more tangible benefits beyond being able to wave my electronic phallus on a leaderboard in the face of players aren't able to devote half-their lives to MPQ? Not too hard a choice.

I'll probably still play DPD, although for how much longer, I don't really know. Those Tacos have been insultingly bad since the supposed improved token odds. Instead of "chance of featured character", my experience has been "guaranteed 2*".

But I'm thinking thinking hard about whether it'll be possible to play this game in a more reasonable capacity and still put up decent scores for my alliance. I think the answer is probably no, which is sad because I like my alliance.

Unknown

theHappyDance wrote:

Well, it does make sense if the goal is to cater to gambling addicts, rather than people who want to just play a match-3 and have some reasonable progression, maybe occasionally dropping in some cash to support the devs.

If you run a casino, you don't actually want people to be able to reliably win, you want them to spend a lot of time at the tables and have the outcome basically be luck (and generally have that luck be bad so they spend more to make up for lost time / money), rather than skill. This reflects most of their design philosophy - catering either to gamblers or super-whales who're willing to spend thousands to place. It's incredibly hard to place reliably if you don't fall into one of those two categories (and if we're honest there's little reason to be grinding an RPG if not to achieve some reasonable progression).

They don't really seem to care all that much about those of us who'd like to play the game for fun.

I did a calculation, and the time commitments for this game are obscene.

For a 4*, the only way to reliably place for PvE is to play the game on avg. 3-5 hours a day, over 7 days. That's 21-35 hrs a week for reasonable placement, which won't even guarantee you 2 covers in my experience.

For a 3*, it's slightly better, but still pretty bad. Over 4 days, that's 12-20 hours. So either way, you're working a part time job with very marginal benefits in or out of this game, and some very tangible real life detriments in the form of time spent. And yeah, I think it's safe to call it a job because the amount of grind in the game rises far above the level that can be considered fun, to the point of simply being a chore.

A game is not a game if you're required to play it on a schedule and potentially rework yours around it in any capacity. So yeah, do I play this game as a part-time job and forsake other things I should / would like to be doing, or play other single-player games / devote that amount of time to other activities with more tangible benefits beyond being able to wave my electronic phallus on a leaderboard in the face of players aren't able to devote half-their lives to MPQ? Not too hard a choice.

I'll probably still play DPD, although for how much longer, I don't really know. Those Tacos have been insultingly bad since the supposed improved token odds. Instead of "chance of featured character", my experience has been "guaranteed 2*".

But I'm thinking thinking hard about whether it'll be possible to play this game in a more reasonable capacity and still put up decent scores for my alliance. I think the answer is probably no, which is sad because I like my alliance.

It's pretty obvious that Deadpool daily is there to cater to the 'casual' player and literally...nothing else is.

Konman

Phantron wrote:

In the grand scheme of things people like me don't really matter. <snip>

I would go so far as to say that in any scale scheme, not just the grand ones, you don't matter.

Vankysher

Though my roster is underleveled for pve (plus I've gone casual overall), I have to agree with a lot of what has been stated in this thread. With matches heavily weighted on how tiles are generated by the RNG, any skill is a mere illusion when the AI doubles or triples your AP gain in a single turn. Sure strategy of team composition plays a small role but when node levels continue to scale upwards it gets trivialized very quickly. Increasing my levels during a PvE to counter the scaling helps for a bit but such a strategy only works to a certain point. This has been the only game where leveling up becomes disadvantageous and that is utterly stupid game design.

As Phantron has stated, beating highly scaled nodes consistently is all about luck. When nodes hit a certain level a bad board, lucky cascade or untouchable countdown tile will make short work of any roster-even underleveled, fully covered ones. There have been extremely few matches where I can say "if only I did this" I would've won. Those who say otherwise are highly presumptuous because you'd have to know what tiles are falling next if strategy played a significant role. MPQ lacks the fun factor to sustain extended gaming sessions despite events being setup in a manner geared for long stretches.

Unknown

raisinbman wrote:

It's pretty obvious that Deadpool daily is there to cater to the 'casual' player i]or any other player who still attempts PvE or PvP and is left wondering why they still bother to open the game[/i and literally...nothing else is.

Fixed that for you.

DBC

Unknown

Vankysher wrote:

As Phantron has stated, beating highly scaled nodes consistently is all about luck. When nodes hit a certain level a bad board, lucky cascade or untouchable countdown tile will make short work of any roster-even underleveled, fully covered ones. There have been extremely few matches where I can say "if only I did this" I would've won. Those who say otherwise are highly presumptuous because you'd have to know what tiles are falling next if strategy played a significant role. MPQ lacks the fun factor to sustain extended gaming sessions despite events being setup in a manner geared for long stretches.

It's rare anything you can do will matter against goon-based dominance. This is not necessarily true in general. For example in one of the Gauntlet nodes at the end that had Nick Fury (and 2 other 4*) that are 395, my first game went something like AI match purple, 3 more purple fall down, and then 3 more purple fall down. Nick Fury used an Escape Plan on turn 6, which was in a spot that I cannot possibly reach, and then it turned into a 1K or whatever strike tile and easily put the game away. Now of course that totally sucked, but even if you believe the AI is totally cheating, you should know that it is clearly not normal to pick up 12 purple AP in 6 turns. So I went again and sure enough they didn't get all that AP and everything went relatively smoothly, though I did pay more attention to purple tiles this time compared to before just to be safe. That I think is acceptable. You're going to get some bad breaks and that's fine.

But for the goon-based dominance? Let's just stick with a case where the goons aren't even pumping the right color. Let's assume there are 7 available matches on the board, which implies 1 match per color on average (there certainly isn't 2 matches per color on average which can be trivially verified by empirical evidence). There are 9 tiles on average per color on board, and AI places CDs at random locations of a given color. So it's twice as likely (2/3) that the CD is placed in a spot that cannot be immediately matched versus a spot that can be. But this isn't a one time recurrence thing either. If the opponent has 2 Pyros, they're doing at least 1 Flamethrower every 2.5 turns (can be more often if they happened to get green elsewhere), and each green match you make makes the next green match harder to make. I'm sure people have noticed that when you fight Maggias, after a while it's awfully hard to make a yellow/blue match since it's either all eaten up by Threaten/Covering Fire, or even if you were able to intercept all the Threatens/Covering Fires that'd also mean you're taking out pretty much every yellow/blue available match. I've games against Hand Ninjas where the board ran out of empty red tiles to place CDs and it's awfully hard to stop any new Strength in Numbers/Meteor Hammer when that's the only red tile on the board.

puppychow

Konman wrote:

Phantron wrote:

In the grand scheme of things people like me don't really matter. <snip>

I would go so far as to say that in any scale scheme, not just the grand ones, you don't matter.

It's unfortunate that D3 no longer allow down voting, or else you'll be slammed with quite a few of those.

Mawtful

All the best, Phantron. Sad to see you go, but I can't fault you for leaving.

Unknown

Have a good life out there you hear? Been nice having you about.

TheOncomingStorm

Phantron wrote:

TheOncomingStorm wrote:

I disagree. I think the game grew right along with the initial player base. It got to be a point, where the gulf between the current player base and future players was too big. Thus, the recent concentration on figuring that part out. Would I had preferred many of those changes not coming at the expense of vets? Of course. But, it's hard not to look at what they've done and think that of someone was starting at this point, the game is much more palatable for them.

I think we all previously admitted when we up voted Ben Grimm ' s heroic jugs thread that the old pves needed work especially if they were going to continue to rerun them. I think it goes without saying the remodeled versions still need tweaking. However, it's hard to say they are not an improvement. Only 9 repeatable nodes, even 24 hours, no 12 hours difference between start and end times. It's the changes that should actually make The Hunt playable.

But again, I'd like to see scaling tweaked and paid closer attention to.

I agree on the new content. They've averaged new pve content every 3 months it seems. They say that's good for their small team. I got no knowledge, so I tend to take their word for that.

On one hand, it's hard to fault them because they made so many changes recently, so they have been visibly busy. On the other hand, if new pve content is what most players want and its their top priority, maybe 1 new one every 3 months won't cut it. *shrugs*

You can't get credit for picking up the low hanging fruit. Literally everybody on the forum other than the guys with the really weird schedule has pointed out that 12H or 1D 12H subs are dumb. Everyone knows Florida has too many nodes. Everyone knows playing Simulator Basic and Hard at the same time takes too long. Even most crazies will tell you that 2H 24M refresh times are nuts. I don't know who even thought any of these decisions made sense in the first place, but you don't get credit for fixing problems that should never have been allowed to persist for more than a week. If they had even a single person trying to place top 10 in PvE or top 5 in PvP they'd realize both systems have some serious underyling problems, and whoever is doing the PvE stuff will almost certainly accomplish nothing in work during the duration of that event which should immediately tell them the time requirements are insane. A comprehensive solution to these problems is difficult, but they're not even trying to band-aid this stuff.

Having thought about it more, I take serious issue with your "low hanging fruit" comment. It's been established that they have a relatively small staff and that was never going to change. Therfore, any expectation that they drop everything they are doing to do small tweaks (however small they seem to players) is just ignoring what they have told us in the past.

They seem to triage changes and chasing down errors. Empirically, we've seen this repeatedly. Mpq has continually adjusted its features. Aside from friends that play the game, this is probably what keeps players hanging on. We continue to hope the next tweak, the next feature, will be the one that fixes everything.

The problem is the player base keeps saying a particular change will make the game great. Mpq makes the change, get a minute of credit, then players move on to something new to complain about. I'm no less guilty in that regard to others.

We ask for time slices for pve, then complain brackets take to long to fill.

We complain t50 alliance rewards for 4* are tearing apart alliances, now we complain about individual rewards.

We complain about sub lengths, number of nodes, and pve end/start times being different. Then you say they don't get credit bc it was an obvious change. So you would concede these are good changes, but while mpq shouldn't get credit, you're more than happy to give them blame for the scaling appearing to be off and more goon/villain combo nodes.

I'm calling **** on that. You don't get to pick and choose.

I would also point out typically they have to go back and make tweaks after they get data from changes. So they'll probably tone down the goon/villain nodes, or it may be that they're more prevalent in some pves and not others.

I don't like my scaling. I also concede essential scaling is off. I'm not as sure about the hard nodes. Remember there have been health buffs, changes to bullseye and moonstone, characters that weren't previously in previous iterations of pves, weekly buffs, etc. So it's hard for me to figure out if my scaling is off or my perception of my scaling is off. It's a lot of variables to take into account in a short period.

El Satanno

I was most upset to hear that you were splitting, Phantron. Indeed your posts here are not only insightful and well-considered, but you managed to avoid the nastier behaviors employed by far too many when disagreement arises. For that, you have garnered my respect. The forum will be a lesser place for your absence.

Maybe you should just not play the game, but keep posting here. That would be good.

Unknown

Quits game

posts 25 times a day in the game's forum

Pylgrim

Phantron wrote:

TheOncomingStorm wrote:

I disagree. I think the game grew right along with the initial player base. It got to be a point, where the gulf between the current player base and future players was too big. Thus, the recent concentration on figuring that part out. Would I had preferred many of those changes not coming at the expense of vets? Of course. But, it's hard not to look at what they've done and think that of someone was starting at this point, the game is much more palatable for them.

I think we all previously admitted when we up voted Ben Grimm ' s heroic jugs thread that the old pves needed work especially if they were going to continue to rerun them. I think it goes without saying the remodeled versions still need tweaking. However, it's hard to say they are not an improvement. Only 9 repeatable nodes, even 24 hours, no 12 hours difference between start and end times. It's the changes that should actually make The Hunt playable.

But again, I'd like to see scaling tweaked and paid closer attention to.

I agree on the new content. They've averaged new pve content every 3 months it seems. They say that's good for their small team. I got no knowledge, so I tend to take their word for that.

On one hand, it's hard to fault them because they made so many changes recently, so they have been visibly busy. On the other hand, if new pve content is what most players want and its their top priority, maybe 1 new one every 3 months won't cut it. *shrugs*

You can't get credit for picking up the low hanging fruit. Literally everybody on the forum other than the guys with the really weird schedule has pointed out that 12H or 1D 12H subs are dumb. Everyone knows Florida has too many nodes. Everyone knows playing Simulator Basic and Hard at the same time takes too long. Even most crazies will tell you that 2H 24M refresh times are nuts. I don't know who even thought any of these decisions made sense in the first place, but you don't get credit for fixing problems that should never have been allowed to persist for more than a week. If they had even a single person trying to place top 10 in PvE or top 5 in PvP they'd realize both systems have some serious underyling problems, and whoever is doing the PvE stuff will almost certainly accomplish nothing in work during the duration of that event which should immediately tell them the time requirements are insane. A comprehensive solution to these problems is difficult, but they're not even trying to band-aid this stuff.

I believe that the problem was that for the time-consuming stuff like PVEs, they never relied on their own experience but rather on data on user involvement... and there was always people willing to go that extra crazy mile and play the game to top 1 completion even in the insane times of 2h refreshes. So, looking at the data, nothing seemed awry; people complained, maybe, but they were also playing up.

I kind of understand why they wouldn't be relying on their own experience. Having been tweaking, playtesting and tweaking again the game through the day, whatever hours were they putting towards the game (which if it's like most game studios, surely was several hours over 8), also playing the game in whatever free time they have left would just conduce to burn out. However, the comparatively quicker pace of fixes in these areas nowadays over the past few months may mean that they are now acting more on empiric evidence, and hopefully they'll keep at it.

Unknown

All the best Phantron. Don't really come on here much now but generally find your posts to be based on a real want for the game to get better, even if I didn't agree with them.

I gave up on pve ages ago, I have been playing this game for well over a year, and though that doesn't make my opinion any more valid than anyone else's, I have stopped believing there is any kind of plan in place to improve this game. They are just firefighting to try and keep the existing content balanced enough that new players come in, and releasing new characters so whales gobble them up.

I am not the player they want. It is arguable that I never was, as I have spent cash on this game a grand total of two times (once to buy an Alliance spot, once to have some HP for roster slots and swiftly regretted that when they launched like five new characters in two months or something (nb - that isn't an exact measurement, I appreciate this is an internet forum and therefore someone will post "not it was only four characters in two months" or similar). I don't care about the latest character release, by the time I get enough covers they would have been altered, or someone they were paired with altered, so I have no idea if they will be any good or not when I come to actually use them. I am in a cool Alliance so play for the communication and to help get rewards for other people mostly now. I have plenty of 166 maxed and 4* hold no real interest for me whilst they are basically level 3.5* or lower. Certainly not enough interest to play pve for hours on end to get 1-3 covers.

I totally get that they are a business and need to make money. And heck this game is still doing well despite the flaws so they must be doing something right (or having a Marvel license is literally a way to print money whatever the quality, one of the two). But I continue to look at the game and think it could be so much more. I'm not even talking about programming here, I don't have a clue about that and freely admit it. But the choices they make, and have made pretty much since the start, baffle me 90% of the time.

But it's a game, and there are tons of them out there, and we will all move in a due time. And they'll keep "balancing" and releasing new characters until some top business bod decides to pull the plug.

Unknown

TheOncomingStorm wrote:

It's been established that they have a relatively small staff

time to go home everyone

optimus2861

theHappyDance wrote:

Well, it does make sense if the goal is to cater to gambling addicts, rather than people who want to just play a match-3 and have some reasonable progression, maybe occasionally dropping in some cash to support the devs.

If you run a casino, you don't actually want people to be able to reliably win, you want them to spend a lot of time at the tables and have the outcome basically be luck (and generally have that luck be bad so they spend more to make up for lost time / money), rather than skill. This reflects most of their design philosophy - catering either to gamblers or super-whales who're willing to spend thousands to place. It's incredibly hard to place reliably if you don't fall into one of those two categories (and if we're honest there's little reason to be grinding an RPG if not to achieve some reasonable progression).

They don't really seem to care all that much about those of us who'd like to play the game for fun.

This write-up applies to every single "collectable card" style freemium game out there. I've yet to encounter even one that breaks the mold. The game itself is a smokescreen, a way to keep you hooked and entice you to hit that "Buy Now!" button. Then hit it again. And again. And again. Suddenly your wallet is hundreds of dollars lighter and you don't know what hit you.

This game has been, in my ~200 days, much less obscene about that fact than others I've played. But it's still there. I'm sitting on 7 unrostered covers in my inventory (well, 8 if I count 2* Bullseye) with a countdown clock to expiry, and my 43rd roster slot costs 550 HP. To roster all 7 would cost probably 30 bucks or even a bit more. And that problem keeps getting worse because D3 keeps pumping out new characters to further dilute the token pool (and also lengthening the DDQ cycle time) and sell more over-priced roster slots.

I wiped on the Yelena + flamethrower node too, and I'm a mere transitioner. I never touched that node again, because, like Phantron says, what's the point? It's a third-rate villain and a couple of henchmen, in a story event being rerun for the Nth time. Is that why anyone wants to play this game?

Pylgrim

optimus2861 wrote:

theHappyDance wrote:

Well, it does make sense if the goal is to cater to gambling addicts, rather than people who want to just play a match-3 and have some reasonable progression, maybe occasionally dropping in some cash to support the devs.

If you run a casino, you don't actually want people to be able to reliably win, you want them to spend a lot of time at the tables and have the outcome basically be luck (and generally have that luck be bad so they spend more to make up for lost time / money), rather than skill. This reflects most of their design philosophy - catering either to gamblers or super-whales who're willing to spend thousands to place. It's incredibly hard to place reliably if you don't fall into one of those two categories (and if we're honest there's little reason to be grinding an RPG if not to achieve some reasonable progression).

They don't really seem to care all that much about those of us who'd like to play the game for fun.

This write-up applies to every single "collectable card" style freemium game out there. I've yet to encounter even one that breaks the mold. The game itself is a smokescreen, a way to keep you hooked and entice you to hit that "Buy Now!" button. Then hit it again. And again. And again. Suddenly your wallet is hundreds of dollars lighter and you don't know what hit you.

This game has been, in my ~200 days, much less obscene about that fact than others I've played. But it's still there. I'm sitting on 7 unrostered covers in my inventory (well, 8 if I count 2* Bullseye) with a countdown clock to expiry, and my 43rd roster slot costs 550 HP. To roster all 7 would cost probably 30 bucks or even a bit more. And that problem keeps getting worse because D3 keeps pumping out new characters to further dilute the token pool (and also lengthening the DDQ cycle time) and sell more over-priced roster slots.

I wiped on the Yelena + flamethrower node too, and I'm a mere transitioner. I never touched that node again, because, like Phantron says, what's the point? It's a third-rate villain and a couple of henchmen, in a story event being rerun for the Nth time. Is that why anyone wants to play this game?

Question: Can you please say which 1*s and 2*s you have and which unrostered characters are waiting on the bench?

simonsez

TheOncomingStorm wrote:

I also concede essential scaling is off. I'm not as sure about the hard nodes. Remember there have been health buffs, changes to bullseye and moonstone, characters that weren't previously in previous iterations of pves, weekly buffs, etc. So it's hard for me to figure out if my scaling is off or my perception of my scaling is off. It's a lot of variables to take into account in a short period.

Well, I can just look at the levels and say that I don't remember essentials starting out over lv200. Those used to be the nodes that would start 130-160, and maybe might make it to 200 at the end of the grind. And when you toss in the things you already mentioned, the buffs and nerfs, etc., it's amplifying something that would've already sucked to begin with.

Konman

puppychow wrote:

Konman wrote:

Phantron wrote:

In the grand scheme of things people like me don't really matter. <snip>

I would go so far as to say that in any scale scheme, not just the grand ones, you don't matter.

It's unfortunate that D3 no longer allow down voting, or else you'll be slammed with quite a few of those.

That was comedy gold! I even used the razz smiley doohickey. I am so not appreciated.

Unknown

I have been playing for 490 days, very competitively in both PvE and PvP and I just don't agree with your core argument. I'm always happy to see any goon over any hero in any node, unless they are feeding someone. Community scaling for nodes with 1-3 goons always climbs faster than non-goon nodes because people beat those easier. The last mission of DDQ is trivial because the goons are so easy you can save up enough AP to kill the hero waves without letting them get a turn, even with a 2* roster. I really hope D3 doesn't replace goons with heroes on high scaling missions because it would be so much harder.