Can we get some specifics on the "New Player Experience"?

Unknown

I'm curious what is changing, as I am constantly trying to convert people to the game, so letting them know whats up in advance always helps.

I know part of it is a 1 star character, were other 1 stars affected as well, and are any being "Bag-Man"d out of the rotation to help offset the adding of 3 new covers to the pool?

mjh

I stopped recommending this game after they released 2 4*s back-to-back months ago. I forget who and it looks as if they haven't learned from it yet.

What would be my pitch anyways?

"Hey! There's this really awesome game you can play in all your spare time, probably even when you shouldn't be playing like at work because if you don't you'll lose out on rewards. Oh and don't forget about waking up at 4am to grind nodes or shield hop because that's fun. Oh and after you do all that it'll take you no less than 1 year to get to where I am unless you spend hundreds of dollars. After 1 year of intense commitment, I'll probably still be ahead of you because "early adopter" so yeah, join in the fun"

My friend and I are both early adopters and we talk about this game daily. He joined literally on week 1 (of launch). I was about 3-4 months later and with every new character release we just say to ourselves "new players have a mountain to climb they can never achieve without dumping an insane amount of money". No idea why anybody downloading this game recently would keep playing after a few days.

nwman

Which is why they have easier brackets for new players etc.

But I can agree to an extent. They should revamp daily rewards or something to help.

Unknown

mjh wrote:

I stopped recommending this game after they released 2 4*s back-to-back months ago. I forget who and it looks as if they haven't learned from it yet.

What would be my pitch anyways?

"Hey! There's this really awesome game you can play in all your spare time, probably even when you shouldn't be playing like at work because if you don't you'll lose out on rewards. Oh and don't forget about waking up at 4am to grind nodes or shield hop because that's fun. Oh and after you do all that it'll take you no less than 1 year to get to where I am unless you spend hundreds of dollars. After 1 year of intense commitment, I'll probably still be ahead of you because "early adopter" so yeah, join in the fun"

My friend and I are both early adopters and we talk about this game daily. He joined literally on week 1 (of launch). I was about 3-4 months later and with every new character release we just say to ourselves "new players have a mountain to climb they can never achieve without dumping an insane amount of money". No idea why anybody downloading this game recently would keep playing after a few days.

Because playing puzzle games is fun, and Marvel Characters are cool?

The game is balanced in away that you don't need to "Catch up" to people to obtain rewards?

The pitch isn't hard.

I've only been playing a bit over 90 days and quite enjoy it, but up front, the new player experience is, well, not very good. The first chapter serves it's purpose, but the rest of the prologue is sub par and does a poor job of presenting the game IMHO. There's plenty of changes needed to improve it, so Im curious just exactly how much is being changed.

GothicKratos

Because Average Joe doesn't throw five hours a day at a mobile game anyways and probably only cares that he gets to shoot Juggernaut in the face with a Unibeam.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

Because Average Joe doesn't throw five hours a day at a mobile game anyways and probably only cares that he gets to shoot Juggernaut in the face with a Unibeam.

Or now, WEBS!

grunth13

GothicKratos wrote:

Because Average Joe doesn't throw five hours a day at a mobile game anyways and probably only cares that he gets to shoot Juggernaut in the face with a Unibeam.

But the moment average joe figures out that there are about another 60 characters (3* and 4*) he needs to fight by playing long hours, he will quit and never come back. The hard core marvel fanatics are the ones grinding it out for new characters. Iron man, jug, venom etc were ok for about 1 week, but they got tedious very quickly when you see the other characters you can't even touch without putting all your spare time into the game. The game model is all or nothing. The only people who can play casually are the ones that have a good stable of characters, because outside of dpq there is no chance of advancement without spending mass amounts of money or grinding.

GothicKratos

grunth13 wrote:

But the moment average joe figures out that there are about another 60 characters (3* and 4*) he needs to fight by playing long hours, he will quit and never come back. The hard core marvel fanatics are the ones grinding it out for new characters.

Average Joe isn't grinding. He doesn't care about grinding because he's playing a game, no different than Angry Birds or Candy Crush. The people that are grinding are the people with compulsions to do so (completionists, competitive nature, etc). If you think that Average Joe is quitting all the time because it's forcing you into grinding or something like that, you're sorely mistaken, otherwise this game wouldn't exist, uh, two years later? Average Joe is playing a game and casually dropping money into the game to get some tokens or some covers and they feel worth it to Average Joe because he's not progressing fast, because he is playing casually. This creates a steady revenue stream.

The people that that are quitting are the people forcing themselves to pay a game in a manner that they don't enjoy. Yeah, a lot of these players drop large quantities of money at a time, their spending is generally more spastic, usually only when they fall behind in resources, or to get something new and shiny earlier - both of which are not steady streams of income.

You pay your electric bill with steady income, not bursts of cash. If you're running Toys'r'Us, you're paying your bills with the people that come in once a month to get their kid a toy, not the guy that comes in only on Christmas and rops a couple hundred.

grunth13 wrote:

Iron man, jug, venom etc were ok for about 1 week, but they got tedious very quickly when you see the other characters you can't even touch without putting all your spare time into the game. The game model is all or nothing. The only people who can play casually are the ones that have a good stable of characters, because outside of dpq there is no chance of advancement without spending mass amounts of money or grinding.

Are max 2*s a "stable roster" to you? Because that's what I have and I play casually. I have no leveled up 3*s, though, I guess I do have some close to cover maxed at this point.

It's your choice to play how you want to play. If you let the game overwhelm you, you totally can get sucked into that whirlwind feeling, but it's just that. A feeling. I've been there, done that. When I first started playing, I grinded every PvE, and I pushed as hard as I could in PvP, but I slowly got this feeling that, especially at my roster strength, it just wasn't worth the time investment. I started late joining events and hoping for light brackets and I did that for a while, but it just became a chore, so I reevaluated why I was playing the game, and I only play when I want to now.


\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

On another note, honestly, it has always struck me as odd that Spider-Man, Wolverine, and a few others didn't have 1*s from the get to.

If it was me designing this game, I would have started with having variants of the "staple" Marvel characters as 1*s (stuff like Spidey, Logan, Tony, Beast, Thor, Rogers) and a couple of "staple" villains (like Venom, Doc Ock, Sabertooth, The Mandarin, etc.).

That being said, I think they did a good job within the scope of Dark Reign here tbh. Now they have shedded the Dark Reign moniker, so it makes sense they are adding more "poster boy" Marvel characters as 1*s and 2*s.

I understand that a 1* is underwhelming for you guys with a bunch of maxed 3*s and 4*s, but don't rain on other people's parade. It doesn't hurt you at all. I don't think there's ever been a 1* Essential, so you'll never be forced to need it.

Heartburn

GothicKratos wrote:

grunth13 wrote:

But the moment average joe figures out that there are about another 60 characters (3* and 4*) he needs to fight by playing long hours, he will quit and never come back. The hard core marvel fanatics are the ones grinding it out for new characters.

Average Joe isn't grinding. He doesn't care about grinding because he's playing a game, no different than Angry Birds or Candy Crush. The people that are grinding are the people with compulsions to do so (completionists, competitive nature, etc). If you think that Average Joe is quitting all the time because it's forcing you into grinding or something like that, you're sorely mistaken, otherwise this game wouldn't exist, uh, two years later? Average Joe is playing a game and casually dropping money into the game to get some tokens or some covers and they feel worth it to Average Joe because he's not progressing fast, because he is playing casually. This creates a steady revenue stream.

The people that that are quitting are the people forcing themselves to pay a game in a manner that they don't enjoy. Yeah, a lot of these players drop large quantities of money at a time, their spending is generally more spastic, usually only when they fall behind in resources, or to get something new and shiny earlier - both of which are not steady streams of income.

You pay your electric bill with steady income, not bursts of cash. If you're running Toys'r'Us, you're paying your bills with the people that come in once a month to get their kid a toy, not the guy that comes in only on Christmas and rops a couple hundred.

grunth13 wrote:

Iron man, jug, venom etc were ok for about 1 week, but they got tedious very quickly when you see the other characters you can't even touch without putting all your spare time into the game. The game model is all or nothing. The only people who can play casually are the ones that have a good stable of characters, because outside of dpq there is no chance of advancement without spending mass amounts of money or grinding.

Are max 2*s a "stable roster" to you? Because that's what I have and I play casually. I have no leveled up 3*s, though, I guess I do have some close to cover maxed at this point.

It's your choice to play how you want to play. If you let the game overwhelm you, you totally can get sucked into that whirlwind feeling, but it's just that. A feeling. I've been there, done that. When I first started playing, I grinded every PvE, and I pushed as hard as I could in PvP, but I slowly got this feeling that, especially at my roster strength, it just wasn't worth the time investment. I started late joining events and hoping for light brackets and I did that for a while, but it just became a chore, so I reevaluated why I was playing the game, and I only play when I want to now.


\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

On another note, honestly, it has always struck me as odd that Spider-Man, Wolverine, and a few others didn't have 1*s from the get to.

If it was me designing this game, I would have started with having variants of the "staple" Marvel characters as 1*s (stuff like Spidey, Logan, Tony, Beast, Thor, Rogers) and a couple of "staple" villains (like Venom, Doc Ock, Sabertooth, The Mandarin, etc.).

That being said, I think they did a good job within the scope of Dark Reign here tbh. Now they have shedded the Dark Reign moniker, so it makes sense they are adding more "poster boy" Marvel characters as 1*s and 2*s.

I understand that a 1* is underwhelming for you guys with a bunch of maxed 3*s and 4*s, but don't rain on other people's parade. It doesn't hurt you at all. I don't think there's ever been a 1* Essential, so you'll never be forced to need it.

I don't think as many people are staying as you think. With so many issues in dire need of being address the dev team felt that this was a better use of their time then all of the issues mention in the what to fix next poll post. We posted rookie mistakes on the forum multiple Times so they had known what short comings the low level has had for awhile. I think that they had been hemorrhaging players since the recent popularity boosts with ultron and antman and this their attempts to help remedy the situation. Trying to harvest potential revenue form early players is good for the game, but may not help too much with all the glaring issues the game has at the moment. The small size of the team also has a huge impact in were the allocating time is concerned in the last video they pretty much said that they wanted to fix a lot of these issues but no time to do it. It seems like they can't have different teams to work on different aspects of the game, that like a bug team, an event team, UI team, be balancing team etc etc. This game proves day after day that it is going to be around, what is hurting the game is its staleness with always repeating worn out story events, lack of new maps and modes to play, and the devs response time to quality of life issues.

Unknown

I can answer this! I played MPQ on steam for a little over a year but then lost a bit of interest in it. I recently got a new phone and decided to give the game another shot, and I had to start over from the beginning. My experience is probably biased by the fact that I had a fairly developed 3 star roster, so my expectations might be a little different from a brand new player.

I can tell you that the new player experience has been uniquely frustrating thus far.

Storymode isn't calibrated for a smooth, fun leveling experience. Before I got my first character to level 20, I found myself ISO starved and unable to progress any further. I had been going back over a few quests to get the extra rewards, but after 12 straight runs with 20 ISO at the end of each, I'm burnt out. I read a while ago that something like 20% of all players had completed the storymode, and this is probably why. Progress is slow and the rewards are too scarce.

Suggestion: Either give out one reward per attempt, or give out 500 ISO on the first try and scale it back by, say, 50% for each subsequent attempt.

So, since the storymode is slow and frustrating, I would like to move in to PVP. The problem is that I have a bunch of characters around level 15, most with less than 600 hp, and I have to go up against teams with a level 40 or 100 character. Even with my loaner, it's a slow, uphill battle when only 1 out of 3 characters on my team is useful.

Suggestion: Maybe scale those 3 and 4 star characters down so developing 1 star rosters have a shot. Alternatively, ensure that storymode provides fast, consistent leveling speeds up to level 40 so new players can quickly graduate in to the larger game.

All in all, I'm not sure I'm going to stick with this new account. It might be that I've gone through early game once before and I'm a little too anxious to pick up in mid game again, but slow and frustrating are the 2 words I'd use to describe my new player experience thus far.

GothicKratos

Heartburn wrote:

I don't think as many people are staying as you think. With so many issues in dire need of being address the dev team felt that this was a better use of their time then all of the issues mention in the what to fix next poll post. We posted rookie mistakes on the forum multiple Times so they had known what short comings the low level has had for awhile. I think that they had been hemorrhaging players since the recent popularity boosts with ultron and antman and this their attempts to help remedy the situation. Trying to harvest potential revenue form early players is good for the game, but may not help too much with all the glaring issues the game has at the moment. The small size of the team also has a huge impact in were the allocating time is concerned in the last video they pretty much said that they wanted to fix a lot of these issues but no time to do it. It seems like they can't have different teams to work on different aspects of the game, that like a bug team, an event team, UI team, be balancing team etc etc. This game proves day after day that it is going to be around, what is hurting the game is its staleness with always repeating worn out story events, lack of new maps and modes to play, and the devs response time to quality of life issues.

I'm sure their retention rate isn't amazing, it is a mobile game, so I'm sure it's not particularly pretty, but I feel like it's marginally better than "hemorrhaging" when it's holding it's own at #51 currently in the Play Store for Top Grossing after two years. That's extremely impressive for a mobile game. How many other mobiles games, in the literal trillions of mobile games, have made that good of money for two years running (or if you want to be super nit picky and say they're really only done "good" for a year of that, that's fine too - how many)?

Looking at the fifty games under it; Clash of Clans (?), Candy Crush, Brave Frontier, Puzzle & Dragons (?), Family Guy The Quest for Stuff (?), The Simpsons Tapped Out (?) and Minecraft. The ones I marked with question marks I wasn't entirely sure how long they've been running, as to hit the two year mark or not.

GurlBYE

Super interesting topic because people don't understand how important new players are to any games longevity.
they could make every event 30 days of grinding and most vested and paid players will stay just because they invested so much time.

GothicKratos wrote:

Average Joe isn't grinding. He doesn't care about grinding because he's playing a game, no different than Angry Birds or Candy Crush. The people that are grinding are the people with compulsions to do so (completionists, competitive nature, etc). If you think that Average Joe is quitting all the time because it's forcing you into grinding or something like that, you're sorely mistaken, otherwise this game wouldn't exist, uh, two years later? Average Joe is playing a game and casually dropping money into the game to get some tokens or some covers and they feel worth it to Average Joe because he's not progressing fast, because he is playing casually. This creates a steady revenue stream.

The people that that are quitting are the people forcing themselves to pay a game in a manner that they don't enjoy. Yeah, a lot of these players drop large quantities of money at a time, their spending is generally more spastic, usually only when they fall behind in resources, or to get something new and shiny earlier - both of which are not steady streams of income.

.

1-The average joe can't grind.
The nodes don't scale down. Like I haven't seen a node rated above 'normal' since Iron Man was my strongest. Those nodes weren't difficult. they were impossible. Match damage killed me.

2- The people playing want rewards, bells and whistles. some sort of progress. No one is playing this over bejeweled if all they want is a match 3 game, even the gameplay isn't unique (puzzles and dragons?), people specifically want their marvel faves. A new player seeing how rare jean grey is may be sorely disappointed. before this new update spiderman ( a marvel staple) was 1 of 40 possible who all have like a .07 chance of appearing in a heroic pack, that isn't given at all the prologue.

3-Players who are new give time to a game before they invest money. In the start people invested money and time and grew with the game. The games existence has a lot to do with vested players, and the marvel name.

4-I seriously doubt that. I think the people quitting feel like they aren't progressing, or they came for their favorite marvel character only to figure out, wow it'll be a year before I can get the 2 of the fantastic 4. Or whoa that hulkbuster dude is strong but I won't be getting him without playing for a year. In the game world outside of MMOs? thats like 4 years.

5- In game purchases are on target to be 20% of the total revenue of mobile games, and thats including paid mobile games, and mobile games with ads. Whales and sporadic purchasers are entirely keeping the free to play model not only alive but more and more appealing to game developers. The issue is, it's similar to going viral, it's not sustainable.
You can only get so many whales.
http://recode.net/2014/02/26/a-long-tai ... f-players/
And this article cites a report that half of mobile in game purchases are made by, .15 percent of players.
so 99.85 are buying but buying your 200 HP here and there but .15% make up just as many purchases on average (yes the numbers won't be exact to this game but its an industry trend)
You are severely underestimating whales impact on the mobile game industry and the gaming industry at large.

whaling plays on a lot of psychologies.
-addiction
-competition
-value propositions'

I'm a marketing guy so it's all super fascinating to me.
As a gamer I hate it because I'd rather have bought a 20 dollar copy of MPQ from the start and bought 10 dollar add ons twice a year at the minimum, other free to plays, I just don't even touch, because of skewed value principles. (this game also has a TON of them but this post is long enough)

ClydeFrog76

Whales are an odd breed.