dying over and over isn't fun

loroku

This is so typical of MPQ game design. So incredibly typical.

I feel like they designed this event to challenge the top 1%, while the rest of us are left to just be incredibly frustrated. It's really poor design.

The main problem is that it ramps up too quickly. From 1, 3-turn CD that gives 2 AP to 2, 2-turn CD that gives 3 AP in just 3 stages? What does stage 8 look like? It doesn't matter because I'll never see it. The difficulty went: 1 - trivial, 2 - trivial, 3 - deadly, 4 - impossible so quit trying. I'm doing about 4k damage a hit on stage 4, and the damage needed is going up nearly exponentially.

I once again got SO excited for this new event! It looked so cool and everything was going so well and BAM! I forgot I was playing MPQ, and this is how they do it.

uberhamster

Gameplay is much more fun when you're able to try and think your way through difficult situations. In Ultron you had to plan around bombs, and mistakes were painful but not immediately fatal.

Not enjoying the Galactus fight and how much it relies on favorable/unfavorable boards. Bringing lots of board shake is helping, but it's still a lot of coin tossing rather than feeling challenged.

blinktag

Agreed. This isn't fun the same way the 4* DDQs aren't fun.

Everything is down to board composition at game start. There is no time for strategy. If you get a board that has only one or two match voices, you're dead almost immediately.

I sometimes chuckle at the thought of match three being strategic, but when it's all up to random it's not fun.

If I wanted random, I'd play slot machine.

loroku

Off-topic, but re: the server outage, that's 100% on them as well. It was SO OBVIOUS what they could have done to avoid it! SO. OBVIOUS.

Just tell the playerbase that you can play any time in the first 8 hours. Everyone hopped on immediately because in Ultron, faster = better. So they fixed the design but forgot to tell the players, so the same thing happened again. Typical.

Lee T

uberhamster wrote:

Bringing lots of board shake is helping, but it's still a lot of coin tossing

Yep, I brought board shakers this round (3) and not once in six games had I the time to trigger one of their abilities.

gigatilburg29

I'm still collecting 3* characters, I have about a 8 characters around level 120 - 140 including heavy hitters like Cyclops & Magneto (also Kamala Khan at level 130) and with this roster I am only able to clear round 1 and round 2.

With my roster i'm not expecting to finish every round but I do expect to make it somehow past round 4. In 3-4 turn im getting demolished, I read people with roster who have maxed 3* only reach round 5-6.

It's just embarrasing how a company manage to mess this up so bad it's beyond my imagination.

moogles85

Apparently you're doing it wrong because that's what they told us in the October community video!

Miles: I've been playing it. It's a ton of fun. I think we learned a lot when we did Ultron, and as fun as that was, this is even more fun.

gigatilburg29

yeah...My eyes get teary when I read that ))

slidecage

tom cruise didnt think it was fun and neither do i

GuntherBlobel

I'd say that the Galactus event overall is better than Ultron, but I agree with OP that the difficulty ramp-up is too extreme.

Here are some things that the Devs should consider:
1) Most people don't get to play Rounds 1-3, because Galactus has such low health in early rounds. Just a few Alliance members are needed to complete this, so most users don't actually experience the "training" process that gets them ready and willing to take the more difficult Rounds like 4 and 5. Please, wait until Round 3 or 4 to increase the difficulty. This is my single biggest critique.
2) After Ultron, I suggested making the Boss fights increasingly more difficult as a solution to the grind of Ultron's ridiculous health meter. I think this is a good solution, but it looks like they increased the difficulty without making a proportional decrease to Galactus' health. I don't care if Galactus beats me, as long as I can see the impact of my efforts on the health meter. By Round 5, I can't tell that I made a difference, particularly if I die trying. Round 4 Health seemed reasonable.
3) No one understands why 4* characters are so difficult to Roster. Ultron made Scarlet Witch fairly easy to Roster, while HB was nearly impossible. In the end, many people just want to add a character to their collection (and buy a slot). Do players realize that the vast majority of players they are not intended to get a single 4* Cyclops cover (because of his rarity)? I don't think they do...

Here's what I like:
1) Many teams work against Galactus. Aside from maybe OBW, there's no one hero that is as critical as Captain America was vs. Ultron. I like that. It keeps it fresh. I keep trying new solutions.
2) The 8 hr. lock out is a feature (not a bug) that reduces grind and make Score Targets more predictable. I don't understand why anyone is complaining about this.

Overall, Galactus is an improvement over Ultron... but the difficulty increases were not well tested for player experience.

PeterGibbons316

blinktag wrote:

Agreed. This isn't fun the same way the 4* DDQs aren't fun.

Everything is down to board composition at game start. There is no time for strategy. If you get a board that has only one or two match voices, you're dead almost immediately.

I sometimes chuckle at the thought of match three being strategic, but when it's all up to random it's not fun.

If I wanted random, I'd play slot machine.

This is way worse than 4* DDQ. With 4* DDQ you almost always have a chance, and if you get a bad board....you just try again.

With Galactus a bad board is a loss in like 5 turns. And that's it. You get locked out until you win another battle (assuming you have all the essentials), or if you have already tried 6 times you quit for 8 hours.

Has anyone done the math on the progressions? Is it even possible to get the legendary token being locked out every 8 hours? At least in standard PvE events you can play sub-optimally whenever you want. This basically forces you to quit whatever you are doing every 8 hours so you can try again.

gigatilburg29

You gotta be kidding me

1) Allot of people didnt get to play anything because the servers were down.
2) Grinding is impossible beaucse the nodes are getting locked out after you play down, no way I can get the health down to zero
3)I agree with this part, it's almost impossible but right now my focus is 3* characters so it doenst bother me that much but I understand the frustation. As the devs are scared if we get them all we will quit the game.

It's an annivarsary and everyone who played this game should feel like a celebration for the time and money the invested in. The point is as they did the same with the Daily Deadpool 4 start and the whole transition to 4* will be easier has been a great dissapointment including this anniversary.

If 80% of all the players are complaining it means they messed up big time.

emaker27

GuntherBlobel wrote:

Here's what I like:
1) Many teams work against Galactus. Aside from maybe OBW, there's no one hero that is as critical as Captain America was vs. Ultron. I like that. It keeps it fresh. I keep trying new solutions.
2) The 8 hr. lock out is a feature (not a bug) that reduces grind and make Score Targets more predictable. I don't understand why anyone is complaining about this.

Overall, Galactus is an improvement over Ultron... but the difficulty increases were not well tested for player experience.

"Many teams work" and "trying new solutions" appear to contradict each other. There wouldn't be a need to find new solutions if different teams worked. You'd already have your winning teams.

People are complaining about 8 hr lock outs because they actively want to play in this event as much as possible. It feels weird for a game maker to tell its users they can only play 5-6 times every 8 hours.

I understand your points about Galactus being better, but the difficulty should be weighted in that equation. If it's so difficult that it makes users give up, then I don't see how it can be better. Ultron 1 was good, Ultron 2 was bad with the same difficulty problem, and Ultron 3 was great by all accounts (I didn't play that one).

RWTDBurn

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

blinktag wrote:

Agreed. This isn't fun the same way the 4* DDQs aren't fun.

Everything is down to board composition at game start. There is no time for strategy. If you get a board that has only one or two match voices, you're dead almost immediately.

I sometimes chuckle at the thought of match three being strategic, but when it's all up to random it's not fun.

If I wanted random, I'd play slot machine.

This is way worse than 4* DDQ. With 4* DDQ you almost always have a chance, and if you get a bad board....you just try again.

With Galactus a bad board is a loss in like 5 turns. And that's it. You get locked out until you win another battle (assuming you have all the essentials), or if you have already tried 6 times you quit for 8 hours.

Has anyone done the math on the progressions? Is it even possible to get the legendary token being locked out every 8 hours? At least in standard PvE events you can play sub-optimally whenever you want. This basically forces you to quit whatever you are doing every 8 hours so you can try again.

5 turns was doable on a regular basis. Round 6, you get 3 turns to do 22K damage. Even using Charlie's Angels (Professor-X, GSBW, Scarlett Witch) with boosted +2 purple/blue AP and +2 all AP is going to require a lot of luck. Scarlett Witch is now useless as her time takes 4 turns. If you don't have a very friendly board you are screwed. Expect to use 15 health packs and expect to win maybe once, twice if you are extremely lucky. This is game designing at its worst.

Pessi

The last 3 days DDQ gave me 5 health packs in a row. I think it was telling me something.

Best I have done so far in round 4 (I completed round 1 then went to sleep as was locked out, woke up and alliance is now on round 4) was with Juggs, Hood and Iron fist - I got him to 50% and that was purely down to luck getting a green then red cascade.

It was fun in round 1, but missed round two because I'm in the UK, and couldn't want to stay awake until 1am to run another clear

Doubt I'll reach progression, even with 5 essentials. I might as well throw under leveled characters under the bus than waste my hard hitters.

*Edit* spelling. Work browsers, so cheap.

Ram51

GuntherBlobel wrote:

Here's what I like:
1) Many teams work against Galactus. Aside from maybe OBW, there's no one hero that is as critical as Captain America was vs. Ultron. I like that. It keeps it fresh. I keep trying new solutions.

I'm reading this and all I can think is "he hasn't reached Round 6 yet." If you know of a team that can avoid certain turn 3 death on the 3rd or 4th turn without a very lucky board, please do tell. Scarlet Witch's cd tile never gets to proc, that's how fast you can lose in Round 6 without a lucky board in turn 2 or 3.

Vhailorx

GuntherB wrote:

Overall, Galactus is an improvement over Ultron... but the difficulty increases were not well tested for player experience.

I don't think I can agree that this is an overall improvement over ultron. Even ultron 2 offered significant better rewards in exchange for its punishing difficulty. Galaxy is has terrible rewards and a difficulty scale that is (in a match-to-match basis) much higher than ultron 2. As someone else said in this thread, round six affords the player 3 rounds to deal 24k damage. Rounds 7 and 8 will require even more damage at the same speed (or faster). A very small amount of math should have clearly indicated to the devs how big of a challenge this is. They have repeatedly needed winfinite combos, claiming that they make the game less fun. But how else are players supposed to play? The very fastest damage dealing powers in the game take 2 matches, and don't do nearly enough damage to drop Galactus.

loroku

Pessi wrote:

Doubt I'll reach progression, even with 5 essentials.

Yup. No idea how someone can rack up a million points when I am doing ~30k per 8 hr refresh.

simonsez

GuntherBlobel wrote:

1) Many teams work against Galactus.

Yes, they all work equally. They all die on turn 3.

simonsez

GuntherBlobel wrote:

2) The 8 hr. lock out is a feature (not a bug) that reduces grind and make Score Targets more predictable.

Yes, the lockout feature makes it 100% predictable that we will not reach the top progression. Kudos for predictability!

loroku

simonsez wrote:

GuntherBlobel wrote:

2) The 8 hr. lock out is a feature (not a bug) that reduces grind and make Score Targets more predictable.

Yes, the lockout feature makes it 100% predictable that we will not reach the top progression. Kudos for predictability!

Eh, this is actually the only thing I like about this event: it doesn't matter when you play during each 8 hour block, as long as you play during them you'll still contribute the same amount (i.e. nothing, but still). It's the first time they've created an event that doesn't require EXACT timing on when you play, which is very refreshing. It's almost as nice as DDQ's "any time in 24 hours" thing.

The fact that the progression reward is laughably too high shouldn't take away from the one nice thing about the event.