Notes from a year at the grindstone (opinions ahead)

Unknown

Last December I joined We Are Gr00t, and along with other incredible members of our alliance family, we have had a lot of success and a lot of fun. I never said it specifically in our recruiting posts (partially not to jinx it) but since that time we have had an unbroken string of success – a full unbroken year of top tier PVE victories. So I think I have seen a lot about the metagame for PVE that allows me to have some informed observations.

With the end of this PVP season, I’m going to downshift daily play dramatically, so now seems like an appropriate time.

Here is what I have learned are the three goods and three bads about the game.

The Good:
Nailed It: I’ve played all the match three rpg type games, from puzzle quest to puzzles and dragons to you must build a boat and all the variations in between. The integration of a simple mechanic with complicated “mana” accumulation into magic the gathering style strategy is awesome. The best.
Exposure to Marvel: I’ve never been a big comic book person, so this has been a great exposure to the content, and I have enjoyed it all
Community: on forums and in Line, there are smart funny people everywhere, and it has been a great experience.

The Bad:
Unjustifiable Time Requirements: The $64,000 problem. To play PVE requires up to an hour a day every eight hours – precisely – with 3 hours of grind. That is SIX hours a day, EVERY DAY. Can some do it faster? Yes. Is that my point? No. Why does game design require nodes to be ground to dust at specific times? This game mechanic is by design and it’s unjustifiable on its impact on consumers. Have an airplane flight and no wifi? Too bad you, lose. Have a work meeting? Too bad. Have a date? Sorry. Have a test tomorrow, too bad. Miss any flip over the event period – up to seven(!?) days and you have lost. Ultron/Galactus was supposed to be a changeup and it ended up being WORSE – unplannable flips of events, so be on all the time or let down 19 other people.

The only parallel I can give is world of Warcraft raiding – which I did for 4 hours a day 4 days a week for over a year with a server first raiding alliance, until I embraced what a colossal waste of time that was. This is a PHONE GAME I just accurately compared to the grand daddy of massively multi player online games. And by compared I am calling WORSE, and having done both at a high level, I think I can say categorically that MPQ is a worse timesuck than WoW. Chew on that nugget for a while.

Dev’s, if you are reading, please look in the mirror and ask “Is this working as designed?” “Do we intend to have people stare into their phone for a THIRD of their waking day as a matter of game design?” because that is what you have made. It burns people out or it turns them in to phone zombies, and the power to over the game mechanics is in your hand.

Limited Gameplay: The match three game mechanics are great, but where is the rest of the game? Why not have a cityscape, with labs, docks, sewers and portals? Crafting? Mining for boosts? Character development? Gear? I hear some of it is coming, but where is it? A missed opportunity to enrich the game.

Lack of content: They took the dark reign off the name of the game, but half of the nodes have the same five employees for dark avengers. Daken; moonstone; ares; juggs; rags. Can we have some other villains please? Must we fight the same mechanics forever? (I will give props for the GR event though, that was the first new content in a while)

TLDR: If you know me, I'm letting you know I’m downshifting because the game mechanics require more time than is justifiable.

Thanks: Madeofglaz, tintguy, nooneelse, alykonesus, bobby, all my gr00t commanders and teammates and extended mercy family, symmetrey, davyx, j1p, scar, eyenerd, anyone else I forgot because there are so many cool people.

fmftint

Devs, as one of the players who defined the pve meta, you should listen to what he has to say


Mods, please dont move this, this isn't a run of the mill quitting or suggestion post

cactusrob

I'd love to see some crafting, even if it's basic. AP left after a match? When you collect 1000 of a certain colour it turns to 100 ISO or a basic token. So many simple things that could really enrich the game, and maybe add a bit more variety.

Cartz

I would like to see different challenges. Like you can only use a 1, 2, 3 or 4* team. A time limit challenge. A gauntlet that you only can select 3 team members and have to last as many rounds as possible against enemies gettong stronger. With rewards based on how far you can get. Other challenges involving only using xmen or avengers. I dont mean when an event boosts certain characters. No boosts or heroics that involve insane grinding. Once of challenges or a series of nodes that get you to the reward.

Just something to change up the game and also encourage people to experiment with combinations.

Jonny1Punch

I had to dust off my old forum account I never thought I'd use again when I saw this. My eyes popped to see one of the true ambassadors in the PVE game and community hang up his gloves. First off, Kedran and I have shared many great highs and lows in the high-end PVE game and he is someone who could always make a home for me or anyone when needed. Even if that meant giving up his own spot or putting in extra hours doing the numbers game. A totally selfless leader and someone I admire greatly.

Secondly, truer words have never been spoken. I agree with the good and bad he posted 100%. Not gonna regurgitate all the things I love / hate about the current state of MPQ or whine about legendary tokens.

But I will say this: Please read his words carefully and heed these warnings from when we lose great players. Morale and burnout are very real things even in a match-3 game. The devs need to acknowledge this and the community needs to be aware as well. We want the game to thrive and continue to evolve and grow WITH US, not against us. No one wants to see MPQ flatline due to lack of innovation and laziness. Here's hoping good changes are in store for the MPQ community next month and best of luck to Kedran in his scaling back.

Thank you for posting your exit interview here for us all to read Kedran. I feel many of the greats walk away without ever saying a word..... Such a shame

jredd

I had to quit playing pve a few weeks ago too. yeah i was doing well, top 25-50 most pve events, but the 5-6 hours a day time commitment was getting ridiculous to the point where my kids noticed that dad was 'busy' playing on his phone all the time (this game is addictive!). that was kind of a red flag.

going to miss the regular legendary token score, but life needs to come first.

TxMoose

thanks op - I never entered the pve meta, and only recently started really grinding nodes to 1. but I have to highlight this point:

Kedran wrote:

Unjustifiable Time Requirements: The $64,000 problem. To play PVE requires up to an hour a day every eight hours – precisely – with 3 hours of grind. That is SIX hours a day, EVERY DAY. Can some do it faster? Yes. Is that my point? No. Why does game design require nodes to be ground to dust at specific times? This game mechanic is by design and it’s unjustifiable on its impact on consumers. Have an airplane flight and no wifi? Too bad you, lose. Have a work meeting? Too bad. Have a date? Sorry. Have a test tomorrow, too bad. Miss any flip over the event period – up to seven(!?) days and you have lost. Ultron/Galactus was supposed to be a changeup and it ended up being WORSE – unplannable flips of events, so be on all the time or let down 19 other people.

The only parallel I can give is world of Warcraft raiding – which I did for 4 hours a day 4 days a week for over a year with a server first raiding alliance, until I embraced what a colossal waste of time that was. This is a PHONE GAME I just accurately compared to the grand daddy of massively multi player online games. And by compared I am calling WORSE, and having done both at a high level, I think I can say categorically that MPQ is a worse timesuck than WoW. Chew on that nugget for a while.

Dev’s, if you are reading, please look in the mirror and ask “Is this working as designed?” “Do we intend to have people stare into their phone for a THIRD of their waking day as a matter of game design?” because that is what you have made. It burns people out or it turns them in to phone zombies, and the power to over the game mechanics is in your hand.

prior to LTs I had stopped playing pve for a while and the game had really become fun and pretty manageable. when LTs were intro'ed I hopped right back into pve for them since I was early in my 4* transition. now that I'm over halfway through, I've already stopped playing 7-day event and am considering dropping it altogether, save a 3-day here or there and release events. to me, high end competitive pve is not sustainable as a player (and not very fun imo) and those that do sustain it have my admiration, but I think its pretty unreasonable to expect that kind of time commitment to ONE PART of a phone game. not to mention pvp, ddq, LRs, etc.

GrimSkald

A very well thought out and reasoned post. I added my +1, but it's worth saying.

For what it's worth, I do think that PVE is not functioning as it was initially designed to do, but there's enough inertia behind it that it's difficult to change. Remember the "first time completion bonus?" Remember the faster turnaround time on nodes? Remember 12 hour subs (ugh!) I do think they intended grinding to be something more of an outlier, but the game developed as it did. Hopefully they'll do more changing in the future, but there may be too much invested in the status quo.

Speaking for myself, I never work harder than enough to get me top 50 in anything PVE. Way too much work for too little reward.

Sm0keyJ0e

GrimSkald wrote:

Speaking for myself, I never work harder than enough to get me top 50 in anything PVE. Way too much work for too little reward.

This, except top 100 for me. Sorry, I have a family and a full-time job and I'm not going to waste my valuable time chasing tokens that usually turn out to be 2* Hawkeye. I realize this statement probably puts me outside of their target audience and hence the devs don't care, but that's a flaw in and of itself as I'm someone with an affinity for the Marvel universe and disposable income.

Edith09

I´m on day 339 and I strongly agree that PVE needs some changes, something new and fresh to make people enjoy it. And TBH time needed to play (if I want to be competetive in PVE) is too much, it might something that will make me quit.

GrumpySmurf1002

I'll be honest, I'm surprised there isn't at least one of these a day from top 10 PvE alliances.

That you lasted a year is both highly commendable and completely insane.

And also, I'd probably quit if crafting becomes a big part of the meta. Crafting stinks. The game definitely needs something else to do, however.

GrimSkald

Sm0keyJ0e wrote:

GrimSkald wrote:

Speaking for myself, I never work harder than enough to get me top 50 in anything PVE. Way too much work for too little reward.

This, except top 100 for me. Sorry, I have a family and a full-time job and I'm not going to waste my valuable time chasing tokens that usually turn out to be 2* Hawkeye. I realize this statement probably puts me outside of their target audience and hence the devs don't care, but that's a flaw in and of itself as I'm someone with an affinity for the Marvel universe and disposable income.

That's fair. If I time things okay and do some grinding, I can get top 50 on a sub so that gets me an extra 50 hero points. This in turn frequently gets top 50 in the event (and some more extra hero points.) But yeah, top 10 is an order of magnitude harder.

DaveR4470

DDQ has negated any interest I have in PvP placement rewards entirely. I've got all my 3*s (well, the ones I actually care about) covered the way I want them. (Actually, I only need 2 more covers -- Rags and Spidey -- to have all the 3*s fully covered.) The only reason to PvP is for the points. Give me 1000 points somehow, and I don't care where I place. I'm not going to be #1, and below that the reward is mostly irrelevant. (I'll shield to hold on to top 50, as the 1 or 2 legendary points is nice, but I don't worry about that much, as it only comes up maybe once or twice a season.)

I don't have the time/money/inclination to consistently get to 1000/1300 in every PvP event, so hitting that LT seasonal progression target isn't really an option for me, either. Get to 700/800 points and it's a nonstop parade of Jean Fistbusters. I can beat those, with a little luck, but at the cost of 3 health packs every match, as I don't have a Jean Fistbuster or Xavier's Angels to throw against them. So that's a solid 10 minutes of playtime....

And PvE is too time consuming.

I guess the tl;dr is "I have a fully covered and complete 3* roster (more or less), with 19 of them maxed out, and still everything I could possibly do seems somewhat pointless to me." Frankly, I'm not sure why I'm still playing.

Philly79

I am almost at my 1 year mark and I joined gr00tlings a month or so after playing, being recruited by Kedran no less. He was/is one of my main go-to-guys for advice especially when I was just starting out. I agree with Kedran so much so that I was thinking of going semi casual during the last pve. I have pumped $ into this game, I have won a ton of stuff and won many battles with cs to get items that were deserved but I feel the same as many others, at this point this game has become a colossal time suck. I will play daily for my rewards and go for legend tokens but aside from new releases I think I am about done...new releases may not even bring me back though....And a huge thanks to Kedran for making We Are Groot what it is today, you did great things man....

GrimSkald

aesthetocyst wrote:

The truly shocking thing is that is used to be WORSE. So much worse. 2yrs ago, according to my fuzzy memory, PvE was literally a nonstop grindfest. Winning meant playing nonstop for 3 days and whoever wiped the least "won".

Yeah, the reset time on the points is now 8 hours. It used to be 2.5. So yeah, the people who won PVE were the ones who, I tinykitty you not, set an alarm for every 2.5 hours and did a full clear. Then they ground for the last 2-3 hours.

I suspect the developers expected us to hit the nodes once or twice each sub, and the points to be based on that. If everyone did that, the placement awards would work out the same. Of course, we're not going to do that.

TxMoose

i'll never forget the first time I played florida on 2.5 hr refresh. that was so f'ed up - you had to basically constantly play nearly nonstop. and the event with 2 subs open simultaneously (simulator and one other) - ugh. glad its in the past.

Sm0keyJ0e

OJSP wrote:

Also:

GrimSkald wrote:

Sm0keyJ0e wrote:

This, except top 100 for me.

...But yeah, top 10 is an order of magnitude harder.

I think you might've misread the post you're quoting?

Haha, I saw this as well. I meant to intimate that IN NO WAY would I ever bother going for t10 again! I'm satisfied with spending a few hours over the course of 3-4 days getting t100.

Crowl

If pve is always going to be placement-based for the main rewards then they seriously need to make it more flexible so people can fit it in around their real life and not the other way round.

Have the first four clears of a node should give fixed points and rewards, all subsequent ones should only give 20 iso and no points prior to the last hour or two which would be plenty of time to act as a tiebreaker for places.