Regarding Power Upgrade Purchasing Changes

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Hi everyone,

Some members of the community have asked us to provide a little more info on the reasoning behind the new change in Power Upgrade purchasing (Command Points are now used in place of Hero Points). With that in mind, here’s word from Demiurge on the change:

“With the Champions update, it should be increasingly clear to players that we've prioritized the long term health of Marvel Puzzle Quest by giving players more to strive for, and longer term goals. We've learned a lot about what we sell in game since MPQ launched more than two years ago, and the Power Upgrade system hasn't changed in that time. We've come to prefer selling things that help you earn rewards, or create new gameplay, rather than things that let you get the reward directly, skipping over gameplay. It can be fuzzy which is which, and it's much easier to sell rewards directly, so there will always be a mix of both types of things for sale. But the more we can offer of the first type, the more satisfying the game is for people and the longer you all stick around. Also, a greater percentage of Command Points come from gameplay than is the case for Hero Points. Instead of something that most players would buy directly with real money,

earning a Power Upgrade now shifts to a long-term gameplay goal for all players.

So there's 2 things driving this decision:

• We want to extend the life of Marvel Puzzle Quest by letting players earn rewards rather than buying them directly.
• Switching to Command Points means more players have interesting decisions they can make.”

Thanks as always for your valuable feedback! We will continue to monitor how the change is being received as we move forward. We’ve got an exciting 2016 planned with lots of cool new updates and features on the way that we hope you will enjoy.

Dauthi

"David wrote:

Moore"]
We've learned a lot about what we sell in game since MPQ launched more than two years ago, and the Power Upgrade system hasn't changed in that time. We've come to prefer selling things that help you earn rewards, or create new gameplay, rather than things that let you get the reward directly, skipping over gameplay.

Thanks for the reasoning, and I agree with it. I am curious how the team feels about 5*s if this is the case. A player can easily skip the 1,2,3 or even 4* gameplay if they are lucky, the lower tiers needing less luck to do so, because they are absurdly strong.

morph3us

Thank you for communicating this to us. Obviously changes like this have consequences, and it helps for us to know your design intents when changes like this are made. Looking forwards to more communications like this prior to future changes to the game!

Ducky

I know you can't answer this David, as you aren't a dev, but how exactly is this beneficial to the long term health of the game? Newer players are now never going to be able to catch up to entrenched vets because they cannot whale covers anymore. This makes the divide between the respective tiers of game play permanent and will likely cause it to grow even more.

And just a note, I have never bought a cover for a character before, so the change doesn't really effect me personally.

evil panda

Thank you David. I was one of the people who repeatedly asked for such an explanation, so I really feel like my voice has been heard.

i appreciate reading about your reasoning. Truth be told, I wish you'd kept more direct buying options and my purchasing would have stayed at higher levels if the option to buy covers had stayed. Not so much because I want a P2W option or a shortcut (although that's part of it) - but because so much randomness of rewards inevitably gets frustrating, and my perceived return on investment (in terms of money and time) is very inconsistent.

But regardless of how I feel about your explanation I appreciate being able to read it and the insight into the thought process. Thank you.

Pylgrim

Thanks, sounds good, but... how come that now 4*s cost 6 times more than 3*s in CP, when they used to cost only twice as much in HP? I'm pretty sure that i4* transitioners are not getting comparatively 3 times as much CP as they used to get HP.

TLCstormz

Thanks for the communication, as I know that many many many people were DYING for it.

djvkool

DuckyV wrote:

I know you can't answer this David, as you aren't a dev, but how exactly is this beneficial to the long term health of the game? Newer players are now never going to be able to catch up to entrenched vets because they cannot whale covers anymore. This makes the divide between the respective tiers of game play permanent and will likely cause it to grow even more.

And just a note, I have never bought a cover for a character before, so the change doesn't really effect me personally.

If I am not mistaken, new players should be able to get covers quicker due to the change in the reward system on PVE's now, back in the days, you need to be in top 20 to get two 3* covers, and top 100 to get one 3*.

With the new reward system, top 50 gets you all three 3* covers and top 200 will get you one (and on the PVE with no new character rewards, new players should be able to get top 50 easily)

Not to mention DDQ, and increased odds to get 3* or better covers - so new players should be able to cover uo a lot quicker than we did within the first year of MPQ

Raffoon

You know... They used to post stuff like this multiple times per week. Not once every few months.

Thanks for taking a step in the right direction, though.

simonsez

"David wrote:

Moore"]a greater percentage of Command Points come from gameplay than is the case for Hero Points. Instead of something that most players would buy directly with real money, earning a Power Upgrade now shifts to a long-term gameplay goal for all players.

• We want to extend the life of Marvel Puzzle Quest by letting players earn rewards rather than buying them directly.

There's one aspect of this explanation that rings false: the price point you set for 4* covers. As discussed in another thread elsewhere, it takes 3x longer to earn 120 CP in PvE than it did to earn 2500HP. Also, HP is readily available in PvP, while CP isn't.

I'm fine with tying upgrades to gameplay, but for those who were ALREADY DOING THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE, you've unacceptably slowed progression. It was a slow crawl to begin with. Now it's a crawl with four broken limbs.

If you guys are SINCERE that this is only about tying rewards to gameplay, and you really aren't trying to slow down progression, you need to set the 4* price FAR LOWER than it is now. Just do the math. Add up what a T10 PvE player earns in HP vs. CP, and set the price point accordingly.

slidecage

djvkool wrote:

DuckyV wrote:

I know you can't answer this David, as you aren't a dev, but how exactly is this beneficial to the long term health of the game? Newer players are now never going to be able to catch up to entrenched vets because they cannot whale covers anymore. This makes the divide between the respective tiers of game play permanent and will likely cause it to grow even more.

And just a note, I have never bought a cover for a character before, so the change doesn't really effect me personally.

If I am not mistaken, new players should be able to get covers quicker due to the change in the reward system on PVE's now, back in the days, you need to be in top 20 to get two 3* covers, and top 100 to get one 3*.

With the new reward system, top 50 gets you all three 3* covers and top 200 will get you one (and on the PVE with no new character rewards, new players should be able to get top 50 easily)

Not to mention DDQ, and increased odds to get 3* or better covers - so new players should be able to cover uo a lot quicker than we did within the first year of MPQ

you got to remember people who had 3 stars at 166 either did not play or play little of the 3 star events since they had all of the covers meaning it was eaiser to get higher rewards cause less people playing. Now these people will be fighting for these covers so they can gain ranks for the champions.

now in a few months when the have the champions max i could see gameplay fall off....but short term i think we are going to see 3 star events just as nuts as 4 star

ALSO can you give us any insight


We’ve got an exciting 2016 planned with lots of cool new updates and features on the way that we hope you will enjoy.



With new updates can you give us a idea when are we taking more stuff coming in feb or are you looking farer out like spring or summer before anything else new is added


i would love to see an added SEASON PVE maybe like a gaunlet but with points (meaning you do not have to clear the nod to advance the prizes) and maybe increase ISO at least 3x

Malcrof

We appreciate the transparency, my big question is this: Will there be a change in the packages that can be purchased? With HP being used mainly for shields, tokens, and whatnot.. will CP packages or larger combo packages be available?

Eddiemon

Malcrof wrote:

We appreciate the transparency, my big question is this: Will there be a change in the packages that can be purchased? With HP being used mainly for shields, tokens, and whatnot.. will CP packages or larger combo packages be available?

I would have thought that phrases such as
" We want to extend the life of Marvel Puzzle Quest by letting players earn rewards rather than buying them directly."
would answer the question about whether they would be selling CP packages.

wymtime

Thanks for some translation. A question I have is will HP be used for something other than roster slots and shields going forward? As someone who has all 3* max covered a 10 pack of covers feels like an expensive waste of resources in the game. Even with the champion feature if I got 10 different 3* that would not be extremly useful compared to the cost of the 10 pack. the resources in the game should feel more useful than HP does now without being able to direct purchase a character.

Raffoon

With this change, our HP isn't worthless, but it's certainly worth less. A lot less.

Are the any plans for HP to be used for anything else?

Stax the Foyer

I do appreciate the feedback. However, I feel that this change was deeply misguided (at minimum) or disingenuous.

The idea that it should be harder to directly purchase upgrades, without corresponding gameplay effort, is a fine one. However, the choice isn't simply between (a) letting people buy covers and (b) distributing the top two tiers of covers on what is essentially a purely random basis. Unless there are significant changes to CP distribution and rewards, you've further hobbled people who want to make steady progress through gameplay (a process that started with the change to the 1300 PvP reward).

How do you expect a player starting the 4* transition to progress, and how much variance between player experiences do you feel is appropriate? Because with this change, the 4* progression has become glacially slow, and it's nearly impossible for a player to offset bad token luck by working hard enough to earn an occasional cover purchase. Do you expect people to struggle through that, while they see people with robust 4* covers who got them before the rope was pulled up behind them?

This doesn't give people more to strive for, it gives people less to strive for, because the only way to progress into and beyond the morass of a 25-character-and-growing 4* tier distributed almost entirely at random is to hop clean over that mess by getting lucky and pulling 5* covers.

This change makes 5*s the only real way to progress in the game, and I don't think that was an accident.

jigawatt

As an actual new player (new as in less than 6 months, way less) this move is terrible. As others have said, if we're coming in with a roster full 1 star and some 2 stars, how long are we supposed to play to get up to a mature 3 star, or 4 star roster? There's a difference between 'longevity' and 'endless grind', and with this they're basically assuming most of their players would LOVE to be locked in to this game for a year or 3 straight. Um, no.

I mean, if they don't want people cover whaling and then quitting, then at LEAST drastically increase the drop rate per 3, 4, and 5* covers so we're actually getting rewarded, instead of just stuck in limbo. The 2* rate is pretty annoying as well, I'm not sure how they think waiting a month for your favorite cover to drop is exciting, but it's not. I guess **** new players, they'll just cater to the 2 and three year whales they have.

Chrono_Tata

While I actually agree with the reasoning stated here, that it is more fun to use HP to buy things that help you to win stuff, rather than buying the prizes directly, the problem is that the change doesn't go both ways, i.e. it's harder now to buy specific covers buy you haven't made it any easier to win specific covers.

Given the huge amount of 3-stars and 4- characters, the transition is extremely slow as you could wait for weeks or months until the covers you need cycle around to be winnable. There really needs to be better methods to win the covers or at least the characters you need without having to wait for the cycle. Particularly annoying is when you happen to not be able to play for a couple of days and miss the rewards you needed.

puppychow

djvkool wrote:

If I am not mistaken, new players should be able to get covers quicker due to the change in the reward system on PVE's now, back in the days, you need to be in top 20 to get two 3* covers, and top 100 to get one 3*.

With the new reward system, top 50 gets you all three 3* covers and top 200 will get you one (and on the PVE with no new character rewards, new players should be able to get top 50 easily)

Agreed. 2/3* covers will continue to become available via pve progression, and even casual players have a shot at those.

As far as extending the life of MPQ is concerned, I think the champion feature is more of a factor than conversion from hp to cp for direct buys. With champions, players can continue to develop their rosters and use the extra covers for something other than iso.

Yes, it is obvious that Demiurge is concerned with making the game interesting to veterans because many of them have quit over the LT exploit last month. So I view these moves as intended to keep the player base, rather than grow it per se. Nonetheless, I think the changes made in the game the past few weeks have been quite positive, and I'm confident quitters will return to the game as positive word of mouth reaches their ears via social media.

batmanone

I must say, the power upgrade change was a rather unpleasant surprise for me today. As a relatively casual player, and an occasional purchaser of HP, I typically scrounge and save it until I think I can use it to get an advantage somehow; lately, I've mainly been saving it and spending it to boost up a few levels here and there on 4* characters who are in the matchup for the legendary DPQ if I think more covers can help me win. Most of my 4* cards have 1-8 covers, under level 100, with only three 4* cards with more than 10 covers. If I had had more warning about the change I would have spent the HP I had saved maxing out covers on my best 4* characters, rather than trying to save for future matchups. But now I will be stuck with several 4* characters at 10-12 covers for a very long time (unless I get lucky with pulls), which particularly hurts especially since a) the champion update highly encourages maxed covered characters, and b) I didn't know that I should be saving CP, so I have virtually zero right now. Certainly no where close to the 360 I need to max out my two best 4*.

whitecat31

I don't really have too much of a problem with this, although it does devalue the Hero points I currently have. I just think the cost in CP is too high for the 4 stars (120 ) and 5 stars (720 ) for that special cover. This is based on how many legendary tokens they could buy. I would like to see something along the lines of half that amount.
In the past to buy a 4 star cover it would cost 2500 HP . Let's say somebody was economical and bought the Stark salary. That is 20,000 Hero Points for 100 dollars.
So somebody was spending 12 dollars and 50 cents to upgrade the 4 star cover. Now they have to spend a lot more. On another note, based on the 6 to 1 ratio for command points I think it pegs the assumed value of a 5 star cover at about 75 dollars. (pre change)

Perhaps you guys could have command point discount events where you can buy covers for cheap.