Some detailed feedback

Irgy

Some detailed feedback on my MtG Puzzle Quest experience.

I'm giving this feedback because I care, the game has a lot of potential but also feels extremely half-baked in a lot of aspects. I realise these days that's the approach, you release the first thing that technically works then gradually improve it, so that's fine I'm just trying to help steer it in a good direction. I'm trying to be constructive but there are a lot of negatives here, since the positives don't need fixing!

Just in terms of my own experience, I'm far from an expert. But I am at the level of experience where one is at the threshold between taking the game more seriously and just moving on to something else. Which I think is the best stage to give feedback from really.


Game Info
Where is it? The tutorial is excellent, and all the things I could figure out for myself are well documented. But go beyond the "play it a few times then throw it away" level of interest and there's nothing. People on these forums seem to know stuff but it's still hard to find information here. Some real examples to clarify:
* I have a friend who'd never used the healing potions because he didn't know if they would ever replenish.
* I honestly thought the "starter pack" cost 200 yellow gems to give 1500 crystals because of the layout (think price on the left, benefit on the right, the illusion helped by the "+ 1500" part being raised)
* I still have no idea what the "menace" ability does despite searching for it on the internet - all I found was a reddit thread of people saying they didn't know either!
* I had to figure out the hand limit the hard way and it sure does burn you
* I had to figure out activate for myself. It's kind of clear when the gems get circles on them but for instance I had no idea whether both players could get the benefit of them or not.
* PVP in any other game means there's a real, live person playing on the other end. In all seriousness, I honestly spent the first 2 or 3 games thinking there was someone at the other end, and feeling bad about my slow play and obnoxious deck (Jace). This one is almost deliberately misleading. "Warning real opponents ahead"? Really?
* And I can only guess what else I might just not know that I don't know about.
Note that I've played both the original puzzle quest games (admittedly only in a single player setting) and MtG, so I should have the right assumptions about how things work, but there's still been a lot to figure out.


Interface
The interface is really unresponsive. I'm on a fairly old device, but I can play games with a lot more going on than this one and their response is crisp and accurate. This has laggy and inconsistent responsiveness to everything you do, leading to misclicks everywhere. Sometimes it bugs out completely - I got stuck in the tutorial because I literally could not open my hand, I had to restart to fix it. I also often get stuck trying to scroll the planeswalkers around, where I can't move out of the detailed information screen out of the way to select a different one. On the whole, it feels as if you (badly) rewrote the finger and gesture detection yourselves rather than using the supplied libraries or something, because you really must have (inadvertantly) gone out of your way to be able to make it this much less responsive than every other app I have.

Separate to but exacerbated by the unresponsiveness, the interface is also very poorly designed. Here's some specific issues in that regard, roughly from most to least important:
* Having to scroll the cards in hand up and down. There's a hard limit of 6 cards in hand. The screen is vertical. The detailed card info is not visible on the cards without clicking then. The interface to view your hand covers up everything else on the screen. Yet somehow despite all these helpful factors you can't fit a measly 6 cards on the screen at the same time? 6 is not a big number. Add the fact that scrolling the hand is a very similar action to moving a card and the end result is that hand management is really really painful when it could easily have been quite simple.

* Deck management is soooo painful. Please let me just add and remove cards with one touch and check the deck size when I'm done. Of course this wouldn't matter as much if the interface wasn't so slow and unresponsive.

* It takes forever just to open a pack of cards and see what you got, which is especially painful when it's all stuff you have already.

* Selecting Play->Quick Battle does nothing if you're in story mode already, and vice versa. I know it's not something anyone should want to do since you can click the bars at the top, but it's still confusing behaviour when you do it.

* Every time I win a PVP battle, when I come out it says my rank is "0" (this is just a minor bug not a big issue).


General Game Experience
"PVP" currently is just the Nissa PVE mission. I have literally never played any other planeswalker and literally never lost. The reward is even the same as just re-playing a PVE level. I'm only level 28, and only played about 10 matches, you can say I haven't played a lot but I've certainly played enough to reach the critical point where I lose my motivation to play more if bad-AI-Nissa is all I'm going to get. I get that there's a lot of challenges in doing real PVP and I can accept that the game may never have it, but here's some ideas to improve the current PVE-with-"real"-decks system:
* Play harder opponent decks each time we win. Just higher level decks would be better than nothing, but what I really mean is giving the defensive decks some sort of ELO-style rating based on their win record against players with their own rating.
* Let us choose to actually build a defensive deck. I'd put different cards in a deck the AI was going to play on my behalf. If not building one then at least choose which one gets added to matchmaking.
* Make the ranking side based on a win/loss record rather than just who could be bothered winning the same battel over and over again the most times. Of course this might not work so well with the fact that no-one ever loses a "PVP" game currently.
* Make people start with different planeswalkers, either random or give them a choice. I realise Nissa is meant to be the "easiest" or something, but honestly they're not really all that different.

The AI is bad. Now I know a good AI for these sorts of games is hard, but this AI is bad in ways that aren't even hard. For instance it never makes a five-gem 'L' shaped match, instead opting to matching it as a four in a row. It also makes idiotic plays like using mass-removal spells when I have no creatures in play, killing its own, or spending resources to boost creatures that are disabled by Claustrophobia. I have the impression some of these things might be deliberately playing badly early on and get better in later single player missions, but the PVP AI should at least be as good as the AI can get since a real human would still be much better. Believe me the PVP mode does not need to be any easier!

The healing and timer mechanics are completely pointless. I've never had to stop playing as a result of the timer, and if I ever even did it would just be an annoyance. This really feels like someone in management said "Ok guys, games have timer mechanics these days, we need a timer mechanic", while the designers/developers/playtesters meanwhile conclude that it's just an annoyance with absolutely no benefit. So they add in so many ways to avoid it that it means nothing, but leave it in there so as not to upset management. As far as I can tell even if you ran out of health, the timer/healing system still wouldn't even motivate payment like it's designed to in other games, since you can't pay your way out of it anyway (maybe I'm missing something but like I said I've never run out to find out). The only impact it seems to have on the game is very occasionally screwing people over who simply forget to heal before a battle (not me I've just read about it). Please either give this a useful purpose or just get rid of it completely.

The tied-to-the-month aspect of daily rewards... yes you're aware of this already. I didn't even get burned myself since I co-incidentally first started regularly collecting them on literally Jan 1. But I just mention it to point out, don't just think of this as something that went wrong because the game was released mid-month in many places. It's something which is going to burn about 25 out of every 30 people who start playing the game in the future, within a few weeks of them starting. Seriously consider whether the benefits of "monthly specials" is worth this cost (plus you can have both, it's just more complicated). It also doubles the annoyance of missing one since you not just lose your progress but also have to wait the rest of the month to properly restart.

The 6 character minimum for names, and undocumented inability to use non-alphabetical characters is a minor thing but still needless and annoying. Also it's nice that there's a warning but why can't we change our names anyway? It's already tied to facebook (which is another annoyance), it's not like there's a problem with tracing our identity.


Game Mechanics
The way the hand limit works is terrible, and clearly the lazy rather than well considered option. My best suggestion would be change it to allow you to optionally replace a card in your hand (similar to if you cast a 4th creature). Some poor side effects of the hand limit as it stands:
* Players hands can fill up with junk and they can't draw replacements. In one of the PVE games both mine and the opponent's hands filled with cards which we literally couldn't even cast due to the lack of creatures in play, at which point the game was completely and unresolvably stuck. Imagine if there was real PVP, and both players are left waiting for the other to give up and disconnect first. Ridiculous.
* Jace's "ingenuity" ability is unusable since there's never space in your hand. But worse than that, it lets you use the ability, waste the loyalty points, and just leaves you wondering where on earth your card is with no explanation.
* Disperse is over-powered against a full hand since it becomes an instant kill for just 4 mana.
* In a lot of situations, card draw is worthless at best and a drawback at worst, which is if nothing else unintuitive.
Of course against Liliana this might all change but it's the experience for the majority of games.

The reward for matching 4 in a row is kind of pointless. You don't appear to gain the benefit of the other gems in the row, and destroying the whole row actually makes it harder to get a planned chain reaction. I often find myself deliberately matching a potential 4 as a 3 instead and while that feels clever sometimes it's unsatisfying.

For future card design, more interaction between the creatures and the gem board would be good. I can see a lot of ideas for this already and that's great but in practice it feels like none of them have a great deal of actual impact. The interaction in practice is still almost entirely one way: board->hand->creatures->life. Part of it is that most board modifying effects are quite bad. There's already a high standard they need to reach since anything that doesn't affect the creature field leaves you falling behind as a result. The fact that they're then random, and sometimes even change the board for the opponent's turn (which is better for them even if it's your colours since they get first shot at any new chain reactions), mean they're often barely even useful, let alone worth the cost of falling behind for. Supports are a good interaction, but rarely very deep as they're usually either impossible to destroy or impossible to protect. An example of the sort of card that would be powerful enough to play might be "Change all gems of colour X to colour Y", since with that you could arrange to get a 5-match out of it and thus value. Or cards that let you change specific gems

There's too many "attackers" in the game. Flying is almost worthless, because the only things you're flying over are other "attackers". The creatures for the most part simply don't interact. And the ones that do die pretty much immediately as a result, skewing things even further. If you want the game to be a battle of creatures fighting each other, "defender" and the like should be the default, not a niche ability. "Attacker" should be the thing that's keyworded and unusual. That way creatures will fight each other and thereby interact rather than just the constant life-total race we have currently. I actually think it's a good thing that the game is pulled towards a conclusion by un-interacting creatures, but it just makes concepts like "flying" and "unblockable" into a bit of a joke.

Claustrophobia has some wierd interactions. Overall the card is far too good, offset by a couple of obscure and unintuitive interactions against it.
* The many supports that buff the first creature in play are wrecked by it making it too good
* The three creature limit also increases the card's power
* When Willbender steals the creature, it's still disabled and doesn't attack. This is possibly good from a balance perspective but looks a lot more like a bug.
* When the opponent plays a defender the creature order changes and you can get unexpectedly attacked. Again this is possibly good from a balance perspective, but it's highly unintuitive.

Activate tiles look exactly like trap tiles as far as I can tell. They also look the same as your opponent's activated tiles. I've noticed you can tell them apart by touching them and seeing which effect generated them, but it's a pain in the neck. There's sometimes a whole bunch of special tiles on the board, some you want to match, some you want to avoid, some that you don't need to match but want to avoid the opponent matching, and they all look the same.

These game mechanics things are obviously biased by my own experience of playing mostly just Jace. On the whole I get the impression I'd have a lot more to say if I'd seen all the cards in the game and so on. I guess the main point is not the specific interactions I mention but just that there's a lot of unintuitive, often unfun and always unexplained interactions in the game. These are just the ones I've come across.


Thanks for reading, hope it helps!