The Health Pack Economy

XandorXerxes

So, MPQ has attempted to play with difficulty a few times, only to get chewed out by the forums because, well, they made things hard. In an event like Galactus, where you get locked out for 8 hours after trying and progression assumes you win every time to get the highest rewards, that's really kind of awful. In any other event however, higher difficulty shouldn't be a bad thing.

What currently makes it a bad thing is health packs. They're limited for a reason that I don't think has been well defined or articulated. Sure, it's something else that would otherwise make us spend money, but I don't feel that's a worthwhile reason to have them - a greater revenue stream would be to allow players to play all the time and then charge small amounts for things that players would use more by virtue of playing more (boosts, etc). Especially if health packs aren't large sources of revenue, I don't see why maintaining them is good in a business sense. By removing health packs and reducing the down time of all characters to manageable amounts, I believe MPQ could achieve similar results - penalizing a player for taking damage / dying, without removing the desire to try new, different, and even difficult things. If nearly dying costs my Iceman to have to wait 15 minutes to heal, I can play with other teams while he heals then come back to him once he's healed. If I let him die and it takes 45 minutes to come back (with full health) from death, well, that's my incentive to not let him die and even if he did, I'm not out too much.

If MPQ wanted to keep health packs around to create hard stops in things like PvP, then break health packs out into particular events. That requires more back-end storage, as you'd also have to track roster health per event, but given that we're already tracking points per event I believe the code base is pretty much already there. Then MPQ could make a really, really hard event that players could wipe their entire roster on, but still turn around and do their PvE / PvP like normal.

Essentially the fundamental problem with adding difficulty is that it impacts every other aspect of the game. You can make it so that we're "supposed to lose" against Galactus, just make it so that once we lose we can go do a different event without any penalty (making the rewards realistic for a "supposed to lose" scenario would also help). Why should we want to do something that's incredibly hard, if it makes doing all the things that aren't incredibly hard impossible to do?

With proper changes to health packs the developers AND the players could get what they want, which from what I've seen is a pretty rare feat despite "win-win" being thrown around everywhere in the world.

avs962

XandorXerxes wrote:

By removing health packs and reducing the down time of all characters to manageable amounts, I believe MPQ could achieve similar results - penalizing a player for taking damage / dying, without removing the desire to try new, different, and even difficult things. If nearly dying costs my Iceman to have to wait 15 minutes to heal, I can play with other teams while he heals then come back to him once he's healed. If I let him die and it takes 45 minutes to come back (with full health) from death, well, that's my incentive to not let him die and even if he did, I'm not out too much.

That would be perfectly fine if 80% of my roster wasn't essentially useless in all game modes. If there are only so many viable teams in pve/pvp, losing even one character for 45 minutes would shut me out of the game completely. And I'm damn well not gonna watch the clock for them to revive, I'll do something, I don't know, productive with my life With health packs, I can throw a kit of bandages and Neosporin at my superhuman who just got sliced to pieces by a symbiote-crazed lunatic and they're as good as new.

That's my only argument for health packs. If you don't want to shut people out, then characters should heal in full after each battle. That would equal more play time and, presumably, more spending on other stuff as a result.

edgewriter

avs962 wrote:

That would be perfectly fine if 80% of my roster wasn't essentially useless in all game modes. If there are only so many viable teams in pve/pvp, losing even one character for 45 minutes would shut me out of the game completely. And I'm damn well not gonna watch the clock for them to revive, I'll do something, I don't know, productive with my life With health packs, I can throw a kit of bandages and Neosporin at my superhuman who just got sliced to pieces by a symbiote-crazed lunatic and they're as good as new.

That's my only argument for health packs. If you don't want to shut people out, then characters should heal in full after each battle. That would equal more play time and, presumably, more spending on other stuff as a result.

If players healed in full after each battle, they would only need one roster. Why bother branching out and trying new combinations?

udonomefoo

Replace crit boosts with health packs

Druss

Replace crit boosts with health packs

noooooooo! I already have 500+ health packs (well I did before this PvE - now 480 odd), replace crit boosts with iso - we all need that.

I actually like the idea of damaged roster as it promotes diversity (well it used to when you had the choice of using someone else) also any type of "puzzle" goes out the window with instaheal - kill the node asap don't worry about matching the countdown tile that will do 6k dam - who cares. This wouldn't be good for the game (so they will probably introduce it)

jredd

i have proposed before, several times, about having a health pack bank, that stores your packs you get from progression and taco pulls. these would be separate from the 10 that regenerate.

@ Druss: how the heck are you accumulating so many health packs?

Spiritclaw

I have health packs coming out of my ears. Let me sell a hundred at a time for maybe 50 hero points or ten command points and suddenly they'd have some value to me. As it is, health packs are the "you didn't win" prize.

jredd

Spiritclaw wrote:

I have health packs coming out of my ears. Let me sell a hundred at a time for maybe 50 hero points or ten command points and suddenly they'd have some value to me. As it is, health packs are the "you didn't win" prize.

do you have an invincible roster?

play pvp? or play at all? cause if you play this game, health packs are valuable. unless you never take damage. in which case, how do you not take damage?

Spiritclaw

jredd wrote:

Spiritclaw wrote:

I have health packs coming out of my ears. Let me sell a hundred at a time for maybe 50 hero points or ten command points and suddenly they'd have some value to me. As it is, health packs are the "you didn't win" prize.

do you have an invincible roster?

play pvp? or play at all? cause if you play this game, health packs are valuable. unless you never take damage. in which case, how do you not take damage?

My roster isn't invincible, I play pvp, and I take damage.

I'd say I play a lot, actually, but possibly not a lot compared to the folks on this forum. I have two accounts, one steam and one ios. Today will be day 693 on steam, with a 72 man roster. iOS is a bit behind that on both numbers. At a minimum, I play DDQ each day on both accounts. PVP I mostly play on my steam account, where I also play some of the non-DDQ PVE events as well.

I like the variety of playing as much of my roster as possible. If someone is wounded, I swap to someone else while the first guy is healing. So, for example, if Luke Cage needs 20 minutes to heal but his team-mates Iron Fist and Magneto are hale and healthy, Black Panther will handle Yellow and Black for the next battle. If the whole team is hurt, maybe it's time for GSBW, Patch, and Spidey to take a turn. Or any of a lot of other combinations.

Really, if I look around at my roster and everyone is wounded (which happens) that's a clue I ought to stop playing MPQ for a while and get to work on some other stuff.

My current health pack total on steam is 205, without any effort at all to preserve health packs. If a required character goes down, I'll use one, but I always seem to draw more than I use. Drawing health packs as a prize sucks for my play style. The ten auto-refreshing packs would be more than enough for me. I recognize your mileage may vary.

I don't shield-hop, and I admit I consider a top 20 performance in PVP a huge win. I probably play ten times as much as the MPQ gamers I know IRL, and one tenth as much as seems common on this board. I'll leave it to you whether that makes me a casual player or not.

IamTheDanger

I'm not so sure about that. I kinda see where you are going, and in theory, it could work. But taking out health packs would mean reducing the recovery time. It's not always possible to stop a character from dying. There bad or color starved boards. Or the Ai gets a few killer cascades. It is possible to loose in 1 turn. Facing a team with Prof. X. once, I made a move which dropped tiles into line of 5. The Ai took it's first turn by matching the crit, activating Prof. X. ability, which killed one of my characters. But that wasnt the end. Hitting that first crit caused a cascade that contained 2 more criticals. With Prof. X. on the enemy team, 3 match 5 crits = 3 dead characters on the Ai's very first turn. So it's times like this where health packs come in handy.

chamber44

jredd wrote:

i have proposed before, several times, about having a health pack bank, that stores your packs you get from progression and taco pulls. these would be separate from the 10 that regenerate.

This times infinity.

Whenever i have extra health packs, i end up playing less because i want to save my 18 or 25 packs for grinding either a PvP or a PvE finish, so I don't use them to heal when i normally would play through three or four matches during my lunch break or something.

rawfsu

I would say the issue that needs to be addressed is when let's say you've used five health packs somewhere, and then you pull five from the DDQ vault. As it is now, you're not really gaining five health packs, just replenishing the five you used, which would've regenerated on their own anyways. I wish there was some way you could put those five you won aside and then add them once your health packs returned to 10.

TxMoose

rawfsu wrote:

I would say the issue that needs to be addressed is when let's say you've used five health packs somewhere, and then you pull five from the DDQ vault. As it is now, you're not really gaining five health packs, just replenishing the five you used, which would've regenerated on their own anyways. I wish there was some way you could put those five you won aside and then add them once your health packs returned to 10.

this is why I don't pull tacos unless I need a pack. any good reward pulled in my chasing of a 5-pk when I need it is just gravy. of course, now that pve might be ruined for me depending on what they do, grinds might not be nearly as critical as before, so pack needs might plummet.

JVReal

I think stretching health packs would be better, shorten recovery time, but you can't remove health packs entirely.

Some people have suggested when you lose, your characters should come out of the fight with the same health they went in with, almost like a reset, to try again.

You would still need health packs because if you win but took a lot of damage, you would still want to heal your guys for the next fight, but the huge negative for a total freak wipe out wouldn't be so damaging.

This is the first online game that did not keep consumables that you win as an inventory item that is kept separate from your active pool of consumables. You win 5 health packs in Taco Vault, you should have them in your inventory as a 5 pack that you can then use to replenish your supply when they run down to below 10, and be used by choice, not by default.

avs962

edgewriter wrote:

avs962 wrote:

That would be perfectly fine if 80% of my roster wasn't essentially useless in all game modes. If there are only so many viable teams in pve/pvp, losing even one character for 45 minutes would shut me out of the game completely. And I'm damn well not gonna watch the clock for them to revive, I'll do something, I don't know, productive with my life With health packs, I can throw a kit of bandages and Neosporin at my superhuman who just got sliced to pieces by a symbiote-crazed lunatic and they're as good as new.

That's my only argument for health packs. If you don't want to shut people out, then characters should heal in full after each battle. That would equal more play time and, presumably, more spending on other stuff as a result.

If players healed in full after each battle, they would only need one roster. Why bother branching out and trying new combinations?

That's where the point about 80% of a player's roster being useless comes into play.

simonsez

avs962 wrote:

That's where the point about 80% of a player's roster being useless comes into play.

Maybe one of these days they'll actually do something player-friendly to encourage roster diversity, like maybe a daily 100 ISO bonus for each different character you use. I think it'd be a great challenge trying to use as many characters as possible, and I sure wouldn't mind an extra 9k ISO per day.

SnowcaTT

simonsez wrote:

avs962 wrote:

That's where the point about 80% of a player's roster being useless comes into play.

Maybe one of these days they'll actually do something player-friendly to encourage roster diversity, like maybe a daily 100 ISO bonus for each different character you use. I think it'd be a great challenge trying to use as many characters as possible, and I sure wouldn't mind an extra 9k ISO per day.

I've been trying to "hint" in suggestions like this for over a year. Recently I've been saying:

PVE with 20 nodes of various difficulty. Hit each once. Can't use any character (that wins) more than once.

Previously I have suggested PVE being basically "all" essential nodes. I can't even remember some of the other ideas I've thrown out here now.

Long ago I suggested giving ISO bonuses that go higher each time you use a completely different (non-essential) team, so if you go A/B, C/D would be +100, E/F would be +100...that's very much like Simon's suggestion here, except my idea was to repeat that however many times you wanted daily.

These type of suggestions have no downside now that prologue playing is out! Shoot, the prologue would greatly help the 1*/2* transition with iso bonuses like this!

TxMoose

simonsez wrote:

avs962 wrote:

That's where the point about 80% of a player's roster being useless comes into play.

Maybe one of these days they'll actually do something player-friendly to encourage roster diversity, like maybe a daily 100 ISO bonus for each different character you use. I think it'd be a great challenge trying to use as many characters as possible, and I sure wouldn't mind an extra 9k ISO per day.

that is a very interesting challenge with the old pve system. 4 clears on the 6 non-essential nodes = 72 opportunities for different combos. that actually sounds 'fun' and 'challenging'. just not very realistic with the new one - that would be tough to get anything more than ~20 different characters in.