Comparing MPQ to other popular phone games

rollx

I play somewhere around 3 phone games a week, usually trying a new one out every 2 weeks or so. Marvel Puzzle Quest is one of those games that is always in my queue to play. I enjoy this game. It's entertaining, it's relaxing (or can be), and I get to play with my favorite characters I grew up with. The other game that is generally in my queue to play for the week is Final Fantasy Record Keeper. I'm not going to get into why or try and persuade users to go check this game out, but there are a few fun features from this game that I think MPQ could benefit from. After all, your best play testers are your community that not only play your game but others on a weekly basis.

1) Scaling
One of my biggest criticisms for the current "scaling" issues are that I can only beat the nodes on PVE with my best 3-4 characters in rotation, depending on which are available. I'm having quite a bit of difficulty with the gauntlet currently running (as most are) but with a bit of luck I can usually succeed after 1 or 3 tries with using some boost and my best team (and possible a Deadpool whale or two). I don't like being constrained in this way. I have 90+ characters on my roster and I'd like a way to use them in a manner that is fun. One of the things I feel FFRK has over MPQ is that they have set scaling in events. You start off rather small, being able to use your lower leveled teams, and eventually get to a point in time that you have to finish with your stronger teams. I like this because it gives you a chance to use all of your characters equally, and try out different teams to use. I want this to be a thing in MPQ. I want to be able to use my entire roster without feeling constrained into using one team for everything. Another thing they do is release half the event at the beginning of the week, then release bonus advanced stages later on in the week. I assume they do this for player retention, so you don't finish the game one day and not come back for a week. This could be an idea that MPQ might want to experiment with possibly and see how it goes.

2) Weekly boosted characters
We have all seen that characters now have team affiliations. I'm sure there will be some new way, but I want to give my two cents on how to use it. Instead of random "boosted characters of the week" we should have team affiliations of the week. This is what FFRK does and I think it makes the game fresh and fun. You're not forced to use boosted characters in this game, but if you do, they give a significant bonus to your team if you do. I think MPQ could really benefit from this. Having random boosted characters for the week is fun, but I think it would be more fun to have team affiliated boost of the week. That way you can have characters that have been balanced around each other (IE Guardians of the Galaxy) relevant again. Possibly even boost the lower stared ones up higher than the higher than the higher stared ones so that you can use them with little restraint. For example, make Gamora and Grocket at max level a bigger boost than Drax and Starlord so that they are all competitive to use for the week. This might even encourage people to level their lower characters so that they can use them again in the redjeanclopsbusterman meta.

3) Daily rewards
I for one love the deadpool daily. It's the one thing that draws me to this game on a daily basis. Having a daily feature makes me come back to this game. PVE events, I pick and choose what I want to do depending on the rewards and time commitment. PVP, that takes me literally 3 hours every 2.5 days to do. But the daily feature is what gives MPQ it's hook. FFRK has a great daily feature as well that gives special items and needed components. I think MPQ could really benefit by this by tweaking deadpool daily. Now hear me out, because I know there are so many people out there that will be getting their pitchforks and torches ready at the sound of DPD changing. My suggestion would be to have multitap nodes with star power restrictions, almost as they have now. Have a node that only uses 1*s that you can hit multiple times, same as a node for 2*s, 3*s, and 4*s, and maybe even a 5* node now. I believe this would again encourage people to expand their roster, and give a fun and fresh way to use all your characters again. It would even be great if the rewards were based on tier level. 1* give 1* rewards (100 iso, 1* covers, crit boost), 2* give 2* rewards (250 iso, 2* covers, % damage boost and ap boost), 3* give 3* rewards (500 iso, 3* covers, + all AP boosted) and so forth.

What are your thoughts? Are there any other phone games that you guys play on a regular basis that have great ideas you think MPQ could benefit from?

slidecage

what other games you play... too bad more games like this are not on steam

mazerat

The time investment is much higher. Other games have energy to limit how much you can do at one time. In theory, this is what health packs would do except that they're set up so that you can play longer the better you're doing instead of being a hard limit on time played. Additionally, PvE encourages heavy amounts of play--one clear every 8 hours and then as much as you can before the reset. Meanwhile you need to do the DDQ and as much PvP as possible (where health packs do often act as a soft limit on play time). And the zero-sum nature of PvE and PvP means that you aren't rewarded for putting all that time in--it's the bare minimum required to keep up with the Joneses.

No roster restrictions. Many games will assign point values to characters and give you a max-team point value that increases as you level. So you wouldn't be able to use a 5-star at all at the start and a roster full of them might take months of play-time to be able to field.

The piece-meal nature of characters is a bit unusual. Other games might require you to obtain 13 pieces before you can unlock a character but this is the first I've seen where you get an unlock immediately but the character is dead weight until you've obtained 12-more pieces.

Other games tend to have fixed difficulties along a progression track. So you start in easy-land and, as your team improves, you work your way into medium-ville and hard-ia and so forth. Outside of the DDQ, everything scales which kind of begs the question--if I can get CP progression on day 1, why am I trying to improve my roster at all? What's my carrot? (PvP is a bit of an exception as it is point gated for reasons I don't fully grasp such that you can top-10 on Day 1 but can't hit 800 points.) Because there's only one mission at a time, though, if lower teams couldn't do PvE, there wouldn't be anything for them to do.

And finally, tying those last couple together, this game punishes progression. If I pull a super-rare character in other games, I'm pretty psyched and jam that sucker onto my roster. Some games give you a random starting character and people will reroll until they get a super-rare one. This game encourages you to stay away from rewards as much as possible. Pull a BSSM? Ew, quick, sell it before it poisons your scaling! Get a cover or three in the new character event? I hope they can carry your team as long as their new-character boost is in effect. I personally am on Day 116 and am sitting on 465 CP that won't get spent until I have a solid 3-star team champ'd (probably 60-90 days) because I'm afraid of opening my rewards.

Melevorn

Any game that makes you afraid to cash in your rewards has a problem. I've hoarded stacks of LTs and CP for that exact reason.

Another mobile phone game I play is Fallout Shelter. So much less demanding of time, stress and money!

mpqr7

Another game I play gives regular new content as well as shiny new prizes that are achievable. The more you play, the more prizes you get. You can pay to let you play more often as well as buy cash to buy clothing and other fun but useless things, as well as speed up other waiting processes.

So no money is needed, and there are no time pressures to play, but you can spend money if you like the game and want to play even more or speed up some of your progress. It's very satisfying to play that game!

smkspy

Rewards as punishment and time limits on achieved rewards are huge problem with this game. It's funny how suddenly I seem to be getting tons of covers for 3 star that I don't have championed yet. With so little iso available I'm having to sell them off cause I'll never be able to champ them before their covers expire.

This all comes down to d3 wanting to buy iso but the value isn't there in that regards.

HaywireII

smkspy wrote:

This all comes down to d3 wanting to buy iso but the value isn't there in that regards.

I wish I could see the stats on how often/how much ISO is actually purchased for cash. $100 to get what takes 3 to 5 days to earn seems silly.

wymtime

I play 2 other games Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. All 3 games have this in common you get more out of your $ the earlier you purchase. In MPQ getting the roster slots withbHP purchase is huge and let's you roster your characters. In both clashes buying gems can significantly speed up your process. In later stages your money does not go far and progress is significantly slower than at pervious levels.

MPQ 4* land takes 3 weeks to earn enough ISO to level a 4*. To earn a max 5* I have not done so yet so I don't know.
In clash of clans to upgrade you base takes an insane amount or resources and then you have to wait 2 weeks for the upgrade to be done. Clash Royale is newier and progress is much faster, you can go from a level 1 player to level 8 I a couple of weeks. Then you have so many cards and need so mu gold it will take months to get to the next level even if you were to drop som $$ on the game.
Overall the late game of mobile games require a ton of $$ or a ton of patience to reach the end. Most people will not reach total competition of any game, it is just the way it is.

Esheris

I play a ton of phone games (although I play MPQ from Steam), my first priority when downloading one of these is find out what is the best monster/card/whatever to get. In MPQ if you drew a 5* early on it's death to your scaling in Pve/PvP.

I want to have the best stuff and feel powerful, but here I am with my shiny championed 4*'s getting my butt handed to me by a 1* Venom and 2* Moonstone...yeah...fun...

In other games I sometimes see variety (Some are worse, some far better. This is just a comparison and not a hate speech on MPQ lol), MPQ needs to branch out with all the characters it has. So much potential but we fight the same villains repetitively.

In the other games I personally play leveling seems pretty easy, maybe a bit of grinding to get leveling material but Max is reachable quickly. In MPQ you need to draw that character 13 times and then spend the rest of your waking time of grinding hardcore to get it to max, then you aren't done!

Character slots/inventory management are a regular thing with collection games. MPQ is the harshest, but I can make enough HP to roster the new characters if I don't spend my HP anywhere else. Boring but whatever, I'd love to see a fall in price still.
Yes, I do have to have them all. Pokemon syndrome.

So in summary compared to other phone games -I personally- play;
Good-
*Super heroes I've loved since I was little, probably the only reason I'm still here.
*Boss fights (even though we don't see them often)/DPD are awesome.

Bad-
*Amount of time to get anywhere makes it a full time job, never seen this in any other game.
*Iso shortage
*Scaling
*Reward vs difficulty (difficulty keeps going up while our rewards are staying the same)

But my Bad-List is very fixable, which is great. This game is far from dead and I believe it can make a come back to being my favorite game and maybe the one I'm willing to spend money on.

Thanks for reading my wall o' text!

Bonus: My favorite phone game of all time? Puzzles and Dragons

GrumpySmurf1002

Only other game I've thrown any time into is Gems of War, from which MPQ can also learn.

There's a ton of non-competitive things to do in the game, almost a daunting amount. Not to mention there are 4-5 different game types to play.

There needs to be more stuff to do that isn't on a timer. That's still my only real gripe with MPQ (ok, Iso shortage too, but one potentially solves the other)

Stax the Foyer

The comparison to FFRK is a great one, because that's the other mobile game that I play. There are a few things that they do that would really revitalize MPQ. As you mentioned, the event structure is very satisfying, with thematic boosted characters and steadily increasing difficulty.

Rewards are based on difficulty:

A player starting out can get meaningful rewards even if they can't beat everything, and a very advanced player has serious challenges on the final rounds, with rewards that provide significant progress. It gives your team a feeling of advancement, which doesn't really exist in MPQ.

PvE Isn't Competitive:

The community isn't pitted against one another. Rewards are purely based on progression, and creative win conditions and battles create the challenge.

No Grinding Needed:

In addition, the best rewards come from beating it one time (and mastering the fight, with win conditions met). There's little advantage to grinding most fights over and over. In MPQ, repetition is a substitute for content.

Now, FFRK has a huge advantage in that it's essentially a port of the very popular Japanese version, so there's a ton of content already developed for them to use. However, MPQ could still have something like that, with little continuing development cost.

MPQ Proposal:

If MPQ had a weekly gauntlet, with, say, 10 nodes of increasing difficulty and one-time rewards. Winning each node unlocks the next one. The nodes are fixed, no scaling whatsoever. Rosters starting out can beat the first few nodes and win a 2-star cover and a small chunk of ISO. More advanced rosters can earn more valuable covers, with the final node being a huge chunk of ISO (say, 25,000 ISO).

It could either be like a heroic, with locked-out characters, or a different team of boosted characters could be provided every week. No restrictions on TUs, if you want to superwhale a node every week or so, go nuts, but you won't be able to beat the whole thing with superwhales every week.

Win conditions could add additional flavor to this (e.g., win this fight with three members of the Fantastic Four, win this fight without casting a purple power) and further compel interesting team compositions and strategies. Even without that, though, real PvE in small doses with set difficulties would breathe so much fresh air into the game, and would reward people who have progressed their roster in a meaningful and permanent way.

rollx

Stax the Foyer wrote:

MPQ Proposal:

If MPQ had a weekly gauntlet, with, say, 10 nodes of increasing difficulty and one-time rewards. Winning each node unlocks the next one. The nodes are fixed, no scaling whatsoever. Rosters starting out can beat the first few nodes and win a 2-star cover and a small chunk of ISO. More advanced rosters can earn more valuable covers, with the final node being a huge chunk of ISO (say, 25,000 ISO).

It could either be like a heroic, with locked-out characters, or a different team of boosted characters could be provided every week. No restrictions on TUs, if you want to superwhale a node every week or so, go nuts, but you won't be able to beat the whole thing with superwhales every week.

Win conditions could add additional flavor to this (e.g., win this fight with three members of the Fantastic Four, win this fight without casting a purple power) and further compel interesting team compositions and strategies. Even without that, though, real PvE in small doses with set difficulties would breathe so much fresh air into the game, and would reward people who have progressed their roster in a meaningful and permanent way.

I really like this suggestion. Mixing gauntlet with heroics would be wonderful (a generally well received format with a generally negatively received format), and take them out of the play rotation. Make it a week long thing in which you can only use the boosted for the week, make them on a set scaling with about 9 nodes (1 trivial, 2 easy, 3 medium, 2 hard, 1 deadly, or something like that), and give them increasingly better rewards.

SuperRecoome

I'm another player of Record Keeper. I agree with what has been said so far. Would also like to add that Record keeper gives away the premium currency like candy. there's is Mythril, and you get 1 a day just from logging on, and more from beating stages. Drawing for a piece of equipment (basically the same thing as a heroic or event token here) is 5 Mythril. Not only is it cheaper, but the odds are WAY better. Their odds would be like if we had a 10% chance of getting a 4 or 5 star cover here. Plus the first draw on any event if you want to flat out pay is 1$ if you want to completely heal your party it's 1 mythril, need more inventory space? (similar to roster slots here) 1 Mythril. Anything else in the game besides a draw is 1 mythril.

When they introduce a new character they make it very easy for everyone to get it. If you want the equipment which can enable special skills (called soul breaks) that's where you spend money. Everything else is cheap enough though that spending the money is fine. Most I ever spent on the game trying to complete a character and get all his equipment was 100$ and that's not at all the norm. Got the shield pretty easy, but the sword just wouldn't drop. Though while doing that I got a bunch of other actual useful stuff

The only negative is Record Keeper also has something of an exp shortage, same as our ISO shortage. Though every Sunday there's a dungeon that opens that gives about 6 times the exp as usual. Something like that would help in MPQ too. Even if they did one day a week at double ISO it'd still be a huge help.

One more thing, I spend money weekly on Record Keeper, I haven't spent money on MPQ in over a year, the reason is because the value isn't there. With record keeper, I feel I get good bang for my buck. The odds are still in favor of the house, but 10% to get something featured (usually one of 3 or 4 items) is still MUCH better than 0.2% to get a 4 star, or 5.6% overall for a 4 star, and it's cheaper per pull. Here I know spending money is likely to be wasted and not help me much if at all, so I don't do it.

Crowl

I haven't played record keeper, but a lot of the stuff being said about it also seem quite similar to Marvel Future Fight too.

In that one you have some grinding, but you can leave the computer to do that bit for you and there are multiple different sections with a set amount of entries per day along with good regular rewards that keep you progressing and crucially there is nothing that punishes you for getting the best stuff or improving your roster.

It suffers in the same way as mpq that some characters are just so much stronger than others, but the vast majority of them are still readily obtainable in a manner that is not simply due to rng and for new character releases they seem to take the view that it is better to encourage people to spend to speed up the leveling of a character they have rather than making it such a chore to even obtain it in the first place. They released crossbones as part of their civil war events and he was obtainable via a simple event that took <10 mins a day and by the end everyone could have got a 5* character and the luckier ones would have got theirs to 6* instead.