Health packs on 24 hour timer

Eec411

I hate losing health packs to a max quantity. Every minute the timer isn't going feels wasted somehow.

In the same theme of "play when you want," I propose changing the way health packs regenerate.

A new health pack regenerates every 36 minutes, which means if you always had less than max, you would earn 40 health packs a day.

I propose that a reset of 40 health packs get put into your queue at every daily resupply and just remove the 36 minute regen timer.

This allows players to not get stifled in their time to play and not have to worry about waiting for a fresh one to come up.

Now I would take it a step further. If you have health packs left before the reset, add 100 ISO to your resupply for every health pack unused. If you only used 20, great, you get 2000 ISO extra on the resupply!

This rewards rosters that don't need the extra packs and all the extra packs you might get from deadpool taco tokens can become ISO at the end of the day.

halirin

For most of us, your suggestion would effectively get rid of health packs as a thing anyone uses. It would really incentivize not playing much as a way to build up ISO.

Eec411

If you don't need them now, you're not getting anything out of them anyway. Wouldn't you rather see an extra 4K ISO every day?

carrion_pigeons

Yes, of course, but the point is that you're making health packs "cost" iso to use, which would be even more feel-bad than the current design.

SnowcaTT

I'd rather see a healthpack-less economy. D3 said (long ago) they don't sell many of them - all they do is limit players on how much they play which is also something D3 doesn't want. Why not just get rid of them and have all characters at full health for each match?

Since that is how 85% of the players I see play anyway, using the Only Character That Matters. May as well balance the field....

Mawtful

First up, thanks for voicing your opinion and sharing this idea.
But I don't agree with it, and certainly couldn't support a change like this.

As has been mentioned already, the entire health system essentially limits play time - which is somewhat detrimental to Demiurge. However, it's not totally at odds with monetisation; the need to heal and the limitation on healing available at any given time does create right sort of environment where a player may coerce themselves into spending money in order to secure a prize which they've already awarded to themselves in their head. I mean, that's it - that's the whole raison d'être for health packs.

So they'll never go away entirely, but I think there's room for some adjustment in how they work and why you want to use them. Characters have two different health timers - one for when they take damage and one when they've been KO'd. I think a better suggestion would be to remove the first timer and increase the second - that is:

Any characters which are still active at the end of a match are returned to full health, however any characters which are KO'd are "wounded" and need time-out to recuperate. This "time-out" can be fast-forwarded by using a healthpack to get them fully recovered again. I believe this change would actually help encourage a bit more diversity in teams - protect tiles and burst healing are now potentially more attractive prospects if they keep a character with enough health to still be standing at the end of a fight. The downtime for KOd characters would need to be significant; it could probably match the Team Up timers. Imagine having to wait 24 hours or more to be able to use a character again. I think most people would definitely prefer to spend a health pack. Additionally, I'd reduce the number of auto-generated health packs back to 5, but replace the crit boost rewards with health packs.

carrion_pigeons

@Snow: Managing your health is a significant part of the gameplay, though. Taking it away and starting every fight at full health would get super boring, since it would mean you never have to switch teams. The design problems with OML should not become institutional.

This is one of those cases where the lack of features in the game makes it so there isn't really a good solution. If the game had a few more gameplay modes, it would be a lot easier to put health packs in a place that makes them relevant without making them into a huge artificial-feeling gating mechanic. As it is, though, I don't really think any change is going to get them into a better space than where they are now.

@Mawtful: do you lose a lot of games where you started at full health, though? For me, I usually gamble with a character at ~40-60% and sometimes he ends up getting downed then, but I don't lose a lot of characters on their first fight.

Maybe you could fiddle with the timers to make health packs feel more useful, but I'm not convinced it would really make a major difference. I know I personally go out of my to avoid using health packs because using them is a major way for me to feel like I'm beating my head against a wall pointlessly, and I quickly start hating the game and quit.

Mawtful

carrion pigeons wrote:

@Mawtful: do you lose a lot of games where you started at full health, though? For me, I usually gamble with a character at ~40-60% and sometimes he ends up getting downed then, but I don't lose a lot of characters on their first fight.

No, I don't lose a lot - but that's kind of the point. Essentially what I'm suggesting is if I win a match, I get a chance at playing again with those same characters. If I lose a match, or even just 1-2 characters, then they're unavailable for some duration OR I need to spend health packs to get them back early. I'm still at the mercy of RNG - I've had more than 1 occasion of unintentional cascades against an enemy Jean Grey that resulted in multiple match-5's and 2/3 of my team KOd before the AI even took their first turn - and there are a number of teams/characters that can turn the tables with very little effort.

Eec411

I can't agree with auto healing after every match either. At that point every character is OML.

I don't understand the argument about giving health packs an ISO value. Right now, if you don't use them, they have 0 value. Why not reward players for not having to use them all?

The valuation of them is not my primary point. With the change to pve, having to do 7 clears of nodes in a 2-3 hour gap is a huge tax on your characters. The devs encourage playing on your own schedule but the health packs and healing dictate your ability to actually play the characters you need.

My proposal isn't even giving us something new if you ignore the ISO boost. We're supposed to get 40 in a day, you just get punished for not using some every 6 hours.

As a bonus, I imagine not having to track everyone's health pack timers would even relieve some stress on the servers. Seems like a win/win.

Norksman

Eec411 wrote:

I don't understand the argument about giving health packs an ISO value. Right now, if you don't use them, they have 0 value. Why not reward players for not having to use them all?

The issue is that your suggestion puts an ISO value on health packs. You're saying it's a 'bonus', however that's not how it'd end up. Suddenly, every time you use a health pack you lose ISO that you get if you didn't use it. That then just boosts the value of OML in particular because of his absurd true healing.

Personally, I'd like to see the removal of true healing all together. It doesn't make sense that essentially only 2 different characters (Wolverine and Daken) are able to sustain damage out of the whole MPQ roster. It adds this whole extra artificial economy to certain characters, personified by OML.

MrCrowley

Having health packs in limited quantities is a good system for the game because:
- Several events require play during certain times, within couple of hours (PVP, PVE), and packs limit the playing during those peaks
- Wide roster is encouraged by having less possibilities to heal a given character during a peak playing time
- Shield sales in PVP partially depend on heal pack amount, especially on weaker rosters that can still progress, but at a cost.

The issue is that 40 hp per day would be more than I will ever need, but 10 hp is not enough for a good climb in PVP if I dont have more than 1 good team to put up.

If everyone had 40hp per day, the climbs would go longer and points inflation would be even bigger than they are noiw.

I am not saying it would not be good for many players, but for the Devs there is little upside.

OneLastGambit

SnowcaTT wrote:

I'd rather see a healthpack-less economy. D3 said (long ago) they don't sell many of them - all they do is limit players on how much they play which is also something D3 doesn't want. Why not just get rid of them and have all characters at full health for each match?

Since that is how 85% of the players I see play anyway, using the Only Character That Matters. May as well balance the field....

It would be quite a nerf to oml really since the major reason for using him is to conserve health packs when climbing/grinding.

Take that away from him and he's far less useful as he's way too expensive to use offensively

Kjeldbjerg

The only thing that annoys me about health packs is using any above 10, since I am not taking advantage of the refresh.

I saw someone mention a while ago, that instead of pulling 5 health packs from your taco token, you'd pull a 5 hp token. So you'd basically have a small vault of hp tokens, to be used when you reach zero. I really like this idea.

TxMoose

Kjeldbjerg wrote:

The only thing that annoys me about health packs is using any above 10, since I am not taking advantage of the refresh.

I saw someone mention a while ago, that instead of pulling 5 health packs from your taco token, you'd pull a 5 hp token. So you'd basically have a small vault of hp tokens, to be used when you reach zero. I really like this idea.

I actually love the idea of HP tokens. then I wouldn't have to hoard tacos. just pull them and save the hp tokens for when you need them. and instead of pulling 5-20 tacos at the end of your pvp climb (increasing the nerves the whole time), you could just go pull one 5-hp token and be done. thumbs up for me.

SnowcaTT

OneLastGambit wrote:

SnowcaTT wrote:

I'd rather see a healthpack-less economy. D3 said (long ago) they don't sell many of them - all they do is limit players on how much they play which is also something D3 doesn't want. Why not just get rid of them and have all characters at full health for each match?

Since that is how 85% of the players I see play anyway, using the Only Character That Matters. May as well balance the field....

It would be quite a nerf to oml really since the major reason for using him is to conserve health packs when climbing/grinding.

Take that away from him and he's far less useful as he's way too expensive to use offensively

I don't care that he regenerates health - making him 5* KK.

I don't care that he throws out strike tiles and does tons of damage - making him 5* IF.

I care that he does BOTH of those ALL the time. One or the other needs to go, or both need to be changed to not as much or not as often.