Poll: More New Characters, or Rework existing ones?

Konman

In your opinion, which do you think would be a more valuable pursuit for the game as a whole?

New characters are exciting and entertaining, even from just the speculation from the hints we are given from update notes and forum posts. Good times.

Too often, however, that new character disappoints. From the character choice itself, the color scheme, the abilities, the art, the mechanics, and/or the synergy that certain characters might've had.

There was a thread in the Character Discussion sub-forum about the irrelevant nature of the latest batch of 4* releases, partly due to the existence of the 5* tier, and partly because several of those new characters were seen as stinkers. Looking at just the 4* tier, where it seems most of the new characters are destined, there are currently 5 or 6 dominant characters, while the rest are unused/unwanted, except for the rare occasion when one is required.

So on which do you think time and resources would be better spent: Development of new Characters? Reworking current characters?

Discuss your reasoning if you like.

tanis3303

How about a third option...

Take a much needed break from churning out characters and FIX ALL THE BUGS!!

MrCroaker64

I voted to rework existing characters for two reasons.

First, with new characters, and my horrible luck in drawing, it will take me at least a year before I would be anywhere close to using it.

Second, I can honestly say that the rework for IM40 has been more useful to me than any of the 4* or 5* covers that I have gotten.

If they could rework some of the other characters to make them more useful, and slow down the new releases to give us half a chance to make progress on leveling the characters we already have, that would be ideal (for me).

Croaker.

Meander

I voted new characters not because I think the characters have been good or that I can keep up or anything, but I know the game has to have a monetization factor to stay afloat. Roster slots sell hp. New release packs are more inviting to many. As long as they keep buying, we can keep playing.

thanos8587

im honestly baffled by people who enjoy seeing new character releases and treat each one as the best thing theyve ever seen. invariably the new character disappoints as it doesnt reach the power level of the top existing characters and just ends up being a wasted roster slot and a useless pull in future tokens.

that being said, im fully aware this game cant stop releasing new characters. its the money that keeps the servers on. the day they stop releasing characters youd better find a new game to play. but i still wont care.

but they could at least fix cho

Calnexin

I voted "rework", but it's context dependent. What's most valuable... to whom?

A rework is more valuable to the players. It provides better tools to work with, and may breathe new life into defunct characters.

From a business perspective - character revamp is not necessary until the player base revolts. There is no money to be had in that endeavor. It is strictly maintenance. If the machine isn't falling apart, there's no reason to invest in the foundation. You spend that effort to maximize productivity.

TLCstormz

Fixing existing characters, AND THE GAME IN GENERAL!

wymtime

I see 8 characters that could really use a rework to make more useful in the game. Some are just bad and others are just outdated. They are all 4*



I also know wasp was just released but she has some major flaws and does not go with most play styles. For a quick support character she is a slow build and her yellow is sub par because it so many yellows give protect tiles so she does not pair well with characters who produce protect tiles

pheregas

I vote the third, unsaid, option. Chill out.

Let's take these characters we already have out for a joy ride. I was pleasantly surprised by how useful Nova is. I just fully covered PunMax... I wonder what joys he will bring. War Machine could be cool, still need 6 covers and 350k iso first, though.

I admit to getting lucky with Quake covers and champing her early. But seriously, I'm enjoying playing around with the roster I have. The last PVE event where I had no boosted 4s was actually quite lovely. The MMR was a lot lower and I got to mix and match people that I hadn't tried before.

Let us all remember that this, above all else, is a game. And games are supposed to be fun.

Mawtful

Konman wrote:

In your opinion, which do you think would be a more valuable pursuit for the game as a whole?

This question only has one correct answer - release more new characters. Like it or not, new characters are the lifeblood of the game. Yes, they're difficult to acquire and costly to level up, but that's exactly the core mechanism that MPQ is built around - it's what keeps us all logging back in daily to get a little bit more ISO and maybe another chance at an OML cover.

People who don't play the game might see that their favourite character is in the game and want to try it, but I can guarantee that nobody read the patch notes and said to themselves "wow, this game updated Iron Man, Vision, and Quicksilver - I just have to play it!"

veny

Well, we have over 100 characters (most of them just sitting in my/our deck waiting for miracle... like tons of ISO dropping from the sky).
As i see this, priorities should be:
1st: ISO revamp or similar stuff (XPs to covers from fights etc.) alowing us to levelup covers faster.
2nd: Something that would allow us to use all/most of our covers - 80-90% of my deck remain unused during normal days. Example of feature: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=48597
3rd: With theese, new covers would make sense and they would be much more appreciated imho.
4th: I dont think there are champs who needs serious revamp - sure, some are weaker than others and some of them (Amadeus Cho f.e.) are far below "useful" level, but without point 1 and 2, players can invest ISO in covers whos power is adequate.

BigRussian

The squeaky wheel gets the grease - as someone above said, without a revolt, its not even on the radar.

Pylgrim

I really like new characters. The thrill of getting something new, the collecting and completing... seeing some of your personal favourite characters be added to the game, etc. That said, we have reached a critical mass of really mediocre or outright bad characters. Reworks need to happen at some point and history shows that it will likely happen. But rather than focusing in a couple or three characters every half year or so, I would indeed prefer they took a month off from new content to completely shake the meta by doing a mass rework.

El Satanno

What I want is reworks. What good are all of these mediocre/bad characters, after all? (Setting aside the broken-**** 5* tier, of course.) What the game needs, sadly, is those new characters. I won't rehash what others have already said unnecessarily.

What I will add here is perhaps a slightly different perspective on why reworks aren't necessarily as revenue-neutral/negative as you may suspect. I'm going to make a few assumptions, but hear me out:

Okay, so some crazy kooks buy big ol' token packs for every new release. Assuming the character is actually good a la Peggy Carter it makes decent enough sense...kinda... But anyway, let's just assume it's the far-more-common mediocre/bad character. That much I cannot assail. Or comprehend. Whatever.

The next biggest expenditure seems to be roster slots, which maxes out at 1k a pop now. If you buy a Stark Salary and use it only to buy slots that gets you a minimum of 20 slots. That's almost a year, assuming the standard release rate and ignoring 5* characters. A savvy player will also earn plenty of HP just playing as well, so you can pretty much get away with just that purchase for your entire time playing.

But what if instead of 2 new characters every month, we get one new one, and one good rework. I'm talking about the kind of rework that IM40 got, not the trifling Vision update. Let's say poor Sue Storm gets turned into a crazy behemoth of invisible destruction. Everyone is going to go bonkers trying to get her up to speed, post-haste. And what do we need for that? Say it with me: TINYKITTY ISO! You don't have that Iso to hand, do you? Of course not! It's literally the only thing everyone here universally agrees on. From whence enough Iso to max out Sue? Motherlodes. Lots of them. And that **** is gone the moment you buy it. So you gotta buy more of them. LOTS more of them. And every month, another one of those former stinkers is going to be transformed into a must-have, meaning even more Iso needs to be purchased, because we all know damn well that tap is not getting opened any further.

The real kicker here is that everyone wins. Demiurge makes tons more money, and more often, because people are buying Iso as if it were a good value. (See what I did there?) The players actually win because now we have a reason to not only celebrate getting the newly refurbished Jugger-Cho covers, but to actually want to use him. HOLY **** REAL ROSTER DIVERSITY!

But I know it ain't happening. It's obvious that making half-decent or trash characters is a lot easier than making good ones. Just look at your own roster and tell me it isn't true. And even reworking bad characters into good ones is hard, as evidenced by Invisible Woman and Ragnarok, who still suck even after being reworked multiple times! So yeah, let's just keep on dealing with the stupid release schedule until we either quit or the servers shut down. Whee.

babinro

You might as well make a poll asking if you'd rather earn 100% of your current wages or just 15% of them. The poll is just not realistic from a business perspective as I understand it.

As for the spirit of the poll...

I enjoy new characters and am happy to see them continue. I don't actually feel it's a good use of time and resources to rework existing character art and skill activation's.

Having said that I don't see why D3 can't simply continue balancing the existing characters WHILE releasing new ones. No need to completely rework..simply adjust numbers on characters who are currently being played less and failed to live up to potential. Do tweaks like the ones you did on 4* Falcap recently.

People aren't casting Cho's Hot Dog Stand? Shock of Shocks! Maybe in the next patch you can let it fire when there's fewer than 8 blue tiles and increase the health to 3500 health. Will that make it great? I seriously doubt it but you can watch the impact of the change and tweak it again later. Maybe a month later he now heals 4000 health and creates a 4th blue tile. Suddenly the skill is making him a potentially interesting battery.

These little changes don't require vast amounts of internal testing either. Let the players be your test subjects in the live environment. Since these tweaks are happening on known trash tier characters it's unlikely anything completely meta breaking will come from it.

More importantly after a several months of doing these tweaks you'll have a game where people feel better about building roster diversity and leveling characters. A change that could only help with potential profits.

Polares

babinro wrote:

Having said that I don't see why D3 can't simply continue balancing the existing characters WHILE releasing new ones. No need to completely rework..simply adjust numbers on characters who are currently being played less and failed to live up to potential. Do tweaks like the ones you did on 4* Falcap recently.

People aren't casting Cho's Hot Dog Stand? Shock of Shocks! Maybe in the next patch you can let it fire when there's fewer than 8 blue tiles and increase the health to 3500 health. Will that make it great? I seriously doubt it but you can watch the impact of the change and tweak it again later. Maybe a month later he now heals 4000 health and creates a 4th blue tile. Suddenly the skill is making him a potentially interesting battery.

These little changes don't require vast amounts of internal testing either. Let the players be your test subjects in the live environment. Since these tweaks are happening on known trash tier characters it's unlikely anything completely meta breaking will come from it.

This is something I have never understood. In almost all games I know changes are usually done like the way you mentioned. This way you can see the impact of the change and then act accordingly, and these small changes almost never 'break' the game.

In MPQ they use almost always the other way around, specially for nerfs. Almost all nerfed characters get completely destroyed and unusable after the nerf (not all of them, both Magnetos are an exception to this rule), buffs on the other hand are more a mixed bag, some are really good like IM40 and Xforce, some are just meh Vision, Quicksilver, etc.

Reworks are harder and require more time, but I agree small tweaks can be done with almost 0 work. If this method (small tweaks) is used in almost every game, maybe there is a reason why, and maybe, just maybe this game should do the same thing.

PS: And please buff Silver Surfer, he is one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe and he is mediocre at best in 5 land. I can live with Cap being mediocre too, but Silver Surfer should be one of the best 5s !!!!

metallion

I would have voted for new characters... if not for the fact that literally almost half of the entire roster are basically reskins of other characters. Let's face it, we all know the devs depends on the new character releases for revenue, but when there are 4 different versions of Wolverine, it's hard to get excited when there's another one coming out, which I bet will happen if they ever enter 6* territory.

And let's not even get started on characters who are just people taking on the persona of other characters (I.e. peggy as cap, TGT, cho), as these will probably will take the number of such characters beyond 50.

I wasn't even excited to see 5*hulk released, partly because he's 5*, but mainly because of all the characters they could have used, they chose one already represented in the game. Other games have the trick to having multiple costumes nailed down great; one of the more common ones I've seen is as IAPs promising different boosts according to the costumes used. Why can't this game do the same instead of having fully separate characters for each version they come up with.

Plus, on a separate note, if they could just make the 4* covers more accessible it might reduce the uproar over the release rate. A 7% chance to draw ANY 4* cover is way too low to properly get a chance to use them in a properly covered state at the rate they're throwing them in our faces. We're no longer in 3* world guys, the current drop rates probably will still work well if they're still releasing 3*s actively. We don't want to be unable to use our characters one year after their release. Oh go for 1k progression you say? I would love to if I'm not seeing OMLs being tossed in my face everywhere. Right now a lot of people are still depending on RNG for these 4* covers, and the current drop rates are not supporting our causes.

As it stands, as long as they don't change their stance on releasing reskins, and they don't review how they issue their 4*s, my stance will always be to stop with all the releases.

mpqr7

I'm ignoring new character releases. I have over 100 characters. I don't need any more. I don't even bother hitting 1000 points on the new character pvp any more. I'll win them when I win them. Even ones that I rush to get... I wouldn't be able to use them for over a year anyway, so who cares?

ammenell

Konman wrote:

In your opinion, which do you think would be a more valuable pursuit for the game as a whole?

- organize the sell tab
- save specific teams
- get that mmr right
- new reward structure

or just give us a new 5*.
what about a 5* bw? a 5* Thor? some lazy version, dont waste too much time and money.

SnowcaTT

The only surprise I had was this is only a 93% "for" proposal. I've suggested several times why not do one new release, one fixed character each season - there are easily two years worth of characters to fix under that method.

Konman

SnowcaTT wrote:

The only surprise I had was this is only a 93% "for" proposal. I've suggested several times why not do one new release, one fixed character each season - there are easily two years worth of characters to fix under that method.

And I think that would be an excellent way to go, but right now, suggestions such as yours seem to be falling on deaf ears.