Reworking character cast, rarity, level ranges, scaling

Pogo

Seeing this thread inspired me to post on a subject that has bothered me for a long time. The built-in level scaling that is tied to character rarity is a self-defeating feature of the game. It's not unique to MPQ, and it's such a foundational element that it would be highly disruptive to make such major changes, so I guess let's just consider this an exercise in game design theory.

As of this writing:
08 characters at 1-star: Levels 1-50 (or 40, for strangely incomplete characters)
14 characters at 2-star: Levels 15-94 (144 with Champion levels)
40 characters at 3-star: Levels 40-166 (266 with Champion levels)
41+ characters at 4-star: Levels 70-270 (370 with Champion levels)
10+ characters at 5-star: Levels 255-450 (550 with Champion levels)


In addition to higher level caps (and by extension higher max stats), characters with higher rarity also generally have more complex powers. One-star characters typically have powers that do one thing fairly well, but due to their level caps, there's no reason to hang onto them if a higher-rarity character becomes available (with the exception of DDQ, which explicitly limits the player). Two-star characters enjoy broader utility and slightly more nuance. Players need to start thinking about how a given character's power works alongside a teammate, rather that just worrying about color coverage and raw damage. As rarity goes up, certain powers start having drawbacks or are only useful in specific situations. At the high end, powers may have multiple effects or be replaced by completely different powers in certain circumstances. This progression makes the gameplay accessible to new players, but also prevents the game from getting too boring for seasoned players.

At first, I was confused as to why higher-rarity characters begin with a level advantage. But once I understood scaling, it made sense that the game would, by design, forcibly make your one-star characters obsolete by making them too weak to justify keeping them for their simple/useful powers. Once you open your first three-star, they're already at/close to the best a one-star will ever get. This creates a sort of design inertia that forces focus onto development of high-end characters. There's currently no reason to release new one- or two-star characters, because they are mostly for early-game players. Players will have to outgrow common characters to stay viable.

No new three-star characters have been released in quite some time, whereas new four-star characters are being added constantly. Four-stars just recently surpassed three-stars in quantity. Looking at the number of existing characters distributed by rarity, I would assume that the release of new four-star characters wouldn't stop until there were seventy or eighty of them, and once there are about twenty five-star characters, a six-star tier would need to be added in order to maintain this kind of rapid growth and scaling. The constant addition of characters serves two purposes: adding a new element of interest to existing players and fans of particular Marvel franchises; and making sure that players have a difficult time rostering everybody (encouraging the purchase of currency to unlock more slots).

Because of this particular execution of the rarity model, the two-star and three-star characters also become obsolete (again, with the exception of DDQ) and four-star characters gradually fall away once a player has a viable team of five-stars.

What this ultimately means is that everything but the very top tier is nothing but a stepping stone. The long-term goal of the game is just to get access to stronger characters ad infinitum. Top-tier prizes for events are generally either a high-rarity character cover or a Legendary recruitment token. Command points were introduced, giving players another way to try to get rare covers. Multiple new high-rarity characters drop every month, but it's comparatively rare that new story arcs, new goons, new bosses are added.

Some of the problems I want to address here:

• Newly-recruited characters far below the top of a player's roster are useless except in instances of roster locks.
• Those characters, if high enough rarity, would be worth using eventually, but level disparity and missing powers make them a bad choice in missions.
• As a result, it is possible (and sometimes necessary) to fully max a character without ever having used them.
• Recruited characters far above the top of a player's roster wreck scaling and might force the player to sell the comparatively rare character to make the game playable again.

Many of these suggestions have been made before, and several of them would need to work in conjunction with each other in order to bring meaningful change (while some might make others unnecessary):

• Invert the pyramid. Offer the greatest number of characters at the most common tiers. Opening Standard tokens is a chore if you're far enough into (or past) three-star transition, unless you have a sizeable champion farm (which is a metagame behavior, not a gameplay design decision). Provide gameplay excuses to use these basic characters more, even if the rewards aren't amazing. It wouldn't be that hard to add new PVP/PVE events with rarity locks. There are tons of Marvel characters out there, and while some of them would make fun additions to the game, many of them just wouldn't be believable at four-star or above. Who was confused that Spider-Man and Green Goblin exist as five-stars alongside characters with cosmic powers, but Sentry is a three-star?
• Release more new story events. See above. Every new character added should be required to have a tailored PVE story event to introduce them, not just a placement reward in a rerun event. If you can't hack together 8 nodes and some dialogue, you're releasing characters too frequently. More (short) prologue chapters to introduce more characters & provide practice, not just at the lowest levels. The chapters are short, but they're something. Rinse and repeat for each lower-tier character. Large new Prologue chapters could be repurposed as repeating PVE events. Alternatively, there could be the oft-requested section where any given character has a rental node with choosable power ranks, preferably against reasonably canonical opponents and presumably with no meaningful reward for winning. This would give players some firsthand experience to help inform their decision as to whether or not to sell off a semi-decent character for a completely unknown one sitting in the rewards queue.
• Add more rarity-locked content or at least incentivize using low-tier characters. This is currently present in DDQ, but with that being the only excuse to keep more common characters around, it feels a little bit ham-fisted and causes players to keep characters grudgingly. How many players have one space allocated for Juggernaut because they want to get the DDQ rewards but don't want to waste a lot of roster space? How often do they use Juggernaut outside of DDQ or Balance of Power? This becomes a metagame decision, not a game enjoyment decision.
• Allow players to use non-rostered characters from the rewards queue. (if "practice" nodes are not an option) This would be tricky to implement (and possibly disruptive) and I'm not too attached to this idea, but this would aid players in deciding whether their pending rewards are worth keeping. The character would have to be used at the lowest eligible level, but with as many covers as were present in the queue.
• Round out the existing one-star characters. For the sake of consistency, give every playable character three powers and an even level cap. Even if it's just a very plain passive power, fill that slot. This would also serve as a quicker reminder as to what a given character's third match color is.
• Resolve "Lazy" duplicates. Make distinctions between Daken, Thor, Captain America, Storm, and Human Torch. This should've been addressed long ago. It's difficult to justify keeping the diet versions of characters unless you're using them in roster-locked missions. "Gold" covers aren't a thing anymore. It's difficult to say which tier should be replaced, though. On one hand, replacing the higher-tier characters' powers would probably be more disruptive, but on the other hand, most of these characters' powers are uncomplicated enough that they sort of belong at the lower tier.
• Make every character at every tier start at level 1, -or at least greatly reduce the starting level in each tier. This is a really tricky one, but I think it would help to relieve the imbalance caused when a player recruits a much stronger character than they're accustomed to. Cover ranks could be changed so that applying the cover prevents it from expiring, but the rank improvement might not be applied until the player hits the new level cap (or at least some other defined level threshold). Thus, a fully-covered four-star character at [what we currently know as lv70] would, in practice, have the power effectiveness of a 1/1/1 at the same level until they spent the XP to rank the powers up. With this in mind, the total ISO cost to max a character could stay the same, just getting cheaper on a per-level basis so it evens out.
• Don't automatically scale difficulty based on the best parts of a player's roster. This ties very closely to the previous item. Choosing clearance levels has made events slightly more complicated, but it opens the door for allowing players to set a lower difficulty and use characters that aren't the best they have available. Maybe prizes are lower for attempting a lower difficulty, but prizes could also be higher for beating a higher difficulty with a non-optimal team.
• Offer a per-mission XP boost for characters used. After beating a node, when rewards are paid out, offer the player a little extra XP (proportionate to perceived difficulty) for each character used in the mission. It would be actual XP applied immediately, not ISO poured into the player's stash. The player would have the option to trash the XP if they're trying to maintain a softcap. This obviously could not apply to champions or characters at level cap.

odjntrade

The rebalancing isn't gonna happen because this is a whale driven game and that is their focus. Whales want more characters to spend on and more opportunities to feel like the big fish in their own pool.

I would agree they should do more by way of story missions and character utilization. When I read that part about the inverse pyramid I thought of a humorous event they could do involving mephesto swapping rarity. 1 stars get boosted by about 10x their level, 2 stars by about 5x, 3 stars stay the same, 4 stars get .2x, and 5 star .1x

Thus low rarity characters become powerhouses for a day. Throw in a joke vault with all the top rewards being 1 stars and a standard token.

Just have fun with it and take a break from the math. That's my biggest suggestion.

Crnch73

Pogo wrote:

• Release more new story events. See above. Every new character added should be required to have a tailored PVE story event to introduce them, not just a placement reward in a rerun event. If you can't hack together 8 nodes and some dialogue, you're releasing characters too frequently. More (short) prologue chapters to introduce more characters & provide practice, not just at the lowest levels. The chapters are short, but they're something. Rinse and repeat for each lower-tier character. Large new Prologue chapters could be repurposed as repeating PVE events. Alternatively, there could be the oft-requested section where any given character has a rental node with choosable power ranks, preferably against reasonably canonical opponents and presumably with no meaningful reward for winning. This would give players some firsthand experience to help inform their decision as to whether or not to sell off a semi-decent character for a completely unknown one sitting in the rewards queue.

I have been thinking this for a while. They keep spitting out new characters that we will not be able to use for quite a long time, all in the name of money (buying HP for roster spots). I have, at best, 2 characters of 4* even worth using, and that is still a stretch. Introducing a new 4* every few weeks, and we realistically get 2-3 covers total for that character... maybe 4 with the SCL progression. Still, that's not usable, and now you have to pray to RNGesus that you get more of them eventually. At the very least, they should be making the release events unique. If you can't create a new PVE event for the new character, you shouldn't be releasing new characters. It has become lazy programming in hopes of easy profit. If this rule was made, that would either keep the game fresh, or make them release characters at a more reasonable pace.

Pogo

I mean, the only real obstacle to pushing out quick cheap debut events is art assets, right? Everything else is pretty much just plugging new numerical values or new text strings into an existing framework? But most of the heavy art lifting is already done within the creation/addition of the new character. The only thing left would be map background art and node layout. That's it.

Okay, sure, there would ideally need to be a handful of lines of dialogue for each node, but that's not very taxing by comparison. Hell, how many times has a PVE rerun event had a newer character swapped into the "cutscenes" but the dialogue remains largely unchanged?

Honestly, I'm surprised Marvel doesn't demand some sort of character intro content for every new addition in order to drum up interest for the various franchises. We get pop-up ads for blu-ray releases, but what about characters who have active comic series but no video content? What reason do we have to care about them beyond the metagame?

Pogo

Specifically regarding my desire for the more common character tiers to have the largest number of characters:

I think this would also help with champion reward structure.

Now that four-stars are surpassing three-stars in number, we're going to see the same problem we see with 2/3 transition champions: There aren't enough reward avenues to get you access to every character.

With only 14 two-stars, only 14 three-stars can be acquired through champion rewards. This would be fine, conceptually, as a means for the most essential or foundational characters to be offered to a player who has very little in the way of that higher tier, but the situation was sort of flipped when moving from three-star to four-star: There was enough room for every character in the higher tier to be represented as a reward from the lower tier, but soon there won't be. Not only is it inconsistent, but it's changing in a way that doesn't seem intentional (or at least, in a way that doesn't seem fully thought-out).

Theoretically, each of the 14 two-stars could give a different character for its 3 three-star rewards, but this isn't much of a solution. First, let's pretend that Bag-Man is a normal character and that championing him is as practical and feasible as with other characters. Three rewards apiece from championing 14 characters means 42 separate instances of a non-random three-star cover being rewarded. So one more three-star character could still be added after Stephen Strange and the math would work. The big problem here is that any more changes would throw the numbers off. The also-big problem (depending on how your roster looks) is that sometimes the champion reward cover is your first exposure to a given character, and gaining three characters instead of gaining and developing one could really screw up your roster slot arrangements in a hurry. Not that champion-reward covers come particularly rapidly, but at the 2-star level they certainly can, depending on your PVP & Standard tokens. On top of that, the disparity in the number of three- and four-star characters isn't such that the same system could be applied at both transitions.

Greatly increasing the number of one-star characters would also mean that one-star champions could be implemented. Maybe only 10 levels' worth, to get early players used to the idea. a 2-star cover granted at lv53, lv56, and lv59, and at least 25HP at lv60. Remember that because the one-stars would be the most numerous cast in this scenario, it wouldn't be feasible to champ-farm those characters in a single sitting with a stack of Standard tokens, and the champion payouts would still be relatively small at that tier.

As long as each tier has more characters than the next-rarest tier, champion rewards can always remain stable. Champion assignments could either be fixed in such a way that a given character cover can only come from one specific champion, leaving the remainder characters to award rarity-specific tokens or something, otherwise certain characters could have more than one champion source. The important thing is that no character would be completely without a source (exceptions could be made for novelty/joke characters, if that trend survives).

What I would suggest is increasing each lower tier gradually until it overtakes its next-highest tier, and then not allowing the high-tier characters to outpace the low-tier characters again. Even if the new releases come at the same frequency, change them so that the lower tiers get proportionately more new characters

So if we're currently sitting at 8/14/41/41/11, and I assume there's at least 3 four-stars and a five-star in the chamber already (if not more), Add them
4,4,4,5, then:
1,1,2,3, 1,2,2,3, 1,1,2,4
1,1,2,3, 1,2,2,3, 1,1,2,4
1,1,2,3, 1,2,2,3, 1,1,2,5

...after which the count would be
23/26/47/46/13
38/38/53/48/14
53/50/59/50/15
68/62/65/52/16
83/74/71/54/17
After that fifth cycle, tier size is inversely proportional to rarity (down to the cycle, not the individual character release). That's 184 new character additions (after this writing), so obviously it would take a long time. If a new character was added weekly, this would take over 3 years.

Again, this wouldn't go over well, as it would mean only 1 out of every 12 new characters would be a 4-star or 5-star. Higher-end players wouldn't be provided with new content as often, and they'd have a chance to slot more of their missing high-tier characters (or strengthen existing characters), also meaning that the company wouldn't be able to keep high-tier players' rosters off balance.

This could only work if the lower characters were added independently from the existing 4/5 release schedule, or if multiple low-tier characters were added in the same update. This isn't a likely scenario, as it means the devs would have to devote resources to adding content that won't be in high demand (even if they chose to continue squirting out new characters without any supplemental/supporting content). Lord knows they wouldn't want to add content that isn't whale-friendly, but as I've said before this whole premise is hypothetical.

Alternate option: Instead of significantly widening every common tier, make them all contain roughly equivalent numbers. So grow from 8/14/41/41/11 to 50/50/50/50/15 or so, and then new additions can just cycle through four-star, three-star, two-star, one-star (repeating), making each new character the champion source for the preceding higher-tier addition. Five-stars could still be injected as appropriate.

I guess I'm trying to solve a problem that needed to be solved before launch (and that according to many isn't even really a problem; trying to get skinnerware and "game design" to play nicely together is an exercise in futility), and even if these suggestions were workable, the slow implementation could take longer than the remaining lifespan of the game.