Recent Quality Drop

XandorXerxes

Devs,

I still like your game (or am otherwise unknowingly addicted to it, either way it suits your corporate overlords), but there have been a lot of recent issues that make me feel like something is slipping:

• Some characters powers are still broken: Phoenix , Venom immediately come to mind. I'm sure there are more out there that I'm just not familiar with (others feel free to chime in)
• 3* Thanos is... absolutely terrible. I know you have to gut the 5* version to make the 3* version, but I really wish you had just never made this version. His PvP was the opposite of fun (I take 1300-2600 damage a round for winning? Thanks!), and his black power is wildly inconsistent in what it does when you level it (it gets worse, then kindof better). Which leads me to...
• Recent QA efforts. I'm not quite sure how Thanos made it through, just like I'm not quite sure how a bug that breaks a large number of character's powers makes it to production. Based on what my limited theorycrafting abilities see as well, we're definitely seeing some rapid power creep in each tier (minus Thanos).
• No character stats being published. I'm willing to blame the holidays on this one, but we're waiting on stats for three characters now.

Can we take a breather, fix the bugs and broken powers, lower the range of power tiers (IE make less powerful characters usable) across a given star-level, and figure out what's going on with QC that some of these huge bugs aren't being caught?

Regards,

XX

broll

I don't know about recent. I've been playing for about a year and it seems like every other update (if not every update) breaks something and that's been status quo most of the time I've been playing. I concur with the OP. I would rather have quality over quantity. If you can't reliable release updates/content at the speed you are then please slow down. I'd much rather see 1 update every 4-6 weeks bug free than an update every 2 weeks that almost always breaks something for that 2 week cycle...

Fightmastermpq

I'd post this in the appropriate character discussion thread but it doesn't exist....the fact that it doesn't exist fits in quite well with this thread so I'll mention it here.....

The worst part about 3* Thanos is that more often than not he will do more damage to your own team than the enemy team. I can appreciate the element of team damaging abilities - Carnage, Sentry, Ares, etc. have all been highly valued characters at one point or another because they are able to put out very large amounts of damage/AP with the drawback of taking some self damage. You have to use a bit of strategy to deal with it - especially over prolonged use. I get it. But all of those characters do significantly more damage to the enemy than to your own team.

With Thanos you typically kill the first character and trigger Court Death doing slightly more damage to the enemy team than yourself. Fine. But then when you kill that 2nd enemy it triggers again and your team takes full damage while the enemy team only has 1 character left taking damage. So if you were to tally up all the damage done more often than not your own team is taking more damage than the enemy team. That's just poor design. During the event we saw tons of people using strategies meant specifically to incapacitate the Thanos ON THEIR OWN TEAM. Several people built him with 0 black covers, others were using the loaner instead of their own shiny newly released character. I saw guys running PunMax over champed 5*s so they could use his green to stun Thanos. I even saw one guy running PunMax with Silver Surfer who can't be stunned - and likely never got to use the beefed up Army of One ability - the best part of a boosted PunMax.

I'm a big fan of having to find new strategies to overcome certain team combos - it's part of the Puzzle aspect that makes the game so good - but they really missed the mark on this one I think.

Crnch73

Agreed whole heartedly. In my opinion, I believe fixing any QA issues (and maybe releasing something we really want) would bring in more money than a new character release. Granted, new characters are basically the only thing that keep whales interested, but I can't see whales spending more than the 1000HP to roster the new 4*. After that, their spending probably dries up a little. Me, on the other hand? I would gladly send money your way for resources... but only if the resources could be spent on something that mattered!

After Carol, I pray there will be no new releases until the major bugs are fixed, and then no new releases until a good feature is introduced to the player base. I can't promise to ever spend like a whale, but I feel like 10,000 people paying $20 is better than 100 people spending 500, no? Also, the quantity of people spending small amounts of money is an easier business model to build around. Obviously you never want to piss off your best customers, but a broader customer base with a small peak is always preferable to a narrow base and a tall peak. Econ 101 (and architecture 101, sorta)

Jabrony_Geoff

Boss Rush and 3* Thanos have tarnished the name of MPQ.
They brought the game into disrepute if you will.
If there is no official word on 3* Thanos's court death then I will sell him without a seconds hesitation.

Ill wait one week.

TetsujinOni

3* thanos court death has a few choices: 0 black, 3 black and run a slightly longer match with an AoE partner to make Court Death only fire zero to one times in the match, 5 black and similar strategies.

He's a challenging character with a passive MASSIVE DAMAGE power. His first PvP was actually more pleasant to play through than Spidey was. Let's see how his second one works before you get torches and pitchforks. (though i did have to dump health packs into a 5-red build of XFool far more often than I was happy about, it was STILL better than Spidey with no boosted champ 4*s)

Much like Agent Venom, the obvious ways to make the character shine are tough.

Crnch73

let's not get off track here. Thanos is just the tip of the poor-decision iceberg that the MPQ dev's have created.

We want true QoL improvements. More so, we want bugs to be fixed, especially in a timely manner. Then, after all of that, we want new characters, preferrably not sucky ones at that. They need to start operating under a proper order-of-operations.

TetsujinOni

Crnch73 wrote:

let's not get off track here. Thanos is just the tip of the poor-decision iceberg that the MPQ dev's have created.

We want true QoL improvements. More so, we want bugs to be fixed, especially in a timely manner. Then, after all of that, we want new characters, preferrably not sucky ones at that. They need to start operating under a proper order-of-operations.

Day 380-something.

QoL improvements to the UX, ISO flow improvements, HP income through play increases have all rolled out this year. SCL 9 and 10 being delayed is still annoying me.

I'm in product management and software engineering; the fact that there is obvious technical debt in the test corpus at Demiurge is an issue which would require a massive slowdown in content that inspires spending to remediate.

So far I'm preferring Thano3 to Sentry in terms of interesting play decisions.

Jarvind

3* Thanos doesn't actually bother me that much, to be honest. Yeah, his black is poorly designed and his purple is very close to useless, but like most 3* characters I'll barely use him unless he's essential anyway, so whatever. Another source of champ rewards.

I'm more concerned with the fact that we're on like a 4-patch streak now of "we fixed a thing but we broke another thing in the process." Like...dude.

I'm on day 500-something and I definitely don't remember patches being this much of a clusterkitty for the first year or so. I dunno if something was outsourced or what but it's gotten dramatically worse over the last few months.

That said, ISO flow has improved significantly and the last few characters have been fairly interesting so it's not all bad.

Dragon_Nexus

TetsujinOni wrote:

3* thanos court death has a few choices: 0 black, 3 black and run a slightly longer match with an AoE partner to make Court Death only fire zero to one times in the match, 5 black and similar strategies.

He's a challenging character with a passive MASSIVE DAMAGE power. His first PvP was actually more pleasant to play through than Spidey was. Let's see how his second one works before you get torches and pitchforks. (though i did have to dump health packs into a 5-red build of XFool far more often than I was happy about, it was STILL better than Spidey with no boosted champ 4*s)

Much like Agent Venom, the obvious ways to make the character shine are tough.

Thing is, it's not just his black that's a problem. Even though at 3 and 4 covers he does more AoE damage in passive to *your* guys than the enemy...which I can only assume is a mis-type of data or a bug.
His purple sounds good on paper, but then you realise it's weaker than Vision's blue and required him to tank a lot.
His green is a long-**** countdown timer than can be easilly gotten rid of and when it does fire it does less damage than either Kamala or Thor's green, two characters you'd absolutely pick over him.

He's just a thoroughly mediocre character through and through.

Bowgentle

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

He's just a thoroughly mediocre character through and through.

It's not like we didn't have quite a few of those when the 3* tier was still a thing.
There's always been stinkers in every tier.

Straycat

Thanos makes some sense in that while he hurts your team, he can tank with his green. So that could protect them while hopefully the green fires and finishes the enemies together. The % is the problem with his purple. Even if he tanks all colors, that extra damage doesn't make his weak colors strong and it doesn't boost his green AOE or black passive. It could have been nice if it boosted all damage by a set amount like Vision. The damage in court death makes no sense as everyone has pointed out. The announcement said it did even damage to both, which it basically does. Strange did good damage but had no health, Thanos has all the health but does more harm than good usually.
Still tho, we are basically one 3 day and one 7 day event out from Galactus and mad titan events where everyone was pretty happy about everything.
I disagree about the quality drop, and lightly disagree about the rate of releases. I remember a 2 week period where it seemed people were getting antsy about nothing new happening. We can play with bugs (starlord brings recharge back to 6, problem solved) but stagnation makes a repetitive game more repetitive.

Calnexin

Jarvind wrote:

3* Thanos doesn't actually bother me that much, to be honest. Yeah, his black is poorly designed and his purple is very close to useless, but like most 3* characters I'll barely use him unless he's essential anyway, so whatever. Another source of champ rewards.

I'm on the same page, but I do see something useful here. Pair Thanos with Carnage on offense. Thanos purple can stop Carnage's tile mods and save some health. On defense - I'm not sure I'd hit that. Combo them up cheap B/Y actives to give attackers a big headache. Vision is probably the best choice for cheap powers to trigger Carnage.

Just imagine facing that. Who do you target first? The android who might start stomping you for 5x match damage, and fuels attack tile generation? The attack tile generator that's almost as dangerous to his own team as yours and is being fed by cheap powers? Or the character with powerful team damage countdown, but is almost as much a threat to your team as theirs?

The design certainly is odd. I can see it working with a bunch of true-healers or as a signoff in PvP.

Tony_Foot

I don't like Thanos but it's hardly the end of the world. No one forces you to champ him and even if you do, you can use him once every 40 pvp's. Not everyone has to be top tier or even mid tier.

I'm enjoying the game more than ever tbh.

Fightmastermpq

Tony Foot wrote:

I don't like Thanos but it's hardly the end of the world. No one forces you to champ him and even if you do, you can use him once every 40 pvp's. Not everyone has to be top tier or even mid tier.

I'm enjoying the game more than ever tbh.

IMO he isn't bottom tier, he is broken. Anyone that on average will passively do more damage to his own team than the enemy team is not just bad, but broken.

Jaedenkaal

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

His green is a long-**** countdown timer than can be easilly gotten rid of and when it does fire it does less damage than either Kamala or Thor's green, two characters you'd absolutely pick over him.

In the interests of keeping this thread as factually accurate as possible:

5 covers of Come and Get Me does ~28% more damage than 5 covers of Embiggened Bash at the same level against any number of targets

5 covers of Come and Get Me does 44%/28% more damage than 5 covers of Call the Storm (at the same level) against 3/2 targets. Against a single target it does very slightly less damage than Call the Storm (96%) but I don't think that's really the point. It does cost 2 AP less as well, so the damage/AP is slightly better at all levels.

Thanos does have the disadvantage of not generating his own Green AP, however, which is where Thor and Kamala really get the edge. But in the conditions stated above ("when it does fire") it absolutely does the most damage vs 3 targets of any 3 team damage power (barring shenanigans with World Rupture)

Lampo

Guys, do you know you can just NOT use Thanos?
That's incredible, I know.
Does he suck? (yes) Just don't use him. Don't even roster him. Leave a free place for the next 4*, who is coming in 2 weeks, probably.
Problem solved.

"And what about events when he is required??? OMG, I'll lose sooo many points and prizes!"
Well, just skip them. You'll survive, I can guarantee. You were not born with all the charachters, so you passed through this once. Relax.


About the rest, I'm at day 440, and during my first year I've seen bad things (too many new charachters, too many repost charachters, some just bad charachters, several bugs, some very bad organized events) and good things (good charachters, championing, shield clearance level, HIGH increase of ISO flow - do you remember when we used to win 20 ISO??? It was less than 1 year ago... and you still complain about ISO... - some very nice events).
I think the game is getting generally better, the developers are trying to help us (especially with the ISO thing). Still there is a lot they could do, obviously, but I don't feel a big loss of quality. Sometimes improvements are better, sometimes they are not really improvements. Just wait until the new fixings, and eventually things are gonna be better