VentureBeat article: How MPQ is making its money

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

I have a 5B spidey where starting off with +2 blue can make more sense than +3...

I don't agree. If I have +3 blue with a 5B Spidey, all I need is one blue match to tie up the whole team, which is important if you're trying to control the board early. At +2, you'd still have one angry enemy left...

Unknown

Knock3r wrote:

Does anybody just use one +1 boost?

Not here, with the exception of the Heroic event boosts. I never use more than 1 of those. It costs 500 HP to repurchase a stack of 5 of these.

I've had to train myself to not +5 boost the match damage bonuses, as players burn through those quite quickly. I keep those to +3, just as the same as the +AP boosts.

I can already see the boost screen in R52...

Full stacks of boosts auto-deployed from the boost screen with the green, vivid "Boost More" button becoming a dull, grey "Boost Less" button that will be easily overlooked.

After all, if the masses can't care enough to click the "Boost More" button when they can actually see it, why would they ever click a "Boost Less" button that they are very likely to outright miss?

Spoit

We’ve seen large swings in the economic performance of our consumables as we adjust pricing, but we think the largest improvements are going to come from updating our consumables to provide greater value to the player. More on that as we update the game!

Any guesses what that means? My money is +damage for doombots at the incredible bargain of 500 HP a boost. FF damage for only 1k a boost!

Unknown

Part 6 focuses on Alliances and how they're trying to increase its player retention:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/24/marvel-puzzle-quests-road-to-the-mythical-1-arpdau-part-6-alliances/

Interesting quotes:

While this series focuses on ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user), the reason Marvel Puzzle Quest is successful is that our game does a good job of encouraging spending over a very long period of time. We like it that way — rather than fostering an ecosystem of whale-centric burst spending, we covert players steadily. We believe we’re providing a valuable service to our players, and they reciprocate by throwing us a few bucks every week. The data bears this out — about 8 percent of our players in March spent money in the game, and a healthy portion of our revenue is coming from players who started playing way back in October.

This just reinforces the fact that this game isn't pay2play or pay2win. 92% of its players didn't spend a dime in March! And don't forget, March is when they ran their last sale too.

Essentially, if every player in an Alliance kicks in $0.25 worth of hard currency (which they can also earn), the alliance can expand. Even without any gameplay, many of our players still opted to spend their precious hard currency expanding their alliances! Currently, this spend makes up 1 percent to 2 percent of the daily hard currency spend in the game.

This goes back to the pie chart in the first post. Alliance costs make up only 1-2% of their revenue.

Because we believe that players who engage with the social mechanics in the game are inherently more valuable to us than those that don’t, we decided our KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for Alliances would be the percent of our active players who are in alliances.

Hence the push for Alliances with Alliance-only rewards and Alliance daily rewards.

This change has one big downside that we will eventually need to combat — the rich keep getting richer. All gameplay patterns follow a power-curve, but Alliances actually make that curve even steeper. The best players coalesce around the top Alliances leaving everyone else behind. As our player-base matures, we’ll eventually implement mechanics to combat this pattern but for now we’re happy to have a world where our best players are organizing online and enjoying some exciting competition.

Oh snap, Al is talking about you, S.H.I.E.L.D and 5 Deadly Venoms!

Bowgentle

Yeah, good luck trying to mature your player base with the way you're handling PVE right now.

mischiefmaker

Something I didn't quite understand:

This change has one big downside that we will eventually need to combat — the rich keep getting richer. All gameplay patterns follow a power-curve, but Alliances actually make that curve even steeper. The best players coalesce around the top Alliances leaving everyone else behind.

Our hope is that this will encourage socialization outside of the game with players actively kicking underperformers out of their alliances and recruiting higher-end teammates.

Isn't the thing they hope to encourage exactly the thing they said they'll need to fix later?

Also, very interested to see what they do to address the first issue. It would be great if I didn't have to choose between playing with my real-life casual friends and competing for top rewards. One way this could work is to have alliance rewards be like loot from raids in MMOs -- there's one piece of super sweet gear that everyone wants but only the top people really need, and then a bunch of pretty good gear that the top people already have but still represents a significant upgrade for everyone else. For example, if the top alliance reward were, say, 3 4* covers (assuming 4* covers are more like Nick Fury, less like Invisible Woman), 10 3* covers, and 20 2* covers, with the Commanders getting to decide who gets what, that would both increase socialization and allow competitive alliances to take in up-and-coming players without feeling like they're being held back.

Unknown

They need to be careful. If this game becomes much more cutthroat than it already is they're liable to burn a lot of people out on it very quickly. Encouraging alliances to get more mercenary will make people less loyal and vested in the alliance, not more.

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Yeah, good luck trying to mature your player base with the way you're handling PVE right now.

Part 7 is going to discuss PvE scaling as a performance metric... this is going to be good.

VentureBeat wrote:

Next up, we’ll get back to numbers with a close look at how we measure event performance using some newly-implemented metrics.

Someone, go upload the "Colbert Eating Popcorn" GIF.

KaioShinDE

When they fix the one-sided alliance reward issue (and they need to, get over it), I just hope they won't do it as heavy handed as they "fixed" people with maxed Spideys dominating PvE, aka introducing a mechanic that punishes you for playing well.

Coming up next to alliances near you: 5 man alliances get a x 5 alliance score multipier. You heard it here first.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

They need to be careful. If this game becomes much more cutthroat than it already is they're liable to burn a lot of people out on it very quickly. Encouraging alliances to get more mercenary will make people less loyal and vested in the alliance, not more.

I agree - although it's not just the alliances but the players that they're encouraging to get more mercenary.

mischiefmaker wrote:

Commanders getting to decide who gets what, that would both increase socialization and allow competitive alliances to take in up-and-coming players without feeling like they're being held back.

Oh tinykitty no. The last thing we need is to import the MMORPG Raid Loot schemes into MPQ.

Knock3r wrote:

This just reinforces the fact that this game isn't ... pay2win. 92% of its players didn't spend a dime in March! And don't forget, March is when they ran their last sale too.

Actually, it doesn't do anything of the sort. Just because only 8% pay doesn't say anything about the relative performance of those players. I'm not asserting that the game is or is not pay2win, but you're interpreting the data incorrectly.

What I find more interesting is this: they're chasing after $1 ARPDAU. or $30/month per DAU. If only 8% pay, that means they're chasing $375/month per paying DAU.

Yikes.

Unknown

"Because we believe that players who engage with the social mechanics in the game are inherently more valuable to us than those that don’t, we decided our KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for Alliances would be the percent of our active players who are in alliances."

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Thanks for telling those people who aren't into alliances or spamming their facebook friends that they're less important customers to you.

Unknown

Lyrian wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Yeah, good luck trying to mature your player base with the way you're handling PVE right now.

Part 7 is going to discuss PvE scaling as a performance metric... this is going to be good.

VentureBeat wrote:

Next up, we’ll get back to numbers with a close look at how we measure event performance using some newly-implemented metrics.

Someone, go upload the "Colbert Eating Popcorn" GIF.

vudu3

Essentially, if every player in an Alliance kicks in $0.25 worth of hard currency (which they can also earn), the alliance can expand. Even without any gameplay, many of our players still opted to spend their precious hard currency expanding their alliances! Currently, this spend makes up 1 percent to 2 percent of the daily hard currency spend in the game.

Oh, if only this were the case. But it's not.

Players can't contribute to an "alliance HP pool"--alliance spots can only be purchased by a single commander. This means that unless one or two people are willing to pay for all the spots in an alliance you're going to end up with more commanders than non-commanders in any decently-sized alliance.

I'm in a 20 man alliance and we have 13 commanders. It's fine for now but I'm a little worried about the future--what do we do in a couple months if some of the commanders are no longer daily players? It will greatly reduce the chances of my alliance ever reaching the top 100 again.

Unknown

vudu3 wrote:

Essentially, if every player in an Alliance kicks in $0.25 worth of hard currency (which they can also earn), the alliance can expand. Even without any gameplay, many of our players still opted to spend their precious hard currency expanding their alliances! Currently, this spend makes up 1 percent to 2 percent of the daily hard currency spend in the game.

Oh, if only this were the case. But it's not.

Players can't contribute to an "alliance HP pool"--alliance spots can only be purchased by a single commander. This means that unless one or two people are willing to pay for all the spots in an alliance you're going to end up with more commanders than non-commanders in any decently-sized alliance.

I'm in a 20 man alliance and we have 13 commanders. It's fine for now but I'm a little worried about the future--what do we do in a couple months if some of the commanders are no longer daily players? It will greatly reduce the chances of my alliance ever reaching the top 100 again.

THANK YOU for mentioning this. It's very misleading the way this was put. I think an HP pool is a great idea and should already have been implemented. It would really solidify the team aspect of the alliance and distribute the monetary burden of buying new slots onto all members of the alliance, which I think works best for everyone.

Nemek

vudu3 wrote:

I'm in a 20 man alliance and we have 13 commanders. It's fine for now but I'm a little worried about the future--what do we do in a couple months if some of the commanders are no longer daily players? It will greatly reduce the chances of my alliance ever reaching the top 100 again.

I know you're not really asking for a solution to having all of these commanders, but support will de-commander people if you need it to happen. Probably need to be the alliance creator, though.

Unknown

Nemek wrote:

vudu3 wrote:

I'm in a 20 man alliance and we have 13 commanders. It's fine for now but I'm a little worried about the future--what do we do in a couple months if some of the commanders are no longer daily players? It will greatly reduce the chances of my alliance ever reaching the top 100 again.

I know you're not really asking for a solution to having all of these commanders, but support will de-commander people if you need it to happen. Probably need to be the alliance creator, though.

Yep, I went through that process and they fixed it within a few days.

Unknown

I commandered several people so they could buy slots, but didn't want any of the new commanders to do anything weird like kicking original members who weren't commanders. So they got commandered also....yes we have far too many commanders and may be a problem in the future, oh well...

At least with the daily iso reward you can quickly see if everyone played or not each day and will actually notice if someone dissapears.

And I built my alliance on a principle, and that was people who wanted to join me can stay as long as they like, doubly so for those who helped us expand. I will not ever be kicking anyone to try to find someone worth more points, just makes me a little sad they came right out and said that is what they want alliances to act like...

Linkster79

Essentially, if every player in an Alliance kicks in $0.25 worth of hard currency (which they can also earn), the alliance can expand.

I call horse manure on this one. From day 1 of expansion everyone was asking for a way to pool resources to spread alliance slot costs. This was ignored and individuals had to stump up the costs.

Unknown

The final piece of the 8-part series will be sure to not disappoint interested readers. It talks about the changes to the Cover store, the guaranteed covers, and the 40 pack.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/15/marvel-puzzle-quests-road-to-the-mythical-1-arpdau-part-8-card-store-overhaul-redux/

Interesting quotes:

In Part 2, we discussed the importance of the writing within the store. In just a few words, you need to communicate the value proposition to the player. This new store layout has much more thoughtfully placed text boxes and actually cuts down on the total amount of text quite a bit.

Most of the player base still don't understand the "800 HP off" text under the 40 pack. Maybe you needed a little more text...

In previous events, our card store featured a pack of 10 cards for about $20 USD that was guaranteed to drop the featured character for the event. That’s unusual for card battlers. Typically, this is the newest, most exciting prize for players. In this latest revision of the store, we removed the guarantee while keeping the expected number of featured characters about the same. For many developers at Demiurge, this was a crazy idea. Many of us figured that the entire value of the 10-packs of cards was that they included a guaranteed character in them, but we were fairly unusual in our design here, so we decided to adjust the system. This change went live prior to the visual overhaul, and the results were phenomenal. The first event to feature this new design was a huge success despite having relatively simple content and no new character on sale. We’re not sure why players preferred this system, but we suspect the answer is a simple one: the uncertainty of opening packs is part of what makes them fun! If, in World of Warcraft, the boss was guaranteed to drop the loot you wanted, I suspect the game would be less engaging overall. Theoretically, you could apply the same principle to card battlers.

Who are these people??? Would you rather pay $20 for a pack that's GUARANTEED to have what you want, or a CHANCE to have what you want? Probably not likely, but what if you did spend $70 on the 40 pack and not pull the feature cover you wanted?

Your No. 1 risk is fun. It’s not technical, it’s not monetization — it’s good old-fashioned game design. The challenge of mobile and free-to-play is keeping your players engaged. The best way to accomplish that is to make a joyful, compelling experience. Creating content that players will be enjoying months after they first start is genuinely challenging. That’s a truly wonderful thing to ask your team to worry about. It is, after all, why we all got in making games in the first place.

Joyful, compelling content? This must be referring to before scaling was implemented.

Unknown

I'm honestly starting to wonder if those of us on the forums just have nothing in common with the rest of the people playing the game.