3 events running but can't play (and MPQ news from PAX!)

Nemek

There are a handful of pictures on the official MPQ FB page of the booth, including one pretty good spidey costume:
https://www.facebook.com/MarvelPuzzleQuest?ref=br_tf

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

It wouldn't, but I feel like he's a main factor behind why the devs chose specific design decisions that resulted in the out of control scaling that we saw. If he was nerfed, then I would imagine that the devs are more okay with toning down scaling and such.

I believe that the devs have at most a very basic understanding of how scaling affects gameplay. Take progression rewards as an indicator, we haven't been able to even reach the midway point for several events in a row now. If the intention was that all progression rewards should be attainable that shows a very worrying lack of insight in how the game is played, paired with a very worrying lack of flexibility to abandon an approach that failed miserably.

I'm very worried that the Spiderman nerf, possibly in combination with an OBW nerf, will make healing up your team between fights next to impossible. You'll still get scaling, up to the point stated as "ideal" where every fight almost downs your entire team. This will make the game for any somewhat progressed roster unplayable, you get one fight out of each maxed character, plus five individual retries due to health packs. Then it's either 8 hours downtime waiting for the 720 health/hour regeneration to finish or pay to continue playing.

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

I believe that the devs have at most a very basic understanding of how scaling affects gameplay.

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively). They understand it and its scaling better than any of us forumites. It's like when people watch their football team lose and say the coach doesn't know how to set up a defensive lineup.

Moghwyn wrote:

This will make the game for any somewhat progressed roster unplayable, you get one fight out of each maxed character, plus five individual retries due to health packs. Then it's either 8 hours downtime waiting for the 720 health/hour regeneration to finish or pay to continue playing.

And I disagree with this. They have had the option of doing this for a long time - they could give us one health pack and make us pay for more or they could not create character that heal but they have one healer for 2star and one healer for 3stars. Also, health packs are a very small fraction of their profits.

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

It wouldn't, but I feel like he's a main factor behind why the devs chose specific design decisions that resulted in the out of control scaling that we saw. If he was nerfed, then I would imagine that the devs are more okay with toning down scaling and such.

I believe that the devs have at most a very basic understanding of how scaling affects gameplay. Take progression rewards as an indicator, we haven't been able to even reach the midway point for several events in a row now. If the intention was that all progression rewards should be attainable that shows a very worrying lack of insight in how the game is played, paired with a very worrying lack of flexibility to abandon an approach that failed miserably.

I've been on a crusade to try and correct this misinformation. Scaling had nothing to do with missing the progression rewards. It was the unchecked rubberbanding that caused the missed progression rewards. The vast majority of players are affected by scaling, but only a fraction of the players help determine the rubberbanding effect. And due to unchecked rubberbanding the grinders weren't incentivized to push onward and upward, and so progression rewards remained out of reach.

And that's because the devs are trying to balance multiple goals - keeping events competitive over the entire duration of the event, and adequately rewarding people for playing the game (i.e. placement rewards vs. progression rewards). The last couple events skewed towards the former goal, while before that we had events that skewed towards the latter. Of course, no one bothers to remember the events where the top 10 was determined days before the end but most people got every progression reward).

DD-The-Mighty

Riggy wrote:

Moghwyn wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

It wouldn't, but I feel like he's a main factor behind why the devs chose specific design decisions that resulted in the out of control scaling that we saw. If he was nerfed, then I would imagine that the devs are more okay with toning down scaling and such.

I believe that the devs have at most a very basic understanding of how scaling affects gameplay. Take progression rewards as an indicator, we haven't been able to even reach the midway point for several events in a row now. If the intention was that all progression rewards should be attainable that shows a very worrying lack of insight in how the game is played, paired with a very worrying lack of flexibility to abandon an approach that failed miserably.

I've been on a crusade to try and correct this misinformation. Scaling had nothing to do with missing the progression rewards. It was the unchecked rubberbanding that caused the missed progression rewards. The vast majority of players are affected by scaling, but only a fraction of the players help determine the rubberbanding effect. And due to unchecked rubberbanding the grinders weren't incentivized to push onward and upward, and so progression rewards remained out of reach.

And that's because the devs are trying to balance multiple goals - keeping events competitive over the entire duration of the event, and adequately rewarding people for playing the game (i.e. placement rewards vs. progression rewards). The last couple events skewed towards the former goal, while before that we had events that skewed towards the latter. Of course, no one bothers to remember the events where the top 10 was determined days before the end but most people got every progression reward).

I was never here for those days. I want them back. But im afraid if they did, they would just remove all the covers from progression and replace them with diminishing value tokens.

LordWill

pandaberry6 wrote:

Moghwyn wrote:

I believe that the devs have at most a very basic understanding of how scaling affects gameplay.

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively). They understand it and its scaling better than any of us forumites. It's like when people watch their football team lose and say the coach doesn't know how to set up a defensive lineup.

Moghwyn wrote:

This will make the game for any somewhat progressed roster unplayable, you get one fight out of each maxed character, plus five individual retries due to health packs. Then it's either 8 hours downtime waiting for the 720 health/hour regeneration to finish or pay to continue playing.

And I disagree with this. They have had the option of doing this for a long time - they could give us one health pack and make us pay for more or they could not create character that heal but they have one healer for 2star and one healer for 3stars. Also, health packs are a very small fraction of their profits.

I think Moghwyn has it right. Maybe to put it another way, scaling affects us WAY more than it affects the devs. Sure some evil person created and coded it, but it doesn't mean that they understand what its like to play under those grueling conditions. Look how many events people couldn't play because of it. How many level 230 fights would you need to go through before you said, hey this isn't fun anymore?

Also I haven't really seen any threads on people saying they need more challenge. Where is it? How do they even arrive at that conclusion? I haven't seen any public outcry that everyone is bored to tears...

DD-The-Mighty

LordWill wrote:

Also I haven't really seen any threads on people saying they need more challenge. Where is it? How do they even arrive at that conclusion? I haven't seen any public outcry that everyone is bored to tears...

First off they really only take minimal feedback from forums. if any. and to answer your question, they're slowing down progress to ensure you play more. they themselves stated they want you to max out everything before you move on to a new cover or higher tier. anyone who has maxed anything higher than 1* knows that ALOT of io and time, given the current slow roll out of specific covers. In the beginning it was to pad out the minimal content. Now its just to do it. its the one deplorable aspect of all micro-transaction based games, that few devs ever work around.

Unknown

pandaberry6 wrote:

Moghwyn wrote:

I believe that the devs have at most a very basic understanding of how scaling affects gameplay.

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively). They understand it and its scaling better than any of us forumites. It's like when people watch their football team lose and say the coach doesn't know how to set up a defensive lineup.

They know the nuts and bolts of how their functionality works, they have the user statistics, etc. But that doesn't mean they know how something will work in real world scenario. For example, scaling got out of hand in Thick as Thieves tournament and IceIX admitted they did not run into those issues on their small scale testing environment.

Puritas

pandaberry6 wrote:

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively).

Errr
I can think of a fair number of players who put well over 40 hours a week into the game

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

Also I haven't really seen any threads on people saying they need more challenge. Where is it? How do they even arrive at that conclusion? I haven't seen any public outcry that everyone is bored to tears...

Hahaha. I thought the same thing when I heard that the levels were going up to 400. Luckily I have lost my entire team so many times in heroic venom that i have not seen any level 400 baddies around.

Puritas wrote:

pandaberry6 wrote:

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively).

Errr
I can think of a fair number of players who put well over 40 hours a week into the game

They go under the obsessively category. Or mods. You could call them either.

Unknown

Puritas wrote:

pandaberry6 wrote:

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively).

Errr
I can think of a fair number of players who put well over 40 hours a week into the game

Yeah, all those fitted kitchen freaks, they are out of control. They are responsible for rubberbanding, Russians invading Ukraine, IceIX not being Asian, and hawkeye token drop rates of 15%. Someone has to stop them!

Unknown

pandaberry6 wrote:

Sorry man but I strongly disagree with this. it's their game. They go to work for 40+ hours a week on this game whereas we play it for fun occasionally (or obsessively). They understand it and its scaling better than any of us forumites. It's like when people watch their football team lose and say the coach doesn't know how to set up a defensive lineup.

It's rather like watching a marathon where the participants were expected to arrive at the goal within an hour. I strongly believe the progression rewards were intended to be reached, probably not by most of the players but at least by some of them. This hasn't happened the past few events and won't happen for the current event, it's going to be missed once again by a very large margin. The devs have had enough experience with rubberbanding to factor it in correctly. Which other game mechanism would you attribute the obviously unexpected lack of participation during the past few weeks to?

pandaberry6 wrote:

And I disagree with this. They have had the option of doing this for a long time - they could give us one health pack and make us pay for more or they could not create character that heal but they have one healer for 2star and one healer for 3stars. Also, health packs are a very small fraction of their profits.

This doesn't seem to have come across the right way. I wasn't talking about health pack related profits, just that all signs currently point towards having to buy health packs in order to stay competitive. To quote IceIX from one of the recent scaling threads:

"Player 1 can fight 230s but will come out of it pretty damaged. They're the intended audience for "230s = HARD"."

This essentially says that your scaling has reached the intended level once every fight gets you down from full health to pretty damaged. If you come out less than pretty damaged your opponents are supposed to scale up until you do, by design. As a result this severely limits how much you can play, one fight per hero, unless you have ways of healing up. With Spiderman getting nerfed this may leave health packs as your only option to play more than twice per day for a short period of time.

IceIX

Moghwyn wrote:

"Player 1 can fight 230s but will come out of it pretty damaged. They're the intended audience for "230s = HARD"."

This essentially says that your scaling has reached the intended level once every fight gets you down from full health to pretty damaged. If you come out less than pretty damaged your opponents are supposed to scale up until you do, by design. As a result this severely limits how much you can play, one fight per hero, unless you have ways of healing up. With Spiderman getting nerfed this may leave health packs as your only option to play more than twice per day for a short period of time.

I'll note that this is meant to be that 230s are the difficult fights for Player 1, not that all fights are supposed to be 230s for Player 1. We intend that characters get injured during every encounter. We do not intend for players to have to drop Health Packs after every encounter.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Moghwyn wrote:

"Player 1 can fight 230s but will come out of it pretty damaged. They're the intended audience for "230s = HARD"."

This essentially says that your scaling has reached the intended level once every fight gets you down from full health to pretty damaged. If you come out less than pretty damaged your opponents are supposed to scale up until you do, by design. As a result this severely limits how much you can play, one fight per hero, unless you have ways of healing up. With Spiderman getting nerfed this may leave health packs as your only option to play more than twice per day for a short period of time.

I'll note that this is meant to be that 230s are the difficult fights for Player 1, not that all fights are supposed to be 230s for Player 1. We intend that characters get injured during every encounter. We do not intend for players to have to drop Health Packs after every encounter.

At those high levels "injured" and "health pack" are one and the same.

Also your scaling system should tank into account goon missions. Just because you come out unscathed from a goon mission doesn't mean it was "easy." It could have required some really luck cascades and fortunate play to avoid being smashed by a flamethrower or rocket.

Unknown

Injuried is most definitely not the same as health pack. It feels like because if the opponent has Daken or any cheap combination of enemies then you better start with full health, and this event is full of such combinations. But you most certainly do not need full health to fight Yelena 3 times in a row.

The scaling needs to account for the fact that there are rather significant differences in the missions even though the scaling factor seems universal. Just because you can beat Yelena doesn't mean you're able to beat Daken. I'm guessing we're seeing nasty combinations of enemies everywhere because these missions still seems to be designed to fend off Spiderman, who isn't even usable. Even Bullseye + 2 Pyros is plenty tough when you don't have your usual bag of cheap tricks on your side, so we really don't need Daken showing up on every other mission.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Injuried is most definitely not the same as health pack. It feels like because if the opponent has Daken or any cheap combination of enemies then you better start with full health, and this event is full of such combinations. But you most certainly do not need full health to fight Yelena 3 times in a row.

The scaling needs to account for the fact that there are rather significant differences in the missions even though the scaling factor seems universal. Just because you can beat Yelena doesn't mean you're able to beat Daken. I'm guessing we're seeing nasty combinations of enemies everywhere because these missions still seems to be designed to fend off Spiderman, who isn't even usable. Even Bullseye + 2 Pyros is plenty tough when you don't have your usual bag of cheap tricks on your side, so we really don't need Daken showing up on every other mission.

Actually Yelena being fed purple by the goon has been my worst fight. Deadly Recon every other turn means I cannot build enough AP to do anything. Every turn I'm thinking, "Don't you want to shoot a pistol? Please shoot a pistol."

Unknown

jozier wrote:

IceIX wrote:

Moghwyn wrote:

"Player 1 can fight 230s but will come out of it pretty damaged. They're the intended audience for "230s = HARD"."

This essentially says that your scaling has reached the intended level once every fight gets you down from full health to pretty damaged. If you come out less than pretty damaged your opponents are supposed to scale up until you do, by design. As a result this severely limits how much you can play, one fight per hero, unless you have ways of healing up. With Spiderman getting nerfed this may leave health packs as your only option to play more than twice per day for a short period of time.

I'll note that this is meant to be that 230s are the difficult fights for Player 1, not that all fights are supposed to be 230s for Player 1. We intend that characters get injured during every encounter. We do not intend for players to have to drop Health Packs after every encounter.

At those high levels "injured" and "health pack" are one and the same.

Also your scaling system should tank into account goon missions. Just because you come out unscathed from a goon mission doesn't mean it was "easy." It could have required some really luck cascades and fortunate play to avoid being smashed by a flamethrower or rocket.

yea, thats the problem at the high levels. you are either killed or you win pretty much damage free.

It's been mentioned a bunch that this only effects a small number of people but I would wager a larger portion of that small number of people are active on the forums. and the new level cap pretty much targets that small number of people because they are the only ones that had high PvE MMR before this event.

As far as play testing goes. does anyone on the dev team take a roster from one of the high level players and actually try to win an event? It might make a great data point as far as how these changes affect us.

It just doesn't feel like these changes are informed as far as what it takes to play these events at a high level.

Unknown

Progression rewards with a rubberband has to be hard to balance.

Too high: people realize early on that it is going to be unattainable and don't bother with the extra grind/effort if the returns are not worth it.
Too low: nearly everyone rubberbands to the leader and rakes in sweet rewards.

I can't blame them for setting the bar a little too high after the progression rewards from the hulk.

Would be awesome if they could implement more hands on progression rewards structure. Leave spots grayed out so the reward and points needed are unknown until you crack the tier below it and the dev's can come in behind the scenes and manually set the levels where they think they should be on a daily basis instead of guessing how many points we will as a community go for 10 days in advance.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

I'll note that this is meant to be that 230s are the difficult fights for Player 1, not that all fights are supposed to be 230s for Player 1. We intend that characters get injured during every encounter. We do not intend for players to have to drop Health Packs after every encounter.

Thanks for the update. So this essentially boils down to what "injured" means. From what I was able to observe, scaling seems to go down if your team loses at least 50% total health, it seems to go up if your team loses at most 33% total health. There's obviously some margin for error here, not every change to the internal scaling counter directly results in level adjustments, ballpark numbers should be about correct though. I might also not have been able to take all counter measures to prevent intentional scaling reduction into account.

Some thoughts:
50% full health loss scaling: If my team is at half health, I won't try another fight that is supposed to cost me 50% full health, waste of time and boosts.
33% full health loss scaling: If my team is at two thirds health, I'm very unlikely to try another fight that is supposed to cost me 33% full health. Damage usually isn't distributed evenly, meaning one team member is very likely to get downed in this situation, significantly reducing the odds of winning the fight at all.
25% full health loss scaling: If my team is at 75% health, I'd most likely try another fight that is supposed to cost me 25% full health. I'd probably pass once that second fight brought me down to half health.

In the very best case (which I was unable to observe) this would mean getting at most two reasonable fights out of each character, which technically fits "We do not intend for players to have to drop Health Packs after every encounter". Is this about correct?

DD-The-Mighty

davecazz wrote:

yea, thats the problem at the high levels. you are either killed or you win pretty much damage free.

It's been mentioned a bunch that this only effects a small number of people but I would wager a larger portion of that small number of people are active on the forums. and the new level cap pretty much targets that small number of people because they are the only ones that had high PvE MMR before this event.

As far as play testing goes. does anyone on the dev team take a roster from one of the high level players and actually try to win an event? It might make a great data point as far as how these changes affect us.

It just doesn't feel like these changes are informed as far as what it takes to play these events at a high level.

Its not a small number. This is not just a "high level" problem. You seem to be leaving out the fact that the vast majority of lower level players are not packing fully covered and leveled characters.

Even though my enemy levels may top in the 100s in hard and high doubles in "easy". I'm having the same experience as you, even though my ai levels are lower.
The Vast majority of non capped character players are losing as much as you are due to incomplete characters as opposed to your endgame scenario of being constantly out leveled by the Ai.
same result 2 different methods.

This issue is far too prevalent across multiple PVE's. No matter how much better you get your roster; the game seems to increasingly kick your teeth in. It never lets up. It may be safe to say this is the intended purpose.