Forum thread

zeroswitch

<6mos

Just started, my previous time-sink was Marvel Heroes Omega (which died late last year, for reasons that are better not gone into here.)    So I needed a new Marvel game fix.  Quite like MPQ!      Not a fan of the recent UI change, but still playing.

Dragon_Nexus

48mos+

I loved Puzzle Quest and I enjoyed Puzzle Quest 2, though admittedly not as much. Didn't like the shift from country-spanning adventure to dungeon crawler.

Then suddenly on the front page of Steam there was Marvel Puzzle Quest in their new releases banner.

I like BOTH those things! And it's free! Even better!

I remember early on googling to see how you get more ISO because I wanted to max out Storm and iron man and black widow ASAP.
I have a rough idea for when I joined, I believe they had an introductory offer soon after launch where the DLC was reduced. I bought the Nick Fury's Doomsday Plan on 25th January 2014.

Dragon_Nexus

48mos+

aesthetocyst said:if you need suggestions for favorite runs from the past I'm sure the forum can help.....hey, thats a good thread idea....

Read Thor from 2015 onwards.
I'm not bias, honest ¬¬

wardenda

48mos+

I found out about it because I had a friend that would show up as playing it and he got me turned onto it.

MisanOne

48mos+

2,616 hours. Day 1273.  Played competitively for awhile and now i'm more casual.
I start most every day with a cup of coffee and MPQ.

Mortalo

24-36mos

24-36mos

I don't remember how I found it. I had some Puzzle Quest games in a library or similar and some Marvel games, so it probably just hopped to the screen once.

Warbringa

36-48mos

I found the game on Steam after playing a bunch of other Puzzlequest games.  Steam recommended it to me.  I knew it was F2P with microtransactions since the game was free to download and I love Marvel.  I decided to still give it a shot and that is how I got hooked!  I was F2P at the very beginning but I did drop some funds early for HP for roster slots.  I bought my first stark salary just when they were removing the ability to buy covers using HP lol.  

1.) If they want to increase the Steam base (and mobile players too possibly) they need to do a few things:

Offer Steam players two choices - a free to download version as is, and a $49.99 version with all kinds of additional resources to allow them to get a nice head start jump.  I think that, due to the nature of the game, you get a lot of people who start but then quit playing after a short time.  Give them a chance to advance quicker earlier on and you may get them to stay.  I think for $49.99 you could give them a ton of iso and HP to start and maybe a few fully covered 1* and 2*.  Steam would promote the game more with a $49.99 option since they get a cut of that and MPQ gets a nice boost from the remainder after Steam's cut.  They then have a better chance of retaining that player who has initially invested money and has jumped out to a nice head start.  Let's be honest, if you gave a player 1 million iso and 30,000 HP and let them be able to jump right into the 2*-3* meta, I think you would get people hooked on the game yet they wouldn't be impacting the game significantly.  You would have to explain the difference on the Steam screens between the resources you get by paying to start vs. F2P download (and what those resources mean and how good of a deal it actually is for $49.99).  Steam users would also post the differences on the forums, for those who would take the time to look into it.  Perhaps they should also attempt that on other platforms.  A buy in price with huge resources attached, since it can only truly help new players (as long as there are no account mergers etc. allowed).  The Steam packages they offer are clearly not a big enough resource package to give new players a huge edge.  

The biggest hurdle I have in recommending this game is the how long it takes a new player to be able to truly enjoy and develop their roster.  I know most of us have gone through that but would you really recommend a friend to start playing the game now with how long it would take them to just fill out their 3* roster?

Re-evaluate their in-game economy:

A big reason that I think people quit the game is that they never truly feel like they are making progress.  A large part of that is due to the ability to gain resources vs. the cost of building a roster.  Most new players get discouraged by the lack of ability to roster all character covers they receive (unless they spend a lot of $ in HP early) and intermediate to older players by the lack of iso.  As the game has gone through various iterations, there has been very little change to the in game economy other than adding additional resources (CP, etc.)  The game truly needs some modifications to iso and HP.  If they want to make more money(from all player bases) they need to offer a whole lot more on their store for in-game HP and iso purchases.  In what other game can you spend a $100 and receive so little of actual use? Make VIP a pay to play for something other than just small monthly rewards.  Offer another game mode or game enhancing abilities (ie like cover swaps etc.) for being a VIP member.  The problem is if you keep VIP as is, you will lose a lot of VIP payers if you enhance the store benefits.  In order to make purchasing of iso and HP a good new source of $ and not lose it in VIP, you really need VIP to offer something else rather than just 25% extra healing and some rewards.  I know this is a big change for the game but this really should have been done years ago and now here we are. 

Neuromancer

36-48mos

I started playing when it was first released, but took over a year off due to burnout. Came back casual.

I was a Puzzle Quest fan, and a Marvel fan. Two great tastes that taste great together, but I wish the gameplay matched the original Puzzle Quest more closely.

Daiches

aesthetocyst said:

So, a couple of new faces (hiya fellas!), but overall, the responses skew to the old.

Old games attracting loads of new players is already tough, playerbases dwindle, and this one certainly has.

Looks like the best way to make Steam players a larger part of the playerbase (to fulfill the requirements of the cynical dev comment) it to outlast the mobile players and be the last ones still hanging around

"OK, look, it's been 10yrs. There are only 20 of us left, 8 on Steam. We're 40% of the playerbase. Can we please have our interface back now?

Answer back from dev:
"Look, I have to design, draw and code a new release every two weeks to coincide with the new movie coming out. And it's getting really hard to find obscure characters and variants from old backissues for the midweek releases. I'm already spent on drawing so many pouches from the last 18 Rob Liefeld releases. AND I have to handcrank the servers while managing our Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Discord, Tencent, forums, basically anything but Line, social media. I'm just one guy, you know."

hopper1979

48mos+

I heard about the game on steam and played on in since day 1 on steam, but I have never seen it marketed or talked about on steam since its initial release.