Upcoming Patch Preview - R40

IceIX

Hello Everyone!

We're excited to announce some big improvements to Marvel Puzzle Quest that are planned for our next update, R40.

Leveling up Character Abilities Is Getting Easier
We've heard from many players that it is too difficult without spending money to level-up the two and three star characters. This had the odd side-effect of making the one-star characters the most useful even though we want our players to graduate to two and three star characters regardless of if you're spending money on the game. Here's what we're doing to make it easier:

Daily Rewards
Each day you play you'll get the next in a series of rewards including tokens that allow you to take a roll from "Recruit Heroes" without using your precious Iso-8 or Hero Points. Best of all - unlike many free-to-play games, if you miss a day we will not reset your progress.

Cover Pack Tokens
We've created a new type of reward, a Cover Pack Token. These will be given out in various places throughout the game - event rewards, mission rewards and our new daily rewards. We hope this will allow more players to experience the fun of cracking open a new cover. Since we're going to be giving out a bunch more cover packs, we will also likely be increasing the costs of of those cover packs in the future.

More Missions
We know many of you have already earned many of the rewards in the game. In the coming weeks, we're going to be rolling out the first "Episode" of the game. We can't say much just yet but suffice it to say, there's gonna be loot there!

Easier Farming
We're going to change the way missions rewards are calculated to make it easier for you to farm all of the rewards from a mission. You'll be seeing less of the dreaded "20 Iso-8" reward!

The Big One: Reduce the Number of Covers you Need from 20 to 5
We've heard two big complaints from everyone about the current ability system:

- Getting your two and three star characters upgraded is too hard - You don't like it when an ability level upgrade doesn't do anything

In response, we're removing the minor upgrade steps and cutting back the number of covers you need to max-out an ability from 20 to 5.

Best of all, your existing characters will all be "rounded up" to the next tier! If you were 45% of the way through the upgrade path on an ability, it'll get bumped up to 60%. The conversion table works out like this:

Old Ability Progress			 New Ability Progress
Level 1 (5%)						Level 1 (20%)
Levels 2 - 5 (10% - 25%)		Level 2 (40%)
Levels 6 - 10 (30% - 50%)	  Level 3 (60%)
Levels 11 - 15 (55% - 75%)	 Level 4 (80%)
Levels 16 - 20 (80% - 100%)	Level 5 (100%)

To offset this in the game's economy, we've reduced the number of covers available in the Prologue missions.

The maximum ability points you can have will drop from 50 (for three-ability characters) to 13. This makes those specialization decisions more meaningful so choose your upgrades wisely!

Ability Upgrade Resources
We know that some of you prefer to spend Hero Points to upgrade your characters rather than acquiring covers as rewards or from cover packs. We've also heard that the escalating resource costs feel unfair so we're changing that - each step of an ability upgrade will take the same number of hero points. For two and three star characters the total number of hero points needed to max-out an ability is somewhat reduced. Because we've cut back the number of covers needed so dramatically, we're removing the ability to upgrade one-star characters' abilities via Iso-8. Our intent with these changes is to shift the emphasis from spending resources to seeking out new covers from cover packs, mission rewards and events. You will also be getting more cover packs through the daily reward system.

"Level" Will More Accurately Reflect Character Power
Starting with this release we've changed the way Character Level works to more accurately reflect how effective a character is. Many of you have probably noticed that a level 5 two-star character is way better than a level 5 one-star character but that it's hard to tell "how much better?". This discrepancy makes it tough to evaluate a Versus or Single-Player fight and we want to make that comparison easier. There are a bunch of changes that we made to the game in order to make this change possible:

• Your 2+ star characters are all going to show up as a much higher level. Their other stats remain completely unchanged. • Two-star characters now start at level 6, three-star characters now start at level 15. • Even though the max level is increased for 2+ star characters, the Iso-8 required to level-up a character all the way is unchanged. There are more levels, but those levels require less Iso-8. • This change, coupled with the ability leveling change, means that each ability upgrade will now grant a bigger bump in the number levels you can train after upgrading an ability.