Puzzle Quest vs. Strike Force

Daredevil217

So, I only have time really to play one phone game as obsessively as I do MPQ. I still very much enjoy MPQ, but beyond that is the sunk cost fallacy I’m stuck in. I haven’t spent a lot of money but I have spent a ton of time and am set to champ 4* #60 (Howard!) on Sunday. I’m definitely on that iso treadmill. And I know if I hop off I risk falling behind as new characters are constantly being churned out. 

So I’m just asking those who have played MSF for their take on the game. I may download it and give it a try myself but with so many people mentioning it thanks to Infinity-Gate, I figured a thread dedicated to those considering the switch would be warranted.

To me it would have to be a pretty significant upgrade to consider abandoning ship due to my enjoyment of MPQ plus time invested, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued. Could be cool to be there on the ground floor (kind of?) for once.  I’m not sure how long it’s been out and how “far behind” I’d be.  I don’t even know the premise of the game. 

Ducky

**Moved to the Other Games: General Discussion forum as the thread isn't really discussing MPQ**

tfcrazy1980

Isnt that a marvel contest of champions character?

Hadronic

I tried it and deleted 20 minutes later
too many animations for me

NeonBlue

It's one of those games that is still trying to balance, as the power gap between characters is pretty high. MSF has a lot of hidden mechanics and like 5 different currencies. It's also a game run on a Stamina system, so it becomes about optimizing your available play time.

Also, unlike MPQ the game encourages playing throughout the day instead of in blocks of time. Whereas MPQ gates you heavily after you PvE and PvP up to a point, MSF rewards the grind more

gmtosca

I'm playing Galaxy of Heroes, which is basically MSF but in a galaxy far, far away.  It still fun but I'm waiting for the point where it's going to become a chore (like what happend with GoH) and...dread it, run from it...it still arrives.

Also, I'm not sinking any money in MSF.  Especially since they have weird offers, like part of the community weren't offered a deal on Cap (I was but it disappeared in a few hours), I wasn't offered a deal with Black Widow, etc...

twistmonkey

To the OP - many MPQ vets are playing MSF at the moment and loving it!

In MSF its significantly less play time per day vs MPQ, and also it's split out during the day (not at set times) so you don't have to spend 1h 30mins in a block doing PVE end grind and new sub clears.

That and the alliance raids are great fun, require ally planning and actual coordination/ team work.

I've been playing ~2 weeks and loving it. It's a new game with a fairly new community which is always refreshing.

My time with MPQ definitely feels like it's coming to an end - the actual mechanics of matching 3 I still enjoy, it's just the game that's been built around it that is stale, time consuming and ultimately at the moment very unrewarding. FYI I'm a day ~1300 player and have probably sunk in the hundreds of £ over the 3.5 years I've been playing.

bigsmooth

I would echo @twistmonkey - I am in the 5* realm in MPQ and it has become, quite frankly, boring. I know that I don't have to use Thor/Gambit in every PVP/PVE node, but the game does not give me any incentive to use anyone else (from a rewards perspective). That makes it hard not to use them, since they're the fastest option available.
I still like the game, but the allure of collecting new characters (or even leveling up my existing roster) has diminished significantly in the last few months - I feel like I am grinding for ISO to re-champ 3*s and champ 4*s that I won't use much, while collecting 5*s is still primarily an exercise in RNG.

MSF has modes that strongly encourage the use of your entire roster and you end up naturally trying new combinations of characters. I find that the overall time required each day as a mostly F2P player is less than MPQ, and you don't really have to set aside large blocks of time to play if you don't want to. RNG and grinding are still issues (as you might expect in any F2P mobile game) but you can auto-win nodes you have already beaten to try and farm rewards. If you like the Marvel license and you are looking for something new, it's definitely worth a try.

PuceMoose

Yep another vote for Marvel Strike Force - I decided to give it a shot, since I enjoyed spending a little bit of time with the old "Alliance" games before they were unplugged.

It has some fantastic animations (playing on an iPad air) - I suspect I'd disable/speed them up if I ever tried to be remotely competitive, but they're quite varied and fun. The fact that there's at least a rudimentary ragdoll/physics system make for some occasionally impressive/amusing animations. I once had Luke Cage punch Punisher so hard that his head got stuck in a dumpster, while his body jerk and windmilled around for a few seconds. The auto-win system is great, and completing the daily objectives doesn't take long. I also like the fact that the Alliance/Blitz modes only require *complete*, and not *win* - sometimes the arena/blitz  matchup system likes to only match you with opponents that you have almost no chance against, so it's nice that even a hopeless loss results in objective clearing for the daily objectives.

scottee

So I tried Strike Force. Gave it a good shot, about 1.5 months worth. Got almost to the level cap of 60 at the time (level 59).

And then I quit.

There's lots of fun parts. But the grind became not that fun after a point, because to make meaningful progress in the later stages takes too long. Now, it's not as long in actual time as in MPQ, but you either invest in your top characters, because they're the ones you use all the time, or you invest in one new character at a time, which takes forever and then makes them only marginally better than your other top characters. 

On top of that, the devs are crazy bad over there. Here, we'll nitpick bad decisions, but it's nothing like what's going on over there. Check the MSF reddit, vets are leaving en masse. It's seriously jacked up. Two of the worst offenses? A/B testing by giving half the players significantly more gold per day than the other half, ON THE LIVE SERVER. That can't be done. The other controversy, giving a youtuber (a bad one at that) a ton of free resources to boost their roster, again, ON THE LIVE SERVER. So he's taking top placements from others.

There's countless threads on reddit of how bad it is, and it's been getting worse. (Like 2 hour raid windows that you have to coordinate with your entire alliance. Yeah right.

So I'm back with MPQ as my only mobile game. There's definitely better animations over there, and the gameplay in each match is more fun. But the long term relative stability of MPQ shouldn't be underestimated. As much as the forums have had uproars over the years, it's still all been a pretty fair game environment, with very little injustice. Lots of things players don't like, sure, but very little injustice.