Roster Slot Prices........a major problem for new rosters

bbigler

So, I have the current perspective of a new 3* roster as well as the memories of my old complete 4* roster, and the conclusion that I've come to is that the roster slot pricing scale seriously needs adjusting.  Here's my reasoning:

Since my restart 30 days ago, I've bought all of the SCL Starter Packs (5x = $98), plus 2 limited offer HP purchases ($70).  Even with this "mother load" of HP in my first month, I still need more HP for roster slots!  I really, really don't want to spend more money on HP anytime soon.  I currently have 77 roster slots, so my slot price is now 1000 HP.  I don't have any covers on the vine that need rostering, BUT........ I also currently have 130 Heroic Tokens saved, so if I were to open them all, I would certainly get some new un-rostering characters (mostly 4*s) and have a major problem of trying to roster them before they expire.  If roster slots weren't so darn expensive, then this wouldn't be a problem.  I've done my very best and I believe it shouldn't be this hard.

Since this game encourages and rewards players for rostering everyone, then I'm not considering the option of not rostering everyone.  The ideal way to play does require you to roster everyone. 

On the other hand with my old complete 4* roster I was making more HP than I needed to roster new characters, so I used my extra HP on Heroes for Hire.  In that situation, the roster slot price was workable, but it still felt overpriced. 

Here's my suggestion: cut in half the roster slot price from 1 to 75 slots, then continue that slow increase until it reaches 1000 HP at 150 slots, then keep the max cost at 1000 HP.  The real solution here is to calculate the average HP players get while they're working on each tier and make the roster slot price line up with that tier.  We shouldn't have to purchase HP in order to avoid cover waste.

Blindman13

bbigler said:

 We shouldn't have to purchase HP in order to avoid cover waste.

This is the key flaw in your whole argument. They want to push you to spend real money to avoid cover waste. That is how the game remains profitable. It's the same reason the cover save feature is not longer available when you get to 13 covers. They are pushing you to buy ISO at that point.

bbigler

Blindman13 said:

bbigler said:

 We shouldn't have to purchase HP in order to avoid cover waste.

This is the key flaw in your whole argument. They want to push you to spend real money to avoid cover waste. That is how the game remains profitable. It's the same reason the cover save feature is not longer available when you get to 13 covers. They are pushing you to buy ISO at that point.

I know that pushes HP sales, but aren't they already making a ton of money on this game?  Couldn't they be a little nicer?

smkspy

bbigler said:

Blindman13 said:

bbigler said:

 We shouldn't have to purchase HP in order to avoid cover waste.

This is the key flaw in your whole argument. They want to push you to spend real money to avoid cover waste. That is how the game remains profitable. It's the same reason the cover save feature is not longer available when you get to 13 covers. They are pushing you to buy ISO at that point.

I know that pushes HP sales, but aren't they already making a ton of money on this game?  Couldn't they be a little nicer?

Apparently not as much as they use to given the heavily monetization changes recently. I do agree though in the sense that given the amount of characters that roster slot prices should be adjusted to take into account just how many different characters you can pull now and the return of dilution...but again, probably why dilution was reintroduced to "force" sales of HP, but long term my belief is that it'll hurt more than help their revenue stream.

Personally, I spent more in my early days on HP to roster all those characters, but that was 3 years ago.

Bowgentle

bbigler said:

Blindman13 said:

bbigler said:

 We shouldn't have to purchase HP in order to avoid cover waste.

This is the key flaw in your whole argument. They want to push you to spend real money to avoid cover waste. That is how the game remains profitable. It's the same reason the cover save feature is not longer available when you get to 13 covers. They are pushing you to buy ISO at that point.

I know that pushes HP sales, but aren't they already making a ton of money on this game?  Couldn't they be a little nicer?

That IS where they make money.
Roster slots.

Blindman13

bbigler said:

Blindman13 said:

bbigler said:

 We shouldn't have to purchase HP in order to avoid cover waste.

This is the key flaw in your whole argument. They want to push you to spend real money to avoid cover waste. That is how the game remains profitable. It's the same reason the cover save feature is not longer available when you get to 13 covers. They are pushing you to buy ISO at that point.

I know that pushes HP sales, but aren't they already making a ton of money on this game?  Couldn't they be a little nicer?

I'm sorry, but that's parallel to saying "Disney/Marvel has so much money, why do they change us to see their movies? They could be nicer to us and release them for free."  If they didn't charge people to see the movies, then they wouldn't have the money to make more.

If they drop the cost of the roster slots, and players aren't pushed to spend money on them, then they stop making money.

mega ghost

While I'd love cheaper roster slots, I agree with sentiment that it will never happen. They specifically designed the game so that we are always at a deficit of something. To get around that deficit we either need to spend money, or be very patient and lose covers — they're of course banking on the former.

Huntah86

I think you're trying to run before you can walk here. I get why you bought all the starter packs and you've spent enough money in a short amount of time to feel like you should be able to progress more but to do everything you want to do all at once is gonna cost a lot more money unfortunately.  Personally, I'd open up heroics until I have a cover that isn't rostered and I don't have the HP to roster them.  Let it sit on the vine until you can open up a new spot rinse and repeat.  In order to sprint in this game you have to spend A LOT of money. It can be frustrating though, I remember having to throw away a bunch of 4* and 3* covers when I first started and it took months and months to fix the mistake of pulling two 5* and leveling them before I was ready but eventually you get to a point where you're pretty much caught up with everything or it at least becomes very manageable.

Jaedenkaal

It occurs to me that lots of HP buying doesn't really solve anything earlier in the game; sure, you get a boost of roster slots early on, but no real increase to your daily HP income, so those next roster slots are further away than ever.

Cover waste is simply a fact of life earlier in the game. You'll just have to take comfort in the fact that those few 4* covers you have to sell probably won't have mattered that much in the long run anyways.

The rockett

Just wait until 300+ then they are 2K HP.  It is really insane how much they are and the price they go up with a new release every 14 days.  Currently I have 248 slots and it keeps going.  Will have 275 by the end of the year it seems. 

Dormammu

Whenever the game encourages us to take part in a survey, they always ask the following question:

On a scale of 1-10 how likely are you to recommend MPQ to someone else?
Answer: 0

Why?
Answer: Dilution and the cost barriers that represents for new players.

I've played mobile games with ridiculous price points. In fact, it's getting worse and worse out there. But MPQ is among the top for getting as little as possible for your money. That's not to say I haven't spent, because I have, but dilution has made the value of any kind of purchase do very little in the modern game.

$100 for roster slots. There was a time when that was all you needed to get caught up and let normal HP gains take it from there. Now with the current dilution, after slots start costing 1000 HP, $100 gets you less than 1/8th of what you need.

$100 for vault purchases. There was a time when that could get you a fully-covered 3-star or two and get you where the real action was. Now with the current dilution, all that will get you is a load of 2-stars and a few 3-star or 4-star characters with one cover each, but you can't roster them because you'd need $800 to get enough roster slots.

A hundred bucks is a lot of money to me, and I'm a middle-class adult. I'm sure it means a lot more to a starving college student. A hundred bucks should represent advancement in a mobile game - it should means something and elevate your play. But dilution in MPQ has turned a hundred bucks into nothing. Prices for HP should be going down as dilution rises, because the ridiculous inflation is only getting worse every two weeks.

evade420

or they should just have roster slot sales more frequently, and 50% would be better than the 20% off we got last time

randomhero1090

@Dormammu

Yeah, that about nails it.  I've spent far more then i'd like to admit.  But willingly.  I'm having a lot of fun with it, but as a newer player, I don't see how you can even want to keep playing WITHOUT spending money.  You would waste so much in terms of resources it wouldn't even be funny.

The amount of time & money needed to get going is kinda staggering.

animaniactoo

The problem, imo, is that you have access to way too many characters, way too quickly. And it feels like a serious burn when you can't roster the new character that you just "won" as a placement prize. It is discouraging to say the least.

All attempts at managing it without sinking massive amounts of money into the game, early in your game tenure, are damaging.

Don't open tokens - you don't get the covers you need to level up and improve your characters.

Open your tokens and accept having to regularly sell off covers for iso, and you JUST MISS that character will be featured as essential 2 events from now and you don't have them rostered and won't get all the bennies.

It's not about some pressure to spend a little money (works well in a F2P game), it's the pressure to spend a *lot* of money or be really frustrated.

Again, I think the solution to this is limiting how many/what characters are available by S.H.I.E.L.D. level. Leverage the SHIELD rank to segment the game and let early rosters build a limited set of characters and get them to useable positions in a period that feels like you're really getting somewhere. As you go, you get access to more characters by leveling up. Theoretically handing out Elite tokens instead of Heroic tokens addresses this, but it's a teeny rubber stopper trying to plug a huge hole in the side of the boat given the number of 3*s in the game, and the fact that you CAN accumulate Heroic tokens sooner than later.

bbigler

Huntah86 said:

Personally, I'd open up heroics until I have a cover that isn't rostered and I don't have the HP to roster them.  Let it sit on the vine until you can open up a new spot rinse and repeat.

That thought occurred to me today.  I wait until I have 1000+ HP and then start opening Heroics until I get an un-rostered character.  If I opened my entire HT hoard now, I'm predicting I would need about 9 more slots.

bbigler

Dormammu said:

Whenever the game encourages us to take part in a survey, they always ask the following question:

On a scale of 1-10 how likely are you to recommend MPQ to someone else?
Answer: 0

Why?
Answer: Dilution and the cost barriers that represents for new players.

I started playing MPQ in Nov 2013; 3* progression was super slow back then.  DDQ fixed that mostly, but then 4* progression was like a pipe dream.  They continued to make improvements to progression for new players which included vaulting in 2017, and then I saw a new player champ a 4* in 2 months!  Because of vaulting, many new players were thinking about skipping over the 3* tier. 

Anyway, part of the reason I wanted to restart was to experience that super fast progression that I never had back in 2014.  Champ rewards made the entire system build upon itself tier by tier, which I like.  Of course, I hear a lot of complaining about 4* dilution on this forum, so I'm looking forward to seeing how big of a problem that is when I get there.  I will be able to state definitively if it's a major problem or not for new players.  I would judge this by whether or not I get into a situation where the biggest impediment to progression is getting 4* covers. 

The biggest impediment to new players is HP for roster slots.  While building the 2* tier, I was ISO hungry.  Now that I'm building the 3* tier, it appears that acquiring ISO and 3* covers is equivalent.  I'm guessing that building the 4* tier will be a Cover Hungry situation, but we'll see.

MarkersMake

/shrug, if you started 2 years ago, a sample of, say, 500 heroic token pulls might get you 50 different characters. Now that same set of pulls might get you 75 due to dilution. I'm sure someone could easily run a simulation to pin down the actual numbers. 

It's not unreasonable to ask for a change in early phase roster slot costs to account for that. It is a bit unreasonable for veterans not take that into account.

Sure, there should still be *some* cover waste, but I don't see the merit in arguing that there should be *more* waste for new players now than there used to be. 

JHawkInc

I do agree that roster slots are too expensive for newer rosters, but I think they should just move the cost around a little, rather than outright making them cheaper. Just change the curve while keeping the same overall totals the same, so maybe roster slots 20-50 are a little cheaper overall, but the curve is steeper up from there than current progression.

The sheer number of 3's and 4's a newer roster might acquire once they get north of 20 roster slots (and have the 1's and 2's from the Prologue's guaranteed covers and standard tokens), and even if you try to hoard and minimize waste (assuming a new player thinks to do that on their own, as most get into the game a little ways before heading to the forums or reddit to get advice), you're going to pull way more new characters that need slots than you are covers for existing 3's and 4's to advance your roster.

So make those earlier slots cheaper, both to benefit the free players (to keep them around longer), and to encourage spending (as you get more bang for your buck on early roster slots). But then you relocate that cost, so by the time you've got 80-some roster slots, you've spent the same as players on the current curve, so there's no need to retroactively do anything for the existing playerbase.

Of course, there may be better way to handle things (and part of me wouldn't be surprised that the daunting cost of roster slots early on actually encourages people to spend a little, which just means that free players are doomed to suffer).

Overall, I think there are improvements that could be made, but I disagree that we things should get cheaper to avoid waste, because the pressure of waste is what drives purchasing and keeps the game alive in the first place.

spatenfloot

bbigler said:

Huntah86 said:

Personally, I'd open up heroics until I have a cover that isn't rostered and I don't have the HP to roster them.  Let it sit on the vine until you can open up a new spot rinse and repeat.

That thought occurred to me today.  I wait until I have 1000+ HP and then start opening Heroics until I get an un-rostered character.  If I opened my entire HT hoard now, I'm predicting I would need about 9 more slots.

That is the proper way to do it, but the problem is that it isn't fun. New players want to get those characters and use them.

Huntah86

bbigler said:

Huntah86 said:9

Personally, I'd open up heroics until I have a cover that isn't rostered and I don't have the HP to roster them.  Let it sit on the vine until you can open up a new spot rinse and repeat.

That thought occurred to me today.  I wait until I have 1000+ HP and then start opening Heroics until I get an un-rostered character.  If I opened my entire HT hoard now, I'm predicting I would need about 9 more slots.

Thats what I was doing when I was firmly in 4* land but had lots left to champ. It ends up being a lot of fun when you crack a small hoard! Just try to stay ahead of the HP burn.

DAZ0273

Unfortunately, this is where you come to the Catch 22 of Marvel Puzzle Quest.

On the one hand – Roster slot costs and Iso shortages are intended barriers to advancement in the game – the former in the earlier stages and the latter in the 4* phase (with only really CP being a barrier to the 5*). On the other hand – the game, sometimes quite aggressively, wants you to roster all characters and level them as high as you can, all of which requires resources being spent as fast as they are obtained until you reach a certain level in the game.

Of course, as there is very limited advice to new players about managing their roster in game, we end up quite often with players with several 5* characters over levelled but with an under developed 2 & 3 star tier which hinders Pve and destroys PvP for those players. Those players have spent resources, possibly in-game and in real life but are now stagnated.

Cheaper roster slots might help with this also meaning you can make more mistakes with your roster and not suffer. However, for the Dev’s any early HP purchases are important for the game because it acclimatises players to the games economy and I can’t see the Dev’s changing that. Once you feel it is OK to spend $20 (or more) on a mobile game, there is a good chance you’ll do so more than once.