New Event - Support Circuit Updated (1/28/19)

n25philly

Just what this game needs, to take even longer to get through.  I'll most likely be passing on this

Spudgutter

Dormammu said:

Spudgutter said:

Dormammu said:

When this game was launched there wasn't enough to do. "Marvel Puzzle Quest is so fun!" we said. "But there's nothing to do except repeat the Prologue nodes over and over for 20 ISO!" Now we complain that the game is a 'grind' and there's too much to do. That it takes up too much of our time.

Let me say a few things about that:

• You don't have to place 1st to progress
• You don't have to clear every single node in every possible event to progress
• You don't have to clear events/subs with absolute optimal timing to progress
• You can take a whole event off (gasp!) and the world won't end
• You don't need every single support at rank 5 level 250 right now this minute gimme gimme gimme

We have been whining and griping about the lack of support availability for 9 months. Here is our answer. As Brigby has stated it is not the final answer, it is the start of our answer. Do you want more support tokens? Here is an event where you can get some. Don't want to grind out optimal clears? Hey, no problem, there's tokens in progression that you can get. The point is, we now have a path to more support tokens if we want them. Don't care about supports? Already have enough supports to cover the 3 characters you use in PvE? Great! You don't have to 'grind' this event out every week.

Here's an idea: before we tear the developers a new one before this new game mode has ever even run, let's wait to try it out. After we've played around with it and see how everything pans out, then we can go internet-mental and start screaming: FAIL! GRIND! THIS SUCKS!

So, in response to a lot of us saying we cannot easily obtain the rest of the supports being created, instead of just adding them to the existing token pool (something they already do every season with 4* and 5* to LT), you are saying their ideal solution would be to create all new content (something else we are always clamoring for, tbf), that makes supports for the most part still just as hard to get?

And your suggested solution for those of us that are not happy is to not play this knew type of event, thus we dont get to participate in new content with the added bonus of also still not getting more supports?

Um, no? I didn't say any of those things. I said play if you want, don't if you don't, and let's maybe see how this goes and if it generates more supports before we decide its an utter failure.

I do think players here feel as though if they don't get 100% of every resource placement/progression prize in every event available that they are missing out and get upset about it. Playing and having fun is then replaced by obligation and responsibility. I don't know about everyone else, but I play MPQ to avoid my obligations and responsibilities.

Let's not split hairs.  

Dormammu said:

We have been whining and griping about the lack of support availability for 9 months. Here is our answer. As Brigby has stated it is not the final answer, it is the start of our answer. 

Dormammu said:

• You can take a whole event off (gasp!) and the world won't end

Great! You don't have to 'grind' this event out every week.

I get the defense, i really do.  I have no problem defending good ideas that are poorly implemented.  I defended the first versions of vaulting and wins based pvp because i could see the benefits to them.  They benefited more people, and those were more likely to be newer/beginner players, which we need to maintain for the overall health of the game.

Sure, there are parts of hyperbole and over reaction here and there, but if the answer to get more supports is to again lock out a lot of them (only 16 at a time i think i saw?), combined with gating them in a 240 item vault that you cannot stockpile, with literally no guaranteed ones except for the super hard core, how is that "our answer" to getting more supports?

jackstar0

Hey Haves, did you want some more?

Cool.

moss04

After this event was announced in the post talking about new ways to get supports I was very excited and hopeful and very eager to hear details.  Now that the details have been outlined here all of that hope and excitement has been dashed against the rocks and killed in a bloody soaking mess with the corpse just floating in the sea.

Only 3 out of every 1000 people in these events will get support tokens from them.

That.
Is.
Awful.

I do not understand why the designers would make an event that is supposed to address the frustration that players feel having had no decent way of getting supports after all of these months and months after they were introduced only to design the rewards like this.  It is beyond flabbergasting. Why? Why?

Dragon_Nexus

Dormammu said:

When this game was launched there wasn't enough to do. "Marvel Puzzle Quest is so fun!" we said. "But there's nothing to do except repeat the Prologue nodes over and over for 20 ISO!" Now we complain that the game is a 'grind' and there's too much to do. That it takes up too much of our time.

You're treating it like a zero sum.

Either we're bored because there's nothing to do, or there's too much of the same thing over and over.

We're all trying to get the developers to create a middle ground. Something to do that doesn't require a huge time dedication. This new event is a singular sub-event with no individually boosted 2, 3, 4 or 5*s (making CL8 and 9 much harder without that boosted 5*) that...is running alongside an existing PvE? Have we established if that's the case?

It's not what we wanted from something like this. It should be short, sharp and snappy. Get in, get some Riso and tokens, get out, see you next week. Much like DDQ.

Once again the issue of support design seems to be causing problems. The "I've got a 5*, I no longer need to pull this support" design scuttles the availability. If you make them too easily obtainable, everyone will get all of them and find there's nothing left to collect. Make them too rare and people forget they exist (the current issue). I feel a fundamental overhaul of the way Supports work would have been better, but we're too far gone from that point.

But I digress. There were ways of making a new event that wasn't a time sink. A grind is only a grind if you feel the time ticking by as you're doing it. If you play something like Monster Hunter, for example, you can maybe spend 2 hours killing the same monster for its delicious carves, but since the fights are so dynamic you don't always notice the time you're pouring in. But with MPQ it's more apparent. Hit the same team four times, now his this same team four times, each time using the same strategies. Variety needs to be built in. We need new gameplay styles, not just *yet another* PvE event that functions identically to the existing ones.

Yepyep

moss04 said:

After this event was announced in the post talking about new ways to get supports I was very excited and hopeful and very eager to hear details.  Now that the details have been outlined here all of that hope and excitement has been dashed against the rocks and killed in a bloody soaking mess with the corpse just floating in the sea.

Only 3 out of every 1000 people in these events will get support tokens from them.

That.
Is.
Awful.

I do not understand why the designers would make an event that is supposed to address the frustration that players feel having had no decent way of getting supports after all of these months and months after they were introduced only to design the rewards like this.  It is beyond flabbergasting. Why? Why?

From all the evidence so far, the answer has to be: they want supports to be an extraordinary possession (unlike characters). Coupled with their profusion, it would seem that they envision an environment in which players have little in common with each other w/r/t their respective support collections. The existence of unicorns' unicorns like Infinity gems and Skeletor's Sword, it seems to me, reinforce this read... In other words, supports will function to fragment the player base's power sets and, arguably, break the logjam at the top of the placements for those events in which supports can be used.

DFiPL

Dormammu said:

Do you want more support tokens? Here is an event where you can get some. Don't want to grind out optimal clears? Hey, no problem, there's tokens in progression that you can get. The point is, we now have a path to more support tokens if we want them. Don't care about supports? Already have enough supports to cover the 3 characters you use in PvE? Great! You don't have to 'grind' this event out every week.

Except this isn't accurate. This isn't accurate even a tiny bit. This is an event where 3 people in every thousand can get more support tokens, and the other 997 are heavily reliant on RNG to give them a support token instead of Obligatory Moonstone.

There is no path here. Not for 99.7% of players.

An infinitesimal fraction of that 99.7% will trip over one left lying around courtesy of vault RNG, but everybody else is getting a reduction in the red Iso-8 they DO get from duplicates in exchange for...bupkis.

This isn't the start of the answer. This isn't even the preamble to the prologue to the start of the answer.

New content? Great! But trying to spin it as a supports solution is ignorant at best.

DAZ0273

Dragon_Nexus said:

Dormammu said:

When this game was launched there wasn't enough to do. "Marvel Puzzle Quest is so fun!" we said. "But there's nothing to do except repeat the Prologue nodes over and over for 20 ISO!" Now we complain that the game is a 'grind' and there's too much to do. That it takes up too much of our time.

You're treating it like a zero sum.

Either we're bored because there's nothing to do, or there's too much of the same thing over and over.

We're all trying to get the developers to create a middle ground. Something to do that doesn't require a huge time dedication. This new event is a singular sub-event with no individually boosted 2, 3, 4 or 5*s (making CL8 and 9 much harder without that boosted 5*) that...is running alongside an existing PvE? Have we established if that's the case?

It's not what we wanted from something like this. It should be short, sharp and snappy. Get in, get some Riso and tokens, get out, see you next week. Much like DDQ.

Once again the issue of support design seems to be causing problems. The "I've got a 5*, I no longer need to pull this support" design scuttles the availability. If you make them too easily obtainable, everyone will get all of them and find there's nothing left to collect. Make them too rare and people forget they exist (the current issue). I feel a fundamental overhaul of the way Supports work would have been better, but we're too far gone from that point.

But I digress. There were ways of making a new event that wasn't a time sink. A grind is only a grind if you feel the time ticking by as you're doing it. If you play something like Monster Hunter, for example, you can maybe spend 2 hours killing the same monster for its delicious carves, but since the fights are so dynamic you don't always notice the time you're pouring in. But with MPQ it's more apparent. Hit the same team four times, now his this same team four times, each time using the same strategies. Variety needs to be built in. We need new gameplay styles, not just *yet another* PvE event that functions identically to the existing ones.

There is a lot of truth in this post. Y'know what makes me scratch my head? This is supposed to be about Supports right? Yet unless the big pin guys are gonna be using them against you, what exactly is there in this event that celebrates that? This would have been a perfect place to actually give the player some loaner supports to try or boosted supports to play with. There is no specific character boost list, why not actually feature/make use of SUPPORTS. I suspect half the player has never even seen what most of them can do. I know I haven't. It might have even generated some excitement. I dunno.

Just seems a missed opportunity.

fmftint

How much is it going to suck to play this, finish T1, win a master token




And open a SWEET R3 support (55%)
Awesome

Dragon_Nexus

Actually wait, here's a better question I haven't seen anyone ask.

Why wasn't this system simply rolled out into existing PvEs? Why weren't these support rewards added to the progression and placement rewards of an existing PvE? Surely that wouldn't have required the design and coding of an entirely new set of PvE events, right?

Kahmon

Dragon_Nexus said:

Actually wait, here's a better question I haven't seen anyone ask.

Why wasn't this system simply rolled out into existing PvEs? Why weren't these support rewards added to the progression and placement rewards of an existing PvE? Surely that wouldn't have required the design and coding of an entirely new set of PvE events, right?

Because more fighting for placement = needing to buy more health packs = needing to buy more Hero points = more revenue.

You didn't think any of this was for our benefit, did you?

jackstar0

Dragon_Nexus said:

Actually wait, here's a better question I haven't seen anyone ask.

Why wasn't this system simply rolled out into existing PvEs? Why weren't these support rewards added to the progression and placement rewards of an existing PvE? Surely that wouldn't have required the design and coding of an entirely new set of PvE events, right?

Vaults, bro. They LOVE them some vaults.

They scoff at the pommel horse. Don't even mention it.

jackstar0

You know what else is true? Mondays are a busy day of my week.

Why Mondays? Especially when you have PvE events that sometimes end or start on a Monday.

The logic of Monday is a mystery to me.

abenness

I’m happy to give it a go and see what happens, thinking that even randomly opening Taco tokens (without hoarding), I have certainly pulled a number of “rare” rewards like the 4* cover or LL token occasionally. I’m happy to do this in a new vault which will feed my 2* farm and have the chance of something else.

And I always have time for something that gives me CP. As mentioned above, dropping to a lower scl and playing progression-only would be viable too. The fewer number of people who want to compete, the easier it should be to place

However, I would also like to voice my preference for more un-timed events..that way I can really enjoy the different scenarios and battles, without worrying about going through again and again with only my fastest team

fmftint

Here's another issue, it's Friday night, this starts Monday, and we probably won't even know when this begins UNTIL it begins. That's just great for S1 players

bluewolf

Join the play to progression and out mindset, and who cares about the slice times?

Vins2

jackstar0 said:

You know what else is true? Mondays are a busy day of my week.

Why Mondays? Especially when you have PvE events that sometimes end or start on a Monday.

The logic of Monday is a mystery to me.

There's probably some metric that monday is the least played day. 

Tuesdays have LRs and the end of s1, s2 pvp.

Wednesdays have LRs and the end of the other slices.

Thursdays are LRs and the start of events.

Fridays are the end of a pvp.

Nobody functions on the weekend.

So Mondays may be the start of some pve, but there's not much pvp that day.  And the first day of pve is skippable for players in noncompetitive alliances.

I don't intend to fill every day of the week with mpq, especially mondays.  But I'll try it once so I can say I did and feel validated for complaining. 

bluewolf

I can somehow imagine the initial planning meetings when it came to slice design and plans and they said, “What days would make sense to have events start and end on, in terms of people’s schedules?”  And they decided to try to avoid Mondays for all the reasons being brought up. It’s busy for a lot of people, they hit the ground running, etc. 

4?5? Years after setting up the slices, they’ve forgotten that, apparently.

All this said.  Playing 4x in a later slice than 1 can be accomplished with 2 hits Monday and 2 Tuesday. Progression accomplished. 

Still more than we needed, but could be more manageable.  Still hoping they adjust the clears. It’s funny that they went back to the days of 4x=progression for this. 

LifeofAgony

Making a new pve does not equate to new content.  FFW wasn’t a new game mode, just a new pve.

This is just another pve.  Stop trying to call it something else.  You can change the rewards or the details but it’s the same as always - be fastest to clear, wait 23 hours, then be fastest grind.

and I’m no genius, but I suspect leaderboards will be filled with same names who don’t need the supports to begin with to be fast at pve.

mega ghost

I'll likely play this all of the way through once and then only play to the first progression token thereafter — assuming I'm available to play when this is being run. I'm glad that they're slowly giving us more ways to earn supports (or support tokens, anyway), but grinding is the worst part of MPQ and we didn't need more of it. As others have stated, this should have just been another DDQ-type event, or maybe even just an additional node in DDQ.

EDIT: Oh wait, the progression rewards don't even offer support tokens, just vault tokens that might get you support tokens? Yeah, ok, I won't be bothering with this. I was barely interested in this when I thought it offered a direct line to supports, but tucking them behind even more RNG makes this pointless.