Speed and New Releases

HoundofShadow

I think, ultimately, it boils down to why you want to play MPQ. I find that players who want to champ every characters in the game or "complete the game" as fast as possible are putting unnecessary stress on themselves.

If your goal is to collect as much resources as possible in the shortest time possible so that you can move on with your real life activities, then it's not a surprise that playing MPQ is a chore because you are playing for the sake of playing.

I chose to be competitive aka "use the same set of characters" aka "MPQ is about speed" in PvEs due to the thrill of beating players with much stronger rosters than mine in top 10 placement. This is the nature of stepping into a competitive arena.

It's true that PvEs are repetitive and it's repetitive for those 1 to 2 hours of playing per day if you choose to. Again, MPQ is about "speed" if you choose to. The keyword is "choose". You can choose not to make it about speed.

The devs don't have to incentivize or dangle carrots in  front of players to use non-top tier characters. By doing so, the players are "indirectly being forced to use" those characters. Instead, the players should choose to use those characters willingly. Not every characters are going to be your cup of tea.

Note: The above might sound contradictory due to the way the devs "advertise", "market"  or "rotate" characters in PvEs, PvPs and in DDQ.

MgoBlue51

My desire for speed actually has nothing to do with placement. I just don’t want to spend more than an hour on a mobile game a day. But at some point, not getting CP every event means you might as well not even play. I wish there was encouragement to use more of of my roster, or less time required to get to the final progression. Or... id like to be more entertained as a whole. 

What I don’t understand from the devs perspective is... what advantage is it to them to require me to play more? There are no advertisements any more, so there aren’t clicks to acquire. I have become disenchanted just enough to never spend a cent ever again on this product, because I can’t bring myself to support the ever decreasing quality of product. My ROI was equivalent to tossing dollars in a fire. I would support the game more if I felt thrilled with the product again... but alas, it’s a match 3/roster building game that requires over an hour a day if you want to actually BUILD your roster. Let me play less or make the rewards actually feel... rewarding. Please?

Daredevil217

bbigler said:

but even if all placement rewards were removed and all "speedy" characters were nerfed, players would still figure out the fastest teams available and use them daily because their time in real life matters.

This is pretty much what I was saying earlier and I wholeheartedly agree. DDQ is a great place for people to try out different teams. And some do. It’s exactly what many are asking for. No timer. All progression. No competition. Higher tier characters locked out of some nodes (many ask for this as well). But many people who don’t play competitively will still use the same teams every day to blow through it. I know that’s true for me. With the exception of Crash I find it to be boring and something to “get through”. If the whole game were like DDQ (all placement, participation trophies for all) I’d hate it and probably quit. This game does a great job of balancing the speed game with something for the participation crowd. I was scared that they were going to move toward events being all progression after places of power and sinister 600. But support circuit tells me that competition isn’t going anywhere. I think they do a great job on balance. DDQ, wins based PVP, boss events, alliance events, shield training, prologue, shield sim, one-off events (gauntlet, growth industry type stuff), etc. are all places where you can play any teams you want and speed is not a factor. I myself am going wins based in this PvP because there’s no PVE going on right now. Playing all sorts of teams. You don’t have to be a slave to the “system” in place and can still have fun not chasing placement, going progression only, if you hate speed. 

HoundofShadow

TL;DR 

1) Because MPQ is a F2P mobile game and this is how the F2P mobile games industry for "card" games typically operate.

2) This is how rewards are typically structured in real life competitions.

Extended version

1) MPQ is a F2P game with microtransactions. Like all other mobile games, MPQ reward players with free resources for playing the game but also limit the outflow of those resources.

Like many other F2P "card" games with microtransactions, the players either play a lot or play hard to advance in the game, or spend money to buy in-game resources to speed up their progress. 

Why are those greedy game companies doing this?

Because they need to entice players to play the game and spend so that the they can break even and make money. It is the goals of every companies to make money. I have not heard of any game companies saying that they are willing to suffer losses, pay their staff salaries using his life saving in order to make the players happy. This is a noble goal but… 

2) Like most competitions in real life, the best rewards are given to the top winners. The rewards get "worse" as we move down the placements.

Lastly, for every group of players wanting to end a match as far as possible, there exists another group of players playing the game leisurely and ending a match in 4 turns is not their goals.

In short, the devs are dealing with many types of players and all these characters with different abilities are meant to cater to many different groups of player. 

bbigler

Personally, if I played 15 battles or less per day for fun and didn't care about speed or rewards, then I would eventually run out of new characters or combos to try, because playing leisurely doesn't build a roster very fast. So, in order to keep myself entertained with new characters and combos to try out, I have to play competitively in order to build my roster fast enough to keep it interesting. But then I get burned out from playing at a competitive level all the time. So, it's a catch 22.

Richyyy

bbigler said:

Personally, if I played 15 battles or less per day for fun and didn't care about speed or rewards, then I would eventually run out of new characters or combos to try, because playing leisurely doesn't build a roster very fast. So, in order to keep myself entertained with new characters and combos to try out, I have to play competitively in order to build my roster fast enough to keep it interesting. But then I get burned out from playing at a competitive level all the time. So, it's a catch 22.

Which, without wanting to sound like a broken record, is why it would be so nice if 'competitive' meant something different at different times. Events where placement is decided by taking as little damage as possible (so winning quickly is still important, but potentially so are shields); rounds where the target is to collect 30AP of a certain color as quickly as possible rather than knock out opponents (you could get lots of variation there, because different characters would help different colors - and certain supports could be important too); even just some more use of some of the interesting things they've come up with for the bosses, only with some more thought put into the difficulty level for stronger rosters. Hell, have an event where all three characters you use at any given time have to start with the same letter. I'd be up for them to try all kinds of gimmicks.

There are a load of things they could do where the competition would still be there but the game would be more interesting, and at least a few of the 200 characters I have who are essentially passengers might come back into play.

Yepyep

bbigler said:

...players would still figure out the fastest teams available and use them daily because their time in real life matters.  ...

Exactly. This is the most important thing for me. I don't know all that much about building a game, as you folks do, or all that much about Marvel and its Universe, as you folks do. I just play and pay attention. And things are broken in this game, because its demands on my time -- if I want to play strongly, collect, grow, and I do want those things, but within reason! -- are going to drive me away. 

It's more than a little like alcohol. It's great, but over time it has demanded too much space in my life. Its success will become its failure.

LavaManLee

Hound, I don't think anyone on here disagrees that MPQ is a business and needs to make money to stay alive.  That is fairly obvious and we get it's not a charity.

In my opinion, though, they could actually make MORE money and leave quite a bit on the table with most of us in the forum and Discord.  This leads me to believe they have a small number of whales keeping this game alive for us and MPQ isn't all that worried about the casual player.

This, IMHO, is very very different than other F2P games.  Especially the other Marvel F2P games.  In most of those games, a newbie can fairly quickly get a team up to speed that does ok.  The characters can be leveled up to that player and it's not too hard to get a decent team going.

Par of this is because in most games, once you get the character (which is generally a combo of RNG and winning events), you can choose to spend all your resources on that one character until they are at the level you want.

MPQ is very, very different where you have to first get the character and then some combo of RNG within RNG (i.e. both the character and the colour of the cover that I want) to get them levelled up.  Take Namor.  If I really, really loved Namor, I can't do much about it for a while.  Yeah, he shows up in a vault now and then.  But the best I can do is eventually BH him and then pray to the RNG Gods.  Sure, I can buy tokens but the odds are really stacked against you to get who you want.  There is no way I can actually tell MPQ " here is my money but ONLY if it helps me get Namor".

Take another game, I won't name.  They just released War Machine in an event that you could get enough to acquire a Ware Machine.  I can then decide whether to spend my own money on War Machine to get him advanced quicker or I can let time and RNG dictate my pace.  With MPQ, it really is time and RNG alone that dictates.

Basically, IMHO, I believe it is too late for MPQ to change course but this is somewhere between a F2P and P2W game and doesn't fall directly into either category.  Not enough way to pay to actually win UNLESS you are a huge whale but not enough microtransactions to be a F2P.  It's a very odd hybrid BUT because the game itself is so good, I will continue to play it.

captainheath

I think they leave money on the table also.  

Lets say I just discovered MPQ and have completed the 3 star rank mostly.  I'm a huge fan of ___ 4 or 5 star.  Even if I spend $10,000, I might not be able to champ ____.

The idea that you can spend $50 on a free to play game and not see noticeable difference in the way the game plays is strange.  But you could spend $1,000 for many of us and not see a change.

HoundofShadow

I think it would be fairer to compare MPQ with other "card" games rather than games of other genre like fighting games or adventure games because their structures are different.

I have played at least 4 mobile "card" games with three of them being  match-3 games and the common unhappiness about MPQ can be found in those games too.

Things like:

1. "Stuck with using the same characters or fighting the same opponents"
2. "Bad RNG"
3. "This new character is bad (because they are expecting each new character to be better than before.).
4. "You either spend a lot of time playing it or spend a lot of money."
5. "This game is P2W".
6. "It's expensive to buy <insert name of in-game resources> to level up these characters"
7. "I can buy a full game with the amount of money I spend here."
8. "This game is a grind."


If these common complains about MPQ can be found in their competitors' playerbases as well, then I think it's simply due to a mismatch of expectation, lack of understanding of how F2P with microtransaction works and how it differs from your traditional "pay one time and get the complete game" games. 

I think most of us grow up paying $20 to $50 to get a full game, which we can play at any time of our choosing, without adhering to a schedule set by the game developer, and we can complete the game in 30 to 50 hours. So, when we decided to play F2P mobile games like MPQ, we also brought in these experiences and expect them to work the same way. It doesn't, unfortunately. Their business model is totally different.

Actually, you can compare the differences between MPQ mobile version and the console version... 

PiMacleod

But just because the F2P model is the way it us, doesnt mean they cant flex it to the desires of their player base.

I do also understand that their metrics may be telling them something totally different than what we see or hear on the forums.   And thats fine.  ...it would be nice to know, though.  If enough people are yelling 'X', but the company wont do it because of 'Y', and the company wont tell us 'Y', no ones gonna stop yelling 'X'.  The discussion will continue forever, due to this.

And I agree... why not create new ways for people to compete?  It's a game, right?  Like most competitive games, theres more than one way to win.  Speed is always a factor, but what if there were other factors added in?  Or taken out?  Theres so much to play with. 

And before its said, let the developers decide if it's too hard or not.  If you decide it's not going to happen before they even have a chance to say Yes or No, then the answer is already No.  Theres nothing wrong and nothing lost when it comes to asking for something from the developers.  Best case scenario:  it happens!  Worst case scenario:  you're stuck where you were... which is the same as if you never asked for anything.  In other words, why not try?

Straycat

MPQ is different than other F2P games, but maybe that's the problem. In most games, you are restricted on how much you can play at once with stamina or energy. MPQ instead limits how much you do as a minimum. The full progression cp reward is pretty key to building a 4* roster, where the bulk of the game is. Its hard to progress the roster doing anything less, and it often requires much more.

The thing is, the game did start with a more traditional F2P model. The limited roster made health the energy mechanic, the nodes lost points immediately encouraging you to play in segments, the node rewards were random and not guaranteed, making max progression less defined and harder to get. As all those factors were eliminated, either by design or not, the game settled on this time/fun dichotomy. If they made a game that people fundamentally do not want to play, isn't that something they should try to fix?

Dormammu

Straycat said:

MPQ is different than other F2P games, but maybe that's the problem. In most games, you are restricted on how much you can play at once with stamina or energy. MPQ instead limits how much you do as a minimum.

MPQ is a true diamond in the rough. When I play other mobile games and hit an 'energy wall', I'm done. I lose complete interest in any game that dictates to me how much I can play. (I've never once stopped playing MPQ because I was out of health.) For all of its other faults, I have the highest amount of respect for MPQ in this regard.

I suspect it is one of the largest contributing factors to the longevity of this game (5+ years) while other Marvel mobile games come and go.

Daredevil217

Straycat said:

 If they made a game that people fundamentally do not want to play, isn't that something they should try to fix?

I don’t know who “people” are, but I actually enjoy playing this game. I have never and will never understand the people who don’t like the game but continue to play it (and complain non stop while doing so). 

Banquetto

Daredevil217 said:

Straycat said:

 If they made a game that people fundamentally do not want to play, isn't that something they should try to fix?

I don’t know who “people” are, but I actually enjoy playing this game. I have never and will never understand the people who don’t like the game but continue to play it (and complain non stop while doing so). 

Gaming flipped a while back, playing for enjoyment now puts you in a minority: playing to collect "rewards" is now standard behaviour.

purplemur

HoundofShadow said:

TL;DR 

1) Because MPQ is a F2P mobile game and this is how the F2P mobile games industry for "card" games typically operate.

2) This is how rewards are typically structured in real life competitions.

Extended version

1) MPQ is a F2P game with microtransactions. Like all other mobile games, MPQ reward players with free resources for playing the game but also limit the outflow of those resources.

Like many other F2P "card" games with microtransactions, the players either play a lot or play hard to advance in the game, or spend money to buy in-game resources to speed up their progress. 

Why are those greedy game companies doing this?

Because they need to entice players to play the game and spend so that the they can break even and make money. It is the goals of every companies to make money. I have not heard of any game companies saying that they are willing to suffer losses, pay their staff salaries using his life saving in order to make the players happy. This is a noble goal but… 

2) Like most competitions in real life, the best rewards are given to the top winners. The rewards get "worse" as we move down the placements.

Lastly, for every group of players wanting to end a match as far as possible, there exists another group of players playing the game leisurely and ending a match in 4 turns is not their goals.

In short, the devs are dealing with many types of players and all these characters with different abilities are meant to cater to many different groups of player. 

I pay for those "greedy companies" salaries, My Stark purchases are the ROI. Why do you act like the players are asking for a give-away?
What are you actually arguing for? Less rewards? Slower characters?  I'm lost in the defending a company's bottom line when that is only tangentially related to releasing slow clunky new characters. The most profitable piece of garbage product will not ensure long term sales. The best game out there won't get played without adequate marketing. You can't recruit quality Human Capital to come work for you if you don't have a long term interest. So SEGA/ Bandai/D3; does not have an incentive to release Namor as he was. They want the developers(demi) to come up with that hot newness that drives sales, generates buzz, receives accolades, etc .They want me to be excited about the product so that I am willing to spend more instead of taking my resources to a competitor like Fox, or Sony, where I FEEL (remember I am a consumer so emotionally driven purchases are my prerogative) like I am getting a better experience.
Don't drag some corporate justification defense into this, because the design decisions involved here didn't come from the Board of Directors, there is no old man Puzzle Quest who lives alone in his mansion starving because he is choosing to keep the factory running so that the ungrateful mob in the town can have their undeserved entertainment. 

The company wants to sell me what I want to buy, they want to know what that is so they ask every other update and players have said Namor!Namor we want Namor and a god Doom. They eventually listened ,but neither met the  expectations of the fans or of the elite players who define the meta. dey want faster, better, more powerful characters {insert product}: Cars, laptops, razors, football, literally everything but Dutch Amish wooden furniture.  This isn't unreasonable to want the latest car to be faster and have more safety features... So why is it so out of bounds to want the characters to constantly be getting better? Whats the alternative: stagnation or regression?

These new releases with combos that start at 21AP are no good. They don't stand up:  There are too many conditionals, pointedly lacking synergy with color overlap and affiliations, THEY ARE TOO SLOW. Too slow to use effectively for PvP climbs, or for initial clears, 5E difficulty clears and even as a fanboi who plays with animations on and wants to see Namor do his thang don't really get to. Maybe a trident per match. 

but forumites who point out the inherent flaws in the product because they love the game,  get accused of all of the nastyness: they are whining, they must hate the game, their toxic, They are emotionally short fused crybabys who tantrum because the developers don't do everything they say how they say it when they say it, overly entitled, etc which is really just so much trolling. Pure contrarianism but lacking the mental muscles to form cogent responses that they genuinely stand behind. If some of these chairperson of the boards didn't go hunting for "gotcha" zingers and excuses to snap back and be outraged at the outrage( complaining about the complainers) maybe the devs would listen more. Why wade through a bunch of gutter sniping to get some quality beta? 
  I ask again what is the argument? that bad design is some magic pill we need to swallow and proclaim it the best? Do you truly not understand why Medusa is better all around than Emma? Strictly better. Is there any debate that Namor is slow? I would go further and say does anyone on here think he's not total stinkykitty? 

I love all the ideas to make speed irrelevant or alternative ways of progressing, I really like the idea of bonus modifiers  but all of that is besides the point that new releases that have a combined AP cost of 32!! is too much. If your average power costs 10 AP(thats every 5 turns you get to fire one if you are able to only pull the color you want) then that is instantly NOT going to be useful. because it is too slow and the devs need to make that type of design stop, it's not good for the game.

HoundofShadow

So, let's make each new character' powers cost fewer and fewer aps, passively generate aps, increase their match damage and damage per ap because this is the only way to change the meta and create powerful characters worth chasing, and because this is how the Elite decides whether a character is worth using.

Then, in the future, we can start seeing threads about complains from players getting wiped out by AI's cheap powers because of cascades. Then, we'll have more "nerf this character" thread. When that character get nerfed, the Elite get pissed off and begin their insult on the devs about not knowing how to do their jobs, and players are spending money to chase X meta character, only for it to be nerfed months later. 

Maybe the Elite players might want to step down from their Ivory Towers and meditate on the concept of "Balance?

purplemur

Or we could just have fun , playable characters that don't cost a bunch and work well with others. 

what's balanced about having 3 expensive powers?

What are five good balanced character designs that you appreciate/like/ use? why can't those be inspirations to future designs? 

Now compare those five with some of the "bottom tier" ones. What stands out as the key difference?

by the way I am not an elite, i deliberately play bad characters and weird team-ups. And even casual players can look at Namor and go nope, I don't want to play with that. Not because he won't help me get T10 but cuz he's all spensive and doesn't do anything fun - but maybe one trident per match - which is not fun. he fails the i play the game to have fun test too. 

dlegendary0ne

Dormammu said:

HoundofShadow said:

We do know that you judge characters based on speed, damage/ap, cost of power etc but there are a large playerbase that don't care about speed.

I don't want to care about speed, I'm forced to care about speed. I would love to take my near-champed Kingpin and Cable into PvP in the near future. But that would be suicide. Like taking a Plymouth to race a Ferrari.

I think it's ridiculous that PvE even has placement or anything competitive about it at all. All those placement rewards should be shifted to progression. Player vs. computer. Not speed vs. speed.

This is exactly why I got burned out and stopped. I hate being forced to play this way to get top rewards.  Add in the daily pve grinding  and it just became too much.  Yeah, I could "settle" for less rewards, but I don't want to play a game to settle. That's not fun to me.  Sucks because I do enjoy the game still. 

Daredevil217

dlegendary0ne said:

Dormammu said:

HoundofShadow said:

We do know that you judge characters based on speed, damage/ap, cost of power etc but there are a large playerbase that don't care about speed.

I don't want to care about speed, I'm forced to care about speed. I would love to take my near-champed Kingpin and Cable into PvP in the near future. But that would be suicide. Like taking a Plymouth to race a Ferrari.

I think it's ridiculous that PvE even has placement or anything competitive about it at all. All those placement rewards should be shifted to progression. Player vs. computer. Not speed vs. speed.

This is exactly why I got burned out and stopped. I hate being forced to play this way to get top rewards.  Add in the daily pve grinding  and it just became too much.  Yeah, I could "settle" for less rewards, but I don't want to play a game to settle. That's not fun to me.  Sucks because I do enjoy the game still. 

I don't understand why it has to be all or nothing though.  That's the mentality that leads to burnout.  Sometimes I play wins-based and can take my Kingpin/Cable for a spin, because I don't care about retals.  Same with only playing for progression in PVE.  Other times (honestly, most times) I play for speed in PVE because I like the thrill of the race.  But the point is people have this fallacy that they have to get top rewards in order to progress and kill themselves for them, only to burn out.  You can still make progress in this game just fine playing the teams you want to play.