How Demi does playtesting

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  • Daredevil217
    Daredevil217 Posts: 3,966 Chairperson of the Boards
    Or... maybe they think someone like Captain Marvel, Doctor Doom, Cable, Emma, Namor, etc. will sell themselves based on fan desire and hype.... basically they’ll sell on their names alone.

    Whereas an Okoye (who?) or Chavez (who??) may need to be really good to warrant being chased. It’s a theory. Though one not well supported by other popular character releases who were great (Gambit being the biggest example) and more obscure characters who suck (Wiccan maybe? Okoye is the only truly obscure character in the 5* tier). 
  • ProtoformX
    ProtoformX Posts: 29 Just Dropped In
    Wait, I thought we're the beta testers.
  • BlackBoltRocks
    BlackBoltRocks Posts: 1,187 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited February 2019
    Ed_Dragonrider said:
    This.


    Players: Why do you always make tinykitty stores, there's nothing to spend my resources on, i want to spend, but you dont let me, you're preventing me, you're so tinykitty for never giving good thing unless it comes with a bunch of bad... give me a store with the best of the best and i'll show you just how much im willing to spend!

    Devs: Okay, fair enough...
    *Rolls out store with the best of the best, at no extra cost than usual.*
    This makes you happy now, right?

    Players: WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO BLEED US DRY OF OUR RESOURCES??!?!


    Seriously?
    If you're going to assign nefarious reasons to everything either way, then what does the actual reason even matter? Its going to be nefarious anyway.

    There is something new coming every 2 weeks!! You'll always be 'just before' or 'right after' something new! 
    Humans will always complain and find ulterior motives for anything and everything. That's the way it is, unfortunately. Instead of giving the devs the benefit of the doubt for giving us the Thor/Okoye/Kitty store and thanking them for it, forumites immediately accuse them of trying to bleed players dry.

    No wonder this world sucks, when you have human beings so determined to see and assume only at the worst of everything.
  • Ed_Dragonrider
    Ed_Dragonrider Posts: 593 Critical Contributor
    BlackBoltRocks said:
     
    Humans will always complain and find ulterior motives for anything and everything. That's the way it is, unfortunately. Instead of giving the devs the benefit of the doubt for giving us the Thor/Okoye/Kitty store and thanking them for it, forumites immediately accuse them of trying to bleed players dry.

    No wonder this world sucks, when you have human beings so determined to see and assume only at the worst of everything.
    Well its certainly a good way of making sure we never get anything so good ever again...
  • LHammer
    LHammer Posts: 108 Tile Toppler
    The limited degree of pre-release playtesting on MPQ can be summarized with a single quote:

    "... by roughly a factor of 18!"
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,283 Chairperson of the Boards
    bluewolf said:


    Note that this is the only FTP game I have ever spent any significant time or ANY money on, so I am not the best judge exactly, but plenty of people say this game is pretty low-key with the offers and sales tactics, which is probably partly why I'm still playing it.  And they do lots of things really well (also why I'm still playing it), and we should probably try to point that out more while offering constructive criticism.
    You can pretty much play MPQ until you are bored which is very generous for a F2P game as most have some sort of play restrictions that are sniffing around your wallet. I once, when laid up in bed with an ankle injury, tried to see if I could manage to play until all of my roster (some 120 characters at that time) was dead and I gave up in the end because it was taking so long.
  • Straycat
    Straycat Posts: 963 Critical Contributor

    bbigler said:
    I see 2 conflicting ideologies here: should they make new characters appeal to casual players or competitive players? (Of course, there's a spectrum of players between casual and competitive).

    Competitive players surely spend the most money, so pleasing them is good for business, but that can also lead to power creep, which could ultimately destroy a game. It's been said that achieving 0 turn wins is "jumping the shark", and I agree.  I want a game that requires strategy and skill (but I also have a competitive nature).  So, they need to slow down the power creep by releasing average characters that hopefully appeal to more casual players. I think one of their goals is to convert casual FTP players into more competitive spending players. 

    Hindsight is always 20-20. I think it was too early for them to release another meta breaking 5* character, so instead they made the Favorite Legends store for more people to get the meta and have fun with it. When that gets tiresome, I would expect another meta breaking character. Bishop certainly shook up the 4* meta (along with Kitty). Honestly, it will be hard to make a combo better than Thorkoye....quick AP production, huge AOE and true healing. Gritty is close with its purely passive power death cascades. 

    So, I guess I'm trying to say that every new character shouldn't redefine the meta, but they also shouldn't be duds either.  Power creep happens in nearly all games to keep players interested, so old characters in this game should be updated to keep them relevant, (which might challenge the meta and increase variety). The power creep is naturally kept in check in PVP since the top meta characters fight each other, but PVE needs periodic updates to avoid 0 turn wins (like new SCLs). 
    How do popular characters differ between competitive and casual players in the 5* realm? A casual player would have fewer total covers before a 5* rotates out so they would want 5*s with unique abilities that have some use at 1 or 2 covers. That usually makes them top tier when champed.
    Also need to consider players not yet in the 5* tier. Someone could just be breaking into the 5* latests now, if Cable was their first champ Carol might be an awesome addition. No idea if that's a large enough group of players to influence design tho.
  • Tony_Foot
    Tony_Foot Posts: 1,814 Chairperson of the Boards
    The rockett said:
    Over the years I have been playing many people have been trying to bring to the attention of Demi and D3 some on going issue like play testing.  This goes back some time to the Boss Rush  disaster.  There have been other  scenarios where we, the player base, have questioned them many time on what and why they have done things.  For the most part, it is a black hole.   It feels like they do not want to engage us.  

    During Gambit’s prerelease, so many people were screaming about this meant and how OP he was.  It took them 2 months to finally listen to us and then they BUFFED him to an insane level.  Months and month later they kill him.  How does a character like that get released into the game?  How did they miss THAT big.......Twice!!  This is why this keeps coming up time and time again over the years. 

    The Allaince Rush event comes out, awesome concept, and falls flat because of what each person had to do for the ally to get full rewards.  Then the 2nd one comes out and makes it even more head scratching.  

    With all the ideas that the player base has posted here or Discord it just seems like it doesn’t matter to them. This is why I care less and less about what they do and what happens next in game.  The drive and passion for the game is dead.  It will be the same asks from the player base and we will get the same response from the Dev team.......nothing. So why care anymore what they do and how they do it?  I hope something good comes along that they have tested for End Game, cause God knows they really dropped the ball (and they admitted it), because this is all getting boring and old. Nothing else to do expect wait and fade away like the rest of the vets. 
    Totally agree. It's obvious by now, whoever is left there isn't playing at the level of lots of people on here and discord. I get that, I wouldn't want to 'bring my work home'. It's equally obvious that lot's of players (of which I don't consider myself to be one) spot the flaws in these releases as soon as the numbers are given. Would it hurt for them to post a quick feedback thread on a upcoming 5* with no names just colours and skills. Get some feedback prior to the car crash?

    This forum would do the work for them in a couple of hours. These people know, the game and the meta. It took them about 3 seconds to know Loki with a 3 turn repeater was never seeing the light of day. They knew what minor fix would make him not OP just a viable alternative. They did the same with Cable, KP and now Carol. They knew the gambit nerf was garbage and said so, they adjusted it pre-nerf and still he's garbage that no-one uses because they didn't care to listen to the feedback.

    Is it that damn hard to look at the numbers his usage and not just admit, hey guys we messed up and make them usable again without 18 months of the forum and online communities repeating themselves over and over.

    At this rate I will have 20k CP before they trip up into someone worth pulling for. I don't expect meta, but I also will no longer waste my time putting CP and ISO into someone who will never ever get used.
  • bbigler
    bbigler Posts: 2,111 Chairperson of the Boards
    ZootSax said:
    Whenever I think of developer playtesting, I think back to the contest to create your best team and what odd results the winners were in the opinion of most of us on the forums (https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/67949/mpq-infographic-best-team-contest-winners-10-2-17).  I'm guessing their playtesting is largely simulated game, similar to the ones implied by the contest infographic, which would invariably lead to drastically different results than live people playing in a highly-competitive environment.
    Thank you for posting this. I think it's been overlooked. The more I think about it, the more this makes sense. If their playtesting is automated, then that would explain so much!  I can see how board shake and repeaters would do well in purely AI games. I can see how true healing can be OP in long AI games.  I can see how the current and past meta characters don't stand out as superstars in an automated game. 

    If this is truly how they play test, then meta breaking characters happen by accident and we'll continue to get new mediocre slow characters in the future.  If they actually use skilled humans to play test, then they are purposely releasing duds along with meta-breakers. Given how they look at metrics, I'm inclined to think they do mostly automated testing, which would explain a lot and is also a horrible way to develop a game. 

    The best way to do testing is by using the player base. They could create a replayable node with no rewards to test out each new character. Then they can run their metrics to see who they were paired with and how well that new character performed. 
  • Straycat
    Straycat Posts: 963 Critical Contributor
    bbigler said:
    ZootSax said:
    Whenever I think of developer playtesting, I think back to the contest to create your best team and what odd results the winners were in the opinion of most of us on the forums (https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/67949/mpq-infographic-best-team-contest-winners-10-2-17).  I'm guessing their playtesting is largely simulated game, similar to the ones implied by the contest infographic, which would invariably lead to drastically different results than live people playing in a highly-competitive environment.
    Thank you for posting this. I think it's been overlooked. The more I think about it, the more this makes sense. If their playtesting is automated, then that would explain so much!  I can see how board shake and repeaters would do well in purely AI games. I can see how true healing can be OP in long AI games.  I can see how the current and past meta characters don't stand out as superstars in an automated game. 

    If this is truly how they play test, then meta breaking characters happen by accident and we'll continue to get new mediocre slow characters in the future.  If they actually use skilled humans to play test, then they are purposely releasing duds along with meta-breakers. Given how they look at metrics, I'm inclined to think they do mostly automated testing, which would explain a lot and is also a horrible way to develop a game. 

    The best way to do testing is by using the player base. They could create a replayable node with no rewards to test out each new character. Then they can run their metrics to see who they were paired with and how well that new character performed. 
    Thats very disappointing if true.It would make sense why health and match damage keep increasing, since that would be the most reliable non passive form of damage.
    Still tho, they design first and test second. I suspect their insistence on using repeaters is more about making new characters feel different or more complicated, rather than how they fare in playtesting. Those random powers like repeaters and board shake have more variance, it makes the highs seem better when there are lows to contrast. Because I can't believe that they would try to make Carol a beast and she end up like that with simulated playtests to verify it, when they could easily make her stronger from the start.
  • CNash
    CNash Posts: 952 Critical Contributor
    edited March 2019
    On a bit of a side note: I looked at the recent 4-stars and it looks like none of them create countdown tiles - they create repeaters instead.
    I wonder if the designers have painted themselves into a corner with 4-star Carol's mechanics? I mean, we know that a lot of powers that were previously "1-turn countdown that replaces itself when expired" were converted into repeaters to break their synergy with Carol, but does this necessarily mean that no new characters can create countdown tiles at all? Or if they do, then presumably they can't easily create SAP tiles, or else they automatically become Carol's new best friend...
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    Let's put your theory to the test using the last 10 4* released:

    C4rol was introduced into the game somewhere in Jan 2017.
    Repeater was introduced into the game somewhere in August 2017.

    I think it's more accurate to  look at all the 4* that was released after repeater was introduced into the game to see whether C4rol is the culprit behind new 4* characters having repeaters instead of CD tiles.

    Nevertheless, let's look at the latest:

    Note: None =  neither has repeater nor CD

    Magik - repeater
    Namor - none
    Spider-Ham - CD
    Prowler - none
    Bishop - none
    Domino - none
    Taskmaster - CD
    Dazzler - none
    Nebula - repeater
    Emma Frost - repeater
    Ghost - CD
    Jubilee - none

    I included 2 more just in case some of you think that limited 4* should not be included.
  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 5,822 Chairperson of the Boards
    It’s not quite as simple as just looking at the repeater/CD, though.

    Magik uses AP for a repeater that converts tiles and makes strikes when matched away.
    Nebula uses AP to make a repeater that heals her and makes strikes.
    Emma....uses AP to make a repeater that destroys specials or AP.  Or uses AP to make a repeater that places strikes and improves strikes.

    Ghost’s CD is passively created when one of her other powers are used and is arguably a drawback since it reduces her match damage boost from 300% to 100%, but will give you some red AP which can be used to possibly deal damage and start that cycle again.  Note there is not any special tile component of the powers Ghost has (well, Invisibility).

    So it’s not as simple as “always make people with repeaters”, but there’s a strong move in that direction when you are directly creating the tile, and it only benefits you, and it includes a special tile creation component.

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