To Devs - Marvel puzzle quest or Marvel vs. kitty ?

DeNappa

HoundofShadow said:

Because almost no competitive 5* players rely on protect tiles to win matches, so Eddie Brock's anti-protect tile is insignificant. If you get a 4* to nerf strike and attack tiles, that's a problem. It could be similar to Bishop "stopping" or "nerfing" 5* characters or teams.

(emphasis mine). I don't see the problem in making that power available at the 4* tier. Especially since it's now exclusive to a hard to cover (crying in 1/1/0 BSSM) 'classic' 5*. It's better than destroying Kitty and/or Grocket with the nerf-bat, imo. And doesn't the effect only apply to the initial strength of the strike tiles anyway? In other words, Kitty can still buff the tiles, right?

peterdark

Steve111 said:

What the game needs is a 5* Anti-Kitty. 

I'm not quite at the same level as everyone else on here but doesn't Kraven help? 

tiomono

If bssm is the 5* counter but is irrelevant because he is in classics, isn't kitty "the problem" also irrelevant because she is in classics.

This is such an odd point to make imo.

Bssm has been available for much longer and in a less diluted selection of characters for far longer. 

bluewolf

They aren't nerfing anyone.  500 people on here could say "nerf Kitty" and they wouldn't do it unless their own metrics made them think it was needed.

Also, nerfing anyone in the 5 tier is just going to drive away that many more whales.

Rocket is the gold standard 4* character all players chase.  If you nerf him you screw a ton of people and make their grinds longer.

You can't nerf them, you can't not use them.  Get used to it.

AlexR

peterdark said:

Steve111 said:

What the game needs is a 5* Anti-Kitty. 

I'm not quite at the same level as everyone else on here but doesn't Kraven help? 

He doesn't, not really. Or at least, Kraven is a useable makeshift bandaid vs GRocket/Kitty (no Bishop) for a 4* player and likely does nothing for a 5* player. There are 2 issues with Kraven vs the current meta:

1) Kitty straight out-buffs his debuffs. For a 4* player, Kraven and Kitty having a tug-of-war over the strike tiles is still helpful since it gives you more time to stun Kitty as she doesn't kill you quite as fast. So if you don't have a better anti-Kitty/Grocket counter team, Kraven+6Ap multi-turn stunner can get the job done. But an actual counter to Kitty he is not, since Kitty will outbuff his efforts. And that's talking about 4* teams with undercovered Kitty. I can't imagine he's at all worth it vs champed Kitty, but I'm a 4* player so i dunno. His even more pressing problem in the current meta is--

2) Bishop/Kitty murders Kraven teams. If you take Kraven into a GRocket/Kitty/Bishop node, Kraven will trigger Bishop every single turn from turn 1.

MrDupaTM

This community must be the only one that is against nerfs. Every single online game have constant patches coming with buffs / nerfs.
There's nothing wrong with having a meta, however one that is a defining as RG+Kitty is never a good thing.

Any character with pick rate over certain threshold (that's surely known to the developers) should be striked by the nerf hammer. Balancing is important. If after R&G+Kitty nerf you get a new meta (Thorkoye) then you nerf Thor and you nerf Okoye. Then you nerf Bishop. Then you nerf whoever is too strong.

I don't know what makes MPQ different from any other online game that we're all against proper balancing.

bluewolf

Have you been playing long?  Have you seen how they devs do "rebalancing"?

Gambit was nerfed to near-unusability.  Same with OML.  Same with XFW, way back when.

They do not tweak characters or frequently update them in any way.  Some characters are lucky enough to still be reasonably good after the nerf.

Players are well aware of other games and the way they try to balance their games in a more nuanced fashion.  This is not one of those games.

Note that some of the reluctance to rebalance may be based on the rate of acquisition of characters, timeframes etc.  There are people here who have been trying to complete Thor since he released, for example.  Have him bonused, open his special stores etc.  Nerfing characters that are so hard to get is going to demoralize people like crazy with the current game economy and availability of covers.

DeNappa

MrDupaTM said:

I don't know what makes MPQ different from any other online game that we're all against proper balancing.

I don't think the community is against proper balancing. It's just that in the past, the devs have proved more than once that they handle balance changes very poorly:

• Balance changes are few and far between
• Even for very obvious balance issues, response time is mostly very slow (like weeks or even months)
• Instead of a proper adjustment, 'balance changes' often simply turn out to be 'nerf into trash-tier' (Gambit probably the most blatant example of this, but also characters like XFW, 4Kingpin, etc)

For completeness's sake, some character changes turn out okay, e.g. I like how they reworked Quicksilver, and IW wasn't too bad either.

AlexR

MrDupaTM said:

This community must be the only one that is against nerfs. Every single online game have constant patches coming with buffs / nerfs.
There's nothing wrong with having a meta, however one that is a defining as RG+Kitty is never a good thing.

Any character with pick rate over certain threshold (that's surely known to the developers) should be striked by the nerf hammer. Balancing is important. If after R&G+Kitty nerf you get a new meta (Thorkoye) then you nerf Thor and you nerf Okoye. Then you nerf Bishop. Then you nerf whoever is too strong.

I don't know what makes MPQ different from any other online game that we're all against proper balancing.

That's the key word though, "balancing". "Constant patches." Thing is, in many games that have regular balances, things get "balanced" -- nerfed gently. Or they get re-adjusted often enough that you know if a nerf was too harsh, it will be fixed.

MPQ doesn't do gentle nerfs. When they nerf, the character will probably be trash afterwards. And when they do become trash, they don't get re-adjusted afterwards to a good medium again, they usually stay trash.

Therefore, the community is very cautious when it comes to nerfs. Sometimes, even knowing this, nerfs are needed. But in MPQ, only ever ask for a nerf if the character in question makes the game so un-fun for everyone that you will even accept that character becoming trash in exchange. Because that is probably what will happen.

NotBAMF

Groot and Kitty are too integral to making PVE for 4* players more tolerable. I hope neither gets nerfed ever.

DAZ0273

The Devs can rebalance - 4* Wasp is a superb example.

However If you want another example of them going to the dark side then look no further than 3* Gambit. The problem was that his black cover passively generated free red and purple AP, so players would simply roster his black and watch it power up the likes of Spider Gwen's cheap purple stun and red nuke for winfinite-type ridiculousness. So that definitely needed dealing with but only to the extent of changing the neverending supply of free AP for an easy to get 3*. So they changed it so that instead Gambit makes charged tiles with his black which is now active. Fine. Good plan. Oh wait, what's this... for no good reason whatsoever, they also gave him damage to his own team for using it. It made no sense whatsoever to impose that condition once you had tackled the actual AP issue. No sense at all. So now Gambit, a perfectly useable 3* character is reduced to a liability on your team if you use his black power. Crazy.

HoundofShadow

I think the devs implemented the players' solutions on how to nerf Gambit, if you still remember that close to 100 pages of Gambit thread. I can see players' suggestions in that thread which became a reality for the current Gambit. I think it's not a case of the devs not knowing how to "balance" the nerf, but more of how they can satisfy different group of players.

It's a fact there are at least two group of players who will contradict each other on how to nerf, as can be seen in most nerf threads One group will support the nerf, the other anti-nerf. When the devs go ahead with the nerf, the pro-nerf will be happy and the anti-nerf will be angry. The word "balance" is subjective because there can never be an objective "balance". I suppose that's why the devs have budgets for power and metrics to make the characters more "balance".

DAZ0273

HoundofShadow said:

I think the devs implemented the players' solutions on how to nerf Gambit, if you still remember that close to 100 pages of Gambit thread. I can see players' suggestions in that thread which became a reality for the current Gambit. I think it's not a case of the devs not knowing how to "balance" the nerf, but more of how they can satisfy different group of players.

It's a fact there are at least two group of players who will contradict each other on how to nerf, as can be seen in most nerf threads One group will support the nerf, the other anti-nerf. When the devs go ahead with the nerf, the pro-nerf will be happy and the anti-nerf will be angry. The word "balance" is subjective because there can never be an objective "balance". I suppose that's why the devs have budgets for power and metrics to make the characters more "balance".

5* Gambit was a special case. The Dev's had the games economy to consider together with considerable levels of player spending to take into account - someone was always going to be mad.

I don't think anybody was calling for what happened to 3* Gambit. The Dev's fully accepted that players use of his black only power was not intended use and tantamount to being close to an exploit. So they righfully fixed "Gambatt" - why they added on the self damage part is a mystery though because absolutely nobody asked for that.

StevO-J

DAZ0273 said:
5* Gambit was a special case. The Dev's had the games economy to consider together with considerable levels of player spending to take into account - someone was always going to be mad.

Yeah, it 'only' took something like 8 months for the 5*Gambit nerf to arrive. I am no 5* player, but having experienced the occaisional suffocating struggle to play against pre-nerf 5*Gambit and his AP reduction madness I still think this was purely done as a cash grab. You had to have a viable Gambit for high tier play, so money was to be had. The devs are free to choose this tactic, but I think it's debatable how healthy this is for the game in the middle to long run.

As for Kitty, like I said I am no 5* player so I avoid playing against her. I am already not a great fan of PVP, so I play to 900 if at all possible and then I'm (shielding) out. I just played Medusa/Grocket/Gamora in Best Buds, and while it was one of the fastest time to 900 I ever played I can't say this was much different than other PVP events. The only Kitty teams I played were pretty low levelled ones, and that was bad enough.

On the whole nerfing situation, I certainly am not in favor of nerfs. I quite like PVE play with Medusa/Grocket/Gamora and I would be very disappointed if Grocket got nerfed because of Kitty. Likewise I would like to think there are better ways than nerfing Kitty to change the meta. But since the high percentage of use of OML was reason for his nerf back when that happened I can't say I feel confident that a Kitty nerf isn't incoming, I see her way more than OML and the Kitty situation is quite similar to the 5* Gambit 'bait and switch'-like situation in my opinion. We'll see how it pans out I guess..

abmoraz

turbomoose said:

Time to nerf kitty , if you have a roster with 3 champed 5*s then most pvp fights are Gritty after the first few wins 

it’s not too bad if you have kitty with 10-13 covers but if not then you have to get lucky 

they nerfed oml then gambit so surely it’s only a matter of time before they nerf her

if they don’t pvp will continue to be boring and a big grind if you want to score over 500 points 

Kitty isn't the issue.  Grocket is.  The quickest fix is to change his passive to be "At the start of his turn, if one doesn't exist, add a sword tile with strength X to the board for each member of the GotG on his team." (Where X is the total of his multiple strike tiles today divided by 3).

This way, he still gets the damage boost.  It stays if they get removed (showing he's always tinkering), and it rewards the team synergy more and reduces the absolute insanity of the power.

tiomono

abmoraz said:

turbomoose said:

Time to nerf kitty , if you have a roster with 3 champed 5*s then most pvp fights are Gritty after the first few wins 

it’s not too bad if you have kitty with 10-13 covers but if not then you have to get lucky 

they nerfed oml then gambit so surely it’s only a matter of time before they nerf her

if they don’t pvp will continue to be boring and a big grind if you want to score over 500 points 

Kitty isn't the issue.  Grocket is.  The quickest fix is to change his passive to be "At the start of his turn, if one doesn't exist, add a sword tile with strength X to the board for each member of the GotG on his team." (Where X is the total of his multiple strike tiles today divided by 3).

This way, he still gets the damage boost.  It stays if they get removed (showing he's always tinkering), and it rewards the team synergy more and reduces the absolute insanity of the power.

This right here. Nobody thinks kitty on her own is scary. Its grocket and kitty. No grocket and people will respond to kitty as they did in her release thread. Too slow starting off to even remotely compete with thorkoye.

The only thing making her overbearing is a character that puts 7 strikes on the board for free at game start. Even pairing her with carnage takes till the players 4th turn before she starts boosting anything unless one of your attack tiles gets matched then it's even longer.

DAZ0273

tiomono said:

abmoraz said:

turbomoose said:

Time to nerf kitty , if you have a roster with 3 champed 5*s then most pvp fights are Gritty after the first few wins 

it’s not too bad if you have kitty with 10-13 covers but if not then you have to get lucky 

they nerfed oml then gambit so surely it’s only a matter of time before they nerf her

if they don’t pvp will continue to be boring and a big grind if you want to score over 500 points 

Kitty isn't the issue.  Grocket is.  The quickest fix is to change his passive to be "At the start of his turn, if one doesn't exist, add a sword tile with strength X to the board for each member of the GotG on his team." (Where X is the total of his multiple strike tiles today divided by 3).

This way, he still gets the damage boost.  It stays if they get removed (showing he's always tinkering), and it rewards the team synergy more and reduces the absolute insanity of the power.

This right here. Nobody thinks kitty on her own is scary. Its grocket and kitty. No grocket and people will respond to kitty as they did in her release thread. Too slow starting off to even remotely compete with thorkoye.

The only thing making her overbearing is a character that puts 7 strikes on the board for free at game start. Even pairing her with carnage takes till the players 4th turn before she starts boosting anything unless one of your attack tiles gets matched then it's even longer.

I remember former player Jarvind describing R4G as the first ever 4.5 star when he was released. So true

tiomono

DAZ0273 said:

tiomono said:

abmoraz said:

turbomoose said:

Time to nerf kitty , if you have a roster with 3 champed 5*s then most pvp fights are Gritty after the first few wins 

it’s not too bad if you have kitty with 10-13 covers but if not then you have to get lucky 

they nerfed oml then gambit so surely it’s only a matter of time before they nerf her

if they don’t pvp will continue to be boring and a big grind if you want to score over 500 points 

Kitty isn't the issue.  Grocket is.  The quickest fix is to change his passive to be "At the start of his turn, if one doesn't exist, add a sword tile with strength X to the board for each member of the GotG on his team." (Where X is the total of his multiple strike tiles today divided by 3).

This way, he still gets the damage boost.  It stays if they get removed (showing he's always tinkering), and it rewards the team synergy more and reduces the absolute insanity of the power.

This right here. Nobody thinks kitty on her own is scary. Its grocket and kitty. No grocket and people will respond to kitty as they did in her release thread. Too slow starting off to even remotely compete with thorkoye.

The only thing making her overbearing is a character that puts 7 strikes on the board for free at game start. Even pairing her with carnage takes till the players 4th turn before she starts boosting anything unless one of your attack tiles gets matched then it's even longer.

I remember former player Jarvind describing R4G as the first ever 4.5 star when he was released. So true

But he is extremely meh without those strikes. That's his one good power. And it is silly strong with kitty, nico, thanos, etc, etc.

KGB

tiomono said:

abmoraz said:

turbomoose said:

Time to nerf kitty , if you have a roster with 3 champed 5*s then most pvp fights are Gritty after the first few wins 

it’s not too bad if you have kitty with 10-13 covers but if not then you have to get lucky 

they nerfed oml then gambit so surely it’s only a matter of time before they nerf her

if they don’t pvp will continue to be boring and a big grind if you want to score over 500 points 

Kitty isn't the issue.  Grocket is.  The quickest fix is to change his passive to be "At the start of his turn, if one doesn't exist, add a sword tile with strength X to the board for each member of the GotG on his team." (Where X is the total of his multiple strike tiles today divided by 3).

This way, he still gets the damage boost.  It stays if they get removed (showing he's always tinkering), and it rewards the team synergy more and reduces the absolute insanity of the power.

This right here. Nobody thinks kitty on her own is scary. Its grocket and kitty. No grocket and people will respond to kitty as they did in her release thread. Too slow starting off to even remotely compete with thorkoye.

The only thing making her overbearing is a character that puts 7 strikes on the board for free at game start. Even pairing her with carnage takes till the players 4th turn before she starts boosting anything unless one of your attack tiles gets matched then it's even longer.

This will murder PvE for 4* players who rely on Grocket for fast clears. PvE is *much* larger in terms of player numbers than PvP. So nerfing Grocket should be a non-starter.

Just adjust Kitty's boost so that she only boosts 5* character created tiles at her normal boost rate and 4* and below tiles at say 1/3 the rate.

KGB

optimus2861

I suspect what you propose isn't currently possible in the code, as strike tiles are only owned by the team and not by a particular character, so far as we know.