Puzzle speed

Xair

I think there is probably a mathematical answer to the question, what is the optimal puzzle time for getting most pleasure from a puzzle. Not ignoring other factors (different powers, effects...), just saying that the speed of solving a puzzle is an important factor in the enjoyment of the game.

Obviously the stronger your roster the faster you become. But then again the faster you become the more challenging content you crave.

I don’t know for sure, but I believe that while a few players might enjoy a very short (one match win), or very long (above 5 minutes) puzzle, most players pleasure is probably derived from solving a puzzle within a short enough timespan that is not too short. i.e. spending around 2 minutes per puzzle gives the required satisfaction of a puzzle well solved.

That is why I think having too many low level puzzles tends to get boring, and having too many high level puzzles tend to get frustrating.

I think the dev team should take this under consideration when planning a new puzzle or champion, both for pve and pvp.

ThaRoadWarrior

The real "puzzle" in MPQ is roster building in this game, so the actual matching of the 3 isn't the primary goal of the player. the core mechanic of the game is opening tokens, and the final boss is random number generation. Re-apply that line of thought to how hard/frustrating it should be to acquire characters, and I think it will better inform your idea of the way the game works.

Xair

no doubt progression is the motivation behind players preferring this puzzle game over other games.
i wasn't trying to negate that point.

LavaManLee

I'm ready for CL10.  That is all.  :-)

ThaRoadWarrior

Sure, but since the "game" of roster building is built on the back of a slot machine, matching 3 becomes the job you do all day to earn enough money for spins. Players want to ease that burden as much as possible, and so they (generally) want anything they can do to alleviate the grind. So they're going to chase anyone they can to make that go faster.

As a developer, your goal is to provide a minimum viable product that will keep the player base engaged enough to spend, or to hang around so the people who are spending have a community to keep them engaged. That term MVP sounds worse than it is, it just means exactly the right amount of game to justify the expense of making the game. You can do 1 of 2 things to obfuscate the grind:

1. make it an utterly mindless, easy mode grind that is effectively a Cookie Clicker experience, then make the feeder-pellet reward of cover acquisition spectacular
2. try and make the journey to resources as engaging as is practical

There's also a third thing, which is community building so that you get social pressure to play and or spend. This forum is an older way of doing that. Another was the classic Facebook wall-spam that has since gone the way of the buffalo (Xair has built a purple outhouse on their farm in Farmville! come check it out!) Time has passed it by in favor of third party apps like Discord and Line (it appears), but there are certainly ways to do that in-game still via tools like GetSocial or similar. 

I actually think the game could benefit from getting users off of external tools like Line and Discord for coordination and getting them into a more robust in-game conversation tool personally. 

Sorry to take the conversation out of front facing game design and more into meta economy design, but games are business and if you don't have a model or a plan, you have a past performance bullet on your resume lol.

shinnaruto

Xair - I love puzzles, the match 3 format + marvel is what initially brought me to this game at the very beginning. However, this far along, it has changed to pure speed. How fast can I solve to max rewards to help progress my roster.

It has changed from a puzzle game for me, to more like a Pokemon game. I want to have all of the characters and level them up to their max. I think this is just where the game is now.

They do have certain events like Apocalypse and Sinister Six, that are good examples of puzzle based. So, they are experimenting a little bit  

Xair

ThaRoadWarrior you make valid points. 
both the social and progression aspects are important.
however, for those 2 issues i am still not sure how i would improve the current game experience of mpq.

with regards to the journey as you refer to it, i find it needs to be fun for me to play.

fun for me is having some challenge, and challenge is the place just below my limit.
i enjoy the "grind", i find solving each puzzle pleasurable.

i noticed that i derive more pleasure from puzzles when the duration it takes me to solve it (win a match), is around 2 minutes.

i don't enjoy the first 3 low level nodes as much as the rest of the nodes, and i don't enjoy the first node as much when i the 3 champions assigned to it are extremely slow. in pvp when the time zone starts i don't enjoy taking the first 3 to 8 free wins (even though i do it when i am able). 
i think that when you design a new champion or puzzle, u can test where it is going to fit in the meta by waging it against the current meta defining teams (both in pve and pvp and boss events), and see how long does it take to beat those teams. if the meta is going to get dramatically slower (or faster), then the design is problematic. 


ofc when new level 10 in pve arrives then everything will have to get recalibrated to that level hopefully with matching 6* champions. 

ThaRoadWarrior

For the haves, this is almost an Idle Game when it comes to resource acquisition. Thorkoye and before that Gambit historically was nearly an auto-win proposition. Similarly Thano5 will let you race through the PVE grind very quickly.

The difference here is that a good Idle Game is almost like messing around with a stock portfolio: you kind of want to arrange some rules (in this context, set up a team), and then just let it run without messing around with it too often. Just check up on it to see if you don't have any fine tuning or even massive overhauls you need to do. In many ways you're incentivized in those to actually leave them alone.

Over the years i've seen people request a mode like this where you just assign un-used or infrequently used roster members to some ai quests where they go do something and come back with resources. You see this in mobile games like Fallout Shelter (sending dwellers on missions to find loot and then recalling them) or even in premium console games like Mass Effect Andromeda where you just go initiate a mission you can do manually as a multiplayer, or in the background where you just come back after some period of real world time has passed to collect the reward.

But in MPQ, the autopilot is you, the player, and you have to manually go through the motions of matching. I've always felt that story mode is where you get resources through grinding, and then PVP is the "big leagues" where you go to flex your newfound roster progress. you get human-constructed teams, even if they are AI piloted, and it's where you get to be a little more inventive generally. Now though, if you can leave out a good Kitty Pryde/Bishop/4ocket team in pvp, you kind of do get the autopilot idle game. I kind of promised myself I wouldn't bring up Bishop, but there you go... OVERCLOCKED!

tiomono

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Now though, if you can leave out a good Kitty Pryde/Bishop/4ocket team in pvp, you kind of do get the autopilot idle game. I kind of promised myself I wouldn't bring up Bishop, but there you go... OVERCLOCKED!

Off topic but I feel the need to say we need to start the offending posts with warnings.

OVERCLOCKED! This comment may include excessive Bishop. Proceed at your own risk.

ThaRoadWarrior

I added it as a suffix, so i guess I used it more as punctuation than preamble...

shardwick

The game is essentially built on speed. What they could do to the game, outside of creating a challenge mode, is to tie specific objectives to nodes in each sub that give special rewards for completing them. Maybe a time challenge, beat this team using only abilities, all villain team, etc. And the objectives wouldn't be tied to placement so you could do a special objective without even doing one clear of a node.

Or they could just dig up the gauntlet and give it a rework with updated rewards and challenging nodes but give it a new name. 

HoundofShadow

Since pleasure is subjective, then how you enjoy the game depends on how you play it.

When I first started playing MPQ, I max-levelled all the one-stars. While many might bulk at this, I think this experience allowed me to discover and explore the different type of abilities in the early part of the game without pressure.

I took note of the abilities that I like, went through each tier and identify the characters that fits these playstyles, made long term plan and make changes accordingly.

Did my plan go well? Yes.

Do I still enjoy the game even though I play competively? Yes.

How? I think self-efficacy and having a curious nature will make your experience more enjoyable, more meaningful. If your goal is to get as many rewards as possible in the shortest time possible, it's not a surprise the game will be boring because you will be operating on speed.

I believe the best experience is not the one created by others, but the one you create for yourself. Ultimately, we have the tools (or characters) to decide how we approach each match. If you choose to field Thorokoye or Gritty for all the matches, then you chose to make every match the same.

Xair

as mentioned above i don't know the stats, but i am sure the that there is an answer as to what type of game play is preferable to the majority of the player base.

if a player wants to play below his max ability, then he can always select a lower level pve than his capability, he can avoid pvp, and he can do only lower levels in boss events.
the choice to slow down exist for anyone in any game. 

the thing is that if a player wants to be competitive, the game should be able to offer a decent challenge both in pve and pvp. 

making a competitive player have to deal with very weak opponents in the highest bracket, feels pointless to me. 
 
i personally prefer not to play single match puzzles. 

i feel that the highest bracket should present a decent challenge to the most powerful champions in the game.

Bowgentle

Xair said:

i feel that the highest bracket should present a decent challenge to the most powerful champions in the game.

No, it shouldn't.

Not when you have to clear each node 7 times.

I guess you weren't playing when PVE was using roster-based scaling.

It was TERRIBLE.

Be glad only the 5* essential node is at 515.

Xair

i wasn't talking about scaling. i am absolutely against scaling in a progression game. it contradicts the point of progression.
owgentle ur are entitled to this opinion, and maybe everyone else think like u. 
i can give an example from mythic+ in world of warcraft, players that wanted more challenge could get it by going after more difficult content, when Mythic+ was introduced suddenly a major portion of the players started playing a content which was completely neglected before that. that tells me that most players want challenging pve content.

i defined a pleasure time for a puzzle around 2 minutes, that goes to indicate that i wasn't referring to making all nodes level 515.

HoundofShadow

Something like Candy Crush?

Xair

i am not suggesting to change the format of the game.
just get rid of the low level nodes from the story, 
and make sure that nodes in highest level pve are designed in a way that they are sufficiently challenging to the strongest champions in the meta.
(naturally the higher level your champions become the faster you can complete a node... but when u get to a point that the highest level doesn't present a challenge it's time to raise to bar again).

DAZ0273

MPQ became Marvel Passive Quest quite a while ago. You make a match and your various passives be it Thanos or Gritty etc take care of the rest. Even at lower level 4* play I'm bring Grocket and a half health Thor if I can. If you wanted a more "puzzle-y" time where, you know, you have to actually obtain AP and fire powers which extends the match time then you'll need a PvE (or PvP) that switches off passive powers but isn't scaled so high that it can't still be tackled by players at the bottom part of the intended SCL.

tiomono

Xair said:

i am not suggesting to change the format of the game.
just get rid of the low level nodes from the story, 
and make sure that nodes in highest level pve are designed in a way that they are sufficiently challenging to the strongest champions in the meta.
(naturally the higher level your champions become the faster you can complete a node... but when u get to a point that the highest level doesn't present a challenge it's time to raise to bar again).

If the highest nodes are made to be sufficiently challenging to the strongest champs in the meta it would force people to chase thorkoye and gritty. There are no other 5* teams that do what they do as fast as they do it. And if you rng your way into wasp, kingpin, or banner your never completing those high nodes.

It's time to unleash scl 10. It has been "coming soon" for way too long. But it's important that the game is still accessible for players that do not have the "meta". Imagine the nightmare of the highest level of the game being made to challenge gambit before his nerfs. That's like putting a game out and telling anyone that didnt have gambit "your supposed to lose". That is not fun.

Xair

if u make sure the meta is balanced then it could work. and each imbalance would be reflected immediately.
its a chicken and egg situation. u eighter give up in advance, or decide to make it work.

shinnaruto

I think that we have gotten around to the discussions of bringing back Heroics. Back in days of yore, Heroics was a PVE that was made to challenge players.

I worry about SCL10 never coming out. I do not know what the figures look like, but is the game still growing or shrinking player base wise? this would mean stretching out the base even further than it is now. I want it to, but I do not know if it will ever come to pass.