Next Character Release Announcement (5/7/20 Release)

IceIX
IceIX ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 4,322 Site Admin
in MPQ General Discussion

Hey all,

So, a bit of news for everyone on our next upcoming character release. For this next character release, we’re going to be bringing out another 5-Star character after Yelena Belova. This makes for two 5-Star releases in a row, which we’ve never done before. This is *not* a new normal, or something we directly planned for, it’s just the way things ended up working out.

As everyone is pretty well aware, the pandemic has played havoc with a lot of work schedules, releases, and everything else you can think of. MPQ was not immune to this, but we managed to largely weather the storm and have shifted to a work from home dynamic for nearly everything. So that’s great! It means that our release schedule for upcoming characters *and features* are pretty well unaffected. We’ve got some exciting stuff coming up in the next few months that I’d love to share once they have baked a little bit longer in the home ovens.

What’s not so great is that it also played with the short term release of some content that we were expecting to hit at the start of May. Yelena Belova was already far enough into development that it made sense to finish her up and release her. 

So, our short term plans were short circuited by recent events. With cinematic releases, we normally tend to plan a bit more in the way of tie-ins, which in this case included another character release. I think it’s easy to assume that the updates to the Marvel movies took us all by surprise. We’re still planning on releasing new content for the movie launch, so it makes more sense to release it at that point than now. Fortunately, we were able to shift our release plans besides that a bit so that there will not be a gap in overall character releases.  To peek behind the curtain a little, characters are planned out well ahead of time. In order to create characters to the artistic, mechanical, and flavor everyone expects, characters themselves take a decent amount of time to create. Hence, a 5-Star release right after a 5-Star.

So what does this mean? Really, other than a weird release schedule for this release, not much.  This next 5-Star release will be a Boss Event, which is something people have been asking for for a bit! So everyone should enjoy beating down another possible world ending threat with their Alliance to celebrate the release of this character. I won’t spoil who it is, but I’ll say that they’re among the top fan favorite bad guys who people have definitely wanted in a 5-Star capacity. They’re also not an alternative version of an already released character, so you’ll have an all new powerhouse to play with!

So yeah. Wanted to get out in front of this release to let you all know what is going on and why. This year so far has been very atypical, and we are very appreciative of the patience you’ve all shown. Thanks for hanging with us! Also, like I said, we’ve got plans for some cool stuff including working on a revamp of S.H.I.E.L.D. Training amongst other things. Marvel Puzzle Quest is still going strong, come what may out there in this wide world! Demiurge Studios and D3Go is in a very unique situation where we can continue to work on the game through these very complicated and challenging times. It is our goal to continue to serve the Marvel Puzzle Quest game and community. Again, we appreciate all the support and patience.

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Comments

  • supergarv
    supergarv Posts: 410 Mover and Shaker
    Thx for the heads up. Comms like these are highly appreciated by the community.

    Was maybe not releasing a new char ever considered? I doubt most players really require the pace of new char releases. Many of us would rather see you fixing some long standing issues with the game. There are too many threads listing these issues that I won‘t repeat them. Just a thought, that maybe pushing out chars is not what we players expect you to do...

    Now that movie tie-ins might be rescheduled, I would love to see these issues addressed...





    (darn I can‘t hold myself: Supports accquisition, CL10 amount of playtime, Roster presets, vaults with „pick-3“ chars, ddq speed up for high end rosters, gameplay speedup [looking at you, attack tiles+pt animations+banners+mindless ones], permanent TU/AP boosts)
  • The rockett
    The rockett Posts: 2,016 Chairperson of the Boards
    While I think we all can understand this, does that mean we will get a few 4* in a row so we are not a 4/5/4/5/5/4/5?  
  • supergarv
    supergarv Posts: 410 Mover and Shaker
    Ok, thanks for that info, I see. To me it feels that developing chars takes like 90% of the game designers work, 9% rare new events and 1% for gameplay/ui improvements over the past years (the 60fps thing was nice, but it did not increase game speed, just the intermediate interpolated extra frames). The QA engineers probably also can only focus on testing new chars and not addressing gameplay improvements - so that was my reasoning that current character development feels like it is taking all possible resources.

    Happy to hear you might be improving on the issues. Maybe make one of your future questionaires to ask players how they weigh new chars vs gameplay vs events? I‘d bow to that result and shut up forever if I‘m wrongly extrapolating :-D
  • The rockett
    The rockett Posts: 2,016 Chairperson of the Boards
    IceIX said:
    supergarv said:
    Thx for the heads up. Comms like these are highly appreciated by the community.

    Was maybe not releasing a new char ever considered? I doubt most players really require the pace of new char releases. Many of us would rather see you fixing some long standing issues with the game. There are too many threads listing these issues that I won‘t repeat them. Just a thought, that maybe pushing out chars is not what we players expect you to do...

    Now that movie tie-ins might be rescheduled, I would love to see these issues addressed...





    (darn I can‘t hold myself: Supports accquisition, CL10 amount of playtime, Roster presets, vaults with „pick-3“ chars, ddq speed up for high end rosters, gameplay speedup [looking at you, attack tiles+pt animations+banners+mindless ones], permanent TU/AP boosts)
    I mean, sure, that was considered. But the amount of work put into design and creation of a character and something like supports acquisition, roster presets, permanent boosts and the like are not in the same realm. Not releasing a single character wouldn't have suddenly put one of these things into, and through, design and production in that amount of time. That's not to say that we're not looking into some of that stuff. Just that it wouldn't have been much affected by a single character launch or lack of one.
    What about character rebalances?  You started a thread asking for feedback, even though everyone in MPQ knows bishop is THE most broken character in the game and possibly ever in the game.  Could you have skipped a release and just fixed the broken characters that we have today?   I don’t think it is fun to be stun locked before AI makes a single move. 
  • LFChikarason
    LFChikarason Posts: 402 Mover and Shaker
    Thank you for an update, glad everyone is doing well, working from home, etc. I do have other concerns I will table for now, just happy to see this level of transparency. 
  • Hilk
    Hilk Posts: 131 Tile Toppler
    @IceIX
    Will there be additional spacing before the second moves into latest legends to allow a more normal flow/buildup of cp.... or will they be jammed?
  • SnowcaTT
    SnowcaTT Posts: 3,486 Chairperson of the Boards
    IceIX said:

    So what does this mean? Really, other than a weird release schedule for this release, not much.  This next 5-Star release will be a Boss Event, which is something people have been asking for for a bit! So everyone should enjoy beating down another possible world ending threat with their Alliance to celebrate the release of this character. I won’t spoil who it is, but I’ll say that they’re among the top fan favorite bad guys who people have definitely wanted in a 5-Star capacity. They’re also not an alternative version of an already released character, so you’ll have an all new powerhouse to play with!


    Looking forward to the Boss event.

    Any thought about having feeders sooner?

    With 5* ImmortalHulk/4*/ 5* Yelena / 5* [new] ... it's going to be pretty rough to find enough resources to be able to collect these characters at this quick pace.
  • Glockoma
    Glockoma Posts: 555 Critical Contributor
    IceIX said:
    The rockett said:
    What about character rebalances?  You started a thread asking for feedback, even though everyone in MPQ knows bishop is THE most broken character in the game and possibly ever in the game.  Could you have skipped a release and just fixed the broken characters that we have today?   I don’t think it is fun to be stun locked before AI makes a single move. 
    Character rebalances are one of the things that got knocked on its head by this whole situation. It's still on our radar, but took a slightly back-er(?) seat to getting everything set up so we could run everything from home. Hasn't been shelved!
    So happy to hear this. This type of communication is dire for a game this age. I understand the commitment to character release and second the fact that it is independent of other current in -game issues. I cannot wait to see upgrades to the game and hope that you all can find the time to assess the plethora of changes required to keep the game updated. This news has definitely kept me involved instead of rage-quitting (again x3). Keep up the work and the PSA’s!
  • Tony_Foot
    Tony_Foot Posts: 1,814 Chairperson of the Boards
    SnowcaTT said:
    IceIX said:

    So what does this mean? Really, other than a weird release schedule for this release, not much.  This next 5-Star release will be a Boss Event, which is something people have been asking for for a bit! So everyone should enjoy beating down another possible world ending threat with their Alliance to celebrate the release of this character. I won’t spoil who it is, but I’ll say that they’re among the top fan favorite bad guys who people have definitely wanted in a 5-Star capacity. They’re also not an alternative version of an already released character, so you’ll have an all new powerhouse to play with!


    Looking forward to the Boss event.

    Any thought about having feeders sooner?

    With 5* ImmortalHulk/4*/ 5* Yelena / 5* [new] ... it's going to be pretty rough to find enough resources to be able to collect these characters at this quick pace.
    It’s looking like the best three in latest in a long long time.
  • Mrcl25
    Mrcl25 Posts: 138 Tile Toppler
    edited May 2020
    IceIX said:
    The rockett said:
    What about character rebalances?  You started a thread asking for feedback, even though everyone in MPQ knows bishop is THE most broken character in the game and possibly ever in the game.  Could you have skipped a release and just fixed the broken characters that we have today?   I don’t think it is fun to be stun locked before AI makes a single move. 
    Character rebalances are one of the things that got knocked on its head by this whole situation. It's still on our radar, but took a slightly back-er(?) seat to getting everything set up so we could run everything from home. Hasn't been shelved!
    @IceIX @LakeStone

    On the subject of rebalances, I hope you consider at some point, instead of releasing a new character, re-releasing rebalanced older characters from all tiers, but specially 4* and 5*s. With special stores, boss events, shield training, etc, as if it was a new character. It would be a way to address the needed rebalance situation while mantaining the same character release format the game has today. 
  • DyingLegend
    DyingLegend Posts: 1,208 Chairperson of the Boards
    I still have questions, but I appreciate these types of communications
  • argle_bargle
    argle_bargle Posts: 88 Match Maker
    Thank you for the heads up. Glad y'all are still managing despite all of this.

    (This means I'll have to stop as soon as I get one Yelena cover. : / Or perhaps I should wait until Yelena and the new character are in LL...)
  • thedarkphoenix
    thedarkphoenix Posts: 557 Critical Contributor
    cool deal, good way to test the waters under the circumstances.

    Heads up are always welcome.
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,759 Chairperson of the Boards
    itsuka7 said:
    I appreciate the info. But I wonder if you have considered what a 2 week 5* release schedule means for 4* players without the option of scl10 to get the shards for their one needed cover to play pve? Have you considered that 4* players cannot acquire enough cp in 2 weeks to have a chance of getting the next cover (it takes 525 cp on average after all), even if they play every pve event for t10 ranking?

    If extraordinary circumstances force your hand as a company, may I suggest that extraordinary measures might be taken to ensure anyone below 5* rank can still play pve competitively? Make sure we get that cover, one way or another. Make up adequately for shortening the cp acquisition time. Double the cp awards in those two weeks, or double the odds of drawing that 5*. Or rig the draws from that special store. But please, please, consider how to make sure 4* players can remain competitive pve players. 
    Cosmic Chaos will give IHulk shards so if you have a cover of IHulk then you should be able to get the shards of the new 5* in PVE.  Also ICE said there will be a boss event so maybe shards will be given in the boss event.

    lastly if you did CL10 for Yelena then you will get another PVE giving Yelena covers one PVE.  That would let you get one cover of Yelena so you can keep hoarding for the next 5*.

    Now if you don’t play CL10 then I would still recommend waiting for this 5* to enter LL so you will be able to get Yelena and the newest 5*.  There should only be 2 event with Yelena between now and when this 5* enters packs

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