Is Wanda Top Ten for sure?

BriMan2222

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

entrailbucket said:

HoundofShadow said:

I just realised we've hit the quota of 2 meta 5* per calendar year: Colossus and Wanda. 

Fighting against Wanda/Apocalypse/Colossus took me 90 to 110 seconds with + 4 yellow/purple/blue ap boost. Without boost it will probably take me 3 minutes or so.

I don't think I buy that they have a "quota" of good 5* per year.

What would their incentive be to do things this way?  From a profit perspective, wouldn't it be ideal for every new 5* to be usable-to-excellent?  Why would they choose to release an underpowered character that nobody spends on?

I think it's *far* more likely that they don't understand what makes characters good, or that characters are good or bad by mistake.

I disagree. That’s not how businesses work . Who would release a product and expect customers to buy it knowing they planned on making it obsolete with an upgrade in a few months . We often held back superior products in our research pipeline because we needed to make our money back on the newest released product. We’d flip it with an upgrade once a year or so. At times we were finding research upgrades so fast it would be 3 to 5 years before we could let them be available to mass market 

Isn't that the whole joke with apple/iPhone and computers in general? Hey I've got the best and newest product now,   aaaand it's obsolete.

TheEyeDoctorsWife

entrailbucket said:

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

entrailbucket said:

HoundofShadow said:

I just realised we've hit the quota of 2 meta 5* per calendar year: Colossus and Wanda. 

Fighting against Wanda/Apocalypse/Colossus took me 90 to 110 seconds with + 4 yellow/purple/blue ap boost. Without boost it will probably take me 3 minutes or so.

I don't think I buy that they have a "quota" of good 5* per year.

What would their incentive be to do things this way?  From a profit perspective, wouldn't it be ideal for every new 5* to be usable-to-excellent?  Why would they choose to release an underpowered character that nobody spends on?

I think it's *far* more likely that they don't understand what makes characters good, or that characters are good or bad by mistake.

I disagree. That’s not how businesses work . Who would release a product and expect customers to buy it knowing they planned on making it obsolete with an upgrade in a few months . We often held back superior products in our research pipeline because we needed to make our money back on the newest released product. We’d flip it with an upgrade once a year or so. At times we were finding research upgrades so fast it would be 3 to 5 years before we could let them be available to mass market 

That would make sense if they released a good character twice a year and *absolutely nothing* else. 

Maybe your business holds off on releasing superior products so customers' current stuff won't be obsolete too quickly, but do you spend research, development, and marketing money on clearly inferior, useless products that no one will buy in the interim?

LOL, the vast majority of players are collectionists , they could care less if they’re not going to be used , I see dozens of “gotta collect them all “ rosters . MPQ sees their market data that players are still spending no matter how bad of a release they put out . They have no incentive to release a new meta every few months . There’s also the paranoia of “ it isn’t any good now but what if it synergizes with the next release as a meta combo and I missed it “. 

Bad

Imo they are not interested in creating meta characters, instead they obviously use to create new concepts and diversity. 
I appreciate that and I think it's a commendable feature when there are already so many characters in game. 
I think there is no absolute bad character in the game, rather characters who more people are interested in him, as there are already a lot of sinergies in the game:  incresing special tiles, AoE damage, multiple hits boosted, increased match damage, multiple cascades, damage reduction and strong passives. 
Wanda is meta because stopped in their tracks hulkoye teams, and at the same time she is a booster and helps with bad boards.
If it appeared a character with an attack negating damage reduction and another fine feature, possible he will be meta too as a great amount of players would be interest in playing him.
Another games just release characters stronger, faster, and more able to knockdown a foe on one turn, and are easily render obsolete by the next one.
This game tries to develop others strategies, and if they are not useful for pvp, possibly they could be good for pve.

Another thing: the power creep seems to have stopped, or it changes to very low health to a lot of health. 

entrailbucket

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

entrailbucket said:

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

entrailbucket said:

HoundofShadow said:

I just realised we've hit the quota of 2 meta 5* per calendar year: Colossus and Wanda. 

Fighting against Wanda/Apocalypse/Colossus took me 90 to 110 seconds with + 4 yellow/purple/blue ap boost. Without boost it will probably take me 3 minutes or so.

I don't think I buy that they have a "quota" of good 5* per year.

What would their incentive be to do things this way?  From a profit perspective, wouldn't it be ideal for every new 5* to be usable-to-excellent?  Why would they choose to release an underpowered character that nobody spends on?

I think it's *far* more likely that they don't understand what makes characters good, or that characters are good or bad by mistake.

I disagree. That’s not how businesses work . Who would release a product and expect customers to buy it knowing they planned on making it obsolete with an upgrade in a few months . We often held back superior products in our research pipeline because we needed to make our money back on the newest released product. We’d flip it with an upgrade once a year or so. At times we were finding research upgrades so fast it would be 3 to 5 years before we could let them be available to mass market 

That would make sense if they released a good character twice a year and *absolutely nothing* else. 

Maybe your business holds off on releasing superior products so customers' current stuff won't be obsolete too quickly, but do you spend research, development, and marketing money on clearly inferior, useless products that no one will buy in the interim?

LOL, the vast majority of players are collectionists , they could care less if they’re not going to be used , I see dozens of “gotta collect them all “ rosters . MPQ sees their market data that players are still spending no matter how bad of a release they put out . They have no incentive to release a new meta every few months . There’s also the paranoia of “ it isn’t any good now but what if it synergizes with the next release as a meta combo and I missed it “. 

Ok, so if they know that everyone will spend a ton of money on any old junk they release, why are any characters *good*?  The incentive in that case would be to make characters that are all the same level of mediocre.

Bad

Also there is the fact that actually that character is meta but few people use it, and just when that character takes his exit from LL, all people start to use him.
Or people playing just realize how good it is the character or his sinergy playing vs him.
Or perhaps they are completing him in the last moment of the deadline.

ThaRoadWarrior

I also kind of question how deliberately meta characters are introduced to the pool. We have seen too many spectacular meta breaker failures in our time here to trust that the meta can be shaken up on purpose in a way as subtle as Colossus. Either that I or I don’t believe Colossus was truly intended to be part of the meta on purpose. I believe it that 5Witch was a deliberate counter to iHulk, but I think his real or imagined synergy with 5Witch was emergent and frankly not that strong. If you look at Odin’s powers, his passive AP reduction explicitly says it will target team up AP which tells me he is the first attempt to dethrone Okoye on purpose, but in the underwhelming way we have seen other pre 5Witch counters come out in the past.

HoundofShadow

This is one of the questions from their FAQ in 2014. I know you are going to say it's 2021 now, so this is not relevant at all. However, their actions or those 5* that have been released over the years imply that it is still true. 

Q: At the top of the leaderboards, Versus is geared towards playing fast (to avoid being hit while unshielded) rather than playing creatively with diverse rosters. The 'fastest' teams dominate. Are you comfortable with this element of the game?

A: Yes and no: In any multiplayer game, high-end competition is going to be a somewhat different game than what most people are playing. There are fewer viable strategies and they’re typically a little less expressive and creative. We’re comfortable with the fact that some of the characters we release won’t find a role in that environment and are just there to be fun and interesting for folks that are less focused on being at the top. We do want the top of the leaderboards to be an interesting place to be, and intend to continue shaking things up with new characters and balance changes when we see a single team composition dominating. But speed will probably always be more important at the top than it is for most players.

Basically, for those who have been trashing 80% of the 5* release as useless, unusable or whatever adjectives you want to describe them, you need to realise that there are other players who find joy in having fun, rather than in playing for speed. Given that majority of the players don't play for speed, it's perhaps natural for them to create something fun most of the time. Of course, "fun" is subjective.

Akoni

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

entrailbucket said:

HoundofShadow said:

I just realised we've hit the quota of 2 meta 5* per calendar year: Colossus and Wanda. 

Fighting against Wanda/Apocalypse/Colossus took me 90 to 110 seconds with + 4 yellow/purple/blue ap boost. Without boost it will probably take me 3 minutes or so.

I don't think I buy that they have a "quota" of good 5* per year.

What would their incentive be to do things this way?  From a profit perspective, wouldn't it be ideal for every new 5* to be usable-to-excellent?  Why would they choose to release an underpowered character that nobody spends on?

I think it's *far* more likely that they don't understand what makes characters good, or that characters are good or bad by mistake.

I disagree. That’s not how businesses work . Who would release a product and expect customers to buy it knowing they planned on making it obsolete with an upgrade in a few months . We often held back superior products in our research pipeline because we needed to make our money back on the newest released product. We’d flip it with an upgrade once a year or so. At times we were finding research upgrades so fast it would be 3 to 5 years before we could let them be available to mass market 

You raise a good point here. The only reason I sort of disagree with you is the fact that this strategy requires that a company, at some point, remove obsolete products from circulation in order to drive revenue on the newer product. In MPQ, every product remains available (albeit limited) to the player base at all times. In addition, it is often offered time and time again. 

In support of your argument, there is one type of product that supports the strategy that you mentioned without requiring removal from the market. This is any product that fulfills a need, but is limited in scope, thereby requiring the consumer to eventually move on to the next product. Fitness and diet programs fall into this category. Old programs are often still sold even when other programs are released making the old programs kind of like introductory programs. In MPQ, the 1*, 2*, 3*, and 4* characters fulfill this role. Each pool of characters are an intro to the next level. This is likely where your argument holds true.

The argument breaks down at the fifth tier. Once a player hits 5* land, it is in the devs' best interest to make every 5* character a hit since 5* characters are not an entry to something greater. Unfortunately, this has not been the case, so I am inclined to believe that Entrail's argument that devs are simply under-performing is what's happening at this level. Even so, if a higher tier is ever introduced, your argument might then become applicable at this level as well.

entrailbucket

HoundofShadow said:

This is one of the questions from their FAQ in 2014. I know you are going to say it's 2021 now, so this is not relevant at all. However, their actions or those 5* that have been released over the years imply that it is still true. 

Q: At the top of the leaderboards, Versus is geared towards playing fast (to avoid being hit while unshielded) rather than playing creatively with diverse rosters. The 'fastest' teams dominate. Are you comfortable with this element of the game?

A: Yes and no: In any multiplayer game, high-end competition is going to be a somewhat different game than what most people are playing. There are fewer viable strategies and they’re typically a little less expressive and creative. We’re comfortable with the fact that some of the characters we release won’t find a role in that environment and are just there to be fun and interesting for folks that are less focused on being at the top. We do want the top of the leaderboards to be an interesting place to be, and intend to continue shaking things up with new characters and balance changes when we see a single team composition dominating. But speed will probably always be more important at the top than it is for most players.

Basically, for those who have been trashing 80% of the 5* release as useless, unusable or whatever adjectives you want to describe them, you need to realise that there are other players who find joy in having fun, rather than in playing for speed. Given that majority of the players don't play for speed, it's perhaps natural for them to create something fun most of the time. Of course,  "fun" is subjective.

I understand what you're saying, but what you're missing is that the difference between "unusable" and "unused" is semantics.

Before SW and boosted 5*, 90% of teams I saw in pvp were Okoye/Hulk.  In the unboosted events, 90% of what I saw was SW/Colossus.

Every other 5* was unused.  Are some of them technically usable?  Of course!  But if no one ever uses them for anything, the distinction is completely irrelevant. 

If I have a specialized set of tools for working on cars, but I don't own a car, those tools aren't intrinsically useless, but they're useless *to me*.

TheEyeDoctorsWife

As someone mentioned , useless characters are not being retired . It would be great if MPQ ran an anniversary poll of which 5 characters the fan base would like to see removed every year ( naturally you’d be hopefully justly compensated if you had it rostered ). I’d limit this to 4 and 5 stars of course , no feeders .

HoundofShadow

MMR matches you with someone who is similar to your roster, points etc. Most casual players stop at around 600-700 points. They are also highly unlikely to use shield. As you move up the point ladder, your variety of opponents become fewer. What I'm saying is, you can see the greatest variety of opponents in the early part of the climb: 0-400. If you skip 20 times, you can see at least 10 to 15 set of different opponents. These group of players are largely your casual players. Once you hit past 800 or so, this is where you see all the competitive players. Of course, timing of your joining the pvps plays some part as well. The recent 5* boost also shake things up, somewhat, depending on who are boosted.

Whether a player wants to use a certain character depends on their own personal criteria, which is subjective. Since the dev doesn't prioritise creating characters' abilities that satisfy an individual player's criteria; therefore, they usually create abilities that target the mass market, and the theme is probably fun or not speed. This doesn't mean they don't create something for speed players, but it's just not as frequent as you see. That's why a majority of 5* released are disappointments because they don't fit their own criteria.

Even though I'm a 5* player now, I still use teams that consists of 3* to 5* characters when I'm not playing for speed.

entrailbucket

Are you saying that when you're under 400 points you see 10-15 different player names, or 10-15 different team compositions? 

I can believe the first, although I find it unlikely.  I generally see 5-6 different names at most when I'm around that point level, for reference.  I could skip 1000 times and I'd see the same 5-6 names.

The second I cannot believe.  I've been playing competitive PvP and placing top 1 to top 10 in events since 2014.  In what must be approaching a thousand PvP events, I can't think of *any* event in all of those years where I saw 10-15 different teams used among competitive players.  The game has simply never worked that way if you're at the top tier.

If I outclimb matchmaking to the point where I see 5-7 point matches, I can find lower-tier, non-competitive teams, and there's significantly more variety there.  Otherwise, at any given point in the game's entire history, there are 1-3 teams in use at the top end, and that's it.

HoundofShadow

I will observe it again because I rarely look at players' names.
 
As for the second, I should have been clearer. As you move to the top, 800 or 900 and beyond, you see competitive players, and they largely use meta teams: thus, the variety of opponents you use get reduced dramatically. Breaking MMR is another matter because the game has been forced to give you those lower tier players due to its algorithm used.

The tighter your criteria are when choosing which characters to use, the fewer your options are. Naturally, competitive players have limited options, compared to players who play for fun.

My criteria is pretty open when not playing for speed: as long as I can create a team of characters, regardless of which tier they are, to win matches against certain group of opponents, then to me, the characters are usable 

entrailbucket

So you don't see a wall of meta teams until you reach 800 or 900 points?

The only opponents I see, ever, are high-level versions of the same 1-3 meta teams, from 0 points until I break the matchmaking threshold.  This is not new -- it's been the same way for 7 years. 

If it's different for you, I don't know what you're doing differently.

By the way, I play for fun, competitively.  Those things are not mutually exclusive.  I don't care much about the rewards anymore, but I've always found it fun to play as fast as possible, and to see if I can win matches faster than my enemies can.

HoundofShadow

I think it's probably due to your mmr. Mine are baby champed mmr (45x), and yours are probably 500+ mmr. There are definitely more players in 45X mmr than those in 500+ mmr. Logically, the number of different opponents that we see are likely to be more than what you see. Probably that's why I don't hit a wall of meta team as early as you. I'll try to take a video of opponents that I see when I'm hitting different scores in the pvp. This will probably be more convincing.

Bad

Mmr does those things. It uses to happen there is someone unshielded at rank 3 and I want to hit him but I cannot see him, and I look at his 500 level roster. 
If he has 2 or 3 550 characters then he doesn't appear in my queue.
But possibly I could win those 75 points if he wasn't forbidden. 
So there are always unaccesible spots in the ranking.

Pantera236

Yeah entrailbucket as someone who just entered high mmr I can say that before when my highest character was a 500 ish apoc I could climb to 8xx off 10 -15 different opponents. Now that I have almost 550s I see the same high level floaters till I hit 9xx, sometimes even 1xxx

entrailbucket

And see, there's nothing magic about 550s that makes this happen.  All the way back to the start of the game in 2014, if you have the best tech, you only get matched against the best tech, whether that's lvl144 Patch/Magneto or lvl270/166 Fistbuster or lvl450 Omlpnx. 

Every character that's not the undisputed best is unused in PvP, and it's *always been that way*.

So when I look at the state of the metagame, I see nothing but the same 2-5 characters over and over.  I do oversimplify evaluation sometimes, but on the other hand, it often *is* that simple -- a character is either used 100% of the time or 0% of the time at the top end.

That's one reason why boosted 5* are so exciting for me and for other players like me.

HoundofShadow

That's why context is very important, especially when it comes to mmr. It makes sense that with your mmr, you are mostly seening meta 5* from 0 to 1200. Players who are in your mmr are largely competitive players or long time players. As mentioned, competitive players' choices are limited because they are interested in using only the best. On top of that, they are a small population in the game, given that majority of the players don't play competitively.
 
As a baby champed 5* player, I'm seeing a lot of different players from my climb from 0 to ~800, using more variety of opponents.

The other way to solve your problem is to have a massive increase number of players who have level 500+ 5* characters. That way, MMR has more choices for you, and you won't see the same 2-5 characters that early in your climb.

entrailbucket

HoundofShadow said:

That's why context is very important, especially when it comes to mmr. It makes sense that with your mmr, you are mostly seening meta 5* from 0 to 1200. Players who are in your mmr are largely competitive players or long time players. As mentioned, competitive players' choices are limited because they are interested in using only the best. On top of that, they are a small population in the game, given that majority of the players don't play competitively.
 
As a baby champed 5* player, I'm seeing a lot of different players from my climb from 0 to ~800, using more variety of opponents.

The other way to solve your problem is to have a massive increase number of players who have level 500+ 5* characters. That way, MMR has more choices for you, and you won't see the same 2-5 characters that early in your climb.

Ah, but there's the catch.  When newer players get lvl500+ characters, they're not going all in on Doc Ock or Kingpin.  They're going all in on the same 2 or 3 characters everyone else at the top end uses.  It's why diversity at this tier of play was impossible prior to 5* boosts, and it's why there's generally no diversity within a boost week.

As far as increasing the number of players at the highest tier, I'm not sure I'd like that.  As it stands, when I attack someone or someone attacks me, it's usually not random.  We're specifically targeting each other for some reason and sending some kind of message.  The game is much more strategic when you remove random hits, and it encourages personal grudges, truces (ugh) and rivalries.