Marvel Puzzle Quest Developer Q&A - June 2022 (6/10/22)

LakeStone

Hi Everyone –

The entire team here at D3 Go! is super excited to have Broken Circle Studios (BCS) on board and we’ve seen some really great insightful questions in response to the news.  A few questions have been answered by the team so far but with all these great questions, we would like to reintroduce the Monthly Developer Q&A here in the forums to help connect everyone with the team.  This way we can make sure your top questions are being answered by members of the team in the most efficient manner.

So without further ado, let’s get started with the Q&A details to keep in mind.

• Any legitimate question is fair game, but keeping your question clear and concise will help. It's much easier to grasp the intent of a sentence or two.
• Let's keep this to a max one or two questions each so we can manage things easily and give everyone the ability to participate. This is a monthly Q&A and you can submit further inquiries next time.
• Please submit your question for this Q&A by Noon PST on June 13th.   
• The team will review the questions and provide answers in the forums based on the collective questions from the community.  We will post the responses before EOD June 20th.

Thank you!

jsmjsmjsm00

Let's try to keep this organized too! Please read what other people post so we don't keep repeating the same questions. There is a "like" feature to throw your support behind something you would have posted yourself. 

My question is simply whether we will expect to see a change in the number of movie/TV tie-ins? There are a lot of popular comic characters that haven't made it into the game yet because it seems releases are almost required for each new movie and TV show. 

MegaBee

What is your opinion on feeders? More specifically, should every 3-star and 4-star be a feeder, and should every 4-star and 5-star have feeders? Thank you for your time.

HoundofShadow

1) How does the dev plan to design characters in terms of abilities, synergies and ap costs? Will future gameplay become more like Hulkoye or Polaris/BRB (Marvel Passive Quest) where you can win matches without much trouble even while watching netflix, compared to characters like Shang Chi, Big Wheel and Moon Knight where you need focus?

2) Are there any plan to make trap tiles more intimidating? Currently, most characters with trap tile abilities are being looked upon unfavorably. For example, Mr Sinister, Moon Knight and Yelena etc. Traps are supposed to induce fear due to the element of surprise or fear of unknown. In MPQ, the threat level of trap tiles is probably 2 out of 10.

Bad

I appreciate this new open dialogue.
Do you plan on implementing difficulty levels?
Imo each new content could be more enjoyed if they were enabled.
On pve there is the CL, but any type of gauntlet different than puzzle gauntlet don't has it.
Precisely on gauntlets not focusing on speed imo the experience could be greater if each player freely could choose the degree of his challenge, for just a tiny amount of extra reward for a excuse. 
Gauntlets offering difficulty levels may be a bit harder to design but if they are good could be reruned after.
On the other hand gauntlets with the same difficulty for all players could be really hard for some rosters, leaving the impression that it's not worth the rewards for the effort when on pve it's possible to choose a less difficult scl; and on the other side of the spectre they could be very easy for players like me always playing scl10, leaving the impression that I'm doing minor play just for to earn easy rewards and stomping defenceless bots.

HoundofShadow said:

Traps are supposed to induce fear due to the element of surprise or fear of unknown. In MPQ, the threat level of trap tiles is probably 2 out of 10.

Probably because they can be overwrited. It could be great a new type of trap rejecting the overwrite but then turning visible.

BriMan2222

Been playing almost since the very beginning and still have no 5 star support and only a few 4 stars.  Will there be new ways to acquire and upgrade supports?

JHawkInc

Supports.

Lots of problems, lots of ups and downs over their history. Currently we have a lackluster system that isn't growing, with a tolerable but still insufficient method to acquire and advance most of them. It's a system that could use a complete overhaul, even if that means completely removing and replacing it at some point.

So what have you got? We had a year where we got things like shards, and general consensus was that they addressed (or attempted to address) every major player concern *except* Supports. So I'd like to see something happen in that department.

For some more specific questions/thoughts:

It appears that characters released as Supports can't become fully released characters. We once pried out of a dev that this wasn't set in stone, but that no plans were made to address it. These days Wong seems like an obvious character choice, but he's already a Support. Hulkling seems like an obvious character at some point, but again, already a Support. Many people were upset when the Black Order dropped all at once because, again, we thought we'd never see them as characters. (and personally, I still think some mentor characters like Professor X would make good Support options, if we could have a setup where characters can be both Playable and Supports).

Supports are hard to acquire and advance. Red ISO is useless if you can't get supports, and there's no way to advance supports outside of RNG (like how shards can help you inch a character along that you can't pull covers for naturally). 

We haven't had new Supports in... a really long time. (I'm one of those spreadsheet players that collects and tracks game info, and even I can't be bothered to check when, exactly, the last one was released)

Infinity Stones aren't fairly available. They're mostly only available to high-end players as essentially trophies (I'm totally on board with such players being able to acquire them that way, I'm NOT on board with them being unavailable to everyone else). But also, I know a player who played PVP SCL7 and slowly earned each Stone, one at a time. Has a full set of six. I've been playing longer, have a more well developed roster, but am completely locked out of that tier of PVP. I can't even attempt the method he did to earn them. I'm not even sure the method was available when I was playing at that level. It kinda rubs the wrong way that I can't even try to acquire something in the game because I'm too high level.

And then, there's the whole "character expansion" aspect of Supports. Many were released alongside a new character, focused on that character, with special boosts only that character could use. When subpar characters are released, it feels like part of the character may have been "carved off" to use as a Support (instead of the the character being competitive with the rest, and then the Support being an additional boost). It kinda felt like some horrible attempt to monetize things, since people were having an easy enough time getting the characters, the horrible-to-acquire Supports would be something for the whales to chase. That kinda really rubbed people the wrong way. So add it to the list of things that need to be better about Supports.

Excited to see what some fresh eyes see for this aspect of the game, welcome to MPQ!

Domitronas

Super excited to see this type of communication!

1. What is going to be your policy regarding retroactively providing rewards to the players if any of the in-game reward systems changes? Think about updating feeders as an example - historically, established players beyond certain thresholds were retroactively provided the rewards after changes were made. Will this continue or do you have other plans?

2. Right now, there are certain levels of "walls" that players hit across all stages of their play, e.g. HP starvation in the early stages when you can hardly roster the characters as they come or ISO-8 deficit when transitioning from 4* to 5* tier (personally, I would need like 5 millions ISO to be able to level up and champion all the 4* characters that have 13 covers already). On the other end of the spectrum there's something known as being "post ISO", where you literally have mountains of it with barely any uses for it. So my question is, how do you feel about the overall in game resource economy? Is there any changes we can expect going forward in this regard?

shardwick

Are there any upgrades planned for PVP? I would like to see a minimum guarantee for points for winning a fight as well as an ability to refresh a node's points to see if a 40 pt fight that you queued up a couple hours ago when someone was climbing is still worth that much or if it dropped down to 20 pts or less.

leviticuschom

Thanks all taking the time to field these Q&As. I'm very excited to hear about this upcoming chapter and wish everyone at Broken Circle the best - and happy to support good planning and execution.

1. Can we expect to see any changes to Daily Quests & DDQs, if so approximately when, what format could it look like?

2. Economies. Many of us are nervous about the 5/3 releases and how that impacts HP/ISO8. Should we as players expect an economy that is contracting (same resources and an increase in demand)  -  expanding (increase in supply/resources and more opportunities to earn) - or an economy that tries to maintain the status quo. Will the economy in the near future contain new currencies, or changes to how current ones can be spent?

3. I know you said 1-2 Questions, but here's a fun one. As a long time MPQ players yourselves, which in-game characters best reflect their role in the comics, who do you like playing with?

p.s. I personally dislike the idea of supports in PVP (unless they could be confined to specific events, arenas). Due to uneven distributions in the past - and never making them a priority myself. Please don't punish my ambivalence. 

KGB

Can we expect any significant quality of life UI changes?

1) I'd like more ways to sort my roster (eg I'm looking for all characters who can fortify tiles for Puzzle Ops nodes).

2) I'd like more efficient ways to open batches of tokens (watching 50 animations when opening 50 takes close to 2 minutes and if I need to open 1000 tokens it takes an hour) with maybe an option to enter a number like 100 and have them all open instantly with no animation.

3) I'd like a way to open vault tokens until something specific happens. For example auto open Taco tokens until I draw the 1000 hp or the Legendary token type thing.

4) I'd like the battles to have faster animations (watching the Mindless ones place tokens at battle start is maddening. So are watching all the animations during the turn for healing, attack tiles, character X is dead, character Y is entering battle, you have applied X boost and so on). In other words no banners, faster (or no timers at all) on animations etc.

KGB

Seph1roth5

Haven't seen the most important question asked yet.

1: Where's Omega Red?
(2)followup: gimme Omega Red!

Persephone

I'm still waiting on 3* Mack with his Shotgun-axe 
I also would like a 4* Dr's. FitzSimmons

dianetics

Can you get rid of all the affiliations on supports? Just tie them to heroes, villains, or any character. There are currently 10 supports tied to specific characters or affiliations which is nearly 20% of the supports that go virtually unused.

Also, where is Omega Red?

Mrcl25

Is it possible that at some point we can have pve without time slices, or is that something we should never expect? There are a lot of ideas on how to keep pve competitive and speed based, but basically If we could do clears for each sub at any time in a 24h window, that would be the best improvement ever in this game. In pvp we have more flexibility because of shields, but in pve we have to play at very specific times each day or we can't compete, and that's my biggest problem with the game.

Chirus

What current plans do you have to prevent excessive HP burden by introducing a new 3* to the collection every month? Do you intend to increase the monthly HP rewards? Will Roster costs go down? How much freedom do you have with the economy of this game?

jredd

One thing i think really slows the game down at times is information banners. and let's be honest, anyone who's played this game for any length of time knows what's going on. i don't need a banner telling me character x does action y. even on passives. there have been toggles to turn off other things in the game. is it possible to introduce a toggle to turn off these banners? 

A feature i think would be really cool would be having each character/roster slot have a sub-character slot for a duplicate/farmed character. that way you could keep your max-champ and start a new build in the same roster slot without losing your champed character. conversely, the increase in roster slot price could be triggered/tied into the total number of characters in the game x 2 so you can roster a dupe without the added roster slot cost of 300+ Also, bonus roster slots/increased max default health pack storage earned through increasing shield ranks. 

DAZ0273

shardwick said:

Are there any upgrades planned for PVP? I would like to see a minimum guarantee for points for winning a fight as well as an ability to refresh a node's points to see if a 40 pt fight that you queued up a couple hours ago when someone was climbing is still worth that much or if it dropped down to 20 pts or less.

Speaking of PvP are there any plans to address rewards in season and normal play? PvP is gated for rosters but we still get 1* battle covers - It really is time to change this up for the higher Shield rank levels. In SCL10 minimum 2*cover rewards would be welcome as these aid with farming. Likewise there are big gaps at the end of Season rewards that could be fleshed out to encourage more play. Finally any more thoughts on returning CP to the 1000 point mark as it was for a short while. All of these might drive engagement for Versus.

captainheath

Could old events be brought back?  I enjoyed the seven-day events.  Maybe even switch up the pattern so they don't always start on the same day.  Can the two-day subs go away?

Is the new pattern of having a puzzle gauntlet during a boss event here to stay?  Awesome if it is.  Don't be afraid to have boss events more than once every four or five weeks.  (Please do the double five star in rewards again.  Small generosities keep your long-time vets coming back.)

Any plans for themed synergies?  Some characters have them, but having a team of three guardians or three avengers should do something.

The Viceroy Returns

LONG time player here (since Winter 2013).  Very interested for what's in store.

Question 1:

Any thoughts on making the presentation for PVE nodes better?

Ever PVE node should show it's status WITHOUT having to tap into it:

1) How many total clears have been done (3/4, 2/4, etc.)

2) If the refresh timer has started, and how close it is to finishing (along with #1)

3) Not as important as 1 and 2, but how many points it's worth.  (so I can easily find which are the highest point nodes that have finished their refresh)

With current UI, I have to tap into and then out of EVERY node JUST to see these 3 statuses of that node.  It's menu throttle fatigue in a big way.

Question 2:

Abilities that depend on the Health % of either themself (5-Star Thor) or an opponent (3-Star Punisher).  Have there been thoughts to have a "style change" on the health bar to show us that the new effect will be active?  Currently have to do a lot mental math to figure out if these states will be in effect.

This is done for some abilities that affect an opponent's Health Meter (3-Star Deadpool Red and 5-Star Old Man Daken), so would be nice to see it done for all powers.

axmoss

Can PVE time slices be like PVP and have 12 hour differences? Two consecutive PVPs do not have the same ending time.