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

fight4thedream

Thank you for taking the time to field and answer questions.  I have a lot I am curious about but I will limit myself to two questions. 

1.) Are 6* characters still taboo or are they something the new dev team is considering in their future plans? 

2.) Any plans to introduce new game events that cater to newer players? 

With over 120 characters in the 4* tier, I was thinking it would be cool if there were one shot events that had players with 1* and 2* (maybe 3*?) that had challenging fights where a new player could earn one 4* cover. Maybe run them once or twice a week. 

For example:

Sabertooth Attacks! 
Sabertooth ambushes Wolverine! 1-on-1 fight. 
Required character: 2* Wolverine
Battle conditions: Match away friendly strike tiles to deal damage to Sabertooth.  Player takes normal damage.

Battle of Wits! 
Magneto takes on his old friend Charles in a game of chess. 1-on-1 fight against 4* Professor X
Required character: 2* Magneto
Battle conditions: Damage can only be dealt either via match 4 (1,500 damage) or match 5 (3,000 damage). Condition applies to both player and opponent. 

And so on. Ideally, the event should be challenging but not impossible and tied to Marvel lore. Just food for thought! Cheers!

Bzhai

1) Are you guys planning to bring back milestones for special events? A lot of events like Puzzle Gauntlet and Boss events can be completed quickly and never looked at again. Adding an achievements list can give some replay value. 

2) Can we get Welcome to Shield events for 5 stars?

3) Red-isos are the only one-function currency in the game. Can we use them like iso-8 to purchase something else?

4) Can the cap for boosts be removed please? I would really like to buy 99+ of them and not have to worry about replenishing and re-equiping them after every fight.

Theghouse

Main question: In regards to PVP - are we close to the end of 5* god boosts?

There are of course many discussion points on this topic but would be interested in hearing dev thoughts on:
- it continues to feel like a lazy bandaid to avoid addressing new 5* power creep, community requests for updating old characters, and the number of new 5* who are considered dead-on-arrival in the meta

- PVP MMR is designed to not match 450 rosters against 550 rosters until above the breaking point, but with boosts it routinely matches smaller rosters with no boosted characters against 570+ boosted teams starting from 0

- it only serves to widen the gap before a player can be competitive in 5* PVP.  Even a player who starts champing every new latest 5* today is way behind because of the number of characters already in the 5* tier.  It's even worse for players who can't keep up with every latest release, or are still not up to the 5* transition yet, as they fall farther and farther behind on the chances at least one of their covered 5* characters will be boosted when they continue getting matched against 570+ teams

- with new character ability designs being more in-tune with current power levels and the meta, and sweeping updates coming to older characters, this bandaid might not be needed anymore? If the goal of updating older characters is to create balance between character power levels, boosting only a small handful of 5* each week to god levels artificially recreates a large imbalance.  There is no logical reason to do both.

Godzillafan67

All newer characters who have a power dependent upon board conditions or character stats have their power texts automatically updated during the fight (e.g. strongest team color, who Valkyrie is targeting,  most prevalent color tile, etc.). Are you going to update older characters so that their powers autoupdate as well? 

Tony_Foot

With a hundred and something four stars on my roster gathering dust, would you consider making pvp a maximum of one 5*. This would open up so many more combinations and not make the game so reliant on god boosted characters. 

Is it possible for example to make say CL1-7 three star pvp and 8-10 four star pvp? At healthy 5* level the games might as well be 2v2 when I'm forced to play 3* pvp. 

With reworks do you have any plans to make Classics more obtainable? For example I wasn't in a position to go for 5* IM and Cap FA when they were released and despite not having half of the 5* champed, it's taken me until this week to get Cap and IM champed. Waiting for them to be featured and getting half a cover of shards takes years.

NemoAbernnigan

Persephone said:

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

I made a rough character speculation for FitzSimmons after I rewatched Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I really would love to see more AoS characters. With May's addition we can finally run a full AoS team, but Quake doesn't have the best synergy with Coulson or May, and Coulson only synergizes with May if you use her stun a bunch and even then it's only a little bit.

As for my questions:

1.) Any chance we'll be seeing any new game types in PvE? Puzzle Guantlet was a great addition and I'd love to see more like that. I've been pitching a 5 character team event for years. I'd love to see how crazy the team synergies could get with 5 characters on your team.

2.) I saw a recommendation from a fellow player a while ago for a shard bank, so players could reallocate the shards they have no use for towards the characters they were  currently working on. I thought it was a great idea but unlikely to ever be implemented. What are the odds that I was wrong?

Wyntre

There are some great questions here, and I kinda want to use the space to ask about gameplay, too, but there's a more important issue for me, so I'll focus on that.  Some time ago (maybe a year?), there was a UI update that significantly shrunk the game on the iPad, and several of us with visual impairments were super frustrated that nobody had done any work with the disabled community to test or even focus group these changes.  There are accessibility consultants who specialize in this kind of work, and hiring one of them before you make major UI changes would be very helpful.

The game already has some significant UI issues in visual impairment starting with the tiles themselves.  For example, pink/purple and red are not only  very close in shading but as both are triangles with different orientations, very close in *shapes* as well.  Same with green and blue being squares and rectangles; the shapes are very close to each other just like the shades are.  It's pretty, but it makes it harder to see.  An accessibility consultant could've told the initial devs this in 10 minutes of looking at the game!

So the question is this: as developers, how are you considering accessibility issue in your work, particularly with respect to the visually impaired--including color-blindness, which affects about eight percent of men?

skittledaddy

So glad you are opening the conversation up to the players! Communication is key to success (for both parties)

My Questions:
1: Do you have some new ideas on how to enhance the Milestone feature? It was a GREAT addition a few years back that seems to be universally liked, but the daily milestones have grown stale and the lifetime milestones are approaching the point of impossibility for us veteran players. This seems like a limitless way to engage a more diverse amount of daily play from all levels of players, use it that way.

2: Can the number of players in a certain PVE (and maybe PVP?) time-slice and CL difficulty be visible to the players BEFORE they join, rather than after? That would eliminate the labor-intensive effort of those who track players counts via outside information and even the field for those aren't privy to the competitive advantage of those waiting to join to catch a bracket "flip".

rbGriphon

1) To encourage play of legacy characters, would you consider awarding a single shard for playing a character, maybe limit 3 or 5 per day.

2) Consider creating a legacy 4/5 star store that runs for a week with a limited number of characters, similar to the Classics, but gives a reasonable chance to pull for characters we might be chasing.

ImmortalZodd

can we please get feeders for all 5 stars that are in classic legends ASAP? It's insane that Wanda still doesn't have a feeder.

JRYUART

1. For those of us post-iso, it would be nice to have more things to purchase using this currency.  I’m have been sitting on roughly 40 million iso for the past couple of years as my average earning/spending has remained even.  It would be great if we could at least have the option to spend it on covers or slots. 

2. Hacks and cheaters.  Hopefully you will find ways to block/ban those who use the speed, character level and resource hacks so that we can have a fair and even playing field again.  It’s gone on far too long and the ones that are actively using them have gotten away with it for too long, despite the legit players knowing who they are. 

3.  May we get a lab to play around in?  You know how fighting games have a practice mode where you can adjust the settings / opponents and just practice combos?  It would be great if there was a place where we could try out teams and scenarios for the sake of practice.  Maybe make this a feature for those who pay for VIP. 

Thanks!

LakeStone

Awesome questions everyone! We will review these and get back by June 20th. Thank you!