Marvel Puzzle Quest Developer Q&A July 2022 Answers (7/26/22)

Bad

HoundofShadow said:

Can anyone explain this:

For example, we could easily see the creation of a trio of cupcake Versus characters that someone rosters in S.H.I.E.L.D. Training that's only there so that people can heal up off of them, and players taking turns at different MMRs so that everyone can do so. 

My guess is that some players are using cupcakes for their SC, or probably okoye could restore all health. 

BriMan2222

mdreyer93 said:

Please don't reduce the god boost scaling. IMO God boosts have been the best addition to the game in a while. Character diversity is so much greater now. 

This.  PVP has been so much more fun with the weekly rotating boosts.  If those are removed or lowered enough that it doesn't make much of a difference all that will happen is we will go back to the monotonous everybody use their strongest meta team pvp, which is mostly just wall to wall Wanda/colossus.  

KGB

DeNappa said:

KGB said:

DeNappa said:

LakeStone said:

Answer - Yes. There are more than a few events that would benefit from an update. Frankly alot of this is rooted in the toolset involved in event creation and updating. Without going too far into detail, there is a surprising amount of data involved in the creation and maintenance of events and the tools to support those effort need lots and lots of love. We're really excited about creating new events and updating the classics! I'm hopeful this is something we can take a crack at next year.

This is something that always baffled me. Given how fairly basic the structure of PVE events is, you'd expect most of this to be configurable by following some kind default template, with a simple editor, that the game engine can use to render the event. 

It looks simple to us but it's probably WAY more complex under the hood that you think.

Every node needs a point setting, the enemies, any dialog, wave vs non wave vs 1 time node vs boss node etc.

Subs need layout screens, ordering of uncovering the nodes (think that Florida sub in The Hunt), whether they are 24 or 48 hours, progression and placement rewards.

Then the over all PvE itself needs things like number of subs, vault tokens storage, the progression and placement rewards and so on.

A massive amount of data has to be kept for every player and alliance at all times across a server farm including saving data like tokens for subsequent runs. All of this is kept in massive databases.

I suspect in the beginning of MPQ a few PvE's were hand designed with rudimentary tools since no one knew if the game was going to be a success. It was years later before new PvE's appeared like Strange Sights and the subsequent ones and I doubt they spent any time creating nice tools to do so because none of that time spent generates any revenue or player good will (ie improves nothing for player experience).

KGB

I'm not saying there wouldn't be any complexity to it at all. But it IS well defined and probably for a large part scriptable by something that could be processed by a parser. For example (just making this up as I go):

{
  "id": ..,
  "name" : "{{FIGHT_FOR_WAKANDA_TITLE}}",
  "thumbnail": resources/wakanda_thumb.png
  "info": ..
  "start" : ..
  "rewards" : [ 
     { "SCL": 1, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     { "SCL": 2, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     (etc)
  ] ,
  "subs": [
     {
         "day": 1,
         "name" : ..
         "thumbnail" : ..
         "rewards": [ .. ],
         "bg_image": ..,
         "nodes": [
           { 
              "id": ..,
              "name": ..,
              "desc": ..,
              "mapcoords": { x: 123, y: 456 },
              "points": 1000,
              "repeatable": yes,
              "waves": 2,
              "visible_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "unlocks_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "enemies": [ .. ]
         ]
     },
     { "day": 2, .... }
  ]
}

And now I'm just throwing all the info in one definition, but I could imagine the rewards tables being separate and just referenced by id, just like enemy level tables based on amount of clears + SCL.

I love your JSON definitions / layout. It's definitely how modern S/W works (or at least how we do ours at my company). They should hire you to do the JSON definitions / layout and server side work to parse it and send to clients.

KGB

HoundofShadow

I strongly believe that we won't see a wall of Wanda/Colossus now. It's going to be much more varied.

ThaRoadWarrior

HoundofShadow said:

I strongly believe that we won't see a wall of Wanda/Colossus now. It's going to be much more varied.

Curious who you think you’ll see if boosts are dropped. It remains a strong team. I imagine you’ll see shang-chi climb teams and Wanda-Lossus float teams but we won’t know till an event without a boost list turns up.

jsmjsmjsm00

I think the takeaway is supposed to be that the devs want to move away from this idea that people just use one team vs every single PvP team. 

They want you to actually change teams based on who you are playing against. 

BriMan2222

Tony_Foot said:

BriMan2222 said:

mdreyer93 said:

Please don't reduce the god boost scaling. IMO God boosts have been the best addition to the game in a while. Character diversity is so much greater now. 

This.  PVP has been so much more fun with the weekly rotating boosts.  If those are removed or lowered enough that it doesn't make much of a difference all that will happen is we will go back to the monotonous everybody use their strongest meta team pvp, which is mostly just wall to wall Wanda/colossus.  

If they do what they are stating with a Rock Paper Scissors approach that wouldn’t happen. Then there is no need for god boost, other than to make sure matches are longer and you take more damage.

Besides all I see anyway on boost weeks is the same pairing for a week past 400. I’d prefer a different boost every event. 

Depends on whose boosted.  This week I've used and seen a wide variety of the boosted characters.  I have use P5 cyclops with shang chi, thor with apocolypse, and knull with apocolypse.  I've seen opponents with every combination of cyclops, thor, and knull together or teamed with shang chi or polaris or apocolypse.

Sure, the weeks when some one like colossus or wanda is boosted they rule the roost, but it's only one week until the meta changes up again.

HoundofShadow

I can't remember all the teams but we'll see

Variations of
Shang Chi 
Gargantos
Crystal
5* Jane
Sersi
Big Wheel
Chasm

Daredevil217

Answer - God boosts aren't so much the problem as it is the exponential scaling that these boosts bring to light. You actually see the same thing at the higher end of 4-Star boosts as well, where a max champed 4-Star boosted character will TROUNCE any non-boosted 270 or below in the game. This is then magnified by the increased match damage that 5-Stars sport which is exponentially increased by the boost. Not announcing anything right now, but fixing that kind of exponential growth is more in line with our current thinking than just bringing down boosted levels which puts a more artificial hard cap on things.

I read that as god boosts aren’t going anywhere (thank the devs!) but I don’t know if others are reading it differently?

ThaRoadWarrior

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

I think the takeaway is supposed to be that the devs want to move away from this idea that people just use one team vs every single PvP team. 

They want you to actually change teams based on who you are playing against. 

This is only possible for rosters who have alternatives. I would bet that there is a very rarified small number of players who have enough viable 5*s to correctly row-sham-bow the teams they're seeing. It's the kind of assumption someone might make if they could easily grant themselves a complete roster for testing for instance, rather than spending most of a year chasing a single 5* through regular play.

DAZ0273

Thanks for the answers, very cool!

KGB

Daredevil217 said:

Answer - God boosts aren't so much the problem as it is the exponential scaling that these boosts bring to light. You actually see the same thing at the higher end of 4-Star boosts as well, where a max champed 4-Star boosted character will TROUNCE any non-boosted 270 or below in the game. This is then magnified by the increased match damage that 5-Stars sport which is exponentially increased by the boost. Not announcing anything right now, but fixing that kind of exponential growth is more in line with our current thinking than just bringing down boosted levels which puts a more artificial hard cap on things.

I read that as god boosts aren’t going anywhere (thank the devs!) but I don’t know if others are reading it differently?

I read the same regarding boosts.

But also in there you should be reading that exponential scaling may be (likely is) going away at some point soon so that non God boosted characters are still viable to use vs God boosted ones.

KGB

Bowgentle

KGB said:

Daredevil217 said:

Answer - God boosts aren't so much the problem as it is the exponential scaling that these boosts bring to light. You actually see the same thing at the higher end of 4-Star boosts as well, where a max champed 4-Star boosted character will TROUNCE any non-boosted 270 or below in the game. This is then magnified by the increased match damage that 5-Stars sport which is exponentially increased by the boost. Not announcing anything right now, but fixing that kind of exponential growth is more in line with our current thinking than just bringing down boosted levels which puts a more artificial hard cap on things.

I read that as god boosts aren’t going anywhere (thank the devs!) but I don’t know if others are reading it differently?

I read the same regarding boosts.

But also in there you should be reading that exponential scaling may be (likely is) going away at some point soon so that non God boosted characters are still viable to use vs God boosted ones.

KGB

But that would also trivialize the challenge nodes.
Not sure they want to go to the effort to use different scales for player characters and PVE enemies.

HoundofShadow

Maybe when god boost is tweaked, the only thing that gain those boosts are power levels. HP and match damage will remain as it is. I'm not sure how difficult it is to implement this, but it will solve those HP Nd match damage issue for many tiers of players.

KGB

Bowgentle said:

KGB said:

Daredevil217 said:

Answer - God boosts aren't so much the problem as it is the exponential scaling that these boosts bring to light. You actually see the same thing at the higher end of 4-Star boosts as well, where a max champed 4-Star boosted character will TROUNCE any non-boosted 270 or below in the game. This is then magnified by the increased match damage that 5-Stars sport which is exponentially increased by the boost. Not announcing anything right now, but fixing that kind of exponential growth is more in line with our current thinking than just bringing down boosted levels which puts a more artificial hard cap on things.

I read that as god boosts aren’t going anywhere (thank the devs!) but I don’t know if others are reading it differently?

I read the same regarding boosts.

But also in there you should be reading that exponential scaling may be (likely is) going away at some point soon so that non God boosted characters are still viable to use vs God boosted ones.

KGB

But that would also trivialize the challenge nodes.
Not sure they want to go to the effort to use different scales for player characters and PVE enemies.

Maybe. The current exponential scaling starts around L330ish. Maybe they just move it to start at L550ish and make the curve steeper so that the 650 enemies remain the same as they are now.

Or maybe SCL11 comes out and they tweak rewards so that SCL10 gets less and SCL11 gets more and enemies in SCL11 go to L700 or 750 using linear scaling so 750 = 650 now.

Lots of ways they can do it.

KGB

jsmjsmjsm00

ThaRoadWarrior said:

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

I think the takeaway is supposed to be that the devs want to move away from this idea that people just use one team vs every single PvP team. 

They want you to actually change teams based on who you are playing against. 

This is only possible for rosters who have alternatives. I would bet that there is a very rarified small number of players who have enough viable 5*s to correctly row-sham-bow the teams they're seeing. It's the kind of assumption someone might make if they could easily grant themselves a complete roster for testing for instance, rather than spending most of a year chasing a single 5* through regular play.

... Or if you have only one 5 you should be using different 4s in your team so that you have options. You shouldn't be champing 5s before you have many many 4s champed. 

Choosing to ignore versatility because you only want to use your one "best team" is exactly what the new devs sound like they are against. 

DeNappa

KGB said:

DeNappa said:

KGB said:

DeNappa said:

LakeStone said:

Answer - Yes. There are more than a few events that would benefit from an update. Frankly alot of this is rooted in the toolset involved in event creation and updating. Without going too far into detail, there is a surprising amount of data involved in the creation and maintenance of events and the tools to support those effort need lots and lots of love. We're really excited about creating new events and updating the classics! I'm hopeful this is something we can take a crack at next year.

This is something that always baffled me. Given how fairly basic the structure of PVE events is, you'd expect most of this to be configurable by following some kind default template, with a simple editor, that the game engine can use to render the event. 

It looks simple to us but it's probably WAY more complex under the hood that you think.

Every node needs a point setting, the enemies, any dialog, wave vs non wave vs 1 time node vs boss node etc.

Subs need layout screens, ordering of uncovering the nodes (think that Florida sub in The Hunt), whether they are 24 or 48 hours, progression and placement rewards.

Then the over all PvE itself needs things like number of subs, vault tokens storage, the progression and placement rewards and so on.

A massive amount of data has to be kept for every player and alliance at all times across a server farm including saving data like tokens for subsequent runs. All of this is kept in massive databases.

I suspect in the beginning of MPQ a few PvE's were hand designed with rudimentary tools since no one knew if the game was going to be a success. It was years later before new PvE's appeared like Strange Sights and the subsequent ones and I doubt they spent any time creating nice tools to do so because none of that time spent generates any revenue or player good will (ie improves nothing for player experience).

KGB

I'm not saying there wouldn't be any complexity to it at all. But it IS well defined and probably for a large part scriptable by something that could be processed by a parser. For example (just making this up as I go):

{
  "id": ..,
  "name" : "{{FIGHT_FOR_WAKANDA_TITLE}}",
  "thumbnail": resources/wakanda_thumb.png
  "info": ..
  "start" : ..
  "rewards" : [ 
     { "SCL": 1, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     { "SCL": 2, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     (etc)
  ] ,
  "subs": [
     {
         "day": 1,
         "name" : ..
         "thumbnail" : ..
         "rewards": [ .. ],
         "bg_image": ..,
         "nodes": [
           { 
              "id": ..,
              "name": ..,
              "desc": ..,
              "mapcoords": { x: 123, y: 456 },
              "points": 1000,
              "repeatable": yes,
              "waves": 2,
              "visible_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "unlocks_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "enemies": [ .. ]
         ]
     },
     { "day": 2, .... }
  ]
}

And now I'm just throwing all the info in one definition, but I could imagine the rewards tables being separate and just referenced by id, just like enemy level tables based on amount of clears + SCL.

I love your JSON definitions / layout. It's definitely how modern S/W works (or at least how we do ours at my company). They should hire you to do the JSON definitions / layout and server side work to parse it and send to clients.

KGB

Haha thanks for the praise. But I'm busy enough as it is, and I'm pretty sure BC will have some competent devs. Besides, this is just spitballing for how I would start setting something like that up in a new project. Not sure how well it translates to a legacy product and the intricacies the old code/game engine has. As you said already, it probably started pretty simple and grew as it came along.

ThaRoadWarrior

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

I think the takeaway is supposed to be that the devs want to move away from this idea that people just use one team vs every single PvP team. 

They want you to actually change teams based on who you are playing against. 

This is only possible for rosters who have alternatives. I would bet that there is a very rarified small number of players who have enough viable 5*s to correctly row-sham-bow the teams they're seeing. It's the kind of assumption someone might make if they could easily grant themselves a complete roster for testing for instance, rather than spending most of a year chasing a single 5* through regular play.

... Or if you have only one 5 you should be using different 4s in your team so that you have options. You shouldn't be champing 5s before you have many many 4s champed. 

Choosing to ignore versatility because you only want to use your one "best team" is exactly what the new devs sound like they are against. 

Back when I had a single 5* champ, I was only ABLE to win at all in PVP by using my "one best team." If I wanted any progression rewards, I had to use Ghost Rider: Robbie Reyes on every team otherwise I was basically locked out. It's not always "choosing" to use your best or fastest team, I'm trying to say that unless you already have good options, you're stuck with who you have for a LONG time in this game as you try to catch up to the meta. I'm pretty close to having all the 5s outside of latest champed now (5 more to go!), 3 actual human years after champing my first one, but it was painful for a long time in PVP.

I would hope that when designers are testing new 5*s, they are doing so in a way that simulates what it would be like for someone who only had that single 5* on roster against a representative assortment of the live player population somebody would be up against. I seem to recall forum user MR_F who was so in love with the idea of champing 5* Wasp as his first 5* against all advice to the contrary, and he pretty much quit the game after doing it. 

TrixieTime

Thank you for all of this valuable insight. Looking forward to this next phase of the game. 

revskip

Thanks very much for taking the time to answer all these questions.  I love this game and have played probably more than is healthy over the years and my one major gripe was that the development team would go silent for long periods on the forums.  It is nice to see that one major gripe addressed.