Marvel Puzzle Quest Developer Q&A September 2022 (9/16/22)

Mrcl25

First of all, I want to congratulate the new dev team. I see a lot of positive things already, and many more to expect for the future.

Now the questions:

1. After your first 3 clears in scl 10 pve, points reduce to half. Almost all nodes reach full points before the 24h mark, following a mathematical formula. However, some nodes are "broken" and don't follow that same formula. Some are full before they should, and others only at the 24h mark. That becomes more evident in 48h subs, but happen in several other nodes. When you are competing for top scl10 placement, every point counts, and pve becomes very complicated. You don't need only to be fast, you need to use spreadsheets to predict your initial and final clears sequence and timing, and those broken nodes make it even more complicated. If pve will keep being competitive, would you be willing to simplify things by making all nodes reach full points only at the 24h mark, or at least correct those nodes that have wrong timers? Perhaps also standardize node points across all events? And get rid of 48h subs, that make you have to wait until full points just for one more clear? It would be much better to have a real day off between two events than a 48h sub.

2. Would you consider rebalancing characters that have already been rebalanced before (by the previous dev team)?

DeNappa

Not really a question maybe, but I just wanna put Orrgo the Unconquerable on the radar as a possible future character  

(or any other of the Howling Commandos, really )

/edit: I just thought of a question: would you consider adding a UI option to reduce the amount of flashes during cascades/power firing? Especially if you're playing in a dark room, it's really straining on the eyes/brains.

Bzhai

1. About wave nodes

Is it possible to change it so it awards full points only upon completion of the final wave? Sometimes you get unlucky with enemy cascades (it's worse when ultron fighters are present) and by the time you get to the last wave you're low on health or the enemy has so much ap they can fire powers 3-4 times. I know bad rng happens sometimes but when that happens I would like the option of retreating and trying again like all normal nodes instead of losing out on a portion of the points.

2. About supports

Can we send our duplicate supports to Forge's workshop/Shuri's lab to break them apart into shards so we can rank up our favourite supports?

Thanks to the team for doing such a great job!

DAZ0273

Are there any plans to update the loading screen? Not a big priority but it would be nice to see a new one for Broken Circles time in charge now.

Carried over from the DDP revamp thread - will the new 3* get multiple rotations as essentials in Story events like the 4 and 5s do?

Thanks!

shardwick

Can we get a quick claim button for bonus rewards instead of having them pop up on the screen all the time? Also, having the ability to disable pop-ups for deals would be great. Maybe reduce the size of the Campaign button on the homepage and put something like a treasure chest for unclaimed rewards, and a new button to show that there are new deals in the store. Because when I'm playing pve it's really annoying to have stuff always pop up on the screen when I'm trying to tap on a node and then inadvertently tap on the pop-up for a bonus reward.

NMANOZ1

Can we start seeing more ways of earning 5 star shards like adding some in the Taco Vaults?

Are you open to reducing the 560HP cost of 20 shards for the 5 star characters?

Kwahder

Any change of releasing MPQ on OSX? Alternatively, as M-series Macs support iOS apps natively, any chance of adding Mac support there?

Woiciu

I know you will give us MCU's releted charcters in the future because you are "forced" to do it. When is devs turn to give character which they want and WE want (omega red)?

KGB

Any chance you guys can figure out how to roll our Savory Taco tokens into our Sweet ones. Having hundreds if not thousands of tokens stranded is annoying and opening them all before Monday is hours worth of work.

Surely it's no more complicated than script that takes X tokens from the Savory vault and adds X number to the Sweet total because these 2 vaults contain the exact same thing (ie these are not limited character vaults).

Happy to wait a month or two for it to be completed as those tokens aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

KGB

MikeyMikeMike

1. Will you guys be adding new game modes or maybe new story events in campaign? 

2. Will you guys start making more Events based on Marvel Comics and MCU Movies and would the characters that take place in the event be boosted?

**Mod note: Removed additional question.  Please refrain from asking more than 2 questions per Q&A. Thank you. -fight4thedream

fight4thedream

As always, thank you for your hard work and taking the time to answer some of these questions.

1. I really enjoyed the last boss event you designed, particularly the introduction of a new enemy type, the Shadow Monster minions, and how they were implemented in the boss node.  There are still a lot of villains not in the game that I think would make awesome "Boss" battle villains such as Master Mold, Arcade, the Collector and the Progenitor, and I would be fine with them being NPCs. So my question is this: Going forward, do you plan to always use playable characters as the "Boss" for boss events or are you open to using non-playable characters like Galactus as well?

Domitronas

How do you feel about the overall in game resource economy? Any plans to make adjustments?  Specifically, there are certain "walls" that player in different stages of play encounter, e.g. lack of Heroic Points in the early stages of play when you keep getting new characters without having the required slots for them, or the infamous "iso-8 drought" during the transition from 4* to 5* land. 

capt

is there any chance that we will get some old school characters like Arcade, Arnim Zola, Chameleon, or some way back characters like Ka-Zar 

DyingLegend

Let's see......

Any updates coming for VIP and Daily Resupply? Playing 2500+ days and getting 500 iso is a bit on the lame side

Any future improvements to address acquisition of classic 5 stars? Dilution gets worse and worse every day, the second a 5 star enters classic, you may never see them again. Maybe bring back Bonus heroes or give us more ways to earn shards?

Grizwald

First question is on the design process.  Do you say "We're going to make a 5* Howard the Duck" and go from there or does someone come up with a cool power set that gets applied to a character?

Second question, is it possible to have a vault that each player could select the three 5* that are in it? Or possibly improve the odds of drawing the selected characters?

Omegased

While I appreciate your speedy responses whenever something has gone wrong, it has been happening a lot. Is this due Frankenstein code, that you're getting used to/plans to fix?

Is there one thing that drives you crazy in the game that you want to fix/change but you can't justify the time needed?

HoundofShadow

1) What made you want to change some important words used in the game? For exanple, increase by x to empower. 

2) Currently, it's not easy to tell whether power/match damage boosts can stack with one another, or the game simply chooses the one that gives the highest damage boost. The only way to tell it is via trial and error. Are there any rules of thumbs to determine this, or how do you plan to simplify this?

The Viceroy Returns

Question:
Why does every 5 Star have different Health and Match Damage "progression tiers"?  Seems like it would be easier for Users to understand (and easier for the devs to maintain) to have them share from a smaller set of progressions like the other rarity tiers do.

Rambling:
2/3rds of the 5 Stars are not viable for top end play almost just because of this, and it get worse when newly released 5 Stars have increasingly higher Health and Match Damage.  It's so bad there are several early era 5 Stars whose Level 450 Health & Match Damage are lower than newly released ones halfway to Level 450.
Some are different by only like 30-100 in Health.  Some of this is from back when 5 Stars were becoming established and less frequently released and had only about 8 to 10 in number.  But now with 70+ 5 Stars, this just makes things clunky and confusing (and drives my OCD a bit crazy I'll admit).  Invisible Woman and Reptil have the same Match Damage.  Why can't 5 Stars?

If the intent is to have 5 Stars feel special/different from the others, at least limit the amount of Health Tiers to 12 or 15 like the other tiers, and if there is still a desire to have different Match Damage from other 5 Stars, limit that to only about 3 to 5 Match Damage Tiers.  The differences would be the starting/final values for whatever Color1 thru Color6 and Crit % would be.  This would allow some diversity without the wild swings we currently have and provide another thematic element for character design.  Could even name the Match Damage tiers to things like "Offensive Match Damage", "Protector Match Damage", "Support Match Damage", etc.
The struggle is real to get certain team combinations where a specific character tanks one color over another (COUGH Thorkoye COUGH).  A system like this could make that more intentional and not get into a situation where I accidentally leveled a character 1 level too high and broke a meta team.  Leveling up a character should never feel like a "mistake".
Example = My Okoye, Kitty, Polaris team is broken because I leveled up Polaris 1 or 2 levels too high and now she tanks Blue.  Don't know how many levels I need for either Kitty or Okoye to tank Blue again, but it will take a long time due to 5 Star scarcity and Blue being Polaris's Color1 for Match Damage.
Much older example from Back in the Day = You could break the Charlie's Angels winfinite team by leveling up 4 Star Professor X too high and gain a color other than Purple from the 5 Star cascades of 3 Star Black Widow's Purple.
Perhaps both bad examples as they straddle rarities (and therefore Match Damage tiers), but the concept still stands = Getting Okoye to tank Red & Yellow for Thor.

It's become what I call the "Dragonball Z effect" = when a new character was introduced, to show off their power they totally trounced the character that was currently established as the strongest.  Do that 4-5 times, and suddenly most of the characters are now too weak to do anything and are nothing more than a Greek Chorus commenting from the sidelines.

Gymp28

First off I’d like to thank all at BC for the design thought and great changes that you’ve brought to the game. I can easily forgive a few speed bumps for all the good that’s come from them. Keep up the good work! 

1) Could you please go into some detail on how the maths for Chasm’s black power works? 

From the power description it isn’t all that obvious, but after a little testing I think I’ve settled on the following: 
  Self damage to Chasm = Chasms match damage x3 of friendly colour being drained + small bonus damage.
  Damage to front enemy = 
Chasms match damage x3 in enemy colour being drained + small bonus damage.

I’ve noticed when the enemy team has no AP and without any damage boosters on either team (E.g. Okoye), strike or protect tiles on the board I’m getting wildly inconsistent results for the damage dealt this way though. Sometimes the damage to each team is identical (though rarely) but other times my Chasm takes maybe 3x the damage that the enemy takes. Sometimes the enemy takes slightly more than Chasm. The numbers can fall anywhere in between that range.
How is the game choosing which enemy colour to base the damage on and is this working as you intend?

I absolutely love Chasms design, but would prefer to be able to predict a little better what happens when using him.
I’ve got a number of screenshots if they’d be of any interest.
Many thanks in advance

Bad

As mentioned chasm usually takes more damage than the enemy, at best it takes the same. 
Also sometimes the enemy takes the passive damage at the start of their turn.
Finally if the enemy ends their turn making a match and chasm dies and there is a cascade, that cascade belongs to AI and it damages chasm's partner which can be really dangerous for the player given that chasm needs alive partners. 
Chasm is already meta and these issues don't benefit him.