Thoughts on the Upcoming End of Story Healing

Unknown

Removing prologue healing is a bad idea that is extremely hostile to players and will make the game much less fun & engaging.

It will drive away many players. Several will ragequit.

The rest will see huge drops in engagement as players burn through their free 5 health packs, then stop playing for several hours until the health packs (or character health) regenerate. As players take longer breaks from the game, they will use that downtime to discover other, better things they could be spending time with, such as friends, family, sunlight, and much, much better games that are far less hostile to players.

Again, removing this feature without providing some kind of free alternative will hurt the game by reducing overall player engagement and reducing the player population--meaning fewer F2P players in the playerbase to convert into paying players, and fewer paying players to convert into whales.

It's a bad idea for D3P's bottom line.

simonsez

If I'm running a business, and contemplating a change that will make my customers "hulk smash angry" and have them "rioting in the streets", why would I go through with it?? We know it's all about money, but does anyone think people spend more money when they're rioting?

Unknown

EvilSonGoku wrote:

A new pvp play mechanic is needed. Maybe instead of just progression rewards, hitting pvp tiers (I.e. 500 you get 2 pts: 900 you get 3 pts: 1100 you get 5 pts) has a rolling point accumulation system wherein after hitting 50pts a new challenge mode is unlocked and a series of simulator like battles for iso prizes and extras and they can have forced or limited rosters for each challenge match). So a new event opens up for this. Not sure if that makes sense.

Tl; dr - prologue healing needs no further nerf; a new play mechanic instead would be welcomed.

Would probably be easier to just unlock something based on the number of 'qualtiy wins', and I think the easiest way to get a quality win would be beating someone whose team average is at least 90% of your team average (so if you have 141X3, the opponent should be level 148 on average assuming the standard +50% level buff).

Prologue healing is more like something they should nerf to protect people from themselves. Right now if you need prologue healing you're not able to win fast enough to get anywhere without shields in PvP anyway so you're probably just wasting your time going in circles. It doesn't hurt anyone else but it doesn't help anyone else either.

Spoit

But seriously, half a day for high health people like Lthor and Hulk to regen completely is just plain silly

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

But seriously, half a day for high health people like Lthor and Hulk to regen completely is just plain silly

I think what should happen is health pack should take way longer to regenerate but health on characters should regenerate way faster, so that health pack is really only for emergencies. As long as you keep the downed penalty the same, even if it only took 30 minutes to regenerate full health you still can't be too reckless with them but you also don't have to wait for 12 hours for Thor to recover.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Prologue healing is more like something they should nerf to protect people from themselves. Right now if you need prologue healing you're not able to win fast enough to get anywhere without shields in PvP anyway so you're probably just wasting your time going in circles. It doesn't hurt anyone else but it doesn't help anyone else either.

Protect people from themselves? So slowly getting wins (and therefore ISO) harms people more than not being able to play at all because they ran out of health packs and usable heroes? MMR doesn't let you simply look for lower level enemies you can actually use your lower level heroes on and ISO flow doesn't let people suddenly get all their heroes to a point where they can be used in PvP in their MMR bracket. Add to that the fact you'll get slaughtered on defence if you're even able to get your lower level guys to win a match.....

What do you think people should do instead? They can't suddenly be able to win enough matches quickly enough to place well when they needed to prologue heal to just keep playing anyway so what... don't play at all? Don't progress at all (at least they're getting ISO even if they're getting attacked too much to get top places)? You seem completely out of touch with people who have lower level rosters and are trying to improve them....

Separately, as far as suggestions that F2P players aren't important because they don't pay money (not that I think that paying players will be willing to pay out for loads of health packs, assuming they need to prologue heal atm (I don't much if at all personally but that's just me)) it shows a bit of a lack of understanding. People spend money on F2P games either to save their time or get a competetive advantage. Now MPQ is essentially competetive in EVERYTHING but the prologue. PvE is still pitting players against other players, you just don't see the name of the guy you're trying to beat each match like you do in PvP. I therefore suspect a lot of spending is to get an advantage over other players.

So you NEED a load of people to actually be getting an advantage over. You remove the F2p players and suddenly occasional spenders see they're getting nothing at all out of their cash, they go and higher spenders stop seeing an advantage over anyone all the way up to whales being left and seeing no advantage because there's only other whales to compete against. It's like that quote from the incredibles (paraphrased) .... if you make everyone super than no-one is

F2P players give people who pay money someone to beat up on and feel superior over... they are every bit as vital to this game as those paying players are. Piss them off too much and your house of cards starts to look pretty unsteady...

daveomite

CornerPocket wrote:

I never prologue heal. Just don't have that much time to play this game. That's the biggest question here: the hardcore is exploiting this. The hardcore is trying to play this game more and win events, probably the same base buying shields and what not to make sure they win. A change like this would take the steam out of their sales

It's not an exploit. ANYONE can heal while playing a match. Yes, some players have more available time in one sitting than others, and may completely burn through all of their health packs, then choose to heal in a prologue/story mission.

The point of all of this:

1. Health packs: they only give you 5 "free ones". You have 3 heroes on a team, that means only two of them could be healed twice.
2. Health packs take approx 35 minutes EACH to regren. That's a long time to wait.
3. Heroes take an incredibly long time to heal. A 141 Thor down to 2k health can take up to 9 hours.

My thought is - fine, if it truly is better for the GAME itself, and not just better for their pocket books - then remove the ability to heal in prologue/story. However, do these simple things that would really help eliminate the need to prologue/story heal to begin with:

1. Provide more health packs - at least 10-12 of them total.
2. Cut regen times on each health pack to no more than 15-20 minutes.
3. Cut hero regen time in half
4. Reduce the cost of health packs and/or switch them to be ISO based instead of HP.

Fact - the only reason why people use missions in prologue/story to heal is the SAVE MONEY and/or a LOT of time. True, it may give some players with enough time to do that a slight advantage, but, remember, prologue healing takes time as well.

CornerPocket wrote:

They need to revamp the healing component entirely. Entice players to NOT bring healers during every fight. Id suggest remove all team healers (Wolvie self healing is fine). Make the only team heal on the environment tiles. I doubt anyone really ever goes for the 2nd environment ability since it costs so much. Make that a heal option and it will actually change match strategy (you will get damaged trying to execute the heal), give opportunities to heal in every match, and lower reliance on team healers

I can agree with this. There DO need to be more frequent and better options to heal. There are a lot of teams that don't even use OBW. Such as in StarFall, my team consisted of Sentry/LazyThor/Pun. So, no healing was happening in matches. And several matches back to back with no healing via packs. But, eventually, packs must be used. Given that, you will run out of packs at some point, and basically be at a dead stop as you can't heal, you're not using a healer, you're out of packs, and it's going to take 2 1/2-3 hours to regen all of your packs - and/or up to 8-12 hours to heal your team on their own.

That does not take into account this other method, that at least I use. If I come out of a match with both Thor/Pun heavily damaged, and I am completely out of packs - I will wait one hour. After that hour, I will use the two regenerated health packs on both Thor/Pun, as it takes a much shorter amount of time to regen the health packs than waiting 8 hours for Thor to heal. However, that 2 1/2 - 3 hour clock to regen all health packs is now tacked onto that extra hour of wait time... making it closer to 4 hours of waiting total.

That is one of the many reasons why people heal their teams in something like a prologue mission, etc. The amount of time you can actually play is limited due to health and health pack regen times. Those times are astronomical and really start to add up.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Prologue healing is more like something they should nerf to protect people from themselves. Right now if you need prologue healing you're not able to win fast enough to get anywhere without shields in PvP anyway so you're probably just wasting your time going in circles. It doesn't hurt anyone else but it doesn't help anyone else either.

Protect people from themselves? So slowly getting wins (and therefore ISO) harms people more than not being able to play at all because they ran out of health packs and usable heroes? MMR doesn't let you simply look for lower level enemies you can actually use your lower level heroes on and ISO flow doesn't let people suddenly get all their heroes to a point where they can be used in PvP in their MMR bracket. Add to that the fact you'll get slaughtered on defence if you're even able to get your lower level guys to win a match.....

What do you think people should do instead? They can't suddenly be able to win enough matches quickly enough to place well when they needed to prologue heal to just keep playing anyway so what... don't play at all? Don't progress at all (at least they're getting ISO even if they're getting attacked too much to get top places)? You seem completely out of touch with people who have lower level rosters and are trying to improve them....

Separately, as far as suggestions that F2P players aren't important because they don't pay money (not that I think that paying players will be willing to pay out for loads of health packs, assuming they need to prologue heal atm (I don't much if at all personally but that's just me) it shows a bit of a lack of understanding. People spend money on F2P games either to save their time or get a competetive advantage. Noe MPQ is essentially competetive in EVERYTHING but the prologue. PvE is still pitting players against other players, you just don't see the name of the guy you're trying to beat each match like you do in PvP. I therefore suspect a lot of spending is to get an advantage over other players.

So you NEED a load of people to actually be getting an advantage over. You remove the F2p players and suddenly occasional spenders see they're getting nothing at all out of their cash, they go and higher spenders stop seeing an advantage over anyone all the way up to whales being left and seeing no advantage because there's only other whales to compete against. It's like that quote from the incredibles (paraphrased) .... if you make everyone super than no-one is

F2P players give people who pay money someone to beat up on and feel superior over... they are every bit as vital to this game as those paying players are. Piss them off too much and your house of cards starts to look pretty unsteady...

You don't make slow progress in PvP. If you're at a point where your points are high relative to your opponents you make negative progress until the overall points have increased or you shield. All that happens is someone grind out to 700, goes to heal and lost 150 points by the time he's done and then he complains about it on the board. If you're going to grind to 700 only to drop to 550 after one game you might as well just stay at 550 in terms of progression. In terms of iso 8 gain, if your sole goal is to get more iso 8 it'd be faster to just do the level 1 mission over and over for 20 iso compared to work up to some PvP rating and then lose 150 points after one fight and then repeat again, unless you actually enjoy these traumatic rating drops.

This isn't just about weak players. Certainly plenty of players with strong rosters have horror story of losing ridiculous amount of points. The PvP system right now has almost no chance to sneak ahead barring extreme luck or favorable MMR. If you're not shielded you will get destroyed by the sharks at some point, and people who aren't strong enough to play continously without prologue shielding are the preferred victims. It'd actually be way better if the game gives you pop up like:

"Based on historical evidence there's a good chance you'll lose 200 points after this match. Would you like to buy a shield instead or take your chances?"

The problem is that the game doesn't offer you this choice and people keep on take their chances and then complain about it. Even if you don't care about people whining, it's not a healthy behavior to let people grind away and then pull the rug under them with a 150 point loss. In the long term the game should be changed so that you don't have these crazy score drops, but until that happens, limiting the ability to play for weaker players (and people who need prologue healing is obviously weaker) is actually protecting people from themselves.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Prologue healing is more like something they should nerf to protect people from themselves. Right now if you need prologue healing you're not able to win fast enough to get anywhere without shields in PvP anyway so you're probably just wasting your time going in circles. It doesn't hurt anyone else but it doesn't help anyone else either.

Protect people from themselves? So slowly getting wins (and therefore ISO) harms people more than not being able to play at all because they ran out of health packs and usable heroes? MMR doesn't let you simply look for lower level enemies you can actually use your lower level heroes on and ISO flow doesn't let people suddenly get all their heroes to a point where they can be used in PvP in their MMR bracket. Add to that the fact you'll get slaughtered on defence if you're even able to get your lower level guys to win a match.....

Aside from "well it OUGHT to be like THIS" arguments that are never going to happen, like giving prologue spidey his heal back or flooding the game with healing characters, I'm constantly baffled by the arguments that prologue healing is an ESSENTIAL part of the game and it would be IMPOSSIBLE for weaker players to play without it... Except, you know, the tons of players that don't have a bunch of covers for the two characters that heal...

Why does it make sense, exactly, to give the guy who pulled an OBW blue such an insurmountable advantage over the guy who hasn't yet?

Unknown

gamar wrote:

Why does it make sense, exactly, to give the guy who pulled an OBW blue such an insurmountable advantage over the guy who hasn't yet?

So they just make OBW blue covers drop PVP events like the other covers. Problem solved.

Unknown

gamar wrote:

Aside from "well it OUGHT to be like THIS" arguments that are never going to happen, like giving prologue spidey his heal back or flooding the game with healing characters, I'm constantly baffled by the arguments that prologue healing is an ESSENTIAL part of the game and it would be IMPOSSIBLE for weaker players to play without it... Except, you know, the tons of players that don't have a bunch of covers for the two characters that heal...

Why does it make sense, exactly, to give the guy who pulled an OBW blue such an insurmountable advantage over the guy who hasn't yet?

Because everyone gets the opportunity to get a blue obw (or yellow spidey) cover at some point. It's people making progress and getting a benefit from their progress. Just like I can run Laken, patch, featured hero and not need healing packs while I climb early in PvP because I progressed to that point. Should my regenerating heroes be banned because other people don't have them?

Incidentally your argument is doubly pointless because people who are in a 2* MMR bracket with an 85, full covered OBW don't need to prologue heal because they just heal in the match, why should those people have a MUCH MORE SIGNIFICANT advantage?

Prologue healing lets players who cannot swap out their team for a usable second lineup (transitioning players mainly), people who are in MMR hell playing teams with a lot more levels than themselves (so taking a lot of damage) and people who don't want to buy health packs in general (almost everyone) play for longer than they otherwise would. Personally don't see why that's a bad thing, especially since increasing health pack reliance is just ANOTHER increase in the pay to win quota for MPQ. If you start making it pay to compete to a reasonable degree by enforcing a need for health pack purchases I personally think you'll see people quitting, including those who spend a reasonable amount of money on the game.

@Phantron Your argument would make perfect sense if ppl only used prologue healing to continue playing after they reach a high score and start getting battered... that is not the case. Lets assume that there are ppl who don't plan their lives around MPQ and have a period of time set aside for playing. They can't keep coming back every couple of hours to use their replenshing health packs for a few matches then stop because their heroes are downed or too damaged to bother playing again and rinse/repeat. They instead put a chunk of time to one side to play then go on with their lives and progress in chunks. There are LOTS of players like that and prologue healing lets them play in that fashion, get some ISO and progression rewards, maybe get some placement awards and feel like they are getting somewhere. Ideally they might also have fun playing .

Before I get told people shouldn't feel entitled to play when they want and have fun i'll just add now that this is a **** game, not work. That's how games are MEANT to work.

Unknown

We all know there's a certain threshold of points where if you cross it, you start getting pounded by everyone. For the sake of argument let's just say it's 700.

Right now I see the argument for prologue healing goes like this. Some guy grinds up to 700 and immediately drops to 550 after the next game, so now he needs to heal to be able to get that 150 points he lost. But what he doesn't realize is that he's always going to lose those points for crossing that 700 barrier barring extreme luck (or if he finally shields). All prologue healing does is lets you to lose those 150 points again when you cross 700 again.

Yes, this applies to everyone, but if you've to use prologue healing, it implies your team is weaker and, more importantly, you'll be visible for far longer while in this deadly zone. Normally you try to get past this deadly zone by hoping you win a few high point matches quickly and then shield up. If you need to run a separate match to just heal in between there's obviously nothing quick about your matches and people will find you and beat you up during this time.

Now of course getting rid of prologue healing doesn't solve this issue, which is why I think something else has to change first. It will definitely alleviate the symptoms of a broken system, though. Right now, you simply can't cross certain thresholds without shields with any reliability, and if you eliminate false hope for those who are particularly unlikely to cross that threshold, it'd be less angst for everyone involved.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

We all know there's a certain threshold of points where if you cross it, you start getting pounded by everyone. For the sake of argument let's just say it's 700.

Right now I see the argument for prologue healing goes like this. Some guy grinds up to 700 and immediately drops to 550 after the next game -snip-

OR the argument is simply it lets people extend their play session. People don't take zero damage in PvP just because they aren't up to 700 points, my post above yours is pretty clear in saying people prologue heal a LOT more than that. They do it whilst climbing up to the point where they start getting hit too. Not everyone has a lot of heroes to use. Some have, say 2x85 then everything at lower levels as they try to get covers and ISO. They get MMR bracketed so they'll end up fighting 2x85 + loaners or 2x approaching 85 + loaner teams (because the way defensive team selection works there's no point running your lower lvl guys out even if you can sneak a win, it's just a massive bullseye) and they'll take damage.

If you are fighting mirror teams and don't have a sufficiently covered and levelled OBW to heal in the match you'll last how many matches on 5 health packs? (love the fact it's not 6 in a 3 per team game) If on the other hand you have an OBW with a smattering of covers including blue you can prologue heal and keep playing even if she's not practical to use in a PvP match.

Also prologue healing lets people extend their PvE play at the expense of more time used in one single burst, which is the way a lot of ppl play games.

Not everyone can play every few hours to make use of health packs regenerating. For some ppl it's get up, go to work, get home and then maybe play some MPQ, then spend time doing RL stuff and sleep. For those ppl removing prologue healing is a huge deal. You are restricting people's play even more for what purpose? To try and get HP sales (don't fancy their chances)? To try and REDUCE hero diversity by forcing ppl to use OBW in their teams as they climb in points because they'll run out of steam otherwise? To save ppl from themselves (no idea **** you're really going on about there, your logic is not so strong on that one)?

As i've said, won't really impact me so much although there was a time when it certainly would have and there are plenty of ppl in that position now even if i'm no longer one of them. Incidentally, I never felt like the presence of prologue healing was in some way harming me as I did it.... funny that

Unknown

There's another factor a lot of people seem to be forgetting about, and that that PVE is a thing that exists. Some of these nodes eat characters. Some of them do team wipeouts. When I'm focusing on PVE, I save my health packs for downed characters and use prologue healing when they're not downed. I can't heal in mission or scaling goes out of control. And I care about PVE about 100 times as much as I care about PVP.

Unknown

I don't remember the climbing phase being especially demanding without heals even when I was running only a 2* roster. By climbing phase I mean a phase where you're doing most of the attacking and not much retaliations are happening. If people need more help while climbing I've no problem with that though I can't think of anything clever offhand that'd only apply to that phase. It seems to me the vast majority of arguments related to prologue healing comes on the phase after climbing where you can spend the next 3 hours without gaining a single point. I didn't prologue heal at all on DA event and got to 900 fine, and it's not even possible to have an overwhelmingly strong team in that event. I imagine in that event people were afraid to attack in general so retaliations are very few. Nobody should have problem climbing when retaliations are low, and when retaliations are high, prologue healing isn't going to help you either.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

There's another factor a lot of people seem to be forgetting about, and that that PVE is a thing that exists. Some of these nodes eat characters. Some of them do team wipeouts. When I'm focusing on PVE, I save my health packs for downed characters and use prologue healing when they're not downed. I can't heal in mission or scaling goes out of control. And I care about PVE about 100 times as much as I care about PVP.

With scaling in PvE you usually get to a point where people get downed frequently and then prologue healing doesn't matter anyway. Unless you do something really consevative like retreat the moment the next hit will take a character to less than 1/3 health, but in that case you might end up having to retreat by turn 3 when fighting a particularly nasty combination of enemy, like say HT + 2 Pyros. I certainly recall quite a few games where HT definitely could have killed a guy by turn 3 if he retreated. Heck, sometimes he can kill a guy by turn 3!

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

There's another factor a lot of people seem to be forgetting about, and that that PVE is a thing that exists. Some of these nodes eat characters. Some of them do team wipeouts. When I'm focusing on PVE, I save my health packs for downed characters and use prologue healing when they're not downed. I can't heal in mission or scaling goes out of control. And I care about PVE about 100 times as much as I care about PVP.

With scaling in PvE you usually get to a point where people get downed frequently and then prologue healing doesn't matter anyway. Unless you do something really consevative like retreat the moment the next hit will take a character to less than 1/3 health, but in that case you might end up having to retreat by turn 3 when fighting a particularly nasty combination of enemy, like say HT + 2 Pyros. I certainly recall quite a few games where HT definitely could have killed a guy by turn 3 if he retreated. Heck, sometimes he can kill a guy by turn 3!

Not really. I manage my scaling carefully, and usually seriously need a heal about every two-three matches or so. If you manage your scaling properly - which necessitates taking damage - it won't go crazy, but you will need prologue healing.

angua51

After reading everyone's thoughts here and being an avid user of Prologue Healing since I first got OBW Blue I tried playing for a day without Prologue Healing or OBW.
Surprise Surprise!
The game became more fun again.
I really hated Prologue Healing. It was tiresome playing the same match over and over to heal Punisher or LThor but I thought it was necessary for my survival in the game.
PvP had become boring too with the neverending OBW v OBW battles. Which I was getting very good at but I wanted a change to make the game more fun and less of a necessary chore - a bit like washing dishes - a necessary but recurring chore. I probably would have stopped playing completely soon through sheer boredom.
Which brings me to the last factor in the game becoming fun again- CMAGS.
From a combination of the last Fresh CUT and the 5000 Point Heroic 10 pack I now have a usable Cmags and what a joy he is to use. So different from the other characters. He requires thought to use and the results have freed me from overuse of OBW especially as he uses similar colors.
If Prologue Healing is to be stipped keeping Cmags whole must be part of the deal.

Unknown

angua51 wrote:

After reading everyone's thoughts here and being an avid user of Prologue Healing since I first got OBW Blue I tried playing for a day without Prologue Healing or OBW.
Surprise Surprise!
The game became more fun again.
I really hated Prologue Healing. It was tiresome playing the same match over and over to heal Punisher or LThor but I thought it was necessary for my survival in the game.
PvP had become boring too with the neverending OBW v OBW battles. Which I was getting very good at but I wanted a change to make the game more fun and less of a necessary chore - a bit like washing dishes - a necessary but recurring chore. I probably would have stopped playing completely soon through sheer boredom.
Which brings me to the last factor in the game becoming fun again- CMAGS.
From a combination of the last Fresh CUT and the 5000 Point Heroic 10 pack I now have a usable Cmags and what a joy he is to use. So different from the other characters. He requires thought to use and the results have freed me from overuse of OBW especially as he uses similar colors.
If Prologue Healing is to be stipped keeping Cmags whole must be part of the deal.

Hate to break it to you, but they're nerfing cmags rather soon, so enjoy him while you can. I haven't prologue healed in a very long time, but their changes seem more aimed at stimulating health pack sales, and less to do with fun-balancing. If they cared about fun, they'd get rid of all the crazy scaling and required babying just to keep the game playable. You shouldn't be punished for playing well.

Unknown

Gotta see how exactly they deal with prologue healing. I don't really use prologue much to heal, but that's mainly because I still run OBW most times, so I'm constantly healing with her, even in PvE as I don't grind enough to scaling to be much of an issue most of the time.

If they nerf her, I'll just play less and if that's not enough to compete for the top spots in my brackets, I won't compete for the top spots. I see no value in buying health packs and this won't make me think otherwise.