How do you define MPQ "skill?"

Bowgentle

Spending only speeds up the process.
Am I faster in pve with my 499 Okoye than I was with my 476 Okoye?
Certainly.
That doesn't make me any more skilful.

ThaRoadWarrior

There are two types of racing - "spec" racing where everyone drives identically prepared cars (Spec Miata is like this at the grassroots level but there are loads of these), and that type of racing is specifically intended to keep costs down so that it is accessible to more people, and then there are classes that have more room, some even completely "open class" racing where you just run what you brung where only safety gear is mandated, but that is to my knowledge really only happening in World Time Attack, or potentially some drag racing classes. Most of the time the "rules" exist in order to promote relatively fair competition (and in motorsports, safety of the participants and spectators).

We could use Shield Clearance Levels (in PVE) as a way to map to this if we were so inclined. Honestly, I've long felt that SCL should gate your maximum character level, not your player SCL level. that way in low SCLs like 3 or whatever, you could only have max-champ 3* or un-champed/soft-capped 4*s be used in it, and so on, up to SCL10 where it would be "open class" and you could run whatever you want.

I think PVP is poorly labeled in that it uses the same SCL terminology to mean something different about your opponents than PVE does. But you could potetentially do the same thing there openly rather than having it happen opaquely behind the scenes via MMR.

DAZ0273

Well currently, PVE SCL gating provide that a race between a Ferrari and a VW Beetle is equal as long as they both roll up to the starting line on a Sunday afternoon together.

ThaRoadWarrior

@Bowgentle said:
Spending only speeds up the process.
Am I faster in pve with my 499 Okoye than I was with my 476 Okoye?
Certainly.
That doesn't make me any more skilful.

There are some characters that other people seem to be using to much better effect than I've ever been able to. Like Adam Warlock for instance. he may as well not exist for how much of an invisible bench warmer he is on my roster, he just shows up in a battle and dies due to health attrition whenever I've attempted to play him. Is that because mine is only 455, and he needs to out-level anyone you run him next to, or is it that i'm "unskilled" in his use? I'm willing to admit it is the latter, but I do think you could give somebody a roster of maximum champs and they would probably surprise you with how poorly they ran it in practice.

ThaRoadWarrior

@DAZ0273 said:
Well currently, PVE SCL gating provide that a race between a Ferrari and a VW Beetle is equal as long as they both roll up to the starting line on a Sunday afternoon together.

And this is fine for SCL10, if you have a Porsche 911 powered VW bus,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59j-a86YU9M

but it is is less fine for SCL5 if somebody in a slightly de-tuned 288GTO rolls up against your Jetta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLJCWb1apYo
(not a 288gto, but the most hilarious reference I could conjure)

DAZ0273

Ha, ha, yeah, exactly!

DAZ0273

@ThaRoadWarrior said:

@Bowgentle said:
Spending only speeds up the process.
Am I faster in pve with my 499 Okoye than I was with my 476 Okoye?
Certainly.
That doesn't make me any more skilful.

There are some characters that other people seem to be using to much better effect than I've ever been able to. Like Adam Warlock for instance. he may as well not exist for how much of an invisible bench warmer he is on my roster, he just shows up in a battle and dies due to health attrition whenever I've attempted to play him. Is that because mine is only 455, and he needs to out-level anyone you run him next to, or is it that i'm "unskilled" in his use? I'm willing to admit it is the latter, but I do think you could give somebody a roster of maximum champs and they would probably surprise you with how poorly they ran it in practice.

However - give that same person the time and resources/video/advice to practice and they would probably develop the "skills" needed if they have the interest in doing so. On the other hand there are some people who are never able to pass their driving test no matter how many times they try (my Aunt failed 14 times!) so even driving straight is beyond them.

Sekilicious

Tinykitty, this morning I was thinking ‘Self, maybe Arcade wouldn’t feel as bad if you put him with your sweet new lvl 456 Okoye (iHulk third)’ then proceeded to get trounced in spite of getting out some doom bots out. Failed driver test #21. Rngesus just wants me to Shang-Chi everything.

Bad

Imo there is something way more important than money or time playing.
It's the amount of time thinking on MPQ.
I.e sometimes I am unable to play the sub and I do it 1 hour after it started.
But a lot of times while working I find myself thinking about that character who I think has x affiliation and it's a good pair with another but I'm not 100% sure of that.
Then I have to open the app and check it, in order to feel everything being all right again.

Bowgentle

@Bad said:
Imo there is something way more important than money or time playing.
It's the amount of time thinking on MPQ.
I.e sometimes I am unable to play the sub and I do it 1 hour after it started.
But a lot of times while working I find myself thinking about that character who I think has x affiliation and it's a good pair with another but I'm not 100% sure of that.
Then I have to open the app and check it, in order to feel everything being all right again.

That's addiction.

DAZ0273

We are in the age of "the internet knows basically everything" and this means it can do a lot of my thinking for me. If I can't beat that poxy Wolverine Puzzle Ops node then I come here and people tell me how they did it and I either have the tools available to replicate what they did or I don't. Or I just decide that I don't really care about Kraven's van or Wasp gauntlets enough to keep trying. That is just me though.

DAZ0273

@Bad said:
Imo there is something way more important than money or time playing.
It's the amount of time thinking on MPQ.
I.e sometimes I am unable to play the sub and I do it 1 hour after it started.
But a lot of times while working I find myself thinking about that character who I think has x affiliation and it's a good pair with another but I'm not 100% sure of that.
Then I have to open the app and check it, in order to feel everything being all right again.

How do you check it if you haven't got it? A whale who has obtained a 5/5/3 Wong already is surely in a far better place to test things than a non -whale who might have a 0/1/0 character? That Whale, if they are interested in such things, may have found a brand new synergy and been crushing PVP for a couple of months before the rest of the player base catches up. When they do catch up they are far more going to be likely to use the strategy that is already a proven winner than theory craft for themselves. Unless of course they have sufficient spare time to deliberately go looking for new synergies with the literally hundreds of characters available.

So - time + money - it is nothing to sniff at.

Bad

@Bowgentle said:

That's addiction.

Nah, it's just bad memory.

entrailbucket

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
There are two types of racing - "spec" racing where everyone drives identically prepared cars (Spec Miata is like this at the grassroots level but there are loads of these), and that type of racing is specifically intended to keep costs down so that it is accessible to more people, and then there are classes that have more room, some even completely "open class" racing where you just run what you brung where only safety gear is mandated, but that is to my knowledge really only happening in World Time Attack, or potentially some drag racing classes. Most of the time the "rules" exist in order to promote relatively fair competition (and in motorsports, safety of the participants and spectators).

We could use Shield Clearance Levels (in PVE) as a way to map to this if we were so inclined. Honestly, I've long felt that SCL should gate your maximum character level, not your player SCL level. that way in low SCLs like 3 or whatever, you could only have max-champ 3* or un-champed/soft-capped 4*s be used in it, and so on, up to SCL10 where it would be "open class" and you could run whatever you want.

I think PVP is poorly labeled in that it uses the same SCL terminology to mean something different about your opponents than PVE does. But you could potetentially do the same thing there openly rather than having it happen opaquely behind the scenes via MMR.

You seem significantly more knowledgeable about this than me -- was I correct that those kinds of equipment rules (for fair competition, driver and fan safety) are highly controversial among the racers?

The issue with gating PvE by character level is that it encourages softcapping, and SCL was designed to fix MPQ's (at the time) epidemic of softcappers winning everything.

I agree that PvP SCL doesn't make sense for PvE players, or, unfortunately, many players at all. PvP itself makes very little sense. It used to be quite simple and then 8 years of compounded fixes made it really bizarre.

entrailbucket

@Sekilicious said:

Speaking of skill, it took a lot of skill to place my r5 tinkerer onto Vulture and press fly while Peter and Loki helplessly matched and did stuff. I’m proud of those skills. Peter did manage to match a green countdown which annoyed me to a great extent.

This is exactly the sort of example I was looking for when I asked "what makes you feel skilled?"

I'm interested in that because feeling skilled is rewarding, and when the game makes people feel that way, they're likely to stick around. One of the questions I love thinking about is "what about MPQ makes it so successful (when other f2p games rarely last this long)?"

If you think about it, very few people in the "community" are the first ones to discover a team combo or strategy. Who was the first person to use Beta Ray Bill/Polaris? I doubt we can even find out.
We just share the teams and adopt them.

But for the tens of thousands of players who aren't members of the community (on Line, here, Reddit, Discord, etc) they have the opportunity to "discover" those combos every day! Imagine being a relatively new player and discovering that combo on your own. You'd feel like a god!

DeNappa

There's a lot of nonskill with regard to roster building, at least. I've seen a lot of rosters in the lower regions recently. There are a LOT of casual(?) players out there who have brutally bad rosters.

ThaRoadWarrior

right, being good at The Game rather than being good at a match.

Daredevil217

@entrailbucket said:

But for the tens of thousands of players who aren't members of the community (on Line, here, Reddit, Discord, etc) they have the opportunity to "discover" those combos every day! Imagine being a relatively new player and discovering that combo on your own. You'd feel like a god!

But even those players probably got trounced by that combo or saw it all over their queues before trying it themselves.

To me, MPQ involves little skill. In PVP, I imagine it’s all coordination. No one is winning a stone without help.

In PVE there is slightly more skill because you have to time your grind times optimally. But once you’ve figured that out you’re just running your usual race hoping someone else crashes. I’m a solid T10 player if I can catch a flip usually. If I get T5 it’s not due to skill (I didn’t race any better). It’s because someone else “crashed their car” or didn’t bother to show up to the race that week. Similarly, if I crash, someone else takes my spot. They weren’t more skilled. They just ran their usual race and other faster cars (e.g. better rosters) mistimed.

In matches themselves I do believe some teams require more skill than others to pilot if playing for speed (the metric by which winners are judged). Hulkoye and Hulkgasm are pretty autopilot. Once I switched to Shang in PVE I had to pay a lot more attention to the board state, who I’m targeting, where to place crits (purple), what tiles to destroy (red), what I’m setting up for next turn, etc. I only say there is skill involved because my times became noticeably faster the more I played with Shang and could spot moves quicker. But he’s more the exception than the rule. With Okoye and Hulkgasm they are autopilot so I didn’t notice any major shifts in clear time the more I played them. I would argue most meta teams are passive puzzle quest, which is why I think Shang is so beloved. They made an actual active character who has to look at the board, match gems, and fire powers, a part of the meta.

Finally, I don’t think there’s skill in roster building either. There are a lot of roadmaps/guidelines on how to build optimally. So it’s just following the blueprint more than anything else.

The thing that’s funny to me is when people derive personal worth/value or think they maintain some sort of superiority over others because of their “MPQ skills” (again I think there is very little). These folks are pretty easy to spot.

entrailbucket

PvP used to require skill. It wasn't coordination that killed PvP -- it was mass coordination. When PvP was a gang war between teams of 20, you had to be fast, but also highly strategic, to succeed. It was a cat-and-mouse game of players trying to score points and others trying to stop them from scoring points, and it was exciting and fun.

Now that there are no more cats and everyone is a mouse, it's just boring. I can't imagine being in some chat with 500 people I barely know and don't care about. Alliances used to matter a lot and now they really don't. And fights against cupcakes are horrifically boring. Maybe someday the chats will implode and fracture and PvP will go back to the way it was.

Sekilicious

I had the opposite experience with PvP. When I wasn’t in a BR getting to 1200 was impossible. I would break MMR with Polaris then get hammered to oblivion by players with enormous 5s that I just skipped. Excellent for getting 75 wins, awful for feeling like you’re progressing in the game. After I champed SC I learned to shield hop, but finding anything worth points above 900 took forever.

Now I coordinate with people in a much larger alliance so that we can all reach our respective goals. Everyone in a BR knows that no one can reach 1200 pts without us, and everyone else is living off the grills that we provide at a certain point. Social skills to fit into a community larger than yourself are the most important skills of all in this case.