New Boss Event: Quandary Info

turbomoose

@DAZ0273 said:
My kiddo hates it. I showed him what to do and he was "Oh, OK...I'm still not doing it" as his tiny teenage brain hurt and there was no more room for puzzles next to Generation Zero, whatever that is (something to do with shooting robots in WWII). As he is now in my Alliance I threatened to cut off his food supply unless he got stuck in so either he will reluctantly add to our Boss total or I will need somewhere to dispose of a skeleton.

Well it is nearly Halloween, so he can save money on getting a costume, with that long hair of his he could be Skelethor!!

bigjojo04

@DeNappa said:
I don't dislike the Quandary "puzzle" nodes by default... but the main problem I have with them is that they lock you out of all your powers, essentially removing all "puzzle" from what would be a puzzle quest. I have all these characters with board manipulation powers, but I'm frustratingly throwing my tablet against a wall because I can't get to this fortified node in the corner despite having 30AP in all colors because yes that's how long i've been trying to get to it.

This for sure. One of my alliance mates brought this up saying that what really sets MPQ apart from other match 3 games are the characters and the powers. You take away the ability to use those powers, a lot of which would be ridiculously helpful in these challenges, and what do you have?

bluspiritseeker

I've been playing for 95% of the 10 years. I've always liked it as I'm a longtime Marvel fan, it's something I can do to split my focus during other things (especially work days), grind for progression and especially on Alliance events, and I really do like that something new is being done. What I don't like is a boss event where I have to actually carve out time to figure it out, record possibilities because I admit I already have the memory and attention span of a squirrel, and just have a bad taste as a result. Most of my alliance isn't bothering or I can tell threw in the towel, which I haven't seen happen yet, until now. I like the concept of the Quandary character. I just wish this had been done better.

spatenfloot

@captainheath said:
I agree, most people don't have a pad of paper and pencil next to the toilet.

there is usually paper

Bad

@bigjojo04 said:You take away the ability to use those powers, a lot of which would be ridiculously helpful in these challenges, and what do you have?

You have a puzzle, the main reason of this mode.

Imo the 2 problematics puzzle are:
Drop to bottom: it's entertaining but usually it takes a lot of time.
Pair of colors: we humans usually don't have chameleon eyes, so it's pretty hard to keep an eye on the color matched and cascades and another one on her health in order to see if it worked. For this puzzle to work better it should remark clearly the matched color done correctly.

skittledaddy

Not gonna lie. I'm thoroughly enjoying this event, so far.
WAY better than the cookie-cutter Boss Events that were released last year. Those were just the same thing over and over again, just with a different skin on them.

Apoc has always been my favorite Boss Event because it had some puzzle-ness to it. This takes that approach to a whole new level.

We're only in Round 6, so far, so Rounds 7/8 (plus the scaling increase coming up in 20 minutes) might get a little hairier. But even if it does, I'll still appreciate the devs giving us something new and challenging.

This is EXACTLY the kind of thing I wanted from Arcade's boss event last year. Instead, we got the same format as nearly all the others.
More events (Boss or otherwise) like this, PLEASE!

JaGo

I mostly agree that truly new and different is good in a boss event. But the drop to bottom and color match node need tweaking. I spent more time on the drop to bottom node than I did on all the other clears combined! I think if they spawned tiles at a slightly increased rate to introduce more board shake would probably be all that's needed. Not sure what to do about the color match node, I still don't understand how it works even after reading explanations. It just seems completely and totally random. Other than those two nodes it's been fun.

-JaGo

LavaManLee

So....something interesting happened to me with the "drop to the bottom" one. I had all of them finished except one that was way up towards the top. I had been playing that node for over 5 minutes and hated every second of it so decided to just lose and move on. I didn't retreat but instead let the tile move to the top so I could lose.

When the tile made it to the top, instead of losing, the tile lost it's "special power
and I won the match!

I haven't tested yet, but we are sure they have to go to the bottom? Would it also work to get them to the top? Just curious.

BriMan2222

@LavaManLee said:
So....something interesting happened to me with the "drop to the bottom" one. I had all of them finished except one that was way up towards the top. I had been playing that node for over 5 minutes and hated every second of it so decided to just lose and move on. I didn't retreat but instead let the tile move to the top so I could lose.

When the tile made it to the top, instead of losing, the tile lost it's "special power
and I won the match!

I haven't tested yet, but we are sure they have to go to the bottom? Would it also work to get them to the top? Just curious.

I've also seen them go to the top, and when I was expecting some big damage nothing happened instead. I'm pretty sure by the wording of the puzzle we are intended to get them to the bottom. I think this one might be bugged in our favor.

allen_koholic

I’m not enjoying this event so far.

The puzzle nodes that lock out your powers are garbage RNG or annoying “puzzles” that we’ve already solved or both (looking at you, Hue shift)

But the boss event herself is … bland. I guess there’s a trick, but it relies on cascades to stun her and it doesn’t matter. Like, she’s feels better than the cookie cutter dumps like Arcade. But as a boss, she’s worse than every other boss isn’t terms of mechanics. It’s really just an exercise in tanking and matching.

Also, I’m sure it’s been mentioned, but Magick’s repeater does weird **** again her.

DAZ0273

I do wonder if this could be coded so that after so many unsuccessful attempts to match an impossible RNG placed thing that the board could reshuffle. Quitting may not be a big deal but it does feel like one psychology wise after your third or fourth impossible scenario.

Ed_Dragonrider

Just wondering, is this even a double iso event?

bluewolf

It appears that for the Boss node in the normal Quandary (not Heroic) you can’t choose characters that aren’t Genius or Supernatural sometimes.

If you leave and come back it seems to reset, and allow you to use anyone.

There may be an order issue if you go straight from completing a node to the boss.

Minor bug but still something to look at.

Blykmyk

I had to come here, reset my password just to let everyone know that after 3500 days this event is the first thing that truly makes me think of quitting the game. Just a terrible experience in every way.

The person who thought that people want to play this game and NOT fire their powers is in the wrong job.

UnityGamer

For those who are upset of the recent Quandary events and have aired their grievances in their social media outlets, I have an update for you. Copy-pasting from the Reddit:

Devpool, in response to Pharoah_Rambam:
Heard and appreciated. We probably won’t be so strict on ability lock out in future runs. You all make a great point. Clearly the goal was the prevent auto-win solutions driven purely by brute forcing problems, but we probably took it too far. Thanks for the voice.

Me thinks there will either be a do-over of this event or something else, not sure. But they have heard, and will look to do better.

PorkBelly

I really hate this event and hope they never run it again.

BeetleGeorge

This is the first boss event where several people in our alliance do not participate to at least full progression but some quit even after a few minutes playing. The others who continued voted the color changing the worst part of it.

qandols

Quandary round 8 is brutal. I use boosted Bruce Banner, ascended Nico Minoru and ascended Moon Knight as they all can true heal. But the 90% damage reduction sucks. And the puzzles makes it take forever.

Heggal

The great cherry on top is that you cant even discuss solutions with your alliance since the alliance chat is such utter garbage.

meadowsweet

Personally, I've enjoyed the Quandary boss event so far. It's a boss event, so it's supposed to be different & challenging. I'm not sure why there seems to be so much anger compared to the boss events for Galactus, Thanos, Ultron, Basilica, etc. but I have a theory why we're currently in a 'perfect storm' that's upsetting many players:

1) There are two duplicate Quandary boss events: regular and heroic mode. So if you're a completionist, that's twice as tedious right there.

2) The only other PVE event at the moment is Puzzle Gauntlet, which folks have soured on over time as the nodes often feel more random, dumb luck, tedious, and frustrating (although this week's has been better than most in my opinion.)

3) On top of that, we're also being tasked with the Daily Quandaries Quests, which have been extremely tedious: Remove 60 Yellow tiles, THEN Make 75 Red matches, THEN Remove 160 Blue tiles, THEN Make 195 Red matches, etc. Again, if you're a completionist trying to grind out every single one, there's a lot of monotonous replaying of the same nodes over and over and over...

Any one of those tedious events might be acceptable by itself, but having to go through all three simultaneously appears to be breaking a lot of players' brains this week?