Discussion on retro rewards policy in regard to character ascension

KGB

@entrailbucket said:

@KGB said:
To be honest I am not sure why the Devs didn't award retro feeders based on whether or not you were a paying customer. As in if you had bought something in the last month, you were eligible for retro feeders and if not, you weren't.

There has to be some reason to spend money on the game and for those who are supporting the game there should be extra benefits.

KGB

This would go...very badly...for them if they tried it. They've set a precedent where once you get to a certain level, you can just coast forever at the top, and so the players at the top feel entitled to those spots forever.

I keep coming back to the same problems, but the way to fix this is to make more characters matter. When you only need one or two characters to win everything forever, there's no incentive to spend or even earn rewards once you've got that guy. You can coast for years.

Making more characters matter creates a diverse metagame but also requires a diverse roster to compete -- and getting ALL the characters to a high level is very hard to do for free, and very hard to do forever.

Curious as to why you think it would go badly? If you are a free player it doesn't matter if you quit since they aren't making money off of you. If you are spending, you get the retro rewards and in all likelihood you keep spending (even if it's just 1.99 a month).

VIP especially should mean something. At least now it gives out a costume in addition to some extras that most players don't need after a certain point. Compared to VIP treatment pretty much anywhere else (when if I get VIP seats at a sporting event I get nicer seats, private bathrooms, often I get free beer and food or at they very least more options and lesser lines. If I get VIP at a theme park like Disney or Universal I get early access to the park, shorter lines etc).

To be honest though, if the Devs really wanted to juice spending they'd just have to raise the max level cap from 550 to 600 or 650 and then watch as those at the top scrambled to spend their hoards in classics trying to get their top characters to 600 or 650 or had a bunch of stark club buys to get those CPs needed for classics.

KGB

entrailbucket

I think it would go badly because those players tend to be the loudest, and the backlash from them would cause the devs to back down and change the policy -- like they have every time before. They seem to have a very low tolerance for bad PR of any kind.

entrailbucket

@JoeHandle said:
Games don't live on money alone. They need engagement.

There are already benefits to spending. One of MPQs success is not being to blatant about such things.

Stark buys are passé. That's a day's worth of CP!

Some chain offers are "worth" it ... but only available on occasion.

Engagement only matters if it creates revenue.

Imagine you own a nightclub. You might give out free drinks to some people to make it look fuller and more popular. Would you treat those folks the same or better than your paying customers, though? If only those people wanted a particular brand on offer, would you stock it just for them?

What if those people started telling your paying customers that they were stupid for spending, and making copies of their free-drink coupons to hand out? Pretty soon only your newest customers would buy drinks, and only until someone told them how to get free ones. How long would it take before you went out of business?

meadowsweet

@entrailbucket said:

@JoeHandle said:
Games don't live on money alone. They need engagement.

There are already benefits to spending. One of MPQs success is not being to blatant about such things.

Stark buys are passé. That's a day's worth of CP!

Some chain offers are "worth" it ... but only available on occasion.

Engagement only matters if it creates revenue.

Imagine you own a nightclub. You might give out free drinks to some people to make it look fuller and more popular. Would you treat those folks the same or better than your paying customers, though? If only those people wanted a particular brand on offer, would you stock it just for them?

What if those people started telling your paying customers that they were stupid for spending, and making copies of their free-drink coupons to hand out? Pretty soon only your newest customers would buy drinks, and only until someone told them how to get free ones. How long would it take before you went out of business?

But... the night club owner is paying for the alcohol, the building, the employees, the taxes, etc. Those are unique, real, physical items that have to be produced and maintained. When they give away free drinks or don't charge a cover fee, and fill their club with non-paying customers, they're losing money. (And when customers produce counterfeit coupons, they're actually stealing from the club owner and breaking the law.)

That has absolutely nothing to do with how a free-to-play mobile game works?

The cost to build a fully functioning game (development, programming, artwork, etc.) is the same whether it's being played by one or one million players. If you're huge, there's some marginal costs that increase like servers required or customer service representatives, but those are probably a rounding error unless you have an enormous player base - which would be a good problem to have!

MPQ is just a digital game. Everyone can have as much of anything as the devs decide. They could gift 50,000 Shang-Chi shards to everyone tomorrow. That wouldn't "cost them" anything, except amongst players who would've been willing to pay money for Shang-Chi shards and now don't need to. But that's not the same thing as giving every club patron 50,000 free beers.

What MPQ players are paying for is to accelerate progress, eliminate frustrations, ensure dominance, efficiently utilize resources, support developers, and generally have fun. You can play for free, but it's going to be slower, more frustrating, and probably less fun. But that has very little to do with the economics of operating a night club.

Maybe MPQ could turn a slight profit if there were only a few dozen or hundred high-spending whales, but I don't think that would be fun for the whales anymore either. If you only have 100 players and every one of them is spending $1,000 per month minimum, how much longer is the last-place player going to keep spending $1,000 to finish last? After they quit, there's a new last place, then they quit, and so on, until no one's left.

Even the whales need a large pool of free & casual players so they can feel superior and see their investment is paying off. And the free & casual players are fine not finishing at the top of the leaderboards because those people just paid to win or have no life outside of MPQ anyway, so there's no shame in losing to them. Everybody wins: the game remains both popular and profitable, and continues on indefinitely.

entrailbucket

MPQ actually has a fairly massive ongoing cost, in the Marvel license. The game's support and maintenance, as well as development are all ongoing costs. It's absolutely just like running any other business. Yes, giving away shards costs them nothing, but allowing free-to-play folks to dominate the game and have their needs exclusively catered to, while teaching others to succeed without spending, will end the game eventually.

The idea that the "whales" need a pool of free and casual players to beat up on may have been true at one point. The problem now is that the top of leaderboards are those "free and casual" players, because spending doesn't give you any tangible advantage at all.

Players with one high level character can beat absolutely any team anybody can throw out there. I've got 30-some-odd 550s and none of them matter, except that I enjoy changing things up and having fun. How many players are willing to pay for "changing things up and having fun," though?

The problem right now is that playing for free isn't slower, more frustrating, or less fun. In many ways it's actually optimal. Spending provides barely any advantage.

KGB

@entrailbucket said:
I think it would go badly because those players tend to be the loudest, and the backlash from them would cause the devs to back down and change the policy -- like they have every time before. They seem to have a very low tolerance for bad PR of any kind.

Other than a few posts here / reddit / discord what exactly can they do (technically posts here can be simply removed, not sure about those other 2 spots since I don't post there) since they don't spend.

Review bombing as was done a long time ago is a joke. For a couple grand they can probably pay 50000 'players' in India to download and give the game a 5* review.

Obviously I'm a lot more of a hard line / confrontational person than they are. And before anyone asks, yes I've been in business before and have dealt with customer before and had no problem being that way and don't ever recall it causing the company to go under.

In truth, I suspect the Dev's just happily hand out whatever the players want as long as the money train keeps rolling to keep the game in business.

KGB

Daredevil217

@meadowsweet said:

@entrailbucket said:

@JoeHandle said:
Games don't live on money alone. They need engagement.

There are already benefits to spending. One of MPQs success is not being to blatant about such things.

Stark buys are passé. That's a day's worth of CP!

Some chain offers are "worth" it ... but only available on occasion.

Engagement only matters if it creates revenue.

Imagine you own a nightclub. You might give out free drinks to some people to make it look fuller and more popular. Would you treat those folks the same or better than your paying customers, though? If only those people wanted a particular brand on offer, would you stock it just for them?

What if those people started telling your paying customers that they were stupid for spending, and making copies of their free-drink coupons to hand out? Pretty soon only your newest customers would buy drinks, and only until someone told them how to get free ones. How long would it take before you went out of business?

But... the night club owner is paying for the alcohol, the building, the employees, the taxes, etc. Those are unique, real, physical items that have to be produced and maintained. When they give away free drinks or don't charge a cover fee, and fill their club with non-paying customers, they're losing money. (And when customers produce counterfeit coupons, they're actually stealing from the club owner and breaking the law.)

That has absolutely nothing to do with how a free-to-play mobile game works?

The cost to build a fully functioning game (development, programming, artwork, etc.) is the same whether it's being played by one or one million players. If you're huge, there's some marginal costs that increase like servers required or customer service representatives, but those are probably a rounding error unless you have an enormous player base - which would be a good problem to have!

MPQ is just a digital game. Everyone can have as much of anything as the devs decide. They could gift 50,000 Shang-Chi shards to everyone tomorrow. That wouldn't "cost them" anything, except amongst players who would've been willing to pay money for Shang-Chi shards and now don't need to. But that's not the same thing as giving every club patron 50,000 free beers.

What MPQ players are paying for is to accelerate progress, eliminate frustrations, ensure dominance, efficiently utilize resources, support developers, and generally have fun. You can play for free, but it's going to be slower, more frustrating, and probably less fun. But that has very little to do with the economics of operating a night club.

Maybe MPQ could turn a slight profit if there were only a few dozen or hundred high-spending whales, but I don't think that would be fun for the whales anymore either. If you only have 100 players and every one of them is spending $1,000 per month minimum, how much longer is the last-place player going to keep spending $1,000 to finish last? After they quit, there's a new last place, then they quit, and so on, until no one's left.

Even the whales need a large pool of free & casual players so they can feel superior and see their investment is paying off. And the free & casual players are fine not finishing at the top of the leaderboards because those people just paid to win or have no life outside of MPQ anyway, so there's no shame in losing to them. Everybody wins: the game remains both popular and profitable, and continues on indefinitely.

The funny thing is, they’ve been giving out “free drinks” for the better part of a decade and have managed to thrive while most other F2P mobile games folded when their bubble burst. I love when players wax philosophical like we know the business better than a company that has been wildly successful. I mean it’s fun to speculate, but none of us really know. The whole idea of “one meta to ruin them all” being the downfall of the game is particularly funny because it didn’t end it when Gambit (though admittedly he was nerfed) was punching up, nor did the game end when Thorkoye was tearing up teams 100 levels higher. When the string of winfinite teams were introduced with Polaris… the game still managed to survive and they even doubled down on that and gave us Kang!

I get it has to SUCK to invest so much time, money and resources into a game only to have some F2P hoarder kick your butt because they made wise moves with the limited resources they have. They invested strategically in the right characters and are now claiming your spot. Ouch. But let’s not act like punch up characters and one dominant meta hasn’t existed for at least half the games lifespan… probably more. Maybe, just maybe, it’s actually profitable this way. Maybe people are spending not because they HAVE to (which of course leads to burnout and the game eventually folding), but because they want to? I know that’s what I do anyway. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but just like everyone else, it’s all speculation.

But I can be sure of this. People have been crying about these same issues for literal YEARS they haven’t changed, and the sky hasn’t fallen yet. Just want to give some perspective.

entrailbucket

@Daredevil217 said:

@meadowsweet said:

@entrailbucket said:

@JoeHandle said:
Games don't live on money alone. They need engagement.

There are already benefits to spending. One of MPQs success is not being to blatant about such things.

Stark buys are passé. That's a day's worth of CP!

Some chain offers are "worth" it ... but only available on occasion.

Engagement only matters if it creates revenue.

Imagine you own a nightclub. You might give out free drinks to some people to make it look fuller and more popular. Would you treat those folks the same or better than your paying customers, though? If only those people wanted a particular brand on offer, would you stock it just for them?

What if those people started telling your paying customers that they were stupid for spending, and making copies of their free-drink coupons to hand out? Pretty soon only your newest customers would buy drinks, and only until someone told them how to get free ones. How long would it take before you went out of business?

But... the night club owner is paying for the alcohol, the building, the employees, the taxes, etc. Those are unique, real, physical items that have to be produced and maintained. When they give away free drinks or don't charge a cover fee, and fill their club with non-paying customers, they're losing money. (And when customers produce counterfeit coupons, they're actually stealing from the club owner and breaking the law.)

That has absolutely nothing to do with how a free-to-play mobile game works?

The cost to build a fully functioning game (development, programming, artwork, etc.) is the same whether it's being played by one or one million players. If you're huge, there's some marginal costs that increase like servers required or customer service representatives, but those are probably a rounding error unless you have an enormous player base - which would be a good problem to have!

MPQ is just a digital game. Everyone can have as much of anything as the devs decide. They could gift 50,000 Shang-Chi shards to everyone tomorrow. That wouldn't "cost them" anything, except amongst players who would've been willing to pay money for Shang-Chi shards and now don't need to. But that's not the same thing as giving every club patron 50,000 free beers.

What MPQ players are paying for is to accelerate progress, eliminate frustrations, ensure dominance, efficiently utilize resources, support developers, and generally have fun. You can play for free, but it's going to be slower, more frustrating, and probably less fun. But that has very little to do with the economics of operating a night club.

Maybe MPQ could turn a slight profit if there were only a few dozen or hundred high-spending whales, but I don't think that would be fun for the whales anymore either. If you only have 100 players and every one of them is spending $1,000 per month minimum, how much longer is the last-place player going to keep spending $1,000 to finish last? After they quit, there's a new last place, then they quit, and so on, until no one's left.

Even the whales need a large pool of free & casual players so they can feel superior and see their investment is paying off. And the free & casual players are fine not finishing at the top of the leaderboards because those people just paid to win or have no life outside of MPQ anyway, so there's no shame in losing to them. Everybody wins: the game remains both popular and profitable, and continues on indefinitely.

The funny thing is, they’ve been giving out “free drinks” for the better part of a decade and have managed to thrive while most other F2P mobile games folded when their bubble burst. I love when players wax philosophical like we know the business better than a company that has been wildly successful. I mean it’s fun to speculate, but none of us really know. The whole idea of “one meta to ruin them all” being the downfall of the game is particularly funny because it didn’t end it when Gambit (though admittedly he was nerfed) was punching up, nor did the game end when Thorkoye was tearing up teams 100 levels higher. When the string of winfinite teams were introduced with Polaris… the game still managed to survive and they even doubled down on that and gave us Kang!

I get it has to SUCK to invest so much time, money and resources into a game only to have some F2P hoarder kick your butt because they made wise moves with the limited resources they have. They invested strategically in the right characters and are now claiming your spot. Ouch. But let’s not act like punch up characters and one dominant meta hasn’t existed for at least half the games lifespan… probably more. Maybe, just maybe, it’s actually profitable this way. Maybe people are spending not because they HAVE to (which of course leads to burnout and the game eventually folding), but because they want to? I know that’s what I do anyway. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but just like everyone else, it’s all speculation.

But I can be sure of this. People have been crying about these same issues for literal YEARS they haven’t changed, and the sky hasn’t fallen yet. Just want to give some perspective.

LOL, you got me! I'm just jealous of all these super-smart, galaxy-brained hoarders, whose superior strategy earned their top spot! It definitely takes someone who's a genius level IQ to hoard all their stuff and go all in on the best character, especially since nobody else follows this route! Every MPQ genius independently discovered that the best strategy was to get the one best character!

Gambit was different. Folks who maxed him out had basically one shot at him, nobody was hoarding yet, and most of those players spent 4-5 figures on him. Okoye/Thor was really the start of it, but hoarding wasn't nearly the mainstream strategy it is now. The whales hadn't yet realized that spending was pointless, and the f2p crew hasn't taken over yet.

I don't care about their profit margins, except as it relates to keeping the game alive. These games die when they stop making money. I've seen games with huge, vibrant communities die because of lack of revenue.

Someone's "contributions" to the community are worth nothing compared to even $1 in spending, and now you've got the tops of leaderboards full of non-spenders, and an entire community telling people that they're stupid to spend any money at all -- that they can win everything forever, for free. That's new, and it's problematic.

Daredevil217

I mean you’re talking about two separate issues. One is the meta. Mpq meta has been stale with one dominant team punching up for as long as I’ve been playing really. That hasn’t changed and the game has survived. Thor/Shang is nothing that we haven’t seen before with Thor/Okoye. Or Okoye/Hulk. I’m not going to chicken little here because people have cried almost the lifespan of the game about how one meta will lead to the game’s downfall and yet… here we are.

The second issue is people not needing to spend money in order to compete. This game is actually one of the better ones out there with this regard. Many games fold when they become pay to win and this game steered away from that model. Which encourages players to keep playing when they don’t see this huge paywall and decide to try a different game. Like I said , I was able to get deep into the 5* tier without spending a dime. I wanted to know I could do it on my own. Now that the rewards are essentially meaningless I DO spend simply because it’s a choice and I don’t feel I have to in order to “keep up”. I’ve heard others assert the same. It’s admittedly not the normal way to generate revenue but it seems to be working for them. Costco gives away “free drinks” constantly and they are also wildly successful not just revenue wise, but customer service wise as well. It matters.

You have 30+ 550s. That is absolutely nuts (hats off to you). But if that’s really what was needed to be competitive it would turn off a lot of people. Because that’s bigger than than biggest pay to win wall. My theory is people spend because they like the game. And many probably like the game because they don’t HAVE to spend in order to compete. They’ll chase Shang and ride him until a new meta makes him obsolete. Just like he made steel witch obsolete who made hulkoye obsolete who made Thorkoye obsolete. This has always been the model. And again… the servers are alive and well and the developers are making plans for the game years out (some of which are huge revamps, like to the in game chat. Not exactly the type of projects the developers would be engaged in if they were worried about the whole thing collapsing). I think we’ll be okay.

entrailbucket

Should it offer any advantage at all to have 30+ 550s? Should it offer any advantage to have anyone at 550, besides the one best character?

What is the purpose of building out your roster when only one character matters? Why would the developers continue to create and sell new characters? What kind of fools would bother putting any effort into anyone besides the very best character(s)? New players spend because they're not yet a part of a community that tells them they're dumb for spending, and that they can easily succeed without doing it.

The issue isn't a few f2p folks finding a way to succeed. It's those folks massively publicizing their strategy and seeing it adopted widely, while stigmatizing spenders as dumb and suboptimal.

Daredevil217

I haven’t seen this rhetoric that “spending is dumb and you’re dumb for doing it” in any of the communities I frequent. I often think we play different games when you post the things you hear/see. I just think you might be part of some pretty toxic communities tbh, or extrapolating a couple bad experiences and assuming they’re the norm or represent all players. Why anyone would discourage someone from paying the bills when they refuse to kick in themselves is beyond me. THAT is my definition of dumb. Most of the top folks I know in the communities I frequent spend a ton and are in buy clubs. They are at the top of the food chain, yet they spend anyway? Again, I’m not too worried.

I guess I know the sky one day will indeed fall. Everything ends. But until that day comes, I’m enjoying the ride. And nothing that’s happening now is “new” to the game. We’ve seen it all before.

I’m not going to say whether you should be entitled to a competitive advantage because that’s a whole other topic and is really a game design philosophy question. I will say that the idea of everyone chasing one team only for that team to be made obsolete by power creep and everyone chasing the next “it” team is not a novel game design philosophy. If all characters were completely balanced there would be no reason to chase anyone else if Surfer is just as good as Shang-Chi. The only reason to chase would be if you want to have more options for fun, which is the situation you’re in now. You have to understand that you are the elite of the elite. So the game is less likely to cater to your vision of what the game should be and is more likely to cater to those wanting to catch you. Especially when that model has a 10 year track record of success. I’m sorry.

entrailbucket

You are also the elite of the elite. Your roster is the equivalent of mine in every way that actually matters, currently. Nobody is even trying to "catch" me right now -- to do so would be both pointless and meaningless.

I'd also point out that I am not now and have not ever been asking for total character balance. We have weekly boosts now, that's not necessary. I'm asking for characters to not be more than a hundred levels better than everyone else. When lvl550 (or in this case, lvl450) is better than lvl672, you're removing all incentive to improve your roster, or even bother acquiring anyone else.

HowDoIUnlockBatman

Personally, I spend every penny i have so that whenever people look at the leaderboards, they see my name. I couldn't care less about the game itself. I've used the same team in PVE for a year because it means i get all the rewards i don't need and nobody else can have any.

I also switch alliances at the drop of a hat so that my alliance mates don't get anything when i spend money but i get CP everytime they do.

I don't even really care about retro rewards. I can 550 anyone the moment they drop with the amount of CP i have. That's not the point. If other people are getting stuff, i want stuff too. In fact i want more stuff then they are getting because I'm better than them

Bowgentle

Where are these hundreds of f2p people at the top of the leader boards?
I'm seeing mostly paying players in t5 of pvp and pve.

Ptahhotep

As I see it an ascended character should be seen as a max champed copy of that character. The other copy that was merged with it was “sold off” to effect the ascension. Covers added to an ascended character are rewarding levels above the maximum level available to the unascended character that don’t include shards or covers. So any retro rewards for an ascended character should be the same as those for an unascended max champed copy.

meadowsweet

@Ptahhotep said:
As I see it an ascended character should be seen as a max champed copy of that character. The other copy that was merged with it was “sold off” to effect the ascension. Covers added to an ascended character are rewarding levels above the maximum level available to the unascended character that don’t include shards or covers. So any retro rewards for an ascended character should be the same as those for an unascended max champed copy.

That logic holds up pretty well for a 4★. We know you combined two characters and at least one of them had to be a Max Champ. The game doesn't track what level the second one was at, so the compromise is to just call it a wash and give them credit for one Max Champ only (more than they get today, but less than it may have actually been.)

But further down the roster, we know that if you have a 5★ version of an Ascended 3★ character, you had at least 2 (and as many as 4) 3★ Max Champs - do you still treat that as a single Max Champ if retro rewards change? What about a 5★ Ascended from a 2★ which could have been anywhere from 4 - 8 Max Champ 2★s originally?

Daredevil217

@meadowsweet said:

@Ptahhotep said:
As I see it an ascended character should be seen as a max champed copy of that character. The other copy that was merged with it was “sold off” to effect the ascension. Covers added to an ascended character are rewarding levels above the maximum level available to the unascended character that don’t include shards or covers. So any retro rewards for an ascended character should be the same as those for an unascended max champed copy.

That logic holds up pretty well for a 4★. We know you combined two characters and at least one of them had to be a Max Champ. The game doesn't track what level the second one was at, so the compromise is to just call it a wash and give them credit for one Max Champ only (more than they get today, but less than it may have actually been.)

But further down the roster, we know that if you have a 5★ version of an Ascended 3★ character, you had at least 2 (and as many as 4) 3★ Max Champs - do you still treat that as a single Max Champ if retro rewards change? What about a 5★ Ascended from a 2★ which could have been anywhere from 4 - 8 Max Champ 2★s originally?

2* don’t have feeders.

JoeHandle

@Bowgentle said:
Where are these hundreds of f2p people at the top of the leader boards?
I'm seeing mostly paying players in t5 of pvp and pve.

Have you checked the leaderboards of SCLs 1 through ... say ... 6 or 7? 😄

meadowsweet

@Daredevil217 said:
2* don’t have feeders.

Incorrect:

GrimSkald

@meadowsweet said:

@Daredevil217 said:
2* don’t have feeders.

Incorrect:

Pretty sure we're talking about a point of language here. No characters feed 2★s