Dev's please no more Spider-verse characters for new characters for a while

bluewolf

Aunt Mays were released as full on joke characters (April). We all know this.

Nightcrawler Spidey was probably highly encouraged by Marvel.

I think many wanted the OG Electro after the 5 (he was dead in comics when she released) and no one really complained about him. Also he’s pretty good.

This new pair? I mean ok. I guess you can complain but this dev team loves to find offbeat, somewhat unknown characters to release. Also female characters - we’ve seen a lot of them recently.

It is what it is, the game provided like 8 years of standard Marvel characters to enjoy before the swing towards (often) the weird and goofy and fun.

MgoBlue51

I'd like to see Bastian from X-Men 97. He wasn't big in the comics, but it'd be a clear 3/5 release with the 5* being his final form

JoeHandle

Who cares what sprites they have been wallpapered with, I would just like the details of the new characters ... sometime before they are live in game

EDIT to add: Finally posted at 1615 CST on Tues 5/28. Now to contemplate whether to wait another season to pull ... I believe I will .... will chase 5Mayday instead of Phylla.

DevpoolMPQ_BCS

Hey all! We hear you. There is one more Spider-related character releasing later this year, but that's it. We also did a quick tally for anyone interested, here are some fun facts:

2024 Percentage of Spider-People: 13.46%
MPQ Total Percentage of Spider-People: 18.18%

Codex

That surely has to be kraven.

bluewolf

@Codex said:
That surely has to be kraven.

Or a 5* Venom….

Venom 3 is coming.

bluewolf

@dianetics said:

@bluewolf said:
Aunt Mays were released as full on joke characters (April). We all know this.

Nightcrawler Spidey was probably highly encouraged by Marvel.

I think many wanted the OG Electro after the 5 (he was dead in comics when she released) and no one really complained about him. Also he’s pretty good.

This new pair? I mean ok. I guess you can complain but this dev team loves to find offbeat, somewhat unknown characters to release. Also female characters - we’ve seen a lot of them recently.

It is what it is, the game provided like 8 years of standard Marvel characters to enjoy before the swing towards (often) the weird and goofy and fun.

The weird and goofy is not what people are having issue with. Big Wheel rolled in and was generally liked. Dr Bong was cool. 3* Arcade was liked (not the 5). Throg was liked when he was released. People liked Goose.

You are misrepresenting the thing people are talking about here.

The complaints aren't about the individual characters. Just the quantity/rate of SM adjacent characters recently...that's it.

This is common to try and shut down points of discussion or discredit others pov's. "You don't like this thing or that thing" when it is just the overarching thing that is tiresome.

Ok. Fair point.

I think we’ve all seen complaints over most of the recent characters. Many times it’s over the weird and unusual, and not getting a classic version of a character people remember from comics/cartoons/etc.

We see just one more Spider-character is coming. My intent was also to point out the ones we’ve seen recently before now all had some additional factor, imo.

TheVulture

Though I am heartily fed up of Spidey-characters in general at this point, I think they have two main handicaps relative to other themes/factions:

1. Spider-Man himself overshadows all the other heroes in his faction by a wide margin, since he never leaves the pop culture space i.e. there are many different answers to "who is your favourite X-Man?", but even after 60 years the answer to "who is your favourite Spider-Man?" will be 95% Peter Parker, 4% Miles, and 1% contrarians.
   However, every iteration of Peter Parker - besides the deliberately overpowered 1* - has been awful (more on that next), and the devs can't keep adding more of him without simply provoking different complaints.

2. Web tiles are awful, and they're never going away!
   From day 1 the game has never favoured a slow build-up style of play, and as the years go by it gets faster and the player-base less tolerant of slow clears - web tiles are the antithesis of efficiency, since they have no passive benefits and the balance of effects which use them has to be conservative because of the wildly differing rates characters can create them.

Together this creates a situation where most potential Spidey hero releases are going to yield negative reactions, as slow, defensive, non-meta characters are launched at people who don't know of or care for non-Peter Parker webslingers.

What would I do about it?
1. Take a break, which Devpool already confirmed is the case.
2. Stick a band-aid on web tiles by introducing a support which gives them the damage reduction functionality of mid-range protect tiles (without all the interaction challenges of actually making them protect tiles). In an ideal world, changing every web tile power to be able to overwrite (not target) enemy special tiles would probably be better & more thematic, but web = protect would at least stop them being a liability.
3. In 2025, make a big deal of releasing 2* Peter Parker (Spider-Man) - a civilian teen/young adult version, who has straight-forward powers (may create a web tile or 2 but doesn't need them for anything) inc. a powerful passive effect, and just masks up (not the full suit) for one big beat-down power. Make him the cover-boy for MPQ for a while w/ an accessible 4* head-start for vets, run a photography themed screenshot promotion etc.
4. Six months later, follow-up with 3* Mary Jane (Girl Next Door) - plus a throwaway 5* Jackpot - who has passives designed to synergize with Peter Parker and make web tiles liveable, possibly acting as the 3* tier Nico/Kitty in terms of turning special tiles into a win condition. Basically an Iron May calibre character without the April Fools baggage.

JoeHandle

Why are web tiles "awful"?

Timemachinego

There's nothing inherently wrong with web tiles and we do have some pretty good options for creating them now (though still mostly in the 4* tier). I think the BAD thing about them is a lot of the involved character design, all those active powers that create a tile or two and do almost nothing else are a complete waste of design space and make those characters actively worse on their own. All web characters should be generating webs passively while doing the things you want to be doing, just as they would in the comics.

entrailbucket

3* Spidey's 3ap web-tile-based stun was the entire metagame for a few months -- it was so bad they had to nerf him into the ground.

There's nothing wrong with web tiles. There may be something wrong with web tile powers or characters, but the tiles themselves are neutral.

WilliamK1983

Do web tiles even do anything? There is one character that I can tell you what the function of the web tile is. Chasm, match a web tile, he heals. Everyone else, haven't the slightest clue.

TheVulture

@entrailbucket said:
3* Spidey's 3ap web-tile-based stun was the entire metagame for a few months -- it was so bad they had to nerf him into the ground.

There's nothing wrong with web tiles. There may be something wrong with web tile powers or characters, but the tiles themselves are neutral.

I recall lots of powers being silly in the early days (2 AP Ragnorak is forever in her hearts ), it wasn't anything about web tiles mechanically that made them interesting or important.

I wouldn't call web tiles neutral though, as they eat into the character's 'power quota' - and sometimes literally their move-sets!
E.g. Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderfriends, Portal Partnership, and Mandela Web are moves whose only effects are to create web tiles, on characters who gain no passive benefits at all from web tiles existing.
The characters with those powers have some good payoffs for amassing web tiles on their active powers, but they still would have far more synergy & potential if they were creating even strength 1 protect tiles instead and scaling with protect tiles, rather than being limited to other web-heads as partners.

BriMan2222

@dianetics said:

@WilliamK1983 said:
Do web tiles even do anything? There is one character that I can tell you what the function of the web tile is. Chasm, match a web tile, he heals. Everyone else, haven't the slightest clue.

Silk, 4 and 5 Gwen, 2099, India, 4 and 5 Spidey (Parker)

They all use webs to enhance their kit in some manner.

4 Miles gains extra ap whenever a web tile is matched, 3 star spider man stuns longer on his blue when there's more webs, 4 Gwen's red nuke costs 1 less ap for each web on the board, iron spider man red does more damage with webs out and he consumes them to avoid damage, 1 star venom does extra damage on his black and his purple stuns longer.

Scofie

This is a really interesting discussion. Here's my take:
Web-tile-based powers should be better than normal powers but mostly they're not. In order to fire one, you need the AP and sometimes a viable number of web tiles. This means, more often than not, you need two or more web-tile users on the team that can create and destroy tiles. Quite often, web users will have a vast majority of the kit based around web tiles. So if you're not pairing with others (and often even if you do), the kit will be worse or slower (or both) than a number of other characters and relies on the right matches to be available. And finally, if your web tiles creator dies, the web tiles just sit there doing nothing. If my SAP creator dies, the SAPs keep doing their thing.

I don't know what the answer to it is but you can have web-based thematic powers without needing web tiles. 3* Spidey is a great example. One of his powers generates a web tile which makes the same power slightly better. It is incidental to the character not the whole basis of the powers. I can't really tell you in which order it's best to fire different web users powers for best effect because they're so intertwined with the web theme and I don't really have the time or patience to use them all repeatedly to find out.

DAZ0273

Web tiles simply need to have some use/facility beyond interaction with Spider characters. Make them like charge tiles where they are still neutral but they do something extra if you match them be it prolong a stun or maybe remove a random countdown or something.

Scofie

@DAZ0273 said:
Web tiles simply need to have some use/facility beyond interaction with Spider characters. Make them like charge tiles where they are still neutral but they do something extra if you match them be it prolong a stun or maybe remove a random countdown or something.

Yes, thematically you could stun the character that matched them. That can be used fairly tactically for 5* Black Panther.

SaltnPeppa

@DevpoolMPQ_BCS said:
Hey all! We hear you. There is one more Spider-related character releasing later this year, but that's it. We also did a quick tally for anyone interested, here are some fun facts:

2024 Percentage of Spider-People: 13.46%
MPQ Total Percentage of Spider-People: 18.18%

That's great you hear us, question is, will you guys be doing anything about it?

killahKlown

OP does not speak for the majority. I'm excited for the two new spider additions

meadowsweet

I'm not opposed to characters just because they're Spider-Man adjacent. If you want to make the case that the Spider-Verse is over-represented, or that other far more popular Marvel characters are more deserving, that's fine.

I guess it's just strange to me that there are so many Spidey characters but we're still missing so many important enemies, while we've seen so many bizarre niche Spider-characters I'd never heard of outside of this game:

• Chameleon
• Shocker
• Hobgoblin
• The Spot
• Tombstone
• Shriek
• Mephisto
• Spider-Doppelganger
• Silver Sable