MPQ Developer Q&A JUNE 2024 (ANSWERS)

S0kun

Thanks everyone for sending in your questions for our June 2024 MPQ Developer Q&A! To answer the question that's been living rent free in your minds lately... no, you won't see any more Spiderverse new character releases for the rest of the year. Some of the below questions are grouped together, but we tried to answer as many as we could. Cheers!

1 @exxterminator @Reaper70 [Official Forums]
Question: Why is every second new release related to spiderman did you run out of other characters or imagination?
Answer: That wasn't our intent, but we definitely can understand why things felt so web heavy recently! Relatively speaking, Spider-verse characters were underrepresented as a whole in the MPQ universe before this wave of releases. The recent characters that you've seen were part of our efforts to level out that balance across the other Marvel "families" and we agree that it could've been spread a little thinner to avoid the perception. There won't be anymore Spiderverse character releases for the rest of the year, but we do have 2 rebalances in the works. Obviously, this is subject to change, but we're pretty confident that Kaine was the last web slinger this year.

2. @_TrashPanda
@trewiltrewil
@Zarqa
The-Reaper [Discord]
Question: Can you add filters for things like Number of Covers & Original/Base Levels?
Answer: This was a frequently asked question so we've grouped them together and confirming that we'll put the request in for these filters with our engineer!

3. @loose5682 [Official Forums]
Question: Is there any update on the status of expanding the amount of AP and damage boosts you can hold on to?
Answer: Yes! A bit of a chicken and egg sort of thing, honestly. This more or less boils down to a UI thing. All UI related things are, as many of the players know, painful to update. As many players are also aware, we are in late stages of an engine overhaul that will make UI changes MUCH simpler. So, when we go about assigning resources, we always weigh out the "do we do it now or later" of the issue. If we wait for the overhaul, this won't land until next year. If we do it now, it'll probably land in August, but would do horrible things to the internal schedule. I'm on the fence, but my gut right now tells me that I won't be patient enough for this to come out next year.

4. @StillMonsoon3 [Official Forums]
Question: There have been a lot of requests to reexamine ISO awards and economics in the game. Was the release of ISO containers and multipliers the promised changes or are there more changes on the way?
Answer: Actually, not at all! Those systems weren't intended as solutions for the ISO vault. They simply provide alternative means to acquire ISO. We have some rather enormous economy-related things coming to the game that is requiring us to carefully and holistically look at basically everything players earn in play. If all goes according to plan, these things will be introduced in an end-of-year / early next year timeframe. In the meantime, we're also looking at manual edits that we can introduce to help out with ISO issues along the way.

5. The Boogie [Discord]
Question: Would you ever consider a mechanism where a player could swap excess quantities of one type of in-game currency for another?
Answer: Not in any sort of permanent way, no. We might offer temporary fixed exchanges (for example, imagine a lightning deal in which you can buy X of one currency for Y of another).

6. Punkers13 [Discord]
Question: Will you fix the other older 5* like kitty pryde?
Answer: If this is in regards to rebalancing older characters, then yes, at some point we do plan on visiting them all as needed.

7. @ciellel [Official Forums]
Question: Will the inequity in boss rewards when one has the offered supports already at 5* be addressed? If you get top 10 a duplicate gives you 1400 shards. If you are in the top 100 you only get 80 shards.
Answer: Good question. I'll bring this up as a point to address as we're looking at holistic economic changes that need to happen (which includes rewards in general).

8. @BlackBoltRocks [Official Forums]
Question: Could you refresh PVE events with new opponents? It'd also be a nice aesthetic if opponents were garbed in their costumes.
Answer: This would be super sweet! Let's just say if I told you how that sort of edit is done, you wouldn't believe me since it requires a ton of heavy lifting. Our engine overhaul however will make this sort of thing quick and painless, and we're looking forward to it! We're also looking forward to some fantastic tools that will let us regularly create new events. HECK YES!

9. Squarephreak [Discord]
Question: When can we expect updates to Alliances, including the ability to see how long since commanders last played, and the ability to kick them? Notifications for alliance communications wouldn't suck either.
Answer: We're currently looking into various aspects of Alliance play and quality of life features like these are definitely on our radar as needing attention!

10. @Darth_Pastor [Official Forums]
Question: Can we have portions of the game, like team building, offline?
Answer: Unfortunately not. Creating offline features that work in tandem with an online live-service title causes a lot of potential for things to break so it's not something we'd be willing to introduce without a substantial game and infrastructure overhaul.

11. ReturnalShadow [Reddit]
Question: What insights do you have for players who think that all resources in MPQ are artificial and don't cost money, and you should be liberal in increasing them or giving them away? E.g. make double iso-8 permanent for free or give away more HP or CP etc.
Answer: As with every game regardless of if it's a live-service or offline title, there will always be a need to balance the amount of effort a player puts into acquiring resources. With titles that are Free To Play, this balance is even more critical since it's one of the only means for us to ensure that we're able to keep the lights on while players enjoy their time spent on the game.

12. @TheXMan [Official Forums]
Question: Can you put something in place to try to prevent accidentally spending large amounts of HP? Either an option in user preferences to enable the buttons above a certain amount or make it so you have to hold in the button a few seconds?
Answer: We'll look into what kind of safeguards are available since accidental spends are definitely things that we want to avoid. If there are other areas where there isn't ample warning before a purchase, please let us know so we can investigate.

13. @whoami [Official Forums]
Question: Adding supports to PVP—I get it, adds additional variety and strategy, etc. however, there are some supports that are critical for quality of life in PVE that may not work so well in PVP ( AP gen ones)—please don’t nerf, just disable in pvp!
Answer: There have been a lot of great suggestions coming out of the community ever since Supports were introduced into PVP! We realize that their mechanics are a tricky balancing act in all forms of play, but are prepared to introduce features to potentially make them behave differently or limited to where they are used. Please keep the feedback coming!

14. @Siv75 [Official Forums]
Question: How can I find alliances that are suited to my gameplay level?
Answer: Feel free to join our official MPQ Discord server were there's an Alliance Bulletin Board for players like you looking for an alliance. https://mpq.social/discord

15. @UnityGamer [Official Forums]
Question: What do you look when creating abilities for a new character? Which character was the hardest to create abilities for? Which character's ability is your favorite/accomplished creation for MPQ?
Answer: When we design a new character, we try to find the essence of the character's powers and story - at least in the target arc, or maybe one of their most popular runs - so that we can represent them through their abilities' names and mechanics.

From there, we design the abilities; sometimes a character's themes practically hand you the design - like She Hulk (Immmortal)! Usually though, we ask questions like:

• What works best with the character's theme?
• Can we shift the meta with this character?
• How can we make this character interesting to play vs. the existing roster?

While we always want to make our new characters exciting and powerful, these goals guide how we get there. Black King (Sebastian Shaw) is a recent example where we wanted to give players another tool against Mighty Thor; happily, his whole "throw your energy right back at you" mutation in the comics was a perfect fit.

Another example: for Riri Williams (Ironheart), we wanted to make her playstyle unique compared to some of the existing roster; her cooldown approach to abilities let us keep their AP costs low for their power.

Which character was the hardest to create abilities for?
Probably Dr. Bong - because he shows up so infrequently and he's a bit of a meme. He's a fun character and we had fun with all the puns, but he went through a bunch of variations because we were having trouble giving him a solid identity mechanically. Even so, I think he landed in a good spot As for favorite accomplishments in abilities, As much as I love Mighty Thor's board shake engine, when High Evolutionary's design came up and I realized that we could build a character specifically to help players ease the transition between rarities, I got really excited! And I'm thrilled with how well he turned out, Classic in particular, for that purpose.

16. @raber18 [Official Forums]
Question: I'm sure this has been asked previously, but is there any sort of potential timeline for new milestone quests? or more specifically milestone quests related to ascension?
Answer: Definitely something we plan on doing, but just haven't had the resources to put towards it yet.

17. @Carnifex [Official Forums]
Question: Who would win in a fight? Uncle Ben or MPQ's official forum manager, ThisisClemFandango?
Answer: F in chat.

18. @DyingLegend [Official Forums]
Question: Can the game get autoplay feature for some of the more trival nodes, like the daily deadpool. I find myself skipping most content becuase its just overly boring to play the same thing a million times. Having autoplay would be great.
Answer: We're constantly looking at ways to make the game's current and future mechanics as interesting to your gameplay experience as possible, but an autoplay feature that's so "autoplay" that you don't need to play the game isn't something that's part of the game's current design philosophy.

19. rene2898 [Discord]
Question: Isn't the Infinite War Spidey costume the one Stark made? Why doesn't this spider have technology as an affiliation?
Answer: It is pretty techy, isn't it? I'll ask the characters folks to take another look and consider adding this affiliation.

20. @Azumi [MPQ]
Question: After playing pvp I reassign my supports for story mode. Does this affect my team on defense in pvp? Do people attacking or retaliating see the supports I used at the time, or the ones I have now?
Answer: They will see the team and supports that you used at the time. Your defense team will always be the team that you last won a PVP match with; the same is true of characters.

21. Indigo Montana [Discord]
Question: I love the seasonal vaults and associated daily/weekly/monthly quests, but can we please, please, PLEASE have the quests reset at the same time as Deadpool’s daily quests, instead of hours and hours later?
Answer: We've forwarded the request to our all powerful overseer of events and vault time keeping.

22. @leviticuschom [Official Forums]
Question: What does the rest of 2024 look like? Will the bigger ticket QoL improvements debut before year end?
Answer: Things are still looking pretty solid for 2024 as we transition into Anniversary and Holiday season planning, but our big QoL features aren't going to be in this calendar year since they are reliant on our engine overhaul that's in full swing.

23. @CASSIDYFROST [Official Forums]
Question: Since the "Not so Stealthy..." tip wasn't for Banshee (even though a lot of people thought it was), is their planning already ready? Could it be a 3* and a 5* Horseman of Death / Vox Ignis variant? 
Answer: Sorry to say but at this time a design for 3/5 Banshee does not exist.

24. @phillsam [Official Forums]
Question: What's going on with the artwork for the latest new characters? Literally just two arts, and just having slightly different "animations" for their abilities? Examples: Spider-Girl 5* , April 3* , Electro 2* , Jubilee 3&5* , Doom 4* , Sebastian 4* .
Answer: While some of the recent characters have had fewer poses, it's not something that's necessarily a new paradigm, or the way things always will be going forward. What * has * been happening is that we've been cutting down on character poses for some abilities where we think it makes sense and pushing that same effort immediately into other art areas like costume creation. The four chromas for Golden Week are the most obvious a direct result of this and simply would not have existed if we hadn't cut a couple character poses. As well, this "extra time" is being used to do costumes for characters that would otherwise have "too many poses" like Puck. So it's a definite tradeoff.

As stated though, not all characters will have fewer poses. Darkveil had a full set, and we have a 3/5 that has one too, in the near term. So really, it just depends on the character and what we've got going on around them.

25. @StrangeWitch [Official Forums]
Question: What is the game's character addition plan currently? Why does it seem like they're just throwing in random characters for no reason and sometimes some are even "poorly made"?
Answer: At any given time, we always have a roster of characters mapped out for a full year. Their inclusion defintely isn't random and is influenced by a number of variables such as relations to Marvel promotional events, how their abilities synergize with our current characters, and a variety of other important factors.

We're always keeping an eye out on feedback from our character releases so definitely don't be shy on letting us know if certain characters aren't meeting your expectations so we can further evaluate them and determine how future characters are designed.

26. Hyphenmoore [Discord]
Question: Are you planning on re-running some old events such as Webbed Wonder or any new PVE events? Recently it has been the same events repeated ad naseum.
Answer: The team has taken a break from resurrecting old events, and I think it's time we drop a few into the rotation. Thanks for this reminder! I'll get the ball rolling again!

27. @MirrorKnight [Official Forums]
Question: There's a lot of QoL features the community has asked for, turning off the ad pop-ups, more alliance tools, support filtering, etc. What are the the top 5 QoL updates in the dev to-do list and your hopeful time frame for implementation?
Answer: These are all on our radar along with a bunch of other QoL features and while we'd love to say "Very soon!" to all of them, we'd like to wait until we get a clearer timeline on our engine overhaul to speak more about what the top features to roll out will be.

28. @Hammer 3001 [Official Forums]
Question: Any chance of changing the PVP progression rewards to match Shield Training? The gap between 25 & 50 is annoying.
Answer: I've heard this before and agree. Making note to account for it as the economy / reward overhaul gets done.

29. @Necroscope6 [Official Forums]
Question: With so many spider characters, are there plans to get more underused characters, such as wrecking crew, absorbing man, grey gargoyle?
Answer: As you might've seen from this year's New Character Poll, we scour all corners of the Marvel universe to introduce a diverse mix of characters both popular and lesser known into MPQ so don't be surprise if you see some "underused" characters show up!

30. @Godzillafan67 [Official Forums]
Question: At each tier level, which active superpower has been fired the most often?
Answer: You probably already know the answer to this one since they're the usual suspects and their most popular abilities.

31. @MirrorKnight [Official Forums]
Question: How are we as the player community currently expected to be able to know what stats and abilities of an ascended character will be prior to actually ascending?
Answer: This is a major gap in our UI implementation that we absolutely need to fill. It's a big undertaking and we didn't want to hold back the feature for this alone, but clearly we still have work to do!