MPQ 2025 Dev Update #1

S0kun

We wrapped up last year with a few updates regarding our current roadmap and some immediate changes that we were planning to implement going into 2025. Now that things have settled in for a bit after a crazy start of the year, we wanted to share news regarding some imminent changes and what you can expect from a revised character release rotation.

SEASON VAULT
We had stated previously that Season Vaults were making a return with more items to collect, but unfortunately the reintroduction of our Season Pass that yielded Season Vault tokens missed the mark when it came to how much of the Vault was unlockable. There were far too few opportunities to acquire tokens and players weren’t able to obtain all the items in a Vault. This is going to be addressed in upcoming seasons with a smaller 60 item Vault and more ways to obtain Vault tokens.

A bit of context as to why the Vault was 120 items, and why it was difficult to gain enough tokens. Originally, we were running the old 80 item Vaults with those Vaults taking up pretty much all the slack in the economy that would be used by other features. Meaning that introducing anything else would almost certainly unbalance the economy; be it HP, Iso, CP, etc. So when we looked at reintroducing them with the Season Pass, we knew we had to lighten this load a bit. Hence, the 120 item Vault which retained all the big ticket items players were chasing after, but also added other items to balance out its overall offerings for the aforementioned reasons. Obviously in hindsight, while it works for economic balance, it doesn’t work for excitement on Vault pulls.

So, we decided to go back to the drawing board and see what we could do. The 80 item Vault was right out. We just detailed why. And a bigger Vault wasn’t doable. But why then, a smaller one? Well, it’s because we reduced the value of the Vault to do it which might sound bad, but it’s actually a positive adjustment and here’s why. The 80 item Vault had 2 Ascended characters, which statistically was the biggest value proposition. That wouldn’t work for a smaller Vault. So just by cutting that to ONE Ascended character, that opened up a TON of value to mess with. We then looked at just halving it overall (which would largely keep the same budget), but came up with issues where a 4-Star led Season Pass Vault would be super “chunky” with almost all the value in a couple covers and the majority of the Vault being relatively cheap Iso and Red-Iso. Meanwhile, a 2-Star led Season Vault would have a decent amount of Season Character covers. It’d be a very weird experience across seasons. A 60 item Vault balances this out across pass types while still having the number of items low enough that we can provide them through various reward and bundle types to clear.

In the upcoming season starting on February 6th, this new smaller Vault will also have more opportunities to acquire Vault tokens. About a third of those tokens can be obtained from activities such as Season Pass tier unlocks and quests rewards. More are available through overleveling the pass by completing more Quests after you’ve reached max rank. The remainder will be found in bundles which will allow players to completely unlock an entire Vault. The plan right now is that if you were to do absolutely everything and purchase everything, you’d actually end up with OVER 60 tokens to the Vault. Which means you’d clear the Vault and have leftovers which you could then spend once the Vault enters expired status, as with other limited Vaults.

The current general composition for these Vaults will be as follows:

• 1 x 3Star4 Ascended character related to the character(s) leading the Season Pass
• 2 x 5-Star Season Pass related covers
• ~8 x 4-Star covers. Depending on which rarity is leading the pass, some of these will be more focused or random.
• ~14 x 3-Star covers. Ditto with the above
• ~10 x 2-Star covers. If the Season Pass is led by a 2-Star (for example, if the Headpool focused pass had a Vault), it would have more 2-Stars here, eating into a couple of the 3-Stars instead.
• ~15 x Various Iso/Red Iso
• The remaining balance is made up of various higher level tokens and premium currency (Classic/Latest Legends, HP, CP, etc)

CHARACTER RELEASE CADENCE
December brought a bit of a different release strategy for a month with a 2-Star release in place of a 5-Star. While this did have some positive feedback, many of our veteran players didn’t enjoy the knock on effects when characters would normally cycle in and out of packs. We’re still in the mind that we want to experiment with character release cadence, but probably won’t be doing that again. So breathe a bit easier. If it does happen, you’ll be sure to know about it though.

Towards that experimentation, we’re going to try this next month going back to a “classic” 5 Star then 4 Star release month instead of the 3/5 Star then 4 Star release that we normally do. We’re going to look at how the player base reacts gameplay-wise to the 5 & 4 Star release rotation, since the 3 Star has a lot of downstream effects that aren’t immediately visible (especially a month later when the 3 Star is Ascendable). And the only way to see that effect is to try it! This doesn’t mean we may not go back to 3/5s, or even that the 3s that are “missing” now won’t get released later. Just that we want to try things and see what sticks.

Something that not all players will notice is that we’re not planning on changing the rewards in Deadpool Daily with this new character release rotation. Some may not remember, but when we last made adjustments to DDQ, we added in extra Hero Points to specifically defray the cost of the additional 3-Star releases. This should theoretically be pulled back since we’re not releasing that extra character for the moment, but we decided to keep the rewards as-is since it’s better for everyone.

One other bit of spoiler: Part of this experiment also affects our New Character Poll winner’s release schedule. Congrats to Hobgoblin for winning! Current plan with this changeup is to actually release Hobgoblin as a 5-Star instead of a 4 Star as per previous New Character Poll winners. Given the amount of time between the end of the survey and calculating results and planned release of the character, a 3/5 wouldn’t have been in the cards. But as just a 5? Crazy 5-Star Hobgoblin bombs for everyone!

That’s it for our first update of 2025! We’ve still got a lot to reveal this year and look to do more of these updates to make sure you’re well aware of upcoming changes and exciting new features that we’ll be tinkering with!