State of Unity AMA with MPQ Game Producer, IceIX - Questions & Answers (July 16)

S0kun

Thank you everyone for joining our first post Unity AMA and submitting your questions. It was great to speak directly to our players in such a format and we'll likely do another AMA in the future during another big update.

Until then, here's the mostly raw Q&A from the doc we were using to track everything that's organized by category. The timestamps represent the time the questions were asked in our Discord server so there's a little bit of jumping around. Please excuse any typos!

Neil - Discord - Bug
Q: Any news on when Captain Avalon will work as intended? He's my fave

A: On the short list, along with SpaceElsa.

Chipster22 — 10:12 - Discord - Bug
Q: Has matchmaking for PvP changed or is it broken? If it is broken do you have and idea what happened? People are reporting that reaching 1200 is much harder now.

A: It half-broke at the same time Captain Avalon released (he didn't cause it, just giving an idea of timing). It's working for a set of players (largely those sitting in 3/early 4-star land) but not so much for people at the further ends of the bell curve. In our morning meeting this morning we were just talking about this in particular. It's directly being worked on.

Andy — 10:14 - Discord - Bug
Q: Any regrets for yelling at the user base for farming daily tokens, rather than any other strategy of ""mea culpa"" and turning the bug off (which happened like, what, the next day?)? Would you do it differently in the future?

A: Mostly in terms of phrasing than anything else. Someone whose game crashed and they got tokens? Fine. No problem. Should have pointed that out. Someone that quite literally spent 12 hours doing NOTHING but exploiting the bug over 1000 times? There's ""taking advantage"" and then there's ""Taking Advantage"".

gameaddict — 10:23 - Discord - Bug
Q: There was the whole token exploit thing and players were not told to not abuse this, which i can see from a devs pov, but on the other end of the scale will players see any sort of compensation for missed rewards. I myself outright can barely play anymore, after every match i have to restart, which means i had to skip every PvE since the Unity update and PvP in regards to placement rewards isn't much better.

A: We gave out some compensation today that was out of proportion with the actual issue in that we all lost 3 days worth of token gains but handed out 5 days worth of each token. Our current line of thought runs that way for a lot of other issues. Anything concrete that comes up where you're missing out on actual game items/rewards you can likely expect recompense that is at least that of what you lost.

DMZ — 10:24 - Discord - Bug
Q: Has the dev team explored the possibility that the current lag could be because the game isn't pulling from the device cache? Or....
Did it dump the device cache during the update, & now we just need to play with all our characters to refill it.

A: That's 100% part of it in that the old cache was flushed and you're getting/streaming all new assets. Due to the differences in the way the Seoul Engine and Unity handle assets, there was no reasonable way to make the caches interoperable. One of the things in the shorter term that we're working on is something you see in other games in an ability to just ""Download All The Things"". We've found that when you're not streaming anything anymore, the game already gets MUCH more responsive. It's not a perfect fix for all time, but it certainly helps.

DeadpoolVII - Reddit - Bug
Q: Why were waves changed to where new enemies won't populate until all are downed? This greatly slows down these missions.

A: Bug. Will be fixed when we get to it.

SubliminalTea — 11:28 - Discord - Bug
Q: When will the endless loading/corrupted save bug be fixed for those of us who can't play the game at all?

A: Depends on the issue. We fixed a couple edge cases already through data patches that were stopping players at 42/52%. We've got another fix to a bunch of ""I load into a black screen"" issues that are all interconnected but related to the same base issue in this upcoming binary that's at first parties. Anything else? I can't say for sure that it's fixed. But I can say that anything that's actively causing people to not be able to play is higher priority than an annoyance to people that can and will be prioritized accordingly.

Godfather Sabbath — 11:32 - Discord - Bug
Q: Less a bug, more a general query - but from when the token thing was happening, I have a small pile of nine Fan Favourites tokens and six Winter in July tokens that I've dared not touch, picked up post crashes and through the normal course of play. Should I keep sitting on them, since there's no option to discard, or is it safe to open them, for myself and others with small amounts like this, or will this get my account rolled back? I don't really want to be using tokens on a post event vault. Or one that doesn't already have a few chunks taken out of it.

A: Nope. If you weren't one of the ones that were literally spending hours doing nothing but exploiting, you've got absolutely nothing to worry about.

thekzl — 11:38 - Discord - Bug
Q: will the next patch bring back the ability to see the scores of an event after it closes? we like to track those (we're not the only ones), but it's definitely been tough to keep up with our alliances when the alliance placement/scores disappear right away.

A: It's not in the binary we've got in, but it's on the short list, and we're seeing if there's a way we can reenable that via data patch instead. Stay tuned!

Darth Pastor — 13:50 - Discord - Bug
Q: Is a known bug where the Season Score is written over the Overall Score?

A: Yeah, there's a few places like that throughout the game. Especially on Steam. Unfortunately it's not a blanket bug we can fix across the board, so squashing them as we see them.

Zarqa - Forums - Comms
Q: What’s your communication plan going forward? How often can we expect update posts about the game/engine, and do you plan to provide us with a priority task list?

A: Similar to the Dev Updates that we've been posting roughly every month, we plan to continue a regular cadence of blog updates as development moves forward. Once we have a bigger update or new feature to discuss, we'll do a similar AMA session.

Spidey300 — 11:18 - Discord - Comms
Q: I, for one, am looking forward to all the new content and QoL changes the new engine will make possible. Has someone on the team kept track of all the things from previous Q&As that were answered with ""this is something we really want to do, but will have to wait until we're on the new engine""?

A: Yep! Literally every Dev Q&A request/bug/etc has been logged. Along with random forum threads and the like as well. Doesn't mean all that stuff will come to the game, or be timely (A procedurally generated roguelike dungeon sounds cool, probably not coming in 2025) but it's all written down and at least somewhat triage/backlogged.

djarcanus — 11:36 - Discord - Comms
Q: When you make a release, can you include more extensive changelog notes? Having a full list of all the improvements and bug fixes (even if they are tiny) would be very helpful to the community.

A: Noted. We've gone on and off of having more robust build notes over times, and I'd like to get back into the habit of surfacing pretty much everything that isn't purely engine based that you're not going to see.

hferg81 — 10:11 - Discord - Content
Q: Will some of the other story missions return at some point (the Sentry one, for example, among many others) or will there be new ones sometime? I'm kinda getting sick and tired of the same five or six every month.

A: Yes. That's part of the event tools that we're directly working on. The problem is with some of those older events is that they're ""cursed"". Due to piecemeal updates of the old event tools, there were compatibility issues that made the events just flat out broken. They wouldn't import, would throw out weird errors, etc etc. The new tools fix a lot of that from the ground up. So while I won't say that you'll be seeing all those old events IMMEDIATELY, getting that old content resurfaced (and we may as well update some nodes while we're at it) is on the books. It's good practice for getting our feet under us with the event tools anyway

Waywreth — 10:21 - Discord - Content
Q: - given alot of requests were answered with ""when the new engine comes out"" can you give us a concrete ETA on when new non-character content will be added? This game really needs some new events, and now with the new engine in place I'd like to see that timeline.

A: I don't have an exact timeline. Just to be 100% honest, and to set an idea of timeline, we were aiming to have something pretty much ""all new"" for Fantastic Four. With the launch of Unity turning out as it has, our priorities are obviously elsewhere. So while I can't say ""immediately"", we're talking a shorter term than a longer one.

theghouse - Discord - Development
Q: If ""rebuilding the game"" in Unity was the only way to support future development, why did you rebuild all the negative or already broken features? Facebook reward sharing, nodes too close together, etc.

A: Because of versioning and branching. Also unintended consquences. For example, it seems to make sense to just completely ditch Facebook friend gifting at the outset. It doesn't work, so why build that in? Except that the parts of the gifting API also handle some of the save data backup/tracking, so we'd have to go down rabbit holes to figure out exactly what to cut and what not to. Which we can and should do! But it's much faster to simply replicate functionality then refactor than to essentially rebuild from the ground up.

JeffDougan - Discord - Development
Q: If you had to give the team a grade on the rollout (standard US grading scale), what's your self-assessment?

A: C? C-? It's definitely not a failure. I'd class that as ""broken game"". And while there are problems, that's not it. And on higher end (not saying brand new, but like, 4gb RAM devices and such) the game generally runs ok. Not saying perfect. Not saying good enough. I personally won't be at all happy till we're at at least a B+ in terms of ""ok, now we can let our foot off the fixing bugs gas""

Cabral - Discord - Development
Q: MPQ has been plagued with issues since broken circle took over culminating in a disastrous release of the Unity engine despite the the long list of bugs reported by Steam users. Instead of threatening players, how are the Devs, QA, and product team holding themselves accountable to prevent this from happening again?

A: Bit of a loaded question with that front half, but basically, we're focused on getting everything working ASAP. BCS (and those of us at 505) have been and will be working constantly to get things in order. How will we be held accountable? Frankly, by the player base, as it stands now. There's no game without the players, and the players definitely have things that they'd like to see fixed and improved. So we need to be guided by that. Which at current, means making the game smooth, stable, and functional on as many devices as humanly possible.

hferg81 — 10:07 - Discord - Development
Q: The stuff at the bottom of the screen (starts with ""Prod:"")... what is that? Are we supposed to be seeing that?

A: For now, yeah. That's literally just the current build, the data patch it's running on, and the server it's pointed at. That way when we get screenshots for any bugs, we can know exactly where we should be looking at in terms of code versions for an issue. That'll be going away in a couple builds at most.

Skar — 10:08 - Discord - Development
Q: does unity not require data pushes anymore? how do you ensure everyone gets the token changeover etc at the same time?

A: At this very current moment, Unity still gets data pushes the same as non-Unity did. But it also allows for inline pushes that don't do the whole ""upend your experience"" that happened with the old engine. So just a more streamlined experience in that regard. It's a definite advantage to how Unity handles server based data packages. Built-in win.

Blitz — 10:11 - Discord - Development
Q: On behalf of my alliance most are in agreeance the new update is lagging, its not formatted correctly to certain mobile OS and the game takes a while to load. The Question is do we have an idea of when the Unity Update will be more stable and user friendly across all devices (I currently have it on a Samsung 23, and the screen is shrunk and the top and bottom are cut off)

A: Bit of a bigger question than I think you're asking. The simple answer is ""We're not perfectly happy with it right now, and won't be stopping on fixing that up until we're sitting in a better position than pre-Unity was"". Some QoL updates will come in while we're doing that too, so it's not a case of ""we'll get parity and move forward"", but it's going to be a process of catchup AND new stuff at the same time. Timeline on all that? As quick as we reasonably can.

thekzl — 10:12 - Discord - Development
Q: - from a functionality perspective, lots of your focus is clearly going to be on improving the engine, and then making some quick wins in terms of adding new content (e.g. characters, events, even other fun stuff) -- but it seems like some of the ""wants"" that are voiced aren't necessarily impacting everyone equally. do you have a prioritization designator in your funnel of bugs that speaks to ""impacts everyone"" vs ""impacts just a few""?

A: Yep, we do. And just because it only impacts a few people doesn't mean it may not be more important than something that impacts everyone. For example, the question earlier about having Saved Teams able to save 1/2 person teams. Not a lot of people actually USE saved teams, or use the workarounds to sneak in 2 person teams as-is. But it's a great QoL/feature that is a great win for those that engage with it.

Daiches — 10:08 - Discord - Development
Q: My main question is this:
Why was the old engine ported wholesale into Unity instead of creating a new engine from the ground up? The pint of Unity was getting rid of the spaghetti code, was it not?

Then why do we see clear examples that this was not what happened. We have the non-functional-for-years FB friend sharing. We have TU sending from 3 UIX ago that requires 7 minutes to scroll just to send an MBW TU. We have the Vine leveling with duplicates screen on that same UIX.

And we also see any indication that zero quick wins were even added in a first phase, such as number of boosts to buy or again - the TU sending interface.

So can you tell us why you went for just a copy/paste after well over a year of development?

Thank you in advance (I know State of the Union addresses this, but the way it is explained is as if the live Beta staggered roll out and all the issues was always going to be part of the plan. If you did Beta AFTER testing all systems in one go, there would have been no need to code in dead features like FB sharing)

A: Spaghetti code: Yes and no. Yes, definitely doing refactoring and removing a lot of that. It's currently happening. Somewhat happened with the initial port as well. But as I said with Facebook as an example, some of the spaghetti code is actually a result of interconnected pieces that have to be unspaghettified. Which, with the old code base was MUCH more difficult. One of the things that we did with Unity was to make things much more modular. So while the functionality is all ""the same"", it's much easier to start and continue to change things because those links are more bisible.
UI wins: Was never the intent for initial release. We definitely want to do UI updates (the Team Up UI is straight out of 2016, the Alliance chat is still old) and that's coming. But was never the goal of initial release.
Why a copy paste: MPQ seems easy. It's just a match 3 board with some characters that influence the board. But when you get into it, there are a LOT of complexities with how characters, events, alliances, etc are parsed. Rebuilding all that from the ground up in a way that would have provided exact and expandable functionality would have taken even longer.

Frikisada — 10:04 - Discord - Development
Q: Has there been any ""vibe coding"" (use of LLM/AI tools) involved on the migration to Unity?

A: Nope. Not really a fan in anything that even TOUCHES on something production facing. FAR too much opportunity for 'oopsie' security issues.

Areebob — 10:29 - Discord - Development
Q: is the current “feel” going to be permanent? The whole game feels like it’s running on fast forward, but then freezes to parse each gem match. Makes for a lurching feeling. Also post-match xp bars move wildly, sometimes sliding in reverse. I assume that’s not intentional.

A: Absolutely not.

ThisisClemFandango — 10:40 - Discord - Development
Q: @IceIX are bcs aware of the reaction to the daily play tokens on the forum? Are you concerned it could of alienated users who were already struggling with crashes and things not working properly

A: We're aware, yeah. Sokun and I keep up on the forums as well as here, even if I haven't had time to actually take part.

Seph1roth5(not unity'd)
[DDO]
— 10:44 - Discord - Development
Q: is there a reason why new supports have been missing for over a year? Are they harder to create than characters? We used to get a new one every month so it's very weird to have such a long dry spell.

[Followup Question] If it's lack of time/manpower, have you thought about having another/more contests like the reddit one where players could make up characters? That's always fun

A: Supports: Easier to create than characters, but monetarily did MUCH more poorly in comparison to the work for a character. So when you compare the work and the result, it turns into a bean counting exercise. And given that a lot of the beans were going towards getting Unity done, it made for a shift in priority. Doesn't mean no more Supports ever, or that we're going to ... stop supporting Supports. Just something we had to make a call on for a while.
Contests: I don't know about a ""Make a character"" contest in particular, but more community contests are something we'd definitely like to do. It's work that mostly fall on Sokun and my shoulders, but it's FUN work.

Eyenerd — 10:56 - Discord - Development
Q: Do you have to get license or permission from Marvel to create characters? We have too many Iron man/ Spiderman variants when there are other great characters like Man-Thing, Alpha Flight, X-Force, etc

A: Without getting too deep into the contractual stuff and inviting the wrath of the Marvel Ninja Lawyers, we theoretically can put anything mainline Marvel has worked on that isn't an obvious sublicense. So yeah, we know that Marvel did some Transformers comics. But you're not likely to see Optimus Prime any time soon. And some characters in particular can be fraught with licensing issues that create blockers. Again, without getting into it, there's a reason Namor wasn't in any games or media anywhere then suddenly he was. One of the other parts of it is that we have to keep an eye on ""character families"" and make sure they're somewhat balanced. We're making a Marvel game, not a Spider-Man game or an Avengers game, etc. So that means balancing out all the various characters we put in. And sometimes, those characters can be sorted into some weird families. So when you see a couple Spider-Man related characters, it's probably as much because we need to balance out family counts as much as ""we want more Spiders!""

I'll also point out that every time we do a poll, even with ""joke"" characters like Stilt-Man or Supaidaman, you all keep voting for them.

djarcanus — 10:57 - Discord - Development
Q: There are some players who still haven't updated to Unity. are they getting any code changes during data pushes?

A: Yep. Which has been part of our major issues lately that we're putting to bed. ALL builds, AND subversions need their own individual patch lines. So instead of running 4 SKUs (one for each platform), we're running 8+ to keep everyone up to date across versioning.

IHaveThatPower — 11:17 - Discord - Development
Q: What do you make of the general accusations that ""devs don't play/understand their own game"", both as pertains to the state of the Unity release as well as the game's ecosystems (PvE, PvP, reward structures, etc.) generally?

(Disclaimer: I do not hold this view, but it exhausts me to see it all the freakin' time, and am curious how it hits on your side of the screen.)

A: I mean, I've been dealing with that accusation since the day the game came out. There's two sides to the coin. Nearly everyone on the team from Marketing to Engineering to Production plays the game. On Live. So yes, we know how the game is playing. But on the other side of that coin, the entire dev/support team's hours in the game is dwarfed by even a portion of the player base every single day. QA can test a feature for 200 hours, and the day it goes out, players will have put in orders of magnitude more time on that feature. So yeah, no. We get the game. But at the same time, no. We obviously don't get the game, because we're only human. And You Are Legion. So we're always open to learning from player positions.

RoshiP — 11:32 - Discord - Development
Q: any thoughts on making dual characters like Cap or Ironman as one character and the powers can flip similar to Legion?

A: ::Absolutely not an announcement, really, just an anecdote:: At one point around the time of Champions 2.0/Ascension, we were looking at the possibility of combining characters into ""Archetypes"". So instead of 4 Black Widows, you had one, but you could unlock the different variants and their abilities into one Black Widow archetype. So Black Widow with Sniper Rifle, Enfilade, and Anti-Gravity Device if you wanted. And select the costume you wanted for the ones available. For a multitude of reasons, that wasn't the way we went. But man, that'd be cool.

IHaveThatPower — 11:52 - Discord - Economy
Q: How likely are we to see a reduction in the HP costs for cover exchanges? When they were introduced, they were pretty roundly called out as being too expensive. At the time, some number crunching by community members here was received rather positively by you. Has anything come of that?

A: 1-3-Star costs are about where we want them given the rewards and power boosts that each cover gives at that level and the costs. 4/5? You'll see so..... :::mMMPPH:: Fine. I'm being told to not say anything right now.

Spoit — 11:55 - Discord - Events
Q: Talking about puzzles, obviously it's low priority and should wait until things aren't on fire, but is there any chance of another look at how level scaling works in the puzzle gauntlet? It's mostly a problem with the terminal nodes where you're bringing in a 3 or 4 star, but some of them anhilate you with match damage within like half a dozen turns, which isn't a problem for actual 3-4* rosters. IIRC the legion-match-special-tiles one is particularly bad

A: We want to do a relook at Puzzle Gauntlet in general. It's old, it's stale, and there are so many neat ideas and things within that toolset that we're just not using, and some tools that are being used that just create an annoying puzzle. So no, but also yes.

Tony Foot - Discord - Events
Q: For me one of the best periods of time in this game was when boss events took community work to figure out teams. Now for everyone they seem to be expected as match one and win. Could these be made harder by CL or any other method?

A: Yep, that's one of the things we'd like to do with Boss Events in particular. Not necessarily Quandary level ""Go get yourself a guide"", but things more like Apocalypse before oneshotting where you need to figure out the best ways to fight them and not just totally power through.

Darth Pastor - Discord - Events
Q: Will there be other themed characters used in the lightning matches? That feels stale.

A: Once we get the event tools worked out, Lightning Rounds are something we'd like to refresh, yes. It's gotten a bit old fighting Ragnarok and Doom, EVERY. TIME.

EmmetJupiter — 10:07 - Discord - Features
Q: are there any plans to expand or add to the single player campaign experience? As of now we have the base campaign and that's it, leaving the majority of the game to be cycled events that everyone has already seen. Is there any inkling of a plan to improve the TRUE singleplayer experience?

A: Yup, both in terms of solo play and in terms of storyline itself. Building out event/mission tools is one of the big strengths of the new engine. To say that making any event that wasn't a copy paste of the previous like a PVP event was difficult is a vast understatement with the old engine. We're eagerly building stuff that enables us to do new and interesting things with events, both competitive and solo.

Daiches — 10:08 - Discord - Features
Q: Will we ever see new supports again? Having seen every support shard I gained in the last year vanish into thin air was a super great experience.

Especially since we need supports to block cheese teams like Kangveil that have no counter (an Anti-Away team)

Related: can we put the puzzle gauntlet tokens at the bottom. I’m scrolling through a dozen of these before getting to tokens I can open.

A: New Supports: Not at this very moment, nothing planned for the remainder of 2025's schedule in any case. But they're not gone and forgotten, I'll say that.
Puzzle Gauntlet Tokens: I'll make a note. One of the things that Unity enabled is better manual (on our end) sorting of Vault/Shop placement. Probably a relatively easy (and welcome) change.

eXeXSchatten — 10:11 - Discord - Features
Q: Will we ever get a Dummy fight or a fight we can modify the enemy team in? To test strategies without gaining or loosing (HP/Iso/Points) anything?

A: It's not on the current list, really in that creating a node that you can fight in is actually a more complex thing than you'd expect. Even using debugs it's not straightforward. But it's also one of those things that pays dividends for development (easier node creation = easier event creation) and it makes sense to allow players in on some of that. So while I'll state that you won't be seeing something like that soon, I absolutely wouldn't count a practice/training/etc node or static event or something out.

jonny — 10:15 - Discord - Features
Q: What about the future? There’s been nowhere to go for larger rosters in the game for quite a bit of time now. More supports? Five ascension? A new level of character / dare I say 6? Any possible thoughts?

Daiches — 10:18
To build on Jonny’s Q:

will you ever try to restore the competitive community by providing chase items? Giving away the stones plus the bad meta effectively killed it. And that’s a large reason the community exists as it does.

A: No new Supports for 2025 planned, but we've got some ideas there. New level of character/6-Stars? I, PERSONALLY, still dislike the idea of 6-Stars, but I'm cool with a Limit Break for 5s that would basically mean the same thing. But some extension of end game gameplay is most definitely in the works. That's one of the reasons we're doing some design work on SCLs as mentioned before. If we squish the useless SCL 1-3, what does that mean for SCL 9 and 10?

Chase items are something we're looking at, yeah. Could be competitive items like the Stones, could be cosmetics, could be some kind of user flair (I mean, we don't even have in-game avatars or anything right now). Multiple ideas, multiple base designs. Simply a matter of executing on one/all of them. Planned though.

hferg81 — 10:29 - Discord - Features
Q: There was a mention of some new achievements/milestones that were going to be added to the game with the new system. Are those still coming? Any idea when?

A: Yep, extending and expanding milestones is on the 'shorter rather than longer but no direct timeline' list.

Skar — 10:52 - Discord - Features
Q: will we see heroic boss events again?

A: Maybe. It's pretty much the same as the answer to ""Why no Supports?"" Heroic Boss Events were just seen as something we could make (hopefully) temporary cuts to while we do other stuff. But Heroics in general are something that a portion of the player base loves, whether because of rewards or because of the puzzle solving. Watching the community come together on the Gorr Boss Event with ONLY Dark Avengers available was awesome. Not saying ""The game will be going that path"" but we're well aware that people like them for multiple reasons.

CerebralJam — 11:28 - Discord - Features
Q: have you considered a Level 11 PvE? 🤣 it has been years since Level 10 was added. I’d love to see some of these maxed out long term players move up and out of 8/9 allowing higher placement, lol. I’m cool with 6s even though I’ll probably be 100 before I get anywhere near!

A: No, in that Shield Clearance Levels are a Marvel Canon thing, and SCL 11 doesn't exist. That doesn't mean there aren't other methods we're looking at to do similar though.

S0kun

RoshiP — 11:34 - Discord - Features
Q: any future plans for affiliation buffs? Like a whole team of X-Men gets damage reduction or something along those lines?

A: That's kind of what we were trying to do with more recent Supports, but it didn't work out as well as we wanted. Also tried doing that with some characters a couple years ago (See: Deathlok, the Phoenix 5, etc). It's still something we'd like to do, because Affiliations are cool and make sense thematically and mechanically, just need to come up with good extensible ways to use them.

Threads - Discord - Features
Q: Any update on exchanging shards and breaking down dupes for covers?

A: It's still on the upper end of the ""not really related to Unity"" backlog. No direct timeline, but has not been backburnered.

Krazy — 10:19 - Discord - General
Q: How do you prefer to get bugs or feature requests?
Conversely, What is your preferred way to indicate a particular item's state to the public?
TLDR; How can we help you out? What can we do to simplify your life, making you be more efficient?

A: Purpose made forum posts whether here or on the MPQ forums. Having a ""hard copy"" of the feature request/bug makes things SO much easier to reference or check in on than random chatter in Disc or a random post within some random thread on the forums. We're going to try getting back to more regular Dev Q&As now that the immediate launch of Unity is slightly calmer, and those kinds of posts/threads are a great repository for that kinda thing.

Neil - Discord - Meta
Q: Are you looking at SHIELD SIM and PVP generally and how to improve the player experience? Coming up against the same OP meta teams is not fun especially when there's no other PvP areas to try newer characters without getting trounced

A: Yup. It also CERTAINLY doesn't help that MMR is a bit broken at the moment. Directly working on THAT and doing some stuff that could be touching on meta Soon(tm). That's not a threat, just that we're well aware that meta is a bit stagnant and we want to address that.

rastered — 10:26 - Discord - Meta
Q: Thank you for doing this. Been playing off an on for almost 10 years, on day 2440. Are you looking at any ways to better stratify top-end PVP? Being at the bottom of the power level for the top PVP bracket is generally pretty punishing.

A: We're working on direct MMR fixes at the moment and we have some possible efficiencies we can make at the same time. Not saying ""We'll fix it forever"", but 100% agreed that some areas of PVP just kinda bite. High end 4-Star/low end 5-Star in particular.

Skar — 10:30 - Discord - Meta
Q: shield rank over 300 when? 😁

A: Quite possible when there's an endgame reason to chase the higher number. Not sure what we'll do about people that have been at 300 forever (if you'd pop to 400 or whatever immediately or have to work your way), but an extension is just logical.

levitux - Forums - Meta
Q: rebalancing characters seems like such an easy win, will this come back?

A: Yup. I know this sounds kind of dumb, but it was actually a bit more difficult than you'd expect to make and balance a character with the old engine. So many interconnected literal Excel spreadsheets that had to be parsed and crunched to make a character or a change to said character. So it wasn't even close to ""Just change a single number, duh"" like you'd think. We're still doing some work on character tools, but getting characters made/balanced/rebalanced is already so much easier and opens up options there.

SaïntP — 11:29 - Discord - Meta
Q: {Question} Is there any chance that we would be looking at PvE any differently on the way is it played for competition? Current we have a lot of sheet users and it is a huge disadvantage for “straight” players. I was wondering if there was a possibility of simply taking the seconds off of the timers?

A: Yes, but I don't have any direct near term news on that. As I said to another answer, while Speedrun Mode PVE is fine for some players, that shouldn't be the only single way to play. And even then, there are likely optimizations that we can and should do to make it more streamlined than trying to time points refreshes.

Neil — 11:39 - Discord - Meta
Q: Q: Can you give us any hints of indication of plans to fix the stranglehold that meta-teams have on PVP? My biggest gripe is, and to use Avalon as an example here, I love the character, built him up quickly but I literally can't use him anywhere because especially when he's not ascended. What's the point of having a featured PVP event when you inevitably come up again 4Juggs/Sam or Jane/Polaris or similar every single match?

A: Nothing I can announce today, and I'm not saying that we're suddenly just gonna upend meta or something next week/month, because we're not. But we're really also not happy that meta is so stagnant and that new characters don't feel cool because unless they're better than MThor, Shang Chi, Grocket, and Polaris, they're just kinda not useful. Something we've got designers looking at ways to help/fix.

VC — 12:41 - Discord - Meta
Q: Are there plans to remove the locking of some characters? Like being able to play Cho-Hulk with the other hulks or modern black widow with the other widows

A: Yeah, alternate versions (like Cho compared to Banner) or alt-universe (616 Wolverine vs Old Man Logan) are definitely something on the list to lighten up, and we just haven't hit all of them yet. But the same character at different portions of their lives like WidowGrey vs Fishnets aren't planned to unlock. Now, if Fishnets got time shifted or something like TeenJean, then we'll talk.

froggerjohn — 12:47 - Discord - Meta
Q: I think most people dislike slow power resolutions (Mindless, AIM, etc), but even brand new characters continue to have really slow effects. ""One tile at a time"" for Avalon, very long delay after Toni Ho powers, etc.

Over and above wishing that existing delays could be reduced, it's disappointing to see new slow characters still being added. Avalon should create all of the tiles at once, and that shouldn't be confusing, even for new players.

Is there a conscious design goal to keeping things snappy?

A: Oh dear lord yes. On the list.

Darth Pastor — 13:26 - Discord - Meta
Q: are there different polls on the works, that aren't limited to just improved odds of characters, or new characters. Maybe outfit polls, or support polls.

A: Nothing immediately planned at current, but zero reason we can't do those. A costume poll was how you all got the Necro-ko costume for Venom.

Darth Pastor — 13:38 - Discord - Meta
Q: And is there always an option to buy the new character in the store, fully loaded, before the character comes as a reward?

A: Not always (but usually), and not fully loaded, but there's generally an opportunity to earn and use characters within their quest timelines, along with being able to use a more powerful version of 4/5-Stars if you spend. We're actually looking at rearranging some of the 5-Star in-app-purchase rewards right now to help with that. It's kinda weird that the 5-Star Step-Up doesn't get you the 5-Star unless you hit the third tier of it, but it's a remnant of pricing strategies from when 5-Star characters were implemented.

bluewolf19 — 13:42 - Discord - Meta
Q: One idea I have had about bad boost lists/MMR issues is to allow the player to pick one extra character per week in each tier to be boosted (maybe not the 1 tier, lol), with the obv metas barred as extras to avoid everyone choosing 4-5 jugg etc. Is this feasible in Unity? sounds like it lines up with your earlier idea a bit with people being away. Would help players with limited rosters compete better, etc.

A: That's a neat idea. I wonder if it'd just turn into ""Always boost X or Y"", but maybe if you couldn't boost again for 21 days or something.

Taiyed311 - Discord - PVP
Q: The class of 2013 event, just to check. There's no prize for placement. So just grab the rewards up to 25 or 50 wins?

A: Yep, it's purely a participation event. Same will be true of most of the other upcoming Class Ofs. If you want to keep fighting past that? Cool. But if you want out after you get your stuff? Cool too.

Frikisada - Discord - QOL
Q: Can we get the enemies to show up in the right way on fights again more than 3 enemies?

A: Part of that is image caching which we're directly working on. So yes.

Serrated — 10:06 - Discord - QOL
Q: There are several long-standing feature requests (buying boosts en masse, accurate timers on pve nodes, etc.) i know bug squashing comes first, do you have/can you share plans for what you intend to do once the engine is stable?

A: Yes and yes to both of those. We've got three lists of backlog items right now: A #1 priority bug fixes/optimizations, QoL updates that we can do as we do some refactoring elsewhere (which these kinds of things fall into), and new/revised features. Obviously, backlog 1 is the prio, but we're directly triaging the rest and fitting them into a roadmap. Until backlog 1 isn't the prio for every one of us, I don't really have a direct answer for which items will be handled, but getting an updated player facing roadmap is on the short list of things to do.

Captain Ribbit — 10:06 - Discord - QOL
Q: Can you please allow us to sort our favorited teams, and also allow us to create a favorite team with only two members (or at least allow us to apply a 3 member teams left and right member to a required node, so it only applies the two)

A: Not quite sure about the first (it's a good idea, I just don't know if that's in our current feature log), but second is definitely on the list. And 1 member for that matter, because why not?

Skar — 10:10 - Discord - QOL
Q: can you PLEASE move sending out rewards like the tokens we just got around s2 pve opening clears? it's a small thing, but 30 minutes later would be much better for the poor souls who compete with the s2 robots

A: I'll talk to the team, but the problem is that there's really no good time. If it's not hitting S2, it's hitting S3. Or it's hitting the end of a clear. Or the start of a clear. Or someone's PVP shield push. That being said, one of the higher items on the roadmap is moving those gifts to more of an Inbox situation where it's not something you NEED TO ENGAGE WITH NAO. Just get the gifts or whatever when you can. So no, sorry, but also, yes, on it.

BX — 10:12 - Discord - QOL
Q: Question at the top CL could we switch the trivial nodes to a clear once and then red x them. Waste of time

A: Even worse at low CLs with needing 4+ clears. We're currently in the process of doing a rethink on SCLs overall. That includes scaling across SCLs (1-3 don't even functionally exist), node clears, rewards for those clears, etc. I don't have timing on that all exactly, but it's something that design is looking at while engineering is dealing with other stuff, so no time lost.

icarusmonkey — 10:12 - Discord - QOL
Q: How far down the priority list are QOL updates, like a percentage toggle for health bars, total strength of SAP tiles on Steam, etc?

A: Really depends on what it is and what the engineer is doing at the time. We have a BIG OL list of UI QoLs that we've got loosely triaged. QoL updates have numerous advantages in dev as well as being player facing. Gets the engineers used to the new engine and its ins and outs, lets us refactor small pieces of code as you're working on a single piece, AND it's something directly noticeable by the player as something that has been improved. So QoLs are higher in our list than some other things.

bluewolf19 — 10:46 - Discord - QOL
Q: While making notes about the store, the HP Lightning Deal Offers have migrated in Unity to below all the Real Money offers, whereas in Old Engine they were typically at the top of all the offers when they occurred. If that is an unintended change, perhaps that can be addressed so people see them more easily.

A: Noted, known issue in general that sorting is a bit wonky there. But we've also got/are finalizing some more tools to help with that. And I'm hoping that we can surface some of that to you all too (hey, if we're building filters, why not let YOU filter too?)

Neil — 11:12 - Discord - QOL
Q: Q: will there be visual indicators of in-game buffs from characters? (Eg. If a character is gaining a % increase in strike tiles effectiveness, can that be shown somehow?) Similarly, for 3* Agatha and characters with similar abilities, can we get a running total of the cumulative damage (in her case, the total of all protect tiles)?

A: Before we buttoned down on ""If it's not a 5 second fix, it's not on the roadmap if it's not Unity"", we were actually looking at some kind of overlay for characters that could be used for that sort of thing. Example would be having a visible counter on Shang-Chi's current Flow combo, or Big Wheel's Momentum. Etc.

CerebralJam — 11:17 - Discord - QOL
Q: regarding crashes/sustained damage with token loss on lower levels and those higher up exploiting tokens. Have you/are you incentivising new players up against extreme competition by giving occasional extra lives? Keeping them on board. This transition is hard if you continually crash. As you progress you get more gameplay time by not running out of lives. As someone new to PvP it eats into your PvE longevity!

A: Compensation. Mentioned this in another answer, but with the disabled Daily Play tokens in particular, they were down for 3 cycles of plays, and we gave the player base 5 of each token in compensation. The level of affectedness by any particular bug is subjective, but generally the actual ""I didn't earn this"" amount is more objective. So whenever possible, err on the side of caution there.

CNash — 11:51 - Discord - QOL
Q: On iOS the game now pauses when you switch away from the app during battles. I understand this is how it has always been on Android, and there's a case to be made for doing this after a full app switch (background/foreground event) but at present it also pauses if you bring up system overlays even for a second. Is this being treated as a bug or just a ""suck it up"" change that aligns the two mobile platforms?

A: Honestly don't know the answer to this, but I'll ask around. I know on Android it's a function of how the old engine did memory management when swapping apps that didn't exist on iOS, but unsure as to if it's handled the same now, or should be.

Neil — 11:56 - Discord - QOL
Q: Q: any plans to introduce ""load outs"" or ANYTHING that means I'm not constantly having to swap my supports around?

A: Not in the near term, but yeah. Supports equipping and such is currently... not great. Usable, but SO much friction.

Darth Pastor — 12:57 - Discord - QOL
Q: Green Goblin has extra wording on his Yellow power, that is redundant. Any plans to modify some older character's existing powers?

A: There's actually a LONG term thing to simplify character power descriptions overall that started after the (deserved) blowback to Chasm. Doesn't always work, but we want to get descriptions a little more towards how MtG does it. Not keywords per-se, but that if a character does X and another character does X+2, it's termed the same as X so it's easily readable.

benthemad — 10:21 - Discord - Roadmap
Q: Any plans on having a proper development roadmap somewhere the community can view it and understand your priorities / progress without having to badger you about it? The visibility of a release schedule with the intended bug fixes and enhancements would go a long way towards building back some of the community trust that you've lost with this unity update.

A: Yep. We're going to be working on/showing that off once the current scramble is a little slower. I'm spending nearly all my time in triage mode instead of forward facing mode, and that extends to a lot of the team.

Jenda — 12:37 - Discord - Roadmap
Q: Can you tease a few upcoming characters while you're here 😅

A: ""Carrying the Torch...""
""Leader of the Pack...""

lightsout — 12:45 - Discord - Roadmap
Q: What is something (that you can share) you are most looking forward to that was enabled by the switch to the new engine/transition to unity?

A: UI updates and the features said UI updates would support. Like, for example, the Battle Pass is relatively simple as a feature. Get X points, gift reward. Sure, edge cases and things like SXP gifting, overlevling and such, but data-wise it's pretty straightforward. Getting that UI set up was difficult with the older engine. Much easier in Unity.

JeffDougan — 13:03 - Discord - Roadmap
Q: We still see periodic complaints about how the game doesn't do a great job of onboarding new players, but does a pretty good job of keeping them once they're in. After the engine bug issues are generally sorted out, is revisiting the onboarding something on thes short/medium/long term list?

A: Yuuuup. An onboarding improvement is in the works, which incidentally has knock-ons to other features that help people that aren't in that area anymore. Example, it didn't land well (and wasn't INTENDED to be an end-game feature) but the Auto-Fire powers is an example of something that was pretty much strictly FTUE, but may as well roll it out to people that want it. So yeah, in the works, and may well touch on things elsewhere in the process.

djarcanus — 11:06 - Discord - Tech
Q: Some of the highest priority issues (crashes, battery burn, slowness, etc.) will hopefully get addressed by the upcoming build. If they aren't, can fixes be done through data pushes or will they require a new build? If the latter, that means players are going to have to wait many days or another week, right? A number of players have already quit the game and more say they will leave if the game continues to be in a state where they can't/don't want to play.

A: In reality, yeah, that's the case. We're getting optimizations out as quickly as we POSSIBLY can. The frame rate limiting we're putting into the very-soon-upcoming build actually has a decently outsized positive help with battery/heat issues while we're doing other optimizations. It doesn't outright fix everything, and a 30 FPS game isn't the best experience, but it's a pretty decent bandaid while we get some of the other stuff done.

gamecat235 - Forum - Forums - Tech
Q: Q1. Are the scroll speed limitations an artificial slowness factor which is controlled and managed in the engine or an artifact of either the engine itself or how the elements are being loaded slowing the appearance?

Prior to unity I could scroll down 500 covers in a few seconds and the scroll rate was incredibly fast. In unity it takes significantly longer and there is clearly a maximum speed.

Q2. Of every visual item which has changed, the battle preview screen where the characters fly in and bounce is the one which gives me the most visual “ick”. Can you provide a method to turn that off and just have the battle preview simply appear without extraneous movement?

A: A1: The former, performance based. We hopefully will lighten up/speed up this as things get more optimized.
A2: Noted. We'll see if we can get it back to at least as good as before soon-ish, but if not a skip to the animation and a fade-in or something may work instead.

KGB - Forums - Tech
Q: Can the development team give us a minimum spec in terms of mobile device / tablet that Unity is going to require in order to run smoothly? For example I'm on a 2019 Samsung S9+ phone that has 6 gigs of Ram and a pretty decent processor (no app or other game is slow). Is this enough hardware to run Unity or am I now obsolete enough I should be looking at a new phone? I am sure many people here are wondering the same about their phones and tablets?

A: Yes, that is definitely a target. General idea: Any device within the last few years with 3+GB of RAM should be able to run the game pretty much fine. Obviously subject to other specs, some wacky handsets exist with lots of RAM but chipsets from 2012. Anything with 1-2 GB RAM is going to be rough, and depending on the device, we may well end up having to blacklist individual devices. It's a fact of life in Unity-land that very low memory devices just have issues with the engine.

MetalMaskMaker - Reddit - Tech
Q: Is there any plan to improve the stability/smoothness of menus and redeeming rewards? The worst lag and most time-consuming issue I've faced since the update is changing between the recruit/offers/vaults screens,requiring multiple presses to attempt to change between them. Loading and scrolling them takes a long time, even for assets already loaded previously.

The same very slow, staggered loading occurs when redeeming vault tokens, there's a lag showing the bright white ""open door"" animation before AND after opening a cover which lingers an extra second, making redeeming multiple rewards and opening the taco vaults a real hassle. The delay also makes it very easy to accidentally to click to spend gold to open vaults. similar to the issue many people have been facing of immediately starting a battle before being able to choose the team they want to play, as the input lag brings you through multiple selections with a single screen press.

A: Yep, both (well, the general situations, lots of sub-situations there) known issues. Subject to optimzations we're working on.

Darth Pastor - Discord - Tech
Q: I have played this game for five years on my tablet. I installed it so I can get the new update, 324. And now I can't play it on my tablet now. Will I ever be able to play on my Samsung A6?

A: Can't play as in ""the game is unplayable"" or can't play as in ""Google doesn't let me download""? We're working on the first with a bunch of optimizations. For the latter, Google in particular has been requiring some API/SDK updates lately that have been deprecating some old hardware for any updates to any software. So if that's the case, there's unfortunately not much we can do about that. Personally, I think if an app ran on a potato and it CAN run on it, it should be able to. But first parties often have different ideas.

Spoit — 12:09 - Discord - Tech
Q: Are you going to be forcing the update through, making the old versions not work? It's been working longer than was typical before

Daiches — 12:47
Will R326 actually be forced update or will we just expand to 4 flavors. Because it’s weird you didn’t force the previous pines, especially the emergency one.

A: Direct result of Amazon going out early a few weeks back and causing an overall version mismatch. The next version will be solving that and we'll be going back to the more normal requiredness after 24-48 hour thing like usual.

djarcanus — 12:09 - Discord - Tech
Q: Follow-up. How many FPS is the old engine? 30, 60, or something else? Thanks.

A: Originally 30 with a 60FPS update on the gem board somewhere along the line.

IHaveThatPower — 13:27 - Discord - Tech
Q: I'm not entirely sure how to correctly phrase this question, or if it's something you're allowed to talk about, but what's the split between server-side processing and client-side processing when it comes to the game? Like, I think it's generally assumed (or was, pre-Unity) that when you're in a battle, that's all client-side and server-side just picks up the results.

Building on that, has there been any thought toward shifting the balance around, both for performance reasons but also ease-of-updates? We talk a lot about data pushes, for example; is there a world where there's no (or less) need to push data to devices, and they can just query the proper state from the server directly (assuming that's differentiated from a data push at all)? ETA: Similarly, waiting for new builds to go through 1PA, vs. stuff you can just make live by enacting it server-side.

A: 1 - The gem/battle board is nearly all client side. There's actually a bug right now that's causing it to time out and cause a ""disconnected from server"" issue when you have high packet loss or no internet connection that we'll be fixing so that the battle board is fully ""offline"" again. You'll still be reconnecting to the server after to validate the battle as per usual, but yeah. As for what's server and what's client? Outside of the battle board, you can think of it as ""Would making an action make a change to my save file?"" If that's a yes, then it's going to have a server side component. Otherwise, probably not. There's an every handful of second keepalive server ping nearly everywhere else BUT the battle board though, which is why you can't idle in most menus without a connection without the game getting angry.

2 - Yep, that's pretty much what Unity enables in a much easier format. There will probably still be data pushes sometimes for compatibility purposes. It doesn't make sense to query the server with all characters in a battle to see if their underlying character data was changed every time when the server instead saying ""Yo, Kitty just got her HP changed, apply that!"" works better all around, for instance.