MPQ Developer Q&A January 2025 (ANSWERS)

Hi everyone!

Here's our first MPQ Q&A of the new year! Thanks to all the players who submitted their questions and apologies in advanced if we weren't able to answer your questions. To avoid nonanswer responses, we left out any questions that had answers along the lines of "Good idea! We'll look into it!" or "Gotta wait for Unity". Some answers below tow that line just a little, but hopefully the general theme of this Q&A is helpful context to what we've been working on behind the scenes.

For extra context, please refer to our recent two blogs in case you haven't caught up on our most recent announcements.

2025 Road Map
Dev Update #2

MPQ Developer Q&A January 2025 (ANSWERS)

1. @supergarv [Official Forums]
   Question: Can you please fix the battlepass / seasonal vaults? The 120 items and few tokens is a real pain for ascended 4* attainabiljty. Releared - it takes 80.000 HP to ascend a 3* to 5* and would organically take years. Maybe rid of needing to merge 2 4*s?!
   Answer: We've definitely heard a ton of feedback from players since both Seasonal Vaults and Passes were added to the game. With the current iteration of the hybrid Season Pass / Vault mechanic, we're continuing to balance out how they work with each other and the Brave New World Season Vault now featuring 60 items and more ways to earn tokens for the potential to 100% clear it.
   
2. @Godzillafan67 [Official Forums]
   Question: Currently, the 3/5-star releases are variations of the same character. Have you considered releasing existing-but-not-in-the-tier pairs? For example, 3-star Apocalypse alongside 5-star Squirrel Girl.
   Answer: Designing the 3 and 5 Star versions of a character usually has the benefit of streamlining design and approvals so from a practical perspective it works. However, there have been instances where we're able to swap in a character if another seemingly unrelated character is ready which has happened before, but not very often.
   
3. Seph1roth5 [Discord]
   Question: There hasn't been a new support in many months (refreshment cart last MAY). What's up there?
   Answer: We've introduced 18 supports since taking over MPQ and decided to put their release cadence on hold so we could evaluate how they've impacted the game. Once we've had time to go through the data, we may very well get back to supports in the future once some higher priority tasks are tackled.
   
4. @SaltNPeppa [Official Forums]
   Question: The game's population has been shrinking. Will there be increased promotion of the game like during the before movie previews for MCU theaterical releases and commercials on Disney+?
   Answer: Older games will naturally run into these kinds of issues which is why we've prioritized updating it's backend infrastructure to allow us to build new and more exciting features that will make more sense if we do any large promotional campaigns like you mentioned.
   
5. ReturnalShadow [Reddit]
   Question: Clarify this: has CS cover swap for 550 Latest always been a game feature, part of an in-game strategy or a service given to those 550 players for free forever? If not, what was it? They are saying you're destroying MPQ from top (vet) to bottom (new)
   Answer: This is obviously a sensitive topic, but we'll try to speak frankly. Any system that required a player to manually go through customer service as a stop gap is obviously not a permanent game feature.
   
   This stop gap caused an unnecessary drain on our CS team and impacted their ability to respond to game issues that otherwise affected the player base. We created an in-game feature to handle the original issue that players were facing, then expanded this out to all rarity levels as part of a more full featured integration. As with most features, it'll continue to evolve as time goes on though.
   
6. @Al_Azif [Official Forums]
   Question: Would you consider doing a closed alpha with some of the more veteran players on the new engine so they can help iron it out?
   Answer: Most definitely! Thanks to those thousands of players who have opted into our Beta during our surveys recently. We'll be reaching out when the time comes because we definitely want to get to a point where community feature testing can be done with both newbie and veteran players.
   
7. @BlackBoltRocks [Official Forums]
   Question: Is it possible to have all subsequent special 5* stores at a 1:5 ratio (just like the Anniversary ones)? There are over 100 5s; this will greatly help with covering older 5s.
   Answer: That was only something that we do ocassionally and not on a regular basis. Anything that heavily impacts the game's economy like these kinds of ratios aren't something that we can easily make changes to without adversely affect another area of the game so we have to use it sparingly.
   
8. @Dyinglegend [Official Forums]
   Question: The game feels incredibly stale and has stuck to the same repetitive formula for an eternity. Any new features coming that will spice it up or break the mundane state of the game?
   Answer: We recently talked about the reasons why you may be feeling this in our Dev Update #2 and also put out our 2025 Roadmap at the end of last year. This'll help connect the dots and hopefully give you some glimpse into our future plans.
   
9. @WhiteBomber [Official Forums]
   Question: We regularly hear about "the budget" for character rebalance and creation; could you elaborate on how the budget works / what it consists of and is applied?
   Answer: That's a bit of a technical question, but to put it simply when making a character we have a system of weights which each type of Ability or Passive Ability which we refer to as the "budget". During the character's initial design, we assign weights to those budgets based on the cummulative budget that we've assigned to that character and start QA testing. During this phase, we look at things like win rates, how often abilities are triggering, and synergies with other characters to make any necessary adjustments before release.
   
10. @ShionSinX [Official Forums]
    Question: Could you expand daily quests to also give 5* shards? 30/20/10 shards for 3/4/5 Star respectively would be great! Maybe also add a token as prize for a new mission like "win a mission with an X affiliation character 3 times".
    Answer: Similar to the question earlier about changing ratios and their impacts on the overall game economy, this isn't something that we'd want to implement without very careful consideration to how it'll impact all areas of the game.
    
11. @Hammer 3001 [Official Forums]
    Question: Why can we not collect shards for Limited characters via Standard, Elite or Mighty buys?
    Answer: Mainly because Limited characters are designed to be special and can only be collected at specific times. If we introduced easier ways to get them, it kind of defeats that purpose.
    
12. @Inarius [Official Forums]
    Question: When dealing with multiple copies of the same character and a cover drops not having all characters present in the same screen after the "decisions decisions" popup is dismissed is cumbersome, could something please be done about this?
    Answer: UI is one of the areas we're really looking to tackle once we get Unity out the door because our current interface is extremely difficult to make any adjustments to.
    
    i.e. Adding a new tab to our Recruit / Offers / Vaults screen requires a major undertaking just to add an additional tab due to how the UI is currently built.
    
13. Carnage1484 [Discord]
    Question: Low level and bad team ups are the equivalent of spam emails. Can something be done to eliminate them? I’d rather get 10 ISO/RISO than a pve level 50/166 TU. At the least id take an auto delete function.
    Answer: Any system that hasn't evolved much since its inception has a lot of behind the scenes hurdles that we'd have to overcome and this is a good example of one of those features. At the moment, we don't have any plans to overhault it, but it's a great idea.
    
14. @NMANOZ [Official Forums]
    Question: Can we get a new currency and milestones just for alliances? Maybe a point based system (like a season pass) or tokens where we can use on alliance specific vaults.
    Answer: Alliances are definitely on our check off list to make some exciting overhaults to so stay tuned post Unity upgrade which will allow us to plan for cool things like this!
    
15. @Pottsie [Official Forums]
    Question: Are there any community challenges planned soon? Would love a chance to have a chance to earn the mind, reality or soul stone.
    Answer: We've got one planned during this current season so keep your eyes peeled for an announcement soon!
    
16. @Jimbo Jambo [Official Forums]
    Question: Now that we have cover swaps, please can you give us a way to combine multiple copies of characters already rostered (especially ascended characters)? Eg I have 3 copies of 2* Daken ascended to 4.
    Answer: Our tinkerers are already tinkering on this.
    
17. @SAking [Official Forums]
    Question: With the recent update to Cable are there any plans to update the equivalent move on someone like Doop?
    Answer: Not at this time, when looking at rebalances we look at the character and not the individual ability.
    
18. @Ptahhotep [Official Forums]
    Question: Why do the vaults for daily play tokens close before the tokens stop being given out?
    Answer: It's a couple of factors. Region timing and the way the vaults end vs Daily Play. Vaults end on a set timer while Daily Plays are removed with tools that are rather cumbersome to use.
    
19. @rainkingucd [Official Forums]
    Question: Can you share the history / lore / reasoning behind the new character clues in the "What's new" thread after the character has been released? Understanding the details encourages us comic nerds to read more about the character (i.e. Seeking Saylum)?
    Answer: It can be any number of things. We look at clues that pull from a character's history, or power set, or name and then try to come up with a transformative double meaning for the most part. It's a bit like the clues for Cryptic Crosswords.
    
20. @UnityGamer [Official Forums]
    Question: When there are no more moves, the board reshuffles. With locked tiles, they can increase the chance at no more moves. What failsafes are there to ensure there is always a move? (Maybe that can be an ability for a future hero)
    Answer: If the game would get to the point where there are no more moves with locked tiles on the board, it then forces a move/match on the next reset so that it clears some of the Locked tiles. There's no time that the game could get in a position with enough unmatchable tiles (like Silver Surfer's Black Hole or Doctor Strange's Eye of Agamotto) that a board reset couldn't force a situation that ends in a playable state. If somehow this DOES happen anyway (which is impossible at current), the game would just do a "fresh" reset with none of these tiles.