Constructing Formal Letter to Developers - *Input Requested*

The correct way to do this would entail a lot of work -- read the Forum and pull out the best pieces. One start is Topics that have gone green. It would be nice if there was a sorting option to easily find the most popular items in the forum.

Next, last posts. Go through the first few pages of the top members, and look for final posts. People that leave the game usually give specific reasons for why they left.

The Stickied items in each section, be sure to read those. For example, the Suggestion index of hot topics. These are hard to maintain, but it's still worthwhile to look through them.

Look through the previous Q&A sessions, especially the questions that weren't addressed or answered.

Once you have the lay of the land, you could compile a letter whose components had a combined 3000+ upvotes.

Thank you for taking this on and as one suggestion after you get some feed back you can generate a poll for top subjects.
My concerns about the game are roster slots and ISO with so many new characters and older characters becoming out dated.

For roster slots: With all the new characters that have been released and all the new ones to come, 1 every other week, roster slots become too expensive. The developers have stated they want part of the strategy to be who do you level, and who do you keep, but that is not very fun. In the begining it is challenging and if you make the wrong choice you can be severly punnished. If you don't make room for the character who is rewarded from PVE you are punished the next PVE. By placing a celieng on the cost of roster slots it will allow players the ability to collect and play more 3*/4* characters. It will also allow more players to purchase character abilites. HP will still be spent it will just now be spent on character abilites to help progression rather than on a roster slot. This will also help speed up 2-3* progression without giving out more rewards.

For ISO- as this is the biggest issue for people in 3* land the issue is this. Even if you are generating over 100k ISO a week you are still not getting ahead on progression with leveling characters. With it costing over 400k to level a 4* and almost 200k to level a 3* players will always be significantly behind. This means some characters will never get leveled and used unless buffed. This means all the hard work the dev's are putting into these new characters is a waist becuase if players don't think they are worth it they won't waist ISO on them. By increasing the amount of ISO 20-40 per win this would give a significant bump and not give a players a free pass to leveling characters. with a bunch of 4* comming out ISO is becoming a very rare commodity.

Old Characters: IM40, BWGS, Doom, Rags, Spderman, IW, all could use a buff. These characters are big in the marvel universe and deserve to be better in the game. Their powers are either too expensive or junk compared to powers of newier characters. Please make these characters more playable. I would also look to include HT, Psylock, MStorm as characters that need more health. They all have some really good abilities, even Storm (hailstorm), but becuase they are so low on health they are not viable, or over powered enough to merit such a weakness. These characters should be fun to play and have abilities that match their status in the Marvel Universe.

I hope this helps and gives more of reasons why I want these changes instead of just complaining.

My recommendation is to tackle a few of the more important issues in the first letter. Too many topics can be overwhelming. Maybe the community can vote on the top 2-3?

My top, and really only, main concern about the game is the increasing cost of roster slots. While they say they've increased hp rewards, I don't think it matches the increased costs for a new slot every two weeks (or less than two weeks since anniversary)

I think the quickest method to get some input is to put a poll. Say, something like select 3-5 of 10-15 options for issues people find the most challenging. While conversation is good, I think you'll need some data to back up whatever claims you try to make. I like polls, I think others on the forum do too. They are a quick way to express a lot of information, making them ideal for this sort of scenario.

I like the idea of this, but don't really know what it is you're hoping to achieve? The forum is pretty vocal about what it likes / dislikes / changes it would like to see. If this hasn't registered with the devs so far, I'm not sure how a letter will help.

But as others have suggested, run a poll and find out what the top 3-4 main concerns to players are, then address those. No point writing a letter about issues that no one really cares about.

What the devs listen to: Changes that will make them more $
What the devs ignore: Changes that will make them less $

don't expect any free QoL improvements

Lystrata wrote:

I like the idea of this, but don't really know what it is you're hoping to achieve? The forum is pretty vocal about what it likes / dislikes / changes it would like to see. If this hasn't registered with the devs so far, I'm not sure how a letter will help.

But as others have suggested, run a poll and find out what the top 3-4 main concerns to players are, then address those. No point writing a letter about issues that no one really cares about.

HiFi suggested it, so I assume it's something that he'd actually pass along actively?

This is maybe not the best feedback, but hopefully you can use it to better formulate what you'd like to say to them.

The problem with making defensive strategies (which in this game are inherently slower) viable is wrapped up in the entire fabric of the game. Mainly for PvE the points/refresh/rubberband system and for PvP the queueing/scoring model which serves up high point targets which forces people to shield hop. As was brought up in this month's Q&A, at the highest levels of competition the game revolves around speed. In PvE whoever can clear those nodes the fastest can start later on their final clear and/or finish more nodes which will net them more points. In PvP, if you can get in those 2 or even 3 matches during your shield hop, then you can generally climb faster and higher than your competition. The longer your matches take, the longer you are vulnerable to attacks, so you want to end matches as quickly as possible. This was highlighted of course by sentry bombing (almost the antithesis of a defensive strategy) which even hurt your own team significantly, but since it was the fastest way to end a match it was used extensively while shield hopping and led to crazy high scores.

So, the way I see it there are really only 2 ways to make a defensive strategy/team viable:
1) Make it such a huge scarecrow that practically no one will attack into it. If some team comp took 10 minutes to kill even for the fastest teams, they would likely be skipped to look for easier/quicker matches. Note this only really works in PvP.

2) Create a defense/combo type strategy which could turtle for a few turns before unleashing some massive abilities that on the whole ended up winning quickly. This is basically just a way of saying they need to create characters/mechanics which can transfer defense to offense immediately and efficiently.

There is a secret 3rd way which is to somehow eliminate speed as an important factor in the game. Sadly, I don't think they can realistically do that (and they pretty much admitted as much in this month's Q&A). Maybe they will create the much-clamored-for 'endless mode' which will certainly favor defensive characters over offensive characters since taking the least amount of damage possible will be the best way to keep going (outside of true healers like daken and wolverine, whose healing powers are defensive in nature anyway, only they have some really powerful offensive abilities attached to them as well).