Note to devs: keys to lasting success

Unknown · February 2014

pasa_ wrote:

Jester Day wrote:

While I agree to the sentiment, one of the big problems with these things is that ultimately people want very differing things. What players A and F consider to be great gameplay does not necessarily translate into what players B and C do. While some will want a slowed game with more strategy and many different options, some people will want the speedy game, with quick rewards for the ego and fast progression.

True, but IMO there are clear points of overall agreements, like that losing 90 pts while you gained 20 playing or that some basic respec system is needed at least due to changing the environment.

This is utterly true, and I offer no argument to the contrary.

Unknown · February 2014

I actually haven't been taking this convo very serious at all hehe.

But you are kind of helping my points with the lists you presented.
In the 2013 list I would consider every game at least decent paced other than maybe assassins creed (which is still a lot faster than this). Even RTS games like age if empire and Warcraft 2 were very fast paced strategy games (once you got past the 1st 5-10 minutes).

The board game comment legitimately surprises me. I just don't have the patience for them.
Yes Call of Duty is the most obvious one but I think our personal view on "fast paced" is what is differing.

In the sports games (baseball excluded, BORING) you play almost non stop. Football you pick a play and go. Basketball and soccer are nearly constant. Dance dance....obvious? Even bejeweled and other match 3 games you don't have to sit and think about what move you wanna do for 2 minutes (or else get blasted by a MINION and lose more than 50% of your health packs for a single bad move?)

All of those games I can play constantly, they require varying levels of thought while playing but generally decisions can be made on the fly and you rarely hit complete roadblocks.

I'm not denying that there aren't some slow paced ones or that there isn't a market for them, I'm just saying there is a MUCH bigger market for games that you can play continuously. Even games like WoW and Elder Scrolls, you aren't at a dead sprint the entire time, but you are always moving, always doing something. You aren't debating "hey am I gonna screw myself if I play right now or should I wait til later". You know when the best time to play those games are? WHENEVER YOU WANT. You know when the best time to play this game is? Please inform me and 99% of the other players because everything I've seen in this game is playing it = bad. You play 1 hour a day you do great, assuming you play it at the correct 4 15 minute sessions I guess?

My statement of look at history wasn't totally accurate. I should have said recent history. Not trying to come off as an **** either but am I making my perspective a little more clear?

Twysta · February 2014

For the love of Yodenheim!
The key is to reward your players, not punish them. I've never seen a game that keeps getting changed to punish a player as they progress through the game. I'm not really sure where anyone would think this is a solid gameplan.

What do people want? Pain and punishment. We're all masochists and we love it.
Make people feel like they're being rewarded for playing! (Even if they're not) The devs here had made great game, but it's no secret that the game has hit a bump. People want to feel like they've accomplished something.
I don't understand why they keep making changes to stop people from progressing?
One of my biggest peeves and it still annoys me to think about it - Hrmpf - is that in the shield training the 2 higher HP (I've always referred to it as gold but eh) were changed from 500 to 100 when they introduced shields first into the game. Now it was difficult to obtain then, even more so now.
Then they removed shields from training - first off when I saw that, I thought to myself who in their right frame of mind would pay for shields in a tournament ladder that never ends? But alas, people were still firing off shields left right and center (for the progression rewards I suppose). So people are using ingame currency to get rewards that you've set. As soon as people are in danger of reaching those goals which reward your player base for wanting to play your game, you change it.
I was confused enough as it was that even the 1000+ rewards are still only classic hawkeye who's 1 star. By the time anyone reaches any of these rewards, they should have the characters maxed already anyway! What's the point in that?
At least when the gold was at 500 it gave me incentive to play the training mode. Heaven forbid you want people to play a largely neglected mode.
Surely the point would be to not only get people playing but to bring in new players and keep them too -The more people you have playing is always a good advert to bring in even more players - I can understand not wanting to over-saturate the game maybe with too many high level covers too soon but downright making a player feel neglected isn't helping whether intentional or not.

People always want more and I appreciate that you're a small team and slowly working your way to produce new content and covers and that is always going to produce more supply and demand in the long term.
It seems like they want to reduce the amount of HP people are getting/building up, but this is f2p, people still have to play to get that HP and it still costs and ton for covers anyway and there's always going to be freeloaders who if anything play your game because they think it's fun but don't want to pay, this is inevitable on a f2p platform. But there's no chance of these people buying anything if they're not playing - I've had friends stop playing because they got frustrated because of the lack of HP they could find and weren't willing to pay which is a shame because at the time I felt the game really deserved their time.

I hope the goals and model they're looking at are reflective of long term goals rather than short term because no one wants to see this game sleep with the fishes.

I feel a bit sheepish that I have to post something like this as my first post especially as a lot of people seem to be signing up to the forums just to gripe.
They just need to slow down and figure things out instead of panic and rushing things out which aren't working. People will wait for a good patch/product, more than they'd enjoy a broken rushed out one.
Maybe they have it backwards. It's not slowing down the gameplay they want, but slowing down how they're trying to adjust the game!
As my old man used to say do it right or don't do it at all (Well okay he never says that, but he could've).

Unknown · February 2014

Just for a simple example;

The hulk event...everybody got a hulk. Everyone was happy.

The daredevil event...not everyone got a daredevil. I know I am not happy.

So don't make the next event have two fights where you must have daredevil. I play this game more than enough that I should have got a daredevil somehow. Gifted, tokens, ranking, whatever. But nope.

Frequency of play isn't rewarded enough unless you consider exchanging covers for 100 ISO a reward.

Edit: great first post twysta!

Unknown · February 2014

You are. And yes, our perception is varying, although I suspect it is not varying as much as either you or me actually assume. I for example do not see any of those games as fast-paced at all. You have a valid point in continuous gameplay however. And I can definately say that I find that a more salient point.

My view is that each game you play in a puzzle game should last between two and five minutes. Two for a really quick game, and about five for a drawn out one. That is for gameplay itself.

Downtime between games however, in this game, I will stand behind it being a bit of a flawed premise. Especially with limited rosters, healing is slow, and thus playing anything but the very simplest of matchups is overly punishing. Add to that that it is very hard to have your main team out and taking on something else with an undeveloped backup team. This is a legitimate concern, to me, and I also guess to you.

For me, the best times of playing this game has been in the morning, before I head to work (I begin at a very lucky point in time for this game, as the normal deadlines for the tournaments are exactly when I begin work, and I have about a ten minute car there) as well as an hour or two in the evening when I come home. The ideal would be that timezone did not matter, and the game being a bit more "pickup and play when you can-friendly", also in the tournament scene, but a decent solution for how to do that needs to present itself.

I will also note that I consider time that I do not do anything but saunter around is time wasted to me in MMOs. Essentially I feel like I have misunderstood your point of the gameplay itself, vs. the downtime between gameplay. In the first, I believe they are at a pretty good place. The latter, there is definately room for improvement.

I very low-end pve "room" which solely gives some ISO and health packs? Where you also can try out newer characters that you haven't levelled?

Unknown · February 2014

Yeah I think we are on the same page now.

Typically my thought process and statements have a very logical sound backing. I just am not the best at communicating them properly all the time.

Unknown · February 2014

The developers should feel bad that games like flappy bird is doing way better than them and that game has only been out for like 3-4 weeks.

Unknown · February 2014

DayvBang wrote:

Crazyeyeskiller wrote:

You've said yourselves the game is designed to have players hit a brick wall at a certain point. Do you think about what this statement feels like to players?

Wait... really?

Shaking my TinyKitty head.

lol you have to be frigging kidding me who the heck does this?

Unknown · February 2014

justaplayer wrote:

DayvBang wrote:

Crazyeyeskiller wrote:

You've said yourselves the game is designed to have players hit a brick wall at a certain point. Do you think about what this statement feels like to players?

Wait... really?

Shaking my TinyKitty head.

lol you have to be frigging kidding me who the heck does this?

Pasting IceIX's direct reply to get some truth to that post.

Re: Brackets: why am I swamped in noob poop?

Postby IceIX » Fri Jan 31, 2014 3:57 pm

Dorthy wrote:I can appreciate that but my question is why are we lumped together in the first place? It doesn't seem to foster healthy competition but rather sets up a wall for beginners to bash their heads into after starting out with an advantage. That looks more like a model for frustration to me than an enjoyable event. Is it just that brackets are timing based and that it grabs the first X number of people who grab points until the brackets full?

The game isn't intended to ever hit you with a full on brick wall, so newer players shouldn't hit that but instead run into difficult opponents that make it harder to proceed. If that user is good enough though, they can battle through it and pick up some rewards that are above what they would "normally" be able to reach. We could bunch people into groups of what kind of teams they have, but then we'd have to also scale rewards for each group so that it makes sense for them. Someone that's 3 days old would see a new Black Widow Original comic as a great reward for winning a Tourney. For someone that's been around 3 months, that's 125 Iso. With the current system, the people that have been around a bit longer tend to take some of those higher prizes, but because of the number of brackets out there there are always players that "sneak in" and grab them as well through gameplay/dint of will and steadily improve their roster. And those that don't do so well still end up getting rewards like tokens and such that keeps them on the path.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2996&p=46009#p46009

I emphasized the sentence that has been misrepresented.

I'm not defending the current state of the game. I don't like grinding prologue for 20iso to level up my OBPatchloki. I want to be able to do pvp and pve, but it's just not happening this weekend. I just don't like things taken out of context or misrepresented.

Unknown · February 2014

Maggotbreath wrote:

justaplayer wrote:

DayvBang wrote:

Crazyeyeskiller wrote:

You've said yourselves the game is designed to have players hit a brick wall at a certain point. Do you think about what this statement feels like to players?

Wait... really?

Shaking my TinyKitty head.

lol you have to be frigging kidding me who the heck does this?

Pasting IceIX's direct reply to get some truth to that post.

Re: Brackets: why am I swamped in noob poop?

Postby IceIX » Fri Jan 31, 2014 3:57 pm

Dorthy wrote:I can appreciate that but my question is why are we lumped together in the first place? It doesn't seem to foster healthy competition but rather sets up a wall for beginners to bash their heads into after starting out with an advantage. That looks more like a model for frustration to me than an enjoyable event. Is it just that brackets are timing based and that it grabs the first X number of people who grab points until the brackets full?

The game isn't intended to ever hit you with a full on brick wall, so newer players shouldn't hit that but instead run into difficult opponents that make it harder to proceed. If that user is good enough though, they can battle through it and pick up some rewards that are above what they would "normally" be able to reach. We could bunch people into groups of what kind of teams they have, but then we'd have to also scale rewards for each group so that it makes sense for them. Someone that's 3 days old would see a new Black Widow Original comic as a great reward for winning a Tourney. For someone that's been around 3 months, that's 125 Iso. With the current system, the people that have been around a bit longer tend to take some of those higher prizes, but because of the number of brackets out there there are always players that "sneak in" and grab them as well through gameplay/dint of will and steadily improve their roster. And those that don't do so well still end up getting rewards like tokens and such that keeps them on the path.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2996&p=46009#p46009

I emphasized the sentence that has been misrepresented.

I'm not defending the current state of the game. I don't like grinding prologue for 20iso to level up my OBPatchloki. I want to be able to do pvp and pve, but it's just not happening this weekend. I just don't like things taken out of context or misrepresented.

I see that it was misquoted but in reality their "Difficulty" is a Brick Wall!

Unknown · February 2014

I agree..but we also don't know thier financial situation right now. Could be they weren't making enough to properly make a profit considering licensing fees for marvel, the handful of ppl being payed for upkeep, the past money spent in development, etc. Part of why I enjoyed the game was you didn't feel FORCED to pay. Unfortunately you have to hit a LOT of players for that to work out, so going from.fun and playable without paying towards nickel and dime-ing might have been out of fiscal necessity. We will never know. There are ways to do that without making everyone feel cheated though and jj there lies the issue...they are alienating thier current player ase in a time where the game is old enough that the initial torrent of players has died down more to a constant trickle....a trickle that requires a steady brook.to.already be in place for.that trickle to.stay.

Sadly, the game being a little.more complicated than something like candy crush makes it WAY more fun, but also hurts them.financially because at least 50% of ppl who pay for phone games are either stupid or don't have the time, care, or wherewithal to learn anything beyond angry bird level of gameplay.

I want to believe they are doing this out of necessity because I feel like they are alienating a lot of ppl, many paying or future paying customers, with a lot of the changes. One change I am not surprised on, but needs a large tweeking, is the silent stealth change to make low levels have an easier time.in the game. It's good because the entrance requirement was getting too high for competing. It's bad (and the reason they tried to do it with stealth) is because the moment ppl realize low lvls rule is the moment ppl stop paying. Once the realize you are PUNISHED for raising your lvl they stop PLAYING. its counterintuitive for lvling to make the game worse for you.

If these changes are not based out of necessity then I question thier marketing department or whomever is making these decisions as there is too much flux in prices of seemingly essential things.

Unknown · February 2014

justaplayer wrote:

I see that it was misquoted but in reality their "Difficulty" is a Brick Wall!

Maybe we can all agree that it's not working as intended then? It's obviously broken. They admitted it. They tried a patch. That didn't work. It's now superbowl weekend so we're screwed until at least Monday afternoon.

I am not one of the lucky ones who got all 20s. I cannot compete in this event and I'm irritated there are those who have a much easier match up than I do just due to sheer luck. I'm just as angry as you about this I'd wager, I'm just not venting it on the forums (right now at least).

Unknown · February 2014

Out of necessity to go broke *faster*? You can't force a cow to give you milk, it needs feeding, care and other things first. And getting desperate will not make it any better.

Unknown · February 2014

Maggotbreath wrote:

justaplayer wrote:

DayvBang wrote:

Crazyeyeskiller wrote:

You've said yourselves the game is designed to have players hit a brick wall at a certain point. Do you think about what this statement feels like to players?

Wait... really?

Shaking my TinyKitty head.

lol you have to be frigging kidding me who the heck does this?

Pasting IceIX's direct reply to get some truth to that post.

Re: Brackets: why am I swamped in noob poop?

Postby IceIX » Fri Jan 31, 2014 3:57 pm

Dorthy wrote:I can appreciate that but my question is why are we lumped together in the first place? It doesn't seem to foster healthy competition but rather sets up a wall for beginners to bash their heads into after starting out with an advantage. That looks more like a model for frustration to me than an enjoyable event. Is it just that brackets are timing based and that it grabs the first X number of people who grab points until the brackets full?

The game isn't intended to ever hit you with a full on brick wall, so newer players shouldn't hit that but instead run into difficult opponents that make it harder to proceed. If that user is good enough though, they can battle through it and pick up some rewards that are above what they would "normally" be able to reach. We could bunch people into groups of what kind of teams they have, but then we'd have to also scale rewards for each group so that it makes sense for them. Someone that's 3 days old would see a new Black Widow Original comic as a great reward for winning a Tourney. For someone that's been around 3 months, that's 125 Iso. With the current system, the people that have been around a bit longer tend to take some of those higher prizes, but because of the number of brackets out there there are always players that "sneak in" and grab them as well through gameplay/dint of will and steadily improve their roster. And those that don't do so well still end up getting rewards like tokens and such that keeps them on the path.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2996&p=46009#p46009

I emphasized the sentence that has been misrepresented.

I'm not defending the current state of the game. I don't like grinding prologue for 20iso to level up my OBPatchloki. I want to be able to do pvp and pve, but it's just not happening this weekend. I just don't like things taken out of context or misrepresented.

Yeah yeah whatever I said I read it wrong but everything I said in the post stands true to reason anyway. The design of this game (MMR + scaling enemies) is obviously intended to halt progression for players at a certain point. It goes fast in the very beginning then grinds to a stop.

I think a better model would be to go free to play for four 1* characters and the Prologue. Allow players to win standard tokens/HP rewards/ISO from the prologue for free, with the current chance of 2* + dropping from tokens (maybe even an increased chance to sucker the cheapos in so they can use that sweet sweet Spidey blue cover that just dropped from the token. Only allow "premium members" or whatever access to use their 2* and above roster and only allow members access to tourneys. Charge whatever you think is right for membership, my suggestion is $6.99 USD with regular sales at $4.99. Once you pay you enjoy a reduced timer on health packs. Stop charging for boosts but put them on a regenerating timer like health packs, allow you to purchase them with HP optionally if the timer hasn't run out. HP cost for shields in tourneys is unfortunate but ok at current price. Perhaps give ten shields as a bonus for signing up then charge. Anyway, this way you can guarantee a level of support for the game that keeps you in business for a while, and can allow for some of the changes I suggested in the original post: faster progression, increased rewards, and you can spend your time creating content like new cards and missions/events without worrying about what needs tweaked to create some more money coming in LIKE THE FREAKING SKIP TAX which is the worst idea I've ever heard of.

LordWill · February 2014

pasa_ wrote:

Out of necessity to go broke *faster*? You can't force a cow to give you milk, it needs feeding, care and other things first. And getting desperate will not make it any better.

you hit it right on the head.

Note to devs: keys to lasting success

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