Marvel Puzzle Quest Developer Q&A July 2022 Answers (7/26/22)

HoundofShadow said:

Can anyone explain this:

For example, we could easily see the creation of a trio of cupcake Versus characters that someone rosters in S.H.I.E.L.D. Training that's only there so that people can heal up off of them, and players taking turns at different MMRs so that everyone can do so. 

DeNappa said:

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KGB said:

DeNappa said:

LakeStone said:

Answer - Yes. There are more than a few events that would benefit from an update. Frankly alot of this is rooted in the toolset involved in event creation and updating. Without going too far into detail, there is a surprising amount of data involved in the creation and maintenance of events and the tools to support those effort need lots and lots of love. We're really excited about creating new events and updating the classics! I'm hopeful this is something we can take a crack at next year.

This is something that always baffled me. Given how fairly basic the structure of PVE events is, you'd expect most of this to be configurable by following some kind default template, with a simple editor, that the game engine can use to render the event. 

It looks simple to us but it's probably WAY more complex under the hood that you think.

Every node needs a point setting, the enemies, any dialog, wave vs non wave vs 1 time node vs boss node etc.

Subs need layout screens, ordering of uncovering the nodes (think that Florida sub in The Hunt), whether they are 24 or 48 hours, progression and placement rewards.

Then the over all PvE itself needs things like number of subs, vault tokens storage, the progression and placement rewards and so on.

A massive amount of data has to be kept for every player and alliance at all times across a server farm including saving data like tokens for subsequent runs. All of this is kept in massive databases.

I suspect in the beginning of MPQ a few PvE's were hand designed with rudimentary tools since no one knew if the game was going to be a success. It was years later before new PvE's appeared like Strange Sights and the subsequent ones and I doubt they spent any time creating nice tools to do so because none of that time spent generates any revenue or player good will (ie improves nothing for player experience).

KGB

I'm not saying there wouldn't be any complexity to it at all. But it IS well defined and probably for a large part scriptable by something that could be processed by a parser. For example (just making this up as I go):

{
  "id": ..,
  "name" : "{{FIGHT_FOR_WAKANDA_TITLE}}",
  "thumbnail": resources/wakanda_thumb.png
  "info": ..
  "start" : ..
  "rewards" : [ 
     { "SCL": 1, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     { "SCL": 2, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     (etc)
  ] ,
  "subs": [
     {
         "day": 1,
         "name" : ..
         "thumbnail" : ..
         "rewards": [ .. ],
         "bg_image": ..,
         "nodes": [
           { 
              "id": ..,
              "name": ..,
              "desc": ..,
              "mapcoords": { x: 123, y: 456 },
              "points": 1000,
              "repeatable": yes,
              "waves": 2,
              "visible_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "unlocks_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "enemies": [ .. ]
         ]
     },
     { "day": 2, .... }
  ]
}

And now I'm just throwing all the info in one definition, but I could imagine the rewards tables being separate and just referenced by id, just like enemy level tables based on amount of clears + SCL.

HoundofShadow said:

I strongly believe that we won't see a wall of Wanda/Colossus now. It's going to be much more varied.

Tony_Foot said:

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BriMan2222 said:

mdreyer93 said:

Please don't reduce the god boost scaling. IMO God boosts have been the best addition to the game in a while. Character diversity is so much greater now. 

This.  PVP has been so much more fun with the weekly rotating boosts.  If those are removed or lowered enough that it doesn't make much of a difference all that will happen is we will go back to the monotonous everybody use their strongest meta team pvp, which is mostly just wall to wall Wanda/colossus.  

If they do what they are stating with a Rock Paper Scissors approach that wouldn’t happen. Then there is no need for god boost, other than to make sure matches are longer and you take more damage.

Besides all I see anyway on boost weeks is the same pairing for a week past 400. I’d prefer a different boost every event. 

KGB said:

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Daredevil217 said:

Answer - God boosts aren't so much the problem as it is the exponential scaling that these boosts bring to light. You actually see the same thing at the higher end of 4-Star boosts as well, where a max champed 4-Star boosted character will TROUNCE any non-boosted 270 or below in the game. This is then magnified by the increased match damage that 5-Stars sport which is exponentially increased by the boost. Not announcing anything right now, but fixing that kind of exponential growth is more in line with our current thinking than just bringing down boosted levels which puts a more artificial hard cap on things.

I read that as god boosts aren’t going anywhere (thank the devs!) but I don’t know if others are reading it differently?

I read the same regarding boosts.

But also in there you should be reading that exponential scaling may be (likely is) going away at some point soon so that non God boosted characters are still viable to use vs God boosted ones.

KGB

Bowgentle said:

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KGB said:

Daredevil217 said:

Answer - God boosts aren't so much the problem as it is the exponential scaling that these boosts bring to light. You actually see the same thing at the higher end of 4-Star boosts as well, where a max champed 4-Star boosted character will TROUNCE any non-boosted 270 or below in the game. This is then magnified by the increased match damage that 5-Stars sport which is exponentially increased by the boost. Not announcing anything right now, but fixing that kind of exponential growth is more in line with our current thinking than just bringing down boosted levels which puts a more artificial hard cap on things.

I read that as god boosts aren’t going anywhere (thank the devs!) but I don’t know if others are reading it differently?

I read the same regarding boosts.

But also in there you should be reading that exponential scaling may be (likely is) going away at some point soon so that non God boosted characters are still viable to use vs God boosted ones.

KGB

But that would also trivialize the challenge nodes.
Not sure they want to go to the effort to use different scales for player characters and PVE enemies.

KGB said:

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DeNappa said:

KGB said:

DeNappa said:

LakeStone said:

Answer - Yes. There are more than a few events that would benefit from an update. Frankly alot of this is rooted in the toolset involved in event creation and updating. Without going too far into detail, there is a surprising amount of data involved in the creation and maintenance of events and the tools to support those effort need lots and lots of love. We're really excited about creating new events and updating the classics! I'm hopeful this is something we can take a crack at next year.

This is something that always baffled me. Given how fairly basic the structure of PVE events is, you'd expect most of this to be configurable by following some kind default template, with a simple editor, that the game engine can use to render the event. 

It looks simple to us but it's probably WAY more complex under the hood that you think.

Every node needs a point setting, the enemies, any dialog, wave vs non wave vs 1 time node vs boss node etc.

Subs need layout screens, ordering of uncovering the nodes (think that Florida sub in The Hunt), whether they are 24 or 48 hours, progression and placement rewards.

Then the over all PvE itself needs things like number of subs, vault tokens storage, the progression and placement rewards and so on.

A massive amount of data has to be kept for every player and alliance at all times across a server farm including saving data like tokens for subsequent runs. All of this is kept in massive databases.

I suspect in the beginning of MPQ a few PvE's were hand designed with rudimentary tools since no one knew if the game was going to be a success. It was years later before new PvE's appeared like Strange Sights and the subsequent ones and I doubt they spent any time creating nice tools to do so because none of that time spent generates any revenue or player good will (ie improves nothing for player experience).

KGB

I'm not saying there wouldn't be any complexity to it at all. But it IS well defined and probably for a large part scriptable by something that could be processed by a parser. For example (just making this up as I go):

{
  "id": ..,
  "name" : "{{FIGHT_FOR_WAKANDA_TITLE}}",
  "thumbnail": resources/wakanda_thumb.png
  "info": ..
  "start" : ..
  "rewards" : [ 
     { "SCL": 1, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     { "SCL": 2, "placement" : .., "progression" : .. },
     (etc)
  ] ,
  "subs": [
     {
         "day": 1,
         "name" : ..
         "thumbnail" : ..
         "rewards": [ .. ],
         "bg_image": ..,
         "nodes": [
           { 
              "id": ..,
              "name": ..,
              "desc": ..,
              "mapcoords": { x: 123, y: 456 },
              "points": 1000,
              "repeatable": yes,
              "waves": 2,
              "visible_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "unlocks_after_nodes": [ node_id1 ],
              "enemies": [ .. ]
         ]
     },
     { "day": 2, .... }
  ]
}

And now I'm just throwing all the info in one definition, but I could imagine the rewards tables being separate and just referenced by id, just like enemy level tables based on amount of clears + SCL.

I love your JSON definitions / layout. It's definitely how modern S/W works (or at least how we do ours at my company). They should hire you to do the JSON definitions / layout and server side work to parse it and send to clients.

KGB