Tesh comments that Marvel Puzzle Quest is getting worse in its P2W, winner take all reward structure. That’s fair. They angered many players with their last patch but did provide an answer to my running question of how you regain trust with paying customers after encouraging them to buy something and then nerfing it. They provided a partial refund, letting you cash in the nerfed characters at a boosted rate. Getting back half your “investment” is not bad when you got to have overpowered characters for a long while.
: Zubon
While we’re mentioning Tesh, check out his latest Kickstarter.
Thanks for the mention, and for noting the Kickstarter! It’s a bit lower key this time around, but something I figured there would be some interest in.
I really want to like MPQ. I love the core combat mechanics of the game. I’d probably buy it in a heartbeat if it were a single player standalone single purchase game. Heck, I even believe that F2P can be done right. It’s just… these devs seem a bit behind the curve, and they are flailing around a bit. The boosted buyback was a nice move, though, I’ll agree with that. I didn’t bite on it, since I’ll just play with what settles out of the mess of balancing, but it was a good gesture of goodwill.
They’re having some serious balancing issues right now with their latest PvE events. They’ve decided to start scaling the enemy strength based on how many characters you have and your win/loss ratio from the previous events. Typically someone who has been playing for a long time has a lot of characters and hardly ever loses the PvE matches. All sounds fair, so far, right?
Except the past two events have had me (and many many others) up against nothing but level 230 enemies. My highest level hero is level 75, and the current event is only boosted Daredevil, which only a select few people got in the previous event. The fights against Hammer and Maggia are still doable sometimes, but a single mistake or bit of bad luck and it’s game over. The fights against Dark Avengers are simply impossible. The game is no longer fun, and I’ve gone from playing every chance I get to just one match a day to get the daily bonus.
What makes it worse, apparently the scaling is strongly tied to roster size, so people with very few but strong characters are getting low level enemies and blowing through the content with ease.
Yay, balance? But hey, I’d have a chance if I wanted to drop $200 on Iso-8 crystal to level up all my characters. Thanks.
Yeah, the rest of the changes these past couple of weeks have been almost entirely horrible on several levels.
There’s a lot of misinformation about the scaling. It is very unlikely that it is tied to the size of your roster. I have 20 roster slots and the highest opponent I have is around 60.
It is, however, tied to your win/loss ratio. From what the developers have said, there is a global MMR and a event-only MMR and your overal rating is a composite of both. I personally think the global MMR includes both PVE and PVP, simply from a coding perspective this would make more sense.
Most of the issues people are facing are because they do not tank their matches. During Thick as Thieves I faced minimum-level enemies all the way because I tanked my entire roster in between score resets and whenever I was not going to be playing for a while. It seems that most players grinded their way until all enemies were level 230 then just sat there and complained on the forums.
Placement in tournaments is more about the meta (when to join brackets, using annoying characters) than about the strength of your roster.
It would take some work to come up with a worse, more perverse incentive system.
Still messing around with it, and I was wondering how they scaled the event. Currently my highest hero is one-star Iron Man at 34, with a few others in the mid-teens and then the rest in the single digits.
The current PvE event has me facing level 12-25 enemies, which I can take down most of the time. Currently ranked 33 (interesting how they do it by 200 man brackets).
For the current PvP event, is there any penalty for skipping fights to find a new one? The options there are all over the place, sometimes I get someone with all sub-10 heroes, other times it wants me to face someone with 3 40+ heroes.
What’s funny is the P2W aspect of this time is super-tame compared to a game like Legend of the Cryptids; in that one each weekly event has a new card associated that you can only get in the shop, and you need to spend a solid $100 to usually get it (its random, of course). Even assuming you do pay to get the newest card, you still need to play 23/7 for a week, and have a $1000+ account, to rank in the top 100 or so and really get the top-end rewards.
If nothing else, LotC is a ‘fun’ game to play for free and see how far you can push it, all while watching the whales duke it out at the top.