24/7 Lightning Rounds + dynamic loaner based on point tier

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

As a new player who’s been playing roughly 57 days now, I feel like Lightning Rounds are the number one source of progression for people just getting into the game.

5-6 matches nets you a standard recruit token and roughly 1000 ISO in rewards. It’s not uncommon to walk away with a 2* cover if you play 8-10 matches per round.

Story and Versus events are both highly stressful and require mature rosters and/or a lot of dedicated playing time to place high enough for decent rewards. The grind of event competition is the leading cause of burn-out and simply drives people away from the game.

Lightning Rounds on the other hand, are stress-free (unless you’re one of the 1 in 1,000 players that actually goes for gold tokens) and offer enough rewards that you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time playing a half dozen matches here and there. This makes them about the only aspect of the game that I enjoy currently. And I’ve done well enough in Story events to place in the top 10 in the last four events (three of those finishes were top 5), but it hasn’t been an enjoyable experience. 8 hour refreshes have made it even more stressful for someone with a weaker roster compared to a veteran player that might have twice as many usable characters to run in the final grind.

I think the health of the game would be improved if Lightning Rounds never stopped running so people have an alternative avenue to Story/Versus for actually progressing their rosters. They can take a break from the grind of event competition whenever burnout settles in but still have Lightning Rounds to play at their own pace while still earning more than 20 ISO per prologue mission.

If there’s always a Lightning Round going then there’s always something worth doing every time you log in, even if you don’t feel like running a particular Story/Versus event because you’re burned out or just don’t need the featured rewards.

It would be the go-to “farm” of this F2P game, and allow people a constant stream of ISO to gamble away on standard tokens or level up alternative characters that they wouldn’t normally dump ISO into over their A-teams.

Also, if we were to have constant Lightning Rounds implemented it would probably be a good idea to open up the featured character roster to include everyone in the game instead of a rotating selection of the same 3-6 characters a season. And I think it would be an improvement if the mechanics were altered slightly so that the featured character uses a randomly selected base power each Lightning Round, and scales up in power rank/availability as a player earns more points in different tiers. Perhaps even randomly assigned powers/ranks every single match to keep things fresh and varied.

For example, anyone with less than 100 points will have a featured character at level 20-40 with a single rank 1-3 power so they aren’t bodying low levels. But once you reach the 150-200 point tier where you’ll be facing level 94’s, the featured character should then be upgraded to include two rank 3-5 powers, as well as a slight level boost to 60-90. Then in the 300+ point range, or wherever the transition to level 166 teams starts to happen, they should be upgraded close to max level, with all three powers at rank 3-5.

This will give people a chance to experience every character’s powers at various ranks and levels and get a feel for how they work, kind of a like a sand-box. The more you participate in Lightning Rounds and the farther you go the more experience you’ll have with each character’s different abilities. And it should help create a little more balance for the higher ranking players as well, instead of every team being stuck with a level 60 rank 1 power loaner whether they’re bringing 1* or 4* to the fight.

It could probably even be expanded to have a small pool of featured characters in each Lightning Round ranging from 1* to 4*, so in the under 100 points tier you’ll be given a 1* or a 2* loaner at level 20-40, then once you reach the 150-200 point tier 1* will be dropped for 2* or 3* at level 60-90, and then work up to only 3* and 4* at the higher tier. So it could be something like Iron Man, Daken, Black Panther, Elektra one Lightning Round, and the next might feature Juggernaut, Moonstone, Hulk, Fury.

But as of this moment, there’s nothing for me to do in this game right now. I’m at the Versus wall where my roster can’t compete with any other matchup regardless of how many skips I make. Same for the Simulator. I’m done with prologue, nothing to do there. Gauntlet is wiping me cause my just starting out roster consists of 3* in the level 40-70 range with mostly 2/0/0 or 2/2/1 at best powers, compared to the 5/5/3 or 5/4/4 Gauntlet AI. I just had a lvl 69 Rocket & Groot go from 700hp to literally full health (over 4K) off 1 yellow match and wipe my 162 boosted Daredevil team for about the 4th time in a row. It’s completely unrealistic that an R&G at my level scaling would ever have 4-5 points into yellow passive. I log-in, I wanna play, but there’s literally nothing for me to do without a Lightning Round. I’m not looking forward to the next Story event where the insane grind will just continue to wear me out. I’m pretty close to just uninstalling at this point.

I wanna be able to just log-in when I feel like it and have something fun to do that’s still putting me closer to my goals. Non-stop Lightning Rounds would allow just that. Getting on like a robot every 3-8 hours to cycle through the same Story nodes in order to get my covers and 20 ISO is tiring. Not having anything to do in the Versus side of the game after beating only seed teams is a brick wall that completely shuts down my ability or desire to play that mode.

2

Liked the post, however the improved loaner the way you described gets to be powerful too fast to the point where it eclipses the lower level teams. Better matching would solve your problem so that you are constantly people that are on par +/- a couple levels. I liked the idea of a point system that you accumulate and are able to boost your loaner, that way you can go hard for one round in particular kind of like dead pool points or something. this game has been neglecting the lower tier players lately, in favor of the highest tier players.

3

I tried to model it based on what I typically experience when playing Lightning Rounds, but I suppose it could be different for other players. I try to hit every Lightning Round I can, and typically after beating every seed team I’ll have roughly 120-150 points which nets me the 250 ISO reward. This is where it tends to immediately jump from seed teams to level 94’s and I start getting attacked. But it could just be that I’m usually one of the first ones to enter.

After being attacked a few times when I drop into the 90-110 point range again I might start to see a few level 15-40 teams. The powered up loaner would be dynamic, and coincide with the rewards point tier, so if you got attacked a bunch of times and fell below 150 points, your loaner would then be dropped back down to 1*/2* at level 20-40. And if you worked your way back up over the 150 point hump, it would be bumped back up to 2*/3* 60-90 with double powers. So low level teams would never have to face someone with a higher loaner than them. But in all the time I’ve been playing I’ve never once made it to the 250 point tier for the second standard recruit token because I don’t bother fighting 94/94/loaner teams, so I can’t comment on what starts to happen in that range, or when it starts to fill with 166/166 teams. I’m generally happy to get my 250 ISO reward from reaching 100 points and then just hit 1-2 more matches against low levels if I can for the win bonuses and wait for the next Lightning Round to start.

But I figured since after ~150 points (or it could be dialed back to 200+ if that’s more the norm) you’ll typically only see 94/94 anyways, it would be beneficial for those people to have a 60-90 loaner with double powers, as well as be more or less balanced since they’d have mirror loaners. And I figured having randomly selected powers from rank 3-5 gives people an opportunity to experience what a leveled up character with power rankings that would actually be used by real players feels like. If you’re only ever given a loaner character with a single rank 1 ability at level 60, and always the same ability every single match/Lightning Round, you never get to experience what that character will actually be like if you were to build one and level it up.

Since Lightning Rounds are more of an ISO farm than an actually competitive Versus mode (at least for 95% of the 10,000 man bracket) I thought it might be fun to have them double as a sandbox playground type environment where newer/transitioning players can get hands on playtime with say a Dr. Doom and his various abilities at rank 3-5 (because only ever playing rank 1 Summon Demons level 60 Doom can be misleading as to whether he’s a fun or viable character to use for players that don’t have a Doom yet). A maxed character will always be 5/5/3 or 5/4/4, so giving players hands on experience with various abilities at ranks 3, 4, and 5 by randomly generating different loaner builds every tier/match allows them to gauge how that character will truly play once leveled and covered, and help them decide how they’d like to eventually build their own rosters.

For a player with only level 20-40’s that just beat all of the seed teams and is now going up against 94/94/loaner, having a 60-90 loaner of their own to stand behind with a few rank 3-5 powers lets them experience that character and his abilities for at least part of that one match, even if there’s no way they can win it. When they normally would just stop playing that Lightning Round, they’d have an incentive to play at least one more match against a 94/94 team just to see what this new powered up loaner plays like. With a level 60 rank 1 Summon Demons Dr. Doom they wouldn’t even take that fight, and might walk away from the experience thinking, “Wow, Doom sucks, Summon Demons is weak.” But getting to play a level 60-90 Doom with rank 3, 4, or 5 Summon Demons and rank 3, 4, or 5 Diabolical Plot would make them say “Oh, this is what Doom will be like leveled up a bit, maybe I’ll build one this way, or this way.”

And for the players that actually have 94/94 teams to play, they can go up against the AI with actually capable loaner characters instead of being hampered by a rank 1 level 60, and it should be balanced if they both have the exact same powered up loaner on each side.

But all of this is just an additional idea I had that I thought would add a little something extra to Lightning Rounds as not only a light ISO farm (as they already are), but also a place for newer players to experience lots of different characters at varying power levels so they can make determinations on what type of rosters they’d like to fill out. There are always polls for what people think the best build for a character is, 3/5/5, 4/5/4, etc. But getting to actually play them is always the most ideal way. If Lightning Round loaners are randomly assigned powers between rank 3, 4, and 5 every match, if you play enough of them eventually you’ll have personal experience with each character and each of their powers at different levels. Except for the 4* if you can never score enough points to get that high.

But even if it’s something the devs would never consider and Lightning Rounds remained unchanged, having them at least running all the time gives players a place to farm a little bit of ISO, and makes sure there’s always something to do whenever you load the app, since there would be a new one going roughly every hour, and you wouldn’t have to worry about hitting the level 94 or 166 or 270 wall where you can no longer progress in that event until 4-5 days later for the next event, when after the first hour or two they’ll be stuck again until attacked several times.

4

i Always thought it was weird the the loaner only came with one cover when you trying to test them out. Another thing they might try is that the loaner gets more powerful as the event goes on culminating in a fully cover character 544 maybe a variant lightning round if it goes 24/7