3rd Anniversary: Hits and Misses

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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Day 1085 vet here, so this is my third anniversary with MPQ. I won’t rehash the first or second one, because those who went through them know how awesome the first one was and how abysmal the second one was. As for the third one, here is what I took away from it:

Hits:
Double ISO (though I would argue this should be the norm, but that is a discussion for another thread).

Trying something new. I’ll give credit for them here, but for something like the BFF pvp, an anniversary season is not the place for it. Also trying a new kind of Boss battle (though my thoughts on that are more under “misses”).

Lots of anniversary tokens, and a good (great?) vault. I still have three days left, but so far, of the 39/100 tokens I have pulled (including daily deals), I have gotten 600 HP, 10K ISO, an LT, 3 Dino covers, PunMax, and 10 3*s for champ levels.

Peggy covers for the Boss battle

Misses
The BFF PVP. What a slog, and I didn’t even get to have fun by play testing with pairs of boosted characters, or try fighting against them, because EVERY SINGLE match was OML/PHX. So many better ways this could have gone, all of which have already been suggested in the thread about that event.

No CLs. And no explanation for why we didn’t get them.

Venom Bomb, one of the most hated PVEs because of annoying symbiotes, run during what should be a week celebrating the game’s players (PLease don’t copy and paste this and tell me how to beat them…I know how to beat them…I just hate waiting over 10 seconds for my turn).

Pitting alliance mates against each other in a Boss battle (granted, the reward is MoStorm, but still…). Also, there are apparently some point glitches, so even if you are hyped on competing within your own alliance, you may have already lost out.

Taking away alliance progression and changing it to placement. Making Peggy covers individual progression rewards instead of alliance rewards. Basically treating it more like a “normal” PVE.

Increasing the difficulty level every 8 hours. WHY??? Also, I just started the event and am only on R3, but the scaling already seems like it’s going to get way out of hand.

Not communicating these Boss battle specifics early enough.

No boosted 2* or 3s for Class of 2016 PVP. No, this did not affect me, but it could affect 2-3 players by discouraging them from playing at all.

Season 10 pack at 3K. Again, doesn’t affect me, but would certainly affect a larger percentage of casual PVPers.

Finally, one that is a personal gripe: Looking at the daily resupply for day 1093 is red Dino, so I presume that 1094/1095 will be green and purple. Yes, I champed my Dino (yes, I’ll have buyer’s remorse next week) and can technically use those covers. But seriously…3 years of playing this game and I get three covers of a joke 4*? I’d take one 5* over that (Goblin purple is on day 490, but that’s part of the 90 day 5* rotation, so I’m not counting that). Instead maybe 3 LTs. Or 25 CP for 3 days in a row. But Dino as a reward for me sticking with this game for this long? C’mon…

I’m sure there are other misses (and maybe even hits) that I missed.

TLDR: a few good things (mainly double ISO), but too many fails overshadow the good this year.

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I have a feeling that they got rid of CLs in anniversary events because the rewards would need to be completely re tweaked for each CL level at double ISO. So there may have been problems to do that. Or they were just stingy and decided “Well it’s double iso, we can be stingy, people wouldn’t notice anyway”. I have feeling it was the lazy reason. It’s probably just a push of a button and then reinsert double iso code they used for old events without CL. Compared with having to go in change every single reward on progression, placement, and then change it for 6 Clearance levels. It does sorta seem like a lot of work. Also what if they screw up and they give out way more iso than was intended like they did with the grandfathered iso. We all know they don’t or can’t take things back from players.

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This looks like a pretty accurate analysis to me.

One minor addition I might add is the pre-anniversary sale. It’s a negative for players when Demi offers a sale prior to, but not during, a big event. Demi effectively wants us all to pre-order anniversary week.

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Double ISO was nice. In fact, I think if they had júst done that everybody would have been super happy. The rest has been frustrating. Terrible event choices with a heroic and venom bomb, specialized pvp events that favour the whales even more than usual, a pve event that is basically already over for me while there’s still 3 days left.

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Bad:
Cover rewards missing from PvP individual fights. Really missed those in LRs, if nothing else.

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Hit
Double ISO

Miss
No increased drop rate on 5* covers.

boss event scaling is insane,45k to drop the boss in round 3? Really?
progression or Peggy doesn’t look achievable with a merging 3/4* transitioning roster.
at first glance anyway

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Aside from double ISO and the Vault, there isn’t much I care for from this Anniversary.

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Hit(s):
Double ISO
Anniversary Vault

Miss: Boss Run setup, execution, overall a horrendous end to the Anniversary run.

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Why the hell couldn’t they put the Class of 2016 characters at increased rates in the cover packs? They are literally Heroics.

There’s tight, and then there’s Demiurge icon_rolleyes.gif

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Dear devs,

Given the boosted list in Class of 2016, and the entire experience of both BFFs & Boss Rush, I appreciate that you went to the trouble of programming (and ostensibly testing) these new events, but you could have saved some effort and just sent each and every player a picture of your extended middle fingers. It would have been pretty much the same thing. Thanks, and I look forward to whatever comes next.

Your friend,
kishida

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I was going to honestly say that this year had been a massive improvement over last year until the boss rush mode hit.

I like the mode itself, think it’s a nifty idea. I like the prize structure and I even kinda like that it’s an individual fight. Kinda makes it like the Gauntlet in a way.

What I dislike is the continued stupidity of increasing the difficulty of the pins every 8 hours. It makes no sense to do so in other boss events, it makes no sense here either. So because I didn’t clear things quick enough, the early rounds could have level 300 enemies but someone who cleared it quickly might have only had to face level 40 enemies? Why don’t they get harder as the rounds progress? You can’t tell me that’s not possible because that’s how the bosses escalate.

I also hate the boss scaling. I’m hoping, as I said in another thread, that someone just coded this wrong. Someone typed that they should scale faster than they intended somehow, maybe. Like in round 1 they should have been level 100, round 2 should be 150, round 3 200 and so on, but for some reason there’s extra scaling going on so they’re 100+Scaling boost.

If the current setup IS how it’s meant to play then I have to ask WTF. It would mean they literally learned nothing from Galactus and just dumped an identically evil murder grinder on us as a celebration. And I for one don’t want to believe that that is what they were going for.

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The perpetual question of MPQ: Are the devs more inept than they are cruel?

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Agreed. They seem to be very deliberate with this

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I agree with everyone else. Double ISO is great. Anniversary Vault is great. I wish they did more different types of vaults throughout the year, other than the typical 80-reward vault, ddq vault and anniversary vault. You could put in different types of rewards in different vaults, and I think that would make people excited.

Maybe an HP-heavy vault one time, and CP-heavy vault another time, a 4*-heavy vault another time, a vault that includes a single 5* another time, etc… there’s no reason why it needs to be the same every event.

I would’ve liked to have won more than one purple dino, instead of winning a ton of red and green dinos which will all go to the trash in a week, since I need a purple dino and only purple to champion him. Hopefully better luck next year… can you believe in 3 anniversaries, I’ve only drawn dino purple once?? The other time was at my day 365-ish login reward.

Misses are definitely some unneccessarily challenging events, such as bff (hello double champed 5* teams!), pvps with new / rare releases (dino + gwen), plus venom bomb, which I couldn’t even fully play, since I didn’t win gwenpool, so why bother if I can’t win the cp at the end. And if you take out scl, then maybe next time, you can re-work the progression rewards so that everyone can win 5 cp in the first and second thirds, then 15 cp in the end… I don’t like that without scl, suddenly you lose all cp unless you hit max prog.

And don’t get me started on boss rush… icon_redface.gif
Can we be “supposed to win” every now and then? It would be nice. How can Green Goblin (and maybe others?) take away 1000+ hit points for every match on EVERY COLOR??? That rips through every hero. So there’s absolutely no strategy, because you lose massive amounts of hit points no matter what.

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I posted this in another thread, but my list is pretty simular:

OK first off let me start by analyzing what was good and bad in this anniversary.

Good:

  • Double ISO
  • Anniversary Vault

Bad:

  • Boss Rush (more on this later)
  • BFF (MMR didn’t seem to work real well with 2 teams, great concept that I wouldn’t mind seeing if tweaked)
  • Class of 2016
  • Didn’t use SCL

Why is Boss Rush bad:

  • Brutal to the point of ridiculous scaling on the bosses
  • Rewards are laughably low compared to difficulty
  • Still uses the mechnic of the henchmen nodes scaling up every 8 hours that’s pretty much universilly disliked.
  • Not an alliance event

Improvements I’d like to see over next year:

  1. I didn’t like the first two PvE events being normal done to death events while PvP getting 100% unique. There should be more unique PvE events (at least 1 outside the boss event).

  2. I’d like to see a boss event where the following happen:
    a. The scaling on the boss should be such that he’s beatable without too much difficulty into level 5 or 6. Level 8 should be the difficulty that level 3/4 are in this event. You would obviously need to increase the amount of time the boss has to be beat each round to make this work, but that’s fine. Being a little grindy would be a welcome change to the way Boss Rush went.
    b. Do away with the 8 hour scaling increases. Increase the scaling on both boss and henchmen by level only.
    c. Better rewards. Round reward should be 5* or LT or 25 CP not a 3*…
    d. Make it an alliance event (this is the least important.

  3. It would be nice if instead of each event having it’s own event having it’s own vault in addition to the anniversary one, make them all go into the anniversary vault.

  4. Test the events better. It seems like every new event has some major issues with them.

  5. For class of 2016 it was only really viable for whales and/or people with high enough rosters to max out a lot of newer characters. For class of 2017 why not make a loner of each character available. The loaners shouldn’t be phenomenal, obviously, but something that at least allows people without strong newer characters to participate.

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For a week with double iso, I disagree. We have 51 other weeks to farm 2* covers. I was able to get something like 170k+ iso from LR. Wouldn’t been nearly as good with 1* covers mixed in there.

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The real problem with Boss Rush is that the boss nodes needs to be calibrated on a 2 match/health pack ratio. I.E. Your best A-team combo (2 heavy hitters, 1 support) should be able to survive 2 matches before they die and need a complete regeneration.

Forget about the points, levels, rewards and any other extraneous metrics.

Your Best team should have at least a 2:1 victory ratio on the most difficult node. Anything less, and you’ve effectively made the game play to pay.

Easy=20:1 victory ratio (i.e. a 4* team should be able to play 10-15 matches before they need health
Normal =10:1 victory ratio (i.e. a 4* team should be able to finish 2 different 4x node refreshes before you need health)
Hard =5:1 victory ratio (i.e. a 4* team should need less than 2 hps to finish a 4x node refresh

I’m don’t think I’m too far off on what the community thinks should be resonable difficulty

18

Another anniversary, another fail. Not sure if I’ll be around for the 4th try.

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  • No 50 HP tokens

  • the shield Simulator was good reward Cage is pretty new character

  • they did try new stuff I just wish they had playtested it

Boss Rush is a train wreck

Reward progression always baffles me, we get one health pack for 36500 points after getting a token for 20K makes no sense , 1 health pack is a 200 point reward I’d rather get a standard token . It’s such a slugfest to play the boss fight , freaking give us 20 health token for 35k

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Lol, I just posted a very similar thread that I had started before a meeting this morning. Seems the fan base thinking is in line.