4* Land Observations

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So we all agree that 4* land is now the heart of the game. What does that mean moving forward? (this is moved from another thread for which it was slightly off-topic)

A few observations:

  1. I think most people will agree that 4s are still too hard to get for the majority of players. The top 10/20/100 reward tiers just aren’t enough. Especially when there are many fewer covers given out in PvP as well and no chance that old 4s are pve rewards. Nor is there any way to earn multiple covers for the same 4* in any given event post-release, which makes building 4s a much longer process). It’s time for 4 PvP and pve events to enter regular rotation.

  2. 3* land is more or less dead and perhaps it should be trimmed. 40 3*s is way too many for an intermediate tier of play (Especially when only about 10 are actively useful). It seems like this will be a problem for demiurge moving forward. The player base is fragmenting and it is very hard to serve every segment.

  3. 5s need to be introduced. Right now averagely-rostered vets like me and superwhales like colog are both competing for the same 4 rewards. That’s untenable. Either the rewards are reasonable for me, in which case colog loses interest because they are too easy, or they are a good challenge for colog, and thus too hard for me. Whales need a super rare reward to chase, but the bulk of the player base needs to feel that the endgame is attainable. Last year the bulk of players were collecting 3s and only the super elites were building xforce and iw. Now everyone needs 4s and I don’t see how one tier of 4*s can serve both purposes.

  4. Related to #2, but new player progression will have to be kicked into overdrive. New players are now expected to build through three tiers of play before reaching and endgame. And with 4* and 3* essentials in pve, most new players will have a difficult time leveraging their lower scaling because they will likely be missing one or two thirds of the essential nodes. Plus with 40 3*s in the token pool, it will require a lot of roster space to survive those brutal early months of play.

2

As the months go by, more and more ways to get 4*'s will be presented in my opinion. They seem to be focused on making the 4 star meta the new goal, with 3* transitioning being what the 2* transition was 6 or 7 months ago, a stepping stone.

That being said, more ways to earn iso and HP are going to need to be added to keep up with leveling and rostering, but it would not surprise me to see 4* featured PVP’s in the next couple of seasons, becoming more regular as time goes on.

3

good observations, give us more iso and more PVE 4* rewards

and 5* can be thanos with 5 gem goons or galactus with 2 of his hands as goons

also we need high level seed teams to hit 1300 in PVP

4

4* should be hard for the majority of players. A majority of players are not built to be collecting 4s. Phrased another way, if you can’t at least semi-consistently hit 1000, you’re not really ready for a 4 roster.

As someone who is deep in the 4* transition, I think the ‘flow’ of 4* characters is good right now. A few more here and there couldn’t hurt, especially as the releases keep hitting, but you have to be careful about marginalizing the transition at any stage.

I also have confidence that we will see another increase in availability from somewhere. Maybe top 5 rewards in PvP/PvE, maybe additional progression, but I believe it will be addressed.

As for the rest, 3* land is not dead, and 5* land is not a thing that needs to happen, IMO.

5

I’m in the middle of transitioning from 3* land to 4* land. I have 20 maxed 3s on my roster, and a bunch more fully covered. So I’m trying to build up my 4s to where they will be useful (only one useful so far is a 4/4/4 XForce).

I think there’s plenty of opportunity to get 4* covers. I’m able to usually hit 1k in PvP with my 3* roster by using the currently boosted characters. I can grind the PvEs to get top 10s in the 4* releases (got top 10 for IMHB, Carnage and Ant-Man). Plus I was about to get my ProfX in the Simulator last season. So I don’t really see why it’s necessary for the game to make it easier to get more 4*s.

I would like to see more Gauntlet-style PvE though. I liked the last tweaked Gauntlet with the 3 3* rewards and a 4* at the end. And I liked the Ant-Man PvE to get the 1 cover. I think that should be done for all of the new 4* releases.

I’ll also agree with the above poster that if you can’t get 1k consistently in PvP, then you aren’t ready to move up to 4*s anyway.

6

I think that by including the highlighted language, you are kinda conceding my point smurf. the 4* releases ARE going to keep coming. At this time last year the game had just introduced its third 4*. The game now has almost 15, and the pace has been accelerating very rapidly.

Giving out 1 cover for a pair of 4s each pvp event (or 3 with the 1300 reward) is find when the 4 bench is small. But’s no longer small. Think about how long it took you to build a 3* roster, especially before you got in a decent alliance and started getting those alliance covers. Now imagine how long it would have taken you to build your 3s if you only ever got 1 cover per character per event. That’s why 4s need to go into regular pve and pvp rotation. demiurge will still probably be careful and keep the reward bands tighter than they were for 3s, but I think that with 15-25 4s in the game, a real 4* transition won’t be possible until players can get more than one cover per event for any given 4* character.

7

lots of things they could do to supplement/increase the ability to earn ****s:

  • weekly/monthly antman quest
  • adding a **** cover at 2 or 2.5x pve progression
  • reducing pvp progressions to 900 and 1200

question is, what WILL they do.

8

How many maxed 3*'s do you need before you’re, “ready for a 4* roster”? Because I have a whole ton of them, plus two 4*'s at level 200 or thereabouts, and I can’t consistently hit 1000. With a five-cover Ant-Man, literally the most covers it’s possible to have without buying any, I still couldn’t hit 1000.

9

You’re wrong.

4* is an elite bracket for vets to chase and fulfill, and to keep long term players invested.

I’d honestly argue 2* is the heart of the game, as that’s where new fresh players are forging their connection to the game, and is why they’re the most plentiful tokens handed out through out the game, and 3* is likely the “core” of the experience, for those that do grasp and become attached while playing with 2* characters.

10

remember forumites represent a small slice at the top of the game. my guess is that the majority of players play a ** roster or are early in *** transition. with turnover and casual players, that is my guess, but I’d love to see some metrics on average roster and average time spent on the game each day. and average performance, etc.

11

You are correct that the bulk of players are now and always have been in the 2* space. I stand by my statement however. For the first 15 months of its existence, the creative energies of the dev team were clearly devoted to building and balancing 3* land. It had the most characters, it contained the essential characters for PVE events and the featured characters for pvp events. While most of the player base was in 2*, the drive of the game was build and use a 3* roster. For most of the first year, 4*s were just a super-rare trophy item that didn’t affect the meta and just differentiated the super-elite from the bulk of vets.

So I guess the point I was trying to make is that the creative energies of the dev team are now clearly focused on building and balancing the 4* space. They finally settled on a relative power level for 4s and tried to tweak everyone into that range (bumping elektra and fury up, and 4thor and xforce down). They have built out the 4* bench so much than superwhales no longer need to field 3* characters at all outside of essentials. They have changed up the pve essentials system so that 4*s are now necessary roster components.

That’s what I mean when I say that 4* land is the heart of the game. 1* land, 2* land, and 3* land are all essentially built and won’t see many changes, 4* land is the vibrant part of the game that is growing and changing and driving the meta.

12

For an active PvPer, It’ll take you about as long to cover any given 4* as it would have when Elektra was released. I think the rate of covers is fine, and would expect to see another adjustment, like the second 4* progression, after a couple more 4* characters are added.

ISO dilution is the big problem. The ISO rate is pretty good for someone in 3* land, after the leveling change and the boosted characters, but inadequate for someone in 4* land, especially if their schedule doesn’t work well with lightning rounds.

The 4* leveling cost curve should be looked at again if the majority of character releases are going to be 4* releases, even if it’s only to make it easier to get the 4* to level 200, similar to the ease of getting a 3* to 120 under the current system. The addition of a few large ISO rewards (maybe 1500 ISO at 1100 points and 2500 ISO at 1200 points) in the 1000-1300 range would be a good idea, too.

ISO costs are, I think, a big reason why the IF/HB combo has become so prevalent. It works really well in the absence of boosts, which has huge value to players. Maxing out any other 4*, who might not be that useful for the 80% of the time when they’re not boosted, is just not something that looks like it’s worth it.

13

This. Every point actually.

Sorry, that’s all I wanted to say for the most part.

Personally I’ve chosen to buy into both 4Thor and PX (I collected XF without any real $). Reason is that I realize the amount of work required to win 4* covers, and I could very well win 4* covers with my roster, but I quite frankly want to play those characters now rather than in 3-4 months and not be totally glued to my phone, grinding away using the same monotonous characters.

I’ve got most of the my 4* with at least one of each cover, but quite frankly I’m more afraid of strong 3* teams than I am of XF/4T.

14

This is maybe the third time I’ve seen you say this. What on earth are you talking about? Seed teams take you to 225 maybe if you catch them at the very beginning. So how would this work in your world to bring everyone up to 1300?

On topic, in the last couple weeks I’ve gotten Star Lord to 13 covers and Elektra to 12. imhb, 4or, XForce and IW were already at 13. Carnage has 11. Prof X last season went from 2/1/1 to 4/2/3… Just a few weeks. I feel like the drop rate is good, it’s the new blood that won’t stop that’s a problem. Thing is 0/0/3, Ant Man is 1/1/2, I doubt I will get a Jean Grey to be honest.

15

I too wanted to ask him this. I assume he means that when you reach the top of the unshielded population instead of cycling through guys for 3-5 points you see a “seed” team that’s at 1300 points. My question is more what is that team (Max feature + both maxed weekly 4*?) and how many points should it have (I said 1300, but maybe lower)? It’s not the worst idea, but it adds far too many free points to the system if people can see these seed teams on a semi-regular basis. Can’t see them doing that.

16

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: fuck that noise.

The idea that “if you can’t hit a tier in a mode of the game you may have no interest in playing, you don’t deserve/aren’t ready for a class of character that those of us who DO play that mode at a high level can get” is…if I said what I really think of it I’d probably find myself on time-out.

I’m not saying hand them out like candy, but an elitist “you’re not ready for these characters unless you meet my arbitrary criteria” attitude is really not helpful.

17

Wait, so you think 4s should be “hard” to get but then go on to say that you bought covers for some 4s because you didn’t want to spend the time it would take to get them?

That’s kind of exactly what I mean when I say that 4s are by and large too hard to get. It’s not that any individual cover is too hard (getting 1k with is fairly straightforward now with a decent 3 roster). It’s that getting enough covers to make 4s playable takes too long to be reasonable. Assume you grind decently hard for a new 4 release and get 3 covers (2 from yourself and 1 from your alliance). Then you score 1k in the character’s release pvp event to get a 4th cover. Now you need 6-9 more before the character is playable. With something like 15 4s in rotation now, and more on the way, it will be something like 45 pvp events before the character has cycled around to to the 1k reward 3 times. So IF you score 1k at every opportunity, and IF you also score 1300 at every opportunity (a much harder proposition) AND you get some lucky cover pulls or a gauntlet event, or a 1st place finish, or a simulator reward, you might cover that 4 in time in something like 100 days. Of course, during those 100 days, demiurge will have released 6-8 more new characters that will add to the cycle length and dilute token odds and soak up roster space/HP that you need for shielding to make 1300.

Do you remember the slog you had to go through to build your first 3*? it sucked and took something like 100 days if you were pretty fast about it. In the current system, it’s very hard to build a 4* faster than that without spending cash or getting extremely lucky.

And demiurge knows this. That’s why they have been increasing the distribution rate of 4s signficantly over the past couple of months. I’m just trying to suggest that the rate still isn’t high enough, especially if they want 4 to become the new end-game playground which they clearly do. I am shocked at the amount of pushback to this suggestion. And I agree with DFiPL that the “you’re not ready for these characters unless you meet my arbitrary criteria” attitude is really not helpful.

18

Having a 4* essential like Hulkbuster in the current PVE highlights this situation rather well IMO. How many average players have such a cover less then 5% I guess so lose out on ISO/Points? Here is a 7 day PVE bad enough but then to lock out 1/3rd of it with a 4 * and for those in 3 * land with no free roster slots a 2 * like Hawkeye is crazy. So a PVE like Hulk is now 2/3rds closed to a player like me with only a mere 53 other characters. Inclusive playing is not part of the ethos here. Not going to burn 700 HP to roster a 2* like Hawkeye when I have 2* elites like Magneto/OBW/Thor and Wolverine instead. Progression reward for this PVE is a Psylocke cover for heavens sake, only top teams will get the Jean Grey cover so no point. Can get a Psylocke cover in DPQ in a few days without grinding away for days this is madness! icon_evil.gif

19

Since it is clear (with the 4th 4* release in a row) that D3 will go this path on, I am heavy thinking… Will I go the 4* transition way?!

I completely do understand D3 with there business. With 3*s they can earn no more money and no money means no staff means no development means no game… and that is bad.

So I agree 3* land is a dead end with no progress (and no progress is for me like being dead), so as full established 3* player who can get the 1k PvP rewards with enough time at the end of the day (and don’t forget, real life is important too) and lil bit luck with token’s you can build up a 4* roster if you are a hardworking bee.

The ISO gap is a problem, HP not. Got 63 slots as a over 450 days F2P player, sold all my 2s and 1s (kept 4 2s and 3 1’s for DDQ) long time ago to make space, have every 3* and 4* (except Elektra and Thing) and 5 slots unused. The 2* essential for PvE can always be collected as a early reward in the PvE itself (or you get it random from tokens).

Maybe there is long requested DDQ style event coming for 4*s and then it would even easier to get them all and if you have a strong alliance, it gets even faster.

The only question left for me, do I have the time and will to go the 4* transition?

Without to much friends or family (especially the little loved ones), SURE! No Problem! But with age comes family, comes bills, comes obligations and so on.

So to spend this much time into a time killing Match-3-Game even with my beloved super marvel heroes and RPG style strategy background and so much other not mobile games at the hand… its pretty hard out there in 4*land for a guy with real life too…

Conclusion:

Getting a 4* roster with enough time effort is absolutely possible at the moment, period! ISO getting is a prob that will be served by D3 in the next weeks/month, I am sure of. To every one who can beat everyone else with their 3* roster, now its the time to do the 4* transition to keep your long time motivation up!

20

the only winner here is d3.. 4* meta is just another mean to siphon off money from us.. the so called “whales”.. in 3* meta i could easily gather 9-10 covers between pvp/pve (4 in the releasing pve (individual and alliance), 4 in pvp (individual and alliance), 2 prog reward (pve and pvp)).. that lets me 3 -4 covers to buy for a total of 3750-5000 hp (less than an asgardian tresasure).. now even if i bust my ass off to finish top 2 in pve and first in pvp, i can scantly muster 6 covers (mb 7 if they put one in prog reward at 1300 in the next pvp, and its not a given as they proved it with thing).. total cost to cover max 7-8 covers for 17 500-20 000 hp.. a steep increase of 400 % in hp (you need to buy a stark roughly to instamax a 4*).. and i m not buying isos.. there is no way to justifiy such an inflation.. Eveb more when the toons are not that good..most 4* are feeling more like 3.5*.. the temporary buff make the new 4* look great before becoming a bench warmer ..personnally, if they dont better the 4* covers flow, i will stop investing in hp (at the rate they release 4*, you need 2 starks each season just to level the new chars).. this level of money is not sustainable for a mobile game..