40 Wins Math and Why It Makes Sense From The Devs Point of View (IMHO)

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So just follow this mathematical trail.

A PVP event is 2.5 days long. 24 hours in a day means 60 hours of event time.

You play a battle then your entire time needs to have a health pack.

You regain a health pack a little over every 30 minutes. 3 x 30 min = 1.5 hours.

60 hours of event time divided by 1.5 hours of health pack regeneration = 40.

One battle every hour and a half doesn’t seem that bad (when you don’t think about Sim, LRs, PVE).

Guess we just pick our favorite mode and only play that.

2

It does when you add life into that mix.

3

I’m not pro-40. I’m vehemently against it. I’m just trying to look at it from their perspective.

4

And the Shadow.

5

We’ve been told before, or at least through Discord, that 40 wins was a compromise on the devs part. Whosoever crunches their numbers actually came up with something higher, so 40 was considered a boon.

6

And here is why it does not make sense from a player point of view. I used to get 1200 with cupcakes…they took that away although 5 star rosters still do them. So then I settled on the 4 star at 900. I just got to 1030 on the last event and didn’t even get the last 3 star reward at 28 wins. So they are making players play significantly more time to get the same rewards.

7

Unless it is a 4* cover I really need…I just go for 16 wins for 10 CP. I just played PvP before the change for the 10 CP anyway at 650 was it? I can see though where players who mainly play PvP would be very mad at this change. I did do 40 wins for the first event (for Mr. F cover) and it was possible but boring and time consuming. It really hurts all the players who could hit full progression before but now can’t get top placement. I would wager there are quite a few of those type of players trying to decide if they still want to invest time and/or money in the game. The devs don’t understand that 40 wins for 4* is great for transitioners who couldn’t normally get that 4* before but terrible for veterans. 40 wins is just far overvaluing a 4* cover, something the devs have always overestimated in value for the past year or more.

8

40 wins is in that awful ‘sweet spot’ of doable enough that a needed cover (like Nightcrawler) feels kinda worth doing it, but the grind is awful enough (3-4 play sessions required, vs. 2 previously to hit 900) that it’s a chore. Also relevant: previously, there was incentive to take on the strongest (or at least highest-point, which has some correlation with strength) targets possible, whereas now you just want to churn through easy targets because they take less time. 2-3 hours of cakewalk fights is vastly less fun than 60-90 minutes of challenging battles.

9

I very much doubt this was the rationale.

I would guess that one of two things led to 40 wins:

(1) Demi calculated the mean points value of every victory across all of pvp (call it v). And then 900/v is about 40.

or

(2) Demi/d3 set some arbitrary engagement metric target, and setting the cap around 40 (ie expecting the hardcore players to grind out 40 wins) would get the player engagement up near the target level.

Those seem like the sort of quasi-quantified, but fairly dumb in practice, things that happen when corporate mandates meet restricted development resources.

10

It’s 5 matches four times a day over a 48 hour event. Pretty much simple why They settled at 40 wins.

11

On discord, there have been a few insights. 40 wins was based on, from my understanding, actual metrics of matches played on average by players. I don’t believe they were looking at “what did you play to reach a score” but “how many matches did you play in an event”. There was even some back and forth where players learned how many matches they played on average and it was, in some cases, close to 40.

As someone pointed out, it was revealed that the initial proposed requirement (internally at the devs) was higher than 40, but they reduced it. It may be that some players were playing more than 40 matches when trying to get to 900 (PVPers know about being stuck so close but not making it).

If you assume that part of (most of?) the reason for the change was to remove perceived/experienced PVP negatives (losing score, being hit incessantly, trying to beat the crowd to get to the 900 score) among the majority of the playerbase, there is a fallacy, in my opinion, in using actual player experience as your guidepost. I would argue that PVP is the place that the true committed people play (PVE is the more casual player’s preference), so their engagement is already higher than the non-PVPers playtime, and, perhaps, preference. PVE can be approached on its own terms and you can play lightly, if you choose, and get benefits. PVP is obviously different.

So, if your goal is to bring more casual players into higher engagement, should you be using the highly engaged player’s match count as your metric? Or should you consider making the goal more attainable so the casual folks decide to give it a try and then become more engaged? (I argue B, of course.)

I am not sure if the developers want more 4s in player’s hands. It would appear that they either want more 4’s out there, or at least want to make them more attainable. I personally feel that more 4’s being rewarded is not detrimental to the game, as it increases excitement, it likely leads to more roster slots/HP sales, and it maintains the need to play (iso earnings higher due to leveling costs). Not to mention that the sheer number of 4 characters dwarfs any increased rewards you can earn through playing PVP. Consider that every 2 weeks, you need 13 more 4* covers (or 5*), but can win 6 covers in PVP progression. And most players have a huge backlog of 4* covers they already need. (55 characters? That’s 715 covers in the right distribution.)

If they do want more 4’s being rewarded, then I hope that the players show them that the 40 win requirement is too high as people stop sooner. And they adjust it downwards.

Also, if the developers insist on this wins based model, they should consider making PVP rewards closer to PVE rewards, with increased per win rewards or random (ie intercepts) bonuses. It would make it feel less slog-gy. A little, anyway. The PVE version of PVP takes a long time. A loooong time.

12

That logic would work if people stopped at 40 wins

13

This makes me think that another explanation might be distributing the server load. In the old system, I rarely had a reason to play outside the last 3 hours of an event. Now I pop in at various random times to play. It’s probably useful to them to have PVP be slightly less of a last minute crunch.

14

What I am interested is that now that we are into our 4th event in the new system how many players who were excited about the change are feeling now. I personally have gotten to 40 wins 2 out of the 3 events and got top 10 2 out of the 3 with an average score over 1500 points. I am planning on scoring high this next event but am completely skipping the 40 wins. The grind just gets to be too much every event. The good news for me is I started later so I believe I should have an easier bracket to top 10 and the 15 CP.
for those of you who liked the change how has the grind been and have you been able to get top 10 as well?