A new character? Really? Again?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

It’s rant time.

So I woke up this morning and checked my Facebook feed to see that they decided to introduce a new character. Really??? ANOTHER new character?! Don’t get me wrong, I like that the game has more variety and that since I’ve started, they’ve moved toward that however, it’s making things for new players like me impossible.

I already went through in another thread how much exactly it costs to transition to a three star roster and how long it will take. That time frame and the cost is already unreasonable on D3P/Demiurge’s part. I’ve since realized I missed about 3-4 free packs and about 400 HP in rewards if you’re good but at most that will add about 1 extra 3* to your roster every month (being generous considering the horrendous 3* pack drop rate of course).

As I also explained previously, they’re full on deluded about how much most people should/will pay to be competitive in this game and adding new characters surreptitiously increases the bar for entry into consistent top 100 finishes in PvP even though in general, PvE is well balanced for even newer players. And changing MMR back didn’t really change things much as I still hit the “too high for me” characters wall at around 535 points in the last event.

So what is so wrong with only getting 20 new 3*s covers a month if you’re spending a reasonable amount on this game ($20 a month really isn’t all that reasonable, see my previous posts for reference) and playing more than an average player has time for?

__Level scaling is done all wrong __

As an example, I recently tried to level my Spider-Man to be a tank for purple and team-up tiles for MNMags and CStorm. Even though Spider-Man and MNMags both have purple as their second best color, I had to level him to 103 to get his purple damage to equal MNMags’ 94 purple and had to level him to 106 to get him to 30 team-up damage, the norm for all level 94s.

Why should I have to over-level a 3* by at least 10% to get him to equal match damage as a fully leveled 2*? Is it to offset the higher damage of 3* abilities?

New 3s covers come it at level 40 and new 4s at level 70 which is bad enough cause they’re not useful at all at these levels and with one cover but even with more covers…

___It takes a long time for a 3 to be useful___*

My Black Panther is currently at level 91 as a 2/4/1 cause that’s the covers I’ve been able to get. With only one cover, Rage of the Panther is exactly equal to the damage of a 4 cover/level 94 Ares rampage but it costs 2AP more, doesn’t have the upside of extra damage below 25% health and gives away AP to the opponent.

I would say to make it about equal, you’d have to have 3 black BP covers to make it even equal to a 2* at equal level. LThor is in the same boat with Call the Storm. And in general, there is no character that breaks the inequality mold except the inexplicable gap between 2* and 3* Cap’s Star Spangled Avenger.

How long will it take me to get those 2 extra BP black covers? Based on earning about 20 3* covers a month and needing approximately 300 3* covers fpr 28 3* characters right now (with new characters constantly upping that total) it should be about 3-4 months before BP is really as useful as my 2* Ares. That’s pretty bad.

I mean, as another spot example, my Mystique now has an above average for the time frame 5 covers and is 4/1/0 right now. Besides needing her for essential nodes in PVE and her being shoved down my throat in PVP, she is completely useless since all she does right now is put a crappy countdown on the board with a one turn stun and get rid of the three colors I use most in a good 2* roster: green, yellow and red.

Actually, worse than useless to be honest because she’s taking up a roster slot I paid 550 HP to get which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that…

There are so many useless/poorly designed characters in this game

Mystique is a great example of how bad a character can be. What’s worse is that D3P/Demiurge made it harder to get good characters like Patch through pack rotation and 3* dilution to get this terrible character.

She’s SO much worse than oBW… SOOOO much worse it’s hard to explain. Her purple power can at most net you 8 turns worth of AP. Even if the countdown doesn’t get matched away or used up with her black (which is the only thing that makes Mystique playable at all), in order for her power to net you equal AP to oBW’s 3 cover purple, your opponent would have to average 1.5 matches per turn for 6 of the 8 turns.

Not to mention that Mystique’s powers are in complete conflict with each other and the only way to get maximum value out of her is to be at a 5/5/5 build because without 5 purple, you steal colors you don’t need if you use her blue and without 5 in black you’re just taking the colors you need away from what is proven to be the three essential colors for damage dealing in most 3* characters - red, yellow, and green.

The forum’s quarterly rankings will point out other examples of characters poorly designed (none worse than Invisible Woman considering she’s a 4*) but them introducing 3s that don’t even compete with equivalent 2s except for the fact that they can level above 94 points to either gross oversight or incomprehensible greed on the part of the design team.

I would say the only exception to this is Blade’s green which is a little overpowered IMHO as I learned in the recent PvE nodes where he was included but considering his other abilities are pretty underpowered, it’s probably OK.

This can be fixed

So as to not seem completely useless, I’d like to suggest that there are ways to fix this. Most people aren’t going to like them because it’ll dilute value for people who played a long time or who extremely overpaid on 10/42 packs but I think it’s the only way to keep the 2>3* transition players playing now and grow the player base long term.

  • Rescale leveling so that 3* level 94 = 2* level 94 at least in terms of match damage.

  • Double the drop rate for 3s from 16% to 32% in the packs that are event specific. Right now you’re paying about a 50% markup for those packs just to increase the odds of getting a 3 from about 16% to 21%. Either that or make the daily deal packs that are event specific cost 130 HP in line with the 3*+ pack odds.

  • Guarantee at least a 4* and 4 3s in the 42 pack and guarantee at least 2 3s in the 10 pack. Considering how much worse of a discount you get versus buying the daily pack, this should be the offset in odds.

  • Short of redesigning every character myself as a suggestion, I’ll just say blanketly that many characters need to be redesigned to make them as powerful as LCap, LThor, X-Force and Patch from a damage dealing perspective but in colors other than Red, Yellow and Green. Stop introducing new characters which are essentially support characters and start doing better. A good place to start would be characters like Mystique, Psylocke, She Hulk and IM40.

  • As has been suggested by others here, create a wild card cover reward for PVP and PVE. Don’t just give out certain colors, let people choose what they need.

  • The most revolutionary idea I can suggest would be to make redundant 2* covers more useful by creating a sort of trade in system. Buying the daily pack is a constant disappointment. Having an 84% chance daily of turning 100HP into 250 Iso is almost an insult. As an alternative, create a system where you can trade multiple 2* covers in for a random 3* cover.

Considering the pack odds of 84% of getting a 2*, the trade in ratio would be strictly 5.25 2* for one random 3*. However, taking into account being able to win 2* covers in PVP nodes and accounting for how much people have invested in this game and the premium you’re asking for in pack deals, I’ll say it should be 13 2s for 1 random 3. This would mean that a fully covered 2* is worth a lousy single 3* cover at random which I think is more than fair.

To summarize, I have a lot of complaints about playing this game but would like to make it better. Thanks for reading everyone, had to get that off my chest.

2

I have to agree with everything but the Mystique part.

3

This. Comparing Mystique’s purple to Aggresive Recon (one of the best active skill in game) is a little unfair.

4

Really? I think she’s not top tier, but one of the best recent 3* additions. Have you met Beast?

5

Not at all unfair, in fact, I would say she was meant to be the 3* equivalent of oBW by design and should be directly compared.

And my point was not about her at 13 covers but in the context of how bad it can be to have an under-covered 3*. With her at 4/1/0 she is 25% of my 3* winnings for the month and is absolutely useless. Her at 13 covers and fully leveled? Different story entirely but ONLY because of her black which is what I pointed out.

6

Beast, Doc Ock, She Hulk, Mororo - All recent releases that are much much worse than Mystique. Hell Mystique has a 19 AP move(set) that does 7k damage, that’s pretty good.

I agree that the recent poll is largely being ignored in favor of getting cover and token sales off the latest Marvel hype. That’s unfortunate, but at least it brings a new PvE experience with it.

I’d like to see D3 scale back on the new character releases until they can pony up some PvE story for them. Right now this game is basically PvP driven with background PvE happening for character releases. It’s getting to be too similar and boring.

7

Agreed.

8

As others have said, I agree with this for the most part except Mystique. She’s really one of the better characters to be released recently - her black is impressive, blue is okay, and purple seems to be a way to ward off players from bringing in 2* BW… which someone had to, eventually.

But, to the main point… influx of new characters is ridiculous, considering the cost of roster slots.

9

agree that it’s just too many characters too quickly. and this is coming from someone with a maxed blade and mystique.

ease up d3…seriously. what’s the rush?

marc

10
11

My roster is at 55 (that’s 1 of everybody if you’re keeping score) and my slots now cost 700. My focus with the game is more on collecting the heroes than it necessarily is on powering out wins or grinding out huge numbers in PvP.

If we are adding Rocket & Groot and Gamora in the next two weeks, that’s another 1400 HP – basically $10 just to be able to add the new characters. I am not afraid to buy HP so I haven’t yet run into a situation where I had to choose to purge someone just to add a new 3* hero, but I can’t imagine how F2P collectors are able to keep up.

12

Sell your useless 1s, and save up the imcoin.png
over time to add them back. Seriously, on a 55 man roster a 1 is basically only useful for BoP which means all you need is covers, not levels, so sell Yelena and Venom and add them back to your roster as imcoin.png
permit.

The character release schedule should at least marginally conform to “it takes the average player this long to get the imcoin.png
to buy a roster slot” which unfortunately as available characters goes up, length of time goes up as well. I agree roster slots should cap out at a reasonable imcoin.png
number just to facilitate this schedule. Likely numbers being thrown about, but 500 seems about right, after 40 slots every slot is 500, at least until you reach 100 slots.

Time was, rosters of 50 were for the big ballers. You want 3 Thor’s on your roster? No problem. Now, just to have a roster inclusive of all the 3* characters that keep getting featured that’s like 30 slots right there. Players are actively punished for de-rostering someone in the form of lost Essentials points in PvE, so of course everyone is going to keep everyone. That’s the crux of the problem and why we don’t really want new characters right now!

Hi-Fi, and D3 in general, you have been great at listening to customer feedback recently. Much improved from 6 months ago, so please, listen to this. Our rosters are big enough. Your Q&A mentions “New characters inspire new PVE” but that hasn’t been the case since basically Deadpool. I’m still waiting on the Punisher story line promised at the end of Hulk, and for a conclusion to Dark Reign in general. I have no concept, at all, of how the Fantastic Four fit into the story, or the slew of X-Men aside from avengers add ons. Consider this, slow your character release roll to the point where new characters CAN be put into new PvE, and don’t release any more characters in Heroics, ever, ever again. Please. I feel like you missed a great opportunity to release Blade in an actual Halloween event, instead opting for yet another rerun.

13

Most 3* suck when undercovered. Some more than others. Sometimes it is more on one ability. Examples include Hood Blue, BP Black, LDaken Purple.

Also, judging a character not at their full potential is a bad way to judge one.

14

i think the best part of your proposed solution is to increase the odds of 3* pulls from tokens. it takes effort to get those as rewards and just massively disappointing when you get a 2*. add to that the dilution of 3* and they have essentially become useless.

15

Also why is iso drop so hard, you do a full clear of PVE at the start you might get one level for one character, later when its hard you get a quarter of a level for a full clear of really hard peeps, just these dribble of 20 iso. ATM I need about 6 million iso for my 3 stars, + however many iso to max 4 X 4 star all of which are max cover. 2 days of lighting rounds that are the only viable iso source, but they run at the same time as PVE end times so you have to choose either the PVE rewards or skipping iso for another week.

Again D3 punish good players because you cant possibly keep up the iso flow if you are winning covers. I hope they don’t ever just make iso cheaper it would create a massive outrage, also I am of the ind there should be something that you need to work for but conversely they need to be a bit more liberal with the iso rewards. ATM I am a heavy player probably around 9 hours a day, but it takes me about 4 - 5 weeks to level up a max cover 166, let alone even looking at my 4 stars.

Some math for the geeks

17 max 3 stars X 5 weeks
4 X 3 star that are close to max X 5 weeks
4 X 4 star X (20 weeks?)

That’s like 185 weeks!

So some time around 2018 I can level up all my 3 & 4 star characters, in the mean time if a new one comes out every 2 weeks there is another 92 characters by then. But despite all that there is no balance so no point to level anyone that isnt in the top 10. WHAT’S MY MOTIVATION FOR PLAYING THIS AGAIN??

16

I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, it’s central to my argument that they should be compared this way. For most people, I would say they actually do make this comparison and should. Why?

  • 3*s are harder to get than 2 stars and take time. It is the primary motivation for playing the game.
  • Fully leveled 2*s are relatively easy to come by in a short period of time.
  • Most people have undercoverred 3*s for LONG periods of time.
  • If you get a few covers (at least 6) for a specific 3* character in a reasonable amount of time and money, you are reasonably lucky because most players (read: greater than 90%) don’t get top alliance and pvp/pve placement covers to be able to get a character to full potential in less than two months time.
  • If you pay to have roster slots you should get value out of the character in that roster slot.
  • If a 3* in one of those roster slots significantly underperforms against a 2* (especially if they’re both at level 94) then you are not getting value out of pursuing a 3* character within a reasonable timeframe.
  • This undercuts the motivation for even getting a 3* in the first place unless you’re willing to play for the REALLY long end game, get in a top alliance that’s outperforming you or are willing to spend a ton of money.

I’m pretty sure that in the chase for 3s you should want to use them as soon as possible, that’s what makes it fun to get new characters in the first place. I would say that comparing a 3 that has enough covers to be leveled to 94 should not underperform but should in all cases OUTPERFORM a 2* 94 considering they cost a premium versus 2*s. One of my points is that they almost always underperform which is a bad omen for the game’s longevity and speaks volumes of how poorly designed most characters are.

You know how many useless 3* people I have on my roster? All of em except two and one of em is a LCap I’ve been lucky enough to get 12 covers for and I have 28 of em. That’s 26 undercoverred 3*s that I’ve worked hard to get and do almost nothing for me. That leads me to not want to wait for the end game, not to mention that more than 20 them will do nothing for me in the end game anyway since Hood, Sentry and XForce are the only real PVP end game for top ranks.

So yeah, can’t agree with you at all when looking at the average player.

17

I m on my way to build the 3* roster…I only want to BUILD it up and not get fuck up in every PVP…

New characters…rotation of old character and we loss chance to build them up…

New character and other covers all get by 166 and 270 teams..

what the fuck the dev team brain is thinking?

18

BTW, I’d like to add in my last suggestion which I posted in another thread but didn’t report here which is to add “auras” to characters - effects which are always on. For instance, Falcon could say, “add 25% to Captain America’s match damage” or Spider-Man could say, “+3 Blue AP when facing Doctor Octopus.”

This would:

  • Add instant play-ability to any 3* since it comes baked in without the need for a specific color cover
  • Create fun dynamics in making teams
  • Create more opponent interaction in choosing certain characters to play against your opponents
  • Make a broader base of characters more viable
  • Create a real meta-game as opposed to the current “Hood/Sentry/X-Force cause they do the most damage the quickest” in PVP
  • Add viability to support characters which currently pretty much suck like Spider-Man since the True Healing change
19

Some of those are interesting, but too complicated for this game. They used to have boosts that did 50% damage toward the Maggia, or Hammer, or Dark Avengers, but they removed those to simplify the game, eg they were too conditional and not being used.

The system of red-iso boosting characters for events is easier to follow.

20

Yep, I’ve had to sell off my 1* characters to open up roster slots for new characters. I didnt want to sell my Venom, but since Spidey is somewhat useless now, I got rid of Venom… so no more nomnomnom icon_cry.gif

Will you really be happy about spending away another 500-700 HP when you want to add that 1* character again? 1*'s are usually buffed in the Heroic events so they do serve a purpose.