A problem with PVE

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

The only reward that matters in PVE is the 25 CP. However if you don’t commit to playing for roughly 3-4 hours per day, then you can’t get that reward.

I would highly appreciate if in addition to the current pve, there was a new, slower PVE that lasted much longer, so you could hit the reward on your own time, playing less often but eventually getting there.

The reason why the current version is a problem is because due to the high amount of time required, I just won’t bother to play pve if I can only play for a few nodes per day, because it’s just not worth it.

Which is actually fine, as now when I just have a few minutes available, I’m playing other games instead! Other games where I can make significant progress by just playing for a few minutes per day… whereas with this game I gain what, 500 ISO? Which isn’t much when I need 360,000+ to champion a single 4*. Games that do include some timer-based goals, but they also have a large non-timer based section as well, so you can play it at your own pace, and it’s actually relaxing instead of extremely stressful to play.

And “play-at-your-own-pace” doesn’t really count for the new pve system where you still need to play for 3-4 hours per day to hit progression and 6-7 hours per day to hit top placement.

2

ISO is my main motivation to do regular PvE clears. Each node may not yield a whole lot, but it does add up with enough clears of enough nodes.
Obviously a case of YMMV though.

3

3-4 hours is I think more than what is actually required. I can get through a clear in less than 30 minutes, and 3 clears/day is typically all it takes to hit max progression. 3-4 hours gets me all green check marks which is above and beyond max progression - close to T20 in a non-release event.

4

That’s going to be a function of your roster. As a player who’s in the early 3* - 4* transition (i.e. no usable 4* unless boosted), the time for a clear is definitely closer to several hours than 30 minutes. Scaling on the harder nodes typically prevents me from doing 3 full clears before running out of HP, and since I can only play twice a day, at least a couple of those clears are at suboptimal points, which means I need to hit a few more nodes on top of that. I generally only hit full progression when a short event ends on a weekend or holiday.

5

they are trying to run a business if they gave you everything for playing 10 mins a day they go belly up.

love to know what games your playing for a few minutes per day and making Significant progress cause i really dont belive that.. unless your talking candy crush lol

they do have something you play at your own pace its called the shield… people have been here for almost 3 years and you expect to get the same rewards they been working for years to get in matter of weeks…

yea i was the same when i was a newbie but you soon will get over it. also why do you want the game to get eaiser you said it cost 360,000 to max out a 4 star.. okay lets lower that to 100,000 now you got major grinders getting all of their people max in a month or two and demanding more so now they bring out 6 stars to make them happy and to push you farer behind

6

You only need 3-4 hours if you’re playing for placement

7

Future Fight recently overhauled their daily mission structure and their daily achievement structure in such a way that it significantly reduced the play time required to complete them. 3 Villian Sieges a day instead of 12. 2 Daily Missions a day instead of 5. Only 1 Timeline Battle required instead of 5.

They have their own issues, certainly, but they’re generally not as tight-fisted as Demi has often been.

I never hit the CP progression award in Story events. Only the couple times it was turned way down for tests. And I do feel like I play too much as it is. YMMV of course.

8

I’ve played for over 700+ days, I’m surely not a noob. I have gotten 1300+ in pvp and hit max prog on pve many, many many many times. I’m just so sick of the time commitment. I want the excitement of the game without the additional stress of it.

I started playing khux, and that’s nice because there are so many different types of prizes you can win, that you truly can do a lot by just playing a few minutes per day. But of course if you play longer, you win more. But it truly feels like every battle actually matters, instead of mpq where it doesn’t matter unless you do around 30+ battles per day.. otherwise why even bother.

One nice thing about khux is that every day there are different daily challenges that give you different prizes, so you can always win something new and interesting. Not just small amounts of iso or else a very small chance at winning a 5*.

In mpq, I can do a few clears of a sub, and it only gives me around a few thousand iso, which just feels like too little to matter.

9

Depends on your roster and scaling. I wish it only took me 30 minutes for a full clear. It takes me closer to 60-75 per clear, so yes it’s takes 3-4 hours a day in cases like that.

10

Then why did you say it takes you 3-4 hours a day, when for someone with your roster, it’d only take 1?

11

Are you exclusively using winfinite? It shouldn’t take a developed roster over an hour to do 10 fights. A 3* player should be able to get through trivials in a minute, essentials take a bit longer - 3-4 minutes, and the 3 hard nodes a bit longer still 5-6 minutes. Worst case that’s 33 minutes plus however long the opening node takes - less than 5 minutes typically? That’s under 40 minutes.

Even when I had a single champed 5* and my next highest was at 360 and my scaling was all out of whack I could still clear in under 40 minutes. There is a thread over in the character discussion with some good 3* PvE teams in it - maybe check it out to give some tips on how to speed up your clears.

12

People need to relax.

OP says 3-4 hours a day to hit progression. Commenters are saying it should take way less. Other commenters are saying you only need to do 4 clears a day to hit progression. Other commenters are throwing figures around about how much time a clear should take… And everyone is pretty much saying the same thing but being overly critical of the OP.

Ideal clear according to a comment: 40 minutes.
Number of clears for Progression: 4 clears

40 x 4 = 160 minutes.
160 minutes = 2 hours 40 minutes. Pretty close to 3 hours.

OP says takes 3 to 4 hours. He isn’t far off from your very own calculations. Relax. Maybe he takes a little longer to think about the board choices. Maybe he has a bad wipe from scaling. If a wipe costs another 5 minutes and he wipes once per clear that’s another 20 minutes a day putting it at 3 hours exactly.

Stop, take a deep breath… repeat as necessary.

Edit: changed the verbiage to describe commenters intent.

13

Isn’t progression only 3 clears though?

OP isn’t stupid, he’s got his head on straight. I’m merely suggesting that if it’s taking someone with 700+ days over an hour to clear PvE then there are probably some improvements they could make to their play to speed things up and hopefully improve quality of life. The entire point of the thread is that PvE shouldn’t take 3-4 hours and I agree it shouldn’t…let’s talk about what we can do on the player end to speed things up too. I’d love to see OP’s roster and know what teams he is using that take so long.

14

I think that the OP has a valid point about the time commitment being out of whack with the rewards you get in Story mode. I’ve got 20 championed 3*'s now, still no max covered 4*'s but getting closer bit by bit. A full clear takes around 40 to 60 minutes for me depending on who’s boosted, who I’m fighting and what my board luck is like. To get the 25 CP is usually 3 full clears and maybe a little extra work so a rough estimate is 3.5 hours a day for 3, 4 or 7 days. That gets me one chance at a random 4 or 5* cover.

Contrast that with versus mode. 2 hours or so to first shield, then 6 minute hop to next shield and maybe a 6 minute hop again if I didn’t get to 1K after the first shield. That gives me a guaranteed 4* cover that I know the usefulness of in less than 3 hours work total. That also leaves the opportunity to go to 1300 for 25 cp with a little more work and another shield.

With Story Mode being so much more time intensive why are the rewards worse?

15

Each clear takes around 30+ minutes (3 hard nodes x 5+ minutes, 3 required nodes x 4+ minutes, 3 easy nodes x 1+ minutes, 1 loaner node x 3+ minutes) . You usually do around 4 full clears per day (2+ hours) plus around 1 hour of grinding per day right before the end (1+ hours). 3-4 hours.

At the very fastest, maybe you just do 3 clears, and it’s only 1.5+ hours / day. But then you run the risk that you miss a few clears and don’t actually hit max progression, which is a big let down to do so much work but not get the 25 cp out of it.

But I would say that the first clear can take up to an hour or more, especially if it’s one of the subs that has a ton of high-challenge one-time nodes, which happens more during Heroics (where you can use any 5*s to alleviate) but also during some of the non-Heroic PVEs like The Hunt (second sub is particularly egregious… darn you, Jump Jets!!).

I’m not asking for a massive increase of ISO. But for instance when they do double-iso, it feels worth it, because suddenly you get a few chances to win lots of ISO easily, which inspires me to play.

Perhaps moving forward, they can do some PVEs where you can win different special prizes from some of the nodes in the subs, including a PVE where you can win more Event Tokens, a different one where you can win more Heroic Tokens, one where you can win more CP, one where you can win more HP etc etc. Maybe even one where you can win lots of covers of a specific hero. Something that makes each PVE seem useful and important, varies it up a bit.

There are other games where each day, there are special quick levels where you can win different types of prizes (money, experience, tokens, weapons, outfits, etc), so you feel like you are getting a jump on hitting certain achievement goals, and you don’t feel so completely stuck and overwhelmed.

Right now, no matter what I do, there’s very little to get anywhere close to the 4 million + iso needed, so it just makes me feel like why bother at all.

16

Because you aren’t including the 700+ days it took you to build a roster capable of hitting 1300 at all, let alone in a couple hours…

OK, So it really takes you more like 2 hours/day to hit max progression, and then worst case you spend an extra hour grinding at the end if progression is higher than usual. Sounds like we are on the same page.

This is all the effort I typically put in to PvE. I have a life outside of MPQ so my play is often limited to about 3h/night with no breaks during the day to squeeze a clear in. So a clear at sub open, and then 2-3 suboptimal clears before sub close is often all I have time for. That with a bit more of a grind in the final sub (which typically has considerably more points) gets me to max progression.

17

I’m with you OP. Once you get to 4* land, it really feels all or nothing.

Yes, we all need iso, so there’s that.

But if you want to earn even a small trickle of leg tokens, you’re all in for 1,300 or max prog. There’s the 2 cp per day in pve, but if those drop on 7/7 and you had to do a full clear just to get there that’s still almost an hour of play to get one tenth of one token. If you have to clear a bunch on main page nodes just to unlock the sub or if there are wave nodes or a lot of one time nodes? Add some more time to that.

As always, we are our worst enemies. If people are ready and willing to play that much per day, then they have no incentive to change anything. Same argument as the silly store resource rates.

18

I am very glad there’s more posters chiming in to help the op out against these veteran forum members who always attack others on technicalities. Whether it is 3 hour or 2 does it really matter. Why should a mobile game take more than an hour each day. It should be a casual game!

Let’s do the math on someone’s typical life. 8 hours a day for sleep, 2-3 hours to eat and prepare food, 8 hours for a job, 1 hour for commute. So 19 hours a day is dedicated to essentials. So you have 5 hours of spare time. So if it takes 2-3 hours a day that is what - about 40-60% of someone’s spare time. What if they want to play another game or have other hobbies. What about kids and family, don’t you think that should take up more time than the game? Does it seem fair to have to spend that much percentage of spare time in a day to get such a small reward?

Let the ones that complete their rosters too quickly complain. Really they are the abnormal ones here and we shouldn’t be feeding their bad habit of ignoring their real life things. I know why you have to play so much. People spend more the more they play and thus that’s why this game requires so much commitment. It’s for profit simple as that.

There are many other casual games that require much less time and those games are the ones that are sucessful yet don’t expect huge revenues for doing nothing. Really just add more valuable bonus content for more revenue. Don’t expect people to not complain when clearly the content is stale, the rewards are unfair.

19

I have my good days and my bad days with Story mode…if I’m not playing anything on console, and just chilling and watching Netflix, or I’m super bored at work, then I usually play them. Otherwise, I don’t. And you know what? Not playing them is just fine. The world doesn’t implode, 98.85% of the rest of the player base doesn’t take a giant leap over me progression wise, everything is ok. The game can only piss you off and steal as much of your time as you let it.

20

PVE has not only a time-problem. The main problem is scaling. We have a new member and he has a real fresh roster:

SpiderGwen Lv74 0/1/1
Iceman Lv70 1/0/0
2CapMarv Lv52 2/2/4
1IronMan Lv50 5/4/4
Beast Lv45 2/1/1
3Torch Lv43 0/1/1
3Bullseye Lv40 0/0/1
Squirrel Lv40 1/0/0
2Widow Lv38 0/3/2
1Storm Lv28 5/4/4
2Thor Lv23 2/0/2
Moonstone Lv23 0/1/2
1Spiderman Lv20 2/2/3
2Bullseye Lv15 1/0/1
2Torch Lv15 1/0/0
1*Widow Lv11 4/5

So compare it to my roster, which has about 24 3*champs and 87 rosterslots.

In Juggs he has about 21.000 points, I have about 12.000(which comes from missing day 1 mostly but the baby nodes). My point is, i have one viable combination in this heroic, beast bp torch, he has a much lesser developed roster and scores the same(actual subnode)/higher then me. This is not envy or something, but should a new player have such scores in a heroic where much better developed rosters have nearly one viable combination? For me its a joke (again, nothing against my alliancemate) and the joke comes from scaling, which makes no sense. Its a cover for lack of content, we all (veterans/casuals/newbies) battle for the same rewards against the same enemies “just” with different difficulties. I want to have the choice, having his scaling to battle for the basic rewards (and rush through it) or a higher scaling to battle for even scaled rewards.