Alliance vs Alliance suggestions

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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After playing this a bit in a T100 alliance and seeing how myself and others experience it, I thought I would try to list out what I think would be the best improvements or ideas.

I assume as a baseline that:

  1. It is meant to remain as a side game that doesn’t demand lots of play time each day
  2. It is meant to increase interest and engagement in fairly low activity players, as high activity players don’t need any encouragement to play more, they just do it
  3. It therefore will continue to limit the activity of individual players to a degree, so it remains a mostly group effort by necessity
  4. The issues that pop up with performance and lag are already high on the list for the devs along with locking down blessings working correctly.

So, a list:

UI improvements

  1. The colors of the hexagons are just 2 without any shading or anything. A taken hexagon (from you) should look different from the ones I want to attack besides the yellow exclamation point, and any green bars around ones we have taken pins in. Maybe it could be shaded lighter once it’s taken.

Incentives

Every other thing you do in the game gives you a reward immediately when you do it. Win a pvp match? here’s some iso or a cover. Win PVE? get node rewards. Sure you can tap those out but the first time you get something. Here…nothing. Not a single thing.

  1. Offer a standard token for winning a front, either the first time you do it in that phase or every time. This encourages people to pitch in more than “hey guys we need someone to play this wave node and then we need 4 more hits to take the hexagon and I sure hope someone does it because I’m out of Morale”. right now the game is designed mostly around the concept of the “search for volunteers to take on work and wonder why only one person responded to my email”
  2. Offer a standard token for placing the first defender each round so more people do that. Limit it to one per player. This creates incentive to take part in doing it.
  3. Offensives should offer an additional reward set at the end for beating the other alliance. It is mind boggling to me that this doesn’t exist. It would create added incentive to keep going vs just chasing a 6 week goal through 8 Offensives and 48 phases.

Playing

Morale being so slow to recharge is a somewhat necessary evil for keeping a group active but also makes it hard to keep success going if things fall apart (people get bored or RL conflicts or whatever) and then your momentum/placement dies off and attrition takes hold. Is this the goal? winner is whoever sticks to it vs plays better? In any case:

  1. Make Morale somehow earnable or buyable. Maybe you can spend HP to get up to 3 within the first 12 hours of attack. Maybe placing the first defender earns you a morale point if you’re under 3. Maybe placing defenders (1 or more) increases recharge time 2x or something. Maybe there’s some side, side game you can play to earn morale (probably unlikely to be implemented).
  2. An Assist point - one per Attack phase. Did your ally mate give a node a shot? Did they lose? Guess how it feels to use your last Morale and fail? So, I’m thinking about an Assist point you can use to do clean up if you can/want after your ally mate died to an annoying iHulk defense but at least they took PM out. Or whatever. Creates added ally cohesion, makes it more fun than yelling into the void “hey does anyone have a morale left, I failed” and you look less like the putz who didn’t make the shot and now you’re the teammate who passed the ball to the guy under the basket. Maybe doing an Assist is half the points but at least maybe you took that hexagon and now you get the shards instead of time running out and it’s got 4 defenders standing.

Defense

Oh man, ok. Defense is a pain and people don’t like it. I’ve already made suggestions about how to make it more appealing. But anyway:

Problem 1: UI isn’t fun to use. Many ideas around this already exist

Problem 2: Many people are starting to default to a boring meta (boring because it’s a solved problem)

Solutions might include:

  1. Obviously the blessing working right will shake things up some
  2. What if there was a a loaner option for the middle square of the grid, so in wave 2? You don’t want it, fine, remove for free. You want it? Great, build around it. Maybe they are boosted. Tie it to the theme of the map so they stand out more from each other and leverage the Marvel-ness of the game. Maybe you loan a goon type who generates AP…? That would be cool and different to use as a player. These are just brainstorming ideas but I feel like without doing something to shake up things we’ll just get massively bored of this whole thing within a few months of fighting the same teams over and over.

Timing:

The event is too long. 8 Offensives? why? There’s no good way to even know which one you’re in especially without any Offensive end rewards to distinguish them.

Do you need to reduce rewards to make it shorter? Do that.

What is the optimal length? I don’t know for sure but 5 seems like the upper bound. Maybe there’s a regular season and a playoff? IDK what’s possible. But there’s no way you keep your 200th place alliance super engaged past Offensive 4 to earn some random 5s in 3 more weeks. Making players accept a mindset of “this thing I’m still ‘playing’ doesn’t matter because we’re losing and have no shot” as a baseline for most of it’s time running is gonna kill it fast.

The shifting timeframes are so annoying to keep track of. Is that supposed to allow more players around the world to play and compete? The only advantage really comes down to morale and the recharge if you can play within the first 12 hours of attack. Is the idea to constantly shift what players will have an advantage from being awake and able to play in those time frames?

Maybe remove that or make earning it by winning attacks or something instead. Just make all of this run on a 24 hour cycle each phase. “12 hours is too long already for defense” no it’s not. If it is, it’s better to make someone wait to attack than to make it hard to remember what’s happening when especially with the 6 hours shifting all the times every Offensive. The entire rest of the game has very predictable cycles and times when you can do things.

Let’s say your defense phase started at 1 pm in Engagement 1. OK, so in 36 hours it starts at 1 AM. Then in 36 hours it starts at 1 pm again.

Offensive 2: Defense phase starts at 7 AM (and change, because of some weird number of minutes in between, so like 7:23 or something)

WHY is this seen as an acceptable schedule? Offensive 3 will start at like 1: 44 PM defense and Offensive 4 will start at like 8:14 AM with defense. I am not sure, ball parking here on the minutes.

What time does slice 1 in PVE start for me? 7 AM. Every day for however many years it’s been (at least 11), it’s the same. (except it ends weird when clocks change)

Please for the love of Odin make this run on a predictable easy, on the hour, schedule.

Thank you for your consideration.

TLDR you seem to have come up with a game design that was not built with the habits and desires of the player base you have but something that…I dunno…imagines a different one? or hopes that some huge influx of new people will come in to bang their heads against vets’ meta defenses and lose after 3 tries? I am afraid that you need to rework this to meet the players you have, where they are.

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And you said you didn’t have the time or inclination to involve yourself in the beta @bluewolf. Just look at you now!

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Defense is the part that’s going to need the biggest change. It’s a role reversal for the players as they are essentially creating a PvE wave node (or to paraphrase from another game, defense is taking on the role of Dungeon Master instead of adventuring player) and not everyone wants to do that.

Plus as a commander if I remove someones character I can’t replace that one in another spot I can only use my own roster. Sometimes I just need to remove and replace. Obviously a drag-drop helps with that in a particular node but doesn’t help if I want to move that character to another node entirely now that its been freed up.

Some alliances probably don’t care much at all about trying to set meta teams (I know this from the casuals we’ve played in the 100+ range). For them, a ‘random fill’ button that simply pulled max level characters from across all rosters with non-zero resolve would suffice (ie you click random fill on a 2 star node and it just grabs 2s from across all 20 players rosters who are L144 and if there aren’t enough grabs a 143 and so on until all 9 slots are filled).

KGB

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Why do you consistently speak as if you represent the player base? Its always the same too, you fabricate, misinform, misconstrue and then position yourself as if you’re speaking for a large body. Why can’t you have an opinion that doesnt try to front like its majority based?

“I assume as a baseline” why? It gets you into trouble every time you attempt to make a point.

“I’m going to make assumptions on intent, and then I’m going to make judgments based on what I will then also assume are correct assumptions. I see no problem with this.”

Where we agree

-The lack of rewards for the nodes is bad design.

-The engagement rewards are bad too. For the collective effort it takes to have success, they are extremely poor.

-No offensive rewards is also a poor choice.

Where we disagree

-adding morale. The point is efficiency. You talk about them not understanding their player base yet you want resource starved players throwing more into a mode for very little return.

-failing happens. Participation trophies are lame.

-“many people are starting to default to a boring meta” where are you getting this data from? Did you take a straw poll and publish it? Or is it you “reading the room”?

-Why does it need to be shorter? Why are you suggesting they lower rewards to make it shorter? Theres no reasoning except you feel it is too long.

instead of complaining and positioning yourself as the class president to demand changes, maybe just dont play it? Why is this concept lost on some of you. Do you show up at the ice cream shop and demand they make you a steak too? I don’t watch tennis but I think I’m going to write an open letter to the head of the US mens tennis association letting him know the changes I want that may, perhaps have me do so cause that seems logical.

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The real problem here is that the essay is too long. Pick one or two of the most important changes and focus on them.

The rewards suck. This takes considerably more effort than DDQ which, for sake of simplicity, let’s say gives an expected 2x 3 star covers a day (a mighty token and the essential 3 star of the day). The expected 3 star Tier rewards for 36 hours of AvA is 20 shards? (With a possibility of 40 shards in a dominant match up.) Why can’t it be 150 shards or more even? If this is supposed to be a casual daily routine it needs rewards comparable to DDQ if not better.

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We need to be able to save wave templates. Filling the nodes is far too taxing

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I’ve been thinking a bit about Morale and I came up with an idea that partially helps with the whole issue of 3 max morale not being enough, especially in alliances where everyone may not be participating in an alliance.

My idea is that you can use morale from players in your alliance who aren’t actively playing AvA. This in itself isn’t a new idea but here’s my additional thoughts on that concept. You can ONLY use morale from another player to finish a node that’s already been attacked and the attack failed (ie node wasn’t captured).

That means active AvA players don’t need to use one of their 3 morale to finish up a failure. They can attack 3 fresh nodes and use inactive players morale to finish up failures.

Essentially all players in the alliance are opted ‘in’ to allow their unused morale to be used by another player. You can opt out of allowing that for active AvA players so you don’t use an active players morale.

This idea helps prevent the issue of one or two whale doing everything via other players morale (or buying more va HP etc).
KGB

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Ok, but how do you determine that a player is inactive for any given offensive? They might just be asleep and planning to do their fights when they wake up, but someone has already used their morale for them.

If they’re automatically ‘opted in’ to this, they would need to swiftly opt out for fear of not even being able to play the mode at all.

It’s an interesting idea, and certainly more balanced than allowing players to buy morale… needs more time in the oven (perhaps like AvA itself)

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At this point I feel like they should just start selling morale. I don’t think it’d be a big seller for them, and I don’t really see a downside for it. Players who want to do more can do more (for a price) and those who don’t can ignore it.

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They’re already selling resolve, so they could probably sell morale too if they wanted to.

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If they start selling morale it’s going to mean the dedicated/top end players will solo the mode and not leave any fights for anyone else. That seems like quite a downside to me…

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I don’t think so. Most of those players are in top alliances with players that all play a lot. They wouldn’t spend anything on morale because they wouldn’t need to.

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I concur with almost everything you said.

As for the points about morale others made: no, they shouldn’t sell morale. Morale is what the entire game mode is balanced around. If you start selling morale or sharing a pool amongst the alliance, you throw out the entire game economy for the mode.

If you are finding your alliance isn’t active enough, maybe your alliance just doesn’t match with your involvement with the mode? Just like people move alliances because half don’t PVE, or PVP, or common firs tmove a player makes from their dead public alliance: because their alliance fails boss after boss.

Unfortunately AvA punishes you heavily for trying to move during the Operation. So not a problem you can fix for a few more weeks. In the mean time.. get your players active? It’s only a few minutes per day. 5 minutes of placing defense, 1 or 2 fights.

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Agreed…filling up the defense side is tedious. Endless scrolling while looking for the heroes that are not at zero. They should default to the bottom if zero

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Filter by resolve is something Jeto already said they are working on. But that sounds also and a consequence of placing too much defense by yourself. You shouldn’t run out of resolve at all if your players participate.

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I don’t run out but my zero resolves default to the top. So I have scroll down often to get to the ones I haven’t used in previous defense situations in the same alliance contest.

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Mine are just alphabetic.. if your 0s are at the top it’s because you’re just clicking the first things you see to fill a node?

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What if what I want is to play AvA more, though? I can play PvE for zero points, or I can grind PvP fights endlessly for 1. Why can’t I play AvA fights more often?

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My thoughts are there’s enough to play, AvA is very strategic where I just prefer to match 3 colours and not think too much about defending a hexagon. The attack part is ok.

I played where I can, but clearly it’s failed if 10 million was ever achievable for the period that the community challenge lasts.

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No I plan my teams but the ones with 0 morale seem to rise to the top over the life of the AvA event. I will try alphabetical to see if that makes a difference