Alliances: The rich get richer

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Alliances
1

This is not meant as a massive whine, just a perspective from someone who can’t “afford” to be in a maxed alliance.

The alliance system mostly just benefits the top players. There isn’t anything fair or noble about the alliances. Sure MAYBE the weakest guy on the teams wins a little more than he otherwise would but that’s most likely only if he could buy his spot.

Alliances have created a whole new tier of inequality. Only the people that are winning more HP than they can spend can realistically pay for a space in a large alliance. And once you are in the rewards are pouring down on you.

I’m not particularly bitter for my own sake. I don’t mind so much that I only win two covers instead of three when I place top 10 (didn’t it used to be top 15 or 25 for 3 covers?).

The alliance system now guarantees that the players that win their brackets also win another extra 100HP and a bunch of ISO. Not to mention that extra cover that most of them probably don’t need.

I’d much rather you just gave the top 50 alliances anywhere between 2000-500 HP instead of that extra cover that they will probably sell half of the time. Give them enough HP to just buy whichever cover they want and award the specific 3* cover to alliances lower down.

The people in the top alliances are swimming in HP from what I gather and it guarantees that they will win their bracket EVERY TIME (unless another top 20 alliance member is present) because they can all just shield as much as they like.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I started my own alliance and it took me a month to scrape together enough HP to buy 1 new slot. I spend most of my HP on roster slots for the new heroes that are rolled out which you absolutely need to stay competitive in PvE events which are the only one where one could realistically finish first if you spend enough time.

I could try to ditch my alliance and find a bigger one, but even then I don’t have the HP to pay for my own slot on the team because.

In order to grow my alliance I would need to stop buying roster spaces and stop shielding during PvP, that way maybe I can make 100HP per event. This would prevent me from adding new characters to my roster which in turns weakens my rewards in future events. It’s a vicious circle.

I understand that those that have played the longest have the strongest teams and therefore the easiest time to stay at the top. It was like that before the alliances too, but the alliances have ultimately just given them more free rewards as long as the top players found each other and continued playing.

I’m not upset for my own sake but more for the sake of all mid-tier players. For these people the new reward system makes it so it takes you about three times as long to max out hero covers which will only increase the gap between the people that were here from the start and any newer people. In addition the new players will NEVER get good enough to earn enough HP to create their own maxed Alliances.

Maybe if alliance slots were a reward rather than a purchase. If the alliance slots were progression rewards instead. Awarded for x hours played or for your entire team having hit members from one other team in a single event. That would have been cool.

When all is said and done it’s just about money which I understand full well.

I really hope you didn’t read this as a rant because I was very calm when I wrote this.

2

I think you may be overstating the role of alliances. Under the pre-alliance system, how many players got three covers in a PVP or PVE? Maybe 10 per bracket. Now, with alliances, the top-100 or top-250 get the third cover to go with a large number that get two covers through individual play. So more people are probably getting three covers under the current system than got it in the old system. And more people are getting some HP now – through several tiers in the alliance rewards – than they used to get.

Granted, there is probably a lag between low- and mid-tier players, particularly new ones, reaching the point of getting that third cover, because they usually need to build a roster before they can join an alliance. But I suspect that those players probably were not winning three covers under the old system either.

I also don’t think the people in the top alliances are swimming in HP any more than they were before alliances. People say that S.H.I.E.L.D members have more HP to buy shields because we have won PVP tourneys, but the last elite tourney top-10 was full of those same people. And shields are relatively new. They were added not that long before alliances, so we don’t know that those people wouldn’t have been buying them at the same rate if not for alliances. I know that I bought shields in the pre-alliance period, and remember a lot of the players in the elite tourney hiding behind shields, jumping out for a quick battle or two, and re-shielding. So I don’t think it is necessarily true that alliances have made those players wealthier. In fact, I suspect that those players made plenty of HP selling covers under the pre-alliance values for covers. That is another change that occurred contemporaneous with the addition of alliances.

Also, have you considered that the slow progress to max out covers is beign affected by the increased pace of introducing new 3-star characters. The game has added five 3-stars in the past month or so – Psylocke, Black Panther, Modern Thor, Steve Rogers, and Human Torch. That is 45 additional 3-star covers players now need, and those covers compete with the ones people were previously trying to earn. So it’s not surprising that it takes longer today to max characters than in the past.

3

The game also has a power cap near the end game. Once you get a set of 3* maxed out, you’re pretty much done leveling. Everything else is horizontal progression. At this point, everyone in the high tier aren’t getting stronger after they get their Patch Wolverine, Punisher, and Iron Man maxed out. The new 3*s aren’t particularly stronger than the current ones.

So yeah, for a while, it’s a case of Rich getting Richer, but once you hit level cap, you don’t really have an advantage when other people trickle into the end game.

4

I can’t begin to speak for all “top” alliances, but I’m quite familiar with DjangoUnbuffed’s operations. I also know that a number of top alliances share many similarities with Django. So, a few points:

  • Some top alliances have unilaterally high-level rosters. S.H.I.E.L.D is the obvious example. 5DeadlyVenoms also had L100+ roster requirements for membership. However, Django, and several other alliances that rank highly, has members occupying a wide range of roster strengths. We’ve got ultra-high-level players fielding multiple L141s, but we’ve also got a few people relying on a 2*-only team. Most of us are knee-deep in the 2*->3* transition. I finally leveled a third 3* to L102 just last night, and Django has been chugging along for 6 weeks now.

  • We’ve never asked a single membership applicant to buy a slot. Many applicants offered to, since that was (and still is) a popular membership mechanism for many alliances, but we politely rejected such generous offers.

  • We are not generally swimming in HP. Some of us do have 1000+ HP (I’m not one of them), but far from of all of us have such a cushion. It’s true that alliance rewards have increased HP inflow for members of high-ranking alliances. However, several of us are still quite shield-stingy, and those who aren’t almost certainly used shields fairly liberally before the alliance days. For S.H.I.E.L.D, the situation is obviously different.

  • 3* cover selling: I have literally not sold a single 3* reward cover from any event after the alliance system was implemented. Most of my fellow Djangoliers are in the same boat. A glance through Djangolier rosters nets 6 cover-maxed Panthers and 1 cover-maxed LThor, total, across 20 members. The numbers are similar for Psylocke and GSBW. We’re not selling off 3* covers left and right. Again, some top alliances may in fact throw away a lot of 3* reward covers. But, I know that several top alliances keep virtually all of them.

On a more general note, I see nothing particularly wrong with the inherent causality of “pay HP upfront for alliance membership, reap greater HP rewards over time.” It’s Investing 101. “New players” didn’t generally get consistent top-tier placements in PvP before alliances. I see no reason that “new players” should easily get a 20-member alliance, nor do I see the alliance system having an inherently “noble” purpose.

As for your suggestions:

  • Alliance slots as a reward for hours played? I thought you didn’t like widening the gap between veterans and new players.

  • Adding inter-alliance bounties as part of the game’s official progression system? I don’t see how you can talk about anything remotely akin to “nobility”, yet advocate making hit lists an integral part of the game.

5

I wrote about twice as much text below but decided it was too much icon_razz.gif

You’re making good points and I’m glad that you’re not selling off all the covers (yet).

BUT

I don’t want to HAVE to pay real money to “invest” into maxing my alliance. And even if I did, finding good enough players to even break into the top 100 alliances could be tough I suspect. I already spent as much money as I wanted to spend on this FREE TO PLAY game. The alliance system feels like a PAY TO WIN MORE implementation. I could try winning the HP to buy alliance slots, but that would probably take me on average 3-4 weeks per slot.

With the alliance system, once you’re in the “right” alliance you’ll be sitting at the top for a very long time unless you stop playing and they kick you out.

I understand that making games is a business for the developer. But even from their point of view the influx of money through alliances will dry up because the people that want to be in one will have already paid as much as they need and the rest of us just won’t bother to pay real money. And now they’ve committed to giving the top alliance players more HP than they were making before and I suspect that those that paid for HP before will not be paying as much because the extra alliance income is slow and steady.

I admit it was stupid of me to hope for any sort of fairness to the alliance system. The noble part of it that I had hoped for at the start was that new weaker players might get adopted into stronger alliances and would get a real boost in their progression. But of course the competition is so cutthroat that there is no room for charity.

I started my own alliance and brought in a very casual friend. Now that I’m trying to grow it and make it slightly more competitive I’m facing the dilemma of having to kick my friend at some point cause he doesn’t play as much as me.

I’m real happy with the opinions that the rest of you have voiced.

6

The 500 HP reward for top seems excessive and should be changed to tokens or something else, if only to make the appearance of favoritism less. By the way, SHIELD’s soul-crushing margin of victory is also present in PvE. My alliance won the last event by 3000 points, or an average of 150 points. In Heroic Juggernaut, if you lead by 300 points it’s basically an insurmountable lead, and we average half that over #2, and #2 averages 300 points per person over #3 alliance. It’s just that rubberbanding makes everything seem way closer than they are, but there’s actually nothing close about a 3000 margin of victory as that is equivalent of 10 person winning #1 with an insurmountable lead. I have no idea how this could be fixed because there is simply a very large difference for whatever reason in all the alliance events so far. The best you can do is make things appear kind of close, but PvP doesn’t have a rubberband mechanism to make it even look like that.

Though in terms of cover acquisition, only top 5 out of 500 gets 3 covers before. Now you have 10 out of 500 getting 3 covers almost certainly (anyone who can place top 10 should not have a problem finding an alliance that can get the third cover). Although the structure obviously overwhelmingly favors large alliances, the truth is that only 1% of the people were ever pulling 3 covers per tournament by definition, and if you’re part of that 1% it can’t be very hard to find a large alliance that wants you. I do think they should lower the cost of alliance expansion significantly since alliances looks like it’s here to stay.

7

Want a tip on how to expand your alliance the F2P way? Do you have enough time on your hands?

Here’s how:

  1. Make sure your main account is backed up
  2. Create a public alliance (only 2500 ISO)
  3. Start another MPQ account (PC/diff device/same device)
  4. Join the created alliance with the 2nd account and make it commander
  5. Play through the Prologue missions, farming and saving up all the Hero Points
    (Chap1 gives 200pts, 2 - 200pts, 3 - 250pts, 4 - 200pts, 5 - 250pts)
  6. Once you saved up enough HP, buy an alliance slot
  7. Rinse and repeat 3 to 6 (up to 6 more iterations)
  8. Come back to the forums and recruit active players who are willing to pay for their own slots.

Viola! You now have your very own 20-man alliance and all the glory that comes along with it…provided you are still sane after all time and effort you have spent on it.

The maximum HP you can get from Prologue missions is 1100. That’s enough for expansion to 11 slots.
Realistically, you might want to skip Chap. 5 and just play through Chap 1 to 4. That will still give you 8 or 9 slots

8

Milkrain:

Alliance slots are indeed steep. Their prices scale linearly, to boot. But no, you don’t have to pay money to invest in your alliance. By “invest,” I was talking about HP. HP is obtained either by trading real-world money, real-world time, and/or real-world ingenuity (performance optimization, not hacking icon_razz.gif
). That’s the long and the short of it. It’s funny that you mention alliance incumbency. A very new alliance, O.L.Y.M.P.U.S., actually placed quite well in the latest PvE, I believe. MisfitRightIn, the alliance who earned #2 in the recent PvE, is a second-wave (but, obviously, by no means second-tier) alliance. I believe they have an explicit “charity” system, whereby they reserve 1-2 slots as “rotating” slots for randoms, in order to give unallied players a chance at alliance rewards. So, I don’t know where your “of course there’s no room for charity” declaration is coming from.

Further, I’m a completely F2P player. Many Djangoliers are F2P or nearly F2P. There’s at least one strong alliance whose founder funded most of the expansion using HP he’d earned and saved up for a while… MakeMineMarvel, perhaps? I don’t remember exactly (sorry, whichever awesome alliance it is!). There’s also a strong alliance explicitly called “F2P Veterans.”

I’m frankly not sure what your definition of “any sort of fairness” is. I have the curious impression that you believe fairness comes when anyone and everyone can field a 20-strong top-250 alliance without much effort. I hope I’m misreading you, because that seems absurd to me. Pre-alliance PVP arguably made the rich get richer already. The difference now is that total HP, Iso, and 3* cover outflow has increased significantly, and more players (in absolute terms) are getting more rewards. As Phantron noted, cover rewards are going to more players than in pre-alliance days. This naturally means that some “weaker” players who didn’t get good cover rewards before are now getting them. I’m not sure how that makes the alliance system unfair.

The way you run your own alliance depends entirely on you. If even you, a person who actively wishes for a more “noble” system, are considering kicking your friend from your alliance to gain a competitive edge, well… icon_e_wink.gif
. I remember more than a couple posts in the “Alliance looking for members” thread by alliances that accept newish players (1*->2* players). Such alliances do exist. They very well could be competitive already, and they’ll certainly be quite competitive in time if they stick to it.

9

Although i have spent money on the game, i still consider myself to be a FTP guy. That grand total of $2 dollars i spent is long gone. You can’t just expect things to be handed to you willy-nilly. Yes there are a lot of people who have bought their success with the game but as HM mentioned,there are others like myself and him that have played the game well to get our rewards.

Its only fair the people who have spent the most time get their rewards. New alliances pop up everyday to challenge the regulars. Its not a case of the rich getting richer. Put in effort and join a decent alliance and rewards will come. But at the end of the day, everyone cant be a winner. Someone’s gotta lose.

10

The game is relatively balanced if you’re in a 20 man alliance. The guys who are taking the top would be the guys who normally take the top anyway if there were no alliances so nothing has changed there.

What is unreasonable is the cost it takes to have a 20 man alliance which is pretty much a necessity. You really shouldn’t have to resort to say making new accounts to join to pay for this stuff. Perhaps the cost should be replaced with a combination of iso + HP. Whoever is saving up for the last slot for 2000 HP needs to be saving up for a very long time if he’s not spending money on the game, and that’s a lot to ask for one guy. It also doesn’t help there’s obviously no way to actually pool your resources together without just implicitly trust someone on their word.

11

If HP-pooling within the alliance is allowed, then the method that I have outlined a few posts up will be even more attractive.
You can easily blow through Chapter 1, getting 200pts each time.

12

I do agree a little. feel like a nasty republican what ever lol icon_twisted.gif

13

I agree that there could be better implementations of the alliance-slot purchase mechanism. For example, I’d like to see the addition of an alliance HP pool, into which members can transfer HP to spend on alliance-only purchases. Since an ad hoc “buy a slot to get in” mechanic is already in place, I’d like to see a game mechanic that makes it more fair, perhaps one in which an applicant can literally buy his own slot, instead of buying the next one and letting Member #20 come in for free.

As for the cost being too high, it is high, but I’d rather not see a sharp decrease in price, if only because my fellow Djangoliers have already bought 15 slots at the current market price. That, I fully admit, is my own bias.

I disagree, though, that a 20-man alliance is a necessity, esp. if you’re only concerned about keeping up with 3* cover rewards. I don’t remember what the dedicated thread concluded, but I think it was plausible for 10 people, and quite doable for 15 people to hit Alliance Top 250? The thresholds were possibly even lower.

14

Although only 1% of the population could’ve gotten 3 covers out of an event before (and 2.5% now), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to eventually be able to get to that 2.5% at least some of the time, but it’d be awfully hard to get there if you’re not in a 20 man alliance.

I don’t know what the picture looks like at the cutoff point for the 3* on the alliance board but as time passes it’ll be increasingly dominated by 20 man alliances since HP accumulates over time.

By the way, if you could pool your resources you’d probably just have people create new accounts and clear chapter 1 and put like 200 or 300 HP in it and then start over and over. I think the cost should be a higher amount of iso instead. That way it’ll be harder to create dummy accounts but you can at least just tell your prospect go grind LRs for 2 days and pay for say a 20K iso8 cost for expanding the alliance. I understand from D3’s point of view 2000 HP is considered less valuable than 20000 iso8, but that only applies to players with extremely good rosters and even if 20000 iso8 is more valuable than 2000 HP, you certainly cannot expect anybody but the highest end player to come up with the latter in a short notice, but the former is not too hard.

15

Rants and raves aside, let’s at least hand it to Milkrain for starting his own alliance. There’s probably no shortage of reasons why someone decides to plunk down the 2500iso, make up a clever name, and start their own alliance. But Milkrain did it. And inferring a little from his comments, it’s possible he did it because he wanted to run his alliance the way he wants.

Occasionally, you get an unhappy comment about alliances being unfair or no one will take them or whatever… and you think to yourself: “Why don’t you start your own then?” Milkrain did it. And he’ll run it his way.

16

Yeah, resource pooling would definitely lead to HP farming. Making the slots cost a large amount of Iso would be an interesting change. It could be tuned to maintain the same monetary cost for alliance slots, but make alliance slots easier to earn in-game. That said, from a thematic POV, HP makes more sense, since HP is used to buy permanent upgrades like roster slots and covers, whereas Iso is more like experience points.

Now that I think of it, making shields costs Iso instead of HP makes more thematic sense. Hmmm.

Agreed. Starting a new alliance is a cool move. Props. I truly hope he can build it into a competitive group. He seems like a great guy.

17

Whatcha talking about? Each new alliance slot costs (# of slot x 100) HP, that is, you can found a 5 slot alliance for no HP, expand to 6 slots for 600 HP, expand to 7 slots for 700 HP, etc. The 20th slot costs 2000 HP. I don’t think Prologue has enough HP anywhere close to fund 2 slots even. That’s why when someone mentioned the option I was eager at first but then just said ‘screw it’ and paid with a backup mobile account.

18

Run through Prologue with multiple accounts. Add each account to your alliance, dump their HP into the alliance pool, remove them from the alliance, repeat until desired expansion goals are met.

19

But in general he is right.
The top players and the payers take the prices.
The progression awards are going down and the top finishers take everything.
And with the prices needed to finish high in the next round…well..
We could do with progression rewards for alliances..
Or a system in wich only the points of the top 10 of the alliance count for total.
That way alliances can help other players and the ones that still got RL along.

20

It doesn’t matter if you count only top 5 or top 10 or whatever. The relative standing of the top alliances wouldn’t change very much, and you’ll also end up with a lot of freeloading which I’m sure is not the behavior D3 want to encourage. The only thing that’d be fair to both small and large alliance is if you do something like 1000/(average of 5 highest placement in bracket) but it may put a bit too much luck on bracket placement, though in that respect larger alliances will have an advantage as you got more people to spread out which in theory should avoid bad bracket luck. But, I don’t think D3 is going to do this and if not there’s no good way to reconciliate the difference between a large and a small alliance. So, the solution should be to make it easier to have a large alliance. Either a community pool or change most of the cost to iso8 or both would go a long way rectifying the problem that saving up 1000+ HP is pretty much ridiculous for any non paying customer that isn’t at the very high end, and those guys can easily find an alliance that needs guys who are that good.