An epiphany, or how I stopped worrying about anything

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Disclaimer : I’m a day 500-ish player with 25-ish maxed 3* and two level 220 4* (I’ll let you guess which ones icon_e_biggrin.gif
), and used to reach 1000+ like clockwork in PvP.

Even though I’ve been quite displeased with all the recent changes (4Thor nerf, MMR changes, XForce nerf, health increase, buffed characters and so forth), I can’t help but recognize that they all aim at bringing a new meta with a very balanced game. Of course you still have power gaps between characters, and I would still bring 3Thor rather than Beast to any fight, but all those gaps are getting narrower and narrower. Likewise 4* are still very good but not the 3* killers that some used to be. Given the game as objectively become more balanced, shouldn’t I be super happy ?
Instead I was morose at best. The Ultron event was a very nice concept (with a poor execution but that’s another story) and it got me excited and grinding away but I wasn’t really that disappointed with the abysmal token turnout. Even the largely debatable way the devs took care of the Ultron phase 2 issue didn’t really irritate me, I was just noticing their usual stinginess.

So I though about it and my epiphany was the following : given the new meta, once your reach a certain threshold, nothing will really change anymore, a.k.a. the biggest design issue of the game : there is no endgame. In other terms, get more than twenty maxed 3* and any new addition to your team will bring negligible results. The law of diminishing returns hits hard, very hard.
Why ? Because all characters are balanced (or will be after a few month) anyhow. One single character cannot possibly change the meta anymore.
This effect is partly alleviated by the classes of heroes we have : tank, (fake) healer, AP production, AP steal, protective tile generation, attack tile generation, etc… But once you have in your roster a certain amount of characters in all those classes, adding one or two will bring marginal results at best.

It used to be very different. We used to have a game where the entire point was chasing the current OP character(s) and once you had it try to profit as much and for as long as possible. It might have been unfair to most of the player base, it might have been going from one unbalanced state to another, but at least the glaring issue of having no endgame was partially hidden. Having the OP character(s) or not made a gigantic difference, there was a marked sense of progress. You had purpose.
Now I really don’t see why I should even compete to get Vision. I mean, on paper this hero is great with a new power mechanism, but what would maxing Vision bring to my table ? Nothing at all, not anything I can’t do with my other maxed 3*. I just finished maxing KK. I love playing with her, she’s a great character. But in the grand scheme of things, she brings me not that much. Even IF and Cage that I maxed recently, two of my favorite characters, didn’t make such a huge difference in my overall fighting capacity. The fun of playing individual matches is still here. The fun of playing for progression, the need to bite the bullet because greener pastures lie ahead is dead and buried. I won’t quit, but I sure feel zombified.

So in a way, I stopped worrying because everything has become entirely meaningless. I can’t stop mechanically amassing covers and ISO through the DP event and continue maxing more 3*, mostly by habit. But I know it won’t change anything compared to what I have right now. And when I see the additional efforts it takes now to play PvP and PvE, motivation dissipates entirely.
Realizing this helps me also understand why the devs always were so stingy : to try to postpone as much as possible this state of affair. MPQ never ever had an endgame, but making this game better is also what is paradoxically killing it. The irony.

How do you feel about this, fellow players with a decent roster ?
Did you manage to keep the flame ?

2

PvE wise at least, having the characters makes a huge difference. Cage and IF largely contributed to clearing all 8 rounds of Ultron 2 without buying any additional kits. Cage also lets you bring OBW to the party on certain hard nodes. With Xforce and 4hor dropped to near garbage, Kamala and Cyclops have stepped in and are one of the strongest combinations out right now. I at first hated She Hulk during EotS (I think its partially due to Wolverine being a really useful partner for her and him being locked out for 66% of the event) but I’m starting to find more combinations with her - I see her being useful in TaT now that Xforce sucks.

For the most part PvE is still fun but PvP has become horrible. It takes way too much time and with the need to boost every match (or risk running out of kits for other things) its probably ISO negative now. It feels like the only reason I’m barely staying ISO neutral is due to the DP dailies.

Up to 5 maxed 4*, 27 maxed 3* and all of them usually see some play time except Sentry and to a lesser extent Gamora, Mystique and Spider-Man.

3

I’m a Day 414 player. I have 19 max 3*, 2 max 4*. Many of my heroes are cover-maxed, and just awaiting my ISO.

I have come to the conclusion very early on that MPQ is a Sisyphus task. There is no end-game (though i have been hoping there’s end game content), and you keep rolling the stone up the hill.

But despite the obvious lack of end-game content, i still like the game.

Why? Let me quote one of my old post

The 3rd point is less relevant now, which as you have rightly pointed out, the sense of progression has been greatly diminished when they remove those OP characters. Also, the ‘re-balancing’ of MMR has make the sense of progression of a mature roster dissipate like snow in summer. Quick and swift.

I have now come to enjoy the game as it is… as a puzzle game. It sounds weird, but i really enjoy playing Quicksilver. He is a deadweight in pvp, he’s incredibly slow (the irony), but he makes my game more puzzle-y. I enjoyed the aspects of trying to make blue matches, so that i can use his black and swap tiles for optimal impact. He is especially fun with Goddess Thor, as i can maximise the use of those charge tiles. That was when i realised the joy of using each characters to clear the game. When i got my blade, i was using him in almost every game. When i got my Goddess Thor, it was also the same. I figured when i max out my KK, i will be using her very often too.

I continue to set personal targets for each event. In SW pvp, it was to reach 800 to get my last purple SW cover. In Beast pvp, it’s about hitting 1k to get my second last cover for Starlord. In Doc Oct PVP, it will be about hitting 725 without shielding, so as to save up my HP; i am not going to try to get the first spot because i recognise it is always competitive for that latest 4* cover (IMHB).

You know, i figured that i can take a one month hiatus, come back to the game, and still enjoy the game with my roster. Sure, i may not have all the latest characters, but i am fine with it. Just play with whatever i have, and enjoy the ride.

I actually wish that more people will enjoy the game as it is, and stop treating the game as a race. There’s no winner in this race, cos you never win. You may be the fastest in rolling up the stone in this stretch, but there is going to be endless stretches ahead… you will never truly ‘beat’ the game. So enjoy the ride, enjoy the game with the new characters; and if you are offended by the game development so much, it’s best to take a step back, give yourself a temporary break or an eternal break.

4

i was beginning to get a few 3* online last maxed was Luke cage which worked wonders for my healthpack.png
, just got LCap max his last 3 red covers came so quickly DDQ, a token, and PVE reward with in a couple days. but like you said “what’s the point” hit me hard after ultron finished. haven’t played any events since and missed a few DDQ. with other games ramping up i fine taking a season or two off until they fix the end game, maybe i’ll get away for good if they don’t shape up.

5

I believe you are looking at it wrong. The point of the game is not finding the “best” team for any meta and sticking with it. The point of the game is be ever evolving, adding characters with really different sets of abilities (like the Vision). Each new character will interact with the old ones in new ways and the devs effort to balance characters in ways that they are all (somewhat) equally viable for competitive play, means that the point is exploration, having fun with different teams, finding out strategies of gameplay that really resonate with you. In other words, you are right, there is no endgame. The idea is not to win more, but win with style, with ingenuity, with fun.

6

I didn’t.
I was in a top 100 alliance for the first season. We all worked together to get that first Nick Fury cover and it felt good.
Then at the start of Season 2 there was about a week of on & off server problems. These were the sort of problems where not everyone was effected equally. More than once, I found myself unable to log in to renew my shields before the end of an event and then by the time I could connect, I’d have lost 4-500 points. A bunch of people from that alliance quit. I stopped caring. For the next week or so, I would log in to see if there was any compensation for the troubles and to hit the prologue mission for the daily reward. I never got compensation, but I did keep playing.

I set myself a target: to level up every character in my roster to their highest available level. I would not spend HP on shields or additional covers at all, but I’d still apply any new covers I earned. I could still buy roster slots for new characters, but at that stage I still had plenty of 1 & 2* characters that I could sell off if needed. And if I could get my roster to the point where I had every character at the maximum level allowed by their covers, then I would have beaten the game.

By the time the Anniversary came around, I had already started to enjoy the game again, simply by playing casually. I would jump into a PvP event and get to 300 points for the token and then forget about it. I’d play during my commute to and from work, and sometimes during lunch, and that was it. Sometimes I would forget about a sub event in PvE. I didn’t even grind Lightning Rounds. I missed out on a few characters when they first launched. And I let it all slide past me. In a way, I’m still going towards my target. Following anniversary week, I gradually started playing more seriously again. I had accrued a fairly diverse selection of maxed 3*'s, and had enough ISO to max XForce. I did eventually break my “don’t buy covers” rule for Iron Fist - I bought 4 purple covers for him and I still think it was a worthy investment. In the last season I’ve really stepped up, and joined an alliance again, so I’m earning covers and ISO and HP about 5 times faster than I was before.

7

I hit my one year anniversary at the end of last month, and I marvel at the fact that I’ve been playing mpq for so long. What keeps my interest is the way the game evolves with new character releases, and their interaction w/ old ones. So I give credit to the game developers for that.

As far worrying about anything, you try to manage the stress proactively by figuring out what your goal is for each event, and how best to accomplish it. If your objective doesn’t look realistic once you’re a day or 2 into the event (like getting 2 HB covers rather than 3 in enemy of the state event), then that realization allows you to dial back on the pressure a bit.

8

I skip a few PVE’s here and there. Despite the general notion that you fall behind if you miss an event, I can’t say it has harmed me in any way really. Much less stress, much more enjoyable, and the reason I have been playing for well over a year.

I know some people are “all or nothing” but they all seem to just burn out within a few months. Personally I am fine with just being at the top every now and then.

9

Now OK I don’t have a fairly good roster and basically I hate that this game is balancing. When I first started playing I hated and liked that I had to skip all the 4*. I had something to work up to. When i seen Sentry(my fav) at first I didn’t like him so I sold him pre-nerf. After hearing and seeing him drop whole teams at once. I had to have him. Post nerf he became garbage, unusuable, mid-low tier. I still eana max him cause he’s my fav but at the same time its kinda pointless. What I tryna say is some characters need to dominate other characters. A 4* should be able to dominate a 3* because of level and coat of leveling. Why would you spend more for less? Certain 3* should be able to dominate certain other 3*. Health increases, smaller boost, nerfed character, stopping shield hopping makes the game slower. And slow paced games get boring. Most games these days that are successful because there fast paced. I don’t wanna play a game where I can feel the minutes past by. I wanna play a game that makes me forget about time all together. The only reason I’m still playing is because I want a better roster than my brother and to max certain characters I like.

10

It used to be for so long though.

Which is a feeling I can really applaud and admire but can not entirely share. I’ve been conditioned too well maybe. icon_e_biggrin.gif

The structure of the game itself is still mostly geared towards rewarding grinding and persistence rather than style or ingenuousness. I do get your point though (yours and several others in this thread) and wish I could adapt as well as you did.

I don’t think there’s a good or a bad way of seeing things, and it was sure nice to have a quick peek on what you were thinking about the current state of affairs. Thank you all for your input. icon_e_wink.gif

11

I have 3 maxed 4s and 30 maxed 3s, with the rest of my 3*s sitting at 120+ (except Iron Fist, who is softcapped at 81 since I missed his introduction pvp and pve).

I have toned down my PvE play a lot mostly due to not wanting to deal with my massive scaling.

PvP is mostly the same for me. I never tanked, so I was used to seeing maxed teams from the beginning. The biggest difference is that people are now using their A teama from the onset, which makes me do so as well.

12

You probably have to be a bit of a collector at heart to keep at this game for a long time. As more 4* get added, the hope is they’ll be strong enough to make you vets chase them. The reality is 4* don’t seem to be allowed to be much better than 3*. Which is kind of weird because 3* and definitely much stronger than 2*.

I don’t know what a new sense of purpose would look like for you. Maybe a 5* gets added? Maybe they add achievements. Maybe there’s an elite pvp division that shows up and requires 3 maxed 4* to even enter? There’s a lot of options. Right now, I don’t know that you’re their concern. They need to figure out how to get new players to where you are faster. The changes they make show that. Once they’re doing that well, I can only assume they’ll be adding more content to the end for those new people to do.

And I can understand why they’ve went this route. Due to the nature of this game, it’s very rich get richer. They need to smooth it all out a bit. Then they need to add some real scarcity to the top level to make the vet accounts actually care. It’s pretty silly that the elite players immediately nab the newest 4* and have it instantly maxed. Lots to do. Lots to change.

On the bright side, I really get a sense that D3 is focused on keeping at this game. Continuing to improve it as best they can. So maybe one day in the not so distant future, you’ll have something to care about again.

13

I haven’t maxed out a 3* yet and I only have one 4* that has three covers, but I’ve slowed down a lot over the time I’ve played. I noticed that the grind never ends, but we only do it for a hand full of reasons. The Collector likes to have all of the latest characters even if they only have one cover. The Dominator likes to have the most powerful team to do anything and this usually comes at the price of getting the new cover because it is the best at the time. The OCD has to have a perfect look to their whole roster which leads also to having the latest characters and best cover spread. After you get through those players, then you have the casual group that rounds out the hand full. The Pacifist is satisfied with any cover they get and will probably never chase or purchase anything in the game. The Puzzlemaster loves the challenge of just putting new combinations together to have the best efficiency even though it will only work for them and never the cpu. These are just a few types I see and I fell into the Collector category on start. Now I’m more on the Pacifist/Puzzlemaster side of things. Yes, my OCD does kick in at times and that’s why I haven’t maxed a 3* yet even though I could. Now, on a side note, I have been thinking that maybe we don’t necessarily have to have levels of character implemented the way they are currently. Maybe we have more of a variation/leveling hybrid to the characters. Like having the different covers but collected under one character slot. Amounts of covers can be applied to the different variation of the character and provide more individual combinations to fit a play style than just rock / paper / scissors. Like I said, I have not put the complete effort into developing this idea, it was just something that popped into my head one day. Okay, resume normal forum activities.

14

Obviously they just need to roll out an elite PvP that you can’t get in unless you have 4 max level 4s, which is the only way to unlock the new OP 5 covers.

15

I agree completely with the OP and I think it’s a fantastic direction for the game now that I’ve experienced it for a while.

I’d much rather have a game that’s about collecting rather than chasing the endless power creep carrot.
Kudos to D3 for showing an ever increasing amount of respect for their players busy lives and schedules.

The flame still burns strong within me (hence being in a top 10 alliance). I like to play with my new toys sooner than later. It’s great to know that I could simply fall back to a super casual top 100 alliance at any time and remain competitive with characters that are 6+ months out of date though.

16

Here’s the solution that’s kept me interested - make a F2P account to run alongside your current / paying account. I’ll be very honest, I play on my F2P account MUCH more than my paid account and I actually have much more fun on it.

17

It’s not silly at all to have whales pay through the nose to max out Hulkbuster, for example. Their financial support is what allows D3 to continue running mpq. and that in turn allows me to continue playing as well. So it’s a win-win situation in my book. icon_cool.gif

18

Thanks for the OP. Cuz as you say it really doesn’t matter.
I’m at 300 days with about 20 characters at lvl 116, and I really feel like the rug was yanked out of me at the end of season 12. I was starting to hit 725 in pvp with 3 rounds of shielding so 800 seemed close at hand. Then the boosted characters and mmr fun balance hit, and I’m back at the 500 lvl. So that kinda killed my drive for pvp and my pve drive kind of went with it.
Its good to hear that the new toon doesn’t matter cuz you 're right, it really doesn’t.
Now if I couldbonly shake my addiction.

19

i like what you’re saying but still…to play ‘with with style, with ingenuity, with fun’ doesn’t happen unless you are able to grind for the new characters and obtain them. otherwise its just a slooooow repetition of the same grind for however long before you either lose interest in the game or eventually get that new character to playable levels. and lets not forget just how many new characters have been released recently. again, i agree with the idea that to not burn out one has to find the fun in different ways of playing with characters old and new but this doesnt change the fact that in order to do this one has to deal with the grind and slow pace of the game…which induces burn out. i’m a consistent 1k scorer in pvp but this last pvp was the first time i just didnt care anymore to play past a certain point. yes, all the recent changes have made me use more of my roster, more combinations of characters, to play with more style and ingenuity as you say…but it wasn’t necessarily fun. why? cause like most other vets have lamented, facing a trio of characters with over 10k health from the get go, may be fun at the beginning, but by the 10th match or so, it no longer is. by this point i’ve already used most of my roster with ingenuity and style and pushing past this point would solely be for alliance/season points or whatever awards. and around 400 points, i could simply stop playing. but it is past THIS point, that you need to grind for awards and new characters so you can keep having fun the way you claim is ‘the point’, to win the new characters to keep the diversity of ways of matching 3 fun and alive. but again, at this point we’re past having fun, at this point its just a mindless repetition of what came before. but its not like they’re gonna lower progression rewards any more than they already have and definitely not where at say 500 points you can win a 3* cover for example. and so, the endlessly violent cycle: to avoid burnout one must grind for new characters, a process which induces burnout.

20

Unco, you are missing the Pylgrim’s point.

Your post indicate your perception that a player must obtain the latest character, in the shortest time possible, to have fun. That is your perception. Pylgrim’s point (and mine) is that there is no need for a player to get the new character on the first run/ second run. If the player has other RL commitments, by all means, just skip the grind. The player don’t really lose out much.

Do you really need to get all the available covers for HB within the first month that it is out? No you don’t have to. Once you can see past this ‘illusion’, then MPQ becomes less of a grind… because you can choose when to play, and when not to play.

Why do you need to grind for new characters, immediately upon its release? Let me share my story:-

I am in an pvp-focused alliance. There is no requirement for me to play PVE, and hence, i pick the PVE that i want to play. I did not grind for the PVE of KK, Prof X, Kingpin and HB. I am also not grinding Vision at all.

I chose to play for QS (cos he seems like a fun character when first released), and i manage to cover max him after the Ultron event. I chose to play Ultron PVE, because hey, it’s THE tie-in with Avengers 2. Manage to get SW to 5/4/3 and some HB covers. However, i am not planning to level them until i have sufficient ISO, which will probably be months away.

I decided to level She-hulk because i really like her new green ability. I now have 100k iso, and is contemplating whether i should max my Fury (which took me 6 months to cover max) or to save the ISO for 3* characters instead.

The point of my story is that i didn’t miss much by avoiding the PVE grind for KK, Prof X, Kingpin and HB. That didn’t stop my progression. It may have slow me down a little, but in the overall scheme, it didn’t matter whether i am getting them cover max in the first month.

This approach has prevented me burning out from the game… and i really enjoy playing the game on my own terms. D3 sets the boundaries, yes, and they set the bar very high, as they need to cater to the top 0.5% who play the game 8 (random number, no evidence for tis) hours a day. But it’s their choice to play so much. You can choose to play that much, or you can choose to play it at your own terms.

D3 has never point a gun at anyone to play the game 8 hours a day.