Be a bit more liberal with ISO-8

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

One of the problems I see in this game is that I’m a little unsure about what the designers want players to do with their rosters.

The very scare amount of ISO-8 that players can be reasonably expected to win imply that designers want players to focus on only 3-4 characters at a time, their ideal team and a few replacements at the most. Outside of PvE events (of which the last few have been far to difficult to reliably win ISO from), players can only be expected to win 105 ISO per match (through PvP, on average). With many of the higher levels costing lots of ISO (1500+) per level, this means that players can spend hours to level up a single character once.

However, the events seem to indicate that developers want players to distribute their ISO among many different characters. With the way each event has different characters that are either buffed or required to participate (and some, like the Heroic Modes, which limit the cast of select-able characters), it seems like the only way to do well is to make sure that you have decent levels in multiple characters to ensure that you have a character that is buffed or required at a strong enough state to participate.

This results is an unfocused game whose mechanics are opposing each other. In order to make the two mechanics fall in line, in would make sense to raise ISO-8 reward so that players can be more reasonably expected to have characters at the decent levels and diversify their teams. The current landscape almost requires players to double-down on a team of three just to avoid wasting ISO.

Another option would be to design events around the knowledge that players are likely to only have 3-4 high leveled characters. However, I believe this wouldn’t be as fun and developers have already admitted to wanting to diversify player team formations.

2

There are other ways around this: Run two events at once: One that is actually good on ISO, but skimpy on covers, and the other that will give you very little iso, but will provide covers as its main reward.

This was actually the way things worked for a while: The last two week-long, iso-heavy tournaments put a wall in front of you pretty quickly. We’ve also had small, 2 day tournaments where the available covers were just not up to snuff. That might be easier to fix by just boosting some of the saddest characters though. It’s not as if the devs don’y have plenty of data to know which characters are unpopular, and even among those, which moves are just too weak.

3

I don’t think they want players having more iso. That’s why there is a shortage and it is ridiculously expensive to purchase.

If it was more plentiful you’d see far more maxed out squads and that would be very boring. The system forces people to make choices about who to level. That’s interesting.

4

The limiting factor in this game is iso8, not HP, once you’re able to compete. So that’d also be why they don’t really like to give away large amount of Iso 8s.

I still don’t have a level 85 Thor and I got top 5 in the Big Thunder tournament (someone must’ve passed me up on #1 at the last minute). Yeah Spiderman did most of the work, but it’s still pretty painful to fight everyone’s level 85 Thors when yours is only level 65, but it can be done.

5

I think the current model of PvE events being iso farms and PvP events being cover farms is fine. The only issue is that they need to have some sort of farmable PvE event up at all times, which they aren’t doing with the gaps in between events and non-refreshing events such as heroic oscorp. Some sort of persistent PvP tournament would also be a good place to let players farm iso (shield training that reset, essentially).

6

tl;dr: ISO scarcity leads to a preponderance of cookie-butter builds, ISO abundance would lead to a greater diversity of characters actually getting leveled and used. IMO the latter is more interesting than the former, even if it means a greater number of max-level characters.

Hm, I think I see where you’re coming from, but I’d argue that forcing players pick whom to level is what makes the game boring.

Given that ISO scarcity forces players to pick 3-4 characters to level, and given that (at least until the Thor/Wolverine nerf) there was a squad that vastly outperformed the others per ISO spent – Thor, Wolverine, OBW – the result was that Thorverine + OBW became the default team for mid-level players (i.e., those with enough ISO to put together a 2-star team but not enough ISO to transition to a 3-star team that would perform as well).

OTOH, if people had enough ISO to raise all their characters to max level, you’d see a lot more character diversity as people learned the strengths and weaknesses of characters outside of the cookie-cutter builds.

It would also allow the metagame to evolve much more quickly.

If a new character – say Colossus – turns out to be an absolute game-changing 3-star character, and they give out his covers as readily as they did Ares’ (I was cover-capped before the main event ended), it would still take forever and a day for most players to put together the ~172k ISO needed to get him to max level.

Shortly after that, they (finally!) release Iron Patriot, another 3-star whose mechanics make him a Colossus-killer, turning the metagame on its ear yet again…or would, if not for the fact that most players would be ISO-bankrupt from getting their Colossuses to the mid-90s.

And, to conclude the rock-paper-scissors metagame, it turns out that Iron Patriot’s game-changing ability is based on him causing big cascades but not having a lot of direct-damage abilities…meaning that Daredevil would eat him for lunch.

So now you have 3 3-star heroes (well, 2 heroes and a villain) who is each enough to build a team around based on their ability to single-handedly affect the metagame. But their combined ISO cost is over 518k.

And this is assuming that these new headliners are optimal with characters that most people already have at max level. Heaven forbid the thing that makes Colossus awesome is an ability that (for whatever reason) doubles the damage or AP-creation of all friendly countdown tiles. Now everyone “needs” to level IM40 and M.Hawkeye, making this trio alone a 415k ISO team.

If ISO was given freely, the metagame would be such that everyone would have at least 3 viable teams, each with distinct styles of play, just from obtaining and leveling these 3 characters.

If ISO remains scarce, players would choose the optimal build (gotta choose one) meaning that the “metagame” consists of the vast majority of players playing the same cookie-cutter build.

Personally, I actually have nothing against the game being pay to win, but at the current $-to-ISO exchange rate (~$330 for a max-level 3-star), for most of us it’s really “pay to be mediocre.”

7

Someone needs to pin this to the top of the forum banner. Maybe someone there will get the message.

8

That’s what I was trying to say. With the way current ISO rewards are given out, it’s damn near necessary to just pick a team of 3 and double down on that. As a result, this game doesn’t have the TCG-esque rapidly adjusting meta-game that the developers seem to desire. The reason so many people used, and continue to use, Thorverine is that it’s too expensive to do anything else. Even with the ISO-refund, I was only able to get enough to double down on a different set of 3 heroes, and still not enough to level them terribly high.

And don’t even bother mentioning buying ISO-8. At those prices, it wouldn’t even be close to worth it.

9

Fair points but I respectfully disagree. I think you’d just see identical teams, over and over again.

10

What the game needs is story progression… How long has Prologue been there?

11

Perhaps another way to doll out ISO would be to base the payouts on matches by what the average level on the enemy team is. The higher level the enemy team, the more ISO you win. This would encourage players to seek out tough enemies and ensure better scaling of the rewards to the challenge of the match. That way, players aren’t walking away from difficult matches with only 20 or 70 ISO.