Comparing the 3 D3 forums

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

As I have been waiting for updates to the MPQ forum June sneak peaks, new character details I decided to look at the other D3 forums GI Joe and Magic The Gathering PQ. I wanted to see how the other forums were being run compared to MPQ. I only looked at the general discussion page for this comparison.
These are some things that I notice and would compare to MPQ forum.

GI Joe: Newest game has a up to date sneak peek thread and does a monthly Q&A with its players. Players put Questions in a google doc and then the devs post a response on the forum. Player base threads are a little toxic right now. It is a small group and multiple threads are complaints titled “are you kidding me”, “balance is awful”, “I want my money”.

MTGPQ: Sneak Peek is updated, devs do a monthly Q&A similar to GI Joe. Player base smaller than MPQ but bigger than GI Joe toxic levels fairly low. There are question threads mild complaints “pulling same dupes over and over” but overall a friendly helpful community.

MPQ: Sneak Peek not updates, No Q&A from the Devs and the community is much larger. From a player base toxic levels seem to be under control. There are some complaints but not on the level GI Joe is right now.

overall I would rank MTGPQ the best forum with dev involvement plus player base community. I would then place MPQ because of player base involvement, and GJ Joe last. Mainly because it is new and people seem to be joining the forum to complain a bit rather than joining to be part of the community.

with MPQ forums adding back a Dev Q&A maybe quarterly since this is a mature game, and keeping the sneak peek thread up to date would go a long way to improving our forum to stand out above D3’s other forums.

2

I found a website called Sensor Tower which provides information on apps and developers. You can view the most recent month’s data for free and see what kind of downloads and revenue D3Go had in May 2020, for free. (It is possible the data is not truly 100% accurate, but I think you can trust it is at least valuable for comparing these games.)

They list App store and Google play store info separately. I did not look at Steam because…well, there are only a few hundred Steam users.

MPQ: Apple Downloads - 40K, revenue 300 K. Android Downloads 700K, Revenue 700K. Total 740K downloads, $1 million revenue.

MtGPQ: Apple downloads 6K, revenue 60K. Android DLs 50K, Revenue 100K. Total 56K DLs, $160K revenue.

GI Joe: Apple DLs 6K, revenue 30K. Android DLs 9K, Revenue 30K. Total 15K DLs, $60K revenue.

The thing is that MPQ has been at that same level for a while. I suspect the growth potential for MPQ is pretty limited at this point, from my observations it’s been pretty stable. I also think the majority of MPQ money comes from casual players at this point who don’t really care much about what’s on the forum etc. The Marvel IP remains the strongest in the world and draws in a lot of players - even, obviously, without any movie in over a year or any cinematic content whatsoever (other than the smallish TV shows).

MtGPQ apparently has a much smaller playerbase that are highly engaged (decent revenue in relation to downloads) and I would suspect they get a good ROI, in their view, from spending time keeping engaged with the community which appears to be a higher proportion of hardcore players than MPQ has. They obviously get a decent amount of activity (MtG is a strong brand, even today) but I suspect they have more revenue from a smaller % of their playerbase vs MPQ which can get a lot of volume of players, making it easier to coast with little effort. If you get 700K people downloading your game and just 1% bought that starter pack (I think it’s $9.99?) that’s $70,000 in new user revenue right there.

GI Joe remains the new game on the block and I assume they have some kind of plan in place to keep highly engaged for some set amount of time to try to build it up. I dunno what they are looking for as far as targets there but I might not be surprised if the plug is pulled on that game sooner than later, based on those numbers.

Their actions have spoken pretty loudly, IMO, as far as how important they consider forum engagement with the longtime vets who mostly populate this space. We are the hardened vets for the most part. They seem to prefer posting things in other spots by and large.

Ex: The Shield Rank increase (200 to 300) was published in an email I get from them. They posted about the new Vulture/Falcon bundle on their FB page.

There seems to be little point in expecting them to re-engage significantly here, nor in getting upset/frustrated about it.

3

Well, there seems to be good cause for being upset about it. It won’t do much good, but the expectation isn’t unrealistic, as this isn’t a fan made forum.

4

First off great info you provided by the website you found.

i understand trying to grow GI Joe as it is a new game in a really competitive market ie: clash of clans. But what I don’t understand is why they don’t try more with the MPQ forums. There is by far the most activity and most revenue.

I also play Clash Royale and saw a comparison of community managers between Super Cell games and the communication between player and Developers was much better in Clash or Clans and Brawl Stars than it was in Clash Royale.

to me it comes down to this, the developer needs to number one want to create a better relationship and communication with the players and forums and number two is willing to put in the work to do so. I thought when IceIV came back that would be the case unfortunately I was wrong.

5

The developer of GI Joe made some big changes and upset the whales and hardcore players. It’s quite a mess there now.

I find the players in MtG more matured in their thinking and have higher sense of gratitude to their developers.

As for MPQ, the dev did a number of monthly q&a and video updates/sneak peaks in the early years. They stopped doing video updates due to poor viewership or the lack of them. Actually, many of their replies are still relevant today. The last time we had q&a was about two years ago. Things started well and then it went south.

The situation in Marvel Contest of Champion is similar to MPQ: dilution, more precious resources, less grinding, cheaper bundles, more communication, more balancing. The difference is that the developers there are more responsive in the forum, compared to here. However, they still get snarky replies and whatever typical negative replies you can find in here, you can find in there too. Things like they don’t play their game, they are incompetent, they don’t communicate, they are p2w, they don’t listen to players’ feedbacks etc.

I think some of the main problems in here are:

  1. Some think that they are better and smarter than the dev in many ways. So, anything the dev say or do is wrong if it’s not what they want to hear or see happening.

  2. There are quite a number of lawyers in here who are going to comb through what the devs write in the forum and then use it against them when the situation see fits.

  3. A strong tendency to prove that the dev is wrong.

Generally speaking, I don’t think people are interested in the dev communicating stuff. They just want to know when the devs are going to do the things they want them to do. Of course, there are people out there who are genuinely interested in hearing from dev’s povs, but they remains a minority.

6

All 3 points you bring up are in essence the same. And regarding that: welcome to the internet, I guess?

While there’s always the toxic posters, it’s possible to just ignore them. There are many users who are open and constructive. And realistic to the fact that not every thought or opinion that is posted by a dev or community rep is necessarily something that is written in stone regarding the game’s development. As long as it’s not outright lies, of course.

7

I think the forum engagement is linked potentially to a staffing issue. Ever since Brigby left, we haven’t had the same level of interaction on the forums.

I’m willing to bet the constraints of the COVID pandemic coupled by a lack of Community Manager is causing the disconnect. I’m sure the team is hard at work, people can only wear so many hats.

I think MPQ has a level of auto pilot with it, while the other games are still relatively new an require more attention. MPQ has been rinse and repeat for a very long time.

8

I always found the toxicity levels with this forum were a feedback loop.

Devs were afraid of talking to players because they were perceived to be toxic. Players don’t get any information about things. Major change happens. Still no information. Players speculate among themselves, getting angry about being ignored. Devs eventually decide to drop a statement. Players ask follow up questions. Devs long since ran away from the toxicity. Players get angry that they’re being ignored. Devs see the anger and stay away. Players get even angrier because despite the anger they’re still being ignored.

The lack of communication has been a problem here for a long time. It will usually improve for a little bit (it really did under Brigby until he kinda disappeared and did by-the-numbers updates which felt more like he just didn’t have time any more), but eventually it goes back to the statue quo where we basically update each other from what’s heard on Discord.

9

Maybe I’m giving more credit than they deserve, but I have to assume it’s a business decision. They look at each game and estimate, based on past patterns or throwing bones or whatever, what the revenue for each game will be both with and without forum engagement. Despite the overall number of players and revenue dollars being so much smaller for the other games, it could be that their hypothesis or experience or fortunetelling tells them not engaging over there costs them more revenue than not engaging here. So maybe MPQ revenue could be $1.01M with engagement (a $10K increase) but GI Joe would be $20K without it (a $40K decrease).

The general consensus that I read from the forumites seems to be that while the lack of engagement is frustrating and disappointing, it is not by itself the reason people quit, stop spending money, or take other revenue-impacting actions. In fact, this forum is pretty active on its own just amongst the passionate playerbase.

10

What’s heard on Discord nowadays is crickets. There was one or two comments in the past 6 months when a major bug happened and they wanted us to know it was being fixed (I think when an event was scheduled wrong, they posted a Discord comment as well as one on the forum).

The communication shutdown is across all avenues of communication, although they do seem to post things on Facebook that don’t get put on the forum (just announcements about bundles, mostly).

11

I would disagree with your point on COVID-19. When you compare the D3 forums GO Joe and MTGPQ are both keeping sneak peeks updates and are doing Q&A. With how much smaller those games are they could have one of those other community managers do double duty and at least update the sneak peeks.

for the game they have launched a new shield training and a new Introducing event which might seem small but probably took a lot of work to develop and the introducing event probably takes a good amount of maitanince since it is new for each character.

The forum engagement needs to be a conscious choice and they have chosen to not stay on top of the forum. I would say it has been bad for a while and just got worse with COVID

12

Many good points there. I think another way of looking at things are how each brand influences their fanbases. MPQ and GI Joe largely centrals around what the characters do and what beliefs (Justice, Fairness, Equality etc) they hold, so there’s a “human connection”. For example, I think some are channeling their inner GI Joe when they post about their negative experiences in that forum. I’m not sure if MtG has such kind of influences because it seems to be mainly about gothic and mystery.

Communication has shut down since Shardmas and it might have to do with a few accidents. Some guy said the wrong thing and infuriated the players. Also, some players were digging out their old posts from 3-4 years ago and used it against them, expecting them do exactly what they said. Time passes and circumstances change, you know? It could also have to do with people nitpicking their choice of words.

They no longer make threads about cash bundles and the reasons are obvious. If not, look for those old threads and read what kind of replies are in there.

Brigby was a helpful and nice guy. Sometimes he can get the update for Sneak Peak in. As for those crucial matters, the best he could say was, he will update when there are more information available.

I see Demiurge Anthony more active in the Bugs forum. Demiurge Bagman interacted for a while shortly after the closure of original Shield Training. So, it is a conscious choice that they are not communicating. Perhaps they finally realised that no matter what reasons or rationale they give for their actions, people will still twist and turn their words into some sinister and negative. For example, when they mentioned that they feel feeders are released at a fast rate last year, they get called out of touch and some went a little further and said feeders are dead. Let’s imagine what the reactions will be if they tell the players and also explain to them that feeders will be updated again in December and Bishop will not be nerfed and more counters will be made instead. It’s not going to be pretty

13

Well there are more than a few angry dudes in the GI Joe forum, one of them is accusing D3Go of funding Antifa!

I see Lakestone posting updates there and addressing a concern about cheating which I assume is from the D3Go side.

14

I know the thread started about D3 forums but we have already discussed COC as another Marvel franchise.

I play Contest of Champions as well and they really seem to be a lot more in touch with their player base and actually take constructive criticism on board rather than doubling down on everything or retreating in to their shell.
They recently tried a beta for the next chapter in story mode, had negative feedback and postponed the release to rework it. Now they’ve posted a state of the game/roadmap: Dev Diary: What's Coming In The Contest | Marvel Contest of Champions. Obviously the detail is yet to come but this shows a level of engagement and communication I wish we had here. It addresses many of the key concerns raised by the community and has revitalised interest (at least in my alliance there).
I suppose the strategy may not matter much to Marvel as long as the margins are maintained/increased and don’t know the details of the contracts between Marvel and Kabam/D30 but it is disappointing to me that the engagement strategies are so different.

15

@bluewolf does the site always shows the latest month data? If so, perhaps we could start tracking the data month to month on a separate thread. May not be entirely accurate, but it will give us a view to the revenue trend

16

It does…

17

Prior to developing MCOC, Kabam had already amassed a large playerbase of 25 million. Their founders were Chinese and they are able to tap into the China market. That explains why some spoilers of MCOC appeared in chinese forum first.

Financially speaking, Kabam had major backings. They had a few hundred millions invested in them. When you have so much money, your ability to make magic simply skyrockets.

MCOC has about 200 developers, which is 10 times bigger than what we have in MPQ. I think MPQ developers addressed different ways of engaging the community in the 2018 Q&A and the limits of what they can do. They decided to stick with communicating when there are big annoucements. True enough, they did stick to their words.

18

I actually misclicked because I had already gotten used to MPQ being on the right :sweat_smile:

19

We have captured GI Joe’s base!

20

I’m clicking MtGPQ forum accidentally instead.

Before the change: Scroll down once to bypass GI Joe Forum and click MPQ General Discussion.

After the change: Scroll down once and see GI Joe Forum. My habit tells me to scroll down once more because MPQ is next. Clicked General Discussion and saw a lot of weird threads.