counter attack system in pvp breaks tournaments

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

on the surface the idea of counter attacking someone that attacked you seems like a great way to personalize the experience by adding community in and not just AI. in practice however the counter attack system does far more harm than good, at least in it’s current implementation. here’s what i feel breaks in tournaments:

  1. if you fight more than 60 minutes in a row in a tournament, and start to reach the top 10 in a bracket, you start losing more points to counter attacks than you can gain. once you hit top 10 the gap between what you gain and what you lose grows larger and larger until this tipping point of futility is hit. this happens because i gain 10 pts per win vs someone lower rank, they then give me -25pts when they fight me back. because they fight ai it’s almost guaranteed they’ll beat any chars i have in 1-2 tries. only once has someone failed all 3 times. the amount of counter attack lists you appear in also increases to a tipping point making it far more likely now that you have high points and been attacking lost to get all progress wiped out.

honestly i spent 2hrs yesterday going from 600-900 pts. then spent another 1.5hrs trying to go from 960-1000 only once breaking 1000 but at the same time losing a battle so it didnt give me the progression rewards. i called it a night and when i woke up i was down to 650 pts… and you know what, i recognized 9/10 names that i lost points to… the exact ones i fought the evening before. i would have far less issue with it if they found me with matchmaking but the fact that i get a huge target on me. while i hope progression rewards get separated from ladder rank i sitll think this dance is going to be incredibly frustrating.

  1. unlimited counter attacks, especially, the final 10 minutes of a tourney a real luck of the draw

i got to 2nd place in my bracket today, i actually held that the final 1hr jockeying up and down between 2nd and 4th. usually at the rate of 1 win to 1 loss from the person i just attacked previous and we kept that dance going. then in the final 1 min, after i finish my final battle and get dumped to the main screen where the tournament is gone, I get notified of being hit by no less then 4 counter attacks and drop a whopping 90 pts all in one go… a few minutes later I’m told I’m a top 10 finisher not a top 1-2 finisher. those 28 pts i won in the last battle might have saved me but really this system encourages and enables dogpiling whoever is in 1st/2nd place with no recourse for them to gain any more points.

My vote? get rid of the counter attack system. you can still lose points on a loss that happens due to matchmaking to balance the ladders. without counter attack it becomes more of a race to the top with your peers, fun!, instead of go up 300 pts, go to work, go down 300 pts. perhaps the theory is that counter attack is fun… i can assure you, losing more points than you gain each attack is not fun. i make a point of fighting only those higher ranked than me to avoid being a tempting counter attack but once you hit the top 10 this is impossible if you want to gain ranks still…

2

I think we’ve all had these experiences. I dropped from a 100 point first place lead in the last tournament to a top ten finisher in the last minute. It can be frustrating. I think some of the moves they have made recently are helping to spread out combat over the whole tournament. Retaliations are a problem, though. I think the most difficult part of them is that when you are at a high enough level, they become pointless. You won’t get as many points as you lost. You’ll leave yourself open to more points lost You’ll lose health for your characters. And, you’ll waste time doing it. Some ideas to fix it are:

  1. Only one retaliation rather than a string of retaliations.
  2. Let the player win back the points stolen.
  3. Don’t let players with vast differences in points attack each other.

A lot of people have been talking about defense recently. I think the best way to combat the problem of not having a way to defend yourself is with the retaliation system. This is what I’d like to see. After someone steals points from me, I get a message I was attacked and lost this many points. I can then retaliate to earn most of those points back. If I win, it is over. If I lose, I have lost health and the points.

The way it is now, a team that is not even close to being on par with my team can beat me using boosts, luck, and 1 to 3 tries. That’s fine. I bet it was a fun, intense game for him. They earn a bunch of points for the triumph, as they should. I lose a bunch of points for the loss, ok. But if I retaliate, I get back maybe a tenth of the points I lost, and leave myself open for another attack. It’s not worth it, so I let it go. Then it happens again and again.

In the playground, if a little kid gut punches the big kid and steals 30 of his marbles, the big kid isn’t going to easily catch him, put him in a headlock, take back 3 marbles, let him go, and then ask to be gut punched again for 30 more marbles. He’s going to grab the kid and take back all his marbles. Maybe the little kid was able to keep a couple that he stole, but not 27 of them. He definitely wouldn’t take another shot at gut punching the big kid. Also, if he was small enough and the big kid was big enough, he wouldn’t even try to face him. He’d be out of his league.

I do understand that there has to be a bell curve, but I think it would still work this way. When my level gets high enough, I get hit more than I can attack. Trying to make the choice of going for more points are trying to get back the ones stolen would be a good system. I think with the recent change to health packs, it would work really well.

3

I think the retaliation system is needed, but let’s keep it to 1 retaliation per person. If you are attacked, you can retaliate once and that’s it. No more back and forth between 2 people, it gets tiring and frankly quite annoying when you’re trying to gun for the top spot

4

thats a step but it still doesnt solve the underlying math issue. once you hit the top 10, around 1000 pts, if you attack and win 10 pts the retaliation attack makes you lose 30-40pts. thats what is at the heart of making this formula broken. it actually makes more sense not to attack so you arent a target and thats broken.

5

You don’t lose more points because of the retaliation system.

The following is just an example. I don’t know the mechanics of the ranking. From observation this seems to be along the lines of how it works.

You have 700 points. Team X has 500 points
Team X beats you. - 40 points to you + 40 points for Team X
You have 660 points, Team X has 540 points
Team Y beats Team X. - 40 points to Team X
Team Z beats Team X. -40 points to Team X
You still have 660 points, Team X has 460 points
You want to fight team X but you’ll only get 10 points.

You’ll have to skip team X and find a team with 860 points to get +40 points.

6

If you don’t retaliate, they won’t be able to retaliate back. Take it as sarcasm if you want, but if someone is immediately retaliating back, just skip them. There are other people with decently high ranks that are eating dinner, sleeping, walking the dog, or otherwise experiencing real life.

7

I think we need to stop complaining about the system and start adapting to the system. I’m not going to spell out how I choose to play, but I will say that skip is the best defense the game currently has, some might say the only defense.

8

Rather than eliminate the retailiation system, how about slightly different matchmaking? So you can better seek an opponent worth fighting.

Last night I was so close to hitting 1000 points, but couldn’t quite get there because I’d spend 5-10 minutes skipping, looking for someone with a higher point total than myself. I might’ve made it by attacking a few lower value targets in rapid succession, but usually in that situation they retaliate or I get attacked through normal matchmaking and I loose points quicker than I can gain them. And of course this morning I woke to 240 points lost while I slept, but most of those weren’t retaliations I’m fairly certain. That’s the heart of the matter, but if I could more easily find an opponent that was worth my time, then I wouldn’t be bothered by the defense losses so much.