Dear Santa Demiurge...All I Want for Xmas is Some Q&A

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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Dear Santa Demiurge,

(Sung to the tune of All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth)

All I want for Christmas is some Q&A, some Q&A

See, some Q&A

Gee, if I could only have some Q&A

Then I could wish you “Merry Christmas!”

Back in March and April we got some excellent communication from the Demiurge mostly in the guise of Demiurge_Will. I thought in the spirit of the Season I’d ask in the hope of that spirit they might answer some more.

To make it a bit easier for them I am condensing some of the topics that have been mentioned in the previous Q&A six months ago. That way they can pick up on any of them as he chooses.

Please ask new questions below with these ground rules:

  1. Do not tag Demiurge_Will or any other red name that answers he/she is aware this thread exists and answering questions is a function of time not being alerted that a question has been asked.

  2. Try and keep your question concise. If it requires paragraphs to explain it probably isn’t of general interest

  3. Don’t post “where are the answers” or “Hellooo where are you Will” we have received more information over the past two months in these threads than the previous twelve.

My thanks to anyone from Demiurge who can take some time to answer anything they can.

Outstanding Topics from previous months:

Versus/PvP

Are there plans to open up MMR?

Can we get weekly 5* buffs?

Can we change the roster of required villains and heroes in Lightning rounds?

Story/PvE

Time slices being made more convenient for those who don’t have an ideal choice ATM?

Is there a way to move the dialog screens to someplace where we can see them all at once and not have to skip them while playing?

Could the animations for Mindless Ones be accelerated? The placing of their tiles is very slow.

Can the yellow loaner nodes be made one-time only?

Roster Slots

Any thought to changing the cost in the early stages?

Boss Events

Difficulty of Side Node Scaling jumping so severely after 24 hours, could it be more gradual?

Rewards seem to be lesser than for a typical Story/PvE event, will they be normalized?

Can you increase the difficulty of the Boss; advanced rosters have more trouble with the side nodes.

Deadpool’s Daily Quest

Will there be a node which rewards a 4* added?

Can we have a daily Crash of the Titans?

Supports

Will they be added to Daily Resupply?

Will there be a token store dedicated to allow purchase via in-game currencies?

Quality of Life

Can Prologue be updated?

Can we have an “Open All” token button?

Can we have a token which can be purchased for Purple-ISO?

Are there new game play nodes on the drawing board?

Can we have some more information on how you view the flow rate of 4* as 5* feeders?

Token dilution in both the 4* and Classic 5* pools

Has there been consideration to a puzzle-based/conditions-based win condition?

Is there consideration to a re-balancing within the 4&5* tiers to make some of the older characters who have become obsolete due to power creep?

I know I’ve missed many other topics from the past six months so please add them to the thread and hopefully we will find something in out metaphorical forum stocking.

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I have a trivia question. We were once told after a year or so that 2* Captain America is the most used character. As of December 2018 who is the most used character?

3

Will we ever see another run of the Gauntlet? Hopefully with updated reward structure?

4

Can we get the ability to earn variant art covers for characters? It would help to spice up rosters a bit.

Can you implement a trade store so that you could trade one currency for another or trade in a cover for something of equal/lesser value that’s featured in the trade store, like maybe a cover for a limited character, a special variant art cover or a costume?

5

Roster slots - any thoughts on changing the costs in the later stages - not increasing to 2k

QoL -

Lots of user interface things that would be good to see, anything in the works?

ie supports UI is super clunky, add options for fave teams, add options for sorting by * in roster select screen, bring forward all required character copies on their nodes

Any way of reducing the number of clicks/taps needed to replay a match?

Can the Story maps all be updated to have nodes in obvious progression path rather than the mess that is Florida?

6

What’s the plan to keep people engaged a year from now? Five years?
Any kind of long term strategy to keep the game rolling?

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Ooooo @Colognoisseur is back at it!!! Love it!!!

Yellow Loaner nodes:

Is there a reason why the Yellow loaner node is a 1 time pass on some PVE events and some are not?

Can we update all yellow loaner nodes to a 1 time locking node? This is a terrible node to grind out if you are a high end PVE player. These teams don’t make any sense that we are using.

Can this node be updated to use the 5E and replace the 2E? If you want people to progress, using a 5* would be better at that than using a 2*.

Feeders:

Why won’t all the 5* have feeders now? This was asked before and we were told that it was a wasted cover/ISO issue. Well…we have saved covers so that is now resolved.

Will the 6/7 3* thAt give out the same 4* ever be updated?

Do you foresee 5* getting duel feeders in the future?

Supports:

When will the token store be updated?

When will master tokens be able to be earned and not bought, if lucky enough?

Will the Stone Supports ever be released in any manner?

Please for the love of God, do not release supports in PVP. IF YOU want to test them, do it in Lighting Rounds first. This will give us a chance and give you feedback of what we see. This could even make the balance of PVP tilt drastically with the way some of these supports/Stones are.

Roster Slots:

As it has been brought up before, the cost of roster slot 301 is 2000 HP. Why? Why isn’t this 1000 like the rest. With this game rapidly expanding more and more high end players are getting to this point.

Why is is there a cap at 600 roster slots? Why would there be any cap?

Shield Rank:

Will this be expanded above 200?

Why is is there a Cap on this?

End Game/High end player content:

While I understand that most of the people I play with in this game are the 1% or whatever percentage we are, but we are beyond dedicated to this game. Will there be any content for us on the High end? i know you have to take care of the newer players and the 3/4* players but this high end is getting BORING, which is not good at all.

MMR:

MMR sucks. Why can this not be opened up? If you have champed 5*, why can’t you see everything? Why does the game limit me and what I can do because of some outdated matrix? You should be able to Q up any champed * level if you are in that level.

I think that is enough from me right now, maybe more later.

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This doesn’t only echo what I would ask. It even echoes the order I would ask them.

One other thing though. Since the inception of the game character after character has been introduced, and though a “favorite team” addition to the user interface would help streamline things so they’re not so . . . um, the way they are, I think there’s still a pretty serious issue.

Currently we have whatever number of 1s, fourteen 2s, forty-seven 3s, seventy-seven 4s, and thirty 5*s. Or something like that. But I really can’t recommend players roster most of those.

In particular, I’d say to new players - only roster 1* Juggernaut (for Deadpool Daily Quest), collect all the non-Bagman 2s (because you’ll earn rewards as you get champion rewards), collect 3 Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye, (a list of about ten more characters), collect 4* Medusa, Rocket and Groot, Gamora (list of about seven more characters), and try to get 5* Okoye and Thor if you can. What I’m getting at is of a hundred and seventy or whatever characters, if you want the best rewards in the least amount of time, players should not collect whatever characters, they need to collect particular characters.

This is “optimal”, and considering regular players are spending very possibly on the order of 60-80 hours a month or more, there is good reason to play optimally. You don’t want to increase your time investment to 80-100 hours for the same rewards, it just doesn’t make sense.

But knowing how to play optimally, or studying up on it is un-fun.

So the question I’m getting at is - are there any plans to make these relatively deadweight characters more useful? Maybe recurring regular SHIELD training not only for 4s but also for 3s? Or something along those lines? Or maybe offering rewards to players that use particular characters other than the ones that are boosted for a particular event? (Say a 3* is boosted for an event. But I probably don’t care if 3* Cyclops is boosted, I’m still going to use 3* Doctor Strange or 3* Hawkeye even if they’re not boosted, because they’re just better, and I have no incentive to do otherwise because boosts don’t make enough of a difference. But if there were actually rewards for using other teams, that might make things a little more interesting.) Or there are any number of other implementations (I haven’t even mentioned PvP though that’s no small matter either) that could encourage players to use a diverse roster rather than the current limited options one pursues for optimal play.

also @The Roc @The_rockett nice post, I thought it made some well considered points.

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So I just read this article about another game, yes I do understand it is the most popular game in the world, but it’s about how quickly they reacted to the player base concern. Can we have this please? At least some communication?

https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/14/fortnite-infinity-blade-vaulted-epic-games/?yptr=yahoo

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The sad truth is: people will keep playing even with zero communication.
So while you and me and Colog and others will complain about no communication, there won’t be any until things go WAY south and spending drops off significantly.
Obviously this hasn’t been the case so far.

There’s been a skeleton crew working on this for the last two years at least and that’s not going to change.

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I know Bow. It’s sad we care this much and try and try to beg for something and it’s crickets. Well I will keep trying until I am done with this game.

12

Demi would have buffed that weapon.

13

I almost spit out my whiskey when I read this. LOL. So very true.

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I know I’m not a developer, but I think there are a few that I can either answer or have personal opinion comments on.

Is there consideration to a re-balancing within the 4&5* tiers to make some of the older characters who have become obsolete due to power creep?
Yup! The team has certainly been taking a look at some of the older characters and seeing where they can eventually make some improvements. As you can tell, the most recent rebalance was Doctor Octopus (Classic), so they’re not hesitant to rebalance those weaker 5-Star characters either.

Has there been consideration to a puzzle-based/conditions-based win condition?
This one is more so my personal opinion, but I’ve always been curious if something like this could be applied to Story Events to make it a little less “first one to the finish line, wins!” and more puzzle/challenge oriented for tie-breaking purposes.

For example, two players could perform optimal clears, but if one player was also able to, for example, complete the challenge of “Win 5 matches with a Spider-Verse character on your team,” then they’d also be awarded an additional X points.

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This is the first rebalance in 14 months (minus Gambit). Sorry but you don’t get a pat on the back for this. Not trying to be a jerk about it but wish there were more than just 1 to talk about.

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The game definitely needs new play modes. The only enjoyment i have anymore is farting around in the shield sim room. I really wish they’d leave that up during the off season. Also, they need to add a team save feature in the character select menu. I’m tired of digging through 100+ characters trying to find the ones i want, especially during pve clears.

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Almost like daily seed challenges in other games like Spelunky where everyone shares the same seed and it’s just a test of ability

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Yes. It has been a while since the last character rebalance, however that’s because going through the process of a character rebalance isn’t exactly an insignificant task. New events, new characters, character rebalances, etc, all require prioritization of development time.

Since the team is a relatively small, but passionate, group of individuals, it’s natural that only a couple features can be worked on simultaneously. In the past, consistent new characters and character rebalances were more prioritized over content like new events or new features.

With the recent addition of new features and events now, such as Saved Covers or Places of Power, that should be an indication that the team wants to devote some time to addressing a wider area of the game, beyond just characters. It doesn’t mean that they won’t return to addressing them, but rather that the time may be more split moving forward.

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I really appreciate that post brigby. I just gotta say though if they are feeling super adventurous with updates send out a poll with which of X amounts would we be interested in. They don’t need to be super specific but a general one liner about the purpose and let the community have a say in like the order we rather have the next updates come up.

20

One humble request from Santa. Change the support token on pve to an advanced support token. Most tokens at 1 or 2* are horrible. I feel cursed to get that reward.