Hi everyone, I’m Chuckova, long time lurker, first time poster.
You might have seen me in such tournaments like Hood lighting round failing to get top 2.
I usually don’t post, but the direction of the game is taking a turn for the worst, so I wanted to say something and hopefully help get it back on the right track.
Design philosophy: Reward vs Punishment.
It’s usually better the reward those that play they way you want as a developer instead of punishing those that play differently.
Seems like MPQ is making the same mistake that early World of Warcraft made by going the direction of punishment instead of reward.
Blizzard didn’t want players playing 24/7 and killing themselves, so they wanted to make players take a break once a while.
So in early WoW beta, they add a ‘fatigue system’ which punished players who played many hours a day with dimishined xp gain and other penalites. Everyone hated it.
They eventually replaced it with the ‘rest system’ which is increase xp gain for those that logged off. Everyone loved it.
They both achieved the same result of getting players to take breaks, but the implementation of rewarding rather than punishing is vastly superior and accepting to the players.
In MPQ
If you log in everyday and play one match you get a bonus chest containing some 100-500 xp or 1 health pack or 50 gold.
Could you imagine if it was change, that if you logged in every 24 hours you got nothing, but if you didn’t login every 24 hours you would be TAXED 1 health pack or 100-500 xp or 50 gold.
This idea is obviously super terrible, should be burned with fire, and never spoken of again.
Both give reason for player to log in every 24 hours, but one is much superior to the other.
Currently in MPQ there are some examples of punishing instead of rewarding.
The Oscorp Heroic event is implemented poorly by punishing players with the lock out of most characters and forcing the use of a few select heroes, most of whom have no boost bonus.
A hero pool similar to the Hulk and Ares event would have been much better, where every hero is available, but a few select heroes are boosted so players are encouraged and rewarded for using these heros.
“Captain America has 10x boost and will make this event easier? Sure I’ll pump 10-20 levels into him.” That is the feeling you want players to have.
Not, “Oh god I need to use my unboosted level 6 Captain America for this event. Because everyone else is locked out. Time to play something else for the next 5 days”
You need to give players the OPTION to use the heroes you want them to use, not FORCE them by locking everyone else out and alienating a large percentage of your player base who either don’t have those heroes,
or don’t have the levels for those heroes.
This event also punishes grinders with increased mob levels of 230 max for every match, and punishes people who don’t play a lot with Zero rubber banding.
It’s pretty obvious some tweaking needs to take place to achieve a finer balance of grinding and rubber banding.
Future implementation of -10 iso skip tax.
There was a brief moment where this was actually live for like 5 mins of game time a few days ago. The skip button was pink and had “Skip -10” on it if I remember correctly.
Just seeing it, I had an instant reaction of disgust.
It would be wiser to reward players not to skip constantly rather punishing them with a skip tax.
I remember someone suggesting some kind of streak bonus which breaks on skip or lose.
This bonus has to be good enough so there is a decision to skip and break the streak or not.
But not so good that skipping is no longer a option.
The max streak bonus also can’t be too long because after a skip it should be somewhat quick to rebuild it back to max bonus.
*note: numbers are not set in stone, it’s just to give you a rough idea of how it would work.
2 streak: + 5 iso bonus
3 streak: +10 iso bonus
4+ streak: +20 iso bonus per win
now there is a small incentive to keep your streak alive and not skip. But players still have the option to skip if need be.
Also it has a side benefit of gently leading players to play on different stages.
Since if I get a hard match up on the forest stage, to keep my streak I have to play on a different stage. So it’s like you get 2 free skips with stage changes before you have to break your streak with an actual skip.
This also gives a small incentive for players to level other heroes to take advantage of these ‘free’ stage skips in some tournaments to keep the streak alive.
with this system, the average iso gain per match will increase from 105 iso currently to a range of 105-125 iso.
Which is similar to what it would have been after the developers added the 100 iso and 200 iso rewards which makes it (70 + 100 + 140 + 200) / 4 = 127.5 iso,
with -10 skip tax and average of 2 skips per match it goes down to 107.5 iso per match. 2 skip per match is probably a very low estimate given the current match making system for many players.
In the end I don’t think this tax would reduced the number of skips as much as you would expect.
But, it for sure will annoy and frustrate a lot of the player base.
Because sometimes you just need to push that skip button for one reason or another outside your control, MMR hell, 0 or 1 point reward, +50 lvls above me, and it’s just so shiny! I need to click it!
I believe the streak system(reward) is superior to the skip tax system(punishment) for the players, and in the end achieves what the developers want more effectively, less skipping overall.
So to the developers and designers of MPQ, for the future changes, I hope you ask yourself if this feature is rewarding the player or punishing the player.
Reward the players and they will reward you back… with money!, buckets full of money! and less forum hate, which is probably more valuable at the end of the day.
Just kidding, money is awesome!
