Devil Dino's Release - The Actual Beginning of P2W?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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We forumites have been through countless updates to the game that a lot of people have considered being a cash grab from Demiurge, ranging from slightly reasonable accusations like True Healing to just plain silly ones like nerfs to Ragnarok / Spidey, conspiracy theories regarding the game cheating and giving the enemy AI more favorable cascades than the player. However, today Demiurge released a piece of information that actually went onto my radar as potentially a legitimate cash grab:

We have so much great stuff, I’m busting out a bulleted list:

Fan-picked PVP and PvE events! These events will reward special Anniversary Pack Tokens that include..
Devil Dino! Finally playable, he’s a Legendary character with 3 abilities. He’s available for this week only, with one exception:
If you’ve been playing for a year, you’ll find a very special Daily Reward for #365: your own Devil Dino.

If I’m reading this correctly, I take this to mean: “Devil Dino will ONLY be available through anniversary packs/tokens in the following week + 1 cover from the daily reward, and will NOT be added as PvP / PvE event rewards.” With the way that everyone has been reacting to, well, every single MPQ update in history, I’m surprised that people aren’t grabbing their pitchforks and rioting, since if Devil Dino is released like a typical 4* with a 2% drop rate in the pack, then the only way to even get Devil Dino will be to spend 50k HP on enough packs to get covers in all his colors, and then another 22.5k HP maxing out his covers.

There are a couple of things that could make this not actually that grim though:

  1. High drop rates on Devil Dinos in packs (say, 15-20%), making this only moderately P2W (say, 30k HP to get the 3 covers and max out his covers as opposed to 75k).
  2. Devil Dino doesn’t impact competitive PvP / PvE, in which who cares if people have him in the first place. If he’s a joke character like Dan from SF4, for instance.
  3. The devs somehow messed up their wording and my assumptions in the previous paragraph were wrong.

Hopefully the devs can clarify the announcement and that it isn’t exactly as it sounds, because if my guess is correct, then October 10th will be a day that lives in infamy, with the potential to even surpass the debacle that was True Healing and Spidey nerfs.

Thoughts? Pre-emptive rage? Comments?

Edit: And just as I posted this, Demiurge Will responds to another comment!

Looks like theory 2 was correct, time to put away your pitchforks boys.

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And now children, time for a story…

Once upon a time, Bag-Man and Bag-Lady had a baby and they named it Bag-Dino.

The end.

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sniff I love happy endings.

4

P2W truly began with Sentry.

Then it continued with Hood by proxy to Sentry.

It was extended by Nick Fury.

Extended further by X Force.

Really, Devil Dino would be, at worst, just be a continuation of what is already occurring.

But it sounds like he won’t be all that great anyway.

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Wat. I don’t think P2W involves two characters that have been around for an eternity (D3’s made 0 money off of the majority of people who already have a maxed hood / xf for ages) and a 4* that for the most part has seen no real high end play and is pretty easily replaceable. I’m not even really considering leveling Fury since C. Mags does roughly what he does for a third of the cost.

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Nick Fury is hardly P2W, and while X Force is definitely P2W calibur strong, chances are pretty good most people have had his covers around since forever and since people don’t try hard to get his covers back when he sucked it even gives a good chance for other players to get his cover.

If you look at design Thor was closer to P2W as he’s unquestionably better than pretty much anyone at that time by design. The Sentry you can make some argument like maybe devs didn’t think people would use strike tile with him, even though he’s one of the best strike tile generator in the game. After all, devs must have thought people would use Magnetic Field to put down protect tiles, so it’s not really that much of a stretch. Compared to Thor, X Force’s design is less of a P2W because his strongest ability, Surgical Strike, can sometimes be defeated and X Force is basicaly just a green Fireball which is inline with the assumption that 4* should be stronger. Of course in reality Surgical Strike can rarely defeated and he puts out P2W worthy numbers, but I don’t think he’s intended to be that way.

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But seriously, the start of P2W was when they switched over to imcoin.png
for boosts, which predated sentry (and maybe pvpshield.png
? ) by a fair amount

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Sort of. The +3 all AP boosts for iso was clearly bad for gameplay as people could just trivially wreck on offense, even more so than now. I think they changed it over to HP to discourage its use, which I guess in a way made it P2W? Doubt that was intended as the main reason though, as you can see from them wanting to even get rid of boosts with TUs.

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It may not have been their intention, but HP boosts are like a text book definition of using $$$ currency to get a in-game advantage over people who don’t

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The boosts going to HP is not really P2W, more like devs being naive thinking ‘who would possibly buy boosts at that price’ and it turns out that was a lot of people. If they want boosts to be P2W they could’ve charged more for them. Obviously looking at all the Sentry bombing in general it’s quite clear they can squeeze a bit more out of those boosts by raising their costs given how dependent people are on the AP+3 all boosts to make crucial PvP runs. There are a lot of decision in this game that’s are more ‘who could possibly do something like this’, as in ‘who would possibly play every 2H 24M continously’, because if this is a plot to make money there are way better plots to make money.

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I’m not saying it’s a good way for the to get P2W money