Difficulty in a Lucky Game

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

It’s hard to figure out how to set up a challenging match in this game. It’s been an issue ever since the first Puzzle Quest and probably for all the other similar games that have ever existed.

People want a challenge, usually. They don’t want pushovers that you can just walk over without a thought, usually. Those just feel kinda dull.

They also want to feel like their skill is being rewarded, that they are doing well at this game and are getting their desserts for it. They want to feel like it was their skill that was the difference between winning and losing.

The problem is, there is a non-insignificant luck factor in this game. Tile drops are important, and random tile drops are not exactly pre-screened to make sure more matches don’t come from them. (If anything, it’s the opposite.)

So either way, you end up getting colors you want and matches you want more readily, or the opponent does.

In such an environment, what can you do (as a developer) to make a player FEEL skilled? What can you do to make a hard battle (One you’d expect more people to lose then win) that doesn’t make them feel like they could have done better, or without making them pray that they had a luckier board?

The luck involved in this game makes it hard to make something difficult without making players feel unlucky. Even against overpowered, overscaled opponents, people blame their losses more on luck.

How can you make such a luck-themed game feel less so?

2

Win conditions.

Don’t just say “your job is to beat this team.” Say, “your job is to beat this team, and also, if you down all of the enemy characters with a single power, we’ll give you a 250 ISO bonus, and if you do it with 30 red AP left at the end of the match, you’ll get another 250 ISO bonus.” It creates an optional challenge that rewards unique team composition and strategies.

It’s still luck, but you have some control over what you’re doing, and if you fail at the win conditions, you still win, you just get less. That means that there’s a spectrum of victory, from a bare minimum win, to a really skilled win. When winning and losing isn’t binary, you can add difficulty without wiping the team (unlike the present event).

3

Perhaps some “scripted” events. In other words, boards that aren’t random, and have an actual puzzle attached. Say give a player a preset board with a specific character and a timer that is hard to immediately match. The objective is to match it before it detonates. New tiles don’t randomly drop in, the board drops, and new dead unmatchable or no tiles drop in. There is a known solution. It may be matching. If the character is GSBW, it may be fueling enough for deceptive tactics to destroy the row. But, have it truly have some puzzle you need to figure out.

4

I remember there were a few of those in the original Puzzle Quest. Like, given a preset wave of tiles, find a way to match them all, get some equipment or something to equip as a reward.

They also had a different research/crafting thing that was “Get enough AP, and special AP, without making the board lock and reset.” It was also single player, so you didn’t exactly have a second AI player screwing up your board.

They were pretty intense and difficult, both of them.

But they were also both away from the main combat mode of the game, which was still tied to all that luck.

(And if there WAS a “Puzzle Mode” it’d take about 30 seconds before somebody posted a guide on how to beat all of them, which is probably why it won’t happen. icon_e_sad.gif
)

Something I DID notice that the game DOES do: On a massive cascade, there’s combo scaling. That is, if a match did 200 or so damage near the start of the cascade, after a dozen or so other matches, it’ll only do 12 damage at the end of the chain. (Unless there’s strike.png
involved, which I think adds to them anyways.)

Would combo-scaling the AP gained make any sense, or would it frustrate players and be too counter intuitive? Most players aren’t counting on the match damage to finish somebody off, but getting 2 AP when you thought you were getting 3 (after 4 or so moves drop) could be the difference between winning and losing.

5

Looking back at the original Puzzle Quest, it worked the same way a lot of games with a luck element did - Magic: The Gathering, for example. Basically, the player was able to minimize the effects of luck on their overall win/loss rate through:

Skill
Abilities
Progression

Skill is basically making good matches and using abilities wisely.
Abilities let you deal damage (giving bad luck less time to take hold) and manipulate events in your favor (board shake, etc.)
Progression gave you more resources (health, damage, starting mana, etc.) so that you could get better, go back, and beat a fight youi couldn’t before, as in other RPG’s.

This is all obvious stuff, but when you look at Marvel Puzzle Quest, especially in the state it is now, the advantages of progression have been seriously reduced by scaling. In PvP, you really only get the progression advantage once you complete a star transition with at least half a dozen key characters maxed, and even then, throughout the climb, you’re rarely so much better than your opponents that you have a distinct advantage. When you throw into the mix the whole “AI on defense” system and the fact that victory + how much damage you take during that victory has an important value in the metagame, progression helps to mitigate luck, but only in broad strokes and not as much as you’d expect from the “RPG” genre.

And then there’s abilities. Unfortunately, a LOT of the ability nerfs throughout MPQ’s history have been to the very things that mitigate the luck factor the most. Infinite loop combos, abilities that generate AP to fuel other abilities, board manipulation, and to a lesser extent, board shake. All of these things cut way back on the effect of luck, and there’s been a conscious effort to push back on that by the designers over the game’s two year history, in the name of maintaining challenge and making difficulty calibration easier. Or, as cynics call it, selling more health packs.

MPQ also has boosts, which again help mitigate the effects of luck by speeding up match damage or AP generation, and those got cut back too, in the same way as abilities and for the same reasons.

And on top of it all, this is a freemium game, and there’s ample evidence that luck and purchases go hand in hand. The classic example is when they removed guaranteed cover rarities from token packs and token sales went up, not down. Gambling sinks hooks into the human brain.

So there’s lots of stuff they could do - lots of stuff other games have done - but it seems that, consciously or subconsiously, the design goal is to push the luck factor of the game as far as they can without completely alienating an admittedly already addicted playerbase. 4* DDQ? Luck plus progression, and with token pulls, progression in this case also has some luck to it. Galactus? A lot of luck in rounds 5-6, although from what I read, two abiliities (Prof X and Hulk) made luck less of an issue in rounds 7-8.