Expectations vs reality

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

This is fairly long a rambly, but I feel like we are our own worst enemies when it comes to expectations with this game, and this results in continued disappointment.
The current shield training poll/discussion is a good example - regardless of any previous communication or teases, the reality is that they do not intend for most players to complete this. The reality is that it is a “bonus” event that gives us free tokens and a chance to decide if it is worth it to utilize our resources in a way that allows us to complete it, i.e., if we want to strategically hoard and BH the required character.
We see the potential the game has and offer up dozens of suggestions. The reality is that almost none of these will ever be used, either due to lack of dev resources, prioritization, or decisions made above their pay grades.
We want more communication and feedback. The reality is that it’s not going to happen. Every year or so they throw us a bone by answering questions in a thread or two, but we want (hope? deserve?) more, but it’s just not going to happen.
We want the anniversary to be more special than an opportunity to spend the money on the game for limited/joke characters. The reality is, this anniversary is really in line with what we should expect going forward, and it was almost exactly what I thought we would get.
We want more 5* feeders. The reality is that at this point we should not expect these, ever. It appears a bean counter was unhappy with how things were going on this front, and who knows if we’ll ever get another one. Also I was surprised to see just how many actually do have feeders, though with Kitty’s meta status, her lack of a feeder stands out.
I’m not saying we should just accept things as is and stop asking for improvements, but I am saying if you don’t enjoy the game and are only playing because you are waiting for something to change, you should probably move on.
My prediction is Christmas will have the 12 days thing. No roster slot sale. No Thanos mad titan DDQ event. I think they may run some events that are thematically tied in some way, but it’s just running one event instead of another so I don’t bother tracking that stuff.
Supports were seriously broken with it possible to get double digit green AP to start a match for instance. The reality is that they put themselves in a corner trying to make these things relevant, went too far, and now they don’t know what to do so they just opted to stop others from unlocking God mode with them.
If dilution is completely soul crushing to you (which is a reasonable stance), ask yourself if you can live with it if nothing ever changes. If not, seriously, do yourself a favor and move on. I don’t think the game is “dying”, but it’s not evolving or solving for a large number of the items that the forum’s playerbase focuses on.

Tldr: I’m incredibly disappointed with all of the issues in the game. It didn’t have to be this way. At the end of the day, I enjoy playing the game still, and enjoy my alliance/the community, so I keep playing vs hanging on hoping that things will change out of nowhere.

2

Who cares if supports unlocked “god mode” when they are only available in PVE. Worse is leaving only a portion of the player base with that and not allowing anyone else access.

Dilution will without a doubt kill this game, just because you currently enjoy it doesn’t mean it isn’t on a downward spiral. New players will have almost no
chance at success while older players are getting tired of the same old crap.

A very reasonable expectation is some transparency about things they don’t intend to do. There is a problem with announcing what you might do (see thread title for that), but being honest about what you won’t do is just good business and quite honestly it is manipulative to avoid it. Predatory even.

When the game has already reached a point that if they change nothing, the economy will collapse under the constant increasing demands…it is most assuredly dying. Especially if they have no plans to rectify the situation. The optics aren’t good for anyone paying attention.

3

For me the relevant question is not whether the issues you mentioned (and we all have been mentioning) will be addressed, but whether or not the devs can reasonably expect us to put any more money into the game if they’re not.

4

Just for clarity, I’m not saying I’m ok with things so they should be okay for everyone or that no improvement is justified, I’m saying that I think it is a mistake for us to continually be disappointed when there is a history that things will stay this way.

5

IOW expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed

6


7characters

7

Me before 2018’s Anniversary: I can’t wait! Anniversary will be awesome with probably a huge new feature and tons of cool stuff!
Me after: Well, that sucked.

Me before 2019’s Anniversary: There is no way that it can be worse than last year.
Demi: :slight_smile:

8

Hold my beer.

9

opened a 40 pack from the ‘lost in time’ store. i expected to get 1-2 torch covers. i got 1 4* cover. not torch. what a waste of 11800 hp.

10

10 pack and 40 pack here. I did get two BH Torch, but nothing organically with those “increased odds” 15x what exactly?

Anyway, I managed to complete shield training. So, I guess that’s good. Spidey looks like another really great 4* who I will use when boosted for sure.

11

Generally speaking

I think the thing about communication is that players only want to hear things that they want to hear. They hear things they disagree with, but it won’t stop them from asking for the same thing again. A quick summary goes something like this:

Players: I want exactly this to happen.

Devs either:
a) satisfy a portion or their demand
b) explain why certain demand can’t be met or will be difficult to realise

if a)

The reaction would be: it’s one step forward and two or three step backwards.

if b)

The reaction would be: I hear you, but I don’t care because I want exactly this to happen. if it doesn’t happen, you never listen to players’ feedbacks.

The second problem is I find that there are quite a number of perfectionists in here. They expect every single thing to run smoothly with zero mistake made. If you have been reading business news, you will realise that no perfect system exists to help big corporations or SMBs to prevent mistakes from being made, regardless of how small they are.

When you have these two factors happening simultaneously, it’s not a surprise that there are a lot of emotionally charged players.

The three biggest topics surrounding this place are rebalancing, feeder and dilution. The dev have already spoken about these topics and explained their stances/circumstances. You can find the explanation about feeder in the one of the podcast and the explantation about rebalancing dilution here which is pretty recent:

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/comment/894729/#Comment_894729

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/comment/894357/#Comment_894357

The fact is the dev has communicated about some of thes issues but the players still don’t care. They want changes to be made immediately.

12

That’s why I don’t bother with 40 packs. If I buy a 10 pack, almost always from a vault, and get nothing but 2s and one or two 3s then it’s a punch to the gut but at least I’m only out like 1800-2800 hp.

13

wont be doing that again, that’s for sure.

14

I’ll take up the SHIELD training one. I understand the concept, I realise I won’t be able to complete it on any level of regularity but you know what bugged me about this latest one? They were clearly going for a Spider theme, it doesn’t appear random and so to complete their Spidey line-up they include…Human Torch. It defeats the entire premise. So either stick with the Spider theme and forego the brand new character element this time or don’t go with themes at all. Doing half and half just looks so bloody unprofessional.

15

As far as I remember, the communication about feeders was that they were being scaled back and would only be for big events, so I think it’s reasonable that players expected one for the anniversary. At no time have they said they were stopping feeders.
They also communicated that they couldn’t rebalance characters because all their effort was going into the anniversary… yeah.

16

Did I log in to the wrong forum? I thought this was a place to talk about and give player feedback from Marvel Puzzle Quest, not the D3GO Annual General Meeting! As I’m here how is the share price going?

17

I think it’s important to point that out because it affects expectation, which is the topic “Expectations vs reality”. Perfectionists are difficult to please.

Overall character balancing is something we’ve been actively discussing. It’s a rough thing to push at the moment though with much of our effort currently going towards the Anniversary and what follows into the Holidays. Never say never, but I wouldn’t expect anything very soon.

I don’t know how you guys interpret this but this is how I interpret it:

It is highly unlikely that there will be any character rebalancing for the rest of the year because they are busy with Anniversary and Holidays. If there is, it’s a bonus.

I think it’s also important to note that the devs are not working on only MPQ, but they are also working on other projects.

Abour dilution:

“Oh, just do this and that would make this so much better” (which is sometimes true!) turns into “Yeah, but that would take a 2 week rewrite of this portion of the back end because data isn’t stored in a way to do that.” Which then turns into cost analyses of whether that’s worthwhile over other things we’re doing.

Contrary to popular beliefs where dilution solution can be implemented immediately or in a short notice, it would take 2 weeks of rewriting the data. On top of that they have to through cost analyses and prioritising of tasks. The devs also shared that they have limited dev time per day so they aren’t coding 8-10 hours per day.

The devs has shared a lot about their schedules in general and the tasks they have to do over the years. But, I think the players aren’t interested in all this.

I think this goes back to my main point: players only want to hear what they want to hear. They will reject or ignore whatever they don’t want to hear.

This explains why many players are always wondering why the devs can’t implement such “simple” solution of theirs. The reality is, it’s not as simple as they think.

18

I think it’s more that what has been communicated hasn’t matched up with what has happened and that is upsetting because players love the game and generally want to support it.

19

The problem with your post and with how things are in the game right now, is that most of the things we are asking for are things that would improve the game A LOT, and that they are actually needed.

Like being able to cover at some points all old 5s? Obviously great. Feeders are nothing crazy, they give six covers in total after you completely max a 4!!! I barely have two 4s completely maxed out, so it is nothing crazy AT ALL. And being able to cover old 5s? This should be a MUST. All games provide you with tools to max old chars, I can’t understand why this game is so fricking stingy.

Regarding, Shield, we are not asking about completing it, just the option for dedicated p[layers to get the bonus 4 cover, we all understand completing it is just for whales. But ok, this has been like this since the beginning so nothing new, and I don’t expect them to change it. Again, Devs being crazy stingy, this is just one extra cover!

Releasing broken chars. Every single game does nerfs. They are needed sometimes, I don’t like them, I think they are a last resort. They should not be abused, but when someone like Bishop is released, there needs to be a nerf. CapWorthy needs a nerf already, which makes things worse, as it is obvious they have learned nothing from Bishop debacle.

Those are pretty obvious fixes the games needs. Being the other big big one dilution (and also the boring state of affairs of PvP in 5 land). But gameDevs looks like they don’t care, for whatever reason. I agree with you, that if you are not happy playing this game you should leave it, but I have to say that I am pretty annoyed seeing Devs ignoring most of these problems just because (Dilution is a harder problem to fix, but the other ones are not).

20

I think it’s also important to note that the devs are not working on only MPQ, but they are also working on other projects.

But…this isn’t how consumer expectation works. If I go to the supermarket and I want to buy some bananas only to be told “Sir! We have stopped work on the fruit section right now but boy have we made progress on the cheese department! Cheese for you today? They are both yellow after all!”

For all I know MTGPQ is a dumpster fire filled with fireworks next to an oil refiniery right now and that is why Brigby has been packed off in that direction with a water hose. So what? Have you ever notice the Devs pop up on the forums and say “Hey we understand some of you guys had something you refer to as “real life stuff” happen which interfered with you playing our game! So as a way of understanding, we’ll make things easier for you!”. No because they don’t, in the nicest possible way give a single Snikt about that, they just want us to play the game, for long periods and preferably spend whilst doing so. So we have absolutely no obligation to consider it “important to note” or care in any other way whatsoever.

Perfectionists are difficult to please.

Quite probably true but the relevance to this topic seems a bit vague. Lets take an example:

One complaint was that it was advertised on the App store that there would be “Daily Updates”. Now obviously that didn’t happen in any way or form and ended up as the butt of several jokes but there is a difference between expectation and what is reasonable leaway to give. If the situation is that you can’t spare 10 minutes to cut and paste something onto your official forum from a calendar you already have access to then the perception is going to be “This is not very important to communicate to our customers”. Now put that in context that this is supposed to your Premium Event which you have announced you have devoted all your lead up time to and it seems a strange thing to just casualy toss away as way down on the schedule and shrug your shoulders. “Anniversary? Eh, we’ll try to care next year.”

Remember when they started Battle at the Basilica early to avoid scheduling conflicts with July 4th? It was inconvenient (and irrelevant to non US citizens) but it made sense and was evidence of smart advance planning. If NYC Con is the reason they are stretched, why not have used the same level of advance planning on Anniversary? Thinking that is a logical and sound way of proceeding is not seeking “perfection”, it is looking at what worked before and using that to inform your future planning.

Maybe there has been a real life disaster (like a dumpster filled with fireworks on fire next to the D3GO Offices!) but a lot of this feels like it could have been avoided rather than bumped down the list to “Get to at some point, hopefully”.

I think this goes back to my main point: players only want to hear what they want to hear. They will reject or ignore whatever they don’t want to hear.

This is a massive oversimplication and would be quite easy to turn around on the Devs. The Devs only want to hear praise. The Devs don’t want to address the problems with their product. The Devs have a history of leaving the game broken. It isn’t fair to label the Devs with this accusation just as the same as it isn’t true at all as a sterotyped over simplification of what players “want to hear”.

Contrary to popular beliefs where dilution solution can be implemented 
immediately or in a short notice, it would take 2 weeks of rewriting the
 data. On top of that they have to through cost analyses and 
prioritising of tasks. The devs also shared that they have limited dev 
time per day so they aren't coding 8-10 hours per day.

These are problems for the Devs. If my client wants me to produce something for him, he doesn’t want to hear about the problems I have in manufacturing, he just wants to know whether or not he will get it or not. Sure things aren’t as direct a link as that here and obviously the Devs make these types of decision with regard to their own internal mechanics but to think that such concerns are at all persuasive at the consumer end is simply a false start from the beginning. It would be nice to think players will be considerate of these things but because the Devs would require 2 weeks to implement them isn’t much of an overriding argument from the consumer side - “2 weeks you say? OK, I can wait 2 weeks! Cost analysis? Fine. Seeya in 2 weeks!”