For those who believe every change is informed by greed

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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I am so, so, so tired of hearing the ridiculous theory that every change in the game is anti-player and a result of a desire to suck every little cent of our wallets being spouted over and over as though it was a religious tenet. How easy seems to believe for some that the developers are devils in disguise, their every action, thought and emotion geared towards harvesting from us, apparently hapless marks, every ounce of money we possess and of anguish is in our bodies.

How cannot be blindingly clear that such strategy, if truly a game company was to be founded on and driven by the most abject greed and abhorrent evil, would result in the quick demise of the game in question? A game that is as actively developed with such player-hostile aims would rapidly drive away their consumer base. What good would be to milk players for thousands and then have the game die immediately? Any person with a smidge of common sense knows that making a good product and retaining your consumer base while also growing it is the only way to keep a business afloat. And no, that’s not called “money-sucking greed”, it’s called making a living. Stop acting as though D3 or Demiurge should be a charitable organisation, toiling in desperate need, only sustained by the heart-warming feeling of giving you a completely free game that conforms to your every whim.

Demiurge has managed to keep MPQ alive and active for almost 2 years now. That’s an impressive lifespan for a mobile game, so it seems that they must be doing something right, don’t you think? Instead of of professing the self-pitying, unrealistic belief that the devs are insatiable greed-fiends that thrive in the shared contempt they feel for the witless masses that keep coming back to their wallet-snatching device, cannot we consider the much likelier belief that the developers are passionate, hard-working human beings, doing a labour of love but also rightfully expecting to provide for themselves and their families from the fruit of their work? That their every decision (even the controversial ones) has the purpose of prolonging the game’s life while keeping as happy as possible the unavoidably increasingly disconnected veterans and newcomers? Sometimes those decisions may hurt the way you personally were experiencing the game; sometimes those decisions eventually prove to have been mistakes or to have introduced new issues, yes. But the goal is always the greater good, a continuously enjoyable game that will allow them to keep making a living out of it for as long as possible.

We can disagree with specific decisions, even complain and ask for compensation if it merits so, or hell, quit if the game is truly not enjoyable anymore, but suggesting that the intent of those decisions is not a good, existence-continuing one just doesn’t make sense. However, if you cannot possibly hold such belief, if it is, freakishly so, more comforting to believe that you are actively despised and taken advantage of by corrupt, corporate monsters… what are you doing here? Staying and parroting this absurd theory only makes you look like the kind of disingenuous mark that precisely would allow these alleged demons to stay in business; one that even though suspecting he’s being screwed with, keeps stubbornly suckling on the nauseating, poison-dripping teat proffered to them at a cost.

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D3/Demiurge is a business. Every decision they make better be informed by their business strategy, their budget and their investors.

Also, it is inappropriate to tell people they cannot hold a particular opinion just because you either disagree or are tired of hearing it.

You even go so far as to vilify the people who hold such an opinion. Not cool man.

But really, what did you hope to achieve with this post? I assure you if your objective is to silence the “And money” crowd, you will fail.

Take care.

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No, see, we completely agree: D3/Demiurge are businesses. It is definitely in their interest and prevalent in their choices to earn enough money to keep the game alive, leaving some profit to take home and live their lives, and budget ahead for contingencies. That is covered by the “making a living” point. It’s disingenuous to believe money is not a factor. What I’m ranting against is the toxic belief that short-sighted greed, a word with very distinct and negative connotations, is the basis for every decision. You many not think like that, I may not think like that, a lot of people may not think like that but let us not fool ourselves that the forums are not littered with posts stating exactly that.

Also, I’m not telling people they cannot hold an opinion; I’m showing them that said opinion is illogical (and toxic). Neither am I vilifying them; just showing how that opinion reflects poorly on themselves.

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Spoken as someone who has never heard of a pump and dump scheme.

You have no idea if anything you said is true. You want a clear example of an anti-player move by d3? You know their refund policy, that offers 2.5k (doubled!) hp for a full xforce, so 1/13th of what he’s worth? You know why that’s in the game?
Because if they need a token refund policy so google can’t step in and demand refunds that are worth anything. So we have to take whatever they want to give us because there is no alternative. We have also been begging to not need to pay 1k+ hp for roster slots. Their answer is “get hp in the DDQ, it’s fine as it is”.

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Wow… you wasted a brand new thread and at least 20 minutes to type up that OP to three people! LOL

Yes that’s right, there are only three people that I have seen on this forum that actually hold the exact view you are espousing hatred for.

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Why are you still here then? Why don’t you quit since you already determined that the company are out to squeeze out every penny from us?

It is not a sarcastic question, but a genuine one. If I feel that a company is out entirely to cheat me with no business ethics and no scruples ( like those companies in China that put dangerous substances in the milk powder) I will run far far away from them as soon as possible.

It is one thing to say that they are doing a business. And another thing to feel that they have ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS ETHICS while running the business. And for the latter, I would avoid the company entirety.

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You know what? I’m actually going to go ahead and agree that reselling compensation is on the stingy side of the matter (though note that this is not a change or new implementation, but rather a policy they’ve had from the beginning and that actually has improved somewhat through the history of the game.)

I kind of understand the why of the policy. If you know human nature at all, you know that people will always try to game or abuse the system. The more generous a provision is, the more tempted some people would feel to take advantage of it and the more people that would unfairly benefit from it. Just take a look at the people annoyed at the fact that moonstone’s reselling will not include hp, even though they don’t have her or even less spent a single hp on her, but were hoping to quickly build some and exploit it.

I’m pretty sure that it also has the purpose of making people slow down and consider before selling away hard-to-build characters that are still completely serviceable, just not longer oppressive.

Having said this, allow me to reiterate that I think they could err more on the generous side of these compensations. The point of this thread is to try to stop people from thinking the devs are a willingly antagonistic force that cares more about money than about making a good game. It is far from perfect still, but there’s a clear intent of heading there.

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The priority of D3/Demiurge is having a revenue stream. That comes first and it’s perfectly normal since it’s a freemium game. The user does not pay any money upfront so of course they want to make you spend money.

They have always been about making money first, design and gameplay second.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/08/marvel-puzzle-quests-road-to-the-mythical-1-arpdau-part-1/

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I enjoy the people (most don’t post around anymore though, mostly the sycophants and the clueless around these days) and there are times where the game isn’t aggravating. Also I named two examples that you didn’t refute at all. Those are blatant. It doesn’t mean it’s all they do.

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It doesn’t need to be perfect, but offering 2500hp for a 270 xforce is pathetic. If they just offered a “temporary respec for 200-300hp” a lot of people would do it, but that don’t pay the bills. People fighting for covers pay the bills.

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Good, so we’re in agreement. I agree the current scheme is lacking and you agree that they deserve to be able to pay their bills with the fruits of their hard work.

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I guess I’m in the minority here, but I’m with you 100%, Pylgrim.

Beyond just being incredibly tired, it’s also intellectually lazy to bang on the greedhead drum all the time. It’s easy to do, and as evidenced rather clearly by the bulk of the responses you’ve received, you get a lot of echo in the echo chamber here. You don’t need to provide any substantive support to your claim, just “Hurr durr greedy devs” and bask in the acceptance of your peers. Congratulations.

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EZ. There’re always excessively-worried/jumpy folks around. Just swap “Calm down” for it. =)

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I did not intend to refute those points. I agree that the game is not perfect and a lot more work can be done. I think they should put a cap on the roster slot prices.

I am pointing out that saying that D3 is stingy (Which is a reasonable assertion) is very different from saying that D3 is “out to squeeze me of every single penny with every change”.

I think that most people who are still playing feel that the game is good, but not perfect. And I think that most people want it to improve. The best way to do it, imho, is to point out the flaws and also applauding positive efforts.

Several of my friends has said that the forum is just FULL of negativity now, which is a shame. There are a lot more moaners thread nowadays…

And arkprime, this is not directed at you. I don’t know what your sentiments are like about d3. It was just that your post was a good point for me to express my concerns about people assertions that d3 is the embodiment of greed. You may or may not feel that way.

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I don’t think most of us old-timers think that the devs are greedy.

They have jobs, and they need to feed their families. It’s ok to make a living.

What I do think, and what’s even more worrying, is that there is a lack of vision.

Case in point:
Start of the game: “4s are meant to be trophies"
A year later: "4s are meant to be god-tier, here’s the promised Xforce buff and 4Thor!”
Another 6 months later: “4s are only meant to be 33% better than 3s! Here’s the nerf!”

Also, saying “we want people to play less” and then turning the grind to PVE up to 11 with 3 hour+ end of sub grinds for 1st.

Implementing shield cooldowns, which does nothing but inconvene people, but doesn’t stop shield hopping, and gives a massive boost to out-of-game-communication that it was suppposed to counter.

Implementing health buffs that make each PVP match take forever, at least long enough for opponents to get one big power move off that leaves your characters crippled, leading to at least double the amount of time you need to spend on PVP.

Failing to even acknowledge if it’s intentional that trying to play for T10 in both PVP and PVE takes about as much time as a full time job these days.

Those are the kind of decisions that makes me wonder if the devs have any idea what they’re doing.

I’d love to see them try to play PVE for T10 for a month and see what this requires. After that maybe they’d have a better idea of the “fun” they are promoting.

TL;dr: it’s not greed that worries us, it’s cluelessness.

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Just played a node or two with the new control shift as the ai power…please explain how that is not the devs being greedy and wanting more money? Control shift change in itself is not a bad change, but she is a dark avenger who we face way too fucking often in too many nodes where she just does damage no matter what. She is a fucking 2* character. Did they really need to fix a 2* character that wasn’t horrible vs bagman who is useless or so many other 3* characters that are so weak that you wouldn’t use them even if they were boosted? I understand doing business…I’m one of the few private practice physicians who is left that is on their own and has to make ends meet by taking care of their clientele. I have to take care of my patients, listen to my patients, understand my patients, etc…if I didn’t listen and understand, I would go out of business very quickly. All you sycophants that continue to agree with everything that the devs do, please understand that if the majority of the players leave, so will the devs an and they will not think twice if you are having fun or not.

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I do agree that I am more worried about the constant change of direction. The about turn of 4* tier does worry me.

As for the “grind”, I feel that their model is correct. They need to provide enough “content” (use loosely since there’s no real content except for Ultron and ddq), to get players to play. Their priority is not to ensure that the most competitive players (top 0.5%) can compete comfortably (hence they don’t care it takes 13 hours to compete in pvp, pve, sims, LR and Ddq at the highest level). They are concern about the average player and whether they can compete (hence the constant changes to help those players).

I am also worried about the lack of end game content… The lack of chase items or elite dungeons or raids (Ultron do count as a kind of raids I suppose). I am concerned about the apparent emphasis on new characters only, with no real new content.

I am worried about those things… And I don’t think calling them greedy is right.

My little hope in them has been

  1. implementation of slices to make life easier for us
  2. reduction of progression reward requirements, even when there was still a minority reaching 1300. And they dropped it to 1000, when I thought they will cap it at 1100.
  3. DDQ. There’s was absolutely no real need for them to give us a mode that gives daily cover. But they did.

What I saw was that while they are slow to react, and make poor decisions at times, they will often implement features for the greater good.

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Excellent example of D3’s greed. Normally you would think a refund means a FULL return of the money that a consumer pays out to purchase the good or service. D3 doesn’t say “partial refund” which is what they are doing in reality.