Help me, Help you: Reaching D3s goals for revenue.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

We have a lot of threads about frustration with perceived money grabs from D3 and the changes that have been made to gameplay. I would like to see if we can consolidate ideas and suggestions in to this thread.

RULES:

Post constructively. If you want to be a smart ass and show your general rage over the state of things, please there are many other threads with other like minded ragers that you can commiserate with.

Post your own ideas. If you have a good idea of a way that D3 can tailor their monetization goals that is acceptable to you, let us know.

Let me start off by telling my story.
I am fine with spending money on the game, I want to support the developers and if I feel I am receiving value for my money, I will continue to spend. I started buying random covers and it was fun and exciting, bear in mind this was back before the daily rewards started and the covers were restructured. Even back then the bagman covers felt like a slap in the face. I bought lots of packs, the randomness was fun.
Once I got most of the heroes and have max covers on quite a few of them, I stopped buying the random packs because there was nothing in it for me anymore. Let me restate this, because it is going to come up again. I STOPPED BUYING RANDOM PACKS BECAUSE THEY HAD NO VALUE TO ME. I experienced the 150HP heroic covers, then watched them go up to 300 and thought, “man am I glad I got my covers before they made the prices ridiculous.” Then D3 instituted sales and leveled the prices to 200HP. I thought this was bearable, but still they had no value to me.
Then they started having events, and they were cool, and they screwed up rubber banding and a whole bunch of other things, but we figured out ways to get around it, so the game was still fun. I was able to get covers for the toons I wanted and continued at a happy pace. Bear in mind I had spent probably about $150 so far. I did not have any real impetus to spend money on anything as I had a HP pool built up and no characters that I really had a hankering for to purchase, that is until Daken came out and I wanted to buy some covers for him.
I have been fairly insulated from the monetization changes for a couple of months as I have not purchased HP since the last sale and have not felt compelled to purchase any covers, HT is looking good, but really go gives a shit about Falcon? I did buy a couple of BP and LT covers.
So, Daken comes along and I want to cover him out. So I look at a heroic 10 pack, I remember one of my alliance mates bought the Falcon cover pack which had I think a 20% drop rate of Falcon and they got 3 Falcons, “Cool I thought, maybe I will buy me some Daken 10 packs” Then I looked at the 6.1% drop rate. That is when I realized yall done lost your minds.
It has taken a while to get here, but this is what it boils down to: I AM OFFENDED BY THE CHANGES THAT HAVE HAPPENED, AND THAT HAS HARMED MY GOODWILL TOWARDS THE DEVELOPERS. No longer do I feel good about buying hero points from the store, no longer do I feel like I am helping out a great company. Now my guard is up, and I keep my ass against the wall because I feel like D3 is trying to Fuck me.
I think the chase for revenue has passed the point of acceptable levels and I realize everyone has a different tolerance for this, I am just saying that this is mine.

NOW, lets talk about what I see as wrong and what can be done to fix it.

Step 1: Give the guaranteed heroes back in the 10 packs.
Taking the guaranteed hero away from event 10 packs was terrible, it got worse when it was made a 20% chance, even worse when it hit 10% and is flat out insulting at 6.1%. Give back the guaranteed hero from the event packs. Your sales may indicate that people are more excited by shit chances for a guaranteed cover, but the forums and common sense indicate people create accounts to come on and say WTF is this? People may be buying these, but the terrible experience they have makes it unlikely they will buy again which flies in the face of D3’s stated goal of having people consider the game like a subscription where they spend over and over again. If you make people feel stupid they ever bought your 10 pack, then you only get one shot at their virginity, you may have broken their cherry, but the experience was so bad they won’t talk to you again.

Step 2: increase the chance of getting the featured hero in the PVE events, make it exciting again.
Event tokens have stupid drop rates of 2.4% chance of getting a new Daken cover from these event tokens is garbage too. Lately I am just angry when I open these because I know the chance of getting something good is nonexistent. Really, it is not a good thing if your players feel resigned opening your reward packs because you are so stingy with your pixels.

Step 3: Remove 2 heroes from the heroic packs.*
Why are there so many damned heroes in the hero packs, there is little chance of getting something you need. Remove 2* covers from heroic packs. For 200HP, let the players get one of the 20 3* heroes, if they are looking for a specific cover there is close to a 1 in 60 chance of getting that one you need versus the stupid chance it is now. People transitioning from 2* to 3* will see value and buy those, excited about the chance to upgrade their roster.

Step 4: Make the 4-5 most recent heroes higher chance of reward in hero packs if you want veterans to buy the 200HP pack every time it refreshes.
Here is an idea. 200HP equals a heroic pack that has no 2s and has a 6% chance of each of the last 5 featured characters, and the rest of the 3 and 4s would be one rest of the random chances. Realistically, not many people are going to buy 11-13 covers to max out their character, they are VERY likely to buy 2-3 covers to finish up their HT or Daken to make them viable to 141. Quit trying to go for the jackpot from every customer. The ones that are willing to spend will do so to get the first character up to max level the day he is released. Tone down the greed in the monetization.

Now here are the questions I have for the community. What do you all agree with? What do you think would work for you as ways you would choose to spend money?

What would the veteran players spend money on when the 200 HP refreshes every day from the hero packs?

2

Increase the amount of ISO in iso purchases by a factor of 10. Because who are you kidding, and veterans might actually splurge to boost that new character

3

Add progression past maxing 3*. I was ready to buy my remaining 3 xforce covers but have since gotten enough of his covers while waiting for buff to almost build a second one. I’m not interested in spending money on characters that are sidegrades of current roster.

The most satisfying purchases I made were upgrading Rags red and Mags blue early on.

Rest of post not constructive so not going there.

4

Step 1 and 2 I agree, step 3 and 4 not so much.
Removing 2* heroes from heroic packs is a good idea, but in my opinion, this would require an upped cost. I would like to see the cost raised to 200 for the daily deal and 400 for subsequent purchases if it was only 3 and 4* covers. This would prevent people from going nuts on heroics to get all 3*'s and instead probably buying the daily deal very often.

As for my own suggestions, hmm.
1 new game modes, even if they require a purchase to access.
-something similar to weapon forging in the older pq games i.e.: a puzzle mode
-survival mode
-simulator style pvp where you can’t use the other team’s characters
The above could all require either a one time purchase or event entry fee ala elite tourneys

2 how bout sticking the forum link on a notice to new players to tell them where they can find out info
-this would allow more feedback from the wide player base and help d3 better to understand the good and bad
-I see many replies that forum users are a minority of game users, d3 should try to increase the number of game user presence in the forums

3 balance characters and add a third skill to any character with only 2 skills.
-this will create a bunch of covers that people will want either to respec or attain. Adding a single new move to a character is presumably easier than making a whole new character.

5

I’d buy re-skins for characters if they were offered.

For example, Original Black Widow looks more ass than bad-ass… She’s a powerful character, so I use her, but her fishnets make me a little sad every time.

6

Also part of the problem with the reduced value of the tokens comes from the fact that they started giving out tons of HP and tokens so they had to reduce the value to compensate for that. Unfortunetely the $ to HP ratio has stayed the same since day 1.

I think that they should raise the HP we get for purchasing it or have better packs that are purchased directly with money.

7

I’m having trouble figuring out how that made to work. It seems like you’d end up locked into a team build, just hitting skip until you find someone else using none of those characters. That, or you cycle out one of your strongest characters and suddenly you get attacked because you opened a hole in your defense and many of those retaliations will probably feature the character you cycled out, so now you’re stuck continuing to not use them to use your retaliation attempt.

8

I think that rather than removing 2* from the Heroic, they just need to add a 3* version - kind-of like the Courageous and Diabolical /used/ to be before they got tinykittied. icon_e_surprised.gif

When I was earlier in my 2->3* transition I invested in a couple of Courageous because literally any cover would help flesh out my roster. I was about to do that again … but then they nerfed them before I had a chance.

Right now I find myself /wanting/ to buy some HP so I can max my Hood blue and make him useful, but I can’t bring myself to give them any money because of the recent lack of transparency and unresponsiveness. If they just talked to us on a regular basis and explained stuff, that’s all I want right now! (and I don’t mean IceIX popping up now and again to give us screened tidbits, I mean direct from the dev team updates of what they’re working on and why they’re tweaking this and that)

9

I don’t know, 1100 HP for a 3* token seems like a crap deal to me, a 1 in 60ish chance of the cover and color you need. I don’t think it would provide incentive to the average player to purchase them on a regular basis. That being said, I am not trying downplay your suggestion, I realize everyone’s threshold for what is too expensive is different.

I just don’t see much value in 2*'s anymore, they are a random drop for any PVP match and they are not the focus for progression, they are a stepping stone. I think the Meta has changed and the game has evolved to the point where ***I***feel they are irrelevant.

10

Clintman’s point number 3!

Is spot on the money (pun intended).

They are giving away 2* characters in PvP fights now. In Krakadoom, getting up to and than down from 1000 points, I got ISO rewards 3 times. The rest were 1* and 2* covers. It’s raining 2 stars.

Can they be removed please. Or you can make a token pack for 2* toons! Someone transitionning into 2* land or that would like that 5th green Ares might splurge for the 2* packs… Think about it.

Diversify! Don’t be a “banana republic”.

That is all.

And thank you Clintman - here is a second +1 for you.

11

My biggest problem isn’t the changes (some are problematic, but not my biggest complaint). My biggest complaint is the lack of communication. TALK to us BEFORE you make big changes. Or as soon as a problem arises. 36 hours for any kind of notice after the server fiasco was a complete disaster and a HUGE fail on D3’s part. Not to mention the changes they implemented after an event started with no notice until we roared. Maybe if they explained what they were doing and why, they could get even better feedback from the community here that could make the game amazing AND profitable.

12

Well, 1100 is cheaper than buying the cover, so if you’re /not/ looking for anything specific then it might be a reasonable deal. Having said that, I was thinking that the price should be lower, but I clearly didn’t actually write that in my reply!

But taking Tonzil’s point about how many 2* covers we are now seeing, they could easily remove them from tokens without affecting 1->2*. What surprises me is that they /started/ throwing these 2* covers at us in PvP only a month after they took them /out/ of the PvP placement awards because “the 1->2* transitions was going too fast” to paraphrase IceIX at the time. Clearly something changed but they couldn’t just reverse the change they had to try something different!? icon_rolleyes.gif

13

I’m not going to say I have a huge problem with anything other than the previously out of control scaling making PVE unplayable to me. I’m also not going to claim I was seeing the worst scaling, but I only ever started playing because it was fun and the ludicrous PvE scaling made it not fun.

On the other hand, I bought lots of HP in the past, and would buy it again in the future, but I am not ever buying another random pack, just like you, Clintman. I wish I had never done that when I was starting now. I WOULD, however, buy all kinds of ridiculous non-game-related stuff. Personalization options, customization, alliance bonuses, whatever. I also like to support the games I play, and I could see myself happily gulping down all kinds of idiotic accouterments like costumes, hats, hideouts, bonuses to earned iso, alliance buffs, etc.

Figure out how to put some of that in there, D3.

14

I agree with you Clintman and think your ideas have a lot of merit. As far as your experiences go, I totally understand and agree.

I am all for D3/Demiurge to be successful and I really love the game. I have spent a pretty penny on the game and it has brought me a lot of enjoyment and a great alliance.

I think the tone in which D3/Demiurge makes its money could be vastly improved. (Like that video that’s in the other thread about how not to do F2P) AND I would like to continue to support the game and developers.

I guess at this stage of the game for me, there isn’t a lot of covers I really need. ISO on the other hand I do need. I wish it was a little more of a value and then I would consider a purchase for that. Also the packs without 2* would be good. I don’t really need a lot of covers though so doesn’t affect as much as others. Game Mechanics are another whole can of worms that has been discussed ad nauseam. I’m not sure if you can have one without the other though since purchases affect game play which in turn affect purchases. So even if they lower the cost of things to bring more “Value” to the game without fixing the other side of things would almost be like I am being supportive of the current system, because in their eyes, when you spend money you must like whatever it is you’re spending money on else you wouldn’t do it…

I could go on and on but getting a little burned out on threads of us coming up with ideas and such and then no response or change. So I dunno. I have spoken my 2 cents over and over like a broken record. Coming up with new ways to say the same things is moot. Either they see it and they don’t care or they see it and will change it. I really hope things do change for the better.

I really do appreciate your posts, and I want to be part of the solution as well so keep up the good fight!

If they could harness the creative power that they have at their fingertips (US) they would be unstoppable…

15

http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/15/marve … aul-redux/

Well apparently we think its “more fun” to not have guaranteed cards in packs. Morons. How can spending 20 bucks on crap 2*x10 be “more fun” or exciting.

16

The article makes it pretty clear their plan is not to get most people to make purchases, but to get ‘whales’ to buy a bunch. It’s their call, but it’s going the way of DragonVale, instead of the way of, say, Dota 2, an actual good game.

17

I think what they failed to understand is that people bought them because they had to. It’s not like you can go to Wal-Mart and by the cards. They have a captive audience.

What’s that saying?

Fool me once shame on you? Fool me twice? icon_e_wink.gif

18

Best way to help us help you (D3) is rethink your entire design philosophy and long-term vision. It should be about creating a fun game firstly, implementing balance and fairness secondly, and trying to suck money from your players never-ly

Creating a fun game? PvE scaling without scaling rewards makes people not want to play. No check
Balance and fairness? Convoluted MMR, rubberbanding, and now bracketing. No check
Nickel and diming your players? PvP Season 1 + Shields = P2W. Check

19

All I see is a bunch of different ways of saying ‘everything should be way cheaper’ without any explanation whatsoever as to why D3 would do this.

If you don’t understand why the move from guaranteed cover in 10 heroic pack is better for D3, you should not be making any suggestions to them. That, along with the Courageous/Villianous 3* token, is guaranteed to lower revenue and it’s surprising they lasted as long as they did.

20

Too bad that the article series ends before the ‘everybody left after season 1 because we made decisions that made huge short term profits in time for this article series but killed the game in the process’ part.

Edit: sorry for non constructive rage post, forgot what thread I was in.