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

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
21

I agree with Clint.

Some Background:

I come from League of Legends, a F2P game where I’ve spend more than 500€ for the last 2 years and the game is still awesome for me and will continue playing and supporting as long as I have fun and I can afford to spend some € a months on it. I would like to do the same in MPQ, but the model isn’t right for me. In LoL I can get everything on the game by playing, I’m buying stetics, skins for my heroes and the heroes themselves (that would be covers in MPQ ). Some people has been playing for more than 2 years and still doesnt have every champ of the game, I have them thanks to spending some € in some of the sales Riot does.

I played WoW since Beta and for 8 years, paying every month and every expansion for 2 account, mine and my brothers, thats an insane amount of money and I don’t regret a single € because It was fun! and I got a ton of hours of fun with my brother and friends.

I’ve spent around 100€ on MPQ. Bought the steam sale to get enough roster slots and get my alliance to 20 without having to ask people to buy their slot. (mostly because half my alliance are friends from RL).

But it’s been at least 2-3 months since I last bought anything. I would have bought a 10xheroic covers if they would still give a 100% chance of getting daken when he was featured, even Falcon! for doing the nodes in PvE that required him. But I won’t spent a single € bying a 10x??? to get 10x2 useless 2*. A friend of mine did it to try and get at least 1 daken and got 10x2*, he has spent quite a lot to lvl his roster and because of that “failure” he is decided to not spent any more money on the game, he barely plays anymore.

I bought some heroic covers when I was finishing my 2* roster, back when 2* where interesting. Now that I have all of them covered and only want 3* I don’t bother to buy anything, I try to climb the ranks and get to top 50, since the recent changes I ahve to spent a lot on shields, so I’ve stopped playing some events.

For me to spent money again on the game there should be some changes:

  1. Heroic covers having a better chance at 3-4* characters, even only if they were the featured ones on the events, something like 25% chance on getting a 3* needed on any of the current events. That would make me buy the daily sale of heroic tokens for 100 HPs. At least some days.

  2. 10X heroic packs should have 100% chance to get the featured character. For example on the current event they ask for Daken on some nodes, I couldn’t get him, so I’m having a hard time on the event. I would think of bying the 10xpack if it would give me a 100% chance of 1 Daken and then a reassonable chance to get some others 3*. I will never spent so many HPs just to get a ton of 2*. Sorry.

  3. I would pay HPs, to expand my “minimun health packs”. Not a health pack that you use once, I’m talking about the ones that replenishes over time. Right now you have only 5, so if you are unlucky you can get destroyed in 2 matches and have to wait for 2,5 hours to be able to continue playing the game or spend a ton of HPs just to be able to continue playing. I would prefer to be able to play the game when I want without having to spend so much money, I already support you guys, people buys AAA games for 60€, I’ve already invested 100€ in 6 months, I’m willing to spend more, but at a reasonable amount of rewards.

Right now you pay to expand your roster slots, ok. I think it would be nice to pay for example 200 HPs and get a 6th “free” health pack, then 250 for the 7th, etc. So If I spend enough money I can virtually play forever, having no issues with Health packs. Its not that Health Packs replenish fast or something its 30 mins for every one of them. But if I had 10 for example I can be a bit aggressive against lvl 100 teams (I’m 85-90 with my heroes). The numbers of HP are just an example, I’ve be open for any other reasonable price for reasonable HealthP permanent slots.

Basicaly I want to be able to play the game at my own pace and not being forced to buy so many things for insane amounts of money. I love the game, It’s been fun (not so much recently its being hard for me to advance at anything and I’m not getting any decent reward).

So, as you can see, I’m not asking for free covers everywhere or anything like that, I want to have fun, and if I can’t make it to top 50 in an event be able to “buy” the character that would place me in the same pace as the rest for the next competition. But buy these “required” characters at a reasonable price. I’m asking to be able to have fun playing the game instead of being punished for playing and paying? yeah, sometimes I feel like D3 is laughing at me when I see the chances of the tokens.

Hoping that some constructive feedback can get the game to a better place.

22

In the short term, sure, but the same thinking also applies to trying to burn everyone out with death brackets and heat seeking MMR too. You were the one who did the original math, showing that the ‘only 1 type of 3*, but not guaranteed’ packs were marginally worse value than just straight upgrading in the first place, phantron.

FWIW, I would totally have bought a ten-pack for heroes I actually care about, like L-daken, if it was back to the old style packs, since at only a marginal loss, it might be worth it to take a gamble when I was largely ambivalent to the exact color it gave. But the value proposition just isn’t there for these glorified heroic tokens.

(Also, I’ve been playing a lot of marvel heroes, where you get a whole character, not just 1/13th of one, for $5-10. I’ve already spent about four times as much on it as I have MPQ)

23

Good points made here. When I was transitioning from 1* to 2* I was happy to spend 100 HP a couple times a week on a daily deal for a Heroic token. Sure, I would have gotten the covers eventually, and each time I got a Bagman I swore “Never again!”, but then I’d randomly get a good cover from a Recruit Token and go spend again. Besides spending $20 every month or two to support the game seemed completely reasonable. Now I have all my 2*'s fully maxed out and there isn’t anything to spend on except Recruit Slots and Shields. Because I’m never going to spend 1250 HP, roughly $12 for a single 3 cover*. But would I spend 200 HP once or twice a week for a daily deal that guaranteed a random 3* cover? Absolutely (at least until I had enough covers maxed out that I was getting too many duplicates I couldn’t use). That sort of deal would make me feel good about pumping more money into game.

So, yeah, have a 200/100 (daily) HP Heroic token pack, and a 400/200 (daily) HP Rare pack. The VentureBeat article shows the MPQ team is really into experimenting and then looking at how changes affect their revenue metrics. I think this would be a great thing to try for a week or a month, check the results and evaluate whether to make it a long term part of the monetization model.

24

I’m takling about the original Courageous/Villianous tokens that are guaranteed 3* for 1100 HP, where people would purposely do worse on events to get them over a guaranteed 3* cover. These tokens are an incredibly awesome deal for the player, which means they’re an incredibly bad deal for the company selling them. I’m seeing most ideas advocating a return to that kind of stuff and some ideas that are even more insane than Courageous/Villianous.

For the generic 10-packs, the ‘only 1 3*’ type is marginally worse than straight up upgrading, which makes sense because gambling should not be better than the sure thing. It’s within an acceptable odds that you can go for it if you feel particularly lucky (or if you’re missing a cover). The ‘increased chance’ pack is a terrible deal, but as far as I can tell from the metrics they use it shows that the industry finds people to be dumb enough to continue buying them and thus they have no reason not to take your money. If you want to blame, blame on all the other guys who continue to buy those terrible deals. If people actually stop buying those deals they’d be forced to at least revert to the ‘only 1 3*’ pack. This is fairly consistent with any gamble pack I see in games that offer a similar deal. As long as people are dumb enough to continue buying them, there is absolutely nothing any individual can do to stop it. The best thing one can do is education and let everyone else know that these deals are terrible and you should never buy them.

If we call 4000 HP about $30, I’m seeing an awful a lot of posts that are convinced paying $30 for one cover is a great deal because they also believe having this will give you a huge advantage in the next event. What people don’t realize is that you’re basically waving a sign saying “TAKE MORE MONEY FROM ME!” because D3 has the metrics so if they realize people are buying up the 4000 HP for guaranteed 3* cover in large numbers (which is likely true), they will quickly realize that selling a guaranteed cover for $30 is undervalued, which is why we don’t even see the ‘only 1 3*’ packs very often anymore. Likewise Courageous/Villianous tokens went away almost certainly because they sold too well.

25

Reading those articles makes me feel like Demiurge is just doing everything possible to reach that mythical $1 ARPDAU…which in itself is a ludicrous goal imo.

$1 ARPDAU equates to about $30 a month. That is TWICE what I use to pay for World of Warcraft. There is not a single mobile game I have encountered that has near the production value or cost of WoW…and yet they expect me to spend twice as much money on it? Shame on them. Even a 50 cent ARPDAU would mean people spending more money on their game than WoW…and they have probably 1/100 or 1/1000 of the development cost or maintenance cost of any large MMORPG.

This is the first F2P game I have ever spent money on. It is a really fun game. Demiurge obviously knows a lot about making a fun game. What they don’t seem to know about is customer service. I truly don’t understand how they can be so poor with customer communication. IceIX. who I know has been put in a bad position, is little more than a Minister of Propaganda. He’s quick to post whenever it’s something new and exciting (hey guys! new heroes coming! new event coming you are gonna love!). However, when the sh1t hits the fan…radio silence. Zero explanation from IceIX or anybody from Demiurge. What ever happened with the server crash a few days ago? Where were the updates to try and inform the customers what was going on, to keep them in the loop? Zero. Nada. Maybe his fellow Django members are privy to what’s going on, but otherwise he’s on an extremely short leash as far as what he’s allowed to post.

So now I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth. Do I continue to give money to a game I love, but a company I can’t respect? I own my own company, and I could never see doing business with Demiurge, being treated this way as a customer. I’m holding out hope and giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are a young company, and working out the kinks. I hope they learn to communicate better with us, the people supporting them with our dollars. I hope they learn to make the game fun again, instead of a chore designed so transparently to draw money out of us. I hope they learn an ounce of charity goes a lot farther than a pound of neglect. They do nothing for themselves by having IceIX parrot off whatever it is they are trying to sell us on (heroes,events) while refusing to address any of the negatives.

26

Hmm, I didn’t even do the basic math and reality check on that one.

Do they actually want to drive the game to the state where every active player spends $350 a year?

That should be painted on the title. You who is not willing to spend that amount: this “free” to play game is not for you.

27

No I understand why they are trying to change it to be more profitable. They don’t seem to understand that the players that have been playing awhile will not waste money on these packs in the current format. I have spent money on this game and would continue to do so if I was getting what I played for. 20 dollars for no guarantee of something I want or need is a waste of money.

28

I don’t think guaranteed is a good idea but I do think the % chance is way too low.

I think they really need to greatly incentivize longtime vets into buying tokens, not just rely on newer players.

What if they introduced a crafting system?

Instead of selling an uneeded 2-star cover, you can decompose it:
50% chance for a boost
35% chance for a gem
10% chance for ISO
5% chance for a rainbow gem

3-stars would have better rates for gems.
1-stats don’t drop gems but may drop boosts.

You’ll need 5 gems of the same colour + 50 HP to upgrade a 2 star ability of the same colour. 10 gems + 100 HP for a 3-star. A rainbow gem can work for an ability of any colour.

29

For the record, we haven’t heard from Ice either, and are just as in the dark as anyone else.

30

Not every player, just an average. If slobo spends that much a month, they’ll allow 11 F2P players

EDIT: actually boosts in (normal) packs aren’t the worst idea ever. I’d certainly love to get some HP-priced boosts instead of another 1* cover. Not sure they’re worth the 250 ISO for heroic tokens though

31

MPQ could really benefit from a crafting system of some sort. This could work but maybe it’d be too complex and give the player too much freedom, so they might think it’ll hurt their bottom line.
Turn 10 1* into a random 2*, 10 2* into a random 3*, something like that. Just so most packs aren’t immediately ISO fodder.

32

I think i’ll have a little say in this one..

I’ve never played a game for more than 1 month and never spent more than hundred dollar on a single game.
But here i am, on day 200+, and have spent few hundreds dollar on this game to support and thank the devs for making one of the best games i’ve ever played since nintendo era.
The last time i bought HP was to expand our alliance (which was almost 2 months ago). I haven’t bought any HP again since that because i don’t find it enticing anymore. I have completed all the covers except for newer heroes since Human Torch. Some members in our alliance has even begun selling 4* icon_e_surprised.gif

At the time i’m writing this, mpq is at #114 in top grossing game in app store, which is a good thing.

I’m pretty much on board with Clint here about making D3 top grossing apps and all of his suggestions, but i’m gonna add just 1 more thing that has nothing to do with the cover packs, but i believe when D3 does this, sales gonna go up.

Focus on re-balancing ALL of your characters. Make it impossible for us to choose between skills on a particular character.

  • Make us want to have and level bag-man to 85! OBW can’t be the only 2* support that we have in the game.
  • GSBW’s red need to be buffed so that we will eventually see 3/5/5 build and not just the usual 5/3/5 build. The same goes to psylocke’s blue, hood’s black, hulk’s red, MN.Mag’s blue, c.storm’s yellow,m.hawkeye’s purple.
  • Overhaul whole character, such as Moonstone and ironman m40.
  • Scale down the nerf bat. Don’t nerf a character too excessively like what you did with c.storm, Rag and Spidey (and c.mag soon?)

Bottom Line: Make it so compelling for us to collect and level ALL of the available characters. Maybe the game needs achievement? something like “when you collect x amount of characters, then receive a special character”

33

ISO multiplier, one time fee, all ISO doubled

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34

Clint, these are excellent points. I made some similar points the other day in the cover lottery discussion in the suggestions/feedback subforum, including the points about: (1) going back to guaranteed covers in packs; and (2) getting rid of 2-stars in heroic packs. I also suggested returning to having packs similar to the old diabolical packs where for a higher price, you could get one each of select three stars. Taking your thoughts further, it would really make sense for the standard pack to be 1- to 2-stars with a chance of a 3-star and very slim chance of 4-star. Leave heroics at 3-stars with a chance for 4-stars. That would probably require increasing the price of heroics, but maybe not. With so many more 3-stars than they had, it now takes a lot more effort to fully cover the characters because the odds of getting them through random heroic pulls is much lower.

But I think your comments hit at a much bigger overarching issue. Demiurge’s changes to the game seem like a repetitive effort to nickel-and-dime users. First it was changing certain boosts to costing HP. Then it was implementing the skip tax. Then it was decreasing the ability to get covers in packs. And so on. In the thread about how not to develop f2p games, the video discusses how users will accept monetization changes initially, but then get fed up as they start feeling like they are being extorted. Last night, as I found myself watching hundreds of ISO disappearing from my total while I skipped 1-pt match after another because that was all I was given, I had that feeling. Here I was in a position where, to keep my position as a season and bracket leader, I needed to spend tremendous amounts of HP on shields. And then I could only fight one battle between shields because I would lose 40+ points each time I was hit, so I needed to find a good battle, so I was spending large amounts of ISO to try to find one. And, of course, because I had to keep even that battle very short, I had to spend even more ISO and HP on boosts. It felt like at every step, the developers were reaching into my pocket. Needless to say, I resented it.

If I stick with the game, I have no intention of doing anything similar next season. I will cut back my spending significantly. If I don’t win my brackets or season, so be it.

In additon to the changes you outlined, a major change that needs to be made is to increase the amount of ISO that is available to players. The majority of characters are now 3-stars or higher, with more on the way. When there were fewer characters to level and ISO was more plentiful (with PVE nodes giving 1000 or even more ISO at times; daily alliance rewards giving 500, not 200, etc.), it made sense for ISO to be expensive to purchase. But players need ISO desperately now. Cut the price. Have sales. Boost the amounts of ISO for winning dead nodes from 20 to 50 (or 100). Do something to increase the flow of ISO so that we can level our covers. With Modern Daken, Fury, Sentry, plus the rumored She Hulk and 3* Storm – and probably plenty of other characters where those came from – it won’t break the game to give players more ISO.

More HP also should be added. When boosts cost 100 HP and 5 health packs costs 200 HP, a 25 or 50 HP reward is rather laughable. The minimum HP prize should be 100 HP. Make it actually seem like we’re winning something.

Speaking of HP. Health packs. With the Spidey nerf, healing is going to be at a premium. Health packs should go back to costing ISO. Prologue healing the Hulk when he is down 8000 health will take 3 or 4 matches. The alternatives of paying for health packs or waiting several hours, however, are not particularly attractive. There is no reason why something as essential to the game as healing should require real-world dollars, and players will resent having to spend precious HP on health packs.

35

Have to disagree with you on several points my friend. The kill to prologue healing is an intersting thing and really won’t affect the game very much for shield hoppers. They can still shield, kill, kill shield and heal. What it does is make using health packs more attractive.

So health packs… Here in lies an interesting issue. They regenerate quite quickly honestly (used to take waaaaaay longer) but now, playing continuously will require use of health packs or use of shields in pvp (to avoid point loss while healing). So this nerf to healling effectively drives hp usage. Is it a bad thing? Well yes and no. Those willing to pay will have the advantage of less downtime, less time wasted healing. People will argue pay 2 win blah blah. But reckless will tell you that patience is a virtue if you intend to be at the top of the leader board. You can still do very well with little to no hp and a lot of patience and planning.

Also have to disagree with the point on hp prizes. I don’t think these prizes should be raised. I don’t think they exist to breed a sense of accomplishment either. I would say they exist for two reasons.
1 give to truely free player the opportunity to earn and save up hp to eventually buy what they want.

  • this also has the effect of givin the impression that purchasing hp is 't necessary and can drive user retention. Users who stay longer are more likely to make purchases in the future (probably because they feel they have received valuable entertainment and feel it’s fair to pay for it).
    2 give the average player a little currency to try and entice them to buy more.

The point of this thread is to recognize that we love this game and want to support it. We have to recognize that paying should result in an advantage because an advantage is desirable, thus people are likely to pay. I am willing to allow people this advantage because it keeps the game going. If it becomes impossible to place in The top 25 without paying a fair bit of hp, then I’ll be upset, but if it only requires a tone of hp for top one, maybe top 5, then that is understandable.

I should get to bed. Please try to ignore spelling errors as I’m typing on my iphone.

36

People have problem with this game because most of its decision assume people are perfectly rational even though most people are anything but.

If you equate 4000 HP as $30, then buying a 10 heroic pack that guarantees a 3* hero is the very definition of P2W. Pay $30 and you’re assured of getting this guy who will, in theory, totally give you a leg up in the next event. It doesn’t get more P2W than that.

So why did D3 stop doing this? I mean, getting $30 for a single cover is a pretty good deal from their point of view. It’s hard to imagine making money more reliably than that in the game’s monetiziation model. They stopped this because they don’t want the game to be too P2W, so you have to buy about $60 (2 10 packs) to be reasonably sure you’ll get your one cover (though you can stop earlier if you get it on your first 10 pack) so people will feel less compelled to buy a single cover for $30 when it’s really not needed because you just get in an endless treadmill (there’s always the next 3* that you need to stay competitive so you’d be paying $30 each time this happens). It’s similar to the prohibitive cost of iso 8 that people are always complaining about. If they’re cheaper, that’d just be P2W because people would be buying the iso8s to immediately get character to level 141 or 230 if you got the right characters.

It’s not the game is too P2W. It’s that it’s not P2W enough where your $30 gets you a huge advantage on the next event. I don’t actually know how you’re supposed to resolve this. If everyone thinks paying $30 to get a leg up on the next event is totally legit, maybe they should just let you have that option. I’m not sure how sustainable such a model is though, because you’d think at some point people will notice this pattern goes on forever and they’re always buying the next 10 pack that has a guarantee featured hero. Or maybe people won’t ever notice and just keep spending money.

37

The question of ‘how much HP should you spend to get top 25’ is a relative thing. If everyone in your bracket is spending $100 on the latest tournament for some inexplicable reason, it’d be completely wrong for you to have any shot at top 25 without spending a ton of money, as that’d imply you’ve an underlying model of pay-2-not-win if it was actually possible for a guy spending almost no money to beat guys spending a ton of money, which is a good way to commit financial suicide. There’s no doubt the amount of HP one must spent in the last few events to place well has gone way up, but so far I can’t tell if this is a persistent trend or is it because of the season 1 ending frenzy. Certainly I can’t imagine people are committing these resources for those awesome Ragnarok or Loki covers.

Continous playing is not something that’s desireable in a game of this genre, but currently there’s no good way to monetize this. In an ideal case you should get better continous play by having a very deep roster, but of course we know this makes literally no sense in PvP and is only marginally effective in PvE. Right now if they just made healing impossible, they still won’t make more money in any meaningful capacity. The PvP system needs to be reworked so that depth goes beyond ‘put Hood on D before you stop playing’. A character with every 3* maxed should have a considerable edge in PvP, and that’s also where you make your money because it’s awfully hard to grind your way to max cover every 3s. No, you’re probably not making money directly off anyone thinking 'I got to max every 3 because that gives me an edge’, but if there’s an edge to having every character maxed, people will be more willing to spend resources on characters which will translate to more revenue in the long run.

38

Off topic one :they really need to improve their custom service experience and devs’ coding ability.

39

Careful with that one. Whenever they increased ISO output in one area, they took away about the same amount from other areas. People buying that ISO multiplier would just result in all rewards getting cut in half within a few weeks.

40

I know this point is not direct monetization discussion, but with MMR tanking being made really difficult to do I decided to say screw it and just let the MMR take me where it will. It is just such a slog starting a tournament fighting against full 141 teams, you feel like you make no progress. The fights take 3x as long and the money is the same. I really hope they implement some kind of increased rewards for increased fight difficulty.

I know the end of season is not a great indicator, but lord is nuts getting attacked at 300 points constantly in Krakadoom. I mean seriously, who ever got hit at 300 points before?

The game is maturing, my roster no longer stands out as being ahead of the pack, tons of people have gotten to the point where they can field a full 141 team.

Now it just doesn’t feel like its worth it to fight these teams that take forever to beat and who give me 1/3rd the ISO (calculated by team spent per match).