Here's Why This Game Has Been Declining

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Overboard

This is the word that (in my view) describes all the recent problems with the game.

People are getting too many 2* covers from PvP? Make them get hardly ANY, so that the transition is quite hard.

People are getting guaranteed 3* covers from Lightning Rounds? Make the rewards tokens that extremely rarely even give 3*s.

(Insert Loki/Rags/Spidey here) is too powerful? Make them bad 3*s.
I want to go more in-depth on this one. Suppose you have your character that is too powerful. I think it’s good for the metagame to nerf them some.
HOWEVER: Just because they were once good does not mean they now need to be bad. Spiderman was excellent, so they made him bad. Why couldn’t they just make him average, or even good? Instead of going from excellent to bad on the scale
EXCELLENT-GREAT-GOOD-AVERAGE-MEDIOCRE-POOR-BAD
why couldn’t he go from excellent to good? Why couldn’t he be similar to Punisher in goodosity, or something? This just doesn’t make sense to me. (And please don’t think that all this means is that I’m pissed they nerfed Spidey. I have him 0/1/2, so really I couldn’t care less. It’s more the fact that they think there’s some weird need to overcompensate for his power level by making it exactly the opposite.)

People are getting too many guaranteed 3*s in 10-packs? Make the chances close to none.

People are beating PvE too easily? Make the levels go up to 395(!)

Boosts are too abundant? Make them cost HP(!) or just make them more expensive (not as big a deal.)

Season 1 was profitable? Make another one RIGHT AWAY, increasing burnout by several magnitudes.

People who have been playing the game longer are winning PvP brackets? Put them all in death brackets and have fun watching them claw each other apart.

And these are just some of the overboard problems.

I love this game. I love it to death. But it seems to me that the devs are flying off into the deep end with most changes they make. That really isn’t necessary. Start out slow, maybe half of what is planned. See where that leaves the game, and if more adjustments need to be made, make them.

This isn’t meant to be a rant topic, I’m just offering my two cents. The playerbase has already adjusted to these overboard decisions. But how many more will we tolerate? There are still mutterings about some of these things, and each one reduces goodwill just a little bit, but it adds up.
And maybe, if we get fed up enough, we’ll go overboard, too.

2

Unless you’re foretelling the future, Cassandra-style, or referring to a brand-spankin’-new announcement, this is patently false. RNGs do what RNGs do.

Player solution: just scale back your personal competitiveness. Many top alliances have done so.

Anecdotally, this seems to have been mitigated in Season 2, which seems to imply that part of the problem was insane Season 1 point-grabbing. Ice has noted that the sharding effect was more significant than they’d intended, so they’re most likely actively tweaking it.

3

All excellent counterpoints. I’m just going to go 1-2-3, that massive quote stack is rater intimidating.

  1. I was referring to the fact that they changed the reward style from
    "top 200=1 2*, top (125?)=2 2*, and top 75=3 2* (I’m just pulling numbers)"to
    "you can only get one 2* no matter how well you place.

  2. Yes, but as far as I can tell, players who want to place well still need to work very hard. I’ve seen people in X-Men, SHIELD, and others. They are getting ~1800 points per PvP and are in top-10 in Season 2. Not much extrapolating needs to be done to see that alliances that want to stay competitive must work quite hard. (Personally, I am actually inclined to agree with you, because I don’t want to stress too much about the game; I am speaking for the people with a competitive streak who feel that they must work hard.)

  3. I hadn’t seen this anywhere, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. I’m glad that they are working on it!

4

It sounds good, but the severe nerfs are probably motivated by practical considerations. They make players less irate than careful tweaking. That doesn’t seem like it should be the case, but if they’re slowly balancing, that means Spider-man is getting a series of nerfs. Players will get angry each time, and the perception that you never know when the next nerf is coming will create more unrest.

On the other hand, if they make spider-man borderline unusable like they have, and everyone gets angry once. If they slowly tweak him upwards now, people will even be grateful. Even if they don’t, they’re better off dropping the hammer all at once. Rag got it even worse and people kept playing.

5

Well, in the case of Spiderman, I do think leaving it tweakless would have been better. It has been shown that the devs don’t care for small tweaks, so I think that dropping him to average (and just leaving him there, without monitoring) would be better than dropping him to nil. Neither involves tweaks, but one allows him to at least be usable.
If the devs will stay in their current mindset, then average-ifying new characters would be better than dropping them entirely. What I was saying was that the devs should get in the tweak state of mind.

And you know, I would prefer a series of small tweaks that don’t make a character terrible that one change that does. I mean, in the process of tweaking Ice could post “Remember, we could be making him like this!”

6

The problem with making him average, from a developer perspective, is then they risk not having nerfed enough. They tend to find is preferable to err on the side of overnerfing so as to not need repeated needs. Small tweaks sound good, and certainly if you asked players, they’d overwhelmingly support it. In practice though, we’re seldom rational actors, and small careful tweaks enrage players. They tend to be perceived as a never ending stream of nerfs rather than careful balancing.

Fine tuning also takes more time than nerfing to the ground and seeing how things shake out, so there’s that too.

7

There’s a post going on right now about how people didn’t even get a 3^ from the 10-pack. It happened to me so I think that can be left out.

8
  1. Yep, I complained about this back when the change was fresh; I was into 3* land, but I could see it really crippling the 1*-2* transition. However, they’ve now added 2* cover drops to normal PVP fight completions, which massively increases the rate at which you can collect 2* covers.

I’ve gotten more OBW covers in the past week than during the bulk of my entire 2* phase. The rate at which I now accumulate Ares covers leads me to suspect that the game is openly mocking me for not having Ares at all during my 2* phase.

  1. Well, then they kinda bring it on themselves, no? Season rewards are virtually identical for the top 100 alliances. There might be some small Iso and HP differences that I didn’t bother confirming. The people jockeying top 1/2/5 alliance placement aren’t doing it for the concrete Season rewards. They’re simply doing it for bragging rights. Even when I tried to hit Top 10 for individual Season placement in S1 (I got #4), it was just to see if I could. Heroic 10-packs don’t mean too much in concrete terms.

  2. No problem. icon_cool.gif

9

There’s no incentive for them NOT to overnerf old characters; relatively few people are spending $ upgrading them, so overnerfing them simply represents a “gentle nudge” to spend $ on the newer characters instead

10

Certainly could be some additional motivation gob

11

Just a small thing. I think they did nerf Spiderman into averageness. He’s still useful as a healer/shileder/stunner, he’s just no longer so OP that he guarantees a win and is chosen over every other utility character out there.

I think people look at the drop, then knee-jerk and assume that because his usefulness was dropped so far that he plunged from Excellent to Bad, instead of OP to average…

However, I’m more than aware that this is not a popular opinion, so feel free to disregard it. icon_e_biggrin.gif

12

I’m still using Spidey because he’s my fave Marvel character bar none. He’s not completely useless at all. I’m a patient player, though, with more interest in PVE than PVP so that might be why I’m not hating on him so hard.