If you were at an MPQ board meeting, what would you pitch?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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Apologies to @Punisher5784 for the unsolicited “meeting” reference. I’m a thread about ideas, I drew a blank on a title.

It’s easy to call out someone, specifically the game creators, when they get it wrong.

But for criticism to be constructive, or effective, it’s not enough to simply point out what’s wrong. We need to provide answers for how to make it right.

What are those answers? What’s missing from the game? What are you seeing that others seem to be missing?

We each have our own perspectives, with knowledge of characters/events related to the game, or comics/MCU, that give each of us unique insights into what MPQ needs to grow and continue being a game we enjoy.

I’m not asking for complaints, there are plenty of places for that. I’m asking for what you want to see in the game with an explanation of how to implement it.

The recent HEvo competition was a great example of forum members coming together to compete in a way that doesn’t exist as a mode in the game. It also illustrates what’s possible when we share insights/ideas/strategies and build on them.

Do we need a new PVE event? What does it look like?

Could a draft/ban list work in PVP to make matches more diverse? Is there something else needed in PVP?

Is there a mechanic that could work as a power, not yet in the game with the potential to shake up the meta in a positive way? What is that mechanic.

Not really theory crafting, but idea sharing that goes beyond pointing at something we don’t like.

I’m using this as a jumping off point to get general ideas concerning any element of the game, in order to see what gets suggestued in hopes of finding common ground that can be expanded upon (with narrower focus) in future threads.

My hope is that we can find a way to channel the energy and passionate responses in a way that is positive.

Finally I ask that if you disagree with someone’s suggestion, and respond to them, you do so in a way that is constructive.

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Definitely NEW PVE stories/adventures, there are so many Marvel related themes

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  1. More PVE events that aren’t time-based: start your slice at X time, grind at the start & end of each 24 hours for the next few days, then hope some people in your slice have a life where they prioritize family, friends, or a career over MPQ placement so you can get the good rewards.

  2. More variety in opponents. I’ve played the same handful of PVP teams a million times. I’ve played the same maggia goons & Dark Avengers in PVE a million times. There are hundreds of characters in this game - at this point I would rather spin a big roulette wheel for opponents.

  3. A better in-game economy where I can prioritize leveling up multiple characters at a time. Shards are far too slow for 4-star & 5-star characters. Having to trade multiple covers to convert colors on a character you have at 5/0/0 is silly. Let folks convert a bunch of unopened tokens or a chunk of Iso-8 for a guaranteed cover (or large amounts of shards or roster slots or HP…)

  4. Finally introduce that XP / level-up system for Supports that we teased months ago, since it’s nearly impossible to get anything above 3-stars?

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Haha no apologies necessary, but thanks for caring!

My biggest wish list include tweaking the PvE time-slices and giving us an option to turn off the Vault animation.

I’d also love to see auto-DDQ (at least for VIP members) and making PvE SCL9 closer to SCL10

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  1. I feel like the recent Class of 201X events kinda achieved this. The limited roster prevented people from using metas so it’s a more even playing field but it doesn’t matter because there’s no placement rewards. So you can fool around with whatever team composition you like and play as much or as little as you wish.

I’d try out a pve event with limited roster, but it can’t be too long cause people don’t have the time for multiple campaigns. Puzzle Gauntlet has just the right amount of content and length. The only thing it needs is milestone quests to incentivise repeated playthroughs.

  1. Favourited shards in progression rewards would be nice. This is in addition to featured characters, not a replacement. Classic legendary tokens in placement on lower SCLs also to help 4* rosters transition faster.
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I feel like they could do a lot with PvP to make it play quite different that PvE.

Here’s a couple of ideas

  1. Right now characters do 100% damage (match/power) whether they have 1 health or full health. I’d like to see events where your damage went down based on your health. So at 100% health you do 100% damage, at 90% health, 90% damage and so on down to 10% health you do 10% damage (to prevent 1 damage marathons, I’d make it so the reduction stopped at 10%). Now you’d have to decide whether to kill 1 character and let the other 2 do full damage or weaken multiple characters to reduce the over all enemy damage etc. This would make some characters/powers shine that normally don’t etc.

  2. We know there is an experimental AI that plays MUCH better (finds all match 5s, spams powers like players do, doesn’t match it’s own SAP/CD’s etc). I’d like to see that AI get into PvP with the caveat that as long as you win the match, your characters all come out at full health but if you lose/retreat all 3 are downed so you have use 3 health packs.

KGB

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  1. New PvE events.
  2. PvE seasons akin to PvP currently.
  3. The ability to auto buy boosts or at least buy a large amount at a time.
  4. Some sort of support ascension system.
  5. Spending bonus rewards put on a calendar instead of being random pop ups.
  6. Faster attack tile, countdown placement, etc tile animations.
  7. (Not for me) but very large iSo increases or a reduction in leveling costs.
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I would like to see more done to make affiliations actually count for something and to bring rewarding game play to using teams that should work well together - if I’m taking a team of X-Men into battle together I should be getting some perk for doing so. It kind of feels that the foundations of this have been laid with all the additional affiliations added but at the moment we’ve just seen minor bits on powers that might do an extra little bit of damage against a certain affiliation. That’s great but irrelevant against 80/90% of the roster.

I’m thinking things like - using 3 characters with the same affiliation grants % damage increase/reduction across everything, or grants 1 additional AP per match (match 3, get 4 AP) due to the team working better together etc.

Each affiliation could have its own perk that is somewhat themed. These could then stack if you have multiple affiliations all represented. I guess it would be like having the perks of supports but at a team level?

It might not make much of an impact on the meta teams, but could vary things up nicely

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Which stories, and what would they look like? Would they run similarly to other events, or be different somehow?

Once upon a time there was an event with multiple branches (nodes went across but also unlocked downward branches that got increasingly difficult) as you progressed. I haven’t seen that in forever though.

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While I agree that timing is important for placement, and it can be frustrating when life doesn’t allow you to play at the right times,…

How are we removing the time element? How would placement be determined between those earning similar points?

If placement rewards are moved to the same sort of structure as progression rewards, progression might get a lot harder.

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@Punisher5784 said:

@Blackstone said:
Apologies to @Punisher5784 for the unsolicited “meeting” reference. I’m a thread about ideas, I drew a blank on a title.

Haha no apologies necessary, but thanks for caring!

My biggest wish list include tweaking the PvE time-slices and giving us an option to turn off the Vault animation.

I’d also love to see auto-DDQ (at least for VIP members) and making PvE SCL9 closer to SCL10

If we could get vault tokens with the option to get them all at once, like pack tokens allow, that alone would need a quality improvement.

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How would non-damage powers work? For example, would healing/stuns/etc also be reduced on injured characters?

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First pitch would be about milestones and there are two parts. Most milestones should go on forever. With farming and the constant and consistent release of new characters, there shouldn’t be caps to a milestone for collect powers, champ characters, etc. This would also apply to general ones like make matches, use boosts and team ups, make match 4, make match 5, you get the idea. Second part for milestones would be the way we can view them. It would look exactly how it currently does so whatever leg of the milestone you are on is what you see. But if you click on it you can see the levels you completed and the resources received. Think of it the way we view champ levels for characters. The unachieved milestones can be visible just like the champ levels or they can be secret until unlocked.

Second pitch would be something @StanleyBurrell had mentioned which is PVE Season. Hopefully he can expand on that some more but here is my vision of it. It would start the same day as the pvp season and last three weeks or slightly longer. A couple extra days allows for easier scheduling so we get less repetitiveness trying to always hit a hard end date. And keeping it to only a couple extra days should keep pve’s and alliance events from overlapping.
The progression rewards and placement rewards would be similar to that for pvp season. I like the idea @Bzhai had about classic legend tokens and favorite shards. Those could be the main resources awarded for placement instead of infinity stones and support tokens, but rewarded to the top 100 instead of top 25 like pvp season.

Thoughts? Changes/tweaks?

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  1. More, new, and varied PvE events
  2. Quicker responses to dominant characters so the meta doesn’t get stale (nerf Chasm please)
  3. More saved team slots
  4. Better Iso8 economy to level/champ characters
  5. Option to show Character animations only once per battle
  6. Ability to filter your Roster in many different ways
  7. Way to level up supports or more reliably attain them (why are Master support tokens still listed in the vault?!?)
  8. More character introductions like Omega Red, where we get to play with and against them in PvE at release
  9. Overhaul of Welcome to Shield so that it actually feels you get to try out a new character
  10. Public posting of priority feature/change lists, with an estimated timeline, and monthly updates. Posting about the support overhaul in blog post and then not getting any updates for months is not the way to do it. Quite the opposite

Above is not in any order of preference, and I realize they are already working on most, if not all of this.

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I like a lot of these suggestions.

I’d pitch the idea of more mechanics for PvE opponents such as

  • Civilian opponents: any damage to these is deducted from your score
  • Hostage: a civilian is locked as the front opponent, you have to do damage an opponent behind them to release them
  • Kidnap: a civilian is taken by a flying opponent, you have to send a team member airborne to rescue them or lose points
  • Peril countdown tiles: Civilians are in danger, match away these countdowns or you lose some of your score for the round if they expire or are left on the board at the end of the round.
  • Entrapment: one of your characters is captured and can’t be used until freed by destroying / downing / sufficiently damaging the capturer
  • Barricade: an opponent wall / force field / rock slide etc occupies the first position and must be destroyed before other opponents can be damaged
  • Mental control: one of your characters fights against you until they or their controller is stunned / downed
  • Theft: an opponent steals something, if they are not defeated within a certain number of turns they escape and your score is reduced

Basically I want something to shake up the metagame so that there’s more to it than arranging your playing times and spamming insta-wins.

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Mod mode off

I like the idea of non-time-based PvE. I guess my questions would be: why the “start and end grind” model? Why not fastest 4 or 6 clears in one hit?

Does it still have to be on a full 24-hour cycle if you did away with fixed time slices? A 16-hour model (within a 24 window)would mean you could fit in an 8-hour sleep (hypothetical obviously!) around your life and play time.

And along those lines - what about speedrunning events? Opening up all chapters at once and timed clears? You could build that out into a season with lowest time overall winning, and a default time for non- participants/non-finishers. Time could be based on best time for each node.

I suppose the answer would be based on: what are we trying to achieve and what does success look like for the vast majority of players and the devs. If it’s better QoL, more puzzley/tactics, more flexible playing conditions etc for players it might be more engagement with certain characters or events, encourages spending, or more time spent on MPQ compared to other games etc for BCS. What can be done that’s going to align those things better than the current model?

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Thus far variety in PVE seems to be the most prevalent request. Varied goals, enemies, no time related placement, etc.

That surprises me because I expected more focus on PVP.

However, PVE content does provide the bulk of play opportunities, while PVP would be harder to remove the need for speed, and should be better potential for creating play opportunities that isn’t stagnant or repetitive than in PVP, where meta play is needed to place.

For PVE I’m currently imagining a sort of open world event that’s constantly running where you select a team for each branch, face random enemies related to a certain affiliation, and earn rewards based on milestones you meet as you go. No placement, just available for casual play, but potential for great rewards the more you play.

But that’s just me trying to figure out how to remove the time restrictions for earning placement rewards.

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So does this exist alongside timed content or replace it? Do players want both?

Edit: or is that just an extended Campaign mode?

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PvP is so effed that I have no idea where to start on improving it.

Maybe some modifier that makes you deal 20% less damage for each character you used in your last battle and 20% more for each character that is the same as you faced last time out.

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@Scofie said:

@Blackstone said:
Thus far variety in PVE seems to be the most prevalent request. Varied goals, enemies, no time related placement, etc.

That surprises me because I expected more focus on PVP.

However, PVE content does provide the bulk of play opportunities, while PVP would be harder to remove the need for speed, and should be better potential for creating play opportunities that isn’t stagnant or repetitive than in PVP, where meta play is needed to place.

For PVE I’m currently imagining a sort of open world event that’s constantly running where you select a team for each branch, face random enemies related to a certain affiliation, and earn rewards based on milestones you meet as you go. No placement, just available for casual play, but potential for great rewards the more you play.

But that’s just me trying to figure out how to remove the time restrictions for earning placement rewards.

So does this exist alongside timed content or replace it? Do players want both?

Edit: or is that just an extended Campaign mode?

My thinking was an extended campaign mode that exists alongside other events. It’s always there. No pressure to play it, but you have the option.

Generally, you need to look at events, select a start time, and you’re locked into playing at optimal times if you have any desire for decent placement.

The other end of that spectrum is not being able to play at all, outside of those optimal play times, because if you do you’re going to drop in placement.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been stuck waiting somewhere with nothing to do…

(I have spent the last few months caring for a loved one which meant just being available at all times… Which is why I had the time to devote to flipping HEvo’s health, for example)…

… But I couldn’t play regular PVE because I had to wait for those optimal times. Then, when the optimal times come around, I’m busy and missing the chance to place well anyway.

Same with PVP really, once you shield hop you need to wait.

Puzzle gauntlet and forum competition aren’t always there.

If there were a mode always available for extended play, I’d play more.

Those looking for competition could still do that, there’s just another option for casual play… Whereas the current other option, is closing MPQ and playing something else.

Could even use the campaign mode to test things where new nodes can be dropped in returning an unexpected attack (related to comics/MCU events, of course) or use it to present new characters…

Instead of relying on welcome to shield…

… Making nodes that highlight the powers of the new character.

Or even giving different affiliations boosts, or character bans depending on where you are on the map.

This is a long form way of saying a campaign mode could provide answers to a lot of different needs.

But it’s also just a bunch of stuff coming to my mind as I type this. I’m sure other’s would have different opinions… And I’d love to hear more of those.