This week we wanted to do a semi-formal Dev Q&A here on the forum. We’ll endeavor to answer as many questions as we can this week, but some might be better for a blog.
We’ll accept questions from:
Today! Monday 15th June AEST/UTC
To Friday 19th June 16:00 AEST
Rules / Our Humble Requests:
Please be patient and respectful.Not just with us as we work through the questions, but also with each other.
Keep just questions in the thread(makes it easier for us than getting through discussions)
Check to see if someone else has already asked your question.If they have, react with a to show you would also have asked that question!
We’d prefer questions about specific bugs be put up in bug threads.We know there’s a long list of legacy bugs, but this thread is a better place for other questions about the game and what’s going on.
FAQ:
What questions can you ask?
Anything! We will answer what we can.
When will your question get answered?
When we can. But if the number of questions get overwhelming, or we’re not able to answer everything this week, we will be collecting the questions to answer later. If your question would be better as a blog, we’ll let you know!
Why are questions getting answered out of order?
A variety of reasons. Some questions are a bit quicker answer, others we’ll want to check on details, or ask someone specific for an answer, etc. But we will get to everyone!
Will we ever be able to trade shards in for our characters at 550 to shards/covers for another character? This was a “promise” from the previous devs that they would do after Unity but, obviously, has not been done yet. Thanks!
Can we please have a discussion about the small meta blocking out everything else? Part of the reason I’m giving up is it’s simply not fun to be forced to use the same 5 teams and fight against them (with required buffs!) all the time in order to get anywhere (or be defeated in the first round).
Will the “Dailly Play” Affiliation ever come back?
Last one was in October. (post Unity)
Not familiar with this? We used to get one token per day, if we played with a character for that month’s theme.
Women’s History, Asia Pacific, Pride Month, etc.
Are the bugs listed in Discord’s Bug Channel also being looked at?
Jeto and TheMigz have commented on numerous occasions in this Forum’s bug channel
I don’t think I have seen any IP2 representation in Discord.
Is that possible to let players change their username for one time?
I just randomly choose an username when I started this game. I never expected how long I would play this game. Till now after 3800 more days, this game has really become a part of my life. Many things also have changed during this decade, good or bad, I really would like to have a better and more meaningful username for this game.
With the ability to download all assets, battery saver and set texture quality to low.
Can you bring back Marvel Puzzle Quest to device: Galaxy A13 5G.
I think you guys have sort of answered this already, but it was a bit vague. Kind of a “we’re going to concentrate on other things right now!” kind of thing.
But, what’s up with supports? They’re clearly a big part of the game still. Puzzle gauntlet, boss events, pve/pvp speed, etc.
We used to get a new one like…every month. They (well, some/most) adds another level to your team and give a ton of variety as well. I really don’t want to see it just abandoned. New characters are being churned out every 2 weeks, what about throwing in a new support in the rotation? 3-4-5-support-3-4-5-support-(rando 2)?
How do you feel about the current state of character balance in MPQ? Are you ok with some characters being usable all the time and others usable only when boosted? What power level are you aiming for with new characters?
Will there be new events such involved Alliance Events like the ones in Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes (it’s a Disney property, so I assume you guys played it or even watched youtubes of their events), perhaps even like the one I suggested years ago regarding the Monsters Unleashed Alliance Event in the Suggestions forum?
Are you planning on advertising the game to get new players to play? Maybe through commercials after a Marvel movie or even on Disney Plus? Because it’s getting hard to find players after the whole Unity debacle.
It’s more the complexity of how spaghetti + Unity + really-old-infrastructure interacts when it’s all mixed together, especially when we’re talking about a project that has involved multiple different teams over it’s lifespan, with yet more hands involved in the Unity port itself.
A big chunky problem is that the legacy infrastructure for MPQ doesn’t map neatly to Unity. Tbh it would be weird if it did. It was a very custom, but calcified package of things developed for the game at a particular time, with the constraints that came along with that. (I cannot emphasize enough the complexity of the pieces that currently go together to make MPQ happen.)
I think a reasonable way to think about it is that MPQ may have been relatively stableon the surface prior to the Unity port, but what the Unity port exposed was it’s fragility and inflexibility.
There were reasons for why every piece of MPQ came together as it did over the years, but there’s a lot in there that was a response to a requirement or set of pressures at the time layered on top of what was there, with increasing tech debt. This type of layering and tech debt is quite common in any long running project, but MPQ did/does have quite a lot of it, and Unity was a strong breeze collapsing that house of cards, even after the various teams’ best efforts to support the change with processes to try and make these things cooperate nicely.
So I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s one thing or another. Things certainly needed to change in a big way to make MPQ more robust and flexible, and it’s port to Unity is a reasonable part of the solution for that. Unity does/can provide us opportunities we wouldn’t have had before, but to get the most out of those benefits, we’re having to make decisions about which pieces of the old infrastructure (or the which ways the old infrastructure is talking to the new…) are stable enough for us to leave alone for the time being to maintain the live game and which need to be reworked or replaced entirely to unblock other areas or speed up development.
Vaults are an interesting one. We want to make sure we're creating vaults that are relevant and interesting to players while also ensuring the health and longevity of the game. We're certainly open to trying different types of vaults.
The difficulty with ISO-8 or Red ISO-8 is the sheer amount of currency that exists in the ecosystem. Though these are definitely not off the table, we have to consider what's something worthwhile that fits in these vaults without making an expectation of egregious ISO values for purchase. We'll think on this some more and see if anything fits within those slots.
We'll also take a look at the Family Legends vault and see what can be done there!
to show you would also have asked that question!
But if the number of questions get overwhelming, or we’re not able to answer everything this week, we will be collecting the questions to answer later. If your question would be better as a blog, we’ll let you know!
