Is this game biting its own tail by greed?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Here’s what I mean: Heroic Packs Tokens are expensive. Now let say that’s greed. I am not saying that that’s ok, but hey! That’s the way they made the game, so if you don’t like it just don’t buy packs right?

But here’s the interesting part and what I mean by “biting its own tail by greed”: Heroic Tokens are useless anyway cause 95% of the time you get 2 stars. That odd is also driven by greed like “let’s not give players too many 3 stars or 4 stars”.

Result: They bite their own tail. Heroic Tokens are useless. Less players buy them. Maybe you remember that thread I opened asking if i should get Roster Space or Heroic Packs with 2800 gold? Well, I didn’t listen to the Community who said “Get Roster Space” at 100%. I got the Heroic Packs! xD

Now if you’re asking the same question, GET THE ROSTER SPACE!!!

And so are Vintage Heroic Tokens that are not incentive enough to keep playing Stories after you got the 8 command points.

True fact: After the 8 command point reward you’re bored enough of keeping playing the same nods over and over. And when you see that if you keep playing there’s that Vintage Heroic, well, you don’t care cause you don’t want another 2 stars.

In their greed, devs devaluated all elements of the game, except Roster Slots. Roster Slots are the only thing worth spending Hero Points in. The rest is history.

PS: I am at a point in the game where I start to realize that 3 stars worth way more than a few 4 stars and even deleted a few useless 5 stars.

I now understand all the Beginners Guides on the internet which kept saying “Sell your 5 stars and 4 stars! Keep 2 and 3 stars only, and buy Roster Space only!”.

When you start the game, it doesn’t make sense. Why would developers devaluate higher stars by design? Well, because it’s not by design. It’s because of “poor design”. And it’s by playing the game that you understand the state the game is in. At start you think “why would I delete that awesome 5 star Hulk??? Those guides are crazy!”. But later, when you look at that 5 Stars Hulk you see “Waste of space”.

I can already see veterans saying “yeah but after some time you will get at that 4 stars / 5 stars transition”. I get that. But shouldn’t the 4 stars and 5 stars you rarely find help you in that transition? Is it normal to delete like 5 “5 stars” heroes because you need the place for 3 stars.

Don’t anwser. Cause again, when you adapted to the bad design of the game, it makes sense. But when you look at the game from outside, a fresher point of view, it doesn’t.

And that’s what it is. All MPQ players had to adapt to that bad design. Keep 3 stars, buy Roster, ignore the shop, ignore versus, etc…

2

I reject the premise of your first two sentences.

HP is for roster space early and once you’ve rostered everyone you’re swimming in HP and the heroic packs are good outlets. And no, a poorly covered 4-star or 5-star shouldn’t be more useful than a fully covered 3-star. That’d be far stupider design. Few guides should be telling you to trash 4-stars or 5-stars anymore, good beginner guides would tell you not to open LTs so you don’t have to worry about 5-stars being a problem and to only open tokens if you have the HP to buy a new roster spot if you get someone you don’t have.

So no, your really weird and poorly worded rant doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s not like the odds of the contents of the packs are hidden from the player. Worse yet, you wrote this thread because you ignored the advice everyone gave you and called the devs greedy for it? Huh?

3

You wrote a book to say, “Game makers greedy. Game has poor design. I make bad choices.”?

Not going to argue with you on anything, just pointing out that you could have saved a lot of time with your rant.

4

I think the bigger problem the OP is experiencing is that the bar for new player entry is very high. People talk about how easy HP is to get, but it easily takes a year or more to get to that point, more like 1.5 - 2 to get the point where it’s so overflowing you can causally throw it away on HP. The gap between new players and vets is a gulf and it widens every day. That’s real concern and I don’t know what the right answer is.

5

That’s a valid concern, @broll . It’s a slow trickle until you’ve rostered and champed all of the 2-stars and 3-stars. Once you’re at that point, you’ll have more HP than you know what to do with even if you’re immediately rostering new 4 and 5-star releases.

6

Every game. EVERY game that has any sort of F2P option has these kinds of choices. And the devs need to get paid, because the game isn’t actually “free”. Some may pay more for it than others in the end, but the devs salaries do not come out of thin air.

If you’re a F2P player, you learn - never ever ever spend the “special currency” no matter what it is on anything but basic fundamentals must haves. In this case that would be Roster Slots for HP, and Leveling up for ISO.

So no, I will not for one moment call the devs greedy for trying to balance the game so that they can actually make money off the options they offer. It actually rather gripes me every time there’s a change and players toss that out there. If they don’t make money - or enough money - the game goes away. If they can’t offer enough good content to make paying money for some of those options a worthwhile investment, the game SHOULD go away.

I personally don’t think the HFH store is a good value. So I don’t spend my HP there. Others feel differently, and that may be true for them based on how much HP they have or what they need most at that moment.

And the devs can’t allow players across the board to develop too fast or they run out of content to keep them interested in playing. Player development vs game development is another tricky balance. From what I’ve seen, they’ve made a number of moves to try and work on this as it’s becoming more problematic. I said awhile ago that I think they’re making mistakes that they need a good big picture person to be able to foresee and minimize.

I do feel one of those mistakes is in some of what early players have access to before they’re really ready for it. On the other hand… if you were warned and you chose otherwise over the voice of several people’s experience… well you just learned the community actually knows what it’s talking about, not that we’ve all adapted to bad game design. We’ve adapted to a lack of clarity early on - but beyond that, it’s a game, and figuring out how to manage your resources is part of it, not poor game design to give you options that you feel aren’t worthwhile.

Oh, and those 2* covers aren’t worthless. They’re good for a minimum of 250 ISO, and more than that if you’re running a 2* farm. So you converted your HP to ISO - maybe not your best investment, but not a completely worthless one either.

7

It’s kinda hard to sympathize with this when you state “every veteran player on here told me to buy roster space, but I ignored them and bought packs anyway.” It calls into question what other solid advice you’ve been ignoring.

8

Cover packs are sexy, roster slots are not. You’re not the first person to fall into that trap.

9

I mostly do not agree with anything you write, but I read it anyway because, whether I agree or not, it is a different perspective. When I and many of the others on this board started, there were only two 4* characters, and they were almost impossible to get. By the time 5*s were released their inherent danger wasn’t that obvious because we were all scaled higher than 255 anyway. So it is important to listen to someone who has had to deal with that trauma and offer advice and perspective on how to deal with it.

That said, your high-and-mighty tone is offputting. You’re preaching to priests. Many of them know a lot more about the game than you do, and if you spent more time reading and less time ranting you maybe wouldn’t feel the need to rant so much.

10

To me it felt longer than that, but I think that’s largely because I was in the bad habit of chasing the shineys in every vault (usually with the 100 discounted single pulls) Now that I’m hoarding event tokens and only spending HP on those vaults when I’m caching in 10+ hoarded covers to chase something I really need I’m finally building a surplus. Over 4000 right now for the first time (without a purchase) after about 1.5 years.

11

At least you are reading someone’s post who can self criticize and try to analyze why he was wrong.

@ALL:

I play this game since around 3 months now, I think. Maybe more. And I am still a noob. So I don’t know what happens later on.

What I can say for sure is that when I play MPQ, it’s more like “ok, what can I grab and leave today”.

The game is not rewarding enough to instead ignite an attitude more like “This game is awesome! How can I keep playing, and even invest more to make it better and make sure that they never abandon it”.

Don’t get me wrong. I play this game because the Gameplay is excellent. And it’s Marvel heroes. Remove either one of these, and I would leave without even thinking twice. But Marvel is so much in hype these days, (with movies, tv shows, etc…) that having a daily game that reflects the Marvel world is always welcomed.

In Fact, if they announce today that MPQ will be no more, or that a better game with Marvel heroes is avalable, I’d say “Wow! Good riddance! It was such a drag!”.

I am not saying this to be mean or to troll. It’s more of a “They have a nice game there. Why are they ruining it with such bad decisions?” bitterness.

12

And the bad decisions they’re ruining the game with is that heroic tokens are expensive and low cover 4-stars aren’t as good as well covered 3-stars?

13

Gently: But in many ways, it’s not their bad decisions. They have more good decisions than bad ones or they wouldn’t have a profitable game. It would already be dead.

And it’s the fact that you called them greedy for having less than optimal choices that you had a choice about. Having choice is part of the gameplay.

I agree there are things wrong and that early players have access to things they probably shouldn’t, and there isn’t enough in game guidance about play - I basically stumbled around for a month or so before I really figured out what I was doing and where to access some options. But… that’s all I can agree on here.

But I don’t think it’s really fair to say it’s self-criticizing when you’re blaming the results of your wrong move on the devs and “their greed” when the data was there in front of you to tell you that this was a poor risk. Including from the devs, who provide the odds right there of what you’re going to pull out of that cover pack in that store.

If the game is not rewarding enough for you then it’s not and that’s more or less fine. I would suggest that if you pull back and look at this as a marathon rather than a sprint, and that yes you do grind and slowly build your resources and roster to be able to have more fun playing overall, you may feel differently about the game. But maybe not. And that’s okay.

14

Once you’re at a point where you have a decent amount of 3s and can really start working on farming 2s then the game gets a bit easier in terms of getting resources. Even if you work hard to get 4,000 points in the pvp season and you’re so pumped to get that heroic 10 pack, and you get all or almost all 2s it’s not the end of the world because that will go into your farm. Also make sure that you have at least one 1* rostered so you can fully take advantage of Deadpool Daily every day. Honestly I have looked at countless rosters and it’s pretty surprising how many people don’t even have a 1*. Sooo many resources people are missing out on.

15

I think the game has been pretty carefully crafted so that as a F2P player your progress is gated. I agree it can be frustrating as a new player that you don’t have enough resources to do all the cool things, but after experimenting with dozens of such games I can say that MPQ has one of the best “premium” resource models out there for F2P players. In my opinion, of course.

I’ll say, I did fall into the daily deal trap as a new player (chasing 3*s) neally 1000 days ago, and I only realized later that I would have been much better off saving HP for roster slots only. I probably only cheated myself out of 3-4 slots, but those were majorly important at the time when I only had 15 or something. But I digress.

So I disagree. I think, in fact, that MPQ has one of the most generously-given premium resources out there.

16

For starters, I don’t think you used “biting its own tail” correctly. If you are just saying they are hurting their sales by how the tokens are less valuable than slots, well hp is hp. If you are saying they are hurting the game by making heroics expensive, I would disagree. If you could buy heroics easily it would devalue the ones you earn, which disincentivizes playing, which would hurt the game.

I think the OP is conflating poor design with necessary gameplay loop. Loot based games are everywhere now, and they all basically function with a common, uncommon, rare, legendary, epic tier set. You aren’t devaluing the upper tier by making them rarer. The 2000 sim reward is already devalued by the increased odds of latest characters. If heroic tokens had better odds, why would I play sim? Its not bad design to make players play.

In other games you need to reach a certain level to equip an item. Same here, but its roster spots instead of xp or completing quests.

17

Every time I start a new game, I notice that it comes with cheap currency and expensive currency. For the expensive currency, I generally only use it for things that cannot be purchased elsewhere, such as roster slots.

I never fall into the trap of using the expensive currency on unnecessary things, such as tokens or speeding up healing. At least not until I have a large abundance of the expensive currency.

18

The only problem i see in payment agenda is the fact, that, as far as i remember, there were no changes in ISO/HP prices. Prices are horribly outdated (from time when 3s were elite cards, 4s were rare and there were no 5*s, no champ rewards, no DDQ, no SHIELD levels and rewards both from PvE and PvP were very poor).
So yeah, basically game experienced some waves of inflation (both ISO and HP), but this change was not reflected by payment option. Not sure if it is greed, but i dont really think it is healthy.

19

While I will say the OP was not written very well and they obviously didn’t make optimal choices early on with their roster, I do believe, and have been saying this for 2 years, the economics of this game (ie in game currency and what real $ buy for in-game currency) have been off. I do think this disconnect has hurt the game since a better economic system could help make the game overall more profitable. I look at what I can actually buy for $ and I ask myself why would I spend my money on that. This is a major problem for any game with this type of model. It isn’t that I don’t want to spend $, its just that the HP/Iso/Cover Token packs pricing for in-game currency isn’t worth it. I do buy VIP from time to time because it basically is probably one of the better monetary deals they offer but still isn’t great and I don’t always choose to renew it every month. With the intercept bonus only requiring a $2/mo. purchase, I may just do that more often.

20

HP flow doesn’t start until well within the 4 star tier phase after all 3s are champed and you have a working 2 star farm.

Sorry OP that you didn’t listen when people said roster space is more valuable at your level than buying a 10 pack. Even at my level, I’m sitting 5k HP and other than daily deals would never spend it on 10 packs. Just not worth the risk.

Edit: I do agree with the others that the main resources are horribly outdated for where we are at the game’s age. $1000 to champ a 2 star is insane, much less buying 4x that to champ a 4 star. That there is really the core argument of the game being greedy more than the OP’S rant.