lack of daily active players

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’ve been looking at thinkgaming.com’s chart for MPQ which is here: https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/ … zle-quest/

The obvious increase coincides with Deadpool’s Daily Quest so it’s clearly at least quite successful on the short term. However, looking at the ‘number of daily active user’ bothers me. I remember this number used to be close to 100K and now it seems to be hovering around 50K. If I recall the LR maxes out at 100K and we did hit a point in the past where we had 2 LR brackets, which certainly doesn’t look like it’s happening now based on these estimates, and while this site’s numbers isn’t conclusive, it does seem to be quite reflective and certainly better than any player trying to guess what’s going on.

Now you might say why do we care if less people are playing if the revenue is going up? But it does matter because we have stuff like time slices and shards that only makes sense if there are a lot of players. I joined a time slice 4 Enemy of the State 12 hours after the event began, and currently it’s still only at 725 players. If the number of active players declined compared to say the pre time slice days, then we’re looking at, on average, less than 1/5th the player pool in any particular event since there are 5 time slices where players can be allocated to. It seems to me the game is trying to divide people up according to their performance and that’s probably a good idea, but it’s pretty bothersome to see a PvE bracket not fill up after 3 days and even if there are tricky stuff in the background going on to defeat people in the ‘XYZ bracket is at ___ people’ thread. Now content like Deadpool’s Daily Quest doesn’t care about the number of other players that are playing the game, but that’s also pretty unique. Issues like the death bracket is also likely amplified by a declining number of player, since assuming it’s weighted toward performance it’d be a lot harder to avoid it when there are only a few players left and you perform well, versus when there are a lot of players and at least you can hope 500 other guys as good as/better than you already got sent in to a death bracket. Maybe it’s a good time to think about the structure of this game itself because I sure don’t think there’s going to be a sudden influx of new players and time slice/sharding mechanics just doesn’t sit well when you don’t have many players.

2
  1. MPQ is still ranked #38 out of 177. That’s pretty awesome.
  2. How is a daily which encourages people to log on every day going to decrease people logging on everyday for only the short term? If anything, it gets people in the habit to log on to get some quick iso, and at least see if the 3* is needed.
  3. Play decline has been happening (I believe) because of certain problems that D3 has worked very hard to fix. For example, the daily fixes the 2-3 transition problem and iso shortage. Also gives a feeling of completion, and small accomplishment carrots that keep people on the stick. The problem the game has is “walls”. Walls are never healthy for a game, because most people don’t view walls as a challenge, they view walls as a reason to quit.

As long as D3 works on removing walls in the game, while keeping rarity relatively good, and keeping the gameplay engaging, people will play, and people will pay. The daily is a HUGE step in the right direction.

3

I think you guys are talking about the same thing. That Daily’s have been exactly what D3 needed, to retain/increase the amount of active players.

However, I saw Phantron’s post as a warning for D3 not to be complacent, because there are other walls, as you’ve mentioned, that will appear or are already present, like 3*->4* transition.

The developers need to figure out more ways to ensure the survival and growth of the game, because this time’s answer to declining actives was dailies… what happens next time numbers decline? Double Daily? Triple Daily?

4

One of the main issues, I believe, in more casual players not sticking around, is the feeling of unreachable rewards.

Look at the number of unreachable rewards in Shield Simulator. If you are a 1-2* roster, where you are going to be excited to see Ares, and be willing to work to get him, how do you feel when you find it is absolutely unreachable.

Casual players, want to feel they are able to reach rewards.

I saw a statistic on how many hours most people’s total playtime on the average console game is. Their total per game was less than 50 hours. What does MPQ have to grab you and hold you in the first 5 hours of play? Now that new player likes the game, plays through prologue, see something like Shield Simulator. The drool, or I did anyway, when they see prizes all the way up to 2400. How far does a 1* roster get? Not very far.

I hear people say they want it to stay hard to earn rewards, but we are the hardcore players. I’m willing to shield hop. I hit the wall of 4Thor-Xforce, and I could just puke. So much for roster diversity. (I know you all earned them, and have the right to enjoy playing them, but its so boring.)

I’m going to keep using Shield Simulator. It is a “Training Facility.” All players should be able to earn all the rewards in it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a location that casual players can feel like they are contributing to their team’s training and improve.

There needs to be a way, where even when a new player is getting slaughtered in Shield Simulator, that they feel like they are improving and contributing to the overall readiness of the XMen and their allies. Get rid of losing points in there. Hell, have people gain something small for every defensive loss. Toss up a screen that shows who you’ve “helped” train, and give people something like 50 ISO for every defensive loss, and 100 for every defensive win. Make it so the player need to play, win or lose, some matches every day, to enable their team to participate in the “offline” training.

Remove Shield Simulator from PvP Season Rankings. It just doesn’t fit.

TLDR: The most successful games have very casual friendly areas. MPQ tries to do this through early sequestration. Then when those players get released to the general population, its a kick in the teeth.

5

Compare this game to say, Pet Rescue Saga which pulls double the money but has 20 times the daily active users (about 1 million). So obviously, MPQ gets very good mileage out of each individual user compared to other games.

However, I think MPQ has an inherent skill cap issue that makes it unlikely to ever have say 250K daily users because this game is harder than it looks. I know a lot of mobile games you get an option where the computer plays for you and generally speaking you’ve enough of an advantage that you can easily have the AI play for you while farming. Try to do that in PvP (AI plays exactly the same way as it does on defense) and I’ll be very surprised if you could get past 300 PvP points in one sitting no matter who you have. Now you don’t have to have millions of players to be successful, but a lot of this game is built inherently on an assumption of fairly large player base. After all, a lot of people have to lose in any particular PvP/PvE event if we define losing as not getting a 3*. If all the people who usually lose quit then someone else now has to lose because only a certain % of people can win. Likewise the existence of difficult brackets is going to get worse because someone else has to fill in the spot for the death bracket if a previous player left. It seems to me this game has heavy fragmenting and divides its existing base into many small subsection as a function of time slice/shard (roughly correlated with performance) but you can get to a point where the divison is too fine. In Lethal Intent I started at 0 with 5 hours to go, worked my way to 800, shielded, and got hit exactly once during the entire event. While my team is very strong, this can’t possibly have happened back when everyone is in the same time slice. Now you might say that sounds great to be able to do easily get to a score without being attacked, but if it’s always like this what’s the point to even compete when you might get attacked once?

I don’t think this is a ‘survival’ issue, but rather that they really need to start thinking about how much they’re dividing up what seems to be a relatively low number of players to begin with. Unless there’s plan to go recruit another 50K people to join the game daily, I’m guessing what we have right now is likely it, and that’s perfectly fine to support the game but don’t take a small playerbase and divide it into 5 time slices and then at least 2 or 3 brackets based on performance (and probably more than that). At some point it’s going to be way too fragmented.

6

Phantron wants to nerf the time slices lol

Although i say that half in jest, i understand the concern but i am curious as to what you think a more reasonable modification to the current system would be? (personal note: if they moved the timing for PVE slices a smidge, i would greatly appreciate it! haha Then again with the US daylight savings thing it might work out that way anyway lol)

Building off of esoxnepa’s point, in my humble opinion the game as it currently exists (yes even with the awesomeness that is DDQ) is still way too oriented around competition. As with any competition, there will be winners and losers. If a player continues to lose, the incentive to play diminishes.

MPQ is not the most casual player friendly game. Sure in the beginning it may seem to be with the prologue and baby brackets, but once you graduate to the big leagues if you want to do well it requires at least a few hours of constant, smart play. i remember reading somewhere on here that over 50% of the player base started playing about half a year ago and i wondered and still do wonder what the devs plan on doing to retain those players.Most vets and hardcore players probably won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future, barring burnout or boredom. And as long as they remain, they will continue to dominate pVp and to a lesser extent pVe (although with the 8 hour refreshes perhaps more so than before?).

Don’t get me wrong. Of course this is how it should be when you hold a competition of this nature but thinking in terms of overall health of the game and player retention it seems obvious that more needs to be done to give n00bs and casual players a sense of progression and possibility of victory. And that is why i have been pushing for more non-competitive content.

DDQ is a wonderful addition to the game, but i hope it doesn’t stop there. Non-competitive game modes allow for a greater variety of play styles. We all know that the secret to pVp is making the climb, speed kills, shield hop and that the secret to pVe is timing, grinding and roster strength (or HP use). What about offering game modes that reward defensive play? Like surviving 10 rounds against Carnage or stun locking an entire enemy team. People are really digging the survival nodes so how about a survival mode that offers progression rewards. The longer you survive the better the rewards? Or other puzzle challenges that move away from simply defeating the enemy team.

Although i understand Phantron’s concern, i don’t think overhauling the time slice system will help player retention. i believe offering a balance between competitive play (for the best of the best and hardcore) and non-competitive play (geared toward the casual player) is a more fruitful option.

7

I don’t mean to go back to when everyone’s on one time zone but I think we’re at a limit of competitive gameplay. Let’s say the generic event in MPQ has 10%-20% as winner, defined as getting at least a 3* cover (certainly can be stricter than that), this model just doesn’t seem to attract enough people. Now the game doesn’t necessarily have to grow to be stable, but again if only 10% can win then if some people who usually loses leave, someone else has to start losing. Unless we end up having bots that fill out the bottom 50% this model isn’t going to change. I think the game has to graduate to a model where most of the content is not competitive, or at least not in the ‘only 10% can win’ sense. The existing stuff can still be there but they’re not going to be what’s expanding the game. There’s no way you can trick people into thinking in a model where 10% only can win that more than 10% of the people think they’re usually winning. I don’t think the competitive aspect is likely to expand but they do need to stop the bleeding. Imagine if everyone in your time slice is running a 4* team, but remember, 90% of them still has to lose in any PvE event and 80% of them has to lose in any PvP event, and that’d not be fun at all. You need the 2* fodder guys to sustain the guys at the top so that they can win, but on the other hand, there’s got to be something for the 2* guys to continue playing too, and progress alone isn’t enough, because otherwise you’ll eventually hit a point where everyone has the same team and still 80-90% of them has to lose by definition.

The time slice is very kind to me, but in this game your success is built upon the guys you ran over, and why should the guys I run over for my easy points continue to play this game? DDQ’s a great start, but I think there has to be other non competitive thing for this to be viable in the long run for people to continue to get ran over by far superior rosters. And while I’m all for fighting relatively fairly, the competitive model of this game cannot possibly work if everything is fair. Imagine D3 cloned you 999 times and placed you in a bracket/MMR against your own clones. Well, that’s going to be a very miserable experience for 90% of your clones, and that’s going to happen if the guys in the transition quit. For that matter, it’s not sufficient that progression is possible, because if all the transition guys become max 4* player, it’s still exactly the same sceanrio where 90% of them has to lose.

8

To avoid that wouldn’t be better small brackets?

9

If you’re keeping the same top x% cutoffs then you’ve changed nothing. If you keep the same top 5, 25, 100 cutoffs but make brackets 250 instead of 500, you’ve done the same thing as just doubling the cutoffs. So would be same as top 10, 50, 200 instead in a normal bracket. I don’t think just doubling (or x% more) the rewards is really going to fix the issue phantron is talking about.

10

Yah, the shile sim needs some work. 1* rewards until 1600 pts? I am at 900 and up against 130+ teams–my highest is 85. I was excited to see Squirrel Girl as a reward, but 2300 pts? She has a special,place in my heart as my first earned 3* from an event, placed first. Heck, even if you earned pts in it and couldnt lose them…shield total stays, but could still lose season pts.

I mean, I still dont have a chance against all the high lvls, but at least you could try to slowly climb

11

There’s similar numbers on Steam, about a 50% drop in peak active players per day from last year : http://steamcharts.com/app/234330

I find it funny that slidecage essentially had similar concerns from the lower roster side but was mostly brushed off. However, going into the last 2 or 3 PVPs, they really have felt like dead brackets with no fodder, but still many attacks. It feels like the churn at the top is higher and that many of the transitioners have abandoned pvp altogether, not even trying for the 400 progression 25-hp mark. I saw barely any 94’s above 500.

There’s definitely going to be some adjustment period here.

12

Another point is just how much the daily has changed the entire game.

Don’t see many talking about it, but the rewards from PvP and PvE have been clearly dwindling over time. They’ve gotten worse and worse, while the amount of effort to gain them has gone up or stayed the same. But the daily - which they claim is to fix the badly broken 2* → 3* transition - changes everything. The entire game is the daily now. PvEs and PvPs are only useful to get characters you don’t already have; otherwise, they are VASTLY too much effort for the paltry, paltry reward. PvEs take 5-8 days and give you at most one 3* for the progression - which is fairly attainable - and one 3* for top 150 - which is hard but possible. Top 50 is nearly impossible - by definition it’s only 5% - and top 10 is laughable. So in a realistic view, you’re looking at 1 or 2 covers for a week’s worth of hard grinding. MAYBE 3 if you try super extra hard and you’re lucky enough to have all the required characters. Or you can get a cover every day in the daily. Why would I do PvE ever again, except for characters I don’t have?

Except of course that thanks to the lessening of HP rewards, I can’t afford all the constant new characters anyway. They increased daily giveouts but have shrunk PvP HP rewards tremendously - it doesn’t really make up the difference that we’ve lost, or at least it doesn’t for anyone in my playing range. PvE is getting stingier, too. So you have this problem where everyone is getting less and less - unless they play the daily, which fixes everything but their HP problem. So yeah: I would expect that a naturally dwindling playerbase + time slices + massive focus away from events and onto the daily would = fewer people in all the brackets. I almost didn’t bother to join the current PvE - and I shouldn’t have, since I won’t get anything from it. But while I’ve been not playing that, I’ve gotten like 3 or 4 3* covers already. Why would I ever slog through an 8 day event for basically nothing ever again? (Spoiler alert: I won’t.) Which is sad, because the story is the part I actually like most about this game. (Edit: To be clear, I actually much prefer the anyone-can-get-it reward structure of the daily to the weird and artificially limited “top X%” reward system of the PvP and PvE events. Those strongly favor whoever already has the strongest rosters, while the daily is much more even and fair. But it does change the game.)

I agree that the overall reward structure of this game is an odd one; it’s one of the few pay-to-win games where paying a little doesn’t really get you any advantage at all. You have to go in hundreds and hundreds of dollars to get any kind of advantage, and that’s after you get a little luck to get you going. It’s both refreshing and a bit weird, since they kind of discourage you from actually paying them anything, but the whales will get sucked dry for very little gain. All of that has got to mean their churn rate is pretty high. I’m sure someone has said this before, but without the Marvel license there’s no way this game would have lasted more than 6 months.

13

Thanks for the Steam Chart link.

I reread Slidecage’s post. If his intent was to address a similar concern to Phantron, then he did an exceptionally poor job. His post comes off as a troll. I did not downvote him, because I figured he is either young or not a native English speaker. Tone of posts on the internet can be hard to understand, but from reading the thread, I was not the only one that read his post as useless whining.

14

I think the best way to keep a larger player base is to increase the solo-player mode, like finishing the Prologue. My recomendation would be once they finish the Dark Reign story and move on to something else, to then sum up the Dark Reign into a single play mode like Prologue. You could keep doing this as you create mini-sagas. When they are done, sum them up into 20-50 game nodes and create a plot line.

What this does is allows a newer player to stay segreated longer while getting ISO and covers before they enter the fray.

15

Steamchart is an interesting look. Seems the trend has always been slow decline in avg number of players. Only three months of the last 14 go against that trend and one of them was now. Realistically MPQ is fun and there is a lot you can get out of it but it innovates slower than the rate at which people get bored and/or frustrated. Maybe not by a lot but noticeably so.

To genuinely start growing the playerbase, they need to be adaptive enough to add new and exciting things ~before~ most players get tired of the last old thing. In the beginning release of a new character filled that new shiny thing requirement to keep most entertained but as it stands now people are actually complaining about too many new characters, that they can’t keep up with roster slots, and they can’t get enough covers to play with their fun new toys and to have the iso to bring them up to speed is laughable. Releasing new characters under the current model earns very little retention excitement for the bottom 80% of players. What is the answer to that, I really don’t know but DPDQ is a great place to start and I hope they have more ideas like that in the works.

16

I’m pretty sure one of the devs once said that less than 5% of the players have finished the prologue. If people are pretty much ignoring the one we have, I don’t know that stacking more on top is something a lot of people will care much about.

17

When I made a second (and third) account a couple of months ago, mostly out of curiosity, the thing that struck me most was the cost of roster slots. I know that’s a common topic around here. But it just takes a couple of lucky pulls from standard tokens for a new player, with very little information, to have to start making difficult choices about either 1) selling a character that looks appealing or 2) spending money on the game. The business model is basically “annoy people into spending money,” but I found the roster slot situation to be too annoying too soon. It’s one of many barriers the game throws up against new players.

18

The pvp model is broken now , it’s a bit late now, but leveling character’s should of been done by " experience leveling" similar to RPG, by playing with that character instead of ISO.
This would have created more diversity in pvp’s and stop the most fortunate players to dominate PVP.
Now PVP is run by two character’s and both of them should be nerf slightly. This game should have stop at 3*, the battles now are getting to long with characters having 14k to 19k in health, killing them is not impossible but takes up more time, wich can get very boring and annoying. Most people I know quit this game months ago and i’m not as exited as I use to be about it.

19

The fact that MPQ FINALLY did something to address 2-3 transition is a good sign.

I was really starting to wonder if anyone working on MPQ understood business or common sense.

Now, instead of all these fluff new chars and other nonsense…you really need to be working on balancing the game and addressing the weak spots in PVP etc. Before you add more fluff, fix the f’ing foundation.

Imagine a Marvel game where players actually get to go into battle with DIFFERENT TEAMS. Holy tinykitty. What a concept.

20

Every “app” game has a shelf life. Over 1 year isn’t too bad at all. Even Angry Birds eventually died off, so will MPQ - it’s just a question of when. Or maybe it will turn into one of those games that just has a very very small community for the last couple years of its life.