Less CP is bad, but I'm not sure we are recognizing the scope of this change

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Less CP really does suck. CP 9 is getting a flat 25% cut to cp. And the HP loss looks like a straight money grab to me.

But making fixed 5* rewards available is a very big change to the economy of mpq. This is something that hasn’t been available since one event in 2016. And I am not sure that we can really anticipate all of the consequences that will for from this change.

Each pve event with a latest character will offer up to 250 shards. It would cost ~87.5 CP to get 1/2 of a 5* cover from lts (and while shards are colorless, tokens come with 4* covers, so that value even out).

Classics will be hard (harder?) to cover, but new 5s each get, what 4-6 turns as a featured latest? That is 2-3 extra covers (without considering PvP or placement), and relatively predictable covers too. So there will be a lot of follow-on effects from that single change, such as the number of pulls necessary to cover a new 5, as well as the best strategy for covering new and old 5*s. Release schedule also seems likely to change.

With so many changes to a complex system, I am not even sure Demi has a solid idea of what the new end state will be (though they clearly hope it will increase revenue).

2

Yeah this is going to be a huge shift for those able to complete 10. For those unable however, the resource cut could hurt. This could be a case of “the rich getting richer”.

For me personally, it’s possible I experience an increase in CP overall. Since I don’t do coordination and was stingy with shields, I’d only hit 1200 maybe half the time. If my ability to hit 1K remains the same, that’s +18 CP. Plus, playing in 10 gets more progression CP overall than 9 did. Couple that with 2-3 colorless covers from progression on a 5* before they leave Latests and it does ease the burden of getting a bad distribution when busting your hoard or extremely lopsided build. This saves on CP so I can maybe chase classics with shards and have a little more CP to spend on special store. Overall this feels good.

However, if they switch to a 4-5-4-5 release distribution, that could put us right back in the same place, scrambling for resources while spending even more time in the game just trying to keep your head above water. I think with that release pattern you’d almost have to play in 10 to have a shot, and those with rosters that simply can’t handle it would get left behind. I could see people getting frustrated and quitting (I know I would if I were in that scenario). But this is all conjecture at this point as they have been mum about pretty much any and all of their future plans. So we the community will continue to piece it together as we go.

3

The SCL I’m playing at doesn’t offer 5* shards. Just less CP and HP.

4

It’ll pull me up from 8 to 9, and that extra four star cover in each event really will help overcome that latest 4 star required in shield training problem.

5

This is true for some people.

But there may be other factorss in play here. Less CP, but more covers (and fewer 5/5/1 builds) means players maybe be able to build stronger rosters faster and none to higher cls. And more chances to earn latest shards means feet pills necessary to cover new 5*s

There are just lots of secondary effects with a change this big.

As for rich getting richer, that is usually a safe bet in mpq. :frowning:

6

It could be that the shards are just the rewards we have been asking for and the devs realized they had to do something good to keep people around.

The game has SO MANY TOP TIER CHARACTERS. 90 4s (1,170 covers) and 40 5’s (520 covers). OK? Rewards have been, until now, laughably outpaced by “demand”, pure and simple.

If the rewards had come in and been like adding 10 CP to progression for SCL10? I was probably going to be done. Because while they might tweak things, they wouldn’t do that much. And they needed to ramp things up to make rewards feel more, well, rewarding.

I guess I wonder if maybe the design is more about trying to give vets a reason to keep coming back, chase something, make their progress measurable.

They are giving enough shards to basically get half a cover in SCL 10 between two events (hit T100 and progression next time.) It’s good enough to make you come back - assuming you want the full cover - next time, in 2 1/2 weeks for Latests, or… a YEAR for a Classic.

So 3/5 of the events you’re making really good progress on the newest characters, 2/5 of the time that progress won’t pay off (via PVE rewards) for a year. A year! A &$#& year!

Shards are all about giving you partial rewards to try to make you want to finish the cover, whether it’s paying or playing or targeting and pulling…it’s another engagement driver and engagement/returning is the absolute baseline for success for this kind of game.

You can’t sell anyone anything if they aren’t logging in, and a reason to play keeps you invested, and willing to spend, etc. FTP 101, I know…

It may be that they increase pressures but if a few covers over 4 months for a character makes a difference to you, then I assume the following:

  1. You are not the person who would generally spend money on those covers if you didn’t earn them.
  2. If those covers aren’t good enough, you’re not turning around and spending to try to finish the character.

So to me, they are primarily trying to make top end play give out rewards that feel good enough to keep you engaged and returning since a big risk in a game like this - top heavy with long time vets, and top heavy with top tier, hard to cover characters - is those same vets getting bored and walking away (or heck, having life changes or whatever that get in the way).

IMO the currency nerfs are enough balance, in their view, to give away some half covers to T100 players in SCl10.

This also presumes you would hit SCL10 every time; I think a lot of players, especially the mostly-FTP or FTP ones, will be bouncing up and down a lot, and in SCL 9 you only get like 75 shards (T10) which, if you did that consistently, would only give you like one single full cover over 6 appearances.

Also, I’m not convinced yet they are ramping up the release rate for 5’s, not exactly. They have gone 4/4/5/4/5 before. Also, there were some longer gaps for some of them and maybe they moved up the next one to push Carnage out at 16 weeks vs 18 weeks, which would have been the case if they went for the normal 6 week gap between Sinister and NewGuy.

7

I feel like they are reducing CP and HP to get us to spend more money.

So now newer players have to be extra careful with spending CP and HP. I doubt these changes impact veteran rosters with a massive surplus of everything.

8

I’m in top 10 in PvE SCL 7. I always go for the highest SCL in PvPs, so SCL 10 is an automatic upgrade for me. To me, it doesn’t make sense to compare new SCL 9 rewards with old SCL 9 rewards due to where I am right now.

Summary: Overall, it seems like my CP gain has increased by 12, but I take a hit in HP (-85) and Iso-8 (-3500) as of now. I’m gaining more colourless 4* covers, more red ISO-8 and better tokens. To me, it is a win.

If someone has the old PvP SCL 9 progression and placement rewards, it would be good so that I can make changes.

Note: I don’t know about sub-evemt placement changes in PvE, so these have not been taken into account.

These are the gains and losses for progression and placement rewards.

Progression Rewards
Elite Token: no change
Heroic Token: no change
Red Iso-8: + 9,680
Iso-8: no change
HP: - 15
CP: - 6
Event token: no change
3-Star: change to 1 colourless cover
4-Star: + 370 shards

Placement Rewards
Rank 2 to 5
4-Star: +50 shards
3-Star: change to 1 colourless cover, + 40 shards
Elite Token: - 3
Heroic Token: no change
Mighty Token: + 1
Red Iso-8: no change
Iso-8: - 3500
HP: - 70

Rank 6 to 10
4-Star: + 150 shards
3-Star: change to 1 colourless cover, + 30 shards
Elite Token: no change
Heroic Token: no change
Mighty Token: no change
Red Iso-8: no change
Iso-8: - 4000
HP: - 25

For PvP

Progression Rewards
I can’t remember the exact rewards for PvP Progression and I play till 1000 points.

200: Elite Token → Mighty Token
300: unchanged
400: replaced by + 150 4-Star shards
450: 10 CP from 575 is moved to here
575: + 125 4-Star shards
650: Event Token replaced by Mighty Token
700: ??
725: ??
800: no change
825: ??
850: no change
900: no change
1000: + 18 CP

Top 50 Placement

  • 60 5-star shards
  • 300 4-star shards
  • 1 Mighty Token
  • 3 Elite Tokens
    HP, Iso-8 and Red ISO-8: Can’t remember
9

I don’t think the calculus needs to be that complex. Do you think players’ net gain is greater than or equivalent to net loss? The inclusion of shards and mighty tokens more than mitigates the ~8 CP and HP to me, but YMMV.

10

This is sort of exactly what I was thinking about with this thread. The topline math is pretty straightforward. We all earn X stuff when we used to earn Y for any given event.

But I don’t think that captures the magnitude of this shift. Because now it’s possible to build ~1/2 of each 5* from play top tier. And players will be getting significantly more 4* covers from each event (even if they can’t play cl10). And HP/CP will be less available from regular play. And players are much less likely to get bad builds from RNG because a significant portion of rewards are now in shards. Etc.

A huge amount of player behaviour in mpq is shaped around maximizing access to the rarest rewards. 5* players chase CP like crazy because CP was the best way to get 5s. In the 3 era, being a top 100 alliance was huge because of the extra 3* covers (less so nowadays, except for release events). HP was relatively worthless to 5* players because even casual play was more than enough to keep pace with the release rate (at least up to 300 roster slots). There are literally years of player best practices built on top of basic postulates about the availability of different resources.

And this is, IMO clearly, the biggest shift to the game since 5*s and the champ system in late 2015 / early 2016. Some of those old postulates about maximally efficient play will probably remain true. But I think some of them are going to shift significantly, and that will in turn shift player behaviour.

11

If you’re only spending CP on legendary tokens, it is pretty easy to determine the “shard value” of each CP. With a 15% chance of pulling a 5* cover, that’s equivalent to each CP being equal to 3 5* shards and 13.6 4* shards.

I’m playing in SCL8, where it looks like 6 CP have been removed from the progression reward table, which would be equivalent to 18 5* shards and 81.6 4* shards. However the reward table has added 50 5* shards and 300 4* shards: far more than the lost value.

Of course, these are shards for a fixed character for the event. At the 4* level, this probably makes them slightly more valuable due to dilution. At the 5* level, maybe slightly less if you’re targeting the “latest legends” store.

It’s harder to guess what the outcome of the HP cuts will be. I’m guessing I’ll still get enough free HP to keep up with roster slots, but won’t be building up the same excess to spend on limited time deals.

12

I also am curious about the HP cuts over time. I think I’m fairly recession-resistant compared to a more junior player for having nearly all the 4*s champed, and spending as I go means that there is generally a trickle of resources coming back in with every cover. I threw 1800 hp at that Essex vault like 3 days ago, and I’m already back up to 550 (from 75 or so) even with getting a 150hp shield and saving out of the ragnarok PVP. But i’m also looking at finding a home for Sinister soon, as well as when they hit the game here soon, so maybe the pressure will be on sooner that it seems.

13

I’m pretty resistant too but whereas I would have normally bitten at a Vault like Essex I decided not to go for it. I had already bagged a Sinister cover and I decided rather spend the HP on actually rostering him.

So I think in the back of my mind there is a little nagging doubt as to whether this will even out.

14

Same - I did it on a whim, even though I didn’t actually care about anything in it besides the sinister token (which I didn’t get), and kind of immediately regretted it. I think my spending habits for PVP are probably going to change a little also. Classically I wasn’t really concerned with placement, but 5* shards are reasonably generous in there, in that they are there at all, so it’s becoming much more interesting to me to hang on to points at the end of events moving forward.

15

Well if you are going to at least 725 then CL10 is zero cost and maybe even a decent profit per event if you can shield on or just after the 3 hour mark.

I’m finding that having the 3* max champed is making a big difference for floating because I feel there are more players playing than before from these first two events . Ragnarok I had a baby champ and all the have-a-go 3* teams that could find me were loving it as none of the boosted 4* are all that good on defence (except possibly Sandman who I am toying with the idea of champing). With Blue Shift it is all a lot more smooth though, especially as the AI just does whatever it wants with Quicksilvers passive.

16

Sandman is better than you think, and if you run him with Vulture/G4mora you can stun on 2 colors both provided by Airborne. I thought I’d be slick and try that team on the Challenge Node, and Vulture got match-killed by turn 2 so that was a failure to launch…

17

At least you made it to the challenge mode! I gave up way before that!

18

I actually found it shockingly do-able since I have Okoye and X champed now; I was expecting a meat grinder from what y’all were saying, but it was only that challenge node I had a time on.

19

Devs still need to figure out a way to make classic 5s more attainable. It’s nice that latest 5s get a boost, but in a world where a champed Hawkeye is now an essential 5* champ to have, players need quicker access to such characters.

20

I wouldn’t say Hawkeye is an essential champ to have. But otherwise, I agree with your overall point. I’m glad for others that Kitty and Okoye get 5 billion special stores a year, but I would love to make some progress on some of my bottom tier 5s too. But I know that doesn’t make them money and I’m in the minority.