Lets all be nice to each other.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Hi Forum, This is mostly by me but it is a message from all of the mod team. I am not going to discuss forum rules here as this is not an official post as we are not using this as a platform to discuss our official rulings or anything like that, this is just a request.

I have a favor to ask. Can we tone down the vitriol a little bit? Now I know the changes have angered most of us, and with good reason, but the hate on the forum has gotten a little out of control. I was chatting with some of the dev’s and heard that they have been getting a lot of PM’s from people who like the changes or at least aspects of them but are too afraid to post on the forums for fear of getting flamed.

That’s not ok. I want this forum to be a place where everyone who has a legitimate opinion can post. I don’t want people supporting the buffs and changes to be afraid to post because of the hate they know they will receive. I don’t know about all of you but I want this to be a home for discussion about a game we all love to play. I want people to be able to have healthy discussions about whatever aspect of the game they choose.

Every day I have less and less desire to come to these forums. When I started playing this was a great place to get info about the game and discuss new characters and strategies but since the nerfs where announced all I see is posts about how D3/Demiurge is tiny kitty. I have seen fewer and fewer posts from people I used to love to read(when was the last time you saw a post from Northern Polarity?) and I would not be surprised at all to hear that this was because they are receiving hate pm’s after the changes.

Now I am not saying those with a negative opinion should not have a voice, of course they
should. But there should be room for the other side. I know we are upset about the changes and the way they have been handled but the forum is more than just a place to voice those complaints. It is also a home for discussion.

So I ask again, can we tone it down a bit, please?

Thanks,
Mageofshadow

TLDR: Lets all be nice to each other.

2

I think there’s plenty of good things going on in the game right now, but just haven’t had time to post as much lately.

But I also admit I’ve been less motivated because of all the negativity. Not because I’m afraid of push back. Fighting trolls with logic is kinda like the MPQ mini-game. But mostly because it’s not as fun to be on when much of the first page is filled with the same couple of flame arguments.

But good job mods. And if the devs are checking this, I think many of the changes have been for the positive.

The MPQ forums are like women. It doesn’t matter how many brownie points you’ve won for doing positive things; as soon as you make one mistake, you’re back at -5.

3

Social contract. It CAN exist on this forum.

“Be excellent to each other.” - Abe Lincoln

4

As an additional service, if you start to feel filled with rage and want to threaten someone or get nasty (and not the GOOD kind of nasty), come back to page one and just look at this for about ten seconds. If a Fennec Fox (I heard he is in favor if the X-Force adjustment, and thinks it mostly a positive step) and a cat (word on the street is he wants to tinydoggy all the tinydoggies who came up with the “fun” balancing - could be empathy for the retractable claws thing) can put aside their differences and get along, then we humans should be able to do the same.

5

One thing that might tone down some of the anger: There are a few situations going on right now that are causing distress, and the mods weighing in on a few of them would tone things down. Not necessarily the nerfs, but there are a few issues (like the bizarre situation with the taco tokens) where we’re not getting a lot of information (one mod has weighed in but given us slightly less information than we need) and others (like the, let’s say, total failure of the RNG on cover order lately) where there’s an opportunity to make a very easy fix to improve the game a bit.

There’s a perception among some of the players that whenever there’s bad news, the devs flee the forums. And given the vitriol, I can understand that, even if they do. But an effort to address some of the problems a little more directly - and to make more of an attempt to balance the bad news with some good news - could improve things around here.

6

What does the fox say?

7

Ree-kee-kee-kee-kee-keekeeow!

8

Nerf anger!!!

9

So the devs are complaining about people being mean to them? Perhaps they should ask why people are being mean to them.

Please be nice to me while I screw you out of cash. That’s some brass neck.

10

Party on dude.

11

This is all bs. I’m no troll. Anyone pming devs saying this is good are just suck ups.

Xf Nerf and upping health and only two color boost and new battle selector means ruined game. Thanks. I wasted money on this game.

D3 has been good to its players. But this ruined game pure and simple. If most are pissed in forum. It is for good reason. Now blaming on trolling is dumb.

I beg that u at least put back xf and return health. I’m sure everyone can live with other major change “tweaks”

12

Be nice to each other? But how will I proc my Anger then?

13

That’s not what the original post said. According to the OP:

I was chatting with some of the dev’s and heard that they have been getting a lot of PM’s from people who like the changes or at least aspects of them but are too afraid to post on the forums for fear of getting flamed.

(bolded emphasis mine)

So, it’s other forumgoers, not devs, who are afraid to post and voice their opinion for fear of negative backlash.

14

Yes you’re right, I misread. They have less of a brass neck than I thought.

But there’s still some brass neck on them icon_e_wink.gif

15

I understand that the vitriol is extreme, and there are those that fear flames or rate-downs, but that’s the effect that powerlessness gives to those playing. I mean, X-Force was bread and butter to so many people, and now is barely water and tack. Scaling, as a rule, is unforgiving and so are bad boards. Many people moderated that with investment in xforce, hood, patch and daken, all of which suffered in the wake of the new paradigm. People are flaming to try and regain some of that control, even if it’s futile. People are posting on the main board asking what can they do now? That’s my question, too. I have 172 xforce 2/5/1 (weak, I know), 153 patch, 153 daken, 153 hulk and a bunch of poorly covered 130s, and none of my 153s got any hit points, so they were all nerfed. Gameplay feels far, far worse, even if my placement was somewhat better for the last few PVPs. I know that’s only because I’ve been lucky, because my scores haven’t even broken 600.

Play feels far shorter on health packs now, scaling feels more (not less) harsh and unforgiving, retaliations and characters feel far weaker. I think it’s that core frustration (that the devs have “moved my cheese”) that drives the anger on the forums. That and the fundamental lack of strategies that will replace xforce in the wake of what is a severely debilitating nerf for many people’s rosters.

In addition, the devs (QS notwithstanding) have been introducing new characters with better characteristics than the old. LC red and IF green/purple will dominate the future PVP landscape, not to mention PVE. It’s not like IF has been given out like candy and LC hasn’t been that common, either.

16

I’ve been playing for around a year and a half now and if there is one thing I have noticed is that when one strategy becomes overly popular (ie: no one over X points running anything other than said character combo) the Auto win gets changed. I don’t tend to play many (read: any) other games with PvP but I have heard of balance tweaks and exploit patches going back to Diablo 1 and beyond. It’s pretty industry standard.

This is the reason that last fall during the anniversary HP sale blitz I DID NOT buy up X-force covers. Yes I saw the win button at a time when I could get in on the ground floor. I would have loved to play this combo since I would have had several months ahead of me to enjoy my newly purchased win button. But if the history of gaming (or just this game; Sentry, Spider-Man, Cmags, hell how about 2* thor/wolvie/storm) is prologue that would have been a trap. At least in the long term sense. Short term = win button still.

I sincerely feel for the folks who recently full covered their tier 1 characters. Mostly because they won’t have a chance to reap the reward for their emotional investment (and let’s be honest this is more about emotion than about money. Else wise people would simply sell their investments at the ‘soften the blow’ buy back rates and reinvest). To be fair a lot of the newer players might not have seen this coming. But I’m also glad that the Devs responded to the problems that were cropping up in the wonderful game they have built.

Going forward I suppose someone could comb through the old forum posts and see how long it takes demiurge to respond to developing exploits. Tada! People now have a rough idea how long their PvP monopolies will last. Regardless I will keep on playing and enjoying the analysis I find on this forum.

TL;DR sorry for your loss guys, good work Devs doing your jobs. So what is the next top strategy :}

17

Whether you agree or disagree with the changes recently, the Xforce one was pretty low. There was no time for most of us to alter our roster to make allowances and the buy back on the covers is pathetic, not really sure what 6k can do to help me get out of the hole they threw me down. So to stay competitive they’ve given me two options, drop a lot of cash to buy covers and iso or go back to the struggle I was in a few months ago.

18

Look, I’ll most certainly be nice to anyone posting on the forums. Discussions are welcome, opposing views are fine, and ad-hominems aren’t acceptable.

I will also continue to express my anger and frustration towards the developers, though. They have repeatedly made decisions that have made my play experience considerably worse, and have even acted in incredibly shady ways on a repeated basis. This is a pattern of behavior, not a one-off case. Then they come in and tell us that they’re listening, so we shouldn’t worry. Listening is great (if that’s true), but they sure don’t seem to be acting.

So if you’re a player, feel free to disagree with me and we can have a civil discussion. If you’re a dev, you’ve reached the end of my patience. I can only give a second chance so many times.

19

Absolutely agreed, but the degree to which players can adjust to balance tweaks makes a difference in the player response.

That we only have the ability to sell a changed character for a tiny fraction of the invested resources plays a huge part in the player response. For whatever reason, it’s a design decision on the part of the developers to leave players pretty much up a creek after a nerf, and it’s not one that I can ever recall them explaining.

20

I think the developers’ approach to posting bad news has been part of the problem lately. They had three major things lately that were liable to upset people: the three new character releases in a row, the character changes, and the mmr changes. The three characters in a row were released with no real warning, which I think was a mistake. Releasing the third after people got upset about the second was a bigger mistake. If they’re about to launch two or three more in a row after the single break, I think they need to tell us now, or people are likely to go ballistic. And I think that’s a reasonable request. That way, people can decide which characters they want to put effort into if they can’t do it three times in a row again.

Th character changes were communicated a week in advance, and included buffs and nerfs, and that was better. But gutting the top-level PVP character was likely to upset a lot of people, and the buffs didn’t really make up for it for a lot of people. Something this major probably needed more warning, since this was the biggest batch of character changes since the game started, factoring in the health changes, and the people who just bought covers for X-Force are justifiably upset.

The mmr changes I think have been handled the worst. The game has been trying to balance an impossible group of things since it began, by trying to throw everyone in the same prize pool, not let the vets dominate the noobs, shard vets and nobs separately, and retain some sense of balance. If the devs truly want to fix PVP, they need to divide up the pools. But this on the fly reworking of mmr has really been handled badly, and doing while all of these other changes are going on makes it much harder to get real feedback.

In the future, I think the devs need to do a few things to ratchet down the anger. First and foremost, they need to give us some warning. Something like, “Just to let you know, we’re teaming up with Marvel to help promote Age of Ultron. As part of this, we’ll be introducing more characters than usual in the next few weeks.” And then, give us something to make up for it. Run a week-long sale on slot prices. Give everybody 500 HP. Open up the prize tiers a little. Something along those lines. And, especially, avoid hyper-grindy 12-hour subs.

Part of why people are so upset is that they’re getting blindsided by this, part of it is because some of these changes are 100% negative for some people. Good communication, and, quite frankly, bribery, can make things a little better. And if the devs could fix some of the more glaring problems that are actually easily solvable (RNG for cover order, for example), that would also bring in some goodwill. Remember how happy everyone was after DDQ started?

Also, and this can’t be emphasized enough, PUT TINYKITTY IRON FIST IN THE TINYKITTY DDQ.