Maybe 'daily player' is asking for a lot

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So I’m looking at my alliance and there are people who are likely leaving, and I find myself asking what is so hard to manage as a someone who plays daily (aka ‘daily player’) and pull an average that’d be for top 100 alliance score? But then after thinking about so more, maybe that’s asking for a lot. We all know in this game you can’t effectively hold your place in PvP or PvE in any meaningful capacity, but the game is competitive enough that just trying to play at the end will rarely get you a very competitive score. This game is also surprisingly taxing. I can do MMORPG dailys in my sleep, but the only teams I’d be beating in this game in my sleep would be the seed teams, and I’m not sure about beating BaconMagic or TooManyPants (they have modern Storm) and definitely not BattleAngel. I remember a long ago some guy in a top MMORPG guild said that just because you’re in the world’s #1 top guild doesn’t mean you’re somehow able to do high intensity fights every single time. Sure the top players can do these crazy fights where if you blink at the wrong time you wiped the raid and everyone yells at you, but that cannot be how you play the game the entire time unless you want to have a nervous breakdown. Even the best player need the equivalent of a faceroll encounter where they can relax. Sure, the equivalent of a faceroll encounter to such a player is still pretty challenging to a normal person, but it’d be a break for the top players.

In this game, you never get any kind of break for all practical purposes unless you’re constantly trying to game the system, and it’s not clear if such tactics are even that effective anymore. It’s basically like raiding at high intensity every single day, and that looks like an impossible level to sustain. But of course with alliance/season reward people are more likely to feel they must contribute or they’re losing their hardwork or letting their alliance down. I have played MMORPG at a very high level and I’ve never thought of myself as too physically/mentally exhausted to continue playing unless I happen to be sick, but I find that happening all the time in this game. That is, I pretty much never make any bad mistakes in a supposedly high intensity game like a MMORPG, but in this game I know if I’m tired I’m probably going to make a bad move which leads to a miracle cascade on the other side and then very bad things will happen and I get angry. And that’s probably not surprising, since most games, even ones against human players, are fairly predictable. Assuming you’ve the right skills you know what the AI is scripted to do, and even a human you know what their tendencies are and what kind of moves are most effective. On the other hand, there’s absolutely nothing predictable about a miracle cascade. If you’re not at the top of your mental capacity you’ll simply get into one of those ‘make this move to setup a match 5 next move… wait the enemy gets that move next!’ deal.

On one hand, you want to the game to be challenging, but on the other hand, expecting someone to play day after day against always challenging opponents is a bit asking too much. Short of not playing the game, there is never easy mode for this game. I’m not saying it should be easier to place well (if it’s easier for everyone then nothing has changed), but there must be less emphasis on stuff like alliance and season that makes it hard for anybody to take a few days off. For PvE, we must move away from the Simulator Basic ‘every node is hard’ design.

2

Pretty much.
I played varsity for two years.
Qualified for cal-i in lol
Top 100 world maintank in wow during wotlk and multiglad

And I still burned out on the amount of effort/time for reward this game takes over a month ago
So charming

3

Well I don’t think just because something is viewed as more prestigious that necessarily means it’s worth it to suffer more pain through it. It’s fine to strive for excellence even if you won’t ever expect this game to be televised. But there has to be a break from the intensity other than simply giving up. Yes players are partly at fault for being unable to let go, but it’s not really helping when so much reward is tied to alliance and now to the season ranking. I think rubberbanding also leads to the need to be constantly playing a high intensity level since it is inherently not possible to simply do well enough once and pull away with a lead, and it is also impossible to simply wait until the very end to play especially with alliance ranking in mind (you might do well in your own sub bracket but you’ll be giving up a decent chunk of points to the guys who played all along if you can only do the last refresh). Yes, there should be a point to play more, but you can’t require high intensity playing all the time, either.

There’s also an issue with the PvE design itself that is not dependent on scaling. If you look at something like Simulator Basic, all the regular nodes are roughly equally difficult. Yes, some combination of enemies are easier than others, and occasionally there’s a particular broken one that nobody is beating reliably, but overall you can say they’re all supposed to be equally hard. I can’t remember a node in Simulator Basic that wasn’t all goons (did those even exist anymore?) that was easy enough to just mess around. I was looking at the nodes for Prodigal Sun and all the 250+ levels are the same old highwire juggling act where one bad cascade can easily wipe you out. Again, I don’t mind that kind of encounter, but you can’t expect people to do highwire juggling acts for 15 consecutive encounters times 10 days in a row.

4

But you scaled yourself into 250s for silly tokens and sub placement. I started to ignore sub placement several PvE events ago and couldn’t be happier.

Agree on other fronts.

5

Bad design: you are forced to play less in order to be effective.

6

Well I kinda agree with that, but new rewards aren’t usually worth playing for (70 ISO, no first completion prize, non-guaranteed tokens).

7

The divide starts right there. Some people are sitting bored at work with lots of time to kill – good opportunity to be daily MPQ or whatever player. Others play in time that can be allocated to other useful of fun things without much restriction.

So why would one want to be a daily MPQ player in the first place – especially stay that way after 5-6 months, having gained almost everything obtainable and playing the game in mass-repeat mode even when it provides its maximum variability? What is pretty rare, see even in the new episode which looked like dark-centered we still fight bulls+hammers and yelena/venom+hammers. BUMMER. The enemies are all the same all around whichever arena.

Your team similarly, just a few characters are viable so you play with the small group even having a full maxed roster. As divergence will bite you in the ass pretty soon.

Games are supposed to be played for fun, and MPQ is damn short on that even on the primary scale let alone with all the forced repetitions. Really the only hope to have some fun I see is just to play it time-to time and ignoring the prizes and the game’s intended ways for competition etcetera completely.

And there is no half-assed casualness. If you play PVE as you see fit you gain no points worth mentioning. And PVP is no better.

Yes, let’s assume that getting 700 pts in PVP having a couple 141s is no big deal – you ask why would someone not want to do it? Wrong question. Why would one WANT to do it really? Especially if in no need of the covers. It’s the hour or two wasted on repetition of the same you did yesterday and the day before, same your team, same other teams in that range. With possibly slight variation of labels that create almost no significance.

It can be done for some goal, like getting a prize one wants for whatever, possibly ill-conceived reason, but just for the sake of daily routine?

Good placement can be done in just the last hour push – yes, probably, but doing the 25th such push starting 4.30AM is not really interesting – probably even the 10th was a stretch.

As some enlightened guy implied, many things CAN be done, many of those are not really good idea to actually do.

TL;DR: current game state to get anything forces like 2 daily time-points to be on watch that in itself is good reason to pass, even if everything was cool what it isn’t by far.

8

It’s actually possible to place first in every single PvE event for months and still keep scaling far below what most regular players get, it just takes borderline Rainman activities to maintain. Maybe that’s one of the core issues, instead of rewarding good play the game insist on rewarding tedious repetition, by continuously cranking up difficulty until good play no longer suffices.

9

I think one of the problems is that the key to this game isn’t skill or even really roster, it’s timing. You have to either orient your life around this game or settle for weaker prizes most of the time. Someone with a work schedule that conflicts with refreshes is almost always going to do worse than someone who has those times available to play, regardless of the relative rosters or skill level of the players. This is slightly less true in PVP than PVE, but it’s key in both.

10

The scaling is not an issue compared to the design. If my levels are in the high 100s which I can easily do by suiciding if I had more time, then I get ‘every node is easy’ instead of ‘every node is hard’. Just look at your PvE nodes. You’ll see, not counting the especially low level essential nodes or the other freebies they hand out, every one of the ‘hard’ node is roughly the same level. Scaling either makes them all too hard or too easy and neither is right. Prior to scaling you’ve The Hulk hard sub bracket that might look like 150, 180, 200, 230. There’s definitely a difference in the difficulty as you go up. Right now with scaling they’d likely be either 150X4, or 300X4. There are only two modes to play this game: hardcore or not playing. There really isn’t any meaningful in between choice for a competitive player. I don’t support the idea that essentially rewards not playing, but there has to be a third level of viable playing in between those two.

11

Here’s what I’m talking about in PvE. For Iso lab China:

Iso assault 2 - level 248
Iso assault 4 - level 241
Iso assault 5 - level 236
Coercive Force - level 259
Daken versus Yelena (Daken required) - level 219
Daken versus Magneto (Daken required) - level 162

Don’t look at the scaling. Look at how close the levels are. If you look at the general trend of essentials being at least 30 or so levels lower, 5 of those missions are pretty much the exact difficulty in levels (not sure why Daken versus Magneto is way lower, maybe community scaling because you can’t use Magneto?) If scaling is high they’re all too hard, but if scaling is low then they’re all too easy. How can you possibly have something between hardcore and not playing when all your missions are always the exact same difficulty?

Daken versus Magneto stands out as the lone hope for any kind of reprieve. For whatever reason, this node is way lower than the rest of the nodes, so if you’re trying to take it easy and you can certain say ‘that level 162 node sure looks easier than the 250 stuff’ (and it’s probably true).

12

You can no longer take a day off in this game if you want to remain competitive. With the constant 2.5 day PvP for season points you could possibly skip one day, but as stated playing the last few hours is no longer that easy to do. You almost have to get a couple hundred points a day so you can make a push at the end. If you’re shooting for top 10 in a death bracket then you need to have a pretty high score early to shield hop. Not only is it time-consuming but is also starting to be a negative cost because the number shields required to get the reward aren’t covered by the rewards.

On top of that you have PvE events running at the same time as PvP. With 2.5 days subs you might be able to take a day off, but Prodigal Sun has 1.5 day subs. No break for you! If you skip a sub it’s nearly impossible to make up the points lost unless the rubberband is based off the main and not the sub.

If you want to play casually by skipping a day or two (except for a quick story match for the daily reward) and/or less than 30 minutes a day then you can forget about getting any rewards. If everyone in your alliance plays that way then your alliance won’t get to 100 either, so forget getting any 3* covers. That slows your progression down to nearly non-existent. The only source of new 3* covers would be from tokens and they’ve been nerfed so much that you can’t rely on them.

So what do you get for your casual play? A little bit of ISO and an occasional worthwhile cover while missing out on essential nodes in PvE and contributing very little to alliance rewards if you’re lucky to be in an alliance with such a small contribution.

13

I think we can look at tennis ATP as a model. From what I can tell, there isn’t some kind of physical limit on the number of tournaments you can enter that counts toward ATP ranking, or if it exists it’s certainly not something the top players of the world needs to max. So if you want to kill yourself by going to every eligible tennis event in the world you can do that, but as long as you can’t do well in the 4 majors you’re still getting anywhere. Also, all the majors are obviously spaced out through the year so it’s not like after a grueling Major competition you then start on another Major immediately so you can actually get a break. Compared to this I remember we had The Hunt for Falcon where 2 sub events, the overall The Hunt event, and another PvP event all ended at the exact same time! I don’t think it’s practical to have ‘lesser’ events simply because it’d be hard to decide whether Top Gun is a more high profile event than God of Lies, but we can certainly space out these events better. As pointed out by many, having a break before season 2 starts would be a good idea too after the grueling finishing for season 1.

14

Putting the qualifier “maybe” on that question is already a sign of being completely detached from reality IMO.

It’s not like you can just log in and that’s it. It requires at least 2 hours too. One hour morning refresh and one hour evening refresh. And even with that you can end up just barely Top100 with PvE scaling and new PvP match making. The time requirements in this game are absurd. If you take a step back from the game and look at it rationally there is just no justification to spend that much time on the game.

15

I’m not a believer that a game has to be a certain size to warrant playing a lot of time in it, but I think the ‘2 cycles of at least 1 hour’ is a very good point and that’s probably more demanding than most MMORPGs. Even in a raiding guild I certainly wouldn’t expect everyone to play for 2 cycles of 1 hour every single day, even for people who average more than 14 hours a week (usually that’d be concentrated during a few days but they can certainly take the other days off). I don’t think this is anything new, though. It’s just stuff like alliance and season made these issues more glaring. The event finish time has always been the same but it’s more noticeable when you can’t afford to miss any event without falling back considerably in standing. Alliance also somehow brought out the worst of this. Let’s say you got 20 guys who can do this and make #50 and everything looks good. But what if one guy gets abducted by aliens and your alliance isn’t aware of this at the start of season 2? Do you just write that guy as lost cause immediately to replace him? But what if he wasn’t abducted by aliens and actually came back 3 days later? But if you didn’t get rid of him, asking everyone to play enough to make up for missing a guy puts a lot of extra stress on the other 19 guys. Okay, you can just say let’s not play for Nick Fury, but why should an alliance that normally can be expected to easily make top 50 just give up? And yet missing even one person can put tremendous stress on everyone else.