MPQ Could. Be. Better.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

Before I begin this rambling post, I should introduce myself: I’m a nearly 400-day player; I’m usually casual, occasionally playing hard to top a PvE or earn a desirable PvP reward; never pay-to-win but I did buy a chunk of HP during the anniversary to say thanks and take advantage of the great token odds. I enjoy speccing new character ideas, and generally side with the devs when changes occur. Roster-wise, I’ve got 52 slots; In PVP it seems I get placed with players who can spend much more time than me (700 points isn’t even enough for top 100, usually) which means no Elektra, Thor-4, or Squirrel Girl; and thanks in part to cover distribution on desirables like LDaken (no pheromone rage makes all my ranks in chemical reaction a lot less useful) but I’ve hit the 4-star wall hard. My XForce is only 1/5/1, 155 and once I get to around 700 points in a PvP I can’t compete with the level 200s with better cover distribution. I’ve given up being competitive most of the time, as time spent no longer equals the reward.

Recently in PvE I came to a realization. Classic Magneto is a really great character. redflag.png
Polarizing Force does a ton of damage and saturates the board, making yellowflag.png
Coercive Field inexpensive enough to play a couple times during a match.

But in a level 166 match, he gets a bad rap, because protection doesn’t matter. Match damage is insignificant and almost of the interplay and tension comes from “Can I get to 11 Black before my opponent does”. Roughly. Even though GSW gets a bad rap, I’m going to use her as a good example of the “standard” strategy in MPQ. The GSW strategy is: Get 9 Purple, which facilitates 19 Green, which means you can devastate the opposing team with Sniper Rifle. That power doesn’t win a match by itself, but combined with some other AP management you’re probably on the right track. All “top-tier” characters follow this pattern; Thor, X-Force, it’s all about getting one color to a certain point that lets you suddenly turn the tide and dominate the match.

So what’s the big deal? Dominating is fun, right? It’s super-satisfying to (pre-nerf) World Rupture, wait a turn, Sacrifice, and watch your enemy team drop like flies. Right?

Well let’s go back to that PvE I mentioned before. It was during the Hunt, and since it was a low-level node (level 100ish) I rolled some low-level characters; my CMags at 90 (5/5/1), OBW, I forget who else. Anyway, it was FUN. Really fun. I held off match damage with Coercive field, I got whittled down close to defeat, OBW had a perfectly-timed heal, and I won, after a tough fight. Why was it so fun? Because my powers were doing stuff. There was actual interplay on the board and a tempo to the battle. It wasn’t simply a race to OTK.

What I realized: The game is more fun, and gives more options for strategy in team construction and gameplay, around level 90, than it does at 166. Why?

When Healing was changed I was certain it strengthened the meta; Being a transition player at the time I saw a lot of OBW/Spidey and it was fun to finally see people try other strategies. Despite the meta changing for the better, as time goes on I’m not sure the game did.

You know what’s usually awesome in video games? Scraping a win. Beating the boss with half a heart left. Surviving a round of Counterstrike after taking an early helmet ding. Dragging yourself across the finish line, on fire, a split second before your opponent passes you.

You know what’s not awesome in MPQ? Scraping a win. Sure, it’s relieving to win a fight that went south (and get the points), it still sets you back. Thanks to heal packs, the point of the game is to win as many matches in a row as efficiently as possible. Two tough fights and you’re done for a while or shelling out HP for more packs. That means Damage is really the only viable strategy; a downed opponent can’t use his powers. AP steal is adjunct to this; it may prevent your opponent from costing you a heal pack, and give you AP for heavy hits. (Ex. Surgical Strike, the be-all, end-all of damage, AP drain, AP gain trifecta) Spider-Man may have the best heal in the game, but if you need you use it, you’re playing “wrong”.

The imbalance of different strategies are all rooted in the “economy” of heal packs. I just don’t want to face an opponent that has a good chance of downing one or two of my characters. What would be fun (defeating a tough opponent) becomes a drag (losing a couple characters and moving down in my roster).

This mindset leads also to the prevalence of boosts: Boosts help me kill my opponent before he deals a huge hit, saving me a heal pack, which makes them all but necessary. Against an identical opponent, boosts ensure that you can alpha strike before they do.

This mindset (and level shift into the higher 100s) has led to a shift toward extreme damage attacks, reducing the effectiveness of low HP characters.
But what if winning a match was all that mattered, not winning with as much health as possible? All sorts of strategies become viable. Look at how different characters shine in the new Survival Mode PvEs; Captain America becomes an MVP (for his defense and AP recycling), Spider-Man adds tons of longevity.

If there were no heal packs, Healing powers and Defensive powers would be good again.

If there were no heal packs, I wouldn’t swear at my phone when a scaled up Daken does 3000 damage to me on turn two for 5 blue; I’d just shrug and feel great about overcoming a tough opponent.

Boosts would still matter, as they would make it easier to quickly win a match, or overcome a high-leveled PvE opponent; speed of wins would be just as important. But perhaps we’d have a meta where Spider-Man was decent again. And perhaps we’d have a game that’s as fun at 166 as it is at level 94.

Thoughts?

2

My thoughts? This post could. be. shorter. icon_e_smile.gif

Secondly, even after reading through this, I’m sorry but I’m not sure what your point/suggestion is? Can you summarize what you want to happen in a couple sentences? Is it just to get rid of health packs?

3

He’s saying: Restore Health to full after every match.

It’s been debated to death and I honestly don’t see it happening, due to the existence of PVE.

4

Absolutely agree with the original poster.

Like most of the folks here, I play MPQ a lot. But, I have a family and a job, and there’s just no way I’m gonna wake up at 3am to grind through another round of PVE to keep up with the dudes at the top of my bracket.

MPQ is a fantastic game with loads of depth and strategy, but the PVP is just like he described… It’s a race to the Big Kill Move and only a tiny handful of characters are actually viable out of the huge number that are actually in the game. I’m realllllllllly tired of using X-Force in PVP when I’d rather be using Daredevil or Captain America, but it just doesn’t make sense to do so if winning is the goal.

The recent prevalence of 4-stars is only making this worse. I’ve given up any hope of ever coming in 1st again, which means I’ve got basically no chance of earning more 4-star covers, which means that I’ll never be able to stand up to the top players who show up with ‘featured character maxed + 4* 270 + 4* 270’. The players who have the time to grind like mad or to pay their way to the top with boosts and health packs keep winning, and everybody else is out in the cold.

The upcoming PVE with Star-Lord is more proof of this. Shorter refresh times and a Star-Lord for top 50 is pushing the game in the absolute wrong direction. If it hadn’t been top 100 for the past few 4-stars, I wouldn’t even have them. As it stands, I managed to earn one cover for 4* Thor and Elektra, but they’re unusable since I can’t ever earn another cover.

The game is quickly becoming a ‘rich-get-richer’ situation where the folks who have the money and the time keep winning the covers that let them keep winning, and even people who play a crapload and drop a very respectable amount of cash over time don’t stand a chance.

I’m a day 400-ish player who spends time with the game every day, and i can’t even begin to estimate how much i’ve spent over that time. The fact that i’m considering dropping out of the game altogether is really sad, and I hope the devs course-correct on this situation sooner rather than later. Make the 4-stars easier to earn. Make it so that using a wider variety of characters is actually viable. Keep the game focused on fun, and not on selling boosts and healthpacks… the money will still come.

5

Yep. I said it would be rambling. And honestly had to wrap it up to go somewhere before I could make a point.

Well, what I want is the post-transition game I’m in–slowly getting more 3s to 13 covers–to be as interesting and varied and fun as when I’m dinking around on the family iPad with 2 Thor and Moonstone at level 80.

The point of my post, I suppose, is that the economy of heal packs defines the game during post-transition, reducing each battle to a simple race for AP. Who can unleash their one-hit-kill faster? It prioritizes boosts, and heal pack burning, which is good for the devs, but interesting powers with board utility are close to unusable in comparison because magnitude of damage is so different.

Previously mentioned CMags’ Polarizing Force as a good example; It dishes out decent damage and desaturates the board, making it easier to get AP. But other Red options simply kill one of your opponents, so why bother making the board subtly better? Of course, people LIKE CMags; what about Doc Ock or She-Hulk? Characters with situational utility are considered useless because Damage!!1 is the only strategy.

One thing the devs could do, besides axing the heal timer, is to take every power that does something useful that isn’t damage, and increase its utility at lower ranks. E.g. For 11 bluetile.png
, Manipulation should trash Countdown tiles at rank 1, not rank 5. If transition players had usable non-damage options, maybe players would figure out how to use them effectively and shake up the higher tiers.

6

I agree with OP. This game would be a lot better if characters always went to fight with full health. Each character could have 5 “battle points”. 1 battle point is spent when it fights and restores over 30-60 minutes. Health packs restores 1 battle point instead of health. This setup would encourage picking up on tougher opponents and feel satisfaction from a tough victory even if you are nearly dead at the end. Now it sort of forces you to look for weakest opponent to conserve your health.

7

I think one thing that may help change the dynamic of pvp play and maybe encourage the use of other characters is to scrap the current point system and develop an arcade type scoring system (I.e. Points for match 4s/5s, cascade multipliers, damage blocked by shields, etc..) where you could accumulate points and the only way to collect is to win the match. So everyone may choose to use xforce and thor but they would miss out on points gained from shield tiles or you could even have featured colors for an event that gets double points or something which would highly encourage other cover usage to take advantage of it. Again the concept is not focused solely on winning, it’s focused on point accumulation which could be gained through many different categories.

Just something that popped in my head when I read your post.

8

You, sir, are a genius. Unfortunately this would require total overhaul to current system and frankly I don’t think the devs are up to it. They’d probably rather take the easy way and change nothing.

9

Actually, this is a good idea, if it was marked separate from PvE to only be used in PvP scenarios. It’s quite clear the game as it is was designed to encourage large rosters. and this extends that. If every hero had 5 uses separate from their regenerating health (which would be used for PvE purposes) that regenerates like Health packs do over time, it would further encourage large rosters, and help out when deciding when to use your health-limited buffed featured character instead of the 1 cover rental. After their BP is gone, any damage becomes dependent on their normal health, so Daken and Patch are still viable contenders for cleaning up the early crowds without burning the BP of your good members. You could even frame the BP in-game like fatigue. Battles happen in the simulator to make them low-impact, but stress too hard and it affects your character’s real health. Battles in PvE are always taken from your health reserves because they aren’t simulations, but real battles to save the real world. Health Packs could still be Health Packs, so they still extend your ability to fight by one fight, but only if you do a sixth fight after the BP is gone.

10

That’s a pretty good expansion of the idea. My guess, though, is that the devs would say that it’s impractical from their end, due to the increased amount of info per character that the servers would have to process. Right now, you have a character and a current health total, which ticks up at a fixed rate (that varies by character, but still at a fixed rate). That basically requires two items of data: the current health of the character, and a time code for the last time the health was updated. From a data standpoint, all you ever need to do is look at the current time vs that time code, and add an amount of health equal to the difference in time X the fixed rate.

If you added what’s effectively a different and parallel system for PvP health, now you’ve got at least 1 more data point - the battle points left on the character. I assume that when you said running out of battle points would lead to “real” health loss, that health loss would also carry into PvE. If not, though, that’s yet another piece of data you have to track for each character. And the more details you add on… the more data you need to store.

It doesn’t seem like a big deal to just add one or two bits of data, but when multiplied over millions of characters, it can definitely add up. Still, it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s impossible.

Hypothetically, though, do you think that it ultimately wouldn’t change how one’s given team places, because all teams would have the opportunity to fight more and therefore score more points? I.e. instead of having the same top 200 people score between, say, 300 and 1200 points in every PvP, you’d now have the same 200 people scoring between 500 and 2200 points or something?

11

Thanks! I thought the idea was rather clever as well and you are right, it would require an entire overhaul…

12

A simple short term bandaid that might help is to keep the same regen rate for healthpacks but triple or quadruple the number you can have banked. So if you only play once a day you can play longer in that one sitting, take more risks etc. Playing short bursts throughout the day and you “get” many more healthpacks than the player who cannot commit to that sort of schedule. Giving everyone the same number per day seems almost like too sensible of an option.

13

this might be more playable if as star.png
increase, battle points increase as well as health packs restore all battle points. 5 battle points seems way too small of a pool if they take 30-60 minutes to get back, other wise you bypass all the small easy fights and only go for high point value targets starting a pvp i can go 20 + matches with the same set by playing carfully now i would only get 7 matches with the whole team using all health packs. this can also be further modified by having the rate at which battle points regen increases as more covers and iso is added to the character giving them a bump once they become maxed as well.

14

I like MPQ a lot. In here you actually do play unlike most other collectible card games where you just dumbly hit ‘Go’ button and see what RNG gives you. Having said that the game is severely lacking in diversity of play modes and casual awards.

Right now there two modes - PVE and PVP - that are quite mutually exclusive. In PVP you need to get most powerful 2-3 characters team and level it to the ceiling to have a good shot. On the other hand it would kill your PVE experience because it would scale through the roof and none but those 3 characters will be playable. PVE promotes a deep evenly leveled rosters. It’s more manageable for me so I play mostly PVE and I am really lucky if I can climb to 300 in any PVP. But there can be much more to the game.

Boss fights - fight a grossly overpowered character/team that can be taken down through several separate fights. Also alliance boss fights.

Puzzles - like chess puzzles. Defeat in two turns. Collect 30 AP in three turns.

Things that can be brought from tradional match 3 games. Play modes on different shape boards, not just square. Locked tiles that don’t move until matched, frozen tiles that need a match next to it.

Team composition bonuses. All 2* team - +5% health. All villains team - +5% match damage. All women team - 5 pink AP at the start icon_e_smile.gif

Team substitutions - select 6 characters instead of 3. When your first 3 is down the second team goes. Combine that with boss fights for more fun.

First time awards. Get some prize when you first time have level 50 hero. First time you got 10 guys in your roster. First time joined an alliance.
Daily accomplishments. Get 3 cascades in a row. Use active black power. Tough victory - win with 70%+ damage taken. And these awards don’t have to be big. Just for sheer fun of the game to feel satisfied when you accomplished something.

I’m not talking about details here or how hard it might be to implement. It just occurred to me that there are a lot of options that can make this game more fun and maybe more appealing to more people.