Fresh off the Developer presses! Check out the answers to your April questions below.
- ReturnalShadow [Reddit]
Question: Many vet players in the forums think that many of your 5-star releases (~70% or more) are “DoA” or “Unusable”. Why are there such a huge disconnect between the dev team and them when it comes to designing abilities and assigning damage value?
Answer: IceIX: From the data, we’re seeing that nearly every 5-Star we release, after their cooldown release period, slots somewhere pretty comfortably into the middle or higher end of the 5-Star meta. They’re not breaking any new meta strategies, but they’re 100% not DoA. It seems like the people that are saying this are being disappointed that new characters aren’t just breaking up the current meta with Shang-Chi, Mighty Thor, etc. Sure. We could do that. But be honest here, what does that look like? Players are already pushing out 2-3 turn wins against difficult opponents with those characters. So to break up current meta or not make them not supposedly “DoA”, the characters would have to do things BETTER than characters that already have the capability of making the puzzle portion of the game last about as long as the menuing to get to the puzzle portion. - @entrailbucket [Official Forums]
Question: Are the fights in the new character Shield Training events meant to be winnable by everyone or are they meant to be gated to certain roster levels?
Answer: The short answer to this is no, not exactly. Similarly to how a first full clear on a DDQ is something players are proud of and post about, Shield Training events (Welcome to SHIELD) are very beatable, but not right out the gate. Many new players will need to make progress in the game before they are expected to regularly clear these. - @Katetheliteraryapothecary [Discord]
Question: When are we going to come up with a 3*, 5* Namor?
Answer: IceIX: I’ll just say that we have no intention of leaving the Phoenix Five as the Phoenix Four. - @jdpastor666 [Official Forums]
Question: When are we going to see updates and rebalances to existing supports?
Answer: It’s in the cards for certain actually! Stay tuned! - @Hammer 3001 [Official Forums]
Question: Why are there still limited characters? You made it obvious that you can change them with the 1-Star Yelena.
Answer: IceIX: We have to find the time to go back to the Limited characters to make them more regularly balanced. Spider-Ham, Devil Dino, etc weren’t using the same balancing formulae as a normal character, and they’d need some work to make them do so. Yelena’s extra ability brought her out of that state, so we got rid of Limited for that character. - @DAZ0273 [Official Forums]
Question: With Affiliation s now becoming possible Milestone quests can we expect them to be upgraded to characters who are missing them? For example Namor and Silver Surfer not being Defenders and Thunderbolts seem all over the place. Many thanks!!!
Answer: IceIX: Sure, its possible. I’d personally say no to Namor’s inclusion as a Defender though, DESPITE the fact that he’s been included on the little team bubbles on covers and the like. He’s never liked being “on the team”, or even working with the people he has to work with while doing Defenders stuff. Any time he’s roped in, he’s always indignant that he has to do it. It’s always a magical/ethical compulsion or a grumbling “FINE, but only because I’d never hear the end of it.” Thunderbolts on the other hand generally tend to be all over the place because we try to keep Affiliations to applicable versions of characters, and Thunderbolts versions of characters aren’t usually universal. - @Tony Foot [Official Forums]
Question: God boosts brought variety to the game. Now we have ascended they seem to do the opposite. We have far more characters to use, do you think the game still needs it? I feel if it was removed there would be far more variety.
Answer: It’s a good point, and something to think about. Rarity boosts haven’t really been looked at very hard post Champs 2.0. We’ll bring it up for a talk internally! - @Carnifex [Official Forums]
Question: How come if I tickle an enemy Hulk (Indestructible) it will generate 54 Anger tiles, but if my Hulk gets hit by a nuclear blast he doesn’t seem to notice?
Answer: IceIX: Because your Hulk is the REAL Hulk and is thus indestructible while every other Hulk out there is a secret Skrull that’s overcompensating to keep cover intact. - @fight4thedream [Official Forums]
Question: The team did a great job buffing Dr. Stephen Strange & Dr. Nathaniel Essex, both of whom served the greatest doctor of all, Victor von Doom, when he was God Emperor. Any chance the savior of the multiverse gets his time to shine in the MPQverse?
Answer: Not planned for the near future, but Doom is definitely on the “needs a bit of help” shelf. - @UnityGamer [Official Forums]
Question: The new 4-star Dr. Doom features “feedback damage.” Is it the same as Thanos’s Court Death where his allies take “penalty damage” when downing an enemy? What is feedback damage? Will there be a distinction between such terms?
Answer: In this case, it’s just flavor for a spell that draws extra energy but damages its casters (or their representatives). Like blood magic, without all the blood. - FluffyLlamacorn [Reddit]
Question: Would it be possible to add a way to check the contents of a closed vault? (I skip vaults where I don’t have the 4s and if it’s been months, it would be nice with a way to see if I’ve gotten the 4 in the meantime)
Answer: That functionality is built pretty deeply into how Vaults are surfaced. It’s something that could be changed, but would take a decent amount of work, so we’ll add it to our list of potential QoL changes! - @TimeMachineGo [Official Forums]
Question: I may not be understanding how the odds work specifically here, but have you considered increasing the “debut” odds for 3* characters as the tier gets larger and larger? I feel like I’m drawing roughly the same amount when they come but getting less.
Answer: Probably the easiest way to think about odds shifts are to think of the specific tier as a bucket, then you toss more copies of whatever it is in when they’re multiplied out. So if you see “x21 odds”, the bucket is filled with all the other covers, then 21 copies of the boosted character are put in that bucket. At current odds, that brings a 4-Star character pull up from something like .7% to ~13% when a 4-Star is rolled. - @Steellatch [Official Forums]
Question: Its been a while since I have seen anything on this topic but is an API still on the table?
Answer: Not in the near term, but possible. A web or other API was actually starting to float towards the top of our backlog, but with a portion of the team’s work towards a full on engine update it was pushed back down. After all, any work towards an outward facing API would almost have to be totally redone with new bare metal engine pieces. - @Codex [Official Forums]
Question: Can you add timers to both the Latest Legends and Support stores?
Answer: Cover packs have timers because that’s when they would end and expire. Legendary and Support Stores never really expire, so it’d take a rework of these stores to do so. - u/Unkn0wnnn90 [Reddit]
Question: When you guys make a section of character clothing store in the app? When you guys do deals on infinity stones on market?
Answer: The first part of that falls under the realm of large UI changes that would be necessary to support the store that’s just not feasible right this second. There have been early napkin designs for what something like that would look like though, so it’s a definite possibility. For the latter, there aren’t current plans to directly sell or make the stones available, but that could change, especially with Supports being available in PVP down the road. - @CASSIDYFROST [Official Forums]
Question: The launch of Doom 4* with a costume that changes very little from the original design was a great idea for me! Will we have more characters with this release form? For example, an X-Men with just a different uniform…
Answer: Alternate costumes for new characters are something we’re tinkering with, yes. As well as the Chroma costumes like we just did for Golden Week which are closer to recolors (and therefore at a lower value monetarily, but no less cool visually sometimes. Check out the fish scales on SP//DR!) - @StrangeWitch [Official Forums]
Question: It is noticeable that lately the release of costumes in the game has increased a little, will this frequency continue? How is their creation process going lately? What do artists have to say about this?
Answer: Conscious decision, and the artists are fully on board. They’ve been pushing hard to get ahead on standard character art so that they can branch out to some other work like costumes and art updates of iffy older art. Expect to see more! - @CarnageWing [Official Forums]
Question: Just like with the launch of Magical Girl, they could introduce other ways of acquiring costumes besides just buying them, winning them 5 times too, just like with her, or in a different way, who knows…
Answer: Necroko was a special case to celebrate the game’s 10 Year Anniversary as a reward for the community banding to gather together to complete a massive community challenge. We’re definitely not saying never again but the event would need to be of similar value. - @kleussaroot [Official Forums]
Question: A great costume idea would be Gambit with the pink crop top from 97 for his 3* version, can we have this in the game in the future?
Answer: No plans at this very second, we’ve got Mister Sinister and Jubilee representing X-Men '97 at the moment, but we can and have done costumes for “older” MCU/D+ stuff before, so don’t count that cajun out! - @ARIS17 [Official Forums]
Question: Can you speed up the Countdown activations or have such a setting? I love playing with teams who rely on filling the board with Countdown tiles. But they are too slow, and to compete, I have to select quicker and ever-present teams.
Answer: IceIX: Unfortunately, current tech doesn’t easily allow us to selectively change certain CDs/Passives/etc. The best we could do is a binary on/off for all of that, and after some internal testing, we decided against it. In test it created a massively chaotic environment where tiles changed colors, blew up, and characters fell over without notification. It’s definitely something we’d like to revisit when the engine has undergone some tune ups, but at the moment, not so much. Trust me, it’s just as annoying to us to play through a 6 Mindless One wave mission. - @seph1roth5 [Discord]
Question: I’m still having trouble understanding how the budget for 5* powers works. Could you show how say, sebastian shaw or angela would look if they had been released as 5s? Or even a 3 like May or Magik. How their ability numbers would be?
Answer: For the most part, you can see that already with Ascended characters, who are largely balanced according to the rarity that they’re currently at. But basically, you can think of a 5-Star character as having the same ability budget as a 2-Star, but with MUCH higher match damage and health built in. - @BlackBoltRocks [Official Forums]
Question: In view of Ascension, is it possible to rework some 5* powers so that they are in line with the numbers and mechanics of ascended 1*-4*?
Answer: We’ve got a list on our end (with all the ones that the community notes, and some more) that we’d like to go back for a second pass on. Simply a matter of finding the time for not only a numbers rework in design time, but also time for QA to re-test and make sure that the rebalanced character didn’t just either fall off the map or break meta in some way. - @OrbitingDeath [Discord]
Question: Can the shard rate for duplicate 4*'s go up? I would think 400 shards (25% until new level) would atleast be worth it for players, considering a dupe 5* gives 1400. The jump is just too big
Answer: The shard rate is based off of the pull rates across the different cover packs for the items. So if we were to make changes to those ratios, the shard rates would necessarily change, and vice versa. - @rainkingucd [Official Forums]
Question: How often are boosts used in fights? Of the boosts that are used, which is the one used most frequently?
Answer: A boost of some kind is used in approximately 55% of battles overall, with a higher ratio of PVE battles using them than PVP. Which makes sense, PVE contains the Deadpool Daily Crash(es), which is a HUGE place players use boosts. The most popular boosts are the AP All Boost, then the various AP Boosts, then Match Damage All. - @DJ47057 [Official Forums]
Question: The new seasonal vault is great. Thanks for that. Why do the quests where i can get token for that alsways have to start at that time? For me it’s 6pm. Why can’t they start with the new day like price reduction for heroic?
Answer: Due to the way that the underlying tech works, daily play tokens have to be turned on or off manually with a data patch. So for right now, that’s just when the engineer(s) in question flip a given switch. - @Zarqa [Official Forums]
Question: Can we get a search function to see which characters have costumes?
Answer: We agree, and it’s something that we’d like to add in future. The way that costumes are implemented on the back end at the moment though make implementing something so theoretically simple a bit of a difficult proposition. It’s on the list! - @phillsam [Official Forums]
Question: Now that you will be adding new 2* characters again (only added 1 and never again), can Kaecilius, Hydro-Man and Molten-Man be added as 2* characters? Or do you already have other plans for these?
Answer: Don’t forget Gorgon! Not at this very second since they’d need some reworks to make them playable (having a character that can’t be killed normally given our current AI would be just a bit broken), but it’s 100% possible. - @_Trash Panda [Official Forums]
Question: Before we could click on “Champion Maxed” button to be able to see Champ Reward info. Now with Ascended characters, there is no place can see Champ Reward info if the character is ready to be ascended. Can something be done about this.
Answer: Good point. We’ll take it under advisement. - @leviticuschoms [Official Forums]
Question: Any chance that Modern Black Widow/Yelena/Red Gaurdian could get rebalances sooner than later? Their intro games in Spider Silk need help. Please consider!
Answer: No plans for them to get a rebalance at the moment, but you do make a good point. Could be worth seeing if a quick numbers check on them reveals anything we could do as a quick fix.
