My 24hr tap journey

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

First of all, the purpose of this post is to share my first and last experience in the ultimate strategy in pve: 24hr tapping. Tapping is the most effective strategy at the current pve setting. For two equally skilled players, the player who taps the most will win the game. It’s just purely the mathematical result. Therefore the whole top10 in pve will eventually be forced to tap here or there. This problem is getting more and more serious and widespread. You may take whatever opinion on what I did but here is just my journey to 24 hr tapping.

It’s the last sub of this pve event. I clear all nodes under 30 mins and I am pondering if I should try out the 24hr tapping.

24hr-23hr (6am) finished initial clears under 30 min and cooked for my daughter and took her to school.
It’s 22hr mark. While I was commuting to my work and I decided to proceed the first clear of 4* node while I am on the train. TBH, I regret the very first minute after I clear it.

4* node is 840 points. Therefore, I need to tap 840/24 = 35 points per hour to make up the regeneration loss.

After the the first three clears, I am in loss of 777 points. So, what is my plan? I am capable of tapping 50 times per hour on that node but I cannot sustain the long tapping time at the speed. So, I set my hour goal at 100 points. That way, I can have 10 min or more break for water and stretching.

There we go. Here are my hourly output.

The slightly varition of output for even hour and odd hour is due to the end of LR. In some hour, I will spend 5-10 minutes to clear the seeds and do one or two fights to reach the score around 300 point and # up.

22hr-21hr 94 points
21hr-19hr 210 points
19hr-18hr 87 points
18hr-17hr 108 points
17hr-16hr 99 points
16hr-15hr 123 points
15hr-14hr 105 points
14hr-13hr 93 points
13hr-12hr 120 points
12hr-11hr 93 points
11hr-10hr 111 points

At 10hr mark, my fingers start to ache a bit.
I decided to take a half hour break for my aching wrist and fingers.
After a short 30min break, the tapping continues.
10hr-9hr 62 points
9hr-8hr 60 points
I felt grumpy and irritable after 8hr mark. My hourly production become merely 20~25 taps per hour.

8hr-7hr 64 points
At 7hr mark, I can only manage to maintain 12 taps per hour. Getting sick of seeing MPQ at this moment.

7hr-6hr 31 points
6hr-5hr 38 points
At 5hr mark, I am just too tired and went straight to bed.
5hr-1.5hr sleeping. Zero production.

I wake up around 1.5hr mark and decide to do nothing and wait for 50min mark for my final grind on the rest of nodes.

Summary:
I am too old to pull this off now… don’t try this if you cannot commit hours of your precious time and energy on a mobile game… I did this just to prove a concept but I actually did not survive the whole journey. Fortunately there won’t be next time.

Statistics:
Taps: 500+ times
Total points tapped: 1563 (its equivalent to 800 point advantage over the optimal play without tapping.)
Between 7hr and 8hr, the points total reach so-call maximum point. It means that I can stop tapping at that time if I mistakenly over clear that node.
When my current total points reach the maximum points from that node 840*2 = 1680. The points tapped after 8hr are the extra points you get from this tapping.

2

Wow. This is nuts and very detailed. Thanks for showing this data. If you tap you win.

3

Did it make a difference? How many ranks did the extra 800 points get you?

4

May your sacrifice not be in vain.
Also.. I see you in my PVE bracket.. I’m watching…

5

He finished first .. topped me by 500.
I had a 400 pt lead going into the final sub,but chose not to follow lol :dizzy:
Hammy

6

My God! Such dedication!

IMO you truly deserve that 1st place. Well played and well detailed post.

EDIT - Also only 3.5 hours sleep…

7

Doesn’t top 2 have the same rewards? So all that effort purely for proof of concept? Damn

8

Nope, in sc9 in 7 day event top 1 gets 4 LTs while 2-5 only gets 2 LTs plus a 1000 iso and 50 hp difference.

9

@Brigby is this the intended game play for pve?

10

Absolutely insane, but nicely done! Will there be a day where top 5 requires 10 hours of straight tapping before event ends? Based on results it takes 10 hours before physical fatigue starts to slow you down

11

The day is here, it just depends on your bracket luck. And how much people want the rewards. The devs should consider that the best way to ensure a win is to play the game until you don’t want to.

And if some whales like it, why would they remove the option?

12

You and I have a very different take on what that data shows. That data shows to me that it takes 8hrs or more of dedicated tapping to make up the difference. That’s certainly not worth it to me and there’s only a small number of people who have the will power and free time to do that. If they have it IMO they earned it. It’s no different then the small amount of people who have tons of disposable income having an advantage based on spending. Tap2Win is at worst at the same level as Pay2Win.

13

it takes way less than eight hours. You can clear 100 points above second place (who is playing perfectly) in less than 30 minutes. For two equally skilled players, 100 points is an insurmountable lead. Unless you tap.

And total lol to the idea that this type of play deserves first place. What kind of game do you want this to be if that’s considered optimal?

14

They are completely different levels. “Tap2Win” is not what the devs intended; they have come out and said so. They simply implemented a terrible system that allows for this in spite of their claims. “Pay2Win” is exactly what the devs intended.

The OP is exactly what’s wrong with this game. Sorry, no kudos for you for demonstrating how to completely waste a day. I have no idea what you do for a living but I would get fired if I played this game all damn day long–by my employer and my family.

15

Yes if you tap for 24 hours straight you will need to have a break point, seems to be 8 hours of tapping. This does not show if you start a sub early, which is what most are doing. If you know it takes you around 40 mins to final grind a sub, and you start 2 hours from sub end, you don’t lose that much on the refresh and therefore don’t need that many more taps to make up those points. Also, you are only tapping 1 node all the time (which would be the 4* or last hard node) , not the whole sub. If you start 2 hours early, you will only need a few extra taps to make this missing refresh up and you will gain a ton and secure 1st place. The question is, is this what D3/Demi want? They said before this is not what they want. With the increase of rewards in SL9, this is getting more and more that you have to tap to win. I hope they lock out the tapping soon, but I know others don’t.

16

As long as you can out tap the point regeneration, tapping is a viable strategy under the current system. I already see many 3hr tapping to gain advantage. Some are tapping 5 or 6hr. How do you beat 3hr tapping? Simple, just more tapping. So, the fight for the placement will eventually become 24hr tapping. Why do I say that? It happens to one game I played before. In that game, only a global top100 can get the precious & limited rewards. The only way to compete is to continuously gain the points until the end of time. It quickly becomes 24hr unstoppable playing. Back then, we had a team of 3 to 4 players who take turns playing the game. I don’t want to see that happened to MPQ and I also don’t want that we need to form the team to play the game, either.

17

Thank you for your sacrifice. It reinforces my belief that I should stick with playing my style and keep a realistic goal of a top 20 finish as the highest i’ll get. normally I’m happy somewhere in the top 50. I already spend too much time on this game, so I’m not going to spend another 3-8 hours tapping. This proves again that the game needs to be changed (hopefully for the better).

18

I thought it was more optimal to tap the first sub only to get edge as it takes less points to make up deficit of points you lose out on. Doing on last sub seems horrible. I think the people who get 1000s of points ahead use first 2 subs or so and spend all day.

19

If you just bracket shop, you can avoid all of this headache. I do it for every new release, all you have to do is join Line and bug the right people until someone tells you there’s a new bracket open in your chosen time slice/clearance level.

I didn’t even use the Line rooms for this one, no one wanted to play in slice 2 CL 6, so I couldn’t get any updates and had to jump in blind. Got lucky and joined as #158 in the bracket. Did my clears, and was one of only 5 people that did full clears and stopped to maximize points. Even if those 4 other guys are all 8 hour tappers, who cares? I still get top ten by default.

System sucks, I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m just saying learn how to game it.

20

On one hand any player who does stuff like this completely deserves better placement. On the other hand this is a self destructive practice that is not only unhealthy for the game but the players of said game.

The SPIRIT of PvE is SPEED. I’ve made this suggestion before but I’ll post it again.

PvE Placement Rework

  1. Remove all node timers.

  2. Make every clear attempt worth the same points. After 6 clears all nodes are worth 0 points FOREVER.

  3. Implement a timer that starts the instant the game gives you access to your first tile switch and ends when the victory banner appears.

  4. Placement is determined by points and ties are awarded to the quickest times.

  5. The placement screen now shows total time played so you’d see something like this:

  • (player name) 12456 points. Clear Time: 1 Hour 23 minutes 15 seconds
  • (player name) 12456 points. Clear Time: 1 Hour 23 minutes 17 seconds
  • (player name) 12456 points. Clear Time: 1 Hour 24 minutes 25 seconds
  • (player name) 12456 points. Clear Time: 1 Hour 24 minutes 45 seconds

When you break down the current pve system this is exactly how it works already except you factor in timing for the start and end of your clears. The player who plays quickest at the start and end of the sub wins (tapping aside). If we boil this down to Speed wins and remove the arbitrary start grind and end time grind times then you have a pve system that rewards the same people it always has but gives them the freedom to play on their OWN TIME rather than on D3’s time.