My experience with the game as a mid-tier F2P player

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Hello there. I’ve been a long time lurker and been playing the game for two months. Been wanting to do this post for a while, and before you say “this guy joined to rant” or lock this as “there are other topics about new changes”, this is neither a rant nor about new changes.

I was really bored on a sleepless night a few months ago and wanted to try that Marvel match-3 game I’ve been seeing on Steam. All the Steam reviews saying the game had the worst F2P model people have ever seen raised some question marks, but I had a few hours to kill and it had Marvel characters, so I went ahead and downloaded it.

Here I am now on my 58th day, with an almost fully leveled 2* team (85 Ares 4/5/5, 77 OBW 3/5/4 - 76 Wolvie 5/5/3 - just waiting for more iso to level him, 61 Daken 5/4, and unleveled Thor/MNMags/CStorm).

The first thing I noticed was that the F2P model being used here is the complete opposite of other models I’m used to - Instead of having people pay for premium items/characters/whatever, MPQ throws those covers at you faster than you can open new slots for them, timed to self destruct after staying 7 days in Rewards tab. Guess this is how mobile F2P games are like - never play stuff on my mobile, so no idea. Was also quite surprised to see the increasing slot cost - I would’ve expected a fixed cost or a $20 unlimited slot purchase - which I would’ve bought in the first week.

After reading Polarity’s awesome guide here to get the hang of the game, I completed my 1* roster, depleted the prologue HP and created an alliance with my brother and 3 other people I found in the Steam hub to keep the HP flowing. I even opened a 6th slot for a friend with the HP I got from the alliance.

I was usually shooting for 300 points in PVP events at that time with my maxed IM35/Juggernaut team for the 2* tokens, which would also net me a top 50 finish and got my alliance in the top 2500. When my MMR skyrocketed I started to tank in the SHIELD Simulator so I could find people which didn’t have maxed 2* rosters.

The point when things started to go awry was the middle of season one - the death brackets as you guys call here. Suddenly I found myself getting pummeled by veterans. Two weeks ago I could get a top 25 finish with 500 points - now I can’t pass the HP threshold at 150 with that much. So I started to grind more, and with the possibility of tanking gone, I started to find myself in even harder situations. I wanted to get that Psylocke cover in the last S1 event so got up to 720 and shielded for the first time with 3 hours left - It was impossible to stay there as I always get obliterated by triple 141 players with every loss taking 40 points from me. I was on the 30th place when I shielded and dropped gradually to 51, so I broke my shield and quickly won 3 matches in the last 8 minutes - only to lose for 45 points on defense at the very last second, ending up at 52, missing Psylocke.

I read that the new brackets are calculated by the days you played, which is completely wrong - my brother who is at day 59 (he started one week after me and passed me while I was on vacation) got up to 300 on the first day of the event, and played the last hour for a top 10 finish with 557 with his 61 CStorm / 61 Thor.

Now I don’t mind paying in F2P games/doing microtransactions, I paid for content in games like TF2 and Path of Exile, which don’t need any payment to compete or even play regularly. I also paid for a skill set in DC Universe Online which has a F2P model not as friendly as the two titles I mentioned, but still ok. I even paid for skins in Space Marine and Borderlands 2, which are both paid games themselves and get a lot of hate for having microtransactions in them. I was also ready to drop 5 or 10 bucks on MPQ for some slots a month ago, but not anymore.

The titles I mentioned above all make you like the game, so I gladly pay for stuff which I enjoy to use. MPQ just annoys you to hell. Want boosts? Pay. Health packs? Pay. Level up your character? Pay. Every corner I turn there’s a Pay? Wanna pay? sign in this game. I’m also ok with grinding a lot and paying here and there, but this game just draws the paywall before you. You can’t buy a cover you want unless you have it dropped first and then pay ridiculous amounts for it. If you drop that character you want, you have 7 days to pay - or say bye to that cover. If you don’t want to pay, you can earn them as rewards - which you need to shield in if you don’t want to get destroyed by people who paid. Seriously, in the Fatal Attraction event, I completed a 20 point match to see I lost to 3x141 teams for 40 each. -100 net points. And paying doesn’t even put you in a better situation - you just keep the annoyance away from you for a few days or weeks and then you need to pay again.

And what’s with the ridiculous prices for HP and iso? The gaming market is so oversaturated that people bundle their games for 1 dollar - and this game wants me to pay for more than 50 to level up a 1/1/1 character I have? Sorry, but I can get much more enjoyment in any other game with that money. I have 22 slots now, have deleted all my 1* characters, sold a ton of 2* covers and also a good number of 3*s I don’t like, and I won’t pay a dime. If the game treated me better I would have, but there’s no way I’m paying to a game that restricts me every way it can. Mind that I don’t want to be first, or even top 10, hell, even top 50 - I just want to get the characters I like and have some HP to open new slots. I don’t care about being competitive.

Reading these forums for some time, I can easily see they’re hurting their player base much more than they should, too - I don’t know if your estimated lifespan for the game is 1.5 years or your Marvel license is running out, but I know there are countless F2P games trying to force these kind of stuff on their players. They’re all ghost towns, with no players, no updates, nothing. Compare this to games like Path of Exile, which is estimated to have new chapters for 10 years, is completely free except cosmetics and character slots, and people still pay for it just because they like it - not because they get annoyed without paying.

I know these won’t be implemented in any way, but I still have some suggestions that would make people feel better about the game.

Fair brackets with fair MMR - rewarding people for playing more instead of punishing them.
Better alliance rewards - there’s no point to open new slots for my alliance since 101st and 2500th places have the same reward except some iso I can grind in 30 minutes.
Better player rewards too - don’t make me try to step over 950 other people to get in the top 50 twelve times for the amount of HP I need to open a new slot. I don’t want the top spot, just want to casually play and get some new heroes once in a while.
Cover gifting in alliance - trading would cut a lot of revenue so I’m sure you won’t implement that but what about gifting a cover I don’t need or want to an alliance member? That would also encourage people to get in alliances.
Having a cover store - I know lottery is a huge part of this game, but still, there are games that can pull lottery, trading and having a store at the same time - just take a look at TF2. I’d like to get my Punisher up to par with my 2* characters, that’s my favorite Marvel hero since that arcade game with Nick Fury I used to play when I was a kid.

TL;DR I’m a gamer that has 200+ games in his backlog. You won’t get any money from me by making the game more annoying, but I’d gladly pay if the system was friendlier.

2

true story. well put.

3

It’s the strangest system. The value you get for what you pay is incredibly minimal, aside from perhaps shields and slots. I assumed they must hate making money and price things so no one buys it, but apparently someone is.

4

A good post.

Someone mentioned in another thread how the business model of this game is so absolutely horrible and it’s in stark contrast to DOTA2 - which is sitting atop the free to play heap making more money than any other free online game. And they do it by encouraging their playerbase to spend money on fun, silly stuff, buy small unlockables (which you can resell to other players) and enjoy the game, not punish them with restrictions, limitations and paywalls at every turn. Mobile gaming could learn a lot from f2p PC titles.

5

For 2013, DOTA2 brought in $80 million, with ~50-60k concurrent users at peak. General rule of thumb is that your active users is something like 8-10x your peak, so anywhere from 400~600k active users. Averaging that out, about $0.44 average revenue per daily active user.

MPQ says that (in Feb, for one day), they hit $1 ARPDAU. Probably during their Valentine’s day sale. Let’s assume that they’re at half that now, so $0.50 ARPDAU. How many active users do they have? Judging by the Season 1 SHIELD (before it got sharded), you were looking at something around 200k. That would extrapolate out to $36.5m per year.

So, totally rough numbers, MPQ is doing about half the revenue as DOTA2, on about half the user-base, with roughly the same average spend per user.

It certainly doesn’t sound like there’s something dramatically wrong with what they’re doing.

The jaw dropping numbers - LOL: 27M daily active users, $624M revenue in 2013. $0.06 ARPDAU. It would be overly simplistic to conclude that lowering paywalls would lead to massive success though.

6

I’m on day 140 or so and my thoughts were somewhat similar when I hit the wall on 2* a couple of months ago. I still haven’t spent any more money since that point but I have kept on grinding and now have two 141 3*, 250k ISO, and 4500 hp.

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ZenBrillig, nice analysis, though I’d guess the active user base is closer to 100K. Season 1 numbers probably included a lot of players who were kicking the tires on the game, did a Simulator battle but didn’t keep playing. Lightning Rounds seem to draw about 10,000 players, so applying the 8 - 10X multiplier also gives around the 100K number. So if the ADRPAU has stayed in the $.50 - $1 range then yeah, I think you are right, they probably are on a $18 - $36M run rate. Which is pretty darned good for a team of 35 - 40 people (at least that’s what the game credits would indicate). Of course it isn’t clear what the revenue split between Demiurge Studios and D3 Publisher is, but from a business perspective it seems like they are on a pretty good track.

Certainly the recent changes to game (massive amounts of cover drops now and the bundling of slots) accelerates the F2P Player’s decision to commit to the game or not. But from my experience that was the time in the game when I was most excited and happiest to drop $20 here and there so that I could keep all the cool characters I was getting. If I remember correctly from the VentureBeat article, in March 8% of the players spent money on the game. So they only need 1 person to say “I’m having enough fun to spend $20” for every 11 people that say “I feel like I’m nickled and dimed to death”. And of those that pay just another small percentage to decide “Hey, I want to drop a Stark Salary on this. Every month.” And I’m sure they are watching their metrics to see if the changes can increase the conversion from F2P to paying customer from 1 in 12 players to 1 in 11 or 1 in 10.

And I"m sure they will keep tweaking their model and monitoring the metrics, which from a business perspective is exactly what they should be doing. Is that going to make every player happy? Definitely not, as we well know from the forums (as just about any change causes someone to get a case of nerd-rage). But I don’t know that I’d be running the business much differently if it was mine.

8

Dota went full release in July of 2013, so that figure probably only accounts for a little less than half a year. Valve also doesn’t release the information and it’s an estimate, so it’s hard to directly compare. They’re currently selling e-tickets to their annual tournament. They start the prize pool at 1.6 million and add 2.50 for every ticket sold. They’re up to 6.5 million. That means they’ve sold close to 20 million in e-tickets in the last twelve days. I think it’s safe to assume they’re probably over 80 million for the year, though where exactly, who knows.

I also think DOTA is planning for a long term operation and MPQ isn’t, but I suppose that’s subjective.

9

You can see here that Dota 2 peaks at 788K, which makes their ARPDAU much lower, but that’s beside the point.

From a very short term business standpoint, this is correct. Valve’s games have very long lifespans though. TF2 is out since 2007 - F2P since 2011 - and it’s still peaking at 68k. Dota will be strong for at least the next 5 years. Will MPQ be around in 3 years? “Season 35 reward Lazy Juggernaut - your 200th slot costs only 10000 HP, and you can buy slots only in 5 packs” There’s a breaking point somewhere, and people have thousands of other games with a more relaxed approach to play (at least on PC. I wouldn’t know about mobile markets) There IS a problem when a game has more rare characters than common and uncommon combined.

Agreed, even though I think this game can manage it (It’s highly addicting, and well, Marvel). I’m not saying it should turn into a Valve/PoE F2P model, just that it needs to loosen the clutch on the player a little bit. The main problem is the system isn’t encouraging me to buy HP - it’s just making me to delete my unused covers. I need to get 12 more lucky pulls and a month’s play worth of iso for that 0/0/1 3* cover to be worth anything anyway, so if I get another hero which is boosted, required for a PvE node or just better in general, it gets sold for 500 iso. Giving out HP rewards more generously or making the slot cost increases more flat than it is now (100 HP until your 10th slot, 200 HP until your 20th, 300 HP until your 30th…) would work better for them in the long run.

10

Unless they make the game like Titanfall where you have fake players in your brackets whose sole purpose is to lose to you, of course you’re going to hit a wall somewhere. On average, an average player will finish place number 250 in a PvP event for not very exciting rewards.