Days of Future Past: Ahab & his hound Rachel Summers lead waves of Sentinels in a horrific future.
The Phoenix Saga: Round 1: Hellfire Club tries to manipulate Jean Grey Phoenix. Mastermind, Black King, Emma Frost, Hellfire Goons attack. Round 2: Juggernaut & Black Tom attack. Round 3: Shi’ar attack: Gladiator & Deathbird attack.
AVX: Choose a side. Hope Summers sparks a war between Avengers & the X-Men.
Inferno: Madelyne Pryor & Belasco lead the forces of Limbo against New York City.
Maximum Carnage: Carnage, Shriek, Doppelgänger, Demogoblin attack.
Figure out a way to make a practice dummy. Danger Room would suuuuuuuper make sense. Old team said they couldn’t figure it out because of the way loaners/health packs worked. That anything they did that let people use their own characters would just be able to be fully healed too easily
Can we get an in game pizza oven? We could have a side quest where we get our characters to deliver pizza. I call dibs on Northstar for my delivery boy! Good luck whoever gets Blob, ha ha ha! I’m pretty sure I asked for that before. If I didn’t then I guess maybe one of the Mods can move this post to a New Boards; New Suggestions (Pizza edition) thread.
We’re not supposed to like the health pack system, but it serves a really important purpose: preventing new players from discovering that the game has very little content. It’s the same reason players have been complaining about an ISO shortage since the dawn of time.
I don’t think health packs do that at all (hide the amount of content the game has). I’d imagine most players discover that limit the minute they switch from the prologue (actual story driven content that was fun to read and play) to the infinite grind of PvE/PvP. Health packs doesn’t have anything to do with that.
Health packs were part of the original micro transaction economy that the game launched with. Presumably they were meant to serve as another source of revenue but it never took off the way hero point sales did (and later CPs and covers etc).
They’ve never sold a significant number of health packs and never planned to. Like 99.99% of players just stop playing when they run out of packs, which is the whole point. If they let you play MPQ an unlimited amount, normal people would finish everything in a day and never come back. Games like this need brakes on them to leave you wanting more (which, incidentally, is exactly what you want, which means it’s working!).
Maybe. But I doubt anyone can finish the prologue in a day (there are 4 chapters with 15+ missions per chapter and you need to repeat many of them to get the cover rewards to grow your characters) unless they are spending 8-12 hours in a single day which would be highly unusual (took me quite a while to finish back in 2015 since I read the story line too).
I imagine they lose a lot of players once the prologue is done and they realize MPQ is not in fact an RPG game (still listed as one on Google play but I would not consider it one nor tell anyone it’s one).
They talked about this a lot in the earliest days of the game, and even more when they did True Healing. Health packs have never been a source of revenue and were not designed to be a source of revenue. They’re only there to make you go slower.
It’s the same reason ISO exists. They have to put brakes on your progress so you don’t get to the end too quickly and and realize there’s nothing there.
Health pack limits also provide a bar of progress for players to get past.
When you have enough teams that you can come back to clear things with team B or C, you’re in pretty good shape. Aka you don’t rely on one team and when you’re out of health packs, you’re waiting.
Other games just do energy which is imo worse. You can’t beat an energy system by building up your roster.
Exactly! It’s a mechanic that encourages players to recruit all the characters…in a game that mainly sells roster slots and new characters. Energy wouldn’t work as well for MPQ because it doesn’t push sales the same way.
Lots of things have changed. We now have quite a few characters who true heal (some even true heal other characters) so they have obviously softened their stance on the whole healing issue but if you are only using the same team over and again then at least it makes you use other characters if you don’t have health packs.
I just find it bizarre that you guys think limiting time played in the game is somehow a net positive for player retention or encouraging spending. It’s the equivalent of saying that limiting time spend with a new beau is more likely to make you fall in love and get married. Its the EXACT opposite of that.
I don’t know how many hundreds (thousands?) of different games I’ve played since getting my Atari 2600 in 1980 through the hey days of Arcades, my C64, Amiga, PCs, gaming systems, phones etc but I doubt I’ve ever had to play any game more than 5 minutes to know whether or not I personally liked it and would play it regularly. You just know right away.
Also, if health packs provide a progress bar as Bluewolf suggests why is that bar still there 14 years later for players with thousand of hours played? Maybe it could make sense up to Shield Rank 20 (or whatever you end up at after the prologue) but it certainly isn’t needed for veteran players.
It’s even worse for paying customers (VIP or other spending). Those are customers keeping the game going and yet you are still limiting game time for them. I’d trade my entire monthly VIP haul (minus the costume) for 1000 health packs (35ish a day).
If it helps, think of health packs like tokens/quarters in a video game. Or just lives, which obviously they are.
MPQ is a FTP, live service game that is designed around a constant rate of revenue making it run and be economic to do so. If it was a “buy once, maybe pay for a pass” thing the servers would have been shut down long ago, most likely, and they would have been releasing yearly updates, or something.
The health packs can still be an issue even for me, on occasion. (PVP only.) Before Hawkeye I might have a bad boost list, or not all of the right ones high enough etc. and might start getting annoyed when I kept dying (only takes 4 wipes before I’m stretching for new teams or digging into taco vaults or maybe using HP for health packs).
Anyway yes, time spent in game on grindy mobile games - meant to be played forever with no end - is purposely limited for most players so their free progress can be throttled by that same mechanic, creating a desire to play more. The playing of the game itself is as much of an ethereal digital asset as covers for CGR or Toad or whoever, a thing you desperately want more of until you have had enough and now it’s boring because you keep getting it and it’s not new.
“Always leave them wanting more” - oldest rule in entertainment. See also: Comics and their eternal storylines.
Clearly this is academic only because almost no development is actually going to be done any time soon.
However, I remember enjoying the original challenge of having to have multiple teams to clear a PvE effectively. Since most teams now are either turn 1 or shrug off 90% of damage it’s become redundant.
I wouldn’t be against replacing health and health packs with a stamina system instead.
Also, bring back Heroic mode. Also, also new PvEs that narratively have your team split up so using characters on certain nodes locks them out of certain other nodes.
How much damage to your roster are you suffering that needs a 35 health pack per day cure? Aren’t you also in an artificially constructed softcap PvP environment where you basically bully everybody by your very deep roster strength? I dunno who you use for the cl10 challenge node but you can still get full progression even without winning that ( but Kang, Hawkeye etc mean you can normally do it via cheese). And health packs regen! For free! Struggling to get my head around this one.
Correct. All of these things are designed to make us make choices - wait until we can get our next fix of the game or pay, in some way or form, to get it again right away. Health packs are still a limiting factor for new players but MPQ offers a fairly reasonable situation in terms of return to play for free compared to a LOT of other FTP games.
And yet EB has argued endlessly that health pack sales are negligible. In other words no one is buying quarters (health packs) to get more game play time. So either he’s dead wrong and health pack sales generate a lot of revenue (even if packs are bought with HP assuming that can be done) or your wrong and it’s not a quarter based game at all but instead survives on selling heroes (slots) and the ability to level them (ISO/covers/CPs).
Also if it was a quarter based revenue game you’d expect a VIP pass to function as the equivalent of buying a whole lot of play time which it does not. You’d also expect in a quarter based revenue game that winfinites would be addressed immediately since they absolutely destroy quarter based revenue and yet almost no winfinites have ever really been shut down in a timely manner.
Health packs may regen for free but only if you have none. If you have some of your own they do not regen at all. In other words I do not get 5 extra free packs on top of my packs which are used first (if that happened I’d be over the moon happy).
CL10 PvE takes packs unless you want to cheese everything with turn 0 winfinites. If you want to use anything else it’s VERY pack intensive on nodes with tile movers (or mindless ones).
PvP uses packs too (unless again you are running cheese winfinites).
Finally there is my personal feelings towards battles and being a hero etc. It doesn’t feel heroic needing a bunch of health packs after battles and when I do I feel like I actually lost.
I’d argue strongly that health packs is a huge factor in players playing a very limited set of characters in PvE and PvP. The reason being you can’t try other teams that are pack intensive because you use up your packs way too fast. I’d expect diversity in PvP to increase if all you had to do is ‘win’ and all characters were healed to full (lose/retreat and you need 3 packs).
Health packs regen as soon as you go below 10. Sure, sometimes I might have a bad PvP and use all 10 but normally it is OK and if need be go again when ready. Or we have two vaults. Or can buy with HP. As a VIP player you also get enhanced healing, If you are burning through them to this extent then I can only suggest maybe adapt your own play style? No offense or condensation intended.
And even the best heroes lose sometimes but they tend to come back and win. My favourites The Avengers the poster child. Health packs help that happen!