Now, we are all the 1%

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

As soon as Worthy Cap enters tokens (on October 3?) we will have 85 regular 4’s there.

That means that when you pull a Classic or Latest (or special CP store), you should expect that non-bonused 4’s will appear approx 1/100 pulls, or 1% of the time. A bonused 4 will be 5 times more likely to appear than anyone else.

So if, for example, you are building a Rocket and Gamora team, and you bonus Rocket, and pull 100 times, you’d get about 6 Rockets for every 1 Gamora. (But RNG is of course fickle, and maybe you’d get more Rockets or 0 Gamoras or whatever.)

Does this seem to be working as intended?

A few other numbers now that we have 85 4’s:

The boost list remains locked at 5 4’s a week, so we are now at 17 weeks to feature everyone once (well, a little less than that because Wiccan and Emma seem to be out of the list). Assuming no special boost weeks to delay things. Anyway, about 3 times a year, you’ll get to use that “good when boosted” 4 you spent all that iso on and chased so hard.

The Behemoth Burrito is 85 days long, so you’ll need a 4 in there about every 3 months.

PVP rewards cycle through all the 4’s in alphabetical order, with new releases and special 4* PVPs interrupting that. We have 3 PVPs a week, which comes to 28.3 weeks…call it 30 weeks with the interruptions to offer everyone. That means about a year and a month to offer everyone twice.

PVE rewards for Classics are still running under the LLLVV pattern, so about every 3 weeks you’ll see 2 Vintage people. (Typically we get 5 events every 2 1/2 weeks, but new releases happen and sometimes 7 days. Let’s say 2.8 weeks.) 85/2 is 42.5 x 2.8 is 119 weeks, or 2 years and 3 months between seeing most Vintage 4’s in PVE rewards/essentials.

I brought all this up in April…along with other points.

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/77947/were-living-in-a-state-of-dilution/p1

Since then, no rewards have changed. No slowdown in releases have occurred (although the 44545 pattern has been firmly established by now, which has slowed down the rate of dilution). And so here we are.

We did have the Gwen Prix recently, which I liked quite a bit and am hoping becomes a regular feature - as in constantly running, but maybe that’s too much to hope for.

And guess what? Yes, this means that the next regular 4* release (maybe in 3 weeks, maybe in 5, but soon enough) will drop your rate on a desired, but not-bonused 4…below 1%.

Do we have enough 4* characters yet? Is there some sort of plan? Do rewards still seem “worth it” to you at this point, or are you feeling more and more like have fallen woefully behind? Even with the fact that this is a FTP game meant to make you feel perpetually behind…that carrot seems farther away than ever.

2

Additional 4*s are a waste of space, time, and money as I said in thread on that topic earlier this year.

The marginal value of each new 4* is either miniscule (if not outright negative because of dilition) , or catastrophic when meta-breaker like bishop comes out. And players lose out no matter what happens.

It is long past time to democratize the 5* tier, admit that supports did not become the new endgame, and figure out some new trophy tier for whales to chase.

3

This game is dying, there is no plan or long term communication for what to do.. Just about to hit day 1900 and still don’t have a 5* fully covered.. Tiny kitty game…

4

Bonus question:
At what point does “we know it’s bad, but it’s so HARD to find a solution!” stop being an acceptable answer, when it’s a problem of your own making AND you already had YEARS to come up with a solution?

5

The Content Furnace is hard to overcome as a monetization model for sure.

It’s been suggested a bunch that the stores get divided up by some arbitrary or meaningful distinguisher (a decent model might be this Class of 20XX format we see the game already knows about via the upcoming PVPs boost list, maybe it’s making better use of Affiliations, could be anything) so that you could kick the dilution can down the road some more. We occasionally see this in the limited run 5* stores which helps people that hoard to cover older 5s, but this would be super useful to bootstrap 4 roster growth for everyone. That system appears from the outside to simply build off of features we see already existing in the game, so one hopes it is less challenging to implement than some others.

6

If this isn’t proof enough for a daily 4*, I don’t know what is…

7

It’s crazy that in 300 pulls with perfect distribution you could expect THREE champed 5* and a 1/1/1 Rocket and Groot.

8

This wild 4* dilution makes more sense to me as part of a larger 4->5 roster growth plan as long as every 5* has at least one feeder. That slows down the general acquisition of any given 4*, but makes it so that progress at the lower tiers will trickle up generally.

This hasn’t actually happened yet, but it was something I suspected might be coming when the Latest 12 went away and the odds went flat on 4*s.

We were sort of tracking well for 5* feeders for awhile, but now we aren’t, so I don’t know…

9

I could see that, if 5 feeders were complete (as you said), but we’d need double feeders being actively implemented. 4* progress is a snail’s back and having new feeder characters like jubilee, IWSM, IWBW, and 4BP really make them feel worthless as feeders with the 1% rate now.

Elephant in the room, but we have 37 five stars and all but 3 are “classic” characters that have their own problem of dilution.

10

Keeping up with 4* will always be a problem for non-competitive players. The first problem is how wide the gap “should” be. The second problem is how fast new players “should” be able to close the gap.

1. How wide the gap “should” be for new character release

Alliance reward aside, using a new release 4* as an example, the top players will be able to cover a new 4* by the time that 4* appeared by the third pve (or 3rd month) based on placement and progression rewards alone.

A pure progression player will get at least 4 covers by the third pve or usually the third month after their release.

The gap between pure progression players and top players are 8-9 covers. Then, everyone else is in between.

If you close the gap for pure progression players and increase their new 4* release cover gain by one per pve or 3 in total by the third pve, players with at least 10 covers will be able to champ the new 4* or close to champing them and players with at least 7 covers will have their new 4* ready for shield training.

Top players can champ new 4* or gain 13 covers in about 3 months. They gain covers three times faster than a pure progression player.

What “should” the gap be? Is the answer at least 3 x 3 = 9 months for pure progression players?

2. How fast should new players be able to close the gap for 4* in general?

There are about 26 new character releases in a year, with approximately 17-18 4* a year.

I started playing around the period when it was running Medusa/Vulture PvP in 2017 or when MEH was out. A rough estimate will put me at about 50 4* in the game when I started playing. I rostered all 4* a year later and there are close to 70 4* in the game.

About 9 months after I rostered all 4*, I have 60+ 4* either champed or at 13 covers that can be champed. It took me 650+ in-game day as a 100% FTP competitive player to do this. Logically, non-competitive players will take approximately 1000 in-game days to achieve this.

How fast should new players be able to close the gap?

11

1,000 days is around 3 actual human years. This is a mobile game. What are we doing with our time alive?

12

Clearly, everything is fine.
Because you totally can expect a six year old mobile game to be around for another 3 years.

13

Personally I think they should give ever player a 3/3/3 baseline char. Rosters are now really differentiated based on champ level size A 270 baseline 4* champ won’t change t50 scores in a meaningful way.

in fact enabling more players to participate in events by giving an effective baseline version would do wonders for matchmaking and mmr.

However not in favor of speeding up drop rates. The goal should not be to make 370 realistically achievable. You want the grind to remain long and difficult. Rather eliminate the excuse of not having a champed version of a char as a barrier to entry.

14

Until now I had been able to cover every new 4* quickly enough with BH and rewards that I had time in between to BH some desirable characters and build them up.

Now it is only possible for me to cover 4s in enough time through all channels to keep up. No more BH for the good ones.

Soon, I guess I will just have to fall behind and not champ some of them. If nothing changes. It’s sad when even after you have all the classics champed/covered you can still barely scrape by. If I was new to the game I would probably quit when I hit the 4* wall now.

15

Being firmly in 5* land, and only play PVE, I really just care about one cover of each new 4* and that’s about it. Everything else is gravy. Makes my life much easier not to care about Champing every new 4* that comes out.

16

Hound, I don’t think you math quite adds up. Or more specifically, I don’t think your metric is particularly useful.

In 650 days you haven’t caught up. You have just caught up to players like me (every character rostered, 60-70 4* champs, another 15 or so 4*s at 10-13 covers). But I haven’t really played competitively since some time in late 2017, and only occasionally play pve to prog these days.

So you have been catching to a player who is mostly standing still. Meanwhile, my peers in 2017 now have 75+ 4* champs at level 330+ as well as deep 5* benches. They basically operate at an entirely different level of play.

So have you really made much progress at all relative to the true top tier of play?

Like most late-stage freemium games, mpq is now fully bifurcated between two, effectively mutually exclusive groups. There are long time vets grinding away at the elder game of chasing cp/5*s and “enjoying” buy clubs. And there are new players who want to dabble with a marvel-themed match-3 game, are surprised by the depth/quality of the game and throw a few $s down to keep up with the roster slot crunch. The idea that someone could realistically move from the latter camp into the former nowadays is basically laughable (it might take 5 years of hard for grinding or a truly astronomical amount of $). And everything in between those two camps is pretty much a non-factor in terms of monetizing the game (and consequently in terms of getting Dev attention).

17

They nearly solved 4* dilution with the latest 12 system. The problem with it was that they vaulted away every other character so a then 3* player transitioning to 4* land like myself was unable to cover the older characters. Sure it was cool to get Rocket, Gamora, Medusa and Carol covered insanely fast but I wanted to play with guys like Red Hulk too. I saw the solution as that 3* player, why not have latest 12, or a version of it, and then let each player add in a few extra characters that they want to focus on? Cover the newest characters and a few older ones that you want to work on and then the rest essentially get vaulted unless you switch them out.

18

This is such an odd game compared to other mobile games. Most games, once you get a character you then work to level that character up and, over time, decide which ones are worth leveling and which aren’t. In game resources are spent to choose who to work on.

This game starts with the character already at a level and that level is set. You don’t really get to choose who to level up. It’s RNG (don’t get me started on the “bonus” feature). You are at the mercy of RNG and as more players come out in each level the odds of you getting the one you want are few and far between.

What the game has going for it is the dynamics. This is a very fun game to play and you can put as much, or as little, time into it as you want. And it also is not a “time” based game in the sense that you don’t really have to finish a match or event in a certain amount of time.

If the game itself weren’t so fun, I would have walked away years ago. As it is, I still play (firmly in 5* land) but definitely understand the shortcomings of it.

19

Vhailorx, chances are, your alliance either spent some money, have played way earlier than me, in top alliances, do some line coordination or a combination of the four. That’s why context is important.

My context is:

  1. I’m 100% FTP
  2. have never been in a top alliance
  3. I spent about 2000 CP on other stuff instead of opening Classics, and wasted about 500 CP in the beginning. That’s about 125 covers.
  4. I don’t do LINE coordination to jack up points in PvP.

I’m not at the top 1% or top 5% of the game, but I’m at a place where I can consistently secure top 10 in SCL 7 PvEs without spending or doing any form of coordination.

What’s your context and what’s your alliances’ contexts?

So far, nobody can answer or dare to answer:

1. How wide the gap “should” be between competitive players and pure progression players for new character release?
I say top players can champ a new 4* by the third pve. How long should it take pure progression players and everyone else in between

  1. 2. How fast should new players be able to close the gap for 4* in general?

I could catch up with all 4* releases and have 70% of the 4* covered at 13 or champed. However, you find this to be slow.

For players like me, how fast do you think I should be able to catch up? Should pure progression players be able to catch up as fast players like this.

I think this same thing has been said over and over when I first started joining the forum:

In 2017, there are posts like new players can never catch up with 4* characters. Even if they could, they need to spend a lot of money to catch up.

In 2019, this “fear” of never catching up is still around.

All I can say, that this is totally false for players like me. Jumping to a conspiracy theory, I think some of the vets are probably using new players as bargaining chips to increase rewards by using fear of never catching up or having to spent tons of money on this game. >:)

Context is important. Expectation is important.

Pure progression players will never catch up with top players. That’s a fact they have to accept. They can’t use the same strategy that top players use to play the game.

Being at the top 1% means a lot of hard work or dedication or money. If players can’t or refuse to do this and expect to catch up with the top, they have unrealistic expectation.

20

It is not my problem to define what pace of progress is “fast enough” or not. What should be expected or not. I am a player and I have almost no information outside of my experience and that of the other players that share theirs.

I’m not arguing about catching up, or not. The point is does the progress players make feel good enough to them to keep them engaged, to keep them playing, to keep them spending?

Two dates and a couple other numbers:

September 2017: The last date we got any permanent increase in rewards (Support Circuit notwithstanding; it seems to be mothballed anyway). Two full years ago, and the game is celebrating 6 years, so for the last 1/3 of the game’s existence rewards have been stuck at the same level.

June 2018: Full dilution (no more Latest weighting). Almost 16 months ago.

After September 2017, we had 55 4’s in the game. Today we have 85, which means we have added 30, or expanded by 54% from a number when presumably the developers felt that the in game rewards were sufficient to provide progress while not being overly generous (aka to stifle spending).

To me, that means that each pulled 4 is in a real sense 54% less helpful to my roster, where my goals are to have high level champs that provide me with more power as well as giving me high end rewards to allow me to pursue 5’s at the same time.

I am not saying this is an easy problem. It is no easier to fix now than it has been at any point. Each solution results in, in my opinion, a set of results which would make some players happy and some players upset, or maybe make all players feel a mix of happy and upset, and runs risks of pushing down spending or driving players away.

I am saying the problem has gotten worse. And it feels worse to me. I hope there is a solution that ends up working.