One of the better freemium games. Some issues remain.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

I’m not going to take the time to collect this into something pretty. Sorry.

I’d like to start by thanking the developers for the time they’ve spent to create the game. It’s a lot of fun, and while my comments are mostly about negative feedback, and suggestions about negative game aspects it’s only to make the game a better experience for the developer’s player base. I do enjoy this game very much, and I know I’m not alone. I’m taking the time to provide this feedback to the developers because I think they’ve presented a fantastic freemium game.

  • PVP matchmaking algorithm doesn’t weight matches based on either active character level, or current possible character level.
    ** This is an issue because when I have three heroes at level 50 (for example), it isn’t a fun play experience to be matched with people with three 80+ characters over and over again. It also isn’t a fun experience to be matched with three level 10 characters. There are further complications to this to be discussed in other points. As the game has been out longer and there are more high level characters it will become harder and harder for new players to start.

  • The leveling mechanic sets up the pvp experience for failure due to the player’s ability to leave a couple of superior characters out for defense while leveling up lower ones. They’re effectively never at risk.
    ** Because of this people will experience fewer characters (only the same few focused high level characters), people will experience fewer character combinations (less incentive to try out lower characters to experiment with combinations because I know I have to deal with level 80+ combatants). If instead characters gained experience based on usage the problem would be fixed. I recognize that this isn’t going to change at this phase of the project but I had to point it out for your next venture.

  • The audio in the game plays with headphones plugged in even with the device on silent. When music is played the in game music stops (thanks), but the SFX continue to play.

  • In a battle you cannot click on enemy combatants to bring a new one to the foreground until after the full list of buffs has played through, however the sound effect for this change plays each time you click to rotate combatants.

  • The UI has issues in several places.

  • The “you have extra characters in this fight” notice covers UI buttons. This is fine for experienced players who are familiar with options, but the skip button is missed by new players completely. Due to the above mentioned issues with PVP this rapidly diminishes the play experience.
  • Click “Train Powers” and you see all three of your powers and clicking on any of the power names gives you details for the powers. The upper right corner has a back button to return to this screen once viewing a power. View the Roster screen and you’re taken to something that looks VERY similar, but doesn’t have the same functionality of viewing powers and a new page button is in the lower right corner (so now we have navigation options at the top and bottom of the screen). Within the Roster screen if I continue to the right I get to the powers and can click on the powers to view them (as with the Train Powers screen), however the back button now takes me to the starting Roster screen again not to screen I was previously on. I recognize that there are page buttons to move left/right, however you’ve provided three identical looking screens (basically) which have different navigation tools for the player.
  • In a battle when you click to highlight a hero to view their abilities and scroll between heroes the clickable area for the UI buttons is very small making it very easy to accidentally click outside of the small hotspots and close the screen.

  • Different rarity cards don’t seem to be balanced well at low levels.
    ** At one point I had a level 30 2 star Astonishing X-Men Wolverine and a level 30 4 star X-Force Wolverine. The two had the exact same stats for health and gem damage. In this case there is no reason at all for me to make use of this very rare card other than to sell it, or hope I happen to get another exceedingly rare card of the same type (the leveled, less rare version is significantly stronger due to powers). I’m assuming that if they were both level 60 things may tip in favor of the rarer card, but you’ve created a casual game, and the majority of your players won’t be around for that much gameplay … and that’s a wishful assumption.

  • Leveling a card is a mystery, and surprisingly unrewarding.

  • I’ve gotten a new card that has only increased my possible level by one.
  • I’ve got two classic Doctor Doom cards allowing me to level to a maximum of level 18 (it started at 15). I’ve got two model 40 Iron Man cards allowing me to level to a maximum of 25 (it started at 15).
  • When I start with a two star card it is level 6, and a second card allows me to level this card to a max of 8, a third to a max of 13. This leaves a brand new player being thrown one star cards every time they turn around and easily making these rarer two star cards obsolete for a substantial portion of the early game. This is a poor player experience for a casual game where people often don’t stick around.
  • When I got a 4 star level 30 X-Force Wolverine I was very happy. When I realized it was significantly worse than a level 30 Astonishing X-Men Wolverine I became bit disheartened. When I somehow gained a second X-Force Wolverine I was ecstatic until I realized that the new level cap for this card was level 34. My two star characters are level 60 at this point and this X-Force Wolverine is dead space. I’m imagining I’ll need a total of 4 or 5 for it to start becoming competitive with a totally free level 50 Model 35 Iron Man (or whatever).

  • Selling starter 1 star cards for 50 coins is just mean.
    ** The game THROWS these cards at the player. Offering something so common for your cash equivalent (bucks in most games), is a great way to make a new player feel bad for a purchase they’ve made (once they realize the value of the card they’ve purchased).

  • Many Environmental options do not scale well.
    ** It seems like there is no scaling involved in your environmental options. This is most notable with the city (when I have 500 health gaining 50 is awesome! When I have 5,000 health gaining 50 isn’t worth the two clicks to gain it once the gems have been earned), with the jungle (100 damage when my characters have 700 health is a tactical decision to gain 5 gems of each color and exciting! 100 damage to gain 5 gems of each color is a no brainer when I have 3,000 health), and with the latvia forest (three 3 damage gems are pitiful at the high end of the game).

  • Inability to see how abilities level up prevent a player from planning out a character’s growth.
    ** I won’t get into the idea that it’s kinda silly that a character with two abilities can have a full 5 tiers of each of their two powers and a character with three abilities must make tactical decisions about how to build powers, however, how am I supposed to make an informed decision about which of the three abilities I want to raise to level 5 when I can’t see what each of the tiers do (just the next tier and current tier)?

  • Not all of the powers’ growth is balanced.
    ** The fifth tier of a power should be the most powerful. With many of your powers this is true because most tier increases will grant incremental more damage, or reduced cost. This isn’t the case with all powers. For example Daken’s 4th tier of Healing & Heat the healing is increased from 3% of max health to 5% of max health … or nearly double the healing from tier 3, Daken’s 5th tier of Healing & Heat reduces the number of yellow tiles needed from 7 to 6. If the 4th tier nearly doubles the healing provided by the third tier why does the 5th tier only allow for some healing in a rare instance? Over the course of a whole fight this is a much smaller increase in healing. By itself this isn’t an issue because he’s a two power hero and you can eventually get a 5th tier. If this was a hero with 3 abilities and I had to pick and choose which powers gained 5 tiers I would be pretty upset with that option. This makes me wary of the rest of the power balance, and makes me curious to see a full breakdown of power growth.

  • Expensive powers are too rarely usable due to cost and fight durations.
    ** Most fights end fairly quickly. I would love to see metrics on frequency of power usage, and gems attained and spent in fights (showing powers used). From what I have experienced the AI almost never uses expensive powers because of fight duration (plus the player can readily reduce enemy gems). From what I have experienced the player rarely gets a chance to use most powers with a cost greater than 10-15. I recognize that there is a lot of chance with the gems that appear, I recognize that there are buffs to increase up to four gem pools by 6, and the remainder by 3, I recognize that the player can use the environment to take damage and gain a crazy large number of gems, I recognize that for basically all gem colors there is at least one ability that will create more of those colors. The model 40 Iron Man’s Ballistic Salvo is a great example of an exceedingly expensive ability that I’m almost never able to use to any real effect. It does massive AOE damage but isn’t usable until so late in the game there is often only one target left. Not fun. I frequently find the same issue with Marvel Now Thor’s Call The Storm ability. I basically need to use Thunder Strike to generate the extra green tiles to make Call The Storm possible, but I need to use Mjolnir’s Might to generate the yellows for Thunder Strike. By the time I can use Call The Storm I’m doing massive AOE damage to the last standing target who is almost dead already. This is very unrewarding in both cases.

  • Nothing in the game rewards the players for fighting a harder opponent.
    ** There is nothing in the game to reward a player for fighting a harder opponent or recognize that the player has challenged an opponent who offers no challenge to the player’s team.

2

Really good post. Nice job.

3

Agree with you on every point. Well said.

4

Welcome to the forums. Many of these things have been said at one point or another but I agree with most of it.

Much knowledge is player discovered and posted on these forums. It isn’t an excuse for a lack of in-game info, but it’s better than nothing. Stick around and you can learn a lot. I know I have.

5

More:

  • The sell value for cards of increasing rarity scales poorly as rarity increases.

  • In reference to fight buffs: how is a player supposed to tell if someone is part of any of the groups that buffs for bonus damage exist for?
    ** I happen to have read a lot of comics when I was younger and remember who’s who. How would someone who isn’t already a big marvel fan know? As examples: Magneto lead the X-Men for a little bit. Does he count as an X-Man, and a Mutant, and part of the Dark Brotherhood? Wolverine is/was an Avenger. Does he count as an X-Man, an Avenger, and a Mutant. Juggernaut was an X-Man for a period of time, does he count as one, but he doesn’t count as a Mutant, right?

  • The icon for damage buffs for the Avengers and the Dark Avengers are too similar. I recognize that they aren’t identical.

  • There was recently a game upgrade. The upgrade was 100MB and on my cell carrier anything larger than 50MB can only be downloaded over wifi. Until I got home I had that thing popping up (what felt like) every 5 minutes. You guys may want to tone that down a bit. I don’t know how common the download size over a cellular network may be an issue.

  • Not all heroes gain health at the same rate, but there is no explanation or announcement of these pros/cons in game.

  • Some heroes have too few health to really be competitive. A level 50 Modern one star Storm can basically be one shotted by some similar level characters. A level 50 Classic two star Storm seems to have similar health (an 83 two star storm has less health than a level 40 one star Juggernaut). The Black Widows (all three) seem to have low health also. I understand that making some characters squishy is part of the gameplay, but in pvp players can too easily pick off low health characters making them inefficient to spend time leveling up. The issue may be how much damage is being done rather than how few health some characters have.

  • Buffing abilities on rarer cards should be used with more care.
    ** The nature of a rare card means a player may not have more than one of that card. The three star Model 40 Iron Man has an attack called Recharge which is only used to power other attacks. The positive feeling of getting a rare card would be decreased by not having a beneficial ability for your group, and it would feel even worse when a Model 40 is the last hero standing and his sole “attack” doesn’t do damage, buff yourself in a usable way, or diminish the enemy in any way (and instead it gives you something you don’t need and causes you to stun yourself). Buffing abilities belong on more common cards because they’re less likely to only have the one buffing attack.

6

I’m done with this game. It was decently fun while I played, but there doesn’t seem to be much progress toward fixing the balance issues. I would have continued to play if there appeared to be progress in fixing existing issues with the game, rather than just shoveling new stuff at us without fixing the things you have already shoveled at us without balancing.

You got about 2 weeks of time as my primary phone game, but no money.

7

Sooo… you are leaving because, over the apparently short time you’ve been playing, during the ~holidays~, there hasn’t been any progress towards fixing complicated balance issues? Kay.

8

I played over a month (my original post was at the beginning of December). During the time I played I saw multiple new characters released (X Force Wolverine, Original Widow, Hulk, Punisher, and Invisible Woman were all newly added I believe). I also saw multiple new events take place.

Many of the issues I named above do not require complex solutions, and I’m sure nothing I stated was anything they didn’t hear during their QA phases. They knew what the issues were as they released everything.

I recognize patterns in game development just fine. This is a common issue. New content is exciting, fixing old content isn’t as exciting.

I’m not rage quitting because I didn’t get first place in some event, or because my phone crashed and I lost a prize, or because any number of other reasons you see in these forums. I’m leaving because I see a pattern of what is to come, so I feel like I’ve already experienced everything this game has to offer. Also, as with the original posts I’m not providing this information to you, instead, this for the benefit of the developers to help them understand how their players feel.

9

You’ve played for a month (during the holidays when people and schedules are most busy) and during that time there was in fact a large 100mb update addressing some issues, improving the UI and adding new content to keep things interesting. I don’t know where you’re getting your expectations, but major client side patches aren’t released on a weekly basis by an group that does any reasonable amount of testing or you’ll have server crashes or worse frequently.

I think the dev’s have done a good job trying to address issues and streamline the game without breaking the balance (and remember, this is the “preview edition”). Keep up the good support Ice IX and dev team!

Also, to the original poster, great list of thing that should be looked into. I don’t expect all of them will change, but much of it has been voiced as concern by posters and should see serious consideration.

10

Oh, so you expected them to go through a player suggestion, design, implementation, QA, playtesting, and release in two weeks. Since the last two weeks have pretty much been vacation.

Gotcha.

11

X-Force Wolverine is not an added character.

And honestly, many of the issues you mention above are either minor (UI issues, ect), or issues that aren’t really issues. You do bring up a number of valid points as well, but most of them ARE the complicated issues that cannot just have a patch slapped on them. Few, like cost of high powered abilities, fall into your category of not requiring complicated fixes.

as far as New Content Vs Old, they have been testing changes in the new content they are releasing. And they can’t afford to just stop making new content to fix old content either, otherwise long-time players will get bored and drop off. It has to be a mix of both, and those of us who have been around have seen the changes that are being. They aren’t being made at breakneck speed, and there are issues that they have yet to address, but they are steadily working to improve the game.

That said, good luck to you if you want to move on. Greener pastures and all that. I’m happy playing (what even you admit is) a great game, that will get greater.