Player Perception: What the metrics aren’t telling you.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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This piece is another opinion piece and reflects my thoughts on the current state of the game and the evolution we are all witnessing. The impact of this evolution affects each of us differently but I hope to capture common threads.

My perspective is from that of a veteran player who has played at the highest levels of competition, though not quite as legendary as Reckless has become with her ridonkulous scores. My perspective is also impacted by my wife who has a full 2* Roster and no 3s that are viable as well as my Brother in Law who has gotten his first 3 Punisher and has a Hulk on the way. I do not claim to represent the population but feel I have witnessed a pretty good cross section of the community with my personal contacts as well as what I have read on the forums.
Let’s start out with the changes D3 made to cover packs. Metrics told them that people hate guaranteed covers, that making it more of gamble to get covers is more appealing to the player base. Then they went from 20% chance, down to 6.1% chance for a featured character.

METRICS say that players are buying more at 20%, and when the chances were reduced to 6.1% that people kept buying them, so therefore 6.1% is a good deal and the community will keep on chugging with the reduced rewards.

PERCEPTION (My perception) is that D3 is showing base greed and is taking an already overpriced commodity and making it insultingly bad. From their venture beat article it seems like they are plumbing the depths of player stupidity by seeing just how much they can gouge without getting punched in the nose.

REACTION I have supported this game from launch and wanted to spend money to build my roster and to show appreciation for a game that I have grown to love. Now I feel contempt for the changes to chase monetization. Instead of going for lots of small purchases they seem to be chasing huge sales, in essence they want everyone to be whales.
I don’t want to give them any money, NOW if I purchase HP which I may well do, I will do it grudgingly feeling like I am getting screwed by purchasing it in order to keep playing the way I want to play. I am starting to see D3 like I see Comcast and the way I see AT&T when they were the only ones who had the iPhone.
I was trying to figure out when it went south for me, and it was Season 1. There were a few things that happened that really turned me off.

Hyper Competition: Crappy events were seeing shield hopping and high scores in the 1500’s. This was really unpleasant. In retrospect I believe it was purely player driven and it has toned down considerably. The players pushed too hard as a community for prizes that are frankly crap and in Season 2 we are seeing a recalibration where people have realized that the push is not worth it.

METRICS may well tell D3 that people loved Season 1.

PERCEPTION from many, and I realize there are also many that feel the opposite, but the perception is that having every PVP event part of the season means that you are feeling compelled to play constantly in order to not let down your alliance mates.

REACTION from many players is that they drop off the face of the game. Here is the thing. It is so easy to walk away from a mobile game. There are tons of them out there and people are always in search of a quality game that is not just a flash in the pan cash grab.

Sharding: Veteran players got pushed into groups with other players who are even with their levels. We know that the deep 3* rosters represent a small portion of the subscriber base, so in unsharded groupings we often found ourselves one of the only big fish in the pond so taking first was pretty easy to do, which was fun. My wife thinks sharding is great, she has a 2* roster and takes top 5 with a score in the 6-700 range, so it is working great for her. My brother in Law is grouped with guys like me, and he stopped playing because it is a brutal slog and he feels he cannot progress anymore. Personally I think Sharding is garbage when implemented without some sort of risk vs reward structure. Intermediates and Veterans feel like we are being crapped on for progressing in the game.

METRICS I believe are going to show that Sharding is a great thing, the newer players are having an easy time placing in the tournaments.

PERCEPTION is that veteran players are being punished for being successful in the game. (Allow me the opportunity to plug the idea of risk vs reward)

REACTION People on the cusp of 3* who get lumped in the Veteran shards will walk away like my brother in law did because he feels like he hit a wall he cannot progress past. Veteran players will get bored because it is too much work just to maintain.

Lack of perceived value in In Ap Purchases: I bought covers for my Daken to max him out. I wanted to buy a 10 pack and see if I could get more than 3. Odds would have been good if they were at 20% like they were for Falcon, but when D3 moved the odds down to 6.1% it left a SERIOUSLY sour taste in my mouth.

METRICS are showing that people are willing to buy, and spend money worse and worse deals. The money is coming in so all is well.

PERCEPTION is that we no longer want to support the game when the focus is changing from game play improving to being purely profit driven.

REACTION is the erosion of good will from the player base. What I have seen in these forums is a super loyal player base that would support this game indefinitely.

What I would love to see is D3 chasing small dollar buys, get rid of this crap of making people buy 3 roster slots at a time, it is insulting. They are constantly releasing new characters, make things cheaper to purchase not more expensive.

  • Get rid of 2*s in heroic packs – people will buy a random 3* character for 200HP, many of them will do it every day. The money will add up quickly if there is some perceived value in heroic packs. As it stands now, I don’t even get excited when I open a heroic pack.
  • Bring back guaranteed covers, let people access the restricted fights by buying a 10 pack.
  • Quit trying to see how stupid people are, quit digging as deeply into our wallets as possible without getting slapped. It is burning good will and makes people look for other things to do because they are disgusted.
  • Add a Risk Vs Reward structure, I have no problem with catering to new players and converting them to paying customers, just don’t do it at the expense of your current customers. I will grind other 141 teams all day long if you make it worth my while.
  • Break up some events from the seasons so people can take a break for a couple of days without having to apologize for taking a break. I have heard of only counting the top 80% towards seasons, that might work as well, just do something to address it.

**edited for readability and BOLDNESS

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I had three friends that loved the guaranteed character pulls. When those stopped they stopped buying and slowly stopped playing. Has anyone run across that?

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I would assume once the average player makes it past the lower tiers, he’s pretty self-sustaining with regards to iso and hp, making him a nonfactor outside of true whales (or perhaps more resistant to game changes affecting their spending habits). So they focus all of their ‘marketing’ efforts at the lower tier demographic, where money is to be made.

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When I first discoverd this game about 6 months ago I rather quickly made 2 separate $20 HP purchases so that I could buy tokens to try and get better covers. For a while I was buying whatever token/pack was “on sale” for 100 HP each day. I have not put a dime more into this game since then and have no plans to do so. The chances of getting a cover I can actually use are laughable. Towards the end of the Season 1 tourney I played more hours of this game than I ever had because I wanted that 10 pack of Heroic tokens SO BAD. About 10 minutes before cutoff I finally got it and I was so happy…we until I saw what covers I got. I could not use one single cover of the 10 pack (3 were Moon Stones) and then my additional rewards based on my finish and my Alliance finish scored me an additional 4 Heroic Covers that were junk. To be clear, I do not have a great set of characters - I have what everyone else in the world has…Lv 85 Black Widow, Thor, Storm, Ares and Wolverine. After that I have a lv 69 Spiderman, Lv 66 Hulk and a ton of others in the lv 40 range that are at Max level because I LITERALLY cannot get a cover I can use. I have over 30k ISO that is dying to be spent! This needs to change - I don’t know how but it needs to change ASAP.

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I’m not so sure it’s self sustaining anymore, I’m not convinced it’s possible for 2* transition people to actually hit 900 without the whales trickling down points from 1300, which means they’re likely only getting 100 points a tournament (50 from top 100, 50 from top 250 alliances), which is basically a wash if they spend a shield trying to get a useful reward.

With the slot changes, they’ll need to do that ^ well, without buying a shield, and thus giving up on trying to get a good reward, in order to buy any more slots. At which point, a new character will be out, and since he can’t afford slots to use him, he’ll fall further behind

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They really need to rethink the rewards, specially after implementing the random covers after pvp matches.

The 600 points reward of a 2* cover is pretty unexciting when you are selling 2* in droves from all the pvp matches.
It’s laughable seeing “7 more days until heroic token” in SHIELD Resupply like that is a big deal, when the chance of getting something useful is pretty slim.
SHIELD Simulator rewards are a joke, half of it are 1* that you can get in a single LR, the other half are some 2* and two 3* at the absolute top that no one who actually needs them will be able to reach.
Taking 2* out of heroic tokens would help that, but then they would need to remove some stuff like the 10-pack progression from seasons because I don’t see them handing 10 3* to everyone who gets 5k points.

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Great post OP, however I honestly have lost all faith in D3 caring about making improvements to this game. Weeks and weeks of suggestions have fallen on deaf ears and they steadily make the game worse. Players keep dumping money into the game cause they are addicted.

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Seconded.

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I didn’t quit, but when i was new, I bought 10 packs when the covers were guaranteed. When they became a 22% drop rate, I was very tempted, but never pulled the trigger. Now that it’s a 6% drop rate, I feel like they think I’m an idiot.

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Their metrics indicate that spending is often the same at day 7 as it is at day 70 (if I have the exact date range correct) Either way established players spend a lot of money. They have stated that their intent is to make the game almost subscription based in that people would spend a little bit of money every month on the game. The thing is they have departed from the concept of little and seem to have no idea of how to show value to established players, instead making monetary purchases insultingly un-economic.

Sit down with your Xbox sometime and play a AAA game with real production quality and then consider why you would spend $120 to buy Daken covers. People are rightly irritated about the monetezation scheme.

Seriously, once you have 3 3* characters maxed out, you are on par with me, WYP, Nemek, Reckless etc. You can compete and beat teams consistently. After that, you are just collecting. They are putting out enough fun characters to make you want to collect them. Now they need to just make them affordable… and figure out a Risk Vs. Reward Structure to incentivize us to fight each other instead of incentivizing us to find ways to game the system in order to make it fun.

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It’s obvious the game has turned into a money grab, it’s just too expensive to go from 2 star to 3 now. Props to the whales but I’m not dumping 100s of dollars into a mobile match 3 game.

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Hear hear.
I was looking at my dwindling HP reserves after blowing some on an 8 hour shield (because god forbid i have something better to do on a Friday at 8pm west coast time) only to still get knocked out of top 50 AGAIN. I was contemplating re-upping my HP and just buying the cover. Just before i entertained the idea of plunked down more cash to patch this leaky ship, i checked steam and saw a game i had been waiting for. And Y’know what? I got so much stress free enjoyment from my $20 purchase.

Not gonna claim to be “done” but all i know is i have skipped the last 2 pvp events entirely -despite them having covers i really want- and i only play PVE on the last day. My only source of stress free fun in MPQ is in ironically; Shield training. No point push, no crappy leader-board shenanigans, and with all the grinders hiking up the end score i rarely get retaliations that are pointless to engage. Its all match-up fun and more worthless 1~2* progression rewards. I’m sure they will eventually find a way to ruin that too, and maybe then i can delete this game.

I hope things get better but I’m not holding my breath anymore and neither should any of you. Play it at your leisure, not theirs, and leave when they no longer satisfy you. icon_e_smile.gif

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This game is going down faster than me after drinking a bottle of Knob Creek.

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Just so you know, you CANNOT say going down and Knob in the same sentence and expect me to think anything work safe.

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So glad I wasnt the only one who went there, snickering at my desk with co-workers peeking over.

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At the start of season 1 I just started to get my 3* up to a usable level. I figured I’d spend my first real $ to buy a 10 pack or two but then I received the 5k 10 pack reward and realised that I’d be better to throw money at pigeons off my balcony.

It’s interesting you say you don’t get exicted because my reaction to heroic tokens is literally “Urgh… just hurry up and give me my 2* cover”. It’s actually become more of a chore than anything:

Click here, go there, scroll to this one, get token, tap through animation, sigh at useless reward, tap there, go to roster, click there, swipe in this direction, press to sell, confirm here…ahhhh… finally 250 iso!

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That part of that article is really what made me stop and make sure I hadn’t misread it. It pretty much told me one of two things:

  1. Whoever interprets their stats at D3 doesn’t know how to interpret statistics. People like uncertainty over guaranteed covers? Maybe for like Loki tokens or other useless characters, but for characters people actually want? There’s no chance in hell that’s true. That’s like choosing the mystery box over a boat. Sure there could be a boat in the mystery box, but you could also just take the fucking boat.

or

  1. Whoever interprets the stats/wrote that crap in the article is purposely misleading people about why token sales went up. The more likely reason is that with the lowering of the % chance to draw featured characters people buying the tokens just had to buy more to get what they wanted. Publicly saying that would be bad since it would be like telling people D3 lowered token % rates to get people to spend more and no one who might buy the tokens would want to hear that.

Either conclusion doesn’t exactly give me a lot of confidence in D3’s future choices.

I pretty much agree with every proposed change you’re making. Although for Heroics only being 3* you’d probably have to mess with the standard pack or introduce a 2* pack of some kind. I could also see keeping the increased chance of a featured character of an event token if the token only gives 3* characters in the first place. About the only reason I’m still going is that I’ve still got a reasonable amount of hero points left and I’m watching all these bad decisions waiting for the super terrible one that finally sinks the ship for good. We’re definitely going that way. Just the sheer amount of turnover among the 5D alliances alone after Season 1 has been pretty absurd, I can’t imagine what some of the other alliances are going through.

Also seriously CptNoraa? I’m trying not to make jokes at your expense here, but you’re making it hard.

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So true. The prices are so ridiculously high in this game. Who in their right mind spends that much money for a match-3 card collecting game when you can buy triple A titles from last year for 10 bucks?

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I have spent probably close to $200 on this game, and it felt like an investment in a super fun game that updates all the time. I think the thing that bothers me the most is that I felt like a part of something exciting that would last for a long long time. Now I am afraid that they don’t even believe in the future of their own game and are trying to milk it for everything they can get instead of nurturing it.

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I sincerely hope the answer is someone to whom 120 dollars is not a real meaningful amount of money. To them it doesn’t matter that it’s twice as much as a brand new AAA title, just that they want to max that new guy and they can afford to do it now. Now if you’re talking someone who just spent that amount once or twice, that’s not really a huge amount of money considering they’ve probably put in 200+ hours into the game.