Hi. I think I should preface this (as it’s going to be…rather long, I apologise in advance) by saying that I’m a paying player of two years and I very much enjoyed this game. For a long time really. But in the past six months or so that enjoyment has slowly eroded and turned into a combination of exhaustion, frustration, and resentment. I used to love playing this game, now it feels like work. Like a second job. Like I’m being ignored because I can’t afford to dump more cash into the game than I already have, or spend time playing throughout the day, every day. Like the only people who seem to be getting catered to are the ones with very deep pockets and/or a surplus of free time every day. Every time I have to schedule my whole day around just a push to get 1000 in a pvp event, I resent it for that being the only way to keep up without putting myself in debt. I have put a lot of time and money into this game and every day it feels like I’m being told that that’s just not good enough. I want to like this game again. So with that in mind, first I want to explain what I think is wrong with the current state of MPQ, and then I have some suggestions.
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4s, 5 and legendary tokens. Others have detailed the problems with these tokens being used as a form of transition from 3* to 4* as the primary characters of ones roster, but there are a few issues I don’t think have been brought up enough. While lots of people argue that 4* characters now being the focus of character content, they’re being treated the same way that 3s were back when they were less numerous and harder to acquire, this ignores the fact that a 4 character costs three times the ISO to level compared to a 3*, and the covers are directly rewarded only via the number one spot in either pvp or pve, or breaking 1000 in pvp. Even factoring in the occasional legendary token, this does not in any way compare to the 3* transition, particularly since the overall ISO and HP rewards have not changed while the cost of the focal point of the game radically has.
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Which leads into my second point, the inadequate ISO numbers. Right now, even if I somehow managed to acquire all remaining 4 and 5* tokens I’m missing, it would still take me another two years worth of grinding to get the ISO needed to fully level HALF of them. Purchasing ISO is nearly pointless as the rate of return, especially for the astronomically expensive 4* & 5* characters, barely makes a dent in a single character even with the biggest available purchase. And every time a new character is released, the difficulty in completing one you already have started increases.
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Too many tinykitty 4s. Stop releasing 4 characters. Please. Just stop. Just like, skip a month or something. I guarantee you will get a lot of gratitude from the player base. Even if the flow of legendary tokens radically increased all of a sudden, there’s just too damned many characters to keep up with, especially with how expensive roster slots are. Skip a month or two, and then only release ONE a month, if that. Spend the rest of that time fixing the characters already in the game, or making new content.
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Power creep. This is probably the worst case of power creep I’ve seen in a very long time. The fact that it appears to be intentional is even more distressing. Will it be a year and a half before you start releasing 6* characters, and silver surfer has become a punchline because some new thing can one shot him? Or will that just be when 5* characters start getting released twice a month, and 4* characters become relics. 3* characters are hardly easier to acquire and level than they were nearly a year ago, and now they’re marching toward obsolescence with increasing speed. I cannot see how this is a sustainable design plan, as each new big thing is exponentially more expensive in every way than the last.
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Serious disconnect between developer and consumer. The anniversary event this year would be a perfect example of this, as would the Crash of the Titans mission design. Server issues aside, I think all can agree that the first half of the galactus event was an absolute debacle, and the response given when everyone complained about how little agency most people had in succeeding was “it’s supposed to be hard.” When people bash their heads against the wall, eating through health packs like candy to try to get the DDQ legendary token, they’re told “it’s supposed to be hard.” To be clear, creating a scenario where success or failure is overwhelmingly decided by blind luck, with next to no agency for the participant, is not making something challenging or rewarding. It is an exercise in frustration. The only ones with any semblance of agency in reliably overcoming these “challenges” were those that had the least to gain from doing so. And yet this is apparently how you seem to want the game to function, despite page after page after page of long time players begging for changes that would make their decisions have at least some positive impact on their experience beyond an ever increasing investment of time or money. I have no idea if you are intentionally exploiting the Skinner box psychological trap as your primary design philosophy, or if that was simply the outgrowth of unimaginative and “safe” game design, but it is maddening and demoralising to feel like the proverbial pigeon pecking at a button in the hopes that THIS time it will get food, and be told “it’s okay, it’s supposed to work that way.” Completing these challenges does not feel rewarding, because I know ultimately my choices had very little to do with it.
Now that I’ve detailed the things that are driving me away from this game here are my thoughts on how to improve it.
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Scaling rewards. We already have the ever popular scaling system in place that modifies pve opponent levels and pvp visibility, why not implement something similar for those who have played longer and have larger rosters. 100 ISO for a mission is moderately useful when you’re working with a 2 star roster, but barely a fraction of a drop in the bucket for someone with twenty 4*s to level. For instance, past a certain number of days played, standard tokens are no longer given as mission rewards, replaced with heroic tokens. ISO and HP mission rewards begin to increase on a percentage scale that doubles annually. Or simply take whatever scaling mechanics are already modifying parts of the game and tie them also to the rewards for those same instances. If someone is being scaled up to fight nothing but missions of 270+ enemies, they likely have a strong roster so make that sharply increased challenge actually enticing instead of “oh yay, another standard token.” Something like this would go a long way toward making those of us who have been around since the first months feel valued even if we can’t play for hours every day.
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Slow down character release schedule. This game needs more characters about as badly as Bill Gates needs to win the powerball. Instead of releasing two characters a month, one a month. Or even one every 6 weeks. Spend that extra time fine tuning the characters and content already in the game and on building new, more interesting and different content beyond the introduction of yet another version of Wolverine.
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Decrease leveling costs. Especially if you balk at increasing the flow of ISO and HP, dropping the costs of leveling further would make a huge difference for many of us staring at rosters full of fully covered characters that we simply cannot afford to level enough to compete. Oh, and roster slots. Paying more than $10 just for the privilege of adding a character I won’t be able to use for months is not fun.
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Improve the reward structure for LT and 4* covers. You want 4* characters to be the backbone of the game now. Cool. Then make them as attainable as 3* were when THEY were the backbone of the game. take the event reward structure, drop the 3* rewards down to where the 2* ones are and replace them with corresponding 4* covers of one, two and three colours with the final reward being an extra legendary token (or two.) For DDQ, give everyone a loaner character that’s fully covered, but level 176 like in PVE feature missions, or even level 70. You’d still have a serious challenge thanks to the massive disparity in health pools and damage scaling, but at least those of us who don’t have that character fully leveled (or at all) have a fighting chance of winning. And lower the threshold for the LT season reward back to something like 7500.
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Remove random element to set mission rewards. I cannot think of any reason to have a system in place that allows for a mission reward to be the default 20 ISO before the listed rewards have been achieved. Well, aside from the exploitative one, and I’d love to hear how that is in any way fun for anyone other than your accountants. Coupled with how harsh scaling can be in PVE, forcing people to play the same mission a dozen times just to get that 1000 ISO or command point reward is insulting. Whatever tiny monetary gain it’s giving you likely pales in comparison to the goodwill and renewed interest in PVE that would be generated by dumping this. Which in turn would give more people impetus to continue throwing money at you.
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Update obsolete 3* characters. There is no reason why so many 3* characters should be as useless as they are outside of being the pvp featured character (and even that doesn’t help all of them) Fixing characters like IM-40 and Spiderman would suddenly give a lot of players a reason to dump ISO and HP into completing them (even if they’re not the new Iron Fist), which I have to assume is something you want.
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Team bonuses. At this point there are a pretty large number of different teams of villains and heroes, adding passive bonuses for fielding them together would make quite a few otherwise b-list characters much more likely to be used, and invested in. Each character could have a specific scaling bonus to certain abilities, health or match damage dependent on how many other members of their corresponding team are present. The bonuses wouldn’t have to be all that big individually, and could cover a wide variety of types, but put together they could add an interesting dynamic to pvp in particular.
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More Balance of Power. This last one is more of a personal preference, but I honestly have more fun in BoP than in any other event. Matches feel actually strategic, and my whole roster is suddenly a lot more fun to play around with. Hell, maybe just replace the season simulator with Balance of Power. I don’t know about anyone else but I would play the tinykitty out of that.
A few hours ago, I finally managed to beat the DDQ 4* mission for Jean Grey, after hammering at it for over two hours and dumping a fairly significant amount of HP into her. When I finally succeeded (through blind luck), I didn’t feel excited, only relieved that it was finally done. And then very foolish for having just spent time and money on something that I wasn’t even enjoying anymore. I want to like this game. I want to have a reason to continue playing, and I know I’m not alone. Meeting us halfway will not drive away the whales or make them any more powerful than they already are as they’ll spend whatever it takes to be at the top anyway. Please give your players better reasons to spend money and time on your game without feeling exploited. Because right now, this isn’t fun.
