Point thresholds for awarding required essential chars in PVE

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’m splitting this thread because I think the question of how essential chars are determined is an issue that is independent of “play to pay” mechanics.

I want to credit MakersMark with this point and I wanted to ensure that his views got a fair independent disucssion.
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Meh.

As has been pointed out, most players are locked out of essential nodes for every single new release. Let’s look at the numbers.

The 4* essential node gives out approximately 1250 ISO total per day (100/250/500/140/standard token=250, mystery boost=0) , and unless you placed well enough to earn that placement cover in the previous PVE, you are locked out of completing that node at all until day 2 or 3 (or 4/5 in a 7 day event), when you can you earn/roster that cover and play that node.

So you’re looking at 2500/3750 (or 5000/6250) ISO that most people are locked out of for every new release.

Yeah, you can complete that node eventually, but the ISO that was available as a reward prior to the day you earn/roster it is locked away from you.

So, where is the magic line? 2500/3750 ISO is a trivial reward amount and not a problem, but 5000 is non-trivial and game-breaking? Can 75% of players earn that cover for placement in the previous PvE? Do 75% even have a realistic chance at the placement reward?
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So you raise some interesting points worth discussing

  1. Can we equate an iso penalty as “significant and substantial” amount of play. If you go and look at the juggernaut node in prologue, you could probably argue that paywalling the 5K node with a 4* cloak and dagger would amount to paygating important content unless you could argue that people could “earn” (as defined in the other thread) him through time.

In any case, I’d want to know.

  1. I still believe that an avg roster should should still be able to realistically place T50 while earning the essential through the prog table. Do I have the numbers or math done? No, but its certainly worth doing and I don’t think anyone here disagrees with the idea that

Essential character restrictions should still allow Newer roster the ability to be top 50 compeitive. If you don’t like top 50, pick any number you feel appropriate and we can do the same math.

2

outside of Strange sights subs i’ve never been top 50 in any PVE

i was gonna say tl:dr but am ashamed to admit i did read

have a like for your troubles

btw thread title makes little to no sense ( I can’t say what I think about that without risking more warning points)

and it’s “Pay to Play” not “Play to Pay”

edit: reading it again: what does this have to do with the point threshhold for awarding required characters?)

if you’re expecting players to able to finish top 50 without the required character then they should also have been able to unlock the required character in the previous PvE and therefore wouldn’t have been locked out

3

With respect to your second point, I’ve also stated previously that I think placement and progression rewards should be reversed, which would be more in line with having most rosters realistically able to compete for t50 (or t10!). Here’s a quote from my own vain self (EDIT - from this thread on vaulted essential characters - Should vaulted characters be essential in pve? - MPQ General Discussion - 505 Go! Official Forums) :

Look, if you don’t already have the 4* character for the current PvE then you cannot win the 4* placement reward. You just can’t. By the time you reach that 4* progression reward you are well out of the running.

So that means that for the NEXT PvE you also cannot win the 4* placement award, for the same reason, (unless you happen to already have it rostered). Vaulting makes that much less likely, particularly for newer players.

Stop me when you see a pattern here.

What would be the harm in reversing the placement and progression rewards? ie Current progression reward = next essential. Current essential = current placement reward

Now, the response I got was basically that the placement cover was to give you a competitive advantage in the next PvE, as a reward for your hard work (or, possibly, for your pre-existing competitive advantage).

Obviously, I disagree. I think PvE should be as level of a playing field as possible. The advantage of the placement cover should be having an extra cover for that character, with all the additional power that provides in future PvE and PvP events.

4

So an “average” player should be able to finish among the top 5% of players in an event? What are you even talking about? This is nonsense.

5

My point was if he feels the “average player” should be able to get T50 then the average player also should be getting the 4 star cover in placement in the previous PvE and therefore wouldn’t have been locked out of anything

6

I get that part, too. I feel like whatever quixotic adventure has been embarked on in the “paygate” thread has spiraled off into some other form of nonsense here.

7

With respect to your first point, I don’t think the ISO amount is actually relevant.

It’s the fact that content has been locked off behind an essential character requirement. For the Star-Lord event, the node is only ever going to be there for a few days, so it’s not like you can access it next time either.

Now, the amount of iso can maybe serve as guide to the severity of the impact on game fairness, true. But there is (philosophically) no amount that makes it not a problem.

But there are bigger fish to fry, in terms of impact on fairness.

I mean, it’s not like they’re currently giving a segment of the population a standing discount on cover prices, right? :wink:

8

Basically. Although I still get a laugh out of whatever he’s typing his rants on changing “lord” to “load” in every post.

9

also sounds like another thread is being referenced
maybe this one would seem less like mad ramblings if you linked that thread?
scratch that…located the referenced post…no help

10

Well what do you think an avg roster should be able to compete for?

I’m purposely not defining avg because we should define an OBJECTIVE measure before applying SUBJECTIVE standards.

Do you think the avg player should have access to a 4*? Is it fair to expect an avg player to employ “optimal scoring”

My objective measure is top 50 competitive. My subjective standard is “avg” roster and optimal play. I don’t think its unreasonable at all for a top 50 player to be fully versed on how the scoring works and all the tactics used to earn top placements even if he can’t implement all those tactics in his own game play.

So whats an “avg” roster? Beats me, I’m certainly willing to discusses what constitutes “avg”, but I think a good 3* roster should be ballpark competitive for top 50 with optimal play.

Feel free to tell me your opinion of an avg roster and what placement is appropriate.

11

If you think the top 1/20 of anything is the “average” portion of whatever that belongs to, I don’t think there’s any amount of reason that will make sense to you. If you roll two 6 sided dice, the “average” roll won’t be a two or a twelve. It’ll be a seven. The way you express it, you make it sound like someone with a roster that’s as common as a seven, should be getting all the rewards that are expected of someone whose roster falls in the same rarity level that a two does on a dice roll.

12

So do you feel like the people who just entered the event to play casually should be factored into the “avg” standard?

I don’t. If you aren’t able to complete the green check marks then you probably aren’t avg.

To be sure I see that you are drawing a distinction of the braket size etc… But I explicitly reject that assumption and say flat out that over 50% of the participants in a PVE event do not play events to the “avg” roster expectation.

Rather they are just playing nodes to accommodate their free time availability and are unconcerned with their final placement ranks. They may play the node 1x or they may play it the full 7x, but they aren’t trying to accumulate points with respect to placement or progression. Maybe they had RL/School/Work/Personal nerf on day 2 and then decided to not play the rest of event? There are alot of reasons why people stop playing pve, but I’ll stand by my statement that 50% of every bracket doesn’t even try to place.

So let me be explicit.
The avg player (someone who tries with the knowledge available to them via the forums) with the avg roster (probably 3* champ, but this is the edge case. No one would ever argue that a 4* roster shouldn’t be able to compete for t50) should be able to compete for T50 even if they don’t have the essentials. Ie. the prog table should grant them access to the node with enough time to reasonably compete for t50.

13

So it’s the “average player who is way more involved in playing the game than most other players and reads the forums, thereby making them absolutely not ‘average’ by any definition of the word because only a very small percentage of players actually do so” definition of “average”? Well, why didn’t you just say so?

14

The simple fix would be to put the 4* cover early enough in progression that you can earn it on day 1. I’m not sure if d3 would be willing to do that, but it’s definitely an easy way to solve the problem.

EDIT - again, D3 probably wouldn’t do this, but if they put 1 cover earnable on day 1 (presumably after 4 clears of all other nodes), and a second cover later in progression (about where it is now - maybe closer to the cp), that would be ideal. Everyone gets 1 cover basically given away, the harder workers can earn another one, the whales can buy more after that, and the stratification between the groups during that PvE for placement is still there, but much more limited (depends on the specific covers for some characters).

15

This implies that it’s a “problem” for anyone who hasn’t made it into one, which consists almost entirely of this thread, 3.5 years into the game’s existence.

I took 6 months off from the game and had a roster that was short by about 10 new 4* characters when I returned. You know what I accepted? That I won’t have every 4* and it would take time to build my roster back to full. Oh well. I didn’t compete for top spots in every event, but eventually I got everyone rostered and I could at least use them for essentials. I didn’t find it something worth pitching a fit about.

16

OJSP asked a simple question and I answered it.

I’m sorry if you think that’s pitching a fit.

17

I don’t necessarily think you are, more that whoever is making this a “problem” is. I think someone who insists “not having an essential character costing you a chance at a top placement in ONE event” is an issue that needs addressing is blowing things way out of proportion.

18

I’ve got a well enough developed roster that I should be able to finish in top 100 for a new release event, if i play optimally to full clears on each node.

I often don’t.

In non-release PvE, I generally only play to 4/6 clears - essentially, enough to hit final progression. In these less competitive events, that’s normally enough to still take top 100.

On the occasion that I earn 0 covers from a new release event, I’ve simply put in the extra work on early subs (going to full clear) and can still usually grab the 4* cover from progression plus make it to final progression. In this case, in my quest for extra points, I’m now earning the ISO that I would have ordinarily left on the table.

19

Well, keep in mind that this isn’t a new game anymore. You have to consider how the game survives going forward, and that will require accommodating new players.

Sure, things were good enough for 3.5 years, but at the time there were neither 3-year vets to compete with in front of you, nor was there a massive backlog of characters to be rostered in order to reach a reasonable level of competitiveness. That’s what new players are facing today, and it’s irresponsible not to look at their experience of the game and consider whether changes might help them and the game itself by extension.

This is a terrible comparison, but I played Everquest for years. When the game launched, the maximum level was 50. Most expansions increased the level cap, as well as adding new forms of advancement. Last I saw, the cap was over 100, and the bulk of the active players were at or near that level. New players would see that massive hill to climb and just go play something else.

It’s a real problem - how do you let new players become competitive with vets in a reasonable amount of time? Everquest ended up literally giving new players characters that were pre-leveled (to 85, I think) with a slew of core abilities that vets had earned over years of gameplay. And for the most part it worked. Veteran players grumbled about having had to level their rogue in bare feet in the snow, uphill both ways, but it got new players through the door and gave them enough of a boost for them to actually enjoy the game.

Is MPQ an MMORPG? Obviously not. But it’s a largely mature game, and there is nothing wrong with the devs taking steps (see: vaulting) to address these issues, nor with players discussing the problems and their potential solutions.

If you don’t care about a particular issue, that’s fine. People care about different things. But Phumade has a valid point about gating content behind a 5* being a poor precedent, even if the actual stakes here (5k ISO) are small potatoes overall. And Wumpushunter had a valid point (in the thread I linked above) about vaulted characters being required as essentials.

So don’t dump on people who want to talk about them. It’s not “pitching a fit” - it’s caring enough about the game to discuss where it is now, where it’s going, and how it should get there.

20

To take your MMO example and try and spin it. I played WoW for a long time. When you got to the level cap, and wanted to raid and compete for the best stuff, you couldn’t just jump into something like Molten Core (basically the first end-game raid) as soon as you hit the cap. You had to go gear up to even enter the instance (for example, playing events without getting the highest end rewards as you build your roster up in MPQ), and even after you were properly geared (had built your roster and covered them) then you had hours and hours of throwing yourself at it before you got your real payoff, which was gear (or in our case, the top tier placement rewards). There wasn’t any skirting of those steps, unless you got dragged through content above your level by someone who was way ahead of you on the curve. (Not an option here.) There was a lot of busy work, with not a lot of reward for doing it, just to have the chance to try the high-end stuff.

Not everything is supposed to be easy, and not everything is meant for everyone in every single event. If you don’t have an essential character for an event? Well, grind out the cover, place where you can, and you’ll have it from the get-go next time they come around. It sucks when I look at the handful of people ahead of me in most PVE events and see mostly people with rosters way higher than mine. Is that fair? Absolutely. They have better characters, so they can beat things faster than I can, so they get more points. That doesn’t mean they should change the game to accommodate me, just because others have spent more time and/or money and have better characters than I do, and I want to be able to play on the same tier they do in every event.

If real life gets in the way on a character release and I can’t grab a 4* immediately, I’m out of luck on the next event, but that cover is there, and I’ve got it for the future. Oh well. Any single event isn’t the end of the world. Characters come and go as rewards. I won’t get them all, and I don’t expect to. Maybe more people need to realize such a thing and settle down.