PvP is going to have problem if the game is balanced

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So recently I’ve been messing around with X Force, and I’ve ran into plenty of mirror matches and found that most of these fights ends up being first Surgical Strike wins the game, and even though you do get to go first, you don’t have as much an advantage in collecting those 11 black as you’d think because AI is really at maximizing total AP gain compared to a human and they don’t panic when pressed for time like a human often is. I almost never uses boosts in PvP and I find X Force to be more interesting than Sentry anyway, but this is also quite alarming. This means if at some point we removed all the cheap enablers like boosts and Sentry, we might be looking at a lot of X Force mirror matches where you have only about 50% chance to win. Here I’m assuming you’ve no advantage in your team strength. If you got X Force so does your opponent. If you got The Hood so do they. Of course top end players will always have an advantage in roster to weaker players, but there isn’t exactly a shortage of people with maxed out X Forces + everyone else that works well with him.

Although I’m a supporter of true healing, there’s literally no way PvP in this game can possibly work if you only win about 50% of the time. I don’t mean it won’t work as in the event structure wouldn’t work. That’d be fine because everything is relative. But if you only won about 50% of the time then that means there’s a 25% chance you can lose twice in a row and have no health packs left. That’d certain be a ‘uninstall MPQ’ worthy moment. From my estimation if you fight fair (no boosts) then Sentry/X Force versus themselves is pretty close to 50/50, and Sentry/X Force versus anyone else is at least 75% chance of winning even when fighting fairly, so you can just prey on the guys who don’t have the best characters, but that’s pretty dumb too. But if you tried to fight fair, you have a very real chance of getting wipe out after 2 games. Right now this isn’t a problem because anyone who has Sentry or X Force maxed is more than capable of running the 2 color boosts every fight and having those solidly put your odds winning in a favorable % even against identically strong teams, but I don’t think we should assume boosts are going to stay in the game forever given there’s a rather obvious attempt to phase them out with TUs. So something has to happen to PvP if they’re going to get rid of the really cheap stuff (which I think they should) and I don’t know what it is, but I know 5 health packs isn’t going to work if you only win 50% of the time. Whereas in PvE, if worst comes to worst you can do all the easy nodes and just wimp out on the hard nodes, that’s just not an option in PvP due to MMR.

2

Removing boosts = game slows down = you will start losing points faster than you gain them after a certain point. So if they do remove boosts, then at minimum, they will have to lower progression reward requirements.

It will be similar to adding the skip tax without fixing MMR, but much much worse.

3

Not if they (1) adjust how defensive teams are selected, (2) adjust the amount of points players lose for losses, and (3) limit the number of points and/or attacks a player can suffer within a finite period of time.

If they genuinely want roster diversity, these are the changes that are needed in some form or another.

4

But if everyone loses boosts there’s also only about 50% chance for another player to beat you in an identical strength team matchup, so I’m not too worried about that. Progression rewards will likely go way lower too and that’s something D3 can do. I’m more worried about how can you even PvP when two slightly worse than normal game can take out all your health packs. Right now you just bring out your Sentry and your boosts and then you’d indeed need a miraculous game for the AI to beat you to a World Rupture or Surgical Strike first, but if boosts aren’t in the game the odds are much closer. It seems like the game’s been trying to move toward a fairer model where the attacker isn’t overwhelmingly favored, and that’s good, but if I have close to 50% chance of losing against an identical strength team that means I can only lose 2 games in PvP before I run out of health packs, and while I don’t believe you should be able to sustain play forever, having close to 50% chance to lose and only 2 games is far too little room. Sure, I can just skip the guys who have X Force or Sentry, but that doesn’t solve the underlying problem not to mention MMR generally has a way to ensure you’re stuck fighting the same 5 guys. I don’t think fighting 5 guys exactly as strong as you is unfair, but this group of people has to have an opportunity to play more than an expected 4-5 games against their equally strong opponent before they all get wiped out.

A fair PvP would be like doing PvE where you can only play the hardest node repeatedly for points, and that would not be very fun at all. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make PvP fair, but they need to be aware of the consequences. I’m seriously considering skipping most X Forces even though I have him maxed out, and it’s not because he’s overpowered unlike Sentry. It’s because X Force versus X Force is totally fair that I can’t risk getting wiped out with 2 below average luck games.

5

If xforce vs xforce is actually a 50/50 win rate, then it will promote people to diversify their team and stop running the mirror match. It’s pretty easy to counter him by simply running a team who’s strongest color serves no purpose for the defending team.

By making the ap gain useless, it lets you exploit surgical strike’s built-in weakness, which is that it can be deny through two colors: black and your strongest color. If the board is littered with black, and it’s clear the ai is going to get to 11, then clear the board of your strongest color instead. A surgical strike only hitting 4-5 tiles is extremely weak for 11 ap.

Personally I would love to see this situation you’re describing, where people have to think about what team to use to counter the team they’re attacking into, instead of the current mindless sentry bombing for 100 matches straight.

6

X Force at least better than 50/50 against anyone not himself or Sentry, and some matchup he is arguably more dominant than Sentry, so not using X Force or Sentry is just a mismatch of roster strength. I’m not saying mismatches don’t exist, but beating people with weaker heroes than you isn’t balance.

X Force’s strongest color is green. At level 270, the only characters that can have an equal or higher match strength is Nick Fury, Invisible Woman, or the featured character in a normal event. Nick Fury and IW doesn’t really work well with X Force, and getting a weak featured character to have higher match strength than X Force is cost prohibitive since the featured character selection is essentially random amongst 3*s.

Assuming both side uses X Force (without him it’s not even fair), there’s no ‘deny’ because both black and green are color you need. You get the first move, but a board is rarely so clear cut that you can just beeline one color. There’s a significant threat that doing such either causes the other side to get X Force first (which isn’t an instant win move but would seriously maim someone), or they’d get a massive cascade and end up winning anyway since you’re tunnel visioning a color. A fairly common scenario would be say you see a match 4 on the board, and it’s a state where the new tiles can easily create a match 4 for the opponent. But just because the new tiles could create a match 4 for the other guy doesn’t mean it’s correct to pass up the match 4. In such a scenario it can easily be like you make a green match 4, which creates a black match 4 for the opponent, and now they’ve a huge lead on you on the race to Surgical Strike. I had many games against other X Forces and I have long winning streaks where I was barely touched followed by complete wipeout from the Surgical Strike green into X Force combo. It just doesn’t take that much for the AI to beat you on the race to Surgical Strike. You only need some combination of bad board/good luck for them/bad luck for you, and none of these factors needs to approach anywhere in the miracle cascade range.

There’s nothing particular wrong with a certain team being dominant as long as the dominance isn’t absolute. Prior to X Force the strongest team is likely Sentry + The Hood + Daken, and without boosts it’s pretty close to 50/50 too for a mirror match and there sure isn’t a better team you can use instead of that. Now in this case the player gets better than 50/50 odds because the AI doesn’t use Sacrifice or Intimidation in conjunction with WR. In the case of X Force, his presence puts Surgical Strike on green which makes both of his abilities AI-proof. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a close to 50/50 mirror match, but I’m saying the health pack system cannot work with such close fights. If the odds of winning is close to 50%, that means there’s a 25% chance you’d get 0 points in PvP and be out of commision for 3 hours after 2 games (losing both) if you played fair. That’s not an acceptable form of playing for anyone. Currently this isn’t a problem because there’s nothing fair about PvP as long as Sentry and boosts are around, but it’s hard to imagine Sentry remaining in his current state forever and I’m pretty sure there’s a plan to phase out boosts (otherwise they wouldn’t stop dropping).

Conceptually, I think it’s totally fine to go 8-7 in 15 X Force mirror matches, but going 8-7 means you need to use at least 21 health packs and at the current rate they regen, that’d mean you would need to spread out in at least 4 separate sessions 3 hours apart, and your unlucky session may end as quickly as 2 games. It’s hard to imagine anyone would have the motivation to continue playing the game like this. I’m not saying this is a reason to not make the game fair, but they absolutely need to be aware that going 8-7 right now is a completely unacceptable result in PvP due to health packs and make adjustments to accomodate that (like increase size of max health pack to 25 and have them regen 3 times as fast, for example).

7

This is a bit of a Devil’s advocate post, but if losing the cheap stuff means XForce or bust, then balance hasn’t really been achieved, no?

Balance in the truest sense should mean that regardless of who you use, there’s an effective non-mirror counter (and really more than one).

8

Completely agree. If the situation is “X-Force is 50/50 against himself and favored against everyone else” then we’re not talking about a balanced game. The X-Force rework was, overall, a good one and it’s understandable that they overshot a bit on how strong he is, given the atrocious state he had been in for so long leading up to that point.

We’ve heard a lot about the devs wanting to promote roster diversity and encouraging extended play through the use of multiple teams, but we’ve seen nothing to back that up. If they want diverse rosters, they need to provide characters that don’t get completely demolished against the stronger characters in their same tier (“tier” meaning number of stars, here) and do something about how defensive teams work in PvP. Really I think the set-up of defending teams is what causes most of the PvP problems. If I’m not playing my last match with my strongest team, then I’m being punished as a player. Combine that with a lack of balance across character tiers and you create a scenario that takes emphasis away from using lots of character from a diverse roster.

What I’d like to see from the devs is a willingness to make larger, more sweeping balance changes to characters from season to season. The season format gives them the perfect opportunity to play around with character balance. They can nerf Laken and lThor into the ground one season and see what happens, then adjust the following season. They’re in this weird place where they seem to want the game to have a living sense of balance, but don’t appear to be willing to commit to it. If characters over-perform to the point of excluding other characters that are supposed to be of equivalent power, then do something about it. Back before the team-up change, the Desert and Jungle environments were wildly distorting the way games played out and the devs knew about it. Instead of doing anything about it, though (Desert, for example, could have instantly been fixed by increasing the environment cost of Oasis by 250%; that’s a simple, easy, quick change) they just let it stay that way for months while they worked on team-ups. That might sound tangential, but goes to my point: they need to be willing to make actual changes instead of sitting on their thumbs for months while play stagnates. By playing with balance they can at least avoid situations where the top-tier is comprised of a single team.

Kind of a tangent about “competitive” play. It’s easy to look at metrics or statistics and say “this is only a problem in the top 10% of players” but that ignored the reality of competitive, progress-oriented multiplayer games. The top 10% performing players in a game show you exactly what a game looks like when played optimally. In one day, a playerbase can put in more combined hours of testing than a month of devs and they will naturally gravitate towards whatever is the most powerful because it gives them the biggest return on their investment of time. This is true of any multiplayer game online. You have teams in MPQ, you have best-in-slot gear in MMOs, you have gun load-outs in shooters, and you have team compositions in MOBAs. Players figure out what works best because they have to if they want to be competitive. So if the top 10% of MPQ players are using one team then, given infinite time, that is what every single player in MPQ will be eventually be doing if nothing changes. A balanced game is one where you have no idea what team you’ll be facing when you click on a node. It is not a game where you think “I wonder if they’ll have Sentry or X-Force.”

9

There’s always someone who is going to be the #1 and the #1 character against himself is always going to be pretty close to 50/50. Sentry versus Sentry is close to 50/50 and he’s dominant over everyone else (and uncertain against X Force). X Force exhibits the same trait (unclear about versus Sentry). If neither exist the dominant character who is Thor, who again is pretty close to 50/50 versus himself. But the question is where do people come up with the roster and the health pack if you’ve several matchups that are close to 50/50? Say you got a great new team to try against the dominant character but it didn’t work, do you know that this team is just bad or you were unlucky? After all if the strongest team is 50/50 against everyone else you shouldn’t expect to do better than say 60% win rate against them, so maybe you just had bad luck. Or maybe your team doesn’t really work, but even if you don’t care about your PvP score you don’t have the health pack to support this kind of experimentation. Okay so let’s say we don’t care about diversity and you just look at all the guys with a ton of points and say “I’m going to use the same team as they are because that clearly works on some level”. Well if those fights are indeed near 50/50 then most of your runs will end rather quickly if you were fighting people as strong as you. Although Magneto was broken, the fact that he is near 100% win rate on offense does give you flexibility. No people probably didn’t really experiment new teams but they also got to play more than 4 games before they ran out of health packs (you’d go 2-2 in 4 games if games are totally fair and that’d be it for your health packs).

The game’s health pack system simply doesn’t support a PvP where all your fights are fair. Let’s say everyone else wins at 50% rate while fighting fair and you’re signficantly better than everyone else so you win 60%. Well, you’re still only expected to play 5 games (going 3-2) instead of 4 games (going 2-2 for the average joe) before you’re wiped out. I guess you can buy more health packs, but given how every unrelated change is accused of being a conspiracy to buy more health packs I’m pretty sure there’s no way this would go well. This isn’t a placement issue, because indeed the guy going 3-2 will consistently finish better than the guy going 2-2, but playing 4-5 games at once before you run out if a ridiculous short number of games to play. And what if you started out unlucky? Or that your odds of winning, if it starts at 50%, goes down very quickly in successive since your characters take damage but your opponent is always at 100% so either you end up taking huge risks or you use even more health packs.

I have some ideas on what team would be good against X Force, but I doubt any team is going to do better than 60% versus him without running boosts, and where do I get the health pack to try something like this? I can easily be wrong and end up wasting health packs, and even if it’s right I’d expect to go 3-2 and that’s nowhere enough to make any kind of push in PvP. So either I boost a bunch, or I just skip X Force (and Sentry), but neither are good solutions to the problem, not to mention MMR has a tendency of making the latter option impossible while the former is clearly P2Wish.

10

I actually disagree here and I think the whole Patchneto situation was a good example of why. Now, obviously, Magneto was broken for reasons that had nothing to do with Patch, but what provided the win condition for that team was less about the I-got-5-blue-so-now-I-have-infinite-turns and more about creating a very powerful synergy. The blue-spam enabled board manipulation such that it was safe to use Berseker Rage, but the amount of damage possible with 9 green and 9~12 red was pretty insane. Magneto could, of course, win games without Patch, but they became much longer grinds (there were also some alternatives like Punisher and Panther), but there’s been a lot less Patch now that Magneto has been nerfed, which speaks to the strength of the synergy. I absolutely think the game can be balanced as such that, while there may be top 3 teams, there aren’t characters so strong that they make their team formation largely irrelevant. Hood is kind of the opposite of Sentry of X-Force in that regard, since he’s so universally useful that he goes with anyone.

Characters in this game should serve specific purposes on a team. There should be a reason you’re picking someone. Characters like Thor and Sentry are ubiquitously strong that there’s no reason not to pick them. Meanwhile characters like Falcon, Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, and Psylocke go largely unused because they function best as niche picks or against specific strategies. As things are right now, for a character to be useful they either need to do more damage than Thor/Sentry (and have about as much HP) or be better enablers than Hood. That’s insane and until that’s fixed it doesn’t matter what they come up with. That doesn’t mean, though, that it can’t be done. They need to start balancing characters for teams and not for individual strength. The past few characters look like they’ve headed in that direction, but some changes need to be made to pre-existing characters for that to be relevant.

I mostly agree about the effects Health Packs have on PvP. When I asked IceIX about what kinds of play patterns they were seeing and/or wanted to encourage in their players, he said they weren’t trying to enforce anything, really and that really makes me question the time-management mechanics they have in place. They feel like things that are in the game simply because it’s a mobile game so of course they’re in there.

11

I have max xforce & max fury. The two combined work incredibly well & I don’t get attacked very often either from the relative strength of two.

Also use boosts. I earn lots of ISO for that very purpose. Why would I conserve my ISO & get rid of a 80-100% chance of winning to not use boosts & be in a 50/50? Xforce only need the green/black ap anyways. Also roster choices for xforce make a HUGE difference. It’s critical to select a partner based off of the defense team. You need people that can use the best stuff the enemies provide for ap w xforce black

12

I think I made this connection quite awhile ago that if the game was indeed 100% balanced then it would basically amount to playing tic tac toe with marvel characters which wouldn’t really matter because both sides would essentially be the same.

Given the track record with Demiurge, we do not ever have to fear them really balancing the game.

13

I’m not sure I agree that there has to be a #1 character. Balance means no matter what team you play, there’s a counter. That counter itself is vulnerable to a different counter. Etc. Simple example that could exist here would be Loki vs Patchneto, if Loki’s trickery didn’t cost a billion AP. If Trickery were down to 9AP or less, now Berzerker/Coercive are easily and devastatingly countered, or at least it’s a race to 9 AP.

There’s no current counter for Sentry, but it would be along the same lines. Something like Moonstone’s Control Shift, but on a much larger scale which counters WR. Of course, I still think best solution for WR is just take the AoE away, but I digress…

XForce’s abilities are a bit harder to counter as they both rely on direct damage and board disruption more than special tiles. Deadpool/Cpt. Marvel’s abilities aren’t quite strong enough to be a deterent, but a (new) character with some type of passive that deals damage if X number of tiles are destroyed at once, or reflects a % back to the damage dealer are ideas to create it. (and if it’s a Blue passive on a tankable match color, even better).

Those of course are single character combinations. They could build combinations as a counter instead of just a single. That’s (one of) the biggest problems with Beast/Colossus/next character they build. They don’t have an obvious purpose. Who do they team with, and what are they built to counter? Seemingly nothing. They’re just another guy in the lineup.

TL;DR: Balance should at minimum look like Sentry > XForce > Thor >n characters > Sentry. You still have mirror matches, but if you can mirror XForce in a 50/50 game, or take Joe NewCharacter in an 80/20 or 90/10 spot, now you might actually open the game rosters up a bit.

14

The human should always win a mirror match.

100% of the time.

I’ve never lost to an AI team that I didn’t already know, going in, that I’d have a hard time beating. Like, for example, if I had 2 level 94s and I fight a team with a 166. Yea, I’ll probably lose that game.

But when I have 2 166s, I can beat any team 100% of the time.

15

Sorry, I think you’re discounting AI cheats (i.e. Call of storm, Venom’s team stuns and other goodies) and boards with bad colors for your team. I don’t care what team you field, but there’s always a chance of the AI making insane matches that leave the player as a bystander for a minute or two. icon_twisted.gif

16

Despite some recent posting, this game isn’t chess. There’s a random component that can be pretty devastating at times…

17

PVP doesn’t need to be balanced to be fun. You SHOULD be winning a higher % of your games than losing. Boosts at one time I thought had to go to slow the game down but the fact is, they aren’t the problem and add a dynamic change to the game. Even XForce, who as a 4* probably should be better than basically every other character for his cost and time to build/attain his covers, can be beaten with decent success.

I think the problem will be more of -everyone is now all maxed rosters so we always face the best of the best. Hopefully there’s enough churn that we don’t reach this point but this is also why I enjoy pve more than pvp even if some of them are tedious. There is much much more variety and you can use your whole roster, not just your best offensive/defensive combo. IF you could pick your defensive team but then play with whoever you want, that would be an amazing change offensively but everyone would probably stick in their three biggest - most annoying guys on defense meaning that’s all you face. Perhaps more ‘seed’ teams mixed in with your point amounts with random rosters to add some variety.

Maybe a drastic change to the pvp point system where you can gain points but not lose points? Who knows but balanced would be best in allowing for several successful pairings, not just hood/daken/sentry and now Xforce/whoever

18

If you only gain points but not lose them it’s just going to be super grindy.

Part of the problem with boosts is that iso based boosts are basically free for anyone with a maxed roster because there’s really nothing else to use it on, which really distorts the game and makes any attempt to make balance probably impossible. It’s not necessary for the game to be 50/50 against equal strength teams but I don’t think it was ever intended that you just run boosts every fight to do better than 50/50. They even stopped having boosts dropping at all and there’s a rather obvious effort to attempt to phase them out (not that it’s successful).

If you can pick your defensive guys every fight would be Hood versus Hood because you’d almost always want him on defense and then you got to pick him to neutralize the enemy Hood, and since most events required a featured character it might as well be a 1on1 between Sentry and X Force, and maybe a couple other guys.

19

Yes, but there are mitigating factors when playing the AI that should more than make up for this random component which, for the record, helps you just as much as your opponent.

  1. They never match 5 unless it is not possible to match 4 in that situation.
  2. They are very predictable in when they use their abilities. Once they hit the AP requirement to use an ability, 9/10 they will use it. So just put your tank out there when they have enough AP for a big hit.
  3. They don’t focus farm. If they need a crucial color, which is available, but there is a 4 point match that doesn’t help them at all, they will make the 4 match 100% of the time.
  4. You control who you’re attacking 99% of the time. The only exceptions being Hawkeye pre nerf, Deadpool and Collossus. So while you can protect your GSBW by using someone with a higher green score to farm for her sniper rifle, the AI cannot. You want the GSBW dead, you got her dead.
  5. You have the option to use boosts and multiple team ups. They don’t get boosts and they only get one random team up attack.
  6. You have a brain. This part doesn’t really need much elaboration.

Like I said, when you’re playing against the AI in this game, unless you’re fighting a team who is way more leveled then your team, only a catastrophic cascade should let them beat you. And those only happen once every 100 games or so? I don’t mean a 5 match falling into their laps. I mean like 3 5 matches falling into their laps. In the right colors.

20

I’d like the guys who say you win 100% against AI fight Sentry versus Sentry without boosts, or X Force vs X Force without boosts. Yes you can do better than 50% but the time the enemy beat you to World Rupture or Surgical Strike isn’t some kind of freak accident. There was a Simulator node that was Sentry + Storm (classic) + someone (Falcon?), which is a good example of a high quality but not cheap team, and that team wasn’t easy to beat even when they’re only level 166. Yes Classic Storm benefits slightly from the levels she cannot obtain normally, but she’s hardly someone like Daken or Ares who is much stronger than the average 3* when equal level. She’d be a decent 3* if she can be level 166 but hardly overpowering.