PvP is stagnant

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I see a lot of posts about how MMR is screwed up but I think this is missing the real issue. PvP in this game is completely stagnant at the top. You know what all the best teams look like, and the MMR does a pretty good job at matching you up against equally strong players. In most similar games there is generally a never ending (or almost never) power creep, so just because you’re 1000 units uber, there are still the guys who are 2000 units uber that you can’t reach but you’re safely ahead of the guys who are 500 units uber. In this game, people all reach the 141X3 relatively quickly, and while the featured guy is probably not always maxed, it usually doesn’t even matter too much unless the featured guy is a new guy like Sentry (no enough time to max without significant $). Now, another way games like this can differentiate between strength is time, but in this system playing twice as much just means two guys smack you for -40 each. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad, but this means in the end we’re basically having a field where all your opponents are practically as strong as you, and why would there be any separation, outside of shields, when you’re matched up against 20 guys often running the exact same team as you?

While in theory being better at the game might get you a small edge, the ability to squeeze an extra victory before you run out of health pack hardly matters when you’re getting hit by 2 guys with the same roster for -40. Even if these guys are somehow really bad at this game and lost two guys while doing this, the overall outcome is still the same. If there isn’t some kind of massive change to the system, then instead we need to somehow have a metric to rank the quality of the victories (and boosts would not be allowed, or you might as well just ask people to pay HP upfront for PvP rating).

The weird thing is that PvE actually does have separation. Being slightly better means you can beat those guys at level 300 while another guy wimps out, or that you’re good enough to use your level 85s to keep scaling low to prevent those levels in the first place, or even you’re clever enough to turn Loki into a victory against Falcon. Now, PvE is far from perfect too, but at least you know what the criterias are. It’s hard to overcome the massive grinding needed to compete at the top, but you know what it takes to get there. For PvP, right now the separation is how much you paid in shields and how lucky you are when you shield hop.

2

The real problem is that you only need 2 chars to own pvp and (drums please.. ) its the usual suspects: cmag/patch.. After the nerf bat mag is about to take we will finally see the advantages of having a strong roster (even more after they phase out prologue healing).. Scores will be way lower and roster diversity is what will separate elite from average.. Not the hp you are ready to invest in shields..

3

But stronger roster doesn’t help if you can’t set your defense team. Let’s say that Falcon dominates Daken (not really, but let’s just say it’s true), so you see a 141 Daken and you say ‘good thing I have a level 141 Falcon’ and you autowin. Problem is then your Falcon is awfully weak against a lot of guys and probably just get lighted up by all sorts of teams. Now of course if you can set your defense team then we’d literally only see about 3 different teams to attack, so that’s no good either. I’m actually not sure how they can possibly fix this. I’d like to use all my characters, but you just can’t let people see your weak characters at all unless you have a death wish. Balancing the character would help, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be enough that I’d risk having people see Falcon on my team, regardless of how good Falcon could be in certain matchups.

4

The only viable solution I could see is to open up the 4* game. Buff IW and Xforce to make them not only viable, but stronger than 3*'s once you level them past 180 or so. Then add another in addition to Fury eventually. It would give incentive to win tourneys or push to 1300, and it would give more end game content for the top players to work toward.

5

This seems like a bunch of addressing symptoms rather than the core problems. Defense teams don’t matter because You can only spend like 5 minutes unshielded before the zombie hordes get you anyway. Given the shield lag, if you can get a reasonable TTK, I’m not sure you’d really do THAT much worse shield hoping with even modern storm.

Well, yes, roster diversity is good and all, you’re overreaching with your arguments.

6

I’m really, really not sure about that.
Teams that attack me and overcome easily (maybe with boosts, I dunno), no matter who I run? (I have 6 or 7 141s).
Punisher + oBW (no argument, they are strong)
(lazy)Thor + oBW (okay)
Ares + Thor
Ares + oBW
Spider-Man + Hulk (you gotta be kidding me)
Spider-Man + GSBW (old school kk)
Spider-Man + MMN (classic!)
Spider-Man + Punisher (taste the rainbow, maggot)
cStorm + MMN (understandable)
Hulk + Patch (okay)
tons of variations with Human Torch, Sentry, lazyDaken, Hood

Not counting cMagneto teams. I’m not sure Magneto teams attack me that much even, I am a bigger offender here, but only because I like to minimize health loss during climbing.
Sure, I can use Magneto/Patch to climb to 300, to 600, to 900 easily. Anything better is off charts. I’m not complaining, they are weak defensively and everyone knows that. So it’s really not as much a domination duo but a health pack conservation crutch.

7

Even though I am in that 2-3* transition, I do run into some teams with 3* around level 100-110. Going up in Starfall, I got mad respect for those people I ran over on my way up that ran Moonstone. Got a hit off on me that nearly dropped my full OBW then hit me with a Gravity Warp for kill. Next time I run into these people, I’m gonna switch out OBW for someone else cause I generally have the most enjoyment from a fight when there’s not an OBW around.

8

There’s no one faster for quick kills though (except maybe sentry/laken), which is what you need when shield hopping. And by the time you get to the shield hopping bands, defense doesn’t matter (if it matters at all to begin with).

9

I would argue that LT + GSBW can be pretty quick, or Patch + Hulk/BP. AoE is usually faster than Magneto + Patch when you have to fight against 12k health dudes.

10

Ah, one more idea to change up PVP forever. Don’t allow an attacker to use a hero that’s also defending. Similar to PVE. It would force everyone to use different combos, because whoever you end up attacking with becomes the new defensive team now available in the pool. We’d see a lot more combinations.

11

In the long run I think there has to be some kind of ‘battle fatigue’ like a character can’t be used multiple times in a row (minus the featured character), though if implemented poorly things can easily be much worse than they’re now.

12

Having a “metric to rank the quality of the victories” is not an easy task. From a general point of view (and not only the MPQ’s one), for competitive videogames, it is the purpose of the MMR.
Well, in fact, it is more the “quality of a player” that “quality of victories”, but I guess it is what you need: you can see the “player quality” as the succession of its victories/loss.

From a dev side, all this MMR stuff is something often implemented as “TrueSkill”. You can search on the internet, it is an algorithm that computes how good/bad a player is, based on its results. Nearly every videogame using some kind of ranking/matching/mmr use something like that, with slight variations. It is comparable to the ELO ranking (chess) or ATP (tennis), but more generic.

One of the main rule of this algorithm is “the way you win or loss does not matter, only the victory/loss is meaningful”. Because otherwise, it is really easy to trick the system: use Ares or Sentry, and the system will think you play badly. Team with OBW will be the best on this system, although they always lose on defense.
They tried to use something like that on pve, then everybody took damage to trick the system, hoping to tell it “hey, I’m not that strong you know, look, I took damage”.

So this algorithm only uses victory/loss, and with a great number of games, it can tell if you are good/not that good at a game. It can determine your “skill” (microsoft called it “TrueSkill” for a reason).

The main issue in MPQ’s pvp, given that you team and opponent team are roughly the same level, is: Skill does not matter!
You have a small luck factor (these crazy cascades…), but 90% of the time, you win if you attack, lose if you are attacked. How can you tell which one is better? I do not know, and demiurge do not know either, that’s why the pvp is such a mess.

I think a solution may start by finding a way to add some skill in the equation. Without a certain victory on offense/defeat on defense, it will be easier.

13

Remove defensive points losses. Job done!

I dont see any downside to this and it is just not fair on any of us that it is possible for any number of players to be able to attack us while we can only attack one player at the same time and for us to lose points for all those defeats (and with the AI controlling your heroes they usually are defeats). This is especially true for those guys at the top who pop out of their shield for 5 mins and play one match only to find that while playing that one match they have been attacked and defeated by a veritable horde! While i am not in that position it seems awfully unfair to me.

Obviously if you play a match and lose then you should lose points for that defeat.

14

I think that characters should be officially tiered and thus give out more ISO for higher tiers when on defense.

Maximum threat: Sentry, LD, LT, Hood*
High threat: BP, Punisher, Patch, Hulk, Human Torch, Ares, oBW*
Higher than average threat: Thor, Psylocke, cMagneto, Doctor Doom, cStorm, mStorm* (would move to High threat but 1620 health)
Average threat: LC, Daken, A.Wolverine, Ragnarok, Iron Man 40, Falcon*
Lower than average threat: Magneto MN, mHawkeye, Moonstone, GSBW, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Loki*
Ignorable, safe to leave last: Captain America, Bullseye, Bag-Man

  • is a support type, may be crucial to take out first, practically harmless on their own
15

The downside (for the devs) is no one ever has to shield anymore. Not to mention it becomes a humongous grind since whoever can play the most ends up winning. You bring up a good point about being attacked by so many people at once and only being able to win so many points back. There are other ways to cure this problem, like capping total points lost in a given amount of time, or other fixes that have been suggested on these threads any number of times.

16

Personally i dont consider a downside for the devs to necessarily be a downside. I cant imagine anyone playing this game right now is too worried about something that might impact the poor old devs pockets instead of ours for a change icon_e_biggrin.gif

Bur surely no more point loss and no more shield is a ‘really good thing’. The game will only become a humungous grind, as you put it, if you let it. It is already a grind anyway. This game is won by the person who amasses the most points and having no shields will not change that. If that person decides to play for 24 hours a day for the whole tourney then let them have the win, they deserve it! The rest of us can play at a more normal pace. The top 20 or 30 places may be taken by the hardcore and be pretty uncatchable but surely that is as it should be, they put in more time and effort and so should reap the rewards. It could be that the reward structure would need altering slightly, maybe extend the 3* brackets to reach down to top 100 instead of top 50, but i’m not sure about that. I dont think it would become much more of a grind than it already is.

17

Remove healing powers and your grind is limited by how much damage you take as eventually you end up running out of health packs to revive. That would certainly boost Health Pack sales to replace lost revenues through Shield purchases.

18

Shielding comes from people with decent rosters securing their positions or shield-hopping to higher totals.
If you remove the need to shield by removing points lost on defense, nobody with an established roster will spend any HP in tournaments again, ever.

I can grind for about 5 hours with Patch/CMags alone, after that another 5 hours with UDaken/LT, BP/LazyCap, hell if I don’t have to worry about defensive losses I can grind with anyone, even 2* teams.
Without ever having to buy a health pack in PVP.

Really not a good idea to remove point losses from defense.

Capping them, now, that’s something else.

19

Not having to spend HP in tournaments sounds great to me! Honestly, what part of the player base is that bad for?

And if you want to spend all day playing MPQ and grinding with your whole roster then I wish you well Bowgentle and will happily concede that you deserve to win icon_e_biggrin.gif

But would anybody really do that except the few ‘crazies’ (not my term)? Anybody playing this game at a normal casual or semi-hardcore level knows they are not gonna get top spot or maybe not even top ten, I certainly know my limits in that regard and am perfectly happy with that. I am not prepared to organise my life and sleep patterns around a game (and being in the Uk it would certainly mean changing my sleep patterns to place highly). What I object to is working my way up to 600/700 pts in a PVP before bed and waking to find myself at between 400 and 500 pts and needing to do all that work again to make it up to the next reward level. I realise my ranking will drop overnight as people on the other side of the world wake up and overtake me, thats fine, just dont take away my hard won points.

It makes even less sense to lose points in the Shield Simulator or for those points I lose in PVP to also be deducted from the Season total as well, thats just evil!

20

The problem is: it’s not about the playerbase. It’s about D3’s revenue.

And judging from the points total in this PVE, there are a lot of people who are willing to grind all day if it’s possible, so I’m afraid there will be wayyyyy more people than the usual crazies grinding like mad in PVP with the proposed changes :S