Pvp Opinions

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

I wanted to create a poll, but either I just don’t know what I’m doing and can’t find the option, or we don’t have one yet.

Anyways, what are your opinions on pvp right now?

During Marvel Puzzle Quest days, before shields, being attacked was terrible. You could be dominating a competition by 100+ points, only to play a match and find out you were attacked for a 150 point loss, and dropped from 1st to 10th in a matter of minutes. When shields were introduced, we started war rooms and communicated out of game to shield hop off of each other to achieve insane scores that were simply unattainable by players who didn’t/couldn’t pay money for hero coins.

In this case, if future events are the same as current quick play, top scores will come down to

A) Whoever has the most free time to play the most amount of matches, since we can’t be attacked and don’t lose points for losses

B) Players with low level planeswalkers and advanced cards/deck building who can skyrocket through leaderboards by winning up to 5 points per match by dominating lower level players without great cards (assuming that winning 5 points actually boosts your score by 5, which isn’t the current case.

Is this fair? Yes and No.

Yes because those with the most amount of time can easily dominate without paying a dime, and don’t have any pay walls

No because players without great cards (newer players, casual players), or players with level 50 planeswalkers simply won’t be able to keep up with the insane scores that players getting 5 points per match can achieve with a bit of planning and time, and there is no system introduced to help players without as much time (children, jobs, lives) keep up with competition by spending a bit of hard earned money.

As always, there are flaws in any system. A lot of Marvel Puzzle Quest players requested a scoring system like this, so I’m curious as to who likes this system over a more competitive system found in other games.

Any suggestions as to how this system could be improved? Perhaps boosts of some sort? Losses deducting points?

Or do you think it’s perfect how it stands?

2

The problem about current PvP is that everything is obscure for some reason. You don’t know who you’re fighting, you don’t know when the scores reset, and you don’t know what the game counts your streak for. I doubt this is a final iteration of the ladder system

The matchmaking is interesting: The game matches you almost exclusively against 'walkers near your level, which means you can be in different “metas” if you do not level your walkers evenly. This can get fairly abusable, specially with PW such as Gideon or Chandra that get so good so quickly and can have very fast decks. As a result you only need some good cards and can easily farm way faster than people who actually level their PWs. I can no longer do that: Everyone’s level 18 right now, but seeing that matchmaking is almost 100% determined by your level, there is little to no incentive to level up soon.

I really appreciate the sort of “underdog bonus” you get for beating higher level opponents, though I don’t see why it would give you additional points. I don’t think competitive tournaments should use a point system that’s entirely binary (1 Win=1 Point) unless there is a match limit, in which case it’s OK, but right now, it traces back to that whole obscurity detail: We don’t really know if points are even worth anything. Quick Battle right now is just a skirmish mode when you want to face different opponents and sometimes get a slight jackpot with the rewards.

I’ve played MPQ and I know that it is a game that rewards slowrolling. I had to abandon the game because I leveled up the first two 3* characters that I got 13 covers of straight up to 166, while the rest of my party still had ways to go. As a result, both the events and the matchmaking suddenly got rude and I couldn’t catch up nowhere as smoothly as before. My brother learned from my mistakes and started leveling people evenly and has had a great time in his encounters.

In this game, that is actually not as relevant; you can have 4 level 50 PW and the 5th one at level 7 and that one will get matched evenly, so at least you can’t commit THAT mistake. However, yes I do believe that the current point system is fundamentally flawed for any competitive scenario unless they establish a limit on how many battles count, which I believe would be for the best. Unlike MPQ, where match damage starts wearing down your characters, in this game it’s not strange for you to not take any damage. No one takes hits until creatures start dropping, at which point the clocks start suddenly ticking, but it is very possible to just prevent your opponent’s creature from reaching you (Gideon) or being played (Jace), heck, i’ve undone 50 points worth of damage with Lilianna. As a result, an attrition contest like those in MPQ would just become more problematic and more skewed towards the people with all the free time in their hands. It will take time to figure PvP out. Right now, i’ll just wait for a cool single player event with neat rewards and be happy with that

3

Match limit is a neat idea, but again, level 1 planeswalkers would get the advantage as most of their fights would be against higher opponents for more points, unless, like you said, the points for underdog wins were tweaked.

Remember The Gauntlet from MPQ? I think that would be a great event for this game. This would allow time limited players to complete all the stages at their leisure instead of having to play every chance they got and wake up at God knows what time in the morning just to finish an event in time, and would reward higher leveled planeswalkers, as they would be more capable of finishing the hardest stages.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for PvP, but all of them have flaws, and there really isn’t a perfect system anyways.

It will be interesting to see which route they go down. I can only hope they don’t turn events into a ‘pay to win’ thing, but if I know D3P like I think I do, it’s only a matter of time. At least we aren’t having to pay gold for planeswalker spots…yet (fingers crossed)

4

Why is it a bad thing that players who play the most frequently or pay the most money win the events? I would rather play a game where people who invest the most resources end up at the top. They could mix in other events that are more performance-based than time-intensive like 5 matches per day and go for a week, but I would still like to see some events where investment → top placement.

5

As long as it is “play a lot to win” it’s ok imho, but if it is “pay money to go faster than people who just play” than it’s wrong. People who pay should only have the advantage to have cards faster than f2p users, they shouldn’t have any other edge over f2p user especially in the ladder system\events.

6

I think this kind of a system would turn me away from the game. I think that investing money should enable you to unlock things that extensive play would otherwise be required, such as additional packs of cards.

Spending money should only save you time, but it should not immediately put you above those who devote the time to earning the same things. Otherwise it becomes a pay to win game, and it will not retain a large following for more than a year or two.

7

Paying should allow an advantage to an extent. I think the card packages are currently pretty pricey, considering you can spend $20 and come out with 2 rares and a bunch of uncommons, however, when you introduce something like boosts and shields, that’s when it becomes pay to win, and a free to play player has to save up forever just to place highly in one event.

As stated above, I think it’s best that paying helps you keep up with players who play extensively, but doesn’t give you an advantage that can’t be topped when abused. Like MPQ’s shield system. There were 2* teams hitting 1600 at a point when 4* players struggled to hit 900 without shields because they didn’t want to pay for placement. Hero points were so rare, and shield hopping was so expensive, that free players would have to save up for months to be able to keep up with the 2000+ scores that were commonplace among the top scorers of events.

The only fair boosts I can think of for this game would be:

  1. Start the match off with 7 mana

  2. All creature cards cost 2 less mana to play. You can also do this with separate boosts for supports and spells, and a boost that does it for all 3, but costs more runes to purchase.

  3. Your opponent’s cards cost 2 more to play

  4. Your hand limit is increased by 2

  5. Your planeswalker returns to the same health at the end of the match as it had at the beginning

None of these offer a distinct advantage over leaderboard scoring, but when it came down to the final hour of events, I bet people would use them more to try and win matches faster to get those extra wins needed to rank up the ladder. Maybe all boosts could cost like 25 runes, with the better ones maybe costing 50, and a limit of 3 boosts per match.

Also, if they introduce new PvE events, boosts could help players frustrated with the final stages, or who don’t have high level planeswalkers and want to beat that extra stage or two for the mid event reward.

One more thing. Is anyone surprised that you can’t buy runes? I’m sure they will incorporate it, but I figured it would have been available at launch

8

Only advantage paying money should provide is more extensive card collection. That’s how card games work and as soon as they start adding garbage mechanics from other mobile games I’m going to take my money elsewhere.

9

Unfortunately, it’s D3. They will introduce something to spend money on. Perhaps alliances like mpq. In the beginning, it cost about $100 to fill all alliance spots until they started doing it for free. If they don’t start making money, they will trash the game, and before they do that, they will try everything they can think of to get players to spend money. D3 has a tendency to make you pay money for something epic, then turn around and make that mechanic worthless after a short time. They did it with Ragnarok, X force, 4 thor, Iron Fist, Professor X, and I’m sure many more. The only reason they let the Sentry era and shield hopping go on for so long was because they were banking all kinds of money off of me as well as many, many others.

10

I’m not going to quote the whole The_Leftist post, but the ones that I would find acceptable are number 4 and 5 (but mostly only 5), stuff like the previous ones shouldn’t exist in the game unless you want it to be 100% pay to win.

This ^

11

I am just going to clarify that I wasn’t recommending a hard limit because this is a mobile game or taking into consideration the power of playing vs paying. I was just considering it a viability since this game is so differently paced from MPQ and, as of right now, uses a completely different point system.

12

PvP should be fun and rewarding without ranking high. Give the top players a few extra crystals and maybe a booster pack or two but if I can’t get something decent out of it without spending the better part of a day/week on PvP, I just don’t see the point.

Right now, there’s little to no incentive to play PvP at all. Yes, there is a leaderboard but nobody knows if that’s actually gonna do anything.

I can get like 50 runes per match but I can get those way easier and faster by beating the heavy infantry again and again (not that this is fun by any means but it is the fastest way to farm runes).

Give me a reason to play PvP and put some efford into it while I’m at it. Give me some extra runes for a win streak, a few crystals for every 10 matches won (streak or no streak) or anything like that.

I’m no big spender on f2p games, but I’ll gladly throw a couple of bucks at D3 every now and again as long as the game is fun. I’ve done so in the past in MPQ. But getting up at 4 in the morning just to get some last matches into an event so I get ANYTHING useful out of it by reaching a decent rank is just not fun.

13

Agreed. I’m really thinking top players on leaderboards aren’t gonna get anything for this first run through. What would be neat is if they introduced progression rewards for example:

10 wins: 250 Runes

20 wins: 25 crystals

30 wins: 250 Runes

50 wins: Booster Pack

60 wins: 250 Runes

75 wins: 25 crystals

90 wins: 250 Runes

100 wins: Booster pack

Every 50 wins after 100: 1000 Runes

Every 100 wins after 100: Booster Pack

This would mean any player could win up to 1000 runes, 50 crystals, and 2 booster packs just from playing to 100, or half that for playing to 50. Throw in ranking rewards that offer more runes, crystals, and boosters to top 2, top 10, top 25, top 50, etc, and players won’t have to keep up with the basts that can play over 50 matches per day (I know, I’m one of those ***holes) and still get rewards for time invested.

I imagine they will have plainswalker specific events with new boosters that feature color specific cards and maybe even gaurantee at least one or two rares for the ones that cost real money in order to draw revenue from the game. My worry is that they will charge a small amount of crystals for some events like mpq did, meaning that we will have to stop buying fat packs and boxes the second we have enough for them in case we need to spend 50-100 for an event.

I don’t trust D3 and wouldn’t put it past them to do something like that, but they can be reasonable on rewards every now and then, particularly on events they make you pay to enter.

14

Hello, newbie here but I think people who pay money should be able to get something that people who don’t cannot like a special kind of planeswalker (not Op of course) or at least ways of getting runes faster than other players… I don’t really spend money on this but i find it totally acceptable that money gets you something that not even playing a lot can get. That’s not to say that PvP events are pay to win. With good design any player with good cards should be able to beat other players with good cards. Level is currently matching people because of HP. Even someone level 1 that has a lot of mana has to have a hard time beating someone with 10 times their maximum HP