Reduce MMR when a 5x Health Pack is purchased

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

One sure sign that a player is having a difficult time is when they purchase a 5x health pack.

I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it when my MMR gets so high that the matches are beyond challenging – they’re unplayable.

The standard incredibly stupid fix is to lose over and over again, sacrificing one’s low-end roster to lower MMR. Tanking and other methods to lose. It’s a colossally stupid game mechanic that gets no money for D3, makes the game worse in many ways, and is roundly hated by everybody.

If buying a 5x health pack could lower or reset MMR, that would save me time. That would save me hours of time playing to lose. And I’m one of the big supporters for the game. When I’m forced to play to lose, that makes me hate, hate, hate the game, and I’ll stop spending on it for days or weeks. High MMR makes the game purchases pointless, since a better roster doesn’t give an advantage, it actually penalizes the player. This means less money for D3. On the other hand, letting the 5x health packs lower MMR would give me an incentive to spend more money, since it would remove a lot of game frustration.

2

Rather than coming up with ways to help people lose faster I think it’d be better to make it that high MMR is simply desireable.

Let’s imagine MMR is a number scaled to 1000, where 1000 represents the strongest players. As we go up on MMR, we expect a direct relationship between your average PvP rating and your MMR. That is, as you start winning more and get higher MMR, you’d still have a higher PvP rating overall. But at some point, rather than hitting a plateau on your PvP rating, your PvP rating actually drops because now you’re stuck fighting 5 other guys that also have a 500 PvP rating who are impossible to sneak ahead because they’re all crazy like you.

What the game should do is that when it detects PvP rating of high MMR rating people actually going down on average, it needs to inject some bonus iso or even possibly HP to make up for that when their PvP rating is below the target range. To illustrate, suppose people with 900 MMR usually have 900 PvP rating, but people with 1000 MMR have 500 rating, then people with 1000 MMR should have a significant bonus in all PvP fights until they hit a rating of say, 950. Note that this is done on average, so if the rest of people your MMR is doing fine, the fact that you’re stuck at 500 doesn’t entitle you for bonus on wins. It only kicks in if people in your MMR range all suffer from the same problem.

Note that because getting this bonus depends on your MMR, you can’t exactly lose on purpose to continue getting this bonus, as you’d lose your MMR for losing on purpose and then you’d get nothing. This only needs to be applied to the very high end of MMR and, in particular, when PvP rating actually declines as MMR rating goes up. PvP rating should at worst remain flat with increasing MMR. It’s okay if a 900 MMR rating guy hits 900 and so does a 1000 MMR rating guy (on average), but there’s no reason why a 1000 MMR guy should have a lower average PvP rating, as all that does is encourage the 1000 MMR guy to tank, since he is easily stronger than the average 900 MMR rating guy so he’d have a rating of at least 900 if he tanked his MMR.

3

I don’t think this is actually a good idea because that’s assuming that you only purchase packs because a character/characters are downed. And if characters are downed, then that would mean you are getting your soul crushed? True. HOWEVER, I can attest to the fact that this isn’t always the case.

From my personal experience in the game, I’ve purchased 5 packs to keep momentum going, to keep in the groove of pushing for points. Would you say that after 3, 4, 5 matches of winning and then having to use a pack really constitutes as those matches are difficult and as a player you need to be placed somewhere where there is less of a challenge?

I can see this as being also highly exploitable to those players who just stash away the free HP given out in game.

The flip side being that even if it was changed to this, since it effects everyone, you still end up in the same place you started before.

4

Err, if you hate the game why do you support it? To me it seems you’re for a considerable part responsible for the problem.

If people were consistent in their support habits – like to restrict it to stuff reaching certain level of security and quality (including design and implementation), we could all enjoy much better stuff.

Rest assured D3 have a ton of excel sheet guys saying “ignore that fix, our income is good enough without it”.

5

This!

The game design is completely insane. Where MMR is used to put you against stronger opponents – you always have a deal of benefit from it. Either by fighting for better prize pool to start with (min-rating events), or getting you more points and better tiebreakers compared to other people fighting easier (see swiss tournament structure).

In MPQ nothing of that is present even as a feeble attempt. Only the penalty is dumped on you. No wonder “tanking” is popular (or we could call it even essential) to get anywhere.

But it was pointed out too many times to worth another run – and the small changes applied just tried to cripple some tanking implementations. We didn’t even see a word of confirmation that any of the devs considered this insanity as actual defect, or anyone is put on the task to thinks something better.

6

Nonce, I noticed that you used multiple shades of green to differentiate from your moderator speak. That’s some impressive attention to detail.

As for MMR, I liken it to the song that never ends.

7

Giving people a direct knob they can spin to adjust their MMR could be prone to exploits. Imagine a strategy guide that says “save 400 HP and buy 10 health packs half an hour before the event ends” or something.