So, to be perfectly clear: Everyone hates update 191?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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1

Looking around it appears at best this update is tolerated with those hoping they’d tweak it to something even remotely comparable to bonus heroes.

At worst people are foaming at the mouth because they decided to reduce your pull rate dramatically from an already poor pull rate.

That’s the impression I’m getting at least. Is there anyone out there that thinks this system is somehow an improvement?

What exactly does it improve?

Because all I can tell is that my pull rate just dropped significantly for everything.

2

It’s pretty simple. Let’s look at 5s only. It takes about 30 more pulls on average to get a 5 character now than it did with a bonus hero. Any shards earned are split up randomly among all favorited heroes - the more you have favorited, the longer it will take to do anything. However, it does allow you to choose the color of the cover you get. This is a fairly reasonable trade-off - slightly less frequent covers, but always a useful color.

This falls apart, however, over time. Say you’re on 12/13 powers and really want that 13th to get the champ. Even if they’re the only character you’re focusing on, taking every shard you earn… Since it takes 30 more pulls to earn that last cover there’s a decent chance of pulling that cover normally. Now you’ve wasted three months worth of progress and collection on something that has been rendered entirely irrelevant via rng. If you have more than one favorited, it takes longer and longer, increasing the chances that your time has given you no benefit at all.

In the old system, if you randomly drew the cover you wanted, you could just turn that favorite off and turn a new one on instead. Zero loss of efficiency, zero unspent resource.

3

If you were 12/13 in the BH era and not 4/4/4, you only had a decent chance to pull that cover normally if you were pulling in Latest at odds of 1 in 63 , in Classic the odds were 1 in 714. Getting a BH (and the missing cover at that) had a chance of 1 in 420 for both Latest and Classic.
In that situation you’d be better of not to select that character as BH (in Latest). In Classic the odds favoured the Bh over a normal pull.

4

I prefer low rate yield CDs to slot machines, so TH is a plus for me. However, I agree that it’s far less exciting and makes the game feel like it has slowed down. Hopefully that’ll change when shards are obtainable via play. (Worriedly optimistic there though.)

My only real annoyance is: open one heroic, get some shards; open one heroic, get some shards; click, double-click, repeat.

There’re still some tweaks to be made on the character UI screen. As noted, earning prizes is difficult to see. There should be “next power” and “previous power” buttons to emulate the prior iteration’s quick navigation. I like the flashy effect when I power up someone. :astonished:

For me, 191 is a release in the positive direction.

5

I hated rng on top of rng for 5* bonus heros. This eliminates both rng and dry spells with bonus heros.

I like that I know exactly where I am on my progress for a character I actually enjoy/want to play with. Even with the “lower” (not all players had equal rng) percentage of getting extra characters I feel the tradeoff for a sure thing is worth it.

6

See: Shard QoL Tweaks. Please post all suggestions here. - MPQ General Discussion - 505 Go! Official Forums

7

Targeted heroes is not disastrously bad. it’s a different flavor of bonus heroes, with some benefits and some drawbacks. But there is absolutely no reason we couldn’t have had this system on top of bonus heroes.

8

I like targeted heroes because I can finally control the build of my favourite 4* who is at 9 covers with 5 saved covers. Now, I’m 60% away from getting the extra covers and I did not hoard at all.

9

Wait…have bonus heroes gone away? Has the Shards system replaced Bonus Heroes!?

10

Yes

11

Quite the opposite. 191 was a direct improvement of many things.

RNG is gone from bonus heroes. You’ll never pull one and have it be the wrong color ever again, because shards will let you pick the color. This means no one else will ever have the misfortune of pulling a 5-star bonus hero and having it be of the wrong color, completely ruining what’s supposed to be an exciting experience.

Yes, there’s some management that wasn’t necessary before, but it’s not the End of Times the way people are making it out to be. Having shards “locked in” to a character with 12/13 covers isn’t a bad thing, because if you pull the 13th cover naturally, shards will get you the first champ level, and let you get a Legendary Token. For any character with 5 covers in a power (or possibly two powers), Shards are better than Bonus Heroes, because you get to control the color you get. A character with a 5/5/2 build has a 2/3 chance of a normally pulled cover OR a bonus hero going to the wrong color, which can’t happen with Shards. When it comes to 5’s, you’ve even got the benefit of the Latest/Classic split. If you’re using shards on a Classic character, you can avoid pulling the 13th cover “naturally” and making the shards go “to waste” by simply not opening Classic tokens with CP in the first place.

The reality is that there’s more management involve before, which can be to the player’s benefit. But for some reason people are acting like it’s the End Times. And as Shards (and possibly Mighty Tokens) are eased into other parts of the game, Targeted Heroes will only get better for players in the long run.

12

I don’t actually have a problem with the system itself, nor am I bothered about the “extra management” it may require, in fact it suits my play style quite nicely. I actually like to fuss over my roster (like the demented hoarder that I am) from time to time, so no problem.

What I have a problem with is dilution. Still.

Dilution isn’t just about pulling the desired covers, it’s in everything. Top players might not feel it as much but dilution also manifests in the lack of iso. When the current rewards were put into place how many 4*s were there? 50? The rewards are the same, in every event, but now I need to champ 90 characters (and rising) from it. The cp is the same too, but I need more pulls because its spread over more characters.

This new system is made up of two parts. You acquire shards through

A.) opening tokens (this more or less replaces BHs)
B.) earning in other ways like placement, progress, etc… (yet to be implemented)
3.) you can accelerate this with direct buys (I’m not counting this in the mechanism itself)

What will make this a good system or not in the eyes of the players is the ratio between A and B. Will opening tokens account for 90% of all gained shards while the rest is earned? Or is that split better, or worse? I’m not naive enough to think it will be 60%/40% split but we dont actually know anything about B just yet.

Obviously the higher B% is, the more the players will feel like their efforts and time are being rewarded.

Which brings me to the problem. So far what has been implemented has not helped against dilution (arguably it made it worse). It did not come with additional resources, which is what is crucially needed.
Getting the right covers is all well and good, but much good it does me, I already have 28 4*s at 13 covers and not enough iso to champ even 2 of them…

What we need is an upgrade to the entire rewards system. The Mighty token seems a step in the right direction, but again, it depends on how it gets implemented, and it still doesn’t solve all the problems.

My problem is that I put so much time and effort into the game to earn these resources, but with dilution the value of these resources decreases. And so the value of my time and efforts are decreasing too. That is what is making me feel exhausted and increasingly bitter…

~o~

Tl;dr: Dilution is the real problem and the only answer to that is increasing resources for the players. As long as it is a gain, the mechanics of it is less relevant (to me).

So far what has been done is not an increase in anything. Then again they aren’t finished with implementing everything they said they would. We still need to wait and see how the next few steps pan out.

13

I like this system so far. Ive earned a few 3s through its, and a few 4s. The color of cover has never been an issue (obviously), where before, my RNG is horrendous. I would usually get 5, and keep hitting that same color… And thats even if i got a bonus hero.

I understand what the main arguments are, but thats always in a perfect situation (queue Weezer). Quite often, that doesnt happen. And as this shards stuff goes on, it might happen less and less, because shards can always help you keep your build even among all 3 colors, aiming for a 4/4/4 before getting that 13th. Probably wont have too many situations where people go 0/4/9, or anything similar, since we can direct our progression now.

14

Somehow I don’t believe you earned “a few” 4* covers with this system. Unless in the last 2 days you’ve opened 400 heroic tokens. Or some absurd mixed equivalent.

I literally horded everything I can get for a week, which was a lot, and still haven’t gotten a single 4* and what was once a 20-30 3* pull was reduced to a handful.

15

The shard system was rumored for months so it’s possible for someone to have decided to hoard everything (many did) for quite a while.

I had a few LTs, 340ish CP and some Heroics and had one Extra 4 on the first day.

16

You don’t need to open 400 heroics to earn a few 4* covers. You need to open only 27 Classic or LTs to get a 4* cover.

17

I don’t hate it, but I don’t really like it either. It just smooths the RNG bell curve into a single number. So, in the grand scheme of things, that’s a positive. But, it also introduces other problems like the “moving target” issue where you could invest shards for a few months into a character, randomly draw the character anyway, and regret that you can’t transfer that progress to a different character.

It doesn’t really solve anything for dilution, because it is the same rate (or slightly worse?) as bonus heroes, which didn’t solve it either. So, it is different, but not better.

I guess, for me to hate it, I would have had to thought it would fix some problems. I never anticipated that the devs would actually give us anything that would fix the problems. The real fix would be to be more generous with character acquisition, and I know that will never happen, despite how many years you’ve been clicking that “I do not feel my rate of progress matches my time investment” on the survey.

18

I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.

At the 3* level, the only characters I ever had bonused were ones that were about to give CP, an LT, or a 4* cover when I got my next cover for them. This change effectively closes that loop as a means of accumulating resources - I’ll likely randomly pull the 3* cover I want, or it will appear in Deadpool’s Daily, before getting enough shards. So it seems like choosing any favorite characters is basically a waste, and I might as well let 3* shards accumulate at random (at least, in most cases).

At the 4* or 5* level, the jury’s still out for me. I suspect that in the long term this change will benefit me at the 5* level (I currently have about 10 5s championed, and a bunch at 9-12 covers). At the 4 level I really don’t know. I have about a half-dozen 4s I haven’t championed yet, and normally I would have had them bonused and probably gotten roughly 1 bonus cover ever 10 days or so. If I continue to accumulate 4 covers through shards at about the same rate, but I can choose which color I get, cool - that’s an improvement. If my rate slows down, booooooo.

But I’m not sure how it’ll land. Right now this change seems to create more problems (slower and less directed 3* growth rate, generally more clicking) than it fixes (you get to choose the cover you want), but in the long term it might work out?

19

My biggest issue, as mentioned above, is that this doesnt solve the actual problem. I’m still getting approximately the same number of extra usable covers as before. If shards are added to progression rewards in a substantial way then I’m cool with this system. Bonus points if they allow me to buy shards with iso.

Oh yeah and the extra clicks are awful.

20

That’s fair. Still that’s a lot to use up for a single 4* and we haven’t even talked 5* 3 shards for a LT? Wtf.