Soylent Team-Ups are People!

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Bugs and Technical Issues
1

So, there has been a lot of speculation about who owns Team-Up Countdown tiles.

Some say it is the character in front.
Some say it is the character with the highest TU damage.
Some say that each character owns one potential Team-Up and it varies by roster.

They are all wrong.

So then, O wise Expawhatsit - who does own Team-Up Countdown Tiles, you ask?

The Invisible tinykitty Man. That’s who.

When your opponent launches World Rupture from a TU, it is not launched by anyone on their roster. In fact, the opponents you know aren’t even really using a power at all. Instead, an invisible and untargetable, mind you, Sentry joins their roster and uses the power himself. THAT’S who owns the tile.

This has been tested and confirmed by a few people around the boards and, full disclosure, was not originally discovered by me, but to give my own story as evidence:

I’m in Deadpool vs MPQ, and doing pretty well. IM40 is my only opponent left alive. He unleashes a Flame Jet. In response, ever being a fan of fighting fire with fire, I toss a Molotov.
Blink
The CD tile disappears. I am victorious! Yes! Ballads will be sung of this mighty victory over the forces of… Wait… Why have I not progressed to the victory screen yet?
That’s right - IM40 is still alive. Only about 100 health, but alive. But the tile is gone, meaning that my heavily strike tiled Molotov killed the tile’s owner who was somehow not the only opponent left alive.

Thus, Team-Ups are not powers - they are characters. Invisible. Untargetable. Characters.

So, why am I posting this in Bugs?

Because this cannot be the way TUs were intended to work. It sure as hell ain’t the way they were advertised to work. I am enough of an optimist to trust that this is the work of a lazy programmer who thought nobody would notice, rather than to believe that the devs as a whole seriously thought that “unstoppable CDs” was an acceptable feature to add without telling us.

2

+1 for this theory (until confirmed by Demiurge, it’s still just a theory, but currently the only one (IMO) that makes sense).

However, I’m willing to bet that the implementation of team-up powers as phantom characters isn’t the bug - if I was a developer, tasked with implementing the team-up feature into the existing MPQ game engine, I’d probably do something along the same lines. The animations and data for each ability has to be loaded into memory, and I’d guess that the data is tied up in “character” data files, so to load an ability you have to load the whole character. Then there’s the crux of the issue, which is who each TU ability is attributed to - there are probably variables in the code that need to be filled, so our phantoms fit the bill there quite nicely.

Rather, the true bug is the fact that multi-target attacks can affect the phantoms at all. But, as you said, that begs the question of how the TU feature is intended to work: was it the developers’ intent that TUs cannot be prevented or cancelled by any means? If it is, then that poses its own problems regarding game balance.

3

This really silly implementation creates inherent issues even without player interaction. For example, Ares’ Sunder has completely different functionality (due to the possibility of additional countdown damage) depending on whether or not phantom-Ares survives his Sunder backlash damage.

4

Does Sunder even show up as a Team Up? I was under the impression that attacks like Sunder & Headbutt that do damage to the user don’t show up as Team Up attacks.

5

Oh, is it not supposed to? I got and promptly used Sunder shortly after team-ups were introduced. Probably a bug like the Redwing and Healing/Heat team-ups other people have gotten, then.