I’ve been playing Marvel Puzzle Quest since mid-December. While nothing close to a “whale”, I am a paying customer - I’ve put about as much into this game as I would any other game purchase. Since I have started playing, I don’t think I have seen a single positive change to the game; nothing that has come out in the past few months has made the game more fun, more fair, or more engaging. By and large, the game has only grown more frustrating.
I think I’m done with it.
But the reason I joined the forums and am making this post is because I know how frustrating it can be when there is a lack of communication - no one can fix problems they don’t know exist. So I’m formulating this post as an attempt to give feedback on just what exactly it is about the game that frustrates and vexes me; what it is that is driving a paying customer from your game.
With that in mind, let me start with the major issues - the things that really irritate me and make the game no longer fun.
First off, any restriction on the team I play with. I find this completely unacceptable; the powers of the characters are what make the game, and it is endlessly frustrating to be forced to use a particular character whose powers I dislike, or, worse, being locked out of a character I have poured a lot of resources into because they play in a style I find very satisfying, usually for largely arbitrary reasons (the Simulator event was the biggest perpetrator here; I can understand the whole “you’re fighting Moonstone, you can’t use Moonstone” mechanic from the actual really-happening game events, but the simulator was a simulation and should have used the same rules as PvP events.)
Secondly, facing impossibly levelled foes. If I have Daken, he is limited to level 69, yet I am constantly forced to fight level 230 versions of him, boosting his power into the stratosphere. Actually, just the level 200+ foes in general are unenjoyable to fight; the fact that the game is filled with them shaped my playstyle to an extreme degree, forcing me to adapt a team that specialises in controlling the board and keeping the enemy team from ever using a single power, because that is literally the only way to defeat foes of that power scale. It’s ludicrous how many foes of that power I have defeated, with relatively little reward to show for it.
Thirdly, the constant downgrades being made to boosts, which ties in to the second point. Boosts are a vital tool in a player’s arsenal, and pretty much the only balancing factor they have to combat the impossibly high numbers being given to AI opponents, and yet since I started playing, boosts have doubled in price (with the best boosts being converted to costing HP instead of ISO) - and I don’t even know what the heck it is you did to them today, as I no longer have the boosts unlocked to see what has changed now.
Every move made by this company since I started playing the game has been to make it worse, not better.
Those three points are the main issues I have with the game. What follows are niggling details, little things that bug but, in themselves, would likely be forgotten if not piled on top of the main issues.
There feels like there has been a heavy shift towards things that cost HP, the rarer and far more expensive resource, over costing ISO, which is a bit more plentiful; of course, it’s also frustrating that no resource is really very abundant, since levelling heroes is a pretty hefty drain on any ISO supply you might build up.
The random “booster pack” nature of getting hero covers is clearly intended to encourage repeat purchases, but more often than not is merely frustrating. I have, by sheerest luck, gotten 4 Loki covers thus far - but every last one of them has been his Black power, Trickery, rather than his Purple power, Illusions. Trickery is a situational power at best, and while I would like to give Loki an actual honest try in a roster, until I manage to get a Purple cover instead, he’s more of a liability than an asset. Because I have to wait until I actually get the right individual cover for a power (and because it takes several covers, and quite a bit of ISO, to get a hero to a level where they can start to be useful), I’ve been reliant of the same 2-star (and one 1-star) team for over a month, despite having as many 3-star characters in my roster as 2-star ones.
Throughout the course of the game events I’ve played, I’ve fought a lot of Dark Avengers, which means I’ve fought a lot of Daken and Bullseye. Daken and Bullseye exist in a category of character I classify as “annoying inconsistent, and also just plain annoying but not really very dangerous”. Several other characters in the game have abilities that trigger when a match of a certain colour is made - Wolverine’s new healing ability, or Spider-Man’s Spidey Sense, for instance. However, all these abilities only trigger when their team makes the match - whereas Daken and Bullseye’s powers trigger when anyone makes such a match. This inconsistency feels like a serious oversight, or just bad design; match-based passives should either work one way or the other for all characters. Having these two exceptions - who just so happen to be overused and overlevelled enemies in much of the PvE content - seems like a glaring mistake.
And speaking of Daken and Wolverine, this is a minor point, but it just feels wrong that Wolverine’s healing power is so much weaker than Daken’s after his recent rebalance (and I don’t even use Wolverine!)
The last thing that frustrates me is envrionment tiles, though this is largely an issue only because of the constant downgrading of boosts (as I had previously been able to cope with my annoyance at those tiles by using Modern Storm and starting with 6 Red AP); simply put, making an environment tile match is simply unsatisfying, especially given how expensive and (more importantly) pointless most environment effects are. Of the many environment effects, the only ones I find really worth using are the forest’s Thorned Rose, the desert’s Oasis, and the snowfield’s Cold Snap - basically the ones that generate AP, because using the character’s powers is really what makes this game enjoyable.
Especially egregious is Latveria’s advantage one (the cheaper of the two), which creates three strike tiles of such little power as to be less than useless. Even at the lowest levels of play, the power of those tiles is insignificant.
Environment tiles basically feel like just “empty tiles”, cluttering up the game board and adding to the game’s frustration. My disdain for environment tiles is such that I still use Modern Storm as my key character, because she is the only character with any tools to deal with the “too many environment tiles” effect.
The last thing that frustrates is the “booby prize” effect - the 1-star 20 ISO reward that seems to be the approximately 80% of all repeat-play rewards, even on matches that still have “1/4” rewards collected. Repeated grinding of the PvE events should be to raise your score on the leader board - not because you’re trying to get the bare rewards of the event completed. Even a modest down-tick of the drop rate of the 20 ISO reward would go far towards making the game feel more like entertainment and less like obligation.
This may not ultimately be a post that helps anyone, but as a paying customer who is about to stop playing (and paying), I thought someone on the development team might benefit from at least a little feedback.