Thank you everyone for joining our first post Unity AMA and submitting your questions. It was great to speak directly to our players in such a format and we’ll likely do another AMA in the future during another big update.
Until then, here’s the mostly raw Q&A from the doc we were using to track everything that’s organized by category. The timestamps represent the time the questions were asked in our Discord server so there’s a little bit of jumping around. Please excuse any typos!
Neil - Discord - Bug
Q: Any news on when Captain Avalon will work as intended? He’s my fave
A: On the short list, along with SpaceElsa.
Chipster22 — 10:12 - Discord - Bug
Q: Has matchmaking for PvP changed or is it broken? If it is broken do you have and idea what happened? People are reporting that reaching 1200 is much harder now.
A: It half-broke at the same time Captain Avalon released (he didn’t cause it, just giving an idea of timing). It’s working for a set of players (largely those sitting in 3/early 4-star land) but not so much for people at the further ends of the bell curve. In our morning meeting this morning we were just talking about this in particular. It’s directly being worked on.
Andy — 10:14 - Discord - Bug
Q: Any regrets for yelling at the user base for farming daily tokens, rather than any other strategy of ““mea culpa”” and turning the bug off (which happened like, what, the next day?)? Would you do it differently in the future?
A: Mostly in terms of phrasing than anything else. Someone whose game crashed and they got tokens? Fine. No problem. Should have pointed that out. Someone that quite literally spent 12 hours doing NOTHING but exploiting the bug over 1000 times? There’s ““taking advantage”” and then there’s ““Taking Advantage””.
gameaddict — 10:23 - Discord - Bug
Q: There was the whole token exploit thing and players were not told to not abuse this, which i can see from a devs pov, but on the other end of the scale will players see any sort of compensation for missed rewards. I myself outright can barely play anymore, after every match i have to restart, which means i had to skip every PvE since the Unity update and PvP in regards to placement rewards isn’t much better.
A: We gave out some compensation today that was out of proportion with the actual issue in that we all lost 3 days worth of token gains but handed out 5 days worth of each token. Our current line of thought runs that way for a lot of other issues. Anything concrete that comes up where you’re missing out on actual game items/rewards you can likely expect recompense that is at least that of what you lost.
DMZ — 10:24 - Discord - Bug
Q: Has the dev team explored the possibility that the current lag could be because the game isn’t pulling from the device cache? Or…
Did it dump the device cache during the update, & now we just need to play with all our characters to refill it.
A: That’s 100% part of it in that the old cache was flushed and you’re getting/streaming all new assets. Due to the differences in the way the Seoul Engine and Unity handle assets, there was no reasonable way to make the caches interoperable. One of the things in the shorter term that we’re working on is something you see in other games in an ability to just ““Download All The Things””. We’ve found that when you’re not streaming anything anymore, the game already gets MUCH more responsive. It’s not a perfect fix for all time, but it certainly helps.
DeadpoolVII - Reddit - Bug
Q: Why were waves changed to where new enemies won’t populate until all are downed? This greatly slows down these missions.
A: Bug. Will be fixed when we get to it.
SubliminalTea — 11:28 - Discord - Bug
Q: When will the endless loading/corrupted save bug be fixed for those of us who can’t play the game at all?
A: Depends on the issue. We fixed a couple edge cases already through data patches that were stopping players at 42/52%. We’ve got another fix to a bunch of ““I load into a black screen”” issues that are all interconnected but related to the same base issue in this upcoming binary that’s at first parties. Anything else? I can’t say for sure that it’s fixed. But I can say that anything that’s actively causing people to not be able to play is higher priority than an annoyance to people that can and will be prioritized accordingly.
Godfather Sabbath — 11:32 - Discord - Bug
Q: Less a bug, more a general query - but from when the token thing was happening, I have a small pile of nine Fan Favourites tokens and six Winter in July tokens that I’ve dared not touch, picked up post crashes and through the normal course of play. Should I keep sitting on them, since there’s no option to discard, or is it safe to open them, for myself and others with small amounts like this, or will this get my account rolled back? I don’t really want to be using tokens on a post event vault. Or one that doesn’t already have a few chunks taken out of it.
A: Nope. If you weren’t one of the ones that were literally spending hours doing nothing but exploiting, you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about.
thekzl — 11:38 - Discord - Bug
Q: will the next patch bring back the ability to see the scores of an event after it closes? we like to track those (we’re not the only ones), but it’s definitely been tough to keep up with our alliances when the alliance placement/scores disappear right away.
A: It’s not in the binary we’ve got in, but it’s on the short list, and we’re seeing if there’s a way we can reenable that via data patch instead. Stay tuned!
Darth Pastor — 13:50 - Discord - Bug
Q: Is a known bug where the Season Score is written over the Overall Score?
A: Yeah, there’s a few places like that throughout the game. Especially on Steam. Unfortunately it’s not a blanket bug we can fix across the board, so squashing them as we see them.
Zarqa - Forums - Comms
Q: What’s your communication plan going forward? How often can we expect update posts about the game/engine, and do you plan to provide us with a priority task list?
A: Similar to the Dev Updates that we’ve been posting roughly every month, we plan to continue a regular cadence of blog updates as development moves forward. Once we have a bigger update or new feature to discuss, we’ll do a similar AMA session.
Spidey300 — 11:18 - Discord - Comms
Q: I, for one, am looking forward to all the new content and QoL changes the new engine will make possible. Has someone on the team kept track of all the things from previous Q&As that were answered with ““this is something we really want to do, but will have to wait until we’re on the new engine””?
A: Yep! Literally every Dev Q&A request/bug/etc has been logged. Along with random forum threads and the like as well. Doesn’t mean all that stuff will come to the game, or be timely (A procedurally generated roguelike dungeon sounds cool, probably not coming in 2025) but it’s all written down and at least somewhat triage/backlogged.
djarcanus — 11:36 - Discord - Comms
Q: When you make a release, can you include more extensive changelog notes? Having a full list of all the improvements and bug fixes (even if they are tiny) would be very helpful to the community.
A: Noted. We’ve gone on and off of having more robust build notes over times, and I’d like to get back into the habit of surfacing pretty much everything that isn’t purely engine based that you’re not going to see.
hferg81 — 10:11 - Discord - Content
Q: Will some of the other story missions return at some point (the Sentry one, for example, among many others) or will there be new ones sometime? I’m kinda getting sick and tired of the same five or six every month.
A: Yes. That’s part of the event tools that we’re directly working on. The problem is with some of those older events is that they’re ““cursed””. Due to piecemeal updates of the old event tools, there were compatibility issues that made the events just flat out broken. They wouldn’t import, would throw out weird errors, etc etc. The new tools fix a lot of that from the ground up. So while I won’t say that you’ll be seeing all those old events IMMEDIATELY, getting that old content resurfaced (and we may as well update some nodes while we’re at it) is on the books. It’s good practice for getting our feet under us with the event tools anyway
Waywreth — 10:21 - Discord - Content
Q: - given alot of requests were answered with ““when the new engine comes out”” can you give us a concrete ETA on when new non-character content will be added? This game really needs some new events, and now with the new engine in place I’d like to see that timeline.
A: I don’t have an exact timeline. Just to be 100% honest, and to set an idea of timeline, we were aiming to have something pretty much ““all new”” for Fantastic Four. With the launch of Unity turning out as it has, our priorities are obviously elsewhere. So while I can’t say ““immediately””, we’re talking a shorter term than a longer one.
theghouse - Discord - Development
Q: If ““rebuilding the game”” in Unity was the only way to support future development, why did you rebuild all the negative or already broken features? Facebook reward sharing, nodes too close together, etc.
A: Because of versioning and branching. Also unintended consquences. For example, it seems to make sense to just completely ditch Facebook friend gifting at the outset. It doesn’t work, so why build that in? Except that the parts of the gifting API also handle some of the save data backup/tracking, so we’d have to go down rabbit holes to figure out exactly what to cut and what not to. Which we can and should do! But it’s much faster to simply replicate functionality then refactor than to essentially rebuild from the ground up.
JeffDougan - Discord - Development
Q: If you had to give the team a grade on the rollout (standard US grading scale), what’s your self-assessment?
A: C? C-? It’s definitely not a failure. I’d class that as ““broken game””. And while there are problems, that’s not it. And on higher end (not saying brand new, but like, 4gb RAM devices and such) the game generally runs ok. Not saying perfect. Not saying good enough. I personally won’t be at all happy till we’re at at least a B+ in terms of ““ok, now we can let our foot off the fixing bugs gas””
Cabral - Discord - Development
Q: MPQ has been plagued with issues since broken circle took over culminating in a disastrous release of the Unity engine despite the the long list of bugs reported by Steam users. Instead of threatening players, how are the Devs, QA, and product team holding themselves accountable to prevent this from happening again?
A: Bit of a loaded question with that front half, but basically, we’re focused on getting everything working ASAP. BCS (and those of us at 505) have been and will be working constantly to get things in order. How will we be held accountable? Frankly, by the player base, as it stands now. There’s no game without the players, and the players definitely have things that they’d like to see fixed and improved. So we need to be guided by that. Which at current, means making the game smooth, stable, and functional on as many devices as humanly possible.
hferg81 — 10:07 - Discord - Development
Q: The stuff at the bottom of the screen (starts with ““Prod:””)… what is that? Are we supposed to be seeing that?
A: For now, yeah. That’s literally just the current build, the data patch it’s running on, and the server it’s pointed at. That way when we get screenshots for any bugs, we can know exactly where we should be looking at in terms of code versions for an issue. That’ll be going away in a couple builds at most.
Skar — 10:08 - Discord - Development
Q: does unity not require data pushes anymore? how do you ensure everyone gets the token changeover etc at the same time?
A: At this very current moment, Unity still gets data pushes the same as non-Unity did. But it also allows for inline pushes that don’t do the whole ““upend your experience”” that happened with the old engine. So just a more streamlined experience in that regard. It’s a definite advantage to how Unity handles server based data packages. Built-in win.
Blitz — 10:11 - Discord - Development
Q: On behalf of my alliance most are in agreeance the new update is lagging, its not formatted correctly to certain mobile OS and the game takes a while to load. The Question is do we have an idea of when the Unity Update will be more stable and user friendly across all devices (I currently have it on a Samsung 23, and the screen is shrunk and the top and bottom are cut off)
A: Bit of a bigger question than I think you’re asking. The simple answer is ““We’re not perfectly happy with it right now, and won’t be stopping on fixing that up until we’re sitting in a better position than pre-Unity was””. Some QoL updates will come in while we’re doing that too, so it’s not a case of ““we’ll get parity and move forward””, but it’s going to be a process of catchup AND new stuff at the same time. Timeline on all that? As quick as we reasonably can.
thekzl — 10:12 - Discord - Development
Q: - from a functionality perspective, lots of your focus is clearly going to be on improving the engine, and then making some quick wins in terms of adding new content (e.g. characters, events, even other fun stuff) – but it seems like some of the ““wants”” that are voiced aren’t necessarily impacting everyone equally. do you have a prioritization designator in your funnel of bugs that speaks to ““impacts everyone”” vs ““impacts just a few””?
A: Yep, we do. And just because it only impacts a few people doesn’t mean it may not be more important than something that impacts everyone. For example, the question earlier about having Saved Teams able to save 1/2 person teams. Not a lot of people actually USE saved teams, or use the workarounds to sneak in 2 person teams as-is. But it’s a great QoL/feature that is a great win for those that engage with it.
Daiches — 10:08 - Discord - Development
Q: My main question is this:
Why was the old engine ported wholesale into Unity instead of creating a new engine from the ground up? The pint of Unity was getting rid of the spaghetti code, was it not?
Then why do we see clear examples that this was not what happened. We have the non-functional-for-years FB friend sharing. We have TU sending from 3 UIX ago that requires 7 minutes to scroll just to send an MBW TU. We have the Vine leveling with duplicates screen on that same UIX.
And we also see any indication that zero quick wins were even added in a first phase, such as number of boosts to buy or again - the TU sending interface.
So can you tell us why you went for just a copy/paste after well over a year of development?
Thank you in advance (I know State of the Union addresses this, but the way it is explained is as if the live Beta staggered roll out and all the issues was always going to be part of the plan. If you did Beta AFTER testing all systems in one go, there would have been no need to code in dead features like FB sharing)
A: Spaghetti code: Yes and no. Yes, definitely doing refactoring and removing a lot of that. It’s currently happening. Somewhat happened with the initial port as well. But as I said with Facebook as an example, some of the spaghetti code is actually a result of interconnected pieces that have to be unspaghettified. Which, with the old code base was MUCH more difficult. One of the things that we did with Unity was to make things much more modular. So while the functionality is all ““the same””, it’s much easier to start and continue to change things because those links are more bisible.
UI wins: Was never the intent for initial release. We definitely want to do UI updates (the Team Up UI is straight out of 2016, the Alliance chat is still old) and that’s coming. But was never the goal of initial release.
Why a copy paste: MPQ seems easy. It’s just a match 3 board with some characters that influence the board. But when you get into it, there are a LOT of complexities with how characters, events, alliances, etc are parsed. Rebuilding all that from the ground up in a way that would have provided exact and expandable functionality would have taken even longer.
Frikisada — 10:04 - Discord - Development
Q: Has there been any ““vibe coding”” (use of LLM/AI tools) involved on the migration to Unity?
A: Nope. Not really a fan in anything that even TOUCHES on something production facing. FAR too much opportunity for ‘oopsie’ security issues.
Areebob — 10:29 - Discord - Development
Q: is the current “feel” going to be permanent? The whole game feels like it’s running on fast forward, but then freezes to parse each gem match. Makes for a lurching feeling. Also post-match xp bars move wildly, sometimes sliding in reverse. I assume that’s not intentional.
A: Absolutely not.
ThisisClemFandango — 10:40 - Discord - Development
Q: @IceIX are bcs aware of the reaction to the daily play tokens on the forum? Are you concerned it could of alienated users who were already struggling with crashes and things not working properly
A: We’re aware, yeah. Sokun and I keep up on the forums as well as here, even if I haven’t had time to actually take part.
Seph1roth5(not unity’d)
[DDO]
— 10:44 - Discord - Development
Q: is there a reason why new supports have been missing for over a year? Are they harder to create than characters? We used to get a new one every month so it’s very weird to have such a long dry spell.
[Followup Question] If it’s lack of time/manpower, have you thought about having another/more contests like the reddit one where players could make up characters? That’s always fun
A: Supports: Easier to create than characters, but monetarily did MUCH more poorly in comparison to the work for a character. So when you compare the work and the result, it turns into a bean counting exercise. And given that a lot of the beans were going towards getting Unity done, it made for a shift in priority. Doesn’t mean no more Supports ever, or that we’re going to … stop supporting Supports. Just something we had to make a call on for a while.
Contests: I don’t know about a ““Make a character”” contest in particular, but more community contests are something we’d definitely like to do. It’s work that mostly fall on Sokun and my shoulders, but it’s FUN work.
Eyenerd — 10:56 - Discord - Development
Q: Do you have to get license or permission from Marvel to create characters? We have too many Iron man/ Spiderman variants when there are other great characters like Man-Thing, Alpha Flight, X-Force, etc
A: Without getting too deep into the contractual stuff and inviting the wrath of the Marvel Ninja Lawyers, we theoretically can put anything mainline Marvel has worked on that isn’t an obvious sublicense. So yeah, we know that Marvel did some Transformers comics. But you’re not likely to see Optimus Prime any time soon. And some characters in particular can be fraught with licensing issues that create blockers. Again, without getting into it, there’s a reason Namor wasn’t in any games or media anywhere then suddenly he was. One of the other parts of it is that we have to keep an eye on ““character families”” and make sure they’re somewhat balanced. We’re making a Marvel game, not a Spider-Man game or an Avengers game, etc. So that means balancing out all the various characters we put in. And sometimes, those characters can be sorted into some weird families. So when you see a couple Spider-Man related characters, it’s probably as much because we need to balance out family counts as much as ““we want more Spiders!””
I’ll also point out that every time we do a poll, even with ““joke”” characters like Stilt-Man or Supaidaman, you all keep voting for them.
djarcanus — 10:57 - Discord - Development
Q: There are some players who still haven’t updated to Unity. are they getting any code changes during data pushes?
A: Yep. Which has been part of our major issues lately that we’re putting to bed. ALL builds, AND subversions need their own individual patch lines. So instead of running 4 SKUs (one for each platform), we’re running 8+ to keep everyone up to date across versioning.
IHaveThatPower — 11:17 - Discord - Development
Q: What do you make of the general accusations that ““devs don’t play/understand their own game””, both as pertains to the state of the Unity release as well as the game’s ecosystems (PvE, PvP, reward structures, etc.) generally?
(Disclaimer: I do not hold this view, but it exhausts me to see it all the freakin’ time, and am curious how it hits on your side of the screen.)
A: I mean, I’ve been dealing with that accusation since the day the game came out. There’s two sides to the coin. Nearly everyone on the team from Marketing to Engineering to Production plays the game. On Live. So yes, we know how the game is playing. But on the other side of that coin, the entire dev/support team’s hours in the game is dwarfed by even a portion of the player base every single day. QA can test a feature for 200 hours, and the day it goes out, players will have put in orders of magnitude more time on that feature. So yeah, no. We get the game. But at the same time, no. We obviously don’t get the game, because we’re only human. And You Are Legion. So we’re always open to learning from player positions.
RoshiP — 11:32 - Discord - Development
Q: any thoughts on making dual characters like Cap or Ironman as one character and the powers can flip similar to Legion?
A: ::Absolutely not an announcement, really, just an anecdote:: At one point around the time of Champions 2.0/Ascension, we were looking at the possibility of combining characters into ““Archetypes””. So instead of 4 Black Widows, you had one, but you could unlock the different variants and their abilities into one Black Widow archetype. So Black Widow with Sniper Rifle, Enfilade, and Anti-Gravity Device if you wanted. And select the costume you wanted for the ones available. For a multitude of reasons, that wasn’t the way we went. But man, that’d be cool.
IHaveThatPower — 11:52 - Discord - Economy
Q: How likely are we to see a reduction in the HP costs for cover exchanges? When they were introduced, they were pretty roundly called out as being too expensive. At the time, some number crunching by community members here was received rather positively by you. Has anything come of that?
A: 1-3-Star costs are about where we want them given the rewards and power boosts that each cover gives at that level and the costs. 4/5? You’ll see so… :::mMMPPH:: Fine. I’m being told to not say anything right now.
Spoit — 11:55 - Discord - Events
Q: Talking about puzzles, obviously it’s low priority and should wait until things aren’t on fire, but is there any chance of another look at how level scaling works in the puzzle gauntlet? It’s mostly a problem with the terminal nodes where you’re bringing in a 3 or 4 star, but some of them anhilate you with match damage within like half a dozen turns, which isn’t a problem for actual 3-4* rosters. IIRC the legion-match-special-tiles one is particularly bad
A: We want to do a relook at Puzzle Gauntlet in general. It’s old, it’s stale, and there are so many neat ideas and things within that toolset that we’re just not using, and some tools that are being used that just create an annoying puzzle. So no, but also yes.
Tony Foot - Discord - Events
Q: For me one of the best periods of time in this game was when boss events took community work to figure out teams. Now for everyone they seem to be expected as match one and win. Could these be made harder by CL or any other method?
A: Yep, that’s one of the things we’d like to do with Boss Events in particular. Not necessarily Quandary level ““Go get yourself a guide””, but things more like Apocalypse before oneshotting where you need to figure out the best ways to fight them and not just totally power through.
Darth Pastor - Discord - Events
Q: Will there be other themed characters used in the lightning matches? That feels stale.
A: Once we get the event tools worked out, Lightning Rounds are something we’d like to refresh, yes. It’s gotten a bit old fighting Ragnarok and Doom, EVERY. TIME.
EmmetJupiter — 10:07 - Discord - Features
Q: are there any plans to expand or add to the single player campaign experience? As of now we have the base campaign and that’s it, leaving the majority of the game to be cycled events that everyone has already seen. Is there any inkling of a plan to improve the TRUE singleplayer experience?
A: Yup, both in terms of solo play and in terms of storyline itself. Building out event/mission tools is one of the big strengths of the new engine. To say that making any event that wasn’t a copy paste of the previous like a PVP event was difficult is a vast understatement with the old engine. We’re eagerly building stuff that enables us to do new and interesting things with events, both competitive and solo.
Daiches — 10:08 - Discord - Features
Q: Will we ever see new supports again? Having seen every support shard I gained in the last year vanish into thin air was a super great experience.
Especially since we need supports to block cheese teams like Kangveil that have no counter (an Anti-Away team)
Related: can we put the puzzle gauntlet tokens at the bottom. I’m scrolling through a dozen of these before getting to tokens I can open.
A: New Supports: Not at this very moment, nothing planned for the remainder of 2025’s schedule in any case. But they’re not gone and forgotten, I’ll say that.
Puzzle Gauntlet Tokens: I’ll make a note. One of the things that Unity enabled is better manual (on our end) sorting of Vault/Shop placement. Probably a relatively easy (and welcome) change.
eXeXSchatten — 10:11 - Discord - Features
Q: Will we ever get a Dummy fight or a fight we can modify the enemy team in? To test strategies without gaining or loosing (HP/Iso/Points) anything?
A: It’s not on the current list, really in that creating a node that you can fight in is actually a more complex thing than you’d expect. Even using debugs it’s not straightforward. But it’s also one of those things that pays dividends for development (easier node creation = easier event creation) and it makes sense to allow players in on some of that. So while I’ll state that you won’t be seeing something like that soon, I absolutely wouldn’t count a practice/training/etc node or static event or something out.
jonny — 10:15 - Discord - Features
Q: What about the future? There’s been nowhere to go for larger rosters in the game for quite a bit of time now. More supports? Five ascension? A new level of character / dare I say 6? Any possible thoughts?
Daiches — 10:18
To build on Jonny’s Q:
will you ever try to restore the competitive community by providing chase items? Giving away the stones plus the bad meta effectively killed it. And that’s a large reason the community exists as it does.
A: No new Supports for 2025 planned, but we’ve got some ideas there. New level of character/6-Stars? I, PERSONALLY, still dislike the idea of 6-Stars, but I’m cool with a Limit Break for 5s that would basically mean the same thing. But some extension of end game gameplay is most definitely in the works. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing some design work on SCLs as mentioned before. If we squish the useless SCL 1-3, what does that mean for SCL 9 and 10? 
Chase items are something we’re looking at, yeah. Could be competitive items like the Stones, could be cosmetics, could be some kind of user flair (I mean, we don’t even have in-game avatars or anything right now). Multiple ideas, multiple base designs. Simply a matter of executing on one/all of them. Planned though.
hferg81 — 10:29 - Discord - Features
Q: There was a mention of some new achievements/milestones that were going to be added to the game with the new system. Are those still coming? Any idea when?
A: Yep, extending and expanding milestones is on the ‘shorter rather than longer but no direct timeline’ list.
Skar — 10:52 - Discord - Features
Q: will we see heroic boss events again?
A: Maybe. It’s pretty much the same as the answer to ““Why no Supports?”” Heroic Boss Events were just seen as something we could make (hopefully) temporary cuts to while we do other stuff. But Heroics in general are something that a portion of the player base loves, whether because of rewards or because of the puzzle solving. Watching the community come together on the Gorr Boss Event with ONLY Dark Avengers available was awesome. Not saying ““The game will be going that path”” but we’re well aware that people like them for multiple reasons.
CerebralJam — 11:28 - Discord - Features
Q: have you considered a Level 11 PvE? 
it has been years since Level 10 was added. I’d love to see some of these maxed out long term players move up and out of 8/9 allowing higher placement, lol. I’m cool with 6s even though I’ll probably be 100 before I get anywhere near!
A: No, in that Shield Clearance Levels are a Marvel Canon thing, and SCL 11 doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other methods we’re looking at to do similar though.
