That feeling of hopelessness

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’d hate to be a new player to this game. The 1* and 2* tiers are still easy to cover, but as soon as you hit 3* & 4* land… yeesh. The saturation of characters has gotten to be staggering to look at.

New player: “Wow, my first 3* cover! Nifty. I’ve entered the big-boy game now! Let’s see, I how many do I need before I have all the three stars fully…gasp 539 more to go?!? And there’s two more tiers after that? Tinykitty this… I’m gonna go play Candy Crush.”

I’m curious how many new players are turned-off by the impossible slog it takes to build a roster. A new player could drop $1000.00 right now on cover packs and not come close to fully covering even one 3* character, without even regarding the cost it would take to roster them all.

I’ve tried to get my friends and family to play this game, and they all think its a great concept and love Marvel comics, but every single one of them lasted about a week before they felt it was too pointless. They’d be sitting on 10-20 covers they couldn’t afford to roster, and they were all for different characters (single cover each) that wouldn’t do them any good even if they did roster them; at least, not until they got the other 13 covers six-to-twelve months down the road.

The over-saturation of new characters is going to kill any life this game has left. It just keeps snowballing, getting worse and worse. Once the veterans fade away and any new players have been scared away by how daunting this game is to progress… what is left?

It would be one thing if you could invest some cash and make some progress, but even vast sums of money just gets you a crapload of 2* covers that don’t get you very far, and a crapshoot of low odds on 3* and 4* - of which there are so many that the randomness of pulls doesn’t get you anywhere close to making progress even after a huge cash dump.

When I hear people say this game is ‘pay to win’ I laugh out loud. You can’t pay to win in this game. All you can do is grind… and grind… and grind… and grind… until a new character comes out next week and you realize you might be able to play them a year down the road after some more grinding.

The developer needs to come up with a way for players to make definitive progress after an investment. I think we should go back to being able to buy covers for HP, at least for 3* covers. Maybe even 4* covers. That would go a long way in helping new players close the gap.

2

Yes, but you can catch those that didn’t realize that in time.
And they will drop serious money on roster slots - one of the main sources of income for publisher.

As long as there are new players nothing will change.

3

I’m on day 300. I lucked into a competitive alliance around day 80 after belonging to a really nice casual one that I accidentally left.

I’m firmly in 3* land, though with 28 3*'s champed, 37 3*'s rostered, and every single 4* rostered, I’m making progress. It was daunting when I started the 2 to 3 transition, but about a week after I was going to commit to it, they changed the buy back for 2*'s. That was a major game changer. Suddenly I could bankroll leveling one three at a time while farming the 2*'s I didn’t use as much.

I have tried on three occasions to roster 5*'s, with the first two being abject failures. The last? I have stuck with Jean/Phoenix (I love you Jean/not Jean) and only her. And in 6 months have 5 covers (literally blowing all of my LT’s and CP on classic tokens, I have 5 covers…).

The game is fun, but honestly, if it weren’t for the social aspect on the alliance, I would have given up long ago. LINE helps so much when you have a supportive, understanding and competitive alliance. And it made the difference in me feeling like just maybe I can do this.

But that’s just my $.02 =)

4

It’s an ongoing issue with the game. It was initially focused on character collection, and that initially made sense when 2s were workhorses, 3s were strong, and the few 4*s that there were, were trophies. The carrot was always just out of reach. I agree with you, for a game that seems designed to appeal to the completionist inside, it’s strange that the carrot is so, so far away now.

It ties into something I’ve been saying for ages - if the game is going to have this many characters, it needs to be about more than character collection, it needs to have some serious thought put into the gameplay modes. The current grind-till-you-drop format of PvE, and the repetitiveness of PvP needs to give way to more nuanced gameplay. You can see that reflected in threads like, “Does clearing PvE put you to sleep? (https://forums.505go.com/discussion/48817)” The devs need to think about engaging people to play because the gameplay is fun, not because we’re all chasing Peggy Carter covers, or similar.

5

Eh, sorta yes, sorta no. I’m on day 200, and at this point I have 34 3* characters rostered, 17 of them either champed or max-covered, and 21 4* characters rostered, none of them even slightly usable. Still, that’s a little more than 6 months to be semi-competitive. I do agree that there is no real point in paying for content. As you said, there is no real easy path forward, but in a way that’s freeing. Like, why would you even bother?

As it stands, I’m sitting on 1.4 million iso, 16 LTs & 849 CP. I know that at some point I will progress to a higher level, but for now I may as well just sit where I am. I think that the one issue new players face is that there’s too much information needed to gain an idea of how to move forward. How to obtain/maximize resources, how to find a good alliance, how to preserve scaling, choosing the right SCL/slice to do well in PvE, etc. The mechanics of the game are enjoyable, and you can definitely find a way forward, but to do so requires far more commitment than should be the case. I agree that D3 should probably carefully consider their core audience and the overall meta, but I don’t believe that MPQ is entirely unwelcoming to new players.

6

I fully agree to you. The problem is, the overflow of characters (and scaling) is the cover for the lack of content in this game. And most people realize too late, what some money (in my case 120 bucks) means in this game - as you said - nothing.

7

We don’t see the end game but I am sure that the devs see the end game pretty clearly. I would not be shocked if by the next Avengers movie we will have MPQ 2 on all platforms and this iteration of the game will die within weeks as most will switch to the new and shiny.

Therefore the devs need to pump as many new heroes in the game as they can. Why? Because whales will buy them, and casual players will roster them occasionally buying HP to get the slot. I think that was in their mind already a while ago but a marketing genius came up with CP and buyers clubs to keep the game alive with 5*. But the diluted 5* pool is not available to non-paying players (is in a limited way but not really) and the whales are starting to lose the interest in the game when they get to fight the same people and same rosters all the time. We are reaching a point when the marketing genius has to come up with another idea driving the sales or prepare the release of the new version of the game.

8

I think the biggest problem for new players is that the game doesn’t actually tell them what they need to know. That’s how they end up with too many covers and a 5 star that makes the game unplayable with their 1 & 2 star roster that they wasted too much iso on.

9

I have 11 3*'s champed and 31 3*'s rostered so I’m happy with 3*'s. 4*'s is a holy mess to get started in. SCL gave the illusion that there was a way to transition into 4* land. The fact theres maybe two or three SCL events made that pretty unhelpful. I have around 15 single cover 4*'s. Iceman and Thoress skipped because of New Releases

10

I think that SCL is their answer to this. They’ve essentially created 7 (soon 8, 9 and 10) tiers of gameplay to cater to rosters of all strengths. This means that newer players don’t HAVE to progress quickly to be competitive. It also mean that they will be able to progress more quickly by playing at lower SCLs and placing better.

In theory.

11

That might help if they stop taking it away.

12

Saturation of chars destroyed mwoh. The market crashed and so did the player base.

13

SCL is a great idea, in concept. It’s great for new players, but incomplete right now. The inconsistency with which it’s applied right now is frustrating, and being in the “top” tier despite not even having a single champed 4* is a little frustrating, though as I understand it I may benefit from scaling when it comes to potential placement rewards, at least for PvE. I feel pretty hopeless about some PvP events, though. I will admit that when an event does have SCL the progression rewards feel exponentially more satisfying, assuming I actually have time to grind them out with the annoying way “ideal” grinding still works on a very strict schedule.

14

As a player on day 223, I haven’t found it a slog. In fact I’m glad to have a mobile game that I won’t consume and get bored of in 6 months. I’m currently on the edge of the 3* to 4* transition with 32 3s champed, 6 more with 13 covers waiting on ISO and the last 2 having 8 or 9 covers. I expect I will have 100% of 3 championed in the next 1-2 months and then set my sites on 4*s.

The biggest problem for me isn’t so much number of characters, but how it’s relatively easy to get 4* / 5* characters that are useless and in fact a detriment to new players vs a help. 2nd biggest problem is the lack of 4s in DDQ. I can’t imagine the pain of leveling those 3 without DDQ. I’m not looking forward to being constantly at the mercy of RNG for progression. SCLs helps this, but doesn’t completely fix it (it might once they open up 8-10 and stop turning it off every other event though…)

15

This x 1000!! They need to update the prologue and explain at a high level how scaling works and how progression is supposed to work.

16

But they can’t tell us how scaling, or mmr, or anything works. That would open the system up to manipulation. icon_rolleyes.gif

17

You can play down a level if you want.

18

I dunno, it might be nice to be in 2* land with all characters at the softcap and a surplus of iso. I don’t think a new player is looking that far ahead to championing all 3* and then rostering all 4* and 5*. Now players have more options when transitioning out of 2* that veteran players didn’t have, I don’t know if that leads to hopelessness.

19

My Single Cover Thoress and Iceman havent benefitted from SCL for some strange reason.

20

Yeah, sure… At least something that tells people that despite conventional logic, having/playing a higher level character isn’t always in your best interest and it’s probably best to not open any LTs until you get to several 3* champion. Also explaining to players that championing even exists. As it is right now that system is completely hidden until you get your first character 2* or above to max level and you may not focus that if you don’t know there’s a whole other tier of level beyond the stated max when you look at the in-game stats…