The Future of MPQ

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’ve been addicted MPQ for 125 days now and feel like I’m getting a good idea of the way things are headed. I’ve read some of the grumblings in the forums and hear the groans in the alliances whenever another PvP reward that they don’t need pops up. I feel like there are some big shakeups coming in the game that are necessary for the longevity MPQ so this post is my prediction / suggestion to D3 on what’s coming and why.

/* First some problems that need to be solved, feel free to skip this part if it’s boring.

The most important things for a game like this is player acquisition and player retention, then from there of course getting those players to spend money. for a veteran player with a solid roster of maxed 3*, theres only two ways to get them to spend, shields, something that seasons and alliances are probably doing a good job of, and new characters. The problem with new characters is that if the character is worse than the ones the veteran is using there is no incentive to spend so this leads inevitably to power creep. Many articles have been written on why power creep is bad so lets just put it on our list of problems.
Another Issue caused by this expanding pool of 3* characters is one that affects player acquisition and frustrates anybody moving from 2* chars to a 3* roster, which is that it is increasingly difficult to actually get the covers through playing to level up a 3*. each new 3* dilutes recruit tokens to the point where token rewards are a joke. The increased starting levels for 3* chars helps a little but it still doesn’t help you battle in the PvPs. This raises barrier of entry higher and higher for any new player who wants to become competitive with each new character released making the F2P side of the game more and more of a myth which is not the way you want your f2p game viewed from the outside.

end boring part */

Pretty much any game that tries to ‘go infinite’ has these problems so there are successful templates out there that we can copy, one of the longest running, Magic, the Gathering comes to mind immediately and many of their solutions seem immediately applicable here. In particular their practice of

Set rotation:
Now that MPQ has dropped the Dark Reign subtitle, the entire marvel universe is a possibility to draw from for characters and stories. Everything related to the dark avengers should be given a dark reign designation and instead of a steady trickle of new characters, release a large new set with a new single player story mode just like you are relaunching the game. new 1*, 2*, and 3* chars. Everyone would of course get to keep their old rosters but for the new events, only new characters would be allowed, the same way standard rotates sets in and out of magic. This would lower the barrier for new players and give them a chance to get on more even footing with veterans and pay to play players. Pay to play players would also have a much larger advantage over F2Pers than with the since new char system, giving them more incentive to max out more chars. This would help with Power creep since (please don’t do this) even if you made a functionally identical char to one from Dark Reign, players would still have to level him to use in the new format. This would allow D3 to split recruit tokens along easily defined lines (like different booster packs, instead of opening one with every char ever made). Plus, thematically it would make sense and that helps sell the restrictions, why would you have falcon in a Guardians of the Galaxy mission right? With smaller character formats to worry about and the ability to use (a little) redundancy from previous abilities it would be much easier to design and push out new characters and interactions between their powers could be made much more explicit leading to potentially more fun interactions. Also specific counters could be put in since you will have better control over the character pool used in a particular story line. This would let D3 run multiple PvP events simultaneously in different formats since the characters would be shared. For example the season could be the new format while older format PvP could be run on the side outside of the season. This might help alleviate the groans from the vets that the rewards are just another set of iso since they won’t have to play in them for their alliances if they aren’t in the season.

Of course the biggest issue with a change like this is communication with the players while implementing it. A change of this magnitude needs to be announced and vetted with the community well ahead of time with the right community managers around to handle the backlash. When Magic created Type II (standard) there was a huge uproar and many people quit, or threatened to. But without a doubt it wouldn’t exist still without it and all the people who complained at the time about the value of their black lotuses would be holding worthless pieces of cardboard if they had their way back then.

2

On a related note, something has to be done about roster slots. The cost of additional slots needs to get frozen at a manageable level or there need to be alternate ways to obtain them. Even without the proposed changes it represents a huge barrier to entry for new players, nobody likes to sell a 3 or 4 star because they have no slots and the unsavvy might sell other chars off leaving their team effectively crippled which will just lead to more feel bads (which means noobs quitting)

3

This is an interesting read and I agree with the majority of the observations. I have some thoughts also where the difficulties come in:

  • Communication - Biggest problem amongst those you have listed, and track record indicates more of the same. See “Team-Ups”, “Ninja Updates”, and “True Healing” for examples. Ultimately, though, the bigger issue here isn’t necessarily communication…it’s the lack of acknowledgement of the user community’s input. Let’s face it - if we’d been completely informed with unyielding transparency about the True Healing scope before it was ever implemented, we’d still have hated it and railed on it in the forums, and it would have been implemented anyway without a second thought. Come to think of it, TUs are more appropriate here since it would appear playtesting with TUs was itself incomplete or of low quality.

  • Power Creep - I don’t purport to have a good solution for this. One property that is sometimes overlooked or lost in the sea of character complaints (“Not another LazyX”, “Where’s Y”, “Z needs buffed/nerfed”, “I can’t believe Z got buffed/nerfed”) is that the powers that new characters have are often moderately useful and pretty cool, unless they’re a Lazy. My thinking is that the development team has conceived a host of powers never before seen in the game by anyone, and whenever it’s time to introduce a new character they figure out which powers match up best with the character they want to debut, give the powers clever names related to the character, and let 'er rip.

  • F2P vs. Non-F2P - Might be the biggest topic of all. Two perspectives here:

    • How do you keep P2W players interested after they have already spent? More characters? New features?
    • How do you convince F2P to pay for something?

    I personally am a F2P with absolutely no interest in ever dropping a dime on this game. I haven’t bought a game since Skyrim…there’s too much in my life that precedes serious gaming anymore, and I am certain that not only am I not alone, but I may be in the majority of F2Ps.

Glean from this what you will. The game may benefit greatly from minor tweaks, or it may need an engine overhaul at some point if it is to remain viable. But let’s not kid ourselves…this crew implemented a new feature in Team-Ups that is wildly unpopular, riddled with bugs, and game breaking for casual PvE. If these bugs haven’t already been fixed, well…if you take care of the small things the big things will generally take care of themselves.

4

F2Per here, and I’m actually happy that I reached a point now where I rarely need to sell characters. I even re-recruited all the 1 stars I had sold, but recently had to fire Yelena and Venom again to make room for Deadpool and Mohawk Storm (but only because I had just bought my first 3* cover upgrade.) Now Fury is the only cover I’m missing.

I bet things would be even better if I was actually a part of a serious alliance, but I’m not complaining because it’s nice to play when I want and not feel duty-bound to score high just for teammates.

5

That’s the beauty of a forced rotation though. And by forced I mean you make the new stuff the promoted, shiny, important stuff, you don’t kill the old stuff, you never kill the old stuff that’s just cruel.

format rotation allows for characters and strategies that are strictly inferior to others to get playtime. Imagine a character who could see the opponents trap tiles and who could ‘mind control’ the opponent into making a particular match the next turn, or who could disarm traps. This character would be useless junk in the current meta because they would almost exclusively be useful with and against daredevil, who himself is far underpowered for the current meta. But imagine if the best attacks and abilities of every legal character involved trap tiles, then this could be the premier support character in the game, then we’d get to explore the design space of trap tiles without Thors and Sentries making us feel bad for a few months. At the pace things are going, the only logical conclusion is a your roster will consist of the optimal mix of does the most efficient direct damage in each color and has the most hp, with a head nod to degenerate infinite combos (cmags). Just look at dead pool, for 6 red ap he is capable of one heck of a first shot, without it, he’d be of zero interest to vets.

6

I’d bet that roster slots are one of, if not THE, biggest sources of income from people though. That first time you get to the point where you have to make that choice between selling a character or buying a few hero points just to open a few more slots has to be the #1 thing that gets people to first spend money on the game. I don’t see them changing that any more than I see them adding in cover trading.

7

I agree that is probably one of the top ways they get new players to spend. I myself spent some money when I fist started to buy roster slots, but those slots were extremely cheap for me, what I’m talking about wouldn’t effect those first couple purchases, if anything it would make them more expensive. There are a number of F2Pers who will never spend a penny on the game so once roster slots hit a certain price they are effectively locked out. When the choice becomes swallow your pride and spend for a new slot or sell a maxed out 3* that might just be the final straw for a lot of F2Pers.

Either way, what I meant was, in the system I am proposing, rosters will balloon much larger and at a much more rapid pace so in the event of those changes, something should be done to adjust the ability to acquire of roster slots. Currently you could do perfectly well and be a pretty high scorer if you only had 3 or 4 max 3* chars. In the forced rotation system, a much larger % of the legal characters become significant.

8

As I stated before, I’m a F2Per and the only characters missing from my roster are Yelena, Venom, and Fury, and only lacking the first two because I had just spent HP on Patch’s last yellow right before getting 2 recruits. Of course I started playing a long time ago when there were fewer characters and I would rarely see a 3* even. But at this point, I can easily make enough HP to buy a slot for a new cover, and in worst case I’ll just sell my underleveled Jaggy or Hawkeye Classic.

And Maxed Out 3-Star? You really expect a F2Per to have a bunch of maxed out 3-stars only, and not have anything lower to sell for a new cover??? Over 600 hours in the game myself, and I only have a single maxed out 3-Star (Patch), and only 2 more fully covered ones (Daredevil and Spidey…)