The Power Creep Discussion thread

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’m wondering what the opinion people have on power creep in this game are. There’s a bit of a feeling amongst some that whenever a new character gets release, they try to make them a bit too powerful to encourage people to buy their covers. If these new characters cause the old ones to become obsolete, one would have to purchase their covers in order to stay competitive. This cycle would continue over and over with new characters obsoleting older ones and players always being forced to purchase covers to stay competitive.

The ideal situation that players hope for is for the current pool of characters to be balanced, and that new characters add new and exciting ways to play the game. The new characters should not be more powerful than the existing pool, but they should be extremely powerful in their own unique ways. This should add more variety to the game and enable more team compositions.

A power-creep environment would actually be removing variety as there would be clear-cut best teams. A positive addition to the game is a powerful and exciting character that fits into the existing pool and adds new way to play. A negative one would be a character that is so powerful and becomes a centralizing force

My ideal model for how a balanced 3* character should look like is Punisher. He’s a character that everyone agrees is a top notch killing machine. Offensive, he just melts everything. Defensive, people fear his ability to do buttloads of damage quickly. Yet NOONE complains about how overpowered he is. He feels just right. Extremely power, powerful enough to make the player feel empowered, yet not so powerful that opposing players feel helpless. Even though his abilities are not off-the-wall creative, they are just interesting enough and varied enough to be fun.

Personally, looking at the recent releases, I do not believe that the new heroes are too powerful. Occasionally, there’d be signs of power creep, but I believe Lazy Thor is more the exception than the trend. The trend has generally been toward interesting characters that add a new way to play the game

From Psylocke all the way to Falcon, I think that the new characters have added interesting ways to play the game. Lazy Thor is overpowered, and Black Panther’s black MAY be overpowered (though I don’t think BP, as a character is) but every other character has been excitingly powerful, yet nowhere near game breaking.

“Power creep” may have pushed IM40 and GSBW to obscurity, but I do not see that as power creep. I see it as balanced characters being added to the pool, exposing how garbage those two are. IM40 and GSBW were underpowered to begin with, but with new varieties of heroes being added to the mix, there is even less of a reason to play them. This isn’t an indication that new heroes are too strong, it is an indication that IM40 and GSBW are too bad

2

I’ll keep my answer short and simple.

Is there power creep? Absolutely every game such as this will have some.

Is the creep completely making characters obsolete? Not yet I’ll use the example im sure plenty of people would love to throw at me.
Grey Suit Widow and Black Panther.

Sure Panther is better but he doesn’t prevent that player who previously had a 141 GSBW from still competing and placing in the top reward tiers this game offers.

3

For every BP and L. thor, there’s a psylocke and human torch.

besides, until the impending nerf, cmags and spidey are still some of the best 3*s in the game, and they’ve been around since almost-launch

(lazy daken will be such a creep)

4

I think the power creep is largely mitigated by the required nodes and featured PVP. D3 doesn’t need to use power creep because they give a short term boost to new characters for a couple weeks, then let them fall back into a more balanced state.

Look at PVP. I still see a lot of hulks, patches, magnetos and Spideys. Heck, I saw a LOT of MNMag-Spidey-Doom teams, which is new for really old characters.

5

Lazy Thor comes close to obseleting a whole mess of characters.

Beyond him, while the new characters certainly have been in the power creep direction, the other characters in the same tier are still generally viable.

6

Thor is a God. God is supposed to be powerful.

Anyway, power creep is something that will always be in a game such as this. But the power creep is already relatively slow compared to other games so I don’t see a big issue here.

7

Loki rises his eyebrows…

8

Creep? CREEP!!! OMG ZERG RUSH EVERYONE ZEEERRGG RRUUUSH…creep…

9

I brought this up at PAX East, but they really don’t seem to care. I pointed out how IM40 is kind of obsoleted by… every character with a group-wide damage skill that has come out, both in red and in blue abilities. For 14 AP you get just a fraction more damage than what Captain America does for 11, and Thor’s yellow into green makes IM40’s yellow into blue look like a complete joke. I’m aware of looking at characters as a whole and judging them on that, but IM40 is pretty much used for his yellow and that’s it. I brought up that the only reason I use IM40 is to go alongside Patch for fueling an instant kill Best There Is, and we joked about that for a bit, but I’m a bit sad to see that they’re fine with IM40’s skills getting laughable damage increases with covers (OH BOY 10% INCREASE), compared to the likes of other characters.

Edit: originally this was balanced out between GSBW and IM40 in the fact that IM40 has a ton of health to back himself up. Punisher came out, but he still had less health, and didn’t quite hit as hard up front (but hit for way more per AP). Then Panther came out, oh boy… but it’s BP’s only damage skill. Then Thor came out, and I can’t really find a balancing reason anymore. Draining AP from other colors should make IM40 into an AP hungry cannon of death, instead he’s a gigantic rock that will hopefully generate some AP off his yellow and black out so Patch gets more colors.

10

Thor is horrifically out of line with every release before and after him so far, so it’s not a good idea to use him as anything indicative of other three stars.

11

I think Ares is a good comp to LT. If you made Ares a level 141 character, he would be just as devestating. Especially his green which has the damage variability you can tailor to your needs.

12

maybe im sadistic but i’d LOVE (and hate to a minor degree) to see a 3* Ares

13

Is it power creep or the game figuring out what it is? L. Thor aside the last 10 characters or so feel right. It’s the older characters that are either completely underpowered like GSBW and IM40 or broken Spiderman and C.Mags because the game hadn’t taken shape. Yes there are going to be peaks and valleys but a lot of games have that in the begnining. Look at Magic the Gathering. Some of the earliest cards are so incredible broken that they had to get the game going the other way. There were cards that were terrible than and now, but their flavor has been reworked. Some MtG sets are more powerful than others, but on the whole, they keep power creep in check. League of Legneds is another game, you have characters that feel okay in the begnining but as the game and play progresses you find that earlier characters are completely broken or vastly terrible. MPQ is doing the same thing, there are early cards that just suck and need some upgrades, like Loki, Dr. Doom, Bullseye, Bag-Man, and then there are Spiderman and C. Mags who when first made were balanced but as the game changed and updated they became bane’s . Sometimes it’s the enviornment, sometimes it’s new characters making the others broken, much like C.Mags/Patch insta death. Give developers some time to tweak the older cards to get them more in line, as for power creep, I don’t see it, the game for the most part is pretty balanced.

14

Had a long post but Phaserhawk basically said the thing I was going to say.

15

Not counting LT most of the new character are ‘probably better’. LT, on the other hand, is simply strictly better.

It’s okay to have power creep in the ‘probably’ range. HT is probably better than GSBW, but you can think of some scenarios where GSBW will be better. On the other hand LT is simply better than GSBW. While ‘probably better’ is generally still more powerful overall, if ‘probably’ means ‘well over 50% of the time’, as long as it’s not 100% of the time it’s within an acceptable limit since they do need to have reason for you to buy the new characters.

16

I love arguing with myself as it presents some flaws in the way I presented my thoughts.

The way my OP was constructed follows this logic:
a) Punisher (a top tier character) is balanced
b) New characters are in line with Punisher (thus balanced)
c) Therefore, power creep is not occuring

Which is obviously silly. If I’m saying new characters are balanced, I’m basically saying they are nearly in line with a top tier character, so obviously the average power level of heroes is trending upwards

However, my general sentiment is the same. Heroes are generally getting stronger. We haven’t had a bad hero since Daredevil, and he brought a really cool, interesting and exciting mechanic to the table. I believe that Punisher is “just right” and that as long as new heroes are balanced to be in line with him, power creep will eventually stabilize and we’ll end up with new releases being exciting without obsoleting old releases. As long as Punisher power level is the standard for balance, the heroes that used to be relevant (say Dr Doom) will still be relevant in the future. New releases would introduce more ways to play, instead of more powerful ways to play.

My feeling is that the game is trending towards balanced, instead of an overall upward trend. If the next 3 heroes are more in line with L Thor, that would be problematic, as the new “just right” line will be drawn at L Thor, and Punisher et al will all feel underpowered. My feeling, though, is just a feeling. The numbers don’t seem to back me up. 2 out of the last 6 heroes have overpowered abilities. If a third of the heroes that come out are overpowered, that would suck, but looking at how Torch and Falcon turned out I’m willing to believe that LThor and Black Panther’s black are hiccups instead of an overall trend.

The probably better/defnitely better is a nice way to look at it, but it depends on which characters you are comparing. Being definitely better than GSBW is not a clear indication of overpowered if you believe GSBW to be underpowered. If you take a balanced character, let’s say Psylocke and say Punisher is probably better than Psylocke, then that’s acceptable. Both characters are balanced and Pun is probably (not always) better than Psylocke. By this argument, Punisher may be slightly overpowered, but within reasonable bounds. If say… L Thor is definitely better than Psylocke, then he’s overpowered

As for giving us incentive to buy characters, they can do that via things other than power creep. Torch and Falcon are characters with interesting and exciting abilities, and while they aren’t any more powerful than existing characters, I want to level them up because they are interesting.

Why L Thor is problematic

If let’s say Falcon was laughably overpowered (at 70% boost on strike tiles), I would be a bit more willing to accept it because he brings a new mechanic to the table and you never know how a new mechanic would play out (especially with exponential growth in play!). That is not the case with L Thor. We’ve had 2* Thor for a while now and we all know how he interacts with other 2s as well as ~100 3s. There’s no reason, no excuse for L Thor to be overpowered, yet they tweaked his numbers to be clearly overpowered. This is the thing that worries me. However the last two characters are close to balanced so I’m willing to give them a pass

17

Punisher is a nice baseline because he’s probably the most powerful balanced character in the game. Nothing he does is outright crazy. Sure, it feels like all his abilities cost a bit too cheap or all his abilities does a little bit too much damage, but someone has to be #1. If the most powerful character in MPQ simply has say 30 higher strength strike tile than what is ‘fair’ and one of his move uses 1 less AP than what is ‘fair’, that’s good enough.

Lazy Thor is the only new character that is unconditionally better than The Punisher. Captain America might be a champ in PvE with his crazy red, but he’s fairly humble in PvP. Black Panther’s black is likely overpowered, but his two other abilities are pretty weak and nowhere as well rounded as Punisher. On the opposite spectrum we got Human Torch, who seems like a weaker character than The Punisher, but HT also has a much better red, so maybe that makes up for his green/black being relatively weak/hard to use. You can probably form a strict ranking order if you try hard enough, but most of these argument would boil down to “X is better for this but Y is still good for that”, and that’s good for balance and good for profit, because you’ll have people buying character Y for the ‘that’ even if X is a stronger character in general.

But there’s no such argument for lazy Thor. He’s flat out better for everything. It’s almost unimaginable to think of a scenario in MPQ where lazy Thor isn’t going to be your first pick without character level boosts, and I’d argue he can easily keep up with most level 3* boosted +90 levels at his base levels. You’d need the most powerful characters also boosted another 90 levels to knock lazy Thor off his ‘first pick’ status, so he’s far too powerful for balance.

18

Never talk in absolutes Phantron, since there is an argument for Punisher over LazyThor! My PvP team since the beginning of time has been C. Mags / Punisher, and after trying out LazyThor/ C. Mags, I can safely say that Punisher/C. Mags is a lot better on offense than LT/C. Mags. PvP tournaments almost always have desert/jungle environments, and getting 48 env AP off of a match 3 env crit triggered by C. Mags blue will almost straightup win you the match, whereas getting a 31.5 env match crit off of having fat old LT on the team is significantly worse. You might think “Oh, but desert green would fuel LT’s green which straight up ends the game”, but from experience I’ve found that 1 desert activation isn’t enough to get enough AP for call the storm, whereas 2 green activations and judgements refueling the board is usually enough to make C. Mags blue go infinite and deal ridiculous amounts of strike tile damage, which is also enough to end the game. While LT is clearer better on defense than Punisher is, I’m going to have to give offense in the jungle or desert to Punisher when paired with C. Mags, which is surprisingly most PvP tournaments and a subset of PvE.

19

If I had to pick one or the other on the opponent’s team, I’d rather deal with LT than Punisher.

20

You don’t need to tell him about cmags being OP, he’s happy to go on about that all day