I’ve seen a lot of hate for the Deadpool 4-Star addition to the game and while I agree that it’s awful, I think it’s important to talk about why its awful so that everyone, especially the devs, understand what went wrong here and how to avoid it in the future (and ideally fix it going forward).
Disclaimer: I am a free-to-player and I always will be. This game just can’t compete for my cash with what else is out there. I buy a lot of games, but I won’t pay for content in this game. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with that. The business model of this game does actually require free-to-payers and if all of them quit, the paid players would find the competitive landscape a lot less appealing. Free-to-players playing a free-to-play game do, in fact, add value to the experience for everyone.
So what’s the problem with the Deadpool 4-Star missions?
It’s not that they’re “too hard” or that it’s “unfair” or that I feel like the devs “owe me something”. The problem is that it’s not a game. It’s a qualifications test.
Games can have hard challenges that are still fun as long as you actually have some tools for creative problem solving. Most of the other challenges in this game, even when they’re hard, are still fun because we can choose the heroes we use, the team-ups and boosts, and we can to some degree choose how to attack the problem. For this event, you get no meaningful choices; your choice of hero is mandated, you get no team-ups, and in most cases boosts aren’t going to be the difference between winning and losing. You have one obvious optimal path and that path still only gives you a slim-to-none chance of success. So it amounts to beating your head against a wall hoping luck stacks up in such a way that the wall breaks before you do. And that’s no fun.
So what’s the problem with having an optional challenge that isn’t any fun? Why don’t you just ignore it?
One of the worst things about this event is that it pretends to be possible. Sure, the enemy is twice or three-times your level, and sure he’s got fast attacks that one-shot you (so far with Magneto and Cyclops as the enemies) and you have slow weak ones. But you have 8 covers with your 4-star and the AI doesn’t play optimally and maybe if the luck rolls your way you’ll have a chance. But that chance is really small. I tried the Cyclops one something like 20 times. I lost that fight every way possible. Not only was it a huge waste of my time and resources, but that was also 20 games of frustration and anger and helpless punishment.
So why not just ignore it? Well for starters because I want to play a fun game and get good rewards. This is a good reward dangled out in front of horrible painful experience that I have, in fact, given up on, but the compulsion to try one more time is pretty high. After all, it’s a reward that you know some people are getting that you’re not.
What this event does is punish players for caring about this game. You can care about doing well and making progress and you can beat your head against a wall and slowly hate the game and the devs more and more with every attempt, or you can choose not to care about missing out on good stuff because the journey isn’t any fun, and hey isn’t that true to one degree or another about this whole game? Neither of these thought processes are good for this game’s long-term health. Neither are outcomes the developers should want.
Part of a Pattern
The bigger problem with this feature, the one that actually makes me want to write about it in the hopes that the devs listen, is that it appears to be part of a pattern.
I don’t know if anyone had my experience in the last Gauntlet, but I worked very hard to get that Thor cover. I even had fun with it. It was a fun challenge to try to get there. But then the very last mission required a 4-star I didn’t have and every minute I spent working to that point felt like a painful waste of my time. Again I was faced with the choice of getting mad about the betrayal or giving up on caring about this game and its rewards.
Remember the Ultron events? Those were pretty cool. I had a lot of fun trying to do well and trying to help my teammates do well. Until a day remaining when it was clear that, even if we had done everything perfectly, all the good rewards were completely out-of-reach. Some were even mathematically impossible. That event, which was solid fun for a few days and a great model for events, nearly made me give up on this game just because of how little it ultimately mattered.
A lot of people refer to rage-quits, but this game is at dire risk of hopelessness-quit. I see the bar for good rewards constantly rising, I see a lot of new features coming out that make the game less fun and less rewarding, and I see the development team occasionally releasing challenges that fundamentally betray the trust players have in a game (that the challenges it presents will be possible and fun even if they are hard), and I just care less and less about bothering to play.
Maybe the devs are doing this on purpose. Maybe they want to weed out people like me who aren’t willing to throw money at a game to make the challenges possible. Maybe they just want to hunt whales and prey on compulsive gambling personalities. But I’ve always tried to see negative outcomes as mistakes rather than deliberately evil acts, so I’m writing this in the hopes that the devs actually want to make this game fun for everyone who wants to play. This is my attempt at providing constructive advice.
A game is series of interesting choices. A puzzle is a challenge that can be solved with creativity and skill. Rewards are not, in themselves, a source of fun; they’re just a compelling incentive. When building features for this game, please ask yourself the following questions.
Is this giving the player interesting choices to make?
Is this something that can be solved with creativity and skill?
If not, you’re probably not making a game. You’re making an increasingly complicated slot machine.