The upcoming X-Force nerf: The final nail in the coffin?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Greetings all,

My name is Jonny and I am currently on day 529 of MPQ. After investing hundreds upon hundreds of hours of time, energy and money I feel the need as a loyal and hardcore vet to speak up and share my thoughts on the recent changes to the state of MPQ. I will attempt to be fair, constructive and not turn this into an exhausting “Save Thoress!D3 sucks!” type rant. Yes I am VERY angry. Yes the atrocious X-force nerf has been confirmed to me by multiple sources who haven’t failed me yet with solid intel. But let me back up a little first and ask you all something: Why do you love this game? What keeps you holding on?

I understand the business model to be successful is always a give and take scenario. You give us a wonderful product filled with cool events and characters and in return we give you our time and money. You have taken PLENTY from us and we all understand this transaction. But let me explain how all your changes are becoming buried on top of each other in a massive pile of distrust, anger, resentment and extreme loss of faith and interest.

ENVIRONMENTAL TILES: Am I the only person who misses these awesome tiles that could generate AP, stun your opponent or fill the board with green? These tiles were fun and diverse and could change the tide of any fight if used appropriately. Remember the laughable hot dog stand tiles? When we lost these in place of “team-up” tiles I don’t think anyone really asked for this. TU’s feel gimmicky and boring IMO. Yet we as a community had no say in this change or if we wanted it to stay. TU’s are also seldom used in high level PVP/PVE because most players use iso boosts… which have now also been nerfed to our dismay.

SHIELD COOLDOWNS: So let me first say I am in favor of a 4hr or less cooldown per shield but as it stands with 8hrs this is not working. Actually its failing miserably. Currently we are being forced to spend 3x as much on shields, score less overall and also be locked out of our own game for hours at a time… how was this a good idea? Lock your players out of the game and force them to pay more to play less? Getting hit on a hop now and having 5 hours to sit and stew about your negative hop while your defenseless w/ no shields available is not fun. FIX THIS. Change the cooldown to 4hrs or less and we have a decent system in place.

PVP/MMR/TIME SLICES: How do you even begin to tackle this mess. Obviously the current MMR is a completely unfun disaster but let me focus on the time slice aspect. I think allowing us to choose our own end times is great, I really do. However the divide and scoring difference between the different slices is astronomical. One shard that’s active and you can get to 1200 points in one shield. Pick a Dry shard? Your getting attacked and hopping like crazy just to reach 800. Why can’t we all play together and attack anyone in ANY shard that’s currently active? This would be amazing and our brackets would be end time dependent only. As it stands the luck of the draw to what shard you pick and the massive out of game coordination required is just too much. Currently in Smash hit I am only seeing the same 4-5 opponents over and over again in shard 2 and fighting all maxed teams. FIX THIS. Put us all back together I am tired of alliances hiding out in secret shards. It is player vs player correct? Also the amount of pressure you put on alliances with the current meta and structure is exhausting and absurd.

FINALLY… THE DREADED AND INEXCUSABLE NERFS: Some were necessary, most have been extremely inappropriate and unnecessary. I believe this is where D3 is going to really get into deep water and its not too late to stop this. No one can argue that nothing makes us feel more angry, ripped off and totally ready to ragequit then when a character we grinded our butts off to earn and spend our precious ISO and HP on gets totally destroyed. Not gonna get into the specifics but where only slight tweaks and changes to AP cost/color scheme/one specific power is needed… D3 goes totally overboard changing all the three powers and ruining the character completely. Sentry could have just had the cost of rupture increased a tad. Mystique could have had some colors switched around. Thoress could have dropped to 8 charged tiles for surge and actually had her yellow buffed but no… you ruined them and in return are slowly killing your customers as all this adds up to a giant amount of distrust and discontent. WE ARE THE CUSTOMERS. WE ARE SUPPORTING YOU AND PAYING YOUR BILLS. So why aren’t you involving us and discussing these changes with us BEFORE they happen? Why cant our voices be heard and input listnened. I highly recommend a community voting option before its too late.

To wrap this up, I have seen the Xforce nerf and let me tell you. It’s UGLY. Be prepared to have him ruined and buried right alongside Thoress. Also be prepared to have this forum flooded with complaints and even more retirement threads. This could be the final nail in D3’s coffin unless they start listening.

MY PLEA TO THE DEVELOPERS OF MPQ:

Its not too late. You can save this game and change all of these things you have ruined. Don’t be stubborn and arrogant and insist you know what’s best for us, believe me its clear you have no one working for you who plays this game at an elite level. You can show humility and admit you messed up and fix the nerfs and current pvp and pve structure. You can rebalance thoress and sentry and cancel the xforce nerf. You can extend the 3-cover rewards in pve from top 10 to top 50! But only you have the power and you MUST stop ignoring us and rolling out these terrible changes. The game is getting stale, the addiction is wearing off and people are moving on at an alarming rate. Stop rolling out so many new and poorly tested characters and maybe you would never have to nerf anyone again.Stop giving us the same lame and regurgitated pve events year after year. I love this game and I don’t want you guys to be out of a job. Think about your families and your careers… Ive seen so many good games and apps become obsolete overnight due to the poor business model and strategy your imploring. Time to get creative and increase the “give” a lot more and not worry so much about the “take”. Im sick of coming onto these forums everyday hoping for a change and seeing 50 more retirement threads. WAKE UP D3. Your better then this so prove it!

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Wait, they’re nerfing XForce? RIGHT AFTER I FUCKING FINISHED HIM?! Link?!

3

An Xforce nerf will do it for me. I’ll be done.

You pretty much nailed it, Jonny.

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while I agree with some, but not all of your points (screw environment tiles, I’ll keep my TUs), I can’t help but notice that a lot of you resentment seems to come more from nostalgia than actual change.

Most things in this game are now better than half a year or a year or more ago. I certainly don’t want to go back to the age before shields, before time slices (every PVE and most PVP ending at 5 or 6am, isn’t that great?), before respeccing, etc. We just tend to forget the bad and only remember the good. So I think it’s highly unfair to claim they’re ruining the game when it’s more that they’ve just not improved the game as fast as we’d like.

Shield cooldowns should be lower but not by much (I’d say keep 8h for 24h, 6h for 8h and 4h for 3h or something like that), though personally I’d prefer to see changes that make shields less necessary rather than more.

Same goes for the nerfs. I mean, the Sentrybombing age was one of the most boring times I’ve had in MPQ, so IMHO the nerf was needed (just the execution of it shot over the target). So it’s not that nerfs absolutely shouldn’t happen than more the execution of them and the frequency (even though I don’t have a high level Thorette I didn’t see the need for a nerf there). I certainly do agree with you that they should tone down on nerfing except when something really is totally broken (Rags, Sentry, etc.) and focus more on improving the characters that are broken in a negative way (IW, Beast, IW, Doc Ock, IW, Elektra, did I say IW?)

5

I think the problem with attacking across time slice is what happens if you have someone in a shard that’s already ended. That’d be the same as hitting a shielded guy and even if no new players can be queued after a time slice is up, you can still accumulate a lot of free hits and this would also mean the last shard always has the highest potential for scores since they have the most number of players they can hit that cannot retaliate. At least so far as PvP progression is concerned I think it should be turned into a ‘number of quality victories’ that’s defined by someone’s strength relative to your roster plus some absolute terms, say a roster that’s no less than 80% of your roster’s level and is at least level 166 average in levels (could be significantly higher due to 4s inflating the level and 3s featured going to 290 now). I have no suggestion as to how to resolve the score in terms of seasons placement, at least none that’d be easy to implement.

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If there isn’t a full refund I’m going to just leave. Uninstall the game (again), drop everything, and go find something else to play. I dropped a good couple hundred thousand ISO and over 5000 hero points (and I feel the need to point out that had I not farmed that, it would have been a good $40). XForce has been broken as hell ever since the buff. Ever since Sentry got nerfed, you guys had to have known about it, given that every single top team ever uses XForce+2 other random schlubs nobody gives a kitty about. And they’re doing this NOW?! God fucking.

7

There’s no statute of limitation on fixing imbalanced character though I firmly believe whenever you’re dealing with a ‘nobody could’ve possibly thought this was balanced’ situation there should be a better than usual refund mechanism. Then again, the devs can say that plenty of people obviously thought he was balanced based on the forum so even if such a rule existed, it wouldn’t apply here. I mean, some nerfs are actually hard to see. If we have Sentry in his original form today, since you can only boost to +4 AP you can’t do a one match World Rupture win. That doesn’t mean he’s suddenly balanced but it’d have taken a lot longer to see World Rupture + Sacrifice is too good, so even for something like Sentry you can say that we didn’t really see it coming. But X Force I’m having trouble seeing why it’d be hard to see he was way overpowered. Did devs think people can’t figure out what the enemy’s strongest color is so that Surgical Strike is going to suck most of the time?

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Xforce isn’t even a huge problem. He’s a great board shaker, but damage wise, he’s pretty on par. Dismantling him if far more unreasonable than finding new ways to counter him. Nerfing him is just silly at this point.

The devs need to be more creative than that.

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He mentioned active shards. So it would not be a problem.

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So what happens if I’m in T2 and you’re in T1, I have you queued, and then your shard ended? When I click fight does it just tell me ‘sorry you can’t do that’? That’d seem to be far worse than even the current system if I suddenly find half of the opponents I saved up can’t even be fought anymore because they’re in an earlier shard. But if I can still fight them, that still gives a huge advantage to the later shards in terms of score.

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At this point any kind of change to XF would essentially mean to me the Devs saying 4s are shiny roster badges, not worth our effort. I’d probably tap out, because no way am I chasing the amount of ISO needed to level him a second time if there is no guarantee the next big thing won’t just be changed as well.
Broken mechanics I get, but OP characters I feel like the game just has to live with, and adjust the “balance band” accordingly. I don’t want XF brought in line with middle of the road 4s, I want other 4*s to be like XF.

This is why buffs not nerfs. I understand that a buff is a nerf to everyone else intelectually, but emotionally it feels like you just go after the favorites. You stab us right where it hurts, plus you know all that iso invested just vanished. I get that some things, like infinite turns, or 1-2 match game ending moves, are bad for the game. But what was Thor’s crime, really?

Ever since the dev’s came out and said “XF exists above the 4* power band” the assumption (good or bad) has been he will be “fun balanced”. At this point I feel like a statement by a dev that said “We won’t be changing XF any time soon” would go a long way. Barring that, everyone is assuming the apocalypse is coming. I don’t know that I’d quit, because even if you kick the king off the mountain someone just takes his place, but I would be extremely upset that this shiny toy they gave us turned out to be a lie.

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A lot of the OP resonates with me:

  1. This new MMR system if kept could kill PVP for many. The Khan PVP was fine, why the matchmaking regression back to this grindy climb? I’m ranked near top 10 with around ~700 points… that’s very atypical of any normal event in memory.
  2. The shield cooldowns comment really resonates. All shield cooldowns did was extend the length of my climb. I still shield hop (8+3+8+3..), but it just takes more of my life now to coordinate the time to go for prog awards, and generally at higher HP cost. It’s not about the money, it’s about the amount of extra coordination time and effort required (unrelated to really playing a match-3 game that I love). I much preferred the prior shield hop system to the current shield cooldowns. Perhaps changing the cooldown periods could work too, but either is better than the status quo.
  3. a hard X-force nerf? Even if one can understand the logic of balancing the stronger characters to be less powerful to broaden roster diversity (and there is a logical debate that can take place there) the problem in my mind becomes that 4* are not worth the return on investment as it currently stands. Since the 4hor over-nerf, I’ve been more and more gravitating to not giving a tinykitty about the 4* characters at all and just enjoying the good to great 3* characters they’ve been releasing. Cage, Khan, Iron Fist, and Cyke are more enticing to me per amount of energy invested than any 4*. And if 4* are not incentive enough to progress it becomes difficult to see what will keep the high end players playing. It’d be better, imo, to keep releasing the great 3* chars, but also keep the 4* chars to be at a higher power level than the current over-nerfs are suggesting is the new norm.

One additional thing that bothers me here is that the changes have been coming so fast, we can’t even see the real effects of each of the changes individually. Is the nerf to boosts a net benefit? Maybe it is, but I can’t really tell for sure because the MMR had changed radically, and the characters I know well enough to measure against other teams have been nerfed, etc. to the point that it’s hard to get any real sense of the merits and demerits of each of the individual changes.

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In regards to my “universal active shard proposal”:

Having a convo with ICE he generally seemed pretty keen on the idea except for some technical and logistical aspects.

let’s say I have someone in shard 4 Qd and im in shard 5. I have them saved for later and want to Hit them but Shard 4 has ended… I understand how this could be a hiccup. I would just like to see all expired Qs rotate through to the next active Q.

And yes I’ve calmed down a bit now and understand my OP was kinda harsh, however I stand by the bulk of what I said and appreciate the upvotes and positive discussion here. Im passionate because I love the game and love the community. Is nostalgia a factor? Yes. But how goes the old saying: " If it ain’t broke don’t fix it".

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Because we are not their ONLY customers. Clearly, their numbers indicate that they can make way more money off casuals than veterans/forumites. After all, their token casino system is their cash cow and almost no forumites waste money on tokens. They are a small company with limited time and resources, so they have chosen to focus on casuals. Hard to blame them really. It’s easier to just build on your current business model to get that casual to buy a 42-pack, rather than design and implement a new system that somehow produces a revenue stream from veterans.

This game is like a drug. In the beginning it’s awesome. The fun is addicting. But eventually, after you’ve become a long-term (veteran) user, your arm turns black and it’s not really all that great anymore. As the drug dealer, D3 realizes it’s not worth it trying to resuscitate the arm of the veteran, because the veteran isn’t going to keep buying the same old product without added incentive. Instead, D3 wants to maximize the fun of the first couple of hits, so the beginner customer gets hooked. The best part for D3 is, customer acquisition is all but taken care of by a multibillion dollar corporation (Disney/Marvel). There will always be new potential customers, so D3 doesn’t need to keep long-time users happy anyways.

15

Then eliminate shards completely.

Have 2/3 shards… one for newer players…possibly one for 2*/transition… one for vets. The system places you in the right shard based on criteria of your roster/playtime. It keeps newer players able to succeed and allows vets to have an even playing field.

These shards are fed with a greater number of seeds that gradually increase in strength before maxed teams seen. Vets would start seeing high transition teams leading into fully maxed rosters higher up. Where in the “easier” shard, they see the equivalent, but maxed 2* players would see 1*s to transition teams later.

Once a new player achieves a certain level, gains a certain amount of covers for a certain amount of characters, and, has maxed a certain amount of 1/2 star characters… all of that progress leads to “graduation” to the next stage.

If done properly, it gives new players an easier, faster way to progress… forcing them to develop their available rosters, but allowing them to be strong in their respective group. For transitional players, they continue to grow their rosters and start to get more and more 3* and occasional 4*. Vet groups…much like always… some 1/2/3/4* rewards… and fewer complaints from weaker rosters/newer players about winding up in death brackets.

Will take thought, creativity, planning and time to sort it all out..but the system is already technically there, just needs tweaking. This also promotes and gives actually reason/need for different * versions of certain characters, and actually letting each shine in its own right.

To explain the idea more, look at it like this:

Noob/beginner group:

PvP: would see low seeds, leading into non leveled 1*'s to fully maxed 1s, with occasional low covered 2s.

PvP reward structure: like how it is now, but make lower progressions, replace high prog 3* with 2*, etc… most 2* rewards replaced with 1* and occasional 2*.

PvE rewards structures: again, switch up rewards and lower progs. Again, these players earn and focus on developing their current group roster availability.

Purpose of this group: Players must earn covers and level their group rosters… 1s, etc. New 1’s introduced, could be carbon copies of things like cap, wolvie, thor, etc, etc. Each time a player maxes another 1 or 2*, for instance, he achieves more in this group. The more they level, the closer they get to graduating to the next tier group.

Transitional Group:

PvP: Sees seeds, leading to low 1/2*, then into mid/high 1 to low 2* up. Top of brackets would see maxed 2* matches with occasional 3*s mixed in.

PvP rewards: similar to current progs, possibly lowered some. This groups goals would be to gain 3* covers and to max them, and to further develop their available roster. So, someone with a maxed thor/obw/cstorm for instance can do quite well in this grouping for extended periods.

PvE Rewards: Same as previous grouping. Some slight modifications to progs/rewards to specifically focus on their particular grouping.

Purpose of this grouping: to allow mid range/transitional players a chance to not only continue to develop their rosters, but to expand said roster, and to gain and train new 3s. As players gain and level more and more 3s, they will be getting closer and closer to graduating to the next tier grouping.

Vet Group:

Similar setup as we had before all the changes. Everyone in the same brackets again, progs back as they were, etc. Maybe some meeting the middle… 1100 prog instead of 1300, etc.

Seeds still exist and are more fleshed out. Breaking up MMR to allow more gradual lead in to fully maxed teams… based on roster, point totals, etc, not just on MMR alone.

In Closing:

First, I typed all of this on my phone… forgive any glaring auto correct/spelling issues. Secondly, I’m tired so hopefully this makes some logical sense.

This is just a rough outline of the thought process. There’s a lot more details to the overall idea, but, it could technically solve numerous issues that is currently plaguing the game. It allows all players, in each group, to develop and succeed… giving them a sense of accomplishment. It removes issues with shared brackets with noobs/vets, where newer players are getting destroyed. It also gives the vets a better, full playground again, with everyone in the same “shard” in a way.

Some time displacement would need to be injected to effectively replace the needs/purpose of shards. Other things would have to be solved and thought out too.

Hopefully, this would also help quell the constant need to nerf/change certain characters to the extent their done now.

Just my really long 2 cents worth.

16

My thoughts on the current state of Xforce:
Not only is he incredibly fun to play and a true 4* character he’s not that overpowered. It’s just that other characters are not up to par in my opinion. Why we needs buffs not nerfs. He’s not hard to beat and not great on defense.

How many times has his yellow tile gotten matched lol?

How many times have you SS’d one single crap tile and wasted the move?

How many times has his green destroyed your own special tiles?

If anything don’t make surgical drain the opponents AP. BAM. Done. He’s fixed.

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typing all that on the phone? you must have a masochist streak, daveomite icon_e_smile.gif

18

Agreed! Either take away ss drain or gain. Xforce rework done. I don’t see where a complete rework would be necessary.

19

There are a few things I would like to add, that do not contradict what J1P said, but they are complementary :

Why do we rely so much on X-Force ?

Because he’s a fast winner. And because he is the only 4* really who is powerful now. Tell me about diversity.

Why do we like it he’s a fast winner ?

Not only because we like things easy.
Climbing up to let’s say 900-1000 can take a long time. Though we like MPQ a lot, and dedicate a lot of time for it, playing competitively should not be a full time job.
Besides, a fast killer saves on health packs.
Many characters are fun/good/whatever, but the matches can take forever. During shield hops, time is a crucial parameter.

In the long run, the whole playerbase will play less. Ok, not bad after all, but what does it mean it terms of Iso farming ? We’ll get less Iso for sure.
It’s not good at all considering the current pace of releases (and 4* releases make it even worse).

The last LRs have been tedious. And less matches meant this time higher placement than before BUT also MUCH LESS Iso farmed. This is a major concern. And DDQ can’t do anything to the Iso problem anymore. With only 140K additional Iso per month, and 1 million Iso in releases, how can DDQ can be a good thing ?

Now, let me point out some contradictions :

F2P/P2W/Vets/Noobs and Transitioning

Roster :
A noob needs 12 million Iso to complete a roster. Take the crap out, you’ll go down to 8 Million probably. It takes more than a full year to get that. In the meantime, nearly 30 characters will be released, adding more Iso to be gotten.

PvEs :

D3 claims they want to help the transitioners, but they give them the illusion they can make it big by allowing them to win 4*s more easily than vets (much easier scaling).

What’s the point ?

Playing Nick Fury with CStorm ?
Playing Gthor with MMag ?

Whales :

This is the interesting part :

For those who max their characters quickly, you are drying Iso out. Are you expecting the whales to put even more money into Iso after all the cash we put for HP already ? Because this is what it looks like.
You claim that we don’t have to max all characters, especially the new ones. But this is wrong.

Why do you think we had Quicksilver right after Kingpin ?
Because if we did not have a new character released, the whales would not have bought the covers for him, they wouldn’t need a max Kingpin to play. Now, without a maxed Kingpin, you can’t play this PvE, and can’t get Quicksilver. (not a big deal you will tell me, as QS seems to be lame).

Vets :

Many of them have put money into the game, and you are making the game unplayable for them, because you want to favour the new players who can bring tons of cash to max their roster.
That’s unfair and dishonest.
You can’t ask people to spend money and then put it in the garbage just because they are not spending as much as in the past.

You are addressing noobs problems, but even if these problems exist, they should not be solved by punishing the vets.

You should separate players by roster level (same way CoC does). There should be events for developed rosters, and some for newcomers. You can’t mix populations like this, when differences are so huge.

4* PvEs should be specific to 3*/4* players only. What does a player with lvl 94 2*s only have to care for Kingpin ? Moreover, he’ll get 5 covers of him ???

Even though many recent changes are good, the Iso draught is still a problem, and the MMR problem should be solved otherwise.

You should spend less time developing new characters, and more time fixing the mechanics of the game. This invested time would be more profitable to you in the future.

20

You’ve stated a lot of good points Jonny. I was a HUGE fan of this game (this is the only game I play), but the love for it has died extremely. To be honest I was thinking about quitting, but as a Commander, I really care about my alliance and I don’t want to see them fail. I’m only playing and hanging in there FOR my alliances. As of now this game isn’t as fun as it used to be. The nerfs were out of control IMO.

But Jonny you’re right, I do believe this can all turn around. I still have hope for this game and hope they just listen to us. Having a X-Force nerf will kill the game.