Things D3/Demiurge needs to improve on!

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

This thread is for constructive criticisms of things D3 has done recently that we don’t like. Instead of yelling and getting angry, I think it might be more constructive to list things that we don’t like and ways that they could improve. I’m hoping Brigby and others can look at this thread and suggest it to the developers to increase QoL for MPQ.

Here are recent changes that I think have not been great and could use some updating:
-Announcements (It really really bugged me that the MAJOR change of Bonus Heroes/Vaulting wasn’t announced but rather just told to players that it is currently a thing. For a change this big, I feel there should at least be a teaser a couple weeks in advance such as “We are about to change something about opening tokens.” etc)

-Vaulting (I understand the reasoning behind it and it IS a good way to gain more covers of the most recent 3*/4s, but a lot of players are upset with losing chances of getting older 4s. Many have suggested having some tokens have the older characters and other tokens have newer tokens. I like that suggestion.)

-Team up tile nerf (This really affects certain characters and was never explained as to why it happened.)

-No compensation for server outage (I know this wasn’t their fault, but it messed up a lot of players’ chances in certain events and even some sort of compensation would be a sign of good faith.)

-Scaling for goon nodes in boss events still terrible.

-Overall communication from the devs through Brigby, etc. (I think Brigby is doing an INCREDIBLE job, but I do think the devs need to give him more info, even if it’s little pieces. Even little pieces affect how players play matches or plan characters, especially with limited resources.)

What am I missing? What else do your forumites thing could be improved?

2

I actually think (my opinion here, I have nothing to back this up) this was probably meant to be an indirect buff to newer abilities like P5nther yellow and Coulson, uh, whichever color spends TU to lower countdowns, I forget. Right now teamup tiles are the ones you mostly avoid and only match if nothing better is available, and powers like these plus the change to consider them “special” tiles seems like an effort to make them more desirable.

3

While we are on the subject of Constructive Criticism, if we want to be fair than we need to criticize not only D3, but also ourselves and the others that visit these forums regularly.

As far as D3 goes, there are many things about this game that could be improved, and not just major events. I have complained about such things as AI play, RNG, Server stability, apparent lack of QA for new patches/releases, and several other things. Some of those complaints were on the forum, some just to my alliance.

On the other side of that is those of us that visit these forums. I think too often we have a knee-jerk reaction to a change and lash out at D3/Demiurge without giving the change a chance to settle in. In the same regard I think we do not give them enough credit when they do something we like. To demonstrate that statement, look at the posts about Bonus Heroes (47 Pages, almost all negative), and the 7-Day PVE Event Rewards Update (5 Pages, about half either negative or saying the increased rewards are not enough).

I think we can all agree that anything that gives us more resources is a good thing, so the PVE Update is a slam dunk win. Do we want even more? Sure. But what we got this last 7-day event was more than we got in the previous 7-day event, so that has to be classified as good.

The Bonus Heroes change is more complicated as we do not know how that will effect us long term. At first glance, it is horrible because of the vaulting. But if the Bonus Heroes drop on a regular basis, it could in fact allow us to cover targeted characters faster than relying on RNG and the entire tier pool. Something else I have seen is that since I have less covers coming in for older characters, and I am not trying to level everything at once, I am seeing an increase of the ISO that I have on-hand. So to me, the Bonus Heroes change is one that I need to give a chance and see how it works out. God know I can always complain about it a month or two from now just as loudly as I could have in the first day or two.

One of the most persistent complaints on this board is the lack of communication from D3/Demiurge. Brigby does a good job, but for many forumites it is not enough. But ask yourself this. If there was a place that you could go, where you know the majority of things that are said about you or your work are going to be negative, what incentive would you have to keep going back? Wouldn’t it be more natural to just avoid that place as much as possible?

Do we all need to drink the Kool-Aid and become D3/Demiurge True Believers? No.

But I do think we could do a better job of holding off on criticizing things at first glance. And definitely tell them when they do something that is seen to better the game.

In that way, we might (I say MIGHT) actually entice the developers to post here more often.

As always, the above is simply my opinion. I am not targeting anyone in particular, and am not trying to pick a fight. Take it for what you want.

Peace.
Croaker.

4

I would agree with some of your sentiments, especially about waiting to see if the vaulting will be worth the bonus heroes. I really like the bonus hero aspect of it!

Also, I do want to give D3 credit where credit is due. That’s why I made a mirror thread of this giving them praise for the good things they do. icon_e_smile.gif

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  1. HIRE A QA TEAM.

Seriously, this is the buggiest game I’ve EVER played! New bugs (on old functionality) are introduced each new game update. That’s just completely unprofessional. It’s bad for the Marvel brand to be associated with such shoddy work. I’m a software engineer, and if my team kept releasing a product with this many bugs, we’d be fired in a heartbeat. There’s simply no excuse.

  1. STOP BEING SUCH A SCROOGE.

It costs D3 nothing to give everyone a token or some HP as a result of outages or bugs. With the latest AWS outage last week, another game I play gave everyone the equivalent of about 50 HP, even though the outage wasn’t their fault. It was a really nice gesture, that created a ton of goodwill, and cost them literally nothing. That game does nice things for its players all the time. As a result, I spend money on that game. I don’t spend a single penny on this one.

6

Their customer service could use some work.
I went from spending close to $50/month on top of VIP to $0/month after my first run in with them.

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Steam player specific gripes here:

1.) Stability of the platform needs addressing, I usually drop 1-2 matches after a couple of matches. It has been happening for the past month or two.

2.) Some sort of chance to earn extra rewards since Shield Intercepts aren’t available to us. I think it is a pretty decent benefit that we are missing out on. Since you are willing to offer a potential benefit to one group of users, why not add another opportunity for Steam users? Even it if it is a special VIP package or something, I know you need to make some $ off of it but I imagine about 10% of your player base is feeling ignored right now. ( I know I am and it is why I haven’t spent any $ since intercepts was rolled out).

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They need to do something about the dreaded 6th cover! I am tired of having covers sitting around because I am stuck with 5 covers on an ability. Bonus Heroes does not help this, it actually makes it worse since you can still pull a 6th cover for the selected Bonus Hero.

There are two highly thumb-up posts about solutions to this:
https://forums.505go.com/discussion/60641
https://forums.505go.com/discussion/37571

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I’d like to second both of these things. While it isn’t “the buggiest game I’ve ever played,” it does seem like they throw out patches with minimal testing, and it would do a lot of good for everyone to hire a couple of testers, and test the new features on a variety of devices.

As far as the second point, D3 should know that giving out freebies actually increases in-app purchases due to people feeling better about supporting the creators, as they feel the devs care about them more.

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pulling of unusable 5* covers in classics. when rng decides to defecate on you with a 1/5/5 type of build or worse, -/5/5, you know that many of your pulls for that characters will be completely wasted. a better solution than 720cp or selling the cover is needed for classics. if the cover could be used for a respec, it would help so much. not a direct swap (although that would be great) but burn the 6th cover to respec from 1/5/5 to 2/5/4. that would be so very helpful.

dilution solution other than vaulting. vaulting was tried in the past and it was determined then that it was a bad solution. was very unpopular and artificially suppressed some characters on some rosters, affecting some players’ ability to compete. after some player turnover, those with solid rulks will rule boosted rulk week and those without rulk will struggle to do much of anything that week. same for ice or any of the top tier older 4s that are only available in very limited ways now. clock is ticking on peggy now. at lower levels, imbalance in 3s will be rough too -

iso. iso has been improved, but for those transitioning from 4* to 5*, it still falls way short of release rate when 5s are considered. it shouldn’t necessarily keep up with 5* release rate, but something closer than what they have would really help. when doing latest legends cycles, I’d like to have iso to take my 5s higher than 360 without having to ditch half of the 4s I pull.

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I think the devs could take a little more care in whom they select as 4 star progression rewards.

First, there is “skipping” characters that should be upcoming in event. Quake in simulator and Miles in Ultron immediately come to mind.

Second, and more importantly, they need to really pay attention to who they select for pve and pvp progression rewards. Having Mordo in the pvp simulator makes zero sense when he is one of the newest latest twelve characters and will be in rotation for months. Only vaulted characters should be progression rewards at this point until the solution to vaulting is presented.

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You know? The Iso Economy ($:Iso) needs to be really examined and adjusted.

I suppose someone is buying it, but I think sales might actually be worthwhile if people felt they were getting a reasonable amount for their $. I think champing a 4* could be worth $100, but it ain’t worth $500+.

And even saying it as worth $100 is hard for me to really wrap my head around.

13

ISO costs for leveling 4*s past 200. It’s an obscene amount to get them from there to 270 (plus champing).

14

i’m still having issues with shield intercepts. either not getting them at all or occasionally not working when i do get them.

15

I don’t think they’re allowed to put ads for mobile games on Steam.

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Just get rid of vaulting and I will be fine.

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They need a 5 year old. From the Evil Overlord List, “12. One of my advisers will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.” I don’t QUITE mean this literally, but I feel like Vaulting would never have been implemented as-is if they’d run it by someone else. I feel like they come up with an idea, and are a small enough group that they’re missing a perspective that would say “Hey, doesn’t removing characters from tokens greatly de-value the Champion system?” and cause them to rethink a little.

I personally think vaulting is a horrible idea, but it also takes only a few moments to think up a better way to do it (What if the available characters rotated so people could still advance old characters and gain champ levels?). So it hurts when the current vaulting system gets implemented, because it makes you ask if they even tried (when things like Strange Sights and Crash of the Mad Titan and most of the new characters and even Boss Rush show that they try, and are even succeeding more often than not).

So they need to improve on… I don’t know, self-review? Dedicating someone to be Devil’s Advocate to tear apart ideas, so they get more polish for being implemented? A level of quality control beyond basic bug-testing and number-crunching? I don’t know how to phrase it, but it always makes me think of the EOL, and having a child as a safety net to filter out bad ideas.

Beyond that, there are some others mentioned here (Brigby does a great job on the forums, but it’s becoming more obvious that there are times when he’s stuck waiting on the devs, could use some better info flow in that regard, for example).

Only thing I would add is a quality-of-life improvement, fully explaining abilities in-game. 3* Spidey doesn’t say how strong his protect tiles are. 3* Hawkeye doesn’t tell what his arrows do. This is a problem that has been around for a while, that they keep adding to instead of fixing. There’s a ? button labeled Info on the token pages to show odds. Fix text for people like Spidey (that can be done in the text box), and then add the ? for people that need more info to explain what their powers do (Goblin’s purple, OML’s second set of powers, Hawkeye’s Quiver, etc), or make it so we can scroll up/down on that info (both on the character page of our roster, and in-game in case we want to read an opponent’s powers), so we aren’t forced to use a secondary resource to learn what a character does.

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1) Better / More Direct In-Game Guidance of New and/or Returning Players

I have to admit that this particular bit is somewhat my fault. I went on hiatus (this is my fault) and when I came back, so much of the game had changed that I could hardly figure out how to get back up and running again aside from holding my breath and just making the jump.

My problem compounded because I had missed multiple releases and therefore was subjected to a cascade of changes. What do I need to figure out first? Which thing affects what thing? Why is it important? And wait. What happened to XYZ character and their 1, 2, or 3 ability?

The FAQs eventually helped in some areas but not in others.

Things I Had No Idea About:

1) Prologue becoming inaccessible post-play.

I played some nodes to see if I could finally collect my rewards… and after a few rounds, I realized that they locked-locked. Oookay.

2) SHIELD leveling.

Okay, this came with a FAQ attached, but when you first open the game, it’s just… there. I had a very Agent Coulson moment where I finally went, “Oh hey! New shiny button! Can I press it and figure out something about it? … Yeah, I can and wow, I feel stupid.”

3) Vaulting versus Vaulted Event pulls and what the heck each thing is and does.

No explanation whatsoever for the Vaulted/non-Available characters.

I saw Mags being offered from Deadpool’s taco truck and went, “… Awww heck, he’s STILL in there?!” which told me 1 of 2 things: 1) Vaulting likely still exists, and 2) he’s STILL stuck in there.

3) Champions. WHAT?!

My roster is a smorgasbord of fully covered 2 stars and a whole collection of single or few-covered 3 stars and the random single 4 stars. Soft-capping was a thing for me because of how unevenly my 2-3 star roster was developing for the longest time. If anyone remembers me, they might also remember that I really struggled through my transitions of 1-2 and then finishing up 2 to go to 2-3.

At the rate my roster was / is developing, I never would have had any in-game reason to realize that Championing is a thing now.

All that said, given that I’m a returning player, I’m not sure how exactly this could be improved on, but perhaps a notification that essentially says:

“Welcome back! Since you’ve been gone, a couple of things have changed so you might want to read over the FAQs before jumping in again. Happy playing!” (FAQ button)

It isn’t that I necessarily needed someone to hold my hand (okay, this time I kind of did because I had a bit of a freakout of Deadpool proportions when I saw SHIELD, Elite Tokens vs Heroic Tokens, multiple Vaults, Favorites, and Prologue locking all at once)…

Rather, what I needed was / is a chance / reminder to get myself up to speed NOW for the basics while in-game and THEN if I have MORE questions, I need to be able to hop on over to this wonderful forum.

19

How about ISO cost to purchase?

It is absolutely insane how much it cost to buy ISO. They can’t have very many people that spend money to buy ISO at these prices can they? If we could buy ISO cheaper they would definitely sell more and also get a whole lot less complaints about the lack of ISO in the game.

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D3 can’t fix half of these.
Demiurge on the other hand…