This Game Isn't Fun Anymore

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Yep it’s me,TheUnwiseOne. The guy who likes to joke around and make fun of people. The guy who who doesn’t take anything seriously. The guy who used to like this game up until recently.

There was a time when this game was great. It seems far away now as i think about it hard enough. But now I and it seems quite a number of people are getting fed up with it. Before, it was a joy to play, but now, this last while i find myself getting annoyed at it quite easily and just switching it off. Forgetting about it and moving on. It’s not enough to make me quit, JUST YET, but i do find myself thinking about it from time to time. That’s not a good thing to hear Mr.Developers.

It’s all well and good, getting new customers in BUT it’s keeping those customers that should be the number 1 priority. You can entice the noobs in with all the shiny rewards and placing above vets in events all you like, but there comes a time when these very same noobs will be writing something like this on your forum. You have seen posts like this probably every day, we have all seen and complained about what is wrong with the game, and although they have listened on occasion, there are still many flaws they have yet to work out.

What is making me annoyed right now is the scaling. It’s what is making many people quit in frustration. Why is it so god damn bad and at complete polar opposites for people with near enough the same rosters? How can someone place highly in previous PVE’s and have level 50 nodes and yet someone else who also finished just as high with a near enough identical roster have to do with level 200’s and beyond? It truly baffles my mind.

I have been pretty much scaled out of this event and its only been through hard work and killing my team off that i was able to get a decent enough score so far. But i shouldn’t have to suicide my team near enough 100 times just to play your game. What kind of stupidity is that? To go through so much effort just to finish an event is ludicrous. 100 times, just to lower those nodes. Which lasted less then 2 hours before they went back up. just because i have 2 141 level guys, doesnt make me a master of the game. It does not mean i should be facing foes higher than my own levels over and over and over again. I don’t use boosts, i don’t use OBW and i only do the essential nodes and yet still the game continues to do this.

So i sent off an email asking them to explain why the scaling is so bad, to be told “it’s working as intended”. Um well if your intention is too lose your customers you are doing an almighty fine job. Listening to feedback, listening to the complaints we have outlined over and over again, should be high up on your list. But still nothing has changed. It gets worse.

Find it tedious fighting level 230 foes? Here have some level 400’s for a change. That will spice things up. Don’t like 6 day events? Sure how about we make them 10 days just for a laugh. Would you like to win something good after those 10 days? Sorry but that guy with the level 38 Storm just took 1st. Maybe next time.

Now i’m sorry if i am a little ranty tonight but even i have my limits. When the game makes you want to shut it down, then it’s doing something drastically wrong. It’s up to the developers to listen and improve the mechanics. The only thing that makes me not just walk away right now is you guys,i like chatting to you and having some fun and talking about the good old days when the game was enjoyable.

Well i guess thats all i have to say right now. sorry if you are still reading this. I’m off to suicide my team again and hope i finish high enough to grab one of those elusive bagmen covers as my reward.

2

Agreed sir

3

Hey buddy. It sucks that scaling is putting too much work in your twerk. I am feeling the frustration too but not because of scaling - my scaling won’t get out of control until the last 2-3 days. The reason I keep turning off MPQ and playing other games is because the rewards have been getting nerfed in every way possible. The major iso rewards made the last simulator event a huge success. Everyone was competing and there was so much positive feedback here in the forums. This simulator is the exact opposite - where did the iso go? And when scaling does start kicking my butt - those 8 minute matches against level 300+ opponents need to reward more than 20 iso. If you are going to increase the difficulty of the enemies, there needs to be better loot drops too. That’s basic gaming. Anyway… I hope this game starts doing things right again - your serious posting is freaking me out. icon_e_wink.gif

4

Yeah that’s yet another thing that annoys me. Dropping rewards without so much as a whisper. Lowering and dropping alliance rewards is a joke. They entice you in then spit you out. And that seems to be happening more and more lately. They have to go back to the drawing board and really do something to fix this. Rewards and scaling need fixed asap. As people have mentioned, a complete reset on everyone’s mmr would help matters i think. Or even explain once and for all how they figure each individual gamers scaling would also be start.

5

I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I don’t have a huge problem with scaling. The game punishes players who take a brute force approach by playing every node to death, while rewarding those who play smarter. Taking advantage of rubberbanding, not falling victim to the laws of diminishing returns, and not obsessively striking after each reset, these things seem to pay off. It’s a similar deal in pvp, where brute forcing through loads of low-point opponents will ramp up your mmr.

I’m not saying it’s a great system, it is quite flawed, but the real problem is a lack of transparency. If the devs want scaling to work this way, then it should be explained clearly within the game, rather than having to scour the forums and learn all this technical detail just to compete. Funnily enough, scaling seemed to work out a lot better for me once I stopped trying so hard, and I still do about as well as I ever did.

6

Sorry to hear about your frustrations. I’m still not convinced about the level 30 M. Storm guy winning the PvE events. They seem to pop up in the first subs or so before the scaling gets them. Out of the top 10 people at the end of the main event, did you check how many people actually had lowbie rosters?

7

Play smarter? Well for the last few PVE’S i have done nothing but the essential nodes and only do 2 run through of those nodes as well. Sometimes 3. But yet my scaling still rises. I cant play any “smarter”

i don’t grind every node, i don’t hit every refresh and i wait for rubberbanding. There is nothing else for me to do to make it easier. Unfortunately while you have yourself don’t have a problem with scaling, others do despite playing smart.

If the developers could just explain it once and for all then those who are stuck in mmr hell could try and escape it. Barring not doing the next couple pve’s i don’t think i can do anything else to help myself.

8

I was been a little drastic with the level 38 guy to make a point lol but yes there has been times, and there have been forum goers with low level rosters who have come here and explained they came 1st or top 10 in pve events. Not just subs either. the hunt for example, in my bracket 2 of the top 5 didnt have a character higher than 70. The one before that, the guy only had a boosted HT and 5 other characters in his entire roster. where did he finish? 1st.

It does get a little disheartening for others as well as myself to see rosters like that win when some of us have been playing for 4 months to get a decent roster. What can you do but just continue or quit, and thats where im torn right now. Guess i shall see in the next 10 day event where i stand icon_e_smile.gif

9

This was true a couple months ago
except for events before that and again in the last couple events
where rubberbanding was diminished enormously, requiring constant grind

leaving you helplessly sitting there watching some guy with a level 40 max roster skyrocket up 5k+ points in the same time it takes you to clear a single node
such competition, such wow!
Luckily my irritation at not being able to realistically complete for first place with people who’ve sunk all of 5 hours into this game is offset by the rewards being worthless anyways

10

I don’t really get this sentiment. Yes, those guys with the boosted HT and 5 other characters is going to have the tools needed to win the PvE event, but scaling is going to catch up to him eventually and the major boosted character isn’t going to be major boosted in the next event, so that guy is going to be forced to continuously spend buttloads of money to maintain his rank or just fall off of the rankings, while the veterans can pretty much consistently stay in the top ranks. I feel like the main issue is moreso scaling rather than the newbies that can win a single PvE event by dumping a ton of money into the game. Dumping money into the game has generally been the winningest strategy for most f2p games anyways, so I don’t see how this is much of an issue.

11

The guy with the weak roster invariably falls out of a main bracket as time passes because community scaling catches up to them. Such a guy may won a sub bracket or two, but it’s not like the sub brackets gave anything worth fighting for in terms of prizes.

Looking at the way things currently scale I don’t think nodes will exceed 300 by the end of this event even if you’re not doing anything to try to lower it and you certainly won’t be seeing level 300 essential nodes. The general selection of enemies is considerably weaker than that of The Hunt (no Daken on every other node).

I think scaling actually favors playing more because that’s the only way you can take more damage which slows/reverses scaling. I don’t get why people think playing less with a better result than playing more is somehow supposed to be a good thing. It’s one thing that the game shouldn’t encourage you to play excessively, but if you actually do better by playing less as opposed to playing more, then there’s something seriously messed up with the game design. Now, playing more might not matter because a lot of the time it’s the difference between finishing #7 versus #4 and that has literally no impact on the end, but it’s not like you can always knew how you’ll finish ahead of time.

12

As you write this, 7 out of the top 10 in my main bracket have level 85 characters tops, and several are using 40-50s.
In 4d21h I’ll have a screenshot proving you wrong :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

13

I’ve seen level 85 guys win it all, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen level 50 guys won it all.

14

As we’ve heard repeatedly, they look at all the stats and adjust accordingly. If people were leaving the game in droves, I bet they would adjust their practices. Just like months ago when they increased roster pricing there was initial uproar but people kept buying roster slots as IceIX commented. Eventually people accepted the roster pricing and moved on. I don’t know if it’s a good practice to keep squeezing until there is no goodwill left, but it must be working out for them. As the saying goes, “vote with your wallet”.

15

You see therein lies the problem.

On one hand you have someone saying that playing less is the best way to counter scaling.

Then the next guy says playing more is the best way to counter scaling.

That is my point. We all have a method but whose is actually right? Beats me.

16

I’m just getting a bit bored with the repitition. Scaling hasnt affected me, I do like one clear and dont use spidey. But constantly getting new characters is t really enticing me to play, it just feels like more of the same. I want my characters finally balanced, I want a new game mode, I want a smart ai. Something to shake things up.

17

Wait, who’s saying playing more counters scaling?

And just because the aggregate numbers may not go down much, that kind of attrition does hurt the community. Pillars of the forums like misguided and zzzWolph have disappeared, and even theladder has become scarcer (even though he’s still demolishing everyone in game)

18

I am in the same position as TheUnwiseOne, I already metioned that I am going to pass this event allmost completely (I played the first two days, but nothing more), so I am going to stop playing for a while and see what happens next, and If this madness of 400lvl guys doesn’t dissapear then I will stop playing completely.

And the people who says that If you don’t play a lot scaling does not go up, well, maybe It was, until now. In the last event I played the minimum to get a top10 position, that was playing the essential and the two nodes with the most score ONE TIME each 10-12 hours, nothing more, just one time. With these tactic the scaling went up to 290 in the not essential nodes and to 150 in the essenstial nodes, at least essential nodes were playable. But now, I begin this new event, and everything went to 140+. Easy nodes 150+ and hard 200+, and essential nodes the same, they are not lower anymore, and all of this on the very first day.

I think it is very clear THE SCALING DOESN’T WORK. It is broken, and it made me hate this game. I personaly loved PvE more than PvP (I prefer single vs multi in general), but now I can’t play PvE. So great.

PS: I can’t understand how anybody could have the brilliant idea of rising levels to 400, it is beyond me… He/She is completely nuts. I imagine some developer saying something like this “Look how many pleople is complaining about having to fight juggernaut or Daken at 230lvl, what a sissies, let’s rise it to 400!!! And see what happens then MWHAAA, HA, HA!!!”

19

Yep, this is truly baffling. While I don’t generally see the sense in developers telling players how balancing algorithms work (“Hey, guys, here’s a list of all the loopholes you can exploit!”), the scaling is getting so crazy that I would like to see some transparency in that respect. I’m the someone (or “a someone”) who placed highly in previous PVEs and got puny entry nodes, as well as easy early nodes. TU1 and I have virtually identical roster strengths (a couple of L141s) and viewed The Hunt in virtually the same “Oh mother of god, THERE ARE STILL SIX DAYS TO GO?!” way, but our Simulator scaling is vastly different.

Seriously, what in the flying f’schnickity is going on?!

20

I am in the same position as TU1 (though I didn’t realize he felt this way, too). And honestly, while scaling seems to be the major factor inhibiting my enjoyment of the game, it is just a lot of PvE elements swirled together that I find unfun.

For the last few days I’ve been reluctant to pick up my phone and dig in. I eventually do it every day, several times, but more out of responsibility than desire. I would rather spend my time in alliance chat than playing, and I often find myself doing exactly that.

The root of this feeling seems to be this: I know I need to knock down some high value nodes in the pve to contribute to the alliance score. So the first place I go is to my Simulator brackets and search out the highest value nodes. They are almost always the essential nodes. So I put together a team that may well exclude one of my most important characters (because they appear as an opponent), add in one required but virtually worthless character, start the fight in the node, play as carefully as possible by getting the colors I can while trying to deny my far superior foes of their colors, have one unfortunate cascade (even a small one sometimes, when it is the wrong color), get wiped. Then use three health packs and repeat the process. Then probably get wiped again. Or else eke out a victory and realize that I still need more points and use my last health packs and go back in again only to get wiped or barely eke out another victory and this time have no reasonable way of doing any more fights for at least an hour, whether I won or lost.

It’s a chore, in the purest sense of the word; an onerous distasteful job. And that’s not even grinding everything down for hours on end. That’s playing for half an hour or so at a time. Are all of my ill feelings coming from scaling? Possibly. I never minded being forced to experiment with new character combinations when the fights weren’t so nip and tuck. Actually, I used to enjoy the feeling of agency or power or what-have-you from battles that I could easily defeat my foes. When I could clear my opponents from one Rage of the Panther I used to feel satisfaction, as in - “This is why I spent all that time and effort maxing this guy, he rocks!” Now I feel outclassed by Hammer agents even when I throw a couple 141s in the ring. I suppose some people might enjoy the tension of a fight that they could lose at any moment from one bad break, or the long grinding fights against 3x250s or higher. Those people are not me.

And honestly, I think the devs do a great job on the game and I don’t mean to give them a bunch of tinykitty about what they are doing wrong here. All in all, though, I don’t like it and I could see it pushing me away if it continues like this a long time. And also for the record: personally I don’t care what the roster looks like for the guys ahead of me. Let newbie and casuals win, for all I care. Just don’t make me not want to play.

TL,DR - “+1”