Thoughts on the Upcoming End of Story Healing

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

During last night’s very informative question and answer session with IceIX, this nugget of information was buried under the giant haystack…

So… in one form or another, the ability to run to the Prologue to heal between matches for those who can is going to end sooner or later, probably sooner.

Before the anticipated riots and table-flipping is sure to commence when the discussion thread opens 24-36 hours before the change goes live, I thought it would a be a good idea to try to ***generate some constructive debate ***over the pending change and to allow players to prepare for it.

Thinking about how to stop prologue healing from occurring, the first obvious thought was to simply disallow OBW’s AGD and Spidey’s Web Bandages when on Prologue nodes. Simple enough, but this really doesn’t make any sense. Disabling abilities in events seems like a lot of unnecessary coding, and Spidey’s new healing was just approved… why would they throw that out the window?

Then it hit me like a 395 Juggernaut Headbutt… the changes to how the game is played would be humongous and definitely HULK SMASH worthy, as noted by IceIX.

Think about this and consider the implications…

– What if characters’ health pools were treated in the same way as a tag tournament fighting game (such as Tekken Tag Tournament)?

 ** The health pools of a character is limited to the health that they started a fight at.  If LazyThor entered a match at 5000/8700 health, then no amount of healing in-match will increase his health over 5000. (Incurred damage in-fight would be equivalent to the red portion of the health bar, but not black).
 ** When a fight ends, the remaining health of a character becomes their new health cap (all remaining health in the red portion of the health bar becomes black and unrecoverable).  Thus, if LazyThor is damaged to 2500 health at the end of the fight, that becomes his health cap for the next fight.
 ** **For healing to occur, a healer MUST be brought into fight and damage healed during the same fight in which the damage was inflicted**.
 ** **Outside of a match, damage can ONLY be recovered by either natural regeneration or through the expenditure of a health pack**.

If the changes were to be implemented in this way, the nature of the game would significantly change as PvP would become much more closely aligned to PvE in how rosters would need to be constructed. Currently, 1-2 141s can be enough to lock down strong placement in a Versus event. But, under this new system, such a narrowly balanced roster would find itself burning through health packs quickly and then have no one else to fall back unto once those health packs deplete. Bringing a healer would be required for endurance runs, but would come at the cost of guaranteed weakness on defense and would likely be sought after easy win targets. Placing all of one’s powerhouses in the same roster would be a highly risky move, as a bad cascade would be very highly detrimental to one’s run to the top.

Retreating would have massive consequences, as running from a potential bad cascade would not only incur lost event points, but also 33% unrecoverable health loss (outside of using a health pack) to everyone on the match’s roster.

So, the question to be asked constructively, is that “is this a good change” for the game? How would the game’s meta change if this were to occur?

– Would players start to build 2x 102s for the cost of 1x 141, to field a more diverse PvP roster and to hedge against a bad wipe/cascade?
– Would players start to use 1* and 2** characters to rise up the leaderboard (for those who still tank), saving their 3***s until absolutely needed?
– Would this change cause more players to purchase health packs?
– Would this change require players to play Versus events in spurts to allow for health pack regeneration over crashing the event in its final hours?
– What are some concerns that I did not think of that should be addressed?

My thoughts to these questions:

– Not initially, but over time maybe. That said, 3*** 102s is really functionally equivalent within reason to a 2** 85. I would think that a player would be more inclined to use the 85 over the 102, unless cover-maxed. The only real benefit I see here would be that the extra 102 over a 141 would be an “extra life” in an event, albeit 30-35% underpowered than a 141.
– Plausible. Irrelevant, for those who don’t tank. The matchmaking system would need to be changed, in my opinion. For everyone not tanking and seeing 3x 141s, they would out of health packs before they ever hit 100. A fairly massive advantage would be gained by those who tank over those who don’t in terms of PvP longevity as they can benefit from throwing 1* and 2** characters at matches, whereas that would not be practical facing 141s. Perhaps change the MMR system for all to see only 1* and 2** in appropriate event point buckets, maybe the same as the current matchmaking ones?
– Plausible. From a business perspective, I can definitely see this angle. May come at the cost of user engagement in events though, if players’ health packs are wiped out too fast/frequently. Quarter munchers were left in the 1990s.
– Plausible. This could be a change in the style of the recent PvE, where rubberbanding didn’t help most catch up and required active engagement in the event. Sharding might also prevent players from sneaking into last second brackets for easy wins.

What are everyone’s thoughts on my conjectures?

2

I don’t want to think about it shudder

I saw that in the IceIX thread and my first reaction was not a pleasant one. Story healing is not that fun anyway, but to take it away for those that have the patience to do it just rubs me the wrong way. But whatever. Devs are going to do what they want regardless. I don’t think it is that impactful to the game, so if they want to take away then so be it. Just another thing to have to adapt to.

3

They’re trying to salvage health pack sales - which from their own figures aren’t very good - and if they try to force it too much they’re going to seriously hurt the game. Healing is already the game’s worst feature, and this will probably hurt them in the long run. Health packs are a terrible bargain, and trying to force people to use them isn’t going to help sales.

That said, this will significantly lower the value of any characters - Sentry leaps out - with a team damage aspect. This may effectively neuter Sentry, in the sense that people will only use him if they’re not going to play for a while after. At the same time, it may make OBW even more ubiquitous, which would be even worse for the game.

4

I think they need to look at the cause of prologue healing before trying to remove the symptom - because otherwise we end up in a worse place. In PVE, you can rotate your team and still do well, so you don’t need to prologue heal or use health packs, but that just isn’t an option in PVP.

5

There are numerous nodes and prizes available in the Story sections. By the time a person transitions to 2* characters, it’s not too hard to collect everything from all story nodes.

To one of the story sections, add one node that has prizes in line with the other story nodes. Now, everyone in the game has a non-complete story section.

IF THE STORY SECTION IS NOT COMPLETE
Functions exactly like now.

IF THE STORY SECTION IS COMPLETED

  1. Mild Scaling turns on
  2. Half the prizes are 20 ISO prizes, half are Half Health packs

The new Half-Health pack. If a person above half health uses a health pack, only half will be used. If below half health, a full health pack will be used. If a player only has half a health pack left, it will raise a characters health either to half or full, depending on how hurt they are.

6

(numbering added for ease of reference)

This solution, as literally described above, is a bit self-contradictory. #2 would seem to eliminate natural regeneration as well, since using his exit health as “his health cap for the next fight” would wreck natural health regen, contrary to #4.

Further, #1 would incur quite a bit of “collateral damage,” in that not only would it eliminate prologue healing, but it’d prohibit exiting a “real” PVP/PVE fight with more health than you started with.

A simpler, more targeted solution (that I’ve admittedly barely given actual thought to) would be to create temporary exit-health caps only for Story mission fights: your entry health for a Story fight is the max health that you can possibly exit with, regardless of how much health you healed during the fight. Any net health gain you incurred would be reset to zero (i.e. your health would be reset to entry health) when the Victory banner rolls in. Nothing else is changed.

7

** The health pools of a character is limited to the health that they started a fight at. If LazyThor entered a match at 5000/8700 health, then no amount of healing in-match will increase his health over 5000. (Incurred damage in-fight would be equivalent to the red portion of the health bar, but not black).

I’ve often thought this would be the obvious solution, if it is technically achievable.

I haven’t ever gone in for story healing myself, so on a personal level any restrictions on it are pure win for me - would add an interesting tactical aspect (not just who to use but in what order and how low can their health be to gamble on one more match), but as with other stuff it does rather favour all us players who a] already have developed rosters and b] were playing when it was easier to actually build 3* characters and not merely accumulate a useless handful of covers.

8

I think people are too fixiated on ‘health pack = more money’. Yes, it makes D3 money, but they also make money in a lot of other ways. If you look at the chart of revenue breakdown, it’d be far better to come up with mechanisms to encourage roster diversity in all events since cover sales/roster slots/ability upgrade make up the bulk of the revenue. Now, there probably has to be some nerfing to your ability to heal to encourage roster diversity (otherwise you just keep on heal the same guys), but the goal needs not to be drive health pack sales. The goal can simply to make you want to have 10 level 141 guys because that’s the best way to approach an event and you’d naturally end up spending more money trying to get 10 guys to level 141.

Now I have no idea how you can easily do this, and from what I recall they say they’re only in the planning stages for these new ideas. I certainly can’t think of a very simple mechanism that’d suddenly make you want to have more than 3 characters for PvP at this moment.

9

I guess I don’t see prologue healing as an issue, don’t do it much and don’t see any good reason they should do anything about it other than to try to force health pack use which is DEFINITELY a bad thing for players. It’ll also make OBW all the MORE popular in both PvP and PvE which is definitely, without argument a bad thing. She is already plenty over-represented.

Also, if they were to implement something like being unable to have your health go above what you went in with then that is an automatic nerf to any hero with regen which seems unwarranted since they already have lower health pools to mitigate the regen effect.

It’s change that’ll most benefit ppl who don’t play all that much and most punish players who play often AND have to face “a challenge” in both PvP and PvE because of MMR/sclaing mechanisms which have been “balanced” with prologue healing present.

I guess my major issue is changing that part of the game potentially impacts so many other systems such as MMR, scaling and hero balancing and D3 are so incredibly glacial at changing anything that it’ll remain somewhat screwed for quite a long time.

10

The two heroes with regen at the 3* tier are Patch and Daken, who have the normal 5800 HP, and I certainly see no reason why they should be classified at higher HP tiers. Yes there seems to be a whole mess of characters who just have a ton of HP and do a ton of damage too, but I’d say that’s because characters like Sentry and Thor are particularly overpowered (high HP + high damage) compared to everyone, as opposed to Patch/Daken somehow getting the shaft on HP class just because they can regen. Certainly if you compare them to anyone not named Thor/Sentry, they’d be quite competitive even if they have no regeneration whatsoever.

11

The downside to the elimination of prologue healing is that those willing to spend money (particularly those willing to spend lots) will have a major advantage that there is no way to offset (other than being RIDICULOUSLY good, and not taking damage). As long as its moderately difficult (which to me is that it takes an avg of 2-3 fights to fully heal a 3*/4* char) there is a way for F2P people willing to invest extra time to neutralize the ease of health packs, which should be preserved pretty much at all cost.

12

I think that MPQ would lose up to half it’s players if they eliminated prologue healing. As a player with multiple 141’s, I’m not waiting the 8 hours it would take to fully revive a downed character. I’m also not going to spend valuable HP on health packs. Once you hit max levels, healing becomes necessary to play. I do not enjoy prologue healing but unfortunately it is necessary in order for me to play more than 1 hour a day.

I have spent real money for HP packs so I have the HP for shielding purposes. My real money and my interest in the game will be gone if this feature is integrated into the game. I have been a player since a Day One and hope to continue to play for a long time.

If any devs read this, PLEASE DON’T DO THIS

Thank you

13

Here’s a thought: how about they eliminate prologue healing by making in unnecessary instead?

What if, at the end of every match, all you characters that weren’t knocked out were returned to full health? You wouldn’t have to go and heal in the prologue because you’d be at full health AND you’d start seeing more diverse rosters because healing in the match isn’t as necessary since you don’t have to end the round near full health to continue. In this scenario, Health Packs are only used to revive fallen characters.

With this system, you get the choice as to whether you think you’ll need that healing/support to tackle the challenge you face or not. Maybe you’d rather go all offence, or stack your team with damage sponges. Or maybe you do want to use a healer just to turn the tide in battle. Health Packs would still be useful, but would be used more as they should be to revive the fallen, not top off the almost healthy.

Is there any single player who would object to this solution? More player freedom to chose something besides OBW and still keep playing sounds good to me.

14

The most obvious conclusion from this is that D3 wants to boost sales of Health Packs, and I’m sure there’s some of that going on. But there’s also another reason why they might be looking at this - to make running defensive (i.e. Protect tile, as opposed to “good on defense”) characters more attractive.

In the current environment, there’s really no reason to run a defensive character. Everything is biased towards doing as much damage as quickly as possible - the damage you take is irrelevant if you can heal it in the Story.

15

I think this would restrict the money flow, even if only a little as most players DONT buy health packs, and with all the changes recently that seemed monetization driven very unlikely to get more than token thought. I can see some upsides, but I know that people (smarter than me) will be able to pull it apart and come up with exploits. Now if we just had them work with devs to address those, it might become viable.

16

I think it would be very beneficial to Demiurge as well and our gaming experience if this kind of change promoted having larger rosters and diversity of teams in fights. But in order for that to work I think there has to be a corresponding change on how defensive teams are assigned.

If there sort of changes suggested here were made by themselves it would change how I play PvP early on in the tournament, but not at the end. I Story heal when I need to up until the last hour of the event and then am willing to use health packs. The Story healing allows me to go up to maybe 400 points the first day (then get beaten down 150 points over night) up to 700 the second (beaten down again) and then be ready for the final push to the end or to a shield time. I think without Story healing I wouldn’t move up as far the first two days, but also wouldn’t get beaten back down nearly as much. The end result would likely be about the same as it is now, only I’d get to have less fun. I don’t really see how that benefits anyone.

But simply removing Story healing won’t get me to start using different teams if they’ll just be slaughtered on defense. However if this was implemented with a change so that defensive losses weren’t so crippling, or defensive teams weren’t the same as your attacking teams, then it might improve the overall experience.

If the goal of the change is to reward players who have invested in deeper rosters then I can be optimistic about it. If the goal is to get me to spend lots of HP on health packs, well, that isn’t going to happen.

17

We multi-141 players comprise maybe, just maybe, 2% of MPQ’s playerbase. I’d say far less that half of the active playerbase even has L85’s.

I can see people retreating at the drop of a pin in PVE, essentially mining the RNG for very friendly boards, since there’s now literally zero downside to retreating. That would likely make scaling worse.

It’d also make PVP pushes by L141 players essentially unlimited in duration with zero downside. Further, I’m not sure making it so that there’s a massive difference between ending with two characters at 20 health each vs. ending with two downed characters is a good idea for PVP. It could go either way.

18

That would be awesome, but it make all events really hard to keep up. Can you imagine what it would be like if hardcore players were allowed to play non-stop? I think MPQ has a lot more urgent issues than story healing, and those should be addressed first. Right now, I think healing is fine and should not be tweaked. If they tweak it, it would be for their monetary gains.

I tried story healing with a maxed OBW, and it takes forever sometimes. Sometimes the computer gets a good cascade and I end up finishing the fight with less health. On average, if I try to story heal, I have to play 2 games to heal one character. Is it broken? I don’t think so because it takes a bit of time to get my roster back.

19

Is this whole “swimming in 141s” going to be your new spidey/cmag thing, now?

20

While that’s true for health packs directly, I think it would help the money flow in different ways, the least of which is happier players. Imagine being able to construct several different teams for the same event: one that’s a damage sponge, one that’s all offence, one that’s all defence, one with healing/support character and which one you used would be dependent on who you were about to face in a rock/paper/scissors kind of way. Any body need a few extra slots?