Time to Face the Facts [a Conspiracy Theory Thread]

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

TL;DR: Placement rewards aren’t random, & of course it’s fine to encourage spending - demiurge are a business, not our friends.

Note: I will make reference to the idea that decisions are made to optimise profit. Yes, the old " contact theory to sell more X". Now I’ve posted that phrase so you don’t have to.

So Women of Marvel awards Iron Fist, and the same ability is relegated to top placement only. This isn’t random.
I know, I know, “They told us it’s random!”
They lied. People can lie. It’s a thing you can do.

Recall the time they proudly beat their chests about hitting the fabled $1 ARPDAU? It didn’t go over to well when the forum found out. There was a lot of talk about leveraging psychology to maximise player spending.

Now it’s very obvious that Iron Fist will become a huge player in the metagame. He accelerates one of the best characters in the game. And the key ability for that had been the rarest reward. Players want Iron Fist’s purple. If they want it now, they’ll have to place in the top 5 against the other best character powered up. If you don’t have a Thor, you won’t be able to compete, and if you do have a Thor, you’re going to be facing a lot of mirror teams. This is going to be an HP Suck on a biblical scale.

So my question is this: would demiurge really place their revenue stream in the hands of RNG? No. Of course not. They may not know the first thing about game design or balance, but their business acumen is strong. Every decision is made to optimally influence the spending habits of the players. Hood Blue would have stayed top 5 forever, given the opportunity, but people start complaining & become suspicious, so they kick it down for an event, but it’ll be back to top 5 soon enough.

Yeah I’m upset that I won’t be able to complete for a purple cover with a 1/1/1 Thor. But I just have to deal with it. Do I think that his purple will be the progression reward for his PvP? Absolutely. That’ll be the last chance to get IF covers for a little while, so it’ll be a brutal climb to get that prize for a lot of players.

Just remember that demiurge is a business; they are here to make money, not friends. If you still truly believe that they are relying on RNG for placement rewards, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. I hope you enjoy the mad ravings of my conspiracy theory.

2

Was there a big sale on tin foil? I’m running a little low right now.

3

Honestly - I think you are right.
My argument is this:
They introduce new character through PVE, we need to be top 10 to obtain all three covers.
There is always one cover worst.

Then, there is possible to obtain 4th, alliance cover - worst one.
Then, next PVE, there is max progression reward, it is again new character, worst cover.
Then, there is PVP, where we can win all 3 covers, there is one for top 150 and one alliance cover, again worst cover.

After this, we are done with covers for some time, we can either buy them, win randomly in tokens, …

My point is, it is always the worst cover which is most easily obtainable.

Good example is yellow Squirell Girl.
I really think there is the pattern.

Edit: Im edditing my post for another proof: We are in the middle of Iron Fist gaining process.
His best cover is purple. Purple was obtainable only for top 10 in PVE.
In next PVP, where he can be won, we need to be top 5 for purple.
Many of us will have IF lets say 2/0/3 after few days…

4

Thing is : they’d probably make more money from people buying the extra covers after they won the first, than the HP spent in the PvE itself (since it is limited to 1% of the players anyway).

UNLESS many players buy those horrendous 10X/42X packs in the hope they will get the missing cover. Meaning they will have to buy several to get the purple, because of course, purple will be the rarest to drop (I remember Devil Dino, I bought 2 packs, and I was flooded with Purple and hardly could get the other colours).

Considering how things work now, I’m pretty sure the UNLESS theory is the best… SADLY.

5

OP is definitely right. This is the 6th or 7th time in a row when it’s happened. Belief stretches only to a point even when dealing with RNGs.

And in the offchance it IS actually random, and just hitting a highly improbable run of coincidence, well they need to make sure that the next time will not be random. I’m so not cool with having all these 5/2/0 characters.

6

Yes you are right. Business is business simple as that.

I don’t believe stuff like that is random. Ppl that believe that shit are just gullible.

7

Whoever said the RNG they use to pick covers was simplistic?

8

well, maybe i fail to miss the point.

OF COURSE you are right, but how is that a bad thing? u make it sound, like its actually an evil plot.

they make the same move i would do, if it were my company and loans to pay for. i would to the exact same thing. this only shows me,they are smart at making buisness deals.

videogames, like porn or bodybuilding is a niche among its main branch medias.

videogames (hobbies), porn (movies) bodybuilding (sport) and they aim at the most fetishized ascepts of its consumer.

people watching porn want to see lesbians? lets pay women do to lesbian scenes
people doing BB want muscles? lets say this supplememt is the best on the market

and now: people want to have the best rooster in a game? lets give them the taste of a skill and the possibilty to buy it afterwards.

easy as that.

9

The other annoying thing is that they make the PVE to give out his cover Deadpool vs MPQ. Normally the PVE after the reward introduction PVE is where you can get the new character through progression if you missed him the first time. However, the progression rewards for this event is extremely hard to hit without already having Iron Fist! Further, the PVP where he’s a reward is a very non-standard PVP tourney, breaking up traditional teams. It’s almost like they’re purposefully reducing the amount of available covers to increase competition and the grind. Instead of the whales buying covers to max the characters out, they’re concentrating the covers within the whales and super-hardcore hands, forcing the rest of us to either buy token packs or fall behind.

I normally wouldn’t be as disturbed by this, but it’s clear that Iron Fist is so OP that he will disturb the meta and a significant part of 3* landscape, faster pushing many 3* characters into uselessness.

10

Sorry curly, I have read your post and all I can think of is rooster porn.

11

So they are using RNG for PVP to choose rewards, that’s fine. This is what Miles said during Cyclops.

They haven’t ever said it about PVE as far as I remember.

If it -is- RNG everywhere, it would mean twice in a row the RNG hit up snake eyes on the desired cover on THREE events (hardest on initial PVE, not on following PVE progression, and hardest on PVP progression). Twice in a row! That’s certainly possible…and pretty darn amazing.

Instead, I would guess they are setting PVE rewards and choosing PVP rewards. In which case I have a suggestion for the Devs: roll the PVP RNG early, and set the PVE rewards AFTER that roll. Then you can get the PVE progression to be the third cover, if nothing else. Also you will stop seeing threads like this!

This also might get you some more cash. I’ve mentioned in many, many threads - people can’t buy covers if they don’t have covers. My mystique is still 0/5/4! Deadpool will sort of help with this - in the sense that you can get every cover in approximately 100 days. Except if you are brand new, when it will be 100 days + time to get a good enough roster (and all the 3*'s ) to be able to beat the last node. It is really in your best financial interest to get all three covers out there - give people a little taste, to make them want (and buy) more.

12

I don’t think it’s too hard to hit progression if you odn’t have iron fist. I’ve cleared each sub once or twice and will hit IF 20 hours before event ends.

13

Yeah I was going to say, I have IF but hit the prog reward on my first sweep of the second nodes. Surely can’t be that difficult for non IF owners to hit it if i have done so with a day left. I haven’t been hitting perfect timing or anything either, placed 90th in my overall shard as of now.

Not that I think for one moment the pvp rewards are done solely by RNG.

14

1 in 9, tinykitties!

11.111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111%

15

OP made a big mistake. This theory implies that the devs actually know what the best cover is, but if the devs suck at balancing, then they should have no idea what the best cover is! The devs cant both suck at balancing and also know what the best cover is. Checkmate. Also im looking at my cyclops and thinking "hmm, if OP was right shouldnt my cyclops be 4/1/4 instead of 1/4/4…?) and shouldnt my starlord be 2/2/4 instead of 4/2/2?

Actually, I suppose it is possible that the devs are both bad at balancing and are also trying to screw us over: supposed evil dev 1 said: “haha, Starlord yellow is clearly his best ability! We will make that hard to get!”. In that case, the outcome is completely random: since the devs have no idea what the best cover actually is, whatever cover they choose has an equal chance of being bad or good, making it ultimately jut as random.

16

Since we’re talking about conspiracies, maybe things belongs here, or I can move it to the Q&A thread.

In the February 2015 Q&A, they addresses the question on how random tile drops on the board are - something along the lines of favoring AI cascading. In their response, the said the boards are totally random, except for early Prologue missions that are more likely to drop red tiles so new ayers can get off Iron’s Man’s power quickly.

This is well and good, except for the fact that I remember someone (can’t remember if it was Will, Miles, or IceIX) addressed this on the forums before. The previous answer given was that drops are random… except for when a board is lacking a certain color, it will be more likely to drop that color.

So now we have two answers of “no” with two different sole exceptions to the rule. This makes me believe that the drops are less random than I believed before.

17

I don’t think this has ever happened. Maybe you can search post history and find this?

I think it was Will who talked about the devs initially assuming that previous PQs had complicated tile generation algorithms, before actually getting their hands on the source code, and being surprised that the tile generation was truly random.

18

I think by now the issue is not “are the reward cover orders random or not?” and more like: “Leaving the new release cover orders up to randomness is producing terrible outcomes, can you please pick them manually in a sensible fashion, thanks.”

19

It was IceIX who mentioned the weighted odds. https://forums.505go.com/discussion/679
When it was brought up again, Will said it was probably a mix up with one of the earlier games. https://forums.505go.com/discussion/18491

Here’s the post Trisul is referring to: https://forums.505go.com/discussion/15895

20

That’s some nice search voodoo, jojeda.

Of course, if the OP is convinced that the devs are lying anyway, it’s not like this disproves that theory. In fact, it’s IMPOSSIBLE TO DISPROVE.

I must say though… life is a little easier when you blissfully believe everything the devs say. Why not koolaid-glass-half-full?

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