Trading/Gifting Mechanic (Solution)

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

The talk of trading always comes up, either on the forums or in-game chat. So I’d like to offer a prospective design for this feature:

Purpose: To allow users to gift unwanted covers to others, while minimizing potential exploits.

Requirements:

  1. A user can select a cover from their unused earned collection and choose to give it to an alliance member.
  2. A user can only gift covers to those who are newer than them, as determined by date first played.
  3. Users are presented with an informational popup when selecting an invalid player.
  4. Users must be a part of an alliance ranked 101 or below, as an average of the previous 5 events.
  5. Users must be a part of an alliance for at least 5 events before being allowed to send/receive gifts.
  6. Users can only receive 3 gifts in a one week period.

Explanation:
While this feature won’t please everyone, it accomplishes a few things. First, it keeps all alliances involved in gaining covers. The veterans earn covers, while the newer players are able to get covers they normally wouldn’t. This should improve player retention as veterans (not hardcore) have a great reason to continue playing even as their chances for getting a useful cover for themselves continues to drop. New players have a great reason to continue as they are able to get better, faster at a snail’s pace instead of at sloth’s pace.

Second, it keeps abuse to a minimum. The trade off is a potentially confusing set of governing rules. This is solved by a forum post and a rules popup the user can manually access in game. They would also include a short explanation of the why.

Other mobile games, like Star Wars Force Collection, have a similar mechanic that could be used as a basis (I do not recommend that game overall though).

2

There are so many restrictions there, I can’t imagine anyone coming into this game and thinking that your suggestions make any sense.

We already have the problem of low documentation of how this game works, so having a six-point restriction on what could be a very easy mechanic would make the game even more impenetrable to those non-forum-reading players, many of whom likely are not English-language players.

(Solutions) should be elegant and simple, otherwise it isn’t really a solution so much as an appeasement or bandaid.

3

I agree with the sentiment of it not being a perfect solution, but I feel like the lack of documentation is a separate issue, and that should be addressed separately.

4

That is a fair observation. I concur with you on that point.

5

Trading COULD work, I think, and it’s always a neat feature to have when ‘collectibles’ are involved but… so far, I have yet to see a system within a mobile OS app/game where it worked without creating a giant mess of new cheaters-related problems that have - more often than not - spiraled out of control.

That said, coming from someone who’s played a bunch of different mobile OS TCG/CCG games and has seen each of the games fall in the realm of trading/gifting owing to poorly implemented trading features, the people who abuse the system, and the companies who either refuse to be or have problems being more proactive at punishing cheaters, I will play the part of saying, “DANGER DANGER DANGER!” and say that the measures taken to SERIOUSLY minimize exploitation would have to be extreme along with the punishment in order to implement such a feature in its intended way while dissuading people from abusing the system.

Trading (and lumped with it is the whole invite-a-friend system) is great amongst honest people, but it seriously ruins a game when the system is hole-y and cheaters and exploiters take over and there are no strict and consistent ways of dealing with the fallout that results.

Everyone wants to believe that people are honest but really, all anyone needs to do is look up any of the popular mobile OS TCG/CCGs to see the extent of cheating that goes on in regards to gifting and trading - even in well-monitored communities - and its impact on the various communities.

If people who were interested in trading/gifting were you and me and the bulk majority of the other forumites in this community (we got spammers here and who knows who else, so that’s why I didn’t say all) who play the game legitimately on legitimate devices and pay for our purchases legitimately, then yeah, it would work.

But… that’s US.

Not… the people who are getting themselves sandboxed or who need to be sandboxed or the people who get sandboxed later as opposed to sooner.

A couple of particular concerns that weren’t really addressed in the OP:

  • Cheaters are going to have to be even more rigorously dealt with and on a -very- timely basis. Previously without trading or gifting, the cheaters could only claim prizes that they are otherwise not entitled to. We have plenty of griping about this already. But with the addition of a gifting and trading system, the cheaters who haven’t been caught will also be able to trade/gift ‘bad’ characters gotten via illicit means.

  • The possibility of ‘cloning’ characters and ‘fake/bad’ characters would have to be addressed (besides sandboxing players) to either help ensure that honest players don’t accidentally get bad characters traded to them/gifted to them or to help deal with the problem when it arises. Previously, these ‘bad’ characters would be stuck with the cheater and their account. Sandbox the cheater, sandbox the characters, end and done. If these characters were allowed to roam about and people accidentally traded their legit characters for illegitimate ones, that’s a &%$#load of support tickets and “I GOT CHEATED!” threads that will be born.

  • How do you keep people from creating multiple accounts for themselves? On first glance, that may not sound like anything important, but I’ve seen it happen entirely too many times - someone trades in their characters/cards to their alternative ‘new’ account and use that new account to game what would be equivalent to the MMR and scaling here and then score big and then trade the rewards back to the other account/another account and rinse and repeat. Yes, I’m aware that people have mobile OS accounts and Steam accounts; I’m not talking about those sorts of ‘multiple accounts’.

Trading/gifting, to me, is a can of worms; new features are great and games need new features to not be stagnant and a trading feature would work so well for a game like MPQ, but especially for a feature that is so easily abused at the detriment of the community at large - again, look at all the other online TCG/CCG/collectibles-related communities - it needs a good strong dose of prophylactic preventive measures implemented to make sure that the can of worms that’s opened is a can of nice juicy nightcrawlers and not a whole bunch of stinging centipedes.

… Okay, bad analogy; fish love centipedes, too. But… you get the picture.