What would you have liked to know as a new player?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
21

Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever buy tokens. Of any kind.

Horde your ISO. Just because you have a lot now doesn’t mean you won’t wish you hadn’t leveled Beast just because he was your most covered 3 star. You’ll need all the ISO you can get once you get covers for characters that actually matter.

EDIT:

Also, I never knew the red tiles were from people attacking me. It always mystified me what these red tiles were that didn’t cost a skip tax to skip. Then one day, after months of playing, I noticed the pop up and the retal tile had the same name on them.

Not until then did it click.

And not until then did I realize that attacking people worth less than 25 points meant that I would be a fat juicy target for them in retal.

And I know a lot of people don’t know this because I’ve gotten in many fights where I’ll attack someone for 35, they’ll retaliate for 15. Then I’ll attack for 35 again. Then they’ll retaliate for 20. Then I’ll attack again for 30.

They never realized that my attacks were not a coincidence and that they were actually causing themselves to lose points by retaliating every single time.

22

I would have loved to know:

That you have 5 refreshing Health Packs.

That there is an official forum for you to get help and guidance at.

Explanation of who your ‘defensive’ team was, and how they are determined in PVP, Lightning Rounds and Simulator.

Explanation that when you get beat in PVP, someone is actually taking away your points, way more points than you earned fighting other people.

Explanation of the red retaliation tile. I got the notification that I was beat 20 times, but wondered why I had all these red tiles I could skip for free… and I skipped them because they were too strong for me to beat.

How the game decided who owned the colors in each fight, and how team placement affected that color assignment.

Clicking (carefully) on a tile tells you how much damage that tile will do, the very basics of gameplay and damage. I came into the game knowing matching colors did damage, glowing tiles were generated from long matches and did more damage… that was all I knew and learned that from Bejeweled.

THAT COVERS EXPIRED… no other game I have ever played has ever taken away a reward because I didn’t use it in 7 days. Still pisses me off to this day.

Explanation that PVE Scales, so even though its easy the first time through, it gets harder and harder. I like that, but I didn’t understand why it was happening.

That there is a pause button hidden in the blue and that it gives you an option to retreat from a battle. Not that I use it often… I believe i did it once because I started a tough battle just before I had to urgently leave somewhere and I wanted my guys to heal and they don’t heal while ‘frozen’ in a battle.

That your characters won’t heal if you fall asleep in the middle of a battle, so finish your battle. Nothing like being 1 hit left to end the battle and you doze off, and 6 hours later, you finish the battle and your guys are still sitting there half dead. I understand why, just never thought about it.

My very first PVE was the Anniversary Week where it was Deadpool vs MPQ, so I was utterly confused by Deadpool Points.

23
  1. Spending 50 HP for a guaranteed Black Widow cover is a BAD investment.
  2. You can not ‘complete’ the game. You are expected to hit particular ranks in different events to progress.
  3. When and how much you can actually participate in non-prologue events, particularly PVP.
  4. That the difficulty of nodes are different. At the beginning all missions in PVE just seemed ridiculous. (scaling might have solved some of the problem).
  5. You have the ability to earn HP besides in a few prologue nodes.
24

It would take $100’s to actually enjoy the game. Don’t really mind, but it would have probably preventing me from getting into this game at the start.

25

Here’s one that only the longest-time players will even remember.

I wish someone had told me to hold on to all my skill covers until they implemented the 5-level, 13-skill system.

It used to be that you had to collect five or ten covers before your skill upgraded to the next level. That was awful.

It would have been nice to know that some 3* characters would be nerfed.

The only real thing I would have liked to know as a new player is how much time this game would take out of my life, and how much money I would have ended up spending on it.

26

Not wasting so much iso on characters that are useless after reaching a certain point

27

(1) Don’t put any ISO into the Bagman covers you get in the early story missions.
(2) Don’t waste a roster spot on Bagman.
(3) Bagman sucks.

28

I had a friend who didn’t know you could choose who to attack. I don’t know if the tutorial explains it but damn that would make the game harder! lol

29

WAIT A MINUTE…I am at Day 69 (ewwww), and there are like TEN DIFFERENT THINGS in here that I’ve never even heard of…

Could ya’ll explain your contributions, instead is just listing them? Please please please, for the love of God? lol

30

If you tell me what you’re not sure on, I’ll explain them (or who ever beats me to it icon_lol.gif
).

I’m actually asking this so I can put together a post of information for new players, so it’s actually rather interesting to hear that there’s a lot here you don’t know. Extra curious to see if it’s mechanical terms or normal game things that just aren’t very transparent in the game (and there’s a lot of both).

31

As a relatively new player (2*>3* transition), I checked out this thread and did learn a few things. I was stockpiling health packs and boosts for when I NEED them, but learned that I can actually use them now as I know how they replenish. So, thank you for that insight.

I agree with the posts above though, there’s still some things that aren’t explained that I can’t seem to find info on by searching the forum. I think they all just apply to PVP, which I’m not that interested in ATM. I’ve learned over the last couple weeks how complex PVE scoring is, I’m betting there’s a lot of hidden systems in PVP too. Maybe you’d be willing to tell me a bit more about Tanking, MMR, and brackets.

32

1 don’t waste hp on covers, buy cover slots.
2 Don’t spend iso on characters unless you are currently using them (i.e. Don’t spend iso on steve rodgers, when you only have 4 covers).
3 Dont play the 500 iso slot machine.
4 Tank in pvp.
5 pve essentials are last weeks rewards.
6 3* characters get rotated out and you will not be able to get more covers until they are re-introduced.
7 build teams that utilize all colors.

33

Brackets are the name for the group your leaderboard makes up. You’re placed into a bracket as soon as you pick a time slice for an event. If you looks in the “Events” sub-forum you’ll see a thread for most every event that says “ Brackets at ____ People” and this is so forum goers can try and place themselves into a new bracket so they can play their way to the top, rather than joining a bracket that’s been going for awhile and begin behind.

MMR stands for Match-Making Rating, it’s a way some games us to determine who should be matched against who, and it’s a hidden value for PvP events. There’s tons of theories out there on how exactly MMR works for this game, but the bottom line is D3 hasn’t told us (mostly to prevent players from gaming the system more than they already do) so there’s not a lot of information to tell here. For some technical information on how MMR typically works, here’s a Wikipedia link, but it’s very Math heavy.

“Tanking” is a practice of losing on purpose to lower your MMR, thus letting you play easier opponents in PvP. Generally this is done to combat “the wall” (i.e. at around 300 points in an event, you’ll start seeing nothing but level 166 3* teams), by purposely throwing matching and lowering your MMR, you’ll start seeing reasonable opponents again. This can also be used in some circumstance to raise your score, by purposely losing lower score games, and when your MMR “normalizes”, choosing high point matches, allowing you to come out ahead - however, this is not normally something you plan to do in my experiences just luck. Do keep in mind that a win is worth much more “MMR score” than a lose is (for an example, with arbitrary numbers and are just examples, we’ll say a win is worth 10 points and a lose is worth 30 points - in a traditional MMR system there’s a large slope there to differentiate wins from loses to prevent “lucky” or “average” players from attaining higher rankings and assure that truly “skilled” players that can reliably win often are at the top).

34

Ha, this.
The fact the enemy chose their moves so quickly made me feel really out of my depth. “Oh god, they already know what move they want to make and now they’re waiting for my slow, stupid ass to make a move.”
Then I realised the other guy ALWAYS made their move within a certain amount of time…and twigged it must be an AI working on their behalf. And relaaaxxxed.

Things I’d want to know…hm. Don’t assume Moonstone, Storm and OBW would be a great team just because you want an all-female team to fight with. And as such, don’t waste time levelling Moonstone up to level 94. Perhaps level Juggernaut instead because in some PvPs he’s amazing.

Oh yes, and what the difference between yellow and red tiles were in PvP. Someone mentioned this above and it jogged my memory. Been playing for nearly 400 days and it wasn’t until maybe my 300-350th days that I figured that out. Because I asked on the forum =/

35

I’m not going to talk about any characters specifically, but I am going to link NP’s amazingly epic transitioning guide. I am however, going to touch base on the scarcity of resources and to be careful with what you spend where, and site some of my own experiences (i.e. before I used to level 3*s to their max when I got a new cover, because “it was only 500 ISO” and I woefully regret it now lol).

Thanks again for everyone that input into the discussion. I have a lot of other stuff typed out already and I will be hitting the keyboard on this chunk of text on Monday. Probably post a lot of it up later in the week for critique and input. icon_e_biggrin.gif

36

Would have loved to know the devs were incompetent.

37

i wish i knew these:
Shields/Shield Cooldowns
Why it is important to join an alliance that suits your playing habit/roster
Why HP should only be used to purchase roster slots and the very last covers for 3/4*s
Why you should never buy cover packs
Difference between covers (abilities and damage) and levelling (health and damage)
13 covers for each character, optimal builds
Backing up using Facebook/Creating a MPQ only facebook account for sharing
Selling cost of characters - more covers on a character does not increase the iso sell price.
Cost of roster slots
PVE = Player versus Event, PVP = Player versus Player

38

Hardest thing for me to realize is that the game is not d3signed or structured for you to feasibly collect all the characters. Unlike other marvel games (such as MAA). At some point, you will need to stop expanding your roster and use your HP for guaranteed covers on the key cards (or your faves).

If you are going to spend cash, wait until a sale event.

Also “demiurge” is not the character from Young Avengers, but rather the company that makes the game

39

I spent the first few weeks (at least weeks, maybe months) just playing the prologue because whenever a new PVE popped up and I looked at the team I had to fight, they were all level 100 and my one stars couldn’t compete with that! I totally missed out that the game typically gives you loaners to fight that first node with!

40

Really? Because I have everyone except Yelena. Still riding off that 2500 HP I got as a random prize in the anniversary. Got that HP rebate from the alliance, too. I spend some on tokens and such and I’m currently at 4000ish HP left and that’s after recruiting Star Lord. I tend to build up HP nicely with events and PvP.