When and how to balance new 5*

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

so with 5* carol being released the initial reviews have not been great. We have also had a string of good but not great 5* with a lot of them having some major flaws. There hav3 been 5* that have been released that turned out to be much better than initial impressions show so what I am suggesting is to relook at 5* released when they leave latest packs and look to rebalance them if needed.

the reason why I say wait to get them out of latest is players will have had an opportunity to cover the 5* and play test them and give the devs a lot of stats.

here are the things to look at. One players who have the 5* character championed how often do they use the character in PVP not sead teams. How often do they used championed 5* in PVE when not buffed. How often do players use said 5* on hard nodes in PVE when not buffed (even if not champed). This should give. Good usage rate to see if players find this character useful.
2nd run the stats on powers especially with all the CD and repeater tiles being used. For these powers how often are thee CD or repeaters hitting 0. If this is a low percentage then this is an opportunity to buff the character (think Loki’s king pins green). Powers should not have a low percentage of usefulness.

3rd based on usage and effectiveness of powers determine if a buff or nerf is needed. I look at Loki’s green, Kingpins, blue and green, Cable’s blue, Carols green repeater, and see powers that are see good unique abilities but have such a low chance of actually being useful, or need great timing to work. Miner adjustments can be made to a lot of new characters to make them more playable in the game rather than sitting there only to be used in essentials for PVP. It is ok to admit you errored on the side of cation when creating a character and then giving a slight adjustment to their powers to make them better.

please rebalance more 5* to make them more useful in the game. They don’t need to be meta, but they should also not be frustrating to use.

2

I absolutely agree that 5* should be tweaked periodically.

However, waiting until just after they leave LL is not the right time to do it. If the tweak takes them from good to great, there would be moaning aplenty from anyone who wishes they had pulled more when they could.

If the tweak takes them from meh to good (but not great), there will be moaning aplenty from anyone who did pull for them expecting that they would be buffed higher.

Notice the common thread here - people moaning :slight_smile:

Maybe instead there could be a general rebalancing at MPQ Anniversary time, where as you suggest they could look statistically at the power set and determine which were least likely to be used, and least likely to be effective, and adjust them accordingly. Changes considered for all 5* who have been in Classics for 6 months or more.

eg drop the cost of Loki green, make Cable’s blue countdown create new green charged tiles, etc

3

Let me preface this by stating this is just speculation on my part, but it is entirely possible that the dev team is intentionally designing these characters with repeaters with counts over 2 to create a “need” so they can later release a character (and/or support) who has an ability to reduce repeater counts.

I am not saying it will suddenly make all abilities tied to repeater tiles great but it certainly increases the value of a character that has a passive ability to reduce repeater tiles if there were a few characters that would be competitively viable if only their repeater count was at 1 or 2. Take for instance, Archangel’s Angle of Attack passive. In the 5* tier largely considered a useless passive (and you may still think so depending on how you evaluate 5* Captain Marvel) but with the arrival of a 5* that does go airborne, people are re-evaluating it. If there were a meta-character that did go airborne or if there were a decent amount of good characters that did go airborne in the 5* tier, Archangel would suddenly see a jump in value, similar to the current Black Suit Spider-man revival.

In order to keep the game interesting, the dev team has to find ways to create interesting abilities that are not game breaking. By putting restrictions on a character’s power set, it helps set up potential future synergies by creating a demand for a specific ability. If I were a member of the dev team, I would be focusing on creating the long-dreamed of rock-paper-scissors meta and currently I think we have two out of the three pillars:

Rock: Okoye

  • passive that boosts direct damage abilities

  • large health pool and great healing ability makes her a superb tank

Current best partner:
Thor

Scissors: Kitty

  • special buff tile extraordinaire
  • goes great with special tile spammers

Current best partner:
Rocket & Groot

Paper: ???

  • passive that reduces repeater tiles

  • passive generates AP when repeater tiles reach zero or passive destroys enemy AP when repeater reaches zero

Theoretical best partner:
-Kingpin?

  • Gambit??
  • Ghost Rider???

There’s potential to be had with repeater tiles, no doubt, but unfortunately these things take time (no pun intended). But considering how many 5* characters have been given a repeater tile ability, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did release a Kitty/Okoye type support character that helped speed them up somewhere down the line.

We arguably have the richest 5* tier meta ever, but there’s still a lot work left to be done to balance out the 5* tier and I am very interested to see what design choices the devs take to bring balance to the MPQ universe. But that, I am afraid, is a story for another day.

4

If I remember correctly, Repeater Tiles were created because countdown tiles that automatically reset themselves when they reached zero had an unintended effect with 4-star Carol of boosting any special friendly tiles to ungodly levels. I can only assume that the fact that there are now two characters that boost friendly tiles every turn with only minor restrictions means that the devs now consider that ability to be just fine.

As you stated, the problem with the “Paper” metagame that you suggested above is that the repeater tiles either take time to have an effect. Meanwhile, those boosted strike tiles are wiping out your character that boosts the repeaters, creates the repeaters, or (more likely) your entire team. We have characters that do interesting things with repeater tiles, but they’re just too slow.

If you want to fix the “Scissors” portion of the Meta (which seems to be horrifically overpopulated with Grocket/Kitty teams) and promote repeater tiles, make Rocket & Groot have a 3-turn repeater tile that creates strike tiles, rather than just throwing them all out at the start of the match. Currently, the only character that helps out immediately against them that I can think of would be 5-star Spidey, if you happen to have the “Strike Tiles reduced” ability maxed out. There are other characters that help out eventually (Kraven, Prowler, 5-star Black Widow) but they’ll likely be long dead by the time they’ve got something good going.

5

I would say BSSM is your “paper”. I think this is the best the top tier meta game has ever been. If the OP gets his wish for a 5* who effects repeaters we might have a Rock Paper Scissors Spock meta and that would be fantastic

6

I almost think a full repeater update is needed. Change it so that it fires on first cast and on all repeats.

7

So my question is this if the characters use rate is low and when their powers are fired they have a low effectiviness why wouldn’t they want to rebalance that power? So for example if players fire Loki’s green 1000 times but it only resolves 5% of the time then it is not working as intended. It becomes a bad experience for the player and the game. So it might be turning it to a 2 turn repeater or having it fire then put the repeater down or reducing the cost.

I get creating a character to help with CD/repeaters and I would say this if the new character comes out and makes CD/repeaters broken then they can nerf the character or the CD/repeater charaters. The goal should be to identify what works and what doesn’t and make adjustments earlier rather than ignoring.

8

Possibly a side note and certainly one of my overplayed soap boxes I like to stand on, but I will hold my position that minor reworks of older 5*’s is exciting and rewards nostalgia as well.

I know they cannot put them in the latest store for profitability, but it certainly would add to the meta mix if done right.

I really enjoy reading some of the ideas in this thread from some of the vets whonhave posted here.

9

I agree that the current 5* meta is pretty good because a fairly large number of characters have value (Thor, okoye, and kitty obviously, but also Thanos, strange, bb, JJ, doom, DD, and a few others), and no single player dominates all aspects of the game. But there are a few VERY large caveats.

(1) veteran players, specifically those playing at the 5* level since late 2016, have a massive advantage because some important characters have been stuck in classics for years (e.g., strange, Thanos, and maybe BB).

(2) BSSM is even older, but now has a very strong niche role which even fewer players can experience

(3) power creep in health and match damage is becoming a serious problem. Marvel’s strongest color is ~33% higher than SS, and she has ~25% more health. At that rate of growth, there will soon be a de facto 5.5* tier (even if power strength remained pretty flat).

(3) there are a few immensely bad 5s that need to be fixed as quickly as possible (wasp, kingpin, banner, revised Ock). And the two nerfed 5s were put into the ground. They should be bumped up a bit (oml should heal by himself and get his black strike stength back, Gambit should get his old red damage back at a cost of 8ap, or his purple should still overwrite all specials. One or the other.). Useless characters at the 5* tier are especially bad because progression is so heavily tied to RNG.

(4) as I always love to point out, Demi must decide how badly it wants a slower meta-game that will allow things like repeater-based or defensive strategies to become viable. Scoring/shielding/grinding would all need to be revised to make such designs viable. That’s a big shift, but also one with potentially big rewards. I don’t know if I would have the guts to risk a golden goose like mpq on that change, but without such a change, character designs like kingpin (and presumably marvel) are just being sent out to die.

10

When you think of other multiplayer games and just how frequently things are tweaked. When you see guns go from 50% spread to 40%. Healing increased from 5HP per second to 10 HP per second. Shield now has 350 health instead of 500. Character movement increased or decreased, all of that kind of thing.

Then they look and see how that does and maybe make the shield have 400 as a compromise because it was too low.

None of that happens here. If a character gets changed up it’s never a small tweak to see how it goes, it’s always a monumental event. And sometimes it makes the character worse. Sometimes better. Sometimes…it’s so different it’s barely the same character any more.

But when the forum calls out for character changes they should be listened to. Not necessarily their suggestions for how to do it, but there are characters I’d like to use more but kinda can’t because they’re not in the meta and can’t be bent to fit the meta.

I loved God Emperor Doom being announced and I’m also very excited about Captain Marvel, she being one of my fave Marvel characters…but neither of them are fast enough or utilitarian enough to help in PvP where 5*s really matter. So if I champ them, I might use them occasionally in PvE when they’re not boosted. But otherwise they’ll join Ghost Rider, Black Bolt and Spider Man as characters who are pretty damn good in their own right, but too slow to get the job done effectively.

11

Interesting ability might be to do an “Executive Decision” on all friendly repeater or countdown tiles on the board.

Also, while less likely for devs to implement, perhaps two types of repeater tiles - an instant repeater which immediately fires upon being placed and then repeats x number of turns, and then a delayed repeater which fires after reaching x number of turns.

12

The things the players want and the things the developers want to do/can do are often different things.

There have been very few 5* rebalances. We had Surfer and Cap First Avenger a few years ago. Then the nerfs (OML, Gambit). Doc Ock was the first buff in a really long time. (Gambit was supposedly a nerf the first time).

Doc Ock was also handled in the best fashion, rebalanced while offered in a new release store, in terms of making a reworked character available to players while making it possible for players to conceivably spend/chase covers.

It could be that they have a plan to rebalance some of the 5’s as they come up in the store rotation (which is about 74 weeks currently), but maybe not (Banner certainly wasn’t).

But even then, as pointed out, it’s basically impossible for the devs to reasonably expect work on rebalancing to result in some revenue increases except maybe among whales who consider trading dollars for CP and random luck at 5’s to be a reasonable proposition. I’m much more interested in developing new characters, generally, than using older ones.

The other concern, of course, is that the basic mechanics of most characters are what defines their viability. And almost every rebalance - the vast majority - have not suddenly resulted in a meta character or even a near - meta, but just a different flavor, usually a better executed one, of the same basic power level character.

One can speculate as to why; but as pointed out by @Vhailorx, the game has been successful following a pattern of doing things, and shaking things up in a big way (such as suddenly implementing a rapid pace of small rebalances) will be a risk. Probably one that the developers would only pursue if the current model stopped paying off. It’s also worth noting that the team is not very large and they probably prefer focusing on the known revenue drivers (new stuff that people chase) for that reason and don’t have a lot of resources to go back and look at old stuff.

13

Quality of life increases with a wider array of usable characters. You can’t tell me that Banner is usable in competitive play. No one expects you to.

Customer retention is paramount in business. The 10x rule usually applies to the cost of bringing in a new client compared to retaining repeat customers.

It does not take a lot of time to increase match damage or health. There was a time when they increased health (and a few, decreased) in one fell swoop. I think this will satiate the needs of at least some of the 5* disparities.

14

The difference in match damage is my big gripe. If they just leveled that off the same as the 1*-4* tiers it would help.

15

I’ve I’ve got to say that, as a 4* player not THAT far from looking to transition, this is one heckuva(n) interesting, informative, insightful, and useful conversation.

Carry on!

16

I’ve never understood how the developers of MPQ handle balancing their characters and Dragon_Nexus (above) spelled out exactly what confuses me:

I look at the way MMOs, MOBAs, shooters, and most online competitive games handle things with little tweaks here and there amidst routine game updates. Balance is the goal as perfection is sought. Major updates (increases in version numbers) can often have large buffs/nerfs, but otherwise its just small adjustments when something is obviously amiss.

For all the things I love about MPQ, the lack of easy/minor character adjustments is its most glaring weakness (in my opinion). How hard would it be to give a character like Phoenix some more health and match damage? It baffles me that they completely rework Mr. Fantastic, a character who in no way needed to be changed, but they continue to ignore what should be simple fixes (like the Phoenix example).

17

It doesn’t quite work the same in MPQ tho. This isn’t really a multiplayer game. For starters we have character levels, while most multiplayer games has everyone on an even field. In your examples, those types of things are more or less universal. Each character has a fire rate and movement speed, armor or healing depending on their role, all varying with usability or skill level. There’s no skill level in MPQ, its all rng whether you have a friendly board and cascades, or if some part of you. The only skill comes from choosing teams, as fight4thedream noted, its more of a rock/paper/scissors type battle. The only sort of comp for regular balances in MPQ is match damage and health, but that also changes depending on their kit.

18

I disagree with this. There are plenty of times where skill comes into play, either in the ability to quickly process information and make good choices, a better understanding of the physics of the game (simple physics, yes, but recognizing a match that will cause a cascade for instance), and correct timing and usage of powers.
I had my daughter who had never played the game before complete a scl9 sub using thorkoye (on deadly) where my only instructions were to never make a match with the hammer, and fire any power as soon as it started flashing, and she had no issues doing it using zero healthpacks. You can’t tell me there isn’t an element of skill beyond that which would have yielded better results.

19

Both are right because there are different kinds of skills involved.

  1. Inside of the actual match, the game is pretty straightforward assuming you don’t miss match 5/4 and fire powers appropriately. Here your daughter will be extremely successful.

  2. But outside the match 3 aspect, Leaderboard placement requires making fast matches, and priortizing alot of different factors. Here it takes more experience and judgement calls to make good decisions like, “Whether I should purposefully create enemy specials for kitty to process”

  3. Building and managing your roster. I.e. Optimizing the resource allocation problems so you don’t have to spend money save covers.

These are all different skills you have to master or deal with it at some level to succeed in this game.

20

I would say you are talking more about strategy than skill. In shooters, the skill is in aiming and reflexes. In fighting games its button commands and reflexes. This game waits for you, so reflexes aren’t involved. Predicting cascades is a skill, but its also dependent on rng. I would say the ceiling for skill in MPQ is barely above the floor. To my point, you handed the game to your daughter and she won with no issues.

You wouldn’t hand off the controller to a novice in a competitive Overwatch or Smash bros match because they would be completely ineffective. Some characters are stronger because they are harder to master, but at the same time people who have mastered them also can’t be OP either. That’s another thing they have to balance, and part of the reason they do update frequently.