Who's enjoying the shift from F2P/P2W to P2P?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Many of the recent changes seem to have been shifting the game away from a casually or semi-casually playable collection game, that you can optionally sink some money into to progress faster, into a full-on pay-to-play system.

In particular:

  • The health “buffs” that prolong matches enough that you almost always need at least one health pack.
  • The weekly boosted characters that don’t really improve their powers, but just increase tile damage and amount of health you need to chew through, helping to ensure you need health packs.
  • The increased cascading, far beyond what should be randomly possible, and that additionally wipes out all your special tiles, but usually leaves theirs intact
  • The board punishing you for holding onto AP. Spend your powers immediately, often sub optimally, or face an endless cascade.
  • Punishing you for not using enough health packs. Turn 1-3 cascade full-on wipes 3 or more times in a row if the game thinks you haven’t been using enough health packs. Use enough that you’re short again and will have a very difficult / almost impossible time getting through a round or matches without buying health packs, and suddenly it goes back to normal again.

This isn’t confirmation bias. This is standard behavior I’ve experienced since the health buffs, and other recent changes.

With all that and more that I just don’t feel like enumerating, they really need to allow some kind of subscription model that removes the health buffs, weekly boosts, and all the other crap that’s destroying this game, all the gimmicks to force you into buying health packs, the artificial scarcity, the roster slots problem, fixing PvP and PvE, and just makes the game fun again.

I don’t mind paying some money on roster slots occasionally to be able to continue collecting, though I won’t anymore unless/until they fix the price at something more reasonable than what they are now, but all these other micro-transactions and artificial frustrations make this game less and less fun.

For now, I’m still somewhat enjoying PvE, but PvP is just a colossal ****fest. Sorry, that’s uncharacteristic of me, but there doesn’t appear to be any way you can even remotely play PvP anything close to casually unless you’re content to spend half a day or more, and a ton of money on health packs. I’m not willing to do that. I’ve already spent over $200 on this game. I’m not willing to turn into an MPQ cocaine addict.

I’ll continue playing PvE for the time being, so long as it continues to be fun, and I have the roster spots, but once that ceases to be the case, I’ll start selling characters I’m not interested in, and then I’ll just stop playing.

Or Demiurge could fix the roster slot problem, and fix the PvE and PvP systems. The balls in their court, but going by how slow these forums have become, I really don’t think I’m the only one who feels, or felt this way. If the company is in financial trouble, talk to the player base, get feedback, and find out what will work for everyone. The current direction the game is going isn’t a direction that I’m willing to continue with if it doesn’t change soon.

2

D3 has always alluded to that there’s a target HP expenditure they’re looking for in terms of hitting certain PvP thresholds. I’d like them to just come out and say what it is. That way either you can tell people don’t bother crying if you didn’t spend at least 3000 HP for a 2500 HP cover, or that if it’s meant to be something reasonable then people can show them that it is totally not possible for an average player with 5 166s to hit 1000 progression on 500 HP + a reasonable amount of playing (say, under 30 hours in 2.5 days). As long as this target HP expenditure is an unknown number, there’s just no way to know if anything is intended.

3

I’m not sure I’m willing to wear the tinfoil hat on artificial (ie non-RNG) cascades for the AI just yet, but I most definitely agree with the overall sentiment of OP.

As i said earlier today, the irony is that DDQ may be (partially) to blame - my theory is that DDQ is leading to a slight decline in cover and token purchases on a PER USER basis, and to make up the shortfall Demiurge is altering mechanics to increase revenue in two other areas - namely roster slots (via fast new character releases, weekly buffed characters, 2* required on Essential PVE’s etc) and health packs (buffed health, big AOE TU’s like Supernova, lots of overlapping events, again weekly buffed characters, etc).

I think that because this is a Marvel property with characters many of us have known and cherished for a long time, that a subscription type model could conceivably work - BUT it would have to be a completely different game. I fear Demiurge doesn’t have the time/resources to take on such a project, and I doubt whether Marvel or D3/Sega would let them create two such similar games in any case.

So we are stuck with this mess (if we choose to play at all, which I find myself doing less and less) - it would be nice if Demiurge could tell us their vision for where & how the revenue and fun lines will cross-over harmoniously. I fear that sadly they are running in opposite directions at the moment.

4

There’s no conspiracy on health pack sales or roster sales. D3 flat out doesn’t know what makes money. +AP all boosts and shields, by far the biggest impact purchase you can possibly make in PvP, are still unbelievably cheap compared to alternatives (health packs, or leveling a brand new character to max level). If they have any intention to extract more money they’d have added a 0 to the cost of both of these items before needing to resort to any fancy behind the scene changes. But that’s what makes this situation all the more troubling. If they just want more money, some people might say sure I got more money if it means a better game. But they don’t really even want your money. They’re just making changes that doesn’t seem to have any obvious goals. Well, the HP increase to all the characters is meant to lead to longer games, but they clearly haven’t thought about what this even means let alone trying to make more money out of it. It’s literally just ‘longer games are probably better’, which I agree as a philsophy, but you got to do more than that. There should be new events/modes that encourage longer type games and maybe even mechanisms that makes money from these games (say, offer the ability to revive your characters in mid battle for a fee). Instead all we get is that games are longer, and you happen to be able to spend more money on it if the longer games get in your way, but they don’t even get in the way of some players, like PvE guys with low scaling are minimally impacted since scaling still completely trumps any marginal change in character’s health.

5

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Phantron - you are on my top 5 all-time favorite poster list, but you’ve got to be kidding me that D3/Demiurge doesn’t know what makes money. If you meant to say they don’t know what changes result in more or less money, then I’d buy that (since many games/apps use trial and error or A/B testing to determine what works best to generate revenue). But they most certainly understand where their revenue is being generated. And I suspect the top 3 areas are by far Roster Slots, Cover Upgrades/Token Purchases, and Health Packs. Health packs likely trails the first two by a good margin, but are still bigger generators than things like Shields and Boosts. They can’t just increase the cost of things like Boosts because then, other than a few whales, people would stop using them - and many newer players don’t even understand Shields and Boosts and never use them anyway.

On the other hand - I LOVE your idea about new events/modes that encourage longer play separate from the modes we have today, or the other about additional revenue generating mechanisms (costume variants, anyone…?).

Lastly, I understand your crusade against players keeping purposely under leveled PVE wrecking crews - that’s a totally separate problem from the OP thread though. I agree with you that it’s an exploit, but I suspect that since it is an exploit, the Devs will eventually get around to closing it (they just have to do it without messing up people who are truly in the 2* - 3* transition period).

6

I just hit my 149th day, so I’m by no means a veteran, but I’ve seen the game change wildly since December of last year. And to be perfectly honest, I love the new changes. In particular, I really enjoy how I’m getting more opportunities to experiment with team construction.

Until last season, the only team I used was Luke Cage + Iron Fist + loaner. Over and over and over. It was boring. However, it was also the only way that I was able to compete against the X-Force + 4Thor + loaner teams that I encountered over and over and over.

The big difference now is that I can viably use my Mohawk Storm + Daredevil team, or Hulk + Kamala Khan. And I’m competing against a wide variety of teams, as well. The sudden presence of new teams is really refreshing. So in that sense, the game has dramatically improved.

The biggest problem with the new changes is really, like you said, the length of time that it takes to compete in pvp. I don’t spend any money on health packs, I just start competing in each round earlier. But what that means is that, all together, it takes at least 3-5 hours of play time to get around top 50. Combined with pve, and that’s a LOT of play time for a mobile game.

The only real solution I can come up with would be to take the current health levels and scale them all down to a lower level. It would make the matches much more dangerous, but shorter. It would also allow me to continue playing with some of my favorite characters that were unusable before because of their lower health. Also, I agree with Phantron that D3 should continue to come up with new modes and play styles. More choices and more opportunities for varied team construction sounds really fun.

What the new changes really amount to is that we’re being forced to make choices. Focus on pvp or pve, but pick your battles wisely because doing everything all the time is just a tremendous time commitment. Pve is actually much less fun to me because I don’t like spending a week stressing about maintaining top 10, 25, or 50 considering I’m already grinding away at pvp. I’d rather spend time with my kids than grind nodes down for hours, which is why my more casual focus on pvp is pretty fun. I do feel that the new changes are actually hurting the D3 business model because we’re burning out faster than before (the game feels much grindier than it even did before), so I would hope they continue to evolve the game in exciting ways (and lower the price of roster slots).

7

Really now? Are we in the ‘the ai cheats by making favourable cascades for himself’ phase again? I thought we were through that a year or so ago…

In any case. Finishing decently (e.g top 25) in PVP is still rather easy and you certainly don’t have to spend a single cent to achieve that with a somewhat decent roster. absolute top finishes (Top 5 / Top Progression reward) seem to have gotten harder, but then those aren’t really aimed at your average casual gamer, are they?

8

Why do you think health packs sales are higher than shields and boosts?

I know I am a sample size of 1, but I have bought many many shields and boosts, and I have only ever bought one health pack in my entire mpq playing span.

Most of my friends who play the game also buy many more shields and boosts than health packs.

I wonder whether the expenditure differs at different levels of play.

9

My experience is that the cascades occur as much against as to my advantage. I have many more cascades that leads into match 5, giving me free turns, and leading into more cascades. The AI did not get more cascades than me.

10

If you are still playing the way used to and expecting the same results; you are not going to be happy and you will probably feel the game is p2p.

However, since true healing and now with the advent of shield cool downs and 8 hour pve refresh timers, MPQ has specifically stated they want players to play on shorter bursts. I use to climb to 300-600 for my first push in pvp. I don’t (can’t) do that any more, so I have to push in smaller chunks and/or use different teams. This is how pvp is set up now.

A variety of buffed characters in conjunction with less points lost for defensive losses and retals, the new meta is more player friendly. Unfortunately, for me it was not vet friendly of you had put all your iso resources into maxing xforce/4or the past couple of months. It took me a good month to figure out if I could and how to adapt to the new pvp landscape. It will probably take me another month and a half to get back to playing top tier pvp like I was before.

Besides the above, there are several things that are helping me.

  1. You can’t wait until the last minute to start any more. The new mmr is specifically designed (more than anything else) to prevent vets from trouncing newer players on late climbs.

  2. Some weeks will not be fun or as much fun. Some weeks when I see the buffed last, I know I won’t do as well. I hope to mitigate this over the next month and a half. I no longer put iso just into my best character. I accumulate iso during the week; then, when the buffed list comes out, I decide who (if anyone) I should put iso into that week. If I level them, I still level them in stages. If I don’t level, I can put iso into a character of my choice or hold onto for the following week.

  3. I now pick my spots. I don’t go for t5 or t10 every pvp. Some I don’t shield at all depending on my schedule. I accumulate the hp for roster slots or for shields when I decide I am going to go for a higher placement. After all, why spend 75 hp for a shield for t10 instead of t25 without shields? You lose 25 hp by doing that just so you can say you were t10.

  4. Smaller pushes. I expect to get 200-250 points a push. I’m prepared that it could be less because it must takes one ai miracle cascade. You cannot force the issue. There really is no need to. The event is 60 hours long.

  5. I would never buy health packs. With the new points lost system, I don’t think it’s needed. At worst, 75 or 150 hp shield is still better than 200 hp for a 5 pack of health packs.

  6. Personally, since the changes, I’ve never spent less on pvp. There just really is not a need to with all the new features. If you’re playing top end pvp, most will have to buy shields. However, that has been the case for many players long before these new changes.

11

If D3 is actually trying to increase health pack sales they’d add a 0 to the cost of all shields and all AP boosts. A 750 HP shield for 3 hours is likely still more useful for PvP than 20 health packs (4*5 pack at 200 HP and call that 750 HP). I know they say you can never underestimate stupidity, but I think even the clueless has figured out that shields are better than health packs in this game. For PvE you can make the same argument for AP+all boosts as they have a far bigger impact to whether you can beat something than health packs, and with scaling being overwhelmingly dominant I just can’t see too many guys even trying this in the first place. It’s either you have good scaling and don’t even need anything fancy, or you have bad scaling and you wipe out immediately and it’d cost you far more than what the cover is worth to attempt to beat scaling with brute force.

12

I’m trying to wrap my head around this number.
Are you saying that a “reasonable” time devoted to playing a mobile game per day is more than the amount of time devoted to sleeping per day?
Does that seem right? Of course, each user has their right to choose how much time they devote to any particular “task”, but that seems a bit much for an expectation for a mobile game. Am I crazy?

13

(Emphasis added)

This plays into what I’ve been harping on for a while - this game has gotten very very hostile to people who have work or school commitments that limit playtime. During the week, I only have time to play much in the evening. I used to be able to do all the grinding I needed to then, with maybe a little before work or at lunch, but several changes - True healing, increased hit points, mmr changes, bad end times, etc. - have combined to mean I can’t really do that anymore. And the net effect hasn’t been that I shift my playtime around, it’s that I simply play less.

14

That number isn’t meant to be reasonable, but I’m just saying even playing that much (30 hours) you can easily show that still isn’t enough to hit 1000 because plenty of people will never hit 1000 no matter how much they play.

15

Yup, I finally gave up the hamster wheel and went casual as a result of not having any time slice in PVE that is reasonable for a working individual on the east coast.

Barely played Hulk, don’t think I’ll be playing Simulator at all. DDQ and PVP up to 575 is about all I want to commit to the game anymore. All the changes finally broke me, lol.

16

The problem with the boosted characters is the same problem as there was before. PvP is a system where you use the best team or you get beaten to a pulp. They’ve made efforts to improve the diversity there, and it’s a little better now, but it’s not the boosted characters that are driving any use of health packs there. In an ideal world you could just sub out team A for team B with minimal impact, but PvP is not ideal.

To that end, PvE is certainly not a health suck, at least from my experience. I don’t quite have Phantron’s super-scaling, but I’m not playing in the kiddie pool either. In any PvE that I actually try (which admittedly is close to none now), I’m using 20-25 characters easy. If I could do that in PvP, I’d never buy a health pack again.

As for the rest, if we’re using one opinion to prove your last 3 ‘points,’ I can prove the opposite. I have experienced zero of those concepts. I don’t get punished for sitting on AP, I don’t get punished for clearing nodes, don’t see increased cascades. Heck, my matches could use a few more cascades for either team, would be nice to get some of these matches done quicker.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got some issues with the game lately. This PvP season has been draining as far as motivation goes, with the low scoring really taking a bite out of the fun. Competitive PvE stinks. And the issue Ben G mentioned about the game being cruel to those with real life responsibilities couldn’t be more true.

But on your ultimate point, there’s nothing about this game that feels P2P to me. It’s been about 8 months since my last spend, and there’s nothing right now that screams “you need to funnel money into this to continue.” PvP is certainly P2W, but that’s not a new concept, and still not necessary to put any money towards.

17

I definitely think the game has gotten even more where the player’s gameplay style is being dictated by the game format. If you want to speed through and destroy PVE, you get with higher scaling. If players want to use particular characters and those characters become too dominant in their use, a re-balance seems inevitable. Some players wanted to speed up PVP with 3 AP ISO and HP boosts, this got curbed as well. Players want to communicate outside the game (also known as the reason lots of people have stayed playing this game instead of leaving long ago), MPQ has stated that they are trying to minimize the effect of this activity as well. Players were shielding very often in PVP (aka pausing the game around their lives), cool downs actually dictate that not only cannot they play in that fashion, but in fact, players that want to “pause” must go on the game’s schedule of every 8 hours (not around players’ own lives and activities).

So from that perspective, I think you are 100% correct. But in fairness, this is not the only game to do this. PAD, FFRK, and lots of games I have not heard or played do the same thing. Other games actually even limit gameplay much more. For those, it does not matter how many characters you have, when your stamina is gone, you get a time out. At least in MPQ, you could always use different characters or play different events. So from this perspective, MPQ does actually permit players more gameplay freedoms than other games; it’s just not to the great degree we had become accustomed to.

18

Matches go on longer so its more likely you’ll get a cascade or be on the wrong end of a cascade with the increased number of moves per match.

Aside, I agree with the sentiment of the op.

19

I know this is a little off topic, but… wow… 2.5 days = 60 hours; averaging in weekends, there is 18-19 hours for work/commute, an overall healthy average of 18 hours sleep (say 7h per night), and a very stingy 2h a day total for meals, hygiene etc. (5h in 2.5 days).

So real life minimum is 42 out of those 60 hours. I am happily married - and intend to stay that way - so let’s add another stingy 3h per day (7.5h) in 2.5 days, so my Real Life minimum hours commitment is 50 out of 60 of those hours. Even if I spent those last 10 hours - 4 hours per day! - playing MPQ, I am still well short of what a seasoned, experienced, and knowledgeable veteran deems a reasonable amount of playtime - 12 hours a day!

I reeeeally hope that was a typo, and the intent was “under 3 hours in 2.5 days”

Thank you, I now return you to your regular programming.

20

I’m enjoying my MPQ subscription of $20/Month