It’s been a long time since I’ve written a new thread to play Devil’s Advocate, but now seems like an appropriate time. Early warning - it’s a long one.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the soon-to-be-reality of True Healing and the motivations that put the change into motion - this thread is to talk about what I believe those motivations to be and how it lines up with many of the controversial decisions put into action in the past (and why it’s not increased health pack usage.)
Edit for clarity:
The purpose of the thread isn’t to say that the removal of healing will be a boon to players or that everybody will be able to reach greater heights when healing is removed or that this makes the 2*->3* transition any easier or harder. The intent is to show why the mechanic shouldn’t exist in it’s previous state and why it’s in-line with the overall goal of removing tedium from the game and not a move to drive health pack sales. If the health pack poll is any indication (and it’s really not, but let’s just believe), the change will have zero effect on health pack purchases. The devs have a decent idea of how they want players to progress from the Prologue to 3*-land, and that was in effect before the healing change. If progression is severely altered due to the healing change, I would fully expect other changes to occur to re-align progression…and it won’t be propped up by tedious mechanics.
TLDR: Prologue healing is a chore. It’s tedious and un-fun (the results, however, can lead to plenty fun). But, since it’s available, players feel forced to partake in it to remain competitive among their peers. Game mechanics that reward tedium and boring gameplay should not exist. Similarly, game mechanics that “force” users to use certain characters should also not exist. The system needed to change.
Player Motivation - Gaining an Advantage
This game is highly competitive, particularly in the top 5% of players. For those top percentage of players, winning is often the primary objective, so they are always looking for little edges to gain an advantage in relation to their competitors. It’s something that’s inevitable, and players will take advantage of every edge they can get, even if the method of doing so is completely un-fun, since the overall objective of winning is the goal. Players wanting to win would feel compelled to adopt any strategy that would give them an edge, since not adopting those strategies would put them at a disadvantage.
A Boring Advantage Is Not Good Design
We’ve seen a number of strategies surface over the lifetime of MPQ that gave players advantages, and most all of them are completely boring. Most of the time, the strategies revolve completely on doing some sort of mundane task that would hardly be considered playing the game.
Specifically, these are the ones I’ll be talking about:
- Skipping. Players would skip opponents endlessly until they got a favorable match-up/points combination. This would often outweigh actually playing matches. (In the pre-nerf Rags/AP Boosts era, 30 second matches were the norm for all top players…likely putting Sentry+Daken to shame.)
- Tanking. Players would retreat-tank entire rosters full of characters in order to “hide” from other top players in PvP or to reduce scaling in PvE.
Both of these methods were considered fairly boring - there’s no enjoyment in it. Nobody sits around thinking that they love watching Yelena bite the dust constantly or that tirelessly watching for high point totals on repeated skips while just barely glancing at the opponent’s team is a good idea for a fun-filled Friday night. If a friend came over and I wanted to show him this awesome game I was playing and I spent 2 minutes skipping opponents or killing off BagMan for the umpteenth time, it would be the worst advertisement ever.
Eliminate Boring Content
So, those two methods of gaining an advantage needed to go.
- Skipping. Victory bonuses were added to the game. Interestingly, both positive and negative feedback were introduced to the mechanic. I’m uncertain on just how effective the change was, though I suspect skipping on a whole has been reduced across the board, even if a large percentage of the reduced skipping behavior is isolated to lightning rounds.
- Tanking. Many changes have been made to tanking in the past - lightning rounds had a much less effect on overall MMR, retreating tank teams were no longer being displayed on defense (which is now reverted, though possibly due to alliance retreat tactics?), and finally retreats not counting as losses altogether. Unfortunately, many of these changes just led to even more tanking…while also creating this “Don’t talk about Tank Club” mentality that many top alliances adopted that was oh so entertaining to watch.
While the methods used to curb skipping and tanking possibly have questionable effectiveness, the motivation for those changes were clear - gaining an advantage through mind-numbing tactics is not the goal of the game. The devs don’t want players to feel compelled to use very boring strategies in order to achieve their goals of winning tournaments.
Healing
Healing falls right into the same bucket as Skipping/Tanking in terms of being an un-fun way of gaining an advantage. A player could spend a third to half of their time in some random Prologue node with opponents far lower in level than them just to add a couple thousand health back on their characters. Few people went to Prologue Heal and thought about how fun Prologue healing was and that they were super excited to show those lvl 30 goons who’s boss. (I’m sure some people went in with the idea of “It’s like a new mini-game! See how many blues I can get without having a countdown tile hit!”…I don’t know.)
But, players feel compelled to do so, because it gives them an advantage over those that don’t prologue heal and enables them to keep up with players who do prologue heal. (Technically, most top players stopped prologue healing a long time ago, but it’s still very much true for most players in the 2* range.)
In-game healing follows a pretty similar line of thought. 2* players feel compelled to use OBW - they don’t have much other choice. They either use OBW or fall behind everybody who does. So naturally, all of your teams consist of OBW and all of your opponents do, too. This is boring (and pretty well chronicled in a number of threads all over the forum.)
This is the motivation for “True Healing.” Prologue healing is boring. Using the same character and facing the same character all the time is boring. The changes introduced in “True Healing” are designed to make it less boring…so that you no longer feel compelled to do some of most tedious crap just to stay in-line with your opponents.
Gaining An Advantage The Fun Way
Instead of the boring ways to gain an advantage, the devs want to focus more on fun ways.
- Deep rosters/roosters. If the whole point of this game is to get covers and invest ISO into them, then you darn sure hope that having a large collection is an advantage for you (sorry Flo98). You see this in effect most prominently in having featured/boosted characters in PvP/PvE tournies and very much so in Heroics. Gaining covers and putting a collection together is fun (I hope it is, at least, it’s probably the main point of playing the game.) Thinking of how characters synergize together and putting together optimal builds for your individual playing style is fun.
- The meta-game. Probably more controversial, but a lot of players have a ton of fun piecing together the meta-game and designing optimal strategies - whether it be in PvP or PvE.
The devs are always trying to push players into gaining advantages through non-tedious/boring methods, particularly the two above.
Health Packs
I think a lot of people overestimate the impact of health packs on the game, currently. Health packs are such a bad investment in terms of cost-effectiveness, it’s likely never used by 99.99% of the playerbase in any sort of consistent fashion. I don’t think I’ve heard of anybody that has bought a health pack outside of extreme desperate measures (“Oops, I accidentally wiped my entire team twice 45 minutes before this PvE ends”.) Any HP spent on consistent sustained health pack usage should probably be used to buy covers outright. I don’t see this changing.
Conclusion
The change in how healing works falls very well in line with previous changes to discourage tedious gameplay to gain an advantage. The devs are (and should) be encouraging tactics that are overall more fun. Any tactic that feels like a chore…like excessive skipping, tanking, prologue healing, or compulsion to choose only very specific characters should definitely be eliminated from the game. There are most certainly a lot of things that can be improved with the game from a fundamentals perspective (and, most certainly, from a communications perspective), and we’ll just have to see how those things play out while giving our suggestions and feedback as we go along.
The Future Obstacles
Having said all of that, I think that there are a lot of things the game can improve on and there are a lot of obstacles from a fairly macro perspective that need to be figured out regarding player motivation.
- Everybody wants to feel like a superhero/winner. In a game about fielding your favorite Marvel super-powered heroes…there are a lot of losers and very few winners. In order to get all of the 3* covers, you need to be top 1% individually and top 0.005% alliance-wise (I used 20,000 as the number of total alliances)? Rough. Many on the forum can top-10 a PvP in their sleep, but that is far far far the exception. How can we make everybody feel like they are kicking ass all of the time? In a game with so many “losers”, that’s really difficult. The top is actually getting rather crowded with large teams of 141s all over the place. At some point, 2* players won’t be able to displace a player with a load of maxed 3*s, since there will be no more room at the top. How do we make it so players have a clear path to achieving their goals and not discourage them by putting them up against high-leveled teams or have them get “picked on” by those teams at the same time?
- Disconnect between PvP success and roster size. We’ve all seen that you really only need two characters to completely dominate a PvP tournament. You can go in with Patch/Mags/loaner or Daken/Sentry/loaner and wipe up. This is obviously contrary to what the devs have in mind for what constitutes having “fun” advantages of large and diverse rosters. Eventually, people will feel compelled to go with a very specific top two characters…how can that be prevented? How do we reward players for their previous effort?
- Rewarding players who take on higher challenges. Both in terms of high-MMR PvP and high-scaling PvE, there is little reason to actively seek out harder competition in the game. How do we encourage players to face tough challenges head on? Instead of trying to manipulate the system into giving them easy missions?
- Self-Healing. This one is a lot more micro…but I’m a little bit worried about Daken/Wolvie holding onto the old healing effect. For as much as I’ve said that players felt compelled to use OBW/Spidey…I worry that the same compulsion will carry on over to Daken/Wolvie.
