Ah. I obviously don’t play enough PvP (and I pick SCL 8 anyways) to really notice this. That seems a little cruel. I mean, I guess you only have to do better than everyone else at your SCL to place first and get those rewards, even if that means you can’t progress any higher than 700 points (or whatever).
It doesn’t really bother me that I can’t ever catch up with players that have been playing much longer than me. Easy to say, I guess, when I’m already at Day ~785, but still. As long as I can complete against others of my relative level, be challenged, get rewards, and progress, it doesn’t really bother me how long the other player has been playing, and I generally don’t check.
One way to separate the masses would be to occasionally do variant PVP events, where the featured/required/loaner character is a different star level and once players joined one they would be locked out of the others. For example, there could be three simultaneous Captain America PVP events featuring his different variants: 2* Cap; 3* Cap; 4* Flaptain or Peggy. Restrict allowable characters for each event to the relative star level and below.
This would be possible with a lot of characters including Cap, Iron Man, Wolverine, Spidey, Captain Marvel, Thor… they wouldn’t even have to feature variants of the same character. You could run an ‘Avengers’ event or a ‘Villains’ event with a different member from each group represented in the various star tiers.
Set the rewards to accelerate to the next star-level, so the 2* event would reward 3* covers, the 3* event would reward 4* covers, and a 4* event could reward LTs.
MMR would still be in play, buffs could still be in play, though I dunno if SCL would work into this - might dilute the groupings too much.
And, more importantly, they’re both using Sony’s or Microsoft’s networks for their infrastructure as, at the very least, a bridge between clients, if not a server host.
For a mobile game, you’re on your own.
If you think ANYONE is going to put out $50m or so to set up what would need to be a World of Warcraft-level client/server architecture for a match-3 puzzle game… I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Bold added for emphasis. That would be super exploitable. I only see two ways that would work, both would be bad:
If the player that didn’t abort get’s prizes you’d have alliances and/or alliance members target each other and take turns aborting immediately for free prizes.
If the player that didn’t abort doesn’t get prizes then you’d likely see most people abort when it seems like they are gonna lose, tinykitty their opponent.
If a system like this were to exists there would have to be a penalty, probably a steep one, for losing/aborting, otherwise the system would not work or be horribly unfair.
A mistake a lot of would be designer do is assume that a game designed around single player, will somehow be meaningful or great gameplay if made into multiplayer.
Never happens.
MPQ was designed from the ground up as a single player game. There is almost zero meaningful skill. An AI can easily play the game at its highest skill ceiling, they just don’t bother to program that because it would frustrate players so much.
The elements of the game are:
Time investment
Luck
Collection
Freshman high school level thinking for optimal play
None of these elements make for a fun or compelling multiplayer interaction.
I believe this refers to doing a live PvP feature with a turn timer. Having a turn timer with a low latency connection could result in people getting shorted time or their turn being totally missed if the timer is short and/or latency is very high.
Hmm, that’s not really latency - that’s lag. But I see what you mean.
I would think the turn timer would have to be somewhere in the range of 30 seconds, so if the lag is bad enough to be meaningful over that time span, there are some serious network issues that need fixing.
