Wow that event was the game in its purest form...

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

This event pretty much was a giant example of what is wrong with the game:

It required days of grinding 2.5 hours when ever possible, if you dare have a life you shouldn’t bother trying to go for top rewards no mater the time zone (but especially if you are in Europe).

Final hours of major events, end in tons of alliance swapping, backstabbing and frustrating results.

The QA team lives in a weird world that thinks those yellow Goon feeding the new Hood Nuke nodes are “fun”.

The event will be rerun again in a week or two, for a new character.

It seems that they have the best of intentions overall (with a side of capitalistic profit as expected), but seem to misjudge or not think things through.

Why was this event not run in the “off season” after the time zone choosing for PvE was enabled? This sort of reward obviously encourages maximum participation, but basically a huge portion of the players new they had zero chance at top rewards, due to family obligations in the States, or multiple sub finishes at times that were not favorable to people outside of the States.

The alliance I am in was top 50 for each sub, yet was 58 overall? How is that possible? Oh wait because someone left within the final hours (as they obviously were not paying attention to the alliance scores habits the first two subs), and getting a replacement with the same points was all but impossible. If they stayed all 20 of us would have that nice red 4hor cover as a team. Instead 4.5 days of hard labor results in 1500 Iso and 50 HP for the 19 of us that stuck together.

All in all, all it does is prove that I only play this game for new covers, yet I hate how often they come out, and I regret wasting so much time of my life after it is done, and even when they do give me something new, that I enjoy, they will run it into the ground as fast as they can. If the repeat wasn’t for a new character, I would take an MPQ vacation as soon as it started.

2

Throughout this game I got the feeling devs are saying ‘it’s not us that are crazy, it’s the players’. While that might be true, they should really examine why this game encourages such insanity in the first place. There are crazy players in every game, but most games don’t try to have mechanisms that rewards insanity. In a typical energy-based F2P, you can’t even play every 2.5 hours if you wanted to, so you wouldn’t do it. Now you can spend a lot of money to do so if you’re inclined, but in that case such games dont’ have any additional restriction on how much you can play as long as you put in enough money. This game has a lot of ‘lose-lose’ mechanism. Suppose I charge you $1000 for a P2W advantage, here I gained $1000 and you gained what you perceive to be a big edge while the rest of the playerbase loses. If I feel $1000 is enough for the wrath of the playerbase then I definitely come out ahead and so did the guy who spent $1000 (at least I’d hope). In this event, nobody gained anything from playing every 2.5H. The nodes are of trivial difficulty for any serious roster so it’s not like you’re making additional boosts/health pack sales, so D3 gets practically nothing and players put in a lot of time and might not have much to show either because everyone else did the same thing, so in the end nobody wins. In a P2W system, at least the dev + the guys who pay ‘wins’ at the expense of the rest of population. In MPQ, everyone is a loser, including the devs.

3

I managed to finish top 5 in the Rocket and Groot PVE event without too much grinding.

This event was absurd in terms of how much more dedication was required to place high. I missed the opening of the event and, after completing my first run of the nodes, was almost 7k behind top 5 and 5k behind top 10. I gave up any real hope of more than one cover at that point, as a full clear of all the nodes would equal me out at best.

I think the biggest issue with this even was simply how powerful a character was being handed out. A 4* character is really appealing. If the exact same event was released for Gamora whenever she gets released, I’m sure the level of competition would be unfathomably lower. It definitely showcased the worst aspect of the game, which is the level of dedication required to keep up with the breakneck speed of releases to stay competitive on the highest level. There’s an argument that can be made that you should have to dedicate time to the game to get the best rewards, but I think this event went a bit past what a reasonable level of dedication should be.

Solutions? Who knows.

I have a question as a newer player as well: Were the previous 4* PVE releases this competitive, or were they released a different way?

4

The reason why competition is high is also because the nodes are especially easy. If the ‘hard’ track is Simulator Basic hard difficult you’d see competition go down simply because you can’t compete over nodes you cannot beat. Yes people will boost and whatnot but Simular Basic hard was enough to wipe out most players using only iso 8 boosts, and using HP boosts would become an interesting tradeoff given how long the event lasted (can easily spend several thousand HP with not much to show for it compared to other similarly crazy guys). The most number of health packs I used on a single clear was 4, and that was without boosting the whole time. I usually only need 2 health packs and I think only Colo and Arktos has a higher scaling factor out of the players that have reported their scaling. I’m pretty sure I can do the whole thing on 0 health packs if I run iso 8 boosts the whole time (though will probably use 2 at the end anyway to patch up The Hood and Captain America so not much point to do it). So if it was easy for me it’s got to be way easier for anyone else with a max roster because their scaling has to be lower than mine while running comparable firepower. And if everyone can do everything every cycle reliably, of course it’s going to be a mega grindfest because there’s nothing to create separation, and this doesn’t even account for the significant number of players that keep their roster purposely at the 2* level to enjoy even more favorable scaling.

5

I totally agree, besides the yellow feeding goon/Hood nodes that resulted in one-shots of any of the members of the team I was using, and a horrible cascade fest with Mystique in the final node twice in a row, I never had to use all the Health packs to make a full clear of the nodes, and I basically only ran 2 teams the entire event. The more I think of it, the more I don’t look forward to seeing this event again, no challenge and rediculously repetitive.

Simulator and Gauntlet are by far the only interesting PvE events, as they have far more variety in opposition. PvP is loosing the variety now as well lately.

6

Since I’m an Android player, I had unfathomably high data usage through most of the TaT event to give out Grocket, which meant I decided not to play at that time, which meant I started this event with no covers.

My aim was to get that final progression reward, so that I would have at least 1 cover.
I nearly forgot that the Daken PvP was also handing them out, but managed to grind my way to a top 25 there, which made it easy to collect the 50k points I needed for PvE progression.

I’m happy that I got what I wanted from this event. I really feel for those of you who pushed for Thor covers.

I’m most concerned what will come of this event once Doom has been “fixed” - which I presume will be soon. He was already highly dangerous when fuelled by goons, but I’d still consider that the difficulty of these nodes was tempered by his current abilities. If Doom is comes back from the vault with a shiny new third power, the next time this event is run (Gamora) could end up being an even greater blood bath.

7

There has been no announcement of Doom being rebuilt, except for “he’s in the vault”. In the vault doesn’t mean squat, evidence by Sentry and Hood both getting tweaked while in the active roster and featured in active events. Until you see a Doom’s New Power announcement, don’t expect a change.

If Meet Rocket and Groot runs again for Gamorra, I will play it, and probably do all right, but I won’t be losing any sleep over it. Even if Gamorra is the next coming of Sentry.

What people don’t seem to understand, or want to acknowledge, is handing out T4or is likely a one time thing. Nick Fury had his PvE, and hasn’t been a reward for anything besides 1-2 ever since. If you are in the top 1% of players (those finishing in the top 10 of a 1,000 person event), it made a certain amount of sense to give this event special attention. After all, Thor won’t be back again as a reward for a while.

I am not sad I put forth the effort to place 1st in my event, and earn that extra Thor, but you can bet I won’t be doing that again until the next 4* of badass proportions is released.

8

Since she’s the reward for first place in the current PVP I expect her to be in the regular rotation from now on.
Which means we basically grinded for nothing for 4 days straight, except to be able to max her earlier if we so choose.

9

I don’t understand this sentiment. Are you trying to say P2W is a good thing? And that only those who pay SHOULD win? Because to me that’s a bad thing.

I will admit to boosting my way through this PvE, and buying 5 health packs in the final 2 hours, but mostly I was competitive because I could be, and that’s NOT a bad thing. The entire premise of Free to Play is you have Time or you have Money and you can use either to achieve results. That a F2P player could possibly win an event isn’t something to be discouraged.

10

I meant more along the lines of reward for top 50.

11

P2W is better than nobody winning. The 5 health packs you bought would cost 200 HP and that’s hardly P2W by any stretch of imagination. This event is decided by how little you slept unless you had a gap of less than about 2K going into the final cycle. Spending money or not doesn’t have an impact because you can be spending a ton of money and if you missed a cycle you weren’t making that up. Since someone has to pay the bills, I would definitely prefer the guys who spend win the game as opposed to a system where everyone just mindlessly grinds stuff while generating no revenue. No I don’t think the game should be P2W, but this PvE is a lot worse than P2W. I got #2 and I didn’t use any boosts that require HP, and even if I used them it wouldn’t have mattered because I can already clear every cycle without them. There is no challenge and there isn’t even revenue generated. Ideally I’d like something that’s a mix of challenge and revenue-generating, but if we can’t get that I’d take just one out of the two, even if all we get is revenue generation. And no I don’t plan on spending money on this game, but in the long run it’s better for me if the game can generate revenue versus not so I’m willing to take a hit on my PvE placement if this translates to additional resources to make other stuff.

12

I think having 4hor as the door crasher was a huge motivating factor for people. I actually came in first in my bracket for the PvE just before this (where I got one of each Grocket cover) and it wasn’t anywhere near as hard as this last round.

The matchups were easy but time consuming. I didn’t need any health packs except a few times. I played as much as I could, grinding down every node to the nub every 3 hours of so.

And yet in the end I netted approx 120k for 55th place while 1st place was around 170k. Not a chance.

13

I think it’s the perfect storm of HP/ISO sales and instant availability of all 3 colour covers for her that is the key. A few people already had her 5/3/5 covered and up to lv230-270 within 20 mins or rewards going out.

I don’t think it was for nothing at all. Yeah, she’s probably going into regular rotation but unless you’re in the right time slice 1300 is now very hard to get (I was virtually soft capped at 11XX for the last two PvPs due to being in a non-hardcore slice) and competition for 1st places is going to be crazy.

14

And that is exactly what this event was for, making people buy the big bundles of HP (and if people are silly enough ISO), after all it is on sale! This certainly wasn’t an event done as a gift to the player base. If it was, it would have had a normal reward structure.

15

I long for the days of 12 hour full refreshes, I hate only having a chance in PVE’s by making sure to play every 2.5 hours for five days. PVE’s are quickly becoming the worst part of the game.

16

I alternated runs of 2.5 hour (or more like 3 hour gaps because I don’t set a timer) grinds, multi grinds before bed or other distractions, and some more infrequent grinds with rubberbanding in the last sub, and I came in fifth place with something like 145k points. Yeah, I played a lot more than usual, but I didn’t have to do every single refresh like some sort of crazy person.

The alliance competition is what was really brutal. The churn in ranks 40-60 was unbelievable, and I feel bad for putting our alliance through it just to get everyone (or actually, 17 out of 20 members because mercs) another 4* cover. I don’t think we’ll push for top 50 if they do one like this again.

17

Agreed, this was rough on alliances, as is the competition for season-end rewards. Really wish they’d expand the rewards just a bit so you can keep one alliance member that has life obligations (like say, traveling for Thanksgiving).

18

Have to agree with the event really shedding some light on what’s wrong with the game. My allaince had a lot of comitment from most people, and a lot of people that sacrificed family time over the holidays. We gave a free pass on low pvp scores to focus on pve. We were sitting in about 40th until 2 hours left when the merc action began to happen.

So a heap of us spent time giving up our lives to try and hit every refresh we could seeing that we were on pace to have all the work be flushed away last minute by questionable but expected behaviour. Next time I will drop out of the alliance for the pve event, and spend $20 on the 1 4* cover and actually enjoy my weekend.

But D3 gave everyone what they wanted, a sale, a chance at Lady Thor 4 * covers and a new pve event…funny how for many it wasn’t enjoyable haha.

Not sour grapes about not getting the allaince top 50, just an obesrveration and frustration for how it all went down.

19

Reading the reaction to this event I’m really really really glad I hit my “last straw” point with the PvE grint after Thick as Thieves and decided to take a break rather than dive back in for the Rocket & Groot showcase. What a clustercat.

20

A lot of this can just be alleviated from having longer refresh times. PVE is a huge grind to everyone. Most of the time, my alliance barely participates in PVE because of this.

What’s really frustrating in an event like this is if you work your butt off and don’t get rewarded for it. I think we all learned from this event. Next time, I definitely won’t be grinding as hard. I don’t need covers that bad that I sacrifice family time and not get rewarded for it.