I am not really in the mood to go in on a long list of points in how Playdom cant do good casual game design, fail moniziation and just overall miserable things.
I have worked on a few casual free to play games and its a fucking golden rule that the free player can get everything just with more time.
Hybrid...same as fucking Magneto. When Magneto was first released the player could do everything perfectly play constantly and don't get him if they got bad luck. However, this was the first character to use the lockbox system so it could in all honestly I guess be forgiven. The next character Omega Sentinel was instead to easy to get so took them some time to balance it.
Hybrid on the other hand is like 15 character with the lockbox system and after doing every daily, EVERY DAILY!!! And EVERY WEEKLY as good as I possible beating most bosses with 100% hp left and so on.
I still have not been rewarded Hybrid. This is utter crap game design, its literately 100% impossible for me as free player of this game to get Hybrid without having to use the gold resource that you buy with money, yes they did change so that people cant now get gold by leveling past the max level..but come on. It takes a few days to get past that for 1 gold I need 100 gold to get Hybrid. Such a fucking Joke.
I want to note that this is not my emotional opinion writing something about the people that work on Playdom,. no its my professional opinion that those people suck at their job. They should design so its a 100% chance to get the character if the player does everything during the timed event. Its not even hard.
As the cover to get a character is 100% secured if the player fails enough times.
It work like this.
First cover - unique 100% chance
Second cover 7/8 chance and if failed then the next one is 100%
Third cover 6/8 then if 2 are fail 100% chance.
Fourth Cover 5/8 then if 3 are fail 100% chance
and so on until the dreaded
1/8 chance and the need to open 7 fails tries to get a 100%.
Its easy to calculate that the 100% sure chance to get a character is
10+20+30+40+50+60+70+80. 310 Boxes..
If the player does everything in every daily event during the limited time frame they should get 310 boxes, its no harder then that. I can even go so far to say that as the chance to get the character on average is much, much higher then 310 boxes. I did the math in some other article is like 175 or something. Its actually reasonable to put it lower then 310, in my professional opinion it should be somewhere on the outskirt almost impossible to fail so something like. 270 or so. Barbecue the player can farm gold the days and get gold at roulette etc (not farmable but they cant by lucky of the daily roulette) so it doesn't have to be 100% to 310 but close to it.
Now I unfortunately did not keep track of the exact number of boxes that the player got but its something like, 5 x 30 = 150 + 4 weekly. So 190 that's just barely over the assumed number of boxes to get.
And yes I am not saying that most people wont get it. But its some players who spend full game time to get do everything hey possible did and they are lacking more then a 100 gold that's a lot, A LOT of GOLD MISSING.
Its tragic when a F2P game stop being F2P, yes Marvel Avengers Alliance has always been Pay2win in PvP but its even more P2W when the free player cant get all the characters even if they do every shitty retain mechanic the game has to offer.
Nothing in the game should force the player to use GOLD simple as that.
I wrote this about Magneto pretty much the exact same 2 years ago..but then like I said it was the first attempt of this game system. Now this system design is just bad when they have done it for over 10 times before and makes it go worse then previously. Greed I guess, it does not take amazing math skills to do a much better set for base value of box to get.
TL.DR
The basic problem is that they put the hard value of getting the game resource just barely over the mean value. There is a base value which is 190 and a mean value of needed resource of 175. But with a big disparity of up to 310 of a true needed value. The result is a user can be over a 100 resources to little which one look at it its a huge value miss as that's more then 1/3 of the total needed value.
So that's the math side of it, which is easy to do better. What is more miserable is the gameplay experience, which is were its a huge design fail. Its horrible emotional bad for the player.
The place the player gets to his just so bad designed. Not only can do they everything and still not get the reward but now they have to use the money resource to buy boxes and these boxes might also fail.
This is another huge design mistake its not, "omg omg I got the character" its not the epic win feeling the player get instead its 4-5 tries of, "fuck this shit I still got another duplicate"
If I would put it in to some kind of happy meter its something like this.
No reward (1/8 chance to get one so) -10 happiness
No reward again -20 happiness
And so on.
While final getting it DOES NOT give the epic win feeling, its more of a "eh..finally got it fuck I hate playdom". Because the player truly did earn the reward before its not a lottery farm thing. Were the player beats a boss x times and eventually gets an item.
A similar play would be e.g World of warcraft beating a raid boss and getting an item. There is a chance to get an item but its not 100% at all, its 20%(personal loot). getting an item means +10 happiness. Getting the right most wanted item, like a weapon its +100 happiness.
Not getting an item its like -1 happiness. Because you don't expect to get an item. So its a lot better gameplay going into being exited getting something and not so angry not getting one, of course one can get unlucky and not get items. And then the - happiness will increase each time.
But this situation in Marvel Avengers Alliance is a severe design flaw. Here the player instead comes from the other side of expectations. The player assumes to get the reward and not to have a chance for it. So its pretty ,much the reverse, not getting is a hard -10 happiness at least while getting the reward is a +1 happiness.
That's clearly not you want with the gameplay experience.
One good way to compare this, is with WoW again. In Warlords of Draenor there are Daily mission, nothing new with this typical Blizzard.
In WoD, its the apexis which gives 1000 a day. Farm these for 5 days and you can buy the chest, farm them for another 12 days and you can upgrade the chest and its then an epic item. Very clear progression.
THe daily missions for Marvel Avengers Alliance follows the exact same basic formula do some daily stuff, kill enemis get a boss etc. Get boxes, which is just another name for an important limited in game currency, so just a time limited game resource. Farm it for X days to get the reward.
Exact same basics, but then MAA adds into the chance of failing and its just so stupid. You have players who have done the dailes for 30 days, not just 5 or so 30! And get no reward. They have to use money for the last 5-120 resources.
You can do the math and argue for should the base value be 250 or 200 etc. The main issue is really this that the player is expecting to get the reward but getting nothing. Completely failing the retain of the player, to point is to retain the player to play each day for a little while so they might play more, invest money w.e. But if the player gains nothing from playing each day for a month. That's really pure insanity.
From my personal player perspective I would never in a million years give money to Playdom, or Marvel or Disney for that matter in this game. Its almost that is such a reverse of retain that I barely want to go and watch the next marvel movie etc. But for me as I write about each character etc I of course have to buy the new hero.....
I really want to emphasize on how the reward truly is zero!!! The player gets nothing but crap in those boxes so not getting the hero for a month of dailies amounts to zero gain in the game world. Unless then one pays for the last X lack of boxes.
Then the question becomes, why return to the game and do dailies? Pointless, the only thing they do is make you have to pay less money. A lot of players, most players are by the nature of refusing to pay any money for w.e reasons. (this system alone should likely be motivation to not pay).
A really weird incentive, play each day for 1 hour or so to get the chance to pay less. Not very motivation. Especially as in how social/casual games are a lot about the reward and clearly progression.
No reward and while the boxes/covers do get closer to 100%. I have experienced going from having 1 box to get duplicates for every possible draw until the last 7 and 8th an then suddenly getting them right away. So its always a miss / hit chance even after a long progression of time except at the final 100% chance. The weird expectations of chance for the player is just kind of hard to read into "how close am I really", even the progression is fucked up. Mainly as each step of the progression makes it a lot worse, the further the player gets the chance of getting the right cover decreases, the "fun game" time, only decreases over time.
I have a game dev friend who also play this game a lot. And we have always joked about how this game show how not to design casual games. And we started does joke back in 2012...this is more sad now how Playdom is going backwards, like this is worse then the Magneto. And that was way back. They should fix stuff not break them more. I was disappointed in the Magneto failure.
A sentence I wrote back then was "Enormously short sighted game design." I think that sums it up pretty good. Making a retain system of - get player to play each day as they get reward, but not even giving them a reward will surely decrease the number of people doing following the retain mechanics the next reward comes.
And also just in general, I blatantly refuse to give money to this company. I have a hard time not seeing a lot of other people doing the same for stuff like this. I know a lot of people have already told me they refuse, so again I come back to this topic that I have discus over the years of license game ruining the licence? Maybe it does, I would think it does.
Like I worked on a couple of licence games, big licence games. And frankly some of those games, SUCKED. And I mean SUCKED, in my defense I told everyone at the company all the flaws pretty much everyday so(yes I am great at parties). No but jokes aside, I really have worked on some god awful license games and I don't take lightly to say this because I don't want to shoot my own CV in the foot so to speak, of course I did learn a lot:) (I truly did try to fix what I could).
No but those games were bad, they could have been a lot better and I know that one of them ended up selling atrociously low. So basically my and other peoples salary was paid from other more successful games. And especially one of those games, I assume it made the player stop enjoying the other part of that huge merchandise franchise.
I am trying to come up with an example of a my own childhood here but I had an overall bad experience of Licence games and then refused to buy any license games for like 10 years, until Marvel vs Capcom 2 was released that was the first licence game I bought in 6 years at least.
There is this economical concept called Long Tail. Basically if something is good enough it will sell eventually. Write a book if its a masterpiece in enough time someone will read it tell it to their friends etc and eventually it will sell. So with Marvel right now its the movies if anything, Movie X was good so I go and see the next Movie, Ok this is not really what specially long tail is about, but long tail is a kinda like having a good brand. Developing a good brand is a Long Tail. (I have an associate Degree in economy/industrial leadership I felt that I really showed it here)
This game is an extreme short tail right and that it become worse with this 15 or w.e character is just bad design classic for free 2 play facebook games I guess but, its such a well recognized brand. That in my opinion its very shortsighted in how it ruins the well established brand. In my opinion the more I play this game, the less I want to pay for any Marvel/Disney product, Truly.
Its kinda the reverse of what Marvel Vs. Capom 2 did. Like one of my best friends really liked playing Marrow in that game, so he went and bought comics with Marrow (which is basically reading Murloc story lines in X-men). Positive effect of having a good quality products. Now instead I just feel like I want to avoid Marvel Products. And I really like Carnage USA too, feels like I should not get the next symbiotic comic event as how much Hybrid fucked me over.
