Request for Training Mode

WilliamK1983

Whenever the write up for a new character is released, what is the first couple of things we all do?  Theorize about best build for the powers, who they could pair with, who they're a counter for, etc.  It would be great to have a place to test those theories out.  Nothing will be gained from this mode except strategies and team builds.  No iso, no hp, nothing. Conversely, nothing will be lost either meaning health packs, boosts, etc.  

If it's just for the characters you have on your roster, that's fine.  There are currently 267 characters in the game and growing.  With the addition of 3* releases into the fold, the combinations are endless.  So why not have a mode where you can test teams out?  You don't want it, don't use it.  Expecting anyone to do that when placement is on the line is ridiculous at best.  

HoundofShadow

@shardwick Parrying mistake in fighting games typically leads into a combo or into a slam that knocks off a chunk of your health, depending on the skills of opposing players or difficulty of AIs. And in Fighting Games, you can play against another human players. Like I mentioned, players are  winning matches more than 85% of the time. Remember a few years back the dev changed the rate for cascades due to players' complains? If you manage to see reviews of new players complaining about losing, they typically complain about how AI is cheating due to cascades. As a matter of fact, the ex-dev addressed this in their blog. So, the AI doesn't have any real skill to speak of. I suggested the dev to make AI smarter but they declined. 

@WilliamK1983 You nailed the core point: 
Nothing will be gained from this mode. The dev gain nothing financially. On top of that, training mode makes shield training redundant.

WilliamK1983

It absolutely does not make shield training redundant @HoundofShadow.  Again, reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.  Shield training is like every other pvp, you battle against the same couple handfuls of character combos.  And you are rewarded resources for reaching specific levels.  IN A TRAINING MODE THE PLAYER WILL GAIN NOTHING RESOURCES WISE.  The devs making money isn't my top priority or concern of mine.  Besides, I'm willing to bet the financials of the game are doing just fine.  

HoundofShadow

The concept of shield training is to give the players opportunity to play with newly released 4* so they can figure out different teams. Likewise, the core concept of training mode is to let players test out combination of teams, except that players will have full access to all characters. How does this not make shield training redundant? Training mode effectively made shield training redundant, except that players earn reward. Rewards are secondary in shield training.

If the dev isn't making decent profit, then they will not increase resources freely permanently without tradeoffs. It isn't that difficult to figure it out. And players will continue to complain about how they can never catch up or how they don't have enough HP. The worse case scenario is that they shut down MPQ for good, which isn't a bad idea actually.

WilliamK1983

It's like I'm talking to a wall having to constantly repeat myself.  Ignore list activated.

Bad

The ignore list it's great but sadly reality can't be ignored.
If you have a brand new training mode and 2 months later the game shuts down then I'm not sure what's the point on enabling a ridiculous training mode, which doesn't serves for anything, by the way, except for players playing the game at their own disposal.
If I can fight with all the characters vs all the characters at my will then I don't need to play any repeated pve anymore, I have everything in the game already. 
But I agree there is a wall here: the I-don't-care-for-the-game-a-bit wall.

Bad

dianetics said:

I don't know why you keep coming back to your specific version of a training mode.
I would hazard to guess most people don't want everything unlocked for a training mode / training dummy.
Your version of a training mode / training dummy serves no real purpose.

I didn't read many post saying a training mode just on the roster we have, more like the opposite.
If it's the own roster, nothing prevents the player to play the easiest node on pve, after 3 clears done, play with any team and quit before killing them: no practice mode needed.
If it's against a meta pvp team, nothing prevents the player before gaining any point, to target the meta team wanted and try any team, as there won't be any point lost: no practice mode needed. 
If it's about unlocking any character and to fight any team, then a practice mode it's needed, what I actually think it's the intention of many players on this thread, and so my reasoning is correct and my rant well founded.

shardwick

HoundofShadow said:

@shardwick Parrying mistake in fighting games typically leads into a combo or into a slam that knocks off a chunk of your health, depending on the skills of opposing players or difficulty of AIs. And in Fighting Games, you can play against another human players. Like I mentioned, players are  winning matches more than 85% of the time. Remember a few years back the dev changed the rate for cascades due to players' complains? If you manage to see reviews of new players complaining about losing, they typically complain about how AI is cheating due to cascades. As a matter of fact, the ex-dev addressed this in their blog. So, the AI doesn't have any real skill to speak of. I suggested the dev to make AI smarter but they declined. 

@WilliamK1983 You nailed the core point: 
Nothing will be gained from this mode. The dev gain nothing financially. On top of that, training mode makes shield training redundant.

You specifically said a punch that would take off 30-40% of health and now you're changing it to a combo or a slam? Neither of those is a punch. A cascade in MPQ is the equivalent of a combo or a grab/slam in a fighting game that can do a large amount of damage versus making a single match 3 in MPQ which would be more on par with doing a regular punch in a fighting game. Also, what does playing against human players in fighting games have to do with anything? Human players are going to be more likely on average to spam fireballs the entire time and not use any actual skill. Hell I probably got better competition against the AI whenever I played fighting games which is what I used the training mode for since I was playing the computer the majority of the time. Not to mention that with AI opponents I never had to deal with them rage quitting or screaming a bunch of cuss words at the top of their lungs at me whenever they would start to lose. 

HoundofShadow

@dianetics The original version of training node was what I've commonly seen. Also, I've seen a few posts in this thread that mentioned wanting to unlock every characters. How is that strawman? These players want training mode too but they want every characters unlocked. Also, I proposed alternatives of "training mode"  that can be implemented immediately according to your roster, if you want to. If you don't want to do that, then continue waiting for it in a few years' time, maybe. Lastly, what do you mean by you want to test teams for 5-10 minutes without using resources? 

@shardwick You mentioned Ryu so I thought you play fighting games as well. Since you mentioned Ryu, then you might be familiar with Street Fighter. If so, you might know about the famous Daigo's parry. If you don't, here's the video. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzS96auqau0

Such timing are not luck based, rather it's a skillset. No one goes into a fighting match knowing that they will win more than 85% of the time unless the AI is as smart as MPQ AI, which does happen for the first few matches of a normal mode. Or unless they are really good players.
 
I'm not changing anything, except adding that slamming is one of the move besides punching and kicking in fighting games. If you don't like slamming, I'll remove that. In fighting games, when there's an opening, it's a standard move to chain punch or kick into combo. That's what I mentioned by punch/kick dealing 30-40% damage. No decent players do individual move like a single punch or kick when they see an opening. 

A cascades in MPQ is largely due to luck unless it's done via certain powers. To be more clear, those cascades that you can see are not luck-based (for example, seeing two match-3 in a single move), but those that you can't see are luck based (for example, making a match-3, only for cascades to happen via tiles falling from the top). On top of that, the starting board in MPQ is random. If you have good luck, you have all the favourable cascades or match-5 to finish the match faster. If you've bad luck, the board will give you a lot of useless colours on the board. No amount of training will prepare you for bad board. If the starting board in MPQ is always the same, then it gives a little more weight for training mode. When fighting game players eat a chunk of health, it's not due to RNG. It's due to skill, timing or experience. 

Again, I'm not totally against training mode. I've mentioned a few factors that would make training mode valuable in MPQ. Unfortunately, the factors are not there. If you want to test teams according to what you have, I've proposed alternatives and I've used them many times. If not, let's just get the dev to make Simulator/Gauntlet happen more frequently with inputs from players on what teams they would like to face. 

Bad

As a side note of that Daigo's battle, the guy yelling don't do it is a friend of the player using Chun Li, who knew that Daigo was capable of parrying all the special hits.
Still, one thing is being capable and other to actually doing it in a Final Tournament, and for that reason he entered gaming history.
Also it's the reason if not continuing parrying system anymore in Street Fighter games.

shardwick

HoundofShadow said:

@dianetics The original version of training node was what I've commonly seen. Also, I've seen a few posts in this thread that mentioned wanting to unlock every characters. How is that strawman? These players want training mode too but they want every characters unlocked. Also, I proposed alternatives of "training mode"  that can be implemented immediately according to your roster, if you want to. If you don't want to do that, then continue waiting for it in a few years' time, maybe. Lastly, what do you mean by you want to test teams for 5-10 minutes without using resources? 

@shardwick You mentioned Ryu so I thought you play fighting games as well. Since you mentioned Ryu, then you might be familiar with Street Fighter. If so, you might know about the famous Daigo's parry. If you don't, here's the video. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzS96auqau0

Such timing are not luck based, rather it's a skillset. No one goes into a fighting match knowing that they will win more than 85% of the time unless the AI is as smart as MPQ AI, which does happen for the first few matches of a normal mode. Or unless they are really good players.
 
I'm not changing anything, except adding that slamming is one of the move besides punching and kicking in fighting games. If you don't like slamming, I'll remove that. In fighting games, when there's an opening, it's a standard move to chain punch or kick into combo. That's what I mentioned by punch/kick dealing 30-40% damage. No decent players do individual move like a single punch or kick when they see an opening. 

A cascades in MPQ is largely due to luck unless it's done via certain powers. To be more clear, those cascades that you can see are not luck-based (for example, seeing two match-3 in a single move), but those that you can't see are luck based (for example, making a match-3, only for cascades to happen via tiles falling from the top). On top of that, the starting board in MPQ is random. If you have good luck, you have all the favourable cascades or match-5 to finish the match faster. If you've bad luck, the board will give you a lot of useless colours on the board. No amount of training will prepare you for bad board. If the starting board in MPQ is always the same, then it gives a little more weight for training mode. When fighting game players eat a chunk of health, it's not due to RNG. It's due to skill, timing or experience. 

Again, I'm not totally against training mode. I've mentioned a few factors that would make training mode valuable in MPQ. Unfortunately, the factors are not there. If you want to test teams according to what you have, I've proposed alternatives and I've used them many times. If not, let's just get the dev to make Simulator/Gauntlet happen more frequently with inputs from players on what teams they would like to face. 

Jesus Christ I literally already covered that at the start of my last reply to you. I can see why people put you on ignore. You said that a punch in a fighting game could do 30-40% damage and that is completely false outside of very few circumstances like a final boss that is designed to be overpowered. So your counter was "Oh yeah? Look at this video of Ken doing this massive combo with a special thrown in which is totally the same as a punch!" Really, dude? This conversation is pointless.

Daredevil217

HoundofShadow said:

@Daredevil217 As for comparing training mode to trying out one car everyday at a car dealership every day, I don't think they allow you to try out the car for 24/7 or give you 24/7 access to try out cars anytime you want without any payment. Neither would they allow you to try out different models of cars every day for one month or more for free. At best, you could do it (try different cars for a while, not for 24/7). If you want do it everyday, I'm sure they will start blacklisting you. As for getting sandboxed accounts, players could do it but it's troublesome to do it because they have to switch accounts back and forth. For players with sandboxed accounts who still use their original account to play, they have different motivating factor, such as being in a top alliances or being part of the LINE group to make them play, or they are already seasoned players.

Next, this is a gacha game. The dev want players to spend. That's why players complain about dilution, never being able catch up and having to worry about roster slot cost. It's all deliberately designed to make players feel that they need to play everyday to catch up. Players don't want to spend a lot to catch up. They don't want to wait 5-10 years to champ all 5*. A 24/7 training mode with access to all characters champed will magically solve all these problems. Yes, you can't bring them to pvps or pves. However, once you have access to all champed characters and you simply want to try out different teams, you'll be stuck in that mode, unless you are in some competitive alliances.

A training mode is no different from unlocking the entire game without spending. Players are tired of seeing Mindless Ones, Sentry and DA in pves. They are also tired of seeing the same meta or boosted teams in pvps. Training mode changes that. You can pick and choose any opponents that you want. Logically, there are at least 17 million combination of enemy teams that players can choose in training mode. With over 70+ 5* and over 120 4*  to choose from, your typical players would be stuck in this mode for months and or even years without needing to spend.

Training mode makes (non-competitive) players less likely to spend and more likely to quit because there are zero pressure to catch up. So far, I don't see anyone saying that training mode will make them want to spend more. As a matter of fact, they expect it to be free. 

How does Training Mode improve spending and extend the longevity of MPQ? It doesn't. If you think training mode will improve spending and increase revenues, I'll like to hear how it is possible.

What you’re not grasping is the concept behind the analogy (obviously it’s not perfect, nor is your fighting game analogy, or any other we can come up with).  Dealerships just hand you the keys and say “have fun” because “try it before you buy it” is a money-maker. 

Why would sandboxed accounts be troublesome? If all the player wants is to unlock/play every character for free, there’s no need to “switch back and forth”. Just use the sandboxed account as their only account. No need to switch. Or… OR maybe there’s a difference between having characters and only being able to use them in a training mode where there are no rewards/rankings, and having those same characters and being able to compete with them? You make it sound like this proposed training mode gives players the ability to use the characters in matches where it actually counts for something. Which if it did, 100 dollars would be dirt cheap and most of us would pay that easily.  

A couple of other points.

1) the new developers (the old ones as well actually) have done plenty of “goodwill” things and made improvements to the game that do not directly impact their bottom line (other than the goodwill itself). So it directly counters your point that any changes they make have to be a “trade-off” or directly make them money. Until you can prove otherwise, I’d stop going to that well.

2) The fighting game analogy (as mentioned earlier) is a bad analogy. Because while I win 90% of my matches against the AI, my opponent isn’t the AI. My opponent is you and everyone else on these boards. I’m trying to clear faster in PVE. I’m trying to hit fast while minimizing getting hit in PVP (without coordinating). My other opponent is myself. I’m trying to optimize my teams to perform better each PVE. I had this whole discussion in my alliance about whether 4* Chimi or 4* Sharon is a better support for clearing fast with Shang-Chi. Would be fun to try both against the same opponents and see. But again, while I could see using a training mode for fringe cases like this, if it did get implemented I know I’d rarely use it overall, so prefer developer time get used for something more meaningful to me (like more rebalances!). 

I personally don’t like using the PVE nodes to practice because 1) you can accidentally kill shot with a crazy cascade (especially with SC) and screw up the whole event. Or, if you exit with plenty of health left on the opponents, it won’t tell you much about how long it takes to finish them.  

Bad

Daredevil217 said:

Why would sandboxed accounts be troublesome? If all the player wants is to unlock/play every character for free, there’s no need to “switch back and forth”. Just use the sandboxed account as their only account. No need to switch.  

Sandboxed accounts are troublesome because are illegal.
The right solution would be to delete that account after many warnings.
If former devs, or new ones, didn't do it can be because of several factors. Because they can't afford to examine continuosly all accounts, because it will be meaningless as infractors would repeat the process, or because they are more interested on players profiles who support the game and aren't those owning sandboxed accounts. 
If all players were sanboxing accounts the game would be already dead.
By the way, it kind of seems like HoundofShadow and me were preaching in the desert.
This game already has changed from devs once. That fact should light a bulb for someone. 

Daredevil217

My understanding is that sandboxed accounts aren’t illegal. You get sandboxed by by the developers (they know about it because they are the ones who do it) by doing something “illegal”. If I’m wrong someone correct me on that. So again, if that’s all people cared about (playing characters but not being able to compete/play with others, I assume they would choose that route.

Godzillafan67

Until this thread, I've never wanted a training mode. But as I thought about it, I realized that I have been accepting a "not for me yet" approach whenever people would post videos of amazing 5* action  or 4*/5* teams that I can't put together (I still haven't champed 49 of the 127 4*s). I've read @Daredevil217's 5* ranking list, but that's all theory for me.

If there were a training mode where I could pick anybody, select their cover count/distribution and level, then I could see which characters I want to chase. When we tell newbs that Juggs, Grocket, and Polaris will make their PvE easier, they could check it out. It would be fun to pit some of the annoying SCL10 nodes against each other! 

I suppose that the training mode is all that some people would require to get fulfillment from MPQ, but I think that most people want to collect and grow their roster "for real". $99 is a cost-prohibitive entry price for me, though I'd consider $5 or $10 for lifetime access.

HoundofShadow

@shardwick Do you really have to be glued to that one word? I merely left out some words and you are biting on the "punch and deals 30-40% of max health" mistake. Look,  anyone who plays fighting game decently knows that you don't do individual punch when there's opening. You punch and do combo. That's why fighting game typically have training mode to train your skills and muscle memories. If you are still going to nitpick about me missing some words and not understand the main concepts between the difference of a match-3 and fighting game, then so be it. 

@Daredevil217 buying car is a 5-6 figures sum of investment. Of course, they let you try it out and please you as much as possible because they want you to buy the car and earn commission. In MPQ it's different. The people here are sensitive to spending a lot. If the dev let you try out a fully champed 5* Jane Foster for free for 3 days and then sell 1500 shards of hers for 99.99 usd, would you guys buy it? Or would you whale for her HP store after trying? Of course not. You guys would rather wait for her to enter LTs or her special store to champ her. Most of you won't touch highly priced cash bundles.

And I like to emphasise, I mention major change without tradeoff. Over the years, the dev and ex-dev have given players items for free without tradeoffs. It has happened many times. The kind of change I'm thinking is shards vs bonus heroes as an example. There were tradeoffs. Other example would be the UI change a few years back. However, it affected steam players and they were not happy about it.

shardwick

HoundofShadow said:

@shardwick Do you really have to be glued to that one word? I merely left out some words and you are biting on the "punch and deals 30-40% of max health" mistake. Look,  anyone who plays fighting game decently knows that you don't do individual punch when there's opening. You punch and do combo. That's why fighting game typically have training mode to train your skills and muscle memories. If you are still going to nitpick about me missing some words and not understand the main concepts between the difference of a match-3 and fighting game, then so be it. 

@Daredevil217 buying car is a 5-6 figures sum of investment. Of course, they let you try it out and please you as much as possible because they want you to buy the car and earn commission. In MPQ it's different. The people here are sensitive to spending a lot. If the dev let you try out a fully champed 5* Jane Foster for free for 3 days and then sell 1500 shards of hers for 99.99 usd, would you guys buy it? Or would you whale for her HP store after trying? Of course not. You guys would rather wait for her to enter LTs or her special store to champ her. Most of you won't touch highly priced cash bundles.

And I like to emphasise, I mention major change without tradeoff. Over the years, the dev and ex-dev have given players items for free without tradeoffs. It has happened many times. The kind of change I'm thinking is shards vs bonus heroes as an example. There were tradeoffs. Other example would be the UI change a few years back. However, it affected steam players and they were not happy about it.

You don't like that I focused on punch? Ok. Most special moves don't do 40% of damage either. The only way that you can get there is with a powered up special meter and that usually takes most of the round or hell even sometimes the entire match to build up for something truly devastating, or through a big combo, you know kinda like what Shang Chi does which takes strategy. And Switch is her own parrying system. 

HoundofShadow

@shardwick The main point is, we don't need the kind of reflex and muscle memories that fighting games need. On top of that, our AI is dumb. That's why I don't see a need for training mode. As I mentioned, if our AI is smart as good human players, I'm fine with training mode. Because (new) players would be able to see how AI teams play smartly on defense for pvps or for other purposes. As of now, our AI can't do that intelligently. It follows specific orders: firing powers from left most colour to the right most colour etc. Players don't do that.

As far as testing for synergies is concerned, as long as you don't have strange criteria like not wanting to use healthpacks or what not, you can test it anywhere in pves you want (since I think your training mode is restricted to players' rosters.) Winning matches in MPQ is almost a given.

As for testing against specific enemies, I find it kind of pointless because the AI can't play as well as good players when it comes to certain synergies or order firing powers and we are winning more than 85% of the time. AI-proof synergies like Kitty/R4G, Polaris/R4G, Colossus/Wanda or Hulkoye are there. You don't need training for such synergies. 

shardwick

HoundofShadow said:

@shardwick The main point is, we don't need the kind of reflex and muscle memories that fighting games need. On top of that, our AI is dumb. That's why I don't see a need for training mode. As I mentioned, if our AI is smart as good human players, I'm fine with training mode. Because (new) players would be able to see how AI teams play smartly on defense for pvps or for other purposes. As of now, our AI can't do that intelligently. It follows specific orders: firing powers from left most colour to the right most colour etc. Players don't do that.

As far as testing for synergies is concerned, as long as you don't have strange criteria like not wanting to use healthpacks or what not, you can test it anywhere in pves you want (since I think your training mode is restricted to players' rosters.) Winning matches in MPQ is almost a given.

As for testing against specific enemies, I find it kind of pointless because the AI can't play as well as good players when it comes to certain synergies or order firing powers and we are winning more than 85% of the time. AI-proof synergies like Kitty/R4G, Polaris/R4G, Colossus/Wanda or Hulkoye are there. You don't need training for such synergies. 

Just so we're on the same page here, you don't want MPQ to have a training mode until the AI plays at the level of human players at a competitive championship tournament that has lots of people in the audience cheering for them? 

HoundofShadow

I don't need that level of smart AI where we have audience cheering. Such level of gameplay would probably be eye opening and shocking for the world. If MPQ could do that, Marvel will show us even more love than they do for MCOC.

The AIs just need to behave like normal/good players like switch our teams around, not matching own special tiles after firing it (because most of the time, it's not beneficial), know how to spam powers instead of firing it only once, firing powers in certain orders to accomplish a certain synergy. Such training mode will be more meaningful.