PQ3 Exit Interview

Early Access Archive Early Access Game Feedback
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Today, with some sadness, I uninstalled PQ3 - despite the fact that I love the Puzzle Quest brand and think this third installment has brilliant depth. As a ‘match-3 RPG’ it shows wonderful promise of concept. Not to mention that PQ3 is simply gorgeous for a mobile game.

But for the last two weeks I did nothing but hoard my resources for improving armor/weapons in the hopes of significant (noticeable) improvement to my main - a lv 50 Paladin who has been stuck in Chapter 13 of the story for some time and unable to advance because of enemy difficulty. I was a daily player who cleared both events, beat all the daily skirmishes and dungeons (plus a couple more), and used up all my PvP tokens. I play for over an hour every day and after two weeks I finally was able to… level up one piece of armor one time and level up one accessory piece twice.

This progression is a literal drop in the bucket compared to what I need to make any meaningful progress. And this basically summarizes my overall experience with PQ3. Since before V.36 I have been sitting in place and spinning my wheels, wholly handicapped from improving my character in any noticeable way. It’s extremely frustrating to invest the time PQ3 requires and still not be able to advance in the core of the game (story mode).

And while I appreciate and understand the ‘Early Access’ phase of this game, changes from the developer arrive soooo slowly that it seems like the game is at the end of its life, mostly ignored by its caretakers, rather than something in active development. What’s worse, is when these changes do finally come, the situation I described above deteriorates rather than improves.

I hope that Puzzle Quest finds its way, but in a flooded mobile market I don’t see it capturing a player base who has the patience or time to wait for improvements which take months to occur. Currently, most of the buzz surrounding this game, is negative.

What I liked:

  1. Graphics
  2. the match-3 gameplay (though the board could be bigger)
  3. RPG elements and depth (followers, minions, lots of gear, a kingdom, a citadel…)
  4. The players both here in the forums and within the game are super nice, helpful, and committed to the game
  5. Many modes to play
  6. Engaging story

What I disliked:

  1. Unclarity of game mechanics in-game
  2. The time required to complete daily tasks
  3. The inability to target or acquire the resources needed to advance
  4. Small resource caps
  5. The fact that everything is waaaay too far behind my character level and story progression (gear, spells, minions, and followers) and has been for a long time
  6. Being forced into a mono-color build with no benefit for matching other colors
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Gotta agree with the points you made.

I’m not sure who 0.36 was aimed at for the rebalancing, but I’m fairly sure it’s stopped people who hadn’t already unlocked the citadel from doing so. Brand new players to the game won’t even get the rebalance gifts, which without those I may as well have parked my L50 character completely.

The level of the gear the game now expects you to have to beat the story is far in excess of what you can reasonably expect people to find and be able to upgrade to at that stage in the game. I’m fine with spending many more hours later grinding towards a perfect set of gear, but that shouldn’t be a requirement for a first character to play through the story. That’s what the further 10 levels of Dungeons and skirmishes are for.

Daily content does take way too long and the PVP stuff really didn’t adjust well with the update.

For now the only progress I can see is running alts through as much of the story as they can - again the airdrop of L35 gear is the primary reason they can get as far as they can, but now on my 4th character none have found gear even close to that.

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In my view rebalancing as effected by 0.36 is incomplete; a half effort driven by a need to slow down progression but not having the time to do the complete overhaul. Spells still don’t have appropriate progression for the resources required to be spent while most of the gear was ignored and provides woefully small benefits compared to the increase in difficulty.

It has been nearly a month since the release of 0.36 and no coordinated roadmap or planning response (other than “we’re listening”) has been offered in the face of the tremendous amount of feedback to date. That’s the sign of a developer still playing catch-up.

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Still pretty confident 0 devs of the game have done the entire daily system every day since 0.36.

Not sure it was even tested for 1 day to see how absurdly long it takes, as currently it falls around 2-4 hours.

If it is anything like the rate they thought gnomes would take in Gems of War, their internal testing would have shown it takes more than 5 hours to do the daily system for PQ3 if they actually tested it.

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This ^^^
After playing this game for about 3 days, I posted in global chat something to the effect of “I can always tell when the Devs of a game do not actually play the game themselves because the major points of annoyance in the game would never be accepted by a Dev that is actually playing and investing their own time.”
A Dev that only tests and does break/fix work will never identify the playthrough issues in their game like someone who plays it from the beginning (without Dev hacks).

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Thanks for sharing and for providing the info in such a well thought out manner. If people are leaving the game, the Devs need to hear what led to that decision.

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I would agree with this statement.

Also agree with this statement.

At this point, I am fairly sure the air brakes were applied to everything because somewhere on some whitepaper design document the advancement of a player through the gear rarities was supposed to take a really, really, really long time (significant sales opportunities at each evolution stage). So long, that a player that played for multiple months could only conclude that Shop, Pass, Challenge board, and likely Flash Offers in the future, are the only meaningful way to advance in the game. Any other source of farming/grinding materials that are not shards have drop rates so low with their “small chance” (and that applies only to Gold and higher chests) that they do not exist in any meaningful way. No one should ever draft a strategy around hoping to farm for relics or glyphs from chests, because the only result will be long-term disappointment. The best a player can currently do is try to “bait” the Shop system / Challenge board into offering the correct upgrade pieces and hope RNG is favorable with providing those offers.

IMO, these 0.36 systems are going to require months of player interaction to form a single effective suite of Epic gear/armor and perhaps 6 months to a 1 year to upgrade those pieces to Legendary. Mythic doesn’t realistically exist as an upgrade option currently, period. But, for now, that’s okay as the vast majority of players will never see a full Legendary set of gear so they will never have to consider that progression wall.

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We are very sorry to lose you from PQ3 and thousands of players are contemplating leaving PQ3 so this thread is very important for this game’s Devs to keep watching.

Lady_Cascade, I ask you if the player base can post their concerns here to keep these incredibly important concerns visible and add other players’ stories, thoughts and feelings here if it is alright with you. We need to be the voice that changes the direction of PQ3 to a game that all players can actually finish the main Story and hopefully find great fun in in the future.

Devs need to know that every player is important !

They need to be made aware that there is much unhappiness amongst players that have disheartening glacial progress concerns, gear issues from increased difficulty ( without gear adjustments that scaled to give us hope ), and dire time-consumption issues among other issues.

How could they NOT have known that some of these decisions would almost completely halt progress of Gear Evolution ? Why did it take them so much time to implement update .36 dreadfully random Relic acquirement ? And how many loot boxes does it take even today in the game to find 1 Glyph ?

They set these numbers to less than a .02 starting percent chance by Salvaging as well as a tiny fractional chance in chests.

The Devs put this upon us. Now they need to change the game or lose more and more players as they have lost you and many other important players.

They are losing Kingdom leaders also. Too many people are seeing good players leave and a great percentage of PQ3’s current players would not, in good conscience, recommend this game to new players in the current state that PQ3 is in.

Bad game decisions like make Glyphs and Relics necessary with nearly a 0 percent chance to loot those required Evolve items was catastrophically negative to every player.

How many lost players will it take for the Devs to make positive QOL changes… how many of these threads do you as a player going to see before it happens to more and more players ?

There is no denying that this game could be so much better than it is now.

Please, I implore you all to speak here and now to the Devs if you want PQ3 to succeed.

Lady_Cascade… thank you speaking your experience in your Exit interview and we hope that this thread inspires people to speak up and in turn inspires the Devs to change this game into one that no player would ever consider permanently leaving.

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@Lady_Cascade - Keep in mind that this is a preview build. A lot of things are missing.

I suggest keeping an eye on your email and giving it another shot once the game launches for real.

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Yes, I understand ‘Early Access’. But at the glacial rate of updates, and a worsening situation with each update, PQ3 is trending the wrong way. As I said in my post, I hope the game can struggle through the crowded field and find its way, but it will be doing so without me.

Today’s trend of publishers pushing games out before they’re ready in order to start seeing some black in their ledger is an unfortunate one, whether done out of necessity or otherwise. Too often we see labels like ‘early access’ for games in a pre-release state full of post-release IAPs that are the only way to progress. I don’t support such tactics.

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I’m a level 50 paladin I started a week before last update. that people did not like. I can now do dungeons up too level II. I have finished the story and have 30 citadel levels. my gear level is mostly 25 and under. my gear score was about 1125 when I finished the story. I just have got extra stuff to level from the shop every day. only money I have paid has been for the VIP. paladin is such an easy class all you do is get light spells that give yellow gems and cast over and over with endless stuns.

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Based on the interview with Steve/Sirrian, 2 months ago, on InfinityPlus2’s Twitch channel, I believe they are using the pre-release to help make a lot of decisions about the final game – which is unlikely to be out before 2023.

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Any idea if that implies an impending data wipe? That is a long time, with a lot of potential for change, and it makes me curious if there have been any definitive statements on a game state reset.

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See the game’s home page and FAQ. No wipes. Game is considered to be “live” in its beta/early access state.

Tea leaves are currently pointing to a November 2021 “worldwide launch” release date (update after the next one likely in September), and not a 2023 release date.

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Given the glacial speed of updates, the laundry list of half finished items and spells, the incredibly basic and shallow gameplay, the unbalanced stats across the board… I hope this isn’t the case

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I got sick of the new system last week. After not being able to progress and/or upgrade my gear or spells after spending hours each day i decided it was time to uninstall.

Good luck to you who stayed.

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Created my account after lurking to cite a similar experience as a n00b. I’m a new player as of .36, with a necro at level 47, looking hard at chapter 8 as a likely plateau. I’ve had success to this point with rares up to this level, much thanks to the players who put together details gear, spell and drop rate theorycraft and posted them here. My gear level is 781, with broadsword at level 20, and an epic Dwarven Hammer (red) at 14 as a recent drop. Red really doesn’t go well with necro life though, alas. Could I roll an alt? Sure, absolutely, and the game clearly encourages that with the shared gear. I’m not sure the alt-leveling grind will be any more fun than waiting for .37, with a clear need for improved drop rates or acquisition costs of the many, many niche relics needed for rare to epic advancement. I’m still playing, though we’ll see for how long.

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