Quick Battle pool 3000 people not fun

buffbeardo

Not worth trying to compete in a pool of 3000. Please lower the pool. Not fun.

WINGSPANTT

Agreed, 3000 is just brutal. 500 seemed like you had a legitimate chance to get near the top. Maybe try 1000 as a compromise?

Morphis

In my opinion 1500 would be a good compromise since reward are really better.
The reward brackets should be once again rebalanced cause of less competition.
Fat pack was like 2-6 place now 2-10.
2nd - 8th place would do it.

Also WINGSPANTT, are you the one from top tier tactics?

OhanaUnited

I also gave up on QB once it expanded to 3000 people. This is definitely not one of those "changes for the better"

Roxton

Yeah, in my bracket, it'd take 111 games at level 60 to make top 10, and that number is likely to double before the reward goes out. It'll probably take 70 games at level 60 to get a guaranteed rare. That's a bit much, I think.

majincob

I think it hasn't changed too much as you can get a guaranteed rare at 150 or less place, which is still pretty easy to do with a couple hours of playing a day. Actually I find it easier to get top 50 now than it was to get top 10 before. (Which is my new goal.)

BoardGameBrawl

Just popped in to give my +1 to this. It's insanity, and the competition only gets worse when you give away exclusives like Garruk. Not to mention, apparent cheating is still rampant: the #1 in my 2900+ bracket has 1956 points. ****?

I know you guys want us to spend money on the game, but this isn't about getting the best cards: how on earth would most people find the TIME to compete like this?

shteev

This weekend, with the Garruk bonus for the top 10, has been crazy. The only people who have a chance are the people who have been playing non-stop for the entire weekend. I know, I've been playing non-stop for the enitire weekend, and I'm in 5th place.

jdantonio

When I came to the forums to discuss this issue I was both happy and sad to see so many posts. Happy to know that others feel the same, but sad to know that so many others are not enjoying the game anymore.

Quite simply, the new size for the Quick Battle pools has sucked most of the fun out of the game. It no longer feels worth my effort to play. The prize payouts just aren't worth it.

I understand that this is a business and that you want to make money. I'm not opposed to that at all. I'm a paying customer. I purchased both the Ob Nixilis and Ulamog packages. That's a lot as money--almost as much as I would pave for an Xbox game! I was very happy to spend that money simply because I was having fun playing the game. I'm no longer having fun, and that's a problem.

The problem with the current prize structure is that I can NOT improve my standing by paying more money. I can only improve my standing by playing MANY more games than I have time to play. I'm happy to pay good money for a big, beefy creature or a cool new Planeswalker. But I simply don't have time to grind my way through 40+ games just to earn a booster pack (especially considering the dismally low chance that I'll crack a rare).

It's all about positive reinforcement:
* When I play a bunch of games and I win stuff, I want to play more games. So I'll pay for cool stuff.
* When I play a bunch of games and I get 100 rune points, I get disheartened. Then I don't want to pay for stuff. Why should I if it doesn't help me win prizes?

Please, I implore you, change the Quick Battle prize structure back to what it used to be. If the structure changes back I'll almost certainly buy more stuff when the next set is released (and I'll probably buy Koth soon, even though I hate red). Keep the prize structure as it is now and I'll probably not be playing any more when the next set comes out.

jdantonio

No response from D3 and no apparent change to the prize structure. This means no more money from me.

EDHdad

I'd like to see a system where, no matter what the size of the bracket, if you get a certain number of points, you can cash out for a prize, leave that bracket and then get placed into another bracket.

Like, maybe if you get 100 points you can take 10 gems, a random uncommon and a basic booster, then join a new bracket.

Or if you stay and get 200 points, you can take 20 gems, a random rare and a 5-card booster pack, then join a new bracket.

buffbeardo

I really like this game and have made a conscious effort to make my posts constructive as opposed to raging. In retrospect, no good can come from that. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Lol. That being said, I really hope the devs will take another look at the current quick battle pools. 3000 people in a pool is terribly demanding. I know it's my choice as to how much time I want to invest but I find the current standards extreme. Feel free anybody to correct me if I'm wrong.

Ap00calypse

buffbeardo wrote:

I know it's my choice as to how much time I want to invest but I find the current standards extreme.

At this point, it isn't really a choice. It's either play whenever and be happy with whatever, or pay D3. Provided and the game is F2P, the devs are humans and want to eat too, their commercial model is based on your time spent playing vs how much $ can be earned in the same time. Even working for minimum wage, the amount of time spent trying to get into the 11-50 or 1-9 brackets isn't worth the investment because X time * hourly wage = buy booster packs and/or PWs. That is, most likely, the logic the devs are using.

zarrick13

I've found tournaments in general to just not be fun.

I don't think the problem is the pool size as much as it is the sheer grind over time and maybe the way the tournament is set up to begin with. Having to spend all day, every day, for 48-72 hours playing this one game in order to get any prize worth a darn is insanity. Even real Magic doesn't force each of its players in one tournament to play several hundred matches back to back to back to back just for a chance at the top spot. It hurts and it stops being fun after the first hundred.

All this is doing is supporting quantity over quality. When people get into a grind mode they take the most effective at steamrolling for points, abuse that to the end, and call it good. It's not rewarding people who want to play for a good time, it's rewarding people who have the time to spend doing literally nothing else.

At the very least the time limit for the tournament needs to be shortened. One day. Half a day. Maybe a couple hours. Marvel Puzzle Quest does something similar now and then, they're called Lightning Rounds. Those work so much better than the multi-day slogs because you have a chance to change things around, to try different things, without feeling like you're getting docked for not spending every waking moment playing. Quick rounds of a couple hours each. Something to get people eager to play a few times a day, and frequent enough that if you miss a few you don't care.

Rewards need to not be so exclusive that you shut out 99.9% of your players that don't get it. Maybe have the same top reward all day for those shorter rounds. Shorter bursts at least make you feel like if you don't win one time, maybe you can next time. And if you don't, oh well, you played a few rounds and had fun.

Right now it's 'play a few thousand rounds, not have fun, and maybe not even get the prize I was shooting for after a three-day binge'. That's not fun, that's abuse of the players.

buffbeardo

Wow that tournament was brutal! I had sworn off quick battles since late April but decided to give it another go. Time to take another long break. Lol. I finished in 111th place with 402 ribbons. First place had over 1400 ribbons! I did get a rare but it was an origins duplicate. Doh. Please devs, make quick battles live up to their namesake which is "QUICK battle". There is nothing quick about playing 67 battles and not cracking the top 100.

Upstartes

Part of the problem for me is that Rune rewards feel pointless. I get so many runes already just from individual battles, not to mention daily rewards. And until I buy another planeswalker, I can't even do anything with them. Winning runes is more annoying than satisfying. And considering how often I get a card I already have if I win an uncommon, the quick battles provide no sense of "winning" something unless I get high enough to win some crystals. That's usually not too hard, but it is still a fair number of games to play, and its not many crystals compared to the daily reward system.

It would be nice if there was some way to guarantee that I would get a card I don't already have. Apart from that, some minor increase in the value of the mid-level rewards would help make the quick battles more satisfying.