The state of the game

Morphis

Buret0 wrote:

So many bugs in the new set, and coalitions are a bad idea. They will eventually make it so the top players all come together and get increased drop rates and push the more casual players to the fringe. It will also cause increased burn-out for the top players who have to keep playing over and over to get their alliance the top scores.

It all depends on how rewards for coalition work.
Is it competition based?
Does it have guaranteed reward thresholds?
Is the difference big or small?

Take for istance the mastery tiers.
The difference in reward is not big so for this event I chose to take it easy and not rush to platinum.
Maybe a "medium" coalition will earn stuff at almost the same speed as a "pro" one.

Valk

Morphis wrote:

Buret0 wrote:

So many bugs in the new set, and coalitions are a bad idea. They will eventually make it so the top players all come together and get increased drop rates and push the more casual players to the fringe. It will also cause increased burn-out for the top players who have to keep playing over and over to get their alliance the top scores.

It all depends on how rewards for coalition work.
Is it competition based?
Does it have guaranteed reward thresholds?
Is the difference big or small?

Take for istance the mastery tiers.
The difference in reward is not big so for this event I chose to take it easy and not rush to platinum.
Maybe a "medium" coalition will earn stuff at almost the same speed as a "pro" one.

I agree, I think the mastery system is more about to separate players with mythic heavy decks from casual players not to reward the myth heavy ones even more for having stronger cards. Lets wait a few weeks and see how the System begins separating so that you won't have to face a Mythic loaded Kiora with a new players common/uncommon deck.

Mangus 73

The best way to make them listen is with your wallet. I agree the drop is so bad right now, haven't even had even a rare in a few weeks excluding event rewards so won't be spending a penny more till its fixed.
I also play MPQ and drop rate is better than this game by miles.
Don't know what they hope to accomplish but its not working.

Hibernum_JC

Okay, so like I mentioned in another thread, I'm sorry I haven't been very active on here recently. We've been incredibly busy and I haven't had the chance to hop on the forums. Sorry guys.

There's a few points I'd like to address in this thread.

1- PvE events. I can assure you more are coming, and we stopped rotating the one we had because we actually went through the rewards we planned giving out for it. I don't know exactly when more are coming, but they are. They take a lot more development time to make than PvP, however, and since we have had limited time and resources we had to make a choice and focus a bit more on PvP events than PvE events. It has nothing to do with rewarding players too much, being greedy, etc. I know this might sound a bit weird coming from the team itself, but that's basically the gist of it.

2- Story mode for Shadows over Innistrad. Developing a story mode takes a lot of time, and sadly it was something we did not have at the moment. Shadows over Innistrad cards are more complex than ever, there were a lot more cards to design and implement and as such this cut into our available time for a story mode. I can't say for sure that one is coming, or that we're cutting them as I'm not in charge of this at all, but we've heard the complaints and the people that be were informed by the team of this.

3- The Planeswalker and Set rotation I have addressed in another post - here: https://d3go.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=49108#p554776

4- We do care quite a bit about our more casual players. You guys are part of the life blood of the game. You provide word of mouth. You introduce others into the game, help others with their limited resources, play the game and enjoy it. I've been working in game development for over 10 years now, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that no one, on every single team I've worked on, ever said "well hey we don't care about the casual players, they don't bring us money" because we know that to be patently false.

5- There are no plans to retroactively balance the old cards to lower their power. That would be counter-productive. If cards and/or Planeswalkers get rebalanced, it's because they actually require it for balancing purposes, not for money purposes. I think we've shown that quite a bit with the big changes to the Origins cards when we released Oath of the Gatewatch.

6- We have systems currently being worked on to have secondary ways to gain cards. I can't divulge too much about it yet because it's not ready, but it is coming.

If there are any other questions you guys might have, please feel free to write them up and I'll see to it that I answer everything I can. We're super sorry about the lack of communication! I know I say that often, but we are incredibly busy with content upgrades and bug fixing and I personally don't always have the time to scour the forums as much as I'd like.

Moopie

6- We have systems currently being worked on to have secondary ways to gain cards. I can't divulge too much about it yet because it's not ready, but it is coming.

I'm hoping this will involve some use for runes. Currently they have no use outside of "Planeswalker XP" and end up being a worthless reward for those of us with many maxed out planeswalkers. Personally, I have 11 out of 13 planeswalkers at level 60, and over 500,000 runes that have literally no use, and it would be nice to have something to spend them on.

Pqmtg-

Moopie wrote:

6- We have systems currently being worked on to have secondary ways to gain cards. I can't divulge too much about it yet because it's not ready, but it is coming.

I'm hoping this will involve some use for runes. Currently they have no use outside of "Planeswalker XP" and end up being a worthless reward for those of us with many maxed out planeswalkers. Personally, I have 11 out of 13 planeswalkers at level 60, and over 500,000 runes that have literally no use, and it would be nice to have something to spend them on.

I think you're over optimistic. It has to be either crystals and/or cash. If it were purchasable with runes, no one would ever buy boosters again.

Dodecapod

Hibernum_JC wrote:

If there are any other questions you guys might have, please feel free to write them up and I'll see to it that I answer everything I can. We're super sorry about the lack of communication! I know I say that often, but we are incredibly busy with content upgrades and bug fixing and I personally don't always have the time to scour the forums as much as I'd like.

First off, thanks for taking the time to respond to several of the most urgent community concerns today; it's encouraging to see meaningful dialogue about some of the decisions, issues, and changes involved with v1.6.0, and what those mean for the direction and future of the game in the coming months.

Unfortunately, there was a serious issue during the new Terrors in the Shadows event, which allowed entering the event but prevented actually playing any matches throughout its duration. At least 3 players are known to have encountered the problem, and it's possible that others did as well without posting to various forums and out-of-game channels, or that many more will eventually encounter the issue as time goes on even if they weren't affected during this past cycle.

Perhaps (and understandably if so) these topics became buried or were overlooked amidst many other important threads this weekend, but there were (at least) 2 threads posted about the issue (viewtopic.php?f=31&t=49025 and viewtopic.php?f=32&t=49026), and if possible, some kind of forum response would be immensely helpful.

If it were clearly a one-time problem, though disappointed at its occurrence, I wouldn't go out of the way to draw attention to one bug amongst the probably overwhelming number to sift through with the new set and all of its interactions, but my concern is that this particular issue will continue to preclude participation in upcoming PvP events as well, and bar some players' access to several cycles of one of the core game modes before support is able to provide any assistance or the bug is tracked down and resolved as a matter of course with future updates.

The PvP events happen to be my favorite game mode currently, and it would be very demoralizing to have to watch passively as various out-of-game channels fill up with screenshots, advice, stories, and various other thoughts pertaining to these events as they unfold, all while being unable to participate at all beyond attaining a nominal lowest-rank reward at the end (which I would trade in a heartbeat for the ability to actually play my matches).

Any acknowledgement of the issue, suggestions about potential ways to jury-rig a temporary solution on our end, guidance about further information to look for that would help with tracking down the problem, or approximate timetable for fixing it if it can't be resolved by the time the upcoming Nodes of Power event begins would be greatly appreciated.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond to the community, and thanks in advance if there's anything you can do to help ensure everyone is able to access and enjoy the upcoming PvP events.

Morphis

Thanks a lot for the reply JC.

Hibernum_JC wrote:

6- We have systems currently being worked on to have secondary ways to gain cards. I can't divulge too much about it yet because it's not ready, but it is coming.

While developing I hope you take in account that some people did convert duplicates.
For istance I did it TWICE by mistake(first time the day next introduction, second time cause of "misclick" recently).
So if it will be based on using duplicate consider using runes instead so previous conversion will not be wasted.

shteev

Morphis wrote:

Thanks a lot for the reply JC.

Hibernum_JC wrote:

6- We have systems currently being worked on to have secondary ways to gain cards. I can't divulge too much about it yet because it's not ready, but it is coming.

While developing I hope you take in account that some people did convert duplicates.
For istance I did it TWICE by mistake(first time the day next introduction, second time cause of "misclick" recently).

I don't know if your UI team are aware of this, but it's been common practice to put an 'are you sure?' box on unreversible decision like that for.... what, 30 years, at least?

Hibernum_JC

Dodecapod wrote:

Hibernum_JC wrote:

If there are any other questions you guys might have, please feel free to write them up and I'll see to it that I answer everything I can. We're super sorry about the lack of communication! I know I say that often, but we are incredibly busy with content upgrades and bug fixing and I personally don't always have the time to scour the forums as much as I'd like.

First off, thanks for taking the time to respond to several of the most urgent community concerns today; it's encouraging to see meaningful dialogue about some of the decisions, issues, and changes involved with v1.6.0, and what those mean for the direction and future of the game in the coming months.

Unfortunately, there was a serious issue during the new Terrors in the Shadows event, which allowed entering the event but prevented actually playing any matches throughout its duration. At least 3 players are known to have encountered the problem, and it's possible that others did as well without posting to various forums and out-of-game channels, or that many more will eventually encounter the issue as time goes on even if they weren't affected during this past cycle.

Perhaps (and understandably if so) these topics became buried or were overlooked amidst many other important threads this weekend, but there were (at least) 2 threads posted about the issue (viewtopic.php?f=31&t=49025 and viewtopic.php?f=32&t=49026), and if possible, some kind of forum response would be immensely helpful.

If it were clearly a one-time problem, though disappointed at its occurrence, I wouldn't go out of the way to draw attention to one bug amongst the probably overwhelming number to sift through with the new set and all of its interactions, but my concern is that this particular issue will continue to preclude participation in upcoming PvP events as well, and bar some players' access to several cycles of one of the core game modes before support is able to provide any assistance or the bug is tracked down and resolved as a matter of course with future updates.

The PvP events happen to be my favorite game mode currently, and it would be very demoralizing to have to watch passively as various out-of-game channels fill up with screenshots, advice, stories, and various other thoughts pertaining to these events as they unfold, all while being unable to participate at all beyond attaining a nominal lowest-rank reward at the end (which I would trade in a heartbeat for the ability to actually play my matches).

Any acknowledgement of the issue, suggestions about potential ways to jury-rig a temporary solution on our end, guidance about further information to look for that would help with tracking down the problem, or approximate timetable for fixing it if it can't be resolved by the time the upcoming Nodes of Power event begins would be greatly appreciated.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond to the community, and thanks in advance if there's anything you can do to help ensure everyone is able to access and enjoy the upcoming PvP events.

I went and answered in those threads - for PvP event technical issues there isn't much I can do but report the issue to the appropriate people, which I did.

soultwist

Thanks, I think a bit of dialog goes a long ways. I've really liked all the new stuff it's nice to have options in how to play and spend time. the only drawback on all the new stuff is I've felt disappointed by the learning curve every single time.

The first PvP event I was excited and clicked join to check it out right away (that is what we did with PvE) and then leveled up my mastery. I was disappointed when I found out I wasn't silver and then doubly when i found out only 10 or so did it right and I missed out on a bigger prize.

I didn't know that losses would matter. I chose a planes walker and thought "hmm, is this deck up to date" and decided I'd try it and see cause what would it hurt? I like that losses count against you for this but I fell victim to it because I didn't know.

Adding secondary objectives is great to help spread out the jammed up leaderboards, but it took me a long time to notice that they had been added.

Dodecapod

Hibernum_JC wrote:

I went and answered in those threads - for PvP event technical issues there isn't much I can do but report the issue to the appropriate people, which I did.

Thanks! Even if it turns out the problem can't be solved immediately, it's reassuring to know that the team is at least aware of the issue, and hopefully working on it.