Your thoughts on the Mastery system and Tier assignment?

mouser

I'm not so sure the current mastery system with mandatory assignment to a tier is the best design. Interested to hear others thoughts and ideas on the current implementation.

Personal observations and feedback from others on and offline:
- On average the decks you'll face in each tier have a reasonable correlation to the level of the tier.
- However, the top decks you'll face in each tier do not have a correlation to the tier level. There are many platinum level decks to be found in both silver and gold tiers.
- Even though the tiers have progressively higher rewards, you may personally see a reduction in your achieved rewards when advancing to the next tier. And there's no way to undo that once you take the step. Personally, I spent a lot of time intentionally hanging out at lower tiers primarily because I didn't want to be locked into a higher tier where I might suddenly find I wasn't very competitive, and could no longer undo the change.
- A simple example being I see a lot of the same players hanging out in Gold regularly scoring mythic rewards in events with what are clearly platinum level card collections. Even with the increased platinum rewards, stepping up a tier with those collections could easily find those players collecting fewer mythic rewards in the hyper competitive top tier of platinum. Many of these players likely have the card inventory available to achieve platinum mastery but have decided they don't want to move to the next competition tier.

Summarizing the issues I see:
a) Top decks you'll compete against in a tier for placement are not correlated to the level of that Tier for the Silver and Gold Tiers.

b) There is no turning back if you level up to the next tier and find yourself less competitive and netting lower rewards then before.

c) Some players do not view moving up a tier as a rewarding goal to pursue. Note: some of this might be due to the effects of (b).


First off, I think the Mastery system is a great idea--encourage players to at least check out their libraries of cards. It should definitely remain in some form. The issue is more with what a player achieves by increasing their Mastery tier. Maybe it's not a good idea to tie PVE (and assuming PVP in the future?) competition player pools to card Mastery. What other ways could we implement a tiered competition system, while still rewarding card mastery?

- Allow players to choose their competition tier? Perhaps with some sort of deck or inventory restrictions that will keep the top tier decks from feasting in lower tiers?
- Are the reward jumps between the different Tiers large enough that you'd readily move to the next level if you could?
- How could card mastery be rewarded other then locking you into a higher tier?

What are your thoughts on the current state of the system and how it might be improved?


p.s. Mods, my intent here is to create a discussion on the state of the system rather then propose any particular suggestions/changes. So I'd appreciate if this could remain in the general forum.

MaxMagic420

Personally, I feel the most necessary change would be to grant color mastery based on battles played, not played and won. Adding commons and uncommons that actually hurt your deck dynamic just by adding them isn't ideal. It can be a grind to master cards that don't help your deck because you have to actually win to get color mastery.

Pqmtg-

MaxMagic420 wrote:

Personally, I feel the most necessary change would be to grant color mastery based on battles played, not played and won. Adding commons and uncommons that actually hurt your deck dynamic just by adding them isn't ideal. It can be a grind to master cards that don't help your deck because you have to actually win to get color mastery.

I've seen people recommend mastery by getting an existing deck, and substituting a card or two at a time.

I suggest you try to actually build decks filled with unmastered cards. It's not hard to master quickly this way, and forces you to actually play the game and build balanced decks.

Tilikum

I think the way it is presently set up is tremendously flawed. I'm doing everything I can to stay in the gold tier and leisurely get my progression rewards or (if I can get away from work) attempt to finish top 5. I wish I tried harder to stay in bronze, really.

I think the tier system should be based on your total event ribbons. The higher you place in an event, the tougher the competition is the next time. It shouldn't be based on how well you can farm Heroic Liliana 3 with some ****, goofball deck.

Edit: I like the idea of mastering cards. I just think that should earn you something else. I just... haven't really thought about what...

Pqmtg-

Tilikum wrote:

I think the way it is presently set up is tremendously flawed. I'm doing everything I can to stay in the gold tier and leisurely get my progression rewards or (if I can get away from work) attempt to finish top 5. I wish I tried harder to stay in bronze, really.

I think the tier system should be based on your total event ribbons. The higher you place in an event, the tougher the competition is the next time. It shouldn't be based on how well you can farm Heroic Liliana 3 with some ****, goofball deck.

Edit: I like the idea of mastering cards. I just think that should earn you something else. I just... haven't really thought about what...

That's a good idea. As for mastery, earning tier upgrades = save slots?

Tilikum

Pqmtg- wrote:

As for mastery, earning tier upgrades = save slots?

Brilliant! You can only save mastered cards to decks. That's got my vote.

EDHdad

I'd like to see some benefit to your coalition for being Platinum or Gold. If I earn 100 points in an event, it does the same for my coalition as a bronze getting 100 points for an event.

I also don't think that color mastery by itself indicates you'll get a good matchup. I've faced plenty of level-1 Nahiri decks in Platinum, presumably because the owner purchased Nahiri but hasn't leveled her up yet.

I do like the fact that, in platinum, there are fewer players in a cluster (approximately 500 vs a few thousand) and that the individual prizes are more numerous (Nahiri is given to the top 25 Platinum players, vs the top 5 in some other tiers).

LeafHyren

I am Platinum and now it seems I won't get Saheeli through the Top 25 rewards because of how strong the top has become. You have to win every fight and most secondary ribbons to make it. And I see some bronze and silver players get it with normal effort... Mastery system is nonsense. Those extra crystals do not amount to significant reward and I would rather get BFZ or Origins booster.


And I wish I could go back. It might be rewarding if only the Platinum tear go Saheeli, than the struggle would be acceptable, although not reasonable hahahaha It annoys me that bronze and silver players get her easily.

I guess it is reasonable to suggest I get stronger, than maybe I could make it, a fair suggestion. But that still leaves me with envy for the ease in which the weaker win hahaha

Platinum is the worst of tiers, never go platinum. And if they add a neat sounding "Diamond" rank I will just laugh at them from a distance

Irgy

The proper solution is quite simple to describe at least: Make the rewards such that you get strictly more stuff for the same level of skill+effort in higher tiers.

A more practical solution would be to make your tier optional - i.e. you can enter at any lower level. Then the difficulty of the tiers would be self balancing, if platinum is too hard then the weaker players will drop down. Of course this then fails to achieve the goal of fencing the good players off even more than the current system does, but it's still an improvement over not having the system at all. I actually think a combination is the best, make tiers optional but make the rewards such that people stay high anyway.

Either way the current system needs rethinking, because it's effectively punishing people for exactly the thing that it's supposed to be encouraging/rewarding.

Pqmtg-

Irgy wrote:

The proper solution is quite simple to describe at least: Make the rewards such that you get strictly more stuff for the same level of skill+effort in higher tiers.

A more practical solution would be to make your tier optional - i.e. you can enter at any lower level. Then the difficulty of the tiers would be self balancing, if platinum is too hard then the weaker players will drop down. Of course this then fails to achieve the goal of fencing the good players off even more than the current system does, but it's still an improvement over not having the system at all. I actually think a combination is the best, make tiers optional but make the rewards such that people stay high anyway.

Either way the current system needs rethinking, because it's effectively punishing people for exactly the thing that it's supposed to be encouraging/rewarding.

The rewards are higher in the higher tiers. Just not high enough to make it worth it.

tm00

Maybe they should implement a system where you can dump runes while opening packs to reduce the number of dupes, and the max number of runes usable is somewhat tied to your tier.
So once you have a big collection you might want to change tier to get better chanches.

Morphis

I've never been a fan of mastery.

It mostly fails at making people actually try different decks.
You usually master a card that thought was garbage and... Yea it is actually garbage.

Tiers also have not a difference in prize worth the effort of mastering cards and the increase in competition difficulty.
Where by difficulty I mean usually "
higher change of fighting decks built around broken combos like SP or decks stuffed with high cost stuff/combos in he hope of ai cascading early in an "unrecoverable" board state.

So for now I am more than fine in gold.
With rc and SP fix I could consider getting platinum if it does not imply much mastery grinding.

I see some good suggestions here that I support like different coalition gains based on tier(to avoid not mastering to support better the coalition) and actual non gameplay benefits from mastery like with save slot decks(that still has to be implemented in itself though -.-' )

Rannah

Why not limit the number of mythics in a deck based on tier? That way a silver Jace player doesn't have to go against a Kiora deck consisting of all mythics and getting crushed. Make platinum unlimited mythics per deck, but 0 in bronze, 1 in silver, 2-3 in gold. That way if you want to play your roflstomp mythic Sarkhan or Kiora deck, you have to get into platinum. I don't see rares as having the kind of power mythics do, so I don't see it necessary to limit them, but you could limit bronze and silver to 2-4 per deck if desirable.

mmraie

Rannah wrote:

Why not limit the number of mythics in a deck based on tier? That way a silver Jace player doesn't have to go against a Kiora deck consisting of all mythics and getting crushed. Make platinum unlimited mythics per deck, but 0 in bronze, 1 in silver, 2-3 in gold. That way if you want to play your roflstomp mythic Sarkhan or Kiora deck, you have to get into platinum. I don't see rares as having the kind of power mythics do, so I don't see it necessary to limit them, but you could limit bronze and silver to 2-4 per deck if desirable.

that is kind of similar to pauper / silverblack and standard for paper magic, except that everything translates differently here. Bronze and silver would be very gross and slow/sluggish. but it owuld give newer players a better environnement, and would call for different metagaming!

i don't hate this idea

Irgy

Pqmtg- wrote:

Irgy wrote:

The proper solution is quite simple to describe at least: Make the rewards such that you get strictly more stuff for the same level of skill+effort in higher tiers.

The rewards are higher in the higher tiers. Just not high enough to make it worth it.

I know, that's what I meant. Currently you get strictly more for the same ranking, but because it's more competitive, for the same amount of skill+effort you get a much lower ranking and end up worse off. They could get pretty close to working out what the right balance would be actually if they simply compare scores between the tiers. So if 300 is good enough for top 5 in bronze but only top 50 in gold then they should make the rewards for those ranks similar. Though still higher for gold, both to actually positively motivate people to go up and to account for harder opposing decks (though I honestly think only about 5% of losses are the result of the opposing deck).

Buret0

Tilikum wrote:

I think the way it is presently set up is tremendously flawed. I'm doing everything I can to stay in the gold tier and leisurely get my progression rewards or (if I can get away from work) attempt to finish top 5. I wish I tried harder to stay in bronze, really.

I think the tier system should be based on your total event ribbons. The higher you place in an event, the tougher the competition is the next time. It shouldn't be based on how well you can farm Heroic Liliana 3 with some ****, goofball deck.

If all you are looking to do is get progression, then move to platinum. I don't find it hard to ever win the requisite number of ribbons to get top progression. Top 5 is usually 3.5 times the max progression reward.

Tilikum wrote:

Edit: I like the idea of mastering cards. I just think that should earn you something else. I just... haven't really thought about what...

My idea about card mastery is to give the card you have mastered a tiny bonus. Examples:

Damage dealing spells deal an extra damage.
Power and toughness of the cast creature increased by 1.
Some supports gain +1 shield, other supports cost one less mana to cast, etc.

The devs would really need to think about the type of reward the mastered card would gain carefully in order to not make them OP from what is supposed to be a small boost. It would also be clever to have the mastery bonus hidden until the card was mastered, then on the "level up" screen it could show the two cards side by side and have a little animation reveal the mastery bonus.

You could also limit the number of "mastered" versions of cards in each deck by having the players choose which two or three cards in the deck will gain the mastery bonus. It adds another element to the deck building choices. You could still choose cards you have mastered in your deck, you just wouldn't get the bonus for those cards.

Maybe stronger planeswalkers would get to add fewer mastery versions of cards to their deck as a way to balance without nerfing.

The other way of limiting would be that different rarity of cards would consume more "mastery" points in a deck. For example, a mythic could consume four mastery points, while a common would only consume one. A Planeswalker would get one mastery point to use in the deck for every ten levels (just like the ribbons in quick battle). So a level 60 could use two mastery bonus rares (three points each), three uncommons (two points each), six commons (one point each), or a mythic and an uncommon (four + two).

The devs could really have fun with this. Add a delirium effect to a spell. Add haste to a creature. Add "generates 1 random color tile" to a land support. Add a draw effect to a spell. Add a landfall give this creature reach until the beginning of your next turn ability.

There's so much you could do with this mechanic. It would generate a ton of interest in mastering cards (if only to see what the mastery effect of those cards would be), it could make useless cards more interesting, and it would give a new deck building dynamic to players.

mouser

I know you mean well, but that would be a bad idea to change a card's stats just because you mastered it. Mastering any individual card is trivially easy--just use it in your deck. Changing card stats depending on your mastery would be incongruous with paper MTG and only confuse newer players more IMO.

arNero

MaxMagic420 wrote:

Personally, I feel the most necessary change would be to grant color mastery based on battles played, not played and won. Adding commons and uncommons that actually hurt your deck dynamic just by adding them isn't ideal. It can be a grind to master cards that don't help your deck because you have to actually win to get color mastery.

In part I agree with this.

The most annoying thing is that to increase your mastery, you have to play a weakened (or severely weakened) deck which may end up being chows to the decks that float around quick battles (forget about events). Sure, you can say replace only one or two cards yadda yadda, except that means it also slows down your mastery because you master only one or two cards at a time, which is still tedious anyway.

Regardless, my personal suggestion is to master 8 cards at a time per deck and use 2 key cards to at least help win with such weak, near-useless deck. For example, when trying to increase my black mastery, I include at least a Read The Bones and Grip of Desolation just so that my deck isn't too vulnerable.

And yeah, to add in about the rewards: Agreed. Among other things, getting some measly mana runes due to getting crushed by broken decks just because you try to master your cards is very much unwelcoming. They should make it so that getting to platinum is worth the risk of getting flattened by broken decks left and right; getting some measly crystals, some measly uncommon or common, or worse, getting mana runes is just not worth it. (I'm gold, btw, and so far I've been able to at least farm a little bit of crystals from each event; thank god I've never ended an event getting mana runes.)

Corn_Noodles

Buret0 wrote:

Top 5 is usually 3.5 times the max progression reward.

That's usually impossible. Most often the maximum score is 384 with progression being 150. That's only 156% above.

Buret0

mouser wrote:

I know you mean well, but that would be a bad idea to change a card's stats just because you mastered it. Mastering any individual card is trivially easy--just use it in your deck. Changing card stats depending on your mastery would be incongruous with paper MTG and only confuse newer players more IMO.

Yeah, but did you look at the rest of the post?

Currently there is a mentality that moving to platinum is a bad idea.

(1) This isn't paper magic;
(2) You give more deck building options to players by limiting the number of mastered versions they can use;
(3) Mastery isn't in paper magic;
(4) The ease of mastering a card isn't the point, it is a small reward for mastering more cards and actually makes mastering cards a goal in itself, rather than mastering to gain harder events.

The newer players aren't going to be confused by the mechanic, because they unlock the new abilities as they play. The bonuses aren't intended to drastically change the cards, but rather to make small changes to reward play and to give players (a) incentives to master, (b) interesting deck building mechanics, and (c) alternate ways to play existing cards.

Having the player base go through and discover all of the new bonuses is part of the fun of playing a game like this.

I don't know, it is certainly something I would love to see added to the game.

Killyah

I must admit when I started playing the game a month ago I thought the mastery system did work to make cards slightly better.

The way the +'s on the mana symbols are shown it looked like the card gained more mana from those particular colour matches, effectively becoming cheaper to cast when mastered.