Open letter to the devs regarding coalition rewards

Feagul

Wow, what a toxic community.

Ohboy

Alve wrote:

1. I spend hours a day managing our coalition, swapping people back and forth, planning for holidays and family emergencies. I even made a friggin' spreadsheet, for gods' sake. No, 'a group of friends coming together' will not have the same results. How shocking.

I'm sorry If I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to belittle your efforts. What I meant was that a group of friends could have done what you do and more, by virtue of their real life bond. And they would still find it hard to compete due to your rapidly strengthening collections. And the window for them to even bother trying closes with each event reward.

2. Giving everyone lame rewards because you feel bad about not getting better rewards leads us nowhere. What we need is a lower dupe rate, better drop rates, maybe slightly expanding top qb rewards bracket and a system which lets us buy chosen cards for crystals. Oh, and more interesting events, not just increasingly pointless objectives ('Cast 15 turtles'). THAT would make your situation better.

It would improve things, but really not by much. Because the power of getting a guaranteed mythic every few days is really strong. I mean really really strong.

3. It is definitely possible to build a decent deck wihout being in a top 10 group. Grind QB (yeah, it's painful, but personally I've done it and it works), don't artificially increase your mastery, just improve your decks as you earn new cards, compete in events. Not to mention spending cash, something this game obviously wants you to do.

That's not really a solution. Buying packs is not an ideal solution as you've pointed our(drop rates). And grinding quick battles give what... 8 people guaranteed mythics every 2 days? That's not viable for any group of people trying to play catch up to a group of 200 people getting mythics twice a week.

4. Without pointing fingers, some people created top 10 coalitions seemingly out of nowhere. I often see players from small groups far, far away in the rankings joining us and immediately scoring much higher than our seasoned players, who have been with us forever. I've seen complete newbies with better black decks than me, simply because I just can't find this key black mythic everyone has. I built a decent green deck just after starting playing (in August), simply because one of my first boosters contained pre-nerf UH. Some of my teammates haven't gotten an UH yet, despite competing at a top 10 level. It's really not as simple as you're trying to say.

Now you go into probability, which is notoriously hard to debate. Of course there will be people who aren't in the top coalitions who can probably fight on your level. But with each event, you will on average pull further away. That's the point. I'm sure you can understand that getting 2 mythics a week pulls you a long way ahead of people who don't (on average). There will always be outliers of course, but that's just a mathematical fact.

Newsflash - having worse rewards won't magically put you in a better situation. It'll just mean that the only way for *you* to earn any cards will be to repeatedly grind qb or spend truckloads of money. Right now at least you can hope to join a top coalition, not an impossible feat - we have openings all the time. Spoiler alert: it's mostly dupes anyway. After getting my first mythic from EM (from a booster box, before you ask), I got it two more times, because why the hell not, right?

Btw, you'd be better off hunting for EM rares. There's one non-exclusive mythic in this set worth getting.

The whole point is that the way to victory shouldn't be "beg to join a top 10" coalition. The system should be designed so that the leader board is competitive. Why else bother to have a leader board? Having a positive feedback loop is counterproductive to that goal. Imagine if any ladder had that kind of feedback. Your harvesters get +2 minerals per cycle if you win the last tournament. Slowly but surely, you'll eventually get a team who dominates because his harvesters collect +20 each time. There's no point in even trying.

If you need an example we need only look at the common process of seeding tournaments. Seeding gives a very small positive feedback loop not to improve competitiveness, but to stiffle it. They do it so that the top players have an innate advantage and hence higher chance to meet in a big clash in the finals. The goal here isn't competitive fair play, but good entertainment.

I of course understand that you're obliged to protect your benefits. After all, it's remarkably hard to dissuade a man of his beliefs when his salary depends on it. But this needs to change if we want any chance of a competitive scene. I'm not even saying remove all rewards(which is ideal)... Just tone it down from the insane levels we have now. We have a real Runaway carriage situation on our hands, and the devs will need to step in soon if they want any chance of stopping it.

aesith

The Slack Coalition set up months ago was done with coalitions in mind where like-minded (or similar activity levels) people could be assigned a coalition.

This has resulted in the same coalitions usually finishing on top, which was the idea. The top scores are through the roof and almost every member scores very high.

With ingame chat now, you don't have to be on the Slack app and can weed out inactives each event and hope the next random in line steps up.

We just have a few months head start on the random coalitions. This took a lot of effort and time to set up so maybe those with issues about the same top 10 need to get to work building theirs up.

All this "helping newer people" thing.....nothing wrong with placing top 100 coalitions (should be quite easy) and earning a rare.

I actually find it a bit insulting to expect immediate results/mythics when I have worked hard to earn mine with my coalition as well as luck in opening packs. But I've also been playing since close to day 1, spent cash and put in the time.

To sum up....top earning coalitions put in the grind time to earn those mythics. Start building your coalition to guarantee rares, understand the scores/effort needed by the entire coalition and then work to compete for top 10.

shteev

Pqmtg- wrote:

For crying out loud. You are doing this to yourself. Don't do it if it's not fun for you. There's a price to staying in top.

And now it seems there's a price for staying at the bottom too. Que sera, sera.

RadicalTed

Ohboy wrote:

What I meant was that a group of friends could have done what you do and more, by virtue of their real life bond.

?????????
what

Also I'm pretty sure you are placing some unwarranted magical deck improving quality on receiving mythics. Of course they can be powerful but no one just fills a deck with mythics and competes at anywhere near top level, especially in this latest event where it seemed to be preferable, at least in the bracket I was in, to run a lot of really just poor commons/uncommons.

What you are describing is the top 10 groups exponentially pulling away from the rest of the population because we are receiving these mythics which I highly doubt is the case. We get some fun new toys, sure, but if you were to receive right now, say, Nahiri's Wrath, Mind's Dilation and Tree of Perdition, would you instantly be playing on another level? Very few mythics are game changers by themselves.

jimilinho_

I would comment but I'm in an 'elite coalition' so guessing I'm not allowed.

shteev

EDHdad wrote:

Anyone could have earned an Oath of Liliana in the last event, and it's one of the best cards in the new set.

My god, it really is, isn't it? It's like everyone suddenly getting Thopter Spy Network

jackvett

shteev wrote:

Pqmtg- wrote:

For crying out loud. You are doing this to yourself. Don't do it if it's not fun for you. There's a price to staying in top.

And now it seems there's a price for staying at the bottom too. Que sera, sera.

Other than reading mean things about gold tier from Steve the internet unicorn? I doubt it.

Ohboy

RadicalTed wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

What I meant was that a group of friends could have done what you do and more, by virtue of their real life bond.

?????????
what

Also I'm pretty sure you are placing some unwarranted magical deck improving quality on receiving mythics. Of course they can be powerful but no one just fills a deck with mythics and competes at anywhere near top level, especially in this latest event where it seemed to be preferable, at least in the bracket I was in, to run a lot of really just poor commons/uncommons.

What you are describing is the top 10 groups exponentially pulling away from the rest of the population because we are receiving these mythics which I highly doubt is the case. We get some fun new toys, sure, but if you were to receive right now, say, Nahiri's Wrath, Mind's Dilation and Tree of Perdition, would you instantly be playing on another level? Very few mythics are game changers by themselves.

Yeah sure, if we're gonna assume you get the worst mythics in every set, then you'll have to assume everyone else does too, but at a much slower rate.

This kind of hyperbole is why discussing probabilities is so hard. People like to state examples of outliers and use them as if they would prove a point.

Why not talk about soi, and only the small collection of edm? Did you get only the **** mythics? Will you only get unusable mythics in future? The point is that on average, you will trend to severely outpace others in the acquisition of power cards. How can you even deny this mathematical certainty?

jackvett

aesith wrote:

I actually find it a bit insulting to expect immediate results/mythics when I have worked hard to earn mine with my coalition as well as luck in opening packs. But I've also been playing since close to day 1, spent cash and put in the time.

To sum up....top earning coalitions put in the grind time to earn those mythics. Start building your coalition to guarantee rares, understand the scores/effort needed by the entire coalition and then work to compete for top 10.

You made me read all that text just to post the honest bits in the last two sentences, rude...

This post sums up the top10 mentality pretty well, right? Sunk cost, anxiety over devaluation of time/money spent, and maybe some smugness for being an OG gangster day-1 player.

And then the second sentence: Acknowledging the self-fulfilling prophecy that gets carted out for every discussion of QB and events. If you have really, really good cards, it's super easy to win most of the time. You will continue to win more, for which you receive really, really good cards. You will win faster for QB and you will lose less for events.

Can we stop bringing out this fallacy like it's a realistic solution? Saying this as a competitive individual who has forced himself to enjoy this game casually to stay sane.

Morphis

Still a little dizzy for jet lag(I moved to Dominican Republic yesterday, 12 hours flight) so excuse me if I did not read all.

I have to say i was wondering the same.
The guarantee mythic really do put top players in a position where they can keep it.
They can but its not guaranteed.

To get into this very position I played A LOT in the beginning so I deserve it to give me some advantage.
A guaranteed mythic is too high of an advantage? Probably yes.

But overall it makes up for the ridiculous low drop rates of packs in this game.
If I have to choose between top players having a good chance to get a good collection in decent time leaving others far behind OR almost everyone getting below decent level I choose the former.

If they increase the drop rates substantially I would consider giving away guaranteed cards(granted top player would still get more packs/crystals than other players of course).
That alone would reduce the difference in prizes value quite a lot.

shteev

Stormbringer0 wrote:

Bottom line: If there are too many elite player, which always block the front seats, other players will stop playing because of frustration.

Well, they could try and encourage the top players to quit the game, say, for example, by running events with incredibly tedious secondary objectives in them.

shteev

jackvett wrote:

shteev wrote:

Pqmtg- wrote:

For crying out loud. You are doing this to yourself. Don't do it if it's not fun for you. There's a price to staying in top.

And now it seems there's a price for staying at the bottom too. Que sera, sera.

Other than reading mean things about gold tier from Steve the internet unicorn? I doubt it.

Nope, you'll have to explain that one to me. I googled 'internet unicorn' and got nothing.

Dologan

Simple solution: Give bonus ribbons for winning using fewer than X mythic/rare cards in your deck (instead of all that tedious specific creature type nonsense).

Then watch perfect score ties practically vanish from the ranking, as people would be forced to handicap themselves to aim for them; and a bunch of creative decks pop out, as the "optimal" deck stops being the one with all the best mythics and rares and instead something more varied.

Sometimes the best solution for a runaway positive feedback loop is just to add a counteracting negative one (just like real money and increasing tax brackets).

Of course, the people with the disproportionately overpowered mythics (Behold the Beyond, Olivia, etc.) will probably still come on top, but at least this would include a few lucky "regular" people and should draw attention to the devs about which cards are in need of re-balancing.

Oh, and also please get rid of the silly level/reward points relation for QB. Why should a player who somehow slays their enemies as effectively with their level 6 Nissa as a lvl 60 Kiora get only 16.6% of the points? Levelling up brings enough advantages of its own; there is no need to further handicap the low level characters that newcomers are more likely to have.

Tilikum

Feagul wrote:

Wow, what a toxic community.

As long as this game is trapped in an ultra-competitive bubble, instead of the devs just trusting how good the content is, the community will ultimately devolve into that.
Yunnn is completely in his right to post a screenie of those mythics. That's not easy to do and he earned it. That's a badass feat. People also gotta understand how deflating seeing that image can be to somebody out of the top 10 lol.

shteev

Dologan wrote:

Simple solution: Give bonus ribbons for winning using fewer than X mythic/rare cards in your deck (instead of all that tedious specific creature type nonsense).

Then watch perfect score ties practically vanish from the ranking, as people would be forced to handicap themselves to aim for them; and a bunch of creative decks pop out, as the "optimal" deck stops being the one with all the best mythics and rares and instead something more varied.

Sometimes the best solution for a runaway positive feedback loop is just to add a counteracting negative one (just like real money and increasing tax brackets).

Of course, the people with the disproportionately overpowered mythics (Behold the Beyond, Olivia, etc.) will probably still come on top, but at least this would include a few lucky "regular" people and should draw attention to the devs about which cards are in need of re-balancing.

The problem there is that most disproportionately overpowered mythics are build around, so the top players often don't use a large number of them in their decks anyway.

Ohboy

Dologan wrote:

Oh, and also please get rid of the silly level/reward points relation for QB. Why should a player who somehow slays their enemies as effectively with their level 6 Nissa as a lvl 60 Kiora get only 16.6% of the points? Levelling up brings enough advantages of its own; there is no need to further handicap the low level characters that newcomers are more likely to have.

OK not sure if you were around at the start, but that was how it used to be, and lvl 10 Gideon dominates qb because they won games in about a minute.

That's why. If the qb format changes back, I'll have to buy a walker and keep him underleveled to play qb.

Ohboy

Tilikum wrote:

Feagul wrote:

Wow, what a toxic community.

As long as this game is trapped in an ultra-competitive bubble, instead of the devs just trusting how good the content is, the community will ultimately devolve into that.
Yunnn is completely in his right to post a screenie of those mythics. That's not easy to do and he earned it. That's a badass feat. People also gotta understand how deflating seeing that image can be to somebody out of the top 10 lol.

Actually his post is about how easy it was for him to get all the mythics and complaining that the devs only released 6 for him to get.

norjee

Tilikum wrote:

Feagul wrote:

Wow, what a toxic community.

As long as this game is trapped in an ultra-competitive bubble, instead of the devs just trusting how good the content is, the community will ultimately devolve into that.
Yunnn is completely in his right to post a screenie of those mythics. That's not easy to do and he earned it. That's a badass feat. People also gotta understand how deflating seeing that image can be to somebody out of the top 10 lol.

To me this sums things up perfectly, there is a lack of content. I couldn't care less that the top stays at the top, as long as there is something to play for a casual player like me. Sadly there is not. Even if i wanted to play an hour a day, i'd not get any significant rewards at all. The daily log bonus averages to be bigger than the reward for say 10 qb or event wins, in other words, there is no reward at all. And to me playing an hour a day is a lot, getting 10 wins in that time frame is a lot as well.

Sure you can argue that as a casual player i shouldn't be able to compete at all, which is true, but having casual players not progressing from playing the game (as opposed to collecting daily bonuses) seems odd, however after having finished the story mode there really is nothing to do anymore except try and rank top in qb/events to get more cards. I'd love there to be a week long event where you have to fight say 100 battles where the reward is more than a booster that you'd get for just logging in, maybe a fat pack, and that isn't tied to your rank compared to others but to how well you did (a bit like the event completion reward 150 ribbons = ultimate reward). Or bring back the story events we had when the previous set was introduced, allowing you to try and just beat the boss in no matter how many tries.

RadicalTed

Ohboy wrote:

Yeah sure, if we're gonna assume you get the worst mythics in every set, then you'll have to assume everyone else does too, but at a much slower rate.

This kind of hyperbole is why discussing probabilities is so hard. People like to state examples of outliers and use them as if they would prove a point.

Why not talk about soi, and only the small collection of edm? Did you get only the **** mythics? Will you only get unusable mythics in future? The point is that on average, you will trend to severely outpace others in the acquisition of power cards. How can you even deny this mathematical certainty?

Ok, "great" SOI mythics-
Olivia
Seasons Past
Engulf
Wolf of Devils Breach
Behold the Beyond
Startled Awake

6 of 21, debatable. Most mythics are not the insane meta defining cards you seem to think they are. There are good mythics like there are good commons. Mythic to me means it is special in some way, not that it is just straight the best cards you want to use all the time. They might have effects similar to other cards and are just cheaper. They might be slightly stronger creatures. They are mostly just options that I have, and that you seem to think completely break the game in my favor. Everyone has access to kills and various types of control on every color, though some colors might depend on a few more rares. There are a lot of really good commons and uncommons that I have basically given permanent spots in whatever planeswalkers can fit them. Mythics can be good, but you don't need them to win, especially against the AI.

Even in the case of EMN I feel only one of the mythics, Deploy the Gatewatch, is truly special and even then not by itself.

Yes, you will get the cards at a faster rate but again, you do not need these cards to win.