Keeping new players.

Ohboy

Well if we're brainstorming ideas to push players to higher tiers, here's a few more in order of complexity :

Give a bigger differential between tier rewards. Just like in saheeli event, maybe only top player gets mythic in Bronze, top two in silver, top 3 in gold and top 5 in platinum. I'm sure the saheeli event caused the single biggest mass migration between brackets as people were forced to move up. And add a multiplier effect to your coalition score from events when you move in the tiers.

Give more progression rewards to the higher tiers, so for eg bronze progression will stop at 2 reward brackets, silver at 4, gold at 6 and platinum at 8 or something.

This also simultaneously solves all the complaints that progression stops too early(usually from the really serious players who should be in platinum eventually anyway).

Add a diamond tier that doesn't rely on mastery. A side NOP style event runs before every event(overlap with last running event?) that's only open to platinum players. Players play that event to battle 10 players within their groups. Highest score or best time gets to progress to Diamond tier, so top 10% of platinum gets to play diamond tier next event. Diamond tier empties back to platinum pool after event. Serious players get to play more pvp event matches this way and it's completely optional(for those that insist peer pressure in coalitions cause them to play more than they want to)

Litter diamond tier with exclusive non game altering prizes, like alternative card art, forum flair, etc. Limited collectable stuff that will tempt players who don't value mythics as highly anymore. Diamond tier players gain potential to earn extra event points for coalition.

Nitymp

Ohboy wrote:

Add a diamond tier that doesn't rely on mastery. A side NOP style event runs before every event(overlap with last running event?) that's only open to platinum players. Players play that event to battle 10 players within their groups. Highest score or best time gets to progress to Diamond tier, so top 10% of platinum gets to play diamond tier next event. Diamond tier empties back to platinum pool after event. Serious players get to play more pvp event matches this way and it's completely optional(for those that insist peer pressure in coalitions cause them to play more than they want to)

Litter diamond tier with exclusive non game altering prizes, like alternative card art, forum flair, etc. Limited collectable stuff that will tempt players who don't value mythics as highly anymore. Diamond tier players gain potential to earn extra event points for coalition.

This.... is actually a really good idea and would be fun! But if implemented this way, rewards should definitely just be for bragging purposes and not affect the game

Ohboy

Nitymp wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

Add a diamond tier that doesn't rely on mastery. A side NOP style event runs before every event(overlap with last running event?) that's only open to platinum players. Players play that event to battle 10 players within their groups. Highest score or best time gets to progress to Diamond tier, so top 10% of platinum gets to play diamond tier next event. Diamond tier empties back to platinum pool after event. Serious players get to play more pvp event matches this way and it's completely optional(for those that insist peer pressure in coalitions cause them to play more than they want to)

Litter diamond tier with exclusive non game altering prizes, like alternative card art, forum flair, etc. Limited collectable stuff that will tempt players who don't value mythics as highly anymore. Diamond tier players gain potential to earn extra event points for coalition.

This.... is actually a really good idea and would be fun! But if implemented this way, rewards should definitely just be for bragging purposes and not affect the game

If yunnn needs a reason to stop dodging and go to Plat, I'll give him one!

I hear he likes to brag haha.

Seriously though, at some point there's a serious diminishing returns for new mythics, no matter how good they are unless there's substantial power creep.

Bragging rights are the best way to keep players interested in competition. It's unlimited endgame objectives that does not eat into d3go's income stream. Win-win.

Alve

I'd be very careful about having high tier players score more coalition points. Some players *cough* have been complaining how hard it is to enter top 10. This way newer players would be completely locked out from any decent coalition rewards - definitely not a good thing if we're talking about player retention

And, let's be real, this Diamond Tier system sounds fun, but they'll never introduce it. Let's keep it real and think of solutions that have an actual chance of being implemented. Elo system or tiers based on collection sound like the most feasible ideas to me.

Gerard

I'll probably get some hate for this but I don't get why some of the posts here are derogatory towards people with using powerful decks and not levelling mastery.

I myself have played since a few months after launch, I have twenty mythics in all (not sure if I rank as op or not). When the mastery system first went live I disliked it and I still dislike it now. I'm in the gold leagues across the board atm and have no plans to get to platinum although it will probably happen one day. I haven't purposely held back levelling but at the same time I have never purposely levelled.

Why would any player purposely make the game harder for themselves by levelling mastery when the reward increases aren't that great? I myself do not see any incentive in levelling at all

Ohboy

Gerard wrote:

Why would any player purposely make the game harder for themselves by levelling mastery when the reward increases aren't that great? I myself do not see any incentive in levelling at all

That's why we're discussing how to create incentives for people to tier up.

The current system is very open to abuse. As a rule, people who abuse systems aren't popular.

If you're not deliberately staying in Bronze /silver, you are not the target for the hate.

Alve

Gerard, I don't mind people not advancing to plat. Gold-Plat is the difference in attitude for me, not decks - between competitive and super-competitive. And the ties in Plat can be so disheartening that I'm not surprised some people would rather avoid them. But staying in bronze with Plat-level collection is just preying on the weak. Nobody likes bullies.

Corn_Noodles

Alve wrote:

Nobody likes bullies.

Check with the developers on that one. I'm sure they know this is going on and they have yet to comment on it or make any moves to reduce it.

Plastic

Ohboy wrote:

That's why we're discussing how to create incentives for people to tier up.

The current system is very open to abuse. As a rule, people who abuse systems aren't popular.

If you're not deliberately staying in Bronze /silver, you are not the target for the hate.

What if mastery affected a person's daily rewards permanently? Doesn't have to be huge, but knowing every day you're getting more than the tier below is nothing to laugh at.

Ohboy

Plastic wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

That's why we're discussing how to create incentives for people to tier up.

The current system is very open to abuse. As a rule, people who abuse systems aren't popular.

If you're not deliberately staying in Bronze /silver, you are not the target for the hate.

What if mastery affected a person's daily rewards permanently? Doesn't have to be huge, but knowing every day you're getting more than the tier below is nothing to laugh at.

It would have to be quite a sizable difference to make people move voluntarily.

span_argoman

Considering that the event reward band sizes are fixed (5/25/50/100/...), I think it might be easier for the developers to adjust the Silver/Bronze bracket sizes to control the player / reward ratio for events. The top rewards can stay the same to increase competition there while the rewards for rank 100+ can be improved to compensate the remaining players for the increased bracket size. I personally think developers could afford to be more generous with the rares for lower tiers.

Secondly I think the idea of awarding mastery points for event placements is a great idea. But I think people who keep getting duplicate mythics from events will be feeling a little sore when they get booted up to the next tier while essentially having the same deck.

My suggestion would be that when players receive a mythic reward from event placement they received it mastered. If it is a duplicate it should not affect their total mastery points. But if it is a new mythic then it increases their mastery level. There could also be a separate but smaller boost to mastery say +4 to all colours for ranking 1-5 and perhaps +1 to all colours for ranking 6-25. So overall this could slowly push the same few winners up into the next tier.

But I think another suggestion made before was to have a restriction on the number of mythics you can have in event decks for lower tiers. Of course this requires the matchmaking to be fixed such that you will only be playing event decks but it should directly reduce the unpleasantness for players in lower tiers who now face multi-mythic decks.

Another suggestion I made in the MTGPQ survey was for players to get a certain smaller amount of mastery points when they receive a new mythic (or rare) and then also gain mastery points from mastering the card. This goes some way towards pushing players with many mythics into the next tier.

The game faces the problem that the new players are facing decks which they are not able to deal with whereas the top players are finding it too easy to win except in cases of massive cascades. And yet balancing this to provide sufficient challenge to the top players would deter the other players from ranking up. So ranking has to at the very least be partially involuntary to push seasoned players into the higher ranks.

norjee

Apart from the story mode that is limiting, it seems to me qb is most accessible (events encourage or need an affiance joining one need more incentive). But in qb you are also matched against well balanced decks as a newbie. So why not match in qb based on account age, make players face accounts no more than double their age. Need to account for inactivity periods, or even fairer, match against total cards received (including dupes), max your cards times 1.5 or some such.

The problem I see is that it is unfair to veterans, they have harder qbs for the same reward. Maybe create tiers in qb as well, higher tier gets sightly better rewards.

For events tiers could also be partially tied to cards received.

Sadly apart from cards, access to pw's creates a gap between newbies and veterans too, I'd just solve it by making all pws available in the vault, if that can't be done, it should somehow be taken into account when matching players, with the slow rotation it can be months to get a PW that makes the most of your cards.

One way I would not measure player xp or strength is by measuring relative strength after winning a battle (the chess thingy mentioned), a bot and a real life player are totally different things, as a "lowly" silver tier player, I'd say I win 80% of my matches not because of skill but because of my deck, and the opponent isn't really a factor. What is a factor is luck (gems on the board, cascades, deck can help there, and dumb luck which cards I have). MtGPQ simply isn't much of a skill based game, it merely creates the illusion of skill, as such using a skill based ranking mechanism won't go well.

Brigby

Hey everyone. It's been a hectic few weeks for me recently, but I feel you all deserve more love from me than the amount I've had time to give lately. It's because of this that I wanted to stop by and talk to you about some of these issues you've brought up.

You guys have been talking about the lack of players willing to progress through tiers which impacts the whole matchmaking experience. I wanted to let you know that we had the chance to bring this up with Hibernum, and we're working with them on figuring out what exactly is going on and how to address it.

In order for me to get a better idea of this issue though, I'd love to join in on this brainstorm session you all have started. So going off of what has been said so far, would this be a correct analysis?

TL;DR: Players with high-level decks are purposefully staying in lower tiers, because the rewards they would receive in higher tiers are not worth the effort of having to deal with more difficult battles.

More detailed analysis with quotes!

The Issue
Players who have high-level decks are purposefully staying in tiers lower than they should be in. This causes newer players to encounter very difficult matches, discouraging them from continuing to play.

Lagartha wrote:

I know a lot of players with a very big collection will intentionally avoid playing all their cards and going up a tier because the battles are much more difficult. That results in decks that belong in the platinum tier flooding the gold tier.

The Reason
Players who should be in higher tier don't want to progress, because they feel the progression rewards are not good enough to warrant dealing with the more difficult matches they would encounter.

Xxdarklit3xX wrote:

Bottom line for me is that at this point, even though I could tier up, I do not want my event performance to suffer for the mediocre reward gains of moving up.

GrizzoMtGPQ wrote:

Mastery is not working as intended because the rewards are not better if you move up.

Player-Suggested Solutions

Ohboy wrote:

A simple solution to people hiding in bottom tiers with dominating decks would be to just award mastery points as prizes as well in the top 25.

If you're topping the charts consistently, you eventually tier up.

Give a bigger differential between tier rewards. Just like in saheeli event, maybe only top player gets mythic in Bronze, top two in silver, top 3 in gold and top 5 in platinum. I'm sure the saheeli event caused the single biggest mass migration between brackets as people were forced to move up. And add a multiplier effect to your coalition score from events when you move in the tiers.

Give more progression rewards to the higher tiers, so for eg bronze progression will stop at 2 reward brackets, silver at 4, gold at 6 and platinum at 8 or something.

This also simultaneously solves all the complaints that progression stops too early(usually from the really serious players who should be in platinum eventually anyway).

Add a diamond tier that doesn't rely on mastery. A side NOP style event runs before every event(overlap with last running event?) that's only open to platinum players. Players play that event to battle 10 players within their groups. Highest score or best time gets to progress to Diamond tier, so top 10% of platinum gets to play diamond tier next event. Diamond tier empties back to platinum pool after event. Serious players get to play more pvp event matches this way and it's completely optional(for those that insist peer pressure in coalitions cause them to play more than they want to)

Litter diamond tier with exclusive non game altering prizes, like alternative card art, forum flair, etc. Limited collectable stuff that will tempt players who don't value mythics as highly anymore. Diamond tier players gain potential to earn extra event points for coalition.

moogus wrote:

They need a more robust algorithm that takes into account your win/loss record, the strength of your previous opponents, and your card pool to a lesser extent.

Would this be an accurate assessment of the issue at hand?
Do you think improving matchmaking to force players to tier up is a good solution, or do you think it's better to improve the rewards at higher tiers instead?

nexus13

Well I for one enjoyed a couple events down in gold because **** didn't include red which is the color I made an effort to tier up way back in the Saheeli event days. I'd drop red there if I could because its crazy in Platinum when a perfect score can leave you out of the top 10. In gold there isn't the insane rush to start on the dot and finish as soon as the last reset happens. I'd be much happier if the AI was better so that there were more player losses so we could get some real differentiation for placement. Losses now for the top players are crashes as often as not. Those that aren't are generally just bad luck. I'd like to see win ratios for the top under 90% so that we get to a place where there is some spread and differentiation. A flawless event should be a huge challenge and accomplishment and appropriately rewarded, not something that ends up as 11th place.

Sinirli

Brigby wrote:

Do you think improving matchmaking to force players to tier up is a good solution, or do you think it's better to improve the rewards at higher tiers instead?

Better to improve the rewards in platinum. Currently there seems to be 100 or so players with perfect scores in the current event. Why would anyone from the lower tiers want to come up and face this level of competition? Top 5 is near impossible here for most in Nodes of Power.

How about giving a guaranteed reward for players who finish with perfect scores at least in platinum?

Mainloop25

Brigby, your reply should probably be its own thread just so that more people end up reading it. That way you get more input.

LeafHyren

Brigby wrote:

TL;DR: Players with high-level decks are purposefully staying in lower tiers, because the rewards they would receive in higher tiers are not worth the effort of having to deal with more difficult battles.

That points to one issue. If we stick to that one alone it says that the Mastery System is not working as a way to segment players into groups of a similar competitive level. When you leave it up to players to determine how the system should rank them you'll get some reasonable minds to do what will benefit them most, and not walk into the slaughterhouse. Especially if you get little benefits from jumping into platinum.

I don't think more reward is required. What is needed is a way to divide the groups meaningfully. A simple card count would do that. People with more than 700 in one, 500-700 in another and on. If someone wants to stop acquiring cards to stick to a lower tier than they can do that but in that pool they would not have an unfair advantage over everyone else.

As for matchmaking. It should have a lot more variety. If it is based on the mastery system then in that this system fails as well. Most in Platinum face the same few players. Overall I suggest matchmaking is NOT done based on mastery.

Norksman

Brigby wrote:

Do you think improving matchmaking to force players to tier up is a good solution, or do you think it's better to improve the rewards at higher tiers instead?

For me, the main issue is this - For progression you need to win matches. If you don't win, you pretty much don't get jack. Moving up in mastery generally means winning less often (either through longer matches (Important for QB) or straight up losing (Critical for Events with limited opportunity)), so less rewards. The only thing in our favour is that the AI is dumb, so sometimes it doesn't make much difference the caliber of the cards in their deck.

Whilst I'm a long way to moving up to gold as I've just broken into silver, the prospect of facing even scarier decks than what I'm seeing now is daunting. Spending 15 minutes fighting tooth and nail against a Kiora or Koth deck with multiple mythics just to lose and get a measly 50 runes is a kick in the guts. As an FTP player, I'm nervous that if I rank up my mastery I'm going to end up being unable to even complete personal progression which will significantly impede my ability to improve my decks to be able to compete at that level.

Corn_Noodles

Brigby wrote:

TL;DR: Players with high-level decks are purposefully staying in lower tiers, because the rewards they would receive in higher tiers are not worth the effort of having to deal with more difficult battles.

There's also the issue of mastering cards being a bit tedious.

LeafHyren

Norksman wrote:

Brigby wrote:

Do you think improving matchmaking to force players to tier up is a good solution, or do you think it's better to improve the rewards at higher tiers instead?

For me, the main issue is this - For progression you need to win matches. If you don't win, you pretty much don't get jack. Moving up in mastery generally means winning less often (either through longer matches (Important for QB) or straight up losing (Critical for Events with limited opportunity)), so less rewards. The only thing in our favour is that the AI is dumb, so sometimes it doesn't make much difference the caliber of the cards in their deck.

Whilst I'm a long way to moving up to gold as I've just broken into silver, the prospect of facing even scarier decks than what I'm seeing now is daunting. Spending 15 minutes fighting tooth and nail against a Kiora or Koth deck with multiple mythics just to lose and get a measly 50 runes is a kick in the guts. As an FTP player, I'm nervous that if I rank up my mastery I'm going to end up being unable to even complete personal progression which will significantly impede my ability to improve my decks to be able to compete at that level.

This is the real problem! not that players are competing against weaker decks. It is about new players having to deal with the crazy Koths and Kioras that should be in Platinum.

Making two pools would also help. One where the current Mastery system can live with some modifications, and a second where matchmaking can be done more effectively. Matching players of the same competitive level regardless of their mastery rank. So that those in the Gold winning easily can get to face Msaytar and other tough Platinums once in a while.