Second open letter to the devs

Ohboy

Hi,

First off, thanks for taking my previous letter into consideration. This recent update has fixed many things I saw wrong with the game, and introduced some very innovative incentive systems that I was pleasantly surprised by. I would still prefer all coalition rewards in the PVE events be in the form of boosters or boxes and NOP not be a coalition battle at all, but I'm sure you guys know what you're doing.

With the incentive system no longer off the rails, I hope to direct your attention inwards to the current state of the game itself. Kaladesh just came out, and you have enough events to cycle through for weeks to entertain the playerbase. There's no real need to come up with new content for a while. This is the best time to do some housecleaning. I'm of course talking about fixing the bugs and possibly rebalancing some cards.

There's a lot of backlog on bugs in this game. Response has been slow for a long time now, but the recent uptick in quick responses from you guys have been very encouraging. I hope you can take some time now to address the bugs and clean up some of the code. It is perhaps the number one pressing issue in this game, creating a hidden layer of complexity in this game that is unfair to less forum savvy players.

Card balancing is another place I hope you spend some time on. The most glaring problem is in Origins. Back in Origins, we had a meta of 4/4 mid range creatures, 6/6 good creatures and 8/8 top tier creatures. This has obviously shifted. We're now in a meta of 8/8 as an average creature you'll encounter in the game. This has made a lot of origins cards absolutely redundant. The best way to release new content into the game quickly is to refresh old, unusable content. What made Gaea's Revenge or Priest of the last rites so much more important than any other creature in the set that only they had their power level adjusted to fit the newer meta? Origins cards being outdated in power is especially bad because it's the only set everyone has access to 100% of the time

And then we have the obviously unbalanced cards. Startled awake is a dark ritual in a colour that's supposed to be held back by a need to juggle limited mana. Drowner of hope in that same colour pie is a total of 12/12 creature strength that comes with an almost guaranteed refund. Behold the beyond is a huge mana generator and card draw in one, only currently limited by the lack of mana ramp options. Deploy the gatewatch hits for 60 damage on the same turn it's cast(sometimes on turn 1) if the right cards fall in the right order. Clearly there are more I'm missing, but I'm sure the community would be happy to point you in the right direction if you guys need assistance.

These balance tweaks are really the low hanging fruit development wise. Tweaking them rebalances the meta and brings a certain freshness to the game with minimum effort. That is so much more efficient than rushing out new cards or events to generate new content. In fact, don't just do that to cards. The older planewalkers could do with some facelifts too, if you're up to it.

There's a final simple tweak that would make this game so much better. Giving players a heads up on the news here in the forums is nice. But not everyone even knows the forums exist. Placing a link to the forums on the game itself would be a great start. Even better would be posting new information in the game inbox itself.

Best regards,
Ohboy

Pestilence

There is link to the forums in-game but it's buried in the faq. A more up front link that is maybe advertised to new accounts would at least alert all players of forum existence.

Hibernum_Will

Hi Ohboy - thanks for the letter! I'll pass it along to the team.