Suggestions for Event Tiebreaking and adding more Fun

span_argoman

Event Structure Overview
So with the current event structure, we have the situation where Platinum and Gold brackets have too many people tied for top spot whereas players in Silver and Bronze struggle to hit all the secondary objectives.

We also have players who advanced prematurely to Gold and Platinum with underdeveloped collections, leading them to struggle in events to even hit progression..

On the other hand, ties everywhere for Gold and Platinum right. Changing the secondary objectives has helped some but we get the following complaints:

1. Objectives are too much a matter of luck. One Olivia immediately fails the lose 10hp or less objective. Have one of your Werewolves Imprisoned on the Moon in Emrakul's Corruption's Green/Red node and you're doomed to fail either one of the objectives. Winning in 5 rounds or less depends on you not being mana or card screwed. Ie. The issue is that hitting the secondary objectives are beyond the player's control (and NOT that they're too difficult). Top players want the event to be a test of skill in a game where you have RNG in card draw, board state, the deck of the opponents you face and the cards you even possess in your collection. Tough.

2. Objectives don't seem to match the theme of the node's colour. Chief culprit Green, secondary culprit White. Green's objective is to summon 2 or less creatures (one of the objectives that generates the most angst), but Green thematically likes summoning creatures. That presents a very restrictive limitation on deck building for the objective, which makes it hard so yay for tiebreaking! But unfun because it is so easily failed due to factors out of the player's control (see previous point). Huh. White is the colour that has many creatures with or ways to imbue Vigilance or Defender, and a planeswalker whose abilities imbue your creatures with those traits. But its secondary objective in Inventor's Fair and Nodes of Power is to lose 2 or less creatures. Guess one has to play without that aspect of White. I'm not sure it makes the White nodes more interesting to play.


And we have to bear in mind the past minefields that the developers have tried to navigate away from:

1. No objectives saying "Cast X or more <target card type>" where X is a big number like 6 or larger because it drags the matches and people don't want to spend 15 minutes waiting to draw the right cards to hit those objectives.

2. Too many matches is too exhausting and so you can't really increase the number of matches too much to help break ties. There's a small group of passionate players asking for more play time that is rewarding (ie. not including grinding QB if you're not one of the QB speed demons). But people are generally happy with the 8 hour timer. And many others are happy with the event time commitment per week. So there needs to be a way to reward people who want to play more without making the game less attractive to the rest of the players.

The above points are the gist of what I understand to be the community's issues with events. Let me know if I'm off. In any case, let's move on to talking about improving the play experience.

Other considerations
Since the rewards in events come from progression and from placement, let's split the player types according to those who only care to hit progression and those fighting for placement.

I believe we don't really want to make hitting progression difficult for the progression group cause some players do already have difficulties meeting progression. We also do not want the game to have too steep an entry curve for new players. So preferably we should be making the game more enjoyable for people who are still building up their collection to be competitive, or who are just playing casually and aren't too bothered about placement.

Suggestions
Suggestion for helping to tiebreak - One-sided Enrage or Supercharge after Progression
Those who are complaining that matches are too easy are the placement players and not the progression players. So one possible idea would be that the moment a player obtains all the progression rewards for the event, their subsequent matches will have the AI only on Supercharge or the player only on Enrage. This makes matches harder as either the AI is getting a ton more mana or you're taking twice the damage whenever you do take damage. Makes those secondary objectives more difficult to hit consistently too. And since it triggers only after all progression rewards are obtained for a player, it doesn't affect the progression players (which just to recap includes newer players and casual players).

Suggestion 2 for helping to tiebreak - Changing the colours of the nodes
One thing that helped keep the events fresh in the SOI/EM cycle was the fact that the colour of the nodes kept changing for each iteration of the same event (actually just Terror in the Shadows I think). This helped cause players had to rethink how to meet the objective in a different colour. Well at least hopefully so instead of them just using a dual-colour planeswalker to play the same deck. So in the short term even if objectives can't be changed to be more interesting, changing the colour of the nodes alone will help.

Suggestion for helping newer players - Dual packs for progression reward 3
Everyone knows the drop rates are pretty low. So a 5-pack isn't going to be significant to veterans or to the game's bottom line. But it's significantly more important for newer players because they have a lot of common and uncommon cards which they need to collect. So to help them get up to speed more quickly I would propose that each event's progression reward 3 gives two 5-card packs instead of one. This helps them get the *basic* collection more quickly which might entice them to stick around for longer and maybe even be willing to spend some money on the game. Also I'm only proposing double the packs for reward 3 instead of reward 6 as players who can hit all progression rewards probably already have a decent collection so they don't need as much incentivising to play.

Suggestion to help players who want more play time that feels rewarding - QB total point reward
So people don't feel like QB is rewarding for the time that they put in cause the speed demons get the spoils and everyone else is just winning a rare, a 5-pack and 30 crystals for their hours of play, or maybe even less than that. I suggest we make QB more attractive so people who have spare time to burn on MTGPQ would actually want to play QB. One known issue is that many people prefer to join QB towards the end of the QB period to join the later brackets where they only have to grind for a shorter period to obtain the same desired rank.

To tackle both issues, an idea could be to upgrade the rewards for each QB bracket according to the total ribbons scored by the entire bracket. That way those who join the earlier brackets feel less bad about it as they know they will get more rewards than those who join a later bracket. I would recommend that the upgrades are more significant for the lower ranks (11-50, 51-150, 151-250, ...) because the speed demons are already getting the mythic & Big Box / Fat Pack. 11-50 could get 2 5-card boosters after a certain bracket point tally. Maybe even a Fat Pack after a massive point tally. The developers should have the data to figure out what's appropriate. But the point is if you want to provide a rewarding means to continue engaging players who want to spend more time on your game, QB is there waiting to be tweaked to be more attractive.

Suggestion for players to possibly feel less bored by the lack of matches in an event if they do - Change the distribution between starting charges and cooldown charges
I've already posted a long post about this so to avoid this post being more gargantuan than it already is, those who are interested can see it here.


Tl;dr Make top end matches harder, make QB more rewarding for earlier brackets, rotate the colours of the nodes in the events, tweak starting charge to cooldown charge ratio, and give newbies more free packs.