dear lower tier players

Dologan

Ohboy said:

Complain about being flooded by runes or complain about runes not being more easily available.

Gotta pick one.

As far as I know, the complaint has never been that there are too many runes, just that there was nothing to do with them for those who had collected more than they needed to level up their planeswalker.

Not enough rune sinks != too many runes.

Also, the experience can be different at different stages (too hard to come by at the beginning, too easy to get later on), so no, you don't have to pick one. 

morgue427

i dont completely agree with you mad wren on how fast they should get runes, grinding is part of the game and should be part of it, i have used a lot of the story lines to test decks. multipe times on same one just to fine tune it and find out what i can expect for a normal first hand, what can i use what am i having problems with so on. without it i think people will expect to be pros within weeks not understanding why the cards they have arent working the way they think they should. that doesnt mean though that it should be hit with a nerf bat hard though, 250 for the first 5 heroic challenges seems like a decent base to me and it is where i test a lot of mine against all 5 just to get an idea.you cant learn if you dont fail or if you cant understand why you fail.
my 2 cents worth and just my opinion take it or leave it as you will

madwren

Ohboy said:

madwren said:

It's extremely important that veteran players not only advocate for new players, but also draw upon and discuss their experiences becoming veteran players in the first place.  New players are, by definition, inexperienced at the game, and are not immediately privy to the obstacles, shortcuts and prioritizations that can potentially help them maximize their experience.

Likewise, promoting a positive new player or low level experience impacts us only indirectly.  Arguing on behalf of the new player who won't be able to level his planeswalker from 0 to 60 in an expedient manner has nothing to do with my gameplay or experience. Insisting that they have equitably scaled rewards and entry fees doesn't benefit me. Encouraging the development of PVE challenges that they can attain at lower levels and with smaller collections, rather than facing the same challenges as upper tier players, doesn't benefit me.

It's frustrating that leveling planeswalkers is such a grind, and that the rune rewards from events is so paltry. They should be handing out runes in allotments of 10,000, but instead they expect people to be satisfied with 250.

From what I gather, the devs are trying to massively slow down the pace of the user experience. And turn it into even more of a grind than it already is.  This has been commented on in numerous threads, but if the perceived problem was the growing gap between “rich” (seasoned/high tier) and “poor” (new/lower tier) players, instead of a player-centric solution which uplifted the poor, they opted for a series of solutions that punish everyone.

By stretching out the timeline for card acquisition, reward accrual, and planeswalker leveling, they’re creating a lengthier—and my fear is, far less satisfying—low level experience.

Complain about being flooded by runes or complain about runes not being more easily available.

Gotta pick one.

 Untrue; that's a sign of limited thinking. I'd advocate a twofold change: one, make runes more readily accessible,  in greater quantity,  to those leveling up planeswalkers, and two, give people something to spend them on when planeswalkers are fully leveled. The deck slots, for example, is a fine start. 

madwren

morgue427 said:

i dont completely agree with you mad wren on how fast they should get runes, grinding is part of the game and should be part of it, i have used a lot of the story lines to test decks. multipe times on same one just to fine tune it and find out what i can expect for a normal first hand, what can i use what am i having problems with so on. without it i think people will expect to be pros within weeks not understanding why the cards they have arent working the way they think they should. that doesnt mean though that it should be hit with a nerf bat hard though, 250 for the first 5 heroic challenges seems like a decent base to me and it is where i test a lot of mine against all 5 just to get an idea.you cant learn if you dont fail or if you cant understand why you fail.
my 2 cents worth and just my opinion take it or leave it as you will

Grinding is part of the game. However, when it requires 160k runes to fully level a dual planeswalker, it's hard to make the case that the current rune payouts are anything but paltry.

It's moot, of course, but it's a shame that the goal seems to be increasing the grind across the board. 

Justyce

If single player is still 250 runes I hardly see difference if you were just grinding for runes and its much easier too

losdamianos

Justyce said:

If single player is still 250 runes I hardly see difference if you were just grinding for runes and its much easier too

let me explain:
Currently per QB fight you get 300 runes
in the future update after 5th fiight you will get 100 runes

quick back of the napkin calculation tells me that in the future update you will get THREE times less runes

There is also an incentive of booster pack, gold and rare which comes with 20-30 fights 

grinding story mode at the moment is much less rewarding hence I dont think many people grind story mode rather than QB

gruntface

When I first loaded the game, my recollection is that there was no good way to earn runes. Just story mode. One of the reasons I never logged in during the early months was that it felt like I was getting nowhere and with no coalition system, no real place to get guidance on why I was so bad at deck building it was hard to find real value in playing (and yes I did often go with recommended card substitutes given my lack of MTG knowledge so learned the hard way that just because a card was a mythic, didn't mean it was always a good fit for a levelling PW).

Wind on a few months and with QB at 300 per win I was finally able to level up my original PW. I occasionally picked up some crystals that netted me better PW and it went from there. If I had been limited to 100 runes a win after a few battles, I would have stopped playing a long time ago. I still struggle to have enough runes to level the PW I spend my crystals on and I'm on a good team and spend decent time grinding QB.

All the changes do is make it harder for a player to feel like they are really making headway and that will stop many before they begin. Very few will invest if they feel there isn't enough free progress to make. Increasing origin PW cost 5x, reducing the ability to put in a couple of hours into a QB to move up a couple of levels, putting in 60C cost events with no explanation these are more for later level players, switching to a much longer reward system to get better cards, reducing the number of cards in packs, etc etc - this is all part of the same direction of travel and will ultimately kill the game.

Right now there are enough players sinking cash into the game to sustain this journey but it is a honeymoon period only. You can only drive on your rims for so long before you grind to a halt.

DuskPaladin

A reason why people like QB is for deck testing @Justyce. They can't really get that versus the outdated decks from story mode. They are also already grinding runes, can't they at least have a little bit of fun while doing it? I know that fun seems to be the least of the devs' concerns, but pretty please?

Justyce

Also please don't nerf single player rune rewards. Since you guys like to steal nerf things 

AngelForge

I still think that the story mode is the thing to go if you want to give new players a good start.
I still remember when I was beginning to play this game and accidental pressed the quick battle button.
I was up against an Ajani deck and lost horribly. Some time (I can't really tell how much anymore) past until I started playing it again.
That was maybe bad luck but it is an experience that happened and maybe to more than just me.
It doesn't sound like a good starting experience, does it?

Anyway, I think the main reason that they abandon quick battle is because it is something for grinder and not for casual players. And grinders do quick battle to get as much content for free as possible, because they have the time to do so.

But D3 does not want your time. They are a company and want money.
They could have lowered the prizes for quick battle as well, but would you then still play it?
Maybe not, it's probably not worth your time. So, why keep a server busy with that?

Will you play 4 battles a day for 15 crystals? I think most people will, because they play casually.
Probably enough to keep them in the game and little enough that they can't get to much by just playing the game?

morgue427

perhaps it was just me but i didnt have a problem leveling up with a combo of story qb and challenges, granted i didnt start buying planes walkers really until i had cards i knew i could run it effectively, As of now i am missing 2 one colors and 3 dual colors rest are all fully leveled.  all people are not like that i guess my ocd mind just wouldnt let me leave them undone lol. plus i was learning what worked with a lot of testing till i found combos that worked or i could steal them from others ;-P. so a hard hit without quickbattles could be hard for new players

norjee

Some time ago there was the hope that now there were no longer previous sets to convert to mtgpq the devs would add others things to keep players busy. It seems the solution found was to slow down progress so players need more time to consume the new sets. (though that's probably just a happy coinsidence, it's pretty obvious all these changes accumulate to having cards and ingame currency being less avaible from playing the game, making spending real life money better value. And it might just be the planned lifecycle of this game, be a liberal freemium game, get good word of mouth and reviews, when peaking, slowly turn around the rewards and make (new) players that have from hearsay the game is a rewarding freemium game shell out lots of money (then finally, slowly abandon the game and start a new pq game with another famous ip, isn't that whats happening to the other pq games...)

I'm just glad i experienced mtgpq at the introduction, it was a rather friendly freemium game then, you could pay to increase progress, but when you didn't you'd still be able to progress a little. Now not so much, the barrier to entry is sky high, want new cards, you better use your wallet cause winning them is slow and painfull, especially when not having a good deck to compete in the top events (and well, how to get such a deck as a noob? no realistic way apart from buying it currently)) and i'm baffled by it. Ironically, i once thought the rewards were skewed because the accumulation of daily login bonusses was higher than what you'd gain by playing half an hour every day, that's worse now, when the new packs with less cards were introduced i thought it was a way to limit cards gainble from events/qb, now qb is gutted even more.

madwren

norjee said:

I'm just glad i experienced mtgpq at the introduction, it was a rather friendly freemium game then, you could pay to increase progress, but when you didn't you'd still be able to progress a little. Now not so much, the barrier to entry is sky high, want new cards, you better use your wallet cause winning them is slow and painfull, especially when not having a good deck to compete in the top events (and well, how to get such a deck as a noob? no realistic way apart from buying it currently)) and i'm baffled by it. 

Many of us are. It boggles the mind how a game could reverse course in such a short time.

morgue427

it is possible to make strong decks with few cards i did fairly quickly but it takes a lot of time and understading of the cards to have a chance, how many are old paper magic players getting back in to it? completely new players will give up faster than a rock hitting bottom i think