2.0 Rune progression according to Devs

losdamianos

LakeStone said:

Quick Battle Changes

We have removed Quick Battle and replaced it with a new daily event called Training Grounds.

The Training Grounds is a free new event that resets every day with progression rewards that will quickly grant you Mana Runes, after a low number of fights. You can still play as much as you want in it, but the progression rewards cap out and the amount of Mana Runes you will get from prolonged play will no longer be as high as they used to be. The Training Grounds fights will not feature any leaderboards or additional objectives - we want this to be a low-stress environment where you can test your decks against other opponents.

We know this change might be controversial, so we wanted to take the time to fully explain the decision.

First off, the initial intent of Quick Battle was to provide a game area where players could test out decks in a safe environment, away from the pressures of Coalition Challenges and hard PvP events. We unfortunately failed in this, and Quick Battle instead became an area where players just enter to grind out Mana Runes. Very few can reach the top, and the mode became discouraging to newer players. This change rectifies that - since rewards cap out quickly, you shouldn’t feel forced to participate in Quick Battle and there are no downsides from just playing it a bit every day to test out your new decks.

Secondly, there is a clear unbalance in Mana Runes from top players compared to new players. Newer players have a very hard time getting Mana Runes in a timely fashion, and this hurts their Planeswalker progression as they play the game. At the same time, since Quick Battle was so skewed towards the top players, those players gained a LOT of Mana Runes, which in turn made it rather useless for them. The change to the Training Grounds makes it fair for everyone - everyone can get the same amount of Mana Runes quickly every day, and as they are far more valuable in the early game, this will greatly help newer players. This unfortunately means top players will not amass as many Mana Runes as they used to, but as their coffers are already very full, we believe redistributing those Runes towards the newer players would help improve their experience more than it would the top players.

Last but not least, we are moving away from the internal technology we used for the Quick Battle. We are moving everything to our new Events technology, which is more stable and much more flexible, letting us make changes much more easily than what the old Quick Battle let us do.

 

Apparently, the sweet spot according to devs is 4 battles a day which will get you 1450 runes and 15 crystals anything after that is worse compared to old system
 

mouser said:

1st round: Old 500, New 350
2nd round: Old 800, New 800
3rd round: Old 1100, New 1350
4th round: Old 1400, New 1450
5th round: Old 1700, New 1550
6th round: Old 2000, New 1650
...
10th round: Old 3200, New 2050
20th round: Old 6200, New 3050
30th round: Old 9200, New 4050

New player after 2.0 update can average "healthy" 1450 from this sad new mode and on average 500 runes per day from daily rewards(assuming you keep track and claim every single one of them). 

2000 runes per day, not bad eh ?


Lets look how long will it take for the new player to master all 22 Planeswalkers with extra deck slot




1775 Days Which is almost 5 years

5 Years................ 

Alternatives ????
Mindnumbing Heroic Challenges (If they still exist that is) Forget about any sense of progression or rewards this is new Puzzle quest You have to be commited as a casual player for 5 years . ENJOY.....


Low lvl PW entry exploit:
If D3 would be committed to users requests and fix this exploit by locking Event entries to lvl 60 PW's new player still needs 5 basic mono colour PW's for his/her first NoP

5 PW's times 80k runes = 400k / 2k runes per day is 200 days of wait for your first Nodes of Power if you dont want to play Story mode 

THEMAGICkMAN

This. All this. 

Theros

In the old system we complained about runes acquisition being too hard. Now they make it hard. Runes from event were too low already. 
They could have kept the old QB system and remove the top prizes if they worry about giving too much.
Testing how fast you can your deck wins a game is what is more satisfying about the old QB, not the rewards.
I don't miss a single even, not that hardcore QB player but it takes me more than 8 WEEKS to make around 150K runes. As of now, I'm sitting at 258K runes that I've been collecting since Chandra 2 was first available for crystals. I feel bad for new players
The new system does not benefit both new and old players, it's counter productive.
If they keep the new system, it makes sense for D3 to reduce the leveling cost of all pws by more than 50%

It is already hard to get cards and crystals. It takes crystals or cash to buy PWs. It should not be hard to level up the PWs

toastie

As a newer (but not new) player: I have never felt like the game gives enough runes, and feel like these changes make it worse.

madwren

Thanks for breaking down the math. 

I'm sure someone will still come into the thread and say "it's not that hard just need to grind always runes you gotta earn it" or some nonsense. 

Justyce

If you buy walkers or bundle packs you do get a lot of runes to help level a walker up. 

Justyce

Also not for brand new players they also get runes from converting their dupes which we still get plenty off.

Steeme

Justyce said:

If you buy walkers or bundle packs you do get a lot of runes to help level a walker up. 

You really don't get that much for the price you're paying.  Saheeli / Tezz 2 cost about 70.00 CAD and they came with what, 25K runes?  It takes 160K runes to bring them to level 60.

In addition, I think the point is that by reducing rewards across the board, the game pretty much requires players to spend money to progress in this game, whereas before a player that had "more time than money" could just grind the game out instead of forking over cash.

Ohboy

Where was this insight when people were complaining about having too many runes? People have been saying runes were worthless and too easy to accumulate into a giant stockpile for months. Why are you guys suddenly finding some epiphany that runes are hard to get only now? It would have helped to speak out back then.

When all they see are people complaining about too many runes, it's hard to fault the game for thinking they should cut back on runes. 

Runes are basically XP points. And they allow you to grind to level a planewalker you might not even have yet(seriously, what other game is so generous with grinding?). If you want to turn it into a currency(to buy stuff), then of course, they're not going to give it to you in such volume. 

In case my point wasn't clear, of course the future rune system sucks. Anyone who played under the original rune system knows it sucks. The handful of people who both played under the original rune system and complained about the massive rune stockpiles they now have due to the current generous rune system suck even more because they have no excuse...they KNOW why they have those massive runes stockpiles. There is no level of suckiness higher than the people in this group who are now pretending to empathize with new players and their difficulty in getting runes. 

THEMAGICkMAN

the problem wasn't so much that we had too many runes, but that we had nothing to do with them.

Ohboy

Runes used to have a secondary use. The problem with it being used as a currency was that they couldn't just give us huge piles of it. 

So in response to the difficulty in leveling, they gave us more runes but had to remove the secondary usage(buying basic packs). They switched the "free" way to obtain cards to an 8h pack and qb+events (later). It was a vast improvement, let me tell you. 

Saying you want them to revert to using runes for secondary purchases is the same as supporting the idea of reducing the rate runes are passed out. They could pass out runes like candy BECAUSE it didn't buy anything. 

That's why all this sudden concern for newbies is so Infuriating. Half of you guys were lobbying for the game to move in this direction. 

I know the follow up question. Why can't they give us lots of runes and still have rune sinks? Because it would remove value from the premium currency (read : income stream). That's just not going to happen, no matter how much we all wish this were a Disney fairytale. 

shteev

Ohboy said:

Half of you guys were lobbying for the game to move in this direction.

Citation needed.

murtagon

I thought the real solution to Runes not being available was pretty clear.  They increased the dup rates and you are expected to trade in your dups since that is your real source of runes...

DragonSorcerer

Don't forget you get runes for the loads of duplicate cards !

//Please do not try to circumvent the profanity filter. Thank you -Brigby

madwren

shteev said:

Ohboy said:

Half of you guys were lobbying for the game to move in this direction.

Citation needed.

I don't recall anyone saying they wanted the accrual rate to be reduced. I do recall (many) people saying they wished there were something to spend runes on, and the most frequent suggestions were 1) crafting new cards, or 2) purchasing deck slots.

Lo and behold, we have deck slots coming. That's awesome. It's just a shame that it coincides with other changes as well.

morgue427

i have never complained about runes personally, but i can see the problem if you had bought every pw and leveled them eventually you would be sitting on a surplus. unfortunately now you still have the problem the ones that had the huge surplus still have them.so problem not fixed just shifted towards the older player base because when new pws come out they still have all they need to level them.

Brigby

*Removed several posts. Please keep all comments on-topic please*

Irgy

I think measuring the time taken to max PWs on 2000 runes a day is a straw-man argument. Maybe someone directly said it was a healthy amount and maybe that was wrong, but either way 2000 per day isn't what people are actually getting.

There's not just runes from quickbattle, there's runes from event progression, runes from event games, runes from daily rewards, runes from duplicate cards. In terms of getting started, there's a lot of one-off runes in story mode, so that subtracts from the total time as well.

Personally I haven't been playing quickbattle at all and I am far from maxing out all my PWs but I'm progressing along at what I would consider an acceptable pace for someone who's not spending any money.

5 years may seem like a long time, but if you consider you only included about a fifth of the runes we're getting that's 1 year. Which is actually not that long a time to have completely maxed out the spending of one particular resource to the point where it just accumulates uselessly. I've been playing for more than a year now, I actually wouldn't really want to have maxed everything out already and have nothing to look forward to.

Of course there's no danger of maxing out everything, since it would take literally about a thousand of years or more to actually get all of the cards even if they never released another one...