How to D3stroy a Great Game

babar3355

Start with a fresh take on a wildly popular game with an intelligent and dedicated fan base.  Construct an intriguing and deep take on an old classic to bring together the best of both worlds. As the player base progresses in the game begin to introduce new content including intriguing PvE and PvP events with fun and exciting rewards.  Create coalitions which adds a dynamic of competitiveness and team spirit that leads to the peak of the game player base.

Then... introduce a huge level of power creep (often for sale) that sets an enormous separation between the late game players and newer or free to play players.  Exasperate the problem by dishing out huge prizes to top players and coalitions with barely crumbs for newer players.  Set up an illogical system based on color mastery rather than player skill that pits elite players against lesser players in events with highly skewed prize pools. Refuse to release drop rates but charge outsized prices for very small glimmers of good rewards. Ignore cheating and other manipulations that cause players to lose out on prizes in events and QB.  Create increasingly tedious challenges to try and cause separation of players rather than improving the AI, changing matchmaking, creating a fair tie breaking system, etc.

Player base begins to dwindle...

Ignore the community and attempt to fix the problems from within.  Attempt to make the game accessible to newer players by massively nerfing prizes across the board.  Remove the rewards and thus the competitiveness of the game, remove the team spirit of the game by reducing coalition events and massively nerfing rewards. Continue selling extremely overpowered cards which ruin the meta of the game and ostracize more players.  Inexplicably, take an expensive game and devalue the currency further by offering less packs for crystals than before (perhaps a last ditch gasp for quarterly profits?)  Continue ignoring the community and their demands as long term players start dropping like flies, and those of us left feel like the very soul has been sucked out of the game.  The competitiveness is gone.  The team spirit is gone.  The fun is gone.

Continue ignoring the community.   The End.... or so we thought...

Edit:  I felt the need to dig this back up as clearly you guys had not finished wrecking this game. 

Remove a beloved aspect of the game that actually allows us to level our planeswalkers despite obnoxious time demands for piddly prizes. Completely bomb a patch that continues to lock players out of the game, removes coalition prizes and events from the game and leave us with absolutely nothing to do in game. Wreck the matchmaking system to be abusive to newer players and exploitable by savvy players.  Blunder the reward structure to not give players their due prizes while simultaneously changing the tie breaker system to "first to join" rather than "first to finish", clearly and EVEN MORE UNFAIR tie breaker system!  Offer little to no communication that the team is even cognizant that these issues exist or care to try and fix them.

(Probably not) The End.

THEMAGICkMAN

This. All the this.

Steeme

This is a little too much doom and gloom considering an update is scheduled this week.

I've seen countless threads like these across countless games and those games are still chugging along.

Not disagreeing with your points per se, but I don't think it's as bad as your insinuating.

shteev

Steeme said:

This is a little too much doom and gloom considering an update is scheduled this week.

I've seen countless threads like these across countless games and those games are still chugging along.

Not disagreeing with your points per se, but I don't think it's as bad as your insinuating.

MTGPQ is most definitely, as you say, chugging along.

The game is rated at 4 stars on the app store. The rating for version 1.10.2 is 2 stars. It really can't afford that kind of drop in popularity to happen again.

squark73

So I started playing a new game the other day. Yes it is a p2w type game but I gotta tell you. You open a door you get a prize, You slay the demon you get a prize, you sign in you get a prize. Even after all that people still pay money in the game. Its pretty sad they don't listen to the community but the rate the players are dropping I'm holding out hope that they have some realization. I'm in a top 100 coalition and I can tell you we have lost a 1/4 of our player base because of this. It's our diehards that are keeping us where we are and they are hoping things change. The only reason they are hanging on as well.

Best of luck in all your future en-devours folks. Not sure how long this game is gonna last. For most they read the writing on the wall and got out early.

babar3355

I am in a top coalition and we have probably lost 1/4 of our members over the past two months.  It was actually starting before the abomination of the new patch.  Rampant cheating, redundant content, bad matchmaking, overpowered cards, etc. were driving players away.  It is such an irony that the player base was unhappy with these issues as well as the prizes, drop rates, etc BEFORE the patch.. yet, austerity was the answer from D3.

Mainloop25

@babar3355 @Steeme

Here is a website with actual data about where the app ranks in grossing. Make of it what you will, I know it's not exact but it gives you an idea of the trend. From what it seems, there has been a downward trend since its peak in December, but it hasn't been a steep drop of any kind.

https://searchman.com/ios/app/us/1031755344/en/d3pa/magic-the-gathering-puzzle-quest/?d=iPhone

https://searchman.com/android/app/us/com.d3p.olympic/en/d3-go/magic-puzzle-quest/?d=android

shteev

I'm afraid that graph makes no sense to me at all. Can you interpret it for me?

Mainloop25

I'll do my best. 

The graph shows where in the app store rankings the app is for each category. If you look at the legend at the bottom of the graph, you can see what each color line corresponds to. Time is x-axis, and rank is y-axis. 

madwren

Thus on December 11 it was at an all-time low, and then December 16 an all-time high. What happened near December 16? Kaladesh release?

Gideon

Say you're ready to update and continually postpone it because internal testing wasn't done. Must be an I D 10 T error.

losdamianos

definitely a pebkac issue

Stormcrow

squark73 said:

So I started playing a new game the other day. Yes it is a p2w type game but I gotta tell you. You open a door you get a prize, You slay the demon you get a prize, you sign in you get a prize.

Yes, well, that's the thing; most f2p games are designed to be, to a greater or lesser extent, a Skinner box. Especially when you're just starting out in a f2p game, it should seem insanely generous right at the start. Basically, you get periodic bursts of pleasure from the game, which by design gradually get farther and father apart, so that you'll eventually want to pay money to "speed up" the rate of pleasure bursts again.

The thing is - and I've seen a *bunch* of f2p CCGs get run into the ground on the basis of this very, very simple misunderstanding - a collectible card game, simply by virtue of the fact that it is a collectible card game, is already going to very steeply reduce the rate at which players get their bursts of pleasure, because in those types of games the primary source of pleasure is not "getting cards" but "getting new cards" and unless there's some kind of anti-dupe protections built in, you're going to hit a very steep curve of getting mostly dupes even when you actually do get cards. The end result is a game where the gaps between the bursts of fun get way too long to keep any but the most die-hard players around. Until they release a new batch of cards and then getting new cards becomes easier again and the game becomes more enjoyable, at least temporarily, until players start hitting the curve again.

D3 really doesn't seem to have a handle on this, as far as I can tell; they're making the common F2P game dev mistake of seeing their CCG's profits dip and thinking they're not making money because their skinner box was handing out prizes too fast, when in actuality their most devoted players are probably going weeks or even months between getting new cards (let alone "new cards worth playing" but I'm not even gonna get into that); that "weeks or even months" gap is way, way too long to keep players engaged with a skinner box. What they actually need to do is speed up progression (at gaining new cards, which may or may not require handing out more cards overall) for players, not reduce it; but that would require understanding that a CCG needs a fundamentally different scheme for player progression than other games where "dupes" aren't an issue and still increase player enjoyment.

babar3355

Stormcrow said:

D3 really doesn't seem to have a handle on this, as far as I can tell; they're making the common F2P game dev mistake of seeing their CCG's profits dip and thinking they're not making money because their skinner box was handing out prizes too fast, when in actuality their most devoted players are probably going weeks or even months between getting new cards (let alone "new cards worth playing" but I'm not even gonna get into that); that "weeks or even months" gap is way, way too long to keep players engaged with a skinner box. What they actually need to do is speed up progression (at gaining new cards, which may or may not require handing out more cards overall) for players, not reduce it; but that would require understanding that a CCG needs a fundamentally different scheme for player progression than other games where "dupes" aren't an issue and still increase player enjoyment.

I think you are right on point with this.  The reality is the MTG community has always been willing to dish out money but D3 seems incapable of figuring out any way to generate profit other than new cards and new planewalkers.  They are finally realizing people will pay for deck slots, but I think this just touches the tip of the iceberg.  Instead they focus on refusing to let players complete collections and endlessly chase cards with very little shot of getting them.  Now they have doubled down with this by eliminating valuable rewards from coalitions and individual events.

madwren

Stormcrow said:

The thing is - and I've seen a *bunch* of f2p CCGs get run into the ground on the basis of this very, very simple misunderstanding - a collectible card game, simply by virtue of the fact that it is a collectible card game, is already going to very steeply reduce the rate at which players get their bursts of pleasure, because in those types of games the primary source of pleasure is not "getting cards" but "getting new cards" and unless there's some kind of anti-dupe protections built in, you're going to hit a very steep curve of getting mostly dupes even when you actually do get cards. The end result is a game where the gaps between the bursts of fun get way too long to keep any but the most die-hard players around. Until they release a new batch of cards and then getting new cards becomes easier again and the game becomes more enjoyable, at least temporarily, until players start hitting the curve again.

Yep. This is very simple. Stagnation is not healthy for CCGs, yet that's exactly what they've created with their events and reward structure.

shteev

I definitely could use some new content of some kind. There's a dearth of new content right now, what with endless repetition of RatC and NoP, without changing them even just a little in ways we in the forums have suggested many times. Perhaps they couldn't find those suggestions amidst the off topic posts. Worse still, I'm being incentivised to hang onto possible new content I have in my possession... There are very good reasons for me to hang onto unopened boosters, and mana jewels, and to not level my new planeswalkers like Tezzeret 2. I might not even buy AJ2 when he becomes available, because I don't feel he's going to add anything to my arsenal. I have the current metagame completely covered, apart from a huge difficulty in winning PvP events in 5 rounds in NoP and EmO. AJ2 isn't going to solve that problem.

What's going to happen when AKH is released is that a content bomb will drop. I'll spend all my saved boosters and cash, get a couple of old cards, a bunch of new cards, and, knowing the game as I do, they'll release 5 new events in the first week. PvE will require a ton of new deck building, and, in fact, so will PvP, since the difficulty of PvP events will be driven not by the cards that people own (nobody will get sod all mythics for weeks), but by the incredibly restrictive objectives which will no doubt be places on the matches (I can see it now: 'Exert 20 or more times'). There will suddenly be too much content in a short space of time, and then we'll all slowly become bored of it being repeated during the 3 months it takes them to code Hour of Devastation. I wrote a forum post once about staggering content, but I can't be bothered to search for it now. I'm sure you get the jist anyway.

wickedwitch74

madwren said:

Thus on December 11 it was at an all-time low, and then December 16 an all-time high. What happened near December 16? Kaladesh release?

@Madwren, I have a sneaking suspicion as to what happened, and it's why I started playing the game (right around that time).

SaffronOlive from MTG Goldfish (a paper and MtGOnline content site) did a write-up on the game. He is a very influential contributor to MtG content, and his deck brews are known to drive up the prices of jank rares the day after his articles come out.

He had a pretty complimentary write-up on the Kaladesh Release on 12/7... so there is likely a connection to the spike.

madwren

wickedwitch74 said:

madwren said:

Thus on December 11 it was at an all-time low, and then December 16 an all-time high. What happened near December 16? Kaladesh release?

@Madwren, I have a sneaking suspicion as to what happened, and it's why I started playing the game (right around that time).

SaffronOlive from MTG Goldfish (a paper and MtGOnline content site) did a write-up on the game. He is a very influential contributor to MtG content, and his deck brews are known to drive up the prices of jank rares the day after his articles come out.

He had a pretty complimentary write-up on the Kaladesh Release on 12/7... so there is likely a connection to the spike.

Thank you for the insight--I agree, that seems very likely to have contributed.  One might interpret the data, therefore, as suggesting a bunch of new players rushed to check out the game, and have subsequently abandoned it.

babar3355

I made some edits so felt this needed a bump.  I mean... just when we thought they couldn't get any more abusive...

Amadeus

not sure if the goal was to make me play less but thats whats happened