Terrifying numbers

Szamsziel

Right now in game there are 22 planeswalkers (I include Ajani2) already. 13 one colours, 9 two colours. 5 starting ones (cheaper). Did you ever wonder how much time it will take to level them all (and add additional slots in 2.0) for a new player?
Buy: 8460 mana crystals
Level to 60: 2.8M experience
In order to equip with both deck slots:
Mana: 4400
Experience: 990k

Assuming that you get only guaranteed rewards (daily) it will take around 6 years of daily login to gather enough crystals.  And 22 years to get experience.  In the meantime you will get 71 boosters per year and 12 super packs.

To gather experience in current qb - 9300 fights to level,  additional 3300 to have deck slots. 

If one fight take 2 minutes - it's 25200 minutes to complete - 420 hours = 17.5 days.

But worry not - you can buy mana - so: 100usd for 3k - so to lvl pw - it's just 300$ and fortunately 500 crystals can be used to buy slots. For all you need additional ~150$.

Question is - how it's possible to ensure fresh blood with such numbers?

shteev

All players do not need to own all planeswalkers.

Machine

Szamsziel said:

Right now in game there are 22 planeswalkers (I include Ajani2) already. 13 one colours, 9 two colours. 5 starting ones (cheaper). Did you ever wonder how much time it will take to level them all (and add additional slots in 2.0) for a new player?
Buy: 8460 mana crystals
Level to 60: 2.8M experience
In order to equip with both deck slots:
Mana: 4400
Experience: 990k

Assuming that you get only guaranteed rewards (daily) it will take around 6 years of daily login to gather enough crystals.  And 22 years to get experience.  In the meantime you will get 71 boosters per year and 12 super packs.

To gather experience in current qb - 9300 fights to level,  additional 3300 to have deck slots. 

If one fight take 2 minutes - it's 25200 minutes to complete - 420 hours = 17.5 days.

But worry not - you can buy mana - so: 100usd for 3k - so to lvl pw - it's just 300$ and fortunately 500 crystals can be used to buy slots. For all you need additional ~150$.

Question is - how it's possible to ensure fresh blood with such numbers?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you include Ajani 2, then there are 24 pws available.

On topic: your calculation will need some rework after QB will be gone tomorrow. I'm afraid it will be way worse than it already is.

Mainloop25

shteev said:

All players do not need to own all planeswalkers.

True. If I were to do it over again (oh wait I have an alt,  so I can) I would skip Tezz1, G2, C2, N2, Garruk, Sarkhan and maybe save Arlinn for last. 

Szamsziel

You're right about pw's - I forgot Kiora and Garruk. 
And it will be worse in terms of experience but a bit better (easier) in terms of crystals.

@shteev - I know you don't have to have all planeswalkers - but isn't that a reason to play? Especially if you really want to participate in events - where the specific planeswalker is required.

All the calculations were done just to show that new player will have a hard life - lack of powerful cards no chance to catch up. 

AngelForge

It's not really beneficial to level all planeswalker to 60.
If you target a lower level for most of your Planeswalker, since you want to use them in PVP, you have to invest way less runes.

For example Level 40 cost only 28325 (lvl 60: 79920) runes for mono-colored and 57530 for dual-colored (lvl 60: 160720).

And the mana gain of most planeswalker are not that great anymore after lvl 40. So, you stay at some level equal or below 40. Whatever you feel comfortable with.

PVE is a different story, but here you choose again what PWs you want to get to 60 (and don't use for PVP anymore if not forced) and slowly start climbing that hill. 

shteev

Szamsziel said:

@shteev - I know you don't have to have all planeswalkers - but isn't that a reason to play?

The way I see it is this:

Players of this game spend wildly different amounts of real world currency. A lot of players are free, some of us have spent maybe a couple of hundred dollars, some of us in the region of a thousand, and some of us.. egad, I dread to think what the upper limit of a whale's spending would be.

Big spenders want to spend money on stuff and I'd much rather they paid for a variety of largely balanced ways to play the game, than for cards which are many times more powerful than those avalable to lower spenders. There can't be many advocates around here for playing a Pay-To-Win game, can there? (Maybe we should start a poll and find out).

Some might argue, of course, that the different planeswalkers currently *aren't* largely balanced, or maybe that the game *is* Pay-To-Win because of the ludicrous power differences between individual cards, and I would certainly agree that, yes, power imbalance is a serious issue in the game currently which should be fixed.

EDHdad

It also isn't necessary to have 3 deck slots for every planeswalker.  In practical terms, you will probably have no more than 3-5 "go-to" planeswalkers at any given time, and some secondary objective in some event might make it advantageous to switch decks.  For example, you might have a Saheeli Rai deck which is designed to win "fast", and a Saheeli Rai deck which is designed to "cast 5 or more vehicles and 2 or fewer spells". 

You aren't going to need 3 different decks for Chandra I or Gideon I if you never play Chandra I or Gideon I.  Even if you do play them once in a while, you won't need 3 different decks.  OTOH, you could get by with 3 very good planeswalkers.  Example, Nahiri for red and white, Kiora for blue and green, and Ob Nixilis or Liliana II for black.  Then, maybe there's an event where you have to cast no more than 2 supports, so you design a Nahiri deck with no supports.  And maybe there's an event where you have to cast no spells, and you design a Kiora deck with no spells.  And maybe there's an event where you can lose no creatures, so you have an Ob Nixilis deck with no creatures.  But you don't need 72 different decks for 24 different walkers.

ElfNeedsFood

If you do need three slots, then you do have to level to 60.  There are also the template slots that you can unlock just by owning the cards.  We'll have to see how good they are, but, if for example, the "win fast" deck is pretty close to the "master" deck or whatever, you may not need one of your slots for that...  Granted, there probably is no cure for the "Cast 5 Vehicles" issue other than the fact that the event will carry your slot, so it's "remove all existing creatures, search for vehicle, take the mediocrity on the chin, move on, repeat every week since they really like this event."

losdamianos

yup
http://forums.d3go.com/discussion/63207/2-0-rune-progression-according-to-devs

madwren

While I agree that not everyone needs to own every planeswalker in theory, in practice D3 has been mandating planeswalker purchase to participate in exclusive events.

The good news, of course, is that you can keep your planeswalkers at low level and still compete, which greatly minimizes the rune sink.  For example, my silver account has a couple of 50+, but the majority are in the 14-35 range and probably won't get higher than that since I not only lack the time to grind runes, but rune rewards are so paltry as to be completely irrelevant to their intended goal (leveling planeswalkers).

That being said, my worry is that the new event system, which limits you to only facing planeswalkers entered in the event itself, might wind up causing even more mismatches between, say, a level 25 and a level 60 because there's a much smaller pool to work with.

But yes, they don't want you to level planeswalkers, and they don't want you to acquire cards. That's what all of these changes have indicated.

shteev

madwren said:

But yes, they don't want you to level planeswalkers.

What confuses me is, they've clearly shut off the flow of runes in order to try and get people to pay money to advance.

But advancing your planeswalkers to level 60 doesn't get you anything apart from the opportunity to be beaten in events by Killwind and Mersicide and score lower as a result. Hardly an incentive.

madwren

shteev said:

madwren said:

But yes, they don't want you to level planeswalkers.

What confuses me is, they've clearly shut off the flow of runes in order to try and get people to pay money to advance.

But advancing your planeswalkers to level 60 doesn't get you anything apart from the opportunity to be beaten in events by Killwind and Mersicide and score lower as a result. Hardly an incentive.

In some ways, it's the action of someone who doesn't want to have to generate new content--by stretching out old content as much as possible. However, that seems illogical, because they're beholden to a game that not only regularly generates new content, but does much of the legwork for them.  If anything, they should be accelerating the pace of leveling and acquisition.

It reminds me of Babar's "thinking outside the box" post.