How to fix training grounds

Springs

@Brigby I'm one of those players that is working to master all my cards. The current training grounds environment does not support this. A simple check of ratio of koth decks (I'm guessing 75% of the environment) and the power 5 (decimator pig, Olivia, Ulrich, geier reach bandit, & emrakul) dominate due to people wanting 4 quick wins and to move on. I own four of the five so not speaking from a unknown place.

Fix 1 - the easy fix. Change the format to nodes with unlimited counters, but the event bonuses only applied to the first point in each node. This would limit koth and add variety to the format for those do want to use it to deck test or master cards.

Fix 2 - the hard fix. Same as above but also add the ability to only utilize cards once. This would force creative deck building between the four nodes.

Fiddler

Story mode is an excellent place to master cards. M<y personal favorite is Origins Chapter 2 Part 1, Angel's Tomb. Low HP boss with simple cards means fast matches. I've mastered well over 1,000 cards there.

Springs

Agreed, that story mode can be used. Training grounds clearly wasn't built for how it's being used. I'm asking them to modify it to force a bit of variety. Not an overhaul, just a tweek to the format. It's a easier ask than saying "ban these cards" or "nerf koth"..those requests don't get answered. 

Brigby

Hi @Springs. While it's not exactly what you suggested, the idea of having a Standard/Non-Standard toggle for Training Grounds is something that has been floated around before in our meetings. While there is no timeline for this idea, if and when it is implemented, it would hopefully alleviate the concern of seeing so many Koth decks.

shteev

Brigby said:

Hi @Springs. While it's not exactly what you suggested, the idea of having a Standard/Non-Standard toggle for Training Grounds is something that has been floated around before in our meetings. While there is no timeline for this idea, if and when it is implemented, it would hopefully alleviate the concern of seeing so many Koth decks.

In all seriousness, why stop there? Putting that switch in is a reasonably trivial job; broadening it out would give you a far greater return in variety of play than it would take time spent programming. Add in all the block formats... hell, allow each set individually to be toggled.

I know what you're thinking... what happens if only one person picks a particular format to play, like, EMN+OGW? My solution to that would be to just tell them they can't play that format. There are other solutions of course which would require a bit of programming on the matchmaking front, but I'm sure you have tons of other programming jobs to do in other areas, so don't try and solve this problem yourselves; just let the player base do the work for you and naturally populate the most popular formats.
[edit]
Wait.. better solution: allow players to play against their own deck in the Training Grounds if nobody else has submitted a deck in that format yet.

Kinesia

Making 4 nodes for training would be great just to have more variety.

I have been playing for a while, but my wife and kids are new players so I have experiences to compare.

People complain about Koth and matching against higher decks a lot but I mostly see him as a symptom not the root problem.

You can beat Koth, you can beat higher level decks, but it's _much_ harder to beat people who have a lot more mythics and masterpieces than you.

I was using a low level character in Training and fight equal level people FULL of mythics and masterpieces and it was just insane. The level really doesn't matter much compared to that.

With Koth... People have gone out of their way to build a fast killer deck, so they have level 60 Koth, mythics, maybe a masterpiece. It's all these _together_ that is the problem.

I have a few mythics and no masterpieces and I can beat people that are using about 3 mythics and 1 masterpiece but hardly ever anything more than that.

Training grounds needs to be restricted to 1 Masterpiece, 2 mythics and 3 rares per deck (or something like that), or the matcher has to look _far_ more at comparative card levels when matching people rather than matching just on level level (which it cant do properly either).

If there aren't people of the right level registered then make them play against themselves. Or (for most events) you can keep all the decks from last time (especially for training grounds), sure make them a _lower_ percentage chance for matching, but keep them in there for ongoing variety. It's just a database call, no extra effort at all.

But yeah, the problem isn't Koth specifically, it's matching and it's more about the Mythics, Koth is just where a lot of people who've bought a bunch of cards put their effort.

My wife keeps threatening to quit, frustrated at losing so much even in training grounds.

The revamp of training grounds a few months ago PROMISED in its stated aims to be more friendly to newbies, so it's failing severely in it's stated aims and needs to be fixed again, very urgently.

The thing is... You can't pander to the old players and survive, a few will stay but most will eventually leave, to make the game keep going you need CONSISTENTLY new players and at the moment it's not attractive to new people and people like my wife (1 month in) are looking at quitting already, this is the true urgent problem with the game, new people urgently need to be matched at people with similar collections, not the rest of us.

Gormhaus

26 planeswalkers but the 75% of my training grounds battles are Koth. I am so tired of fighting Koth.

DumasAG

Do like Trial of the planes. Have 6 nodes, with the sixth being locked (and unlimited charges, any color eligible). The other 5 have one charge, are tied to a particular color, and each one gives you a daily bonus. That way, at least 5 different PWs per player are in the mix to fight against.

Of course, if you do this, you should also give us a free deck-slot for training grounds decks so we don't have to recreate 5 decks every day...

Also, how is standard toggle only something floated with no timeline? It's the easiest decision to make, just add it.

Sirchombli

Sure koth is a beast. His cards are aggressive, fast and unforgiving. It's like a worse case scenario stress test for my standard decks. I don't have a single standard deck that can't win against legacy decks. You need to be able to handle aggression in standard, too. Cycling is making everybody soft. If you can't beat the piglivia gauntlet, you should probably keep brewing.