Although I am a bit trepidatious about having a psychologist trying to manipulate my mind behind the veil, I honestly couldn't agree more with your sentiment and your ideas. It really ties into my initial summary about how D3 didn't pursue the optimal path because they don't really understand the MTG player base. (Or maybe any player base).
But yes, your ideas are some pretty basic solutions that would make for a more enjoyable experience for all players. Well done @kinesia !
I agree on this. It really does take ages for a newer player to be competitive. The nerfing of rewards across the board didn't help. Standard did, though only to a limited extent. This is an issue for any growing card game. As the card pool grows bigger, it becomes more and more difficult to get the necessary cards to compete with the other players.
Hearthstone as the top electronic card game is still figuring out ways to make the game more welcoming to new players after their switch to card expansions without Adventures (basically what MtGPQ does). They have a pity timer which sets a hard limit on bad RNG for card drops and a card crafting system. They recently implemented measures like guaranteeing a Legendary (Mythic equivalent) in the first 10 packs of each expansion, no duplicates for Legendaries, and you get a maximum of 2 copies of a card in a pack (Hearthstone allows up to 2 copies of a card in a deck).
In any case, it's a work-in-progress for the developers to figure out what is the best way to keep newer players interested in the game. I believe the pity timer would be a good idea to implement since it gives a set expectation to players on the number of packs they need to open to get a card of a certain rarity. Mitigates the negative feels which @Kinesia was talking about.
babar3355 said:This is just as much cherrypicking as what you claim I was pointing out. For all you know the graph could have steeply shot up for the prior 6-8 months with the release of the SOI block and the era of abundance. Perhaps spending went way up after that release and subsequently fell in late 2017. But to your question, what was happening during Nov.-Dec of 2016? The community was sick of the long delay in new content, masses of server crashes, rampant cheating, frustration over drop rates / duplicates, and still terrible progression potential for new players from late in 2016 and early in 2017. Oh, and casting 5 Eldrazi in every game was pretty awful too. Perhaps D3 perceived a drop off in revenue as related to being too generous as they ignored our many pleas to fix other important aspects of the game. In fact, here is one of the most read posts in the history of the forums that I posted in mid January 2017. https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/57380/d3-prioritization-thread/p1It's easy to look back and forget that the community was largely upset with D3 well before the "austerity" package of mid March. Also, I should probably be more careful in linking graphs like the one that shows D3 revenue rankings. I have to admit that I have no idea what they are actually showing. Is it trailing 12 month revenue? Trailing 1 month? It can't possibly be just today or it would be way more lumpy when patches hit or Baral went on sale. Also, interesting that the patch doesn't even show as an App update on March 3rd, although it definitely was...
This is just as much cherrypicking as what you claim I was pointing out. For all you know the graph could have steeply shot up for the prior 6-8 months with the release of the SOI block and the era of abundance. Perhaps spending went way up after that release and subsequently fell in late 2017.
But to your question, what was happening during Nov.-Dec of 2016? The community was sick of the long delay in new content, masses of server crashes, rampant cheating, frustration over drop rates / duplicates, and still terrible progression potential for new players from late in 2016 and early in 2017. Oh, and casting 5 Eldrazi in every game was pretty awful too.
Perhaps D3 perceived a drop off in revenue as related to being too generous as they ignored our many pleas to fix other important aspects of the game. In fact, here is one of the most read posts in the history of the forums that I posted in mid January 2017.
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/57380/d3-prioritization-thread/p1
It's easy to look back and forget that the community was largely upset with D3 well before the "austerity" package of mid March.
Also, I should probably be more careful in linking graphs like the one that shows D3 revenue rankings. I have to admit that I have no idea what they are actually showing. Is it trailing 12 month revenue? Trailing 1 month? It can't possibly be just today or it would be way more lumpy when patches hit or Baral went on sale. Also, interesting that the patch doesn't even show as an App update on March 3rd, although it definitely was...
Thanks for the thoughtful response as always @span_argoman. I don't have a lot of time to respond right now but I was just throwing a bit of spaghetti at the wall to remind people that the community wasn't extremely happy with the developers before the austerity package. The February austerity you are discussing was the change to mythics only for to top 2 coalitions in midweek events I believe. The major austerity package was around March 3rd.
As for cheating, my suspicion is that it was occurring in the 4th quarter of 2017 but I have no hard evidence.
For content I did think the release was slower than you listed but was also talking about other stuff to do. (Story modes, new events, etc.) We basically had the same events cycling every week for what seemed an eternity.... reminds me of... now.
I also distinctly remember in Nov 2016 the servers getting to a point where I would get a load in or load out error every game I played for several events in a row.... You can say this was always a problem but we actually saw members quit our coalition over this.
Probably should have just done a TLDR: The community was frustrated over a lot of issues. They were begging for and hoping for some changes. Largely we got radio silence, no improvements, and finally a big nerf to the ability to collect the sets.
My point is I think D3 probably thought the revenue drop was due to being too generous, but I think it was many other problems.
As for the top players vs others, I don't really know the ratio of prizes, nor do I even think that's what the dispersion has to be. Again, if you ultimately make each set collectible it doesn't really matter in the long run. However, if you offered ranking profiles, achievement trophies for top players, foil card packages, etc you would still encourage players to want to win without providing them a competitive advantage. I am 100% honest when I say that I don't care one iota whether I get top 5 or top 50 in EMO. Half the time I don't even bother playing these events. You absolutely have to make the game reward competitive behavior or you simply won't drive revenue. (Again, maybe it was just me and all of my network, but there was a much larger incentive to spend when you were fighting for a mythic prize.)
I have never played Hearthstone but would be intrigued to know what reward structure they use for competition.
There's a lot more to discuss like the claim of MtGPQ having an endless source of revenue from new sets, game and card balancing based on players having complete or partial collections, and the comparisons to other games and whether their systems are a good point of reference but time is limited. I'm happy to discuss these matters with you @babar3355 and anyone else who wishes to join in the discussion (as far as time permits).
James13 said: Since Span is likely sleeping (he's in an Asian timezone like some others here) I can try to guess on his behalf. Lol.I think he's referring to his time for discussion there and willingness to cram more like the comparisons he's referring to into an already long post.