Booster crafting till I’m 75

andrewvanmarle

Some people like completing their collections, khurram.

I think it's not a bad idea. You don't get what cannot be earned, and the game get a steady source of revenue (which is a good thing for devs and players alike) 

This game is all ready play to win, a vip subscription won't make any difference. 

FindingHeart8

Tricky issue.  Perks to people who pay for the game can be cool, because the developers need to make money somehow, however I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about it.

V.I.P. monthly paying status makes me feel obligated to pay, not making it a choice.  Yeah you could say "Well, you don't have to pay," but if V.I.P. players get crafting/booster discounts, then not getting the V.I.P. puts you at a significant strategic disadvantage long-term.  So yeah...you would basically have to get the V.I.P. to stay on top, ergo making it a financial obligation.

However, if Octagon is looking for additional revenue, I would encourage them to consider the "Watch this ad to get 5 free yellow crystals," that refreshes once every day.  With as huge of a player base as mtgpq has, they could probably rake in a steady stream of money off of advertisements, as well as please the player base with an easy opportunity at extra crystals

madwren

_Daromax_ said:

Now I'm at the point where I can do anything with the cards I already have but I can't have fun because I can't get the cards I really really want to try out now or soon

Requoting for emphasis.  Magic is a game of ideas, creativity, experimentation, whimsy, etc.; and unfortunately the slow drip of rewards usually stifles any enthusiasm that arises from that.

Brigby

bken1234 said:

Brigby said:

Bullvinne I agree that if we were to theoretically implement any sort of VIP feature into the game, it would only award players content that non-VIP members could achieve as well.

The items we credit in Marvel Puzzle Quest are all resources like Iso-8, Hero Points, and Command Points, with the addition of 1 Legendary Token. Nothing exclusive

Brigby in Marvel do VIP members have early access to exclusive content? That would be a great selling point. 

Ex: Release a PW first to cash sale for VIP members, then to sale for cash to the public 2 weeks later, then 3 weeks later in the vault. 

No. Marvel VIP members do not get access to exclusive content, such as advanced character releases. The only thing I can think of that's exclusive to VIP members is that the out-of-battle healing time for characters is reduced. 

DumasAG

FindingHeart8 said:

Tricky issue.  Perks to people who pay for the game can be cool, because the developers need to make money somehow, however I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about it.

V.I.P. monthly paying status makes me feel obligated to pay, not making it a choice.  Yeah you could say "Well, you don't have to pay," but if V.I.P. players get crafting/booster discounts, then not getting the V.I.P. puts you at a significant strategic disadvantage long-term.  So yeah...you would basically have to get the V.I.P. to stay on top, ergo making it a financial obligation.

However, if Octagon is looking for additional revenue, I would encourage them to consider the "Watch this ad to get 5 15 free yellow crystals," that refreshes once every day.  With as huge of a player base as mtgpq has, they could probably rake in a steady stream of money off of advertisements, as well as please the player base with an easy opportunity at extra crystals

Don't lowball your starting rate! I fixed it in the quote for you  

FindingHeart8

DumasAG said:

FindingHeart8 said:

Tricky issue.  Perks to people who pay for the game can be cool, because the developers need to make money somehow, however I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about it.

V.I.P. monthly paying status makes me feel obligated to pay, not making it a choice.  Yeah you could say "Well, you don't have to pay," but if V.I.P. players get crafting/booster discounts, then not getting the V.I.P. puts you at a significant strategic disadvantage long-term.  So yeah...you would basically have to get the V.I.P. to stay on top, ergo making it a financial obligation.

However, if Octagon is looking for additional revenue, I would encourage them to consider the "Watch this ad to get 5 15 free yellow crystals," that refreshes once every day.  With as huge of a player base as mtgpq has, they could probably rake in a steady stream of money off of advertisements, as well as please the player base with an easy opportunity at extra crystals

Don't lowball your starting rate! I fixed it in the quote for you  

Ah, yes...thank you for pointing that out @DumasAG, clearly the coffee hadn't kicked in yet and my math was off

Thuran

Maybe we should all hoard orbs and hope for another Christmas -10% offer

FindingHeart8

Thuran said:

Maybe we should all hoard orbs and hope for another Christmas -10% offer

HA, I wish I had that level of patience (I probably wouldn't even make it to summer lol).

ZW2007-

I cannot imagine that a VIP system coming to this game would be a good thing. Current rewards are barely enough for the average player to get by on and rewards would likely get worse after a VIP system is added, just like they got worse after booster crafting was added.

DumasAG

ZW2007- said:

I cannot imagine that a VIP system coming to this game would be a good thing. Current rewards are barely enough for the average player to get by on and rewards would likely get worse after a VIP system is added, just like they got worse after booster crafting was added.

I had stopped playing for a couple months when booster crafting was implemented, but did the rewards take a significant dip? When events are actually running, I feel like the rewards lately have been relatively high. I just bought Angrath and I'm already above 200 crystals, and that's with two losses in Hour. Across Ixalan plus training grounds gives us a pack and signficant amount of crystals every day. To me, I feel like the rewards are more generous than the month or so before I went on hiatus. Can anyone explain how rewards have depreciated?

ZW2007-

The lack of rares from progression/placement rewards is a huge hit. Sure you may be earning the same amount of crystals as before but you are getting 100% less 'free' rares. Those rares helped all players and eventually turned into bonus Orbs which still made them valuable. Eventually a dedicated player could have all the rares from a set and then use those Orbs to craft mythics. Now, you end up using Orbs to craft missing rares and will likely have far less mythics from the newer sets.

span_argoman

If we compare packs, Crystals and guaranteed Rares earned per week before Ixalan and for this week, we get:

Platinum Pre-XLN (without individual rankings but in a Top 100 coalition)

Crystals per week: 345

Packs: 1 basic booster, 1 Legacy booster, 6 Standard boosters and 1 Legacy + 2 Standard Rares

Platinum this week (without individual rankings but in a Top 100 coalition)

Crystals per week: 355 (*edit* Miscalculated coalition gains)

Packs: 1 Legacy booster, 2 AKH boosters, 9 XLN boosters ie. 1+11 Legacy+Standard and 1 SOI + 1 AKH Rare

We lost 1 Rare but have 4.5 Standard boosters more (treating a basic booster as 0.5 packs). I think that's quite a bit more in Orbs if we are calculating by that measure.

Thuran

But do those calculations take into account the price of entry? 

I'm not saying 2 boosters and 30-40 jewels is bad, but you do earn a net -5 crystals every day if you complete ALL daily events. 

khurram

You get 45 jewels, 2 standard boosters for basically spending only 5 crystals.

What are you guys complaining about, again?

James13

Thuran said:

But do those calculations take into account the price of entry? 

I'm not saying 2 boosters and 30-40 jewels is bad, but you do earn a net -5 crystals every day if you complete ALL daily events. 

He's factoring AI entry cost (net +10 daily 6x) and ignoring (skipping) TotP in his calculation.

ZW2007-

span_argoman said:

We lost 1 Rare but have 4.5 Standard boosters more (treating a basic booster as 0.5 packs). I think that's quite a bit more in Orbs if we are calculating by that measure.

I look at 1 Rare as 1000 Orbs since you could eventually get all (or most) of the Rares through that. 1 new Rare earned is equal to 1000 Orbs spent. With how bad the drop rates are from XLN 5-card boosters, you likely aren't getting more than a handful of new rares and most of the time you are getting 50-70 Orbs per pack. If all the Rare rewards were dupes then the packs would be much better value since they would be 150 more Orbs at the bare minimum while also having the chance to give mythics. However, it would take a while for the Rares to always be dupes and up until that point, I think the Rares would be the higher value. I know that if anyone could, you would be the one that could come up with a good calculation to see which is better value when you figure in Orb cost to craft the Rares we no longer get. (That is not a challenge to you lol.)

I just look at XLN packs as worthless besides the Orbs they give so I figure those 4.5 extra packs per week might get you 500 Orbs on average which means it would take two weeks to craft a new Rare. So early on in a set, the Rares are better value as long as they are new. Once you are getting dupes more often, then the packs have the higher value in Orbs. I'd prefer more Rares early on and less Orbs in the long run than what we get now. Keep this in mind as well, as time goes on, we will no longer get any standard rares as rewards if they stick to the current structure and that is when it could become an issue.

Looking at XLN, I was missing 12 of 40 rares by the time it became available in booster crafting. I was missing what I thought was one of the best rares in the set (Dowsing Dagger - little did I know it was bugged and would never get fixed...) and wouldn't you know it was the last rare I crafted. I bought a lot of XLN premium packs (probably close to 20) and still needed to spend 18k Orbs to finish off my rare collection. That is more than 2 new Mythics at the same inflated newest set cost. I would say the amount of Premium Packs I bought and Orbs spent puts me at one extreme end of the spectrum. Now imagine a more casual or newer players situation, they won't have the crystals to buy that many premium packs without spending loads of cash (I had been hoarding crystals for months during the great content drought) nor the Orbs stockpile to finish off the Rares like I did (I hoarded dupes since day one because I thought the rune conversion was an insult and enjoyed tallying up my dupes from time to time as something to complain about).

Conversely, RIX is a smaller set with far better drop rates and I am only missing 2 of 21 Rares as of today. I estimate that I opened 15-17 RIX Premium Packs at this point. I will obviously not need to spend more than 3k Orbs to complete my RIX Rares as soon as they are available for booster crafting. It is difficult for me to gauge how much of an improvement RIX is over XLN since RIX has nearly half the amount of Rares compared to XLN. We shall see what happens once DOM comes but I worry things won't be better. It also seems like personal crystal rewards were cut back drastically since you are showing that we actually earn more per week now without those figured in but there have also been new planeswalkers to purchase with crystals that I hadn't had to do in a long time either. I suppose time will tell.

Bil

   I think Its not particularly accurate to estimate the cut off on rare cards without taking in account personal rankings and top 50 coalition ranking.
   I understand this choice though... as those calculations include more players if you consider wider brackets.
  However, its important to remind that many rares were also earned through personal rankings and top 50 coalition reward (At least 1 legacy and 2 standards if i'm not confused).
  Besides, the main problem of actual rewards is that we have a lot of XLN boosters, but droprates are so low that a single HOU booster before booster crafting was more rewarding than 2 XLN boosters. Not to mention that we used to earn standard boosters from the latest set , while we now receive boosters from the previous one.
 
   Overall, i feel the game is still rewarding in terms of currencies and boosters (even more in terms of pinks) ... But we get less valuable cards from them than before...which could explain the general feeling IMO.

span_argoman

ZW2007- said:

span_argoman said:

We lost 1 Rare but have 4.5 Standard boosters more (treating a basic booster as 0.5 packs). I think that's quite a bit more in Orbs if we are calculating by that measure.

I look at 1 Rare as 1000 Orbs since you could eventually get all (or most) of the Rares through that. 1 new Rare earned is equal to 1000 Orbs spent. With how bad the drop rates are from XLN 5-card boosters, you likely aren't getting more than a handful of new rares and most of the time you are getting 50-70 Orbs per pack. If all the Rare rewards were dupes then the packs would be much better value since they would be 150 more Orbs at the bare minimum while also having the chance to give mythics. However, it would take a while for the Rares to always be dupes and up until that point, I think the Rares would be the higher value. I know that if anyone could, you would be the one that could come up with a good calculation to see which is better value when you figure in Orb cost to craft the Rares we no longer get. (That is not a challenge to you lol.)

I just look at XLN packs as worthless besides the Orbs they give so I figure those 4.5 extra packs per week might get you 500 Orbs on average which means it would take two weeks to craft a new Rare. So early on in a set, the Rares are better value as long as they are new. Once you are getting dupes more often, then the packs have the higher value in Orbs. I'd prefer more Rares early on and less Orbs in the long run than what we get now. Keep this in mind as well, as time goes on, we will no longer get any standard rares as rewards if they stick to the current structure and that is when it could become an issue.

Looking at XLN, I was missing 12 of 40 rares by the time it became available in booster crafting. I was missing what I thought was one of the best rares in the set (Dowsing Dagger - little did I know it was bugged and would never get fixed...) and wouldn't you know it was the last rare I crafted. I bought a lot of XLN premium packs (probably close to 20) and still needed to spend 18k Orbs to finish off my rare collection. That is more than 2 new Mythics at the same inflated newest set cost. I would say the amount of Premium Packs I bought and Orbs spent puts me at one extreme end of the spectrum. Now imagine a more casual or newer players situation, they won't have the crystals to buy that many premium packs without spending loads of cash (I had been hoarding crystals for months during the great content drought) nor the Orbs stockpile to finish off the Rares like I did (I hoarded dupes since day one because I thought the rune conversion was an insult and enjoyed tallying up my dupes from time to time as something to complain about).

Conversely, RIX is a smaller set with far better drop rates and I am only missing 2 of 21 Rares as of today. I estimate that I opened 15-17 RIX Premium Packs at this point. I will obviously not need to spend more than 3k Orbs to complete my RIX Rares as soon as they are available for booster crafting. It is difficult for me to gauge how much of an improvement RIX is over XLN since RIX has nearly half the amount of Rares compared to XLN. We shall see what happens once DOM comes but I worry things won't be better. It also seems like personal crystal rewards were cut back drastically since you are showing that we actually earn more per week now without those figured in but there have also been new planeswalkers to purchase with crystals that I hadn't had to do in a long time either. I suppose time will tell.

Let's go with your measure of valuing a guaranteed Rare at 1,000 Orbs (which I don't agree with because as you pointed out we have to factor in the chance for duplicates past the first Rare). By your metric, I should value the drop chance of Rares and Mythics in an XLN pack at their non-latest Standard crafting cost (1,000 & 5,000 Orbs) since in this discussion we care about cards of rarities at Rare+ only. Even at the current RIX-level drop rates of 0.57% for Mythics and 2.90% for Rares from XLN packs, that would still net an expected value of 353 Orbs per pack or 1,588 Orbs for 4.5 XLN packs vs 1,000 for the guaranteed Rare.

You can't look at the bad boosters you get and say oh I only expect to get 70 Orbs from an XLN 5-card pack. That one pack with a Rare drop (valued at 1,000) makes up for almost 3 packs of 70 Orb packs. That one pack with a Mythic drop (valued at 5,000) makes up for the lesser Orbs of like 20 x 70 Orb packs. Granted it comes with greater variance, but considering the number of packs we are getting each week it should start evening out before too long.

Also you spent on XLN Rares while it is the latest crafting set which means you're paying a 50% premium on crafting. If you waited for RIX to become craftable in a few more weeks, you could have spent 33% less than you did for the same number of Rares. In any case, you are saying you had 12 missing Rares out of the total of 40 after only 28 days from Ixalan's release. I'm not sure what your measure for rate of completion of Rares is but I'm fairly sure I was not even close to having 28 Rares out of 40 for AKH or HOU one month after release. And I was getting the guaranteed Rares from the coalition events then. Heck, by the time Booster Crafting came around which is around 7 months after the release of AKH I still had 2 Rares which I hadn't opened. (Approach of the Second Sun and Drake Haven lol, go figure)

And congratulations on having your Rare collection for RIX almost complete barely 3 weeks after the set's release! The first difference is the increased drop rate, yes. But there's also a difference from RIX having a smaller pool to draw from. Generally as your pool of possible drops scales up, the pulls required on average to pull all the cards goes up much more quickly. Meaning to say that you will need many many times the number of pulls on XLN to collect all 40 Rares as opposed to the 21 Rares for RIX instead of just being double in number, even with the same drop rates.

But I'm not sure what the concern is for DOM though. We will still have less time to hoard Crystals for DOM than in Hibernum times, but we will have twice the amount of time to hoard Crystals for DOM than we had for RIX as well as a better idea of when the next set will arrive which helps with our planning. So it might still feel a little cramped but I think DOM will feel better than RIX.

And yeah, the rush of planeswalkers makes one feel poorer but that's different from being proof that rewards have been reduced which after calculations turned out to not be the case. I admit I initially also felt like rewards had been decreased due to the lesser number of events each week and the loss of the guaranteed Rare.

The slight increase in Crystals gained is primarily due to the introduction of Across Ixalan and the increased Progression rewards from RtO and BoFT which match the Progression Crystal gains of planeswalker-locked events like HoD and ToS. As long as we have at least one of the XLN, RIX or planeswalker-release Coalition events each week, we are gaining slightly more Crystals a week than before.


Also @James13 is right that I am excluding TotP in those calculations as HOU packs aren't worth the cost of TotP even with the Platinum rebate. We had 6 months to open HOU packs between its release and the release of XLN. A diligent player of TotP would have some 130 HOU packs just from TotP alone over that period. Coupled with the competing pressure on Crystals reserves for spending on RIX and new planeswalkers, this option loses out. Across Ixalan is included because you get a net profit on Crystals along with the XLN pack and Jewels for Platinum players so there's no reason not to include it.

*edit*
I would like to clarify that TotP is not worth playing only if one has to choose between spending on planeswalkers, spending more on RIX or on TotP. If the player has sufficient Crystals for the planeswalkers he or she wants to get and is comfortable with his or her RIX collection, then TotP is still worth playing because it gets you more Orbs and Jewels for 30 Crystals than any other option around.

NinjaE

When I played Marvel, I paid for the VIP program. It was worth it there, so I'd be inclined to do so for this game if it is anything equivalent.

ZW2007-

span_argoman said:

But I'm not sure what the concern is for DOM though. We will still have less time to hoard Crystals for DOM than in Hibernum times, but we will have twice the amount of time to hoard Crystals for DOM than we had for RIX as well as a better idea of when the next set will arrive which helps with our planning. So it might still feel a little cramped but I think DOM will feel better than RIX.

My concern for DOM is mainly what the drop rates will look like. If they are RIX level, then the short window to save crystals combined with new PWs to buy won't be too bad. If they are XLN level, things will be terrible.