Who are the legacy events for?

ZW2007-

I think a big problem is the rush to catch up with paper magic. I understand there was a huge delay on XLN but there was no reason to rush out RIX as fast as they did. Due to this, we got two new sets and only two new events. DOM will release for paper in 23 days. I wouldn't be surprised if we get it in PQ soon after. How many times have we played these great, amazing new events? Three times. Race to Orazca twice and Battle of the Four Tribes once. I wouldn't even call that new content if we never get to play it. These are not meant to be disparaging remarks against the devs, simply stating facts. On top of all this, some of the new cards are bugged (or still bugged after being "fixed") and some ugly old bugs have re-emerged like the one where your game freezes if you try to replace a stack of tokens. Perhaps there is some contractual agreement that forces them to keep a certain pace with paper releases but I doubt that. Anyway, I think XLN and RIX ended up being good, fun sets and I like the attempts made to improve events even though I'm not a big fan of the end result (the overlays of the Oktagon events give me hope that my Planechase idea might one day come to fruition.)

Back to the real topic at hand, these legacy events need the rewards fine tuned. Rares and packs should just be replaced with Orbs. I have no use for SOI rares or packs but maybe you do. Thing is, Orbs have equal value to everyone. Yes, the rare reward could get you one of the eight SOI rares you are still missing, or it will more likely become 100 Orbs. A new legacy rare costs 600 Orbs. Maybe the reward could be greater than the value of a dupe rare but lesser than the cost of a new rare, say 150-200 Orbs? Same goes for the pack rewards. The beauty of it is, you can play a legacy event and eventually earn Orbs to buy a Standard mythic. Increasing the Orb value of my dupe rare by 50 or 100 (by directly rewarding Orbs as per my suggestion) wouldn't cut into the company's bottom line when it would still take me more than twelve of these events to get one new mythic. Since we seem to only see these events once a week, that's 3 months of these events for one mythic. A new set comes out in paper every 3 months. They are bent on keeping parity with with paper. These rewards would never bring me close to being ahead of the curve with keeping up with sets and that is assuming 200 Orbs for max progression and another 200 for top whatever-th (anything that rewards a booster) placement. See where I'm going with this? At the rate of 1 legacy PvP event a week, yielding 400 Orbs to active participants, I could get 1 guaranteed new Standard mythic per set (or every 3 months). One "free" mythic over that time period would not break the bank. You know what it would do? It would drastically increase participation in these events and it would reduce complaints about seeing these ancient events. Oh and remember when Terrors used to rotate the colors of the nodes while the objectives remained the same? How hard could it possibly be to do that for all the old events? Doing that would make them much less stale.

TomB

While I agree that any and ALL new (bug free) content is welcome, I also appreciate Legacy events because I like playing with my old cards too. And, while I like big rewards and don't want to give anything back, since I'm just playing for fun it doesn't really matter to me if the prizes make it worth my time playing.

Just my $.02...

madwren

They exist because people need something to do. It's busywork. They may provide minimal rewards, but they're innocuous; reruns aren't taking away from any significant development time, so it's a pretty easy way to generate ongoing/rotating content.

It's understandable, however, that people are frustrated with the busywork, especially when the rewards are meager or irrelevant for many players.  Not for everyone, though--many people are happy playing these events and building their collections step by step.

Keep in mind, though, this always happens. ALWAYS. When you have no more summits to climb, those at the top (or endgame) are always hungry for additional content.  Whether it's a mobile game, MOBAs, FPS, MMOs.... it happens. It's natural. Frequently people reach the endgame by being dedicated, passionate players, and when they've done all that needs to be done, They Just Want More Novel Experiences.

I agree with zw2007; I think the primary problem has been that they're trying to catch up to paper, which hasn't left them much time to breathe or think about altogether. new game modes. To Oktagon's credit, they've tried to make tweaks to the existing formula, with some success. However, anyone trying to say that the new events aren't simply an updated version of old events is being disingenuous.  C'mon. You can hang a hundred pictures on your walls, but it's still the same room you started with. Just a bit prettier. Or messier.

I appreciate that they've tried some new things (even if I haven't liked any of them), but they're all variations on the similar themes that d3go established. Will we get more game modes? I hope. Once releases are aligned (which may be soon), I'd expect them to start looking into ways to grow the game's competitive offerings. I don't know if we'll get any, due to the way the interface works, but it'd be nice to see some new ideas.

It'd be great if one of those newer ideas involved bringing back guaranteed rares, or changing the reward structure so we could earn orbs, or drastically increasing the ability to grind runes, by the way.

Brigby

*Please keep all comments civil and constructive. Thank you!

Kinesia

James13 said:

Live PvP of this sort phone app is a recipe for disaster.  I wouldn't pay for the massive server upgrade required, suffer through lost connections, and exploit matches galore.  I could set up an infinite combo that does nothing or simply sit on a match waiting for an opponent to concede me points.
Any additional layers of complexity required to address those problems would invite more failure points to the whole process.

The implementation we have now is good enough for a low resource match 3 phone game with magic flair.

Efforts should be directed toward new events and extending story mode from it's multi-year sleep.  I've loved the new twists and match gimmicks.

I play some other phone strategy games with live PVP and I enjoy this because it's NOT them. There are heaps of problems like James says.

Balance becomes a much more massive issue.

The biggest problem, though, is that if I get a phonecall during a game, which is _Expected_ to happen sometimes then I lose. Fullstop.
Even if the app will reconnect (which it doesn't always, but it's dependent on the OS and the phones memory, NOT this specific app) in live PVP you CANNOT let people take more than a few seconds to have their turns and any timeout has to be considered a loss. Otherwise people can grief by just not taking their turns.

Even more than any of that (because I don't care about losing sometimes, in PVP games you expect to lose  about 50% of the time), the thing that bugs me the most is that as SOON as people think they are losing they QUIT. And that is the bit I can't stand, I want to play every single game through to the end, I _never_ want the game to end early, even if it's in my favour. And if I'm losing I never quit, I try and turn the ground around as best I can, but in live PVP that goes away. The best parts of this game are _lost_ in PVP.

Kinesia

In terms of releasing Rivals fast and catching up with paper... They are necessary long term and things will get better now it's done.
But Ixalan could NOT have been fixed or balanced without releasing Rivals, it would've taken _longer_ to make it usable because it definitely looks like they designed them together (which only makes sense in terms of resources and the fact that they already had both sets in hand.)

They have done very creative and cool things with the current game modes so maybe they _can_ come up with something completely new, but complete newness takes _much_ longer. They needed a balance of "good" and "fast", next comes "stable" and "reliable" and "complete newness" is further down the track but they'll be _thinking_ about it and trying things out _while_ they are doing all the other stuff.

Kinesia

It's also really fun trying old events with new cards and strategies and walkers, like I did the black node with a standard legal Vraska deck with oathbound vampire and chupacabras for horrors. No legacy creatures at all.
It's fun! It's only the werewolves you can't do that with, but you can always do silly things, like Huatli Wolves of either colour.

The quirky silly things are fun and when the rewards matter less you are free to do them.

I _kicked_ myself for accidentally picking the wrong white planeswalker for spirits, I wanted to use my new red dragon just forgot at the wrong time...

FindingHeart8

Brigby said:

*Please keep all comments civil and constructive. Thank you!

Happy 4,000 post Brigby!!

Back on topic: Legacy events are cool, we should keep 'em

TheF3C3SK1ng

Gideon said:

All of you are happy playing the stale content and that’s fine. I think they should develop more game modes. I want live PvP scheduled events. Two headed giant. 4 player mode with a cross board like chess 4 How about a March madness tournament. I’m more upset that you all appear to be happy with crumbs. I want more cake.

[redacted bk]

Really, LIVE game events? Like, we play against each other in REAL TIME?

Considering how much of this game is broken, I cannot ever see that being implemented.

I will admit though, it would be great.

But seriously. The legacy events are fun, and they  give us a chance to play old cards that are awesome but worthless in most events. Devs listened (sort of) and keep dropping them in, I appreciate that.

Mainloop25

I will admit though, it would be great.

I don't think so . I think it would have to be a whole different game to work. Too many troll decks would ruin it, in its current form. Also, whoever goes first in this game has a huge advantage. How would they deal with that? 

TheF3C3SK1ng

Mainloop25 said:

I will admit though, it would be great.

I don't think so . I think it would have to be a whole different game to work. Too many troll decks would ruin it, in its current form. Also, whoever goes first in this game has a huge advantage. How would they deal with that? 

I have no idea how they'd deal with all of that, which is why I think it is a ridiculous thing to ask for. Nonetheless, it could be fun if it was somehow made to be "fair". 3 game series, roll for first game, loser goes first game two? Still, the troll decks will ruin it, because, you know, people.

BenRama

The legacy events are for people who *enjoy playing the game* ,irrespective of payout. I like using legacy cards because fun games are fun. If the payout isn't to anyone's liking, it's easy enough to just not play it. Or at least that's how I see it.