Rotations and others

Tilwin90

I suppose it's time I bring THE discussion. I know there are many opinions on rotations, their necessity and advantage, as well as the risk they come with. So I will do my best to cover here some of the points I have collected and hopefully get some more straightforward answers from D3/Oktagon or at least some insight into how strategically these rotations are done for both the players and the company.

Purpose
1) As the card base expands, there is an increased gap between newer players and experienced players. A Standard format ensures that every now and then we get the chance to level the field up a bit for everyone with new sets appearing.
2) Power creep is a real deal. The more cards you push into the game, it becomes more and more difficult to come up with better and better cards to encourage players to be excited about new sets. A rotation encourages new strategies and diversification by restricting the card pool.

Faults
1) The gap mentioned above is in fact exacerbated by the implementation of the Mastery levels that does not take into account event sets.
If you became a platinum player a year ago, there is little incentive for you to return to the game now that 90% of your card base is obsolete for Standard events. That's no way to encourage older players who scooped to actually return and enjoy the game. This is something that often happens in paper magic.
What's worse, newer players are actually affected more by this, as a smaller card collection is much more affected by a rotation.

2) Something Wizards learned is that they have to give players time to plan and prepare. This is why bans are carefully planned, and the release plan is known way ahead by the players. The rotations plan... even stricter! Players need to know precisely when they will lose some of their beloved cards so they can plan ahead their purchases!

Well, this does not happen in MTGPQ. And while I understand that programming these things takes time, we need a stricter schedule. We need the ability to plan.

3) The power creep issue is solved in paper magic via something Maro refers to as the "pendulum", also using the neverending staircase metaphor. Basically, you pull the game in different directions (like a pendulum rotating on multiple axis), but ultimately the overall power level (maximum distance from the resting position of the pendulum) is capped. 
I have occasionally seen this happen in MTGPQ, but there is still a lot of work in this direction. 

4) The new packs - yes, that awesome new content you're giving us, and the perfect reason to rotate things out. Why did you up the cost on those?! And why don't they contain any masterpieces anymore? Don't give me a parallel with paper magic please (that the paper magic set does not contain the masterpieces) or that hey, we can craft those cards for a higher cost. The truth is that newer players don't even craft that much. So what you've achieved is upping the cost and increasing the playable barrier for the newer players... yet again!

Did I mention what a big downer was the poor drop rate on IXN packs? Not only was that not announced, but it felt incredibly shady! What's the point of having a restricted Standard format if you're going to cripple the drop rate on specifically those sets?!

Suggestions
1) Properly implement mastery! This will greatly help newer players no longer be afraid to experiment with their cards or just get double-impact from a rotation!

2) Instead of just recycling events as legacy events, why not spice things up a bit in the non-coalition department? And we're not necessarily talking about prizes here.
I would die for a block event where you can play with only ORI + SOI cards for a change. Or maybe a KLD event. Etc. 
This doesn't seem like something difficult to code and it would shake things up sufficiently to give players something fun to do.

3) Temper down these ridiculously difficult events for newer players - give them something to play! I absolutely I understand that some people out there with full card collections feel unchallenged, and so something like Bo4T felt exciting.
But looking at the newer players I'll be surprised if any non-cycling bronze player can get past Zacama or even Beckett Brass. So what have you achieved? You've locked out beginners from at least playing SOME of the nodes. They are stuck in all nodes!

And some might say "a-ha, but newer players don't need to gain access to full content". Then explain to me why Bronze players get to go through all 5 nodes and why they have the same progress as platinum players? The rewards have already been dampened. What's the point of tiers here, and how do you encourage your players?!

You might ask how this is related to rotations... well if you get a poorer card collection, I wish bronze & silver good luck beating most of the challenges with their card collections heavily crippled.

4) Slow down with the rotations! Seriously! Wizards got a huge wave of complaints that they had sped things up too much, so they slowed them down. Look at paper Standard right now... It has KLD + AMK + IXN + DOM blocks all in! And core set is still upcoming! That's 8 sets staying in Standard before the next rotation!

What is MTGPQ doing? With the removal of AMK (and don't get me wrong, I am happy to see cycling go and all those perfect scores returning to normal, but it will IMPACT A LOT OF PLAYERS), we are left with ORI + HOU + IXN + RIX + DOM... that's 5 sets! Did I mention in MTGPQ it's much more difficult to grab good cards than in paper magic? (don't start with crafting please... I'll get to that in a second)

5) Fix the pack costs, get masterpieces back in, properly adjust drop rates for all sets! This is something lots of people have been angry about lately, and I'm sure that if this move will be repeated, more people will continue to leave.

Bottom line: Stop accelerating your development like you're in a race. It is way too obvious to me the game is starting to see the results of this "rapid implementation" of new sets, reflected in:
- poor decisions for the players
- poor long-term strategy
- TONS of shameful bugs
- speculative decisions when it comes to implementation of various mechanics (ahem, flip supports are cast the flipped part, and the original support gets put into the graveyard... interesting...)

Stabilize the current content and get this game back to a solid foundation.
In the meantime slow down with the rotations and leave players cards to play with in sane and fun events!
Thank you!

GrizzoMtGPQ

@Tilwin90 great post. So spot on. I wish I could give this 100 upvotes.

Mburn7

This is very well written, and pretty spot on too.

@Brigby take notes (or just have the devs look at this)

timthes

I agree with both above posters, devs should definitely read it and do something with it. 

Mainloop25

That's a good point about lower level players. If you are not in platinum, you shouldn't be playing Totp, and maybe not even Across Ixalan. But what does that leave you to play, then? Cutting down the amount of daily events was a misguided idea. They left the majority of players with nothing to do. Wonder if they are seeing a drop in daily logins. 

UweTellkampf

THANK YOU

TheZorch

Nice post.  Spot on.

BATMAN1

Just waiting and wondering when “not another dime” will resurface 😉

DBJones

This is a good collection of most of the things that really need to be looked at in this game, good job! For the rotations, perhaps they could be set as always 3 weeks after the paper release? That should give us some time to get the new cards before losing a set, and they're already announcing the paper releases in the app. That's assuming future PQ card releases are within 1-2 weeks of the paper ones.

Sirchombli

I agree that we need to be better informed about set releases. I fully understand that development takes time, but the time from when the set is finished to when it gets released doesn't need to be 48 hours. Finish developing the set, give us a few weeks of spoilers and a release date then release the set on the date given . We can't have another rix situation . That felt unorganized . Worse , the amount of time between xln and rix was exactly as long as it took to cycle through the exclusives . That's shady . Even worse we're cycling through those exclusives again. They're craftable now, though . No discount . Couldn't even get the graphics guy to update the splash for Beckett Brass , who has the wrong power and toughness . Drop rates in xln are conspicuously low . The high drop rate of rix was adjusted to be in line with other sets , but xln stayed abysmal . What, exactly is the aim , here . We're losing more and more players , and the questionable decisions keep happening, and continue to be more and more loose . Sure , there is a certain corner of the player base that will loyally jump into every release head first , buying every exclusive and planeswalker . It's probably best not to keep taking advantage of them. If they get fed up, I'm pretty sure the game dies . Maybe it's time to start respecting the player base and treat this like something that matters , because it does to a lot of us .

Kinesia

Unlike TotP (which newcomers should never have been allowed to join) Across Ixalan is actually good for bronze until they have most of the commons/uncommons, it's also much nicer and more fun than TG, that is the true disaster for beginners right now.

Beginners can actually do a LOT of the event, but slowly over time, you work out your strategy for each boss over trial and error over _weeks_ not just the one event. I remember learning RotGP that way myself, but also I did B4T on my alt and I actually got a lot further than I expected and had to use totally different strategies than on my main. Like building a huge first strike blocker with Gideon helps you win a LOT of the nodes.
What would help the beginners the most is that _after_ a loss you were able to still look at and edit your deck and play 1 "test" game that won't count for rewards or against your tries but lets you test your deck better. And, sure, it helps older players too, but eventually the older players aren't having the original loss, so eventually it only helps the new players.

BlueGlow

Big + to the point about rotation planning and giving players time to prep. 

We really want to know in advance about releases and rotations, especially when they don't match paper magic.

I was caught by surprise when Kaladesh rotated; I had just done a bunch of booster crafting, because I was assuming the standard rotation would match the paper schedule, since there had been no announcements to the contrary.

People have been asking for ages if the Origins set will rotate out when a new core set is released, and we still don't have an answer.