Rising Tensions

madwren

Nalthazar said:

I think that if we had more charges at the beginning, the event would be over more quickly and carelessly for players with bigger collections, and we would see complaints about the event not being fulfilling enough time wise for people looking to play the game more.

How would more charges affect the rate of completion?

It takes me four games to complete it. It will take me four games to complete it whether you give me one charge at the start, or whether you give me four charges at the start. 

Some other people might not be as efficient. It might take them eight games to complete it. It will take them eight games to complete it whether you give them one charge at the start, or four charges at the start.

The difference is that the low charges prevents both efficient and inefficient players from playing further, whereas events like AX and TotP allow them both to keep playing until they run out of full charges.

There is no benefit to that. For example, the event for me starts at 8:00 pm. That is prime playing time. I play my four games, I get my reward, then I usually want to test some decks or play some more before bed--yet I can't. The event is actively preventing me from playing more.  I have time that I am willing to spend on the game playing with new cards.

Nalthazar said:

I can understand why this is a problem for you. I have a toddler that is a wrecking ball, a job that requires me to work during almost all of my waking hours that aren't consumed by the toddler, and as such have very little free time to complete events. That being said, this event is in place of a PvP event that would have many more charges to complete and a ranking system, which would require a lot more time. Instead of having one event during the week that takes a ton of time, it is parceled out over the span of a week. That makes it a lot more manageable for me. That being said, I wish there were also more events that consumed more time. 

This event is not in place of a PVP event. It is the replacement for Across Ixalan as a daily, non-ranked PVP event that provides us a steady stream of currency. 

Nalthazar said:

I think this event takes such a small amount of time compared to other events that I don't think it is bad for the players as a whole. It will only impact a minority while making the game better for the majority. .

What makes the game better for the majority?  Achievable objectives, check. Interesting event design? Check. Desirable rewards? Check.  Single charges? No. That doesn't make the game better.

If something is 75% awesome, that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up in the air at the other 25% and say, welp, guess there's nothing more to be done here, let's go home.

Gabrosin

Kinesia said:

I do think the first node deserves slightly more leeway than the rest, to stop being locked out so easily, but then... You don't want people _only_ playing the first node and not bothering with the rest. Don't know a solution right now.

This is fair, quite often in Across Ixalan I'd just do three fast wins on the first node and come back to do one more at a later time.  I almost never went past the second node.  It felt like a waste.

But starting with one charge and yet all nodes unlocked is probably going to solve this.  Even if I have a favorite node, I'll have to wait for several hours for it to charge up to the point where I could skip all the others.  More likely I'm gonna play my one match on each node right away, knowing I'll need to play an extra match if I take a loss.  Not a big deal.

Theros

The event starts at 11 pm local time for us which is way too late (may be not for you ). By end of the day when you get time after work, family and what have you, you're under pressure to complete them nodes with no fail .  The first time I played the event I could not afford to lose 1 game so the possibility of missing the rewards is real.
With across ixalan, I would finish all progression in 35 mins to 1hr at most.

Suggestions to log in before the event starts or play a node is not a good user experience.
When will we stop telling other people how to play?

A good fix is to add starting nodes, everything else is fine

Mburn7

Theros said:

The event starts at 11 pm local time for us which is way too late (may be not for you ). By end of the day when you get time after work, family and what have you, you're under pressure to complete them nodes with no fail .  The first time I played the event I could not afford to lose 1 game so the possibility of missing the rewards is real.
With across ixalan, I would finish all progression in 35 mins to 1hr at most.

Suggestions to log in before the event starts or play a node is not a good user experience.
When will we stop telling other people how to play?

A good fix is to add starting nodes, everything else is fine

Doesn't it run all day the next day too?  I usually play the daily events in the morning/throughout the day, since they usually end around 10pm for me and start at midnight

Feden

To me at least, a nice enough change would be just making it 24 hours like TG.  It also starts at 11pm for me, when I'm rarely awake, and there's no RT from 9-11PM, when I generally play a bunch.

arNero

Okay, after getting trashed by a Kiora deck earlier, I have to re-state my displeasure about a few things in Rising Tension.

One, the fact that the other three nodes only start recharging after you beat the previous node is just not working here; It means that if you are unlucky enough to not be able to beat the first node repeatedly, not only you are wasting charges but also time, lost hours that amount to nothing because once you actually unlock the second node onwards you may have already lost too much time and you wasted 20 crystal and failed to complete all progression.

Two, the fact that like Across Ixalan, Rising Tension uses Trial of the Planes' gradual unlocking system is NOT a good idea, mostly because it simply doesn't make sense; you have made each Guild node to be the same difficulty (unlike Across Ixalan where the passive spell effects vary from node to node) except for the secondary objectives, so having to unlock the second node onwards by beating the previous node just plain doesn't make sense at all.

Three, having to get 60 ribbons instead of 40 can get annoyingly tedious. Several nodes (namely Boros and especially Dimir) have objectives that are soft-contradictory to each other, in that trying to complete one may result in you missing out on the other, which means the chances are pretty high for you to not get that 15 ribbons on win, which drags out the play time because instead of playing four times per day, you may have to play six, or eight, or twelve, I dunno. But it's just too draggy. Across Ixalan's 40 ribbons is what I can consider upper limit; 60 is bad number.

The solutions I suggested on my previous post stand:

1) Open all nodes from the start, and/or
2) All nodes start at full charge.

Mburn7

arNero said:

Three, having to get 60 ribbons instead of 40 can get annoyingly tedious. Several nodes (namely Boros and especially Dimir) have objectives that are soft-contradictory to each other, in that trying to complete one may result in you missing out on the other, which means the chances are pretty high for you to not get that 15 ribbons on win, which drags out the play time because instead of playing four times per day, you may have to play six, or eight, or twelve, I dunno. But it's just too draggy. Across Ixalan's 40 ribbons is what I can consider upper limit; 60 is bad number.

I don't think 40 ribbon progression is proper for a free mythic.  Especially not since the nodes recharge (and recharge pretty quickly at that).  True 12 matches eats up a lot of time, but it only takes 12 if you completely ignore the secondaries, since they are actually using the "good" secondaries that are really easy to build around and get.

Also, after how much we have been asking for more playing content lately, why complain about having to actually play the game?  If playing matches is such a drag why play at all?  Nobody is forcing you to do anything.

NinjaE

Agree. 60 isn't bad at all. It goes quick. Plus, you're still getting oodles of runes in the process.

This isn't the hill to die on.

jtwood

NinjaE said:

This isn't the hill to die on.

Yep. This event is awesome. It's fun, the objectives are good, the play style is more than fine enough, and the rewards are stellar. More like this please. You won't hear me complain (except about deck slots, because I want to save my decks for this awesome event).

Nalthazar

madwren said:

Nalthazar said:

I think that if we had more charges at the beginning, the event would be over more quickly and carelessly for players with bigger collections, and we would see complaints about the event not being fulfilling enough time wise for people looking to play the game more.

How would more charges affect the rate of completion?

It takes me four games to complete it. It will take me four games to complete it whether you give me one charge at the start, or whether you give me four charges at the start. 

Some other people might not be as efficient. It might take them eight games to complete it. It will take them eight games to complete it whether you give them one charge at the start, or four charges at the start.

The difference is that the low charges prevents both efficient and inefficient players from playing further, whereas events like AX and TotP allow them both to keep playing until they run out of full charges.

There is no benefit to that. For example, the event for me starts at 8:00 pm. That is prime playing time. I play my four games, I get my reward, then I usually want to test some decks or play some more before bed--yet I can't. The event is actively preventing me from playing more.  I have time that I am willing to spend on the game playing with new cards.

Nalthazar said:

I can understand why this is a problem for you. I have a toddler that is a wrecking ball, a job that requires me to work during almost all of my waking hours that aren't consumed by the toddler, and as such have very little free time to complete events. That being said, this event is in place of a PvP event that would have many more charges to complete and a ranking system, which would require a lot more time. Instead of having one event during the week that takes a ton of time, it is parceled out over the span of a week. That makes it a lot more manageable for me. That being said, I wish there were also more events that consumed more time. 

This event is not in place of a PVP event. It is the replacement for Across Ixalan as a daily, non-ranked PVP event that provides us a steady stream of currency. 

Nalthazar said:

I think this event takes such a small amount of time compared to other events that I don't think it is bad for the players as a whole. It will only impact a minority while making the game better for the majority. .

What makes the game better for the majority?  Achievable objectives, check. Interesting event design? Check. Desirable rewards? Check.  Single charges? No. That doesn't make the game better.

If something is 75% awesome, that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up in the air at the other 25% and say, welp, guess there's nothing more to be done here, let's go home.

The increase in charges would increase the amount of Mana Runes we were getting. This event is already the best way we have ever had of generating Mana Runes. You can earn up to 600 per node. If they gave 4 charges up front instead of 1 that would be a potential increase of 7,200 Mana Runes, which very well might be more than they want to give us. To me it isn't just about the initial charges, but about what a player can get out of the event. 

If you want to be testing more decks and keep playing, take them to the Training Grounds. That is what they are for. Training with new ideas and cards and playing as many matches as you want. This is an event that has rewards that are greater than individual Training Ground matches with objectives. 

We are used to events like Trial of the Planes and Across Ixalan, but this is a new event and they are changing things up. You might not like the change, which is probably why you are voicing your feelings about it, but the event doesn't need to follow the same suit as those two. 

When I said that this is in place of a PvP event, I am saying that because we aren't getting any other new events from this set, unless they tell us that they are adding something else and this is an event and it is a PvP based event, hence a PvP event. I know it isn't like an event like Nodes of Power, but it is all we get for now. 

When I say that it will make the game better for the majority, I mean that the rewards we will get from this event will benefit a majority of the players. The increase in runes means that newer and experienced players alike will be able to level up more of their Planeswalkers and buy more deckslots. That is a definite positive for many people. For me, the things you listed with a check are what matter to me about the game being better. For me personally, I don't mind the 1 charge because of what we are getting as a result of that one charge. I would rather it stay at one charge and not see the amount of Mana Runes earned per match reduced. 

The once change I would like to see to the event though is for it to unlock all four nodes at the beginning. I feel like it becomes unnecessarily punishing if you lose a node in the early, as it will prohibit you from playing any of the other nodes until you complete that node and this doesn't feel like a progression event to me. That is just my take though. 

IM_CARLOS

I think you get enough charges to complete this event every day. 

Well, if you don't have the proper pw (color) you have to purchase one first, but if you wanna win much you have to invest first. 

Kinesia

It lasts a day. Even if you are asleep when it starts and sleep for 8 hours, you can log in at that point and just _join_ (not play) and the first node starts to build, you have breakfast, go to work, maybe you get to play a game on transport (some do, some don't), then at lunch you can almost certainly play a few games and the charges will have built up.
By the time you are heading home and play a game on the way you have to have tea with the family...
So... 19 hours have passed since start and you've played about 5 games and hopefully unlocked the second node.

You might even be finished by now...

But because of the timing you probably have 3 nodes on the first and second left now, you can easily finish in your last 5 hours before going back to sleep.


Where the hours fall in the day might be very different from this, but the basic idea that you'll have gaps all throughout the day and you will have unlocked the 1st node in time EVEN if you were asleep at start time, that's pretty easy.


For me... It unlocks just before tea time. I work only on unlocking the 2nd (and if possible 3rd) nodes and leave the rest till the next day and can easily mop it up. But there are very few situations where you won't be able to do _something_ earlier in the day, just a bit, and that's all you need.


This is the ONLY event where there is actually a benefit to joining before it even opens.

arNero

To be frank, I don't disagree with you all who said that increasing the requirement from 40 ribbons to 60 ribbons is the end of the world, especially since compared to Across Ixalan, the secondary objectives combinations are relatively more reasonable (except Dimir).

Still, the fact is that the changes on node recharge and such force people to waste more time to get all rewards per day compared to Across Ixalan, which is NOT what I call a welcome change, but eh.... I guess I'm a minority here.

Thuran

So, anyone else didn't get ANY orbs from their dupe mythic today?

ninjark

Thuran said:

So, anyone else didn't get ANY orbs from their dupe mythic today?

I had to go to cards and manually click convert.

BigSwifty

I love RT. Such an improvement over AI. Perfect balance of challenge to reward imo, and FUN!