Mastering cards seems a lot tougher than before

IM_CARLOS

Irishme said:

@Brigby

I am one of the screwed.  I mastered 2,321 cards before the update.  I had two unmastered masterpiece when the update occurred.  I started at level 41, got up to level 42 and am now locked at this level until a new set comes out.  Someone who did not master cards before the update can now progress beyond me.  There are many with less than 1,000 mastered cards who are only a few levels behind me.  This to me is very unfair.  

Interesting! I had 2300 mastered card (only missing 33MP, 16M and 4R) and started with level 42.

The level thing is like dice roll I think. 
I saw lvl36 player with just 700 card mastered and don't belive that the difference between 36 and 42 are 1600 cards. 

Somebody say I just took my lower bonus before. WRONG! There was no bonus, I only runes for the matches, the same runes you get today for the same matches. 

For now level is just an abstract number and missung rewards are a (very annoying) one time effect. But maybe in future there is more into level like matchmaking or rewards and then it's totally wrong to punish people to put more efforts in this game before such an update, so they can't catch up anymore. 

They have to fix it and communicate the exact parameter for levelling. DO YOUR MATH! Make it consistent and transparent or you will definitely loose more longetime p(l)ayer like me.

Tilwin90

It's very hard to follow the long conversation here, so here are my only 2 cents:
- If multiple tiers are being developed and the rewards are affected on the current platinum (or the new platinum requires an absurd level), it will be very stupid. It  means that absolute grinding and large card pools get rewarded. I see no fun in mastering very bad cards just for the sake of "leveling them up". It's like asking a paper magic player to play very poor cards in constructed just to "tier up".
- The fact that all cards value the same are another debauchery if you think back to bronze. In the past people had very tricky decisions to take if they wanted to stick to a tier. If tiers will be tied to levels and all cards value the same regardless of rarity, pay to win enables players to stick to low tiers by leveling ONLY key cards. This gives an absurd advantage even with rotations knocking at the door - and worse is that any bad decisions made in regards to this strategy are irreversible as it is.

I sincerely hope that this card mastery thing is seen as a "gain some cute stuff" opportunity rather than decide tiers, matchmaking level etc. Though it seems at the moment it certainly decides tiers, and I wonder if matchmaking wasn't changed to reflect player levels as since the past release I've been facing quite some difficult opponents... Maybe it's just bias though, can't really prove it that easily.

Oh and doesn't current level reflect the same level one would achieve if they were to master the exact same cards starting NOW? If the two would lead to different results this is a huge flaw in the system!

Unknown

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Laeuftbeidir

We also came to some weird conclusions in our Slack. I'm one of the players who - now that I start to receive actual comparable numbers - got a good reason to feel punished for having played all my cards to often. If you have any comparable data (especially rewards when leveling up) I'd appreciate them to fill up my list.

Transparency would be a great first step. I wonder why the Infos were not published in the blog post.

Feden

I'm also not touching the core conversation here.  So I'll just add that going from 35 to 36 gave me 3825 runes and a legacy booster, in case that's still needed.

Thuran

I just reached lvl 38 now, gave me 4050 runes, and a legacy booster

Said booster contained a dupe rare, and prism array, so...yeah, none of that if you are lvl 42

IM_CARLOS

It's not about the level rewards, okay not the biggest issue. It's the fact that you will be way beyond 42 with 2300 cards mastered.

Not really a handicap for now (beside the missing rewards), but if lvl. get more influence post future updates, then ... Problem! 

Tremayne

@TheDude1 - writing from mobile so the quote thing is skipped.

regarding rewards. I do not agree with you, though not all of point is wrong. Yes, I get better prizes in higher tiers. However, I can’t stay in lower tiers when I have played for as long as I have. At least not without keeping to Origins and select cards from following sets.
so I say it was not my choice to tier up, it was required from the game designers, so I don’t accept that I should be badly converted at this time.

the nest two points we seems to be in agreement on - at least close enough for me to end it here.

regarding the new XP potential. You have made a very detailed response and I can’t get in to it all at this time, I need to ponder it some more.
However, from Brigbys answer I got the impression that the XP-system is not new, it is just visualised in a new way. So the cards have always had a value attached to its mastering, the new thing is that these values are connected to your level.

From the feedback so far I get the impression that some discrepancies are introduced, but their ramifications are very unclear to the players. I have plenty of cards to master and can level up for some time to come, while others cannot because they have very few cards left to level up.

But this is the biggest problem for me now. I will avoid mastering more cards until I know what the consequences of mastering entails.

so I have been cut of from new material! - I know that is my decision - but clearly the uncertainty has a huge impact if other players come to this conclusion.

mayor

So this update caused frustration because:

1) Inconsistent rewards between players of the same level

2) Inability to progress if almost cards are mastered

3) Amount of mastering points has been changed -not only in heroics as stated- making it more time-consuming

4) Levels do not reflect the effort or time spent to master cards before patch

5) We have no clue of what player level represents

I share most of these concerns especially because my unmastered cards are limited. Not being able to level up in the future or seeing that the time I spent leveling cards/playing the game is punishing makes me disappointed with the way levels have been calculated. It also shows that the devs either didn't think that enough or it is a result of wrong math.

To me the amount of cards mastered is a good indicator of how much time someone spent in game and so his experience and I'd love to see that reflected in the profile.

rafalele

@BrigbyIn the new "Tour de Ravnica" event we are getting 2XP for each not mastered card.

Is this intended or is a bug?

Thuran

Ive noticed my gain in AM are also down from 20xp to 2 xp

Bil

  I tried to master cards in tour of  ravnica ...

  I was happy on the first run : each game grants 20 xp per card ... But the second run only grants you 2xp ... 

   Xp gains have clearly been nerfed at least for pve events

Machine

@Brigby: It seems that in the second run in the Avacyn's Madness event, the cards only get 2 XP instead of the 20 XP during the first time of any particular encounter. Surely, this is not how mastery worked before the update. I hope this is not the way the devs are planning to go, because mastery would take forever like this. It seems that if one has met one of the objectives without meeting other objectives, cards only get 2 XP.

Machine

IM_CARLOS said:

It's not about the level rewards, okay not the biggest issue. It's the fact that you will be way beyond 42 with 2300 cards mastered.

Not really a handicap for now (beside the missing rewards), but if lvl. get more influence post future updates, then ... Problem! 

This time I do agree with you ;-) It seems that players that already had a lot of cards mastered are being disadvantaged heavily here. I'm sure that @Brigby is aware now of the issue.

I only hope that this issue will receive top priority by the devs. This is a major bug.

ZW2007-

TL;DR: Something is wrong with player experience/levels that needs to be investigated. I believe card mastery is working as intended but there is definitely an issue with how much experience is being credited to players from cards mastered prior to 3.2.

Forgive me if this looks a little sloppy but I took some of the numbers from sjechua and kind of guessed at the missing ones:

Level	Experience	Level	Experience	Level	Experience	Level	Experience	Level	Experience
1	0	11	650	21	1800	31	3200	40	5500
2	200	12	700	22	2000	32	3200	41	6000
3	250	13	750	23	2200	33	3400	42	6500
4	300	14	800	24	2400	34	3800	43	6500
5	350	15	900	25	2600	35	4000	Total	99300
6	400	16	1000	26	2800	36	4000
7	450	17	1100	27	3000	37	4000
8	500	18	1200	28	3000	38	4500
9	550	19	1400	29	3000	39	5000
10	600	20	1600	30	3200	40	5500

So my estimate is that to hit level 43 it would take 99,300 xp.

Here is my estimate of how much experience each card is worth:

Rarity	XP
Common	40
Uncommon	80
Rare	160
Mythic Rare	320
Masterpiece	320

I have confirmed that it takes 2 games of Rising Tensions to master a previously unused common (20 xp per game) and 4 games to master a previously unused uncommon. Since this lines up with the old system of 2 and 4 games, that leaves me to assume a rare is 8 games (160 xp) and a mythic/masterpiece is 16 games (320 xp). Obviously the number of games required has changed depending on the event but it seems that any PvP event that has limited charges will give 20 xp per card, per game won. As for what they did elsewhere (Heroic encounters and PvE), I have to believe they screwed something up.

Here is a breakdown of my personal mastery:

Rarity		Mastered                   XP
Common		232	9280
Uncommon		204	16320
Rare		206	32960
Mythic Rare		158	50560
Masterpiece		20	6400
Total XP			115520

Again I apologize that it doesn't look great but pasted from a spreadsheet is easier than trying to load photos here.

So looking at that, I should have at least 115,520 experience accumulated. Keep in mind this does not even take into account all the cards that are partially filled with experience but not mastered. Based on my estimated level breakdown, I should be well over level 43, probably somewhere around level 45. I am currently level 38.

Now, if someone owned every single card in the game and had each one mastered, they would have a total of 298,760 experience. I personally only have 820 cards mastered and should be somewhere around level 45. Those with over 2,000 cards mastered should be well above that, probably somewhere in the upper 50's or into the low 60's.

There is definitely something wrong with player levels and experience. If I took the time to master all my unmastered cards, I would shoot way past level 43 and all those people that already mastered most of their cards and they would never be able to catch up to me. Regardless of lost rewards (perceived or not), this is just unfair since player levels will likely have some meaning at some point in the future. If levels are completely meaningless, then I guess it's not a huge deal beyond the lost rewards (which I personally won't throw a stink about). However, if they are meaningless, what was the point in even adding them?

TL;DR: Something is wrong with player experience/levels that needs to be investigated. I believe card mastery is working as intended but there is definitely an issue with how much experience is being credited to players from cards mastered prior to 3.2.

Laeuftbeidir

@ZW2007- nice analyze!

I just tested a couple of not mastered cards in herroic encounters. A common gives 100 experience points (counted, confirmed by another player as well: 16 matches at 6xp and one at 4xp). After the same amount of matches, the uncommon is at 50%, rare at 25% and mythic /mp at around 12.5% (hard to tell yet, but around half of the rare value). I'll go on counting, but not today.

So the actual XP per card are :

100/200/400/800(not 100% sure about the last, but between 700-900 with 800 making the most sense) 

I wonder how our values differ so much? Could you confirm? Also, that doesn't disprove your point, quite the opposite.

Tremayne

Bil said:

  I tried to master cards in tour of  ravnica ...

  I was happy on the first run : each game grants 20 xp per card ... But the second run only grants you 2xp ... 

   Xp gains have clearly been nerfed at least for pve events

Wanted to confirm this, so I added a non-mastered card and had the same experience.

 Is this as intended?

Tremayne

@ZW2007- - I have not been able to master a common card in two matches so far. My experience so far has been close to @Laeuftbeidir above.

Irishme

Current level is 42.  Before the update had the following mastered:

common: 721
uncommon: 712
rare: 508
mythic: 325
masterpiece: 55

There are already level 43 players who currently have less mastered cards than myself.  This is exceptionally unfair that I am penalized for playing the game too much.  

Aeroplane

The grind doesn't equal the reward. I'll just passively master my cards or create a Karn deck to test out unmastered cards once in a while. "Meh" update for leveling and mastering...next!