Player Level and Card Experience (2/25/19)

khurram

Firinmahlazer said:

starfall said:

Firinmahlazer said:

Hey Brigby thanks for taking the time to address some of the questions that have been floating around. Much appreciated! 

As a matter of interest. may I ask how much you personally have been negatively affected by the XP system?

I don't know and I don't care. I'm plat. Been playing for like 2 years. I have a bunch of cards mastered. Started at like lvl 35? Everyone is upset over something that didn't even exist until a few weeks ago. 

So the short answer is no, you have not been affected. I'd guess that you had less than 750 cards mastered.

The matter of when it started to exist is irrelevant in determining it's importance or the impact it's going to have on the playing experience and makes it an invalid argument in the defence of this shitshow.

I'd say that this is panning out to be the worst move made by devs in the history of this game. 

Mburn7

Like I said before, though, lets try to keep this civil.  Oktagon made a mistake.  Their apology was a classic "I'm sorry you're upset" that never fails to make people more upset than they already were.  We've made that point explicitly clear.  There is no need for anyone to get nasty or continue debating the merits/demerits of the rewards that were given out (since those are just a small, insignificant part of the complaint).

//Removed Off-Topic Thread Content -Brigby

ZW2007-

Back to the original task at hand, players are not upset about the missed rewards from the initial burst of "leveling" up. Players are upset about the rewards they may miss in the future because their initial level was handicapped for no good reason.¹  Players of equal skill, color mastery, and card collection are no longer equals. They are separated by whether or not they spent time mastering cards. The irony here is that those that spent the time to master more cards pre-3.2 are the ones that are at a disadvantage when compared to their peers.


¹There was a reason and they explained their reasoning multiple times but it wasn't a good reason though.

Brigby

*Please keep all comments on-topic, civil, and do not attack other players. Thank you!

IM_CARLOS

Okay Brigby, but as you can see this is a thread and there is a lot talking about here since weeks. So, time to do something more like 'wait till the future come true sometime'-saying.

Froggy

I tried to read past the first page of posts. After almost getting through page 1, I skipped to the end. It appears nothing was done about the completely senseless and illogical implementation of this “system”.

What the devs (Or D3) have done would be the real life equivalent of Apple releasing a brand new version of their lightning cables on all their new devices and not providing the actual cable. When customers complain, their response is “don’t worry! We already thought about it. Coming soon...”

Yeaaahhhhh... Way to go.

Fix the problem already and credit everyone with the xp they deserve and never got.

This current arrangement and mishandling shows severe incompetence. Time to sort things out.

Khyb

@Brigby

If part of the reason for this implementation was working out the issues of match fixing that the color mastery system had, isn't this going to create a buzzsaw of long experienced players with the entire catalogue of cards in the middle of the pack rather than the top?  As it is, a player with 500 or 600 mastered cards would start encountering a perma barrier of players with over 2000 mastered cards at their level who cannot move up.  

It seems a lot of your response is riding on those players moving up quicker because of their rate of play when the mysterious new elements are added but it seems dreadfully obvious that many players didn't master cards previously, not because they wouldn't play more, but because they didn't see the point or wanted to elevate their chances to encounter lesser opponents to heighten their chance for better rewards.  I suspect plenty of them will play as much or more than people who spent a lot of time mastering cards in the previous system.  

Speaking of the previous system, the players who mastered many cards used the color mastery system as the devs intended it to be used.  This was the official achievement path of the game.  Why would a rule following player affected adversely by a new system that disregards the old systems achievement path have any faith that the current devs will honor putting in more play time to "catch up" with arbitrarily awarded higher level players in the new achievement system? 

Can I add to the chorus of pleas for less vague "we will work it out in the future" answers? It seems that this problem began with the team not beta testing the idea process with it's players in the first place.  If you are not seeking input from players about the next phases I am certain at this point it will be a mess.  Thank you.

James13

I'm interested and excited to see what happens with the system.

fiirst

@Brigby

Do the Dev have log of all player mastering data at kick-off 3.2 ?

IM_CARLOS

starfall said:

Incidentally, I got a bit sick of talking about hypotheticals, so I got the permission of a couple of players to mention their names in the forums, and to post screenshots of theirs.



1705 cards mastered in total, level 68. Screenshot taken this week. (was level 32 when update 3.2 dropped).



2171 cards mastered, level 41. Screenshot taken just after the 3.2 update.

What a shame... 

I have 23something masterd and only lvl.43.

So, like I said: no more money until problem solved!

GrizzoMtGPQ

1284/2353 at level 54

Irishme

It’s the same for me.  2321 mastered before the update, level 42.  I’ve pretty much stopped playing since it doesn’t seem they will correct this.  The numerous bugs, customer service canned messages without ever helping, and now this, last straw for me.  One more event to give my team extra time to find a replacement and then I’m done.  

Brigby

Hi Everyone,

Thank you all for providing your feedback and sentiment. We've been reviewing all your comments and discussing what we can do to try and alleviate these concerns; specifically the concern of high color mastery veteran players being surpassed in level by players that mastered less cards pre-3.2 update.
(In other words, how high of a level should veterans have been given during the initial implementation?)

In addition, I wanted to respond to a couple questions I've seen pop up a few times in this thread already.

Some players said:

Just give veterans all of the experience they earned from mastering cards pre-3.2

While it certainly makes sense to give them the equivalent amount of experience, I want to explain why that unfortunately would've actually ended up hurting veterans in the long run. (The team certainly took this route into consideration)

If the team were to have done a direct 1:1 conversion of their experience into player level, even after applying the experience curve, this would've meant their levels would've been much higher than the vast majority of players. Now you might be thinking, "What's wrong with that? They mastered all those cards. They deserve to be at a much higher level than everyone else." When it comes to the respect and admiration of achieving such heights, yes, there's no doubt about that!

The problem with giving them all the experience they mastered though is that due to their high levels, this means they'll inevitably encounter Matchmaking issues from being in such a small pool of opponents. We've seen in the past players expressing concern about being matched against the same opponent over and over again in a single event. We want to avoid that..

Now you might say, "Sure it'll probably be small, but how small could it possibly be that it'll be an issue?" Good question! I crunched some numbers real quick. Let's say a player hits the minimum points to reach Platinum in all colors. That's a pretty impressive feat, and in doing so means they've reached the top 1.87% of players! That already limits the pool of opponents significantly.

What about for the high color mastery veteran players we're talking about with color mastery levels of 2500+ Platinum Color Mastery in each color? If we were to give them all of their experience, and put those players at its respective player level, the percentage of players they'd be able to match against would be... literally .038%

That's incredibly small, and would mean those players would unfortunately be fighting the same opponents for quite some time.

Khyb said:

Can I add to the chorus of pleas for less vague "we will work it out in the future" answers?

We knew it had been a while since we've provided any news on development, so in our haste to provide everyone with an update, it seems we might have teased these new features too early. This reminds me of when we announced Booster Crafting too early, only to encounter road blocks that forced us to implement it many months down the line.

In the end, the feature ended up being a great boon for players, but the time leading up to its implementation was laden with questions about its full details before that info was ready to share. Naturally players grew frustrated by this.

Players understandably have just as many questions about these upcoming features as they did for Booster Crafting, but it's unfortunately the case where conceptually the goals of these features have already been realized, but the granular details as to how those goals are accomplished may potentially evolve over time.

In other words, we don't want to confirm one thing several months earlier and end up presenting something potentially different later on.