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

ZW2007-

Brigby said:

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

So the justification for one bad implementation is another equally bad implementation that will be forthcoming, got it. Also, hitting platinum in all colors is not difficult at all and if only 1.87% of the player base is Platinum, I find that suspicious to say the least.

Brigby

starfall said:
The pool is only small IF YOU DEFINE IT TO BE SMALL. DEFINE IT TO BE BIGGER.

Unfortunately due to the way the system is currently structured, the team would need to massively rework the way the Matchmaking system operates, in order to make matchmaking ranges dynamic like that.

This of course takes not just time and resources, but time and resource away from other features we've mentioned that would directly support and bolster the current features in the game for all players.

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ZW2007-

Why not implement a hard cap to players levels right now and allow everyone to be advanced to that level if their previously mastered cards allowed it? Say perhaps level 75 as the cutoff. With each passing season (whatever those will be), the level cap can be increased. MMOs have leveling systems and a maximum level. Then they add an expansion and increase the maximum level. Seems silly to say "We hosed some veterans so the noobs wouldn't feel so left out, but we're allowing other veterans to grind to such high levels with zero limitations that noobs will never catch them, ever."

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NickBKK

@Brigby you said 
“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..”

Please correct me if I am wrong.
- You can’t avoid “that”. Now any players with thousands of unmastered cards can keep mastering cards and getting their levels as high as they possibly can. There will be (or already are) people with very high levels sooner or later.
- BUT, People who have mastered most cards before the update are getting stuck. Period.
- In summary, you are avoiding it now only in one snapshot of time. But it causes permanent damages to a group of people who really have the most passions in this game.

Brakkis

Brigby said:

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%

You mean the percentage of players Euky is already in, if not less than that?

Poor guy is going to have a hell of a time finding opponents. It's almost like the majority of players with a collection of mastered cards high enough to match against him, or higher, are about 20 levels below him because of this poor decision.

Machine

Brigby said:

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.

I appreciate the effort of taking the time to (yet again) try to fix things with talking, but you're saying nothing new. The fact is that veterans with a lot of mastered cards won't be able to catch up. It's hard to believe that less than 2% of the players are platinum in all colors.

Yes, it might take some time to rearrange the system, but the way it looks now, the developers should take that time. Too bad other features will be delayed, but this is a major issue.

The small pool is not a valid reason, as players that have started to master their cards post 3.2 and reached levels of 60+ are now in a similar void. I just passed 2000 mastered cards. When 3.2 hit, I was level 41. Now I'm "only" level 43. Go figure.

Brakkis

Essentially, there were two paths to choose from.

Path 1
Give all players the experience they've actually earned, without a curve, and create a small void of players at an exceptionally high level who would be stuck facing the same players consistently in PvP events until such time as other players catch up.
 - The thing is, it would be entirely possible, thus inevitable, that other players would catch up. So long as card mastery rewards experience, newer and/or less experienced players would gradually catch up on that front and the issue of the high level void would inevitably cease to exist.
- Additionally, the issue can be alleviated to a degree once player levels factor in to matchmaking by increasing the match range to +/- 10 levels.

Path 2
Give all players experience based on a curve that actively punishes the most dedicated players by locking them in to a permanently lower level than any player who puts in a similar amount of effort after the fact.
- Not only would this lock said players in an impossible to fix issue, it would also create that very same void you were trying to prevent, without the inevitability of it course correcting over time.
- The difference in possible levels is already more than 20 for some. Setting the player level matchmaking to +/- 10 would be of no benefit and increasing it to +/- 25 would cause matches of immense imbalance.

You should have taken the first path. You took the second and the glaring issue of this choice has been presented to you with plenty of evidence and reasoning. This should be corrected immediately rather than platitudes about why this choice was made.

Mburn7

@Brigby I think the key reason that the pool would be so small at high levels is because the amount of XP needed to level up appears to plateau out after level 40.

I have no idea who thought that would be a good idea.

If the number of XP needed kept increasing, than at some point it would be high enough that a large variation of legacy players would be clumped within a few levels of each other.  It would also make it extremely difficult for them to level up, true, but it is already difficult for them because of how many cards they have mastered.

There is a probably a compromise somewhere in the middle (I'd say making the XP needed flatten out at 10K around level 60 or something instead of 6.5K at 40), and this is something that really should have been considered before releasing the update (possibly with player feedback)

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khurram

Option 1- Get matched against opponents from a relatively smaller pool, which would inevitability expand anyway.

Option 2- Get screwed for your dedication to the game and for the hours you put in it, and get robbed off your rightful level. 

It was indeed a tough choice, glad you guys took it off our hands.

Froggy

@Brigby thank you for taking the time to give us a complete answer.

Only one question:

How many players is 1.87%? That’s a statement totally out of context.

Avahad

Does everyone remember the days when most of your match ups were against a small pool of players? Killwind, ultradaved etc..... I sure learnt a lot about deck building back in those days..... 
i wouldn’t mind a small bracket to start with at all- I’ve played (and payed) to be up there amongst them
as stated above- the bracket size would eventually grow anyways.......

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Gabrosin

starfall said:

Also, here's a good line of code, that you can have for free:

IF (no opponent in bracket) THEN (check next bracket down)

Don't be ridiculous.  When you want to play a PQ match, the request goes out to Oktagon, where a hardworking employee searches among the other players waiting to play for someone appropriate and then manually sets up the match.

Do you want to put all those people out of a job?  You monster.