Long-Time Veterans - Player Level Adjustment (4/22/19)

Brakkis

starfall said:

Brakkis said:

That other MtG based game is just looking better and better.

There's a thread for discussing other MTG based games which have more respect for their players here:

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/78138/giving-mtg-arena-a-try

Shhh, we don't mention it by name.

Tremayne

Thuran said:

So first we get cheated out of level appropriate rewards in the initial conversion, and now you tell me we get cheated out of 40 potential levels more?! 

With a cap on level, this is just straight up punishing veterans harder!

Thanks for nothing!!

Well, I have actually seen several posts to the effect “give us our rightful level, don’t care about the rewards”.

 I didn’t complain at the time, because I lacked the imagination to realise this was the part D3/octagon chose to adhere to. So now I have realised I have to dissent to all requests that I do not agree with.

recently, I requested no account resetting for mastering data, as someone thinks that is desirable.

Tremayne

@starfall - not sure I follow everything in your post. My point was that D3/octagon had a request to lean on in making the level jump without handing out prizes.

Since the level system was introduced, Brigby has stated veteran players would not get everything they were entitled to because that would skew the in-game economy. Do not understand this argument but there it is.

Now D3 have reset player levels based upon the data you mentioned from v3.2 without taking progression from v3.2 until now into consideration, which I find extremely odd. However, I did get the prizes from the few levels I received while playing with cards from the new set. So for now I am ambivalent to this part of the recent “fix”.

The thing about the XP and level issue, is simply beyond comprehension, because there is so little usable information about this part of the future. For some reason, the veteran players are unimportant to D3, so I guess the veterans should prepare to be poorly treated in this regard also.

I have realised shouting at the D3/octagon windmill is pointless, since it seems to be grinding on whatever arguments are flung at it.

bobby_2613

Wait what... We change level but don't get the rewards from it???  That's tinykitty... :-/

WiLDRAGE

I gained 16 levels after the leveling was added.  Now I'm sitting at level 80 now with 1242 mastered cards.  I wasn't very vocal about the system before but seeing people with 400-500 less cards mastered than me be at the same level is some kind of tinykitty.

Tremayne

@starfall - I thought it was Brigby, but seems that it was in this blog post.
https://d3go.com/details-on-the-new-content-featured-in-3-2-and-mtgpqs-future-updates/
Check the section “Veteran players”

Fiddler

The irony of this is that the color mastery points on my profile are incorrect. They have been for years. I've had two support tickets raised but nothing was ever resolved. Oddly enough the difference used to be 2,500 points exactly (500 for each color). With 3.9 or around there that started changing and toady I am 2,184 points behind. With a profile total currently 13,429 that means I was bumped to level 90 today rather than level 100.  Not that it matters to me.

Mburn7

starfall said:

starfall said:

Thus, if I have my fully earned total of 706200 XP and am at level 137, the matchmaking system will apparently not work; but there is no reason why I can't have 706200 XP and be level 100, simply by changing the level boundaries, in multiple ways which have been discussed.

I've been thinking about this whilst in the bath, and I think I might have a route out of it.

The key is that what the players want is total fairness, and that is achieved by keeping our XP totals intact, and not rescaling them or resetting them.

On the other hand, what the dev team wants is level numbers which are a closer together. So, a spread of levels 1-100 is ok, but levels 1-150 is not.

Both of these goals can be achieved!

Of course they can both be achieved.  For some reason the xp needed to level up stagnates at a relatively low value after level 40.  It appears the dev team is hard set on keeping that exactly like that when changing the system, despite there being no reason I can see for that specific number.

It Oktagon would just toy around with the xp needed to reach each level everything could be done to everyone's satisfaction (I have suggested several ways over the last few months, here's another one:  Let the xp number flatten out for 10-15 levels and then jump up 1000.  That will both allow players to level up for a long while on their own and help force players into set brackets for matchmaking)

But alas, we're still upset.  *sigh*

efhktddyjkb

Wow. That’s unbelievable how this solution does not answer at all to the issue we complained about. It’s like there was no learning curve for the devs …

So, our main issue was (and still is) that basically the system wasn’t fair because people wouldn’t get the same number of experience points while mastering the same number of cards. But it’s still the case with this new adjustment.  Sure, we get a little less robbed of the experience and levels we should have. But we still are robbed, aren’t we?

Please, stop punishing the veterans and just give us the levels we have rightfully earned. Not an arbitrary level !

Gabrosin

I'm pretty tired of this whole thing, but for what it's worth, I agree with the obvious consensus here: this is not a real fix for the problem.

Many people in the other thread said that this was not about the rewards, but that doesn't mean a solution which jumps people to an arbitrary level without handing out those rewards is a valid solution.  When we said this isn't about the rewards, we were saying it was about player inequality.  A player who had mastered 100 levels worth of cards but was arbitrarily capped at level 40 missed out on the opportunity to gain 60 levels, and there was no conceivable way that player could obtain either the rewards or the status from those levels.  Now that player has had their level adjusted and will be in a fairer place with regards to eventual matchmaking... but once again, they've been prevented from earning the rewards for that stretch of levels.

By choosing to implement a one-time adjustment, the developers are also displaying that they don't understand the root of the problem.  Just like the initial implementation, there's no true correlation between a player's XP/mastery and their level.  I got bumped up from 70 to 90 because at the time of 3.2 I was just short of the 15000 threshold to go to 100, but I've since mastered a bunch of cards and now I am once again unable to catch the highest-leveled players (though the gap between my potential and theirs is now smaller than it once was).

Frankly, this is the laziest possible attempt at a solution to a problem that really shouldn't be that hard.  Somewhere the developers have the script or algorithm they used when this feature was first introduced, that took a player's mastery and turned it into a level and handed out the corresponding rewards.  The devs should be able to reuse that, just without the arbitrary capping at the top of the curve.  Hell, the players have already re-done the math on their own.  Just put everyone at the level they belong with the appropriate rewards and we can be done with this!

If the thought of having level 140 players is a problem, then I agree with the suggestion in the other thread of using level checkpoints for rewards.  You can hand out a small dose of goodies every 5000 XP even if the highest levels take 20000 XP total before your actual number goes up.

mrixl2520

This is nonsense. Yesterday I was in the lvl 40s range. Today I am lvl 80, with only 811 cards mastered. Where are my 30-ish levels worth of rewards??? I don’t really care about my level or amount of cards mastered. I play for rewards and new toys, and I just missed out on a lot of them.

With respect to all the players who have worked hard to master cards, I don’t deserve to be level 80. I am a long time casual player (since month 1!) and hit platinum ages ago. I have no idea where I should land level-wise, but to lump me in with all the folks who have mastered significantly more cards then me is not fair to them.

This dumb idea has gummed things up so bad, and it keeps getting worse. Does anyone at D3 really know what is going on, or even care about player experience? To all the players who offered critiques, insight, solutions, data: does this new version even slightly resemble what anyone expected?

ZW2007-

I just don't understand why this has to be so complicated. It's really simple to scale the levels. By spending countless seconds in excel I mapped out a level progression that would cap out at level 109 if a player owned and mastered every single card in the game. With the scale I made, players would be able to reach level 66 faster than they could under Oktagon's system but beyond that things would slow down greatly. This would allow newer players to feel like they are progressing faster while also giving veteran's exactly what they want, all the experience they have actually earned. As a new set is added, tweak the level costs again and set the newly desired theoretical max by making it nearly impossible to get higher until new content is added. World of Warcraft started with a max level of 60. It is now up to a max level of 120. It no longer takes the same amount of experience to reach level 60 as it did when that was the highest level...

Tremayne

Fiddler said:

The irony of this is that the color mastery points on my profile are incorrect. They have been for years. I've had two support tickets raised but nothing was ever resolved. Oddly enough the difference used to be 2,500 points exactly (500 for each color). With 3.9 or around there that started changing and toady I am 2,184 points behind. With a profile total currently 13,429 that means I was bumped to level 90 today rather than level 100.  Not that it matters to me.

I checked my mastering points and my numbers are so much off I must be a mistaken.

2 points for mastered common cards
+ 4 points for mastered uncommon cards
+ 8 points for mastered Rare cards
+ 16 points for mastered Mythic and MP cards
(colourless cards earns half points)

this formula results in a discrepancy of 400-500 points in every colour. Does multi-colour cards give less points in each colour?

ertaii

Well. Just leveled to level 100 due to this update. My coalition leader, who has mastered around 150 cards more than I do, and was 10 levels ahead of me is now... level 90 ! Yeaaaah, well done Oktagon ! I couldn't have though of a more twisted system and I'm definitely a deranged mind !