Keeping new players.

Brigby wrote:

Hey everyone. It's been a hectic few weeks for me recently, but I feel you all deserve more love from me than the amount I've had time to give lately. It's because of this that I wanted to stop by and talk to you about some of these issues you've brought up.

. . .

The problem with people moving to Platinum is that it's already a logjam up there. Right now we have around 80 perfect scores, which means that even if a person performs flawlessly, their prize is effectively determined by their time zone. That's ridiculous--and before anyone asks, no, this problem doesn't affect me. I'm West Coast USA.

It's definitely a positive that the prizes for 6-100 are effectively the same (a rare and some cards), but the prizes being so timing-dependent isn't a positive.

Yeah card mastery has very little to do with actual skill. It just means that you played a certain amount of matches with enough different cards.

Brigby wrote:

Do you think improving matchmaking to force players to tier up is a good solution, or do you think it's better to improve the rewards at higher tiers instead?

This only mentions tiers, thus events, what about quick battle where if anything the problem is bigger (though to make qb fair for new and old players, again both would need different rewards and play in a different tier/league, i suppose that's problematic with the current design). The events are not even accessible in a practical sense to new players as their matchmaking is biased to level 60 PWs. (Not that in QB a lower level pw has any chance of winning, but at-least qb needs only 1 level 60 pw, events need them for all nodes, thus 5)

Both pvp styles are more about activity and luck than skill. And maybe that's good, to win the big prizes, it's ok to play like an addict for 2 or 3 days. But the problem is, what experience do those players that don't care about that get? A player who is playing an hour a day (which is already much) gets as much out of the daily activity rewards than out of qb and even out of the events, there's no balance there. For me, the solution would be story events, like the one we had, pre created progressively hard missions (if match making ever starts to work, you could match progressively harder player decks too, maybe even give the ai pw's a progressive level boost) where you're allowed to fail and all that counts is winning in the end, winning is beating the (just a number) 20th mission, whether it takes 20 tries or 200 is irrelevant (ie no limited tries (as current events), no bonus for more wins (current qb))

To address the unbalance of starting times (though that affects new players as much as veterans, as such it's not strictly on topic) why not make events / qb last x days + 5 hours, so for each follow up event / qb they start 5 hours after the last, this should rotate times more fairly. Or have tiers / slots with different starting times and assign players to one based on a user preference.

But even then neither improving matchmaking nor forcing players to tier up addresses the source of the current unbalance: access to cards and plains walkers, new players don't have either. Matchmaking has to account for both though i'd rather have matchmaking looking to card library size while at the same time pw-rotation is ended and all pws are made available again. As noob it was eyeopening to be up against koth, giving me all the more incentive to get him. With the current temporary lock down on pw's that alone removed a huge incentive to play.