'Free to play' games have evolved over time to have more and more obscure monetization schemes. Humans are bad at making many decisions on a row and the developers have figured this out, so they tend to make things take more effort to figure out. The less clear it is what you're doing, the more likely you are to make a purchase that you wouldn't actually make with a clear head and perfect information.
You'll never find an actual price tag on a thing you want to buy. In League of Legends, for example, the new champion costs 7800 blue essence or 975 riot points. What does that even mean? Blue essence you get over time for playing the game, riot points you can buy with cash. 490 points for $5, with 'bonuses' if you buy in bulk. So Senna is priced at $9.95, but you can't spend exactly that amount. In this case the next highest amount you can actually spend is $10, so really close, but often that is not the case. They make you buy extra points and then you're committed to the platform by having more currency to spend later. But not too much more! You'll need to top up if you want to buy something else. The idea is you spend more now, so if you don't come back they get more than they would have with an actual price. And if you do come back you're hooked and more likely to spend more. And by having to look at all this math your brain gets a little overwhelmed, and if you have money to spare it's easy to just spend rather than work it out. They've also worked anchoring in there by giving you a base price for points but then giving you even more if you buy in bulk. Lots of marketing trickery going on.
MTG Arena has lots of this happening. Not necessarily maliciously evil, but it's certainly using things that worked in the past for other people and those things work by taking advantage of people. MTG Arena also seems to have extra systems making it more convoluted but I suspect this was more no one had an actual vision for how to do things so more people tacked things on that they thought was needed. It certainly has kept me from really figuring out what I should be doing to build a collection properly. But I've qualified for some sort of tournament so I need to play a wider variety of decks. So I need more cards. So I need to work this all out.
MTG Arena doesn't use a disenchanting system like Hearthstone does, so you never need to make a decision about keeping cards you've opened. You always keep them, you can't destroy them, and if you get more than the max amount you get a very minor boost elsewhere in your collection. I think this is an actively good decision. I've hated that I've had to blow up Hearthstone cards to build decks in the past because it actively hurts my collection to make short term progress and that's a bad feeling no matter which side you're on.
There are a bunch of different currencies going on. You've got gold, which you earn by doing daily quests and as tournament prizes. You've got gems, which you buy with money and earn as tournament prizes. You've got XP, which you earn by doing daily quests. You've got wildcards, which you earn by opening packs. You've got packs, which you can buy with gold, or gems, or cash, or earn as prizes, or earn from XP. And you have the individual cards that you can get by drafting, or playing sealed, or opening packs, or doing dailies, or as prizes, or from earning XP. They all switch back and forth in different ratios depending on different tournament formats!
But for now, all I really care about is getting more cards. How do I make best use of the different currencies in order to get more cards? Gold and gems are the two hard ones to look at, so I'll do the rest first and hope that makes it easier to look at those.
XP - There's a cap on how much XP you can earn and not really anything to spend it on. You can get at most 750 XP per day (first 10 wins and the daily quest) and every 1000 XP gets you a level on their mastery system. You do also get 3750 XP per week (first 15 wins) for a max of 9000 XP per week. There are 110 levels with rewards and 112 days in the season for a max of 144k xp. So you do have some extra to spare, but you really need to go hard to get all the rewards. (For every 1000 XP above the cap you get an extra uncommon for whatever that is worth.) You need to spend gems to get access to all the rewards, with the following being available.
everyone - 42 packs
old players - 6 packs, 10 uncommons
3400 gems - 20 packs, 2000 gems, 10k gold, 10 mythics, 3 rares
wildcards - These are how you actually make specific cards that you want. There are wildcards for each of the different types of cards (common, uncommon, rare, mythic) and nothing to do with them except trade them for cards. You earn more wildcards in one of three ways. You can open them in packs as a replacement for an actual card (1:3 packs for commons, 1:5 for uncommon, 1:24 for rare/mythic). For every 6 packs you open you get an uncommon wildcard and a rare wildcard. (Every 5 rare wildcards in this way are mythic instead.) And you can get wildcards out of 'the vault' which turns extra commons and uncommons into 3 uncommon, 2 rare, and 1 mythic wildcard. It takes 1000 extra commons to get this reward, with extra uncommons counting as 3 commons. You get these extras by opening packs and doing drafts/sealed events.
packs - Opening a pack gets you 5 commons, 2 uncommons, and a rare. (1 in 8 rares will be mythics instead) Getting your 5th copy of a common or uncommon gets you vault progress. A 5th copy of a rare gets converted into a different rare from the same set. If you own every rare you get 20 gems. Same with mythics except you get 40 gems when full. You also get 1/6th of an uncommon wildcard and 4/30ths of a rare wildcard and 1/30th of a mythic wildcard each time you open a pack.
individual card rewards - Daily reward uncommons have a 9/80 chance to become a rare and a 1/80 chance to become a mythic. If you already have 4 of the assigned card you get vault progress, 20 gems, or 40 gems.
gold - 1000 gold gets you a pack
gems - 200 gems gets you a pack
Ranked draft events cost 750 gems or 5000 gold. You draft 3 packs and keep the cards, with 5+ copies replaced by vault progress or 20/40 gems. You do not get wildcards from the packs. You do not get wildcard progress for opening packs. You do get 14 cards per pack instead of 8. You also earn prizes based on how well you do in the event, which are packs and gems. If you have a 30% win rate then you rate to get 1.23 packs and 153 gems. A 50% win rate is worth 1.33 packs and 347 gems. A 70% win rate is worth 1.62 packs and 672 gems.
Traditional draft costs 1500 gems with the same cards drafted. It's best of 3 instead of best of 1, and the prizes are spikier. A 30% match win rate is worth 1.85 packs and 244 gems. 50% gets you 4.4 packs and 1350 gems. 70% match win rate is 6.9 packs and 2361 gems.
Sealed aren't up right now, but the info for the last sealed shows it was 2000 gems to join and you got the cards from 6 packs. You don't get to rare draft them. You always won 3 packs and then scaling gems based on your wins. 30%-524, 50%-1002, 70%-1672
Standard events cost 95 gems or 500 gold. The rewards are gold and three uncommon cards. The cards have upgrade chances based on how many wins you get. The gold return is 230 for 30%, 410 for 50%, and 715 for 70%. As for card upgrades, you have a 7% chance of an upgrade with 4 or fewer wins,. A guaranteed upgrade (and 6% more) at 5 wins. And another guaranteed upgrade (and 5% more) at 6 or 7 wins.
Traditional standard is 190 gems or 1000 gold, with a best of 3 format. Prizes again are 3 uncommons and some gold. Gold returns are again spikier, with only 415 for 30%, 1470 for 50%, and 2396 for 70%. The card upgrades are better here, but not twice as good so you definitely lose out here compared to the best of 1 event.
Ok, so, let's assume I'll hit the 70% win rates for everything except ranked draft, where 50% is more reasonable. (The problem with ranked draft is it pairs by rating, not by record in the draft, so I expect to only play good players the whole time. The other events aren't on the ranking system so I expect to get a decent mix of everyone interested in playing events. Constructed I'd need an actual good deck to hit that, unfortunately, but let's pretend we get one.) For building a collection the main thing that matters is rares. Rare wildcards, in fact, since there are a lot of junk rares out there, but any rare is decent. For now I'm going to assert I get enough mythics, uncommons, and commons. I'm going to count a random rare as half as good as a rare wild card. Well, mythic wildcards I'll count as rare wildcards even though they're worse because if they're worth nothing I won't have enough and it makes things a little easier for my spreadsheet.
An opened pack is worth .7385 rares. Constructed uncommon rewards are actually worth .64 rares if you win 70% of the time. The best of 3 constructed uncommons are worth 1.16 rares. A limited pack is worth .557 rares, but you do get some selection in a draft and can choose to rare draft the shock lands and not the garbage rares. And if you do end up with most of the rares you can get small gem rebates.
So a ranked draft is 5000 gold or 750 gems for 2.65 rares and 347 gems. This is a better use of gems than buying packs (you spend the gems that would buy 2 packs to get 2.65 rares). It's actually a bad use of gold compared to buying packs.
A traditional draft is 1500 gems for 6.77 rares and 2361 gems. If you could actually win 70% of your matches this would be an absurd rate of return. I feel like this can't actually be a fair potential win rate. Looking at a 50% win rate is 4.94 rares and 1350 gems which is still really, really good.
Sealed is 5.56 rares and 1672 of your 2000 gems back. Or 1002 of your 2000 gems back at 50% win rate. So just worse than the traditional draft, but also probably an easier place to get a high win rate.
Standard events are both essentially infinite ways to grind up small amounts of value. They don't actually make wildcards is the big problem, so while you can still use the random rares they both seem good. They do also let you build up gold to spend on something else. That something else could be packs, but probably it should be drafts so that you can launder the gold into gems in order to do more drafts.
It's really not much clearer now than it was before, but I think what I've learned going forward is that sealed events are actually a pretty good deal. They only show up right after a set is released so saving up some gems to do some for the next set makes sense. Beyond that if you have a good constructed deck you should grind cards in constructed tournaments. Drafting should be used to convert gold into gems, and then the gems should be spent drafting or sealeding.
New cards likely get banned tomorrow, so it seems like I need to see what happens there, then build a new deck and play tournaments for uncommon upgrades. I should also spend most of my uncommon wild cards to make it more likely I get vault progress out of drafting.
Showing posts with label CCGs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CCGs. Show all posts
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Magic PTQ Changes
A year or so ago Matt told me about a local PTQ that broke some records and came in at apparently 367 players. I'm cherry picking a little, but one of the GPs I attended back in University (Pittsburgh) only had 234 people! That was a team tournament with I think 24 people qualifying for the Pro Tour. To have 50% more players with 4% of the slots on the line is a pretty big difference! When I heard how big that PTQ was I decided I was almost certainly done with trying to play Magic at a high level. The switch to Planeswalker Points over the old ELO system had really made it so that running a PTQ was my only hope and the idea of playing a locally run event with several hundred players is super unappealing.
Earlier today Wizards announced changes to the PTQ system that help fix that problem. They realize they have too many people trying to qualify in some areas (a good problem to have I'm sure) and decided to add an extra step into the qualification process. Now you need to win a tournament in order to qualify for a PTQ in order to qualify for the PT. They're letting every single official store run one preliminary tournament each season and then they're going to run a small number of PTQs that are only open to people who won a preliminary tournament. It doesn't matter where you won a preliminary tournament; it lets you play in any PTQ on the planet. But you can only play in one PTQ per PT.
The PTQs themselves are going to be put on by primary event coordinators and will grant 4 or 8 slots based on attendance with the breakpoint being at 128 people. This feels like a good size to me. They probably won't be so big they'll be overwhelming and if they are they'll have a good enough return on investment to justify showing up.
Potential worries are how many people are going to end up showing up to these local store events and just where they're going to locate the PTQs. There are only going to be 16 for all of the US and Canada which makes me wonder where exactly someone out in, say, New Brunswick is going to need to go in order to play in a PTQ. I wonder how many of the ~3100 stores are out in that area... And if Toronto is getting several hundred people for a PTQ how many are they going to get for a local qualifier for a PTQ? The same several hundred? Or did a bunch of those people travel from several hours away for the PTQ and won't bother to come for a PTQQ?
I'm tentatively encouraged by the announcement. While I didn't have any desire to learn a Magic format enough to run a 400 person PTQ for 1 invite I could totally see going out to a local sealed deck event for 40 people. Then if I win that I don't see any reason why I wouldn't want to run a 80 person PTQ for 4 invites. 80 people is very manageable. 4 slots is a good reward. Only getting to play 1 PTQ in a season is fine for someone who wasn't going to play in a huge PTQ in the current system anyway!
It's probably a lot worse for someone who travels a lot to hit all the PTQs in a region, but I don't feel so bad for those people. Especially since Wizards is adding more GPs onto the schedule! I feel like a GP is a better format for someone who wants to travel and play a lot of extra Magic to qualify for the Pro Tour and PTQs are better left for giving more local players a chance. (I do say this as someone who won a PTQ in a different province so it is a little hypocritical of me...)
Maybe I'll get back into Magic...
Earlier today Wizards announced changes to the PTQ system that help fix that problem. They realize they have too many people trying to qualify in some areas (a good problem to have I'm sure) and decided to add an extra step into the qualification process. Now you need to win a tournament in order to qualify for a PTQ in order to qualify for the PT. They're letting every single official store run one preliminary tournament each season and then they're going to run a small number of PTQs that are only open to people who won a preliminary tournament. It doesn't matter where you won a preliminary tournament; it lets you play in any PTQ on the planet. But you can only play in one PTQ per PT.
The PTQs themselves are going to be put on by primary event coordinators and will grant 4 or 8 slots based on attendance with the breakpoint being at 128 people. This feels like a good size to me. They probably won't be so big they'll be overwhelming and if they are they'll have a good enough return on investment to justify showing up.
Potential worries are how many people are going to end up showing up to these local store events and just where they're going to locate the PTQs. There are only going to be 16 for all of the US and Canada which makes me wonder where exactly someone out in, say, New Brunswick is going to need to go in order to play in a PTQ. I wonder how many of the ~3100 stores are out in that area... And if Toronto is getting several hundred people for a PTQ how many are they going to get for a local qualifier for a PTQ? The same several hundred? Or did a bunch of those people travel from several hours away for the PTQ and won't bother to come for a PTQQ?
I'm tentatively encouraged by the announcement. While I didn't have any desire to learn a Magic format enough to run a 400 person PTQ for 1 invite I could totally see going out to a local sealed deck event for 40 people. Then if I win that I don't see any reason why I wouldn't want to run a 80 person PTQ for 4 invites. 80 people is very manageable. 4 slots is a good reward. Only getting to play 1 PTQ in a season is fine for someone who wasn't going to play in a huge PTQ in the current system anyway!
It's probably a lot worse for someone who travels a lot to hit all the PTQs in a region, but I don't feel so bad for those people. Especially since Wizards is adding more GPs onto the schedule! I feel like a GP is a better format for someone who wants to travel and play a lot of extra Magic to qualify for the Pro Tour and PTQs are better left for giving more local players a chance. (I do say this as someone who won a PTQ in a different province so it is a little hypocritical of me...)
Maybe I'll get back into Magic...
Thursday, March 27, 2014
More SolForge Bitterness
SolForge has been making some changes recently, and they haven't been making me happy!
I'm not sure when the first change came in but they added the ability to quickly flip through games that are waiting for you to act. Instead of having to leave your current game, go back to the menu, and pick a different game where it's your turn you get a handy button in the corner to jump to the next game waiting for your attention. This sounds good except they still haven't added a proper mechanism to easily see what happened on a previous turn so if you want to pretend that the game is a real strategy game you need to play it in real time to see what gets played. But plenty of people have built decks full of legendaries that don't care what their opponent does, and they don't care if they lose any given game to a silly mistake if they can play three times as many games in the same period of time.
What does that all mean? It means some people with awesome decks just create a lot of games and have a worse winning percentage than they used to. Which means they get paired against me, and that they take a minute between turns because they're flipping through the rest of their games. I spent something like 5 hours trying to get my first online win of the day! Every game was slow and against people with better decks. It was not fun. I didn't want to do it, but if I won an online game I would have enough tickets to draft. I still like drafting, and I hadn't figured out the problem, so I kept pounding away at it. And getting more and more bitter.
The next day I had my tickets for a draft. I don't get to draft constantly and I need those first online win bonuses to keep going. The way I make sure that happens as often as I can is I partition out my three draft games. Play one game the day I draft, win it. Stop. Come back the next day, play until I win. This way I can get multiple 'first win of the day' bonuses out of a single draft. This is not the way I want to play, as I want to just draft and play a bunch, but it's better than having to play constructed ESPECIALLY after that first change.
Everything went according to play. I came back the next day to discover that there was a new draft queue in the lobby for 4 games instead of 3. Ok, sounds like it's a good thing, but I have my current draft to finish up. Play a game... My opponent played a card I'd never seen before. It turns out they'd also released a new set and they'd decided the best way to deal with existing drafts was to make me play against the new stuff. This is ridiculous for many reasons!
So I can play some more terrible constructed to get a chance to try out the new set and the 4 game drafts... Or I can get fed up and quit. I'm going with door number two for now, at least while I have puzzles to solve, FFX to play, and Path of Exile maps to run. This game is so very frustrating. It could be good and fun but they make so many stupid decisions. If they'd announced anywhere in the game that a new set was coming out I could have saved my tickets to draft then, not right before. Or I could have played out all my games. Maybe I could have read about the new cards instead of being thrust into a game against them without even knowing that they existed. And they really need to have a significantly shorter time limit option for constructed games so I'm not stuck waiting a minute between turns!
I'm not sure when the first change came in but they added the ability to quickly flip through games that are waiting for you to act. Instead of having to leave your current game, go back to the menu, and pick a different game where it's your turn you get a handy button in the corner to jump to the next game waiting for your attention. This sounds good except they still haven't added a proper mechanism to easily see what happened on a previous turn so if you want to pretend that the game is a real strategy game you need to play it in real time to see what gets played. But plenty of people have built decks full of legendaries that don't care what their opponent does, and they don't care if they lose any given game to a silly mistake if they can play three times as many games in the same period of time.
What does that all mean? It means some people with awesome decks just create a lot of games and have a worse winning percentage than they used to. Which means they get paired against me, and that they take a minute between turns because they're flipping through the rest of their games. I spent something like 5 hours trying to get my first online win of the day! Every game was slow and against people with better decks. It was not fun. I didn't want to do it, but if I won an online game I would have enough tickets to draft. I still like drafting, and I hadn't figured out the problem, so I kept pounding away at it. And getting more and more bitter.
The next day I had my tickets for a draft. I don't get to draft constantly and I need those first online win bonuses to keep going. The way I make sure that happens as often as I can is I partition out my three draft games. Play one game the day I draft, win it. Stop. Come back the next day, play until I win. This way I can get multiple 'first win of the day' bonuses out of a single draft. This is not the way I want to play, as I want to just draft and play a bunch, but it's better than having to play constructed ESPECIALLY after that first change.
Everything went according to play. I came back the next day to discover that there was a new draft queue in the lobby for 4 games instead of 3. Ok, sounds like it's a good thing, but I have my current draft to finish up. Play a game... My opponent played a card I'd never seen before. It turns out they'd also released a new set and they'd decided the best way to deal with existing drafts was to make me play against the new stuff. This is ridiculous for many reasons!
- Pretty much by default in a CCG the new cards are better than the old ones. They can't be worse or they wouldn't sell any packs!
- In SolForge in particular the way drafting is set up the better cards show up less frequently because people learn to take them highly and the algorithm adapts to that. This means that my deck has a bunch of legitimate 5th picks in it because I was forced to pick between two terrible cards in all six of my packs. A new set has no such data and therefore the commons in that set will show up more or less randomly. This means a deck drafted right after a new set is released rates to be significantly better than a deck drafted at the end of a set's lifecycle.
- I had no idea what cards my opponent could be showing up with and therefore couldn't possibly play around any of his tricks.
So I can play some more terrible constructed to get a chance to try out the new set and the 4 game drafts... Or I can get fed up and quit. I'm going with door number two for now, at least while I have puzzles to solve, FFX to play, and Path of Exile maps to run. This game is so very frustrating. It could be good and fun but they make so many stupid decisions. If they'd announced anywhere in the game that a new set was coming out I could have saved my tickets to draft then, not right before. Or I could have played out all my games. Maybe I could have read about the new cards instead of being thrust into a game against them without even knowing that they existed. And they really need to have a significantly shorter time limit option for constructed games so I'm not stuck waiting a minute between turns!
Monday, February 17, 2014
Back to SolForge
Last month I finally got fed up with constructed in SolForge and got annoyed with how rarely I could draft so I stopped playing the game. I moved on to Hearthstone where I could draft much more frequently and could play more games per draft. I quickly moved on from Hearthstone because I found the games to not have interesting decisions and to take way too long to resolve. SolForge has faster games and actual decisions to make during the games in terms of playing for the short term or the long term when choosing which cards to play and level up. They just wouldn't let me draft without paying them a silly amount of money.
My sister let me know a couple weeks ago that they'd changed the way they gave out draft tickets in SolForge. They turned the 'first online win of the day' bonus from being 1/40th of a ticket to being a guaranteed ticket. You need 7 to draft, so even if you never got another ticket in any other way you'd still get to draft once per week by winning an online game each day. They also added in a small prize for winning any additional online game (about 1/400th of a ticket) which isn't very good but it's better than nothing like it was before.
Of course getting that online win each day isn't exactly tons of fun. The problem is everyone who kept playing has another month's worth of legendary cards and I don't. So the people currently around my hidden matchmaker rating now have substantially better decks than they used to, which means I lose way more often than I used to. It's a little frustrating.
On the plus side there is an out... I can draft and then just play until I win one draft game per day! Drafting is still so much fun in this game that it's been worth doing for the last week. I like how fast the games play out so I can see how my drafting did. I don't like needing to play constructed for tickets but at least now it's less constructed and I can somewhat mitigate it by portioning out my draft games but that goes against how fast I can conclude a draft...
I'll probably get fed up again, but for now SolForge is back in my good books. Hearthstone is probably dead to me for reals.
My sister let me know a couple weeks ago that they'd changed the way they gave out draft tickets in SolForge. They turned the 'first online win of the day' bonus from being 1/40th of a ticket to being a guaranteed ticket. You need 7 to draft, so even if you never got another ticket in any other way you'd still get to draft once per week by winning an online game each day. They also added in a small prize for winning any additional online game (about 1/400th of a ticket) which isn't very good but it's better than nothing like it was before.
Of course getting that online win each day isn't exactly tons of fun. The problem is everyone who kept playing has another month's worth of legendary cards and I don't. So the people currently around my hidden matchmaker rating now have substantially better decks than they used to, which means I lose way more often than I used to. It's a little frustrating.
On the plus side there is an out... I can draft and then just play until I win one draft game per day! Drafting is still so much fun in this game that it's been worth doing for the last week. I like how fast the games play out so I can see how my drafting did. I don't like needing to play constructed for tickets but at least now it's less constructed and I can somewhat mitigate it by portioning out my draft games but that goes against how fast I can conclude a draft...
I'll probably get fed up again, but for now SolForge is back in my good books. Hearthstone is probably dead to me for reals.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
More Hearthstone
I skipped out on playing Heartstone a bit last week after noticing that I only got one daily quest, not three, and that I'd therefore not be drafting every day. This week I decided I should probably play it again to give it a fair shake and saw that some quests had built up. So you get one per day and only need to play every three days to clear out the queue? I like that as a feature. It makes you feel less bad about missing a day while still incentivizing you to log in pretty frequently.
I've done a couple drafts since then and managed to even pull off a 9-3 record once which got me what I can only assume is this game's version of a foil along with more than enough gold to draft again and a pack and some crafting reagents. I haven't actually done any crafting but it seems like a way for you to crush a whole ton of cards you don't want into specific cards you do want. I don't know the ratios but it sure sounds better than the whole Zimus problem I had with SolForge.
Robb has been trying to tell me that Hearthstone is a better card game in part because it doesn't have the legendary issue that SolForge has and that the commons compare much better to the legendaries. Having played against a few legendaries today (one guy even had two of them in the same draft) I think that's a bit of hogwash. Ragnaros is way, way better than a common and will win a game on his own if the opponent doesn't have a stupidly good board position or a removal spell that can take out an 8/8. Even if he does Ragnaros will have killed something else too so he'll have been a 2 for 1.
Even ignoring the whole legendary thing (I actually beat the guy with 2 of them because I had a removal for his 8/8 haste and he played his broken 2 drop on turn 12) I just haven't been having much for playing the game. I'm finding it really rather boring, actually. Part of it is the pace of the game I think, which is really slow. It has lots of cutesy animations and stuff that just slow the game down. It reminds me a little of the Cyanide Blood Bowl client... Really cool to start but eventually I just don't want to see pass replays and guys slowly running down the field.
The other part is the game doesn't seem to have many interesting decisions. It works a lot like Magic does except you get a land per turn for free (and don't have to waste draw steps on land) and the attacker chooses blockers, not the defender. So if you have a 3/2 and I have a 2/1 I'm going to attack your 3/2 in order to trade. On the other hand you're going to attack me to do 3 damage if it's your turn rather than trade because I'm probably going to make the trade on my turn anyway and that's 3 free damage. Of course if you're about to play a 6/2 or something then you probably want to make the trade on your turn, and maybe you think my deck has a lot of pump spells or something? It's certainly a decision to be made, but it's one that I think has a blatantly obvious choice an overwhelming amount of the time.
I think it's obvious anyway... I play plenty of matches against people who make what seem to be incorrect decisions. I don't actually know all that much about the cards or the strategy but I keep identifying misplays and then beating those people so I feel like I probably have a decent grasp of things.
Because everyone draws one card per turn, and everyone has a 2 casting cost spell they can play once per turn, it really feels like games devolve into who can make the most efficient trades. If I keep getting 2 for 1s eventually I'll have cards left over and kill you with them. So the trick is staying alive long enough for those extra cards to come home. The majority of my losses seem to come against mage draft decks because they have access to a card that does 4 damage to all of my creatures. I've lost 3 times to decks with 2+ copies of that card in the last couple days. The mage passive spell also feels strong in that it does 1 damage to anything which completely invalidates 1 toughness creatures. You're often stuck drafting them anyway and it just results in the mage getting more card advantage on you.
What it boils down to is I rarely feel like I had any chance in the games I've lost. I'm often winning on my opponent failing to properly trade efficiently. And the games are taking a long time to resolve for what they are.
I still have more than enough gold to draft but I don't know that I'm going to bother. The act of picking cards in the draft is fun but the games to see how the deck works out feel like a chore. I have plenty of games to play that don't feel like a chore, so I think Hearthstone is getting axed.
I've done a couple drafts since then and managed to even pull off a 9-3 record once which got me what I can only assume is this game's version of a foil along with more than enough gold to draft again and a pack and some crafting reagents. I haven't actually done any crafting but it seems like a way for you to crush a whole ton of cards you don't want into specific cards you do want. I don't know the ratios but it sure sounds better than the whole Zimus problem I had with SolForge.
Robb has been trying to tell me that Hearthstone is a better card game in part because it doesn't have the legendary issue that SolForge has and that the commons compare much better to the legendaries. Having played against a few legendaries today (one guy even had two of them in the same draft) I think that's a bit of hogwash. Ragnaros is way, way better than a common and will win a game on his own if the opponent doesn't have a stupidly good board position or a removal spell that can take out an 8/8. Even if he does Ragnaros will have killed something else too so he'll have been a 2 for 1.
Even ignoring the whole legendary thing (I actually beat the guy with 2 of them because I had a removal for his 8/8 haste and he played his broken 2 drop on turn 12) I just haven't been having much for playing the game. I'm finding it really rather boring, actually. Part of it is the pace of the game I think, which is really slow. It has lots of cutesy animations and stuff that just slow the game down. It reminds me a little of the Cyanide Blood Bowl client... Really cool to start but eventually I just don't want to see pass replays and guys slowly running down the field.
The other part is the game doesn't seem to have many interesting decisions. It works a lot like Magic does except you get a land per turn for free (and don't have to waste draw steps on land) and the attacker chooses blockers, not the defender. So if you have a 3/2 and I have a 2/1 I'm going to attack your 3/2 in order to trade. On the other hand you're going to attack me to do 3 damage if it's your turn rather than trade because I'm probably going to make the trade on my turn anyway and that's 3 free damage. Of course if you're about to play a 6/2 or something then you probably want to make the trade on your turn, and maybe you think my deck has a lot of pump spells or something? It's certainly a decision to be made, but it's one that I think has a blatantly obvious choice an overwhelming amount of the time.
I think it's obvious anyway... I play plenty of matches against people who make what seem to be incorrect decisions. I don't actually know all that much about the cards or the strategy but I keep identifying misplays and then beating those people so I feel like I probably have a decent grasp of things.
Because everyone draws one card per turn, and everyone has a 2 casting cost spell they can play once per turn, it really feels like games devolve into who can make the most efficient trades. If I keep getting 2 for 1s eventually I'll have cards left over and kill you with them. So the trick is staying alive long enough for those extra cards to come home. The majority of my losses seem to come against mage draft decks because they have access to a card that does 4 damage to all of my creatures. I've lost 3 times to decks with 2+ copies of that card in the last couple days. The mage passive spell also feels strong in that it does 1 damage to anything which completely invalidates 1 toughness creatures. You're often stuck drafting them anyway and it just results in the mage getting more card advantage on you.
What it boils down to is I rarely feel like I had any chance in the games I've lost. I'm often winning on my opponent failing to properly trade efficiently. And the games are taking a long time to resolve for what they are.
I still have more than enough gold to draft but I don't know that I'm going to bother. The act of picking cards in the draft is fun but the games to see how the deck works out feel like a chore. I have plenty of games to play that don't feel like a chore, so I think Hearthstone is getting axed.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Hearthstone
Often after I post something about SolForge I'll get someone talking to me about how Hearthstone does it a little differently and asking how I feel about the differences. I do my best to avoid playing betas so I haven't been able to contribute to that conversation as I've never played Hearthstone, or watched anyone play it, or even read much about it except what Sthenno has posted about it. Over the holidays my brother finally convinced me I should sign up for the beta (the day after they'd invited everyone who had already signed up) by giving me an interesting comparison between the two games...
Basically he told me that SolForge is clearly a game made by CCG players while Hearthstone is clearly a game made by video game developers. So SolForge is a better card game while Hearthstone, despite being in beta, is by far the more polished game.
At any rate earlier this morning I got an email from Blizzard inviting me to the Hearthstone beta. It's almost like they read my post from 2 days ago where I swore off SolForge and decided it was time to capture me into their market. I got it installed and played a little bit this morning and was definitely impressed with the polish of the environment. It's integrated with Battle.Net for one thing so I already have a friends list and chat features with people playing WoW, SC2, or DIII. But the tutorial missions featured characters from Warcraft lore, and sound effects as well. The speech from a peasant finishing a job in WC2, or the sound of an archer being constructed in WC3. Probably the best thing was the final fight in the tutorial which was against Illidan Stormrage (who I'd swear should be dead... My druid has his skull!) who opened the fight with the ominous voice saying 'YOU ARE NOT PREPARED'!
Which made me unreasonably happy, though I suspect it will also make other people who played World of Warcraft during the release of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. I just had to go dig up the intro video from that expansion...
So good!
Anyway, Hearthstone didn't seem like that interesting of a game, unfortunately, but it deserves more time before making a final judgment on it. I did get pranked by the tutorial and ended up buying packs with my first 200 quest gold. It's 150 for a draft, so I didn't get to do a draft today beyond my first free one. On the plus side the draft format is a lot better than the one in SolForge. In SolForge you get 3 games per draft, period. In Hearthstone you get until you get 3 losses or (I think) 9 wins. So you get at least as many games in, and you almost certainly get a bunch more. I went 5-3 in my free draft which I think is pretty good for not having a clue what I was doing.
I think the daily quests give out enough gold on average to be worth a draft per day on their own, ignoring what you might win, which is a lot better than SolForge where I was looking at getting a draft per 3 weeks or so ignoring prizes. And on the bright side just playing games for the quests will be interesting while I still have stuff to learn about the game so I won't mind grinding for draft gold for at least a while!
Basically he told me that SolForge is clearly a game made by CCG players while Hearthstone is clearly a game made by video game developers. So SolForge is a better card game while Hearthstone, despite being in beta, is by far the more polished game.
At any rate earlier this morning I got an email from Blizzard inviting me to the Hearthstone beta. It's almost like they read my post from 2 days ago where I swore off SolForge and decided it was time to capture me into their market. I got it installed and played a little bit this morning and was definitely impressed with the polish of the environment. It's integrated with Battle.Net for one thing so I already have a friends list and chat features with people playing WoW, SC2, or DIII. But the tutorial missions featured characters from Warcraft lore, and sound effects as well. The speech from a peasant finishing a job in WC2, or the sound of an archer being constructed in WC3. Probably the best thing was the final fight in the tutorial which was against Illidan Stormrage (who I'd swear should be dead... My druid has his skull!) who opened the fight with the ominous voice saying 'YOU ARE NOT PREPARED'!
Which made me unreasonably happy, though I suspect it will also make other people who played World of Warcraft during the release of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. I just had to go dig up the intro video from that expansion...
So good!
Anyway, Hearthstone didn't seem like that interesting of a game, unfortunately, but it deserves more time before making a final judgment on it. I did get pranked by the tutorial and ended up buying packs with my first 200 quest gold. It's 150 for a draft, so I didn't get to do a draft today beyond my first free one. On the plus side the draft format is a lot better than the one in SolForge. In SolForge you get 3 games per draft, period. In Hearthstone you get until you get 3 losses or (I think) 9 wins. So you get at least as many games in, and you almost certainly get a bunch more. I went 5-3 in my free draft which I think is pretty good for not having a clue what I was doing.
I think the daily quests give out enough gold on average to be worth a draft per day on their own, ignoring what you might win, which is a lot better than SolForge where I was looking at getting a draft per 3 weeks or so ignoring prizes. And on the bright side just playing games for the quests will be interesting while I still have stuff to learn about the game so I won't mind grinding for draft gold for at least a while!
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Done With SolForge
A couple weeks ago I came to the conclusion that playing constructed in SolForge is a bad idea. The number of legendaries in a deck seemed to be a very strong indicator of who was going to win a given constructed game. I have a large number of legendaries but not as many as someone who would have paid a lot of money. This means I found myself in games where I didn't feel like I could win (people with 3 phoenix and 3 Zimus) and in games where I didn't feel like I could lose (the average person). Neither of those were terribly fun for me. Just like how I don't like playing League of Legends against a team full of diamond players, and I don't like playing against a team full of silver players. It just isn't an interesting challenge to stomp or get stomped. This does mean I need to lose some games, and I don't like losing a given individual game, but I accept that I need to lose some of the time to make winning a tight game something that can happen.
Unlike LoL SolForge doesn't have a good matchmaking system. It doesn't matter if I play in tournament or just random online matches... A large number of my games will not be interesting. So constructed is out. Drafting is still pretty fun though. Most people won't have any legendaries at all in a draft, and most decks will be of comparable power. Some people will draft badly and be easy wins, and sometimes I'll draft a sick deck and stomp everyone, but I expect to have fun games a pretty good chunk of the time. Enough that I want to draft more right now!
Unfortunately I can't draft right now. The system is not designed to let people draft constantly. SolForge drafting essentially uses the same content gating system that other free to play games use... You can spend a bunch of money or you can waste a ton of time to get what you want.
Now, I'm someone who is more than happy to spend money on a good game. I'm also someone with a ton of spare time to spend getting what I want. So why am I so unhappy with SolForge? It's the scaling involved. A draft costs 7 event tickets and will on average return 4.125 tickets. So each time you draft you need to come up with the missing 2.875 tickets. A ticket is about a dollar, so you can spend about 3 dollars on a draft. Alternatively you can sometimes get a free ticket from one of the 3 daily quests. I don't know the exact odds but they seem to be pretty low now compared to when they first launched. I had to play for 11 days to get the 3 tickets I needed since my last draft, and one of those was by cashing in 40k silver. So I can spend 3 dollars, or I can win 3 matches every day for a week and a half per draft.
When constructed still had some appeal to me winning 3 matches per day didn't seem like such a terrible chore, but now when I don't want to play constructed I really don't enjoy feeling forced to play for a week and a half per draft. On the other hand spending $3 per half hour seems pretty excessive too. I could sign back up for World of Warcraft and only need to play for a couple hours per month to have a better deal.
There's also the problem of needing a sufficiently large bankroll in order to actually keep paying 4.125 tickets per draft. The 4.125 only works if you get your 3-0 early in your stream of 8 drafts. If you kick off with the 0-3 or a 1-2 you're set way back. This is what happened to me. I went 1-2 a while ago with a pair of incredibly close losses. Then after I finally scrapped together 3 more tickets I went 1-2 again today. I'm now looking at needing to play a game I don't want to play every day for 2 weeks before I can get my 30 minute draft fix in again.
I'm not interesting in doing that, so either I spend a bunch more money or I'm done with SolForge. It would be so easy for me to keep spending money. Once I get started I'm unlikely to stop. I'm very prone to addiction and once those floodgates open I don't know that they get to close. I know from my Magic days in my teenage years that I am the whale these payment schemes are targeting. So I need to stay strong and not give in. I hate this payment scheme. Hate it. So even if I would have reasonable fun per money buying in for more drafts I just can't let myself do it.
So I'm done with SolForge. Maybe when trading comes in I'll be able to liquidate some cards for more drafts and I'll come back and draft for a couple weeks. I do like drafting. But I will not pay them any more money, and I will not continue to log in and annoy myself playing a game I don't want to play.
Unlike LoL SolForge doesn't have a good matchmaking system. It doesn't matter if I play in tournament or just random online matches... A large number of my games will not be interesting. So constructed is out. Drafting is still pretty fun though. Most people won't have any legendaries at all in a draft, and most decks will be of comparable power. Some people will draft badly and be easy wins, and sometimes I'll draft a sick deck and stomp everyone, but I expect to have fun games a pretty good chunk of the time. Enough that I want to draft more right now!
Unfortunately I can't draft right now. The system is not designed to let people draft constantly. SolForge drafting essentially uses the same content gating system that other free to play games use... You can spend a bunch of money or you can waste a ton of time to get what you want.
Now, I'm someone who is more than happy to spend money on a good game. I'm also someone with a ton of spare time to spend getting what I want. So why am I so unhappy with SolForge? It's the scaling involved. A draft costs 7 event tickets and will on average return 4.125 tickets. So each time you draft you need to come up with the missing 2.875 tickets. A ticket is about a dollar, so you can spend about 3 dollars on a draft. Alternatively you can sometimes get a free ticket from one of the 3 daily quests. I don't know the exact odds but they seem to be pretty low now compared to when they first launched. I had to play for 11 days to get the 3 tickets I needed since my last draft, and one of those was by cashing in 40k silver. So I can spend 3 dollars, or I can win 3 matches every day for a week and a half per draft.
When constructed still had some appeal to me winning 3 matches per day didn't seem like such a terrible chore, but now when I don't want to play constructed I really don't enjoy feeling forced to play for a week and a half per draft. On the other hand spending $3 per half hour seems pretty excessive too. I could sign back up for World of Warcraft and only need to play for a couple hours per month to have a better deal.
There's also the problem of needing a sufficiently large bankroll in order to actually keep paying 4.125 tickets per draft. The 4.125 only works if you get your 3-0 early in your stream of 8 drafts. If you kick off with the 0-3 or a 1-2 you're set way back. This is what happened to me. I went 1-2 a while ago with a pair of incredibly close losses. Then after I finally scrapped together 3 more tickets I went 1-2 again today. I'm now looking at needing to play a game I don't want to play every day for 2 weeks before I can get my 30 minute draft fix in again.
I'm not interesting in doing that, so either I spend a bunch more money or I'm done with SolForge. It would be so easy for me to keep spending money. Once I get started I'm unlikely to stop. I'm very prone to addiction and once those floodgates open I don't know that they get to close. I know from my Magic days in my teenage years that I am the whale these payment schemes are targeting. So I need to stay strong and not give in. I hate this payment scheme. Hate it. So even if I would have reasonable fun per money buying in for more drafts I just can't let myself do it.
So I'm done with SolForge. Maybe when trading comes in I'll be able to liquidate some cards for more drafts and I'll come back and draft for a couple weeks. I do like drafting. But I will not pay them any more money, and I will not continue to log in and annoy myself playing a game I don't want to play.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Android: Netrunner
Two weekends ago I picked up a copy of the new Netrunner game. Last week I read the rules, briefly looked through the cards, and built a couple of legal decks. Some people came over for board games on Saturday and I played one game with Sky. I certainly want to play a few more times to draw more conclusions but here's my initial thoughts...
With one minor difference the rules to this game seem identical to the rules for the old Netrunner CCG. I was expecting them to deviate a bit more from the original game but since I liked the old game this is just fine by me.
That one difference is they added character cards for each side. Each character card has one minor ability (doing 1 damage whenever anyone scores points, or getting a minor cost reduction on your first card per turn, that sort of thing) and then some rules regarding deck construction. The cards are split into specific factions based on character with a bunch of generic neutral cards that anyone can use. Then each character can use a few cards from other factions as well. This doesn't really change the way the game is played but does put some real restrictions on deck creation. Restrictions breed creativity, or so I've been told, so this sounds like a pretty good change.
The problem is with the implementation. The corporation in particular has to put a specific number of agendas into their deck. The box contains exactly enough agenda cards for each faction that you barely have enough assuming you use every neutral agenda in the deck. This means you can only build a single deck at a time. And it means you have no choices to make at all when it comes to which agendas you use. Restriction may breed creativity, but this just seems stifling. One of the neutral agendas has a special ability that can only be used if the runner is tagged. This seems decent in a deck focused on tagging and terrible in any other deck. And yet every deck just has to use it.
There also aren't very many other cards to pick from. Some cards have drastically different power levels. Sky kept drawing cards and shaking his head at how useless they were. I was similarly drawing some useless cards but since a lot of Sky's bad cards made me discard cards it didn't really hurt me very much. Maybe there's a focused discard deck in there somewhere that can actually kill the runner? But it felt like there just wasn't enough going on to build a focused enough deck at this point.
Would I buy it again? I actually don't think I would. As a lonely nerd I don't really have much opportunity to play a strictly two player game. And if I did have someone to play with, and we wanted to play Netrunner, I feel like it would be better to play the old game with the old cards where you could actually build a variety of decks. Maybe with an expansion with some more cards it'll get to the point where it does what I want? I donno.
I am happy to see an old CCG coming back though. I would love to see the old Lord of the Rings CCG make a comeback. Sim City, on the other hand, can stay in the vault.
With one minor difference the rules to this game seem identical to the rules for the old Netrunner CCG. I was expecting them to deviate a bit more from the original game but since I liked the old game this is just fine by me.
That one difference is they added character cards for each side. Each character card has one minor ability (doing 1 damage whenever anyone scores points, or getting a minor cost reduction on your first card per turn, that sort of thing) and then some rules regarding deck construction. The cards are split into specific factions based on character with a bunch of generic neutral cards that anyone can use. Then each character can use a few cards from other factions as well. This doesn't really change the way the game is played but does put some real restrictions on deck creation. Restrictions breed creativity, or so I've been told, so this sounds like a pretty good change.
The problem is with the implementation. The corporation in particular has to put a specific number of agendas into their deck. The box contains exactly enough agenda cards for each faction that you barely have enough assuming you use every neutral agenda in the deck. This means you can only build a single deck at a time. And it means you have no choices to make at all when it comes to which agendas you use. Restriction may breed creativity, but this just seems stifling. One of the neutral agendas has a special ability that can only be used if the runner is tagged. This seems decent in a deck focused on tagging and terrible in any other deck. And yet every deck just has to use it.
There also aren't very many other cards to pick from. Some cards have drastically different power levels. Sky kept drawing cards and shaking his head at how useless they were. I was similarly drawing some useless cards but since a lot of Sky's bad cards made me discard cards it didn't really hurt me very much. Maybe there's a focused discard deck in there somewhere that can actually kill the runner? But it felt like there just wasn't enough going on to build a focused enough deck at this point.
Would I buy it again? I actually don't think I would. As a lonely nerd I don't really have much opportunity to play a strictly two player game. And if I did have someone to play with, and we wanted to play Netrunner, I feel like it would be better to play the old game with the old cards where you could actually build a variety of decks. Maybe with an expansion with some more cards it'll get to the point where it does what I want? I donno.
I am happy to see an old CCG coming back though. I would love to see the old Lord of the Rings CCG make a comeback. Sim City, on the other hand, can stay in the vault.
Friday, December 09, 2011
Final Fantasy Trading Card Game
Did you know there is a CCG using characters and summons from the Final Fantasy games? I sure didn't, until very recently! It appears to be a Japan only CCG that came out early in 2011 and has already released an expansion set. I don't know why I'm surprised that new CCGs are still coming out or that they made one for Final Fantasy but I really wasn't expecting to find one.
I did a rudimentary search for information and it doesn't look like it's really for sale in Canada. And by really I mean at all. I found one guy out of California selling some opened packs on eBay but that looks to be it. I did a search of a couple generic 'import from Japan' sites with no luck. And wow... There are some really creepy things available from Japan. Like this lap pillow...
At any rate... If anyone happens to know of a way to get some cards for this game or sees them in a store somewhere please let me know. It doesn't look like a terribly good game but I figure since I love CCGs and I love Final Fantasy that I should at least give it a try!
At any rate... If anyone happens to know of a way to get some cards for this game or sees them in a store somewhere please let me know. It doesn't look like a terribly good game but I figure since I love CCGs and I love Final Fantasy that I should at least give it a try!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)