Thinking it through, I seem to be against dynamic pricing. Can you explain the appeal to me? I have, as I often do, accrued a wall of text. I'll try to organize it somewhat, likely at the cost of some cohesion between topics.
BuyingFor what it's worth, I'd want The Merchant to be "the card source of last resort." Any card should cost enough that players really consider buying the card outright or trying to obtain packs to mine for it. With the prices right now, there's not a great reason to buy packs over cards. Obviously dynamic pricing solves this, but I'm not a fan of the idea that some players will have a head start simply by getting to the merchant first. What might work would be to make rares prohibitively expensive at the start so that the first to afford them are those who deserve the chance (participating in and winning events), and then those players much choose carefully which to buy. That rare would be more expensive for others, but there would still be plenty of other choices for those who follow. The same concept follows for uncommons and commons, but obviously they should be more obtainable. I'd be sure to set ceilings and floors for card prices based on rarity.
SellingI don't mind the idea of getting rid of cards, but I don't think that players should benefit from their useless cards. Only Merrick wants your copy of
Mordor Enraged. Of course, this could ruin the idea of dynamic pricing since selling is the easiest way to gauge demand. So instead, I would have the value of sold cards set at a certain point rather than making them a fraction of the demand -- if a player wants a card, that player shouldn't be encouraged to sell it because of the market. Definitely not encouraged to the point of exploitation. Since players only need to collect 4 of any given card (rather than, potentially, a set for several decks), there's already going to be a lot of surplus. Combined with floors for card values not letting bad rares slip below a threshold, people wouldn't be able to buy up the stock and sell them back for profit. Also, I might consider allowing packs to be sold if, say, one has all the cards from Mines of Moria that one wants. Haven't given a single thought to the implications of this, it just came to my mind and I typed it.
CurrencySo gold is money and silver is tickets. I think it's a great idea to separate the two. Where does the gold come from, the 50/week allowance? Winning events? In leagues, I appreciate that more skilled players are rewarded for their efforts, while less skilled players can compensate by simply participating. Even so, you should consider the balance of rewarding active (and hyper-active) players without discouraging those who can't play as often. As an aside, I would not want the leagues to be filled with a bunch of moochers who have no intention of playing a game. Set a floor for participation to receive anything? This, combined with league entry having a cost associated with it, would encourage those who join events to actually play them out.
I don't want casual games to have any value associated with them or they will become more competitive than they currently are, at a time when casual is simply the best place for competitive constructed play. Why play my fun deck and lose against everyone else's competitive deck while they farm up for leagues? Nobody plays casual to lose, and playing your competitive deck should
always be acceptable, but I wouldn't want to implicitly encourage any behavior over another in what should be, indeed, casual. In my opinion, you'll need a new idea for ticket distribution. How exclusive do you want leagues and tournaments to be? I considered selling cards to gain silver, but then you're effectively buying silver with gold and, unless the conversion is properly managed, the whole thing is ruined.
RewardsOverall, if you want dynamic pricing based on supply and demand, you also need to look at whether leagues are dishing out too much supply to winners. It's 60 packs for the Sealed winner, and 40 still for 8th place. Just joining the league grants 5 booster packs. It's half that for My Cards leagues, and the winner of a Constructed league is only taking home 10 packs. To keep currency and packs valuable, as well as keep the server running smoothly, I'd want to severely cut back on the number of packs doled out, and reconsider the relative "value" of the league types. For those who play or played in physical tournaments, for LotR, Magic, or whatever else, what's the typical payout? If packs are worth $3 in 2002 dollars and $5 in today's dollars, how many packs should a win be worth? Scale down from there. I would still want those who meet the participation requirements to receive
something, which would set the lower bound.
The most valuable rewards, without a doubt, are the AI promo cards. Why? Nobody has them -- they're a tier above Tengwar. I really admire that they are placed on such a pedestal, so when working them (and Tengwar) into the prize structure, I'd want to try keeping them exclusive enough to envy while still allowing them to be seen. I think a big contributor is the fact that when you win a Promo, you don't get to pick. Maybe it's a useless
Bill the Pony promo, maybe it's that sick
Terror of Flame and Shadow promo. The randomness makes the latter all the more valuable. I'd build a deck around that card, even though It's really not that great, just to show it off.
CollectiblesThis is all to revitalize My Cards collections? I gathered some thoughts on
an earlier thread, but I'm not sure I totally agree with everything I wrote. The main take-away is that there are two real reasons for people to play My Cards: players either want a long-term Sealed league in which they slowly (but as quickly as they possibly can) build out increasingly competitive decks, or players want to collect every card. The first kind
need resets, the second kind
loathe resets. What has come to my mind since is a third type of collection: a set of cards not meant for playing, but for collecting.
This would be a sort of collectors book of cards which should not disappear. Players can stare at them, track their progress to completing certain blocks, whatever they want. Perhaps that could be a home for unwanted cards, rather than trading them for currency? "Prestige" a full block collection to earn a certain prize, or allow duplicates of a card to be transmuted into a random card of the same or higher rarity for the collection. In this way, collecting becomes its own game: related but distinct from playing LotR itself. The first kind of player will hate this and ignore it, but for the second kind it would be the reason to play. It's also a lot of work to build out.
OtherFor curbing exploitation, would there be a way set a trial period for new accounts in which they cannot contribute to exploitable things for the first, say, two weeks? A new player shouldn't be prohibited from doing too many things, but just learning/remembering the game and getting used to playing online will surely take longer than that. Would it take much effort to have the server check how long players have been on the "trial" list every server week or night, and remove that tag from their account afterwards?
As for your other idea... Sorry ket: some people enjoy foils. Perhaps the effect could be improved, and the default could be swapped to static images for those who can't play with cached memory all the time, but there's no compelling reason to remove them. I'd be all for making foils more expensive to buy, or better yet totally unobtainable outside of packs / rewards, but that would be to increase their value more than to get rid of them.
As always, if there's anything I can do to help with any improvements I'd be more than happy to give it a shot.