The Last Homely House
Undying Lands => Valinor => Topic started by: ket_the_jet on October 02, 2019, 03:39:02 PM
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Gemp currently has one currency, gold and silver (fractional of gold). I propose separating these into two separate currencies:
"Gold" is awarded for quality finishes in leagues and tournaments. This is the currency for use in the merchant, which would have dynamic pricing.
"Silver" is the currency to enter tournaments and leagues. 1 silver would be awarded after any game played ending in a loss; 2 silver would be rewarded for any game ending in a win.
Other ideas I have, which may vary in popularity:
- Remove the gradient "foil" options from the game entirely.
- League pack rewards are only packs from the league itself (i.e., Fellowship sealed awards packs options from sets 1-3, etc.)
How could any of these systems be cheated or exploited? Let's talk stuff out here.
-wtk
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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.
Buying
For 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.
Selling
I 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.
Currency
So 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.
Rewards
Overall, 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 (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/wiki/lotr00030). 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.
Collectibles
This is all to revitalize My Cards collections? I gathered some thoughts on an earlier thread (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/forums/index.php/topic,11323.0.html), 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.
Other
For 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.
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Trial period
The trial period is not really going to work well, because I can create a bunch of accounts and wait for X amount of time, before executing my devious plan.
Currency separation
The idea that we were discussing previously in the chat, was that the ONLY way of getting gold, is by selling cards, and the gold can ONLY be used for buying cards. You could obtain cards by buying them, or winning them in tournaments and/or leagues.
As for the participation tickets (entry to leagues/tournaments), these could either be completely removed, or awarded in some other way (weekly allowance + as prizes?).
Tournaments and Leagues
Leagues are the best way for people to compete, as they do not require high upfront time investment. You can play on your own schedule (as long as you can find an opponent).
Scheduled tournaments - they are currently dead, and the reason, I've been told, is because there is no incentive to play them. I'd love these to be exciting, even if they require a bit more time investment. I'm willing to adjust a timing of those (when they start), as well as prizes, formats, or anything you can think of.
On-demand tournaments - here is the problem, and an easiest way for exploitation. One could create an on-demand tournament and fill it with fake accounts, only to receive prizes on the main account. I'm not sure how to solve that - maybe removing the on-demand tournaments altogether? Maybe moderators should be able to create them with a click of a button, if people in the channel voice their interest?
Prize payout
If we were to make collecting cards again "a thing" the prize payouts should be much lower. Most likely by a huge lot for leagues, as their main purpose is NOT to win, but to compete. Tournaments could be left for the hard-core players that want to compete and win. What are your toughts?
Collections and reset
At the moment each player has two main collections - "Trophy" and "Normal". They both create a pool for "My cards", they could be reset separately. So, it's perfectly fine for me to keep some specific cards (AI and Tengwar) cards in the "Trophy" collection, and reset the "Normal" one. Also, whenever the special cards are awarded, they could go to the "Trophy" section and effectively could never be reset. However, since they could be there forever, these should be awarded only for very good performance in competitive events.
Player rating
I think that in general it's a good idea, as it might be a purpose to compete for some players, but also a way to ruin other players' day. Someone will always be "at the bottom", and this could work, as long as people will not bully others over the rating.
Maybe we could learn from MTGO - in that they made their rating and rank private, so for example - you could see your rating and what rank overall on the site it gives you (maybe even split by format), but you can't see others?
Maybe the rating and rank of X top players per format could be public? As an incentive and "bragging rights"?
Your feedback
I'm looking forward to read your feedback, and revitalize tournaments and collection building.
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I'm all for the idea of new changes. I don't have the time to invest competitively as I did earlier this year. But the one idea I strongly agree with what Marcin said about keeping tengwars and ai cards out of the reset pool. Some of those ai holos took years and thousands of packs to collect and I simply don't have the time to do that all over again. But y'all do what you need to keep the site fresh and interesting for the players. And thank you for the time and effort y'all invest to keep the game alive.
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As someone who only joined Gemp a few months ago, but had spend A LOT of time on GCCG way back in the day (which had its own collection mechanic) here's what I think:
1. Having one currency for both collecting regular (non-Tengwar, non-Promo) cards and entering competitive matches limits those who wish to engage in both. I support separating currencies into "Gold" which only works in Merchant and "Tickets" which can only be used to enter Leagues and Tournaments. Players should get a set amount of each currency at the start of every week, and rewards for different types of ranked games can vary include a different mix of both. This way people can be free to spend their gold in Merchant on cards/packs/foils while still having a way to enter ranked games.
2. I STRONGLY object to removing foil coverings completely. With Promos and Tengwars already being very difficult to obtain, foils are the only way for "casuals" to show off their collections and pretty much the only reason to bother with the merchant system at all. People who are bothered by them can disable them in Settings anyway.
3. Dynamic pricing is a tricky subject. From what I have read, Gemp used to have that function for a while, and though I wasn't there to witness it, I saw the way it worked on GCCG. Basically, even excluding the possibility of blatant exploits by creating multiple accounts, it brings a strong imbalance. Cards commonly used in popular decks will reach prices almost unavailable to casuals, while cards that never see real gameplay will be near worthless even if they are Rares. The current Merchant makes no distinction between Greenleaf and Beauty is Fading, allowing people to collect (either to foil or to play Collector's Leagues) the exact cards they want in an exactly calculated amount of time. Dymanic pricing will make it easier to collect the cards which rarely to never see actual gameplay and increasingly difficult to get the useful rares. I lean mostly against it, unless some market regulation is put in place.
4. Re: League reward packs having only boosters from the League format. I'm not against that idea that in principle, but it will lead to a favoritism towards Fellowship and Movie blocks in terms of collecting. I realize that post-Shadows formats are less popular in general, but there seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy going on: Because War of the Ring / Hunters / Standard leagues are non-existent, people have less incentive to experiment with decks in those formats in the first place. If you want to restrict the rewards boosters, you need to make sure that leagues featuring post-Shadows sets are run as often as the first 10 sets.
5. The way ranked games are currently set up, the rewards are very uneven against the buy-in, as Phallen Cassidy pointed out above. Entering a Sealed League, you are guaranteed to make your Gold's worth in boosters at once (with all of the rewards being extra), while in Constructed you need to finish near the top to just break even. Moreso, a 40-days long league costs only slighly above the 10-days long League, which in turn is only slightly above the 1-hour Tournament. If keeping only the current "Gold" currency and pricing, I would argue that the cost of a buy-in should be directly proportional to a maximum number of games in a League/Tournament, with the rewards for a worst case scenario (all games played and lost) be equal to the cost of buy-in in boosters. Of course, if a new "Ticket" currency is to be introduced, both entry costs and the rewards will have to be rebalanced across the board anyway.
6. Currently there is no way to earn Gold outside of a weekly giveaway. Gccg used to have a similar setup, except in addition to a scheduled hangout you were also able to earn a (much smaller) amount by playing a game featuring only the cards you owned. I suppose that for this to be implemented in Gemp, precautions against cheating will need to be made (Eg: a game must not end on a timeout, must not end within the first few minutes/rounds, must not be against the same opponent over and over etc.), and I'm not sure how much work coding that in will that entail to make it worth the effort. But if the payoff is something small like 0.25 it may make the cheating counter-productive while still giving at least SOMETHING to those who play games with only the cards they own. Perhaps on-demand Tournaments in each Major format (Fellowship, Movie, Expanded) with 1 game max, 2 players, zero buy-in cost and a payout proportional to a total cardpool available (Movie reward = Fellowship reward x3; Expanded reward = Fellowship reward x5) are a way to do it? This way player names not being shown before the game starts would make cheating more difficult, while Tournament logs being available for all to see could allow cheaters to be spotted easily.
7. In regards to the general schedule of Leagues and Tournaments:
* Constructed Leagues (both progressive and not) seem to be working quite nicely for all, I see no need to change anything.
* I am likewise quite happy with the way Sealed Leagues work, although I would like to see The Hunters block being added to the rotation and War of the Ring being featured more often. Perhaps a Movie block Sealed League could overlap with a post-Shadows sealed League, so that when one is at Series 1-2, the other is always at Series 3-4, where participation is always lower anyway?
* I haven't had much experience with Draft yet, but again I would love to see the lesser formats such as War of the Ring, Hunters and both Hobbit drafts being featured more frequently. As I stated above, playing and losing all 10 draft games should definitely give you the entry buy-in worth in boosters back, while the overall cost of a League with 1 series of 10 games each should be exactly 25% of that with 4 series of 10 games each.
* General League series rewards: currently you only get a foiled Rare for winning games 10 and 12 in a serie, but with each serie being only 10 games the last point is moot, while the first is pretty much unattainable even for the best players, especially in Sealed. Perhaps the distribution of foils be changed from C-C-U-U-R to C-U-(C+U)-R-R, or maybe the foil rewards could be moved to odd wins instead of even ones to allow for a single loss.
* Scheduled Tournaments: With players from different time zones being online almost all day long, perhaps All Cards Tournaments they be set up to run every 4 hours at the rotation of Fellowship-Movie-Expanded-Fellowship-Movie-Expanded? Again, the buy-in cost for an event of 2 games max should be about 20% to that of a 10-game League, and the reward for losing both games should give you that cost worth of boosters back.
* Collector Leagues and Tournaments: The more I think of it, the more I like my above idea of on-demand My Cards Tournaments in either Fellowship, Movie or Expanded with 1 game max, 2 players, zero buy-in cost and the reward being small above to buy only a few commons/uncommons in Merchant (If no major changes to Gold or Merchant are made, 0.5G for Fellowship win, 1.5G for Movie win and 2.5G for Expanded win). Remove Promo rewards from on-demand Tournaments.
* General rewards re-balance: Collector Leagues (if any ever take place) and 4-series Leagues should award Pick of a Tengwar, Pick of a Promo and random foil rares: 4-3-2-1 of each for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place. Drafts and other Leagues of only 1 serie should award random Tengwars, Random foil Promos from sets 14, 16 and 19 only, plus a random Masterwork from sets 12-18 at a similar ratio (3-2-1 for placing 1st, 2nd and 3rd). Scheduled Tournaments should award a random Promo OR a random Masterwork (including Holiday Powerful Guide) to the top player only. If Tickets are introduced as a currency, playing and losing all X games in a League should give you exactly the amount needed to enter a League of X games, with each win giving twice that amount: could be awarded either after each game or after the League ends.
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2. I STRONGLY object to removing foil coverings completely. With Promos and Tengwars already being very difficult to obtain, foils are the only way for "casuals" to show off their collections and pretty much the only reason to bother with the merchant system at all. People who are bothered by them can disable them in Settings anyway.
What does it really show off, besides the wealth of free time that you had to foil up all of your cards? It isn't really so expensive that you can't complete a deck just off selling the prizes of one or two completed sealed leagues. That is to say, completed as in...all forty games played. Not necessarily won.
The fact that you are suggesting there is a different type or quality of player who would desire the online gradient collection is possibly reason enough for MarcinS to think a rating system is a bad idea. The only difference between someone with with a completely foiled deck and another person is that the former has a lot more free time and the latter prefers to facilitate faster loading speeds for other players on the site.
-wtk
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The trial period is not really going to work well, because I can create a bunch of accounts and wait for X amount of time, before executing my devious plan.
Good point, it merely delays problems. As far as merchant abuse, setting a static sale price below the lowest dynamic buy price should keep a lot of the problems out. For league abuse, could you make it so that duplicate accounts can't play one another outside of casual games? Otherwise, I know the admins have a way to check for duplicates -- could the league automatically keep duplicates from joining, except for a whitelist for the handful of legitimate accounts?
On-demand tournaments - here is the problem, and an easiest way for exploitation. One could create an on-demand tournament and fill it with fake accounts, only to receive prizes on the main account. I'm not sure how to solve that - maybe removing the on-demand tournaments altogether? Maybe moderators should be able to create them with a click of a button, if people in the channel voice their interest?
The reason on-demand tournaments are valuable is they give promos. I don't like the idea of just removing them, though if the reward wasn't so great maybe people would prefer the daily tournament to get promos. One thing I do like about the on-demand tournaments is that the deck must stay the same for the duration, since that's not the case for any of the other leagues. If they do go away, could that feature be worked in elsewhere? In Decipher tournaments, could people see the decklists of participants after the tournament finished? Would be neat to see what the winning strategy was.
If we were to make collecting cards again "a thing" the prize payouts should be much lower. Most likely by a huge lot for leagues, as their main purpose is NOT to win, but to compete. Tournaments could be left for the hard-core players that want to compete and win. What are your thoughts?
I'm guessing the distinction here is those who want to participate vs those who want prizes? Right now, leagues are the way to be compete for wins because they track who the top player is. Prizes aren't very coveted at the moment, but lots of people are still interested in being considered "the best."
At the moment each player has two main collections - "Trophy" and "Normal". They both create a pool for "My cards", they could be reset separately. So, it's perfectly fine for me to keep some specific cards (AI and Tengwar) cards in the "Trophy" collection, and reset the "Normal" one. Also, whenever the special cards are awarded, they could go to the "Trophy" section and effectively could never be reset. However, since they could be there forever, these should be awarded only for very good performance in competitive events.
I know some players collect "regular" cards too, though I don't know how many. I was thinking that the collection could be a way to encourage some players to join events -- those who enjoy playing, but don't care about competing might compete for a collection. I think a necessary component to a "permanent" collection is the ability to clear it and start over if the player wants, maybe get a cool reward as a result.
I think that in general it's a good idea, as it might be a purpose to compete for some players, but also a way to ruin other players' day. Someone will always be "at the bottom", and this could work, as long as people will not bully others over the rating.
Maybe we could learn from MTGO - in that they made their rating and rank private, so for example - you could see your rating and what rank overall on the site it gives you (maybe even split by format), but you can't see others?
Maybe the rating and rank of X top players per format could be public? As an incentive and "bragging rights"?
I'm not a huge fan of a ranking system among so few players. I don't think making them private would solve much, because players could still heckle one another to ask what their rating is. I think the leagues already do enough for competitive play, and people already brag about league performance over others, or even those who didn't join the league. I don't want to attach any weight to casual games, myself, but I could see myself being the minority on that.
2. I STRONGLY object to removing foil coverings completely. With Promos and Tengwars already being very difficult to obtain, foils are the only way for "casuals" to show off their collections and pretty much the only reason to bother with the merchant system at all.
Well, the goal of the rework would be to make the merchant useful again. I think foils could be made better just by making it harder to foil cards, since the whole point of foil cards is they make plain cards special. Right now foiling a card (or every card) is basically trivial, so ket's perfectly justified in being irritated by them. They're pointless.
Dymanic pricing will make it easier to collect the cards which rarely to never see actual gameplay and increasingly difficult to get the useful rares.
That's actually the goal here too. What's the point of owning Legolas, Greenleaf when everyone can do it just as easily? If My Cards is going to have any value, it needs to provide something different from All Cards. Namely, scarcity of resources.
Not many people know, but the reason Sealed and Draft leagues don't play later sets is Decipher never made Sealed and Draft leagues for later sets -- almost every league on Gemp is a direct copy of what Decipher used. If someone wants to try creating the framework for those leagues, it would be easy to implement.
And hey, welcome to Gemp!
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...and the latter prefers to facilitate faster loading speeds for other players on the site.
-wtk
This will not longer be a problem - after restart the foil rendering setting has 3 possible values - animated, static (default), and none.
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Phallen, many of your responses assume status quo in every region I have not mentioned, and as I said - I'm ready to overhaul the entire league/tournament/merchant/collections system, if need be.
As an example - you object to removing on-demand tournaments on the grounds that they give promos. It seems if we give promos as rewards in other areas, it becomes a moot point. As for seeing decks - it has been always possible for tournaments - "Tournaments" tab - "Load finished tournaments" - "See details" of the tournament you're interested in, then click on the name of the participant to see the deck list.
As for ranking, I meant that to be only from competitive games (ie. leagues and tournaments). And if someone asks you what's your rating, just tell them whatever number you wish, below the top number that is public. They would have no way of validating that.
As for it being too easy to get foils, once again - people assume that everything stays the same, ie. league winner gets 60+ boosters, and everyone gets participation rewards. This DOES NOT have to be the case, so making such assumption renders a response pretty useless.
As for dynamic card pricing, no - cards will NOT be unobtainable, there is a ceiling for a price of a card - it's based on the price of the booster and chance of getting that card out of a booster. Or more specifically, the average value of the cards you open in a booster. Which is exactly how it worked in real life. I would not be worried about that.
Players should get a set amount of each currency at the start of every week, and rewards for different types of ranked games can vary include a different mix of both.
Problem is, that giving a currency that impacts the card price market (in case of dynamic merchant pricing), is exploitable, as there would be no control over how much currency is in the market. People could abuse the system and create multiple accounts and flood the market, or specific part of it they wish to manipulate, with currency. Which is why, to prevent that I'd say that such currency should only be earnable by doing well in leagues, scheduled tournaments, and possibly on-demand tournaments created by moderators.
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Problem is, that giving a currency that impacts the card price market (in case of dynamic merchant pricing), is exploitable, as there would be no control over how much currency is in the market. People could abuse the system and create multiple accounts and flood the market, or specific part of it they wish to manipulate, with currency. Which is why, to prevent that I'd say that such currency should only be earnable by doing well in leagues, scheduled tournaments, and possibly on-demand tournaments created by moderators.
I am confused: if the new "Tickets" are only available as Ranked Game prizes, how does one get into Ranked games without receiving a set amount to begin with? And how would that affect the Merchant if the "Gold" currency is given out anyway in the same as it does now?
Still, if the goal is to revitalise seldom-used aspects of GEMP (Merchant and Tournaments) and an overhaul of the entire system makes suggestions of specific tweaks useless, here are some broader observations:
Merchant
As already noted above, Merchant is interesting to two very different types of people: those who simply like to collect stuff and may potentially want to acquire 4 foil copies of every single card over time and those who wish to participate in "My Cards"-type Leagues / Tournaments. Periodical resets would make it useless for the first group, while still making the games more and more imbalanced over time for the second group. Even with Tengwars persisting through a reset, losing special cards such as Promos, Masterworks and Entire Decks of mostly foiled cards would not sit well with many, even when they provide no gameplay advantage. Also, wasn't the entire reason the current merchant system was put in place (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/forums/index.php/topic,8716.0.html) to prevent manipulation and abuse, which are inevitable in a player-based economy?
Exclusivity over time
With a collection element build in, long-term players will always have an advanatge over newcomers, be it in regular cards for "My Cards" games or in Foils/Tengwars that serve only for bragging rights. The Question then becomes, what importance is given to that advantage and how many people actually are in the second group, eager and willing to consistently participate in "My Cards" type games? A competition in deckbuilding with a limitation of randomizing cards is well-served by Draft and Sealed Leagues, while buying an exact decklist you want in the Merchant is simply a matter of time, whether the priced be fixed or dynamic, thus removing the limitations of the format. However, if certain prizes remain rare and difficult / time-consuing to obtain (Tengwars, Promos, Masterworks), it will encourage players to keep participating in Ranked Games for many months and years to come, as their personal trophy collections grow ever so slowly.
Proper incentive
With many different options for non-casual games available, people are usually very good in spotting the most cost- and time-efficient one and investing in it over and over rather than trying other, less rewarding options. Looking back at the history of pre-2014 system on this forum, some of the most rewarding methods seemed to be the Daily "My Cards" Tournaments, which gave out free boosters for just participating, the contents of which could then be sold for quite a lot in old "dynamically priced" merchant, allowing to buy or foil plenty of desired cards in turn. When the merchant rules changed, the meta shifted and the biggest "rewards per entry" moved over to Leagues, especially Sealed ones, which give out many more boosters proportional to the entry cost. To encourage participation in a wide variety of events, rewards would need to be evened out per the cost of entry ( and possibly separated into different categories to award Tengwars/Promos/Masterworks/Rare Foils depending on the type of Event played.
Ranked Games
With both Leagues and Tournaments, there are two incentives for people to participate: the satisfaction of finishing near the top and the permanent rewards received for that. While I don't think participation should be free, the current costs may be a bit high: the weekly allowance is barely enough to enter more than 1 League at a time, leaving no Gold for Tournaments, especially if one wants to use the Merchant as well. It is for that reason that I support a separate "Ticket" currency for Ranked games: this at least removes the decision of whether to spend "Gold" in Merchant or save for ranked games later - that is in fact one of the reasons why On-Demand Tournaments rarely happen: many players simply cannot pay the entry fee. Whether in Gold or in Tickets, if the cost of entry is proportional to the max number of games in Tournament/League, simply participating returns an adequate amounts of tickets/boosters and finishing at the top awards variable but rare "bragging rights" prizes, more people will have both an incentive and the means to participate more.
Solutions
While enabling dymanic pricing in Merchant may have its merits, resetting entire collections seems like a very bad idea to me: wiping out six years worth of collecting, including not just countless foils, but also Masterworks and potentially Promos, is bound to upset a lot of people and discourage them from engaging in collecting in the future. A better way to encourage collecting would be add some minor rewards for playing "My Cards" games - a tier or even two below Leagues and Tournaments. This way you have:
- Casual games: no entry barrier --> no reward
- On-Demand "My Cards" games: Collection barrier of entry --> small monetary reward to be spend on increasing the collection
- Tournaments: entry limited by Tickets --> rewards rare AI cards and extra tickets
- Leagues: entry in tickets --> rewards boosters, AI cards and more tickets
Tweak the entry costs and rewards enough to have something unique to offer in every format, while not making people feel like they've wasted their entry fee if they haven't finished at the top, and people will come in and play. Make it like a mobile games progression (but less evil): you can grind the simplest challenges over and over for a miniscule amount of currency, or deem yourself competent enough to compete with the pros for the big prizes. But if you don't feel like investing time/currency into a ranked event at the moment, there should still be an option to do something non-trivial, but relatively obtainable (see: My Cards games) to make you feel like you've accomplished something.
P.S. Since the Hunters (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/forums/index.php?topic=8330.0)and Rise of Saruman (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=6077) starter deck lists can be found on this very fourm, adding them would both enable Hunters block Sealed games and solve the problem of obtaining fixed cards from those sets, which judging by the old forum threads, was apparently an issue as long as dynamoic Merchant pricing was in place.
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Solutions
While enabling dymanic pricing in Merchant may have its merits, resetting entire collections seems like a very bad idea to me: wiping out six years worth of collecting, including not just countless foils, but also Masterworks and potentially Promos, is bound to upset a lot of people and discourage them from engaging in collecting in the future. A better way to encourage collecting would be add some minor rewards for playing "My Cards" games - a tier or even two below Leagues and Tournaments. This way you have:
- Casual games: no entry barrier --> no reward
- On-Demand "My Cards" games: Collection barrier of entry --> small monetary reward to be spend on increasing the collection
- Tournaments: entry limited by Tickets --> rewards rare AI cards and extra tickets
- Leagues: entry in tickets --> rewards boosters, AI cards and more tickets
Tweak the entry costs and rewards enough to have something unique to offer in every format, while not making people feel like they've wasted their entry fee if they haven't finished at the top, and people will come in and play. Make it like a mobile games progression (but less evil): you can grind the simplest challenges over and over for a miniscule amount of currency, or deem yourself competent enough to compete with the pros for the big prizes. But if you don't feel like investing time/currency into a ranked event at the moment, there should still be an option to do something non-trivial, but relatively obtainable (see: My Cards games) to make you feel like you've accomplished something.
P.S. Since the Hunters (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/forums/index.php?topic=8330.0)and Rise of Saruman (http://lotrtcgwiki.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=6077) starter deck lists can be found on this very fourm, adding them would both enable Hunters block Sealed games and solve the problem of obtaining fixed cards from those sets, which judging by the old forum threads, was apparently an issue as long as dynamoic Merchant pricing was in place.
Regarding resetting collections, why not just create a new collection track? Like "Official Collected" as a new format? Players who want to participate all start out with zero cards in this collected format, and players who want to trade in their "old" collection (or unopened packs) at a discount for the official collected format stuff, they can still have their head start.
Just spit balling here, but maybe trading in 10 rares gets you one rare in the new format? Or trading in five packs in your current collection gets you 1 pack playable in the new collected format?
This could all be too convoluted...
-wtk
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I am not seeing a point of it, that is all. What is the goal here, to give people a way to collect stuff as a [mostly] pointless side-game, or to provide a framework for competitive "My Cards" Leagues and Tournaments? If it's the latter, you need to dangle a carrot of shiny rewards to incentisize people to chip in, making the idea of a periodic reset even more baffling. If the goal is to encourage deckbuilding under limitations, Sealed and Draft games already provide an even playing field for that, in addition to a set end date. Without an end date in mind, people will simply invest heavily to buy the cards their decks require, making games in a such format no different from "All Cards" in just a few months' time.
In my view, you need to provide different rewards to different types of players. For the ultra-competitive types you have League ranking, shiny "bragging rights" cards and possibly an overall rank standing. For more casual players who don't play as often, you still give out some of the currency so they could build collection and potentially foil their cards, but withhold all "alternate image" unique cards to ranked games, to show who's who in the casual lobby.
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Again, most of the recent comments assume, that with a wipe, all of the promos/masterworks will disappear, while it's entirely possible to move them to the "Trophy" collection, and any new ones being added there as well.
As for weakly allowance, my idea was to have a weakly allowance of "Entry tickets" (or get rid of them entirely - and any entry being free), and no allowance of the currency used in merchant.
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So, the only way to get the Merchant currency would be by selling cards from boosters, which you only can earn in Leagues / Tournaments? Considering that only a few dozen players really participate in those, that may have an unintended side-effect of cutting everyone else from using the Merchant entirely. Although, that would even further support my idea of On-Demand "My Cards" mini-tournaments with only a small reward in Gold. That way, you can start by giving every account a bunch of starter decks (one per block, one per set, or just a copy of each) plus a one-time allowance of currency: enough to buy either a whole bunch of commons/uncommons or only a handful of rares. Then have everyone play with just those cards for a while if they want to earn more money. Introduce a few basic checks against exploiting (no rewards if a game ends on a time-out or a concede before X in-game actions are taken), make Tournament history go back at least a week so that Moderators can spot obvious alt-accounts and it all seems good.
With free money no longer given away willy-nilly, League rewards will become even more prominent. Assuming that current values of both prices and rewards are rebalanced across the board, a way to encourage Event participation might indeed to be either remove entry cost completely or hand out enough weekly tickets to enter every ongoing League. Keep Promos, Tengwars and Masterworks to the top players, but give the rest just enough boosters to make time investment worthwhile (as in, proportional to the amount of games played). This way everyone has an equal shot at the "bragging right" AI cards, everyone is in the boat at the competitive events, and the people willing to put in time to play "My Cards" games over and over get an edge in the Merchant money, but that can only be used to play "My Cards" games, in which other players presumably aren't interested.
This sounds unfair to the casual players though: the majority of the on-and-off people in the lobby who are not interested in the high-stakes competitive matches and simply want to replicate the experience of opening physical boosters and collecting some cards. Perhaps the way to accomodate both groups is indeed to have a long-term Collection and a shorter-term My Cards list. Have the long-lasting (6-12 months) "phases" in which all cards from opened boosters go into "My Cards" and can be used in "My Cards" ranked matches, but at the end of each phase go into "Collections" and can be only observed (or foiled for use in casual games only). This would both prevent the frustration of having a long time spend on a personal collection wiped out and provide for a periodic reset of a "My Cards" environment. We already have multiple cardpools for each individual league, what's one more at this point?
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If rankings are over only competitive play, then I think it makes sense. I think the reason the answers all seem based on the current system is because it's easier to extrapolate from what we know than from what we don't. If you're willing to change anything and everything, it's hard to know where to start. I guess with the currency, as ket intended! I'll try to use that as my base for ideas.
If money will come from prizes, I have two questions. First, what will My Cards be used for? We really ought to establish that. When My Cards was first conceived, what was the idea? If it's just another way to compete, I don't think this is the way to go. Players who do well will get more cards, which will allow them to do better. Second, how can the process of selling cards be improved? To sell (or buy) many cards, I have to go through the process 2x-1 times, I suppose because of some sort of server delay. The first action goes through fine, but the second merely makes the first populate. Then the third works, but the fourth is redundant, etc. Especially if this is the way to get money, I'd appreciate a "sell all >4" button.
I think keeping some cost associated to joining leagues is a good idea to encourage those who join the league to play it. Perhaps a reward of playing all or X games in a league would be a full or partial refund of the entry cost? One of the problems we have now is that just by being patient and waiting a few weeks, you'll have enough gold to afford every league you could want to play without needing to sell cards. What about a limit to how many tickets a player can hoard? Or only giving a weekly allowance to those with fewer than X tickets? I dunno; it seems to me that leagues being free (or having some nominal cost as they do now) cheapens them more than anything, but I wouldn't want less popular leagues to just never run if nobody wants to pay for 'em. Where's dmaz? What's the league schedule nowadays, and how would associating a real cost to leagues affect it?
I'm fond of my idea of using a "prestige" system to give value to the collection without making collecting aimless, but it is my idea ;) It could be an alternative (or only) way of getting certain promos or tengwar. An option for "collecting players" to have another route for rewards, or for "competitive players" to get other/additional rewards. Once you run out of trophies there's not much more to collect, but it's easy to add new stuff for players to grab. I've got a few ideas tucked away, and Second Edition offers near-endless possibilities.
The trouble with My Cards isn't that it's too easy to collect things right now, but that it'll always be possible to have every card eventually without scheduled resets. And with scheduled resets, what is My Cards but a long, free-form Sealed League? What do you think about creating one of those as ranked play? At the end of every "season" there will be winners and losers, big rewards, and a new "season" to look forward to. The complicated part is that rewards from other matches would no longer feed into this format naturally -- would rewards be given to the current "ranked" league or to players' collections? Would/should different formats be allowed? How would one lucky player pulling Greenleaf and Aragorn's Bow affect things? Maybe it's not such a great idea after all, but I'd still appreciate your critique.
So, the only way to get the Merchant currency would be by selling cards from boosters, which you only can earn in Leagues / Tournaments? Considering that only a few dozen players really participate in those, that may have an unintended side-effect of cutting everyone else from using the Merchant entirely. Although, that would even further support my idea of On-Demand "My Cards" mini-tournaments with only a small reward in Gold. That way, you can start by giving every account a bunch of starter decks (one per block, one per set, or just a copy of each) plus a one-time allowance of currency: enough to buy either a whole bunch of commons/uncommons or only a handful of rares. Then have everyone play with just those cards for a while if they want to earn more money. Introduce a few basic checks against exploiting (no rewards if a game ends on a time-out or a concede before X in-game actions are taken), make Tournament history go back at least a week so that Moderators can spot obvious alt-accounts and it all seems good.
MarcinS is right, there's no reason to suppose many of the current habits of players on the current system would transfer to an altogether new system. If it's unused, there's nothing to break by tinkering with it.
I think that proposing a way for games to offer no reward is a nice idea, but in reality it would lead to people purposefully losing a game early if they don't have the right start, or conceding to rob their opponent of a reward. There's no real way to distinguish from a legitimate or illegitimate game based on any one statistic, so I wouldn't try going down that path. I'm also not sure how easy it would be for moderators to spot duplicate accounts, but whatever happens I wouldn't want to add any work for the moderators. I don't think it's fair to put the burden of keeping the system fair on them.
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Thanks for all the input. I'll compile a proposal for the features, and post it here for a review, once I get some more free time (probably in 2-3 weeks).
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I'd forgotten about this until the tournaments came up in yesterday's chat. So I still think compiling everything in one place is a good idea, even if we can't fully act on it while MarcinS is busy. Currency and My Cards have to be overhauled together, obviously, so here's what I get so far:
- Split the current currency into two: gold for the merchant and silver for events
- Change the merchant pricing somehow to be more accurate
- Set everyone's currencies to some low level, still above what a new player would get. What that low level is depends on how entry should work and how the merchant operates.
- Change the current prize structure. I have some ideas below, I don't think it matters much as long as it goes way down.
And here are what seem to be the main outstanding questions:
- How should currency be distributed? A few different ideas have been tossed up.
- What is the benefit/appeal to dynamic pricing for the merchant?
- What should the purpose of My Cards be?
- How should prize support work so that the prizes are relevant?
- Should we have some sort of player ranking? How would it look? This is pretty tangential and matters the least.
- Can anything be done to make foils valuable? Should it be?
- Should the on-demand tournaments be removed in favor of a mod command?
- Should there be regular resets to My Cards?
So, my ideas:
Currency Distribution
I think it makes sense to award some small number of tickets each week and the smallest fraction for League participation. Ideally, players who are active in a league can make back most or all of the entry fee and players who join a league and play no games take a modest hit to their ticket fund. I'm thinking everyone gets 10 tickets per week they log in, with the ability to earn 1 ticket per league game played and another ticket for winning a league game. 4 serie (40 game) leagues should cost 50 tickets, single-serie leagues should cost 20 tickets.
My Cards Reset
Without a reset, My Cards remains pointless. With a single reset, My Cards will have a purpose for a while until everyone has what they want and we're back where we started. I propose a regular reset to be coded for January 1 server time. This way players can take the holidays off of playing at the end of the season without much consequence since it's a blank slate for the new year. I really want to enforce the break -- leagues that begin prior to January 1 and end afterwards shouldn't award My Cards, in my opinion. Perhaps that means there shouldn't be any leagues that span from one year to another? Thoughts?
Current Collections
To make everyone as happy as we can, I say we move everyone's My Cards collections as is to the Trophy section. If any portion of this should be reset individually, I'm under the impression that it could be. This way no current collector-type is harmed. The biggest downside is that people who don't care about them might not want the clutter (myself included) -- ket's idea to trade in existing collections for My Cards in the future sounded good to me, although anyone who's participated in leagues over the last few years will have hundreds of packs and thousands of cards just sitting there. It'll be a hard balance between worth doing for anyone and setting the top players up to dominate without even trying. I still like the idea of building out collections for other neat prizes, but that should probably wait until never when it's worth the time required.
If collections are moved as-is, I'd appreciate a way to voluntarily remove cards from the Trophy collection. I understand that for some people it actually does matter, but I'd really hate the clutter. I already have some Tengwar I want to get rid of because it was handed out in error.
Also, since Trophy collections are currently used in My Cards games, the trophies persist throughout resets, and they're generally better cards in the first place, I think Trophies should only be usable in casual games. Otherwise the winning-est people will automatically have a head start that they don't need to win more.
On-demand and Daily Tournaments
Daily tournaments should continue to be free and also give a ticket per game plus a ticket per win in addition to the current prizes. They should also be reverted to My Cards as the main way to use that collection outside of My Cards leagues. On-demand tournaments should stay All Cards but still reward tickets for playing. I want to increase the minimum participation to 6 for daily tournaments and 8 for the single-elimination tournaments -- I think 4 is too low to be viable and even self-defeating.
Prize Pool
Give Sealed, Constructed, and Draft the same prize pool instead of maintaining one for each type. 1 pack per serie you play at least 5(?) games, 1 pack per 5 games won. I am a fan of how foils are given out too -- maybe a cycle every 3 wins with a random Common, Uncommon, Rare? What about random packs, but the foil card comes from the block? That way - to ket's point - you get some reward you might care about and - to Malachi's point - players might decide they have enough cards to venture into a format they wouldn't normally try. This already skews towards a prize structure, so perhaps top 10 get a booster pack choice, top 5 get a random AI, top 3 get a Tengwar choice? The latter two would be for trophies, not My Cards.
I wager this roughly translates to 11 packs for the top few places in a 4-series (4 for playing games, 6 for winning 75% of those games, 1 for being in the top 10) and on down to 5 packs for the last-place active participant (winning 5 games is reasonable right? ...Right?). Does that sound alright? It is usually a month-long endeavor, but I'm cautious to reward the players who have time to play EVERY league too much more than the players who do well in just one.
Merchant
For the merchant, what about a hybrid option? Dynamic, but not quite based on stock. So each card starts out at a fairly steep price. Every week, the price goes down some nominal amount. Whenever a card is bought the price jumps up some amount, and whenever a card is sold the price jumps down a bit. If that works, then prices could persist through seasons -- Aragorn's Bow would stay in demand for a year I figure and so start the new season more expensive than Beauty is Fading. Or maybe start the new season at the highest sale price from the previous season? Anyway, here's my proposal for pricing under this structure:
Pack - X gold (depends on how gold is distributed and what not)
Reflections Pack - I dunno how much these went for IRL since they offered some of the best cards of the time along with a bunch of Decipher overstock. Set them to the price of 3 packs? 5 packs?
Starter deck - I don't know how to handle these.
Rare+ - 50 pack max price / 20 pack starting price / 10 pack minimum price
Rare - 20 pack max price / 10 pack starting price / 1 pack minimum price
Uncommon - 5 pack max / 3 pack start / half pack minimum
Common - 1 pack max / half pack start / 10% pack minimum
I figure that the max price is way too high and nobody would ever pay it, the start price is high for most but a bit low for the best cards of that class, and the minimum just prevents abuse with the useless cards. Oh, and selling price should not change regardless of current merchant price. Maybe rares sell for 30% of a pack, uncommons sell for 10%, commons sell for 1% only if the merchant is above minimum price? This way selling a pack's entire contents will get you 50%-57% of the cost to buy one.
On another note, selling cards is painstaking. I floated this earlier, what about a button for "sell all >4x" in the merchant? And then a "sell all" button for individual cards.
Starting Currency Amount
I still think that perhaps starting new accounts with no currency would help with multiple league submissions (if that's still a concern) and the potential to manipulate prices in any way. It puts no burden on truly new players since it takes some time to learn how to play the game on Gemp and makes things at least a little difficult for potential exploiters. No matter how currency shakes out, there has to be a way to make some when you've got none, right?
Foils
I think foils could be neat, but are pointless at best right now. Remove the option to foil cards from the merchant to bring value to the foils from packs and prizes. They still won't do anything, but maybe they'll mean more? If foils are everywhere I'm with ket, they're just a waste. And yet, I also think it'd be a waste to just do away with them.
I hate to start the conversation over, but also I suppose I intend to start the conversation over. Can we get some agreement about direction? Once we do, I can start laying the groundwork for some of these so at least we don't waste our time talking about it.
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> What should the purpose of My Cards be?
Honestly I think they should essentially be for alt-images. Foil is one such way of doing it, but having different template types, alt-portraits, masterworks, foil animations, and other cosmetics are about the only reason I can think of that you would want to "own" cards in a context where everything is freely available to use. It's already a bit of a flex to play against someone with an all-foil deck, but imagine if there were half a dozen foil types and you were against someone with a uniform foil deck in *that* case. Flexing is about all there is.
With multiple procedural variants of cards available, then it becomes harder to get a *particular* effect on the exact cards you want. If there's a firey foil, then people will want that on the balrog, and if there's a shadowy foil, then people will want that on nazgul, etc.
And then gate some of the best effects behind boosters and you're golden. Let most of em still be foilable, but crank up the cost so that it's super expensive to get the good ungated ones, but you can burn your lesser foils for cash just like you can today.
The system just lacks bigger numbers and better things to spend the gold on I think. Take a look at TF2 for inspiration on how to really manage this, is what I recommend.
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I like the idea of having an on demand 'daily' for multiple blocks, now you're stuck with Fellowship and Movie (great blocks but sometimes you just want something else).
I also see some good points Phallen has made above me, especially the merchant idea with fluctuating prices.
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> What should the purpose of My Cards be?
Honestly I think they should essentially be for alt-images. Foil is one such way of doing it, but having different template types, alt-portraits, masterworks, foil animations, and other cosmetics are about the only reason I can think of that you would want to "own" cards in a context where everything is freely available to use. It's already a bit of a flex to play against someone with an all-foil deck, but imagine if there were half a dozen foil types and you were against someone with a uniform foil deck in *that* case. Flexing is about all there is.
With multiple procedural variants of cards available, then it becomes harder to get a *particular* effect on the exact cards you want. If there's a firey foil, then people will want that on the balrog, and if there's a shadowy foil, then people will want that on nazgul, etc.
And then gate some of the best effects behind boosters and you're golden. Let most of em still be foilable, but crank up the cost so that it's super expensive to get the good ungated ones, but you can burn your lesser foils for cash just like you can today.
The system just lacks bigger numbers and better things to spend the gold on I think. Take a look at TF2 for inspiration on how to really manage this, is what I recommend.
TF2 meaning Team Fortress 2? So this is what the "trophy" collection is (or at least is intended to be) now, a place for the pretty things to show off. What you propose is removing My Cards entirely, and I really think that's a waste when there's a lot of potential to mix up gameplay and make collecting exciting again. I get how buying skins and hats is appealing, but in a game where you can do more without disrupting the balance (which TF2 would do if it had expensive loadout items with considerable advantage -- look at how quickly the full set bonus went away because it did this very thing) why not? The promos and AI we have now are generally neat and there's plenty of space to really make it awesome, it's just that I wouldn't put that before a more meaningful game experience. There's more out there than only flexing if we look for it.
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So long as My Cards formats are opt-in, it will only ever be used by a handful of people who fondly remember playing with collection restrictions. New players will compare it to the full free formats and find them lacking, and many veterans who recall the annoyances of collection limitations will join them. The interesting parts of the collection restriction are basically made redundant by Sealed events, which is the same sort of idea on a smaller time scale. Between regular constructed on one hand and sealed on the other, there's no niche that My Cards addresses uniquely enough for it to meaningfully exist I think, not without forcing the whole player base to use it (as most digital card games do, but gemp cannot).
(My !perspective is slightly different from yours however, as the Player's Council is looking to have the meta shake-up effect (that I think is the underlying thing you're looking to accomplish with this) through errata and new sets. There's no need to wring blood out of the stone in that case.)
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I don't agree. When I was a new player, I wanted to try My Cards specifically because it was more constricted than the full free formats (and I was very disappointed to have missed a reset and gone up against Constructed decks as everyone else's collection was full). As a somewhat veteran player, I want to bring them back because there are many awful cards and strategies in Constructed formats which could really shine in Sealed but aren't starter decks. New and veteran players have chimed in every so often about how neat it would be if the Sealed prizes could be used in those leagues (which is essentially what this does), and many others have voiced desires to get My Cards and Tournaments back online (which is what sparked all of this).
Leagues, draft, tournaments, new formats -- everything is opt-in, but I don't think you'll find that this means it is only used by smaller handfuls of people. Collecting is fun and has been gamified the world over, I think adding this aspect back into the game would be a good thing. Other than that it isn't too terribly different than what's currently out there, I'll grant you that. Still, there's an evolution to a strategy as you go from the basics of a strategy to a fully constructed deck that's missing. A lot of B-list strategies are such because they're not optimized with certain rares.
It makes sense from where you're coming from that you don't see the point. I think your !perspective is cutting you off from the hundreds of players who have stuck with, returned to, or found out about the game for 15+ years without a single change though. While adding new content is great and eagerly looked forward to by many, there's still plenty to do with what we have for both new and experienced players. I don't think the two directions are at odds, so why not do both if we can?
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I for one am ready for a collection reset; I'd prefer to get my TENGWAR selections reset as well ... as there was a bug and I now have 9? copies of a certain Tengwar ring ... but that is just me :P I'd love for "my card" competition to have meaning again; and I think the tournaments SHOULD be my card only and have greater rewards (in promo or packs or whatever is appropriate).
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I have a number of thoughts that have occurred to me concerning gold and card collections; everything is all interconnected and I think most of these should be considered when trying to solve the design of these systems. I haven't spent the time to turn this into a cohesive essay, so I'd like to just present them as individual items and let the reader connect the !dots.
Most of these items represent a large amount of dev work, I'm fully aware. But this is an attempt to envision what complete victory looks like; we can always iterate in small chunks to get from here to there.
#1 - My Cards
Having read through the above thread and spent some time musing on it (after arguing about it with Phallen in private), I can see the use of the private temporary collection, which is used only in Collection Events and is reset regularly. My thinking however is that it should be completely divorced from the gold system -- make it so that you have a separate set of currency (perhaps Common Tokens, Uncommon Tokens, Rare Tokens, etc) which would instead be used to purchase cards for this mode, and then make it so you can craft 3 cards into a token (or something like that). You still get the liquidity of turning event rewards into the cards you actually want (keeping the element of luck by potentially winning those cards at random), while also preventing the conversion of abuse of any other gold leak into card advantage.
There are two broad groups of players who care about "my cards", I think: the collectors (magpie gonna magpie), and the players that want a challenge by being restricted to a limited number of cards. Restrict My Cards to only serving the latter group (alongside draft and sealed) and serve the magpies with trophies instead.
Alongside this, however, "My Cards" should absolutely be renamed (it seems like it is a common point of confusion for new players). Perhaps "Campaign Cards" and then dub each season a Campaign? Something like that. Set up Campaigns to reset every six months or quarter or whatever. Could maybe even be possible to have multiple Campaigns running simultaneously, but I don't know if that starts to dilute the concept too much or not. It would allow groups of people to propose their own events outside of what's ran automatically, however.
#2 - Trophies
(This is a partial repeat of an earlier post of mine, but it's been fleshed out some).
Trophies (being permanent and flashy) should be all about flexing. They should appeal to those collectors who want a collection grind, and be a means of turning gold into things that non-collectors might actually want to use in their games. Introduce alternate templates (masterworks etc), typefaces (tengwar, angerthas), border colors, foil effects (rainbow, shadow, fire, whatever jazzy thing we can think of), languages (the ~7 official languages and as many others as the community would like to support), on-play effects (sound bytes, !fireworks, whatever), and any other cosmetic effect we can think of.
Alter the way trophy collections work: you collect Base Cards, and each Base Card has a certain number of cosmetic Slots in it. You can pay gold to buy a Base Card, pay (exponential) gold to add a Slot to the card, and then gold for the various cosmetic effects themselves. Make them expensive. LUDICROUSLY expensive when combined. Introduce a "cosmetic booster pack" that has cards and slots and a ramping chance for the more expensive ones, but make this an unreliable method at best that is just the cherry on top to participating in leagues.
Basically, make it so that the gold you get is poured into pimping out your favorite cards, and make it so that having a binder full of fully pimped out cards is something that would take years to do. If someone drops a starting fellowship that is (say) gold-bordered with silver tengwar text and a masterwork background, then you immediately go "aw #$&*@!, this guy's been around" with just a hint of "oh snap I totally want that, that's beautiful". The collection goals are limitless as well: I want all my nazgul decks to have the Shadowy effect, white text, and green-glint text effect, while my Balrog deck has a bunch of firey effects and more red colors. One doesn't necessarily collect literally every permutation, but one can still have a "complete tengwar set" or "a complete greenery set" or what have you. Goals that are built around upgrading the specific instances of a set of cards beloved to the collector, and yet perfectly scalable to infinity if one is dedicated/insane.
The PC wants to start issuing alt-template cards as top league rewards, and all such cards should be available at an obscene price in the shop as well. This entire concept would require development around an image API that can generate the images as needed, but it's not anything that should be insurmountable.
Trophies should also be renamed; the word "trophy" typically means something that you look at and don't use, and this isn't that. Perhaps "Gilded Card Collection" or "Prize Cards" or something. Also make it so that you do not explicitly include gilded cards the way you do Campaign Cards or constructed cards, but you have a setting that either applies your gilding to every applicable cards in a given deck or doesn't.
And yes, this will take some dev work, but even more graphical work. Work that I myself would love to dive into, once other dev work is not demanding my attention.
#3 - Gold
When thinking about gold in a virtual economy, you have to consider the sources of gold ("gold faucets") and the things you spend gold on ("gold sinks"). Ideally, the sinks are deep enough to easily drain all the faucets, but not so deep as to make the faucets seem insignificant. This is usually more complicated as one has to consider the effect of players trading, but I think we can avoid that particular issue due to the abuse it would inevitably fall into.
So what are the current gold faucets?
- weekly allowance
- event rewards
- selling the card event rewards
What are the sinks?
- purchasing cards
- entering events
Both of these have room to be expanded, in particular the sinks. There's a few things that have been idly mentioned on the PC discord that haven't made their way here, but here's the list of everything I can think of that *might* go on this list, if the rest of our plans get enacted:
Gold Faucets:
- weekly allowance
- event rewards
- challenge rewards
- bug bounties
- wiki bounties
- translation bounties
Gold Sinks:
- trophy base cards
- trophy cosmetic slots
- trophy effects
- account upgrades
- event buy-in
As you might imagine, the Trophy changes are what I think ought to be the primary gold sink for everyone. The other new items above will be explained in other sections below.
#4 - Daily Challenges
Something that has been suggested to the PC and that I think would be a good addition is the concept of a set of challenges/achievements that one could earn rewards from. Something like a daily challenge that is issued (either globally or randomly per individual) that says something like "win a game with a deck that has no conditions" or "win with a nazgul/hobbit deck" or "win a game with a shadow side that has only minions" or whatever else we could come up with.
On the technical side, an achievement system to detect successful completion of these challenges would be of moderate complexity.
#5 - Account Upgrades
Something we might consider is making accounts that first sign up limited in one way or another, both to prevent sockpuppet abuse and to make it a bit easier for new players to get their bearings. Offer upgrades in the store that unlock access with gold to various things:
- Leagues
- Tournaments
- Campaigns
- Trophies
(Naturally, no actual in-match advantages should be granted in this manner.)
In some ways this is just a proxy for putting time limits on new accounts, but it could also offer more levers for moderation in grey-area situations (by giving the offender a negative gold amount or revoking one of their purchased rights and making them literally earn their way back).
Automated logic could also be used to aid this: if a member joins that has the same IP or password or other suspicious element, grant a lower starting gold balance or weekly allowance amount. If a player has a too-high concede rate (or concedes too early too frequently), start attaching gold penalties, which can prevent the sock from quickly and easily getting to be used as such.
(Such a system also suggests maybe getting rid of the weekly allowance and just granting a per-match reward; so long as the suspicious avenues have an automatic penalty reduction upon detection, the sock might not ever go anywhere unless the owner sits down and plays real games, which, lets face it, is already a victory of a sort.)
#6 - Bounties
Encourage people to make bug posts by earning gold when they do. Win-win. Also issue bounties eventually for meaningful wiki activity (if a good ungameable metric can be figured out) and translation submissions once *that* particular ball starts rolling. In other words, incentivize the community to help us develop the platform; I'm sure there's other bounty types I didn't think of that could also be considered.
Anyway. Like I said, mostly random thoughts, but I wanted to get them all out here to be part of the conversation.
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#1 - My Cards
I'm glad you're coming around! I don't mind splitting the currency up as long as there's appropriate stress on each system. I'm not sold on the token idea though. I don't recall seeing much confusion about what My Cards means, though if there will be two or three groups of "My Cards" then the name probably ought to be clarified. I'd advocate for longer campaigns over shorter ones; give people an appropriate amount of starting resources (every starter deck, for example) and then a slow trickle afterwards. By the end of a campaign I think players should nearly have Constructed decks for the strategy they focus on and pretty good options for adjusting based on the meta -- they should be able to enjoy "landing" and playing games with the dream deck they've been building all season before cashing out and starting over. I would definitely say one campaign at a time, although I'm not sure what you mean about allowing groups of people to propose their own events.
#2 - Trophies
My initial idea here was a cutesy Pokedex of cards, basically mirroring collecting IRL. Then I'd allow players to "prestige" a collection for some bonus to keep the cycle going if they want. This goes far beyond that which hey, more power to you. I can definitely see that Valve has inspired you, haha. Renaming trophies doesn't seem as necessary to me, but maybe there's a term that can capture both the collecting and flashiness aspects of it if it's important to you.
#3 - Gold
I think ket's idea to split gold and silver is a good one, and it makes sense to keep league currency separate from most other things. Especially with all the other changes you propose, do you really want players to keep in mind how much they can spend while still affording the next league entry?
#5 - Account Upgrades
I think I prefer using the ticket system here, it comes out cleaner than explaining to new users how to buy these features. Just set starting league/tournament/campaign (using gold to buy the thing that lets you use gold is kind of redundant) currency to 0. Punish players directly rather than indirectly. Automated logic doesn't appeal to me as a direction to handle rule breakers either, for a large variety of reasons. Gemp really doesn't have a moderation problem, though a large part of that may be that there's not much to abuse. My suggestion would be to simply forbid league matches from being played by two accounts with the same IP. Perhaps cultivate a whitelist for Sealed and Draft games and forbid the same IP from entering those leagues more than once otherwise. Tournaments shouldn't match two accounts with the same IP in the first round, after that the existing tournament matchmaking logic will do just fine. What other cheating is possible right now? Anything else can be built into the systems as they're brought online.
There are some conflicts between your ideas and what I proposed earlier, mostly because you're interested the Trophy collection and I'm interested in the My Cards collection. I can drop the notion that everyone's whole My Cards collections should move over to Trophies if it doesn't make sense with your overhaul, but any players using it as a long-term league will take a hit and some people do care about them. Plus some parts of My Cards are trophies (AI cards, foils, Masterworks, promos). I, for one, would actually prefer a full reset to everything but my AI and promos (though I'd even give up those if I have to choose between keeping everything or nothing). Maybe opt in/out? I know that makes the move a lot more complicated though.
Since My Cards, the merchant, and prize support are already in place, they seem to be a good place to start. I'm not set on my prize/currency distribution models or the specifics for the merchant, and they weren't written with Trophies in mind, so changing them to fit your goals works for me. The biggest hurdle is the merchant: right now it is for My Cards, you want to repurpose it for trophies. It occurs to me that if the merchant stays with My Cards then the My Cards currency will have to reset with each season as well. With a third currency (one for leagues, one for My Cards, one for Trophies) you could add another section to the merchant, yet my concern is that there could be some confusion in general about when a card is gained for My Cards and when it's gained as a trophy. I have two ideas for that. Least intrusive with what you propose would be to rework the prize structure from the ground up. Trophy prizes should be in terms of specific trophy cards and/or the third currency to let players buy the trophy cards/effects they want, and then any packs or "plain" cards awarded would be just for My Cards. While not perfect in my mind, at least it can be consistent and explained. More intrusive would be to make the seasonal My Cards leagues work in tandem with the Trophy collection. Getting that to work would require some concessions from us both, though as you might imagine my first pass at the idea asks more from you than from me :P
The current prize structure hands out packs and semi-random cards as well as specific desirable trophies (Tengwar & AI). Keep that and make it so opening packs and receiving "regular" cards goes to both collections, and then the specific Trophy rewards only go into that collection. Since players will end up with more than 4 (or 1, if your idea for Trophies means changing the appearance of all copies of a card in the deck instead of individual cards?) copies of cards in their Trophy collection, use the excess cards as currency the same way the current merchant does for foiling. Then you could let the trophy section of the deck builder double as the purchasing interface for all the neat upgrades -- zoom in on a trophy and the popup window shows an interface similar to the merchant showing your available effects and what you can afford. You could still use the merchant for this as long as it's clear when you're dealing in My Cards vs Trophies, though that doesn't sound quite as clean to me.
The system works well for My Cards, but now your trophy collection is made up of more-or-less random cards. How can you get the ones you want? To avoid the coupon collector's problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem) I would steal your token idea and refashion it a bit. X cards of a rarity can be traded for a random unearned card of the same rarity or a selected copy of an earned card of that rarity or a random card of a higher rarity, perhaps restricting the randomness to be in the same block as one of the cards combined. Y copies of a specific card can be traded for a slot or perk or whatever -- the grander the perk or greater the number of slots, the more copies you'll need to make it happen. Don't care about collecting? Deck out your Hobbit Swords, or turn them into the cards you do want to deck out. Do care about collecting? Earning slows as you collect more cards and more of the holes have to be filled by combining, but it never stalls out until you finish.
The length of a season, prices for cards in the Merchant, and rewards going into My Cards can be dictated by how quickly you want trophy collections to fill up. Both of us want slow-but-meaningfully-progressive timelines so it shouldn't be hard to come to an agreement. Shorter seasons means starting with more stuff (what players begin a season with would be the only time something gets added to My Cards and not Trophy), but depending on your thoughts starting at 6 months and adjusting from there sounds good to me. The greatest implication is that the dynamic merchant pricing I proposed will affect Trophy and My Cards players. I count that as a good thing, it makes power rares such as Aragorn's Bow both a more valuable trophy and harder to obtain in My Cards. Still, care would need to be taken to ensure those cards are still accessible to both groups.
So what do you think, is this at all compatible? Or is adding a currency going to get just as far without the mess? Again, the main thing I want to avoid with this system is Trophy hunters annoyed at their My Cards winnings, or My Cards players bitter about getting an unusable Trophy base card. I think there are positive side effects to it but I'm open to whatever works best.
EDIT: It occurs to me now that the card-combining mechanic could be for My Cards instead of Trophies, which is almost exactly what you proposed. Gold stays a permanent currency and there's no need for a temporary one that follows My Cards leagues since again, the cards themselves are the currency. So that's a lot neater than I first judged, not a bad system. This would replace selling cards from the My Cards collection? Dynamic pricing gets the boot too I imagine, which is shame since that could be really neat if it's done right. I'd still rather see where the flipside goes, but I think I better understand what you were going for initially now.