Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation

[ket_the_jet]

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

[Phallen Cassidy]

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. 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, 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.

[MarcinS]

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.

[Viggo]

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.

[Malachi]

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.

[ket_the_jet]

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

[Phallen Cassidy]

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!

[MarcinS]

...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.

[MarcinS]

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.

[Malachi]

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 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 and Rise of Saruman 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.

[ket_the_jet]

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 and Rise of Saruman 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

[Malachi]

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.

[MarcinS]

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.

[Malachi]

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?

[Phallen Cassidy]

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.