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October 18, 2019, 02:13:59 AM
Reply #15

MarcinS

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #15 on: October 18, 2019, 02:13:59 AM »
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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December 03, 2020, 01:30:21 PM
Reply #16

Phallen Cassidy

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #16 on: December 03, 2020, 01:30:21 PM »
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.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2020, 01:32:02 PM by Phallen Cassidy »

December 24, 2020, 12:29:32 PM
Reply #17

TelTura

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #17 on: December 24, 2020, 12:29:32 PM »
> 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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January 05, 2021, 01:11:21 PM
Reply #18

Jens

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #18 on: January 05, 2021, 01:11:21 PM »
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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January 07, 2021, 06:53:46 AM
Reply #19

Phallen Cassidy

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #19 on: January 07, 2021, 06:53:46 AM »
> 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.

January 10, 2021, 04:03:55 PM
Reply #20

TelTura

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #20 on: January 10, 2021, 04:03:55 PM »
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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January 11, 2021, 07:48:24 AM
Reply #21

Phallen Cassidy

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #21 on: January 11, 2021, 07:48:24 AM »
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?

February 09, 2021, 04:46:17 PM
Reply #22

CoS

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #22 on: February 09, 2021, 04:46:17 PM »
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).


March 19, 2021, 08:44:07 PM
Reply #23

TelTura

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #23 on: March 19, 2021, 08:44:07 PM »
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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April 05, 2021, 09:38:38 AM
Reply #24

Phallen Cassidy

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Re: Gemp Currency Ideas and Conversation
« Reply #24 on: April 05, 2021, 09:38:38 AM »
#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 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.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2021, 11:27:04 AM by Phallen Cassidy »