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 DistributionI 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 ResetWithout 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 CollectionsTo 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 TournamentsDaily 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 PoolGive 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.
MerchantFor 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 AmountI 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?
FoilsI 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.