This was changed to keep it fair.
Fair for who?
If you were to keep the cards from leagues, the league price would have to increase by the cost of the product (18 boosters + 3 starters),
No it wouldn't, because none of this prize or product support actually costs real money. If you wanted to, you could make it a better deal for people to join and play in the league, than to just buy cards outright. At the very least, I think you should let players keep product roughly equal to what the league costs. It only serves to encourage people to play in the leagues. Otherwise, it seems like a better deal NOT to play in the leagues.
which would make it even more costly to enter the league, to the point where it would be too expensive for anyone to play (50g+18*10g+3*25g=305g).
Gemp is an artificial market, you can adjust the costs in whatever way works best to create a positive playing environment. It seems to me that one of Gemp's few weaknesses, is that it is currently not very feasible to delve much into collected formats. I suggest you take steps to resolve this in whatever way is most practical.
The idea of entry cost for leagues is that it covers only costs of prizes, both for individual games and for the final result.
There is no cost for prizes, because it's all virtual product. If this were a real tournament back in the day, prize support would be provided by Decipher, so there's not really any cost there either. The tournament serves to promote the game and encourage people to play.
As for starter prizes, yes they do not include the random rares. If they were to include them, they would have to be substantially more expensive, and I wanted to make it possible for people to get the fixed cards at a reasonable price.
They wouldn't need to be more expensive, because the economic system is completely artificial. You can set whatever price you like for anything. As it stands now, to me it feels like the starters are too expensive when they don't come with any rares.
You get to keep all the prizes.
It seemed like many of the prizes I got were foil cards that weren't worth very much, and certainly don't help much in terms of building a collection. It's still a mystery to me what would determine what kind of prize I'd get, when I win a game.
A league is a very good way to increase your income, but it works only if, once you sign up, you play all (or close to all) games available.
Every game available during the course of a month? How often do you expect your players to be on their computers, and not working at jobs or taking care of other real-life things?
Last sealed league I had win rate of 60% - not bad, but also not great (out of people who played all 40 games I finished 14th, exactly in the middle, as there were 27 such people). This gave me 28 booster choices as prize support (3+2+3+3 as series prizes and 17 as overall prize). It was definitely worth 50 gold I paid as sign up fee.
That's great IF you have the time to play that many games, AND you actually have a halfway decent win-rate. Again, not really conducive to players who are new to the game, who are still learning. The end result is that better players build their collections more, while players who aren't so good may not build their collections much at all. If anything, it seems like this would create more and more of a division for collected league play, as only the better players have a decent pool of cards to draw from.
On a more general note: yes, Gemp collections are increasing way slower than GCCG collections. I'm not sure it this is bad.
I've never played on GCCG, so I can't really compare the two. My only experience is with Gemp... and of course with playing the game in real life, back when it was made. All I'm saying is that it feels like the current setup does not allow players to build their collections at a reasonable pace. I'm not saying it needs to have the same setup as GCCG, all I'm saying is that the current setup feels waaaaaay too slow to me. And also that there is not currently much of an incentive to join a sealed deck league, and it's going to be ages before my collection would be ready to join a collected format league.
GCCG had huge prize support. Winning a game gave you money to buy 10 boosters and losing one gave you enough for 2,5.
I agree that this seems like too much. But I think that a balance can be struck. I don't think Gemp has reached that balance yet.
Where is the fun of collecting if collecting is very easy?
Where is the fun of collecting if it is too hard? Again, balance.
League prize support was designed by me with the following (set by MarcinS) goal in mind: a player taking part in leagues and getting a bit over average results there should be able to build one competitive deck in two months.
Then your system is designed to reward above average players, while punishing average and below-average players. It also handicaps people who are simply not able to play in the league 40-some times per month. The long-term end result of such a system, is one where the best players also have the most cards, and will be able to shut out newer players or players who are still developing their skills. The only level playing field for those players would be a 50g sealed deck league where they don't get to keep their cards afterwards. Fine for above average players who play 40 games a month, but leaves the rest of the masses with next to nothing.
In real life, sealed deck tournaments were designed to be entry level points to introduce new players to the game with a more-or-less level playing field, and to give them a basis from which they could build a collection, no matter how good or bad they did in the tournament.
Topic: Suggestions to Improve Gemp (Read 17778 times)
