New player thoughts, and suggestions on bringing in a new player base

Hey guys,

I was looking over some of the forum topics, and I couldn't really find any topic aiming at this. I thought I might share suggestions, as someone recently getting back into Poxnora from 2010-ish. As to my suggestions, please feel free to disagree with them, as I am not an expert on financial structuring, or know the technical difficulties that you guys face.


1) Please get rid of the leveling/token system.

As playing competitively is the only way to realistically level champions, beginners will not be able to level up. I've gotten tokens from playing ranked, so I assume those who have been long time players don't have this problem, but they are probably the ones who need them least. Also, I think the whole token buying thing will only serve as another point of frustration for beginners throwing down lots of money, and realizing that they either have to spend more money to buy token packs, or do a whole bunch of repetitive solo campaigns with an unleveled bg.

2) Bring back Individual packs/boxes for each expansion

Players can research which mechanics/races they like best, and choose the expansion that is right for them

3) Give people Avatars and Banners for free.
Pretty much everyone has a banner and an Avatar, just give the banners out as rewards for finishing the tutorial quests for each faction. I've been playing without buying an avatar, and as everyone else seems to have them, it honestly just feels like I'm required to pay more money for a default feature. Why not just make more avatars and sell Avatar packs?

4) Make daily quests faction-based only (you can keep the weekly ones the same), and have them all award more gold

Maybe it's because I'm spoiled by playing games like Hearthstone, but really, the only reason to keep playing this game (for me) is the customization, and figuring out new battle groups. Getting new packs just by doing a daily quest every once and a while, and the daily skirmishes means that I pretty much just get one pack a week. And as the runes are like 10 cards out of 1000, I almost have no hope of creating another themed bg unless I just plop down another wad of cash.

If I could buy packs and boxes for each expansion individually, I would at least be working towards something. And if I could get a new pack every like two, three days just by doing three or four dailies, or conversely ranked matches, I would be pretty motivated. I'd tell myself something like: "Maybe in a couple weeks I can buy 6 more Heroes of Malijara packs with the gold I earned and complete my Kanen battle group. And for whatever champions I'm missing, I'll buy the packs for with real money, and trade the rest of the ones that I don't need to a player base that might actually need these runes, and don't already have everything with the exception of the new expansion"

5) Bring back the cheap starter battlegroups

6) Provide starting players with a choice of a starter battle group from any faction when they first sign up, so that they will have something to build off of when buying their first packs/boxes.

I think the whole starter battlegroup is a great idea because if people find that their initial packs contain mostly Forsaken waste runes, rather than Savage Tundra runes, they can just pay 5 bucks, and work their new runes into bg that is already viable

I'm sorry for the really long-winded message. But I really love everything about this game, except for the fact that I can't possibly afford to keep playing it once my shards run out. I don't really expect a response to this, but I realize that there probably aren't too many new players to provide you with feedback.

Thank you for taking the time to reading my concerns!

Oh, and has Desert Owl ever considered paying Twitch streamers to Stream Poxnora? I just started playing the Duelyst from watching a TrumpSC stream.

 

id like to see some starter themed bg for each fac., (maybe like TG ones that u cant trade but eventually add to?)..mtg has em ready to go,,, it'd prolly help getting newer players playing faster and learning the game..
tokens ,, take em out,, just let players choose there runes powers, on some rune options its not even an upgrade..
prot-wrath packs...its time.
Most games today , for the most part u can jump in and play,,, pox its a bit different,, the faster a new player is up and playing the better.

 

switching out the fw faction bonus would be a nice start...

 

Divide the pack for factions st extended pack/box st core set pack/box ecc.

Keep the last expansion pack box as it is now.

 

They have faction based battlegroups that you unlock from tutorial.

 

The biggest problem with this game is the access to runes 6000+ and pack and box not splited for expansion and faction. Plus new player get almost nothing at the start.

 

Untrue, almost everything you said.

 

Hey guys,

I was looking over some of the forum topics, and I couldn't really find any topic aiming at this. I thought I might share suggestions, as someone recently getting back into Poxnora from 2010-ish. As to my suggestions, please feel free to disagree with them, as I am not an expert on financial structuring, or know the technical difficulties that you guys face.


1) Please get rid of the leveling/token system.

As playing competitively is the only way to realistically level champions, beginners will not be able to level up. I've gotten tokens from playing ranked, so I assume those who have been long time players don't have this problem, but they are probably the ones who need them least. Also, I think the whole token buying thing will only serve as another point of frustration for beginners throwing down lots of money, and realizing that they either have to spend more money to buy token packs, or do a whole bunch of repetitive solo campaigns with an unleveled bg.

I never had any issue with leveling/token. You get plenty of that stuff by playing ranked. You could ask anybody for them and they will give them away.

2) Bring back Individual packs/boxes for each expansion

Players can research which mechanics/races they like best, and choose the expansion that is right for them

Getting specific rune is the job of the rune forge/trading. I have no issue with this, except for the fact that the devs need to make unforging mass runes faster and make a trading API.

3) Give people Avatars and Banners for free.
Pretty much everyone has a banner and an Avatar, just give the banners out as rewards for finishing the tutorial quests for each faction. I've been playing without buying an avatar, and as everyone else seems to have them, it honestly just feels like I'm required to pay more money for a default feature. Why not just make more avatars and sell Avatar packs?

This is not a problem for me. You can get an avatar + banner for 5000g. That is 3 days worth of daily quests. Very easy.

4) Make daily quests faction-based only (you can keep the weekly ones the same), and have them all award more gold

Maybe it's because I'm spoiled by playing games like Hearthstone, but really, the only reason to keep playing this game (for me) is the customization, and figuring out new battle groups. Getting new packs just by doing a daily quest every once and a while, and the daily skirmishes means that I pretty much just get one pack a week. And as the runes are like 10 cards out of 1000, I almost have no hope of creating another themed bg unless I just plop down another wad of cash.

If I could buy packs and boxes for each expansion individually, I would at least be working towards something. And if I could get a new pack every like two, three days just by doing three or four dailies, or conversely ranked matches, I would be pretty motivated. I'd tell myself something like: "Maybe in a couple weeks I can buy 6 more Heroes of Malijara packs with the gold I earned and complete my Kanen battle group. And for whatever champions I'm missing, I'll buy the packs for with real money, and trade the rest of the ones that I don't need to a player base that might actually need these runes, and don't already have everything with the exception of the new expansion"

I am against this. The win 2 games with faction is an excellent way to get newbies to try out different factions with public bgs. Otherwise they will just get stuck with a bg they happened to try at the start based on the bg description. Any change I want is for it to be "win 2 games or play 4 games" just so people won't get too frustrated losing, but there is still an incentive to win.

5) Bring back the cheap starter battlegroups

Yes. They should make it possible to buy public bgs. They should also make cheap/competitive bgs available to buy. Right now the step from playing public bg to your first made bg is too big.

6) Provide starting players with a choice of a starter battle group from any faction when they first sign up, so that they will have something to build off of when buying their first packs/boxes.

I think the whole starter battlegroup is a great idea because if people find that their initial packs contain mostly Forsaken waste runes, rather than Savage Tundra runes, they can just pay 5 bucks, and work their new runes into bg that is already viable

What this game need is 3x starter battlegroups per faction that can be bought cheaply with gold. So new players can go straight into the deck building aspect of the game.

I'm sorry for the really long-winded message. But I really love everything about this game, except for the fact that I can't possibly afford to keep playing it once my shards run out. I don't really expect a response to this, but I realize that there probably aren't too many new players to provide you with feedback.

Thank you for taking the time to reading my concerns!

Oh, and has Desert Owl ever considered paying Twitch streamers to Stream Poxnora? I just started playing the Duelyst from watching a TrumpSC stream.

Stream watchers are short attention span kiddos. They are generally not very good for a complex game like pox. Just compare twitch count for MTGO vs Hearthstone.

Pox is a great game that can hook you in once you get into it. What's important is to make sure that new players don't quit after 2 hours. If they are the right players for the game, that is players that would enjoy the game, they would keep playing once they get into the game. So the focus should be on the first 20 hours of the game for new players and providing them a strong and frustration free experience.

 

the tutorial packs are ok but u cant manipulate them,,, so if a new player wins a rune,,, say a leg voil that he can use in his voil starter deck. he cant even add it in until he aquires every other card in that same starter bg to make a replica of entire bg..or any useble cards he may get cannot be added,,, making a bg thats "yours" is part of the fun in pox. but as of now that would take more then a few weeks to get it goin,, let alone learning game mechanics and stuff.
its a pretty big hill for someone who wants to "check out" pox.

 

Yes i think all public BGs should be available for purchase as well, and as a reward like win 30 games with this public bg in training match and you get the bg unlocked to you. It would be a great starting point for new players to first gain some experience with the BG, then start tinkering with it. It's very overwhelming to make a bg as a noob because of the massive # of runes, it's much easier to have a premade bg then ask "hmm is this particular rune a good addition to my bg". However, making a bg based on runes you got from packs is gonna result in trash bg and getting completely owned with a junk-junk bg is not gonna be fun.

 

For all I care you could make every common rune in the game public for everyone to use,

suddenly new players can do whatever they want with plenty of ressources.

 

I am in favor of this, but these initial runes should
a) be untradeable
and b) unforgeable.

If either of these things are allowed then you essentially destroy the economy.

 

It won't tho.

 

1) Create an account
2) Get your free decks
3) Transfer these runes to your primary account
4) Shard these runes
5) Create any rune you want whenever you want
6) Economy is destroyeed.

 

yea I mentioned above that free bgs should not be tradable,,, perhaps an option to buy, or an investment of time , (winning x# of games like bfg said to prevent alt spam), and the runes will be yours,,, but we cant have every new acc start up with exos and leg included (unless they buy) but these starter decks should be interchangeable with shard-able runes.,
unless we use the idea , which was mentioned some time before about making all the early exp (upto 250 shard value fer exo) free. (or a fac of your choice per acc),,
I been here for a while so im kinda stuck here...but if I was new entering this game the way it is,, I probably wouldn't stay.

 

you don't get a free deck with an account. you get a free deck after some work. you get a public deck after winning 30 pvp games with it, for example.

also if you want free runes you can already farm tourneys, much faster that way too. the economy isn't destroyed yet.

as a matter of fact, runes being more available does NOT destroy the economy. This misconception probably came from the idea that inflation destroys an economy. But this is also not true. Hyper inflation is a symptom of an economy being destroyed, not a cause of it. A recent example is the case of Zimbabwe. The government drove out white farmers and appropriated lands to give to black people, who do not productively farm the lands. Food production plummeted causing a famine. The price of food rised rapidly (supply/demand) and the government then printed money because they are dumb. In this instance, the economy is damaged because there is a reduction in goods. An economy CANNOT be damaged by a large supply of useful stuff. Because having a lot of useful stuff is GOOD. Having a lot of runes is GOOD.

 

My idea is to give x1 of all Core Runes from one faction (untreadable, unforgeable), the player can choose this faction. This way, at least he will get some stuff to work with.

Also, I always said here in the forums: WE NEED MORE PACKS/BOXES DIVERSITY. Core have 6 expansions, while Extended have all others 21 (or 22) AND from all factions, this make it very hard to make your bg, AND make it less enjoyable to buy the packs and open them. We need an Pack/Box for every 6~8 expansions, leaving the last one always left and separate from the others. The marketplace should be the place to get runes, the forge need's to be just an "fix" for your unanwanted runes.

 

Unless things have changed, this game is an arena battle game which is fine if that's all you want. You can build your battle groups and play against either the computer or true pvp. I would like to see the option of playing the computer using actual line ups or bgs that players have. (Gems of War uses this principle for its pvp play.)

Anyway what I was missing was a strategic nation building layer to give some context to the battles. This game is a good way to resolve battles, but offers little to nothing beyond that. That's why I stopped playing it.

 

Make token packs like 300 gold, the fact that were still dealing with 3k token packs is completely insane. Don't tell me to play ranked because most of the time you either don't get a token or the runes you need to lvl require tokens before you even begin ranked. Token packs are a gold sink and push new players away along with the inability to have any chance at getting a rune the players wants.

Starting off in pox is still to slow and a grind and it's mostly because of simple things like the tokens and faction packs not being a thing yet.

 

I believe that this is how the skirmish works. I don't know the exact structure but I understand that some, if not all, of the decks you face in this mode are mined from real players' lists. Someone else can correct me on this because I could be way off (don't play many skirmishes).

To the OP: the hearthstone comparison is a bit disingenuous since this game has a trading aspect with a pair of well-developed, automated, trading sites. Although it takes longer to get an individual card, each card you don't want can be converted into one that you want to use with maybe a 20% loss in value as opposed to the 75% you get in HS.

Accessibility is incredibly generous right now. The real underlying issue of pox is that it is about 10 years and 30 expansions old, so there is an overwhelming amount of content. Either c0rpse or Sokolov brought up the idea of block rotations a long time ago and the community was overwhelmingly (myself included) against it. I think we made the wrong choice, but that discussion would need its own thread (and really only be applicable if there were another revamp or as a warning for pox's successor) and I'm not about to write out all my thoughts on that right now.
(edit: actually I will)