Barrel-o-Feedback (because Monkeys make messes)

I think it would be healthier for the game if multiplayer was a more attractive avenue to earn gold. Pulling all those people grinding campaigns into 1v1 matches couldn't be anything but positive.

 

I don't agree with your extreme case at the bottom, the value of CD is dependant on your strategy. Also, the value of that CD reduction varies based on the value of the rune having its CD reduced. To further complicate the formula the faction bonuses are balanced somewhat against their font bonus. I would definitely agree that UD has, if not the strongest faction bonus, one of the strongest. However, UD might as well not even have a font bonus for all the good it does. I occasionally will stop a stealth unit from trying to ****ishly cap my close fonts, other than that it's useless. On the other hand the FW font bonus provides a terrain(?) that the faction can synergize with and which has a fairly useful inherent value.

 

again, you cant just look at one build to evaluate a faction bonus, it has to be useful for every theme in the faction. low cooldown may seem useful, but when you consider youre running around 15 champs anyway for first turn draw purposes, and you have to spend nora to deploy champs regardless if they are a 1st time deploy or not, most games for most decks it doesn't play a role. I suppose you could evaluate font/faction bonuses as a set, but split decks don't divide the font bonus in half. if the fw font bonus is the best because its faction bonus is the worst, then when you split with FW you get the best font bonus with half of a better faction bonus. so much for all that careful balancing.

 

So then with splits the balancing comes down to to combination of 2 split faction bonuses plus either font bonus. I did say that it complicated it. My original point was that I didn't think that they were balanced nor that they could be truly balanced. Additionally, I think the usefulness of the FW faction bonus must vary by playstyle because I've never built a FW BG that didn't love that bonus and I've built a decent number of them.

 

sounds like youre conflicted, you enjoy the FW bonus, but think the bonuses can not be balanced properly. I would suggest that they remove faction wide bonuses and instead move them to the 'theme level'. so you could still get your death benefit bonus as a racial or some other mechanic, and they could move forward with balancing the game.

 

I'm not conflicted, I agree that it's impossible to have perfectly balanced faction bonuses but I disagree that the FW bonus is as bad as you say.

 

Sorry but I'm with Ragic on this. The FW bonus number wise is the worst bonus by far.
The only relevant effect is on champions that are very cheap to begin with in hopes of cycling through them quickly.

When the rune dock was 15 runes this was a relevant bonus.
With the 30 rune dock it basically doubled the number of available champs to deploy and made the bonus pretty much irrelevant for anything that isn't already super cheap nora wise within the faction.

 

I think the bonus is relevant for all decks, the problem is you can't get away with running less champs due to the risk of not getting a first turn champ. If additional rune reveals were added to allow FW to run 10-12 champs instead of 15-16, I feel that would be a good solution.

 

I was just looking up old poxnora stuff on google, and apparently it used to be 24 bucks for a 100 rune pack in the early days? I find it kind of strange that Pox's pricing has become more prohibitive as time went on considering most F2P games have moved in the opposite direction.

I know people disagree, but I still feel pricing is going to be the biggest issue with the Steam relaunch; $20 for a box is going to seem awfully expensive when the Steam store page is flashing banner ads for AAA games that cost the same or less.

Imagine going to buy a box and being instantly reminded that you could get both XCOM and Bioshock Infinite for around the same price because they're on sale. Then imagine you're also a new player with no vested interest in Pox.

 

a box is 100 runes and it cost a few dollars less than 20

 

My math is horrid. For some reason I thought it was less. Whooooooops

 

Quick update: I've put as close to a TL;DR as I could in the OP summarizing the various points of each post with bullet-points. Hopefully that helps!

Also, I'm considering changing the last reserved post from Q&A (thinking that's less likely, now) to "Additional Thoughts" as a way of cataloging other ideas being thrown about in here like Faction Bonuses (which I'll give a more thorough look later today).

Thoughts?

 

I deleted most of my wall of text reply to increase the odds it might actually get read.
Rune Forge:

1. For the love of everything, YES!
2. I like this but, if #1 is implimented, it seems unecessary.
3. Seems handy, good for people new to the forge and for planning.
4. Again, YES! We shouldn't have to turn to external assistance to make a 'cool new feature work decently. Either a or b works, both would be even better.
5. I think I like the looks of the linear values best. (Without judging specific values in the spreadsheets)

Marketplace:
Am I the only one somewhat unhappy with the whole core/extended model? I don't want things like they were with soe with each realease being a pack but grouping them, say 4 releases each, at least gives you a chance to try to hunt a set of runes you want, or to go fishing for a certain legendary, without needing to increase any rates for anything. The odds of getting something you want when buying an extended pack are pretty abysmal as it stands, assuming hit the 5% lottery.

I wasn't around back when the runes still had bases.. but I must admit I rather like how they look in the images I've seen.

Revamp
In general.. I agree with pretty all of this. I'm not going to bash on the devs for there being issues with the revamp since it is ongoing and was rushed out for the sake of keeping people playing the game. I think more updates would be good though. Just a short post of what they're looking tweaking and their thoughts of how to do it. Give it a day or two for some feedback, then let's see what is being implemented. Rinse and repeat.

 

idk, I've really enjoyed the ability to play my high power champs multiple times a game and I've lost a few times too many to Dark Knight+Death Guard

 

multiple times a game reads as 2… in which case running two champs effectively makes the bonus for high cost champs pretty irrelevant.

How long does a game last and how long does it take for a champ of 75+ nora to come off of cool down?

In most cases that 2nd deploy is coming out towards the end of the match.
In all cases you will have plenty of other champs available.

I do agree that champs with low costs like death guard are the only ones that really could be argued to benefit from the bonus to a relevant extent.

 

When I'm talking about multiple I mean either the games where I played Moragen 3 times or that one time that a Life Siphon BG managed to play the same Death Guard 9 times.

 

What is so bad about that? SP has just about the exact same bonus only it comes into effect when played and on death instead of just on death (though FW would get more at once.)

Yeah, saving up for a box takes a VERY long time but is much more worth while at the moment. This causes a great deal of frustration whenever I try to F2P this game.

I completely agree, sadly competitive play is nearly impossible for free players right now. Not only do they not have access to newer runes but they also have much smaller collections on average. Re-balance that then build up competitive, otherwise you end up with a lot of new players who are very sick of losing because they do not have powerful runes and have no way to get them.

 

the problem is FW champs are dirt cheap and a 20% bonus is 8% more than SP which is ridiculous its even more free meat for a faction that has tons of free meat

 

The biggest struggle in PvP games is finding a way for the loser to feel like they still won something. I don't support the "everyone's a winner!" mentality, but in order for less confident folks to poke their heads in, they need to obtain something from ranked games (win or lose) that is more valuable than just gold. I'm hoping Tokens with my proposed overhaul system will help with that, but it probably needs something more.

I've seen mention of a daily/quest system that rewards players for participating in ranked each day. That, more gold and free Tokens seems like a great first draft for a more appealing ranked environment.

 

I let this slide down the list during the forum spam extravaganza, but this feels like an appropriate time to bump this given the most recent Q&A. As I've mentioned in other threads, I'm currently working on art/graphic examples for some of my suggestions. I'll post them here (or in a new thread with links) once that happens.