Originally posted here http://forums.poxnora.desertowlgame...satisfy-this-community.5489/page-2#post-76436 Hello! This is a constructive post with logical reasoning, if you as a reader think this is unconditional whining expecting free gimmies, please refrain from posting! Sorry for the tone! --- I've been pretty vocal before the revamp and before the switch over from the old forums to this new one, I'll state this again here: It think is a poor choice to use this current method of revamp. What it did was created another 6+months of unnecessary balancing chaos while achieving little to no net results in the overall balance of the game, only causing new issues. The game may need to be simplified, this is just not how you go about doing it without some serious repercussions and we are seeing some of these effects now. There are better systems. IMHO some things they SHOULD have done in terms of game balance was: 1) CP system: remove the CP system altogether, the fastest way to do temporarily bandage fix that was a combination of: lower token price to 0 gold or 1, auto-code every rune to level 3, etc. They could do this in a heartbeat to alleviate some major problems while they work on other things, this system could be revamped at a later date. Takes no effort to change a code in a simple fashion like this, like literally 5 seconds. TLDR: Bandage fix CP system by dropping token price to 0. 2) Ability upgrade system: once the CP system is bandage fixed, they should have kept the old abilities system if they really WANT an abilities system in the name of diversity. IF you ask me, this always creates problems with balancing, better to keep every champ consistent, but whatever. TLR: Keep the old ability upgrade system, two per champ. 3) Rebalancing of abilities: next would be to balance the game manually. There are some quick ways to start: remove fluff abilities from champions in a blanket fashion, update useless upgrades, rebalance ability sets, nora costs, etc manually. Prolonged periods of rebalancing creates disruption which leads to the next set of problems. They are already doing this stuff anyway with the current revamp system. TLDR: Blanket remove fluff and manually readjust each champ, just like what they are doing now 4) Accessibility: prolonged periods of balancing changes makes a lot of cards/themes temporarily unplayable while new ones become mandatory. Some themes are not runnable without central cards such as water gen for aquatics. From the perspective of a (new) player with very little resources, it is devastating to have the balance of their budget deck they spent so long to perfect under the current grind system, disrupted. Some themes are either broken or made so clunky it's not enjoyable. Players during this period must be acquiring cards on-the-fly in reaction to nerfs and buffs, and the current prices do not allow this. Investing into new expensive cards risky, you don't know if they will be nerfed tomorrow. TLDR: rebalancing causes an investment nightmare under the current pricing system for a new player and it's paralyzing and disheartening. Leading to our next problem 5) Pricing: OWL's deceptive price revamp actually made a ton of cards harder to get, even simple cards such as tide master, kartch and gekaal which used to be worth not much, are now 500 shards, 250 shards etc and gekaal is now 50k credits in pb and out of stock. 'Legendary' key cards are no longer buyable with gold( the old 150k's+), and new expansion cards cant be accessed without paying. This directly pay to win. You can no longer directly buy cards. To a new player it was chaos, drowned by the forum's excitement about the crappy inefficient forge system, the return is garbage and it's just junk, the reliance on the randomness of the booster pack system is poorly implemented, it was poor design to remove the gold-2-rune system. The doubling of gold accrue from an event that never went away was a GREAT bandage fix in the right direction, however they proceeded to nerf the gold accrue again on the dailies. What were they thinking? All of this deterred new players even Further. Make no mistake, the new system gave accessibility to a ton of cards, however OWL undid themselves by blocking off or raising prices on a lot of others runes, it made no sense. TLDR: lower pricing through various means, give full-access to the game through gold. Up shard return rate and forge rates. 6) Burden of knowledge / DRAFT MODE, To play effectively you need to know what your opponent is doing/will do, and that knowledge come much faster by playing other factions. For a new player there isn't much opportunity to actually experiment with other runes, under the current pricing system, CP system, gold accrue and accessibility system. Throwing together a budget deck was hard because most of the key cards are out of stock(OOS) on pb, key ones I've ran into for an aquatic theme was tidemaster bandoleer, flood generator etc, sometimes those cards were out of stock for days. One VERY SIMPLE METHOD to address this with no effort is to introduce unlimited draft mode, free to access, available at all times, with the reward of wining the draft very little or as much as what you'd win normally playing ranked/campaign. This code is already in the game, takes no effort, and lets players experiment right off the bat all the runes to their heart's desire. There's the benefit of evening the playing field; no power imbalance between decks unless theres a poor job at balancing runes. Livens up the game by attracting new players since free draft mode gets rid of all accessibility issues, burden of knowledge issues, power imbalance issues all at once. You could have other drafts with more prestigious prizes cost a lot to enter of course. If you were to have a high fee to a prestigious draft, at least players would know the meta of the current set of draft rune rotation. The phenomenon of draft barrier is seen in games like MTG today where if you aren't well practiced in the current draft meta, your first games of draft were most likely money sinks because you are going to lose. Free draft mode would alleviate this. TLDR: free draft mode solves multiple issues, is already coded in the game, and attracts swarm of new players. Theoretically the most correct way to do this in the perspective of balancing/accessibility is to have access to all runes free except reskins, all in-game currency and microtransactions are based on reskins and visual effects, or other ideas. Leading to the final point: 7) True F2P business model This game is advertised as Free to play (F2P), and should be as such. The old SOE and current system are deceptive models which are not truly F2P and more like pay2win. Dota 2 and to an extent League are F2P games. How a TRUE, HEALTHY F2P model works: Most of the players play truly play free. Those F2P players are key for interactions, community and economy. They have full access to the game right off the bat with no gameplay disadvantages (not so for LoL, more on that later). Out of sheer interest because the game is cool, a portion of players would naturally be paying for microtransactions that no way affect the game balance, like reskins, visual effects, etc, economically fueling the company. This is viable because the cost to run a server is quickly compensated by a massive player base. As long as you have the player base because your game is cool, it's up to the company's competence to have creative microtransactions in order to sustain themselves. These microtransactions should not affect game balance. If there's a large player base but not enough money to sustain the company, then the problem lies in the competence of the company for not having enough attractive options in their microtransactions. In the perspective of visual appeals, this is about reskins. There are plenty of other ideas out there, using runes that have different weapons with different skins for example, they could, if they wished, make a visual equipment based system like Dota 2. That's it! Poxnora is a very visually pleasing game and their reskins are nicely done, I'm looking at winter Euan for example, the team already had the ability to do this, their current or old artwork team is already competent, and putting resources into a better visual team is even better. Ever played guild wars 1? Your gear didn't get any better, you played that game for FUN and visual skins rather than a forced grind. TLDR: You can have a successful true F2P business model based on visual appeal that affects no gameplay balance, examples are Dota2 and League. Edit 1: Heavily cleaned up for blondie. Now you won't go insane reading it.
Really, really hard to read this; tried 3 times, failed each one. Try better formatting, clean your text (too much unnecessary information/words), break down the thread into separate topics (therefore threads), make a good tl;dr, create parts and headlines. Also, mentioning the things that they SHOULD have done but obviously haven't first thing in the post isn't really your best choice (irrelevant in so many ways).
While I agree the current results of the revamp are anything but favorable, I disagree that it was a poor choice to revamp, in general. I guarantee you that had DOG made a number of choices differently with regards to how they applied the revamp, many would be praising it as the best thing that ever happened to the game. Many were already starting to do so before the veil was pulled back. (see the preview threads) As I read through the rest of your points, I can't help but feel like I'd be copy-pasting large portions of my own suggestion thread if I responded to every point. To avoid doing so, I've linked my thread so you can read through it at your own pace and will focus my feedback on points I didn't cover. #2) At this stage, it would likely be more work to revert the upgrade system to the previous four option setup. There are a number of advantages to the current system worth exploring, but the devs need to figure out how to provide compelling upgrade choices before we can do so. #3) You're making "blanket" (generalized/sweeping) suggestions without providing context. Which abilities do you consider "fluff?" What are some examples of abilities you consider "useless?" I find it difficult to agree/disagree that your suggestion is easy to do without knowing what you're referring to. Some specific examples would be appreciated #5) This felt more like a rant than feedback. I agree that the current Marketplace is prohibitive to new players, but what suggestions do you have for improving the situation? Do you want the the ability to purchase individual runes with gold? Do you want lower prices? What, exactly, do you want to change? #6) YES! I completely agree with the idea of a free (practice) draft mode: Practice Draft: costs nothing, but you don't keep any of the runes. Gain gold/XP (more for placing 1st/2nd) at similar rates to the Training Grounds. Gold Draft: costs slightly more than a single booster pack. You don't keep any of the runes, get a booster pack for participating and win an additional pack if you place 1st/2nd. Gain gold/XP at similar rates to Ranked. Ticket Draft: the default drafting mode, (almost?) exactly as before. #7) I agree that DOG would benefit from having it's financial focus shifted towards aesthetic features, but they need to stabilize a number of things within the game before they can fully commit to it. I'd rather they adjust existing prices and add more purchasing options before they make the leap to a modernized F2P model. I would be skeptical of anything other than careful steps towards that goal. ----- I didn't play GW1 for the reskins, and "fun" is a terrible word for describing anything in the context of game design. It's an entirely subjective word with zero objective value. I played GW1 for the collectible nature of their massively customizable skill system. Others played it for the well-supported PvP system. Very few would state that their primary reason for continuing to play (even now) is/was reskins.
kudos for actually reading past that initial draft, i've cleaned it up. definitely crawling your thread in detail now, it's exceptionally well done and puts mine to shame. I made the thread kind of as a vent because I've been saying most of these things since before revamp and predicted the results we have now, they were just drowned out by the forums and labeled as skepticism, guess I came back to vent a bit. #3) They are more or less doing the same thing now, they are mass removing a lot of abilities in a blanket fashion, manually readjusting etc, except a lot more chaotic and as you put it in your thread, 'lacks perspective'. If they were working on top of the old system at least they have a healthy point of reference, and saved themselves months of time and resources which were critical opportunity cost in making a forward jump with this game. 5) All of the above, if we assume they arent giving all runes for free like I proposed, then the current prices and exclusivity of rune acquisition are obviously unfeasible to new players, so global drop in price, all runes buyable with gold would be a great start. 6) Amazing system! Love it 7) I think they could have done this from the get-go, as in as soon as they acquired the game. They just didn't for whatever reasons and I sensed a hint of greed in there, I don't have proof though. The runeforge for example and the removal of buying runes for gold, they actually went out of their way to make the shard ratios ridiculous, and went out of their way to remove all the direct gold-2-rune options we had, and this was in no way improving what we already had. Regarding GW1, to me PVEwise it didn't have that forced grind mentality compared to typically WoW for example where you must grind for this set of gear before you are able to advance to the next set of gear, I logged on to PVE for the fun of running the dungeons, and the reward was skins that did not make me stronger. And to me that is actual fun. Games these days have an artificial pressure upon you to grind, like WoW, you were forced to grind N just to begin playing the game, like grinding for basic PVP gear just to begin PVPing, grinding pre-raid dungeons just to start raiding, etc. Poxnora model is grind N hours so you could accrue gold just to acquire key runes that would make your deck work or not clunky to play, etc. GW1 has no such pressure, thats what I was getting at, and both WoW and pox could be the same if they wanted! Edit1: Sorry forgot to address your first paragraph. It is generally agreed that a revamp is not bad, the point I wanted to make was that they chose a terribly inefficient and chaotic system. I suspect out of greed they wanted to capitalize on the existing token/CP system and perhaps out of nostalgia reasons wanted to do their old nora per upgrade system, perhaps a revamp like this saves them the effort from understanding the old meta fully? All speculation, again I don't have proof. The point is I think a revamp based on the old system was fully viable as proposed in my first thread, achieves about the same results, with a lot less effort, time, and resources required. We'd actually be swimming in new players right now and they can be making money if some key rational features were implemented, no idea why they are not...
