Alright so there has been a lot of debate on what to do with CP and players basically seem split into two camps. 1. Do away with CP altogether 2. Expand the usage of CP and make champions more customizeable again. Both of these have advantages but also significant downsides. This thread is NOT to debate either. Instead I wanted to present a, still mostly unformed, idea that I need to work out a lot more but that may just end up combining the best of both worlds. I want to put it out here just as food for thought. IDEA We keep CP and include stat upgrades again with one difference. Runes now have the ability to change into DIFFERENT runes depending on which stats you upgrade. For example: You start with a base vanilla Minotaur of the lowest possible rarity. It costs 60 nora, has a damage of 10, defence 1, speed 5, hitpoints 50. Slow but bulky like you would expect from a Minotaur. Now you have a certain amount of cp to upgrade those stats with and at certain stat thresholds, you have the option of changing your vanilla Minotaur into a different rune of a higher rarity. For example, say I upgrade its defence to 3. You will get the option to change your vanilla Minotaur into a Minotaur Sentry, which would be one rarity up and also cost a bit more in terms of nora. Alternatively, you could upgrade the vanilla Minotaur's damage to 13. This gives you the option to change it into a Minotaur Fury, also one rarity up but focused on offence instead of defence. For the sake of this example, I choose to make my Minotaur into a Sentry. You will get some new static (defensive) abilities and once again, a set amount of cp to upgrade your champ with. This time I choose to upgrade its damage to 14. This gives me the option to change my Sentry into a Minotaur Gladiator if I so choose (a higher rarity, more nora-expensive rune with balanced attack and defence). Conversely, if I further upgrade defence again, I get the option to change into...say a Minotaur Bulwark (a higher rarity, more nora-expensive rune purely focused on defence). The possibilities are endless here and best of all, a system like this would allow for 'grouping' the hundreds of currently existing runes into an indepth, highly customizeable, but yet clear system. At its core would just be the vanilla runes (which would be playable by themselves as cheap options) with all the classes/more complex runes added later through upgrades. Of course you would still buy packs. Say I find a Minotaur Gladiator in my pack, I would be able to use it immediately without first having to cp a vanilla Minotaur. In essence, if you got all the runes you needed directly from packs, you would never have to cp (except if you wanted to customize the champs stats a bit). And certain runes like legendaries, heroes and LEs would only be available through packs and not through upgrading of base champs. I'm sure there are a ton of issues with this and I would like to hear them (the main one I can think of right now is that, if people can obtain most runes through upgrading base ones, they might not buy as many packs as they used to). Hopefully we can move the idea and with it the whole CP debate forward and come up with a solution everyone could be happy with.
- Hey ... you tried. Too many paths, too many variables...commons turn into specific exotics I want? galactic money loss. They would need tons of upgrades for say a barbarian.
I know, trust me I did think of that But it might not work out that way. For starters, they wouldn't really need to design anything new. The 'tons of upgrades' are already in place as currently existing runes, they'd just need to be organized under a base rune so to speak. Certainly wouldn't be easy and yes there would definitely be tons of paths and variables but I don't think that part of the idea is particularly impossible. The game is due to receive a major overhaul regardless. The turning commons into specific exotics part...yeah that's definitely an issue BUT, would it really result in people buying fewer packs? You could make the process of cping a rune take a long time. Hell, it already takes a long time now. If you had to cp a rune from 0 to 200, say 3 or 4 times to get a specific exotic...would many people still not prefer to just buy or trade for the exotic in the first place? People buy tokens now for exactly that reason, to eliminate the grind. And excess runes you get from packs you could always use the Runeforge for to turn them into something entirely new. Which is not to say your point is invalid, it certainly isn't. But there may be ways around it...
It's completely unrealistic, but I'm really glad you mentioned it. Way too complex to explain to newbies, and new expansions would mess up the whole hierarchy of everything. That being said, this is a really unique idea that deserves mentioning.
Create armour and equipment for sprites... give us a few dozen visual enhancements to spend CP on. CP is still fun, but no longer a grind or required. It also allows us to each enhance our BGs to be uniquely ours.
the customization should come from deck ideas, not individual toying with single runes. remove upgrade system in general. downsize abilities per champion to 1-7, but with clear/strong abilities. not abilities giving other abilities. consolidate abilities to have the same mechanics in general. there shouldn't be the difference between slowing/decreasing SPD, for instance. tons of interactive mechanics like Charm vs Fear. make things more universal since it brings balance, richer design (less is more in this case). what you propose is even more complexity and it doesn't add much depth considering how painful to understand this will be...
Heh thanks I know the idea in its current form is unrealistic although I don't think it's AS complicated as people seem to assume. Mainly I'm hoping it will lead to more discussion and perhaps inspire either DOG or someone else in a way. Because I'm strongly against just removing the CP system altogether or making it purely cosmetic. That would, in my opinion, turn Pox into little more than an ordinary online trading cardgame. Think about it, a rune with no customization is really not all that different from a card. Then you have games like Hearthstone, Duel of Champions and MTG already existing. Hearthstone is simplicity itself. The game literally takes 5 minutes to learn and has fairly impressive strategic depth for such a simple game. Duel of Champions actually has a very strong strategic element of positioning that Pox also has while being considerably clearer and more concise. MTG has card diversity out the wazoo. The game has been around for years and has more different cards to tinker with than Pox will ever have runes to choose from. Between these three games, which all have giant multinational brands behind them, how many new players do you think Pox will be able to reel in if it doesn't have something unique or distinctive to it? No, Pox needs something to it that only Pox has and this is just a first attempt at finding it. An imperfect attempt maybe but who knows, it might lead to something better.
This is a really cool idea but I think it would take far too much time/creativity to implement. Especially for the most well represented races. And I see it being incredibly complicated to predict/follow sometimes. I'm all for the minimum change path. Just remove the CP system so every rune starts at lvl 3. For the people who want more change we could assign nora costs to every upgrade and allow any champ to have anywhere from 0-4 upgrades. And we could reinstate vulnerabilities as upgrades for nora discounts.
Well here is my take on this. Despite my suggestion of making it cosmetic, I agree with you. I like a functional level up system. However, I feel that no functional benefit is better than what it is currently. It's an afterthought system, stemming from Pox 1.0. It never was implemented with enough thought or dedication. In some instances, the updates are worthless. In other instances, you MUST have an update for a ruin to be good. In both cases, it's a tedious process to get your rune there. In the end, Leveling needs to be fun. That's the draw of it. If it is not fun, it is done wrong.
??? I'm honestly perplexed by this point of view. Pox Nora is by far the most unique TCG I have ever played. Of all the things that make Pox Nora unique, the upgrade system would rank somewhere along the bottom to me. When you think Pox Nora, you think "trading card game with upgrades", really? It's such a tiny thing in the grand scheme of things. I'd say the USP is "turn based strategy" quite clearly. Duel of Champions may feature positioning, but that's still a far cry from a full-fledged TBS. I'm sorry if I sound a little overdramatic, but I really can't believe you just said that.
Lol I'm sorry. I am well aware that it is something close to heresy to claim that Pox is anything but completely unique but honestly, no, I don't see that anymore. Turn-based strategy...how exactly is that unique? The whole Heroes of Might and Magic series are turn-based strategy games. HOMM1 is in fact pretty much the original turn-based strategy game and it was there long before Pox was. These days, there are many others, some good, some bad. How do I know that? Because I've been looking for one to replace Pox for a long time and while many of them can easily replace the current Pox, none of them can replace the older version. Customization plays a crucial part in this, no other game had it before and none has it today still.
Of course there are other turn-based strategy games, but how many (competitive multiplayer) TCG/TBS hybrids? If you dismiss the TBS element because "there are other TBS games", then I'd point out that there are also countless other games which let you upgrade or customize your units.
You're right, that was poorly phrased. Let's try again. What I've felt for the past few years is that Pox is slowly becoming more and more similar to an actual TCG. If you think about it, TCG's are all turn based strategy games as well. The distinguishing element between them and the current Pox is the fact that Pox has, or had a far stronger element of positioning. Normally in a TCG it doesn't matter (much) where the cards are located on the battlefield (although even this is beginning to change) but obviously in Pox it does matter where the runes are positioned. Not as much as it used to however. Whenever I lose a game now, it seems that the vast majority of the time, my opponent did not win because his positioning or strategy was superior but rather because his runes or the synergy between his runes was superior. Likewise there have been more than a few games where my positioning was absolutely godawful (I distinctly remember thinking a few times 'god I've become really rusty at this game') but which I still won even though my opponent played far better. The games were decided not through strategy or positioning, Pox's 'defining feature' but rather through the innate abilities of the runes. I've observed quite a few high ranked games over the years and discovered this has become true in Pox even at the very highest levels of play. This is usually how TCG's are decided as well. So yes, while Pox still has the unique combination of TCG and TBS, the latter seems to have become far less significant over the years. Pox's other unique selling points: - its customization of runes - its strong faction vs. faction play (and the way this immersed players in the game) have also largely disappeared with the upgrade system and the incessant pushing of split bgs by SOE (along with the general diminishing of the player base). That's why I feel Pox has become, perhaps not ordinary, but certainly far less 'unique' than it used to be. And when you're competing against the kind of games that have come out recently which, for once, not only have big brands behind them but are also very high quality, I think it needs a LOT more to it to get new players. Make no mistake, the influx of players happening now is almost exclusively returning players. New ones are still few and far between.
I do agree with you that positioning and calculation skills have been de-emphasized by the complexity creep (that is after all a major reason why I keep lamenting about that), but from what I've been hearing from the Owls so far, they agree and aim to rectify that issue. I'm not against champ customization (as long as it isn't just creating unnecessary complications), I'm just saying that that alone really isn't going to make or break the game for me. I find it much more important to highlight the game's strategic elements again, which in my view have always been the real selling point.
