Is there a feasible way for a new player to start anymore?

I haven't played in a long time, and my own situation had my thinking: If I didn't have pleasant memories of the game and enough runes to toy around with middling decks/use poxbox, why would I even give the game a chance?

I just imagine using one of the free decks, jumping on and getting instantly obliterated by the handful of people who still play. With little new blood and with no recourse in deckbuilding beyond spending a large sum of money on a game I haven't really begun to understand or enjoy due to one-sided stomps, where's the hook to continue playing and buy packs?

Seems like a bigger issue than balance, but then I'm not a doctor and pretty awful at the game at the moment.

 

Dumping about 500 dollars into poxbox.

 

Doesn't really seem like a sustainable business strategy for a game company due to obvious reasons, but again I'm no doctor.

 

As the game is right now I don't see a way for a new player to get into it without spending a large amount of money.

In my opinion the reason why Pox Nora is hard to get into is the fact that Pox Nora doesn't have enough new players. If we had a bigger playerbase the Training Grounds wouldn't be a wasteland and a newcommer could be eased into the tortures of ranked play with people of equal skill levels in there. But as it is we can't give new players an experience to enjoy because we have no new players. It's actually a somewhat interesting problem!

I think the official DOG statement was that they want to fix all the balancing and gameplay issues first and then start a marketing campaign to increase the player influx. Until that happens PN will be a rather horrible experience for a newbie, I imagine~

 

Training grounds needs incentive . Some sort of a reward system or something . Maybe if you win X amount of games with a BG the runes become yours to keep.

 

The game's structure is kind of archaic in a F2P landscape that contains games like Dota 2, Hearthstone, TF2, and WT/WoT. I think "Spend a ton of money or don't play" isn't really going to fly when there are very, very well made games that require little to no investment to access their content. Even Hearthstone, which does the TCG thing, makes it easy to get a pack or two a day if you're casual, and if you're good quite a bit more -- the caveat being that they don't allow trading because Blizzard doesn't like their profits going to third parties (see: Diablo 2-3).

 

There is no way for a new player to come into the game as it stands. There probably won't be for quite a long time. You could invest about $100 in boxes and have enough trade power to get what runes you wanted outside of legend heavy decks.

You would be foolish to conduct such large trades in the current balance climate however. Hard to get into and hard to convince investing in other than love of the game.

 

They really need to revamp the new player experience. the free decks. the starting runes... the gold gain... tons of stuff needs to be redone to match other modern f2p tcg's like duel of champions infinity wars...hex...etc...


poxnora was designed to use mtgo's model of pay to play... sony wanted to force it to be f2p but they didn't actually do enough to make it a viable option. either redo things so f2p actually WORKS... who cares if you get a lot of leeching players who don't pay the company anything, if the game is popular you'll still attract more paying whales. OR remove f2p entirely and just pray you can squeeze your few remaining players for a lot of $$$.


In order for a rich person to blow 500$ on pox he needs 1000s of noobs to curbstomp, and those noobs aren't going to play poxnora when there are so many other more friendly f2p tcg options.

 

careful, baskitcase might accuse you all of being my alts.

 

Wait a little, you cannot expect to have a golden road leading to a dark pit, first fix the pit, then make the road to it.

 

It a short, heavily sarcastic, and likely British accent, no.

DoG has barely had the game long enough to fix the champion pool let alone address NUX. They're having to dredge through an archaic code infrastructure to make sense of what's now going on in Pox, and trying to do so with what I imagine is a slightly larger team than SOE was giving the game before they sold it.

So, to be more fair to expounding on an answer, NUX and getting players into Pox will likely not be any kind of priority until DoG irons out gameplay, balance issues, bugs, and gets a chance to put some polish on all of it before worrying about attracting new people here.

It's just not a good idea to try and attract new people into a construction site. I've been told iron girders falling on people isn't a solid strategy for retaining or promoting people into investing in your product.

 

Hey, again, I'm no doctor. But the game being balanced for the current meta revealed some worrisome nonsense: Drakewing Swarm was the poster child for Swarm and for some reason does not have swarm; Slipworm was one of the first constrict users back in the day as an anti-range unit, but no long does its job and doesn't have constrict. The balance tweaking is obliterating fundamental cards, so maybe it should wait until they find a way to lure in fresh blood.

Having basic, common cards meant to introduce players to concepts stripped of their purpose speaks toward a broader theme in the complaints directed toward the revamp. It's hard to fix so many runes, I know, but just sticking Regen/1/2/3 on something and giving it a price tag isn't balance.

So, I'd say the current team didn't really fix any balance issues, they just changed them. Balance isn't going to be easy to fix when no one is playing. MTG still exists because despite the insane decks each year, they exist only in the pro environment -- I can go down to a hobby shop and make back my money in a booster draft, and also do the similar crap in their online service.

There's an easy way to make Pox popular again.

 

They're not even trying to balance for the current meta, which is where I think a lot of people are getting hung up. Gedden's goal, or as far as I understand it, was to get something in place, so that we don't have the egregiously craptastic mess that they adopted buying the IP.

And we're just going to have to agree to disagree on what should be taking priority. But I'm pretty sure it's a better idea to get the game some place stable before trying to lure in new blood.

 

I have said this once and ill say it again, pn needs to go back to its roots, training grounds used to have nearly 100 players on average staff members were always there and there was tournaments for new players, the winner got a free rune if i remember right it was a rare and sometimes a exo these runes were donated by established players who cared about getting new players involved, to me this is really the only way you can interest new players, I just returned after a long pn vacancy, if i didnt have runes avatars and gold would i start from scratch? no I wouldnt for the sole purpose that this game isnt kind to new players, and wont be until dog realise that the way things are right now are NOT working.

 

I think its completely possible to make a deck with just commons and uncommons that you can beat rarer card decks with. However, it might not be very easy to a new player because you need experience.

Does Pox work in any mobile systems? So many games have gotten popular via app store/playstore. Would this be the next stage? Or if it not possible to get it to work in all small screen phones because of the complexity, what about tablets?

 

getting into the game with not much money?
no problem. rarity is not everything.
this is a high skill game, you have to practice anyway a lot to get the feel.
start without much money and rule the top 20?
I think not.
But on the other hand i got a lot of stuff... but wont be able to be top 100
so who cares.

 

I completely disagree with the majority of posts here. It is possible to get into the game with little or no money. Simply focus on completing the daillies every day and join a guild, quite often a helpful guild is willing to help you get a basic deck up and running by giving or loaning you runes and helping you create a deck.

The revamp made it a lot cheaper to play Pox

find a faction you like and get involved in the faction forums, see if they have a rune pool and try to use your gold to buy packs regularly , once you have a few runes, make the most of the rune forge!

 

I can't agree that dallies being accessible for new players to start on gold gen. Dallies for the most part require rune variety or trick decks. Deck variety requires a lot of runes and trick decks have been getting steadily nerfed while requiring runes new players may not want in he first placed. Take for example the titan caller daily this week. Would that be at all fun for new starter deck who has to find a way to focus the titan caller while she can summon 2 titans a turn with or without fonts? How about the draksar boss with bounty hunter and surge? Centipede required a fairly focused aoe deck since the centipedes were endless. Unless players are getting a shot at "goblin brute" type dailies every day and most will have to go through something much more demanding first I wouldn't call it new player accessible.

Faction rune pools are also all but extinct. In the past there was 1 faction rune pool per faction, usually 2 private faction rune pools per faction, and then you had the people who made it a business. If you knew a few people there were even more private collections all before you even hit the trade section or bazaar. Now we have 2 pools to choose from and that SL one that cropped up if it's still active. Nowhere near what it used to be.

Guilds I won't comment on as I never bothered with them in Pox nora. I would think that a guild offering anything but commons to a new player considering player retention would be silly though. Also very unlikely to stay a trend with the dwindling player base if new players somehow came in force.

I can agree with cheaper entry. At about 5 boxes you should have enough runes to trade for or pull a majority of 2 decks you want to create that isn't completely legend Exo. I have actually never pulled more exo / legends over the years than the small time frame DOG has taken over. I get around 10-20k trade power a pack lately with the last 3 boxes or so yielding me a very large trade boost even now.

 

Honestly I don't get what everyone here is talking about it really only takes about 1 box to get into the game. Buying packs is like an almost like a 80 % chance of getting a exotic or leg in almost every pack I got something higher then a rare .And because of revamp legs and exotics are not needed as much anymore. I myself have been playing since beta of this game and I bought 1 box when Sony took over for the first time and I consider myself rich in game if the new player really wants to obtain good runes they will find a way. Yes it could be a little easier I suppose but its not impossible lol.