Massively imbalanced in favor of the rich

MtG is super accessible though. You can buy easy starter boxes, then just play for fun with your local friends. It's not a very complicated game either (sure you can argue about the details of the rules, but that's half the fun when playing the game socially). You get something physical to play with, that you own personally and could sell to somebody else if you wanted to.

Pox Nora is nothing like that, and trying to compare it is not helpful IMO.

Some advertising isn't going to cut it either. If the game failed on Steam, I'm sorry to say but that's really saying something. It's hard to get any better advertising than being on Steam these days, especially if you don't have a huge advertising budget (which indies like DOG obviously don't have).

That said, the most important thing IMO isn't to reduce the power level of expensive stuff, but to shield newcomers from the "rich guys" (aka level 99s). And the only way to do that is to get a lot of new players into the game. And the only way to do that is to make the new player experience the absolute number one priority, bar none.

After the game almost died, I really don't get how some people in the community still haven't understood the gravity of the situation. However you feel about catering to the newbies, certainly everyone can agree that it beats shutting off the lights.

 

There are a few players here that still stuck around after the steam sale.

I have to say, however, that the steam roll-out was extremely poorly executed, and there were a lot of changes that were also going along with the game at the same time. They also tried to have a full Facebook integration occur at the same time.

The number influx was great, but the sticking power was overall low, especially due to no real direction towards the main site or the forums (especially important given almost *EVERYTHING* was done on the main site, and the most of the information could have been found on the forums). Some people were able to find their way, but it… was a rough time in the game.

 

Yeah but that's the thing, most players will not go to the forums, no matter how much you guide them. That's always going to be a minority (with healthy, well-frequented games). A few hardcore players sticking around is not going to cut it, because it won't create the critical mass of newbies that is required for matchups to become more balanced again. The skill gap is so big at this point, that newbies really should be allowed to play out the "best of the rest" among themselves.

That's why the new player experience is so critically important. A new player needs to be guided by the game itself, and always have something fun to do. Once they are hooked, they might dig a little deeper. But first you need to hook them. The new tutorials are a great first step, but there is still a long way to go to make the game really new player friendly.

And frankly, if they don't want to pay, we should still do our best to keep them around. Because we need every single new player if we want to create that critical mass of new players. They are the new ones that other new players have a chance to beat. The ones which create the "friendly" environment for new players to become familiar with the game, like how people try their new Magic set with friends first (even if those friends never buy any cards themselves).

 

Can't quote everyone since after reading 8 pages of this, I obviously can't remember who is who.
Also, as a newb player who's played on/off, I guess some things i say have some relevance to the NUX.

Starting out with things I noted:
1. The comparison of MTG to PoxNora.
a. Pox is P2W. Well, I think most TCG's to some degree are. I mean, MTG is basically P2W also. Sure you can build a deck that's budget (say Elvish Predations in MTG) and have fun playing your friends merfolk deck (strictly speaking in Lorwyn terms) and seeing the interesting combos and stuff that arises from tribal themes. Likewise, you can build a budget BG (that's decently good) and play with guildmates in arranged games. I mean, MTG has cards like Bitterblossom, Pox has its LEGs. But no one is FORCING you to play competitive ranked. Like seriously. If i take my first made MTG deck to a Pro Tour, I'm pretty certain everyone and their grandmas there could scrape me (of course there were some bogus comments about how new players blame expensive cards as the reason they lose, whereas Brian Kibler/Jon Finkel can wreck me with basically any deck).
b. For me, the difference lies in the complexity of cards. In MTG someone drops a Jace the Mind Sculptor. You complain that he has an OP card. You take 10 seconds to read the card, figure out how to play around it, and win (or lose). In Pox, I recall recently playing a Mirefolk deck (not even sure if the deck was good or not). I had seen none of those runes before and didn't know what he could do with them. Experienced players see Pox BGs and have a relative idea how to stop it. New players in MTG, even with some obscure decks (other than win combos, which like Cascade Swans/Splitter Twins were basically known and as soon as a player drops something like that you could instantly know a combo was up), can basically figure out how to deal with the deck (given that they could in the first place). Playing that Mirefolk deck I basically didn't know how to counter his pressure (and still don't really).

TLDR:
- Making Legs available to all isn't a bad idea, but shoeboxing nerfing them is quite stupid (unless they are broken which then the need to be toned down into non-brokenness)
- There should be a list of good BG's that players can imitate. In MTG, people post latest winners decks all the time so people have an idea of what is trending lately. Furthermore, somewhere in the arguments, some experienced person claimed he could make good common decks easily. However, back in SOE forums, GabrielQ was almost the only person ever giving me constructed BGs (yeah there were more but Gab was the only consistent one to offer constructed BG's that related to the deck idea I was trying to go for). Kibler goes on deck techs/videos to explain how his current deck works and gives sample competitive decks. We should have made public all the decks that people use during ranked games of Rank 100 to Rank 1 players as well as have a list of generaly budget decks that's actually competitive and fun.

Basically the general idea is that New players don't want to be overwhelmed by too many things at once (rules, basic strats, deck building, advanced techs, massive rune/card pool) while pro players want that.

2. Some suggestions I did like:
-Making a new room for general games and change battlegrounds into Ranked.
-AI to play against outside of dailies.
-More card accessibility for new players (I understand rune forge is there (and I have ~3k credits) but not everyone wants to farm for a month to get enough for that exotic they want). IMO, they should drop the price for the one pack to make it so that people who want to generate shards can do so but provide more incentives (better exotic chance) for those who do farm a month to get a pack. It's really disheartening to farm for a MONTH before you can see a result (to the people arguing that you should spend money for fast results: that's pretty dumb considering that for a new player who wants to test a game out will not want to spend any money at all; that will be like saying that in order for new LoL players to test/see champs really fast, they should spend RP [why free champion rotation exists]). Of course we can't hand out cards but offering some way to get shards efficiently is a good idea.

3. Making a limit on rarity
-Check Urban Rivals. They basically limit on the powerlevel, not rarity, but the same idea.
-Basically, Pox can assign powerlevels to complex runes and say, for example, that a bg can have a power level of at most 100 during some format of ranked. Then people can be competitive without really spending so much getting the newer more powercreeped runes (but spending will still exist).

TLDR for 2/3: Make it so that new players can slowly get themselves accoustomed to the different runes of the MASSIVE rune pool without spending money. Reduce the stress by assigning powerlevel to a lower tier ranked system so that players can graduate to the higher ranked ladder (if they choose to do so). And if they don't it won't be like they are destroying the new players ONLY because they have stronger runes.

4. (personal idea) Maybe have it so that players can temporary playtest decks from other players. Or you can arrange a mirror game and someone inserts a deck and both players use it.

OVERALL TLDR: Make more game modes. Have experienced players bring in players instead of just crushing them in ranked/arranged. Talk to us new players, I promise our newbness isn't contagious.

Iono how good these suggestions are since again I'm quite new to Pox, but I believe some will help NUX?

(inb4 some experience player shits on this post) XD

Edit: So apparently, under the current daily grind rate, 3 pack can be gained every 2 weeks while a box at 1.5 months. Maybe drop box price back to what it was before (once a month), and change pack rate to once a week? (and then all the new players who don't wish to grind for something once a week, they probably weren't the type of players to hold long anyways). And since packs, under my idea have reduced exotic rates and are mainly for seeing new cards and or sharding them for other cards, DoG will still get money for people who are impatient and want to buy boxes (Not sure of current DoG sales, but I'm guessing they are getting more money from boxes anyways).

Edit 2: Actually scrap Edit 1. Instead keep everything the same, but reward players for consistently playing. Say maybe if someone completes 6/7 dailies every week, they can get half an extended pack bonus gold at the start of the next week. And if someone completes say 27/31 (24/28, 25/29, 26/30 depending on the month) dailies for a particular month, they get a quarter of a pack's worth of gold. Miss 2 days one week? No big deal, try again next week. Miss 4 days out of a month? Well at least you still got some of the week reward. This rewards playing (whether this applies to just playing dailies or games agianst players is up to DoG's discretion) which is what most newer games are doing (Puzzles and Dragons, PWI, PTCG, Solforge, etc). This makes the lobbies more filled and makes grinding a LOT more bearable.

 

3 packs is 9k which is (if ONLY playing dailies) around 11 days (~800 gold for doing dailies, if I'm wrong, someone correct me).

If you play a game or two after doing dailies, you'll easily do 1k a day.. IE: 1 month for a box. The daily / weekly reward thing (rewarding consistent logging in) has been done in a lot of games and I imagine is very easy to implement in pox. Maybe if you log in and do the dailies every day for a week you get a free expansion pack? Might be too abusable. But some kind of bonus like that is fine.

 

I'm talking about the Extended packs, which I think are 3.5k each. So 3 packs is a little more than 10k. And just doing dailies is 750, so it was around 2 weeks.

Of course, you could add in a game or 2 every day to get the 1k per day, but some people take considerably on dailies (I remember before I got Euan Clearing Deck, some dailies took me 20+ min [and newer players will take even longer per daily]). So a person playing an hour every day is already quite a commitment, so I think expecting more from a new player is not reasonable.

I basically geared my article towards a new player who just started playing. In this case, he wants to see that the game is fun (which is why I don't agree with removing complexity since that's part of why the game is fun, and also grinding for a long time is not fun by definition), the game is skill based, and they could acquire that skill without putting in money. Of course, after a while, they begin to enjoy the game a lot more and decide to drop in a few dollars here and there. And from Puzzle and Dragon scheme, Pox will be making quite a lot.

 

The "gaming geniuses" that called the shots during the steam launch probably made the (Un)ACA website too!!

Seriously though, "epicfailsauce" does not begin to describe both of those events.

The following pic highlights the real deal vs the squeal.

​

 

Communism is bad.
Socialism is bad.
Murica #1 you dirty non-patriotic commies, welcome to Capitalism.

 

So eloquent, so true, and so fraggin rich of you. Will you join me as a Robot Party Patriot?

We will defeat Emperor obama, Darth holder, and Jar Jar biden... but NOT putin, cause dude be Walter White on steroids!

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