unranked battlegrounds IS the same as the old training grounds. If you don't want to face meta, you can try to get a game in training grounds with starter decks.
But problem is you cant use your own runes in training grounds. There I had more fun because rarely you saw players use meta. Meta was for battlegrounds.
Well, the battlegrounds ranked is for meta, but custom unranked games are the exact same thing as the old training grounds, just with a different name. Maybe just some bad matchups recently?
I understand what you say but still very rarely anyone is using non meta even in custom games. Maybe I have been unlucky and get players using meta all the time, and by meta I mean angels and 200-300k poxbox stuff.
I believe the player size is partly due to this. It's going to be hard to run people without large enough collections to have exotics and legendarys floating around or at least a large stock of rares. This game gets what 190 people prime time? It would be like going to a quake 2 or doom convention and not expecting to get matched up with die hards. It kind of reminds me of when i played twisted metal head on and we were only a community of around 50 people. Most of us could run the cars and maps blindfolded there was no new blood to break up the match difficulty because the community was a pool of stagnant vets.
You are very right, same thing happened in metal gear online. Everyone left to play call of duty exept hard core players so oviously every match was high level. But in poxnora there is a way to fix this by creating a room that is just for fun baning legendary, exotic and limited runes.
Before you hit the "ready button" ask not to use meta bg. When I jump in a custom game with a low xp player (and low ranked obviously) I ask if they have any preferences in what I should use. replies were: no FW; I'm new be gentle; go away you OP vet (the last one was strange as I tried to stress him I wouldn't use my better bg and he had 5x more games behind his name). Against the last new player I used a starter bg. He did have good legendaries already, but lost because he made a few early mistakes or had a bad draw.
I play non meta things like stitched every now and then.....and i do find it fun for a while... it makes it more fun when im vs strong decks so its challanging, try to have fun and enjoy the challange
This. You cant expect to have much of a casual community when the playerbase is this small. Once the game gets revamped and Poxnora maybe gets some good advertisement up, we might see more players and therefore there will also be a more casual and fun playerbase. When the advertisement starts it also depends on us (The Players) To give new people a positive experience so that they might stick with the game. Decondor is doing a whole lot just by keeping Poxbox up, and we can do a whole lot just by advertising this game to our friends, so that they can advertise to their friends, etc. I guess DOG will have to make an effort on advertising, but so do we. The sheer advertising power of sharing with friends is surprisingly strong!
I really think when the push for new players start, they need to be shielded completely from the current veterans for a (long) while. The easiest way to do that would be to ensure that the matchmaking system never ever matches a level 99 with a sub level 99 (or maybe start allowing the occasional exception once you reach level 50 or so). Losing against a smarter player is one thing, but losing against somebody with vastly more experience (actual experience, not the "rating" experience) is just frustrating.
TG is great as is. I love having uels of skills instead of runes (though some of the TG BG's need a rebalance)
How about a series of options that you can check off when you make a game that limits the rune pool that can be played in that game? So: Allow/Disallow legendaries or limiteds; Allow/Disallow exotics... and Limit to expansion 1-6; limit to expansion 1-8, and so on?
Interesting idea, the only problem would be if we created a separate lobby it would then potentially split the user base. We may play around with some ideas, but I would also say just hold tight because the balance changes that are in the pipe will definitely have an affect on the meta. We want to make a lot more of the runes viable. If there still seems to be this issue after the balance pass then we may play with other ideas. We have some ideas we are playing with for the training grounds, but we want to keep the Battlegroups fairly static because it is intended to be a tool for new players. There were some fundamental problems with the old training grounds with noob stomping that we want to prevent from happening again.
