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The economy - for those who have plenty of time at hands


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2 minutes ago, Ponni said:

Ok, good to hear on the distributions. Would it be possible to share details on how many boosters a single user could earn doing achievements or which cards you perhaps are being considered as achievement rewards? Or is this a secret until the release? ; )

I know there is a megathread on achievements, but I am not sure I have read any details in the forum on what will be after the release.

// Ponni

That decision is not final yet, so I have no information to give as of now :P

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8 minutes ago, korsbaek said:

I dont understand why you would limit the trade of gold between players, makes little sense to me.

Devs made the choice to bind mikro progression (upgrades) to gold deliberately. A nontradable currency makes a lot of sence for a progression system, one reason would be to make multiaccounting less efficient. But there are many more.

If you think of gold as some sort of experience points, the system makes a whole lot more sence. :)

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The static card shop is probably one of the best ideas I have read thus far.

The static card shop could not only allow one to purchase specific cards to finish a deck and control the level of inflation on the AH but one could take it a step further and allow you to sell to the shop and get a BFP refund based on rarity. Not a high amount but it would allow you to properly dump the 3 BFP AH cards that few buy and clog the AH sorting tables. Some cards like Nox Carrier would simply be better off sold to the merchant rather than trying to increase it's effectiveness in game or put it on the AH.

I would also like to see more to do within the game. It sounds strange that the best way to get cards is to sell a booster pack and focus so much on the AH. It's like the reverse of most every card game out there. The AH in most card games is meant to find specific cards needed to finish your deck.

It would be also nice to play the game for more than an hour before it becomes less desirable to do so rewards-wise. 20 BFP for a map is paltry and simply encourages me to do whatever daily missions I can, get my one pack and log out. Can't say that is helpful in building a community for essentially a largely multiplayer game.

 

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6 hours ago, Kyoji said:

It sounds strange that the best way to get cards is to sell a booster pack and focus so much on the AH. The AH in most card games is meant to find specific cards needed to finish your deck.

The prices at which cards are being sold at in the marketplace currently suggest that nearly all boosters are worth their value, some even more (meaning buying the booster is better than the cards from said booster). So I am very confident about your statement that selling boosters and buying the cards instead in the marketplace is the best option. For specific cards, AH is and will be the best option. If you simply want cards, boosters can be equally as good or better (as of now).

6 hours ago, Kyoji said:

It would be also nice to play the game for more than an hour before it becomes less desirable to do so rewards-wise.

This is a never ending battle: some people want rewards quickly, some people don't. We can't make everyone happy. You'll have to rely on future achievements or own goals, besides the current quest system and daily rewards, for more content for now.

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2 hours ago, Ladadoos said:

This is is a never ending battle: some people want rewards quickly, some people don't. We can't make everyone happy. You'll have to rely on future achievements or own goals, besides the current quest system and daily rewards, for more content for now.

I understand. I can only speak for myself naturally. I think there is a difference and fine line between slowing down the game and forcibly stalling progression. In a game like this whereby new asset development is limited I would argue that the way to increase longevity isn't necessarily to make the game a crawl early on but rather put high tier rewards for people to achieve such as the use of promo cards being used as a BFP sink later in the game. 

I can only speak from my own logical hypotheticals, however, I think that reducing playtime would inadvertently hurt the game in a few ways:

For one this game isn't in a vacuum and there are other games and consoles releasing around the same timeframe. If one puts down the game after a few hours and plays something else there is that possibility they get hooked onto that instead. Look at any steam library to see traces of that.

Second I would think that lower playtimes would hurt people trying to find multiplayer matches due to a lower lobby of players.

Third is the simple fact that progression is a tightrope that should feel challenging without being tedious. Especially now we see the after effects of a mixed economy in the AH where a single card that isn't even rare or ultra rare costs 2 or 3 packs worth of cards. Now one may say that it's fine because you can just use your packs to buy the cards you want, but again I remind everyone that this is a deck building game (plural). In other words in order to get one card for one deck you need to remove a card that could otherwise be used in another deck.

While it should take some time to build a deck, I think that one pack a day is a bit too low. The declining rewards from quests should be slightly increased as well as make more challenging missions offer slightly more rewards on a gradient scale. This would allow people to reasonably get 2 packs a day doing a daily and grinding through missions with playtime. Keep in mind that for upgrades we are already having to grind missions to get them and with duplicates and all it could take many missions to get one of the cards you want. 

Possible solutions?

Some have already been stated in this thread so I won't tread on them again.

Due to duplicates being a thing if you wanted to reward players and give them something to work towards then make upgrades consume a duplicate card. In other words to go from level one to two it would require two of the same cards plus the upgrade or rework charges.

This would allow you to increase the amount of packs one can gain without effecting the economy too bad as people will now need multiple copies for themselves while allowing players to experience the fun of deckbuilding and not have to play with the same deck in over 50 missions because the only way to get a deck is to buy single cards on the AH.

Granted I know my suggestions are just that, mine and I don't expect everyone to agree. I am only providing what feedback I can from my perspective. :)

Edited by Kyoji
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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm sorry, if this post is a bit out of place or maybe this idea has already been posted, but I didn't read the whole thread, only the initial post and a few replies. But anyways, here we go...

I'm going to make a bold statement about the economy of this game.
The statement is, that we do not need another money sink, since we already have one, which is able to balance the economy - Boosters!

 

My argument goes as follows:

Boosters are always 450 BFP (Ignoring the 100BFP discount and faction boosters). They always yield eight cards with different values, which are mostly determined by their rarity and their usefulness ingame. Each card in the game has a certain probability to appear in a booster. Therefore, we can calculate the expected value you get out of each booster. This can be done by multiplying the current value (in BFP) of each card in the game by its respective probability to appear in a booster and adding all of these numbers up.
Now, what would a "Skylord economicus" (aka. SkyEc, a player who only plays the game to get as many BFP as they can) do?
They would calculate the expected value of a booster and compare it to its price. If the expected value is higher than the price (i.e. over 450 BFP), they would buy boosters, since, on average, they could sell the cards they get for more than what they invested. If the expected value is lower than 450 BFP, they would not buy it.
Now let's assume people would grind BFP like crazy, inflating the currency. This would mean, that the prices for cards in the AH would go up. Therefore the expected Value of a booster goes up as well. At some point the expected value of a booster exceeds 450 BFP, at which point it is, on average, better to buy boosters until you get the cards you need and sell the remaining ones than to buy them straight from the AH. Therefore, SkyEc would buy as many boosters as they can, removing currency and creating cards. This deflates the currency and inflates cards. This would go on, until the expected value drops below 450 again. At that point people would start trading on the AH again and grind BFP.
With this push and pull on the values of cards, the economy should be somewhat stable, fluctating only a little around the break-even-point, where the expected value is around 450 BFP.

Now, here are some problemsI found with that idea:
First of all, boosters are a gamble. It is a known fact in psychology, that humans typically don't gamble, if the stakes are high and the outcome is low, even though they would win money on average. This means the average player would not buy a booster, when the expected value is only 451 for example, therefore not acting like an ideal SkyEc. This shifts the break-even-point mentioned above. It will not be at an expected value of 450 BFP, but quite a bit higher.
Second, grinding cards out of boosters is tedious and time consuming. Imagine, you are in a situation, where you desparately need a certain card, e.g. a charge for your mountaineer. Even if it may be economically better at that point to buy boosters until you get one, it may take tons of boosters. Furthermore you will have to wait until people buy the remaining cards from those boosters to get the money you spent back. Therefore it might just be easier to buy a mountaineer of the AH, even though it might be expensive.
Lastly and most important, the player can not easily see the expected value of a booster. This would require them to Check the AH for every single card, get the value of each card, know the probability for each card and then do the math. Let's be honest - no one is going to do that by hand!

Therefore I want to propose the following idea:
If we could have a way to see the expected value of a booster, maybe using a tool like @Maze's Skylords Marketplace Journal (See this post) or maybe even a display right ingame at the booster page in the store, which would let us see an estimate of the expected value, people could act accordingly and buy boosters, when their value is high. Maybe they wouldn't start buying them, when their value is 451 BFP, but maybe at 500 BFP and certainly when it is syrocketing to values of >1k BFP.

Imo this solution has some benefits. First of all, it doesn't need a lot of programming effort (At least that's what I would guess) unlike a whole new card store etc., since we already have the infrastructure for it in place. The only problem would be to figure out, how to implement a way to calculate the expected value (especially how to determine the value of each card?).
Another benefit is, that this will keep the supply up for both cards (through boosters) and for currency (through grinding), which makes for a healthy economy (At least that's what I've heard, I am by far not an expert on economics). And you will always find the cards you need on the AH.
This solution might also be more incentivising for a wider range of people to sinl sind their currency, since they immediately see, what they are getting for their money, while "classic" currency sinks, such as a promo-market, only appeal to a small percentage of people with very huge moneybags.

Well, anyways, these are just some thoughts I had the last few days, which I think might fit this topic. If there are any obvious logical mistakes in my argument, please tell me!
I would love to hear, what you think about my ideas. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Am I missing something obvious and make myself look stupid? Just feel free to comment. :)

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2 hours ago, Metagross31 said:

I'm going to make a bold statement about the economy of this game.
The statement is, that we do not need another money sink, since we already have one, which is able to balance the economy - Boosters!

The target for an additional money sink is not to increase booster values (which always stay the same). The taret is to reduce the pricegaps between highvalue and low value cards recived from boosters.

In our current economy more and more bfp and thus cards are pumped into circulation and since boosters are boud to their value the only way for cards to retain their combined value is to increase high rarity (and demanded) card values while low rarity cards (and undemanded) drop in price until they're basicly worthless. This will generate an economy with ultra rare cards being ridiculously pricy while common cards can't be sold even for 3 bfp. The current faction boosters help to keep supply of certain cards in check and the effect is spread evenly between all cards instead of just a couple of cards (like it was before with Infect etc.).

All in all: An additional money drain does not prevent this from happening, but it slows down the process by keeping the rich occupied with draining the economy instead of flooding it. The rich ppl in the economy have the biggest impact on it and could excellerate this process by buying a lot of boosters at once, basicly flooding low rarity demands and therefore raise prices of high rarity cards.

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