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I'm one of the PvP Players who left and tried to come back, here are my thoughts


qudekRa

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Hi guys, a bit of a wall of text while i escape the heat after work, hope the formatting works out. 

You wouldn't know me. Just know i enjoy competitive RTS and had around 60 ladder games on Skylords, but stopped around march(?), when most PvP players left. 

I'm posting this in hope of getting some more opponents on the ladder in the future.

 

I highly appreciate the map and balance changes, though i guess a little too late, as even during EU rush hours, PvP is mostly quite empty - or maybe right now everyone is just catching up on that sweet vitamin D?

 

I think there could be some other improvements made to make PvP even more attractive:

Major Issues I see with free PvP Decks:

  • Some decks are outdated

 Example: all Fire T1 Decks still have Mortar Tower. Since the changes only usable by very good players and not suitable for free tier imo. Cards that got viable through balance changes are completely absent as well

  • Decks are too meta

 Kind of a Catch-22. I guess it makes sense to give out the top meta decks defined by the successful players to put everyone on equal footing, but this leads to most folks deviating only by a few cards from the decklist, and the meta reinforces itself. I guess players that are still active now are getting quite creative - but during the PvP Surge a few months back, for 4/5 games felt quite stale  vs the same Lost Souls or Stonekin decks and if new players arrived, this would definitely repeat.

 Also it feels like some insanely strong cards get disregarded. Maybe i'm just too nooby... but what about Treespirit?! I think since the phase tower nerf this could easily make Nature T1 the strongest. Quite the unfun card though, so guess i'm glad this isn't played.

Minor Issues I see with free PvP Decks

  • changing free decks = keeping (half-)empty deck lists

 Really not a big deal, just a bit messy and not very elegant imo. Did this bother anyone else?

  • Deck lists discourage deck building

 Free deck lists diminish one of the defining aspects of trading card games: Building your own Deck. To be fair you could still tinker up your deck from scratch, but realistically you'd copy a deck list and change it from there. I think it's a bit of a tricky situation: on one hand, i already conceded that the deck lists were a good addition and I also think having a "foundation deck" is benefical for building new decks, but on the other hand it takes away some of the (impossible to quantify) magic & personal attachement to a deck. Does that make sense? Can you relate?

 

My suggestions for free PvP:

I believe all of those issues could be resolved by:

  • Adding additional Deck lists per faction, like:
  1. Themed decks, like Fire+Nature featuring more Twilight Cards
  2. Decks built around some specific strategy, like Frost+Fire built around Homesoil + Rallying Banner + Lyrish Knight,
  3. Decks with no T3 / Decks with expanded T3
  4. Structure-focused decks
  5. A 2vs2 deck with a T4 card
  6. "Foundation Decks" with just some core cards + open card slots

you could even turn suggestions for new deck lists into a community contest

 

  • Giving all PvP Cards // OR // Keeping the rotation-concept, but instead of 2 Decks give 2 complete colours

 Again, I'm grateful for free PvP Cards. But overall the "being-locked-out-of-changing-my-style-for-a-week" while not having built up a personal card-/gold-pool yet, + having had a hard time finding a "personal-flair-main-deck" due to the meta staleness  just left me rather frustrated than happy and ultimately lead to me quitting the game once already. Despite being a huge fan of the mechanics.

 

  • Introduce a Monthly / Seasonal Ladder + Alltime Ladder

 PvE Rankins already have an option to filter the time frame! PvP Ladder right now just shows around 80 active players. For some fresh wind, i suggest a monthly or seasonal (something from weekly to up to 3 months) ladder, that shows just top 100 players (if playerbase is big again maybe 200 again) and starts anew in the next month/season ASAP. At the end of month / season, you could give some goodies like Extra Boosters / Extra Gold / Extra Avatar to high rankers to increase playing incentive. Past Months/Seasons could be saved like in PvE Rankings. Maybe there could even be a non-saved daily ladder ranking with gold/very small bfp reward? I think that could be a better incentive than the PvP daily quests and would would give you an extra pointer to whos active today beside the playerlist in the PvP lobby +maybe we get some interesting rivalries.

 Alltime Ladder should be non-resetting and have no activity decay, would be just a acummulation of all seasons(so no extra queue), and show everybody that RadicalX is still boss. Give extra Ranks / Avatar / Frame / Promo to high rankers. Could make a monthly/seasonal ladder feel more interesting when you see an alltime legend is competing.

 

Edit: Fixed some spelling errors and just some afterthought: Maybe ELO-Rank classes could be rebelanced in general? I remember back in the Battleforge days the highest rank was Legend (Pointy Gold Shield IV). I remember the huge gravitas around the gold ranks. Of course due to the ELO creep gold ranks got common and new ranks were necessary at some point, but with the player base as is, how about balancing the ELO threshold so just around Top 15 Players get gold ranks, and ~top 3 gets teal ranks regardless of ELO ? Could improve the value-feeling of ranks and incite competition

 

You guys have any thoughts on this?

 

Don't dry up in the heat folks, have a good week and see you on ladder, gl hf

Edited by qudekRa
Timer, Kapo and Kubik like this
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First of all thanks for your feedback, agreeing on many of your thoughts here. 

 

To give you some input on the current process as the major aspects you point out are being worked on:

- We expect meta shifts with the bigger balancing patches, that will come soon: Pure Frost and Fire Frost design upgrades will go live next patch, Bandits might get an even bigger overhaul afterwards considering the process of devoloping new cards started recently

- We will move towards to a seasonal system soon - cosmetic rewards are being worked on, we didn't fully decide on when and how to distribute them yet

- We also currently are building a new set of free PvP decks, that will be adjusted due the amount of balancing changes we made up to this point (expect them to be ready with the next patch)

- And on a sidenote: We nerfed Treespirits together with Phasetower & Mortar to prevent the exact type of oppressive gameplay you seem to be worried about 😄 

 

Some other points like expanding the pool of free PvP decks didn't get discussed yet. I think it should be possible to adjust decks to personal needs within a rather short timeframe - still something I will keep in mind. Making entire color trees accessible won't happen in the near future though. Ladder updates and rank/acitivity distributions might be an important topic to discuss before the seasonal system starts, we might consider making some improvements here.

Generally speaking we want to attract more players towards PvP again with fresh content and an optimized system so any feedback in that regard is always going to be appreciated! 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I like the idea of more diversity within the free pvp decks.

Especially 2v2 decks could be gateway for new pvp players, as it is considered to be less stressful than 1v1, like in most other rts-games (Starcraft is a good example for this). Additionally, each deck could come with a small description (Interface adjustment @MarcoMaarwhat its main dynamics are, to guide player choice; as there is relatively few information available about 2v2 matchups and card-combos.  

Furthermore I support the idea of "themed" decks, like the suggested rallying banner Fire/Frost or a Soul Splicer Shadow T1 etc, even (or especially) if these decks are not the strongest meta possible, as that does not matter on lower ranks anyways.

FYI: Within the current system, after one rotation I had Pure Shadow and Pure Fire locked in permanently, because they give me two decks with no overlap and some of the most expensive cards (Harvester, Nether Warp, Cultist Master, Firedancer, Disenchant, Sunderer, Juggernaut) and let me focus on collecting only nature and frost cards, which I prefered for PvE anyways (my first buy was Enlightenment, as during EA times).

Edited by Xanatoss
qudekRa and Metagross31 like this
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/10/2021 at 12:19 PM, Xanatoss said:

I like the idea of more diversity within the free pvp decks.

Especially 2v2 decks could be gateway for new pvp players, as it is considered to be less stressful than 1v1, like in most other rts-games (Starcraft is a good example for this). Additionally, each deck could come with a small description (Interface adjustment @MarcoMaarwhat its main dynamics are, to guide player choice; as there is relatively few information available about 2v2 matchups and card-combos.  

Furthermore I support the idea of "themed" decks, like the suggested rallying banner Fire/Frost or a Soul Splicer Shadow T1 etc, even (or especially) if these decks are not the strongest meta possible, as that does not matter on lower ranks anyways.

FYI: Within the current system, after one rotation I had Pure Shadow and Pure Fire locked in permanently, because they give me two decks with no overlap and some of the most expensive cards (Harvester, Nether Warp, Cultist Master, Firedancer, Disenchant, Sunderer, Juggernaut) and let me focus on collecting only nature and frost cards, which I prefered for PvE anyways (my first buy was Enlightenment, as during EA times).

I think adding some description or maybe even just a plain link to forum posts is certainly possible. Shouldn't be too difficult of a change if we have the content we actually want to put there.

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  • 1 year later...
On 6/19/2021 at 4:43 PM, qudekRa said:
  • Giving all PvP Cards // OR // Keeping the rotation-concept, but instead of 2 Decks give 2 complete colours

 Again, I'm grateful for free PvP Cards. But overall the "being-locked-out-of-changing-my-style-for-a-week" while not having built up a personal card-/gold-pool yet, + having had a hard time finding a "personal-flair-main-deck" due to the meta staleness  just left me rather frustrated than happy and ultimately lead to me quitting the game once already. Despite being a huge fan of the mechanics.

Exactly what I thre into discord today.

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10 hours ago, Pok100 said:

Exactly what I thre into discord today.

Just to clarify, we moved away from the old rotate-every-seven-days, to rotate-every-24 hours since this original post. This should offer a lot more flexability into finding your deck, especially considering you can combine pools and add your own cards. For example, picking the two decks that contain the most cards you want out of Pure Nature / Pure Fire / Twilight N-start / Twilight F-start and adding your own cards to the result should give you great flexibility to make your own decks. Especially considering the most expensive PvP cards are almost all found in the free PvP decks. 

An example; say I want to play Pure Fire, but I prefer Disenchant Purple over Disenchant Green. Then I can select Pure Fire for the bulk of my cards, and Fire Nature, which contains disenchant purple. I can then swap those cards around. 

The biggest roadblock I have found ever since I started playing PvP, was not having the other affinity Netherwarp, but that should be a big exception and not the rule of the average PvP deckbuilding experience.

On a more broader note; back when SR got revived, there was a lot of discussion about the availability of PvP cards. Some people complained that giving out free PvP decks would completely ruin the collecting part of the game, and they wanted the experience of slowly building their decks over time. Others opted to have every single card available, which (beside other reasons) would result in choice paralyzis and overwhelming new players without a guideline or framework. In the end we settled on our current system: free competitive PvP decks for every color, with the option to swap between them and add your own cards. This will put everyone on equal footing* from the start, but still allow for experimentation (like me putting Viridya in almost every single deck 😛 ). 

*While its common in games these days to have the starter decks be just that; starter decks, the decks provided by SR are very competitive and used by most of the player base. Its more rare to see exceptions then you might think. 

Having the rotate system was also another way to allow dedicated PvP players to have a ''point'' in collecting cards and interacting with the market. If you want 3 fully upgraded decks, you would need to collect the cards for one of them. But you should not have to play PvE for months before you can dive into PvP. The old 7-days rotation system was removed however, due to it needleslly block players from trying out decks in their first week(s). 

 

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