devtrackers.gg
Tl;dr: Duplicate protection is not functioning the way a lot of people expected. In case it's considered by design by Team 5, and not a bug, I want to catalogue all the messed up experiences that result from this in an effort to convince them that it should be considered a very bad experience and a bug that should be fixed.
I've seen lots of people finding duplicate protection not working the way they exist, including for myself. There's a degree to which it does work: Caverns of Time packs will give you unowned Caverns-exclusive cards before it gives you cards you already own from other sets. But it does not in general give you unowned Caverns cards that also belong to other sets before giving you owned Caverns cards (e.g. you can get an additional "Caverns" A Light in the Darkness even when you own already both "Whispers" A Light in the Darkness before you get a Worgen Greaser even if you don't own Worgen Greaser). A lot of people were not expecting this. The blog post made it sound like it applies in the more general case:
Duplicate protection applies to both the original version and the Caverns of Time version of all 113 reprinted cards. That means that if you already have these cards from the original set that they appeared in, you won’t open them again in Caverns of Time packs until you have all cards of a given rarity from the Caverns of Time set – meaning that players who already have the reprinted cards will be able to get all the new cards even faster!
Note that the blog post does not say "until you have all cards of a given rarity exclusive to the Caverns of Time set", which is what would more accurately describe the way it's actually working. What's going on in general appears to be that the post made it sound like the different versions of the card work interchangeably, but in reality there are 2 separate versions that are treated as separate in most ways. At this point, I'm not sure if this is considered a bug or is the intended design, but below is an attempt to catalogue (feel free to suggest other things I missed that I should add) all the negative and/or confusing experiences that result from the way it currently works, so that hopefully if it is by design Blizzard can see that it is a bad system that should be fixed:
- The value of Caverns of Time packs (both non-golden and golden) goes down a lot if they cannot be used to help fill out collections. It circumvents the whole point of duplicate protection in the first place if I can keep getting duplicates of cards I already own rather than getting a card I don't own, e.g. A Light in the Darkness over Worgen Greaser.
- Cards earned through Caverns of Time packs do not count towards the achievements for getting all the cards in particular sets.
- A corollary is that when you get duplicates from Caverns of Time, the collection does not consider them duplicates for the purpose of disenchanting (i.e. you can't just press the global disenchant button for them). If you do want to disenchant, it's hard work to navigate to the specific set to disenchant them that a lot of casual players won't figure out. Similarly, searching for "Extra" does not show the duplicate copies as extra.
- Adding to that point, it is unclear if it is even considered "safe" to disenchant duplicate copies across sets. If, for example, Mean Streets Worgen Greaser and Caverns Worgen Greaser are effectively considered two separate cards, if a future Twist format includes Mean Streets but not Caverns, does it mean I can't play Worgen Greaser if I only own the Caverns version but not the Mean Streets version? Can the developers give us assurance they will be treated as interchangeable? Or can the developers give us assurance that Twist formats would always be set up to avoid this problem? Or is this actually by design to make more money by getting you to need to actually own both versions of all these cards to truly have a full collection?
- An added issue is that this devalues Wild packs in general. Even if you don't purchase any Caverns packs, and even after you've got the Caverns-exclusive cards, you can now get duplicates of cards you already own before getting other unowned cards. For example, if I'm missing Rinling's Rifle from for Darkmoon Faire, I can now start getting the Caverns version of A Light in the Darkness (even though I own both Whispers versions) before getting to these unowned cards that I want. Again, this is basically screwing duplicate protection in general even for folks who don't want to participate in Caverns packs specifically.