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I'm not trying to whine or convince anybody to stop playing. I do genuinely like the game, and as a PoC-only player it was probably a matter of time anyway given the shift toward PvP focus. But I've thought about this a lot, particularly because I keep thinking, "I have a few minutes, I should open up LoR," followed by remembering why I stopped. Distance has given me some perspective, and I'm hoping that this perspective can turn into useful feedback. (Because I WANT to play. It's fun! It's just that there's so much crap that ruins the experience to the point where I feel worse after trying.)
To be clear, I wasn't doing a slow drop-off. Hell, after the most recent expansion I started playing a whole lot more. I dropped a solid $50 on coins, bought the pass, bought some skins... Actually ended up buying a PoC champion or two, if I remember right. I knew they were unlockable over time, but I like the mode so much - still do, in theory - that I wanted to vote with my wallet. I don't regret it, even though I'm probably not finishing the pass now.
I want to start by emphasizing the things I really enjoyed about PoC:
-Being able to play familiar champions in new ways/with new synergies, either by breaking region restrictions or adding items with new effects. Jhin/Aphelios with Slow And Steady is, to this day, one of my favorite experiences playing a card game of any kind. (Yeah, I'm a Johnny.)
-Having to overcome an unusual drawback, or an opponent with a particular strength, with the tools you have at hand. It's nice when a deck is suboptimal for the task at hand, as long as it's reasonable to try to pull out a win. See Reason 3 below.
-Not having to care about the PvP meta, while still getting to play LoR. The game's design is so, so fun. It's just skewing a little toward solitaire speedruns right now.
So that might provide some context.
Reason 1: The Grind
Cost to unlock a PoC champion: up to 30 shards.
Cost to make a PoC champion 1/2/3 stars: +10/+20/+40 shards.
I'm going to do a hot take here and say that it takes 2 stars for a champion to realistically have a chance at beating Galio, and arguably Kai'Sa; by "realistic" I mean you have enough wiggle room that you don't need to highroll/your opponent doesn't need to lowroll every game in order to win.
If you spend money to unlock a champion, it still takes over a week of playing 5 games a day (4 shards/day, 30 shards means 8 days with 2 shards left over) before you can get that champion to the point where they aren't arbitrarily gated out of content. There is no way to reduce this commitment.
But there's a weekly quest, too! 5 completed adventures - meaning if you lose you've wasted your time - nets you a silver champion chest and a bronze item chest. 5 adventures is a pretty significant investment, so the rewards should be pretty great, shouldn't they? Well, maybe... if you don't roll duplicates. Because if you do, that weekly quest is actually worth less than the dailies.
(Oh, and those item chests are the only way to get relics. You can't buy them or craft them from shards. Starter quests and champion adventures sometimes give you relics, but once you've done them all you're stuck gambling on the weekly bronze reward.)
Reminder that I bought a couple of champions with real money, played literally every day for quest rewards, and put my rewards exclusively toward the new content. I don't have any of the new champions at 3 stars yet. I think only one of them is 2 stars. I have zero Taliyah shards. Zero.
Reason 2: The Endgame
Right now, there is only one adventure that is intended to be challenging for a 3-star champion, and that's Galio. His adventure consists of 2 minibosses - Zoe and Viego - and then a final encounter with Shyvana/Senna/Malphite, where Galio can occasionally show up if you've done something wrong. If I had to, I could probably name every single possible encounter, in order, from memory.
Because after a certain point, it's the only thing you can play without being guaranteed to stomp. And with a given champion, you'll almost always pick the same fights, because certain encounters totally invalidate certain playstyles, so there's even less variety from adventure to adventure.
Yes, the new Kai'Sa adventure is challenging too, but it's shorter, most of the fights are redone (not even necessarily "harder", looking at you Vekauran Vagabond) versions of encounters from previous adventures, and the rewards aren't as good. Worst of all, it suffers from the exact issues Galio's adventure has... which I'll address with reasons 3 and 4.
I'd love a way to add deliberate drawbacks - something like reducing Champion level or star level, or even taking negative powers at the start of a run - and while getting extra rewards for doing so would be nice, at this point I just want to be able to play a different adventure while feeling like I've won through skill rather than an inherently powerful loadout.
But that doesn't exist, so when I want to play one of my favorite decks, I only realistically have one adventure I can play, and I can't even get too experimental because...
Reason 3: You Just Lose
The Zoe AI invariably drops her on turn 1 or 2. She doesn't innately have Spellshield, but she gains +1/+1 with every spell she casts, and her deck is full of ways to grant Spellshield to her. If you have a ping, AND she doesn't have enough Burst spells in hand to overcome it, AND she doesn't get Spellshield in time, AND the AI doesn't have another Zoe in hand, the fight is fairly straightforward.
If any of those aren't true, you probably won't be able to stop her from hitting the board, at which point you have maybe a turn or two before she's a 10/10+ with Elusive and Spellshield. If you don't have an Elusive blocker or a way of recovering health, you just lose. If you have those, but she gets a Stun or Silence (which she has a 1/3 chance each turn of getting for 1 mana), or she's able to Challenge it away, you just lose.
Certain decks can rush her down or ruin her gameplan very easily. Others essentially cannot beat her without highrolling or building in a very specific way.
Viego has similar issues. Don't have enough removal to beat his spellshield+high health every time he gets revived or played? I guess you have to pray for a big unit then... There it is, you drew something that can buy you time! Except whoops, 4 mana Vengeance. You just lose. But wait, you can buy another turn... can you turn it around? 1 mana Dawning Shadow, you just lose. Scraped out another turn with a crazy play? 9-mana Harrowing into another 1 mana Dawning Shadow, you just lose. And none of this is even related to his encounter's gimmick - reviving your units for a turn when he kills them, which is a genuinely interesting thing to play around - it's just Viego randomly drawing something that invalidates your whole match, because the game decides you don't get to reap the benefits of the gameplan you developed or the big play you pulled off.
Even on lower levels you see stuff like this. Azir plays Dais turn 1, Dunekeeper with attack token turn 2? Looks like he randomly drew into 15 damage of overwhelm, hope you have something to manage that. Irelia plays Ribbon Dancer turn 1? Six damage and a free keyword, and that's before you're allowed to even play a card. Ren Shadowblade plays a 1 mana Shadow Fiend with free attack for 5 damage, and if you don't block it, it adds a 1 mana Shadow Fiend with free attack to his hand, and guess what he's gonna do as long as he has mana.
None of the fights I've listed in this section are climactic encounters. Ren Shadowblade isn't even a miniboss. All of them are speedbumps on the path to the challenge you're actually building toward, and they essentially say, "oh, you don't have an answer in your first 2-3 turns? Guess you gotta start over." It's not interesting difficulty, it's progress lost on a dice roll.
Reason 4: Respect my time
When I play against Profiteer on my phone - adds a fleeting Lucky Find to her hand every turn, has lots of ways to generate Lucky Finds - the AI's turn takes so long that my phone goes into sleep mode.
Profiteer is the worst offender as far as I can remember, but she's far from the only one. The AI is capable of making decisions instantly. Why do I have to sit through a 10-second animation every time the enemy plays a Focus card? Why am I locked out of performing any action for a minute or more in a PvE experience? Why can the AI hold me hostage in a game I'm choosing to play, that I can't surrender without losing progress? PvP hostage decks are bad enough. Why does the AI get to pull a Resetti and attack me, the person playing the game, regardless of whether it can beat me through intended mechanics?
This is especially bad if you're at a mana disadvantage. I spent a bunch of time trying to beat Kai'Sa with 1-star decks (see: The Grind) and what I kept finding, over and over, was that I'd play my one card for the turn, and the AI would go "Okay, gonna play this. Do you respond? No? Alright, it resolves. Then I play this. Do you respond? No? Alright, it resolves. Then I play this..." and I'm just sitting there, wondering why it even passes me priority when it knows I can't afford to play anything, and I'm against an AI so it's not like I'm going to bluff a 0 mana answer.
And god help you if you DO have a card that you just don't want to play. You get the same vicious cycle as above, except you have to actually click the skip button every time the AI passes control over. Did you generate Jettison from Coral Creatures? Well, I guess you have to decide whether saving that spell mana is worth clicking "skip" an extra 40 times this game.
...So yeah. Great game, and I love the potential that PoC represents. I'm just done letting it dick me around with avoidable, fixable problems, some of which people have been complaining about since the mode launched. I finally realized after closing it one day that I always feel worse after I've played than I did beforehand, and that just doesn't describe an experience I want to put myself through.
I hope this feedback is useful if a dev reads it. If nothing else, I hope somebody finds this entertaining or thought-provoking.
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