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Thank you for your response. I don't know if it was communicated somewhere but I'm just worried that it will set false expectations on users only to be disappointed comes open beta time.
Thank you for your response. I don't know if it was communicated somewhere but I'm just worried that it will set false expectations on users only to be disappointed comes open beta time.
We tried to make it clear in the pop up that happens after the tutorials when you get the wildcards, but I don't think we were explicit enough.
Trying to compensate by working it in where I can answering questions. Apparently in all caps sometimes..
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Thanks for going into it a bit more!
We definitely don't want people feeling miserable if they didn't play for a day. The current quest system will let you bank up to 3 quests, so you only have to play every three days for totally optimal XP. We have ideas on how we'd take this further in the future if needed.
How much quests warp gameplay and in what ways is something we have thought about a lot. We've tried to make our quests generally aligned with winning, though if you're REALLY min-maxing them, it can still lead to some odd plays. We're trying to strike a balance for the people who love them as inspiration to try something new or only want to play a couple games a day (this is a lot of players), and those who'd rather play their own way no matter what.
While it doesn't totally solve the feeling that there's value on the table, our game-win XP is very high relative to quests compared to genre norms. Hopefully this helps at least a little.
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We'll have to see how the quests we've created for LoR work out. We fully intend to curate them and add more over time.
As a last note, we want there to be non-trivial XP on losses. Right now it's pretty paltry because we don't have protections in to avoid abuse cases, but once we have those, legitimate losses will be a decent source of XP.
For your 1st point, thank you. Your reasoning makes a lot of sense, and it's good to know that it's a major goal.
For your 2nd point, can you clarify a bit on what exactly do you mean by the "lackluster" feeling? It just seems to introduce unnecessary RNG to the reward system, something that you have clearly stated that you would like to avoid. Basically if you try to finish 1500 dailies only every week, it means that you have a half a week (3500 exp = 3.5 days) extra from the rest of the players, which is a huge advantage.
Just to give you an example. Today I got a 500 gold quest "play x colors" in MTG:A, which is in my current best deck (Golos Fires) colors. Somehow I managed to painstakingly win 4 games (2 BO3 matches) without actually finishing that quest. Now I really enjoy this deck and want to play more, but it's not optimal for me to do so, so I'm going to just turn off the game and wait until tomorrow for the quest reroll. Basically I really want to play, but I can't. I'm not sure if this reasoning is something that you can intuitively get from players' behaviour data, so that's why I'm outlining this here.
Some additional questions:
How are you going to compensate players if their cards got buffed/nerfed? What Eternal CCG has done is to only give the equivalent shards value if it got nerfed only, but there are some cases in which it's questionable whether it's a buff or a nerf. For example, it may seems to be a buff when you increase a unit's power from 3 to 4, but then it means that the unit is now exposed to a commonly played removal that hits 4 power or above.
Is there wildcard meter when buying packs like MTG:A? If no, how exactly are you going to balance people who only enjoy constructed vs drafting etc? For example, I hated drafting, and I appreciate that it's actually comparable value to buy packs in MTG:A instead of doing drafting.
Do you plan to have BO3 type of matches, or all matches for now are planned to be BO1 only?
For a lot of players there's an excitement to getting quests that are more valuable than normal...it's a nice mini-jackpot moment for them. As for RNG in the reward system, we're trying to strike a balance, not avoid it. A lot of the rewards you earn in LoR have some element of RNG to them. It's what you buy that has no RNG.
We can see a lot of the behavior you're describing by looking at what players re-roll, when they log out compared to active quest progress etc. A fairly major difference is our ratio of XP from quests and XP for playing biases much more to playing than genre norms. There's still an edge for trying to reroll for only 1500s, but the EV on the margin just isn't very high (100XP when a PvP game win is 250XP).
For your new questions:
Your analysis of the paid advantage seems reasonable and the mitigating factors seem fair. The actual effect of the mitigating factors will depend on the numbers (for example I'm sure most developers intend for many decks to be competitive, but actually achieving that is difficult, although an active balance cadence will hope).
With regards to XP efficiency, one thing I really hope is that efficiency is not determined by games per hour like Hearthstone, because that means the optimal efficiency strategy is playing the best aggro / fastest deck over and over, and that gets boring.
I want to see what we can do about at least mitigating the efficiency of playing the fastest-possible deck. We've talked about this some and it gets pretty gnarly when you start thinking about how to abuse any of the systems that would really help.
We have a design that I think will help, but not sure deck speed will be entirely removed as a factor.
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Our quests generally don't require winning. Winning is inherently more efficient because of the increased agency you have in game, but you can make meaningful progress when losing.