Drop Rates

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
21

Indeed.

There have been countless threads demonstrating positive ways in which presumed developer concerns could have been met without alienating the community. If you think there was a mythic gravy train, then fine, many of us in top coalitions understand that dialing it back a little was fine. We’ve said as such. However, it makes no sense to then cripple the income by which we try to attain them in order to gouge us for more real money. It smacks of either greed or desperation, I’m not sure which—but whichever it is, it isn’t player-centric. “You’ll get fewer good cards, and it’ll take you longer to get them, and you’ll earn fewer crystals to spend on acquiring them” is a remarkable trifecta of failure.

By comparison, “We’ll slow down the mythic acquisition, but we’ll give you more buying options and demonstrate more transparency while still maintaining a healthy rate of income” would have been fantastic.

22

You must have missed the rest of my post, which clearly stated the only reason I opened the packs is because I looked through the list and was missing several key cards including the rares.

I’m not moaning about duplicates. I’m disappointed that I blew 900 crystals and got nothing in return. How many crystals do I need to spend to even get a single Rare card that I don’t have? I wasn’t even expecting to proc a Mythic.

And enough with the attitude about “most players not understanding basic probability”. I have a Math degree from Waterloo which at least at the time was considered the best undergraduate program in North America.

In addition, here’s something you don’t understand: Their “RNG” algorithm is not purely random. There is likely some business logic behind it. Savour that for a moment.

23

Here’s what happened 3 months ago when devs tried to test the waters with a more moderate approach:

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/55996

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/55993

24

^^That just proves that we were on a slippery slope. They tested the waters by throttling mythic rewards for NoP, saw that it got a bad reaction, then doubled down bythrottling rewards across the board? Way to go.

25

There was an obvious need to stem the flow of mythics. They tried to test the waters and got a bad reaction, so they decided not to fix it. Kick the can down the road.

We’re now at the end of that road. Can’t be avoided. That’s why we all get punished. Because tough measures are the only ones that will still work. You guys rejected the milder ones when they would still have helped.

Madwren talks of top 10 members understanding the need for these measures. This is the opposite of understanding. But of course, that’s why I supplied the links.

26

@brigby,

I assume there is something like a marketing guy/department, maybe they would consider this :

People will spend money on something that rewards them, that’s’why the mythics that can be bought have done rather well (comsidering the amount of olivia’s’out there).

Offering things like a mythic of choice in limited quantities will get you more money from the whales than this tombola offered now. Buying packs becomes increasingly UNinteresting when you raise up the ranks and increase your collection. The commons and uncommons are filled quickly and the rares usually follow suit.

In essence, start offering something that actually delivers a reward for the money spent.

27

Hi Everyone!

I’m not a top player but I play Mtgpq every day for several month now andxenter every single event and i finish at least in the top 100 most of the time. I’m rewarded with lots of packs and crystals and i’m pretty happy with that.

Normaly i ended up with about 2-4 Mythics a month wich I consider is enough for I don’t spend that much money in the game.

Now since the last update I opened about 60 Packs and some Premium Packs and I ended up with ZERO Mythics this month. This is just not acceptable for me icon_e_sad.gif

You said that you would make the game easier for the new and midrange players to close up to the elder ones…but for me it is no longer possible to even get mythics to get close to the top players. That is just demoralizing…I really lost my goal for the game cause I no longer have a real chance to take a step further icon_e_sad.gif

I’m not to concerned about the duplicates itself, cause I hope that they will actually make it real to use them ingame for specific card gain…but getting no real mythics at all is really frustrating.

I don’t demand from D3 to get a 100 mythics everyday but for me the actual droprate right now is nearly dead…

Greetings Eladamriel

28

The problems are many-fold.

Among others that Magic is a trading card game and and any implicit expectations for MTGPQ to be the same are, at this point, very far from true. In paper magic you can actually get all cards, just by throwing enough money at the problem, good luck with that in MTGPQ. Paper magic partly solves the saturation effect of obtaining “all” cards by having various special editions etc. that increase collectibility and give the hardcore collectors something to do. MTGPQ has tried something similar with the introduction of ‘polished-turd’ masterpieces with an argument along the line of ‘it will look really cool in your collection!’. Except you can not show off your collection to anybody. And except that in paper magic if you are not really at a stage where you are interested in collecting odd cards, but just need a playset of whatever to complete your deck, you can trade in that ‘cool-but-not-neccesary’ card and everybody wins. This is the reason it works.

In the end, cards have value because the game is good (eg. they are fun to play with) and because they are powerful (they give a competitive edge). This also holds for MTGPQ, this is why people felt that paying 30$ for Olivia was a sweet deal - it gave a competive edge. When you decrease rewards in all events, you thus devalue all cards. It does not really matter if you top 5, 25 or 50, the payout is very similar - and pretty bad. Then there is the aspect of fun, as has been touched on - getting new cards is fun, even if it’s not a super-tier card, some new cards open up a host of interesting - fun - decks. I fully agree that this is partly what keeps events ‘fresh’, if you’re always playing the same objectives, with the same cards, it does get pretty tedious. The game is at its best - for me - when you can brew new decks for certain objectives, refine and tweak as you go. At some point this needs to be stirred up, either by new event (or event objectives) or by getting new toys (cards). With decreased crystal and mythic payout, the latter is certainly not happening as often as it used to.
I do think that prizes may have been a bit generous to the top before. You actually have a very good tool for tailoring prizes now via mana jewels. Mana jewels actually has the potential to bridge the huge gap between a rare and a mythic, by giving out some fraction of a mythic. It might be worth considering that a very low fraction of a mythic for even a high placement is not very encouraging. Particularly when you can get large amounts of mana jewels for $$, that kind of just reinforces the point ‘why pay to win, when what I win is worthless?’

Then there is the new player experience, with the decreased payout and drop rates as they are, how do you expect somebody to remotely catch up to the top players? You need a solid selection of cards from 3 sets (arguably, mostly SOI/EMN) and as evidenced by this thread, you can hardly get there.

What is the harm in people being able to collect most all cards? Give the whales something else to splurge on and chase. In the end, you need a sea and some small fish for the whales to swim along. At the current rate, you’re drying out the ocean at an alarming rate.

29

I’m sorry, at what point did I say “there have been countless threads, starting three months ago, demonstrating positive ways in which presumed developer concerns . . .”?

I mean, it’s fantastic that you’d rather spend your time digging up reactions from three months ago instead of three weeks ago, but it’s a questionable contrarian strategy considering the number of recent posts expressing a degree of understanding and detailing the myriad routes the developers could have taken instead. It almost makes one question your sincerity.

30

Was there, really? Whose need? New players’? Mid-level players’? Whales’? D3’s financial department? People with enough free time to regularly get Mythics from QBs, but who refuse to join a Top 10 coalition?

As far as I can see, from a player’s gameplay perspective, “too many mythics” is only a problem when bad matchmaking forces one to compete against people way out of their league. There is no inherent problem with people with similarly large mythic collections and near-fully optimised decks trading massive blows with each other, while mortals do so within their own more limited means. There is an argument about matchmaking being bad, but then what needs to be fixed is the matchmaking, not the mythic flow.

Then there are the psychological issues of challenge, feeling of progression and envy, but those are mostly due to the distribution rather than the flow of mythics, which takes me to the next point…

The “milder” measures you mention (limiting mythics to the Top 2) only exacerbated the problem, because while they restricted the flow of mythics, it did nothing to spread them around. What real difference does it make to restrict Mythic rewards to 40 instead of 200 of the ~20,000 players out there?

The Mana Jewels were a step in the right direction, in principle, as they allowed to break down Mythics into “quantized” chunks which could be distributed more widely. But then they tinykittied up the implementation by offering them in insultingly pathetic amounts as free rewards.

Madwren did NOT say that Top 10 members understood the measures, just that dialling things down a little would have been acceptable. As one of them, I would agree. But turning a full mythic into <5% of one is the opposite of “a little” and it helps nobody except, perhaps, relatively casual whales.

31

I would theorize that restricting mythic dispersion amongst the general population, and cutting down on the number of packs you can open at the vault, is not a move to help the health of the meta. It’s a decision with a singular goal; If you want mythics, then buy them in the vault. The simultaneous price-hike for mythics in the vault was insulting.

Make no mistake, they shifted the commerce of the game to P2P. Until they fix the packs in the vault, the rewards, and the matchmaking, that’s where the game will sit.

As an aside/personal gripe, I’ve just spent my last crystal until something is done about packs in the vault. Anniversary bundle, BFZ premium pack, SOI premium pack, netted me no mythics and 7 rares (all dupes). That’s including the 4 guaranteed ones, so all of those packs dropped, total, 3 rares.

32

Agreed. The number of jewels available to paying players in a week is often far higher than the number available to win in events, and Elite packs are surely now the #1 way to get hold of mythics in the game.

33

In the United States, minimum slot paybacks are set and regulated by State gaming boards or commissions for casinos on public land (as opposed to Tribal land). If casinos have to adhere to a certain level of transparency, I’d think D3 could as well.

34

I would ask you to be very careful doing this both now and in the future. To many people on this forum, you are the voice of this game and the publishers/developers. People are looking to you for concrete answers and it is very easy for them to confuse hypotheticals with certainty.

35

Brigby, since I put a ticket in about a week ago and have yet to see a response, perhaps you can answer this.

I bought a premium pack for 300 crystals and got only the bonus rare. The Super (edited from “Elite”) pack says guaranteed rare or better. Shouldn’t the Premium’s give at least one rare plus the bonus rare?

/Tinfoil hat on

May be overstating the obvious feeling/opinion of some but IMO, they have dropped the mythic rate for people to spend $$ on getting purple crystals as the only way to get mythics. I have almost every rare in KLD but very few mythics (maybe the coding is why I got no rares in my premium pack).

36

More about the December change from top 10 to top 2.

First, it was done without engaging the community in discussion about the perceived problem. Note the recurring theme. It did, however, generate discussion that later led to a greater degree of acceptance for the two facets of the issue: 1) the rich get richer, and 2) the lower tiers need assistance.

Second, while there were naturally some complaints from people who simply didn’t want their mythics taken away, it doesn’t compare to the wealth of constructive brainstorming over the last month in this forum, from players of all levels of gameplay. The change from top 10 to top 2 only affected a small percentage of people. The last update affected everybody, and guess what? An engaged community comes up with a lot of fantastic ideas. It’s a shame that despite that community effort, there’s still virtual radio silence. It’s disheartening.

There’s nothing to be gained by some players diminishing the efforts of those who have generated positive solutions, or by attempting to blame the top-10 coalitions for some members’ dissatisfaction with a previous change that exacerbated the issue of disparity between player collections.

There has been no process of engagement. There hasn’t been an ongoing dialogue. There have been fits and spurts of communication that fire our hopes up briefly, only to find them snuffed out once more when weeks go by without further response.

I have a player-centric approach. I want people of all tiers to be able to regularly procure new cards, create original decks to complete myriad objectives, earn commensurate rewards to the time invested, spend their hard-earned currency (real or virtual) on fairly-priced items, and most of all, to feel excitement instead of numbness when they open the app each day.

Maybe this is because I come from an MTG background, where the only limit to your play was your skill and imagination. Saw a deck you liked? Go buy the cards and play it, or trade for the cards you want, and then do your best. That’s why I’m here. Not to play the same events and objectives in a repetitive grind over and over again while new cards are held far out of reach.

37

No there wasn’t. There was an obvious need to dial down the power creep, not to de-incentivize the reward structure across the board.

Since you don’t go for top ten coalition rewards, let’s talk about something that would affect you: quick battle rewards. If you woke up today and saw that instead of a guaranteed mythic for 1st place, they replaced it with 50 jewels. Wouldn’t you be a little upset that they suddenly decreased your payout for the same amount of effort?

38

The problem with QB is that the top spot is often unavailable no matter how much effort you put in. Cheat accounts usually pick it off. Currently in my bracket the top two bots are battling it out at scores around 2,400 and 2,100. Yesterday at noon CDT they were 498 and 600.

Third place in the bracket is about 700.

In the past I would occasionally spend the 12-16 hour grinds to hit around 1,600 points and secure that top spot. Back in the day you could race to a 400 point lead with an early grind that would discourage all but the most dedicated from chasing you. Won a few top spots.

But with the advent of cheats, there’s no point anymore. I just grind out 20-30 rounds to gather a few crystals then quit.

39

And let’s not forget that there is a formal policy to not provide the rewards you missed out on - even with evidence of cheating.

40

The reason I used qb as an example for him is because he regularly goes for the top spot. Slashing rewards for something he chooses to spend the majority of his game time on would certainly upset him, I imagine.