How's Your Luck Today?

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

Since when did this game become one of luck and not skill?

Last NOP I lost the +1 in the blue node EVERY TIME because of haste creatures (Olivia and Pig). I had a friend who was in line to win black and had a 48 strength Gaea dropped on him.

In an upcoming event we have to win in BLUE in 5 moves or less – AND engergize 5 gems. Has anyone tried this? I have – about 50 times in QB and it’s not possible unless all the stars are aligned and the angels are focusing their songs on you.

Objectives like this are insulting to the spirit of Magic The Gathering — we really work our butts off to put our best decks forward and go into each match at the mercy of RNGesus.

Let’s just think to how we got here – a bunch of people (rightly) complained about ties. Instead of fixing the rewards system and just rewarding everyone who actually deserves rewards to get them, Hibernum ruined NOP and added a bunch of ridiculous luck-based objectives.

Now they’re doing it with another event.

This is NOT a solution to the tie breaker problem –

–This is gluttony. This is a company not wanting to give rewards to people who deserve them because they want those people to spend more money. Guess what??? A lot of those top scorers are going to spend money anyway because they like this game.

–This is a band aid – forcing people to lose so that ugly graphics can be prioritized over looking at the real problems with events such as the ties and matchmaking.

–This is inexperienced concept development – whoever is coming up with this stuff does not play this game at the Platinum or Gold level.

–This is disrespect. It’s been almost 2 months since anyone from D3 or Hibernum actually reached out to the community and sought feedback. The last time there was a Dev thread, it became an amazing conversation and it allowed a lot of us to feel more vested in the game. Radio silence since.

I love objectives – I play Story Mode probably more than most people – I post all the time about more story mode and moving old PVE events to story mode. I love building new decks and trying new things – but the difference is that PVP is NOT PVE and I’m not going to get hit with an Olivia or Pig on turn 2 in an Encounter where I am supposed to take 10 or less damage. Objectives should be designed to be obtainable with thought and skill (this is what makes them fun) – every now and then I expect RNG to block me. They should not be designed to make a player fail.

Whoever is in charge of this stuff should start a dev thread – this is a really great community of people who love this game and have great ideas – I bet a lot of people have ideas on obtainable objectives that we’ve never even heard of.

Once again, it comes down to two things – inexperience and communication. These two things will be the downfall of this game.

2

#RealTalk

(extra characters)

I have no idea what that means, but I hope it makes me sound cool. Anyway, I agree with virtually everything you said Bken. A good remedy to too many people getting perfect score is NOT to make impossible missions like within 5 round with 5 energy in the blue node. WTF? I also don’t think they should keep pumping out Nodes of power with 100+ perfect scores in platinum even if they did fix the tie-breaker system… easy games are not fun.

So what is the problem?

  1. The game is totally imbalanced. Certain cards are so powerful they can make virtually any deck nearly foolproof. Same with certain PW’s. What makes MTG great is a real attention to balance, which is not what is happening in MTGPQ.
  2. Matchmaking - a. The ridiculous matchmaking mechanic that forces us to play the same players repeatedly (surprised the game didn’t break when Mericide got locked out.)
    b. Allowing low level PWs to compete in upper tiers (I know people who played lvl 12 PWs to win Dynavolt in platinum). Not fair, not logical, not acceptable.
  3. The AI - Seems to be getting somewhat better… and then it fumigates its own full board while the player has an empty board. I admit that it is probably hard to code a good AI, but Magic Duels does a far better job with a far more complex set of cards. And I have yet to see the AI cast a sweeper that only affects itself.

Stop using what Bken calls the Band-Aid method and figure out how to produce a challenging, largely skill based game that is fair and balanced.

3

I do agree that making objectives impossible or at least highly luck based isn’t the answer. At minimum it leaves the player feeling abused. And at worst it actually benefits cheating.

The solution I proposed elsewhere is to eliminate individual ranking awards entirely, and extend progression to the theoretical max score for the event (in pack form ideally; or at best rare with chance of mythics only).

The immediate benefits is it eliminates cheating as an issue in events entirely by making it simply not matter. And solves the tiebreaker issue similarly.

4

This, this, so much this.

5

They should change the tie breaking system and fix the cheating problem. Period.

Taking away individual rewards adds nothing, it just takes away the incentive to be competitive instead.

6

I’m going to regret this, but here it goes.
First. Regarding Olivia and tier cards in platinum. What did you expect in the platinum level? Caterpillar’s? Vanilla creatures? Really? I have said this a million times, don’t level up to platinum unless you have really powerful decks. And I don’t mean full of mythics, but decks that can compete with anything thrown at them.
Second, extra goals. I for one welcome the extra challenge. Bonus points should not get easily, the should ask for extra challenge. In fact they should be accomplished only by playing almost perfectly.
Third, imbalance. This a trait of every tcg, you can’t blame d3go really when even the real deal, magic the gathering is imbalanced. If the source game hasn’t been able to fix that problem, how could mtgpq be able to do it.
I do agree with matchmaking. Duels should be only vs decks that participate in the event and should be more random. But I don’t have any problem beating tides of mersmicide decks. Its kind of fun thinking of his decks as a boss

7

I don’t understand why the community isn’t entirely up in arms demanding this. It would make events so much more fun and solve a boat load of development issues at the same time. Top 1-5 highest scores should get a pack or rare with chance of mythic. No tie breakers, no getting up at 4 a.m., no harassment from cheaters… just putting creative decks together and playing hard to get a perfect score. D3 is so over the top greedy, they’ll probably just crunch some numbers and quash the whole notion… that certainly doesn’t mean we should forget it though.

8

While in general I agree with you, the Blue node objective he was talking about can be failed from a single lucky cascade by the AI. Take 10 or less damage is tough on it’s own usually, especially in blue with a lack of decent defenders (unless you use Kiora), but a single cast of Olivia will deal 11 damage to you, and that’s a failed objective. Even if you can get rid of her the next turn, you still failed the objective. Blue tends to be a reactionary color, with lots of bounce (ineffective here), single-turn disable spells (again, ineffective here), and steals (ineffective yet again).

Using something like Claustrophobia would help, but can be easily destroyed. That’s one of the few proactive options open to most blue decks. And putting it in your deck might weaken it against other types of decks depending on what you’re going for (and it’s not like support removal isn’t common in many red decks that also run Olivia).

I’m fine with a challenge. I’m not fine with a single card cast knocking me out of the running.

9

The blue node doesn’t bother me. Use flying defenders, and if you don’t have those then you are using the wrong PW. If you get hit by a huge, hastey creature on turn two then perhaps you didn’t sacrifice enough runes to the RNG gods (the other name bothers me to type). I mean, as blacklotus is prone to say “If you don’t want a game with an element of luck, you should try chess or checkers”.

But trying to win within 5 turns in the red node is hard even with Olivia, Pig, Casitgator, Deploy, Akum, etc.. trying to do it in blue AND cast 5 energy.. If someone can get that more than 10-20% of the time I would be shocked. Then it becomes less about card quality or deck building and more about pure luck.

And my gripe is much more that the game is way TOO easy, which is why the events are clogged with perfect scores except in NoP where the top is clogged with cheaters.

MTG might not be balanced, but because of stuff like set rotations their is not a dominant strategy that works for multiple quarter that causes the game to become stagnant and boring. That is very much what is happening in MTGPQ.

10

I can’t say I know anything about the spirit of Magic: The Gathering seeing as how I don’t play the paper game, but I think we are acting a little entitled here. This game has Progression rewards and Ranking rewards. That already very clearly splits the line between rewards that everyone should get based on how many absolute points they have scored in the event, and rewards that players should get based on the points scored in the event relative to others. To reiterate, Progression rewards are there for everyone who does well whereas Ranking rewards are meant to be only for the select few. There’s a reason for that differentiation.

Yes, the game is currently in a state where we in Platinum are getting into 40 to 60-way ties for perfect score (I finished my matches some 16 minutes after the last node refresh in today’s EC and was ranked 30th lol). Does that mean that we should all get the top prize of the Ranking rewards which is supposed to reward relative performance? I don’t think it should. To me it means the developers need to find ways to make the Platinum meta more challenging in order to filter out the best players from the very good. And until they figure out a good way of doing that, I’d rather suck it up and find ways to outcompete the rest.

And instead of complaining about the changes they made, we can try to discuss suggestions on making the game better and signal through our discussions what we would like the game to be like. This would also hopefully help the developers improve the game sooner rather than later. If not this topic is just another way of slamming the developers which I cannot agree to be a constructive way of doing things. I made some suggestions in a separate topic before but people didn’t seem interested to discuss possible solutions.

I agree that the developers need to do a better job on communication. I would hope by now that they are well aware of this and do not need us to throw petty tantrums like this in order to realise that.

To the point about objectives, I believe we know that in part the difficulty with designing good objectives is due to the power creep that has occurred in this game and the fact that the AI has not kept up with this power creep at all. The discussion on power creep and how it distorts this game warrants a whole separate topic on its own imo. But as long as player-controlled decks are way more powerful than the AI-controlled decks we face, there will be an issue designing good objectives to differentiate the players.

One way to do this will be to give the AI an advantage in playing (like the one-sided Supercharge/Enrage I proposed in the other topic) but let it be open knowledge so players can plan for dealing with it. Do not secretly give the AI more cascades which would lead players to wonder what in the blue blazes is going on. (For the record, I know the AI cascade thing does not happen but I’m using it as an example of a bad idea which should not be implemented.)

Making the game more challenging in the right ways (and hence fun) should be our focus rather than just clamouring for more rewards.

11

You are trying to get two extra goals…that should be close to impossible in most games. I’m fact a pure blue deck should not be able to get that win within 5 turns. But if you change that to Saheeli it should be easier, having access to haste. You need to think what tools do i need to this. take the gideon hero challenge for example, try beating the starfield nix challenge with mono B, specially the way it was before when discarded supports where brought into play with it. It was impossible, you needed to splash red for support removal.

Thing is you guys want to perfect every event and that is really boring. Not being able to perfect every versus gives you challenge and another criteria to getting first besides who logged first into the event. Its a bonus, not a “must do goal or you loose”.

About balance I agree with the need for rotations, but this wont be really troublesome till 2 more sets i think. At the current moment you can create decks that compete with staples like olivia and season past with other cards. Just look at the current energy extra swap deck. Or dredge. and we dont have really enough sets to make a decent rotation. But yeah it will need to be addressed in the short term.

12

The solution is simple. Let them stop rewarding mythics for top scores and give crystals instead. There is no need for tie breaking and making lame objectives. everyone on the same rank are equally rewarded with same amount of crystals.
People can use them crystals to buy BBs or other boxes. The drop rate is already too low, D3 does not have to worry about people getting too many mythic.
Let mythic be available for purchase in the vault with real cash.
This will certainly make cheating pointless and discourage the practice.
Since KLD D3 reserves the best mythic for coalition events only and making garbage available for purchase in the vault.

13

The problem with the “don’t level up” is that:

  1. New sets are continually released
  2. Players naturally want to play with new cards
  3. In order to avoid leveling up, at some point, a person has to NOT play with any new cards for fear of leveling up accidentally

It’s incredibly suboptimal–from both a business standpoint and an enjoyment standpoint–for any player to reach the point where they have to deliberately avoid playing cards. I’m sure there are many gold players who are treading that thin line and doing what they can to avoid leveling up. That’s completely unfair to them.

14

You don’t want the differentiating factor between good players and great players to be mitigated by building scenarios that rely entirely on luck. It is one thing to run into a monster cascade on the other side and be unable to stop the AI from beating you, or ruining your objectives… that’s fair, that’s luck, that’s what makes the game fun.

It’s another to be required to cascade into 15 loyalty with uncaged fury in hand by turn 4 against a static AI who never does anything or else you don’t get the objective. Its odd to me that you don’t get the difference between unrealistically luck based objectives and the actual AI disrupting your pursuit of objectives.

On a side note, why does eliminating the only thing worth playing this game for from the game a good solution? Individual and coalition mythics are what keep me playing. I have opened 10 KLD big boxes and received 1 mythic. I promise I would not keep playing if I couldn’t “earn” my own rewards.

Which is exactly the point of this whole pose. Getting lucky isn’t earning it. Having to race cheaters and other players at 4:00 AM is not what the developers say the point of the game is… From Hiberiums last development thread “In Events, the first player to reach a score wins a tie on the leaderboard. Will this change?
In the long-term, yes. Events should reward you for playing smart and building the optimal decks - regardless of when you play the Event. However, in the short-term we want to use optional objectives to avoid ties by introducing granularity in the Event scores. (As mentioned above, Event balancing is an ongoing task. We’ll keep an eye on the leaderboards for the rebalanced Events and make changes in future if necessary.)”

So, the answer is the game is not about racing. The game is about being rewarded for your merit. Sorry, opening a 10th blank big box is not my idea of an attractive reward. So, disagree with all of you. Fix the game, don’t remove rewards.

15

The win with 20 or less life is tricky as well. I just went from 81 life to dead as the AI only had Emrakul on board and I had a hand full of kill cards with OB Nix. Nahiri’s Harbinger ability and then an Olivia with Mirror Pool. Brutal.

Another tricky one is the destroy 2 or less creatures. When playing against Gideon 2, the Hoplite tokens going away counts as destroying a creature. Nothing really you can do about that. I was one point off of perfect because of that.

16

You are only looking this from a gamer point of view, and that is unrealistic. Its a F2P game, meaning you aren’t required to bought anything to actually play the game. Yet it does have to make money, beyond just making enough money to pay for continuously development it needs to actually gain money to the ones that invested in making the game.
Such kind of games cant reward skillful players totally cause once the players got the hang of the game it would stop making money, you have to “cheat” them by using the luck factor, specially in gem matching games. This is true in all F2P, since its the only way to get money thru all the lifetime of the game.

Add to that, F2P games are supposed to be cheap to game, not meaning that their quality is equal to cheap, but the production value should be cheap and the development time should be fast. You cant just make games that overly sophisticated. the AI cant be that good.

If you want a game that rewards 100% skill, you can always buy a game. Since the income of those now come from DLD content.

The only things that this game need to fix ASAP are cheaters, and they actually banned some of those a few days ago. And the damn bugs, i have no problem with loosing to luck, but loosing to bugs is no fun.

17

I also support the removal of individual ranking rewards for individuals and instead have progression rewards up to max points. The only real reason to fight for top rewards are guaranteed mythics and they can’t hand those out to everyone with perfect scores without completely screwing the game balance.

I don’t like the move to incredibly hard objectives (e.g., blue win in 5) because these are heavily luck based. If you get a bad draw, the AI gets a good cascade or you get a turn with only loyalty gems, you are screwed. The alternative is to go back to the days of “8 werewolves” type objectives and the 40 minute matches those brought.

Its also its no fun having the last nodes open up at 1 am or 4 am because then you’d need to wake up in the middle of the night to play the game. If they made the time from final refresh to end of event longer (12 hours) and removed individual ranking, everyone would have a fair chance to finish and get the enhanced individual progression rewards.

I would suggest keeping ranking rewards for coalition events because those don’t suffer from ties and the effects of luck are

18

not all cards are unbreakable, on the emrakul challenge blue node i had a kiora i was going against my firrst round sphinx’s tutelage theirs? startled awake’ startled awake, decimatior, yes the pig. that was a fine howdy do. i won but no chance on those dam objectives though, who puts a secondary as 2 spells on a class known for spells for gods sake.
just a chance to vent and brag at same time good mind will beat bad ai every time lol

19

That’s bad coding… self destructing creatures should count as you destroying them. Just like before the patch when opponent cast moon on your creature it counted as a summon.

20

I am having hard time understanding how you can’t comprehend the concept, so I guess I will try one more time.

I want there to be an element of luck.
I want the challenges to be difficult.
I want the challenges to be diverse and interesting.
The challenges should be able to be accomplished if you are not facing an opponent.

No idea how this has anything to do with making money when they restrict the prize pool anyway…