I noticed that the Progression Rewards for Emergency Ordinances is missing one tier, in particular it’s the first tier of 5-card boosters. You now only get a 5-card booster at the end of Progression. The second reward of Runes has been increased by 250 Runes for anyone who cares. You choose to add back guaranteed Mythics for the top 3 - 10 coalitions in the weekend PvEs and flood the game with Mythics again, fine. You choose to cut the crystals in the Progression rewards for the weekend PvE, err ok fine? But the mid-tier of 5-card boosters in Progression Rewards has been removed and I hope for a good explanation from the developers because this hits newer players hard.
It should long be evident by now that the game isn’t very friendly to new players. Having that 5-card booster in the middle of the Progression rewards gave newer players something to work towards even if they could not complete progression. Now with harder secondary objectives, which ensures that the average score for newer players will drop, why are the mid-Progression boosters get removed as well?
Revolt against the Consulate has 22,000+ players who have joined the event and it has been running for almost 47 hours over a weekend. Yet that is at least some 8,000 less than when the player count was first added to the game. This is despite the addition of referral cards to try to attract new players and the game having over a million downloads on Google Play Store (granted some may be the same players downloading onto their various devices).
So probably one needs to look at the problem of player retention, in particular new player retention. And making the game harder for new players to develop their arsenal is not exactly a smart way to keep them playing. Most games start off easier to hook people into the game and then get gradually harder, filtering out those who aren’t committed or capable enough to progress. This game, due to:
- Cards of each rarity being mostly much better than cards of the lower rarity, with new players generally only having access to uncommon and common cards;
- No proper separation of players with really good collections from newer players;
- The mastery system doesn’t work because players can keep playing the same core of cards and never really move up in tier.
- It does not factor in the player’s competitive performance (which is influenced by their deckbuilding skills, deck piloting skills and meta-reading skills among others).
- It does not factor in that there were players who intentionally mastered cards ended up out of their league versus players who tried their best to stay in as low a tier as possible while still reaping good rewards.
- QB being overwhelmingly dominated by top players when it is essentially the only renewable source of cards and crystals, leading to no real avenue for newer players to build up their collection if they can’t perform well enough in events;
- Bronze and Silver tier having the same secondary objectives as the higher tiers in Events when the secondary objectives are now tailored to challenge Gold or Platinum players;
- Matches outcomes being affected more greatly by RNG in one form or another due to power creep (see more detailed explanation below -*-);
is actually a very unrewarding game for new players. And if that isn’t going to get recognised then we can forget about growing the community further.
Sure, the vocal ones in the forums here tend to be the veterans and they tend to whine only about stuff in-game pertaining to their own game experience. But nonetheless, great care should have been put to ensuring that the new player experience is fun. Yeah difficult objectives make it more challenging for Gold and Platinum players. But how are Silver and Bronze players even going to score to hit Progression? Back then, people complained that Progression ended too early and that they felt they were not being reward for the second day of an Event (hello what are ranking rewards for then?). Now newer players have trouble even hitting full progression when they are the ones who need the cards most.
Let’s see, maximum score in a single day event is 105. If a player totally ignores secondary objectives, whether it is because their card pool does not allow them to or they do not wish to take the risk and end up with a loss, they can hit a maximum of 60 points. Couple that with a loss or two to a cheese / multi-mythic deck / cascade-o-plenty match and new players are being kicked way down.
The developers really need to look hard at the new player experience because all the referral rewards in the world will not help if the players do not get retained. It’s like sowing seeds in a field but not watering them, or scattering them on rocky ground. You can sow 10,000 seeds and a very pitiful percentage will germinate. Please start to show in what you do that the playing experience for new players is being taken care of. Because while we freely admit that this game has great potential, unfulfilled potential is effectively as good as no potential. The game needs to move in a better direction than what we have been shown these past few months.
-*- Initially when the game only had the Origins card set, things were not out of balance between mana gain and impact on the battlefield. There was room to recover from insane AI cascades through strategic play and hopefully not too bad draws. Nowadays, one mega cascade can lead to Olivia, Ulrich, Deploy the Gatewatch, Decimator, Mirrorpool’d Gaea’s Revenge or a bunch of these stuff altogether. This imbalance is why decks are now forced to play with creature removal cause you can no longer outplay strong creature presence from the AI; you have to get rid of those cards NOW. Planeswalker mana gains gradually creeping up has also made high cost cards much more palatable to play (and also as a side effect much easier to cascade out).
I love the feeling of a swirl of rainbows leading to my whole hand being casted. Likewise I generally find it pretty amusing when it happens for the AI (not so much worried because I already build my decks to factor in such situations) but I can imagine the frequency of it happening nowadays is not being all that well-received by most others as we can tell from outcries on the official forums and elsewhere. For clarity’s sake, the issue isn’t with cascades. The issue is with cascades now more frequently leading to situations which one cannot recover from, ie. situations which feel out of one’s control and hence generally aren’t perceived as fun in the context of games, due to power creep in cards and planeswalker mana gain.
