I'm currently level 7, and I'm getting frustrated with the treasure system. All treasure's worth is based on rarity, with no increase for the level of the treasure. All the equipment in my level range sells for the same price as the level 1-3 equipment I started the game with. This makes it exceptionally difficult to save up gold for shop purchases, especially when the cost of buying gear from the shop steadily ramps up at higher levels. I feel like there's a problem when most items in my inventory are only worth 1 gold a piece. It's not even worth selling them at that point.
Word. Even considering a module can grant 4 treasure chests for a total of 2*3+4 = 10 items, the average gold income from selling ALL the gear you find seems round 14-16. Either you get lucky and find a Legendary treasure (worth 200 gold pieces, happened twice to me) - and I definitely wouldn't call that LUCKY since your Legendary drop is a TREASURE, or you're stuck with an income of an Uncommon item every HALF HOUR OR MORE of work. An encounter lasts about 5 minutes if you're as fast as me (it can probably last less if you're faster, but come on, it's not like you can finish an adventure in less than 15 minutes anyway). That's WAY too low. And you can argue that the point of the experience is to use the random loot drops you find and not build cookie cutter groups with singleton gear pieces, but it already isn't working. There was a common strategy for dwarf fighters in PvP (step) and everybody just uses the best step gear they found. It's not like the fact that you're stuck with randomly determined loot changes much in terms of strategy, it just seems like a big NO sign on the Shops. Which are randomly stocked anyway, so it doesn't even mean that much! I'm either comically missing the point, or I really doubt the selling prices should be so low. If you want to discourage selling gear pieces, that's fine, but at that point your should ramp up the treasure prices. A treasure of a certain level should sell at half to two thirds of an item of that level so that you can buy what you want after two treasure drops. What kind of lousy adventurer risks his life for a gem worth less than his starting gear anyway?
All of the shops which restock daily sell items for 5 (common) or 25 gold (uncommon), which is within anyone budget. Only the rare item shop sells items at a higher rate, which is based on the level and rarity. I feel that the shop provides you with the opportunity to trade in what you do not intend to use for something you can. Additionally, I feel that rare items should not be easy to obtain. The fact that the rare item shop restocks weekly allows player the chance to work towards saving up for a specific item they want. Thus promoting more play and not simply giving away rare items. I've recently purchased 2 rare items both worth 700 gold, all of which I obtained solely from selling treasures I found. Which shows that if you save you can afford those rare items, if that is what your concerned with. There is also MP to take into consideration. From a single MP match you can obtain several items of varying rarities and levels. This I believe is why regardless of the level of an item the gold value does not change. If a young adventurer randomly finds a legendary treasure, it would be just as valuable as legendary treasure found by a veteran adventurer.
It doesn't seem like you have trouble completing the adventures? And hence no need for better items to progress? So you ask for easier access to items, so the game just become unnecessarily easy for you? I think it's great that you go on adventures for a chance for good drops, and not just visit a marketplace. This is the spirit of adventure, this is one of the parts that makes the game fun for me to play. I've bought a few items myself, but I haven't had a problem with the economy. You don't need epics at lvl 7. There are many usable common and uncommon cards, so it's easy to buy replacement items, even if you only get a few gold when you sell your stuff.
I have a problem with the rare/epic/legendary treasures. When you drop one, its an UNLUCKY drop, because it take the place of a same quality item, while worth far far less. Here is the sell/buy prices based on quality. Sell price of treasures, compared to buy price of a same quality item. Legendary: 200 golds / 2500 golds (need confirmation, I saw items at that price some days ago) Epic: 50 golds / 500 golds Rares: 10 golds / 100 golds Uncommons: 5 golds / 25 golds So, that means that when you drop a legendary treasure, you can only cry your eyes out because you just lost a legendary item, and dont have even enough to buy a single epic. In fact, you need two and half legendary treasures for a single epic! And you would need more than 10 legendary treasure to buy a single legendary item... Same for dropping a epic or rare treasure, since you need 2 treasures for a single item of the lower tier, or 10 treasures for an item of a same tier. Yes, choosing an item is far better than looting a random one, but between looting 10 items and choosing one, I take the looting everyday! I think the ratio of treasures needed to buy an item of same quality should be more along something like 3 for 1. The only problem I would see with a ratio like this, is a single epic or legendary drop would allow to buy far too much uncommons/rares. So, why not keep the same prices as right now, but add a trade possibility, to trade one treasure for an item of lower quality, or 3 treasures for an item of same quality?
Again, the buy price for rare, epic, and legendary items (items found in the rare shop) are based on the level of the item. For example: a rare item may only cost 100 gold, while a different rare may cost 500 gold. Another example: a epic item may only cost 500 gold, while a different epic may cost 1,000 gold. Treasures sell for double what an item of the same rarity would. Yes, obviously most players would rather take an item as oppose to treasure; but that is all part of the game. Loot is random in nature! So, something you may not find valuable (aka: treasure) may be exactly what someone else wants. Treasure encourage you to visit the shops and provides you a better chance to find items you don't have, or may not have seen before.
I have two problems with the system in place. First, I object to finding 5/25 gp equipment "affordable". As I said above, a 4-matches adventure grants around 14-16 gp worth of items, most of which you're better off saving than selling as each piece of equipment is different and it is very very rare that you have a piece of gear strictly better than another one. A 4-matches adventure lasts about 20 minutes if you know what you're doing. I find it pretty hard to finish a match under about 5 minutes, but I concede there might be faster people out there. Still, 20 minutes seems a reasonable expectancy. That means you need about 40 minutes of gameplay in order to buy ONE UNCOMMON ITEM. The problem I have with legendary drops is a time one. I want to see improvement due to what I manage to achieve in the game. The feeling of improvement of my party of adventurers is the most visible source of satisfaction in this game, at least for me. In order to improve my party I must either gain experience (which only lasts for the campaign) or gain loot. It is pretty evident that the endgame content of this game is multiplayer based: quests can be interesting, but will feel stale after a while. You are basically repeating the campaign 3/4 times with added difficulty, fun but uninteresting. Multiplayer in contrast can lead to an interesting ladder-based competition, can provide actual challenge and can be prevented from getting stale with proper support from developers (adding content will spice things up when the meta gets solved). Which means in order to stay interested in the game I need to have a good multiplayer experience. Due to the complete randomness of drops and the anti-farming measures put in the campaign, in order to get good equipment you have two options: first, win multiplayer a lot. However, this is terribly impractical. 20 wins is, at the very least, 200 minutes of play counting about 10 minutes between your turns, your opponents' and the ladder, and more likely it's around 300 minutes because you WILL lose. Especially if you're still farming for equipment. That's 5 hours in one day, which is insane and won't be done by many people. That means that the only way to get good equipment if you have a reasonable amount of time in a day is to farm campaign / buy from shop. Rare shop has insane prices. I said above that you are usually gaining less than 1 gp per minute, so it's unreasonable to ask for 2500 gp, that's going to happen once in a month, if at all. This is kinda bad.
Well, you tell me the prices change with the level of the treasure/item, but its not what I see in the game. In the rare shop, every rare is 100 golds, every epic is 500 golds, whatever the level. Similar, all treasures sell for the same prices, whatever the level. I got a lvl 3 epic treasure, and a lvl 18 epic treasure, both sold for 50 gold apiece. And my point is still valid. I think that selling 10 epic treasures to buy a single epic item is a ripoff. As the prices are right now, I HATE looting treasures. Btw, it would be interesting to make a poll about treasures, to see what is the % of content and discontent players about treasures.
I also think it is like this. In the rare shop, I have 2 Legendaries at 2500, some epics at 500 and the rest are rare at 100 - regardless of level. The two legendaries are a level 18 and a level 6.
When I began playing I earned just over 1 gold a minute. I would farm the first encounter of Tunnels Into Darkness (and then abandon the adventure) over and over, so I could buy something (anything). But once you are able to get into MP then your income should increases dramatically. As far as legendary items are concerned, they are exceedingly scares, as they should be. I have several (more than 10) legendary items and only one of them will I ever use in ranked MP. I personally have obtained the 20 wins nessecary for the epic chest in MP 7 days in a row. Yes, the likelihood of others repeating this is slim, but possible. Also, it's not true that, "you WILL lose," but I understand the point. I just feel that the shops are not meant to be your go to source for items, but more of a place to find the occasional item. I think that if your going to spend 2500 gold on a single item then, yeah it's going to cost a week(s) or months worth of gold. But that is just my opinion. In my Randimar's Rarities I currently have: 17 rares at 100 gold, 1 rare at 200, 1 epic at 500 and 1 epic at 1,000 gold.
I dont think shops should be the main source of items either. The discussion started about the treasures, which right now are ripoff and considered unlucky drops. If I drop a legendary treasure, I weep and cry because I just lost a legendary item and got less than half an epic instead. And with the rarity of legendary drops...
It's not the likelyhood of getting the chest. It's bound to happen if you put enough time in it. And yeah, you can have a crazy high winrate by being good at the game, ok, but still, my two points stand. Which are that treasure sells for too little, meaning you can't afford even simple items without spending ludicrous amounts of time farming; and that epic and legendary items require a lot more investment than is healthy to get, because the MP chest requires crazy amounts of time, the shop is, as you say, NOT the way to get legendaries, and the profits of farming are ridiculously low. Increasing the sell price of the treasures would solve both problems, but there are other possible solutions of course.
As I said, obtaining treasure specifically promotes going to the shops. Were it not for needing to sell my treasure I wouldn't visit the shops, and I've found so many wonderful items as a result. Treasure originally sold for the same price as items, but was increase to the current amount. I'll make a poll to see how people feel about the current value of treasure. And I really do understand feeling let down by your legendary being a treasure; but now I just consider myself lucky to not have gotten a level 1 common item!
Well, the worse case is a gold or purple chest where you drop treasures instead of items. You're guaranteed a rare or epic, and you get a worthless treasure?? Arghhh!! Just now, I finally did my 20th victory and got a epic chest. And I find a legendary treasure as club reward... Well I dont have club membership, so hopefully I'm not affected, but if I had, I would have been really bummed. On standard chests, its a little less annoying because if you didn't get a treasure, you could have got a worthless item instead anyway (but its still horribly annoying when the treasure is legendary...)
For information, yes, the in-store prices depend on your level--but only if they are above YOUR level: If that's confusing, I got some examples. In that thread, I hypothesized it might be good if the two ways of getting items (looting and buying) happened with similar frequency: either you found an Epic item after X number of adventures (on average), or you earned enough money to buy one. I have no idea whether that's good game design, but regardless I doubt that's what's happening right now. In principle, I like the fact that prices go up so much. However, I also realize there's a problem: just look at all the people in this thread who didn't notice the "levels" thing, because by this point they are all high enough level that prices have stabilized. And at this point, they STILL don't have enough gold to buy the most expensive items! Prices might go up to 5000, 7500, and so on, but you never will spend 7500 gold: not only because you won't want to, but because there will be no 7500 gold prices by the time you HAVE 7500 gold. That said, you certainly can get a lot of gold if you are obsessed. I estimated that 500 per day wouldn't be unreasonable for someone "farming." If you estimate 15 gold per adventure, that's around 33 adventures. Then, if you estimate 20 minutes, that's 11 hours. Yes, people who are completely broken and do nothing but play MMORPG's all day would do this. What does it mean for the rest of us? Certainly if there's no trading any time soon then we don't have to worry about obsessed people "ruining the economy" for us. I imagine that the system in principle could work, but needs all-around editing (not just "increasing the worth of Treasure") to streamline it.
That's actually pretty reasonable. Good to know the pricing is going to be changed too. I'll wait for the next change to give more feedback on this issue.
I'd like to point out that while, yes, the treasure itself is annoying in its low worth to the shops, useless gear is probably even more frustrating. It's basically vendor trash... but vendor trash that's almost not worth going to the shop to unload. The cost to buy relevant gear at the shop is ramping up, but all my commons are still selling for 1 gp a piece.
By "the cost to buy relevant gear," do you mean that you need more and more total items as you proceed through beta? Myself, I find I only need single specific items here and there. I'm quite alright with replaying adventures until I earn most things, thus not spending any money. And on that subject, I haven't encountered too much "vendor trash." I think that most items in the game have some use, and if they don't then they at least have amusing names or graphics. I find that this whole "card suite" deal means that, yes, I DO want several different variations on "2x such-and-such + 1x another card," because it overlaps with what I put in from other card suites. Lastly . . . I realized something. Okay, continuing with the "15 gold per adventure, taking 20 minutes" estimate, I came to around 500 gold per 11-hour day. Remember the "rarities" shop? The idea there was that it turned over inventory once a week, allowing you enough time to build up the cash to afford something. What if you wanted to make a quick 2500 gold to afford the amazing Legendary that just stocked? That means 5 days at 11 hours each. Um, yeah. Of course, such goes out the window if you earn a bunch of Legendary Treasures really quickly. But you can't bet on that. In total, you really won't buy a single Legendary in this game unless you have the gold sitting around already or purchase gold with real-world cash. And, AGAIN, you would never buy a 5000 or 7500 gold Legendary (if you happened to spot something 2 or 3 levels above your own). I think that either some real statistics are needed to show that the economy works (not just these guesses), or some revision must be made to render shopping viable.
Hmmm... I realized something else about this whole economic issue that I think might be worth to point out. Yet another reason IMO to increase the selling price of treasure (I believe having a very low sell price for equipment encourages beginners to not sell stuff hapazardly, which is good behavior and will help them a lot in the long run; however treasure is designed to be sold, and by tweaking only treasure drop chances and selling price you can easily manipulate the average income of a player). Let's say Card Hunter is a hit, due to all of us spending money on it at launch and getting more and more traffic. Well then I think it's very likely to be expanded: extra quests, extra modules, possibly more levels, extra content... And of course, extra classes! The rogue, for starters, but I bet that if this works and is profitable BM will add more and more (I know I already have some ideas, and I'm just a random dude popping up some days ago). The class system seems to work and be balanced around the following assumptions: boots, skill and race for everyone, an armor slot, two six-cards offensive slots, four three-cards slots for specification (the fighter gets one more six-cards weapon to break things up). If the rogue comes along, there's going to be rogue skills, a new "leather armor" slot, rogue weapons and possibly one or two more slot types to complete the class (cloak and rogue tools?). As more and more classes get added, and more and more loot gets added, you are bound to have a situation where the random loot drops will have a statistically significant chance to NOT include ANYTHING useful for your team. And even if you just add more and more items, the "item themes" will be diluted, and making for instance a "Chopping Deck" is going to be more and more difficult as the game grows. Now there are quite a few solutions: - Do not include many classes. I think that would be missing out on some amazing possibilities though, as each class (provided the play style is varied enough from class to class, which is plenty possible as this framework is ripe with design space) adds something significant to the game, provides incentive to go through the experience more than once and varies the meta in the PvP section significantly. - Reuse the same slots. This is a good idea in a vacuum, from time to time. Sort of like how shields are shared between fighters and clerics. However it has two problems: thematically unsound, as rogues don't have much in common with the classes we have now (well, boots for everyone! But...); and more importantly, you NEED the different slots to differentiate substantially the playstyle of the new classes. A "paladin" class that used a weapon, a divine weapon, heavy armor, shield, helmet and two divine items - while possible and probably easy to implement right now - would be far less interesting than a paladin with two holy weapons, a shield, a divine item, a holy armor, a holy helmet and an oath that played as a tank that sacrifices himself for others, with lots of smite cards and auras that buffed nearby allies or debuffed nearby enemies, along with paladin-only Fearless traits or similar things. This can therefore alleviate the problem, but not solve it. - Separate content. Rogue items are won and sold only in rogue-specific areas, quests, even campaign worlds (I can already see the map branching out to other planes of existance...). Druid and ranger items can be found only in these and these places. The problem is that multiplayer would be a catch-all and therefore less profitable, that the randomness of loot is sacrificed and that it doesn't really make much sense. I think the item shops are bound to get separated for clarity (we already have different item shops for the various levels for this very reason; at least I think that's the reason). The UI for shops and inventory, while nice to see and flavorful, is really unfriendly with the drop-out list of pieces (lack of visual recognition / eye candy means I never use that thing, I only click on the item slot I want to look at; but this is a whole other problem I will talk about someday). If more and more slots are added, separating the content into various flavorful shops is going to be a necessity. Besides, going to an University Shop to outfit mages, to a Black market to outfit rogues, to a church to outfit priests et cetera seems nice to me! - Tailor item drops. Code the looting experience so that there is a higher chance to loot something for your class. This reflects something GMs have done for ages, by the way, which is kinda cool. However you lose out a bit on the random experience, you have a real incentive to run only-X parties in campaign to farm specific items, and you still have some trouble with multiplayer (if you code it the same way you reduce the incentive to experiment and change up your party composition, which is a problem especially for beginners). Still, this seems like a nice addition and would prevent a lot of headaches. - Change the item economy and add basic items to shops. Yeah, you knew I was going to end up here. But really, if you think about it, it would probably solve the issue before it even arises. I found only items I don't need, no problem! I'll buy the basic items for my strategy the moment I unlock a new slot and with a substantial gold revenue I will be able to buy whatever it is I can't manage to find in my adventures while still accumulating a fair amount of items for other classes in my inventory. This is classic D&D behavior to boot.
