The card hunter club improvements suggestion thread

Since this would be the main way the guys at blue manc could make money from the game, there needs to be a bit more incentive to being a part of the club and this thread is about how to improve membership in someway.

*I would like to see Adventures to have a cooldown but be free to club members, also keep the option for free players to simpley pay for the adventure if they wish to play it Aka the way Dungeons and dragons unleased does their instances

*A members forums

*Get access/preview to latest cards/items one week in advance

What else would you guys wish to see from the Subscription features?

 

I don't really like the subscription model either. I'm likely going to pay for the extra content once Beta is over (the extra modules), but that's it. And I already know that the MP system is what will make this game stand out and be played for long periods, so anything that harms MP (like P2W) is bad in my book.

 

I like the subscription model, though it might be a bit too expensive with its current implementation. It's a way to support the maintenance and future development of the game, without that support merely falling back to a standard pay2win solution (buy more epic chests than the other players). This one requires that you actually earn your rewards.

It could give access to extra usability features, such as extra number of saved equipment setups (if there will be any at all), extra sorting/display options in the equipment screen (a table grid with card data for instance), sorting options for the cards below each champion, or some data on each champion's deck (how many attack cards, how many heals, ..)

It could also be something like a lower dungeon-cooldown, or perhaps 3 free dungeon resets each day (not even sure I want that, not fun farming the same adventure over and over..).
Or if they added a new module each month, you would get that module for free as a subscriber

 

its way too expensive for me

 

Care to elaborate on exactly what you mean by inventory slots?

 

I really like the CH club as-is, and I'm not too fond of a few of these ideas to "improve" it. The adventure cooldown serves a really important purpose: it stops players from finding the most efficient (fastest) adventure to complete, and just farming it nonstop. This is beneficial in two ways - one, it stops people from getting loot way faster than intended, and two, makes it so that players aren't forced to farm the same adventure over and over again (which they would if it's the most efficient), which is good because that's not very fun.

As for the ability to have extra sorting or UI information and whatnot, I don't see why on earth that stuff would be a good thing to lock behind a paywall. So the paying customers get a good UI, and everyone else gets a stripped-down version? That seems like the sort of thing that'd just turn players away.

In addition, Farbs has said that he's working on adding custom scenarios as a CH-club member feature. Between that and the way that the CH club rewards add up (it gets you WAY more items for your money than buying a chest does, assuming you're actually playing the game), I feel like it'll be well worth the money.

 

I think the club is way too expensive. The rewards seem good to me, but I think the income model should be volume rather than price per unit. The club right now offers some cool rewards and if it were offered for a few bucks a month, I bet most people who could afford it will pay for it. I can afford the current model, but I wouldn't pay it. $50 a year is unreasonable...consider half that amount (at a volume purchase) and I think many folks would pay for some pizza. Otherwise, I think many will stick with the free offering. Personally, I'd rather just pay for the game and expansions rather than the micro-transaction model. It really turns me off.

 

Me too. I just grabbed the $50 pack, because this thing is definitely worth a "full price game", but I really hate free to play models in general. I'm too accustomed to buying games, and have had a couple of bad experiences (I.e. getting in trouble with the wife), so I use a strategy of setting a price I'm happy with, and then stopping.

The problem is that this means I wince a tiny bit every time I see that cushion, because it means I have to choose not to click it on every single loot drop :'(

 

While i don't actually disagree with you i have to wonder how long of a club member subscription do you get from a 50$ investment?

 

I unlocked all the treasure hunts and grabbed 3 outfits, and I don't enough pizza left for a 6-month subscription. With current numbers,The $50 price point is a 6 month subscription + 200 pizza.

I'm still trying to figure out how much I value other things, and in the meantime I'm not in any hurry to spend the pizza.

Edit: To get back on topic, some things that would make the card hunter club more appealing to me:
1) Separation from gold economy. By giving you items, the current CH club is effectively giving you gold. This puts it in direct competition with the chests (both gold and pizza), and makes me feel like I should understand how much gold it's worth before I buy it, but this is impossible. Someone did figure it out somewhere and the answer is of the form "CH is more cost-efficient than [some other chest] if get at least X epic loot chests from PVP". That's some *really* hard maths along with some crystal ball gazing to figure out how much I think it's worth to me.

Just to make this clearer - I find it much easier to look at the character skins, figure out how much they cost, and decide whether I want to pay that much. There's an elf warrior skin that is *awesome*, so I'll grab that, and I like the elf priests more than the default, so I'll get one of those too. It's a much more straightforward "Do I want this thing that much?", and it makes it much easier for me to say "totally". It's also all positive - I like the skins that I bought, and I don't feel bad about any of the ones that I didn't (except the other elf priest - I'm still not sure which of the two female elf priests I like better, so I'll probably have to get both and spend some time trying to make a party with 2 elf priests work).
2) Less reliance on playing. I don't get a lot of time to play on a daily basis, so the current "25% more loot!" is an unappealing format. I probably wont get the X chests from the previous point. One thing that has worked well for me in the past is temporary sales - they make me feel like I'm being rewarded for my limited free time in a weird sort of way (because I get more sales per hour played than people with a lot of free time).
3) Lower price point: There is a magic number below which I don't feel like I need to have a solid grip on the value proposition. Depending on the thing, this is a dollar or two up to $5 ("a cup of coffee"). Right now the lowest price point is $8.33 (obviously varies by pizza price) for a monthly subscription. If this went down to less than $2 for a weekly membership, or less than 50c for a daily membership, I'd find it much easier to say "whatever", especially in response to something that I want coming up on the cushion. Note that this while it would almost certainly get more money out of me, it makes the thing that I really don't like about the current model worse - I would need to look at what I've not bought carefully every single loot drop. Like, I don't know if I'd drop more money, I might I'd just burn through my pizza and start feeling bad faster.
4) Cheaper: Naturally, I want everything cheaper, we all do, but the club does seem expensive. I honestly have no idea how the economics on something like this should work, though.
5) Finality. I would *love* to just be able to drop a good chunk of money on the game and be done with it - unlock all the models and levels and what-have-you. Microtransactions just leave a bad taste in my mouth.

 

A question: has it been stated anywhere that if a Beta reset occurs that the amount of time remaining on your Card Hunter Club membership will be reset, or that the pizza spend will be refunded? I'm assuming the pizza would be refunded, but am not really certain.

Also, the club is very expensive. I love this game, but it is very much a casual thing for me. I'd drop a dollar worth of pizza for a days membership, but I'm unlikely to get my money's worth buying a longer term subscription (by long term I mean a month as I may only play a day or two in that month).

 

I'm also not a fan of micro-transactions. But it appears there's a huge market for those, so I understand why they're using the model. I would much rather just pay up front and not have to think about every transaction ... it's tiring, so I would probably just opt out of most of the options. I'll pay for bonus missions, new models, etc. The club and chests just don't appeal to me.

Paying for a subscription to the club doesn't make sense to me. It's around $9 for a month, and around $87 for a year (less if you buy pizza in larger amounts). I'm pretty sure I can beat the game in a month, which would mean there's no reason to keep the subscription for more than a month, as I would no longer be getting bonus items from the campaign after I beat it. I'm not going to pay for the opportunity to farm the same adventures over and over again.

Also, $87 is pretty steep for a game, especially one with a casual feel like this. I love this game ... it's amazing. But I'm still never going to shell out more than $60 for a game.

If there was a way to permanently join the club, for a reasonable fee, that would appeal to me. I'm talking much less than the current asking price ... something like $20 worth of pizza. That would be hard to pass up. So for around $30 you could join the club, and get all the bonus adventures ... basically the "full" game. Spend some more on skins, chests, or whatever and you get up to the cost of a new game ... $50 to $60.

That's the kind of model that would appeal to a customer like me.

 

As was mentioned earlier I would like to see a permenent membership option as well, for something like 60$, which is still the price of a brand new AAA title and those have to deal with stuff like retailers, advertisement, big fancy next gen grayfics. All that considered this is an amazing game that I'd gladly throw 60 bucks at, and you won't hear me say that about the majority of releases. Also I don't know if this was mentioned but membership is priced in a way where you have to buy a suplus of pizza 6 month costs 1600 meaning you have to buy 1800, 12 month costs. On top of all that the membership is 10$ a month, a bit more than 8 if you get 12 month, that's even more expensive than WoW I believe. As far as benefits go, I think they're fair for the most part. P.S. I apreciate your avatar OP

 

So completely unrelated to card hunter, a friend of mine brough up "Why do I hate Free-to-Play so much?", and after a little conversation came up with this:

and I thought "Wow. Thats exactly what bugs me about the card hunter club cushion".
I should add that I did join the card hunter club, and it's great in that it makes me forget about it. I noticed the first two or three rare+ items that I picked up off the cushion and thought "neat", and then I forgot about it completely, but I don't like the presence of the cushion when not a member, because it makes every loot drop a sales pitch, when it should be a goody bag.

 

Another thought that irks me about the club. I just dumped 99 dollars into pizza, but cannot afford to get the extra dungeons, all the figures and a year's membership to the club. That seems kinda crazy.

Additionally it is worth looking at similar games. The Hex MMO tcg which offers a different experience and is much more hardcore, has a VIP option which costs only $4 per month and I would argue gives significantly more benefits worth a far greater value than the card Hunter club. If club membership worked out at something like $4 a month it would still look quite expensive when you consider what you get when compared to an offering like Hex's.

I want to give Blue Manchu money, but I think a hundred dollars is more than enough to get all the opening gear and a year's membership to the club.