A heartfelt letter to the Devs (State of the game)

Yelling "but it's p2w!" is an easy way to save face when you are losing. Some people tend to think they are the awesomest and best and that the only reason they are having trouble is that the game is a luck-based, p2w trap with paywalls designed to drain them all of their money. Of course there's some luck involved and it gets a bit easier if you pay enough to get more loot, but there's a huge skill component also. And some people just can't admit they could actually do better if they learned new things.

That's what I think of most of the p2w arguments, especially those people who post here once and then vanish and not the likes of OneMoreNameless.

 

... I should probably clarify something here. I don't have any problems with Card Hunter's loot balance or overall difficulty. Nor does it bother me overmuch that free players are given reduced loot or locked out of certain campaign adventures - the rate of progress and amount of content available for free is far more than enough for someone to try out the game and judge whether they like it enough to pay money or not, and $20 is reasonable price for a game of this length and quality. I don't even mind that other players can pay further real money to make the campaign easier for themselves! It doesn't affect me any more than an easy mode I've resolved not to use in any other game.

No, what has left a bitter taste in my mouth is the presentation of all this. The membership clock ticking down on the world map. The adventures wait-locked away from replaying.* The garish pillow upon which loot is delicately handed to you, the glorious payer. The breaking and rebreaking of character to encourage you to get out your wallet again. Card Hunter is constantly in your face with reminders that you could be feeding it more money, even if you've already paid and are doing just fine. This isn't like a brick and mortar store displaying its goods in a window, this is like a furniture store letting you sit on and then purchase a chair except the chair keeps playing the store's jingle every five minutes it feels your arse at home and sporadically whispers to you descriptions of comfier chairs with more features that you could be going back to the store to buy!

( * Sidenote: The reason I consider this egregiously pay-to-win is because it prevents (effeciently) grinding for exp or loot, leaving an eager player who finds themselves stuck with the most apparent options of either waiting in real time (possibly while their membership runs out) or paying real money to immediately gamble on extra random loot, treasure hunts etc. in the hope of receiving something that helps them out. It also just kinda sucks as a binge-player to be told "Nope, you can't. Go twiddle your thumbs." )

I have consumed other free-to-play games in the past, some of which were designed with much stronger incentives for paying and more worse restrictions for not. At one point I dumped several months of free time into an MMORPG knowing full well that its endgame content and gear were effectively unobtainable without dumping several months of free cash into the game also. But it didn't irk because all of its pay-to-win benefits were neatly tucked away in a single 'real money store' and entirely ignorable while you were grinding your stress away. They were also a little expected given the genre. By comparison, Card Hunter is of a more tactical genre, ostentatiously aimed at oldschool gamers, and the majority of its content (in terms of maps etc.) is a strictly singleplayer** romp that could easily have been released as a standalone game. Being filled with invitations to use their wallets to help advance is thus particularly out of context and not going to encourage players to use their brains instead.

( ** Sidenote x2 Combo: I would argue that Card Hunter's current MP is affected somewhat by the game's pay-to-win mechanics. While the wide variety of rare items have their uses across the campaign, there are certain notorious items that are more powerful than others of their token cost, and the single mode of PvP is much more limited in scope than SP so only a certain subset of items are tactically appropriate to combat effectively. The matchmaking system should allow unlucky free players to still enjoyably duel other unlucky free players, but if you were interested in climbing the ranks then whether you've paid or not is much more likely to make a difference to if or how fast you can manage that. )

So that all irritates me. But at least I know that the game's fun without paying-to-win, right? Well, most new players and potential customers won't. When they log in and start playing their first adventures what they are going to see and assume is that club membership is highlighted everywhere ('and so must be super important!'), stores full of powerful equipment absolutely nowhere within their income ('wow guess I'll have to buy it with real money'), Gary making light of the chest store ('so the game is balanced around opening them? uh'), and grinding adventures isn't even an allowed option ('... maybe I won't come back tomorrow at all'). I'm not in a position to judge whether or how beneficial this is to Blue Manchu's finances, but it sure as hell doesn't reflect well on their game's image.

Rant over, GG.

tldr Yes.

 

The game is P2W to some extent.

Buying chests is a fast way to get all the great items. 100 dollars buys 25 purple chests. This means a chest costs 4 dollars. Assume that in a purple chest gets a legendary item 1/3 times... do the math and you'll see that a legendary item costs 12 dollars. There are 225 legendary items in the game so that would cost you about $2,500 to have a really strong set of them. If a person pays that much he will have a big advantage over the competition. Is anyone doing this or close to it? I don't think so. But even if they are...

If you play 15 hours a week, with a membership, you will likely get 2.5 legendary items per week on average. This includes randimar's. So in about 18 months they'll have the same set as a person that just paid up front. This will have cost them about $150 instead. Alternatively, a person can play about 40 hours a week and get there much faster and cheaper - in about 7 months maybe at a cost of about 60 dollars.

Without a membership you clearly won't be able to compete in the long run, at the highest levels, in any sort of reasonable time frame. If they add new content then you might never catch up.

Based on all of this the game is indeed pay2win. However, the cost isn't that crazy. And since nobody seems to have bought all those epic chests, all a person really needs to be able to compete is the membership.

If you like the game and play it a decent amount then just buy the subscription. Forking up 9 dollars a month to the devs will likely not hurt you at all but help them out a lot. To me that is all 100% reasonable...

 

Just want to add a few cents here:

- I a agree that OneMoreNameless has a point. No matter how objective we try to be we all have our own opinions about the game and that will not change. The current set up (like the loot presented in on the club membership pillow and the one-handed-bandit chest shop) can make people jump to conclusions very early on. These people might leave the game without understanding a few things, which might have changed their attitude towards the game.

- an argument that is popping up is that the wait-lock mechanic is strictly P2W. It's a very subjective statement, so I don't like that it is stated as a fact. First of all, you are never ever out of options to grind for loot!* The very first thing that would come to my mind if adventures were locked out it is to go and play MP (the first 3-6 wins a day are totally worth it, even if you don't have the ambition to be teh 1337 winnah) - an option which is heavily advertised in the game and my belief is that they want us to switch between MP and SP to get loot when we hit a wall in either. It's a great incentive since people that jump in to play a few games a day really increase the variety of MP fights and waiting times are reduced across the board and elo is matched better which makes the MP experience much more fun for everyone . If someone says that MP is not his/her thing than sorry, but you're just being picky! I guess I was lucky loot-wise since I never hit a wall due to lack of tools (although I had hard moments in the game). Another thing, which I think programmer pointed out already, paying customers don't have their timer reset.

(* OK, if you go through all your unlocked adventures, quests and win the epic chest in under 18h, than yes, you're out of options, but good luck with that).

- there's a lot of outrange about stuff being difficult or that someone doesn't have the right cards (but then again, some people say it up front that they can't be bothered changing their set up each time :/ ) there is absolutely no necessity to go back and grind low level adventures for loot OR even buy extra chests. The success stories on the forums of newcomers that can't handle an adventure at first but manage after fifth try and advice from the community is one thing. What is more, very early on you are given pizza which can be spend on the multiplayer starter packs. Just have a look through those, they are not filled with legendaries but they are very useful, especially if you're starting out. BM just give everyone free goodies, assuming you want a helping hand.

- I completely don't agree that the game is P2W, especially that the highly competitive items out there are not legendary, epic or even rare (I'm not using a single legendary in my MP set up, although I got a few). I buy stuff from Randimar every week, but sit on approx. 2k gold and never felt short of gold to buy anything since I have not yet found a legendary item that would be even close to worth buying (I've put money into the game for the club memberships, have never bought extra chest nor exchanged pizza into gold). Gold management is another thing that needs to be learned in the game. If someone is really feeling bad that he/she can't afford all legendary/epic/rare in their shop each weak than they need to rethink what they're doing, it's totally not worth it spending that money. Just prioritise a build or two you want to make in the future and spend sparingly.

- at the end of the day, this game will die without our financial support and compared to P2W games out there, this game is nowhere near. They have to advertise money-sinks, they just have to. Out of all the 'free2play' games out there they're asking for very little (i.e. assuming all you would spend you money on is the membership to speed up your grind).

- all of this is based on the premise that you need to use legendaries to be competitive - which in my humble opinion is as wrong as it gets.

 

This is just not the truth. There are fantastic legendary items that are a lot better than their more common counterparts.

 

I have failed to find any (although I have quite a few). To be hones all my legendaries piss me off, because they just don't synergise well. One need to remember that in any card game getting your highest rarity items and banging them together is not what makes a good deck.

 

Just because you haven't found good ones yet doesn't mean they don't exist...

Can take a look on wikipedia

 

The thing is started playing a week or two after the release of the game, took me a week to go through the campaign and now I play 3-6 MP wins every other day or so and somehow I get completely different experience when it comes to those must-have legendaries that you claim are so OP.

Please, make a topic with those OP hard-to-get items (including the build) and maybe let the community decide if they are really so irreplaceable?

 

While I can see some of the points of both sides of this argument I have a hard time thinking this is a P2W game. I bought the basic edition when my first party was around level 8. Not because I couldn't progress, but because I was enjoying the game so much I wanted to support it. I didn't hit my first "toughness" wall until level 13 (Mountain Pass) and 14 (Lord Batford's Manor). And when Gary was presenting the different ways I could spend pizza I didn't feel pressure to buy pizza. The fact that he gave me pizza to try it out was great because then I could learn and then properly determine if I DID want to spend money. Those "feature tutorials" didn't make me feel like I had to spend money to do well. They were just letting me know that was an option. I kind of wish I hadn't used the pizza he gave me to open a chest. I would have rather saved it for later.

Honestly, I LIKE the wait when it comes to doing the adventures. I prevents me from playing all night. If I could spend money to get rid of the wait, then I'd say it is closer to P2W, but not fully P2W.

My club membership has since expired and now that I don't have it I don't enjoy the game any less. In fact, I'm less disappointed with what drops on the fluffy pillow since now I'm happy when it's common or uncommon unlike when I did have the membership and got an item I already had 3 or 4 copies of. Sure, I sold extras for 1 or 2 gold, but even that doesn't make me think I have a leg up on any other player.

Shrug. Just my 2 cents.

 

Personally, I don't have an issue with only being able to do adventures once per day. I think I'd get really bored of repeating the same one over and over in a day. It would feel way too much like grinding. I'm not too sure about the intention of the mechanic, perhaps to limit people from gold grinding certain quick adventures. I sort of see it like doing daily quests in an MMO. I just level another party or play MP if I'm stuck.

 

Time-locks are usually intended as a way to promote user retention. It's a well known game design technique, and not really considered an abusive one either.

Obviously things are different when a game pushes too far with those, imposing frequent and excessive locks and also offering you ways to raise those locks via upfront payment. Luckily enough BM is not doing any of these.

 

I'm new and only heard about the game recently, I want to echo some of the points above

• There are serious difficulty spikes that force samey tactics and decks
• Frustration exacerbated from being so vulnerable to a bad luck deal
• If adapting the deck is part of the challenge: give a better idea of what's coming up & allow us to save equipment layouts
• The orb levelling system devalues loot drops massively just as the difficulty starts to ramp up (I'm sure its better later)
• Don't mind lock outs (prevent grinding)
• The club drops are a bit in-your-face annoying

Really love the style of the game and happy for a challenge; but this feels tuned a bit too hard right now (at least in the mid game). If I'm reading advice that says: when you get from level 8-14 basically drop healers and super stack your deck this way for X I feel that choice is being eliminated and that is a problem beyond just 'learn to play'.

 

The latter is in the game right now, both in the Keep and when readying your party to reply a campaign module scenario.

 

Is that the store/retrieve option? I thought that was for saving your game... Well that helps a bit, although I was kind of meaning an individual character layouts, especially since it's often only one or two characters who need to change.

 

I thought the same at first.

Anyways, yeah, it's the whole party, but you can just change the description and be pretty sure of what you're retrieving etc.

 

I'd like to add that I for one would love to receive a Card Hunter newsletter. Of course, it could be opt-in to prevent any kind of spam accusations. I'd find it useful for gleaning an overview of what's new in the CH universe without checking the forums. For example, new build notes could be included within the newsletter. I'm not playing any MP until the draw issue is resolved in some way and I have no way of finding out without checking the forums.

 

L2W can also mean "learn to win" and there is some of that. Every level is doable with normal loot, the right tactics, and a little bit of luck too if you are on the edge.