[Suggestion] MP incentives re-think

Hi there, there's an interesting discussion going on about upcoming changes to Randimar's shop, pricing, SP grinding etc.

Here I would like to discuss the incentives behind playing MP and why MP-oriented players go for SP content grinding rather than sticking to MP.

To cut the story short: SP gives much more gold per hour, even if you're on a win-streak in MP.

Currently, if you're lucky, there's an item or two per week that people with still growing collection would like to buy (soon, there will be much more). The closer till the end of the week the more of certain type* of MP players go for SP campaign grind to have a chance at buying those items before they disappear (*at least from my experience and other people in the discussion liked above, I'm sure this does not apply to everyone). In a way they sacrifice their 'fun time' with the game to increase their gph (gold per hour) or as Genki puts it (hope you don't mind me for quoting it here):

I feel very similar to Genki about this and it's interesting to see that I'm not alone - maybe there's more MP players that share this sentiment of being in a crossfire of different incentives?

What's important here is that at the end of the day we see less MP matches being played, less fun to be had by players whose interest in the game is winding down with time - overall lose/lose for both the game and the players. All of this because we're dangling the carrot in the wrong direction. I guess BM want's us to dish out our wallets in a scenario like that - but hey, if that legendary costs me three pints at a local pub then forget it.

So why MP can't be as economically beneficial to play as SP OR at least be not as far behind? Currently even the winners don't get as much loot as SP-farmers and average elo players will of course loose as many matches as they win, if not more, seeing a chest once in a blue moon.

The latter is probably the greatest deterrent of all - putting time and effort into something which might not not give a dime at the end without a chance for improvement, since no wins means no items nor gold for improving your deck.

I need to think about it a bit more, but what currently comes into my mind is to at least fight the greatest deterrent, touched upon above, and give the basic chest for loosing a fight. It wouldn't count towards your golden/purple chests, so winners would still have an advantage (besides bragging rights) but at least MP wouldn't be as inferior farming space. This would still be just a tip of the iceberg however when it comes to making MP on par with SP in terms of gold per hour.

 

I would guess BM would be happy to give a minor reward just for playing MP (ie. even if you lose), the hard part is how to you reward someone who plays a game and loses without rewarding the player who instant-quits repeatedly to get the same reward?

 

Don't give chests for quitting, that would incentivise sticking till the end of the round, even if loosing

 

People complain about being punished for resigning in perfectly reasonable situations as is because it hurts their match seek timer. It's really hard to differentiate between legitimate resignation and match-throwing, and a significant portion of players will feel victimized no matter what we do. Definitely still thinking about these problems, though, so all your posts and suggestions are good food for thought.

 

Instead of responding to MP concerns, since I've already done that, I'd like to bring my SP perspective about grinding SP. I don't like it. I hate grinding. I've done it twice and it bores me to tears. So I understand where that perspective is coming from. And what I mean by grinding is on Saturday I see an item in Randimar's and try to farm as much gold as I can as quickly as possible for the week so I can buy it. Then, the next week I did it again. There's a record of this somewhere in Rate My Randimar's thread. I could barely log in to do the LF after that, so I understand Genki and others concern about grinding SP and then wanting to quit. So what I do now is just play SP like I normally like to. I usually get about 500g per week doing this. So I can't even realistically get a Legendary item more than once a month.

I assume my "meager income" is more than what a person who regularly plays MP gets, but having Randimar's reset daily isn't going to give me incentive to even play SP the way I like to. It's going to make me want to grind more so that I can get that second item after I burn my gold on the first one. Then I'm always having to play catch up for that next item that comes by. Eventually it's going to overload me and I'll stop playing. That's why I like the slow measured pace of a weekly reset. If there's nothing in the shop I like, I have a free week of fun casual playing. If there's something I DO like, I have to weigh my options and my gold reserve and make a decision. If there's 2 or more, well, ugh. This "ugh" situation is going to go up for me even with the currently proposed changes let alone the original ones.

So with that in mind, I like the current proposed changes to Randimar's even though I think it'll increase the pressure on me to grind SP, which I'd rather not have. That's why I think it's a good compromise. I don't really like it either, but I can live with it for the greater access that it gives MP players.

And thank God they removed the everyone gets the same thing change. That was the worst of it, imo.

Now granted, based on what I've seen in other threads I appear to be a minority subset of SP players, but I'm trying to think of everyone and what's best for CH & BM.

 

I'm not sure if it's bad to punish for non-sporty behaviour. Part of the reason why people want to finish their match asap, especially if loosing, is that this lost match doesn't get them anywhere, no loot, no advancement along the chest track.

Right now it's all or nothing - that's another argument to give some sort of reward for taking part in a game and sticking around while you're getting a beating. Don't want to - ok, but no treasure for you. Quite fair and square to be honest.

 

I suggested once that if someone loses a PvP game without resigning, it should count as half a victory in the PvP chain. It's good both for the newcomer who loses a lot as well as for the skilled player as it will reduce the time needed to get the purple chest. At high levels, mostly caus of WW, games can take up to 30 minutes to be completed, that's 10 hours for the epic if you win all your battles.

 

How about rewards based on stars earned? You'll sometimes get hosed for getting rushed but those losses happen pretty fast anyways.

 

Except when you advance through the chest line via leagues. I once did the test of starting Chess Madness as soon as it begun, trying to play (and win) as much as possible, and I got to the 18th chest just in those 3 hours of the league. I got the epic 30 minutes later.

And before the leagues, I remember arriving at the epic chest in 6 hours, it's definitely possible with a good win rate. 10 hours is too much imo, and the average time per game isn't 30 minutes, it's between 15 and 20, at least in my games (and I'm not a very fast player precisely, I like to think my moves).

 

There's a lot going on in this thread... :O

I'm just going to point out this:

MP players tend to want specific items to enable certain builds, but the MP / League chest rewards are great for filling in your entire collection.
SP players tend to want a complete collection, but the SP rewards are great for earning gold to go buy specific items.

Something is perhaps amiss here? >_>

As for the cost of resigning, I would just say that losing often hurts so much because matches can last for up to 40 minutes. Losing wouldn't be so much of a waste if the timer was ~10-12 minutes each. (Yes, that makes you rush against the clock; yes, that's a very good thing in a synchronous online MP game.)

edit: And from the archives - http://forums.cardhunter.com/threads/feedback-mp-vs-sp-rewards.6002/

 

I think that's quite cool that losing gives you nothing, I don't mind it. Increasing the MP rewards have been discussed before, even many times I bet, and that would be OK. But why not just increase the chests' quality? Would be quite hard (near impossible) to tell the difference between honest losses and too fast resigns and winning should be desirable anyway

 

Still a lot of time, much more then what the average player can afford to spend. That's why it has been suggested several times that there shouldn't be a timer in the chests chain. But some really prefer having one or two golden chests daily for 1 or 3 wins.
And unless I missed something, gold leagues aren't supposed to last forever. Luckily for us, BM staff is busy right now with balance and other nice stuff coming up like co-op.

 

I think Cardhunter Meta has the right general idea. Losing with at least 2 points and the opponent with at least 4 could still give a basic chest, though not advance the chain.

 

The thread is going somewhere were I didn't plan - the idea was to make MP on par or at least not so far behind SP in terms of gold farming, so people that like to play MP can actually play MP.

Giving a chest to the loosing party for sticking around (or reaching 3 stars) would be one option that wouldn't increase the divergence between the winners and losers. Increasing the quality of chests would make the difference for winners only and the major deterrent for average players, i.e. no wins no gold, would still push many MP people into the safety of SP grind, so exactly what I'm trying to prevent by making this thread

 

Would you be happy if, say, 50% of MP drops were treasure, instead of items? It sounds weird at first, but in other CCG games (*cough* Hearthstone *cough*) you only get GP for your daily PvP wins, while "items" (cards) are primarily dropped from PvE quests and "leagues" (arena), or purchased from the store.

I haven't got a horse in this race, having mostly abandoned MP, but stating more clearly what you're after might corral folks' imaginations.

(Also, speaking from the vantage point of 100% complete SP, it feels really weird now that Card Hunter has become "GP Hunter", since that's the only way I can ever possibly reach 100% completion of my collection... Randimar even does better than the Loot Fairy at bringing me new items.)

 

GP acquisition would be made much easier (much less time consuming) if equipment sold for more than it currently does. And since there is no trading, market place or auction house, what fear is there of gold being inflated (besides enticing people to buy horribly overpriced pizza).

And like neoncat (in reference to Hearthstone) says, perhaps there could be daily MP quests in addition to, or instead of, the chest ladder. Stuff like, win 3 games in a row, win a game using only Elf Wizards, etc.

 

I have mixed visions of this idea, involving wonderful daily party diversity becoming a thing, and wonderful daily party diversity getting utterly steamrolled by the usual builds played by people who know an opportunity when they see one.

 

Rewarding both winners and losers is one of the best ways to incentivize people to play multiplayer, but the problem with rewarding losers is it encourages players to resign prematurely. One big flaw with the current system is that regardless of the game length, the reward is unchanged. Players are encouraged to play short games, which often leads to premature concessions. Losing a long, grindy game feels horrible because you don't get anything out of it and you just spent 40 minutes of your time.

To encourage people in a losing position to play the game out, I propose giving both players a scaling reward based on the length of the game. This kind of reward system is implemented in League of Legends and I think it works beautifully. It encourages both teams to fight to the end, knowing that the extra time they put into the game will not go unrewarded. The problem with directly porting this system to card hunter is that it would encourage stalling and slow play, so we need to tweak it a little bit.

My proposal is this: Regardless of whether you win or lose, at the conclusion of every multiplayer match you will receive 1 gold for every 10 seconds that elapsed on your opponent's game clock.

This would be in addition to the standard chest reward track that the winner progresses on. The numbers can be tweaked but 1 gold per 10 seconds seems fair to me. If both players take the same amount of time each match, you'll make an extra 180 gold per hour playing multiplayer (though queue times will reduce this figure). This would encourage both players to play the game out without encouraging either one to stall. It would be an easy way to incentivize people to play multiplayer rather than farm single player.

Let me know what you think.

 

To add a different perspective, my best memories playing CardHunter are those longs, well-thought games against skillful players, no matter what the results were. Obviously I am happier if I win those long matches, but if I lose them I don't feel that I lost 40 minutes of my time just because I didn't get any reward. When the game is good, rewards are nice and can be a good incentive, but playing the game itself should be a satisfactory experience. That's how I see it.

 

I felt that way too for a long time, at least until most of those long games involved loads of whirls. >_>