PvE droprates are too low

Ooohhhhhhh ... 7 pages was all it took to get to the heart of the matter.

This is clearly the problem. The droprates for PvE are bad because it's possible to play them on repeat forever for full rewards. I think it is plain as day you should fix this so that once you beat a map, your reward for that map is downgraded until the next day (i.e. do this per map, not per entire campaign). Then you could have reasonable drop rates in first-time replay PvE and this would all be a non-issue.

 

Very few players can get that high in just 4 months, especially if they only play SP. I think 40-50% is more realistic. (I've been playing since beta and I only have 84%.)

Treasure hunts. Figures. 1 week club memberships when they see a legendary they need. Expansions.

But yes, this is a place where we could use some more options.

 

http://forums.cardhunter.com/thread...unter-faq-and-glossary.6913/page-4#post-80249

 

Don't get that literally .. when a Customers says "I don't like that car you're selling it's too slow" -> he IS RIGHT.. he doesn't like it because it feels too slow for him.. You however can be aware that the car is
made for other types of Customers that dont care about acceleration etc etc .. or you can realize that with increasing it's acceleration you can get some other customers .. that's up to you, but that Customer was right.

That's what I told and I'm right.. I do feel that farming with terrible drop rates is pointless .. and giving that I dont feel that keeping Membership ON is worth it ..
you however can brainstorm about it and see if its only me (where I guess it would be totally wrong to increase drop rate) or there might be some value in increasing drop rate..
(or you might have other reasons not to increase drop rates, that I'm unaware of.. but that still doesnt change that I'm right about my feelings)

And when a customer is right, it is polite to address him as such ..

 

Unless I'm grossly mistaken, the drops for the 1st battle of any map are the same for 1st time that day and subsequent runs of an exhausted adventure. It is only the last battle loot chest that drops in rarity rate for an exhausted adventure.

 

I speak of Customers = players who buy pizza and chests .. (and play ofc)

Well if a players pays some money for game, he probably bought Treasure Hunts already in first month or so

That 1 week club stands though .. that's what I do now.. play a bit and if I see a Legendary I buy 1 week club .. (happened once in 2 months)

 

It should be noted that grinding the first level of an adventure is almost always used to farm items. Gold is just a by-product of selling what you don't want.

 

I thought you might bring a different story to light regarding repeat farming. Someone earlier was telling me it died with the treasure nerf to kobolds. It didn't - it just became less widespread.

Someone earlier also mentioned that they believed many club memberships come from good items falling in that slot. To whatever degree that's true, the following chain might be worth noting: increased item drop rate->increased chance of club slot showing a worthwhile item->increased revenue from club memberships. I specifically point that out because it's not immediately obvious that allowing items to drop more easily might actually result in increased income.

 

A Back Story
Once upon a time, several months ago, Cardhunter had virtually no gold sinks. Sure, new players could buy common and uncommon items in shops, but as they advanced and played they soon reached the "max usable" quantity for all of these. Randimar's existed, but often offered no legendary items at all. When it did, they were often not worth buying. Rares were fairly plentiful, but they often drop during play and the demand was soon sated. For many, 6 weeks of nothing worth buying was common. So we farmed.
There were many farmers back then. @Oberon and @Qivril played both SP and MP, and were probably the best farmers of all, but some other guy got a title stuck on him. (Of course there is the possibility that several SP players have amassed the entire collection and left without saying anything because SP players can be like that, but we don't know, so I'll ignore it.)
The Kobold Mines offered the highest treasure rate, so we could direct someone there who got lucky at Randimar's and needed gold quickly, but gold was rarely a goal for farmers. We farmed for items. For Lavastaff, and Lochaber, and Strongarm, and Vibrant Pain. Many of us preferred SP because the level of the items was focused, and we knew what we lacked and what we sought.
And we rarely found it.
We took in thousands of unwanted or excess items and spent hours every week selling them from our bloated collections so the game wouldn't slow to a crawl. And for this we got gold.
And the gold piled up.
And up.
And when we had more than we thought we could spend in Randimar's within six months or so, we threw tens of thousands in gold at 18 gp chests, got few or no desired items, and spent an hour or so selling the excess for gold. Useless gold.
So we farmed, sold excess, threw gold away on chests, and slowly (or in a few cases, quickly) acquired the elusive items we sought.
Then Gold Leagues came in, and we could spend a pittance on something worthwhile. When someone in MP chat said they didn't have 50 gp for the entrance fee (how odd that sounded!), they were directed to speed farm the mines for 15 or 20 minutes and get it.
Then Randimar's was changed to offer 10 each of Legendary, Epic, and Rare items every week! And The Daily Deal came, offering a Legendary and 3 Epics every day! Stexe was dismayed, and suddenly gold was no longer useless.
Ergo, gold farming suddenly became hugely popular. The knee-jerk (and widely expected) response was to nerf kobold loot. And firestorm. And many other useful farming cards that were deemed OP, or simply Un-Fun, in MP. And MP rewards were buffed.
Few farmers cared about the kobold loot, but many were PO'd by the card nerfs. Some quit, some stayed and kept farming.
And that's pretty much where we are today.

 

I see ... very interesting. I think the overall changes have actually improved things quite a bit given what you're describing. Good job by BlueManchu!

I don't have any issue with the nerf to kobold loot or Firestorm (I wasn't around in the first place to know the difference). I just find the status quo to be that the PvP drop rate far outstrips the drop rate of PvE in a way that affects the choice to play PvE content negatively.

I think we've narrowed down the issue to having viable PvE drop rates that are not abusable by speed farming. That's not to call farming itself an abuse; that's to say that it changes the intention of the drop rate and any calculation you would make of it when you multiply by 50 (just a random estimation of how many more times a farmer plays a level than a normal PvE player).

>> The solution is to make PvE content viable for casual one-time-a-day players, with normal drop rates, and to allow farmers who want to continue to replay content multiple times to do so for lesser drop rates which add up over time.

I think BlueManchu has done that, with the exception that you can play the first level of each map forever without a dropoff in rewards. They should fix that so each map is once per day at a normal drop rate before it changes into the diminished rate aimed at preventing gold farming from being a better source of items than PvP. Then normal PvE players wouldn't have to suffer the consequences. Right now the game treats all PvE players as if they were farmers -- which they are not.

 

I clarified this above, you're working on misinformation.

 

Great, as SP isn't rewardless in Card Hunter and there is no gold grinding problem either so no need for a fix.

Nope, no play styles or preferences were removed. The players were just liberated from the tyranny of repeating one map ad nauseam and set free to play whatever adventures they personally find most rewarding as they were now all equally rewarding.

Yes, wonderfully harmonic as Blue Manchu seem to agree perfectly, providing ample opportunities for players to do just that and much more should the players so desire.

Well, at least they are at liberty to non-advance them at the same rate as the MP-only players are not advancing them seeing as the rewards are about equal.

Happily there has never been such a problem in Card Hunter.

 

I don't really find this comment helpful without explaining what you mean. This is what Flaxative said:

True. (You can also endlessly replay the first map of a mission to always get the full reward for the map. On some missions, this is a very effective quick gold grind.)

If you can play the first level of a PvE map forever without a dropoff in rewards, that's a problem that needs fixing. That's what I said. Not sure where you're finding an error.

If you play 3 PvP matches a day your rewards will be incomparably better than if you play 3 PvE matches a day.

Put another way, if you spend 1 hour of normal PvP play in a day your rewards will be incomparably better than if you spend 1 hour of normal PvE play in a day.

 

These are not comparable as winning 3 MP matches takes hugely more time than winning 3 SP matches. Lost matches produce no items.

Not true according to the data we have and some quick approximations and brief anecdotal evidence. I just got better rewards for the same time spent in SP than Drakkan in MP. I might have been very lucky. You might have been very unlucky in your SP runs. Too little data to get a reliable result. Extrapolating from all the data we have I got a result that says SP is more productive. "Incomparably better" is nowhere near the truth as far as we can currently determine.

 

PvE does not equal farming.

Your idea of how long it takes to play PvE is extremely skewed because you assume people are playing as fast as they can.

Playing PvE for the enjoyment of the maps is entirely something else, and there are lots of folks who enjoy doing that. It takes 5 minutes or so per map (yes that's less than PvP). If you play at a normal, reasonable, successful rate, you will complete about 10 maps in an hour in PvE. Unfortunately the drops you'll get in ten victories in PvE (this assumes you win every time which is also not the case) are much much worse than what you will receive for 1 hour of playing PvP, even if you're not that great a PvP player. That's just a straight fact based on the numbers.

The only way your argument makes sense is when you assume a nonsensical amount of time per PvE match. The super-fast PvE run is something farmers do -- all the power to them. And that's why you need to curb the farmers' PvE rewards and not normal players. I'm not sure how to make that any clearer.

Having the rewards for the first time per day of a PvE quest be more in line with PvP rewards hurts nobody. It wouldn't change how PvPers play; it wouldn't change how farmers play; and it would vastly improve the experience for casual PvE players.

 

I read what Flax said, did you read what I said? - It's not helpful to a thread to repeat the same things over and over so I didn't, I mentioned to read what I had said above. Not to mention the link to the faq of which I gave to answer your question about what drops from specific chests, also should have clarified this. However, if I need to be more clear...

It used to be that you could not replay an adventure for diminished rewards, once you played an adventure you were done for the day on that adventure. Therefore, the approach to speed farming was to replay only the first battle of an adventure so as not to exhaust the given adventure you wanted to farm. Now you can replay adventures for "diminished rewards." HOWEVER, it's important to know what is diminished! The "diminished rewards" ONLY apply to the final chest of the final battle of an adventure. Rather than giving the final loot chest, it gives the same chest as preliminary adventures (2 items, no guaranteed upgrade). So while you technically can still repeat the first battle without exhausting an adventure for "full preliminary chest rewards," the fact is if you were to exhaust the adventure and then play that first battle again, you get the same rewards because the "diminished rewards" only applies to the last battle.

What Flax said is technically correct, you don't get diminished rewards by replaying the first battle, but what you appear to be inferring and which is actually NOT the case is that those rewards for the 1st battle are worse after exhausting the adventure; they are not.

 

I believe your error is in stating that it is a problem.

It takes as long as it takes, but after the "story" goes away, there is little reason to lollygag for most. If you play slowly, you get less per hour. If you play quickly, you get more per hour. Entirely fair.
In pvp you rarely get fast games, and when your elo stabilizes you should lose about half.
For the average player, all but some of the high level adventures can be played much more quickly than one pvp match, which you have a 50% chance of losing and getting nothing.

 

@Scarponi - All right this makes a lot more sense (assuming I understand how it works now).

So: The chests before the final chest in a campaign are 2-item no guaranteed upgrade chests. Those are always the same, whenever you beat that map.
The final-map chest, for the first time you play it per day, is usually better than the above-described. When you play it beyond the first time, however, it reverts to the above-described type of chest.

If that's how it works, I think it's a great system and works fine.

And, if that's how it works, it's just an issue of balance and not of design really.

 

That's how it works.

 

Great, thank you for clearing that all up.

In that case I think the first-few-daily chests of PvE either need a buff or bonus, or the PvP chests need to be nerfed somehow.

Right now the system is not balanced how it should be, which is balance between normal-speed PvE and average-skill PvP. You can always add some other factor in there to prevent rapidfire farming from throwing things off, but rapidfire farming is not part of the balance you should be striving for any more than trading resignations for free chests in PvP would be.