PvE droprates are too low

Pondering the really long-term prospects for the SP campaign puts me in mind of the old joke: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Well, don't do that."

If you stop an think about it, it's weird to expect that you will enjoy the same thing indefinitely. Eventually, the principle of diminishing marginal utility kicks in and even something you enjoyed a whole lot at first begins to pall after the nth repetition. For example, Star Wars is one of my favorite movies ever. I still rarely miss an opportunity to quote a bit of SW dialogue in any even tangentially-relevant context. If prompted, I will definitely recommend the movie to others and otherwise praise and admire it. But it has been years since I actually watched it. I have seen it many times and I just don't feel the need to see it yet another time. Games may be the kind of thing that can engage one's attention for longer than movies can, but very few games can remain compelling indefinitely.

This is why I think talk of changing drop rates is largely a non-issue. If they're tuned in such a way that many of us can find the SP campaign entertaining for months and months, that's no small thing. "But I haven't reached 100% completion yet" is not a good reason to keep plugging away at a game that isn't fun for you anymore. If you do get to the point in a game where playing it is something you only do out of force of habit or some phantom sense of obligation, stop playing it. You may still want to enjoy it, but if you don't enjoy it, you will be happier if you move on and do something else instead. Quite possibly, other people will as well. There's nothing like burned-out, disgruntled not-quite-former players hanging around to ruin the atmosphere of a game's forums. (I'm basing this on my experience with other online games, not any particular posters around here.) It's no failure on Blue Manchu's part, or yours, if their game doesn't consistently fascinate you for years on end.

That said, CH isn't a static thing. It's under active development, so periodically things to get shaken up by balance changes, new modes of play (co-op!), and entirely new content (EttSC?). Even if there are no new worlds for you to conquer now, it might be worth checking back in a few months to see if there's new stuff to rekindle your interest. I'm sure the BM guys are working as hard as they can to keep things dynamic and interesting, and as far as I'm concerned they're doing a good job. I'm having fun with CH and don't see myself stopping anytime soon. But, bottom line, we're talking about a computer game here, not a spouse or a family member. If I eventually tire of it, whether I have ALL THE THINGS or not, I'll be grateful to BM and the community here for many happy hours spent playing, but I'll move on.

 

The game is great and I still play it. I actually just gave some feedback from my perspective to BM, there were even several suggestions (from several players) of what could be done to improve end game content in first 5-6 pages.
But this thread is losing its purpose now when some wise-guys drop by, read few posts and feel the urge to post... and usually miss the point, like you did.

(and actually that can also be the reason of ruining atmosphere of game's forums, you posting with wrong assumptions and others replying .. like I just did .. but wont any more - BM stated that they understood, so goal is achieved .. if we get some endgame contend - great, if no .. well still ok .. )

 

I specifically said I wasn't talking about anybody here, and I meant it. I certainly wasn't thinking of you, Drakkan.

I still follow the forum for an online game that's been going on for over a decade, and that's what I had in mind. Part of what I like about CH and its forums is the relative newness and freshness. It reminds me of the early days of the other game, when most posters were excited about things and there was a lot of productive back-and-forth with the devs. But now think about how every time there's a balance change, some people gets upset about a nerf to their favorite card/strategy/item/whatever. Multiply that by scores of balance changes and consequent disgruntlement and things begin to change. Rightly or wrongly, the direction of this thread reminded me of some of the early stirrings in that direction I've seen elsewhere.

It has been my experience that for a variety of reasons (sunk donation costs, attachment to the community, just plain old compulsive behavior, etc.), people can talk themselves into playing a game longer than they ideally should. Let me emphasize that I am not in any way suggesting or implying that you are one of these people. I'm glad you are still enjoying the game; so am I. My point was that, in a long-running game, factors like drop rates probably have a negligible impact on keeping the game interesting for long-time players when compared with something like new content. (Given your suggestions earlier in the thread, I think we agree about this.) I found your post about what the SP campaign can look like from the point of view of somebody who has been building a collection for longer than I have helpful and informative. I was trying to offer the perspective of somebody who has played a game that has lasted long enough to really show what effect long-term goals have on people. Evidently, I did so in a clumsy and bumbling way and gave offense. I apologize.

 

I completely agree, Mag. I think I know the forum you're talking about; I don't play the game but I occasionally visit the forum to stare in fascination at the train wreck. Your posts were clear and well communicated, not clumsy, and remind me that I should probably stop contributing to the snark on this relatively fresh forum.

 

Flaxative, can I take your "Like" as a "yes", then? Sorry to belabour the point, but the line the ducks are in isn't perfectly straight yet.

 

As far as I know, yes, that's accurate.

 

Thank you kindly!

 

Exactly. If it's the challenge you are interested in, the less loot the better, really! Ideally, there should be just a trickle of loot that you use cleverly to beat the challenge. Enough to make it interesting, not enough to make it overpowered.

That said, there are many SP players who like to farm. But again, they will also like a challenge to their farming design, not loot for nothing.

 

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but my concept of a 'Legendary' item is one that hardly anyone gets....

 

And yet the idea of rarity that high is directly at odds with healthy deck-building in a collectible card game. If one doesn't own and can't acquire a Vibrant Pain, for instance, how can a deck with adequate Nimble Strikes be built? You can find it on a few other items, but all have too few copies and/or too many bad cards that muck up your build . You likewise can't build a good fire wizard without a stack of the right legendary items. High item rarity makes particular cards and builds insanely difficult to acquire, hurts player innovation by unnecessarily restricting potential deck designs, and creates (for me at least) a lot of "feel bad" moments where I simply can't actually do the things in the game that I want to do. In SP maybe that doesn't detract from the experience too much, but in MP it basically means if you win the lottery enough you randomly get the right to have a given build, while others (who perhaps have even played more/dropped many more items than you) still can't build that. In practice it means that you might not even be able to build a very competitive team, given how focused many of the top tier builds are around a fairly narrow set of items.

 

This is how I felt way back when. Never understood (as a player) complaints about rarity in SP because I never compared myself against other players, and I beat the whole campaign with basically no legendaries and none of the rare cards many folks talked about (Firestorm, Nimble Strike). And, of course, I've always thought that PvP players should have access to every item in order to make a healthy environment

Many of our top players at times have used essentially peasant teams (maybe one or two rares). Just putting that out there. I agree with you in theory though.

 

C'mon @Foz, let's not make stuff look way worse than it actually is.

Everybody who played CH for a decent amount of time knows legendaries are hardly a necessity for putting decent builds together. In fact, some common/uncommon items are considered among the best in their respective slot.

Sure, some legendaries are required for very specific builds, but it's not like your options are limited to those few builds, and everything else is trash. The amount of viable builds in this game is staggering, and not every build requires insanely rare items and in quantity.

At the end of the day, you'll be able to buy stuff from randimar's and the daily deal shops, given enough time. We're talking about a selection of 17 legendary items every damn week. These days, almost everybody who's played the game for more than a couple months is running at least some variation of build revolving around pretty rare items (VP, Blue Destruction, the Strongarm, etc etc etc).

Completing the collection may not be the easiest thing in the world, getting access to rare items though is far from being the impossible task some people is depicting. It's multiple times easier now than back when we got no Daily Deal, no Fairy, loot rewards were worse across the board, and randi only brough a very limited assortment of goods each week.

 

I actually heartily disagree that item rarity hurts player innovation. If everyone had access to all the items, builds would be more stagnant, as people would just try to copy the best builds (which they already do) rather than being forced to play with a limited selection of items.

When I was younger I got into a CCG but had very little money to play it. My buddy played a lot though so he would give me cards that he had enough copies of that he wouldn't use any more. This meant I essentially was always playing peasant against players who were playing with much larger collections. I couldn't take them on toe-to-toe, so I was forced to find atypical strategies that worked with the cards I had. The innovation came from my lack of collection, not from those who had large collections that usually ran very similar decks. While I always wanted the better cards, I learned to enjoy the challenge of beating players with strategies they've never seen before.

 

I agree with most of what you said; but I'd just like to mention that I've been around for a lot longer than a couple of months and I don't have any of the legendaries you mentioned. And if I did have them, I wouldn't be using them in my current builds anyway. (They just aren't needed for the kinds of builds that I usually use.)

I do fine in MP using very few legendary items. And when I do use legendaries, it's often just for novelty rather than because they're integral to my build. I think the key message is this:

 

And then I mentioned what, 3 out of 278 legendary items? I'm pretty sure you had the chance (i.e. buy and/or drop) to get hold of a good number of them during your long CHing career?

Maybe you have some of the following? Illusion, The Lunginator, Hawlic's Surging Shield, Bleneth's Skull, Staff of the Misanthrope, Shield of Ultimate Dodging, Dark Drews's Mace, Huetotl's Firebrand, Bynzer's Black Spear, Avakiria's Cup, Smoag's Bucket of Pitch, etc etc etc

And yes, people often do the mistake of thinking you simply can't have a good build w/o an insane number of legendaries, which is simply not true. So I agree with that.

I remember, back when I had been playing the game for about 6 months, I had way less legendaries that I own now. I was missing all the cool items, but I did have some interesting piece of equipment. I.e. one of the first non-dud legendaries I dropped was General Jelom's Helm, and I had heaps of fun designing decks around it. At that time, getting hold of specific legendaries was much, much harder than it is now, so you kinda had to cope with whatever the RNG gave to you.

I think I honestly had more fun with deckbuilding back then, because the meta was incredibly more varied, and the fact you couldn't have most of the l33t items meant you really had to pull off stuff which had to work despite lacking all the right items for the most optimized builds. Good times.

 

I must say I don't agree with you this time ..

I have learned a lot form my long MTG carrier. If you want tournament deck, you need good cards. Deck that was made by innovation with limited card pool is usually behind a deck of another good innovator with super-set of cards (So if you both had the same deck-building skills, he could make same deck as you, but you cannot make same deck as he).
You can make a good deck, good results also, by using less powerful card pool for sure, but it's rarely a Tier One deck..

I think, there are players who like innovating and players who like using already made decks.

From my experience, new players usually start by copying decks.. (me in MTG) but in time, when they learn physics of the game, some of them start innovating..
And its a lot easier to innovate (a competitive deck) when you have lots of cards ..

If you managed to compete with your peasant decks against those players, I guess it was due to your understanding of the game, deck-building and play-skills..
When I see someone who's good with limited card pool in CCG game, I ask myself how good (or how much better) he would be with all cards available..

At the end, I think it comes to player nature .. some like challenge of competing with lower level cars.. some (like me) are perfectionists and like playing with best cards, not copy+paste .. but it is good if you have option to quickly change your deck (whether just 3-4 cards or whole strategy)..

 

I completely agree. I never said that larger collections don't give a strategic advantage - in fact I noted my disadvantage in the example. But my comment was on deck diversity and innovativeness not on what you need for tier one competition which is a different question.

I like to think of myself as an innovative deck builder, but I can say without hesitation that the larger my collection is, the less innovative my decks are. Six months ago if I wanted to make a burning wizard, I would have had to scroll through my collection figuring out how I could make a good burning wizard with what I had. I would have tried various strategies and various combinations because, not having the ideal items, I had to be creative to make it work. Now if I want to make a burning wizard, I open my keep, slap on the best items without much thought and go. That's not to say the capacity for innovative play doesn't remain, but the impetus for it lessens considerably.

 

But then, getting hold of "good" cards in MtG usually means you have to spend a lot of money on booster packs and/or purchasing specific cards on a one-by-one basis.

In CH, at least you don't have to dish out money to do that, you just need some time.

The problem is, some people think "some time" means you should be able to acquire all the cards/items in a matter of weeks/months. Which I'm not saying would necessarily be a bad thing, mind you. But that would indirectly hurt Blue Manchu (and hence CH) a lot, in at least two major ways:

1) Rare items being obtainable in a timely fashion would maybe help with making a few player sticking with the game for longer but, on the other hand, would also probably cause tons more people to leave the game sooner (cause the "long term goals" related to acquiring more items is now much more feasible in due time).
2) Rare item being obtainable in a timely fashion would mean less people would purchase pizza for randimar's/membership, because then rares could be obtained a lot more easily.

Long story short: it really only takes a few months of dedicated play for you to get yourself a solid collection. You don't need every item in the game in order to be succesfull, just like you don't need every card in MtG in order to put a decent deck together. I do understand though, in this day and age, the idea of playing a game "for a few months" might be scary, especially to people used to quickly-consumed experience, especially in the context of flash games.

This is why I think more content would help more than dishing out more rewards. PvE-only players are mainly interested into the content and challenges a game has to offer. The illusion of better-drops increasing the active-players-base by considerable amounts is just that, an illusion, at least until further evidence backing the contrary is exposed.

I'll also add:
3) not everybody having access to the same set of equipment actually does make the meta way more interesting.

This might be counter-intuitive, but I think Scarponi has a solid point there. Imagine every MtG player could easily get access to the best cards. You could imagine every player but my grandmother playing stuff like black lotus, demonic tutor or what have you (sry, haven't played MtG in a long time, so I have no idea if/what other powerful cards have been released in the last gazillion expansions).

Simply put, if you can get to use the top-0.1% of the available card-pool, why bother tinkering with the 99.9% reminder at all? This is already happening, to some degree, in CH, due to how the daily deal, more-generous randimar and better SP/MP rewards made the hunt for specific, rare items a simpler affair.

Furthermore, I think any comparison to MtG needs to keep in mind the fact cards do cost money (and lots of, in many cases). All the chit-chat about Tier-1 decks is interesting and all, but there's no way you can get your toe into any high-level competitive play without spending considerable amounts of money into your collection.

In CH, at least you have the option of playing for 100% free. Sure, it'l get you a tad longer to get hold of the rares needed for a specific build. Or, you can invest into membership and/or exchanging pizza for gold whenever an item you seek shows up at the shops. Your choice.

 

First, what is a carrier? I'm sure you meant career.
The huge difference between MtG and Card Hunter is based on 2 big factors. First is you can't pick cards but items. This means that people have access to nearly every card fairly early, it is just a matter of the package they come in. The biggest exceptions being volcano and fireball, which are both very hard to come by. I still don't have a VP, but pre-balance I use other items (lochs and nifty) to get NS or just items with cards like vicious thrust. Of course it took me about 5 months of playing before I understood why a Nimble Strike was better than a standard 11 point attack.
The second and more significant factor is you can win with any deck in card hunter, much more than any traditional CCG. A big part of this is the fact that there is no way of making an ultimate deck, every build has a weakness and decks built to be universally competitive never have the punch of the most focused ones. The fact that you are playing on a physical map makes positioning a huge factor. You can have a handful of Gold attacks, but if you are not in range they are worthless.

Of course having more options is always good, but I topped out around 1580 in rating months ago with what was a much less robust collection. No one is going to be highly competitive in MP day 1, but with a pre-made build a good player can hit a rating of 1200 in a week or 2.

I suffer the problem of enjoying making builds way too much and it is a tough game to try out a new build. The difference between a good build and a winning one can be 1 or 2 items and sometimes adding in "better" items can be detrimental.

I think the level of variation is often exaggerated, since how varied can two different 2 warrior 1 priest builds be? I think you could have 30 different builds each which had very few overlaps in terms of items, but they would still play the same way.

Final thought there does tend to be a peak in terms of innovation, if you have access to everything (like people do on the test server), it becomes harder to innovate because you want to use the rarer items to the detriment of finding the best balance. Savvier players than me can overcome this power-lust and see the forest for the tress, I get caught up in wanting to use of the great high rarity items I have which is a mistake. But what do I know I am a journeyman player who has only been in the top 100 for like a week and after over a year of playing I've dipped below 1300 too many times already.

 

@Scarponi, @Bandreus - although CH and MTG have common points, they are different in a way that MTG can keep its diversity by new expansions (it was 1 big 2 small a year when I played some 7-8 years ago). With that in mind ok I can say that not-having-all-the-cards in CH surely brings more diversity.. (so you dont have Raging Battler/Ap. Ferocity so you need top play another skill..)

But in competitive MTG, you usually have access to all cards you need before big tournaments. By (draft/sealed) rewards, TRADING or buying..
(and you dont need all MTG cards, there are formats - like last x expansions) .. and it's not that expensive (and cards have some real money value, you can sell them) but that's offtopic.

I'm not saying we need access to all the cards in CH.. I just say that in MTG we had access to all the cards, and there was again so much innovating..
and games were so interesting.. plus you couldn't blame anyone for not-having-VP-or-something.. don't think it wouldn't be interesting that way

If we want more diversity in CH -> I think good way to do it is with new expansions .. to introduce some new strategies .. for example with warriors, you can build:
- big hitters, less movement
- lots of movement + smaller hits + buffs
- stabbing warriors
- crushing warrior
- dodging warriors (pre nerf) vs blocks
- heavy vs lightly armored
- bla bla

so with new expansions, some new strategy/synergy/mechanic can be introduced to competitive level and we'll get another warrior type.. same with mages, you now have control, electro, burning, .. new cards just need to buff some existing-but-not-powerful-enough mechanics .. or to introduce new ones (rampage, auras, teachy card.. there were millions of ideas on the form).. and we'll get diversity..
(or new class.. but that's lots of work I guess)

if step-attacks are a must have.. then dont nerf them, just buff some other options.. (or you'll get VP + that big hits .. but ok )

About that diversity .. we'll see what new expansion offers and we'll surely get some diversity