Losing in PvP - please give some kind of reward.... It really is NO fun to get pwnd for nothing.

So having more strategy options in a strategy game is bad?
You can "risk" your characters and put yourself at a disadvantage, or play like you do now to win.
Except this way, even if you lose a 26 minute match by ONE star because your opponent draws a lucky card - you at least get something for putting up a great fight (and for your time).

 

Or you can run to Victory Squares and start pressing "pass".

I'd probably do one of those parties and sometimes grind while I'm drunk

 

Might be viable, probably would be.

Then again, if new players will face tons of "suicide" decks, it might put the off MP.

 

You can't get a piece for every star you earn, because you only get two pieces of loot for winning and getting a standard chest, and you don't want to award more loot for losing than you do for winning. Of course getting two pieces of loot for losing with 4 or 5 stars is perfectly reasonable (imo) since that means it was a close game. And winning is still much better since it moves you forward on the chest track.

I seriously doubt that we'll see people make multiplayer teams purely to run to the victory points and sit on them to get a couple of stars without trying to win, since it's honestly more time efficient to beat one of the easy treasure-giving campaign maps (mines of the kobolds or whatever) and buy gold chests in the chest shop to get your pieces of low-quality standard chest loot. If it's really a problem, then just award one piece of loot for every enemy killed rather than stars earned. There should certainly be a way to give a consolation prize for close games that is difficult and/or inefficient to abuse.

 

One random treasure for losing - no guaranteed rarity. But only if you don't resign.

 

Here is my 2 cents on the subject. I agree that something should be given to the person that loss since they have lost time and loss of time with nothing to show greatly discourages players. Now for the award i can't see any good way to implement gear drops for a loss to many abuse chances. I only see gold as a viable choice, but even with gold there has to be heavy restrictions. Like you cannot resign, and only 1 gold for every 2 stars. I know your probably thinking that a loser should at least get 5g and i say no because they can still go to a store and get something with 5g make it 4 and they can get something every 2 games.
We all want the loot no argument there, but if we don't stagger our loot gathering we will have all the loot in a month.

 

Maybe a slot reel for the losing player, where each victory point increases your chance to win a random item?

 

The rewards for losing a PvP match are the mental challenges you've faced for the last twenty minutes, the player experience that you've gained, the variety of tactics and decks that you're sharing with other players, perhaps even the social engagement of a player chat, but above all, the general fun times of playing Card Hunter. If you desperately need more loot, the campaign is right there for grinding. The moment you start handing out any rewards to the player for losing, you're going to get people gaming the system or just not bothering to try as hard as they were before - both of which hurt the enjoyment of players who just enjoy the competition ie. those who PvP is primarily aimed at, and who I would like to imagine are the silent majority here.

Now, to be fair, if you are losing constantly and thus receiving no loot at all, that is a legitimate problem. But the problem is an imperfect matchmaking system (and/or other players abusing it) and not you needing to be handed freebies.

 

This isn't about having more strategy options. It's about removing the clarity from the goal of each match. Currently the goal is clear. The goal is to win the match. But if you start adding bonuses for other things, there is a potential conflict of interest between trying to win the match and trying to get those other bonuses. Player who want to get the most items may play differently to those who are genuinely trying to win multiplayer matches. It would have a slight distorting effect on the ranking system and leaderboard, because not everyone would be playing to win. Some players would use builds designed to win matches, while other players would use builds just designed to get points.

Obviously winning matches would still be desirable, but the metagame would definitely be skewed away from anything which didn't get some early points.

For example, a couple of days ago I made a new build which involves 2 wizards and a priest. The strategy is basically to keep the enemy warriors off my wizards by using cold and push back spells, and to use my priest to keep everyone healthy while I gradually whittle down my opponents. If the enemy chases me off the victory squares, I just let them, because I don't have the brute-force damage or defence to stand toe-to-toe. As a result, I typically don't get any points until right near the end of the game. It isn't uncommon for me to come back from a score of 0-5 to win the game. In fact that's exactly what happened in my most recent game that I played just a few minutes ago. And because I had this thread in mind, I took a screenshot.


(In the above screenshot, I'm 'karadoc', on the white team. The score is 5-0 against me, but I'm about the win the match.)

The strategy I used in that game is designed to win matches. I built the decks in a way that I think is powerful, and I'm playing in a way that I think is the best way to win using the deck that I've built. But although my strategy is designed to win matches, it is not designed to get victory points. I generally don't burst down the enemy or camp the victory squares. I just whittle them down gradually. And if bonus items were being awarded for victory points, the strategy I'm using here wouldn't get any of those bonus chest, and so it would be in my interest to just use some other strategy instead. For example, I could go back to my previous strategy which involved a kamikaze glass-cannon warrior whose job it was to just pick one enemy target and take them out quickly at any cost - making it a 2v2 game for the rest of the battle. That strategy would almost always earn me a bunch of victory points even if I didn't win, whereas my currents strategy does not.

What I'm talking about has nothing to do with having more or less strategy options. It's about clearly defining the goals of the game. I'm just saying that I think it would be better if the goals remained clearly defined, as they are now. If bonuses were awarded for things other than winning, then the goals would become obscured. Some very close matches end with a score of 6-0, and some one-sided stomps end with 6-4 or so. Awards given for victory points does not reflect how close a game was, or how well a player played, or how much a player was trying to win or anything like that; and so it will distort how the game is played.