The multiplayer item barrier lasts well beyond what I would call "starting." The level 30 character Borgo appears to be quite powerful, yet he doesn't have any gold talents, and presumably his owner hasn't collected very many gold-tier items. But our expectation is that you'll want to have gold-tier stuff for multiplayer. They've probably made several adjustments since that diary, but based on the Borgo pictures I am guessing that singleplayer levels range up to 45 or 50. The easiest way to set multiplayer is just to declare it as the highest singleplayer level, a point when you have some gold talents but not so many that all your equipment is fantastic. Anybody who isn't close to that level of advancement, either through time or purchases, will be at a material disadvantage unless there is some method of (very roughly) equalizing upward the item set as well as the character level. The method(s) should be flexible enough to accomodate players of any degree. It's true: those who are most interested in multiplayer will likely be willing to make multiple cash purchases to endow their item collections quickly. Yet it will pay in goodwill and lobby activity to consider the free players and occasional purhase players who are not rushing through. Jon has indicated that they are building an "extensive" singleplayer experience; he was a bit surprised by the quickness of the PAX demo play, but the aim is (I believe) 30+ hours, not counting time spent farming for more of the good items. That means an "extensive" period of time that some players could remain in the middle stages of having some stuff but not enough stuff. I'll be honest, ranked play is not a big draw for me, so I am not likely to make purchases for the express purpose of using them competitively. But that doesn't mean I won't want to play multiplayer at all. It would be a real bummer to refuse friends' invitations because my level 30 Dwarf Priest doesn't have the right accessories.
Yeah I've been thinking about the same issues. If the single player campaign is 30+ hours, I'd expect players won't really be seeing "high level" items until the last 3rd or less of that. Based on the dev diaries, it didn't seem like item rewards are purely random, rather you get items appropriate for the level of the module. This makes sense, as you wouldn't want a low level adventure handing out a vorpal sword, even though in Cardhunters it would likely be unusable by the low level characters. Until your characters are high enough level, you won't be able to beat the later modules with the best loot. Once you do get to that point, players will likely need to replay (grind) those levels to get enough high level equipment to build competitive decks. So if you have leveled your group into the 20s-30s you probably won't have the items to really be competitive in multiplayer. Even when you've capped out in single player, it's likely you'll need to replay for more items. And, with a collectible game, this will repeat with each new content release. You'll have to reacquire the new releases better items to keep up with changes in the metagame. There's a big difference between what it takes to keep up in a collectible game like Magic versus a game like LoL or WoT. In LoL, new champions tend to push the metagame but often aren't required purchases. Even when you do need a new champion or two, its not that difficult to have saved up enough of the game currency to buy them. If you have to spend real money, it's still only around 8 dollars for a new champion. Compare that with a CCG, where each new release introduces many more cards (50-100+), and players normally need to adapt much quicker. After a new release it's unusual to see tournament decks that aren't updated with new cards based on shifts in the metagame. 8 dollars (or more) might get you a single copy of a rare card in a CCG, meaning that updating a deck can easily cost more than a hundred dollars. Creating an entirely new deck focused on the new cards in the release can be much more expensive. In a collectible game players need to acquire a lot of cards, and then keep acquiring many more with each release, and often want/need to do it in a short amount of time in order to stay competitive. So how players get those items, and especially how long it takes players to get those items for free, matters a lot. If non-paying players can't acquire cards quickly enough, than the multiplayer metagame will be primarily driven by paying players.
I think you assuming that old gear will be irrelevant with each new release and each new release being the top tier is not only unfair but also obviously something that would make a ton of players stop playing so i can't see that happening. It's basically that which killed dungeon defenders arguably the best td game in a very long time but they ruined it with every new content having the new best loot as well as some other things but lets not get in to that.
Yeah, I would imagine they would try to make new content mostly provide more variety to the strategies and tactics you can employ, rather than simply obsolescing all of the previous equipment. I hope, anyway.
well, seeing how this is F2P, I'm guessing you'll also be able to buy the same items/characters if you want to avoid grinding or going through the single player stuff (personally, I'm more looking forward to the single player stuff, though still)
Possibly relevant to everyone's interests is this Rudolpho tweet: That would imply to me that there's one multiplayer "tier", and it's level 18. Word's still out on what assortment of talents you have at level 18.
