Does Randimar's Rarities need such a small selection?

In short, is there a good reason the rare shop couldn't stock 10X or 20X the number of items it currently does? At the most extreme end, couldn't it simply stock every item (also functioning as a way for players to see all the items/cards in the game)?

My thoughts:

1) This shouldn't negatively impact the ability for the Developers to sell pizza, as I'm not proposing any changes to the gold cost for the items. In fact it could encourage sales if people saw more items in the store they wanted (and Beta would be a great time to test this monetization theory).

2) Allowing people greater access to the higher rarity items would make it easier to adjust to the metagame, I think this would improve peoples experience in MP. Essentially, if people saw an item/build they wanted to try in MP, they would have a more direct path to doing so other than crossing their fingers when they open a chest.

3) I could be wrong, maybe this is a bad thing, but it seems like the beta is a great time to try it. As a benefit, during the beta it would make it easier for us testers to get specific items in order to try and break them. And I think it does it in a way that the Developers would still sell pizza.

 

Not at all, I read this thread and thought about adding to it, but felt the discussion was a little different.

As I understand the thread, this moved the common/uncommon shops to daily resets. Which I think turned out to be a good thing. It doesn't seem to have upset the game, and I'd say it makes it easier for players to get specific items for harder campaign levels or for use in MP. For testing purposes, it also helped with balancing Martyr Blessing since it was an uncommon and could be stocked in the shops it was trivial to obtain. This made it easier for multiple people to try builds and report back, and the issue was identified and resolved.

Leaving the rare shop as weekly resets has good reasoning. It allows players time to save up for certain items. I think this is a positive for the game.

However, it also means that players see about 1/7 of the stock for the rare shop in comparison to the common/uncommon shops. The simplest answer would be to increase the stock in the rare shop. Players would still have time to save, and would also see more items. It didn't seem to cause issues with the other shops and I haven't seen any complaints in the forums. I expect it could have similar positive benefits for testing by improving access to higher rarity items.

The other benefit to the developers, is that free-to-play games are always looking for new things to sell to their players. This keeps them in business, and is good for everyone. The rare shop is them sort of dipping their toe into offering higher rarity items for gold. I'm simply suggesting, the water seems fine and maybe it's time to go up to your waist. Doing it in the beta would get them the data on if it's a net positive or negative for them and the game.

 

I have bought one item from the rarity shop so far, a rare staff. I would like to spend my gold. I think a weekly rotation is fine with maybe even some kind of lock feature would be nice. It does, however, really need a bigger selection.

Moving forward though, how will these systems fare when more cards are introduced into the system? There's been several mentions of cards not even in the rotation right now and assets that got all the way to level 50. This will cause a heavy dilution effect and make specific cards even harder to come by. We haven't begun to even consider expansion card sets post release.

I think not having enough gold to buy what I want is a better problem to have than having gold but nothing to spend it on for weeks at a time.

 

I feel shops need revision in general. As with Pengw1n's comment in that thread (it's "crowded"), just plain adding more items doesn't do it for me. As it is, hundreds of items slip by in the regular stores without me even seeing the "hidden gems," because there are too many items . . . and one can be lead to believe they are all junk. See:

Normally, I search for goodies in the non-Randimar's shops. They restock regularly, right? But I am hampered by the "rarity cap" on those: days and days of repeated searches has taught me that every card I want is on "Rare" items. Oh, apparently I can't find anything I want there, so I might as well not search the regular shops and only go to Randimar's.

One could say that the simple solution is as you propose, Oberon: change Randimar's so it's more helpful for people searching for specific items. Well, I'd say that I'd rather the other shops be more like normal loot heaps (but with price tags). Sometimes they'd have Rare items. Then Randimar's could stay as it is and provide nice solid "you may save up money for awhile to get this" items so long as it isn't the only game in town.

And, again, I think that the huge number of items (regardless of rarity!) in each non-Randimar's shop makes me less likely to "browse" and find "hidden gems." A change there would improve the experience too.

 

All good points.

I don't have an answer for organization. I have a pretty large collection at this point; 25+ legendaries, well over 200 epics, etc... I appreciate the sorting tools they provide and have had to learn how to use them, often I'm sorting on a specific type of item and then by rarity or token requirements. This still means I'm looking at over a page's worth of a specific item. If the items went to level 50, I'd have to assume you could have upwards of 3-4 pages of each item type in a large collection. This is why you have to learn to use the text search, but that implies you know what you're looking for.

But you're right, in the stores I tend to work on the theory that I must already have all the commons/uncommons I want. I know I have holes in my collection, my search for Marty's Medallion was proof of it, but heck if I know where. Perhaps a "New" tag on items in the stores for items you don't have, like what you see on new cards? This would still not do much for the rare store though.

 

I've been thinking that too. Maybe some additional info when you right click an item, like how many copies of this item do you own? Also some buttons in there to filter your collection to just this item, items that have the same cards as this one, items that fill the same slot as this one, etc.

 

Back in the day, when I had multiple copies of near all of the items in the game, it was sheer hell trying to find something as my inventory just scrolled down forever. Filtering by specific location eased the pain slightly, but looking through a lot of items becomes very much a case of tl;dr. If a shop stocked everything up to lvl 50, it wouldn't be quick or easy to find anything, much less evaluate the items.

I like the idea of a NEW! tag for items you don't have, though.

 

So, are people supportive of the idea to have more items in the rare shop? Understanding the need for organization, do you see any other issues?

For organization purposes they could create multiple rare shops, for different level items, like they do with the common/uncommon items. If map space were an issue they could be combined.

I still think more rare item options each week would be a net positive.

 

I do think a "new" tag for items you don't own would help. I've been paying careful attention the last few days, and sure enough I didn't have 3-4 uncommon items in the shops. I figured it out by doing a search for their names.

 

Yeah, I have to agree with this sentiment. While it isn't really what you were saying here, it touches on what I feel is quite possibly the biggest problem with Card Hunter atm - the inability to get specific items you want.

In order for Card Hunter's multiplayer to be both competitive and fair, players need to be able to get the specific items they want to build their parties. Now, this doesn't have to be easy, or cheap, or fast, but there really has to be some sort of non-RNG way to get the items you need.

Personally, I'm a fan of how Valve solved this problem when they started adding new weapons to TF2 - a crafting system (prior to them implementing trading and solving this problem by making every non-real-money item practically worthless).

A crafting system allows for a guaranteed path to specific items, and the recipes can be designed in such a way that doing this is incredibly expensive (for instance, requiring something like 8 legendaries to make a legendary of your choice).

Alternately, they could simply add a way to request items be added to the shop's inventory, at some sort of really high fee and/or cooldown.

This would be incredibly helpful - probably even more helpful than the "new" tag currently on cards. Perhaps it could be improved by showing exactly how many of that item you already own (perhaps in the tooltip), and having a "sort by # owned" option to find items you don't have many of.

 

I would like to add to this, by suggesting that I would like to be able to see all items wearable by a certain class via check box.

i.e. If I only care about Warriors today, I'd like to quickly browse through all 4 shops looking specifically for warrior items. If you want to get more granular have an option for determining specific slots as well.

This may be overkill, but there's a lot of items in the game, so some assembly required.

 

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you can already do this. The shop filters are the same for the inventory filters. You can click on weapon slots or any other item slots and it will only show those items. There isn't a class wide filter as far as I know. I don't think that would be any more helpful than specific slot filters.

 

While you are correct, I'm more referring to more than 1 slot's items visible at the same time.

For example, if I wanted to see ONLY Boots, Helmet, and Armor. I currently have to switch between Boots, then select armor, then select Helmet.