Get More Stuff: Changes are Coming to the Card Hunter Economy

That's the key point there. I haven't seen anyone arguing that SP farming was more profitable than leagues/MP since the balance changes, and some long-time farmers have stated that they curtailed SP activity. (And BM should have the data to see the extent to which anyone is still farming.)

Of course, a healthy MP environment contributes to the long-term viability of the game, but it does kinda feel like there's now an explicit carrot-and-stick trying to shuffle us over from SP to MP.

 

2 more ideas:
Yeah, treasure drops from SP could be doubled as well.
Leagues' prizes could be reduced. They will be giving crazy loot now since they count towards MP chest path anyway. Epic chest only for the winner and 4 3 2 1 golden chests onwards? Since it's actually quite weird to get (a lot more than) money's worth for just signing up.

 

Will Loot Fairy and the bandit ever hang out at the same adventure?

 

Feleran, I'm guessing you meant the league price could be increased, the cost raised. "Reduced" means to lower the price and that word doesn't seem to fit the rest of your suggestion.

EDIT: Ah, I see from another thread that you meant that the league prizes could be reduced. Funny how that typo turns the meaning upside-down.

 

Prizes* not prices, sorry. Lower prizes would do good since they are too good atm.
Or the cost to enter could be increased, that would work too.

Not the first time I mistake these 2 words -.- Won't happen again.

 

Looking at this from a solely selfish point of view as I always do with balance changes and community suggestions, I see that it will allow me to get more loot for less effort, helping do those quests. I'm not sure how it'll affect ranked, as there'll possibly be more people drawn from SP. The loot gap between the "I have alright loot" and the "Triplicate boots of sparkling cloth and team run" folks will more then likely shrink a bit, and it'll help me with boosting those gauges in that shiny badge under my posts. Finally, with more people likely buying pizza to buy gold to buy those daily deals, Cardhunter will have its finances boosted, meaning that I can continue playing for longer. The only downside I see for me is the loot gap between "I have alright loot" and "I still have a non-specialized elf wizard from the starter pack" folks will also shrink, meaning it'll be probably harder to find a match where I can crush the opponent utterly within the range ranked searches for.

 

I think boosting the loot from the first MP chests is a great incentive, at the same time i agree that the league loot could indeed be dampered a bit.
My problem with all this is not that the loot gap might be shrinking per se, but its shrinking means moving into the "powerhouse builds for everyone" territory. In mind i am already there, i've already come to expect the unlikely and overwhelming whenever i play against an opponent, no matter his rank.

 

Keep in mind that we can't do everything at once, given the size of our team. We want to do some nice things for SP for sure, and we have some ideas. But ranked PvP had a much lower reward rate than SP grinding (even after the balance changes, for sure), which was a big problem. And we don't particularly have any real desire to reward people for grinding the same map over and over again for gold by clicking Firestorm twice—that's not our game

 

[citation needed] ^_^

 

Compared average gold value of ranked rewards / time (which we had stats on) to how quickly one could get gold just completing SP adventures. For the former, we looked at average length of a game and assumed 50% win rate, so you get a chest every X minutes, and so on. For the latter, we looked at some stats, and then I tried my best to speed farm things to see if those stats held up. I was a little bit faster at completing adventures than we'd expected, but both my rate of loot while grinding SP and the expected rate of loot while grinding SP were more than twice that of our ranked stats. This is all post-balance...

 

One thing that has saddened me during the rebalancing has been the removal of SP content (i.e. in level 2/3 adventures). I hope that no more battles are going to be removed just to try to fit the new playing field - seems like wasted resources to me to develop a map and then bin it...unless you plan to ressurect them in new adventures, of course (please!).

I'd like removal of content to be seen as a no-no, never as a fix - maps can always be amended.

 

Ah, kk. Many of those assumptions don't hold for top tier play (see below), which is where our conclusions diverge.

1) lately my win rate, including leagues and when playing seriously, is >80%
2) MP chests give far more epic/legendary items, and your calculations won't value a new item at the 500/2500 gp that it's effectively worth

 

Leagues =/= ranked multiplayer. Leagues give substantially more rewards than ranked multiplayer and because of the lack of real matchmaking, strong players like you will have high winrates.

The concern here is that ranked multiplayer in particular doesn't currently reward players enough. I think most of the community agrees that leagues give plenty of spoils.

Regarding your second point, don't forget that single player has the loot fairy which you can get twice a day. The fairy chests are even better than the gold multiplayer chests.

 

But they are still lumped together as PvP. The first point stands regarding the original calculations.

The loot fairy provides pretty much the only worthwhile cost/benefit for PvE. But once you've got the fairy, you're done with PvE for another day (my schedule often doesn't let me catch the fairy twice any more), so the second point also stands. Empirically, in the last few weeks, I've earned just 1 new item from the fairy and ~4 from MP ladder chests (excluding leagues entirely).

 

Oh, I should also point out that I'm offering purely theoretical criticism of the structure/rationale/effects of these changes. I play very little PvE any more, so by all means gimme moar shinies in PvP.

 

I'm pretty sure Flax's calculations were specific to ranked multiplayer and not PvP in general. I don't think you can lump leagues and ranked together, but I am all for reducing the league rewards or increasing the entry fee. Leagues are just too profitable compared to other styles of play.

Once you've gotten your 2nd gold chest, you're pretty much done with ranked for the day. Anything beyond that is extremely unprofitable. There are so many common chests you need to slog through it's just not worth it from a reward standpoint. Especially with the current queue times.

Currently, if you want to maximize your loot to time invested ratio, you should hunt the loot fairy whenever possible and play whatever leagues you can. Standard ranked play has no place in optimal loot hunting, which is a huge problem in my opinion.

 

Yes. I tried to make this very clear in my second post.

@neoncat:

And for every one of you, there's someone with a 20% win rate. It balances out at 50% for the average player, no? Pointing out your win rate seems completely irrelevant. We're trying to make ranked play more worthwhile for the average player. And you get bonus loot with your high win rate. Isn't that just good for you? Doesn't change any of our math.

Something like five chests/day give more epic/legendary items. The best of those chests require hours and hours of play to achieve, and half of that time you're getting nothing. I highly doubt that getting 20 ranked wins / day provides a better gold value/time than completing the campaign every day, based on the stats we've looked at.

This is exactly one of the problems we wanted to work on.

Anecdotal ≠ empirical

 

"Find treasures -> sell for gold -> buy items" is only one way to get the items you want. I greatly prefer the more direct "Win lots of battles until the item shows up in the chest" (I never liked the treasure/shop economy). And for that MP was always much better than SP, even before the leagues. I think eliminating the top secret loot tables for Kobolds (and Slug'Gut too, I hope) would be enough to stop players from mindlessly farming SP levels.

 

A lot of people DO like the treasure/shop economy. Basically anyone who wants to build a specific deck for multiplayer play has traditionally had to grind SP relentlessly in order to buy the items they want (when those items even show up in the shops in the first place).

 

Exactly. It changes my math.

grumble grumble close enough XD