[Poll] Treasure Hunt Opinions

As you may have heard, there's an expansion coming called Attack of the Artifacts, with lots of new cards and items, some new figures, and 6 new SP dungeons (with all new monsters). This has a lot of people excited, since there's been so little new content since release. Testing is taking place over on the test server (free! come join us!), and there are hints that they're almost ready to release it.

But... 5 of those 6 new adventures are Treasure Hunts. Worse, they have to be played in order; you can't even see Black Plume Mountain until you beat the other four Treasure Hunts. This is a big change from before, where all Treasure Hunts could be purchased independently, even if they were obviously the second half of a larger adventure (Return to Woodhome, Sinister Wood, Descent to the Core).

I've already seen people less than enthused that some of the new adventures were Treasure Hunts (back when I assumed there would be 3 free and 3 TH), so I thought I'd start a new discussion here before things get set in stone.

 

I'm not sure I fit under any of the voting options so I chose not to vote. In general I understand the devs need to generate revenue through the game and am HIGHLY appreciative of their efforts to do so without the game becoming pay-to-win (which creating exclusive adventures rather than exclusive items is a reasonable way to do it). That said, I'm not in a financial position to pay to play right now, so I would definitely have preferred more free content.

 

Words from a freeloader (sorry I prefer playing games in hard mode, might throw some cash later tough for some figurines when I'll be done with the hunting if I am still hooked by the game): those new pay to play adventures come with another (other then submitting mauve manticore maps) way to get free pizzas: leagues. So I guess it's ok.

 

I'm not sure I'd say "brilliant way to pay the bills" but it sure makes sense to me that as BM has put out tons of high-quality free content & experience, and continues to do so, they be allowed to charge for some of their work. The new treasure hunts are not integral to the expansion—you can still get all the new gear by playing exactly as you have before—they're just, like all previous treasure hunts, new content we can pay for. I think it's fine, and I intend to buy them.

 

We all want more SP content, but we need to accept that it takes a lot of time to develop. They have to be able to pay their people for that time. In a perfect world, Cardhunter would be wildly successful, Blu Manchu would be raking in money, and could use their fat stacks to fund new content. But, given the unique aspects of Cardhunter, this may be a trial run for an alternate way they can fund new content. Or maybe this was always the plan? Who knows? But if they can't afford to make more, it'll stop, and that's no fun.

It think it depends on how you look at it. This release contains:
- 6 new adventures
- A bunch of new/unique monsters
- A lot of new items
- A good amount of new cards


5 of the adventures are paywalled as treasure hunts, but everything else seems to be available to all, assuming even the monsters will show up in user generated content and future Muave Manticores. I'd love it if all the content could be free, but only if that were a viable option for continued development.

I'm pretty much at the point where I view this as a project I'd like to see continue. So much like a kickstarter, I'm happy to throw a bit of cash in the hat to keep it going.

 

It is an incentive for people to spend money, the devs also need to eat.

What i would like to know is, do you only get the new items from the new adventures or are all AotA items in the normal loot tables?

 

All AotA gear is in normal loot tables.

 

Plus there's a new shop selling chests guaranteeing at least one item (of the highest guaranteed rarity) to be from AotA.

 

I expect the lower chests in this shop to be a popular option as a place to spend gold.

 

I was kind of hoping those who purchased the original starter packs would automatically get these free or at least heavily discounted... I know there will be a new pack for $15. I'm torn right now, maybe maybe not.

 

Cardhunter is an odd duck, so it's hard to draw direct comparisons.

I struggle to think of a comparable freemium game. It's a collectible game with the requisite MP, but it also has a massive SP campaign. Most collectible-freemium games (and most real world CCGs for that matter) make their money by selling items. The more recent breed of iOS games have taken this design to the extreme, where you need to spend silly amounts of money to obtain "ultra rare" cards that are simply made to be 5X, or 10X or 100X more powerful than the common, generally available items. New game designs don't even try to hide this any more, the stat lines of higher rarity units are simply substantially increased and they than make leader boards to show that the people with the most rare cards are the most "powerful". The designs have come a long way from the days when games included a lot of powerful items at higher rarity that players wanted to collect.

In my opinion Cardhunter made certain specific design decisions that hinder its ability to support itself off of item/chest sales.

1) With over 200 items at the highest rarity (Legendary), and given a very small drop rate in chests or via gameplay, it's very difficult to attempt to collect them. With such a large set it's also incredibly difficult to obtain any specific item you may want.
a) Assuming roughly 8 legendary items from 100$ of pizza, it takes 1000s of dollars to obtain all the items from random pulls. This also makes the odds of getting any specific legendary item very small and very expensive. With such extreme odds, it actually discourages purchasing chests for the higher rarity items.

2) While some legendary items are powerful, or at least interesting, the vast majority aren't exciting in any game terms. I'm not claiming that all legendary items have to be incredibly powerful, but enough of them need to be good/greatin order to encourage the effort to obtain them. Instead, even if a player spent 100$ on chests, they really only have a chance to pull one or two of the "good" legendary items, making the theoretical cost of a "good" legendary very high indeed. This also discourages purchasing chests.

3) As your collection grows, chest purchases get worse. If the high rarity items you receive are over the number you want or need, than they only have gold value when sold to Randimar's. 150 pizza is worth 1500 gold, so if even one of the epic items from a chest is unwanted/unneeded it becomes cost ineffective. Collecting a lot of gold is pointless as well, because Randimar's rarely stocks items worth purchasing. This discourages buying chests.

4) Looking at how they are handling the new items in this expansion seem to make these problems worse. The item set is now even larger, and the packs for AotA mix in regular items as well. So it's not a viable option to try to purchase chests to obtain just the items in the new set, as you will get many items you already have. Compare this to how collectible games normally release new content, it's released in exclusive new packs to encourage sales.


This is one of those odd aspects of Cardhunter in my opinion; I clearly think it's a very good game, but as a collectible game it does a really poor job of encouraging collecting. I like the game, I play a lot, I want to collect more of the items, I also have extra money each month, but I have no desire to buy chests. That's not a normal business model for a collectible game.

So I'm happy to have them selling SP content, as I'm more than willing to purchase it. But I do have to wonder if that means each level after lvl 1 7 will now cost roughly 10$?

 

I don't know which answer to choose as I'm paying for Club membership and regularly buy some pizza to get something from Randimar's store (unfortunately, I don't have much time to farm gold).
Paying some more for the new campaign is OK for me, especially if the rewards will be good. Moreover, I guess that Loot Fairy will visit the new scenarios too, so if you want to catch it every day, pay for them

 

I'm not satisfied with any of the poll options. I am certainly disappointed to learn that so many of the new adventures will be paywalled - I had been keeping myself ignorant to avoid spoilers, but it's probably better to get my disappointment out of the way right now. In my head this was going to be a major expansion, with lots of new adventures and a level cap up to at least 25 or so.

I'm not sure that I understand what the barrier is to adding adventures. It's certainly more work, but it doesn't seem like it would be such a huge problem - players have been submitting the, very satisfactory, mauve manticore adventures at a good rate. I had at one point thought that Blue Manchu should shoot for adding a new adventure every week, just to keep things rolling, though I certainly wouldn't expect new monsters and equipment at the same rate. Clearly something is acting to limit that though, by a large amount.

Unfortunately, my suspicion is that Blue Manchu has come to the same conclusion that Oberon has: the other means that they've implemented to make money off of the game are insufficient. Releasing mostly treasure hunts will give them a temporary bump in income, but they're going to have look for something more sustainable in the long run. The most obvious option that I see is ads - show something briefly each time a player starts an adventure or while they're waiting to join multiplayer, this takes advantage of the fact that they've got a game that people want to play a lot of. This would be easy to do on the tablet version, but I don't know what advertising networks are available for PC games.

 

(Emphasis mine) See note at Blue Manchu being two people. More work is itself a huge problem as they have an incredibly long list of things they want to add/fix and very limited resources to do so.