Conclave Arcana Conflicts - Why has the team dropped the ball on them...
Okay, first and foremost, I want to say - I'm not quitting, I'm not going anywhere, I love the game and community and I'm definitely staying - so no such sort of drama will come out of this post. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I will touch upon the three big mistakes the team made when approaching the CA conflicts, which maybe surprisingly (or not?) are not just math but actual human error in my mind. The three main points are:
- BFs have been assigned a disproportionately larger amount of CP than they should have been assigned. (someone made the decision, it was not math)
- The way the replacement of wagons work is definitely not thought of enough and is just made so it can be a land resource drain.
- The two things above lead to the situation where if you do not feel insulted enough as a small to average (or even a bit above average) player who has put money into the game, then this should definitely add insult to injury, namely the fact that the most well off players in terms of game resources will actually get "free of tax" airdrops because they stake cards on a lot less wagons than the cards staked provide airdrops for them.
Now let's go over each point.
So, I'm sure there some people asking themselves - so where's the issue. The issue is that people who spent $5-6-7K had the expectation that they would get at least 7-8-9 airdrops per conflict (as was the case with RB) not because they are entitled for that but because when you spend that kind of money on an RF set, you're likely more or less spent for some time, and obviously the more airdrops you get, the less frequent your trips to the marketplace are. Skewing the CP like that towards the premium BF cards devalues the investment these people made in the game, and leaves a bad taste in their mouths. Now, I know someone will come with the spreadsheet and show me that everyone gets exactly what they paid for, and that may, indeed, be the case, but it's not about that. It's about perception and unfulfilled expectations. People bought in with a particular expectation, namely that their level of investment will help them get through the airdrops with little additional investment into cards, and that definitely made them feel even better about it and then the reality of "math" hit them like a truck. Yes, math is cold and calculated, but it was not math the entity which assigned the CP values to the BFs to begin with. This is a mistake made by the company, and now the company is hiding behind "math". RF players who put the "average" amount of $5K to $10K into the game should be the largest group of players the game has, and they should not feel they were tricked into buying cause that will just drive them away. All respect to the whales but the game just won't survive on the BF collectors alone. In the end of the day who is going to buy their RFs drops if all RF people have walked away?
Another bone I have to pick is the way the wagon system works. Okay, I'm all for more land utility - it's great. I myself have 10 plots I am currently not working due to the ridiculous (in my opinion) staking requirement of 50,000 DEC for a Common plot. As we've already established earlier - I'm not in the position to pull randomly hundreds of thousands of DEC out of pillows but that's a completely separate topic. Back on track - land utility is great, people crafting wagon kits is great, however, the implementation of the actual mechanic is totally unthought of. Okay you buy the wagon kit for $4-5-6, then it breaks and you "repair" it with a new wagon for the exactly same amount of money. How does that even make sense and why is it called a "repair". I thought about it for like 1 min and came up with - each wagon has 3-4-5-N number of charges. It produces a card - you pay 1000 or 2000 or N amount of DEC to repair it. After all charges expire - your wagon is kaput and you go to the market and get a new one. Yeah, that might reduce the buying pressure on wagons but why does it have to feel like a constant tax feeding a particular group of people. Again - I have nothing against the group of people, they are playing according to the rules, I have against the one who has set the rules. After all we already have Midnight potions, lottery tokens or whatever their name is and I'm sure they will come up with other stuff soon as well, all of these items share the same resources, so I don't see the need to push them so ardently. Anyhow, back to wagons. It feels really bad for people who were expecting some amount of airdrops and end up getting a lot less than they expected to also feel joyous about being "taxed" for each card they happen to miraculously get. How's that gonna make you feel great about airdrops. Isn't the point of airdrops to excite people and not make them think - oh boy, it's the middle of the month, the airdrop is about to finish and I'll have to figure out a way to get enough money to buy new wagons and the RF cards I need to max my the RF drop.
*screenshot above obtained from Azircon in tavern in Discord.
Again wagon-adjacent. The fact that some people (again not the fault of the people - let me be clear) will have say... 60-70 wagons packed with the cream of the crop in terms of CP BFs, and respectively get over 100 airdrops - maybe 120 or even more - does not really matter how many more, but the amount of wagons that gets destroyed is the amount they have. So they get 100 cards, but they essentially get 40 cards for "free" if they have 60 wagons. How is that remotely fair? I, for instance, have 40 wagons and that will yield 8.5 (8) airdrops for the first conflict. Where are my non-taxed airdrops? I won't ever be in the situation where I get more cards than I have wagons. I just find this really unfair and adding just more insult to injury. By the way, it so happens that the largest producers of wagons will probably spent a lot less on wagons in relation to the amount of airdrops they've obtained than any regular RF holder, who is already not really thrilled about this whole situation.
Okay, I can write more but I think I'll start going in circles. I think I've expressed my main sources of irritation related to the CA airdrops. /rant over
Over and Out,
Referral
I completely agree that the 5x multiplier of CP for the BF cards was too much, which has resulted in too much of the proportional CA conflict points going to BF holders. But once that bed was made, we all had to sleep in it.
There are some benefits to all the value flowing to BFs: RF and BF cards sold for lower prices than comparable sets. It was easier for people to complete their RF sets. More pack sales value went to the SPSDAO.
But the big negative is the skew of airdrop value to the BF holders. There's no good way of fixing that now and I don't see how CP values can be reset after BF were already given the 5x multiplier.
As for the argument about having more airdrops than wagons... this is compelling because I fall in that category. I even have dozens of 5K and 2.5K CP cards that I don't put on wagons because it would cost me 5 additional repairs for 1 additional airdrop. Not worth it unless the airdrop is a $30+ card and those repair fees would stick with me for ALL the airdrops, I could never turn them off.
I'm not sure what the fix is here, but I'm fine with leaving cards unstaked because it would force me to buy more wagons than I already have. 39 drops for 33 wagons. That is how I budgeted my CA purchases, targeting 4.34 M conflict points per hour, and I'm right at that threshold.
I understand the complaints: "I've already spent so much, I don't want to spend more." "I want to compete at the highest level, I need all the cards at max level." This is always a struggle. There are always more cards to buy to complete a set. Even with my 39 airdrops, I still don't have a fully maxed set of CA. My priority was the high CP BFs and GFLs, rather than maxing out all of my cards.
We all pick our battles, and I settled on banking those airdrops because they are excellent rentals, and I love collecting premium cards. In the end, I will still end up being a net buyer of airdrops because I will still need a 4th GFL to max it out.
Thanks for your comment, Duce! Yeah, of course, you've got it all figured out and that's definitely commendable. As I've said, there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, you're playing by the rules. I have an issue with the way the rules have been set in this particular case. As I mentioned, I'm also not playing with a complete set due to the fact that I saw this CP inflation coming and I did want to get at least a decent amount of airdrops. 8 is not perfect but still a decent amount and who knows... I might get lucky.. :D
Great break down I will also use this in my video.
Be my guest, Steve! ;-)
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The 5x multiplier is the real issue, it didn’t need to be done. If it was the collector market they were going after then the rarity is enough. Traditional card games , mtg for example, don’t give additional use just because it’s different, collectors and players still want them to bling up their collections and decks
Yup, 5x is just too much...
You make the points well, and I for one can relate to the sentiment.
While the utility for land resources is good and needed, the chase cards are a good idea, the incentive to build a deck is laudable, the thinking and execution is just joined up badly.
Maybe there is some "golden metric" round which the costings in materials are based, a metric that may be somehow pinned to a desired value for a "base case card", but heaping resource costs into game mechanics with no "fun element" seems a bit forced , and to be honest a bit lazy.
I appreciate that this is early stage development, and in some ways the numbers were skewed by having base resources in production for far too long before they had a use, but heaping large input costs into game mechanics to soak up resource supply is always going to hurt those at the bottom of the pile.
It is precisely the bottom of the pile we are trying to grow. Players like yourself, myself and the many above us in the various rich lists will wince, but those below will be shocked and dismayed, they don't have 4+yrs of engagement with the game to shore up their frustration, neither do they have the investment in time, money and energy that has taken us here.
Shift the lens downwards to the bottom of the pile and focus the effort on preventing exploitation by bots rather than gating the game experience behind too big a paywall in an attempt to discourage the RoI bots
I was not prepared for 800 CP per chance , I was prepared for a hike up from Reb, but the magnitude of the hike tells me someone didn't think things through sufficiently.
I was not prepared for a $5 bill for every airdrop I "won" due to my previous investment in Reb and CA
Absolutely! We're constantly supposedly trying to make the game better for the little guys while simultaneously not considering the impact decisions such as allocating huge amounts of CP to BFs have on non-whale paying customers.