Ann. 3046 - [2014-06-20 21:14:19 - Stage 12]

[Menhir]

Ann. 3046 - [2014-06-20 21:14:19 - Stage 12] Posted By Chewett
The boost per token when sacrificing has been reduced after discussion with players as this has been identified as something which divides players greatly between paying and nonpaying. Hopefully this should level the playing field slightly.

 

For me the worst decision ever. The rate dropped by 60% and all effort to train and sac creatures are 60% less from now on in comparison to those of the last 5 years. I´m just expressing my disappointment with this. I hope this decision helps the realm somehow.

Edited June 20, 2014 by Menhir

[Jubaris]

Better to increase reward from no-tokens, rather than to decrease rewards from tokens when sacrifising, how about that?

[Ary Endleg]

Better to increase reward from no-tokens, rather than to decrease rewards from tokens when sacrifising, how about that?

 

You have to do both then. If you only increase reward from no-token creat, then token bonus is applied it's still same :p anyway token bonus was indeed absurd, it went 10 times over the base value, now it's 75% less. However it does raises the issue of past people having "better deal".

[Chewett]

Feel free to propose a better solution, We talked to a number of grinders and you did not appear when we asked for people to comment how to change things (this was a number of months ago now)

 

The tokens were identified as the main thing in the shop that differentiated paying players from ones that did not. If you had money you could get 960% extra stats from sacrificing a creature, is that fair?

 

Your only complaint is that grinders of the past X years had it better than you now will in the future, This is mooted again and again when features change for the positive or negative that "In the past we had it harder/easier and therefore its not fair". 

 

The change is needed to try and balance out paying and non-paying players, those that pay for tokens still get a bonus compared to those that dont which I still think is unfair. Our mission in MD was previously that no paid shop feature should influence gameplay. This has changed since MD was founded but we shall attempt to ensure that, even on some level, its slightly fairer.

 

960% additional stats for money is not fair.

[Nimrodel]

Feel free to propose a better solution, We talked to a number of grinders and you did not appear when we asked for people to comment how to change things (this was a number of months ago now)
 
The tokens were identified as the main thing in the shop that differentiated paying players from ones that did not. If you had money you could get 960% extra stats from sacrificing a creature, is that fair?
 
Your only complaint is that grinders of the past X years had it better than you now will in the future, This is mooted again and again when features change for the positive or negative that "In the past we had it harder/easier and therefore its not fair". 
 
The change is needed to try and balance out paying and non-paying players, those that pay for tokens still get a bonus compared to those that dont which I still think is unfair. Our mission in MD was previously that no paid shop feature should influence gameplay. This has changed since MD was founded but we shall attempt to etc that, even on some level, its slightly fairer.
 
960% additional stats for money is not fair.

umm there are other ways of getting crits tokened than buying credits yourself. I don't see why people cant get their creatures tokened by someone, or exchange gold for credits or win stuff, or put up in their wishlist tokened crits etc... While I don't train tokenned crits for saccing, to me it seems like md is demotivating the players whose money contributes to the existence of the game in some form... Is that a wise step? *shrug* time will tell.

Though I should add one last thing. If you want stats, grind more than the those who grind with tokened crits rather than complain about how the payers have an unfair advantage.

[Ary Endleg]

Though I should add one last thing. If you want stats, grind more than the those who grind with tokened crits rather than complain about how the payers have an unfair advantage.

 

Impossible, if paying player grinds for 2 hours, you have to grind for 20 hours each day just to catch him up (token-wise, before this change). But he's paying player so he also enjoys 2% boost from permanent boosters, how do you grind more when day only has so many hours?

[Jubaris]

 

You have to do both then. If you only increase reward from no-token creat, then token bonus is applied it's still same :P anyway token bonus was indeed absurd, it went 10 times over the base value, now it's 75% less. However it does raises the issue of past people having "better deal".

 

Don't be so literal. What I meant was that tokens boost percentage should drop, while the regular stat gain should increase (so the rewards with the tokens would still be the same, looking at their fixed value, while their relative importance would drop).

 

Example.

Creature without tokens gives 100 attack.

Same creature with X tokens gives 1000 attack.

 

New system:

Creature without tokens gives 800 attack.

Same creature with X tokens gives 1000 attack.

[Nimrodel]

Impossible, if paying player grinds for 2 hours, you have to grind for 20 hours each day just to catch him up (token-wise, before this change). But he's paying player so he also enjoys 2% boost from permanent boosters, how do you grind more when day only has so many hours?

Then buy stuff with coins in game if you cant spare enough time. When quests are organised, participate and try to win them to get stuff which you can keep or sell for coins. You can get tokened crits to train via multiple ways...

Now that the tokens give less boost on saccing, would people want to buy tokened crits in the market as much as before? Maybe not. What happens to the economy then?

anyways. No more comments. Lets see how this turns out in the future. For the players who have already grinded stays by tokening will be majorly benefitted. The ones who want to pay now may lose interest... As menhir said, hope this does good to the game.

[Chewett]

Interesting to note that tokens are not bought that often in actuality according to the current shop and creature/token distribution, Most of the money is not made from those branches.

 

If money is your concern, I wouldnt worry about it :)

[Nimrodel]

Interesting to note that tokens are not bought that often in actuality according to the current shop and creature/token distribution, Most of the money is not made from those branches.
 
If money is your concern, I wouldnt worry about it :)

Then how are payers getting loads of benefit from tokens? Anyway, lets see what happens.

[Chewett]

Then how are payers getting loads of benefit from tokens? Anyway, lets see what happens.

The minority that purchase them get large amounts of stats :)

[Nimrodel]

The minority that purchase them get large amounts of stats :)

Thats a pretty interesting find. Wonder how many of the tokened crits are acquired through trade. Will dig into the market later...

[Eara Meraia]

well for me this is very demotivating announcement. Stats are hard to get and tokened creatures are hard to get as well!! As soon as you get some you get motivated to train them as good as you can, since you see it as a way to get at least a bit closer to those who have got thousands and millions of stats before (saccing angiens for example). And what now? Now this cluft is bigger and basically there is no other way to keep up with those who is strong already. Also tokens are less attractive to buy now. I don't see how this decision will motivate people to fight more and therefore I see it as harming for MD.

 

 

If you want to take decisions like this, you need to set all stats of older players to zero and make them start all over, then it would be fair. But again...far away from fair, I don't think there can be any 100% fair solutions in this case but there can be at least motivating ones. I agree with Rhaegars suggesstion.

[lashtal]

I must say I am quite disappointed by this decision. Not much for the thing itself (I have no tokened creatures), but for what it seems to represent.

 

I understand MagicDuel is a game like no others.

I understand the will to narrow the gap between paying players from those that doesn't.

But this is getting masochistic.

Is MagicDuel afraid of money? Aren't there costs to pay? Server, booze... ?  :blink:  :P

 

Not only there has been no shop reset for ages (-> no reasons for players to keep supporting the game's finances, since many of us have nothing left to buy), now we are limiting something people may pay for... and in the name of what exactly? 

 

Grinders have huge stats because they grind, tokens or not. 

Tokens give a good boost - consider also their random distribution and the fact you pay for them - but you still have to grind in order to benefit from sacrifice. The 960% plus stat gain is still applied to the number of won fights the creature has. 

[Chewett]

This was a change that a number of people talked about and agreed on. Most of you guys were around when Mur was asking for people to discuss it and none of you came forward. Think up some decent changes, ones that can actually be implemented and we can improve the situation.

 

This was on my list as something to do, It had a definite values that I could implement and approval from those that were discussing the changes.

 

If there is something that you can present, agree on, and is implementable then we can move forward :)

 

The problem with most of the new ideas is that they are general ideas but are not implementable since they do not have specific values/ideas I can actually implement. They are very general and hand wavy. Im very open to changes here guys, Thats the whole point of "perpetually in beta". If nothing, this announcement has actually got people talking and thinking as to how to balance the changes rather than the 6 or so people that were discussing it before.

 

So, Lets discuss. And unlike most discussions, actually get a solution :)

Edited June 20, 2014 by Chewett

[Chewett]

If someone wants to step forward as a co-ordinator for this project, come forward and get some approval from the masses. I can work with one person to talk to them about what we can change and how much work its likely to take. Short answer, we can change anything :) but it might take a bit of coding time.

[DarkRaptor]

Question: Those that have been on the discussing party.. how many wins did they ever get into a creature?

 

(a max number please)

[Chewett]

Question: Those that have been on the discussing party.. how many wins did they ever get into a creature?

 

(a max number please)

 

Lets not let this degrade into a flame war :)

We should focus on what should be changed, and why, to make it fairer. This is a good platform to work from, since people apparently want to get involved now :)

But, if you really want to know, Eon was one of the ones discussing it

 

I think you all know his fighting credentials.

[Ary Endleg]

Okay for those of you who don't get it yet, tokens help you get up the base values of your att and def stat for a decent base, this is step one. Step two is using the foundation made by tokens to buy percentage boosts from permanent branches, paying members will most likely empty token section once or twice and no more, all eyes are shifted then to perma boosters for every sequential shop reset. Additionally Rusty/Rein have biggest win-to-stat ratio, they are premium creatures to who get tokened. Token bonus is just a first part of problem. When you get 10, 20, 50k stats it's all percentage boost then, that's how you reach millions. All that matters then when is how many shop resets you have, you will start getting more and more and more stats for less and less and less money.

 

As some of you like to point out that "grinders get big stats paying or not" that's... less important. If you RP all day long and never fight you pretty much don't care at all for this part of game, it's unfair to say that people who bitch about premium advantages  are the ones who don't fight. I find it to be the case exactly opposite, grinders who grind and don't pay vs grinders who grind (and sometimes grind less) and pay. That's the main fight. Compare grinder who doesn't have juicy stuff and the one who does, stats are laughable when compared and it does not reflect the effort properly. Grinder pretty much has to invest all the free creds in that direction. It will take him 2 years to get materials for building that foundation if he doesn't pay.

 

Another problem now which raised now is that some of paying players don't like this because people back then got more resets, better ratios, more people to fight and now it takes way more time to catch up the top grinders with millions of stats. If you keep nerfing values down, people will get demotivated too much. After all grinder wants to be the best! His motivation is to be the first beat the current top player, get more than he does. If old player got this far because he had better ratio, it's no hard math to figure out that in order to become top new grinder has to make big investments in money and 5 times bigger investment in time just to get even. So for new grinder to catch up Eon/Darky he needs to grind for 10 years now just to get to same level they are on NOW at this moment!

 

Basically, this closed in the gap between first phase paying grinders and the rest of mortals, but greatly enlarged the gap between them and percentage boosters! New paying grinder now has weaker base, it takes 4 times longer to build the same decent base for percentage boost.

 

@Nimmy, many trades are done outside the forum. People first ask their IM contacts if no deal is made then they go on forum if they are really desperate. I doubt you will find much in that dig.

 

I agree too with Rhaegar's suggestion to a certain degree. But by doing such things you just aren't taking into account stat rewards from fights, they would make win grinding much more juicer than heat/combo fighting, probably resulting in another GGG because it's super simple way of doing it. You then not only need to increase base value of sacc ratios but also increase stat reward from fights at same time.

 

Or in addition to this last change, also nerf down the percentage boosts too. But then what do you do with those "that had better deal before", if you touch their stat, it's unfair, if you leave it be it's unfair, if you reset everything it's unfair. Really I still fail to see how to make everything right, how to leave the sheep untouched and wolf satiated. But let's face it, so far it was unfair and game in state of such supremacy of premium goodies just can't go back on advertisement shelf, which devs plan to do when they finish enough features. New players don't like to join free to play game which in fact turns out to be pay to win game.

[No one]

This was a change that a number of people talked about and agreed on. Most of you guys were around when Mur was asking for people to discuss it and none of you came forward. Think up some decent changes, ones that can actually be implemented and we can improve the situation.

 

This was on my list as something to do, It had a definite values that I could implement and approval from those that were discussing the changes.

 

If there is something that you can present, agree on, and is implementable then we can move forward :)

 

The problem with most of the new ideas is that they are general ideas but are not implementable since they do not have specific values/ideas I can actually implement. They are very general and hand wavy. Im very open to changes here guys, Thats the whole point of "perpetually in beta". If nothing, this announcement has actually got people talking and thinking as to how to balance the changes rather than the 6 or so people that were discussing it before.

 

So, Lets discuss. And unlike most discussions, actually get a solution :)

 

The shop advantage is not something you want to play with. It is payed advantage and it has just one purpose : gather money for the server. Play with the advantage is playing with the server.

 

Of course, for the RPers or lazy ppl (like me) there is always 2 choices : play our best and hope for the best to play no more :P ... joking, we can always admire and then ignore the real.grinders. They are a different breed from us.

 

For those that choose NOT to pay (yea, and those that can't) there are always other means to gain the credits.It always existed. So stop complaining and use the free credits page. If I would have voted every day in my 2000 days of MD, I would have gained ...aaa, yea a lot (math is failing me at this hour).

 

I never quite understood Mur's choice in fiddling with old features and settings when there are other features waiting to be discussed & coded.

 

Chewett, change it back and check the proposals for new features. Those would make a lot better discussion thread.

 

--------------------------------

I guess I wrote too much this month ;) I'm off waiting for next month

[everyone]

I don't mind the fact that the reward was lowered, just how much it was decreased. 75% seems like a lot to me, considering the current gap between those trying to even get close to players like darkraptor, Eon and Lightsage, whose stats range into the millions. It will be near impossible to catch up to the current "top dogs" (maybe not Eon or Lightsage, who aren't really that active now) but darkraptor is certainly not going to be easy to catch up to. There are also others whose stats are significantly high, and would be at an advantage due to this change.

 

In my plan to gain as much stats as I can and get close to them, tokens were only half the plan. The other half of the plan was to use the permanent boosts in the shop. Which with the shop resets I have would yield far more than the tokens themselves would have in the long run.

 

What do you think is going to happen when another shop reset is given out? Those that had the benefit of gaining massive stats are going to further increase the already large gap between them and other players.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tweaking the system so that there is a better balance between paying & non-paying players. But I think the MD shop, more so the permanent boosters should be evaluated. Not just the tokens aspect. I think the way the shop is accessed (what sections are reset and which ones aren't instead of the whole shop,would also be something to look at it)

 

Anyways, I'm tired and I'm going to edit this post or make another one tomorrow, after I have gotten a chance to sleep in and better organize my thoughts :D

Edited June 20, 2014 by everyone

[Clock Master]

You failed to mention that beside money these players also invested a lot of time in gaining those stats. I have personally seen how much each of Eon, Alyon and darkraptor worked for their stats. It is not their fault that the rest of us were "lazy" to get where they are now. Gaining millions of attack and defense is the last problem that needed to be fixed because if you understand anything about combat you will know that all that can be countered.

 

Can you point me to this discussion that was held? It is hard to believe that the best thing you guys could come up with was nerfing down the token bonus

[Nimrodel]

Okay for those of you who don't get it yet, tokens help you get up the base values of your att and def stat for a decent base, this is step one. Step two is using the foundation made by tokens to buy percentage boosts from permanent branches, paying members will most likely empty token section once or twice and no more, all eyes are shifted then to perma boosters for every sequential shop reset. Additionally Rusty/Rein have biggest win-to-stat ratio, they are premium creatures to who get tokened. Token bonus is just a first part of problem. When you get 10, 20, 50k stats it's all percentage boost then, that's how you reach millions. All that matters then when is how many shop resets you have, you will start getting more and more and more stats for less and less and less money.
 
As some of you like to point out that "grinders get big stats paying or not" that's... less important. If you RP all day long and never fight you pretty much don't care at all for this part of game, it's unfair to say that people who bitch about premium advantages  are the ones who don't fight. I find it to be the case exactly opposite, grinders who grind and don't pay vs grinders who grind (and sometimes grind less) and pay. That's the main fight. Compare grinder who doesn't have juicy stuff and the one who does, stats are laughable when compared and it does not reflect the effort properly. Grinder pretty much has to invest all the free creds in that direction. It will take him 2 years to get materials for building that foundation if he doesn't pay.
 
Another problem now which raised now is that some of paying players don't like this because people back then got more resets, better ratios, more people to fight and now it takes way more time to catch up the top grinders with millions of stats. If you keep nerfing values down, people will get demotivated too much. After all grinder wants to be the best! His motivation is to be the first beat the current top player, get more than he does. If old player got this far because he had better ratio, it's no hard math to figure out that in order to become top new grinder has to make big investments in money and 5 times bigger investment in time just to get even. So for new grinder to catch up Eon/Darky he needs to grind for 10 years now just to get to same level they are on NOW at this moment!
 
Basically, this closed in the gap between first phase paying grinders and the rest of mortals, but greatly enlarged the gap between them and percentage boosters! New paying grinder now has weaker base, it takes 4 times longer to build the same decent base for percentage boost.
 
@Nimmy, many trades are done outside the forum. People first ask their IM contacts if no deal is made then they go on forum if they are really desperate. I doubt you will find much in that dig.
 
I agree too with Rhaegar's suggestion to a certain degree. But by doing such things you just aren't taking into account stat rewards from fights, they would make win grinding much more juicer than heat/combo fighting, probably resulting in another GGG because it's super simple way of doing it. You then not only need to increase base value of sacc ratios but also increase stat reward from fights at same time.
 
Or in addition to this last change, also nerf down the percentage boosts too. But then what do you do with those "that had better deal before", if you touch their stat, it's unfair, if you leave it be it's unfair, if you reset everything it's unfair. Really I still fail to see how to make everything right, how to leave the sheep untouched and wolf satiated. But let's face it, so far it was unfair and game in state of such supremacy of premium goodies just can't go back on advertisement shelf, which devs plan to do when they finish enough features. New players don't like to join free to play game which in fact turns out to be pay to win game.

That'll just prove that majority of the token trade goes through coins and not credits. That should mean tokened crits are pretty accessible for all players. No?

[Kyphis the Bard]

Since one of the main arguments regarding how hard it is to catch the ancient grinder is, is the permanent boosters, why not just cap how much that can afford you from now on? That won't do anything about the people who already have huge values, but will allow more active people to catch up as they will only benefit to the same extent from now on from that boost.

[Eara Meraia]

Decresing current stats gain for all players makes no sense at all since the situation just stays as it is now, but less people even try to reach those values old grinders have, I will give you the example: many people consider me a grinder. And yes, I like fighting. I also got some highly tokened creatures. My best creature with over 10000 wins (with many tokens) now gets an attack gain of 2000. What would that be without tokens? (if somebody has such creature can tell the exact value, but let us say 1500). Do the math and calculate how many wins you need to get 500k attack. Still want to fight? Really?

 

As Rhaegar said - leave the token bonus as it was and raise the current stat gain by saccing non tokened creatures. This will hopefully make players who don't want (cannot) pay fight again and everyone will profit. Descrease all stat gains through tokens and you will demotivate those who got tokened creatures and change absolutelly nothing for those who don't have them.

 

I also  think the system that would help to decrease the gap would be "Those who have more stats get less bonus" (not sure if it is technically possible to do though).

Edited June 21, 2014 by Eara Meraia