What do folks across all platforms think? If you imagine a typical scenario ..... new players installs the game, can get a decent understanding of the game via tutorial, struggles a bit in story mode but feels satisfaction with his win when it comes.

He's getting hooked.

A few days or weeks later. He's nailed story mode. He has ventured into deck building, he tries versus, wins a few, loses a few. Still hooked he wants to improve his deck. He plays more, wins some, buys some packs. His decks improve. He wins more than before on average. He really likes the game.

He climbs in rank, then hits some try hard decks or Tier 1 unfun stuff. He thinks he will try and maybe spends out some coin. He gets some nice cards. He builds his decks out further. He discovers net decking. Some decks looks interesting. He doesn't have the cards.

His versus is hit and miss but better than 50% so he increases rank. At times it takes him longer to get a match. He is patient and keeps at it.

Maybe at times he is handed it, just bad luck or a crazy deck. He wants to try other decks but does not have the cards. He tries buying a little more, a different set. He gets some good cards but not enough to build a top deck with.

We leave him at this point . Q is do you think he is likely to continue, or does he get frustrated and eventually give up?

Knowing duels as you do, and if you had this sort of experience when you started, I guess you are still here if you are reading this.

Most of us I guess want the game to succeed and survive, and to date it has.

I am sure like most games Duels will get newcomers across all platforms all the time.

Do you think the cost of cards is off putting.

Personally I think as long as newcomers realize that:-

a) Origins as a base is probably good to complete

b) In principal if you stick to a current block you can get a good experience and build competitive decks but miss trying and playing with new set mechanics. The story mode and D unlocks allows players to get a flavor of what a set is about but it does take either a lot of play or spending to make you competitive in versus at higher ranks.

Discuss ....

SD

Definitely easier than other F2P games to grind to full collection but that grind is also definitely getting too much and daunting for new players I reckon.
Just because it's easiest to do, doesn't stop it from looking like a rather daunting task.

Depends on his personality; if he wants to win he'll probably continue to keep it moving; which means either spending money on coins or continue to grind them out.

Just look at paper magic; people spend $500 -$1000 to build decks that are competetive; you gotta spend money to make money.

Tournament winnings aren't too shabby either. SCGlive for example.

Persistent CCG environments such as this one will always reach a point in which strictly selective purchase options are required.

If Duels was a system on its own, sooner or later we could expect to get a set, from which new players could likely start over, giving them a good starting experience and enough tools to handle the farming.

Given that cards choices and set balance are made for the paper environment, instead of the limited port we play, new tools could very well harm starter shells.


Kaladesh was a great example, seeing how returning players were able to go back in top shape, just by coupling Origins with the new aggro tools. A set like that also allows players to stockpile resources for future investments, with more ease than older options.


All in all, new players are indeed required to inform themselves about the current meta, looking out for brew options and various guides; otherwise they seriously risk to gamble their limited resources onto plenty of sets, getting no love from RNG.

Provided the information, new players can navigate the game's economy and RNG without harming their play experience.

Therefore, if they simply implemented that single cards purchase or any similar selective purchase options, instead of only the RNG base option, new players would be more enticed to join, and the gaming experience would be far better.

The kind of Gold Farming and booster system we have, are quite generous options, but at this point there's need for some more.


Also sexism and patriarchy.

^ Pretty much my experience with Hearthstone. You dust some cards, buy a cheap deck, get bored, can't afford another deck, stop playing.

Oh dear the impersonal pronoun is hardly needed nor is he/she, I doubt (hope) anyone wouldn't infer sexism ....

Success & survival are two quite different things.

Do people remember the hype & excitement back 18+ months ago right before Duels was released?

One out of two isn't bad, I suppose.

BTW, I don't think cost is the biggest problem with Duel's free-to-play model. As was said back at the beginning, the bigger issue is the backwards (compared to most other free-to-play games) decreasing difficulty of grind. Grind becomes easier (greater % of victory & less tediousness) as you accumulate more quantity & quality of cards in your card pool to construct decks from. However, it is so off-putting at the start that people don't play much beyond the story mode. This really defeats the purpose of Duels as a gateway to the MtG ecosystem.

Building up your collection and improving your decks over time is a verry fun expirience for new players. Not having access to everything you want right from the start is usally what keeps you playing for longer.

Yes. It's either pay up or get stomped at this point.

On Xbox, I was able to win consistently on the ladder with the deck I was helping Psychatog put together. He only had Origins + BFZ + OGW.

You can win consistently with about 3 sets (and possibly 2 with ORI + KLD) as long as the deck is properly built.

But yeah, optimizing and unlocking everything is going to take some serious work.

I only had the Starter Box unlocked and grinded out 70% of SOI while it was on sale for $100/pack on Steam. Because of time constrains, I spent $$$ only to finish the rest of the SOI pack which I think costed me $10 in real money. I'm currently holding my own on Steam hovering around Ranks 30-37 and I'm holding my own with a decently built Rg Werewolf Midrange deck.

You don't need all the cards (which is really code word for you wanting all the shiny mythics & rares to make something inconsistent) to be competitive, you just need to learn how to build a decent deck and you'll be fine.

I was also able to build a nice UR Rise from the Tides deck for the Steam afterparty which landed me in 3 or 4th place...can't remember vs everyone else who had "all the cards"

As long as the player can win on the ladder, he'll keep playing to unlock cards.. especially if he has a semi-significant financial investment.

It's a massive deterrent.

I'm trying to get back into the game, and 5 hours in I am just quite frequently pissed at it because I'm running into situations where I can't do ****. Because I don't have X, and in order to get X I might have a full 80 boosters of whatever set X is from. If this was any other tcg, I would consolidate some materials and resources to make at least one deck I can be happy with. In Duels..... it's 100% rng. And I know the "if you like magic it's not a big deal to grind" **** is really real, but I really don't like losing over and over and over to try and eventually have fun in a game where ... I don't know. It feels like there is a straight up paywall. It feels like I need to buy the Kaladesh and Origins sets to get into the game before I get too pissed at meta decks and just give up. Will I do that....... I can't do that. It would be insane to do that. You don't throw money at things you don't enjoy in the hopes they get better once you've paid into it. You put money down on things you like. I'm going to keep at it, b/c the nostalgia is real, but if I was a relatively frugal new player who wasn't motivated to keep going? You bet your bippy I wouldn't stay around.

The other thing I wanted to say reading this thread is that you all are completely out of touch if you expect the average new player to do a lot of research outside of the game. That just doesn't happen, and to be successful these games need to be somewhat accessible to people who do zero research outside of the game. Otherwise it's just another big barrier to entry.

I wouldn't call getting stomped on at the start a very fun experience. New players have noted quite the opposite, that it is very frustrating. Just try versus duelling 10 games using deck with majority D cards to see what I mean.

Not having access to everything you want right from the start doesn't mean you will play for longer in this case. That's the whole point of the OP. The difficulty of grind is inverted, too high at the start.

In many free-to-play games, free stuff (little bits anyways) is readily doled out over time to hook players into investing time. The difficulty of grind is low at the start as well to get people to emotionally attach to their time/efforts spent on the game. Thus, when the difficulty of grind ratchets up later, people are more readily willing to invest more time/money into the game (even if prior efforts/time are sunk costs). That's how a successful free-to-play model is suppose to work.

Otherwise, why is Duels even bothering with free-to-play? Just make everything free. Afterall, Duels is suppose to be the introductory gateway to the MtG ecosystem, right?

I still maintain that Origins should be free. You can't expect people to go into a gun fight where they have a .22 and everyone else has howitzers. Let them have old school Thopters, Elves, the renown white weenies, and whatever else was popular than.

I think we are far enough along that Magic Duels could do a "free download weekend" where Origins packs are completely free. I could totally buy into that.

They could also just make the all the sets but the newest 2 cost 100 Gold permanently.

To be honest though the problem isn't that there are too many sets. The problem, or my main problem, is that I can't pick which cards I want. There is no option to buy "singles" and no way to even target what you want. I understand people really really like Kaladesh and that's the thing everyone is advised to get but maybe Joe-Smo really likes From Beyond and is frustrated because they can't get their hands on it. This is the only ccg I know where this isn't even an option, not even for some absurd price.

While we are on this topic, I find this interesting to look at for various games.

http://steamcharts.com/app/316010

Decided to look at it for Magic Duels on a whim. Turns out the game peaked at a massive number in August 2015 (this was release month wasn't it?), got completely nuked within a month, and now is steady at about 3000-ish average players online except in release months, where it goes up to something like 3500-ish.

I think the whole system is bad both for newer players and actually also for veteran players. People have already argued that while grinding the whole collection is easier than other games, it's harder to actually get the cards you need when you start the game right now.

But the other issue is that for people who have been playing regularly from the beginning, it's so easy to get all the cards that you quickly lose any incentive for playing.

I don't know how other veterans feel, but as far as I'm concerned grinding gold and ranks on ladder is extremely boring and generally I pretty much stop playing a few weeks after unlocking the new cards. I like participating to the occasional tournaments when I can but outside of that there is not much that drives me to coming back into the game between seasons.

At this point in the life of the game I don't know how they can change the system, but it's currently set up in a way in which pretty much nobody wins. Beginners face a huge hurdle that they possibly cannot pay for and veterans mostly don't need to spend money at all and can get bored with the game quickly if they don't enjoy doing only laddering. I also doubt Wizards is making a lot of money with this game so they probably lose as well.

For now I'd say new game modes and purchasable rewards as well as the possibility to directly purchase some cards directly would be a very welcome addition. I'd love them to implement an actual best of 3 mode with sideboards as well as a draft mode, but at this point and with the current player base it's unlikely they will invest more into totally new features.

For a new player that has no experience with MTG or has no idea what a mana curve is or lacks the skill to quickly identify what is wrong with their deck... Not only are they dealing with not having the cards to make a competitive deck they are probably using the deck wizard to build their deck for them. Even if they had all the cards their deck would probably be a 100 card pile. 0% chance the deck is properly built.

I doubt many just jumps into this game at this point that isn't being coached/pulled into it by a friend or has just made a hardware purchase that allows them to play this game and already has a strong grasp on the game principles but didn't have access at the time of release. I myself am an example of the latter buying an xbone during the middle of SoI block. I felt like after I spent all of my story coins I made a half decent delirium deck and I had fun with it winning some and losing often when playing ranked. I played the AI more than ranked then, quests didn't specify ranked matches at that time, but during EMN I was able to create decks using origins support and immediately shot up to rank 40 playing with different archtypes. Now I am the one steam rolling poor rank 1-10s when i face them. If I am not trying to grind quickly for a quest with limited time I will often play them to the turn I win and then concede to them so they can get the coins. Problem is many will concede as soon as I wipe the table or even kill a strong creature, you have to at least hang in there a few turns to receive my generosity.


I am finding that playing 2HG with friends that are starting the game is fun. We will play vs the AI and it can be difficult as you have to carry your friend to help them grind those coins but you can still work together and help them optimize their decks and strategies. Sometimes the AI just owns us playing mythic after mythic back breaking cards but that makes the wins more fulfilling. I guess I still enjoy just playing this game but 2HG is a big part of my enjoyment.