"New" Player Experience

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CCGs in general got an issue with value for money.
I guess if you want golds you might be better off spending money on Meteorite Powder.
 
fodare;n8771170 said:
Don't spend money on this game. You can spend $10 and get zero silver and zero gold. No thanks.

like if it was any different in any other games where you buy "lottery tickets"
 
PackingMoney;n8771190 said:
You can't really expect something from $10 as it gets you like 5 kegs, especially when golds are at least 1/20.

fodare;n8797280 said:
You can't expect to get anything for spending $10? WAT? This is why you shouldn't spend money. There would not be a potential to just toss money away for literally nothing.

Did anyone promise you legendaries or epics in kegs? No. You have the chance to acquire them. There is a pity timer similar to HS that ensures you'll get a legendary sooner or later.

You will get 5 cards per keg no matter what. You can mill for dust, working towards your desired cards, so you will always get something.

You give the impression 10 dollars is a lot. Naturally that depends on your economic situation and country of residence, and I don't mean to diminish your buy, or say that you're wrong for hoping (not expecting) for a great return of investment.... but assuming you fundamentally like the game, you will very likely spend dozens if not hundreds or thousands of hours in this game over the course of time. In my country, a cinema ticket to a 2 hour movie is 15 dollars by itself, without popcorn, soda or anything. Considering how much enjoyment I derive from Gwent, I have had no qualms about spending a total of ~100 dollars on it over the course of 9 months (I joined Closed Beta in October 2016 if memory serves).
That's roughly 10 dollars per month, and over time it will be less and less as my collection is complete and I'll have the requisite scraps to craft all new cards as they come out. If I hypothetically play Gwent for 2 years, my 100 dollars will have turned into 4.16 dollars/month. I would be surprised if anyone cannot find the budget to support a developer and game they truly enjoy by such a small amount.

You're given really, really decent starter decks in Gwent, especially compared to its competitors. You're given a super generous F2P model by industry standards. You have the option of buying kegs, which will give you something, and which has the chance to give you something great. Nowhere is it guaranteed that you get just the cards you want, nor is it true that 10 dollars doesn't get you anything. That's a bit inane.
 
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fodare;n8836990 said:
Okay, now crawl out of your narrow minded, itsy bitsty world view bubble and realize every single thing that you're claiming "justifies" the price tag is totally subjective. $10 is a lot of money, clearly you're oblivious to the state of the economy, let alone the entire world around you. I have no intention of ever spending money on this game again. I don't have any extra money, so when I'm able to get some extra I'd like to actually get something. I'm not going to waste the little extra money I have on potentially nothing. This is not something poor people do. But you'd have to actually be aware of other people in the world to actually understand what I'm talking about.

oh yea, 10 bucks is a lot in every country where minimum wage is not 8$/hour, i live like 2 hours from germany and minimum wage in my country is around 2 euro/ hour, obviously these prices are made for western market, though cd projekt is polish company and their salary is not much better than in my country, id actually buy whole new game for 10 bucks rather than pointless kegs (or any packs in any ccg tbh) it waste of money
 
fodare;n8836990 said:
I have no intention of ever spending money on this game again. I don't have any extra money, so when I'm able to get some extra I'd like to actually get something. I'm not going to waste the little extra money I have on potentially nothing.
Then don't purchase kegs. Simple as that. Single player adventures are coming, you can save money for those. You can purchase meteorite ores and upgrade soon-to-be nerfed cards to get double value (nerfed premium leg is 1600 scrap refund). Plenty of ways to get your money worth other than kegs.
 
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I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to create a discussion topic of my own (I understand it's a spam prevention method, I just don't think it's a good one) so I'll hop into this one.

Where I stand - I'm an experienced CCG player, I've been playing Magic since it originally came out and was a pro tour scrub at one point. I'm an infinite/legend hearthstone player. I like CCGs. And I've got to say, while I really enjoy the gameplay of Gwent, after a few days of playing I don't think I'm going to be coming back. Which is a shame, because I fundamentally like the game - I think Projekt Red have really got some good ideas.

The UI is kind of hateful. The constant (long!) loading screens might be fine in some other games, but if your game is based around fast gameplay, making me wait a minute to play a five minute game becomes really irritating. Add to that the number of players who engage in near-constant "roping" and the fun kinda drains out of things.

But honestly, I could get over the UI... I've been setting up the game when I'm doing dishes or some other task, as it doesn't really require my attention. The reason I'm writing this post is that, as a new player, my experience of this fundamentally interesting game is pretty bad. I've been playing for two or three days. I'm level 7, I've completed all the single-player quests and opened however many kegs that allows. Playing levels 1-6 was fairly easy, I won the majority of my games, which I expected - after all, there are always a lot of new players and I understand the fundamentals of games like this pretty well. I decided I liked Monsters, played around with that deck, tweaked it a bit as I saw weaknesses and got cards which could fill them in. Some of the games were massacres but a lot of them were really tight and fun, where I felt like I was winning because I was outplaying my opponents. I knew it would end eventually, of course, as I started facing better players... and the fact that I'm still using newbie cards really started to become apparent, but the frost synergies in the monster deck are pretty resilient and let me win a lot of games against people with better cards, but there were still definitely moments like when I first saw Ragnarok - "Oh, I can't win now, gg and good card."

I'm not really complaining about that. That's card games - there was a golden age of magic where Wizards believed that "rarer shouldn't mean more powerful" and instead the rarer cards were more complex and had more strategic depth - a good deck still likely needed many of them but they didn't just flat-out obsolete the common cards. But we're not there any more and gold cards in Gwent aren't any more odious than the insane mythics in Magic or legendaries in Hearthstone. They are what they are, and that's not a problem.

The problem, for me, was that at about the midpoint of level 6, I stopped facing other newbies and FTP players. I started facing exactly two decks: King Bran and Brouver Hoog. (I assume, by how many times I've faced the exact same decks, that it's clear what decks I'm talking about.) Obviously I don't know for certain that these aren't FTP players, but the fact that I'm facing the same deck (different players) over and over, and the fact that each of these decks plays two non-starter gold cards and at least 4 non-starter purple cards (IE more of these types of cards in one deck than I've opened across all factions) I'm guessing that these are paying players.

Take this as arrogance if you like - and hey, I've already admitted that I'm a newbie, it's hardly impossible that my understanding of the game isn't as deep as I think. But from my perspective, some of the people I'm playing are good; and some of them aren't. They overplay into my frost; they throw away a card on a round where me winning is a foregone conclusion because they didn't count something right. But in the end I wind up losing by a point or two, because I simply don't have any golds which effectively add 25 power to the board. Because their three purples combo together and mine just do stuff, so the things I'm doing don't matter.

I expect that kind of thing in ranked play... I wouldn't expect to be able to compete in ranked. But I'm still in what feels like a newbie area of the game to me, and the message I'm getting is "You're level seven. Start paying up or stop playing."

And that's a shame, because it looks like the answer is "stop playing." When I started hitting the same wall in Hearthstone. I drafted and did dailies for three or four months, that gave me enough juice to build a low-tier deck, which got me a few ranks up and gave me some cards I needed, so I kept drafting until I could make a higher-tier deck, and... you get the idea. Here, my choices seem to be (and PLEASE tell me if I'm wrong) leveling up through casual play or playing against an AI that either of my 3-year-olds could make mincemeat of.

I just loaded up a "casual" game. Oh look! It's turn one and my opponent has two golds and two purples in play. Doesn't seem like a particularly good play on turn one... but who cares? I'm going to lose. (Yep, I won round one, managed to force him to spend two extra cards in round two, lost round three by two points despite that. Because the cards he played were rarer, and stronger, than the ones I played. Oh well.) I guess I'm done for the time being, but I really hope this game actually turns into a FTP game. I'd like to play it (and frankly I'd like to give CD Projekt my money!) but right now I just can't imagine doing that.

(Oh, and to the person who inevitably will respond "STFU NOOB HAHA YOU CAN'T BEAT KING BRAN THAT DECK IS SO EASY"... you're missing the point.)
 
amoshias;n8839660 said:
Here, my choices seem to be (and PLEASE tell me if I'm wrong) leveling up through casual play or playing against an AI that either of my 3-year-olds could make mincemeat of.
Doing dailies for about a month you should be able to craft a good deck. You can do it in ranked or casual, whatever. Yeah you might lose at first but this is okay. You are not expecting to have all the cards at once, right? It is fairly easy to play this game for free and be competitive. I payed them $20 but only because I wanted to thank them for their work. And to be frank, I received garbage in those kegs lol. Waste of money but it is okay.
I am rank 13 and climbing further without real investments. It is real, just keep collecting cards and you will eventually become competitive.

Actually, there is a patch coming that will nerf some cards. And after that you will be able to mill these cards for their full value. It means that bronze Queensguard that previously gave you 5 scraps while milling will cost 80 (if I remember correctly). So, I would advise you to collect as many extra cards as you can right now and mill them when patch comes out. You will receive really A LOT OF scraps to craft necessary Gold/Silver cards.

This is just an advise in case you are really interested in the game. It is worth it.
Oh yeah, and forget the AI, it sucks.
 
amoshias;n8839660 said:
I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to create a discussion topic of my own (I understand it's a spam prevention method, I just don't think it's a good one) so I'll hop into this one.
A few months back we had a massive issue with spambots where they would create dozens of threads in a very short time. One of the measures we took to combat this was to require 10 posts before users could create a thread unless the thread is in the tech-support sub-forum. So once you get to 10 posts you'll be able to create threads. Sorry for the inconvenience.
 
Like I said, I understand completely why you would do it. But when a new player - someone who wants to be part of the community - comes here and gets the response that he's not allowed to post, that says "Nope, this community doesn't have an interest in welcoming new people." And when that person is coming to say "I like your game but your new player experience is kind of off-putting" then that kinda doubles.

The Gwent forums probably aren't the first forums to face this particular problem; I've never seen this particular response before. This is a community for a computer game whose creators presumably want more people to play their game, so more people can give them money. It seems like a poor choice.
 
amoshias;n8844100 said:
"Nope, this community doesn't have an interest in welcoming new people." And when that person is coming to say "I like your game but your new player experience is kind of off-putting" then that kinda doubles.
Totally understand. Not our intention, but trust me it's better this way. It's much more friendly than logging into forums as seeing the first 83 threads in a row are advertising Korean Casinos. We had to do that in combination with a bunch of other things before the spambots stopped. I don't like having it this way either. But it's significantly better than the alternative was.

EDIT: If you would like to discuss this more at length, shoot me a PM so we don't derail the thread.
 
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Hi, Amoshias. You basically took thoughts from my head and added your ability to express them coherently, which I seem to lack sometimes :)

I'm bartle-explorer type of player, so I mostly enjoy slowly discovering things at my own pace. The way I thought I would play this game, open keg or 2, analyse what those new cards can do, tinker with my decks a bit, try it in casuals, see whether my decks work little better or fail completely. This turned out to be completely impossible, because for last week or so I only encounter 2 types of players - either people from low ranked who have fleshed-out decks, or level 7-8 noobs who absolutely have no idea how to play the game, and who are just 1 step above the terrible AI. I feel like this game has no middle-ground at all - either go full competitive or get out. And during last few days, even the noobs started having powerful golden cards. Recently a level 7 player opened the game by throwing Ragnarok at me. It's round 3 finisher card, and he barely had any worth from it, because I didn't even manage deploy my units yet. But someone in the internet already told that guy - "Bruh, you gotta get Ragnarok, it's BIS gold card and a no-brainer".

So I have 2 silver card drop from all the kegs I opened (one of them being useless Scorch), and a single gold one, which is completely useless too because it requires several specific silvers to really work. I have 500 scrap (I crafted like 3 common cards), and the game basically tells me now - dude, stop fooling around, mill your junk, get a deck from GwentDB and go full ranked! But I don't want to do that. Because this game has so little RNG, playing same deck gets repetitive really, really fast for me.

So today I had my last 500 exp to level 10, and I deliberately idled out and lost several games in row (hello ropers!), to lower my MMR and see what kind of people game would pair me up with. In the end, I got a level 7 monster deck player who opened game with 3 witches. I mean, it's 3 silvers worth 600 scrap, and level 7 player can't have that scrap yet from playing the game! By the way, I think you are wrong about P2W - those players mill the faction leaders to get it. I think it's absolutely irrational to allow such option - it taps into long-term appeal of the game, and you shouldn't be able to mill your core cards. Anyway, level 7 players netdeck already. That's your new player experience for ya :)

I checked other places for what people think about the game - the hardcore crowd seems to be obsessed with it. Love-hate relations, really, because from one point, it caters to their taste with no RNG play. And at the same time they are all frustrated - since it has little RNG, you can't win with mediocre deck - it's either tier 1 deck or bust. I think CDPR repeats the same thing Capcom did with Street Fighter V. SFV was released in absolute bare-bones state, lacking every usual casual mode and having only what "pros" cared about - sound fundamentals and online mode. They rushed game to tournaments and had notorious streamers playing it. That resulted in what I call the "brilliant failure". That very vocal minority of competitive players valiantly stood against all criticism, labeling everyone criticizing a scrub and shouting their "Git gud" battlecry with insistence of cuckoo clock striking 12. Critics gave it good reviews, because none of them wanted to piss of the hardcore player community. Instead of 2 millions Capcom expected it to sell within first month, it sold only 1.4 million. Capcom started trying to salvage it, added SP campaign - too late, it shipped only 100k extra copies over the next year. Guys, video game industry is essentially about repeatedly making fads. No one cares about your game once it has been released and the hype wave passed - you don't get launch No.2, 3, etc. You can't say to people - buy vase today, and we'll send you tulips sometime later. It's not how fads work. You released the flashy launch trailer, you started taking money - that's your launch window, no matter what you like to think.

So to sum up, this game is definitely not the worst 35 hours of my life. I really, really enjoyed the first dozen hours of it. It managed to flare up my interest for Witcher franchise which I didn't play yet, though I'll probably have horrible flashbacks in taverns. And if would encounter a hardcore CCG player, I would definitely recommend this game to him. Unfortunately I can't do that, because hardcore players seem to be inversely common in anyone's social circles compared how common they are on reddit and forums. Would I recommend this game to a regular person playing few games of Hearthstone during their day? Nope :)
 
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