[UPDATED] Changes to GWENT’s economy and full mill value refund policy

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They have milled ALL of our collections for SCRAPS with the premise that we can craft Premiums with them.

... now they go back and say "Well, it is too generous to craft them Premiums with only scraps, kiss your scraps leftovers and money you paid for MP in Beta goodbye, ta-taa!"

Mind you - I don't say the new system is not fair, I say it is not fair what they do with their MOST LOYAL FANS time after time after time, in that case it was THEM that milled OUR collections for SCRAPS.

I do have criticisms of CDPR but this isn't one of them. CDPR did not deceive you with your above accusation. You CAN craft those premiums with your scraps right now. Use them and get a full collection. If you have your ful collection there realy isn't anything to complain about. Take your left over scraps and either hold them to buy future non premiums or you can convert them to meteorite powder. Nothing was taken away from you.
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The game is still unplayable on ps4...

It's just as bad on Xbox I promise you.
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This is really disappointing. I mean I get they want to make more money but at least be honest about it, and don’t say that it’s “for us” when it’s really just a way to sell more meteorite powder. It’s very disappointing to hear this, especially since we have no way to convert our scraps to meteorite powder.

Not sure what you are talking about. I just got done doing that yesterday. You buy and mill the same premium card over and over again. TaDa! You just coverted scraps to powder.
 
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I don't mind this changes, mainly because I gave up on Gwent when bugs brought me one loss too many, but what I do mind is the BS corporate excuse they gave for it. We all know they are doing it because they need money and we all know they can't just go out and say they need money. But "sense of accomplishment" is the same excuse that EA/DICE gave when they locked Luke and other main SW characters in Battlefront behind a 15 hour grind to entice people to spend real money to unlock them. Also, it really isn't much of an accomplishment if you luck out and get premiums opening RNG kegs.
 
I really do think that players that actually paid money for the game deserve something special for actually supporting the game.

And you know what? If paying players dont get incentivized by some kind of reward to actually pay, it does hurt me as a "free to play peasant" because companies dont run on good intentions and loyalty, and if developers dont make a profit from either the scrap economy or the golden cards, then they will be forced to make money thru other means like:

-By "making it more fun" and less hardcore (introducing RNG, gambling casino fiesta)

-"Design decisions" like making the game more mainstream, by making the game simpler (removing mechanics and keywords)

-By making it portable to mobile (remove 2 rows LOL)

I would a billion times rather they straight forwardly rob us in the scrap economy as long as it doesnt corrupt game design and game balance decisions.
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(please dont merge this two posts mods, its a different stand-alone point)

Also i want to tell you guys about money and games thru what happened to "League of Legends" in the latest years that can be illustrative:

Some big chinese company bought LOL and to make it even more profitable than it is, it ruined the entire gameplay and uses behavioural manipulation for greed:

-Whenever a new champion gets released, they overtune it so that its overpowered, this incentivices people to buy this champion to gain an unfair advantage; they also release "skins" along with the new champion, so big spenders not only buy the champion but also this... then 2 or 3 weeks later they nerf the champion to normalized levels once enough people bought them.

-To keep up the pace in competing with all new Battle Royale genre, they compromised in-game strategies just in order to make games "shorter and more action packed" so that professional games are more entertaining.

-All the "boring champions" got nerfed to the ground that dont make "flashy and entertaining plays" such as tank and support classes.

Do you see how money can ruin games? League of Legends and Artifact are extreme and cynical cases because they have greedy teams behind them; Gwent is not greedy in comparison, but if it cannot make a decent profit, gameplay and design decisions CAN AND WILL be corrupted.
 
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I personally am not all that concerned with Premiums, though I wholeheartedly agree with those who are angry about that change.

And on top of that, I can think of no good reason excuse to stop offering full-mill for nerfed cards. Sure, Pioneers (like myself) and Open Beta players will only be mildly inconvenienced by the change; but new players could easily wind up spending all of their resources (or even worse, actual money) to make a deck that gets trashed by the next update.

Just about every major change made to Gwent since Midwinter has made the game worse, and it saddens me to see that this is no exception.
 
I personally am not all that concerned with Premiums, though I wholeheartedly agree with those who are angry about that change.

And on top of that, I can think of no good reason excuse to stop offering full-mill for nerfed cards. Sure, Pioneers (like myself) and Open Beta players will only be mildly inconvenienced by the change; but new players could easily wind up spending all of their resources (or even worse, actual money) to make a deck that gets trashed by the next update.

Just about every major change made to Gwent since Midwinter has made the game worse, and it saddens me to see that this is no exception.
Honestly if that means more frequent balance changes i'm all for it. And let's be honest, you can easily open 2 kegs per day (without even trying much) so it's not like people will be starved for cards.
 
Honestly if that means more frequent balance changes i'm all for it.

If it provides incentives to add new cards to the game I'll share in your enthusiasm :).

Less generous Gwent = more better Gwent = win. Although, I would point out it's possible it could just be less generous Gwent = less generous Gwent. Which would be fine. The game has always been remarkably generous in terms of card collection.
 
Beta players probably have enough scraps to obtain most of the normal cards from next expansion.
If people are angry because they cannot also have premium version of new cards without spending any money....that's just not fair.
Those abnormally huge amount of scraps are result of generous(or inexperienced) in-game economy policy of CDPR.
I always realize generosity doesn't feel generous anymore when it continues.
 
these changes makes me want to create a new account and start over. to feel it's actually card collectable game. good change.

Do you want to start over together? We can even coordinate our queues. That way it will be fair if we run into each other because we will both have Wolf Packs, Peasant Militia and Bone Tailsmans :).
 
I support the changes in general, because I see that CDPR has to make money. Still I would like to suggest a softer approach to this.
After a nerf full scrap and powder should be given only for the number of cards a deck can contain. (1 gold, 2 bronce), further copies in the collection should just receive the reduced value. To control it, I assume this refund should be automatic.
 
This makes a lot more sense and it's a good change imo. I'm especially happy that you warn people up front. Nobody 'needs' premium cards to play the game, so it should indeed be special.
 
So what will happen with premium starter cards after this change?

At the moment you can't transmute standard starter cards to premium, you can only craft the premiums directly with scraps. You can't get them from kegs either.

Something will have to change, otherwise premium starter cards will be unobtainable...

Chiming in: Hi, can we get a signal here from mods/CDPR about this? Will it be possible to transmute the starter cards later? Some people are vain ;), want to have these in premium as well and juuuust ran out of scaps to do craft them :p ...

Breli
 
CDPR also need to earn money and pay there bills. Its fine by me. Beside they even give us time to craft the premiums if we want. Those animated cards are not easy to make. They should worth something if you want them. Still really rewarding game

You see, this is where most of the game companies make a fatal mistake. They don't make the game people WANT to pay for, they make the game people HAVE to pay for. It's ok to have cosmetic items behind a paywall, but it's not ok changing the way it works when people already spent real money.

I have every game by CDPR (except The Witcher Adventure Game), I bought Thronebreaker on a release day on GOG just to support CDPR for making a great game. Even though I have a back catalogue of games for years ahead. Heck, I still don't have time to go through Blood & Wine which I bought 2 years ago!

But after this I won't spend another dime on Gwent, erm, sorry, Thronebreaker Multiplayer.
 
Heck, I still don't have time to go through Blood & Wine which I bought 2 years ago!

Not acceptable. I demand you fix this immediately and play through B&W. :)

But after this I won't spend another dime on Gwent, erm, sorry, Thronebreaker Multiplayer.

Not sure why it's a big deal. The game is F2P. It's extremely easy to play it as F2P. HC might be a bit less forgiving given the state of the starter decks. It's still extremely forgiving to F2P approaches. I could see getting driven away from HC for a number of reasons. This is not one of them. Even though the sugarcoating on the reasoning behind the change is quite comical.
 
Not sure why it's a big deal. The game is F2P. It's extremely easy to play it as F2P. HC might be a bit less forgiving given the state of the starter decks. It's still extremely forgiving to F2P approaches.

Exactly! That's why many players, including me, spent money: because we wanted, not because we had to. As people above already said a few times: CDPR took players' money for powder and effectively converted it to scraps. That's a bad move.
 
Worth mentioning: Prestige 5 and 10 guarantee premium cards in kegs, and prestige 8 and 9 add Meteorite Powder to the daily quest rewards (link).
This can easily be changed in the future. :sneaky: Do not hope too much.
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you could craft the same premium legendary in Homecoming, provided the card is still in the game. I don't see how this is unfair.
Exactly. There are dozens of cards that are not in the game anymore. And they will not return until new rules apply.
 
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If CDPR has to choose between increasing their game revenue by means of cosmetics (in a F2P game), even though some old beta players may not agree with the Powder - Scraps exchange, I would have done the same, it's way more important to have a good income if you want to keep the game alive.

Also, players can still get Premium cards with Scraps until January. Yes, the collection is not as large as it was before, but it is still a large collection. Don't forget this is merely cosmetic and with the remaining Scraps you can buy regular cards and without ever missing a new card. Besides, from time to time there will be some kind of event for getting Premiums from regular Kegs.

I myself lost a los of scraps, because I was saving the Powder and buying directly Regular cards instead, when I could have bought directly Premiums, but whatever.

And I personally find more irritating releasing Thronebreaker for 30$ with that amount of bugs, way way more.
 
Exactly! That's why many players, including me, spent money: because we wanted, not because we had to. As people above already said a few times: CDPR took players' money for powder and effectively converted it to scraps. That's a bad move.

In fairness one of the important elements of this post is the second sentence. You wanted to spend money on a game in beta stages. Spending money on games is risky in general. You can watch as many trailers, game play videos, etc. as you want and, sometimes, it's hard to fully know if you're going to get what you expect out of it. They can also change rather drastically. This is especially true for games in early development, before they hit the "full release" version.

So, while it may seem like a dick move to force card collections to auto-mill, then spin around and change the game economy mechanics for the bottom line, it doesn't feel like a huge problem. If people feel betrayed or screwed over it's their right. I'm just pointing out the reality here.

Whether it's a bad move remains to be seen. It also depends completely on whom views it as a bad move. If enough players think they got betrayed and drop the game or refuse to cough up more money over it then yes, it's a poor choice. If Gwent manages to leverage more income out of it then it's not exactly a bad move for CDPR. If the game gets stronger support because of it then players win too. I'll believe the last option when I see it. I'm sure as hell not going to believe it because someone says so.
 
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If the game gets stronger support because of it then players win too. I'll believe the last option when I see it. I'm sure as hell not going to believe it because someone says so.

The problem is not that CDPR doesn't have money. The problem is that with all that money and a huge team they still released an unbalanced mess called Homecoming.

Do you really think that forcing even the most loyal players to leave and making the ones that's left to pay is good for anyone? CDPR was one of the universally loved game companies thanks to their no DRM policy (another example of people paying when they don't have to) and listening to their community. The way they handled the whole Homecoming thing (half a year of silence, changing many things people liked, then 1.5 months with no balance patches, and now this change) shows they are no better than EA, Blizzard-Activision or Bethesda.

Look at Valve: they know they screwed up with Artifact, but it took them less than a month to release a big update addressing many complains.

What did CDPR do not in 1, but in 2 months since release? Fixed a few minor bugs, changed some numbers on a few cards and told us "Gwent is not dead" (without promising anything specific). And then amidst all this they announce another change explaining that'd be a good thing for the community. Yes, we all agree Gwent's too generous. Yes, it's ok if CDPR makes money on cosmetic stuff like many other companies. But cut the marketing crap and at least have the decency to accept why you are making the change. It's ok to make mistakes. It's not ok to lie.
 
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