Is the Price Of Power expansion set roll-out a 'pay-to-win' strategy? Do you approve of the strategy?

[BartonFink]

At the moment the only way that you can access the new Price Of Power expansion sets is by buying them with real money (or by being such a veteran player that you have enough shards to craft a few of the new cards). Ordinarily you could get such cards by using 'gold' in your account to 'purchase' kegs from a particular expansion set (i.e. no real money required). Apparently players will be able to use gold to get these expansion set cards in November this year. How do you feel about this? Has CDPR made the game 'pay-to-win' with this new strategy? By 'pay-to-win' I mean that there are probably cards available in this series that will give people a competitive edge over people who don't want to pay for the cards or pay for the shards or who haven't got the amount of shards needed to get a good number of cards.

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game - Price of Power

Play GWENT — a strategy card game of choices and consequences, where skill, not luck, is your greatest weapon.

www.playgwent.com

 

[Draconifors]

At the moment the only way that you can access the new Price Of Power expansion sets is by buying them with real money.

Massively incorrect.
You can craft the cards with scraps, and you can get them in Ultimate/faction/Neutral kegs.

Insufficient actually looking into things does not make for a good basis for arguments.

 

[Messyr]

Definitely not Pay 2 Win, this has nothing to do with it.

This however doesn't mean I'm happy with the model, so my short answer is "No and No".
The packs offered in their current format are very clunky for me. I have all the cards in the current collection and right now I'm sitting on 50k scraps. I'm able to craft the whole mini-expansion on the spot. As such, paying real money for packs that contain premium versions of cards I can get from my unused (and literally useless) crafting materials seems to be a profuse waste. Still, the expansion board is gated behind these offers - in order to get that I should buy the "Combo-pack", and forgetting I'm sitting on a pile of mats.

Nah, I just went and crafted every card myself. Rather sad, as I'd gladly pay for the board and other cosmetics, but actually buying premium cards is an uncomfortable concept for me.

 

[Madlax1992]

In my interpretation, this is not as much P2W as Gwent has always been.

The 30% discount offer for the entire expansion (released in 3 parts) was at a reasonable price, considering the fact that you had to buy around 100$+ expansion kegs to have most, if not all the cards. This was my experience from the Master Mirror and Way of the Witcher expansions.

The presentation of the expansion was rather poorly made, as it emphasized the microtransaction first and foremost, giving to many people the wrong image. CDPR, get a new PR team/rep.

I don't necessarily approve of this kind of business model, but I dislike keg gambling even more. Sure, Gwent doesn't give the same odds as a FIFA lootbox, but still, gambling is gambling.

The reason for not releasing expansion kegs for PoP right now is because the card pool is just low. 26 cards requires a very small amount of kegs for you to get most, if not all of them. Even if you don't get all, you get scraps with which you can make them. Probably for a player that is fine. But for a business point of view it ain't.

Gwent has always been P2W, in the sense that if you are a new player, and you wanted to be competitive, you had to buy kegs and increase your card pool anyway so that you can progress and enjoy the game. All free games are P2W, or freemium how they call it. This way of selling the expansion does not make it more P2W. After all, you got alternatives. Ore to buy factions kegs. Scraps from kegs to craft the cards. The amount of scraps needs to get all the cards from an expansions faction is small, some 1220 scraps or something like that (bad at math).

 

[Slizzl]

I don't understand all this whining about p2w despite the buffs to starter cards. A ton of old NR cards were just buffed. Most other CCGs just let old cards rot in order to force players to buy new cards, this isn't the case with Gwent. Currently you can compete with a lot of old decks.

 

[Messyr]

I don't understand all this whining about p2w despite the buffs to starter cards. A ton of old NR cards were just buffed. Most other CCGs just let old cards rot in order to force players to buy new cards, this isn't the case with Gwent. Currently you can compete with a lot of old decks.

Well said. The meta is at it's healthiest in the past months. The current practice of actively revisiting and buffing chunks of the outdated cardbase greatly improved the viable variations to compete with.

That said, the current discussion is more about being P2W or not (obviously not).
The generic argument of "new players have it rough" is literally true for almost anything - in order to excel in an area, you usually have to invest first, being the underdog for a while.

 

[BartonFink]

Massively incorrect.
You can craft the cards with scraps, and you can get them in Ultimate/faction/Neutral kegs.

Insufficient actually looking into things does not make for a good basis for arguments.

That doesn't change the validity of the topic. I.e. sure, you might be able to craft cards from the new set but shards are for sale too in GWENT and if you haven't been playing long, you're pretty much not going to be able to get the cards for free until November. My little inaccuracy isn't a game changer.

 

[Draconifors]

shards are for sale too in GWENT

Not in the version of the game I've always played.

Your inaccuracy absolutely makes a big difference simply because your claim is not even remotely true. However, you are free to believe whatever you want.

 

[BartonFink]

Not in the version of the game I've always played.

Your inaccuracy absolutely makes a big difference simply because your claim is not even remotely true. However, you are free to believe whatever you want.

And you are free to believe that someone who is new to the game or hasn't accumulated enough duplicate cards to mill in order to get an extremely large number of shards to craft Price Of Power cards is not faced with the prospect of having to buy the cards in order to be competitive playing the game, potentially.

 

[saodhar]

Well said. The meta is at it's healthiest in the past months.

"Meta" can't be "healthy". It is a disease of having imbalance in the game and it should be cut and cut with balancing fixes until the only "meta" that remains is skill and a bit of luck.

That said, the current discussion is more about being P2W or not (obviously not).
The generic argument of "new players have it rough" is literally true for almost anything - in order to excel in an area, you usually have to invest first, being the underdog for a while.

Definitely not P2W. All cards are craftable. And if you lack resources - you still don't HAVE to pay. Just farm scraps from trees and GG rewards. I don't have the starter decks, but from the forum messages I assume they're pretty decent - so there's always something to play with.

That doesn't change the validity of the topic. I.e. sure, you might be able to craft cards from the new set but shards are for sale too in GWENT and if you haven't been playing long, you're pretty much not going to be able to get the cards for free until November. My little inaccuracy isn't a game changer.

The HORROR! You can't get all the cards right after starting playing the game. Took me 2 years of playing a F2P game to complete my collection using crafting and kegs. Have I died of frustration and boredom because of that? Nope. Was I always at the bottom of the ladder? Nope again.
And it's "scraps", not "shards", maybe you're posting on the wrong forum?

 

[Draconifors]

get an extremely large number of shards to craft Price Of Power cards is not faced with the prospect of having to buy the cards in order to be competitive playing the game, potentially.

More than one thing wrong with this.
1) There is no need to craft every single card.
2) There is no need to craft a single card to stay competitive. In this game it is not necessary to have the newest cards to be able to do well.
3) The game is extremely generous with rewards, so it is not difficult to earn scraps for crafting and ore for buying kegs, plus you can even get kegs with Reward Points.

It's play-to-win, like it always has been. Not pay-to-win. And I sincerely doubt that will ever change.

 

[Lokiat0r]

And you are free to believe that someone who is new to the game or hasn't accumulated enough duplicate cards to mill in order to get an extremely large number of shards to craft Price Of Power cards is not faced with the prospect of having to buy the cards in order to be competitive playing the game, potentially.

Extremely large?!?! This is the SMALLEST expansion, resource-wise that I've seen them release. Even the leader expansion a few months ago, while far smaller in the number of cards, was much more expensive resource wise as every card was an 800 scrap legendary.

You're looking at 1 legendary card, 1 epic card, 2 rares, and 2 commons for each faction. That 1220 scraps (max) if you want to incorporate the new cards into a deck. That's maybe a week's worth of effort for me at an hour per day. From what I've seen so far, the best cards are the bronzes and you should be able to farm 220 scraps for those really fast.

 

[Madlax1992]

I think first and foremost we need to define what P2W is, because people assume the game is not P2W because it gives you alternatives to obtain cards. Which is correct, but does not paint the whole picture.

I consider a game to be P2W when it monetizes practices that give paying players an edge over f2p players. Paying extra for kegs gives you an edge, whether we like it or not. Not only you increase your card pool faster, you gain duplicates more often which translates in more scraps for crafting cards. Now there are degrees when it comes to P2W as well, I consider Gwent to be among the more generous, less greedy P2W freemium games. But it is still P2W.

Saodhar for example said that it took him 2 years to get all the cards. It took me some 7-8 months to get almost all of them (there are a couple of neutrals, no more than 10, which I did not bother crafting because they are useless and never see any play, but I can craft them anytime I want). This is what I mean by P2W. This is my interpretation though.

 

[quintivarium]

I answered yes and no. While it is possible to be successful without extensive purchases, the new approach of regularly releasing small sets of new cards without expansion kegs until months after the release is much harder on ftp players. Between power creep (which is extensive) and low probability of getting new cards in ultimate or faction kegs, significantly more scraps must be spent to keep up with the new cards.

Honestly, it’s not that expensive to craft a net deck — most players could earn scraps for that in a month. But for those who like to create their own decks or who wish to acquire a complete card collection, this change significantly increases the time/expense. Every card crafted when one has a small card collection increases the chance of drawing already held cards in kegs, making collecting cards less efficient. I would consider changes that require players to pay more for equal effect at least a move toward pay to win.

As to approving of the change, I fully agree that releasing fewer cards more frequently is good for the game. It creates consistent meta changes and keeps all cards fresh. And I buy the argument that mini-expansions contain too few cards to justify new kegs. But there are obvious work arounds to this — such as using place holders for expansion cards not yet released, letting expansion kegs draw from 80 (or another reasonable quantity) of the most recently released cards, or having expansion kegs replace a new card not yet released for the expansion with a random older card. Because CDPR has not chosen one of these strategies, nor has presented an argument for reducing its generosity to ftp players, I do not entirely approve of the changes.

Note: I think CDPR did justify bundling unique cosmetics with purchased expansion packs and I do not find this practice objectionable.

 

[Madlax1992]

I answered yes and no. While it is possible to be successful without extensive purchases, the new approach of regularly releasing small sets of new cards without expansion kegs until months after the release is much harder on ftp players. Between power creep (which is extensive) and low probability of getting new cards in ultimate or faction kegs, significantly more scraps must be spent to keep up with the new cards.

Honestly, it’s not that expensive to craft a net deck — most players could earn scraps for that in a month. But for those who like to create their own decks or who wish to acquire a complete card collection, this change significantly increases the time/expense. Every card crafted when one has a small card collection increases the chance of drawing already held cards in kegs, making collecting cards less efficient. I would consider changes that require players to pay more for equal effect at least a move toward pay to win.

As to approving of the change, I fully agree that releasing fewer cards more frequently is good for the game. It creates consistent meta changes and keeps all cards fresh. And I buy the argument that mini-expansions contain too few cards to justify new kegs. But there are obvious work arounds to this — such as using place holders for expansion cards not yet released, letting expansion kegs draw from 80 (or another reasonable quantity) of the most recently released cards, or having expansion kegs replace a new card not yet released for the expansion with a random older card. Because CDPR has not chosen one of these strategies, nor has presented an argument for reducing its generosity to ftp players, I do not entirely approve of the changes.

Note: I think CDPR did justify bundling unique cosmetics with purchased expansion packs and I do not find this practice objectionable.

I understand where you are coming from, but one of the main complaints the community provided as feedback was that expansions are a bit too rare, barely 2 per year and initially, this approach with releasing a smaller number of cards during the course of 6 months was greeted warmly.

Mostly ftp new players are having this issue, because the ftp old players already have a considerable amount of ore and scraps to get them cards without buying them.

You can't please everyone is what I am saying. And there are few workable solutions in this situation. Introducing expansion kegs now would have like giving the expansion for free. There would have been no point in buying it if one has expansions kegs available now, when only 26 out of over a hundred cards are out. Gwent would cease existing with this kind of business practice.

The bigger the card pool is, the longer it takes to complete your collection. That is common in all card games. However, this expansion part came with a thorough rework of old cards. So in a way this was a much larger expansions than the 26 new cards as you got a couple of dozens that were reworked, some of them entirely, some of them partially.

I would say that the current approach, while not perfect, is better than the approach in previous expansions. Certainly better than buying a pack of kegs that did not give you all the cards when finished opening them.

 

[MANYUE2003]

If everyone can get all the cards available in the game, it is not a p2w game. Time and patience will get an f2p to where he needs to be.

P2W card games (and there are many) have cards that you can only buy with real money and are not accessible to f2p players.

Post automatically merged: Jun 9, 2021

If everyone can get all the cards available in the game, it is not a p2w game. Time and patience will get an f2p to where he needs to be.

P2W card games (and there are many) have cards that you can only buy with real money and are not accessible to f2p players.

 

[Sensimilius]

Even if you don't get the cards you want from the kegs, you get to mill the cards you don't need for scraps and then with scraps you can create any specific card you want. :]
I mean Idk how it is for newer players but I started playing a year ago (season of Magic last year) and not once did I feel it was/is P2W...

 

[ya1]

This expansion is definitely the most aggressively p2w so far. But I still consider Gwent to be very f2p friendly. If you play 15-30 minutes everyday, sometimes more, you can afford pretty much everything except premiums.

Imo problem is not how the expansion is priced or released. Problem is the cards. They are designed to attract people. And they massively power creep. Those ceilings are sick. This makes the game even more binary and matchup/draw dependent. Not drawing these new cards or failing to get an upper hand in some binary interactions involving them = autolose.

 

[Cyncynat88]

No, I beg to differ. Gwent is nowhere near Pay-to-Win, and neither is the new expansion set. I have been playing the game for over a year now and frequently have easy wins against more veteran players (those who give you 13 scraps or ore) and terrible losses against those who have started more recently (those who give you 9 or 11 scraps/ore). When you start playing the game, you have only a limited set of cards but so do your opponents. In the beginning, when you are level 30 or something, you do not need them because you play against other players at a similar rank. Besides, there are so many opportunities to expand your collection - winning games, daily bonuses, daily quests, contracts, reward book, journeys, expansions etc. Just play consistent for several weeks, and you will get all the cards that you really need.

I sincerely do not understand the issue with the new expansion. There are only 26 new cards - not having one, two or even half of them does not put you in a worse position than other players. I have over 100k scraps, and I have unlocked so far only 10 cards (mostly bronzes) from the new expansion. Hell, only last week I finally decided to unlock Eist (I disliked the card and did not want to play it, and still I am not planning to). That does not stop me from enjoying the game and winning matches. Some of these new cards are absolutely fantastic, and I enjoy playing them, but we do not need tonnes of resources to get them. You need 1540 ore to craft two copies of all bronzes from all factions in the new expansion - is that really something difficult to get? Just play the game and slowly build your collection, that's all you need.

 

[quintivarium]

I think the main source of disagreement here is what it means to be pay to win. To me, pay to win is more a spectrum than a single trait. Except for a very few games developed just for the joy or challenge of doing so, games are expected to bring revenue and I can think of four basic models for doing so: selling rights to play the game directly (like buying a board game from a store), pay to play where players buy time/charges to allow opportunity (or additional opportunity) to play a game, and pay to win where players buy game resources that allows them to acquire better tools to win or to acquire those tools faster, and finally by merchandizing or selling cosmetics (often in conjunction with other methods).

By this definition, Gwent (and all collectable card games to my knowledge) fit the pay to win model. Gwent may be more generous with payouts, but it is still a pay to win model; I don’t think that is disputable as monetary purchase of kegs and packets definitely speeds progression in the game.

Within this model there are definite ranges. I do not dispute that within Gwent, totally non-paying players can fully compete. And this might differ from some other games. It might require less time commitment to build good card collections than other CCG’s. But it is also indisputable that changes making free acquisition of new, generally power crept cards more difficult further out on the pay to win spectrum. Whatever it’s justification, denying the appearance of theses new cards with reasonable probability in available kegs makes acquiring the new cards harder / more expensive. Thus, it is undeniable that the new structure of expansions is making Gwent less free to play friendly.

You can reasonably argue Gwent is still good to new players; you can argue that CDPR is still very generous with granting resources; you can argue that no one needs to actually pay money to win; you can argue that delaying kegs until enough new cards are produced to justify a keg is necessary to allow more frequent release of cards — and I agree on most of these points. But recent changes to the keg structure have inarguably shifted the game more in the pay to win direction — moves in that direction also justify objections.