Ich was not informed in-game that my scraps will be worthless in two month, so i made only a few cards to test the game. Now i lost almost everything i paid for.
What about people who actually spent their money and now lost their powder since it was converted to scraps?
Moreover, (former) generosity of Gwent is a dangerous misconception. Why? Because, unlike in other CCGs, you can't build a decent deck without really expensive cards. Almost every competitive card in Gwent is either rare, epic or legendary.
Remember when Midwinter update was released? Almost all new cards were at least rare, and we all know the power level of those cards was really high.
I would still call it "generous". Some of T1 decks (monsters) have less than 10 gold cards to get - that's in range of new players.
If you're going to mention that, you're going to have to tell the whole story. In Gwent, you can only have one copy of a legendary/epic in your deck and, with the provision cap, you cannot make a deck consisting of only legendary cards, unlike pretty much every other CCG. Also, there are actually common/rare cards in MtG that are a poorer version of an (mythic) rare card for the sole purpose of having a cheap (but less strong) deck, precisely because most competitive decks are too expensive. In the case of MtG, the biggest offender are the rare double-colored lands.
Not only is the rate at which you gain resources in Gwent faster, in the end, you'll require less of them to actually make a top tier deck. This kinda renders your argument moot.
Don't twist my words, please.
Basically, you are saying that it's possible to have more expensive decks in MtG than in Gwent. Sure, by all means.
What I was saying is this: it's impossible to have cheap competitive decks in Gwent because gold cards by default are much stronger than bronzes, and all golds are either epics (~25% to find in a pack) or legendaries (~5% to find in a pack).
Actually, all decks in Gwent by design (i.e. by CDPR's design enforced by the provision system and gold/bronze power) are bound to have 40-50% epic and legendary cards. And then, among bronze cards, rares are also usually stronger than commons. So a deck in Gwent, I'd say, has around 80% of rare, epic and legendary cards. Only the most control-heavy decks in other CCGs have that distribution of rarity. The majority of other competitive decks, especially aggro, have a much lower share of epic and legendary cards (or don't have any at all).
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Now let's take a look how many packs you need for a tier 1 deck.
HS (everyone knows it's expensive, right?): budget hunter deck (legend viable!) is around 1600 dust.
Woodland Spirit (one of the cheaper tier 1 decks in HC) is minimum 4k scraps.
Each keg yields you ~80 scraps and each pack yields ~100 dust.
So you need 50 kegs and 16 packs correspondingly.
Casual player is able to earn ~150 ore and ~50 gold daily respectively. So it actually turns out that in both "generous" Gwent and "expensive" Hearthstone you need around a month to get yourself a competitive deck. But it's actually cheaper to buy 16 packs in Hearthstone than 50 kegs in Gwent.
Did I manage to tell the whole story?
I've got over 200 RP in my first week of playing Gwent and trying different things.
Any player who will use them wisely should have enough resources to build some T1 netdeck.
For Gwent, if you look at the bare minimum for a competitive deck, then you'll need more rare+ cards than in most other CCG. At the same time, the cost variance in Gwent is much lower because of the aforementioned provision system (and the limit on gold cards). From a purely economical (F2P) standpoint, this does favor F2P players, which should be noted.
In the calculation you've made, you didn't include the reward points, which also gives you a lot of extra resources, neither did you include the drop-rate or the actual value of legendary cards. The latter being that a legendary in one CCG doesn't have the same overall "presence" (simply put, value) as in another CCG.
For the sake of argument and to keep the calculations simple, let's leave them as they are. However, there is still one very important criteria you didn't mention: sustainability. To put it simple: how easy will it be for a F2P player to keep up with the expansions and the shifting meta? To put everything into context (the whole story, so to speak), while plenty of CCG can give you access to a competitive budget deck fairly quick, not many CCG are as flexible or forgiving for F2P players to sustain them throughout the game's lifespan.
I actually counted reward points: 150 ore = 2RPs converted into ore + 50 ore on average for a daily quest. Yes, even a casual player can get more than 2 RPs per day, but you also need to keep in mind that it's impossible to convert all of those into ore. Plus, you need to unlock at least some leaders via reward points.
That said, I don't argue Gwent is friendly to f2p-players. But I wanted to point out its generosity is misleading due to different rarity distribution of cards. The same is true about some other CCGs (like Eternal and TESL). Yes, they give a lot of rewards, but those are mostly useless cards you will never play outside limited formats. Finally, even if you spend real money, you still need to farm dailies and whatnot (unless you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars).
Thanks for raising that question! It took me over a year (~400-500 hours in the game) during the OBT to be able to obtain every card I needed for competitive decks. I also spent money (not much, but still). I also reached rank 20-21 every season. I also received rewards for dailies and 6 rounds won (sometimes for 18 round if I had time to play). I also milled cards for full value after nerfs. I also didn't spend scraps often on crafting Premiums (I mostly spent powder - lucky me, right?). So you see I probably maximized my card/scrap gain per hour. But it still took a lot of time to get everything.
And how many new cards were introduced during that time? Around 150? Basically, the same amount as other CCGs receive every 4-5 months. And do you remember how OP the majority of those new cards were?
So, the rewards for ranked are already lower than in the OBT, and climbing ranks takes much more time. If CDPR starts releasing at least 100 cards every 4 months, I really doubt it would be possible to keep collecting everything as a f2p player.
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To sum it up, Gwent seems generous and sustainable for f2p players only because the meta is stale and there are no new card sets.
That's true, but there is a middle road here. HS is releasing so many big expansions, that you just cannot keep up as a F2P player. MtG has a similar thing and has an even worse economy because you cannot dust cards, nor do you get much for the 5th copy of a card. However, that's a different thing.
Apologies for the wall of numbers, but I'd done the work so I thought I'd share in case any one else found it useful. If you spot any errors, please feel free to point them out.
In Beta, we had 110 Legendaries, 150 Epics, 405 (135 * 3) Rares and 192 (64 * 3) Commons.
HC is complicated slightly because of the whole Starter / Base / Thronebreaker sets thing, but (if I've counted correctly) we now have -
So we've gone from 405 to 160 Rares and 192 to 220 Commons in a full collection. A decent improvement.
On the other hand we now have even more Legendaries and Epics and they are a much bigger proportion of a full collection. Not including Leaders, the proportions of each rarity have changed as follows -
So 1 step forward, 2 steps back. I'm not expecting it based on previous experience, but it would be nice if future expansions were bronze heavy, with a bias towards more Commons. Given that higher rarities can ultimately make CDPR more money, while bronzes, especially Commons, are essentially giveaways, this seems very unlikely though.
I agree about the rarity distribution being way out of whack, but I'll give CDPR a small amount of credit for slightly rebalancing the rarity distribution of bronze cards in HC.
In Beta, we had 110 Legendaries, 150 Epics, 405 (135 * 3) Rares and 192 (64 * 3) Commons.
HC is complicated slightly because of the whole Starter / Base / Thronebreaker sets thing, but (if I've counted correctly) we now have -
- 0 + 113 + 7 = 120 Legendaries
- 9 + 142 + 11 = 162 Epics
- 1 + 77 + 2 = 80 * 2 = 160 Rares
- 21 + 89 + 0 = 110 * 2 = 220 Commons
So we've gone from 405 to 160 Rares and 192 to 220 Commons in a full collection. A decent improvement.
On the other hand we now have even more Legendaries and Epics and they are a much bigger proportion of a full collection. Not including Leaders, the proportions of each rarity have changed as follows -
- Legendaries were 12.8% of total cards and 56.4% of total scraps before, but in HC are now 18.1% and 65.5% respectively.
- Epics were 17.5% / 19.2%, now 24.5% / 22.7%
- Rares were 47.3% / 20.7%, now 24.2% / 8.0%
- Commons were 22.4% / 3.7%, now 33.2% / 3.8%
So 1 step forward, 2 steps back. I'm not expecting it based on previous experience, but it would be nice if future expansions were bronze heavy, with a bias towards more Commons. Given that higher rarities can ultimately make CDPR more money, while bronzes, especially Commons, are essentially giveaways, this seems very unlikely though.
Yep. I already said that, but CDPR is falling into a classic trap of milking a cow more and feeding it less. I.e. they are trying to increase monetization when they need to improve the game. This could be because HC is doing so bad, they just want to get whatever money they can and then shut down the game (or put it in support mode with a small team).
Indeed.
Ever since Midwinter, their decisions and the strategy behind them have seemed less and less thought through and have so far been detrimental to the game and its future. I hope that it's not too late for them to turn things around, but I have plenty of doubt. The first 12 months of Gwent's development were trending very positively. The last 12 months, not so much...