zaosha;n9098720 said:
Your issues seem to be with the overall design of online CG's, and not Gwent specifically. Gwent does require either a decent time investment or some cash to develop competitive decks, but I think the game is reasonably balanced in that regard. Do you have actual suggestions on how card acquisition and/or the monetization model should be changed in Gwent?
Yes well I pretty much said that I find several of the issues I mentioned to be present in software based CCG.
Matchmaking is tricky to fix, I know, since you're also reliant on the pool of players currently on. Then you also have to decide if you want to create a matchmaking system that focuses on speed or accuracy, personally I prefer accuracy since it results in better quality matches (but in many games devs focus on speed, even in bigger games like say Dota 2). But if a game has bad matchmaking it needs to be fixed in the areas it is lacking.
I also know that devs/publishers wants to make money, so they can't make it too viable to not pay and still have fun if the game is free to play. That said you shouldn't feel that the one with the biggest money investment is heavily favored no matter what in any mode you play. That creates a kind of all or nothing mentality (you either invest nothing to try and play it casually or you have to invest a lot to have a decent chance at winning consistently).
To work around this you could create seperate modes where you put restrictions on either the players or the decks. For example a "bronze card only" mode (but possibly still allowing leaders) could be an alternative. You wouldn't really move up in rank by playing it but you could play it more casually and on a more affordable level.
To use MtG as an example again they not only have blocks containing only a select number of cards but also different ways to play that are more affordable than the super competitive constructed ones like limited and commander.
But the potential big money investment problem also ties into another problem...
Rebalancing of cards. This is good for less experienced card designers that also don't have a lot of resources for playtesting cards since they can rebalance things that are too out of wack... however it means that you can shaft players with existing cards and decks (in terms of viability and how they play). In many software based CCG this is a problem because you can't sell or trade your cards to other players, which means you have to mill them for borderline pathetic returns. This makes investing money in packs feel like a waste or potentially an even bigger investment.
I mean I could go on and on about these and other problems, but it's up to the devs to fix this. I'm not dedicated enough to Gwent to spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out potential solutions to all of their problems which might only maybe be read by the devs. So this is most likely my final post unless I decide to check in with Gwent again maybe 1 year from now. Because as it stands it's not a game I want to invest either more time or money into.
