^Sad to see you quitting. Enjoyed talking to you. But yeah, the way Skellige is now, it leaves a huge sour taste in your mouth whenever you play against them.
This expansion kinda rendered my previous Syndicate deck useless, thus the need to start all over again. I coped a bit on Power Shift with a Scoia'tael deck made especially to take advantage of this mode, but it went old pretty quick. On top of that, obtaining rewards has become a chore and the pleasure of playing this game casually is going off day by day.
Not to mention the influx of players who switched to either NG or SK decks, mostly the later though. The fun factor has simply been overwritten.
Thanks, I complete recognize your experience, as one reflected by many players.
Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's due to the sheer amount of flux I've seen in such a short time that has killed the game experience for me. Just seeing one decision after another being to the detriment of the gaming experience and more about squeezing money out of the player base, is draining:
1. Throne Breaker on PS4 Pro was in a disgraceful state when I came to play it. Snail pace AI causing simple matches to last 30 minutes. Attrocious frame rate issues.
Having 30 hours of gameplay overwritten by the terribly misleading UI.
Having to replays 5 hour blocks of the game because cards didn't unlock correctly in Gwent.
In summary, it was an unpatched shit show. And note they still were asking full price for it 1 year after release!!!
2. Console servers were being shut down. PS4 players would not be able to transfer dust to the GOG account. The dust economy was also being changed to 800 dust for a premium legendary up from 400!
3. The transfer process was another shit show. Once a request was made by completing the form, there was no confirmation message. There was no confirmation email. That is criminally bad customer service.
4. The transfer took longer than expected. When it did happen, it was without warning and no confirmation email. So I lost about 500 dust (worth 800+ in the new economy). Terrible communication.
5. I join GOG.com with one week to go in season of the Viper. A discover a number of my favourite Iron Judgement console decks have been nerfed. I then encounter scenarios and the new poison mechanic for the first time. But it was still somewhat fun, but more grindy than before.
6. Unprofessional communication via Twitter and not announcing the season end correctly means I spend 70+ reward points sub optimally on the viper reward tree trying to get a card back that was impossible to get due to the sudden unnanounced end to Season of the Viper (whilst the mystery countdown still had 2 hours to go on the website). Again to be clear there was no warning of exactly when they would do this, they just switched it off. So that's twice I have way lost way too much in-game currency to stomach as a beginner.
7. I purchase premium journey with 5 weeks remaining. As I am gridnig through it, I notice even though I have paid for this with real money, they are expecting me to craft a lot of the new Merchant of Ofir cards to be able complete all the challengers. Predatory Monetisation right there. I was not impressed.
8. As mentioned the Journey challenges required you to play mechanics like Poison. But they didn't do this once, but twice. Also they didn't include older tags like Thrive. It was always pushing players to get the newest cards. The bigger problem, was the journey was also directly encouraging more and more people to play Nilfgaard Poison decks. Which in turn exacerbated an already stale meta where everyone was playing Poison Ball.
9. GG bonus is lower now than it was on console.
10. Meta decks / Match Making
11. Legendary drop rates. I actually opened 200 kegs across three days and got 1 legendary. Hmmm... Maybe if I had spent real world money...
12. Daily quests are stealth nerfed making it harder for new players to accumulate RP.
13. Master Mirror is released and we have the utter shit show we have all witnessed this past week.
To clarify, when I transferred from Console I was still using Iron Judgement decks. But Merchants of Ofir for all of the anger toward Poison Ball still left room for old decks to be competitive at Pro Rank (except the Witcher archetype, poison was the final nail in the coffin there).
But that is most definitely no longer the case. You either craft (i.e. buy) the new ridiculously OP (read game breaking) Master Mirror Cards or you might as well not play the game. I choose the latter.
TLDR: Given how much this new MM expansion is an obvious Pay to Win cash grab, to add to the list of the other obvious cash grabs that have been implemented in only the 3 months I have been playing. I cannot support such a game anymore.
Maybe it was once a shining beacon of what a CCG could be (as I keep being told), but that is clearly in the past, as I see no evidence of it here. Instead all I see is an unethical predatory cash grab like many other mobile games. Where CDPR is now more concerned with making money than the integrity of the game.