It never was about whether cards needed to be crafted, as Defenders and Dandelion were undeniably demanded in those quests. It is about how much of a problem that would be considering the Journey as a whole. Don't tell me it is any sort of sacrifice or waste to craft a Defender - a card that is universally useful in plenty of different decks. Which leaves Dandelion.
Comparing to all the RP you got from the Journey so far, 800 scraps should be quite doable undless you spend all your scraps as soon as you get them. And yet I do agree, that it is not pinancle quest design. As it was repeated in the Gaunter challenge with playing the evolving card ten times, it took yet another round of feedback but it has been changed. CDPR learned the lesson, the new quests do not require 800 scraps to complete. Even though the Gaunter quests are almost a little too easy now.
Fair point, and I think it's important that CDPR listen. That first Gaunter quest was quite disgraceful, especially considering you had to make your choice before anyone had access to opening their Master Mirror card packs. So whereas they get brownie points for reconsidering on the second series of quests. That initially decision should still get them a lot of deserved flak!
Sure, crafting all the cards makes quest progression much easier, but that is the usual choice in plenty of aspects of the game: Do I have the time to grind or can I throw money/scraps at the problem? For newbies the biggest offenders were Dandelion for reasons mentioned above, and Bounty as there was no starter deck to it. All the other categories (like artefacts or Inspired) can be done with a undeveloped collection - albeit slower but certainly not impossible with a little progress every day. If you decide to join later, I am not surprised time becomes an issue - but those battle pass features are meant to make you play a little every day after all.
Ultimately the quests should give incentive to try different decks - and yet players decided to just make a grind deck and be done with the quests for the week on day one.
I 100% agree with your intention here in what you wrote, I share the majority of your sentiments, but I would say it didn't reflect how Journey was implemented. I will explain in more detail later.
Afterwards everyone went back to the flavour of the month with happended to be Poison NG at that time. I blame the players for that issue, not the quests.
I agree the players are to blame, but I also blame the quests.
Are you sure your actual problem is not Poison NG hate? Inspired for example has been a quest requirement twice as well. Would you also have complained if the quests pointed towards a NR spectre deck? (Which one quest did.) Players played Poison NG because it was strong, not because the Journey made them.
Yes I'm sure it's not that. I'll address these points later.
Regarding matchmaking:
Please do feel happy with your hypothesis, but please do not claim it to be anything more than a hypothesis. Despite the SK meta, a deck gets matched against NG... Not surprising, if you keep in mind that Nilfgaard is an overall popular faction and on top of that is considered the only thing that can hold up a candle against SK right now.
Now nothing I wrote should leave you to believe this is an issue of being matched up once with NG once or twice during the SK meta.
I trust in the official statement of CDPR which states that the matchmaker does only consider rank/MMR/number of victories in arena - and I have no reason to doubt that. It does not require a more complex matchmaker to let Johnny have his moments - because Johnny is satisfied with that one flashy victory out of ten games anyway and any sort of matchmaking manipulation without competitive standards would make Spike pretty unhappy.
I have no reason to trust a developer of an monetized mobile CCG. They can release the data if they want to put this to bed. Again it is not about letting an individual win more than another. It would be about encouraging exciting counterplay. Is it okay if I give you the link to another thread instead of retyping all my arguments on this topic and why it would benefit them to implement it? Just writing this reply has taken 30-40 minutes out of my day.
Despite your accusation I am not trolling. You even quoted the sentence were I stated my intentions which makes me even more disappointed that you came to a different conclusion.
Okay I apologise, but let's be fair here. Your mocking tone and your repeated worst possible interpretation of mine and other poster's points was not helping you get your point across.
Now:
A few starting points.
Journey was set up so you had to complete the quests in sequence to accessing the next week of quests.
The vast majority of players are FtP model. They will only be accessing the free version of the journey. So anything placed on their journey path is going to directly effect what we see on the ladder etc.
Okay, so lets separate things out a bit:
I don't have a problem with CDPR encouraging FtP players to craft cards and potentially spend money on what is essentially a free gift to help their in-game progression.
I do have an issue when instead of doing this they used the premium journey to squeeze more money out of players who had already paid for access. This is when we are starting to enter the realms of predatory monetisation.
Let's use the "bounty" tag, as it is a great example. This appeared on the premium journey the same week as "aristocrats" appeared on the free version. Now if CDPR wanted to encourage diversity of play it would have been the other way around.
I take your point about Defender being useful addition to any deck, but the Defender x5 quest also appeared on week 4 of the premium journey.
Now let's talk about how the journey influenced the meta.
Regarding inspire key word I unfortunately don't have my complete notes. I do know it appeared week 3 on free journey as a x15 task. I think that is a good addition that would encourage deck diversity. Unfortunately in the same the first monster's key word "consume" on the premium path...
Now again my issue was them over supporting two factions in particular and feeding into the stale meta. Within the first 5 weeks NG had already had the tags "aristocrats", "poison," "lock," and "create"
I think it is fair to say "aristocrats" + "poison"= poison ball. And that Soldier's Ball was a tier 1 deck. So it was overplayed in the meta.
But as you say you could also play ST. "Harmony" (free wk4) + "poison" = mystic echo. Another tier 1 overplayed meta deck.
The next week (Wk 5) we also received the "move" key word on free...
Regarding your accusation that I am a poison ball hater.
I don't have a problem with the existence of poison ball. I actually occasionally play that archetype myself at times.
Though I would admit that I think double ball (whether an effective deck or not) is obnoxious to play against, but I don't think that is a surprising opinion to hold.
In summary, on the subject of monetisation. I have no problem with CDPR encouraging FtP to purchase cards to progress in a free gift like the Journey. That for me is an ethical approach.
But they used premium journey (I suspect intentionally) to target people already investing money in the game. This is where people with real issues regarding money control reside (gambling addictions, etc.). Hence predatory monetisation. And hence my issue.
I hope I have sufficiently made my point without going through everything a week at a time. Especially as now my notes are incomplete, and I have deleted the game.
Thanks for the discussion, I'm off to work
