ElephantBanjoGnome wrote:
No catch-up mechanism required - it's like any real card game. You have to buy the packs to get the cards, whether you start now or started back then. Giving new players an artificial leg-up flies in the face of those who have put in the hours to build their collection up slowly.
I dunno, the game as it stands now is seriously hostile to new players. When we started playing there were just Classic cards, and it was entirely possible to put together a strong deck as an F2P-er in a reasonable timeframe, I can't be arsed checking back to the start of this thread but IIRC I was F2P for a couple of months before I dropped any cash. At that point I had pretty much the final iteration of a Trump F2P mage deck, and indeed when I bought my first 40 packs, the only change I made to that deck was a Cairne for a Boulderfist. (Which was a marginal change.)
(Even right back then, the primary reason I bought packs was just to give me the freedom to try other classes and decks.)
Look at the game now and Naxx is basically obligatory, you'd want maybe 40 packs of Classic, and 40 packs of GvG - to give you a decent chance of being able to put together a single competitive deck. (With the possible exception of shit like Face Hunter.)
Would it be so bad to offer a deal like Naxx + 60 packs of classic cards for £30? Only usable once per account, so even old-timers like us might bite just to get the discounted 60 packs for a chance at some legendaries we don't have and a guaranteed shitload of dust.
A game needs to be attractive to new players to continue to grow and indeed just maintain its player base, as there are always going to be players leaving, and those need to replaced with new players otherwise the game will just wither on the vine eventually.
The mate I mentioned a few posts back is 50/50 on whether or not he's going to jack the game in or persevere, because he's staring down the barrel of a spend of the best part of £100 (Naxx, 40 Classic, 40 GvG) to really feel like he has a chance. Even at Rank 20/19 he's coming up against decks loaded with quality epics and legendaries, producing combos and synergies he has no hope whatsoever of countering.
Your attitude is very much just 'I'm alright Jack' which isn't helpful to the game overall IMO. If new players are given discounts/leg ups to help them get into the game why do we care? It doesn't diminish our card collections in any way, and doesn't invalidate the time and effort we've put in to get where we are.
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One thing they could do is tweak some of the originally-nerfed basic cards that never see play now, because in their original form quite a lot of them aren't even remotely OP any more. Shattered Sun Cleric as a 3/3 for 3 mana (as it once was) that gives 1/1 isn't even as good as, say, a Dark Cultist that's a 3/4 for 3 and gives +3 health.
I dunno, you can bet that established players with near complete card collections will find all sorts of ways to fuck with game mechanics if any cards get 'un-nerfed', so whilst it might help newer players in some regards I'd guess it'd hurt them more as established players go back and look at what they can do with these more powerful iterations of older cards.
Also Dark Cultist versus the Cleric isn't really a fair comparison as the Cultist is a class card and they can be above average, plus the Cultist filled a gap for priest that really needed filling. (Plus Cultist isn't guaranteed to give his bonus, whereas the Cleric always does unless you play her into an empty board.)