Frustrated with Elements? 10 Common Frustrations, and What to Do About Them.

[RootRanger]

If you stop listening to what someone has to say after hearing a single point that you don't agree with, you're not going to be hearing much.

I would like to see if he can answer my opinion about #1. If he has a valid answer to it, then maybe the rest will be worth reading. Otherwise it's probably not worth the time.

And I disagree with a single point all the time. What's different about this is that the very first thing I read is something that's the complete opposite of what makes sense to me and he seems to overlook something rather clear.

[Astrocyte]

For #7 no Elder has Trident either... really nice guide though.

Updated #7 to include Trident. Thanks for catching that.

2. You might already need to restart.

I see no reasons to do this. Even with negative score.

Edited the negative score bit before. The main reason is money -- if you get adventurous with deckbuilding right away, but don't build a good deck, it's pretty easy to lose all the early quest money. And if you're so new to the game that you don't have any rares yet, and so bad off that you can't afford AI3, it is faster and easier to start over and collect the quest rewards again than to try to build your back up from zilch. If my meaning isn't clear I can rewrite item 2.

[3. No matter which element you picked, the starter deck is a lousy deck.]

This was explained in the very old FAQ, written by zanz. It still exists. Look here: <snip>

Not arguing with Zanz's motives, and his remark supports my point -- the first thing that needs to be done is dump the random cards for quick improvement.

4. Deckbuilding is everything, but you can't afford to experiment with deckbuilding outside of the trainer.
Depends on your account. I test decks with my real account. Advantage: you can keep the rewards.

You can keep the rewards if you built a good deck -- I've lost a lot of money to testing my crap deck ideas in my real account! 

If you stop listening to what someone has to say after hearing a single point that you don't agree with, you're not going to be hearing much.

I would like to see if he can answer my opinion about #1. If he has a valid answer to it, then maybe the rest will be worth reading. Otherwise it's probably not worth the time.

She, actually. Based on your post I doubt you'll consider my answer "valid," but I'm happy to respond.
You are right that the only real fun is competitive PvP, and that most PvP activities are unupped. However, you still need a rather large library of cards for PvP. Many PvP events have broad deckbuilding rules, or rules that change throughout the event -- you can't get through those events with just one or two decks. Even for most weekly tournaments, it's best to have a few decks on hand, and those may or may not have any similiarity to decks you already have the cards for. For league, you'll eventually fall behind if you only ever use one deck (even if it's a great deck) because people will adapt to it. 
For a new player using something close to their starter deck, playing mostly AI3, it's going to take 4-7 wins (that's not games played, that's wins) to earn just 100 electrum. One copy of some unupped cards costs that much. So what do noobs have to do to get more cards? They have to grind for money.
Once you have a card library built up, it's all gravy, but if the process of building that library isn't grinding, I don't know what is.

[artimies7]

I'm going to route this around to my RL friends. It should help a bit.

And I once had negative score. Even now my win/loss ratio is shakyshaky. But I'm still going strong. Booyah!

[RootRanger]

She, actually. Based on your post I doubt you'll consider my answer "valid," but I'm happy to respond.
You are right that the only real fun is competitive PvP, and that most PvP activities are unupped. However, you still need a rather large library of cards for PvP. Many PvP events have broad deckbuilding rules, or rules that change throughout the event -- you can't get through those events with just one or two decks. Even for most weekly tournaments, it's best to have a few decks on hand, and those may or may not have any similiarity to decks you already have the cards for. For league, you'll eventually fall behind if you only ever use one deck (even if it's a great deck) because people will adapt to it. 
For a new player using something close to their starter deck, playing mostly AI3, it's going to take 4-7 wins (that's not games played, that's wins) to earn just 100 electrum. One copy of some unupped cards costs that much. So what do noobs have to do to get more cards? They have to grind for money.
Once you have a card library built up, it's all gravy, but if the process of building that library isn't grinding, I don't know what is.

So all you'll need is maybe 2 decks per tourney, and let's say that's 2000 electrum. With a standard unupgraded FG farmer, that's less than one hour of playing. And this is assuming that the player had absolutely no cards except a FG farmer. A player is going to accumulate a lot of cards before getting bored of tweaking their deck against AI2, AI3, Bronze, and Silver. This is a maximum of one hour per week, but probably a lot less, to prepare for tourneys. And the first few hours with a standard unupgraded FG farmer will seem fun and not like a grind. After that you'll have enough electrum for you to hardly even need to grind anymore. Add in Oracle/Arena winnings and there's not much you'll need to buy each week for tourneys.

There really isn't much grinding needed. I think it would be a lot more helpful to point new players in the right direction (FG efficiency thread, for example) instead of scaring away most of them.

[Astrocyte]

So all you'll need is maybe 2 decks per tourney, and let's say that's 2000 electrum. With a standard unupgraded FG farmer, that's less than one hour of playing. And this is assuming that the player had absolutely no cards except a FG farmer. A player is going to accumulate a lot of cards before getting bored of tweaking their deck against AI2, AI3, Bronze, and Silver. This is a maximum of one hour per week, but probably a lot less, to prepare for tourneys. And the first few hours with a standard unupgraded FG farmer will seem fun and not like a grind. After that you'll have enough electrum for you to hardly even need to grind anymore. Add in Oracle/Arena winnings and there's not much you'll need to buy each week for tourneys.

There really isn't much grinding needed. I think it would be a lot more helpful to point new players in the right direction (FG efficiency thread, for example) instead of scaring away most of them.

The best unupped FG farmers have a maximum winrate of ~30% -- meaning that, in a best-case scenario, for every 3 games you win, you lose 7 games. And you're not going to win a card every time you win against an FG. AND you need a significant bank beforehand in order to survive until you win a card.

Each win gets you 31-55 electrum (none of the unupped FG farmers turn out reliable EMs) -- let's assume 45 for the sake of simplicity. Every loss costs you 30. And suppose you win a card from the spinner one in every 12 wins. Upped cards sell for about 1100.
30 games later that's:
12 wins (for +540 electrum)
28 losses (for -840 electrum)
1 card (for +1100 electrum)

Now I know you wanna say "540 - 840 + 1100 = 800, that's a great return." And it is. But look again. Those 12 wins and 28 losses can happen in any order. If the wins mostly happen up front, great! But if they don't... in order to eventually profit 800 electrum, you have to be realistically prepared to lose several hundred electrum (up to 840) up front. Where are you gonna get that starting money? ... Grinding AI3 or Arena first. Not for less than an hour, either.

And again, all this is a best-case scenario, assuming you win 3 out of every 10 games, get at least 45 electrum every time you win, and win a card in 1 out of every 12 wins. If the RNG hates you, you could very easily lose more and win nothing. If you think the first few hours playing with an unupgraded FG farmer is fun, either you are blessed by the RNG like none other or you have some interesting ideas of fun. It's constant losing, with the occasional win to briefly stem the bleed of electrum, and a lot of runs back to AI3 to raise more money to keep the campaign going. More than once, using a variety of forum-approved unupped FG decks, I ran myself broke without winning any cards at all.

You think I'm talking smack and scaring people. I think you're being completely unrealistic. It seems we will need to agree to disagree.

[RootRanger]

Eh, check your stats first. Here's a good source. (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,25609.msg349336#msg349336)

When I say an unupped deck can make 2000 electrum in under an hour, I'm not kidding.
Sure, you'll have to raise some electrum first. But at the beginning of the game, you can learn about cards you haven't seen before and try out strategies you've never tried before to raise electrum. If that's not fun, I don't see how anything in Elements will be fun.

[AngelMusti]

take a prozac if you're frustrated bout playing elementz, i think this game is relaxing. there  are no 10 rules of frustration.  noobs mess up its normal , they learn out of it and adept. thats wut elements all about , learn & adept.

[Jangoo]

6. You need money.
The cost of new cards adds up fast, and it takes a whopping 1500 to upgrade just one card! What to do?
There are a few accepted paths to fast money. Whichever one you take -- once again, make your own deck in the trainer, or look around the wiki and the forums to find one you like.
(1) Build a deck that's designed to beat Level 3 as quickly as possible, and grind AI3. If you like to glue yourself to the screen and click nonstop, this is for you.
(2) Build a deck that's designed to get Elemental Mastery (that is, beating the other guy when you have full HP) in Level 3, and grind AI3.
(3) Build a deck for farming Silver League or Gold League in the Arena, and grind there. A win in Silver League pays 40-60 , and a win in Gold League pays over 100 . Decks that can regularly beat Gold League are often mostly or fully upgraded (or "upped"), but once you have such a deck, your money problems are basically solved forever. In the meantime, as long as you can keep at least a 2:1 win-loss ratio, Silver League is a good moneymaker. There's no unupped deck that always beats Silver, but you can get pretty good win rates with partially upped decks.
(4) Build a deck for speed-farming False Gods and save up ~1000 besides. The point here is to play as fast as you can (forfeiting to False Gods your deck can't beat, playing the ones your deck can beat) in hopes of winning an upgraded card from the spins. You can then either keep the card, or sell it for over 1000 . I personally prefer the Arena (some of those fortunes I mentioned losing in the first paragraph were lost to False God farming), but some people still do this.

I think you put that list in the exact wrong order because for making money bottom to top would be best advice.
Personally, I still firmly believe in strategy number 4 ... anything else, realistically, simply isn't a match for a solid FG-farming-strategy.

Here are some numbers:



1  AI3 farming   UPPED: ~2000 electrum/h 
                             UNUPPED: ?? (but certainly less)

As can be seen in the True score efficiency study (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=21923.0) even the very, very best FULLY UPPED
AI3 decks can't breach an income of 2000 electrum/hour. You get this number by looking at the statsheets kirchj33 posted, taking the "electrum-change" and dividing it by "total time". Now consider what unupped AI3 decks, like newbies would have to use them at first, will produce ...



2 EM AI3 farming        see above

A cose look at the abovementioned study quickly reveals that the very, very best, most productive AI3 decks in fact ALL rely on getting in as many EMs as possible.
Hence: strategy 2 = strategy 1

This may, somehow, be a bit different for unupped AI3-grinding but for all I know the unupped life-deck with heals is a very strong contender here as well ...



3 Arena-farming (Gold)     UPPED:  ~ 4800 electrum/h - ??  (unconfirmed)
                                              UNUPPED: ?? (but certainly much less)

Now there isn't really any conclusive data on this but I will go ahead and explore the possibilities a bit.
Here as well, winning upped cards is the way to go, so Gold-league for comparison it should be
(and Silver-league most likely doesnt stand a chance):

~100 elec/ win it is?
~1300 elec every 4 matches IF you keep winning in a streak? (1 upped rare card) 

The question is now, how big a win-rate and how much speed/game a good Arena-deck has.
I hear people talking about some 80% someplaces? At least when I played THIS praised Arena-deck (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,29406.0.html) against Gold-league,
I couldn't really make an 80% win-rate ... while losing about every third game, more like 65% perhaps.

Nevertheless, assuming you play such a very good deck:

80% win-rate
1:30min/game  (40 games/h)
-> 5.55 win-streaks in 40 games

Then your base-income is:

32wins x 100elec - 8losses x 15elec + 6 EMs x 100 =  ~3700 electrum/h  [base income]

Now you are going to win cards. With the above deck, you will hit 5.55 streaks of 4 matches in 40 games on average.
But since you don't actually win a card every time you get a special spin, lets assume every fourth time it goes wrong,
which may still be very optimistic (.75-factor):

5.55 x 1300 electrum x .75 = 5400 electrum/h  [card-income]

80% win-rate --> 3700 + 5400 = 9100 electrum/h

Now, this is the BEST POSSIBLE FULLY UPPED, highly optimistic scenario and I don't think it's safe to assume it.

Here is a very fast 60% winrate deck, which is probably much more realistic:

60% winrate
1:30 min/game (40 games/h)
-> 2.38 win-streaks in 40 games

24 wins x 100 - 16 losses x 15 + 4 EMs x 100 = ~2500 electrum/h  [base-income]
2.38 x 1300 x .75 = 2300 electrum/h  [card-income]

60% win-rate --> 2500 + 2300 = 4800 electrum/h



4 FG-farming       UPPED:  ~7200-10000 electrum/h     
                              UNUPPED: ~4600 electrum/h

"Some people still do this" ... what the hell dude!?
This is THE classic division to become a rich bitch and until somebody brings some actual stats on Arena-farming will always be:

Stats from the FG-efficiency-study (see my sig):

FULLY UPPED, top-decks:

Fast-draw Ghostal:                                       7115 electrum/h
Mono-Aether                                              :  7240 electrum/h
recent entry (Instosis)                               :  ~10000 electrum/h     

PARTIALLY UPPED:

Flay'EM:                 4700 electrum/h (with a measly 4 upgrades)
Rol/hope:    not tested yet but looking at the upped version being top this should also rock (would be 6 upped RoLs)
-> Lots of other partially upped spin-offs from fully upped decks that will get you above 2000 elec/h easily

UNUPPED:
LiquidAntimatter:    4500 electrum/h
(mind that the sample was done by a player who always get exceptionally high numbers, it's probably a bit lower for most people)

CCYB unup          :  3200 electrum/h


---


Conclusion:

Even unupped False-God-farming is almost as profitable as fully upped, top of the line Arena-farming.

So if you need cash, don't get tricked into any vague "does pretty well" statements about Arena, AI3, Halfbloods or whatever.

Just mind Astrocytes tip number 4 and 5, aim for a top FG-farmer and get rich asap!

[jacker]

Great job

[sprtstr14]

I agree with most of these. And now I want to add on to one part. Since the most fun part of the game is through the forums why should new players require a 30 post count to do the new fun stuff?

[oblivion1212]

I agree with most of these. And now I want to add on to one part. Since the most fun part of the game is through the forums why should new players require a 30 post count to do the new fun stuff?

not sure about the post count being 30, i remember somewhere ~50, but meh, screw my memory.. XD

i think it's because of the possibility of "ghost/alternate accounts" joining in tourneys..

i can duel my other account hiding under "insert_non_related_to_oblivion1212_name_here" and reach about ~100 wins (okay, exaggerated numbers here XD)
but, playing alone, my "real account" gets a "free" reward for man-slaughtering my "alternate account" in the face :O

*ON-TOPIC*
nice guide, dude.. i actually look at these without numbers.. might as well change that to bullets to remove confusion in priority? or not.. 

[TheForbiddenOracle]

i think it's because of the possibility of "ghost/alternate accounts" joining in tourneys..

Nope, it's because of new people just joining in without reading the rules at all and frustrating everyone in there