A few details about T500

[Marvaddin]

Losing high ammounts of HP per day is bad, while reseting if you use the oracle is good? So, we are giving an advantage to those that dont login every day? In fact I think zanz even created the oracle, and recently improved it exactly to make people login everyday.

I think there should be a higher HP loss according to the league, like 10 HP / day in bronze, 15 in silver,  20 in gold and 20 (or even 25) in platinum, to a minimum of 50 HP. No need to reset deck if you use the oracle, this would already make the deck lose a lot after like 3 days, and drop, eventually being eliminated.

Also, I think there should be a wider reward scale. Bronze league games are fun, but having them at 8 electrum, less than AI 2, is pretty ridiculous. There should be a minimum limit. Im also up for upgraded spins, but to encourage people to really submit good decks, the rewards for deck wins should be bigger. Since yesterday, my deck got 33-8 record, so I got WOW 264 electrum. This is what? Like playing AI 3 using TADAbow for 10 minutes? Hmmm, in fact, less than that.

[TheonlyrealBeef]

The incentive to change decks should really be increased. Even if it is more convenient not to change anything.

I got lucky and got pends yesterday. Today I see that my deck went 25 - 0 overnight. Am I going to change to Long Bow? Hardly... 199 HP is almost as it was yesterday.

HP really should decrease more drastically. 10-25 per day I think. Otherwise players (like me) will keep waiting for a good card before changing decks again.

On the other hand what if a player can't connect for several days? His deck will be screwed up and fall out of the league. That should be considered as well... 10 per day would be more reasonable still...

Why not make it so that if you spin the oracle it resets your deck? Simple solution.

I like being able to choose to keep your current deck if you don't like the card given to you. If you have to make a deck with 5 Chimeras or Floodings then you'd rather keep your current since it wins more.

For people who don't have all cards another element is important for that: having the cards to build a deck around the card the oracle gives. I could easily imagine people in bronze league to not have all cards and only be capable of building a limited amount of decks.

[Essence]

^^ this.  Being forced to reset your deck is silly; that's what the HP loss is for.  It's not like you won't have a huge variety of decks to play against once the Arena goes live and there are actually 500 decks involved.

As for putting a minimum on the award for Bronze League, that's just silly.  Right now the difficulty of Bronze League is roughly between AI2 and AI3, and it offers rare spins every 6th win -- so having an award that's less than AI2 is perfectly reasonable.  It's a free market; if the reward drops too low, people will stop playing it, and it will go back up. 

The problem on the opposite end is that the Platinum League awards are probably currently artificially low because there are so many people playing it just to see what it's like.  If it goes live and the reward shoots up to 1.1k per game over the first month or so, that'll be about right.

[Jocko]

What if older decks, besides losing hp each day, lose chances of being played against? It would require a modification in the system that selects an arena opponent, but it could be done, and it could ensure more people will rebuild their decks more frequently.

[Essence]

I don't think that any changes need to be made to encourage people to rework their decks.  But IF a change were to be made, it should be simple and easy, like having the HP loss of a deck be equal to the number of days old it is.  For exampe, you lose 1 HP at reset if your deck is becoming 1 day old, 2 HP at reset if your deck is becoming 2 days old, etc.

That way, after 1 week, your deck has lost 7+6+5+4+3+2+1=28 HP.  After two weeks, it's lost 105 HP.  And so on.  That would be easy to code, easy to calculate, and perfectly reasonable.  It's not like we want to demand that decks be shuffled three times a week -- successful decks should be allowed to reign for a while.  But every couple of weeks; that's quite reasonable, yes?

[Chromatophore]

I like the current exponential hp decrease.  Well i heard decks lose 1,2,4,8... is this confirmed?  Its sort of a compromise in that if you get a good card spin you can leave your deck up a few days, but beyond that your deck is going to get a lot weaker and after a week its gone anyways, so there will still be many different decks.

If a week is too long, i'd rather see a 1, 3, 9... than the -25 per day.

-10 per day would letting them stay longer than now isn't it?

[ddevans96]

I heard it was an exponential decrease as well, but I thought it was 1-4-9-16 etc.

[Chromatophore]

I heard it was an exponential decrease as well, but I thought it was 1-4-9-16 etc.

I suppose i'm being rather pendantic, but 1 4 9 16 is quadratic decrease not exponential

[tyranim]

I heard it was an exponential decrease as well, but I thought it was 1-4-9-16 etc.

its not this, i saw one with 198 hp, so its 1-2-?-?-... to me so far

[zanzarino]

Right now the aging effect is (-) 1,2,4,8,16,32,64 HP's. I might change it to 2,4,8,16,32,64, since -1 is actually not making much of a difference. I doubt any deck will survive 24h with -64HP without dropping out of the top 500, but, just in case, I'll add a limit at 1HP left. The idea is not to force players to change deck every day, but force them to change it at least twice a week.

I am currently working on fixing the updated cards bug and the "remove all" button bugs, I am adding all the due explanations about the golden rings, the special spin, the aging effects and all the common questions that I can find in the forum/chat. A patch for the beta will come soon.

Giving players level-based advantages in HP/mark/card drawing makes no sense to me; it pretty much eliminates the challenge: playing against a platinum deck with platinum privileges is like playing a level 2: you are against an AI (handicap), that is forced to have certain cards in the deck (handicap) and you eliminated the handicap on your side. If you think platinum is too hard and frustrating... well, do not click on it other people might enjoy the challenge even if it comes with a little bit of frustration and the feeling of playing against a "cheating opponent". Currently platinum is the most clicked, after bronze.

However, I am thinking about increasing the card limit to 35 when building an arena deck (as in 5 from the oracle, 30 from you), this should eliminate some of the most boring decks built around only 3 cards (plus quanta generators).

Some balancing might be done before (and after) the arena goes live but so far the dynamic rewards system seems to work quite well. I might have to increase the reward for winning a game with your arena deck, but we'll have to wait for the arena to go live for that. Right now a bronze deck is getting only 50/60 electrum per day because it gets 50/60 wins but who knows how many wins it will get when the arena is live.

Thank you for the feedback.

P.S. : I am also thinking about giving upped rares as a reward from special gold/platinum spins, since right now it feels like filling up those 3 rings for an upped rare is just not worth the challenge.

[Hodari]

Might want to add a maximum number of at least certain cards which can be in a deck as well..some cards like explosion, bh, silence, quicksand etc. seem to be just too powerful in a fully upped deck with 12 of them.  Just finished a game I would have won except the AI used nightmare on me about 10 turns in a row

[dragonsdemesne]

I'm not going to get into debates about how to balance the system, and I haven't tried the beta, but I'd like to say a few things about the idea in general.  (this became a rather long post, just skip to the last paragraph to see my main points if you don't give a crap about my experiences with Elements)

Firstly, I started playing elements in mid-march, so a bit over 3 months.  (say roughly 100 days)  My stats are 77764 score, 2393-1941 win/loss, (I was unemployed in march and april :p) 3080 electrum, and I own 414 rares and the complete set of unupgraded cards, except that I need one more druid staff.  I have no idea if this is good or not, but I'm using it as a point of reference so people see where I'm coming from.

That score, if I remember from the list, is level 58, and the upper end of gold.  I don't know what level zanzarino thinks an average person will get to after 3 months, but that's what I have.  I suspect that due to having more time in march/april than some people, and having played CCGs almost as long as CCGs have existed (I started about 1995) that I learned Elements faster than most.

Now, when I started playing Elements, I thought it was great fun.  I eagerly took on the simple n00b quests and I can remember trying to farm that first 500 score for the rare weapon :p  Then I started taking on AI2, and eventually AI3.  I tried moving on to higher levels, but then at that point I got a bit frustrated with losing to AI4/5/6 so much, so I sold everything but a 30 card monolife deck, (rares were worth like 150-250, seemed HUGE at the time!) upgraded as many cards as I could, and farmed AI3.  At that point the game got a bit boring, but I slugged away at it, playing hundreds of 2-3 minute games and reinvesting in the life deck until I was wtfpwning AI3.  Then I built scaredgirl's rainbow deck and started playing against AI5/6. 

At that point, even AI5 was still a bit of a challenge, but it was exciting to play against multiple draws and triple marks, not to mention all of the upgraded cards.  And you could actually WIN upgraded cards if you got lucky!  I still remember winning my first upgraded card (it was a relic, oddly enough, given how rare it is to win a relic off a false god) and going HOLY F... I can sell this mofo for 1k+.  Great fun!  Eventually I progressed to building my own rainbow deck to farm false gods, and slowly improve my win rate.  I invested in an upgraded cremation deck to farm t50 and I now have all the unupgraded rares except one druid staff, and in most cases 12 of each weapon. (not yet with 6 upgrades in all of them, though some I have that)  t50 got pretty boring for me and I just don't have the motivation to get the rares left that I need; I'm content to pick them up off of false gods when they come, though at some point I'll have to get that last SoD.

Farming false gods was great when I started that, too.  The decks seemed SO hard at first.  (some still do :p damn you eternal phoenix)  Some of them were pretty easy even then (hi neptune) but most were quite challenging.  As I farmed more though, more and more of the false gods were easier, and the day finally came when I even beat Divine Glory. (the last one I hadn't beat)  I still play against the FGs, because it's the hardest level, and have a lot of fun, and of course I'm still working towards owning a complete set of upgraded cards, Eventually, though, I'll have that, too.  (probably not for a few more months yet... how many rares would a full set be, anyway?  I'd guess 1200 or so, and then however many towers/pendulums constitutes a 'full set', so another few hundred cards) 

In any event, farming false gods will at some point become less interesting.  Why?  Because I'll be winning too much.  It won't be challenging.  At this point, my win rate against FGs is about 50%.  The best claimed win rate I've seen so far is for GotP Time at about 66% I think.  Presumably, that means I should be able to achieve at least a 66% win rate, either by copying that deck or finding something equivalent or better, if it exists.

From what I've read about the platinum level of the Arena, it will be significantly harder than false gods.  I'm assuming that most people in the platinum league will know how to build a good deck.  If they just grinded score forever and don't know how to build a good deck, they probably won't submit a crappy deck because it would cost them electrum, so I'm assuming that all of the platinum decks will kick some serious ass.  And now I finally get to the core of what I'm trying to say, which is that the Arena will add an even greater challenge, and something to work to beat.  Will we lose a lot against platinum?  Yeah, probably.  Will we get better rewards than false gods?  Maybe; I have no idea and actually don't even care that much if we do or not; I'll leave that for others to balance.  The biggest thing that interests me about the platinum level is that it will probably kick the hell out of me.  I like that.  I like a challenge, and to a certain degree, we all do.  I mean, does anybody take a fully upgraded deck against AI0?  No, other than maybe once as a joke; nobody would seriously do that, because it would be no fun.  Now, false gods will never be that easy for anybody, but at some point they will probably be easy enough to be uninteresting, once I can build any deck I want.  Platinum level adds that new dimension, something EVEN HARDER than false gods to fight against.  Even if there weren't any rewards for winning at all in the arena, it would still be fun as the ultimate test of deckbuilding/playing skills.

(well, the ultimate challenge unless zanzarino designs stronger false gods or adds another level of upgrading for 15k a card and makes 'true gods' with full doubly-upgraded decks or something :p)