A few details about T500

[ralouf]

Yeah it is like when you play an arranged pvp match you can read that you won electrum but in fact it just show your last win screen.
Hence I assume you EM'd an FG and got 2 identic cards in the first reels before testing your deck

[Jangoo]

To marvaddin : if I'm facing the N°1 in plat league I'll just try to face him, even if this wil be hard the rewards is crazy !

to patchx : I'm okay with that it is to frustrating to loose after2 wins in plats. I think that the rewards shuld increase when you chain wins. Moreover thsi perfectly fits with arena context (more win = more rewards), I talk about plat but we can do this in gold too and even maybe in silver or bronze. For me the rewards are always low in platinum league :

Just compare to FG :

FG : 200 HP *3 marks double draw full upped, win =100 electrum and spins are all upped. difficulty : medium
Plat : 200 HP *3 marks double draw full upped or almost, win = 130 electrum (~) spins are ALL unupped. after 3 wins in a row you're almost sure to win an upped rare : difficulty : hard,very hard or impossible (depending the opponent).

Thoughts ?

Right.

Recent FG-decks get a near 50% consistent win-rate
with a cardwin rate > 33% (it seems to be more like 45% actually)
and about 3min per match
-> One card in 6 matches = ~20min

In Plat-Arena you never know what you gonna get or if your deck can deal with it.
If you play really well and make it though every other win-streak, you will end up
about the same as FG-farming.

[Donot]

Why does the deck hp atrophy?  I mean, I know Zanz coded it that way - but why? If the goal of the arena is to get people to post interesting decks, why penalize the good ones that folks would want to leave up longer?  Why not just put a 7 day expiration on all decks, sort of like how the old T50 reset every weekend.  Do we need to weaken the decks artificially?  Doesn't that just weaken the arena as a whole?  I think if the goal is to get a variety of decks out there - just let them be out there! and then expire them after a couple days (somewhere around 5 to 7 seems good). 
 
Also, the ranking system seems broken.  It should be a function of wins, losses, times played, and age (to reflect opportunities to be played, e.g., total number of plays since posted).  What's the current formula?  Does it do this?

[The_Mormegil]

I'm not sure if the decks selection is weighted: I'm rank 10 in Platinum, W/L is 74/10, and my age is 3. Also, Electrum earned is 496.
NOT WORTH IT.

Really, I put my effort into making a deck, leave it up for 3 full days, it's in the top 10 of the freaking PLATINUM ARENA aaaand... I get less than 500 electrum. Geez, it's like fifteen minutes farming? LESS! -.-

No, seriously. Platinum is borked. It's definitely a bad system, we have shitloads of reasons for that. This could be a really intresting new part of the game, but it's completely ruined by its execution.

1) Elimination of T50 has effectively killed farms. Thus, rares are really rare again. Big plus. Now, in order to get rares, you shall farm Bronze League with a good and very stable (because some of the decks are evil even there) AI3 Farmer - everybody has one of those upped, practically - for some hours. You get one spin every six games (maybe on average it's more like 1/7 due to some rare losses), and every spin has a slight chance to give you the rare you want. To get 12 rares you will probably have to get about 150 spins, for a total of about (rough estimate) 1000 games against Bronze.

Consequence: Bronze League will be played a lot when new rares are released and will be stomped hard. The amount of games we will have on Bronze League those days is more than is normally good for every League. Will any other League be played for rare farming? Hardly: Bronze is very likely the best one.


2) Dynamic rewards will cause other Leagues' reward to go up. Fantastic! So other Leagues' rewards will be worth it... when Bronze is being pummeled to the ground due to new rares. Of course, this will only be for a while, as total rewards will increase in time to discourage an ever-increasing amount of money being generated. This means that after a while the rewards will go back to a "Not Worth It" state. probably very fast due to how good FG farmers gain 4000 every hour!

Consequence: Leagues will be played at least for a while after new rares come out.

3) Platinum decks are terribly tough. Win rate is low. Rewards are low. An FG farmer, even a bad one, nets about 3000 every hour. An AI3 farmer - even unupped - nets at least 1000 per hour, a good one will net a lot more. Platinum League decks will net about one spin with a CHANCE for an upgraded card every... say... 50 games (probably more). I farmed for about 7 hours and got two spins. Base rewards will net about 200 every game - if the rewards are good, some games net about 70 which just sucks. Gold is kinda more balanced, but due to not having upped cards as reward it cannot be compared to good FG farmers. Silver nets a low amount of money. Bronze sucks. I foresee an average electrum gain that is MUCH worse than any other AI level, possibly even worse than HALF-BLOODS.

Consequence: Leagues will not be played enough in any other case.

4) I got less than 500 for a top level Platinum deck. People these days actually PLAY Arena matches due to testing what is new. When people go back to normal farming, rewards will become even more crappy. Very much likely, in a while, it will not even be worth the effort of putting up a good deck. What will be worth it, though, will be putting up a crappy deck, since in the time it goes down in ranking it will reward those playing it a lot.

Consequence: Higher Leagues will, in time, become a crap-fest. 500 players in Platinum means that if 90% of people put up a crappy deck every day, you will have a good place to farm for rares / score / electrum... as in T50. No reason to put up a good deck -> farms.


Now, what should be done to avoid this scenario:
1) Increase score reward for higher Leagues. Add a (GOOD) score bonus for every bonus spin, based on League. Since you gain 35 score for every minute of AI3 farming, I think a bonus score of 35 / 105 / 315 / 945 will be good enough, but I would like to see the opinion of good farmers - like, say, 10 men or willng3 - on this. That way you will have Arena as the "ultimate challenge", not for money but for score, and it WILL be played. Bronze for rares, Platinum for score.
2) Increase electrum gained for decks in the leagues. You don't really care if low-score people gain more electrum due to this, since this will keep them in the game more (I remember the hard times I spent trying to match AI3 back in the days... having a nice profit every day from my work - there's Oracle too now, but you don't really work for that so it's not as satisfying - would have been nice indeed: the money to invest trying to balance my Nova/Rustler/FFQ deck), and small amounts of money don't mean much to higher League players (I frankly don't care if I get 500 electrum for free, and even 1500 is pretty low for three days in Platinum; heck, most players in Platinum will probably have all cards upped!). So increasing electrum gain is not bad from any point of view, and will instead be a reason to put up a good deck and compete - rather than decaying into a farm-fest. I think good rewards could be 5 per win in Bronze, 15 per win in Silver, 45 per win in Gold and 135 per win in Platinum.

With the above balancing I think Arena will be played a lot, and will stay fresh and intresting, fulfilling its full potential.

[Wolfunit]

Really, I put my effort into making a deck, leave it up for 3 full days, it's in the top 10 of the freaking PLATINUM ARENA aaaand... I get less than 500 electrum. Geez, it's like fifteen minutes farming? LESS! -.-

Mormegil you do know that this version isn't live on Kongregate or Main Site so there wouldn't be alot of players playing in arena to give your deck more coins.

[Higurashi]

Good point. It's probably smartest to wait with balancing until we're hit by the full force of the big userbase.

[The_Mormegil]

Really, I put my effort into making a deck, leave it up for 3 full days, it's in the top 10 of the freaking PLATINUM ARENA aaaand... I get less than 500 electrum. Geez, it's like fifteen minutes farming? LESS! -.-

Mormegil you do know that this version isn't live on Kongregate or Main Site so there wouldn't be alot of players playing in arena to give your deck more coins.

Well, this is true. But, see through the rest of the post, as I have other feedback. As long as we hit a good balance on rewards for having a deck up and score rewards for playing the Arena, I think it's fine.

[ggabriel2]

Why does the deck hp atrophy?  I mean, I know Zanz coded it that way - but why? If the goal of the arena is to get people to post interesting decks, why penalize the good ones that folks would want to leave up longer?  Why not just put a 7 day expiration on all decks, sort of like how the old T50 reset every weekend.  Do we need to weaken the decks artificially?  Doesn't that just weaken the arena as a whole?  I think if the goal is to get a variety of decks out there - just let them be out there! and then expire them after a couple days (somewhere around 5 to 7 seems good). 

The HP decay is pretty negligible for the first several days. A deck's lifespan is realistically going to be around 4-5 days anyhow, around the lower limit of your proposed hard expiration date--that's when the HP loss catches up, as before then it's pretty negligible. A deck with 192 HP is going to be marginally weaker than one with 196 or 198 HP, but realistically the HP difference is not going to matter often enough to really be worth caring about. The sliding HP scale just gives you a softer time limit to work with; you're encouraged to refresh your deck every 3 days, to keep new cards rotating in from the Oracle instead of the same decks getting used perpetually, but you get the option to let it linger in a weaker form instead. If the HP loss hurts hard enough to matter, the deck will gradually lose rank and get played less and less anyhow.

[dracomageat]

I'm confused.
I've created a deck in the arena section of the beta version of the game but when I try to play, it enters me into games with my regular deck, not my arena one. My life and such are also at the normal level, despite having upped them during deck creation.
Am I meant to have to win a few games before I can use my arena deck or is this a bug?

[pikachufan2164]

I'm confused.
I've created a deck in the arena section of the beta version of the game but when I try to play, it enters me into games with my regular deck, not my arena one. My life and such are also at the normal level, despite having upped them during deck creation.
Am I meant to have to win a few games before I can use my arena deck or is this a bug?

The Arena deck is the deck you're setting up for other people to play against. You use your own normal deck to play against other peoples' Arena decks.

Notice how there is a sword icon next to the "pick a League to challenge" area and a shield icon next to the "Change your Arena deck" area? You attack with your normal deck, and defend with your Arena deck.

[Hodari]

One other thing that maybe should be fixes is it seems like the Oracle is giving the same card to a lot of people each day.  Today I got dissipation shield and from chat, it sounds like a lot of others did as well and even more people got other types of shields in the last 2 days(I also got Hope the day before).  If the idea of the oracle card is to force a variety of different decks, then it would be good to make sure the card selection is more random(and yes, I know several people I talked to getting the same or similar cards COULD happen even if it is truly random, but seems at least somewhat unlikely for that).  If the oracle card is truly supposed to be completely random, than given this and the complaints about decks selection and some other issues, might need to look at how "random" the game RNG actually is

[lskpiano]

Today's changes in the beta are awesome! (And I just beat a platinum deck -- whoo hoo!)

I am just amazed and astonished at the skill and vision Zanz puts into this game.  It is a never-ending source of challenge and entertainment. Thanks, Zanz!

Oh, and I have one question. Are winning streaks reset overnight? I thought I had streaks going in bronze and silver (I might be remembering wrong), and this morning none of the continuous victory circles are lit up.

Thanks,

LSK Piano