War #10 - Market Prices

[Blacksmith]

In-element discounts will increase vault sizes, meaning that to keep War at 10-12 rounds, you'll have to pay for that -10% elsewhere.

I expect most Generals will be going for 24 copies of their key cards regardless of market prices, whether they're incredibly cheap or incredibly expensive. The leftover points from that 10% discount will, therefore, mostly be going into off-element cards.Maybe that is true for elements like darkness, aether and gravity. But for elements like Light, earth and fire it's not the same. Last war light we was forced to add scrap cards like holy light to the vault only to get 50% in element. We had a very low amount of sancs, miracles and other key cards. Now light is an extreme example, but so is darkness just on the opposite side.

An example, with some bloated numbers to see the effects:

Spoiler for Example:

As General of Team Darkness, I need lots of copies of my most important cards, Liquid Shadow and Cloak. Liquid Shadow costs 200 points, Cloak costs 100 points.
I also want lots of Skeletons, Antlions, Mindgates and Fire Spirits in my Vault, all costing 100 each, but I only have 10,000 points to spend.


With standard pricing:
I take 20 copies of Liquid Shadow and 20 copies of Cloak in my Vault. This costs me 4,000 + 2,000 = 6,000 points spent on my in-element cards.
I can now afford to buy 20 Skeletons and 20 Antlions, for a grand total of 10,000 points spent for my vault of 60 cards.

With discounted pricing: (20%)
I take 20 copies of Liquid Shadow and 20 copies of Cloak in my Vault. This costs me 3,200 + 1,600 = 4,800 points spent on my in-element cards.
I can now afford to buy 20 Skeletons, 20 Antlions and 12 Mindgates, for a grand total of 10,000 points spent for my vault of 72 cards.


With standard pricing, I spent 10,000 points to get 60 cards.
With 20% discounted pricing, I spent 10,000 points to get 72 cards... a 20% larger vault.

Obviously, without numbers at exact intervals of 100 points each, this isn't going to be a perfect representation of what will happen in a real situation, but the point still stands.
In-element discount = more off-element cards = larger vault = longer War.


From here, after vaultbuilding, the options for controlling War's length are:

• Have a longer War. War will go on for another 1-2 rounds... potentially even longer, depending on the game-changing power and number of cards each team buys with their extra points.
• Increase discards. Larger vaults means they need to decay at a faster rate for War to end at the same time. Much more punishing in the later rounds, when teams are struggling to hold onto the cards they need to win matches.
• Decrease the number of vaultbuilding points. Lower the number of total vaultbuilding points so that vaults don't become too bloated. At this point, you have to ask yourself... is this actually better than having the much neater flat rate for all teams in the market?
• Let the WMs control the vault size decline with tougher Event Cards. Your call.

This has been my line of thinking for not wanting to give teams an in-element discount. I've had several experienced War players build mock Vaults for several teams for me, and I have already tuned the initial vaultbuilding points/discard values to end War at round 10/11 without any event card modification at all - our ECs will simply make small changes here-and-there over the course of the event to make sure everything is going according to plan.

A 10% in-element discount could mean another 1,000-1,500 points for some teams to spend on more off-element cards.

If you want to continue requesting this discount, I'll listen to your feedback, but I want to make sure you're all aware of the implications first.

The suggestion was not to decrease cost of 10% for in element and having everyone get ≈1350 more points, like stated above. The suggestion was to limit the impact other teams usage have on your key cards which had severe impact on some teams. And in order not to affect anything else a decreased vault size of 4.5% was suggested. ( the exact numbers is of course still up for discussion ). So this will not lead to bigger vaults! Just makes the inelement cards easier to obtain.  This will not give any team more out of element cards. People will still have to follow the 50% in element rule. This will make it easier for teams to fulfill the 50% in vault requirements. This will of course affect different teams differently but on average I think this would be a good addition.

[iancudorinmarian]

I disagree with in-element discounts. Just going to throw my 2 here.

[iancudorinmarian]

I disagree with in-element discounts. Just going to throw my 2 here.

That's fine Ian. But on what grounds?

For the same reason Physsion stated: I don't want an extraordinarily long war again.

[Sera]

You could bump base price then add a discount in-element.

[chrispybacon84]

The WMs have obviously done things for a reason. They feel that the things they have done will lead to a better war. If not, this will be seen during the rounds. If something doesn't go as well as planned, it's seen as a mistake and will be taken into account for the building of next war.

Let's just take everything as is, see how it actually goes, and then give our constructive criticism.

[Blacksmith]

I disagree with in-element discounts. Just going to throw my 2 here.

That's fine Ian. But on what grounds?

For the same reason Physsion stated: I don't want an extraordinarily long war again.

I updated the above comment to further explain my suggestion. WHich solves the longer war issue.

[Calindu]

But a 10% reduction helps the best elements way more than the weaker elements, because their cards are the most expensive ones, and they'll take the key cards regardless of what price they pay.

[Blacksmith]

The WMs have obviously done things for a reason. They feel that the things they have done will lead to a better war. If not, this will be seen during the rounds.This is not something you can change with Ec during the rounds since the vault building happens before the rounds. If something doesn't go as well as planned, it's seen as a mistake and will be taken into account for the building of next war.It was a misstake not having this last war. However I think it was the right decission to wait with it 1 war to see how well the new market system was balanced.

Let's just take everything as is, see how it actually goes, and then give our constructive criticism.

But the rules was in fact the same last year and several people base their opinion around the last wars outcome.

And just to be clear. I have lots of confidence in the Wo's. The work the previous WO's did last war was magnificent. All that is needed are some minor changes and I think this is one of them of reasons I already stated.

[JonathanCrazyJ]

But a 10% reduction helps the best elements way more than the weaker elements, because their cards are the most expensive ones, and they'll take the key cards regardless of what price they pay.

Literally what I came here to say.
Whether this overbalances the nice organic handicap that the market is intended for or not is another question. I can't tell if 10% in element discout would:

a) neutralise any benefit to lower-tier teams and put them back in the doldrums
or
b) solve the issue of higher-tier teams getting ganked by market prices

[Blacksmith]

But a 10% reduction helps the best elements way more than the weaker elements, because their cards are the most expensive ones, and they'll take the key cards regardless of what price they pay.

I think that is a card cost issue and not a discount issue. Once again I could take the light example where our key cards that other teams used costed to much for use to pack as many as we wanted of them. And light is not a strong team to start with. And with a smaller starting vault I don't think that is a big issue. We will still have the same amount of cards, just more in element cards. So I don't want to make it easier for teams to pack their most expensive cards. I do want to make it easier for teams to reach the 50% in element rule which was a problem for a few elements last year.

[Vangelios]

 Well 10% or not this is going be long war someway, the discards are light and now with 50% more points to spend a vault more greater will be, this war can be faster just if one or two teams win pratically all time
 Weaker elements are weak, WM's or players can't do miracles this is a fact and against facts don't there discussion, but ok we will not do the weak still more weak,

 so really 10% is inviable in the moment.

[serprex]

So there's a lot of talk about the market system being to handicap elements. That's actually the secondary goal originally, but the most publically popular. The primary goal was to create a 300 variable equation to tweak war meta with, allowing for arbitrary metas (ie not a grabbow meta). I rolled around the idea of originally having randomly generated market prices, but decided that some curation could generate a funner meta. Discounts have a nice effect that they'll encourage different teams to play different decks; preferably War meta doesn't fall into every team playing the same decks (grabbow, dark domin, sopa, lolhope, sanctstall, pugon/fractagon, dimsplashrush) but the salvage mechanic operates against that goal

While salvage is really important for War's predictive element, discard+revelation might be enough if salvage was instead a constant amount of per win which could be spent in the market. Original conception of the market thought about this. There was potential to have market prices change over rounds where high demand would increase prices, but that'd kind of leak salvage information. Which might not be too bad if one can only tell "Many team that won a game two rounds ago salvaged these cards last round". Would cut off organic market adaption at some point when team counts drop too low for that information to become too specific. Truth is vault information of other teams is surprisingly detailed after a few rounds

Maybe next war someone can setup a giant poll voting on every card & then prices can be given a normal distribution 200 +/- based on their percentile rank of (upvotes*2-downvote)

tl;dr despite considering discounts, this post attempts to state no opinion on the current discussion
real tl;dr market prices are about more than balance