On the general direction of Duelyst

[tsevech]

Hi, guys! This is not a thread about balance issues, expansions, or playstyles, but rather a collection of thoughts about a few recent changes which hit the game in this beginning of 2017. In my opinion, the game is losing a few features which made particularly enjoyable to log in:

1. Daily challenges: we know that they are coming back at some point, but we don’t know when or how. I think daily challenges were a nice diversion from laddering, quite enjoyable and relaxing, now we get the useful yet boring common card per day.

2. Monthly cards: there are good reasons why monthly cards are not printed anymore, yet they offered a nice way to keep the meta fresh and provided incentives to push for higher ranks on the ladder. Now new cards are only introduced via expansions and many players are scared to test weird cards on the ladder, which makes the games more repetitive than ever (though deck diversity is quite good)

3. Patches: we were used to get two patches per month, at very predictable times. Now it seems patches are released more occasionally, even though the game has tons of things which are rough around the edges. I’m actually surprised that a few minor things which have been suggested in the past have not been pushed in recent patches, because they are quite trivial to implement. See all the suggestions about the UI, like the bug of the BBS visualization or the lack of a Previous button in the match history.

We got Boss Battles to partially compensate for this, but my feeling is that they are not enough to fill in the holes left by the other changes. I think it’s important that the game gets constant small additions and tweaks to keep it fresh, and show players a constant commitment in improving the game. Do you also share the same feelings or am I alone?

[enlightenedowl]

I think they should bring back unranked matches with proper matchmaking. This is the only online card game I’ve ever played or heard of that doesn’t have this option. I’m a hardcore player and it’s not even a mode I would use and I still think it’s an absolute must have.

I could care less one way or another about daily challenges. I never did them while they were around. But it seems like the majority of the player base enjoyed them and I think bringing them back would be met with largely positive reception. This feature is definitely an extra/a bonus though as opposed to something important for the game the way unranked queue is.

Boss battles are pretty much the same as daily challenges for me- I don’t find them particularly fun and the reward isn’t great enough for me to make myself do it anyway so I just don’t bother.

What I would like, definitely, is significantly better rewards for reaching S. Reaching Diamond is stupidly easy. I can do it in literally two or three hours, no problem. Getting to S, however, is significantly more challenging and time consuming and the rewards do not properly reflect the time and effort I put in. It’s far more practical to just hit Diamond and call it good, but I have too much pride and I’m way too OCD to get anything but S so I grind it out every month anyway even though it’s totally not worth it.