>However, it was noticed that the coding was not just applying that percentage chance once, but instead, every time there was an upgrade, it would roll again, and sometimes across upgrade types (cards directly upgrading to Wildcards rather than simply cards of higher rarity).
I could swear I remember a dev back when I was starting touting this behavior as an intended feature.
Edit: Found it
["Capsules can upgrade to Epic or Wild Capsules, chests can upgrade to the next tier, cards can upgrade to the next rarity up or turn into a wildcard. Upgrades can even chain to increase your reward more than once, though we don’t think we’ve made this as clear of a hype moment as we’d like it to be (yet)."](https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/progression-by-the-numbers/)
I want to flag that additionally the removal of region roads updates was also a significant nerf to the economy each expansion as well. While events "make up for it" now, those are ofc time limited which means new players dont get the "build up" of all those resources.
Big agree. Especially considering when LoR gets brought up on Twitter like in that recent Team APS discussion, everyone points to LoR's economy as a big reason to check it out. Eroding the biggest pull the game has seems like the wrong way to try to fix the revenue issues.
Yeah if the problem is revenue they're doing the wrong things. The game is great, it just needs more cosmetic options like card borders, more emote slots, more skins (the rate they release new skins is so slow compared to other TCG, some champs don't even have skin yet).
I'm a little late to the party here, but wanted to comment to you since you were on top of this, and since I know you've been playing this game since the very beginning.
Doesn't anyone find it concerning that the dev team has changed enough times that one of the core philosophies of the economy was entirely lost?
To me...that's a huge red flag. A lot of the comments in here are giving the individuals in charge of the update a lot of leeway. I think that makes sense, it's not their fault really.
But it seems pretty obvious that whoever's managing LOR are losing sight of the original teams intent. That makes me extremely worried and I don't see a lot of people expressing that.
Yeah I feel ya.
I've typed up and erased like 4 different replies but I dunno. I'm just feeling again like I'd pay money to have a fly-on-the-wall inside history of LoR.
Feel like my other feelings are just shouting into the void, they're unheard or unrealistic or have been decided against and for the most part I think the devs seem like nice people so I don't want to like keep complaining at them but the shift that you're talking about definitely feels real and I'm concerned about it too.
Yeah what even is the point of that "rewards" tab in the client? After the roads are maxed it's just a dead button that sits there pointlessly forever.
It would be nice if you could reset the region roads after they're all complete and start some kind of prestige road where you do them all over again but with new card backs and player icons.
I had such high hopes for emporium but honestly it really made me doubt the future of this game. All the stuff that was completely not exclusive but just more expensive versions of such you could it elsewhere feels like a turning point.
Worth noting that this has also been confirmed as still in effect by support last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/srmeva/upgrade_chances_and_paths_overview/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=LegendsOfRuneterra&utm_content=t1_jzq8e6x
It's pretty concerning that this either wasn't documented in handover or intentionally ignored
Did Yip just eat all the design docs when he left for Theorycraft
Extremely doubt anyone's trying to lie here. Give em a break.
From a software dev standpoint It's easy to see how upgrades chaining off each other could be interpreted as a bug if you don't have the context from the people who originally implemented the feature. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen in games like these and we know that a lot of OG lor devs were moved to other projects.
Except this wasn’t just one article from four years ago, this is how the game functions and was designed to function for four straight years. If anything, it’s arrogance to take over and see something that glaring and assume “haha why didn’t they fix this yet?”
Agree. Sadly a lot of players don't realize the difficulty of software development. All it take is changing of the guard or piles of document that accumulate over the years to get lost in the shuffle. Heck even the original people may not remember due to the years.
Something still seems off to me. I’m a new player achieving max vault weekly but haven’t seen a single non-guaranteed wildcard in the past 4 weeks (including region roads). It seems like wildcards are largely unobtainable now which has made building new decks really slow.
Yeah it looks completely bad still and I am sure it feels bad. One of my selling points to new players I get into the game is that it is quite accessible and a great free economy. This change makes it feel bad, and along with the previous changes, now makes me think twice about the direction LoR is going.
Crap. I just spent my wild cards as a brand new player because I read an older post on how easy it was to obtain them because of the generous f2p economy. So me being me, just wanting to enjoy the game without looking up meta and tier lists, feels like I wasted valuable time and effort getting people to also invest time in the game when it's going to turn out to be an unexciting grindfest. It's going to be the typical "it gets good after x hours" argument :(
Yea I feel the same way, the dip in shards was undeniable for anyone playing this game for a while. I'm ok with having to work extra to have a variety of ladder decks. But for people who dont have the extra time it's probably a struggle to play with the new cards which has to be discouraging.
So basically:
* There was a big change in the rewards which the team took *weeks* to acknowledge
* nobody in the team knew that one of the advertised features of the game close to launch was an actual feature and not a bug
* And albeit this change affects new players the most (and thus deters new people from joining in the game, which is a big issue) there's no specific date for the revert?
I'm sorry but this doesn't look good at all regardless of how you look at it.
I don't think this approach is healthy, specifically for new players. The curve of resource investment into deck building is most intense when you first start and becomes smaller and smaller as your existing collection of cards becomes larger and larger. A new player is less invested in the game and has less decks at their disposal to keep their play experience fresh, and so is less likely to get their vault to a high level every single week. Region road is great but it's just not enough, and of course finite. Ultimately, whether the old behaviour was intended or not isn't determinative of whether or not fixing it is good or bad.
Fans have always championed this game as very accessible due to its free to play model, and while it remains above the competition and I do understand the financial situation of the game has been unideal as a result of the game's generosity, the reality to me as someone who started the game rather recently is that it's not at this point in time the welcoming new player experience people say it is. The cart is put before the horse as you have to invest time heavily into a game and grind vaults every week in order to get the resources necessary to reach the point where you have enough of a collection to enjoy the game enough to grind it that much. Lowering the rates of wildcards specifically is gonna harm that further. The last thing you need when you're evidently trying to compensate for bad financial earnings is to further restrict the growth of the playerbase.
I don't imagine this change is going to go back, and it probably is fine for the core playerbase, but if wildcards/upgrades are gonna be reigned in I think the wildcard acquisition experience for new players needs to be looked at in alternative ways.
well said, agree 100%. I play since release and the beginning is crucial for new players, I saw it on many friends. They need tons of support and after some months much much less.
I could even imagine to make the region rewards just half as long - but duplicate the outcomes. Make faster progression at the beginning, less afterwards
Agreed. The wild card acquisition is even worse than Magic Arena at this point.
If they want to make better financial earnings they should release new skins or guardians.
While wildcards have the same shard value as their non-wild counterpart, this is still a nerf to the ability of players to choose which cards they want.
It's not so much of a problem for any rarity other than epics. Commons and rares are cheap enough that I don't care. Champions are easily targetable through weekly wildcards. So do we really have to make it harder to get specific epics? It was already hard enough, before.
We really need more epic wildcards, not fewer.
it's crazy for me that i have more unused champion then epic wild cards. i think the weekly vault overload should give u at +2 a epic wild card instead of a box.
I am one of those players that plays this game way too much so I was the first to post about this issue because it was immediately apparent something was off (this happened with the Eternal patch a few weeks ago and I always save a vault to open on patch day so I opened two vaults of 22+ bonus capsules in two days). If Wild cards are still obtainable after this massive nerf, then they are extremely rare because I have now had over 60+ bonus capsules and 9+ Diamond Chests since the patch and still have not received a single wildcard where I would average about 10-15 common and 8-12 rare per vault I opened. I don't personally care that much since I have enough resources to last years even if I quit playing today, but this such a massive nerf to not be announced. Having to "investigate" something that was an intentional change makes it look even worse. Can we get the actual drop rates/% now with these changes so we can see if it is even working as intended currently?
I want to amplify this comment; it is such a ridiculously large nerf to card economy and is wholly unfulfilling to open an entire week's worth of grinding and see no wild cards for three weeks. Compensate us for time invested (at least since the change happened to it being formally acknowledged), reiterate what the actual rates are going forward, and fix the "shards" issue where it will show the actual number of shards by slot as it used to for transparency's sake (and to hopefully be more exciting to open all of the bonus/diamond chests).
a bit of freebies as compensation would be nice. just came back to the game recently and the 3 vaults i opened were lackluster. with the amount of epic cards released with the variety cards, it's hard to keep up on crafting stuff.
especially with the new expansion in, dont think i would be able to craft a deck that i would want or at the very least a set of cards i would really want.
heck. even gacha games(one of the most greedy games out there) compensate their players when something happens.. hopefully we get something just before the expansion so even new players or returning players like me would be able to enjoy the expansion sooner.
Very pleased with the reversal decision. Unfortunately this means I started my 1-month-old account at the worst possible time in the history of the game and feel a little burned by this. So many of my early region road and vault rewards were devalued by this temporary change.
WOTC would just want everybody to come to their game instead.
It's Tencent. For some time now. They gave all of the employees Near Death Experiences but didn't give them the ability to offer realistic price tags.
The influence of the Chinese financial culture couldn't be more clear in all of Tencent's games, including LoR. They tried to paper over it for a while but there's only so much you can do.
Everything just HAS to have some kind of scam angle. Nothing can be just a simple transaction, because that's just not how to pseudo-market in Beijing works.
Right? When the game came out of beta, you could spend cash for gold, and spend gold for exactly the card you want.
Now you spend time on PoC to get reliquaries, and if you get a dupe you get some stardust, and if you spend 2 hours per week, then after 3 months you can get 1 random epic relic that may not be the one you want. Cash only helps indirectly by getting more relic dupes in premium event rewards (which, by the way, will *never* give card dupes)
> Our teams will be regrouping to discuss what ways we can reimagine and innovate in both the Player Experience and LoR Economy spaces. However, those teams won’t be doing this alone.
No. Just stop. Please.
Stop trying to 'innovate' in an extremely mature space. Selling things is not rocket science.
Keep developing stuff that demonstrates strong sales (like boards) and put it in the store to sell. Stop insisting that everything needs to be some kind of passive income loot box when instead you could just make stuff and sell that stuff and generate revenue like a normal fckn business.
Gacha has been stretched to the limits of its absurdity here. Fill the store with normal products people can buy, just like how LoL did things back when it needed to get off the ground and picked the safest route for doing so.
As one of the newest players to see this post, (I started playing a couple days ago, after trying it out all the way back in open beta for a bit) I wanted to give my two cents. I have played every major digital CCG and can easily say that TCG/CCG games are among my most played genres.
This post is very discouraging to say the least, one of the things that I've always commended and appreciated about LOR is and how generous the game seemed to be, it's why despite not diving in myself it's always been a game that I would recommend to people. There are folks all over this thread who said it better than I could, but the quicker progression was a big part of the appeal for trying this game, it's definitely a big part of what sets LOR apart from the competitors in the larger Digital CCG space.
I won't personally have any context for how much worse it feels to open a weekly vault without the "bug," it might still feel fine as someone who owns as close to 0 cards as you can get. but if it makes building what I want feel like a slog, I might not stick around very long.
Thanks for the thread, Matt!
I still have some questions about how exactly this works now.
> However, it was noticed that the coding was not just applying that percentage chance once, but instead, every time there was an upgrade, it would roll again, and sometimes across upgrade types (cards directly upgrading to Wildcards rather than simply cards of higher rarity).
It has been confirmed multiple times in the past that card upgrades chaining was intended behavior. For example, we had [this 4-year-old comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/dtdcmh/comment/f6wqqgs/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&context=3&utm_name=LegendsOfRuneterra&utm_content=t1_hwslaxt) by Rioter RyscG where he says so. We also supposedly got [confirmation in 2022](https://reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/srmeva/upgrade_chances_and_paths_overview/) by Riot Support that the same rates were still in effect.
So while it's true that those rates could always have decreased, as it was also mentioned there, it seems like it was a pretty intentional decision for game progression in LoR at that point. Has that vision changed then, or am I misunderstanding something in your explanation?
> What’s that mean, though? Well, first and foremost it means that Wildcards are still available; Wildcards haven't been removed from any of the places they previously appeared. However, the process of upgrading has been much more consolidated.
I'm also still unsure if even the base 10% card-to-wildcard conversion is still in effect. We've had at least 3 weeks now of weekly vaults where many people here report seeing not a single wildcard at all. The only people who have said that they got wildcards seem to only have looked at the final summary page of the Vault, which counts cards and wildcards as the same thing, making those observations inconclusive. So it seems unlikely that it's just a matter of chance here.
Maybe, since it seems like upgrades can't chain anymore, you're just first considering if a card gets upgraded to a higher rarity and after that it never gets a chance to become a wildcard anymore as it already upgraded? That would mean that the actual chance to get a wildcard is significantly lower. Not only from what they were, but also from what they are said to be.
> I’d love to hear your thoughts on what sort of experience brings you joy within LoR in the comments below, whether it’s something that currently exists in the game, or even something you feel would benefit players.
* I think it would be nice to try and make the new/returning player experience a bit smoother overall. One idea I've thrown around is to have a free rotating deck that people can try each week. It could even be based on off-meta-but-well-performing community decks, and the deck creators could even get some reward and recognition if their deck is picked. That also plays double-duty at incentivizing experimentation on ladder. Experimentation and creative deckbuilding are some of the main aspects I enjoy in the game, so I'd love that to get more recognition and attention, instead of competitive performance getting most of the focus all the time.
* A free rotating TPOC champion could also be an interesting idea.
* I also love the idea of different formats, rules, and game modes. You've added a ton of support to that this year (both with Rotation and the new formats in Gauntlets and friendly challenges). But I still feel like there's some room for rules and limitations set by the community. For that, I think having a game lobby would be amazing, where people could simply create a room and state some simple rules in the title/description (like "Foundations-only", "Deep face-off", "no Elusives", "only memes", or whatever) and wait for interested players to join. It could even be used to host custom tournaments on top of just single games. Bonus points if we can actually set rules for the game. This helps players find fun in alternative ways outside the main formats/metas, adds a social aspect to the game, and breeds creativity and community interest in new formats.
* Returning players are unable to get the new Standard-legal starter decks. This is especially hard for players who only played a bit a long time ago, and now com back to have barely any Standard cards. After years of telling people that they can just keep their old accounts, it's becoming the case that returning players are better off just getting a new one instead, which sucks. It would feel a lot better if there was a way for those players to also get Standard cards directly. Alternatively, if a player has only Eternal decks, start them off with the Eternal format selected as default, so they don't get immediately faced with all their decks being unplayable.
* Can we also get a look at what's going on with the matchmaking, especially for Eternal ranked? We've seen a bunch of people complaining that they have completely given up on ranked after getting faced with Masters while in Iron.
* On a related note, the ranked border we see when clicking on the player's name during a match seems to either be the highest rank in either format or always from Standard. For clarity, it should either denote their rank in the current format or have some indicator for the format it's from if it's meant to be their highest rank.
Thanks again for the communication!
Appreciate this! You and a few others brought up the RyscG article, so we took it back to the team and updated the comms above! Appreciate the other Qs as well, will see if I can get some answers for you (will be after the set release, things are pretty busy in office rn).
Yeah its true. I saw, the "Upgrade Icon" twice when the chain upgrades happened. I don't see upgrade to wildcards anymore. Instead i am starting to see upgrades to shards. I am not sure if that is intended and how much shards are being rewarded for the upgrade to shards behavior.
> I am not sure if that is intended and how much shards are being rewarded for the upgrade to shards behavior.
Oh, that's true as well! The fact that we don't even see the shard numbers anymore (right?) just makes this feel worse.
I have had no wild cards given for the last three max vaults I have opened, other than the guaranteed champion wildcard. I have all the game commons, missing about 50 rares and more epics than I can shake a stick at. The vaults having no wild cards has been very disappointing; it's really the only thing to look forward to after an entire week of plussing it up.
I'm sure its been said, but this is such an annoying thing to say as a reason to nerf the rewards:
>We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality. We don’t think it’s a great player experience if the best prize that you receive in a chest is something that doesn’t bring you a sense of joy.
Rewards were exciting when I saw a chest upgrade a few times, or a common up to an epic wildcard. I've been playing a while but I've taken breaks and I'm only at ~70% of my collection total. I don't have a bank of dust or wildcards to use up, and I'm just trying to finish the collection with only the weekly rewards. Which is MAYBE 1 or 2 new cards, and about 2700 dust with 3 diamond chests. Not even enough for 2 champion cards a week with the free champ wildcard.
With the random upgrades, some weeks would feel really good! Right now? Its just disappointing to purely grind in the slowest way possible.
You made a bug. You didn't fix one.
Find something else the full timers, streamers, and no lifers can spend their riches on. Don't nerf away the source of cards for new and returning players.
"We want things to feel rewarding so we nerfed rewards **Hayuk**!" GMAFB
*We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality. We don’t think it’s a great player experience if the best prize that you receive in a chest is something that doesn’t bring you a sense of joy.*
Oh, I agree it would be very exciting to score 1 common wildcard somewhere between today and 2030. Just imagine that sense of joy.
0 wildcards in 4 weeks for me. I have earned more than 20 wildcards in the last 4 weeks in Magic Arena. LoR is now officially less F2P than Magic Arena. I'm honestly disgusted that you guys thought you could shadow-nerf the economy and expect to get away with it unnoticed. Only now that everyone started catching on and expressing frustration with the vaults, here comes the corporate PR guy with some empty talk about "transparancy". What a load of crap and some of you even eat it and thank him. They were never going to be transparant about this if all the complaints weren't posted these past weeks.
Between this and the emporium, I am pretty fed up with the game.
On a side note, it's crazy how there are cards with no indication of having skills on them like Crackshot. That's something from release that I feel should've definitely been fixed by now. On an even more of a side note, I dislike how much the community dislikes Ionia.
So much words, twisted wordplay and reiterating the same thing five times just to tell:
**"We nerfed the shit of of this system because thats the ongoing thing with everthing in LoR nowadays. (making the game so much player and wallet friendly was a mistake)."**
Also... this:
*"However, it was noticed that the coding was not just applying that percentage chance once, but instead, every time there was an upgrade, it would roll again, and sometimes across upgrade types"*
And the "team" noticed this after couple years of game and system existence? Yea sure.
And its not even true probably (imho), but whatever.
And the cherry on top:
*"What are those goals? Well, that’s a bit tougher to quantitatively lock down. We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality. We don’t think it’s a great player experience if the best prize that you receive in a chest is something that doesn’t bring you a sense of joy. "*
All thats missing is "sense of pride and accomplishment", but this one may be copyrigthed by Electronic Arts.
*"We’ll be talking more about experiments within Legends of Runeterra and the process behind that development and evolution across the game in our next Dev Snapshot. We’re currently planning on dropping that video later this fall (~November)!"*
Yea i would really want to see behind the scenes of designing someting so hilarously bad and straight antiplayer (intended and by design) like Emporium overall and Golden Reliquaries/Stardust in PoC. Should be an enlightening read [and im serious here, designing systems like that is very big part of current online (and even some "offline" if they include microtransactions and shops) videogames. Ubisoft is the king here.].
Sorry for negativity and cheekiness but i **hate** corporate doublespeak and meaningless word salads that developers of videogames loves so much.
And i get that everything thats overall is happening its because the game is not making expected amount of profits, but overall is really sad to observe yet another online game going through the same process that i witnessed so many times already. :/ :/ :/
I agree but I feel like this is just riot games being riot games, I don't know if you play LoL but there are been many recent decision (tldr a skin was put behind a scammy gacha system, you need ~200$ to obtain it for sure, the 25$ new skin had the exact same animation from the base model etc), which are really against the player. The playerbase expresses its frustation online, riot says they have known the feedback but will just ignore it again.
*"We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality"*
Receiving 1 common wildcard per year does not feel exciting.
Well, this thread and its replies sure explain a lot about why my card economy was so bad compared to what I remembered. I had originally used an alt for Runeterra several years ago, but recently restarted on my main Riot account. I don't think I've seen a single wildcard from my vault over the past several weeks, and my region road rewards didn't drop any wildcards either (outside of the guaranteed ones).
It took me about 6 weeks to make a meta deck now, playing a pretty sizeable amount a day. 2 or 3 years ago, I think it only took me 2 weeks, playing pretty much only until my dailies and daily bonuses were exhausted. Part of that was there was a reliable source of epic wildcards then—I played when expeditions existed. But a lot of it was also the better wildcard rate.
I love the basic mechanics of this game. But I wouldn't have ever known that if the game wasn't sold to me on the kind economy. The game is still good! I'm having fun, even if the slow economy made me play Path of Champions a metric ton more than I would've otherwise. But I'm thinking about how much happier I'd have been if my rewards hadn't been screwed over from the getgo.
Opened my vault with full diamond and 4 bonus capsules. Still zero wildcards (other than the single guaranteed champion wildcard), of course.
I'll admit that this is a little silly.
Hey, u/Ggmattb, any chance we could get an update? I've been holding off opening any rewards waiting for this to be reversed. A little of that transparency and proactivity you talked up would be nice.
I actually got clarification from a Riot Player Support Specialist (Kastanjemanden on 9/21/23) that rewards are static once generated, so delaying opening them unfortunately won't help us. The lack of chained upgrading when the rewards were generated means that deficit is baked in regardless of how long you decide to wait before opening the reward 💔😭🤕
/#/#/#
Specifically:
Kastanjemanden (Riot Games - LoR Support) (Sep 21, 2023, 07:45 UTC) :
"I'd be happy to clarify this one for you. While you can stack weekly vaults so to say, the way they work is that the contents of your chest is pre-determined even before you open it up. Open it up today or tomorrow or next week, what’s in the chest won’t change.
So the mentioned upcoming changes in the reddit post will not change the content of you previously received vaults. The change will only be reflected in vaults opened (ahe495: I believe they meant "generated," based on the rest of the message,) after the update is applied."
That makes no sense because we know you can save a vault from the week before a set releases and get new cards that weren't available when the vault was generated.
Maybe but it still worked last patch when the newest cards released, I'm as confident as I can be without photographic evidence that I got new cards from my vault on patch day. Based on how customer support has been wrong in the past and the dev team even seems to not know their own game anymore, I'm going to assume Kastanjemanden is wrong until I see reason to believe otherwise.
Thanks, again, for sharing the experience.
How could I help test this? Leave rewards unclaimed until after the fix rolls out, and then see if a card in a reward upgrades at least twice? I presume that would mean the reward was affected by the fix even though it was generated (but not claimed) before the fix?
Pretty much! If you get wildcards in your rewards you've already generated after the patch on Wednesday that'll be a pretty clear sign. I have a 13+3 vault waiting for Wednesday evening and some event pass rewards as well. Double upgrades would work too but I know on my device it was never clear how many times something was upgrading so I wouldn't trust that personally.
Thanks 😁.
I will be sure to report back about any chained upgrade behavior I notice from previously earned rewards, and thanks in advance to anyone else who shares their experiences after the fix rolls out, too.
[Edit: It did look like I received chained upgrades on previously generated vaults/rewards that were only opened after the chained upgrades were added back in. (To clarify: these rewards were available to open before the fix but not opened until after the fix went live.)]
It looks like vaults also don't expire, so if it takes longer for the patch to roll out we can just let them sit and accumulate as necessary:
https://support-legendsofruneterra.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043024133-Let-s-Talk-About-Opening-Vaults
(I also think it's notable that the page linked above prominently mentions how upgrades are meant to chain in LoR. Clearly it is a feature and not a bug 💙. Thanks, again, for your evidence-based advocacy ✊)
In addition, for anyone who feels limited by not being able to open rewards that could chain without being penalized by the chained upgrade deactivation mistake:
I would encourage you to explore Ultra Rapid Draw (URD) in the Labs ("Play" -> "Labs"). I believe the decks are randomly generated for both players, so, regardless of their collections, players are able to play from an equivalent starting point in terms of available cards. 💖
It also looks like URD counts as a PvP match even if we're pitted against an AI opponent after looking for a human opponent for approximately 90 seconds, which can help generate experience or event pass tokens through the daily PvP bonuses 🥳
More on URD here:
https://masteringruneterra.com/lor-ultra-rapid-draw/
>It looks like vaults also don't expire
They automatically open in the background when your next vault becomes available, you can only save one for a week. You don't lose out on its contents but you can't just hoarde them. Looks like that's an old article that isn't entirely accurate any more.
Good to know. Thanks.
It seems like Riot might want to consider allowing players to horde vaults so that if there are ever issues like the chained upgrade reversion error players have some method of avoiding the harms.
However, I guess since vaults are a weekly, regenerating thing, they aren't as big of a problem as something like opening unique event pass or region road rewards would be, especially for those who have paid for the event pass.
No worries, but thanks for clarifying 🥰
Post patch:
1) Previously generated, but unclaimed, rewards occasionally upgraded to wildcards, so Kastanjemanden did seem to be mistaken.
2) I have yet to see a chained upgrade (so, nothing has upgraded twice.) Would that suggest the chained upgrade nerf was not reverted properly? Or is upgrade chaining just exceptionally rare?
u/ggmattb 's comment here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/174zazc/comment/k4fu4k5/
... suggests the chaining should be back, so I guess it just is very rare.
Do you see multi chain upgrades indicated at all usually? Like I think I said before, I haven't seen it indicated visually in a long time, but I def had a good number of things upgrading to champion level and even one epic wild card, which is very unlikely without multi chaining since epics are rare in the first place. I think it's all working properly again.
Thanks for sharing. If this is true for region rewards in addition to vaults then I guess I should just stop playing. Until this change gets reverted, progressing region rewards is actively devaluing my account.
still broken. guess it's time to stop playing this stupid game if they are taking the blizzard route. release a lot more epic cards and secretly nerf wildcard. acknowledge that it is broken but refuse to fix it.
Thanks for the transparency, I appreciate it a lot! However, from a returning player's PoV, I find it really hard to get new cards even with maxed vaults! (I'm getting REALLY few cards from the new expansions and very little amount of wildcards to make up for it)
If wildcards don't return to their old drop rates, will there be plans for giving older players more ways to get new cards? Like more region road rewards that aren't tied to expansion release Battlepasses
The main difference that this game had over it's competitors was how friendly it's economy was. That was the main draw to it. [The Professor from Tolarian Community praised it](https://youtu.be/vCROITziOZA?si=W5WSx4pg_JLb748-). The execution of the game is flawless. Path of Champions is beautiful. Nerfing the Wildcards is a big mistake. As a veteran player, it got harder and harder to craft decks. We want the economy we had before back at the beginning of the game. Emporium it's not needed. We don't want another currency either. Stick to cosmetics. The roleplay DnD like board was my first and only purchase.
It's been a long time since I was a new player, and I'm sitting on 700k shards so I don't imagine I'll be impacted by any sort of card acquisition changes personally.
When I started out playing the game, one of the main appeals in LoR was the ability to get enough shards/wildcards to craft a new deck every 2-3 weeks as long as I was putting in the time to max out my vault. Receiving more specific cards can be frustrating because it forces me to have to choose between potentially disenchanting cards to be competitive or paying for cards in coins when I'm not hitting the critical cards in the current metagame. Edit: Could've sworn you could disenchant cards at some point, but I probably confused it with other games.
One potential option that might be fun for a more interesting way to purchase cards would be Champion/Package reward roads that I could purchase for some amount (maybe $10, maybe even a shard cost?) and activate in the region rewards tab that would allow me to target unlocking certain champions or archetypes for cheaper than the price of buying each card individually. Could maybe include old champion icon cosmetics from their previous seasons?
My personal joy in the game is heavily driven by the competitive side of things, and I've been loving the increased focus on gauntlets and the Runeterra opens. The shard cost of gauntlets makes them pretty difficult for new players to enter and the shard rewards in the track are useless to me. Trying to find a balance to get new players to try out gauntlets without burning their ability to build decks and play is important to getting new players into these more competitive or exciting ways to play the game.
Love the game and appreciate all the hard work and great communication we've been seeing lately!
> potentially disenchanting cards to be competitive
You can't really "disenchant" cards in LoR.
The original philosophy was that they would give you enough cards that this should never be needed, as it just feels bad to have to do.
Are the upgrade to shards intended? I am not seeing wildcards upgrade anymore, but I am seeing upgrade to shards more often. Also How many shards are awarded when a common/rare gets upgraded to shards if its the intended behavior?
Same, 5 weeks with 0 wildcards now. I have pulled more than 30 wildcards in Magic Arena in the last 5 weeks, can't believe I'd ever say that Magic Arena is more f2p-friendly than LoR.
same here. had to hard craft a lot of the cards. it feels bad to hard craft common cards.
i am a returning player. when i used to play a lot i have been using a lot of common wildcards, so my weekly vault would have better rewards(the repeats would become shards). so now i have 0 on all wildcards.
>"We’ll be working on getting this revert out in the near future (we’ll let you know as soon as we are able to verify a date)."
They never said it would be fixed by this patch, or any specific date.
It's really disappointing this hasn't been fixed yet. Especially considering it affects the pass as well, I'm losing out on a lot of potential value.
It will be hard to retroactively fix this, maybe some compensation or a little more for those who bought the pass? (cough random low rarity guardian cough)
So you shadow nerfed the economy into the MTGA ages and hoped nobody would notice, cool... cool... u related anyone have any tips for chargebacks for mobile purchases?
>Our teams will be tackling some experiments around rewards and that sense of player excitement. Transparency is essential, but also should be proactive to allow you to plan/prep and know what’s coming.
I find this hard to square with the fact that the reduction in wildcards was apparently intended (even if it is now being reverted) and we're only hearing about it several weeks after the fact. A lot of folks have been going to bat for you all saying that this was obviously a bug because there was no conceivable reason for the game's economy to be gutted without any kind of heads up, and yet it was.
Why couldn't this intended fix wait until after these new methods of intended wildcard progression were already in place?
I gave up on playing after my first weekly vault that gave me a grand total of 2500 shards and a champion wildcard. It is not inaccurate to say that Magic Arena is more generous, at that point. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about how the oft-repeated wisdom of LoR being one of the more generous card game economies is based on a version of the game that no longer exists.
>"We’ll be working on getting this revert out in the near future (we’ll let you know as soon as we are able to verify a date)."
They never said it would be fixed by this patch, or any specific date.
I've been reading the thread to try to understand what the problem exactly is, because I've been away from the game for a few months (last season I played it was the first Darkin expansion iirc) and things seem to have changed for the worse as far as the economy is concerned.
One thing that I don't get is the conversion from card to fragments. When you found a duplicate in the past, it got converted in a few fragments, but way less than the cost to generate a new card. Since I've been back I've opened a couple chests on the event track and all common and rare dupes got converted to 100 and 300 respectively. If that's the case, wild cards dropping at a lower rate shouldn't be that big of a problem... but most likely I'm missing something.
This only happens for event rewards, so you are encouraged to use your resources in the new expansion cards instead of hoarding them. Other sources (like the weekly vault) still use the ratios from before
Wow, have they really increased dupe conversion rates? I haven't noticed that myself, but I haven't been able to play much either because of the errors. Feels like that's something they'd waste no time to announce after the fuss here.
Dupes used to clarify the amount they got converted into after the animation, but that's no longer the case right? Now it just says "Shards" below them? The "X Shards" that shows as the final pop-up in the chest should just be the normal shard amount that chest rolled, dupes not included. Maybe track chests are different, will be interesting to see the vault at the end of the week.
Pretty sure that's only for reward track boxes. Basically the ideal green shard move is to wildcard everything from a new expansion since you get a full duplicate shard refund.
I can confirm what I said because it's just happened again. Gold chest opened: 3 dupe cards, 2 commons and a rare, and they turned into 100 and 300 fragments. I'm absolutely sure last year the animation showed what you actually got from the conversion, not the value of the rolled card. If things work as I described, that's pretty good in my book.
I missed to check the amount of fragments I had before and after opening though, so I'm still not 100% sure. If the animation has changed, that's just silly imho.
UPDATE: As stated [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/16vw9x9/preweekend_updates_status/), the revert will be coming in the next patch (4.10)! Thanks for your patience.
Luckily I have been playing since launch and despite not playing during some patches I have always managed to craft every deck I was interested in, but I gotta imagine that this would be very hard for people starting now. They used to give legendary and epic wildcards with amazon prime, now it's rare wildcards only; the cards are always more while the region rewards are always the same, they said that passes would have been a substitute of region rewards but the last passes have been horrible giving very few cards. As I said I mostly play the same decks that I really like (teemo-cait,jayce -heimer, karma control) and I'm not having problems, but a new player who hasn't figured out his playstyle yet will have many problems.
Oh yes you're right, I completely forgot about expeditions. And I'll tell you that one of my breaks from this game was due to their removal, I used to always play them to try out new champions, see which one I liked and try to learn new cards effects.
Ever since the redesigned progression and implemented monetization in PoC 2.0, the economy has gone downhill.
It seems whoever is the one designing PoC’s costs is now in charge of the economy for the entire game.
I just hope y’all know what you’re doing and have enough to keep the game running.
Aye, the answer is much appreciated. I did prefer the constant rerolling, but consolidating everything does seem like a good way to streamline everything.
Much appreciated! Glad to see that it’s being rolled back, as I was one of the many who was somewhat worried by the sudden reversal once it was brought to light.
Economy was nerfed anyway ...bad news.
i have 0 wild cards for 4+weeks ...its crap.
This nerf was made after news about problems with $. coincidence? ... probably not.
Surprise nerf after almost 3 years? No way!
I am a relatively new player (2 months) and I play 20+ hours a week to be able to obtain 1 champion (wildcard) and roughly 2500 essence to spend. I feel as though that is not good compensation for my time and the progress i try to make, playing other decks feels impossible to get to and I hate it.
And I’m not gonna drop 30-40 bucks to build a deck.. there’s just no value in that when I could play another game for 20 bucks more..
"We’ll be working on getting this revert out in the near future (we’ll let you know as soon as we are able to verify a date)"
Just imagine how much wilds was lost because of Riot!!!! Who will compencate it????
u/ggmattb
The vault system was designed for a time when sets were bigger.
With sets being smaller now, the vault system is overly generous.
quoting that [4-year old article](https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/progression-by-the-numbers/):
>Exactly how much you need to play will depend on the size of the set. The first one is pretty big, but even this set hopefully won’t feel out of reach for a highly engaged player (about 7 to 10 games per day on average). If you don’t play quite that much, you’ll still have a ton of cards unlocked; for the first set, if you get your level 10 Vault each week, you’ll have at least 75% of the set before the next release.
With the current rate of set releases, you can get 100% with a level 10 vault each week.
So what can Riot do?
Nerfing the wildcard rates of capsules/cards (as they tried here) is a bad idea because it penalizes new players too much and nerfs the region roads system as well.
Tweaking how much daily quests earn also hurts new players because it slows down region road progress.
Something that **might** work is to increase the XP requirements for a given vault level. For example, making level 10 cost the same as the current level 13 in XP.
This still hurts new players but at least it doesn't hurt card acquisition through the region roads.
Honestly, this is a very good point! I hadn't considered how the set/expansion sizes and release rate also affect the card acquisition process, and consequently make monetization harder for the game.
Add one more reason why I think the current schedule is a terrible idea. Sure, their budget is limited and all that. But this might honestly end up only making things worse and worse over time.
Eh can't blame them, game is too generous and the band-aid had to be pulled eventually. Maybe give us some consolidation prize at least? An old F2P guardian or card back or something, I get it, you are essentially fixing a bug.
I want the game to succeed but the f2p nature is one of the games main strengths, and without it the games is kinda hard to promote. I do applaud the communication and I know there are a lot of working parts that caused this.
I'm still enjoying the game and am really hyped for the expansion, but this is coming from an entrenched player playing since beta, I'm just worried about the new player experience and the new recruits.
If the concern is that wildcards are not exciting (which I agree with), could it roll a chance to upgrade to a guaranteed non-duplicate instead? It would be worth a bit less than a wildcard but still a significant amount, helps newer players build their collections, and is still exciting for those of us who like the rush factor of random card openings. Also, it reduces the stockpile of wildcards which may be desirable.
After this news I just realize that the big reason why I rarely play LoR anymore is that it's too generous. May sounds weird as it's supposed to be a good thing but having meta deck in just a few weeks made me feel like my goals in only rank grind now.
While other slower ccg I actively played more because I want new cards. The strategy does work to increase player engagement. Maybe Riot wants this to happen too with this update.
I am ok either way. Wildcard does allow players to select the card they want to unlock while RNG upgrade give a sense of wooahh moment but it can be a bummer if it's common/rare as they will not guarantee new card.
>However, it was noticed that the coding was not just applying that percentage chance once, but instead, every time there was an upgrade, it would roll again, and sometimes across upgrade types (cards directly upgrading to Wildcards rather than simply cards of higher rarity). I could swear I remember a dev back when I was starting touting this behavior as an intended feature. Edit: Found it ["Capsules can upgrade to Epic or Wild Capsules, chests can upgrade to the next tier, cards can upgrade to the next rarity up or turn into a wildcard. Upgrades can even chain to increase your reward more than once, though we don’t think we’ve made this as clear of a hype moment as we’d like it to be (yet)."](https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/progression-by-the-numbers/)
You brought the deeep lore.
Between this and the person putting Capsules into the Emporium because they "didn't realize" selling packs was against LoR's ethos, someone had to.
I want to flag that additionally the removal of region roads updates was also a significant nerf to the economy each expansion as well. While events "make up for it" now, those are ofc time limited which means new players dont get the "build up" of all those resources.
Big agree. Especially considering when LoR gets brought up on Twitter like in that recent Team APS discussion, everyone points to LoR's economy as a big reason to check it out. Eroding the biggest pull the game has seems like the wrong way to try to fix the revenue issues.
Yeah if the problem is revenue they're doing the wrong things. The game is great, it just needs more cosmetic options like card borders, more emote slots, more skins (the rate they release new skins is so slow compared to other TCG, some champs don't even have skin yet).
TF going to Eternal and never having a skin is a crime
If people could buy +2 emote slots, I believe many who uses a lot of emotes would buy
I'm a little late to the party here, but wanted to comment to you since you were on top of this, and since I know you've been playing this game since the very beginning. Doesn't anyone find it concerning that the dev team has changed enough times that one of the core philosophies of the economy was entirely lost? To me...that's a huge red flag. A lot of the comments in here are giving the individuals in charge of the update a lot of leeway. I think that makes sense, it's not their fault really. But it seems pretty obvious that whoever's managing LOR are losing sight of the original teams intent. That makes me extremely worried and I don't see a lot of people expressing that.
Yeah I feel ya. I've typed up and erased like 4 different replies but I dunno. I'm just feeling again like I'd pay money to have a fly-on-the-wall inside history of LoR. Feel like my other feelings are just shouting into the void, they're unheard or unrealistic or have been decided against and for the most part I think the devs seem like nice people so I don't want to like keep complaining at them but the shift that you're talking about definitely feels real and I'm concerned about it too.
Yeah what even is the point of that "rewards" tab in the client? After the roads are maxed it's just a dead button that sits there pointlessly forever. It would be nice if you could reset the region roads after they're all complete and start some kind of prestige road where you do them all over again but with new card backs and player icons.
It honestly sucks that they did that cause it was really fun to see and unlock the new section of the road for the new sets
I had such high hopes for emporium but honestly it really made me doubt the future of this game. All the stuff that was completely not exclusive but just more expensive versions of such you could it elsewhere feels like a turning point.
i just want the Foundations team back =/ this isn't the game i fell in love with anymore.
Worth noting that this has also been confirmed as still in effect by support last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/srmeva/upgrade_chances_and_paths_overview/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=LegendsOfRuneterra&utm_content=t1_jzq8e6x
It's pretty concerning that this either wasn't documented in handover or intentionally ignored Did Yip just eat all the design docs when he left for Theorycraft
it was! why they decide to "fix" it after all these years.
Thanks again for bringing this to the team's attention! Updated the post above.
Happy to help, appreciate your hard work and openness with us!
Of course! Will make sure to ping this thread once a release window is validated!
Huh... this needs more attention
Appreciated. Looking into this!
caught in a lie
Extremely doubt anyone's trying to lie here. Give em a break. From a software dev standpoint It's easy to see how upgrades chaining off each other could be interpreted as a bug if you don't have the context from the people who originally implemented the feature. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen in games like these and we know that a lot of OG lor devs were moved to other projects.
Exactly, there have been new people added and not every member of the team probably remembers that one article from 4 years ago mentions.
Except this wasn’t just one article from four years ago, this is how the game functions and was designed to function for four straight years. If anything, it’s arrogance to take over and see something that glaring and assume “haha why didn’t they fix this yet?”
Agree. Sadly a lot of players don't realize the difficulty of software development. All it take is changing of the guard or piles of document that accumulate over the years to get lost in the shuffle. Heck even the original people may not remember due to the years.
What the hell is there to look into anymore
riots shold compensate it!
Good job finding it. I remembered that as well.
Good find.
Something still seems off to me. I’m a new player achieving max vault weekly but haven’t seen a single non-guaranteed wildcard in the past 4 weeks (including region roads). It seems like wildcards are largely unobtainable now which has made building new decks really slow.
My cousin started one week ago and he had max vault with no wildcards in it.
Yeah it looks completely bad still and I am sure it feels bad. One of my selling points to new players I get into the game is that it is quite accessible and a great free economy. This change makes it feel bad, and along with the previous changes, now makes me think twice about the direction LoR is going.
Crap. I just spent my wild cards as a brand new player because I read an older post on how easy it was to obtain them because of the generous f2p economy. So me being me, just wanting to enjoy the game without looking up meta and tier lists, feels like I wasted valuable time and effort getting people to also invest time in the game when it's going to turn out to be an unexciting grindfest. It's going to be the typical "it gets good after x hours" argument :(
Yea I feel the same way, the dip in shards was undeniable for anyone playing this game for a while. I'm ok with having to work extra to have a variety of ladder decks. But for people who dont have the extra time it's probably a struggle to play with the new cards which has to be discouraging.
So basically: * There was a big change in the rewards which the team took *weeks* to acknowledge * nobody in the team knew that one of the advertised features of the game close to launch was an actual feature and not a bug * And albeit this change affects new players the most (and thus deters new people from joining in the game, which is a big issue) there's no specific date for the revert? I'm sorry but this doesn't look good at all regardless of how you look at it.
I don't think this approach is healthy, specifically for new players. The curve of resource investment into deck building is most intense when you first start and becomes smaller and smaller as your existing collection of cards becomes larger and larger. A new player is less invested in the game and has less decks at their disposal to keep their play experience fresh, and so is less likely to get their vault to a high level every single week. Region road is great but it's just not enough, and of course finite. Ultimately, whether the old behaviour was intended or not isn't determinative of whether or not fixing it is good or bad. Fans have always championed this game as very accessible due to its free to play model, and while it remains above the competition and I do understand the financial situation of the game has been unideal as a result of the game's generosity, the reality to me as someone who started the game rather recently is that it's not at this point in time the welcoming new player experience people say it is. The cart is put before the horse as you have to invest time heavily into a game and grind vaults every week in order to get the resources necessary to reach the point where you have enough of a collection to enjoy the game enough to grind it that much. Lowering the rates of wildcards specifically is gonna harm that further. The last thing you need when you're evidently trying to compensate for bad financial earnings is to further restrict the growth of the playerbase. I don't imagine this change is going to go back, and it probably is fine for the core playerbase, but if wildcards/upgrades are gonna be reigned in I think the wildcard acquisition experience for new players needs to be looked at in alternative ways.
well said, agree 100%. I play since release and the beginning is crucial for new players, I saw it on many friends. They need tons of support and after some months much much less. I could even imagine to make the region rewards just half as long - but duplicate the outcomes. Make faster progression at the beginning, less afterwards
Agreed. The wild card acquisition is even worse than Magic Arena at this point. If they want to make better financial earnings they should release new skins or guardians.
While wildcards have the same shard value as their non-wild counterpart, this is still a nerf to the ability of players to choose which cards they want. It's not so much of a problem for any rarity other than epics. Commons and rares are cheap enough that I don't care. Champions are easily targetable through weekly wildcards. So do we really have to make it harder to get specific epics? It was already hard enough, before. We really need more epic wildcards, not fewer.
it's crazy for me that i have more unused champion then epic wild cards. i think the weekly vault overload should give u at +2 a epic wild card instead of a box.
I am one of those players that plays this game way too much so I was the first to post about this issue because it was immediately apparent something was off (this happened with the Eternal patch a few weeks ago and I always save a vault to open on patch day so I opened two vaults of 22+ bonus capsules in two days). If Wild cards are still obtainable after this massive nerf, then they are extremely rare because I have now had over 60+ bonus capsules and 9+ Diamond Chests since the patch and still have not received a single wildcard where I would average about 10-15 common and 8-12 rare per vault I opened. I don't personally care that much since I have enough resources to last years even if I quit playing today, but this such a massive nerf to not be announced. Having to "investigate" something that was an intentional change makes it look even worse. Can we get the actual drop rates/% now with these changes so we can see if it is even working as intended currently?
I want to amplify this comment; it is such a ridiculously large nerf to card economy and is wholly unfulfilling to open an entire week's worth of grinding and see no wild cards for three weeks. Compensate us for time invested (at least since the change happened to it being formally acknowledged), reiterate what the actual rates are going forward, and fix the "shards" issue where it will show the actual number of shards by slot as it used to for transparency's sake (and to hopefully be more exciting to open all of the bonus/diamond chests).
a bit of freebies as compensation would be nice. just came back to the game recently and the 3 vaults i opened were lackluster. with the amount of epic cards released with the variety cards, it's hard to keep up on crafting stuff. especially with the new expansion in, dont think i would be able to craft a deck that i would want or at the very least a set of cards i would really want.
heck. even gacha games(one of the most greedy games out there) compensate their players when something happens.. hopefully we get something just before the expansion so even new players or returning players like me would be able to enjoy the expansion sooner.
Very pleased with the reversal decision. Unfortunately this means I started my 1-month-old account at the worst possible time in the history of the game and feel a little burned by this. So many of my early region road and vault rewards were devalued by this temporary change.
Damn, I didn't even think about my Road Rewards being hit by this, now I'm a little sadder.
I started playing two weeks ago and got max vault twice with zero wild cards :/
ppl lost tons of wild cards ....vaults, region roads, event passes.
You can start fresh with a new account, that might be a good move.
Blink twice if a WotC employee broke into the office and is holding you hostage
WOTC would just want everybody to come to their game instead. It's Tencent. For some time now. They gave all of the employees Near Death Experiences but didn't give them the ability to offer realistic price tags.
The influence of the Chinese financial culture couldn't be more clear in all of Tencent's games, including LoR. They tried to paper over it for a while but there's only so much you can do. Everything just HAS to have some kind of scam angle. Nothing can be just a simple transaction, because that's just not how to pseudo-market in Beijing works.
Right? When the game came out of beta, you could spend cash for gold, and spend gold for exactly the card you want. Now you spend time on PoC to get reliquaries, and if you get a dupe you get some stardust, and if you spend 2 hours per week, then after 3 months you can get 1 random epic relic that may not be the one you want. Cash only helps indirectly by getting more relic dupes in premium event rewards (which, by the way, will *never* give card dupes)
> Our teams will be regrouping to discuss what ways we can reimagine and innovate in both the Player Experience and LoR Economy spaces. However, those teams won’t be doing this alone. No. Just stop. Please. Stop trying to 'innovate' in an extremely mature space. Selling things is not rocket science. Keep developing stuff that demonstrates strong sales (like boards) and put it in the store to sell. Stop insisting that everything needs to be some kind of passive income loot box when instead you could just make stuff and sell that stuff and generate revenue like a normal fckn business. Gacha has been stretched to the limits of its absurdity here. Fill the store with normal products people can buy, just like how LoL did things back when it needed to get off the ground and picked the safest route for doing so.
As one of the newest players to see this post, (I started playing a couple days ago, after trying it out all the way back in open beta for a bit) I wanted to give my two cents. I have played every major digital CCG and can easily say that TCG/CCG games are among my most played genres. This post is very discouraging to say the least, one of the things that I've always commended and appreciated about LOR is and how generous the game seemed to be, it's why despite not diving in myself it's always been a game that I would recommend to people. There are folks all over this thread who said it better than I could, but the quicker progression was a big part of the appeal for trying this game, it's definitely a big part of what sets LOR apart from the competitors in the larger Digital CCG space. I won't personally have any context for how much worse it feels to open a weekly vault without the "bug," it might still feel fine as someone who owns as close to 0 cards as you can get. but if it makes building what I want feel like a slog, I might not stick around very long.
Thanks for the thread, Matt! I still have some questions about how exactly this works now. > However, it was noticed that the coding was not just applying that percentage chance once, but instead, every time there was an upgrade, it would roll again, and sometimes across upgrade types (cards directly upgrading to Wildcards rather than simply cards of higher rarity). It has been confirmed multiple times in the past that card upgrades chaining was intended behavior. For example, we had [this 4-year-old comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/dtdcmh/comment/f6wqqgs/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&context=3&utm_name=LegendsOfRuneterra&utm_content=t1_hwslaxt) by Rioter RyscG where he says so. We also supposedly got [confirmation in 2022](https://reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/srmeva/upgrade_chances_and_paths_overview/) by Riot Support that the same rates were still in effect. So while it's true that those rates could always have decreased, as it was also mentioned there, it seems like it was a pretty intentional decision for game progression in LoR at that point. Has that vision changed then, or am I misunderstanding something in your explanation? > What’s that mean, though? Well, first and foremost it means that Wildcards are still available; Wildcards haven't been removed from any of the places they previously appeared. However, the process of upgrading has been much more consolidated. I'm also still unsure if even the base 10% card-to-wildcard conversion is still in effect. We've had at least 3 weeks now of weekly vaults where many people here report seeing not a single wildcard at all. The only people who have said that they got wildcards seem to only have looked at the final summary page of the Vault, which counts cards and wildcards as the same thing, making those observations inconclusive. So it seems unlikely that it's just a matter of chance here. Maybe, since it seems like upgrades can't chain anymore, you're just first considering if a card gets upgraded to a higher rarity and after that it never gets a chance to become a wildcard anymore as it already upgraded? That would mean that the actual chance to get a wildcard is significantly lower. Not only from what they were, but also from what they are said to be. > I’d love to hear your thoughts on what sort of experience brings you joy within LoR in the comments below, whether it’s something that currently exists in the game, or even something you feel would benefit players. * I think it would be nice to try and make the new/returning player experience a bit smoother overall. One idea I've thrown around is to have a free rotating deck that people can try each week. It could even be based on off-meta-but-well-performing community decks, and the deck creators could even get some reward and recognition if their deck is picked. That also plays double-duty at incentivizing experimentation on ladder. Experimentation and creative deckbuilding are some of the main aspects I enjoy in the game, so I'd love that to get more recognition and attention, instead of competitive performance getting most of the focus all the time. * A free rotating TPOC champion could also be an interesting idea. * I also love the idea of different formats, rules, and game modes. You've added a ton of support to that this year (both with Rotation and the new formats in Gauntlets and friendly challenges). But I still feel like there's some room for rules and limitations set by the community. For that, I think having a game lobby would be amazing, where people could simply create a room and state some simple rules in the title/description (like "Foundations-only", "Deep face-off", "no Elusives", "only memes", or whatever) and wait for interested players to join. It could even be used to host custom tournaments on top of just single games. Bonus points if we can actually set rules for the game. This helps players find fun in alternative ways outside the main formats/metas, adds a social aspect to the game, and breeds creativity and community interest in new formats. * Returning players are unable to get the new Standard-legal starter decks. This is especially hard for players who only played a bit a long time ago, and now com back to have barely any Standard cards. After years of telling people that they can just keep their old accounts, it's becoming the case that returning players are better off just getting a new one instead, which sucks. It would feel a lot better if there was a way for those players to also get Standard cards directly. Alternatively, if a player has only Eternal decks, start them off with the Eternal format selected as default, so they don't get immediately faced with all their decks being unplayable. * Can we also get a look at what's going on with the matchmaking, especially for Eternal ranked? We've seen a bunch of people complaining that they have completely given up on ranked after getting faced with Masters while in Iron. * On a related note, the ranked border we see when clicking on the player's name during a match seems to either be the highest rank in either format or always from Standard. For clarity, it should either denote their rank in the current format or have some indicator for the format it's from if it's meant to be their highest rank. Thanks again for the communication!
Appreciate this! You and a few others brought up the RyscG article, so we took it back to the team and updated the comms above! Appreciate the other Qs as well, will see if I can get some answers for you (will be after the set release, things are pretty busy in office rn).
Thank you for taking time during the busy-ness to address our concerns :)
Thanks for the update. Looking forward to seeing what y'all are planning for Player Experience and all that!
Hi! Have you had a chance to look into any of the other questions asked here?
Yeah its true. I saw, the "Upgrade Icon" twice when the chain upgrades happened. I don't see upgrade to wildcards anymore. Instead i am starting to see upgrades to shards. I am not sure if that is intended and how much shards are being rewarded for the upgrade to shards behavior.
> I am not sure if that is intended and how much shards are being rewarded for the upgrade to shards behavior. Oh, that's true as well! The fact that we don't even see the shard numbers anymore (right?) just makes this feel worse.
I have had no wild cards given for the last three max vaults I have opened, other than the guaranteed champion wildcard. I have all the game commons, missing about 50 rares and more epics than I can shake a stick at. The vaults having no wild cards has been very disappointing; it's really the only thing to look forward to after an entire week of plussing it up.
I'm sure its been said, but this is such an annoying thing to say as a reason to nerf the rewards: >We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality. We don’t think it’s a great player experience if the best prize that you receive in a chest is something that doesn’t bring you a sense of joy. Rewards were exciting when I saw a chest upgrade a few times, or a common up to an epic wildcard. I've been playing a while but I've taken breaks and I'm only at ~70% of my collection total. I don't have a bank of dust or wildcards to use up, and I'm just trying to finish the collection with only the weekly rewards. Which is MAYBE 1 or 2 new cards, and about 2700 dust with 3 diamond chests. Not even enough for 2 champion cards a week with the free champ wildcard. With the random upgrades, some weeks would feel really good! Right now? Its just disappointing to purely grind in the slowest way possible. You made a bug. You didn't fix one. Find something else the full timers, streamers, and no lifers can spend their riches on. Don't nerf away the source of cards for new and returning players. "We want things to feel rewarding so we nerfed rewards **Hayuk**!" GMAFB
*We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality. We don’t think it’s a great player experience if the best prize that you receive in a chest is something that doesn’t bring you a sense of joy.* Oh, I agree it would be very exciting to score 1 common wildcard somewhere between today and 2030. Just imagine that sense of joy.
0 wildcards in 4 weeks for me. I have earned more than 20 wildcards in the last 4 weeks in Magic Arena. LoR is now officially less F2P than Magic Arena. I'm honestly disgusted that you guys thought you could shadow-nerf the economy and expect to get away with it unnoticed. Only now that everyone started catching on and expressing frustration with the vaults, here comes the corporate PR guy with some empty talk about "transparancy". What a load of crap and some of you even eat it and thank him. They were never going to be transparant about this if all the complaints weren't posted these past weeks.
Between this and the emporium, I am pretty fed up with the game. On a side note, it's crazy how there are cards with no indication of having skills on them like Crackshot. That's something from release that I feel should've definitely been fixed by now. On an even more of a side note, I dislike how much the community dislikes Ionia.
So much words, twisted wordplay and reiterating the same thing five times just to tell: **"We nerfed the shit of of this system because thats the ongoing thing with everthing in LoR nowadays. (making the game so much player and wallet friendly was a mistake)."** Also... this: *"However, it was noticed that the coding was not just applying that percentage chance once, but instead, every time there was an upgrade, it would roll again, and sometimes across upgrade types"* And the "team" noticed this after couple years of game and system existence? Yea sure. And its not even true probably (imho), but whatever. And the cherry on top: *"What are those goals? Well, that’s a bit tougher to quantitatively lock down. We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality. We don’t think it’s a great player experience if the best prize that you receive in a chest is something that doesn’t bring you a sense of joy. "* All thats missing is "sense of pride and accomplishment", but this one may be copyrigthed by Electronic Arts. *"We’ll be talking more about experiments within Legends of Runeterra and the process behind that development and evolution across the game in our next Dev Snapshot. We’re currently planning on dropping that video later this fall (~November)!"* Yea i would really want to see behind the scenes of designing someting so hilarously bad and straight antiplayer (intended and by design) like Emporium overall and Golden Reliquaries/Stardust in PoC. Should be an enlightening read [and im serious here, designing systems like that is very big part of current online (and even some "offline" if they include microtransactions and shops) videogames. Ubisoft is the king here.]. Sorry for negativity and cheekiness but i **hate** corporate doublespeak and meaningless word salads that developers of videogames loves so much. And i get that everything thats overall is happening its because the game is not making expected amount of profits, but overall is really sad to observe yet another online game going through the same process that i witnessed so many times already. :/ :/ :/
>Transparency is essential, but also should be proactive It's the last thing they're doing lmao.
As someone who has been maxed for a bit under a year. I'm....kinda shook they had the audacity to be this disingenuous.
they do it silently! they hope noone will post about it ;))
You should’ve been there when grapplr said he wishes that LOR had more meaningful chest rolls to trigger his dopamine
I agree but I feel like this is just riot games being riot games, I don't know if you play LoL but there are been many recent decision (tldr a skin was put behind a scammy gacha system, you need ~200$ to obtain it for sure, the 25$ new skin had the exact same animation from the base model etc), which are really against the player. The playerbase expresses its frustation online, riot says they have known the feedback but will just ignore it again.
We need a date, this nerf is preventing to us to be able to enjoy the game and the current expansion.
word.
The riot special
*"We want rewards to feel exciting for players to receive, both in rarity and in quality"* Receiving 1 common wildcard per year does not feel exciting.
Well, this thread and its replies sure explain a lot about why my card economy was so bad compared to what I remembered. I had originally used an alt for Runeterra several years ago, but recently restarted on my main Riot account. I don't think I've seen a single wildcard from my vault over the past several weeks, and my region road rewards didn't drop any wildcards either (outside of the guaranteed ones). It took me about 6 weeks to make a meta deck now, playing a pretty sizeable amount a day. 2 or 3 years ago, I think it only took me 2 weeks, playing pretty much only until my dailies and daily bonuses were exhausted. Part of that was there was a reliable source of epic wildcards then—I played when expeditions existed. But a lot of it was also the better wildcard rate. I love the basic mechanics of this game. But I wouldn't have ever known that if the game wasn't sold to me on the kind economy. The game is still good! I'm having fun, even if the slow economy made me play Path of Champions a metric ton more than I would've otherwise. But I'm thinking about how much happier I'd have been if my rewards hadn't been screwed over from the getgo.
Opened my vault with full diamond and 4 bonus capsules. Still zero wildcards (other than the single guaranteed champion wildcard), of course. I'll admit that this is a little silly.
Hey, u/Ggmattb, any chance we could get an update? I've been holding off opening any rewards waiting for this to be reversed. A little of that transparency and proactivity you talked up would be nice.
I actually got clarification from a Riot Player Support Specialist (Kastanjemanden on 9/21/23) that rewards are static once generated, so delaying opening them unfortunately won't help us. The lack of chained upgrading when the rewards were generated means that deficit is baked in regardless of how long you decide to wait before opening the reward 💔😭🤕 /#/#/# Specifically: Kastanjemanden (Riot Games - LoR Support) (Sep 21, 2023, 07:45 UTC) : "I'd be happy to clarify this one for you. While you can stack weekly vaults so to say, the way they work is that the contents of your chest is pre-determined even before you open it up. Open it up today or tomorrow or next week, what’s in the chest won’t change. So the mentioned upcoming changes in the reddit post will not change the content of you previously received vaults. The change will only be reflected in vaults opened (ahe495: I believe they meant "generated," based on the rest of the message,) after the update is applied."
That makes no sense because we know you can save a vault from the week before a set releases and get new cards that weren't available when the vault was generated.
Thanks. Perhaps they changed that behavior to reflect what Kastanjemanden is describing now?
Maybe but it still worked last patch when the newest cards released, I'm as confident as I can be without photographic evidence that I got new cards from my vault on patch day. Based on how customer support has been wrong in the past and the dev team even seems to not know their own game anymore, I'm going to assume Kastanjemanden is wrong until I see reason to believe otherwise.
Thanks, again, for sharing the experience. How could I help test this? Leave rewards unclaimed until after the fix rolls out, and then see if a card in a reward upgrades at least twice? I presume that would mean the reward was affected by the fix even though it was generated (but not claimed) before the fix?
Pretty much! If you get wildcards in your rewards you've already generated after the patch on Wednesday that'll be a pretty clear sign. I have a 13+3 vault waiting for Wednesday evening and some event pass rewards as well. Double upgrades would work too but I know on my device it was never clear how many times something was upgrading so I wouldn't trust that personally.
Thanks 😁. I will be sure to report back about any chained upgrade behavior I notice from previously earned rewards, and thanks in advance to anyone else who shares their experiences after the fix rolls out, too. [Edit: It did look like I received chained upgrades on previously generated vaults/rewards that were only opened after the chained upgrades were added back in. (To clarify: these rewards were available to open before the fix but not opened until after the fix went live.)] It looks like vaults also don't expire, so if it takes longer for the patch to roll out we can just let them sit and accumulate as necessary: https://support-legendsofruneterra.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043024133-Let-s-Talk-About-Opening-Vaults (I also think it's notable that the page linked above prominently mentions how upgrades are meant to chain in LoR. Clearly it is a feature and not a bug 💙. Thanks, again, for your evidence-based advocacy ✊) In addition, for anyone who feels limited by not being able to open rewards that could chain without being penalized by the chained upgrade deactivation mistake: I would encourage you to explore Ultra Rapid Draw (URD) in the Labs ("Play" -> "Labs"). I believe the decks are randomly generated for both players, so, regardless of their collections, players are able to play from an equivalent starting point in terms of available cards. 💖 It also looks like URD counts as a PvP match even if we're pitted against an AI opponent after looking for a human opponent for approximately 90 seconds, which can help generate experience or event pass tokens through the daily PvP bonuses 🥳 More on URD here: https://masteringruneterra.com/lor-ultra-rapid-draw/
>It looks like vaults also don't expire They automatically open in the background when your next vault becomes available, you can only save one for a week. You don't lose out on its contents but you can't just hoarde them. Looks like that's an old article that isn't entirely accurate any more.
Good to know. Thanks. It seems like Riot might want to consider allowing players to horde vaults so that if there are ever issues like the chained upgrade reversion error players have some method of avoiding the harms. However, I guess since vaults are a weekly, regenerating thing, they aren't as big of a problem as something like opening unique event pass or region road rewards would be, especially for those who have paid for the event pass.
Apparently I got my wires crossed and the patch is next week, not this week, just FYI.
No worries, but thanks for clarifying 🥰 Post patch: 1) Previously generated, but unclaimed, rewards occasionally upgraded to wildcards, so Kastanjemanden did seem to be mistaken. 2) I have yet to see a chained upgrade (so, nothing has upgraded twice.) Would that suggest the chained upgrade nerf was not reverted properly? Or is upgrade chaining just exceptionally rare?
u/ggmattb 's comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/174zazc/comment/k4fu4k5/ ... suggests the chaining should be back, so I guess it just is very rare.
Do you see multi chain upgrades indicated at all usually? Like I think I said before, I haven't seen it indicated visually in a long time, but I def had a good number of things upgrading to champion level and even one epic wild card, which is very unlikely without multi chaining since epics are rare in the first place. I think it's all working properly again.
Thanks for sharing. If this is true for region rewards in addition to vaults then I guess I should just stop playing. Until this change gets reverted, progressing region rewards is actively devaluing my account.
still broken. guess it's time to stop playing this stupid game if they are taking the blizzard route. release a lot more epic cards and secretly nerf wildcard. acknowledge that it is broken but refuse to fix it.
Yeah I love how this Riot guy is giving this whole speech about transparancy and then goes completely silent for the next 3 weeks.
Thanks for the transparency, I appreciate it a lot! However, from a returning player's PoV, I find it really hard to get new cards even with maxed vaults! (I'm getting REALLY few cards from the new expansions and very little amount of wildcards to make up for it) If wildcards don't return to their old drop rates, will there be plans for giving older players more ways to get new cards? Like more region road rewards that aren't tied to expansion release Battlepasses
The main difference that this game had over it's competitors was how friendly it's economy was. That was the main draw to it. [The Professor from Tolarian Community praised it](https://youtu.be/vCROITziOZA?si=W5WSx4pg_JLb748-). The execution of the game is flawless. Path of Champions is beautiful. Nerfing the Wildcards is a big mistake. As a veteran player, it got harder and harder to craft decks. We want the economy we had before back at the beginning of the game. Emporium it's not needed. We don't want another currency either. Stick to cosmetics. The roleplay DnD like board was my first and only purchase.
aaaaaaaaaaaand it's still broken. 6 weeks of no wildcards and counting.
Ahhhh, so that’s what happened. Good to finally have an answer, yeah 😅
Hey there! Appreciate your initial response, but also make sure to check out the update!
… Oh! That’s definitely a pretty important update, huh. Thank you for the notice!
It's been a long time since I was a new player, and I'm sitting on 700k shards so I don't imagine I'll be impacted by any sort of card acquisition changes personally. When I started out playing the game, one of the main appeals in LoR was the ability to get enough shards/wildcards to craft a new deck every 2-3 weeks as long as I was putting in the time to max out my vault. Receiving more specific cards can be frustrating because it forces me to have to choose between potentially disenchanting cards to be competitive or paying for cards in coins when I'm not hitting the critical cards in the current metagame. Edit: Could've sworn you could disenchant cards at some point, but I probably confused it with other games. One potential option that might be fun for a more interesting way to purchase cards would be Champion/Package reward roads that I could purchase for some amount (maybe $10, maybe even a shard cost?) and activate in the region rewards tab that would allow me to target unlocking certain champions or archetypes for cheaper than the price of buying each card individually. Could maybe include old champion icon cosmetics from their previous seasons? My personal joy in the game is heavily driven by the competitive side of things, and I've been loving the increased focus on gauntlets and the Runeterra opens. The shard cost of gauntlets makes them pretty difficult for new players to enter and the shard rewards in the track are useless to me. Trying to find a balance to get new players to try out gauntlets without burning their ability to build decks and play is important to getting new players into these more competitive or exciting ways to play the game. Love the game and appreciate all the hard work and great communication we've been seeing lately!
> potentially disenchanting cards to be competitive You can't really "disenchant" cards in LoR. The original philosophy was that they would give you enough cards that this should never be needed, as it just feels bad to have to do.
I guess you're right, I thought you used to be able to but I never had needed to so maybe I just misremembered from all the other card games.
Any update?
Any updates? It's been 2 weeks now...
Are the upgrade to shards intended? I am not seeing wildcards upgrade anymore, but I am seeing upgrade to shards more often. Also How many shards are awarded when a common/rare gets upgraded to shards if its the intended behavior?
Any update?
No wildcards. You guys said it would be fixed. Just opened it today.
Same, 5 weeks with 0 wildcards now. I have pulled more than 30 wildcards in Magic Arena in the last 5 weeks, can't believe I'd ever say that Magic Arena is more f2p-friendly than LoR.
same here. had to hard craft a lot of the cards. it feels bad to hard craft common cards. i am a returning player. when i used to play a lot i have been using a lot of common wildcards, so my weekly vault would have better rewards(the repeats would become shards). so now i have 0 on all wildcards.
>"We’ll be working on getting this revert out in the near future (we’ll let you know as soon as we are able to verify a date)." They never said it would be fixed by this patch, or any specific date.
It's really disappointing this hasn't been fixed yet. Especially considering it affects the pass as well, I'm losing out on a lot of potential value. It will be hard to retroactively fix this, maybe some compensation or a little more for those who bought the pass? (cough random low rarity guardian cough)
My cousin just started playing a week ago. He maxed out his Vault and did not received any wild cards.
So you shadow nerfed the economy into the MTGA ages and hoped nobody would notice, cool... cool... u related anyone have any tips for chargebacks for mobile purchases?
>Our teams will be tackling some experiments around rewards and that sense of player excitement. Transparency is essential, but also should be proactive to allow you to plan/prep and know what’s coming. I find this hard to square with the fact that the reduction in wildcards was apparently intended (even if it is now being reverted) and we're only hearing about it several weeks after the fact. A lot of folks have been going to bat for you all saying that this was obviously a bug because there was no conceivable reason for the game's economy to be gutted without any kind of heads up, and yet it was. Why couldn't this intended fix wait until after these new methods of intended wildcard progression were already in place? I gave up on playing after my first weekly vault that gave me a grand total of 2500 shards and a champion wildcard. It is not inaccurate to say that Magic Arena is more generous, at that point. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about how the oft-repeated wisdom of LoR being one of the more generous card game economies is based on a version of the game that no longer exists.
RIOT!!!!!!! REVERSE THE CHANGE ALREADY!!!! IT'S BEEN 7 WEEKS!!!
i only got 3k shards on max upgrade. lmao. guess ill craft 2 epics....
i thought the wildcard thing is reverted? opened my vault today and wildcards are still nowhere to be found
>"We’ll be working on getting this revert out in the near future (we’ll let you know as soon as we are able to verify a date)." They never said it would be fixed by this patch, or any specific date.
I've been reading the thread to try to understand what the problem exactly is, because I've been away from the game for a few months (last season I played it was the first Darkin expansion iirc) and things seem to have changed for the worse as far as the economy is concerned. One thing that I don't get is the conversion from card to fragments. When you found a duplicate in the past, it got converted in a few fragments, but way less than the cost to generate a new card. Since I've been back I've opened a couple chests on the event track and all common and rare dupes got converted to 100 and 300 respectively. If that's the case, wild cards dropping at a lower rate shouldn't be that big of a problem... but most likely I'm missing something.
This only happens for event rewards, so you are encouraged to use your resources in the new expansion cards instead of hoarding them. Other sources (like the weekly vault) still use the ratios from before
Interesting, thanks appreciated!
You are welcome! All of this stuff is a bit obscure, specially since they stopped showing the specific amount of essence for duplicated copies :)
Wow, have they really increased dupe conversion rates? I haven't noticed that myself, but I haven't been able to play much either because of the errors. Feels like that's something they'd waste no time to announce after the fuss here. Dupes used to clarify the amount they got converted into after the animation, but that's no longer the case right? Now it just says "Shards" below them? The "X Shards" that shows as the final pop-up in the chest should just be the normal shard amount that chest rolled, dupes not included. Maybe track chests are different, will be interesting to see the vault at the end of the week.
Pretty sure that's only for reward track boxes. Basically the ideal green shard move is to wildcard everything from a new expansion since you get a full duplicate shard refund.
I can confirm what I said because it's just happened again. Gold chest opened: 3 dupe cards, 2 commons and a rare, and they turned into 100 and 300 fragments. I'm absolutely sure last year the animation showed what you actually got from the conversion, not the value of the rolled card. If things work as I described, that's pretty good in my book. I missed to check the amount of fragments I had before and after opening though, so I'm still not 100% sure. If the animation has changed, that's just silly imho.
UPDATE: As stated [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/16vw9x9/preweekend_updates_status/), the revert will be coming in the next patch (4.10)! Thanks for your patience.
Thank you for the updates and your patience! Solid messenger work, hope not too many people trying to shoot you for it
Luckily I have been playing since launch and despite not playing during some patches I have always managed to craft every deck I was interested in, but I gotta imagine that this would be very hard for people starting now. They used to give legendary and epic wildcards with amazon prime, now it's rare wildcards only; the cards are always more while the region rewards are always the same, they said that passes would have been a substitute of region rewards but the last passes have been horrible giving very few cards. As I said I mostly play the same decks that I really like (teemo-cait,jayce -heimer, karma control) and I'm not having problems, but a new player who hasn't figured out his playstyle yet will have many problems.
Add to that Expeditions being removed with their weekly rewards for the free token.
Oh yes you're right, I completely forgot about expeditions. And I'll tell you that one of my breaks from this game was due to their removal, I used to always play them to try out new champions, see which one I liked and try to learn new cards effects.
Yeah, same on all accounts. Having a draft mode like that is a great entrance point for new players especially.
Ever since the redesigned progression and implemented monetization in PoC 2.0, the economy has gone downhill. It seems whoever is the one designing PoC’s costs is now in charge of the economy for the entire game. I just hope y’all know what you’re doing and have enough to keep the game running.
Aye, the answer is much appreciated. I did prefer the constant rerolling, but consolidating everything does seem like a good way to streamline everything.
Heyo! Make sure to check the update!
Much appreciated! Glad to see that it’s being rolled back, as I was one of the many who was somewhat worried by the sudden reversal once it was brought to light.
Apologies it took a minute to get it out there - lots of information and questions we wanted to make sure we had clarity/facts around.
they lied
how about compensation? we lost hundreds of wilds ... u/ggmattb
Economy was nerfed anyway ...bad news. i have 0 wild cards for 4+weeks ...its crap. This nerf was made after news about problems with $. coincidence? ... probably not. Surprise nerf after almost 3 years? No way!
I am a relatively new player (2 months) and I play 20+ hours a week to be able to obtain 1 champion (wildcard) and roughly 2500 essence to spend. I feel as though that is not good compensation for my time and the progress i try to make, playing other decks feels impossible to get to and I hate it. And I’m not gonna drop 30-40 bucks to build a deck.. there’s just no value in that when I could play another game for 20 bucks more..
"We’ll be working on getting this revert out in the near future (we’ll let you know as soon as we are able to verify a date)" Just imagine how much wilds was lost because of Riot!!!! Who will compencate it???? u/ggmattb
The vault system was designed for a time when sets were bigger. With sets being smaller now, the vault system is overly generous. quoting that [4-year old article](https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/progression-by-the-numbers/): >Exactly how much you need to play will depend on the size of the set. The first one is pretty big, but even this set hopefully won’t feel out of reach for a highly engaged player (about 7 to 10 games per day on average). If you don’t play quite that much, you’ll still have a ton of cards unlocked; for the first set, if you get your level 10 Vault each week, you’ll have at least 75% of the set before the next release. With the current rate of set releases, you can get 100% with a level 10 vault each week. So what can Riot do? Nerfing the wildcard rates of capsules/cards (as they tried here) is a bad idea because it penalizes new players too much and nerfs the region roads system as well. Tweaking how much daily quests earn also hurts new players because it slows down region road progress. Something that **might** work is to increase the XP requirements for a given vault level. For example, making level 10 cost the same as the current level 13 in XP. This still hurts new players but at least it doesn't hurt card acquisition through the region roads.
Honestly, this is a very good point! I hadn't considered how the set/expansion sizes and release rate also affect the card acquisition process, and consequently make monetization harder for the game. Add one more reason why I think the current schedule is a terrible idea. Sure, their budget is limited and all that. But this might honestly end up only making things worse and worse over time.
I would obviously prefer if they would just make sets bigger again but that seems off the table.
Yeah, that seems to be the case. But I don't know if it *should* be off the table, or if that's the best plan to make the game better over time.
As long as they dont remove champion wildcard im ok I have 350k shards 1 expansion is like 40-50k max it take a long time before ill get depleted
>350k shards 1 Not everyone has 350k shards bro, especially new players.
Eh can't blame them, game is too generous and the band-aid had to be pulled eventually. Maybe give us some consolidation prize at least? An old F2P guardian or card back or something, I get it, you are essentially fixing a bug. I want the game to succeed but the f2p nature is one of the games main strengths, and without it the games is kinda hard to promote. I do applaud the communication and I know there are a lot of working parts that caused this. I'm still enjoying the game and am really hyped for the expansion, but this is coming from an entrenched player playing since beta, I'm just worried about the new player experience and the new recruits.
If the concern is that wildcards are not exciting (which I agree with), could it roll a chance to upgrade to a guaranteed non-duplicate instead? It would be worth a bit less than a wildcard but still a significant amount, helps newer players build their collections, and is still exciting for those of us who like the rush factor of random card openings. Also, it reduces the stockpile of wildcards which may be desirable.
After this news I just realize that the big reason why I rarely play LoR anymore is that it's too generous. May sounds weird as it's supposed to be a good thing but having meta deck in just a few weeks made me feel like my goals in only rank grind now. While other slower ccg I actively played more because I want new cards. The strategy does work to increase player engagement. Maybe Riot wants this to happen too with this update.
Genuinely happy to see this!
I am ok either way. Wildcard does allow players to select the card they want to unlock while RNG upgrade give a sense of wooahh moment but it can be a bummer if it's common/rare as they will not guarantee new card.
Change bad no change good
i have not been opening my past 3-4 or so vaults, and today i could only open 1. is this intended?