@game devs: simple things you can do to make this game better

[ShinyMegaRay]

I have a few ideas for things that should be implemented in ptcgo. I believe these ideas could help improve the quality and fairness of this game.

 

1) Allow coins to be traded. This would be much more balanced and stable than using packs as the primary player-establish currency in the game.

2) Do something about gem gameplays. Since the removal of gems, only the EXTREMELY wealthy players can afford these amazing looking items. Also there are many gameplay items that are either unobtainable or all of them are trade locked. I cannot tell you how much I would like to have something like the silver munchlax coin in my collection. Stop taunting your players with these gameplays, either implement them or remove them. Maybe consider giving a rare gameplay item to players to complete or exceed the limits of the versus ladder.

3) Improve the trading system. It takes forever for trade offers to load. I've always thought it would be cool if you could view how many people have viewed your public trade offer and see who is currently viewing your collection in the trading post. In general, the current trading system is very buggy and slow. The ability for a player to view the average trading value of a certain cards would also be really cool.

4) Make the versus ladder worth the players' time. Nobody wants to grind the ladder for 6 hours to get a trade locked FA plumeria or something else bad. Try a FA cynthia or something. Also I don't understand the point of trade locking cards earned from the ladder. You should atleast be able to trade your FA plumeria for a couple packs on the public trade.

5) Add playmats. Pretty self-explanatory.

6) Make tournaments more interesting. Maybe instead of only 8 man tournaments add 16 or 32 man tournaments. Prizes currently suck, but atleast the packs are tradable. Maybe give out gem gameplays or a rare card as a prize. This is a stretch, but it would be amazing if every month there was a huge tournament where players could compete for championships points towards their world's invite.

7) A ranking system would be fun. Maybe the top 3 players earn some kind of award at the end of each month.

 

These are just a few of the ideas I have that could improve this game soooooooo much. One of my main fears is that with the removal of gems, most high value items in the game will be accumulated into a few accounts owned by only the wealthiest players. This could become very toxic very quickly. Pokemon is one of the world's largest franchises. Improving your online trading card game would be a great way to give back to your community. If you like my ideas, feel free to thank me with a silver munchlax coin :-P

[Sakura150612]

1) Not sure what you mean. Even if coins were tradable, the only things you can buy with Tokens are tradelocked stuff, so you'd be back to square one as far as establishing a more manageable currency goes. The next step would be to make tradelocked cards tradable, but that won't happen for a number of reasons that have been thoroughly discussed in this forum already.

 

2) I agree that they should do something about gem cards and gameplays, but our community has been complaining about that for years and there is still no response. The removal of gems means that, at the very least, they won't be releasing more region-exclusive content that forces anyone outside of Canada to pay an arm and a leg for a single card. Of course, there's still plenty of the older gem things that are circulating at completely absurd prices and I'd like to see them made accessible as much as you do. All I'm saying is that it's better to not get your hopes up because this is one of those topics where we receive little to no answer whenever it's brought up.

 

3) Certain tweaks would be nice for sure. I can agree to that.

 

4) Nope, can't agree here. No one forces you to grind, you're just given the option to rise the ladder if something that catches your interest shows up. You can disagree with me, but I don't think people should complain about free things. The cards on the ladder are just a nice bonus and should be taken as such. One of the reasons why the ladder rewards are locked (as well as the reason why most of the freebies given in the game are locked) is because it'd be way too easy for people to exploit it and farm rewards without much effort. This is also more likely to invite bot users to make chaos everywhere. We''d also be risking the return of "genting" or other forms of collusion as there would be more incentives for excessive grinding. The whole thing could become a mess, it's better to leave it as it is.

 

5) Could be interesting, but the community's opinion seems to be divided when it comes to visual changes. Some people love them, others hate them, and a lot of people wish that they would spend more time working on other more pressing issues than making a visual update. If this is something they can do on the side with relatively little time commitment, then I wouldn't mind.

 

6) The idea of tournaments larger than 8 people circulated for a while but it seems that no one speaks of that possibility anymore. Could be an interesting idea as well though.

 

7) Wouldn't mind it, but they would have to come out with a proper ranking system and not the points shown in the current leaderboards (which basically just show who has grinded the most). There are other priorities right now if you ask me, but it could be something that they could do in the future.

[XK920XK]

1) Disagree with this strongly, this encourages the use of multiple farming accounts, there was just another post posted today about bots farming up vs points, now imagine if they get added benefits of tradable coins too.

 

2) I will admit that when i first started to really get into this game i wanted these items and cards to be easily available to all. But now (i as someone who never owned a single gem vivid) look at this as a challenge. Its something i can now strive for and try to get. It keeps me playing the game because its almost like an achievement. What else am i going to do if these items were so easily obtainable. Look at all the players have own these, they basically all went into a hiatus mode except for when new sets comes out cause they have nothing else to strive for since they have everything already.

 

3) I can tell you one reason why trades load up the way they do, its because of server load reasons. Its the same exact reason major email services and popular online shopping sites dont show you all your emails and all the items you search for at once. It will create a server overload and or data overload on receivers end. if too many people are doing trades and it send out these request constantly it will slow down the server and not to mention not everyones computer is able to handle a full trade listing in one shot.

 

4) Same reason as i stated in #1, if you make vs ladder stuff tradable, people will just create farming accounts and get a ton of tradeable cards.

 

5) I agree, add these in, it will add something new to game

 

6) 8 man events takes too long for players already, so many complaint threads on here about how long players take to play, imagine doubling that time, yea right. Also, the game use to have higher end events for 24 tickets and give out gameplays and bigger prizes but not sure why they stopped, im assuming its because few players bothered to play them.

 

7) TPCi proably doesnt want this to be competitive online, they want players playing IRL. It even clearly states on the website that the online game is made to be a practice area where you can take hone your skills. This basically says that the online game is just for practice and no ranks will probably be added anytime soon or if ever.

[ShinyMegaRay]

Thanks for the response!

Regarding the worries about bots wrecking havoc, I feel like certain measure could be put in place to reduce this problem. For example, if you concede a match you receive no reward or progress towards the ladder. If this was implemented, unless your a super intelligent AI, you would never advance in the ladder.

Maybe tokens wouldn't be a great universal currency system, but I feel that a different currency should be implemented. Perhaps players could receive points or something when they redeem packs and the points could be traded or exchanged for coins. This isn't the most essential feature, but I feel that something like this could bring much needed stability to the game's economy.

If anyone has other ideas I'd love to hear. Who knows, maybe the game devs are listening.

Edited February 17, 2019 by ShinyMegaRay

[ShinyMegaRay]

Also to be clear, I'm not advocating to have gem gameplays handed out like candy. I agree that having ultra rare items in the game gives the players a fun goal to strive for. I'm mostly concerned that the top 0.0001% of players will ***** the gem gameplays. It is also annoying to have items that everybody wants, but cannot be traded for or even obtained (namely most of the silhouette gameplays and some coins).

[Sakura150612]

Believe me, if we remove the lock on free things, people WILL find ways to exploit the system. Rather than open up that possibility, it's better to leave the current system in place. Keep in mind that while the devs are trying to figure out how to "patch" against exploitative behavior of different natures, the decent players that are just trying to play the game normally will have to put up with genters, rage stallers, bots and who knows what else. And this is assuming they do find a permanent solution to stop these people (not very likely). It's just not worth it.

[Mod_Alder]

Hello trainers, thank you all for posting your great feedback. I will go ahead and forward this thread to the support team. 

[BowserLuigi]

Thanks for the response!

 

Regarding the worries about bots wrecking havoc, I feel like certain measure could be put in place to reduce this problem. For example, if you concede a match you receive no reward or progress towards the ladder. If this was implemented, unless your a super intelligent AI, you would never advance in the ladder.

 

Maybe tokens wouldn't be a great universal currency system, but I feel that a different currency should be implemented. Perhaps players could receive points or something when they redeem packs and the points could be traded or exchanged for coins. This isn't the most essential feature, but I feel that something like this could bring much needed stability to the game's economy.

 

If anyone has other ideas I'd love to hear. Who knows, maybe the game devs are **********

How is punishing concedes supposed to help combat bots which don't concede? Edited February 18, 2019 by BowserLuigi

[SuperStone]

Punishing concessions isn't the ideal route forward, since the rewards go to the other person, not the one who conceded.  Also, most players regularly concede games that are over in board position if not in fact, and they shouldn't be penalized for that.  What they did when they were cracking down on Genting was temp-ban accounts that conceded too quickly too often.  This could possibly work against reward-bots, but it's just really not worth the hastle.

[ShinyMegaRay]

I doubt it would be too difficult to crack down on bot accounts that display certain characteristics such as, but not limited to:

- logging on, collecting the daily reward, and rarely participating in any other parts of the game.

- conceding to a majority of games within the first few turns

- stalling out games

- only completing trades with one centralized account

 

I know that in some multiplayer video games, abandoning a match can result in a temporary ban or other punishments. Maybe implement a system where if a player concedes within the first 3 turns of a match, they have a cooldown period of 10 minutes where they cannot battle again. Punishment could be increased for people(bots) that stall matches. Maybe instead of daily rewards, they could have daily challenges (i.e KO 5 pokemon in versus) to prevent bot accounts from farming daily rewards. Finally, what if a new, tradable currency is introduced that players get when redeeming codes. For example, redeeming a pack would give the player a pack + X amount of this currency. This currency could also be obtained through progressing in the versus ladder. I think that this game would be more enjoyable if there was a formal currency that is more stable than packs. I briefly discussed this idea in one of my previous posts.

[Sakura150612]

I know that in some multiplayer video games, abandoning a match can result in a temporary ban or other punishments.

I don't know if you're thinking about the same game I am, but if you're thinking about League of Legends then there's a huge difference with the PTCGO. In LoL you must form part of a 5 player team in a game that lasts at least around 20 minutes and where you cannot be replaced. If you leave, you're leaving your teammates in a 4v5 situation, all but guaranteeing their loss most of the times. Having your opponent concede really fast does not even amount to a minor annoyance when compared to being held hostage for 30 minutes in a hopeless game and with no way out (unless you want to afk as well and take the potential punishment). Even if you had a different game in mind, I sincerely doubt we're talking about 1v1 games such as the PTCG. Implementing a punishment for fast concedes would be an unwise decision. I'm glad that no such thing exists in this game and I hope that it's never implemented either. I refuse to be held hostage in this game as well when I open with an unwinnable hand and be forced to watch my opponent slowly play out 3 turns before I'm finally released.

 

Attempting to create an anti-bot system is not worth the effort it would take and it's not worth risking the damage bots could do because we suddenly decided to change the perfectly good rewards system we currently have. There's an old internet adage that says "don't fix what ain't broken", and I think it fits this situation well.

 

EDIT: About the idea of a new currency established by the game, I'm not too sure of what that's going to achieve. It would "equalize" the value of packs since they all give the same amount of that currency. However:

 

1) Packs will still be tradable. If people want to keep using them as money, they will.

 

2) People will have no incentive to use this parallel currency system over packs if given a choice. The main issue is that packs have inherent value due to being a direct source of cards, while this theoretical currency will not be worth anything by itself. For this reason having packs will always be safer.

 

3) There's also another problem, and that's that making all packs have effectively the same value is not necessarily a good thing. I don't major in economy or anything even remotely similar, so what I have to say is just my speculation based on my experience, but people generally don't like fixed prices or prices that have been artificially modified. The markets work the best when they are free, and when someone else decides for you what your goods are worth (in this case, the developers deciding that all packs are worth the same) people tend to find ways of getting the true worth out of their goods in one way or another (and in the worst case scenario, black markets arise and things are sold at super inflated prices). I don't think that people will necessarily offer cards at a much higher value than their theoretical equivalent in packs, but I do think that the prices of cards will adjust accordingly to undo the "equalization" done to pack values (for example, cards comming from low value packs may conserve the 1 to 1 equivalence in price between the new currency and packs, but cards from higher value packs might end up being significantly more expensive to pay in the new currency as opposed to packs). TL;DR, even if you "stabilize" the currency by making all packs worth the same, people will adjust the prices of cards to reflect the actual market value of the packs they come from. And again, that only IF the new currency catches on (and that's a big if; my guess is that it won't).

 

I'm sure there are others out there that are as skeptical as I am. That said, I'd like to hear the opinion of big traders. Personally I wouldn't be willing to put my faith on a representative currency that fixes prices (not on the cards, but on the packs) given a choice to deal in packs, and I don't think that many others would either. But still, it'd be interesting to hear what the people that would be most affected by a major change such as this have to say.

Edited February 27, 2019 by Sakura150612

[Nitron2097]

The only improvement I'd like to see is a way to turn my 2,000-plus trade locked copies of every common card into something more useful. I know this creates a farming possibility so it can't be anything crazy, but maybe like 500 trade locked extra cards get you 10 coins or something, or another simple exchange like that.