Tournaments’ New Format
I’ve heard uncountable praises about the tournaments since @weirdbeard took over this task. And, don’t make me wrong, I love the energy he has brought as well as the changes he tries to implement. In other words, I respect the work the team puts in.
My post is not intended as a criticism of the work that has been done. I would simply like to raise a point that I think might be worth considering. It all comes down to the fact that Collection Power does not reflect the competitiveness of a deck, to say the least.
Modern Bronze Blunderbuss Tournament
This week, I was participating in a tournament named Modern Bronze Blunderbuss. I was able to join it for a fee of 2 SPS as I was still in Silver at the time. When I got back to it a day later, I saw that being in Gold would have cost me 40 SPS to enter!
This is a bit tricky for me. While I understand that this has been put in place to prevent higher players to play in lower leagues tournaments, I am not sure that this works as intended.
Personally, I am far away from a maxed-out Bronze deck, even though I do play in Gold III thanks to the purchase of cheap CP. More importantly, I believe that many others are in this situation.
Collection Power does not reflect the Competitiveness of a Deck
Most of my Collection Power comes from Reward Cards, which is the cheapest way of getting Power, but we know that the CP does not match the monsters’ actual strength in the game.
If the overall objective of the development team is to incentivize players to go up in leagues, this jump in Tournament fees does not align with this goal as it pushes me not to go up.
By the way, I purposefully lost a few matches to get back to Silver and see if the fees would revert to 2 SPS for the next Modern Bronze Blunderbuss Tournament. And, to their credit I suppose, this little experiment didn’t trick the fees system.
So, the main thing that this limit does effectively is to discourage players from moving up in leagues the next season if they want to participate in Tournaments that match the level of their Deck Value, not their Collection Power.
In fact, I’ve been matched with many players with much stronger decks than mine. Some were even from the top of the Silver Leaderboard. Thus, does this new format really work as intended?
I do understand those players who stay in Silver while they could easily go up in leagues. The current incentives, Tournaments being a huge part of it, seem to make their choice worth it.
The Deck Value, a much better Gauge?
In the end, I got totally destroyed, but that was okay as the tournament was kindly designed to give back the 2 SPS fees as long as we were in the first 256 places. There were 267 participants.
Sure, I recognize that my poor performance was certainly due to a lack of skills. Yet, I still do manage to play in Gold most of the time, so isn’t there an issue in the way the players are filtered?
The Deck Value or the DEC per Dollar-cost ratio, even though they are not perfect, would be in my opinion much better suited to sort the players.
Those two indicators, contrary to the CP, take into account the actual strength of each monster in the current meta.
So, @weirdbeard, if you ever read this post, this was my two cents.
I would love your feedback on this! :)
Thank you very much,
Thomas
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