Shop Improvement

All about the shop and the way of improving it
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Gravoid
Posts: 29
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 9:17 pm

Shop Improvement

Post by Gravoid »

First of all, congrats for this GREAT game, it's AWESOME!

Then my sugestions:

- The shop could have a list with all cards available and you could choose which cards you wanna buy (something like in Trophy Room). Have to press the square button (J) during a half of an hour, to find a card that you want, is really sad.

- Another point is the price of the cards, with only one battle you can buy a rare card or more then 20 common cards! I think this is really cheap, especially the price of the rare cards, and if the price goes up a little it won't be bad.

This is only a suggestion, I understand that you are really busy with bugs and etc, but if you have time, this would improve the game experience a LOT!
Psyringe
Posts: 1163
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:53 am

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Psyringe »

Thanks for your suggestions. :)

Regarding the selection of cards in the shop: The shop is meant to let people relive the experience of actually buying cards in a shop in the 90s. This means that "customers" have access to regular boosters, and to a (very limited) selection of singles. In these times, it was very hard to get hold of certain cards - but that wasn't a bad thing. It made people think about what they *could* do with the cards available, and they often ended up with strong decks that they wouldn't even have thought about if they just had gotten the cards that they originally wanted. Also, it made people really happy when they actually *did* see a rare and powerful card for sale.

Hence, the shop is not actually meant to be able to give you any card at any time. You can exploit the "Refresh" feature to get any card if you're using it long enough, but as you said, it's a pretty sad way of playing, and we hope that most players will accept the challenge of building strong decks with the cards available, instead of spending hours exploiting the shop to get exactly the card they want.

Regarding the price: Prices have been discussed before, and will probably continue to be discussed. Personally I think that different people have different preferences with regard to the economic difficulty of the game, and that the only solution to make these people happy is to provide different difficulty settings for this part of the game. No one's working on such a feature at the moment though, and it's currently hard to tell when (and if) it will be implemented. Feel free to suggest a different pricing scheme (but be aware that the current pricing scheme has resulted in much less complaints than the earlier ones, so it's probably pretty near to a "most accepted" solution already).
Gravoid
Posts: 29
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 9:17 pm

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Gravoid »

I didn't have understand why the shop show only some cards, but know that you explain, is cool ideia to try to build a great deck with cards that you don't know.

The raise in the prices is just a ideia, is alright the way it is now.

Writing this now, I had an idea, an "solution" for both problems:

- The creation of a "REQUEST" tool, where you made a request, of ANY card already unlocked, for the seller in the shop, BUT you will have to pay a much more higher price for the card. If the normal price in the shop is 500, you will have to pay around 2.000, for example (4x more).

What do you think?
wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:42 am
Location: Japan

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by wololo »

Gravoid wrote: - The creation of a "REQUEST" tool, where you made a request, of ANY card already unlocked, for the seller in the shop, BUT you will have to pay a much more higher price for the card. If the normal price in the shop is 500, you will have to pay around 2.000, for example (4x more).

What do you think?
I was thinking of doing something exactly like this in the "trophy" room, where you can see all unlocked card. I haven't worked on it yet...
Psyringe
Posts: 1163
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:53 am

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Psyringe »

Gravoid wrote:The creation of a "REQUEST" tool, where you made a request, of ANY card already unlocked, for the seller in the shop, BUT you will have to pay a much more higher price for the card. If the normal price in the shop is 500, you will have to pay around 2.000, for example (4x more).

What do you think?
I think it's a good idea, as long as (like you said) the price for individual cards is really high. Ideally, the price would be high enough so that people will prefer to buy boosters for 95-99% of the cards that they want, but can use the "request tool" for some crucial cards that they just can't seem to get otherwise.

One method to encourage people to buy boosters instead of relying a lot in the request tool, would be to tie the "request price" to the number of cards of that set already owned by the player. In the beginning, when the set has just been unlocked, prices would be extremely high, so buying boosters will be preferable. Later, when the player already owns 60-80% of the implemented cards of that set, prices might drop to a region where requesting some cards becomes a viable alternative. Even then, people can buy boosters, and even if they don't contain the specific cards they want, having more cards of the set will have lowered the prices for requests.
Saint
Posts: 434
Joined: Sat Jan 09, 2010 4:57 pm
Location: Netherlands

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Saint »

The way i see it having to press [] to get new cards is good as it is, its supply and demand if you go to a shop in real life and want to buy lets say a iphone the second it comes out theres a big chance you'll come back empty handed and the whole idea of the shop is that your not the only one buying things there (you actually are but it is sort of faked) and just like a stand on a market, the guy is selling socks so you can buy socks there, if you want razorblades you go to a different stand, and next to that shops go out of stock aswell, same as everyy real life shop.

The idea of you requesting a card to him might be a good one though you can make it task thing aswell, you request a card he says you have to battle a specific deck and you can win the card, or buy it with a discount or whatever (just an idea of mine), simply letting you buy the card for a much higher price, idk if that's that great for the whole shop thing, and next to that the boosters will be rendered completely useless cuz you'll just play a few extra battles and come up with the credit easy as that.
Rather make it a challenge to get the card you really really need.

But then again the challenge thing might be even more fun in the campaingn mode wen/if that's created :P

But then again thats my oppinion.
"The bird of the Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame." - Ripley Scrowle, Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum - 1652
Gravoid
Posts: 29
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 9:17 pm

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Gravoid »

I agree that the challenge idea would be great, but the possibility of request a card, and the shopkepper sell it for a very high price is also great (in my opinion ;) )

The reduction of the price when you have more cards of the set is also essencial, for you encourage people to still buy boosters. But as already said, is pretty boring to really want a card, spend a lot of money buying boosters, a lot of time hitting the square (J) button and still don't find it.

If this upgrade would be implemented, is also necessary some kind of control of how many cards of determined set you already have.
Psyringe
Posts: 1163
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:53 am

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Psyringe »

Good ideas imho, though probably harder to implement than some functionality to let people buy cards from the trophy room at a higher price.

Personally I favor giving out specific cards as a reward for specific (hard) objectives. For example: Beat deck X in less than 6 turns on the highest difficulty level, and as a reward you can choose one of three randomly selected cards from that deck. I'm favoring this approach because it makes people build strong decks specifically to counter a given AI deck that has a card that they want. That's an additional (and hopefully welcome) challenge to "build a generally strong deck". Other options are obtaining cards as rewards during quests (once these are implemented), or to pay for them tokens obtained in a token reward system. However, all of these ideas are much harder to implement than the "buy from trophy room" idea, and since most developers are pretty busy right now, ease of implementation is a decisive factor.
Saint
Posts: 434
Joined: Sat Jan 09, 2010 4:57 pm
Location: Netherlands

Re: Shop Improvement

Post by Saint »

Well if you ask me you can better leave it as it is now, its not that bad really, maybe add another row of cards you get every [] you do but that's about it. Task rewards in normal mode and Quest rewards in campaign mode will be so much better (but you read that in the PM of ideas i have for the campaign thing aswell (just for psy and wolo that is)). Simple letting people buy "more expensive cards" thru a request mode makes the game way to easy and i think the replay factor of the game will go down rapidly because you can easially make credits just crushing easy decks...

My opinion, wait for the dev's to have more time on there hands then put in a well working system that actually makes the game better and sometimes even harder instead of making it easier then it already is :P
"The bird of the Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame." - Ripley Scrowle, Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum - 1652
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