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Post by Sosa on Feb 7, 2010 13:27:35 GMT -5
 A few of your fellow orphans are spending some of their off-time playing the WoW TCG. If you're an active player or someone who has even a little bit of interest in checking it out, I'd like to invite you to join us! We are just getting a new season started, and are working our way up the set list in chronological order - so this is the perfect time to get started!What is it?The World of Warcraft Trading Card Game is a playing card game based around custom deckbuilding and trading cards, similar to Magic: The Gathering. Obviously, it's theme is heavily inspired by WoW itself. It's made by Upperdeck Entertainment, and you can check out the official website here.
The WoW TCG is unique in that it features both a "PVP" component (traditional 1v1 or 2v2 games,) or a fascinating "PVE" component in the form of co-operative raid decks. Like the game it draws inspiration from, Raids are challenging and require your group to come up with interesting strategies and to work closely together to win!
We have a special system in place to emulate most of the unique properties of a physical card game:
- Players have their own seperate card pools, which represent the cards they own.
- You can receive Points just by playing the game.
- Points and Cards can be traded with other players, or you can redeem your Points to purchase additional booster packs!
- Points are tracked and you can check your balance online!
- We're working on adding more web-based features to automate card trading and possibly buying singles!
What do I need to be able to play?We use a program called Lackey CCG, a versatile application specifically built to allow people to play card games (of virtually any kind) over the internet. You don't need to spend any money on physical cards or any additional software. Lackey is donationware; if you enjoy using it, you can help support its future development with a donation via the webpage.
We also use Ventrilo to chat and co-ordinate the games. If you're able to read this, you're already an Orphan... so you should already have vent installed. What if I don't know how to play?The official WoW TCG website has an interactive flash demo that teaches you the basics of how to play, as well as rule information. Newcomers are welcome! We'll be happy to show you how to play the game through Lackey CCG. Okay, so how do I join?The easiest way is to send me a private message here on the forums. I check them daily. You can also contact me in game (if I'm subscribed, I can't play WoW every month) or on my vent server, listed below.
You can also send me an email or an instant message using the icons below my name. Ventrilo / Lackey Server Information:Server IP: 72.185.75.108
Port: 3784 (Ventrilo), 25711 (Lackey CCG)
Password: Socks Have any other questions? Post them here or PM me and I'll be happy to answer them.
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Post by Sosa on Feb 7, 2010 13:31:50 GMT -5
How do you earn points?Earning points is easy! To earn points, all you need to do is play the game. Games can be played in several different formats, including: ranked 1v1, ranked 2v2, unranked 1v1, unranked 2v2, and Raids (4-6 players.)
Each game type has a baseline number of points earned. However, each additional game that you play during the week will earn you fewer and fewer points.
For example:
- Player A played 5 unranked 1v1 games this week. He earns 123 points. (Average: 24.6 Pt./Game)
- Player B played 10 unranked 1v1 games this week. He earns 200 points. (Average: 20.0 Pt./Game)
- Player C played 20 unranked 1v1 games this week. He earns 326 points. (Average: 16.3 Pt./Game)
Ranked games and unranked games earn the same number of baseline points. However, the ranked games you win in a given week also contribute towards a Winning Bonus, which can be up to 1/3 of your Baseline.
- Player D played 10 ranked 1v1 games this week, and won 6 of them. He earns a baseline of 200 points, and a Bonus of 60 points. (Average: 25.0 Pt./Game)
Diminishing returns reset weekly on Sunday at midnight. That's really confusing. Why don't you just use the previous system from Magic: The Gathering?The previous system was broken and required change. Diminishing returns did not exist. Players received points based on the type of game and whether they won or lost.
This quickly lead to the best players eclipsing everyone else. When unranked games were added to balance this, nobody bothered playing ranked anymore. The new system fixes both these problems by incentivizing ranked games without penalizing players for losing.
The point system is automated (on your end,) so all you need to do is worry about now is playing games and checking your balance. But I want more points!The fastest way to get more points is simply to make sure you play the game.
The pricing structure has gotten a major overhaul as well, and it should now be much easier for new players to quickly ramp up their card pool or veterans to fill in cards missing from their collections. What's the new pricing structure?[/color] Ranked games will be using the new core format, which includes the three most recently released sets. Since nobody has a big card pool in the beginning, the first three sets will increase in price incrementally before they get "bumped down" the block list and discounted.
- 40p - Fires of Outland (3/07/2010)
- 30p - The Dark Portal (2/14/2010)
- 10p - Onyxia's Lair (2/14/2010) (Raid Token)
- 20p - Heroes of Azeroth (1/9/2010)
- 10p - Outdated Sets (none yet)
So I can only buy boosters? Why can't I just buy singles?This is something we eventually expanded into in Magic: The Gathering. The problem with buying singles (beyond having to come up with an entirely different price structure, since an individual card value varies way [/b] more than the average value of a booster,) is that it encourages card sniping, or buying only the best possible cards to fit a specific deck. We set a point structure that heavily encouraged buying boosters instead of single cards in M:TG, and it did little to curb this trend. Players that had lots of cards but nothing they really wanted were "stuck," as players who simply sniped cards had no need or interest in trading. We may expand into purchasable singles in the future if the economic model of the game looks like it can support it. My personal philosophy is: it's better to give more cards to more players for the same points so that card rarity can establish a relative value. Common cards are exactly that: common. Every player should have at least a few of them to make up the basic structure of their decks. Uncommon cards and especially rares will be harder to find - you'll need to trade with other players to get them. This ensures new players will always have something of value to trade and veterans will always have something they're looking for. I'd call that a win-win.[/blockquote] What's a raid token?Players do not purchase Raid Decks as there is no need to actually own them in this version of the game. Instead, they may choose to purchase Raid Tokens which basically serve as an entry cost.
The number of tokens required to participate in a raid depends on how many players there are and what roles they take. This reflects the variance in difficulty imposed by the number of players participating. Refer to the chart for the Onyxia's Lair raid for an example.
| |||||||||||||||| | Onyxia's Lair | |||||||||||||||| | | # of Players | Player Cost | Boss Cost | | 3P + 1 Boss | 1 Token | 2 Tokens | | 4P + 1 Boss | 1 Token | 1 Token | | 5P + 1 Boss | 1 Token | Free |
Why do I have to risk my points to participate in a raid?Because, put simply, raiding is designed to be a challenging and rewarding experience for all players involved.
Heroes that manage to successfully complete a raid are able to win rare and valuable Loot Cards, which are cards that can only be obtained by participating in raid decks. Generally, these cards are geared towards team-based play... but they represent a powerful boost to your cardpool that you can't get anywhere else!
The heroes decide how to split up the loot that they find, but if they can't reach a common agreement, individual cards can be randomly assigned.
If a Boss player manages to "wipe" the raid, the boss player wins the total point value of all the raid tokens consumed in the event... a powerful incentive to be merciless towards the opposing heroes!
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Kaifu1
Soldier
Playing Dragoon is like playing FFXI on Hard Modeplg%%Old School%%[Xb0:Aifuu]
Posts: 1,102
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Post by Kaifu1 on Feb 7, 2010 19:05:37 GMT -5
We should have went into Zandikar. My landfall deck would have pissed you off.
Kai~
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Post by tempus on Feb 8, 2010 2:13:30 GMT -5
If you played Illuminati you might lure me... fnord
-t
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Post by Sosa on Feb 16, 2010 9:10:21 GMT -5
Big news on the card game front. Firstly, both Blizzard and Upperdeck Entertainment have confirmed that they will not be renewing their contract to produce the World of Warcraft TCG. Far from a death sentence, there has been so much controversy regarding UDE's conduct and utter failure in marketing the WoW TCG and Minis games that there's been rampant speculation this would be coming for over a year. This news comes on the coattails of UDE being sued by Konami Digital Entertainment for counterfeiting hundreds of thousands of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards after they were dropped by Konami, and another recent lawsuit by Major League Baseball for the exact same thing.Blizzard has confirmed that it will not be dropping the World of Warcraft TCG. It is not currently known if production will continue to be in-house (they were basically responsible for doing everything but marketing and distribution for the last year, which was widely regarded as one of the game's best) or if they will enter negotiations with a distributing partner. Wizards of the Coast, the producers of Magic: The Gathering, is apparently interested. Either way would be good for the game in the long run, though the uncertainty regarding the game's future is causing a lot of people with money invested in the game to be... understandably nervous.
What does this mean for us?Frankly, the later (Blizzard in-house) work that was done on the game is some of the game's best, and is one of the primary reasons that the game was seeing a lot of activity in late 2009. As such, we're implementing a ramp-up to get through the older sets more quickly. The point formula has been changed to provide players with 5-10 games a week with about 20-30% more points than they're currently earning. In addition, diminishing returns were significantly decreased (at 20 games, you were making about 15% of the points that you did for your first game, now it's more like 45%.) The information in the FAQ above will be updated later today after I finish running the last point models to ensure a smooth transition. In addition, we will be introducing new booster packs at an accelerated rate. An announcement will come sometime next week with a release date for the Fires of Outland and subsequent boosters. [Edit: Minor grammar fix, cleaned up the thread a bit. Adjusted some FAQ content for consistency. New content added to FAQ.] |
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Post by Nosferalatu on Mar 2, 2010 18:36:37 GMT -5
ROFLMAO @ the "LEEEEROOOOY JEEEEENNNKINS" at the end of the TCG interactive demo.
When are you guys normally playing? I'd be down to try it out, but if there's only a few of you playing and you're not on when I'm on, it won't work too well...or perhaps your "group" is a lot larger than I think.
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