More than 90% of players have left Master Duels

[theoncastillo28]

https://youtu.be/tOGArTMewDc

Over 90% of players have quit this game. What are some suggestion for Konami to save this game? Given the poor outcome of master duel, can we infer that tcg/ocg card game actual losing a lot of players as well?

[C.C. 折オリ枝 の 夫]

Merilirem님이 먼저 게시:

Akemua님이 먼저 게시:

It's like you people forget Steam isn't the only platform for the game. Also, people have been saying this ♥♥♥♥ for months, yet here we all are and I BET you and people that love saying this will be here months later.

I think the fact that people started doomcrying day 1 has grated on a lot of us. At this point it just feels like they will be right as a collective simply because they will keep saying it until the game ends for whatever reasons.

*year 7077, Konami finally shuts down, closing the servers for Master Duel for good, and ending support for Yu-Gi-Oh*
Certain players: "See? My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great........great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great.....great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great.....great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great relatives were right, Master Duel was meant to die because of the unhealthy meta, you meta slaves just didn't want to believe it, but we knew it all that time"

[Dr. Raven]

Astrallight님이 먼저 게시:

Better play 1 out of 5 meta decks in ranked if you want to have fun otherwise just uninstall. Game focus too much on newer cards while older cards gets weaker and have fewer support cards to use. Meanwhile newer cards have tons of effects baked into them that can be spammed without having a downside. Thats Yu-Gi-Oh for you.

Link, XYZ, Sync, Pendul summon monsters have destroyed the game as it is and have too much power creep build into them without sacrifising anything to use them. Also the amount of OTK decks that exists now destroy the game even further. Que up, go afk and get destroyed on first turn, move on.

Does not sound like a healthy game when enemy can OTK you without you getting a chance to defend yourself. Or decks that focus on summening 400 monsters on first turn that all grant him effect immunity or can discard a enemy monster to the graveyard without having to pay anything to do it. People can whiteknight the game as much they want. They will keep calling you a Yu-Gi-Oh boomer while hiding behind OTK/Meta decks.

Summon monster/place trap/spell cards/attack monster/Your turn is what true Yu-Gi-Oh was about. Not this BS of a game it has become. But whatever. Whiteknights will keep calling the game fine while the rest leaves to play better games.

Pretty much agree with most of this. Game has taken the same turn the pokemon trading card game. Aside from suffering massively from power creep and a stale meta, that the game is extremely aggressive and in MD's case that means the winner is decided almost always in the first or second turn, which end up lasting so long as well which is a negative imo. Thankfully the time limit being lowered helped with this a lot.


Game is the most fun with crazy rulesets. In addition to the meta being less stale and seeing all kinds of weird things, first turn victories are almost never a thing. The limit 1 was admittedly my favourite so far. It's also actually fun to build new decks. Where as there's zero reason to do so normally unless you're building decks with the new meta cards meant to stomp the old stuff. Which I don't have the interest to do cuz I don't want to use the same 1 out of 5 decks and play against the same 5 decks every match.

[𝔼ℂℂℍ𝕀 ℤ𝕆ℕ𝔼]

Akemua님이 먼저 게시:

𝔼ℂℂℍ𝕀 ℤ𝕆ℕ𝔼님이 먼저 게시:

Continue to cope brother. There is a reason every month the player base keeps dwindling. Just because you get a match doesnt mean the game is not heading to death lol.

It's like you people forget Steam isn't the only platform for the game. Also, people have been saying this ♥♥♥♥ for months, yet here we all are and I BET you and people that love saying this will be here months later.

Game loses more and more players every month, direction of the game is going less free to play each month as well as an unhealthy gamestate. You can continue to pretend this isn't happening but the fact that there is this many people leaving not even a year after the game came out is truly telling. Just because the game isn't at a state where you wait ten minutes to get a match doesn't mean it isn't dying and that the community has pretty much died either.

Pretending this stuff isn't happening is just being ignorant at this point. People are simply unhappy with the state of the game and are either playing sims or just not playing at all. No one wants this game to be bad and fail, people want to play yugioh but with a game that is simply worth playing. This game backed by a multi million dollar company simply has not even reached a level close to the quality of the sims in almost a year of being out and that is simply embarrassing that fans can create something better than this.

At the end of the day regardless of what you or even the quality of the game there will always remain loyal whales to fun it and konamis pockets and keep it going even if the community and playerbase is dead. Just look at duel links after all lmao.

[Adremm124]

Aldain님이 먼저 게시:

"That's fine, casuals bad, F/L list is fine, go play Duel Links if you don't like it"

Let's see how the replies pan out.

Lol you're a casual

[Taweret]

what they should do to save playerbase is to give premade theme decks like in duel links to choose from and tweak around decklists to balance it but they are too lazy to do it, that would be better than grinding for these cards. i mean why play master duel when everyone in community knows about free alternative just, because it's mobile?

[Merilirem]

Taweret님이 먼저 게시:

what they should do to save playerbase is to give premade theme decks like in duel links to choose from and tweak around decklists to balance it but they are too lazy to do it, that would be better than grinding for these cards. i mean why play master duel when everyone in community knows about free alternative just, because it's mobile?

Personally I could never get into all those simulators. I tried them but they never clicked. Master Duel feels great even if it could use some refinement in certain places. Its also fully automated which makes it less burdensome than the other sims last i checked.

[Taweret]

not to mention while it tries to be all that graphic heavy, the artworks and borders of cards look all blurry smells like cheap mobile game by a mile.

[DeathDweller]

Merilirem님이 먼저 게시:

Personally I could never get into all those simulators. I tried them but they never clicked. Master Duel feels great even if it could use some refinement in certain places. Its also fully automated which makes it less burdensome than the other sims last i checked.

YgoPro was fully automated last time i checked, plus, it has better functions in editor, more cards and of course plays much faster

[Filipino Enjoyer]

Taweret님이 먼저 게시:

what they should do to save playerbase is to give premade theme decks like in duel links to choose from and tweak around decklists to balance it but they are too lazy to do it, that would be better than grinding for these cards. i mean why play master duel when everyone in community knows about free alternative just, because it's mobile?

There's already a Yu-Gi-Oh game that does that, if you want to play themed duels go play that instead

[FlintX]

C.C. アヌビス님이 먼저 게시:

Then, people need to understand that Yu-Gi-Oh isn't for everyone, it's not an easy game like CrapStone, and if you suck, you don't get to play.

Pfff. Funny you are saying that now cause in many of my previous topics questioning odd cards interactions and misleading card texts, some of the "pros" were quick to type this is "a children card game meant for children, easy to drop in and learn."
Sure, maybe if you just Google a braindead meta trash deck and repeat their same generic omninegate combos nonstop like a bot, so yeah, it is pretty much true I guess.
Alas, the hypocrisy.

Also on top of that, the portuguese translation of card texts are all wrong since forever. There is literally no wording distinction between the terms select, target, choose. It all uses "choose" wording for everything. And there are many other cards missing essential information or with incomplete meaning in the description as well. Utterly ridiculous.
As we do have enough words/verbs that could fit the correct translation just fine. It seems like no one ever passed the directions for whoever they paid for doing the translation.

And for some reason Konami never bothered reprinting those cards or even the ones that got an errata for portuguese translation and never will. Oh wait, I know why. Because that would cost lots of money, obviously. So they keep releasing new cards with the same mistakes and screw portuguese, because no one cares anyway. "They've be using wrong translated cards since always, then let's just keep it that way and pretend there is nothing wrong."

Lmao. I'm actually surprised how brazilians did managed to compete all those years in world championships or whatever using and learning cards with wrong text description. I guess it must be the reason why they give preference for english text cards and negotiates them for higher value in the informal market.

[MancakeBR]

𝔼ℂℂℍ𝕀 ℤ𝕆ℕ𝔼님이 먼저 게시:

MancakeBR님이 먼저 게시:

The game isn't dead when you can get games within 3 seconds.

Continue to cope brother. There is a reason every month the player base keeps dwindling. Just because you get a match doesnt mean the game is not heading to death lol.

It isn't cope, it's fact. Want to know what a dead game looks like? Go look at Smite.

[DeathDweller]

MancakeBR님이 먼저 게시:

It isn't cope, it's fact. Want to know what a dead game looks like? Go look at Smite.

Smite is an eight-year-old game with ups and downs just like any healthy game and despite been in it's downs nowadays, it still has more average players than when it started:
https://steamcharts.com/app/386360
In 2-3 months Master Duel will have less than what Smite has currently and that's not even a year old game:
https://steamcharts.com/app/1449850

The game is dying, that's the only fact, it isn't a money success, it isn't a game success and Konami has pulled the plug for less than that in the past. The fact that they don't even bother as much as they do in Duel Links shows where it's going.

They running out of cards to release and then what? Do you think this game will hold onto those ridiculous events and cosmetics for another year or 2? While Duel Links, even with the big chunk that migrated over here gone, still has pretty much a healthy playerbase because it has plenty of events, it is way more balanced and they keep releasing cards in small portions 5 years now and why it keeps going? because it is a Yugioh game on it's own, not a poorly executed HS clone. These are the facts...

[Lunar Shower]

theoncastillo28님이 먼저 게시:

https://youtu.be/tOGArTMewDc

Over 90% of players have quit this game. What are some suggestion for Konami to save this game? Given the poor outcome of master duel, can we infer that tcg/ocg card game actual losing a lot of players as well?

Recent years have seen the TCG grow in truth, so its not so much the game as much as just the fact that Master Duel has lacked any real things to give it staying power. More formats, more events, more modes, all this would definitely help, and I imagine something like the leaked "Classic mode" could help to bring back some older players who only dipped their toes in the water briefly upon release for a bit, all the more if its related to GOAT format in some way likely.

[Lunar Shower]

DeathDweller님이 먼저 게시:

MancakeBR님이 먼저 게시:

It isn't cope, it's fact. Want to know what a dead game looks like? Go look at Smite.

Smite is an eight-year-old game with ups and downs just like any healthy game and despite been in it's downs nowadays, it still has more average players than when it started:
https://steamcharts.com/app/386360
In 2-3 months Master Duel will have less than what Smite has currently and that's not even a year old game:
https://steamcharts.com/app/1449850

The game is dying, that's the only fact, it isn't a money success, it isn't a game success and Konami has pulled the plug for less than that in the past. The fact that they don't even bother as much as they do in Duel Links shows where it's going.

They running out of cards to release and then what? Do you think this game will hold onto those ridiculous events and cosmetics for another year or 2? While Duel Links, even with the big chunk that migrated over here gone, still has pretty much a healthy playerbase because it has plenty of events, it is way more balanced and they keep releasing cards in small portions 5 years now and why it keeps going? because it is a Yugioh game on it's own, not a poorly executed HS clone. These are the facts...

This... genuinely doesn't even make sense. While I agree the comparison to Smite isn't really sensible, Duel Links in itself hasn't really been doing well for itself for a good while, and isn't exactly a replacement for what Master Duel offers. The two are almost completely different games, with completely different metas and playstyles, Master Duel being more close to the OCG/TCG with emphasis on the OCG side of things, and Duel Links being its own thing almost entirely, with the only real life variant being Speed Duels.

Genuinely, the biggest things damaging Master Duel's odd's of success in the long term are its horrible mobile port on Android, and lack of any real casual friendly modes save for the new Casual queue, which in itself isn't really enough. Doesn't help that recent events, the last one, and the upcoming one, are both heavily competitive ones which drives away the casual fanbase even more.

The real truth of the matter though is that Master Duel was NEVER going to retain the massive success it saw day one. A large amount of the players who gave the game a try were either doing so for the first time, or returning players from ages ago for nostalgia, and with how different and complex the game is now compared to then, most simply wouldn't care to learn or change with how the game functions today. Realistically all the game even needs to have a healthy playerbase is a few thousand players, much like duel links, since the game by nature is a 1v1 affair anyways, the biggest problem they might face in the future is having a problem attracting and also retaining new players, an issue that Duel Links itself has as well.

On top of that, on mobile now there is Duel Links, Master Duel, and Cross Duel all vying for a Yugioh players attention, splitting up potential playerbases among the three games and diluting the potential player base more then it really needed to be.

In the end, Master Duel will be fine, and has been a pretty huge success for Konami, evidenced by the sheer numbers the game reached in such a short time after release, but that doesn't guarantee long term success. Also, no idea in the slightest as to why you'd compare the game to Hearthstone (HS?) if that is what you're implying, as aside from both being digital Trading Card Games, they really aren't similar at all in the slightest, with Master Duel thus far being infinitely more f2p friendly for those who want to play at a decent/competitive level.

[DeathDweller]

Lunar Shower님이 먼저 게시:

DeathDweller님이 먼저 게시:

Smite is an eight-year-old game with ups and downs just like any healthy game and despite been in it's downs nowadays, it still has more average players than when it started:
https://steamcharts.com/app/386360
In 2-3 months Master Duel will have less than what Smite has currently and that's not even a year old game:
https://steamcharts.com/app/1449850

The game is dying, that's the only fact, it isn't a money success, it isn't a game success and Konami has pulled the plug for less than that in the past. The fact that they don't even bother as much as they do in Duel Links shows where it's going.

They running out of cards to release and then what? Do you think this game will hold onto those ridiculous events and cosmetics for another year or 2? While Duel Links, even with the big chunk that migrated over here gone, still has pretty much a healthy playerbase because it has plenty of events, it is way more balanced and they keep releasing cards in small portions 5 years now and why it keeps going? because it is a Yugioh game on it's own, not a poorly executed HS clone. These are the facts...

This... genuinely doesn't even make sense. While I agree the comparison to Smite isn't really sensible, Duel Links in itself hasn't really been doing well for itself for a good while, and isn't exactly a replacement for what Master Duel offers. The two are almost completely different games, with completely different metas and playstyles, Master Duel being more close to the OCG/TCG with emphasis on the OCG side of things, and Duel Links being its own thing almost entirely, with the only real life variant being Speed Duels.

Genuinely, the biggest things damaging Master Duel's odd's of success in the long term are its horrible mobile port on Android, and lack of any real casual friendly modes save for the new Casual queue, which in itself isn't really enough. Doesn't help that recent events, the last one, and the upcoming one, are both heavily competitive ones which drives away the casual fanbase even more.

The real truth of the matter though is that Master Duel was NEVER going to retain the massive success it saw day one. A large amount of the players who gave the game a try were either doing so for the first time, or returning players from ages ago for nostalgia, and with how different and complex the game is now compared to then, most simply wouldn't care to learn or change with how the game functions today. Realistically all the game even needs to have a healthy playerbase is a few thousand players, much like duel links, since the game by nature is a 1v1 affair anyways, the biggest problem they might face in the future is having a problem attracting and also retaining new players, an issue that Duel Links itself has as well.

On top of that, on mobile now there is Duel Links, Master Duel, and Cross Duel all vying for a Yugioh players attention, splitting up potential playerbases among the three games and diluting the potential player base more then it really needed to be.

In the end, Master Duel will be fine, and has been a pretty huge success for Konami, evidenced by the sheer numbers the game reached in such a short time after release, but that doesn't guarantee long term success. Also, no idea in the slightest as to why you'd compare the game to Hearthstone (HS?) if that is what you're implying, as aside from both being digital Trading Card Games, they really aren't similar at all in the slightest, with Master Duel thus far being infinitely more f2p friendly for those who want to play at a decent/competitive level.

Duel Links always had more players on mobile since it was released there 1 year prior but even after the split it still has ups on it's playerbase on Steam, sure not that great but it still doing fine. Now Smite also was on other platforms and it's standalone launcher before steam and does fine for an old game.

Master Duel on the other hand has it's main playerbase on Steam, which hasn't seen any increase no matter what since day 1. From what i've seen that's a fast dying game and this show also with Konami being strict with gems lately, raising Duel Pass price while lowering obtainable gems. Yet all the updates and events are pre-scheduled with some minor fixes in between. That shows that this is a "how much we can still make before the end" situation if you ask me.

For me the fact that Duel Links, Master Duel and Cross Duels are all different formats, on the same devices, at the same time, doesn't matter that much. What matters is: how the game is designed, as it copies many aspects of HS like the interactive fields, the pack system, the visuals etc, that had me worried since i saw the first trailer, cause it seemed soooooo slow to play with all those animations and i was right. I'm pretty sure they went for those particular things (which are ok at best) because they saw everyone else doing the same interactive field thing etc. for the past 8 years, rather than focusing on polishing the Yugioh gameplay.

Then we have Konami refusing to separate the TCG from the video games. You can't have a video game wait for the TCG to release a card and then bring it over, you can't expect the playerbase to wait the TCG to change a rule or a card and have it on Master Duel 4-6 months after.
Most CCG's nowadays can change their rules, card texts or release new content on the go, without them being dependent on a physical game and that's why Duel Links worked, they changed the rules to fit it's gameplay.

For Yugioh video games to succeed and stand out again they need to:

1 Be fast in every aspect: gameplay wise, pace and interaction between players

2 That's a personal opinion: put some weight on the monsters again cause that's what made Yugioh popular, the monsters. They animate Harpie's Feather Duster while Exodia gets a 5 frame animation.
I know there are a lot these days, but having a 10 year span since the last full on - online game ,they could easily have most of them as 3d models with 3 simple animations (attack idle, defense idle and attack animation). If they could do it for Nightmare Troubadour with today's tech they could just have them play simultaneously as they were summoned without them slowing the pace of the game

3 Separate them from the TCG to balance things virtualy: tailor cards, rebalance old cards, etc and have a team that caters to those video games and their playerbase, to interact with them players, listen to what they have to say and fix the mess they have been making for the past 15 years. (and yes i know it's not going to happen)