"I Don't Get It," or Musings of a Fossil Attempting To Understand Master Duel/F2P

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

As a preface, this is the ramblings of one old man, and of course by no means representative of any other person or group. That said, if it gives some insight into some thoughts/feelings shared by others, or helps people who are feeling frustrated but not finding themselves able to articulate why, that would be a lovely thing, though I don't make any claim to represent anyone but myself. Even more lovely if thoughtful discussion sparked from it, though I doubt I'm the type to inspire such. I'd also like to state that I mean no offense to anyone who enjoys this title - if you do, great! Honestly hoping any of you that do might have some insight into some aspect of it that I'm missing, because as the title suggests, I don't really understand it.

For context, a little insight into myself. I'm currently pushing 40, and have been in at least peripheral contact with the franchise since the early manga (being that it ran in Shonen Jump, it had furigana which made it great for someone cutting their teeth on the language,) with the majority of my experience with the card game iteration being through the video game adaptations, especially the Game Boy/Advance, DS, and PSP ones. As such, what I primarily seek from the video games is, well, a video game, as opposed to a cell phone business model tournament simulator like this and most other currently commercially available Yuugiou games seem to be aiming for, so admittedly I am likely not the target audience. At any rate, that's basically the stance I'm looking at this game from.

I'd like to start with the positives of the game. The interface is quite well done for mouse and keyboard, to the point I wouldn't have realized it was a cell phone program if not for the business model. In addition to the traditional Yuugiou deck-building search functions, having the ability to quickly look up related cards and where to acquire them is a great addition, as is being able to add more copies to the deck of cards already in it without searching them again. Structure decks are also plentiful, and not limited to a single purchase, so if the deck you want to build fits into one of those themes or you just need cards from them for material, like the Fusion Magic from the Blue-Eyes deck, that can be an affordable and reliable way to get started on something. The ability to recycle cards into material to make new ones is also a good use of duplicates, since near as I can tell there is for some reason no trading feature despite the heavy focus on multiplayer, so being able to turn the thousands of copies of non-rares you build up into something that might be useful is nice, to say nothing of having a use for duplicates of the same higher rarity cards. The modes where they go into the lore behind related card sets are great, and I'd love for them to add ones for groups like the XYZ Dragon Cannon, Hakamori, or Amazoness sets.

The problem I see with the game, ultimately, is progression. The game floods you with gems early on, and then they dry up quick and you're left with a slow drizzle. Near as I can tell, you can get 145 gems a day (40 x 3 daily missions, 20 for a login, and 5 for letting a video play for 20 minutes,) with a minor chance to get a single digit amount as a reward box if you win a multiplayer game. Because of the odds manipulator it's more intelligent to save up and purchase 20 at once for the guaranteed SR and then UR afterward, which means you'll probably be pulling every two weeks if you login and do these daily missions every day, which while not necessarily difficult once you figure out a system that works for you (I do the three solos a day daily, then just run an all-Magic deck to get the Magic daily done, and then a deck of low-level monsters for three duels to get the Normal Summon daily) is still fairly time-consuming, and outside of the solo daily is more of a chore than anything. This is honestly kind of mind-boggling to me, considering how much more engaging games like Tag Force and Spirit Summoner were right out the gate, starting you off with enemies on essentially the same level as you, and giving you enough points to buy new packs right away and start immediately on customizing, without any real world time limitations.

The best thing I can say about this game's progression is the ability to break down (some) cards into material to make new ones of the same rarity grade at a 3 to 1 rate, which is admittedly an advantage over several of the older games and of course the physical card game. The problem here is that to get the materials, again, you need to be pulling cards in the first place, and in the case of the highest rarity, UR, it takes you two weeks of logins to get one. Multiply this by 3, and it would take some 6 weeks of daily play to get one UR card you want. I know Yuugiou games can be grindy (goodness knows I'll be grinding away for not just cards but deck capacity as well when I start up DM4 in the Early Days Collection), but this seems kind of insane to me.

The heavy focus on multiplayer I feel compounds the progression problems - it'd be one thing if you could just ignore the multiplayer entirely, or at least until you have a chance to build up a decent supply of cards and start making a variety of decks, but 8/9 of the possible daily missions can ONLY be done in the multiplayer, so there's basically no recourse but to plunge into the multiplayer, which naturally is not the most productive place to be for someone just starting out. To acquire cards, it seems you have to volunteer to be a punching bag for people, and you can't even leave it idle while you do other things since the game registers timeout as a surrender rather than a loss (and it doesn't even seem to give you the full 300 seconds either, which makes me wonder what the point of that timer is) and gives you nothing for it.

Now, admittedly, I am probably just not a good match for what this game sets out to do in the first place, but insofar as progression is concerned I feel that it's still pretty telling that this is worse than the games from 20 years ago in that regard. Which of course leads into the point of "play a different Yuugiou game," which honestly I probably will end up doing for the foreseeable future once the Early Days Collection drops, but for the sake of argument let's take a quick look at what's officially available at the moment:

Duel Links - Better at aiming for the anime fanservice content, with a pretty big roster of characters from even the newer shows too, and even with the original seiyuu reprising their roles when possible, but at least as far as I can tell is even worse progression-wise than Master Duel with tons of cards simply being unobtainable outside of events, on top of I believe only supporting the Speed and Rush formats.

Rush Duel Saikyou Battle!! and what I'm unclear whether it's an expanded version or full on sequel, Rush Duel Saikyou Battle!! Ikuzo! Go Rush!! - Started playing the latter version recently since it was free. Slightly better on the progression front in that you can at least get resources to buy two booster packs after winning a solo fight, but suffers from the same problems as the former two with daily missions that make it bad cost-performance to do more than one solo and one online duel a day, and then so far for me at least has compounded this by the player base possibly just not being as big as the others, as there are times I simply can't get a match up at all and have missed out on the dailies for it. Not sure if the characters/story are original to the game or based on the newer shows, but voice acting is there and pretty good at least, and if the characters/story grow on me, all the better, but too early to say. Also, as the name suggests, this game seems to be purely about the Rush Duel format.

Duel Monsters Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution - This is probably the best modern Yuugiou game I've found, with a pretty healthy variety of content in enemy decks and cards available, and as far as I can tell giving you enough points per win to guarantee you can buy anywhere from 2-4 packs per round, in addition to three cards from the deck you just fought if you haven't already acquired them (thus motivating you to take on specific duelists/decks if you're looking for specific cards.) Downsides would be that it seems to just lag out and freeze up completely anytime too many cards are in play, a forgettable soundtrack (though that sadly applies to most Yuugiou games), unskippable animations for a variety of monsters, the campaign basically just being the key plot points of the shows narrated over by what is either a character from one of the later shows or an original character just for this game, and a lack of voice acting.

Unless there's another title I've missed, it seems like out of the four or five titles currently available from Konami, we've got a grand total of one normal video game running regular OCG rules (as opposed to Speed/Rush) and that was released in 2019, so the fact they've gone 6 years without anything else speaks volumes. We can only hope Early Days sells well enough to motivate Konami to make games again, but that's sadly unlikely.

I'm sure there were other things I wanted to say, but I'm blanking on them at the moment and this has gotten pretty lengthy anyway. I'll close off by saying that while there's a lot I dislike about the title and I'm reasonably sure that both Master Duel itself and Konami's direction with the games as a whole is just not going to gel with me, I'd prefer to like it if possible, because there is some cool stuff - I mean, they somehow made "Wake Up Your Heart" into a card, which is enough to make a man weep! Hence why I'm still poking at it for the moment, and hoping to find something I've been missing that will make it all fall into place. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

In before campaign code spam

[Merilirem]

As a FTP player a bit younger than you I can say that I have at least 1 copy of all the alt arts released. So the resources are pretty plentiful for that. You get around 10k gems per month total from doing missions/events and generally just playing the game. I've gotten 100 gems in a day just from random duel rewards. There might be a cap to it but its random and I don't need gems enough to care.

If you just save up gems to buy stuff you can get anything you want over time. If you are in a rush you can spend money but I've not spent anything since launch and am not even tempted. The actual decks I want are affordable enough since each one is a permanent addition to my card pool. I suppose it depends how fast you want to build new decks. I am fine with 1 back of new cards every month. I enjoy building decks with what I have so much I can't even handle the cards I currently have.

I got back into the game after basically going cold turkey since Chaos Format back in 2006ish. Am enjoying it just fine, despite some big issues.

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by Merilirem:

You get around 10k gems per month total from doing missions/events and generally just playing the game. I've gotten 100 gems in a day just from random duel rewards. There might be a cap to it but its random and I don't need gems enough to care.

I did hear from someone in another thread that you can gain an extra 500 by releveling from Rookie to Bronze once a month, so with the other rewards that should come out to 7-8000 a month if my math is right.

Originally posted by Merilirem:

If you just save up gems to buy stuff you can get anything you want over time.

Granted, but for the amount of time and effort involved, it just doesn't seem worth it at all. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental here.

Originally posted by Merilirem:

I suppose it depends how fast you want to build new decks.

For me that's basically the entire point. I've managed to build all of one deck so far, a Hakamori deck, and I would love to build a variety of decks yet, such as a burn deck, a deck out deck, a fighter-clan deck, an Exodia deck, etc. etc. The entire fun of the game is in tinkering around and building a variety of decks.

[itzRiceKrispies]

Man u are asking a lot from me to read all that. We are a bunch of Yugioh players after all. We aren't really known for our reading comprehension skills. I read Merilirem's reply and I think I have the gist & that is u feel u aren't getting anywhere with the amount of gems and the duels themselves are a mixed bag. If this is wrong feel free to correct me.

I would say many of us feel somewhat similar to u. The game is currently in a better and worse spot then it was 3 years ago. I actually quit playing this for over a year cause of how bad the timer and meta was at the time, & Maxx C. The gem rates are actually quite fair as far as F2P is concerned. The best way and time to obtain a deck is to buy all u can from the newest released decks when they launch. Such as the current one which has Millennium and Fiendsmith. If u want to build those deck(s), NOW is the time.

The way MD handles the banlist is baffling at times. At the rate they are going they are likely to un-ban Halqifibrax before banning Maxx C or Fiendsmith Lacrima. The biggest way this game gets u is in the out of pack UR's which completely hose the normal drop rates of UR & SR cards from the secret packs u buy. Long story short. It takes time to build up enough gems and dust in order to afford a modern deck; as now the starting benefits are often not enough to afford one anymore since 80% of the deck is UR rarity.

In my case, i'll stick with it for now, but admittedly if Omega fixes their crappy timers I might bounce. Well see. Only time will tell.

[Gauche]

Originally posted by Gauche:

You can unlock all the cards offline and even have custom CPU duels
https://github.com/pixeltris/YgoMaster/

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by itzRiceKrispies:

I think I have the gist & that is u feel u aren't getting anywhere with the amount of gems and the duels themselves are a mixed bag. If this is wrong feel free to correct me.

More or less yeah. For the amount of play done, progression is glacial, and that's even WITH the chore of doing the multiplayer content.

Originally posted by itzRiceKrispies:

The gem rates are actually quite fair as far as F2P is concerned.

Which is a horrifying thought, because if the majority of F2P is WORSE than this, that model needs to be fixed badly.

Originally posted by itzRiceKrispies:

The best way and time to obtain a deck is to buy all u can from the newest released decks when they launch. Such as the current one which has Millennium and Fiendsmith. If u want to build those deck(s), NOW is the time.

That's another point - making things limited based on real world time is a TERRIBLE idea, and whoever came up with it should be fired. It's one thing to have abysmally low drop rates in a game you can play freely on your own time and get more packs as you please, but when it's time-limited AND there's a limit on how many you can pull, it's just a predatory attempt to get you to spend real money.

Originally posted by Gauche:

Originally posted by Gauche:

You can unlock all the cards offline and even have custom CPU duels
https://github.com/pixeltris/YgoMaster/

I'll have to give this a look, off-hand it looks like an objective upgrade.

EDIT: The github program doesn't work, there's a glitched title and main menu screen, and when going into the deck editor it gives an error about not being able to load files, and the instructions given on the website do not resolve the problem, nor does uninstalling and reinstalling from scratch.

[Gauche]

Originally posted by 魔装機神 Psybuster:

Originally posted by Gauche:

I'll have to give this a look, off-hand it looks like an objective upgrade.

EDIT: The github program doesn't work, there's a glitched title and main menu screen, and when going into the deck editor it gives an error about not being able to load files, and the instructions given on the website do not resolve the problem, nor does uninstalling and reinstalling from scratch.

I just set it up for the first time and it works on my machine
Not much support[github.com] outside of noting the requirements and following the Usage steps

[Silyon]

Confession time. I've never played any of the old video games aside from Sacred Cards and Reshief of Destruction, both of which I've come to understand over the years were not exactly stellar examples to begin with. Even so, I've never held any particular interest to pursue the games, mostly because many of them radically redesign how the TCG itself is played. When it comes to Yugioh, I like the game and tolerate the anime, and only desire a way to play the actual TCG without having local freinds to play with. Master Duel gives me this, and before it launched I either didn't play or relied on occasionally dubious 3rd-party programs such as the variants of YGOpro and Duelingbook.

To me, Master Duel is literally what I've always wanted in a Yugioh program, even down to the "tedium" of collecting cards and slowly building a collection. I for one don't want to be given the whole card catalogue out of the gate, like most 3rd-party simulators offer, because at that point there's nothing to work towards and no reason to not use the objectively best cards in the game to accomplish whatever you want. I find the restrictions of simply not having X or Y cards a challenge to overcome and a goal to help keep me playing when my attention would otherwise wander. Which it has done many times before.

Master duel does not have to be nearly as free as it is, and all of it's direct competitors are nowhere near as generous with in-game currency, drop rates, or reasonably-priced cosmetics. The gems themselves are pricey, but that's about it and irrelevant for a free player like myself. Most of my issues in Master Duel, as well as the issues I see being discussed frequently on these forums, are problems with the game itself and not the simulator that Master Duel is.

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by Gauche:

I just set it up for the first time and it works on my machine
Not much support[github.com] outside of noting the requirements and following the Usage steps

I've noticed, tried those support steps and they did nothing. For reference:

Title: https://i.imgur.com/a67sbzX.png
Main Menu: https://i.imgur.com/n8h5Qtn.png
Deck Edit: https://i.imgur.com/wzAiNWA.png

Originally posted by Silyon:

Even so, I've never held any particular interest to pursue the games, mostly because many of them radically redesign how the TCG itself is played.

DMs 1-4 and 7 and 8 play off of original rules, since DM 1 was back before Konami got the rights and made the OCG. DMs 5 and 6 were IIRC the first games to use the OCG rules, hence the subtitles of Expert 1 and Expert 2 respectively, and then leading into Expert 3 not even keeping a DM numbering, and then becoming the International games. In addition, some one-off titles exist that use the OCG rules like Nightmare Troubadour and Spirit Summoner, and the Tag Force series basically uses the OCG rules and then just adds in a unique tag duel mechanic on top of that.

Originally posted by Silyon:

To me, Master Duel is literally what I've always wanted in a Yugioh program, even down to the "tedium" of collecting cards and slowly building a collection. I for one don't want to be given the whole card catalogue out of the gate, like most 3rd-party simulators offer, because at that point there's nothing to work towards and no reason to not use the objectively best cards in the game to accomplish whatever you want. I find the restrictions of simply not having X or Y cards a challenge to overcome and a goal to help keep me playing when my attention would otherwise wander. Which it has done many times before.

This is a big part of the fun of the video games as well, and part of why I'm quite excited for Early Days tomorrow.

Originally posted by Silyon:

Master duel does not have to be nearly as free as it is, and all of it's direct competitors are nowhere near as generous with in-game currency, drop rates, or reasonably-priced cosmetics.

Which just tells me that F2P is a horrible idea in general if other titles that do it are even worse.

[Gauche]

Originally posted by 魔装機神 Psybuster:

Originally posted by Gauche:

I just set it up for the first time and it works on my machine
Not much support[github.com] outside of noting the requirements and following the Usage steps

I've noticed, tried those support steps and they did nothing. For reference:

Title: https://i.imgur.com/a67sbzX.png
Main Menu: https://i.imgur.com/n8h5Qtn.png
Deck Edit: https://i.imgur.com/wzAiNWA.png

Are you running it on Japanese locale?
This user is getting the same glitched title menu issues: https://github.com/pixeltris/YgoMaster/issues/532

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by Gauche:

Are you running it on Japanese locale?
This user is getting the same glitched title menu issues: https://github.com/pixeltris/YgoMaster/issues/532

I am indeed. Seems that it's just straight up broken at the moment then, hopefully it'll become playable at some point!

[TormentedSalad]

It will feel slow given the time i've spent with this game it felt like I had everything at the start then I remember hitting a wall where resources were tight, but I found now I have more than enough gems the way I see it theres a dip there where your starting gems dry up and you still dont own alot of useful generic extra deck monsters and spells but once you own those you start racking up gems again.

If it helps you any you dont need to watch the replay if your intent on picking those 5 gems up you can just exit the replay and get the 5 gems.

[Raven]

I'm actually older than you op o/ Frankly, video game industry has become predatory as whole, and as a community have let things go so far, there isn't really a way to climb back anymore, not realistically anyway. We're actually 2 generations behind what is the commonsense of today. Technology is learned way younger, accessed, and groomed.

The F2P model as a whole is pretty greedy, but that said, Master Duel isn't that bad yet (they seem to be getting a bit more greedy as of late with their practices). If I am perfectly honest, I'd prefer a subscription model for long term engagement to the play. It'd certainly destroy a good chunk of bots.

That said, I don't think MD was really what you wanted in the first place, it was never marketed with the intent to be a video game. It has no ties to the anime aside from using it for promotional purposes. MD has always been an officially sanctioned alternative to tournament play. Its only *really* supposed to mimic the card game and nothing else, the pretty graphics and QoL features of how it highlights parts of the card are just extras.

The target for this game isn't as a "video game" title, but to facilitate actual dueling. I feel like having that misunderstanding from the first place is what would hurt your expectations when playing MD.

edit: I haven't bought a booster pack in awhile, but I suspect the gem prices and the booster pack prices really aren't all that different. So actually get them for free is extremely generous, until you remember its just digital and they don't lose anything for that.

[Meneluma]

The whole expensive to build modern deck part might explain why you see so many tenpai players down in rookie.
When the cost in gems/dust to build that deck for your main account is that steep, seems like most people just make alt accounts and abuse the near 10k of free starter gems to just build the deck that way

[TormentedSalad]

Originally posted by Meneluma:

The whole expensive to build modern deck part might explain why you see so many tenpai players down in rookie.
When the cost in gems/dust to build that deck for your main account is that steep, seems like most people just make alt accounts and abuse the near 10k of free starter gems to just build the deck that way

It really isn't maybe if they make new accounts constantly it might seem so but I own most staples at 3 because over time i've dedicated UR dust from the duel passes to getting them and it will cut chunks of any deck they build between hand traps common extra deck staples like S:P (Which I even own a royal) and I still have cards for decks that I played ages ago I still own a fully functional Virtual World deck Shaddolls and right now I have about 5k gems SR and UR to spare and all im really missing from this selection pack is Fiendsmith Engraver i'll go back and craft that when I need him.

[itzRiceKrispies]

Originally posted by Meneluma:

The whole expensive to build modern deck part might explain why you see so many tenpai players down in rookie.
When the cost in gems/dust to build that deck for your main account is that steep, seems like most people just make alt accounts and abuse the near 10k of free starter gems to just build the deck that way

Exactly. Konami owns the servers and this generates income. They know this & are making money off of this. Thats y every new deck is 80% UR. I was shocked that Snake-Eyes ash was an SR.