Game is bad for new players.

[Efiarx]

It was said million times in 50 reviews. Any way to contact game owner directly? does he know how bad things are?

Stonedog*s topic inspired me to write it. As he says someone intentionally crushes all criticism.

I know the game from head to toe i was #1 in Leaderboard on a second day of a season in August. And even i say that game is bad for new players to get in. Who must say it so you can finally listen all those reviews/feedbacks?

[Peace]

Absolutely no one that is a part of the staff crushes criticism, The devs are open to criticism and are open to hearing what players think about the game, For reaching them directly you have the options of using the Kards support link which can be found in the Pinned Thread that Thomas made about posting guidelines, On here the devs will respond as well, There is also discord where you can talk to them openly

[Peace]

Here is the discord link https://discord.gg/F7Dcbf4 and here is the support link https://support.kards.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

[Drago]

This game is a waste of time who doesn't have the elite card combinations. Rush decks and retarded "bwahahaha"ing players everywhere.

[Thomas]

Originally posted by Efiarx:

And even i say that game is bad for new players to get in.

Thank you for the feedback. The whole KARDS team is actively watching Discord as well as the Steam forum here and takes into account all the constructive feedback.

It would be great if you could provide some more details / specific examples. This will help focusing the discussion.

Thank you!

[Efiarx]

Well since there are so unusually many company people here i think i can try help u with improvements.

1. Make at least 3 free arena tickets for new players so they can see what is good.
2. Dont put low ranks vs officer club.
3. Packs cost. I personally dont care how much they cost since i got/bought all i need to beat any deck. But i dont know make a 1 time offer for new players like 20 packs 80% less cost.

Problem #1 - player base is not growing.
Problem #2 - Meta decks crush new players regardless rank and discourage them to play.

many more things to say

[Peace]

2. Is mostly caused by the current low pop, Once Kards Is available on other platforms we should be seeing more new players giving better balance between new players and veterans , 3. Is also there for new players with the welcome package which is a one time deal

[D13]

Feedback from a player of 2 months, #20 on the ladder last season, I've spent $5.

1. Honestly draft should just be free and the rewards cut drastically or completely. It's a more level playing field for new players and exposes them to cool mechanics which would hopefully get them interested in constructed. Slogging through losses with starter decks trying to save 15 coins to draft "fair" games is a terrible new player experience.

2. Matchmaking is a mess because of low player count... So why not just let people (new players) make mission/achievement progress in the training mode? Keep gold rewards for pvp and then bots are limited in their effectiveness to afk farm content.

3. By my quick estimates, I personally believe the collection rate is "fair". Where it is lacking is specificity, the ability to acquire the cards you actually want.
-In Hearthstone and Elder Scrolls Legends you can "dust" any card.
-In MTG Online you can buy individual cards
-In MTG Arena you get wildcards (both in packs and as a bonus for buying packs)
-In Gwent you are presented multiple cards and you choose the "rare" that you want.

All those systems let you "aim" your collections towards a faction, mechanic, or playstyle you prefer. Packs actually give you a sense of anticipation and progress.

In Kards I click through and look at how much my resource counter goes up, knowing I need 320 for my next elite. My 10 reward packs for the Season 5 Officer Club got me 22 resources. Honestly those 22 resources are more useful than the German elite I pulled because I have 0 interest in Germany at present.

Those 10 packs have a "worth" of about $14 US and didn't get me close to a card I wanted. Why would I actually _buy_ packs?

[Thomas]

Thank you for the detailed and constructive feedback! Very helpful indeed, please continue adding to this discussion with such a level of detail.

Other messages, for example one liners that had no further reasoning or explanation or off-topic, have been removed. Please stay on topic and constructive like Efiarx and D13. Thank you!

[Ben]

I think this is basically what 70% of new players experience:
1. Login
2. Game mechanics are fun!
3. Start winning a little bit
4. Gets repeatedly destroyed by 'unfair' cards
5. Analyzes the degree of effort/cost to get said 'unfair' cards
6. Quits

Unless you're Blizzard or WOTC you can't be stingy with free currency and have broken cards at the same time. Either you give all players easy access to to these cards or you balance the game and add more deck diversity.

Everytime I bring up an example like Blackout vs. Monty, I am told this is totally okay because you can only have 1 Monty in your deck. What about Kittyhawk and Mosquito? When you can load up your deck with these must-include cards regardless of what your deck strategy is, it just becomes a competition of haves and have-nots. Skill needs to be more of a factor. Not to mention more Specials/Elites will be printed in the future, further decreasing deck diversity in the current balancing philosophy.

Locking all the broken cards behind a massive grindwall or paywall is an easy way to get people to pass on the game. There are some OP cards like Katyusha and Panzer IV that are not Special/Elites, but these cards are not even fun to play against. The amount of pressure a Katyusha generates if you don't have an immediate answer for just 2-cost is absurd. And the retreat mechanic is just plain undercosted. This leads everyone being required to play rush decks or own all broken cards to compete.

Finally, if Kards resolves these issues and starts building the player base, please add dust-refunds for nerfed cards. It's not a problem now because of the low player count, but this is a standard expectation from most people who have played digital card games. Nerfing someones 320 dust Elite without compensation is an easy way to make someone quit.

[Tristan]

I dont think the game is bad for new players, but I think they need to be directed to draft, after learning the ropes against the AI and playing a few matches against humans. Draft is where you earn cards and where you learn what cards are good. If players aren't progressing quickly to draft, something is going wrong with the messaging to new players.

[Tristan]

Most decks tend to be rush, midrange or control. Of the three, rush is the most new player friendly, as it can be strong with few elites/specials and is easier to play. There are strong rush decks in every faction except for UK.

[Yossarian]

READ THIS BEFORE DEVS DELETE IT
LOLOLOL I come back to this game after going for a hiatus because back in the day, the devs of the game offered a survey which SAID was going to help improve the game but was really about finding ways to socially engineer more addictive players and find out which of their players had depression...
Now i come back and having played this game for a couple of rounds, I find that many of the problems that i highlighted on steam discussions back in the day are still plaguing the game now. well I'm glad my ol bud, stonedog is still around. So here we go; luckily Alvera can't ban me as easily as he would on your discord. LOL on the "we don't crush criticism", Alvera.
AGAIN, I think i said this many, many, many times before but again I say it; the biggest problem with retention of new players and hence your small population size; is that the game is unfair to new players. They go up against MADE-DECKS with elites and specials to the wazoo; and all they have are basic common and limited cards. The only way to go up against them is to go through a grind of completing achievements where you know your going to lose but you play the game anyways in order to put down as many cards as possible to grind out the achievements. I'm pretty sure you know this... I can think of a lot of old names/veteran players who have told the devs exactly this and have complaint more angrily than this.... There's an easy fix to this.. offer an elite or special as part of every card pack, half achievement progression requirement, dont have them versing officer club players and introduce a way to turn any card back into resources. No one likes having to grind out your insane achievements.
I understand you have to make money and monetize the game somehow; first off, offering a special/elite per card pack isn't going to kill your profits; in fact more people might decide to buy if they know they can get something worthwhile from a cardpack instead of the 10% or watever it is to get an elite card. 2nd you should be monetizing this game via cosmetics. There was an old steam discussion where players (WHO WANTED TO GIVE YOU GUYS MONEY! I Can't stress this enough) found that there was literally nothing to buy and complaint about card packs not being worth the cost; hence wanting the devs to implement cosmetics in order for them to PURELY support you because they love your game! I come back after 3-4 months and find you have absolutely nothing new to sell in your shop except card packs and the old nation packs... This is the most insane thing i've seen; I've never met players who had to ask devs to monetize their game more via cosmetics; I've never met devs who not only didn't listen but passed up easy profits and stick to the old horrible monetization scheme which has drawn the ire of so many players with goodwill or badwill before out of all f2p games i've been through. Your literally the "konami" of p2w ccg games and irl konami was one of the pioneers of p2w.
I can't believe u spend so many months on draft, fully prioritising on it that in such a way that you didnt even try to fix ongoing player issues especially with new players. Don't you answer to the people who invest in your game? wth are those meetings like?
In terms of draft, i am impressed. I like how it plays and it indeed is one of the selling points of this game. But to put a price tag of 15gold per ticket is ridiculous. You want people to slug through 45 victories to get the chance of playing draft once? Are you insane?
This idea that player population would be solved as Alvera says it by Kards being "available on other platforms" is such a short-sighted way of looking at things. Even if Kards becomes available on phone, tv and pedometer; it's still not going to fix the problem of player retention. You might have +500,000 more people looking into the game which is what will happen once it switches to mobile but your just gonna have +500,000 people leaving. And as any dev will tell you in your line of business, switching to mobile from pc will have unforseen server load issues which would need to be fixed; perhaps not due to your incompetence (highly unlikely) but maybe due to AWS for example. If a new player walks in; not only does the game have server lag issues, graphics which somehow takes a huge load on the phone processor (due to devs priortising fancy graphics of cards flipping and being destroyed/soundeffects) but also find how grindy the game is and how insane card packs costs are; do you think that new player will stay??? Then what??? your just gonna tell your publisher that it was AWS fault for your bad mobile launch?? LOLOLOL. You devs, really come across to me as people who don't even play your own game.... I don't understand how you guys don't even know this yet...
I'm being harsh and somewhat rude because I KNOW EVERYTHING I SAID HAS BEEN SAID TO YOU BEFORE BY OTHER PEOPLE. When @Efiarx puts out this thread and tries to tell you that new players have it bad because he CARES about this game and devs/mods response is to say; "hey thank you for calling please tell us more about your complaint.... ahh I see now... thank you so much for your feedback... yes guys pls more detailed feedback like this is helpful"; from my perspective having been him before; it sounds soooo scripted and sooo disingenuous. YOU KNOW THIS! STOP PRETENDING YOU DON'T!

The only reason this game got so much attention in the beginning, was because of how beautiful the art was (not talking about the propaganda poster copies but the paintings) and how well the game concept plays. I hope you paid your graphic designers/2d artists well... Whoever suggested to priortise fully on draft without a wink of eye to fix ongoing player based issues should be fired. You could have made easy money and got a lot of players off your back, by offering a special/elite per card packs, allowing players to turn any card to resources and adding cosmetics for profit... I have never seen such incompetence before.. and it hurts to see good art wasted on you.

Also that survey was disgusting and disingenuous in nature. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Taking advantage of players with the goodwill of wanting to help improve your game, only to ask them questions in order to exasperate their addictions and hence find ways to monetize them is DISGUSTING. There are 10 year old kids who play your game you know? Your literally taking advantage of lonely10 year old kids who one day will likely become addicted gambler when they grow up because games like these instil this notion of: "One more... just need to open one more card pack...". You give indie game developers a bad name. Shame on you.

torni, player with more than 400hrs and reached officer club for the first 3 seasons

wat up stonedog

[Hisendam]

I don't understand why so many players are raging about the 'bad' new player experience. Kards is just like every other ccg out there that is not freshly released. Once you don't have enough new players who can battle each other the new player experience is kinda crap in constructed-pvp. That is just the nature of the genre, guys! So wait until Kards is released (on mobile) and get into the game at that point, if you don't like it right now.

[Tristan]

"The only way to go up against them is to go through a grind of completing achievements where you know your going to lose but you play the game anyways in order to put down as many cards as possible to grind out the achievements."

Or you can play draft, like I did, until you have a better collection.

"But to put a price tag of 15gold per ticket is ridiculous. You want people to slug through 45 victories to get the chance of playing draft once? Are you insane?"

The first win daily, plus 3 wins, plus your quest gives you 8 gold. With a 50% win rate, a draft pays out 5 gold on average. So every 5 days you're getting 4 drafts as a f2per, and that's not counting gold gained from the draft bonus, or from achievements.

[Efiarx]

Yossarian, i have read your soul cry. Every. Single. Word. Twice. I dont know you but i can surely tell that your knowledge and feeling in this matter are very deep, decent and true.

I just hope this game be good someday, and all efforts of people like you, like us, and many others before and after will not be in vain.