Sunday, January 20, 2013

Bazaar Changes

Rage of Bahamut
 
Thank you for playing Rage of Bahamut.

In order to improve your overall user experience and prevent inappropriate Trading within the game, we will be revamping the Bazaar system. Please note that the change will be effective Feb. 4th, 2013 (ET). Changes include the following:

1) Registered/Non-Registered Users
- Only user who performed Device Registration may now make use of the Bazaar system. Non-registered users will not be able to utilize the system.

2) Search Function
- You will now be able to search for Cards using Card names.
- You will still be able to search via filters.

3) Selling Cards on the Bazaar
- When selling a Card for others on the Bazaar, you will only be able to request Cards of the same rarity on your Bazaar WishList. For example, if you are selling a High Rare Card on the Bazaar you may only request High Rare Card(s).
- Due to the above changes, we will be adjusting the Guidance section for the Bazaar.

4) Trade/Gift Limitations of SSR+ Cards
- Any newly added Cards that are SSR or Rarer will now only be Tradable for up to 10 days from the release date. Once the 10 days have expired you will no longer be able to Trade the Card, and must sell and/or purchase it via the Bazaar.
- Please note that the above does not apply to Cards whose Rarity reaches SSR at final evolution.
-You will only be able to Gift Cards that are Rare or below.

5) Trading Restrictions for Items
- Previously, the Trading rules required you to be either a Fellow or in the same Order for 2 weeks. Please note that this duration will been extended to 30 days when Trading Items.
  - Under the new rules you must meet the requirements below to Trade/Gift Items:
  - You are a Fellow and/or in the same Order as the other user
  - Either and/or both of the following:
    1) You have been a Fellow with the user for at least 30 days.
    2) You have been in the same Order for at least 30 days.
 
My views:
1) Don't really care ab out registered users. Whatever.
 
2) Search function, finally.
 
3) Wait?..What? Great, no more down/uptrading guys. Yeah, people weren't limited enough.
 
4) For those who are wondering why this is a rule...it's to limit a person who maybe had 500 accounts from being able to transfer SSR to his main account. Of course these accounts can still just sell the card for HP on the bazaar and transfer that. Still dumb because it solves nothing but adds another limitation on a heavily limited trade system.
 
5) This is directly related to point four. Ideally, if you cannot trade the SSR with your main account you would sell it for HP, this makes it more difficult to get that HP to your main account. 
 
Honestly. Points 3, 4, and 5 are just stupid. They solve nothing. I have already thought of how to work through all of it. Player has all alt accounts linked to each other in some network. Each account sells their cards on bazaar for HP. Since the alts are long term friends, all HP goes to one main account. Finally, your main account sells a HR for the price of all the pooled HP. 

Regardless, Mobage have handled controlling exploiters horribly from the get go, and their new changes just prove again that they have no idea what they are doing in regards to them.
 

26 comments:

  1. This is just ridiculous.
    To be honest, I personally think that it is the time to leave this game and search better games than this.
    Mobage/Cygames has screwed up this game so badly to the point of no return. :(
    It's so disappointing that it was a very good game :(

    Just a little of my though. :)

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    1. I agree this is just plain retarded, out of all of these 3 hits me the hardest since I like to play the market but it does prevent people from buying cards with irl money, 4 makes sense to a degree because it makes it a bit more obvious for the admins to pick up on I suppose essentially forcing accounts to have to transfer a copious amount of Hp definitely sets more flags than a 1 card trade, 5 kind of is the nail in the coffin for people selling cards for irl money

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  2. This game is now all about economics. It has very little to do with actual achievements in the game. The only strategy I see as a successful option is to do one of two things:

    Regularly skip event participation doing what you said using your HP to buy cards and sell them later for a profit until you amass thousands of HP. Then in one fell swoop blast a HW event finishing in the top 100 of individual player. I think there is a good chance with thousands of HP you could net a profit. The only problem with this strategy being the new rules that won't allow you to distribute your vast hoard of rewards to alternate accounts saving them until later to sell for a larger profit. I guess it could still work because even with thousands of HPs you still probably only pick up an handful of SSRs that you won't be able to move. Option two is to build up a vast hoard of HP and sell them on ebay for 25 cents a piece and walk away. I think in 6 months you could possibly obtain 3-4000 HP and net 1K USD from playing a free online game. I guess it's all about what you're in it for.

    I think the new rules do to a degree make it harder on high level players to cheat. The new system has almost no impact on an HR SR player. Realistically there are only maybe 1500 players that have better stuff than that across the board. I mean I've been playing for 4 months and I don't have a single SSR or Legend in my deck, and that said I almost never lose a battle ever when attacking. With my all HR evoed to SR setup I almost always hit for 150+ and almost never lose. As a note I lost a total of 2 battles during HW with a total expenditure of around 50-60 HP. I guess the question for the new rules changes remains "What is Mobage trying to accomplish?"

    1.) I do not think Mobage is Naive to the issues with the rewards or the high level players almost certainly cheating to attain their results.

    2.) I think more than stop the cheating completely with the rules change Mobage is making an effort to make cheating more visible to them. I'm not going to say they won't miss anyone, but I think they are going to blast people when the rewards come out from this war.

    3.) I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it. This is a 10s if not hundreds of millions of dollars to Mobage. They are not stupid, they are thinking about things, but at the end of the day for them this is much more about the bottom line than it is about the actual gaming experience. People say well they are making the top spenders angry and they will leave, but for every guy they lose that spent $1000 on this game they bring in 10000 more players. Think about this. The more the prices of good cards drop on Bazaar the more accessible the game becomes to new players. For the record, despite having and increasing # of options for High level decks, the price of Enkidu, once the staple of the best offensive players, hasn't dropped much in 4 months. As an opportunity here Marduk was only 220 HP over the last few days I bought three to hold and when they get to 500+. Its basically Enkidu for Man.

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    1. My SKL10 Claymore Maids have SUNK in value in the past few months. I scrimped and saved and wheeled and dealed to get those 3 cards evolved and skilled up and now they're relatively worthless.

      There isn't a better Man HR attack card. But SRs and SSRs have come down so far in price that Clays are selling for rediculous low values. /shrug

      The whole economy seems to be a mess, but I'd rather see the cost/benefit of events addressed first. That's where the game is really failing in my opinion. I'm ok if over time cards devalue in exchange for better cards. I'm not ok with the fact that currently someone can spend 100HP on a Holy war and only expect to see ~30HP in returns (unless they get MAD lucky with the silver coins...which I did not)

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  3. All in all I think players have to evaluate why they play this game. If it's because they want to have some bad ass unbeatable deck that opportunity is attainable. If its because they like the trading and statistics and trying to earn a profit like a market game. That's still very prevalent. If they like the card art work, that has only improved over time. The only thing I see being different now from before is that there really isn't the opportunity to be a big dog. If you want to rank in the top 100 of events good luck. Even hard is rank int he top ten for orders in any event. I thought a while ago my alt order had a shot at the next CW event. It's basically 40 Alt accounts all with 650+ stam and 800+ CW Each just waiting to explode, but after the HW rankings I don't think it will be enough. I mean I think the top order probably spent 300K HPs or more.

    So really if you're just playing the game for fun, its not much different than it ever was.

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  4. In my mind if these changes make cheating more easily visible to those charged with the task of tracking such players down... I'm willing to be inconvenienced.

    You're right, points 3-5 are further restrictions on a heavily restricted trading card game... HOWEVER, the large chasm between those that have hundreds of alternate accounts with a jail broken device who switch cards to attain rewards in beginner rankings, make HP off referral cards, have unlimited stamina accounts for feeder grinding and LCP log in rewards is what makes events so hard to profit on.

    I’d be willing to bet the top 300-500 rankers in EVERY event (with a couple exceptions I’m sure) aren’t just “bending the rules” by having a SINGLE alt stamina account… but are grossly breaking the ToS and cheating.

    Take those 500 or so users out, then suddenly those of us ranking 1500 legitimately are in the top 1000.

    So in my mind… I will wait out these changes while they weed out the cheaters… and I’m sure I’m underestimating how many people truthfully ought to be banned.

    Bring on the changes… it sucks for now… but I’m fine with the long term vision.

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  5. I'm mostly going to get a little flamed for this but here goes.

    Why don't they make Bazaar tickets a registered account verification. That way only registered users or paying members of the community get tickets.

    For trading making unregistered account only able to receive gifts and/or add bazaar tickets to do a trade. 5 bazaar tickets/ day is too low for making trades require tickets.

    My other idea is unregistered accounts can only trade cards away and items are forbidden to be traded away. In general it makes unregistered accounts sinks for items.

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  6. I haven't really thought about how the cheating/abusing issue could be solved but these changes definitely seem very annoying, specially for high level players.

    However, its probably true that for most players who play by the rules (single account, no shenanigans) it means very little.

    Usually the best way to solve a cheater situation is to make the gameplay itself be free of ways to abuse it. For example, a lot of the things that you benefit from by having multiple accounts are due to the fact that you get them without doing much more than logging in daily: bazaar tickets, logging campaign prizes. I would just do away with a daily reward and instead give more rewards based on interaction, like questing and battling, so that its more convenient to do everything in a single account by spending more time on it, than to have multiple accounts and doing a single click.

    As for protection elements in the bazaar, instead of putting a hard restriction, why not put a warning, for example: WARNING - YOU ARE TRADING FOR A LOWER RARITY CARD.
    WARNING, YOU ARE TRADING FOR AN AMOUNT MUCH LOWER THAN THE 24 HOUR AVERAGE OF THIS CARD, WARNING - YOU ARE TRADING THIS CARD BACK IN ADDITION TO OTHER ITEMS. There are plenty of things that can be done with computers to help people avoid getting scammed.

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    1. Gabo is right... They made alt accounts and cheaters more relevant when they started the stamp login rewards. For each alt, that's at least 3 LCP and 3 HP per 15 days. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a guy with 10 alts is now making 60 HP per month without considering a good pull from those LCP. Skill feeding became easier for the cheater's main accounts because they started giving out archangel queens for free too. Mobage is clueless.

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  7. how do you do a 6-7?do you enhance 6 cards and evolve or .......

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    1. One of the base cards are maxed before evolving into the + version.

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    2. Hey lucarada, thanks for your blog, really helps ro start and begin in spooth condition. Now i feel like the game isn't going in the right direction and becomes more and more about just taking my money. So do you think i should sart to invest my time on that game or do you know any other good trading game on IOs ? Thanks again. Cheets

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    3. I see that a lot of people still like to count the last enhancement and add 1. He could be referring to a 6-6, which seems more likely. Even the wiki is using the 4-7/6-11/8-15 notation.

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  8. so you evolve: fully enhanced wraith,FE wraith,FE wraith, FE wraith,FE wraith, FE wriath? sorry if im being a noob, but i did and 8-6 on a minotaur and i only got 13 k attack. also, i dont trust the wiki. i screwed up on a master gunner ia whikle ago and i screwed up my 5-9 master gunner( i expected 15 k but got 14 k

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    1. Not sure if this clarifies anything, but the general rule of thumb is to delay enhancements as much as possible. While a 6-2 means enhancing only the last two cards in ++ form, a 6-6 means starting your enhancements one step earlier where you fuse a maxed + form with a maxed base form, twice.

      So here it is, step by step, for a 6-6:
      1. Fuse two unenhanced base forms. You get a + form.
      2. Max enhance the + form and fuse it with a maxed base form. You get a ++ form.
      3. Repeat steps 1 and 2. You now have two identical ++ forms.
      4. Max enhance both ++ forms and fuse them together. You get a final form.
      5. Max enhance the final form. Congratulations. You now have a maxed 6-6.

      Personally though, I would max enhance everything (4-6, 6-10) just to squeeze every drop out of my cards. Anything less than a "proper" evolution and my OCD screams at me.

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    2. Yeah, you need to do it enhancing backwards with the count.

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  9. secoind question, from anybodies pertsonal experinence, does a 6-7 wraith have at least 15 k attack

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  10. Lucarda, correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't section 5 affect buying/seling of cards as well?

    Assuming you would like to sell a Claymore for 7 HP to someone; you have a 'Card' and the other person have an 'Item'. As per section 5, the limitation for 'trading item' would be 30 days. So since the other person is trading an "Item", that means we have to wait for 30 days instead of 2 weeks before trading?

    Or does it only affect trading of HP/CW/Magic Circle <--> HP/CW/Magic Circle ?

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. You are correct you would have to wait 30 days before trading rather than two weeks, Deleted above post because I worded it kind of improperly

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    3. It does, but most people aren't selling directly to players. The trading changes don't effect bazaar as far as I've noticed.

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  11. Wow... Rule 3 is probably the worst of them. I've actually traded some HR cards for low tier SR cards in the past. This just makes the process much more cumbersome.

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  12. I regularly put bazaar interactions up of a rare for an HR card. I do probably 2-3 a day so this is going to suck :P

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  13. I know someone who quit the game and made 2k USD.... Back when it was easier to trade... This just confirms my reasons for leaving the game. they make it near impossible to do well unless you drop thousands of dollars on LCPs that usually give garbage.

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    1. Well, when everybody was telling me how great bazaar was going to be when the prices dropped I wrote a post of how economics works and what would happen. Sure enough, pretty much economic collapse exactly as I said it would happen.

      If tickets didn't exist economy would regulate itself because I know people who would buy every HR on the market and relist for 5HP higher than what they are currently going for, keeping the value up.

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