Monday, February 4, 2013

New Card Releases

Yesterday when I logged on and saw that Hector and Echidna were released, I started to think about how many recent card releases we have had. I used to collect football cards when I was younger and there were a lot of duplicates, re-releases, special editions, etc. As a kid, one of the things that always held true, they stopped making the old cards when they released the new cards.

I think Mobage could learn something from this. A lot of the fun of card collecting games is having cards or archiving cards that other people don't have. When I look at Empusa for example, she was just a high normal card with titillating artwork, but sells for quite a bit because she was discontinued ages ago.

I feel that Mobage should start reducing some of the older High Rares and SRs from Rage of Bahamut card packs. I think it would be a good idea to remove cards like Great Spirit, Elaine, Lovely Elf, Master Witch, etc. These cards don't really work in any decks anymore and only really serve as cards to increase somebodies archive. By removing them and adding extra perks for Archive Rage of Bahamut would be giving players something extra to do that's fun.

If Rage of Bahamut started discontinuing cards while adding effects to perks like you get 5 extra points to distribute every 20 Archives (after you cap your card inventory), I think we'd see a lot of active trading which would pump a little more life into the game. It would also help people sitting on tons of 1HP HR cards liquidate them.

The final effect of a change like this would be that a lot of the 1HP HR cards are removed from card packs. This would increase paying customers ability to get better cards, increasing their desire to purchase card packs, because lets be honest, right now even if you get an SR there's a 70% chance you get an SR that nobody wants because it's inferior to newer ones.

These were the thoughts I had when more new cards were released. What do you think about the constant releases of new cards while the old cards remain on the market?

Rage of Bahamut Guide Hector 

Rage of Bahamut Guide Monstrous Mother Echidna

33 comments:

  1. They should definitely remove older srs from cps for a little while just so they're prices go back up to reasonable points. Sutekh is 50hp ea and Thor is 25hp ea? Like da fuq?

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  2. I agree. There are so many cards out that when i get a CP and end up getting the same HR that I have already gotten 5 times before, it can be maddening. Doing what you are talking about might bring some of the older players back into the game as they will generally have some of the old cards that you are referring to while helping them engage the newer players that desire those cards for their archives.

    Also, do you anticipate that the value of the cards will steadily go back up once this event is over. I mean, like LOL said, cards that were once unobtainable for the lower market players are freaking crazy cheap now. Like getting haniel for 70hp or a bahamut for 120hp. Just seems crazy that prices across the entire market are suffering, not just the prices for the cards that are being doled out in this event. Sure would be nice to pull about 350 to 400 hp for my bahamut i just pulled being one of those lower market players.

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    1. Rage will probably follow us up so quickly with another event everybody will be selling to get HP.

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    2. I believe the rapid price drop is a result of the last Holy War. Due to the inclusion of full force attacks, high powered orders increased their hp spending dramatically to fight for top positions even though the rewards for doing so were no where close to what they were willing to spend. So at the end of the event, they tried to sell their SR and HR cards all at once to recoup their investment. By doing so, they flooded the market with valuable cards which weren't selling because only they had 350 to 400 hp to spend on a single card. So the price kept dropping until lower market players could afford them ... thus the Thors selling for 25 hp.

      The good news is that the prices are going up. Most of the really awesome deals have been snatched up, allowing many lower market players to advance a rarity on the cheap. Considering that every player between ranks 3,000 and 30,000 is about to get 10 hp, hopefully the average player will be able to afford higher priced cards - resulting in a gradual price increase over time.

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  3. im actually luycky beacsue i liquidated all my cards for hp, i started noticing the real bazaar change when everything was less than 20hp. i wish cards went back to regular price. just saying, but anyone noticed the price rises?, very fgew but mad hatters prices rose, i got them for 5 hp but now its 8 hp minimum, im going coocoo wiht the price change

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    1. The problem is one of the worst things for any economy, game or otherwise is massive instability. In this case the prices are so inconsistent nobody wants to buy anything ever.

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  4. personally lucarda, i dont ever know how to get hrs before the economical breakdown, thats beacsue i didnt know how to get hp, i never got any luck with cps and feeders noone was willing to buy

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    1. If you started right after bazaar when players couldn't trade it made it damn near impossible for newbies to get HP. The old way of doing it was farming for feeders and trading them for HP. Once you had 10-20HP though you could use forums to buy low and sell high making 5-10HP a Day until you hit 100HP and then you could do more.

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    2. So how do people make HP now in the post-Bazaar game? I used to trade cards for higher-value cards a lot (e.g.buying a master witch for 2hp, trading it for an lovely elf worth 3hp, trading that for a temp vamp worth 4hp, and so on, until I had an Ifrit or Wraith that I could sell for 20-something hp, and re-start the process.) That doesn't work any more because all the cards have decreased down to minimal values now and are basically the same price.

      After that stopped working, I would level cards and resell them (e.g. Max'd Ifrit for Ifrit + 3hp). This is still do-able, but harder because the value of the base cards continues to decline, and also people are only paying 2hp for maxing services now.

      Recently I started trading hp/cw, and made a lot of money during the early stages of this recent event when I could trade 10cw for 11hp, and then turn around and trade 10hp for 11cw. But those prices are unstable, and it's easy to lose money if you're not paying attention to market fluctuations. (current prices seem to be around 10hp for 16cw, or 10cw for 7hp - averages 1/2 hp profit per trade, but demand is low).

      So on average I'm only making 1-2 hp per account per day. Anybody have a better idea?

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  5. I like the archive idea, but you gotta get cards off the market. I suggest a golden archive were you only get archive entry if u consume the card. You get golden archive points for cards in it. Every 10(?) points you get 3 attribute points. Rares give 1p, HR 3 p, SR 8p, ssr 16 p etc....each card only counts once off course.

    This would instantly kill loads of rares HR n SR, if one combine it with no rerelease of old HR/SR/SSR it would be really great.

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    1. See, thinking outside the box.

      I don't know if these types of things are too difficult to program or if Mobage just doesn't think of them.

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  7. Would a system of rarity locked pvp ladders help? Like have a [HR] ladder that would reward well. You could only use cards High Rare and below, which would cause a bunch of high level players to buy up lots of rares, because at this point the difference between an 8-16 and a 6-10 or 4-7 would be enough to win, since the cards themselves aren't super expensive. A full atk and def deck of 8-16s would cause an actual demand for rares outside of the typical kids levelling up. The specfics of how the ladder works with your atk power would need to be worked out but I think if the rewards were good enough you'd see all sorts of players start buying up the lower cards.

    With a system like this I think you'd also see the rare meta-gaming that people talk about. Demon players building alternate realm defensive decks, attackers having realm-specific-debuff leader cards, all the sorts of things that are simply too expesnive at the current SR and up card prices.

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  8. I've been thinking the same thing. I was heavy into football cards and when the new series came out the old series became obsolete.

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    1. Immediately yeah, everybody wanted the shiny new ones. But after everybody had the new ones, they realized they weren't special. Then they were jealous of the ones from last year that they couldn't get anymore of their favorite players.

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  9. i started during the middle of tears of the moon. so im not exactly a newbie, i remeber that cards were about 20-30 hp for really bad high rares

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  10. Let's face it though, Rage is a phone game. Like most phone games, after a period of time, people will get bored and stop playing. Unless drastic changes are made to the game and current economy I see many people slowly quitting. Very unfortunate because many people have spent lots of money on the game and the prices are so low that it has decreased the value of anything they own. The idea of stopping old card production is ideal. It's like finding treasure in a sunken pirate ship, sure it's gold, but the fact that it is historical and what not escalates the price beyond that of the price for current gold.

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    1. Right now, the two biggest problems facing the RoB economy is the massive imbalance between supply and demand, and the lack of holy powder available due to these past two events.

      One way to fix both of those problems is by having another "Castle in the Sky" type event where players just throw their rares and high rares into some glutonous fairy of some sort. Not only would people be clamouring for rares to stuff down it's gullet, but they'd be willing to pay hp for them. It would simultaneously decrease the supply of rares, increase demand, and therefor raise prices.

      The problem with an archive bonus is that it benefits old players who already have an almost insurmountable advantage to new players who have a hard time earning enough hp to buy high value cards. And after the last holy war, many primo cards weren't selling partially because the prices were unstable and smart buyers were waiting for the prices to hit their minimum, but also because there was genuinely less holy powder to go around. Hopefully the hp influx from Labyrinth will help that problem.

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    2. I agree whole heartedly with your comment. If Mobage released another “Castle in the Sky” a lot of the “less than 1HP” cards would be bought up and “fed” to the “Fairy”. I actually liked the event, but on the other side being one of the middle of the realm players I was able to get 4 Achilles for under 30HP to help bolster my deck, and now I’m just waiting for Lancelot and Icarus to fall to 30HP.

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    3. Castle in the Sky didn't effect prices of cards in the slightest as far as I noticed.

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    4. Agree, didnt do anything to card prices. You need to have the masses consume the cards. Not just 100 ppl byung cards to feed some fairy. Only way is an archive that consume cards. I dont see the disadvantage to new players. New players managed before when HR were HIGH RARE etc.

      I also think they should skip the pcp in login campaigns. Add another hp instead, would liquidate the market and get rid of the big influx of cards. Atm they throw out 30 million rares or higher a month for free (or little less dempending on the multiban).

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    5. Yeah, that card pack just begs for exploiters.

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  11. Mobage needs to do a couple of things if they want to save this game. First off they need to seriously crack down on alt accounts. I'm not talking about people who have 2 or 3 I'm talking about more than 10. If you go to user search and type in h- or any letter you will get a ton of accounts at lvl 10. That goes for each letter in the alphabet. Next they need to stop these damn stamp campaigns or at least limit them to a couple a year. Everyone loves free stuff but in conjunction with the numerous alt accounts its no wonder prices of rares and hrs are so low. Lastly based on what I have learnt the first cause of economic unrest in the game started with the introduction of the bazaar.

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    1. My idea would be to have the same idea of the bazzar but get rid of tickets or possibly set a limit to the amount of srs and above you can buy per day to limit suspicious activity. Another idea would be to not list the prices of each card so people can't instantly undercut each other. This would cause ppl to go back to the old way of trading in which they would have to check rob forums for price checking. There should also be a limit to how many cards u could put on bazaar for ppl to look at. Those are my ideas but mobage proboly dosent care about the state of the game atm.

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    2. The prices dropped not only because of bazaar, but because of the heavy trade limitations forcing people to use the bazaar and the ticket limitations.

      Not listing prices on bazaar would pretty much encourage not having a bazaar. If they were really worried about suspicious activity on bazaar they could require tickets for anything SR on up, but everything lower doesn't require tickets.

      An yeah, the stamp campaigns need to stop.

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  12. Does anyone remember what the Bahamut card was going for before the market tanked?

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  13. 1500 to 2000 hp if i remember correctly.....

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  14. Two things:

    The Stamp Campaigns. No, they don't need to stop. Free things are always fun. Just don't give away the card packs. Instead give more a magic circle, Rupies, or friendshippoints, or maybe more personal hp or cw. 2 extra personal hp or cw won't hurt Mobage that much. Skip the card packs, maybe replace them by one Rare & UP ticket at the end of each campaign. The problem with the card packs is not all the cards (how many good cards do we actually get from it), but the free hp that comes with the card packs. Change a card pack to a Rare&UP ticket and you've tackled that problem. It will even benefit Mobage, because the players with 100 alt accounts actually need to buy hp now, to keep competing.

    Second thing. A Castle in the Sky event would actually work. Meaning you could get rid of a lot of cards, and consequently raise the prices. But, there would have to be more restrictions on such an event:
    1. Don't give away so much high normal or rares in the event that get you that much points in the event (like Slime Elena).

    2. You (we) don't want people to buy new cards, because you want a lot of cards off the market to raise the prices. Mobage will not like that. The most important aspect of such an event to Mobage is to be able to sell cards and make more profit. That’s why you need restrictions:
    a. Not every bloody card you buy with a skill may be used as a feeder. Only high rares and up (I believe it was rares and up in Castle in the Sky)
    b. Put special card packs on sale with a chance on a special high rare (or up) feeder card which gives more points (makes Mobage happy, high level players will want those cards).
    c. Only rare cards which are already in your inventory (not just archive, you actually need to “have” the card) at the beginning of the event can be uses as feeders. As stated under a. Rare cards you buy during the event can’t be used.
    d. In combination with what I said under 1., only special rare cards that come out of treasure chests during the event, or special rare cards you get from exchanging items (flowers, shards, crystals, whatever), can be used as feeders. These cards cannot be bought in card packs.

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    1. Free stuff is fun to a point. The problem with tons of 'free stuff' is that it devalues 'other stuff'. If tomorrow the government gave everybody one million dollars, the price of everything would skyrocket to compensate for peoples new found wealth. All this 'free stuff' that is 'fun' plays a role in the devaluation of other stuff. Just because mobage CAN print money, doesn't mean it should.

      As for the Castle in the Sky Event, the market prices raised by about 25%-30% during the event on SOME cards, and after the event people said 'well event is over they are worth less now,' and proceeded to cut the price in half. Overall, Castle caused a price drop.

      In the event they created a castle in the sky following your guidelines, it would be inherently anti-fun. All of your restrictions on the event would make it near impossible for new players to be involved and enjoy it.

      To me, it just sounds awful and would only result in a mild price increase at best, followed by a drop in price afterward, just like before. After all, your event is virtually identical to the previous other than it requires HR to be purchased.

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  15. Vote on my idea. Would give a new dimension to the game and get rid of lots cards=raise value of cards.

    http://feedback.mobage.com/forums/172709-rage-of-bahamut/suggestions/3633489-a-new-archive-that-consume-cards-the-golden-archi

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  16. I got a 1x apsara and 4x xuanwu.
    Is it wise to trade 1 xuanwu for the new Enchanting sylp?

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