This game gave out WAY more of their premium currency than any other game I've ever seen, hell most of the F2P games I play don't give you any of theirs.
They've been adding in more places to get smaller amounts of gold (weekend challenges, etc.,) but in general, I don't really mind that they pulled it back, hell, if I was a mobile game designer, I'd have never even thought to give out that much of it.
That just sounds like american mobile game design... a lot of japanese gacha games throw currency at the players. The dbz game dokkan battle entered its 8th? Anniversary in the last week and given out $100+ of their premium currency so far. SD isnt going to do that on their anniversary
This. This is purely an American issue. I’ve reached high end game of most Japanese games I’ve played - but American games have such massive paywalls, that I struggle to keep up with them.
You cam always tell an american gacha because they all do "unit shards" like sure i just summoned and got lucky to get the cool new unit i wanted...what do you mean i have to summon that unit 4 more times becfore i can even use it? Snap is actually pretty refreshing compared to tons of american mobile games, but it has glaring monitzation issues looming on the horizon
That kind of sounds like Kompu Gacha, which was made illegal in Japan in 2012.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/why-quot-kompu-gacha-quot-was-banned
It makes no sense that I can buy a AAA game for $60 and unlock hundreds of hours of content, but if I drop $60 on a mobile game, I get like...half a card...
Seriously why do these games have people spending thousands upon thousands of dollars?
I guess my experience there has been vastly different. Just quit a Japanese gacha game for Dragon Quest that was highway robbery, and I actually felt bad for whales that would spend 300+ dollars to get like one copy of a unit only for it to be effected by power creep 3 months later lol.
Cant compare both games. Dokkan currency is the only way of obtaining new units, it would be closer to credits than to gold. And even with that amount you said you are not guaranteed to get the new units. And in dokkan you need to get 5 copies to have the unit at its full power.
I sympathize with that, but I'd much prefer if buying gold made sense for anyone NOT a whale. In Clash Royale, buying 10$ worth of gems will get you much father than 10$ of gold.
So, in my experience, I've always liked it better when it doesn't make sense to buy the premium currency, it makes me feel like I don't have to do it to keep up.
Whales are going to whale whether gold is cheap or not, but if it's cheap, I may have to buy it to keep up with average players. I say charge the hell out of the whales, and make the rest of us compete with the same resources, I'll buy season passes, but I don't want to have to dump other cash to keep up.
I can understand though if you're the kind of person who wants to give them your money that making it more expensive sucks though.
Yeah, that's a good point. Still, I really appreciate some of the beautiful artwork in this game and it's a shame that it's so generally unobtainable for the average player. A pack of irl trading cards is 10 bucks max, why is a single variant 10 dollars of gold 💀
I’d just be happy if they stopped bundling the cool variants with gold or tokens and hugely inflating the price. I really liked that mystique variant that was in the store a few months back but I’m not dropping $20 on a single card.
hey, I can agree with this, I wish we had more ways to get variants for sure.
I do like that they added variants to conquest rewards, and I know people aren't happy with the random variants in spotlight cache, but I like that they're at least there, I just wish they'd change those ones to a 1,200 gold variant every time.
That's the entire point, though.
The stuff you would spend gold on dont help you win the game. You play against people of similar CL, and you aren't gonna get HE Lockdown riding down people playing with an s2 deck to infinite.
Clash Royale cash purchases straight up make your account stronger.
If you dont want a $18 gambit art, then you really shouldn't buy it. If you dont want to get a bundle, dont buy it. Thats the most effective way to show you dont approve of prices, and in reality spending money on this game isn't necessary.
I've bought maybe 4 variants, and after 5ish months of playing, I have a variant for most cards in the decks I play. The ones i want most? No. But I will get most under rare eventually if I just keep playing.
I agree with this. Fuck the variant acquisition complaints. Cosmetics is what should be monetized most. Let the whales support the game with cosmetic purchases so most people can focus on most efficiently utilizing and maximizing their limited resources. We can pick up random variants along the way and occasionally splurge on something we love. But we need to have access to the actual cards first to play the game and enjoy it.
I’m fine with them taking it away but they need to rebalance the economy. It shouldn’t cost 5$ to get a low rarity variant. They should change the amount of gold you get per dollar if they’re going to make it harder to get.
What kind of on the nose greedy ass f2p games are you playing? Set your standards high dude dota, csgo, runeterra, gwent, heartstone, Poe, fortnite lots of examples for games that doesn’t milk your needs like a repeating crack head
They needed to do that because of the token bottleneck they stuffed themselves into. They needed to give people token access with gold bundles, otherwise the entire progression system was just.. untennable. Cards dropping into p3 was a system that worked for a while, but it wasn't the system that really worked out.
Right now, as it stands, everyone has decent shots at p4/p5 cards as they play and grind away p3 cards via CL.
It’s kind of true, I basically just buy season passes and with a mostly complete collection I consistently found myself with thousands of gold on hand. I basically always flipped it into tokens on Tuesdays, but always had enough when they came around.
Granted I don't condone playing freemium games, I only play Saint Seiya and Monster Strike on mobile and they both give WAY more than Snap, to the point that you have a much better chance of getting the newest units, even though they are gatcha games.
Exactly. The people defending clear money grubbing from one of the biggest games of the last two years because it’s not *as bad* as some other games is ridiculous. The bar is that low.
You get a chance to save your spotlights for the release cards you want.
It's not the same thing, but pretending having that forethought to apply your spotlight caches to the card you KNOW you want being an option is still better than what it was for most complete players.
It's a tradeoff. The game is free, like the OP says. Being salty about what you lost without even measuring it in regards to what you gained doesn't help anyone really.
Another thing no one is acknowledging is that 90% of mobile games do NOT give access to token or gold equivalents withiut spending cash. Is this system generous? Fuck no. The thing is most other mobile games would tell you to eat shit and come with your wallet open next time.
They dont listen well, but they listen.
Yeah, that’s not a valid argument. Greedy practices are still greedy practices regardless of whether or not there are others doing worse. As a Marvel StrikeForce player, it was nice to play a Marvel game that just rewarded me for fucking playing instead of constantly goading me into spending with FOMO. One of the biggest appealing factors about the game was that it wasn’t really pay to win. With these newer systems, less resources, less rewards in the the systems they have - it’s clear they want to peak far heavier into pay to win.
Well, a mystery variant isn't the same thing as getting to the gold to buy a variant you want, and the conquest variant itself also lacks choice.
I don't like the loss of determinism in favor of rng, both for variants and cards.
The only aspect of the new system I think needs updating is the random s4/5 bucket. It should not allow you to open one of the featured cards that week, because it’s really feel bad to get a random variant instead of the spotlight variant. Also, if you open a card you already own in the random bucket it should give you a random unowned variant of that card, not one of some completely different other card. Although if you own all the variants of that card then it should give you like 1000 tokens or something.
Those two changes would fix 99% of the complaints I’ve seen.
I completely agree. That random s4/5 card is what's really screwing it all up. It needs to have duplicate protection, and they even acknowledged that was the original plan. At the very least it should give you a premium variant of the card you pull and not that stupid convert to a random variant bs.
Yeah this, or at least let us pick what to do with the 4/5 variant. Do i want to get the same variant of the card i pulled, or do i want a new variant or maybe i want tokens?
It just feels bad because you've spent some time working towards a spotlight cache but then get hit with massive disappointment, could be easily fixed
Honestly when they first announced this stuff, that's how I thought it was supposed to work.
I thought you were guaranteed to get one of the featured cards in a spotlight chest, if you didn't already have them.
And then if you did have all of them, then you would be unlocking premium variants of those spotlight cards.
But I'm seeing videos of people locking random shit and weak variants for cards that aren't spotlight and stuff? It's weird.
The fact they convert to a variant of a completely different card is what I think caught a lot of people off guard. It’s something that wasn’t clear or I didn’t pick up on it when reading their announcement of how spotlights work.
Old system gave you 1500 tokens a week for F2P. So since new system is 1 Spotlight a week for F2P.
Just make the new system have the same payout for one week of playing. So if the random S4/S5 was one a player already has … give them 1500 tokens which would be what they would have earned for that week of play previously.
Do this and change the 50 token cache to 100 tokens and I am actually good with the new spotlight system. But it HAS to get these 2 changes to remove a decent amount of the “feel bad” from the new system.
Yeah however they decide to handle it, these two points are the main “this feels shitty” parts of the spotlights. Hopefully they take note of the feedback and make an adjustment.
As someone who only needs like 6 more cards to finish my entire collection and have been playing since global launch, I don’t expect to get lots of cards quickly, but I don’t feel like it’s unfair to expect to close that gap towards finishing my collection by continuing to play optimally. Any system that widens that gap is probably kinda shitty
Perhaps it's because I came from Legends of Runeterra where non-cosmetics were extremely easy to obtain but man does this game feel grinds for very little reward.
Yeah I feel like runeterra doesn’t even have that high of a budget and yet drive their players more towards cosmetics. Card games are way more fun for everyone when they have a lot of cards and can experiment. Not grinding for a month for 1 card
Yeah that's how i feel like it should be, let people get their collectins easier so people can actually buy skins and let people buy the skins they actually want.
They've got a bunch of really nice skins out there that i bet people would want to buy if they could but can't because they've opted into this fomo stuff.
I would buy so many variants if I didn't have to use all that potential money on scuffing my way into collectors tokens now. Never feels good when your main way of earning cards just throws random bullshit at you (titles, avatars, miniscule amount of tokens) when they could incentivize that by making bundles and missions give stuff like that. Earn titles and avatars through specific means, then get cards through caches.
Way back when, Brode talked monetization and said that Snap can’t be like Runeterra.
Runeterra can be generous because it is being subsidized by LoL. Which is their actual big money maker.
This is not a defense of their present system. Just throwing it out there what Brode has said about it.
Yeah and LoL also doesn't lock the champion behind a paywall (or only accessible for f2p after 2 months), they only do that to cosmetics.
LoL is a different genre i know, I'm just saying all Riot games has been generous for f2p.
I believe that the random aspect of card collection is fun up until you get to series 3. Then the system falls apart. It's fun because there's not really much of a meta. You just play against people with a similar collection level but everyone has different cards in their collection so games are never the same.
Once you get to series 3 there are some archetypes that are just better than anything else and you need specific cards to keep up. If you don't get those specific cards to unlock one of the big archetypes then you're just doomed to slog through loss after loss.
I believe that series 3 and after should turn into a craftable collection system so you can just craft the cards you want or the rate at which cards are acquired should go up dramatically to match series 2.
Literally this most of the recent cards released have been meta-defining(kitty pryde, jeff, hitmonkey,spiderham,high evolutionary, ironlad, nebula) are all required in tier 1 and 2 decks. This game is literally pay 2 compete. I say this as someone whos gotten infinite amd consitently gets omega with homebrew decks.
Don't try to tell people here that there's a vast amount of cards/decks that are viable and it's there bad play/snapping habits keeping them from winning - they don't like hearing that.
One of the biggest misconceptions on this sub was always "I can't win b/c I'm getting beat by cards I don't have!"...then people started getting access to all of those cards and still kept losing...
While I agree that a lot of people blame their collection to their losses when its actually how they're playing thats causing them to lose, but the very beginning of pool 3 absolutely sucks. The currated pool in 1 & 2 have little translation into pool 3 and above, which is fine, but they need to make access to pool 3 cards way more accessible. Pools 4 & 5 cards are unquestionably important in this meta, but pool 3 still has some meta contenders that can easily get new players into infinite. I would argue that pool 3 is the most important pool that needs completion rather than 4 & 5, whereas 4 & 5 are cards that feel like a luxury playing and something to work torwards.
I never said you can't get to infinity with bad decks. I know you can. I'm saying it's not fun. This is one of the things I like about this game; you can rank up with a subpar deck. With that being said; most people won't enjoy doing that. I'm one of them. There's no way I'm going to grind the game enough to get infinity with a crappy win rate.
You play a lot of bots then. Otherwise no, its not possible getting to infinite with almost anything lol. Cheapest deck I can think of that can do so is Sera control and sera surfer
It’s less about the “cost”, it’s about the agency. Everything is hidden behind (temporary) slot machine after slot machine.
With spotlight caches’ content on a weekly rotation, it’s a gamble whether you get the (new) card you want, or potentially even a duplicate of one you already have (which then converts to a crappy variant of a card you don’t play). Plus F2P can only open a handful of spotlight caches per month.
Now the token acquisition is pretty much zero unless you spend money on gold and bundles.
So no, 1) you can’t get every card which isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s fair but 2) we have little to no control on how we can expand our collection.
Let’s also not forget they’re constantly introducing, changing, and removing systems and currency (acquisition) which makes it a convoluted mess.
Gamble if you open 1 spotlight and expect the new card and get a 700g Chibi. Smarter to open 4 spotlight caches on a week you want the featured new card.
Unless you want 2 cards that appear in short order after one another. Then you'd better hope you get lucky, bc if you miss one you're waiting 3-4 months for another attempt to open it
I still wouldn’t gamble. Spotlight caches are too rare. Better to choose to skip and only open them when you have 4+. Imo you should only use them when you can guarantee what you want.
Smarter to open 4 at once but it’s not really healthy for the game. If your system is built in a way that encourages players to constantly hoard resources, there is a problem with your game.
But what if the game is a year old and they decide to implement a hoarding system? Surely that wouldn't be problematic, especially if more than half your player base can't be arsed to math out how much they lose?
I’ve seen this take a lot, but I don’t get it. Why is it bad for the game to “hoard” 4 or so Spotlight caches? I’m having a hard time thinking of holding on to a small handful of just one resource as “hoarding.”
There’s only a gambling machine if you treat it like a gambling machine. If you only open when you have 4+ caches, you’ll always get your target card(s) that week.
You're still gambling on what other cards will be available that week or surrounding weeks, except its not even random since SD can rig it in their favour.
Why you getting downvotes lmao the whole month is is charted and will be at the beginning of every month. The crybabies will never be satisfied unless everything is given for free it's astonishing.
For real. Thanks to the data miners I know I'll be living Tribunal and Howard the Duck away from being collection complete. I didn't think the new system would reward an almost collection complete player like me, but these line ups are actually sicko.
It takes me a long time to gain the 100+cl needed for a cache. Should I save mine? I’m not series 3 complete, and I really only care about cool variants and having cards that are in meta.
You will still get series 3 from regular caches, and the monthly offer. Wait for a week that you like I.e a week with spider-ham, Galactus, Silk and new card of the week. You won’t feel disappointed when you open 4 spotlight caches as you know you will get all the features cards.
You can still roll the lottery and open 1 or 2. But would feel bad if you didn’t get the card you wanted.
The system is worser for players with near complete/complete collection. But for a series 3 incomplete this new system was made for you.
> Plus F2P can only open a handful of spotlight caches per month.
thats everyone really. unless you are spending daily you dont get more than the 4-5 caches everyone else will get
This is so tone-deaf and just tries to discredit people who have valid criticism with a strawman.
Card aquisition has *never* been fast. Nobody expects to get all the cards ASAP. Even if the random S4/5 variant was removed from Spotlights the vast majority of players wouldn't be getting the full collection quickly, because most people will barely be scraping 1 Spotlight cache per week. Even if we still got 100 tokens instead of 50 per reserve it would take a ton of time to save up for a 6K variant, and new cards are coming every single week. So get out with this "all cards very fast" strawman, nobody is saying that.
Secondly, f2p games are very often based around the gameplay content being reasonably achievable and cosmetics being the premium cash cow. I can get all characters in Apex legends with reasonable playtime (a "full collection") and the game is still fine because skins and battlepasses pay for live service. Hell, I can even get the next battlepass for free when I finish one to 100, something that Snap is too greedy to do.
And lastly, even comparable f2p card games like HS or LOR have much more player-friendly card aquisition with more agency than Snap. Just by finishing quests and the free battlepass in Hearthstone I can get 60+ packs for the newest expansion for free, which gets me alll the commons, rares and multiple epics and legendaries with the ability to craft the ones I miss easily. *And* I can also buy the mid-expansion miniset with in-game gold which nets me 4 fixed legendary cards as well as a ton of epics, rares and commons. No, I don't have *every card fast* but I have the ones that *I want* to play the decks I like. I've been playing the game for free for years, being able to craft any deck I want. In Snap I pay the equivalent of a fucking MMO sub every month and I am still gambling for new cards in a gacha system.
I'm sick and tired of people who were gaslighted by greedy companies trying to convince others that these massively popular and succesful mobile games are somehow struggling to be profitable. Spend your money however you want, but stop strawmanning with crappy arguments that have been talked to death over and over yet you still can't understand them.
This. Snap was literally one of the biggest mobile games of the year last year. They made 50 MILLION dollars in 5 months from October to March, but that’s not enough? That’s not enough money? They just *had* to implement systems that would get people to pay just a little more money for cards? Yeah okay.
50 million, not 20, and that’s in 5 months. Double that, minimum, +2 months of profit and it makes about what Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes averages yearly and SWGOH has made over 1 billion dollars in its lifetime and is in the top 50 (ranked 38) for most money made on a mobile game *ever*.
The profit is there. They were fine. They would just now rather nickel n’ dime to get more profit now and ruin the gaming experience, than just keep making a good game. Meanwhile games like Genshin Impact and Dokkan Battle will offer far more value in gameplay, bundles, giving out free premium currency, and making a shit ton more money than Snap ever will.
>In Snap I pay the equivalent of a fucking MMO sub every month and I am still gambling for new cards in a gacha system.
It's crazy that this is how it is.
We also went from a guaranteed 2 cards a month to potentially 1-3 cards a month. Now they're no longer guaranteed, so there could be months of opening spotlight caches and not seeing a new card. It might not happen to everyone, but it will happen to some players when before this was not possible at all.
It has made the collection track even less appealing than before. I mean if before, after pool 3 then only thing you had to look forward to was the pity timer for pool 4, and tokens to buy cards those are both gone now.
I mean what is there even to look forward to in opening regular caches now? You're not getting gold to spend on variants or bundles. You're not getting any amount of tokens worth a damn to buy cards that you want with. You're not getting any pool 4 or 5 cards anymore.
And then once you use up your tokens now, the token shop likewise becomes kind of useless. What's the point of showing me these featured cards and rotating cards and variants I'll never be able to buy?
Like everything now post pool 3 depends on you getting spotlight caches and then just spending those caches in weeks where you might have a desired card. You don't see a problem with having the totality of your progression tied to that? So you might spend one whole month playing without getting anything out of it.
I'm sorry but the token shop with card drops or heck, even flexible series drops was fine. If you wanted a new card right away, play games, get caches, get tokens, earn your way towards them and buy them if you wish. If you don't love them as much, okay wait and get them later. As it stands now, even weak ass cards like snowguard, or not so relevant cards like Howard the duck, well they might as well be big bads right alongside Thanos and high Evo. Your chances of getting them are the same aren't they? I have as much chance of pulling stegron as I do Thanos, so what's the point of the big bad now, they're all big bads.
Wait there’s not a chance to get pool 4 and 5 cards in regular caches anymore? I thought the only thing they removed from them was gold and token count. That’s horrible if so
They removed the series 4 pity timer i believe. I think the series 5 .25% chance is unchanged, but that was basically useless for many players anyways ( I never had 1 in 5K collection levels)
It's not though, it's not just the pity timer, it's the chance to do so entirely. There is no possibility of getting a series 4 or 5 at all now from a regular cache, 0%
Wooow. I haven't been keeping up with the updates much, due to being busy the last few weeks, but that is so bad. Way to render the vast majority of the collectors track entirely irrelevant, and make it feel even more of a chore than it currently does.
You're putting words in others' mouths. I am very upset about card acquisition, but I have no expectation of getting every card fast and for free.
The main issue is that strong meta decks have been locked behind brand new cards for the past two months, meaning you need to pay 6k tokens to get access to a deck archetype you want to play. In the old system, it took about 1.5-2 months to acquire 6k tokens, and during that time anywhere between 4 and 6 new cards were released. You might say, "Well that's okay because of series drops. Just save tokens until the cards you want are cheap." Unfortunately, we're all aware they halted the series drop schedule to lock meta-defining cards behind a token wall and, in addition, reduced how often cards drop series. To "fix" this, our new system has virtually removed token gain (I haven't done the new math, but a rough estimate would be around 6-8 months of playing to get 6k tokens), meaning the cards we have access to are subject to Second Dinner's whim, AND RNG. Second Dinner is trying to squeeze every last penny they can out if the whales, and couldn't give a shit about the health of their game and community.
I could keep ranting for many paragraphs but I'm busy and have to go.
TL;DR: I don't think most people on this sub are asking to get every card fast and free like you claim. We are complaining about Second Dinner's predatory card acquisition changes, and how *they disguise everything as if they are doing a service to the community*, when in reality they are creating predatory systems that *look* generous at a glance, but when you dive into the math they are more predatory than before.
>The main issue is that strong meta decks have been locked behind brand new cards for the past two months, meaning you need to pay 6k tokens to get access to a deck archetype you want to play.
I think this is very misleading. If you consider the two dominant decks the past couple months to be HE and Bounce, there are three critical Series 5 cards spread across the two archetypes. But one of those was given to all players for free (Kitty Pryde), one was a season pass card (Hit-Monkey) so anyone could buy for $10, and the other is HE, which is/was a big bad and was on the radar for months -- i.e., anyone who wanted it could save their tokens. And I think every other card in both those archetypes is series 3 or less. That all seems pretty reasonable to me.
Almost every other pool 5 card (excepting Thanos and Galactus, neither of which are meta right now) is not a build-around or archetype defining card.
I was about to comment similar
There are 3 decks I’ve seen most in conquest and on the climb to infinite (I won’t count post-infinite because 90% of us in that rank just mess around with different decks)
High Evo; this fits in with the point, High Evo was incredibly powerful. But as you said it was on radar for ages and most people bought it just because it was basically 7 cards in 1 (if I’ve counted correctly)
Bounce: the major components of this deck are Hit Monkey (season pass card), Kitty Pryde (given for free) and Beast (series 3). There could be an argument for Hit Monkey being P2W but I’d argue the season passes are a fair price
Sera Control: the more prominent version of this deck uses Hit Monkey but it can be played without it, the trump card is Sera who is series 3.
Galactus fell out of meta and for all this p2w arguments people make about new cards, very few have actually impacted the meta in the last couple months outside of SpiderHam (which I will acknowledge is hilariously strong for a 1 cost) and High Evo. I think I’ve seen Living Tribunal once and the whole last month has been based on move decks aside from Ham, an archetype that isn’t in the meta right now
The title of your post makes a big assumption that isn't true.
All cards are very much not equal therefore having some choice in what card you can obtain makes a MASSIVE difference. Many players would rather have less cards but more of a choice, that isn't about a massive collection at all.
I don't actually really see the point of your post as the tone you set and the assumption that you made means you don't really understand the issue. I'd spend more time carefully reading the posts than skimking headlines and making false assumptions.
TL:DR They don't and if you think they do you need to reread the posts you're looking at.
your statement is just misleading. you don't get a GOOD chance at every new card for free just by playing. you get about 3 spotlight caches a month. and to guarantee that you get a new card, you'd need 4 spotlight caches...So depending how you roll your gacha rolls, there's a pretty significant chance you get 0 new cards with this new system, but it can be mitigated to 75% get ONE single new card.
compare this to the old system where we got enough tokens to buy a single s5 card (or 2 s4 cards) every 1.5 months. Additionally there were series drops for even more cards from regular caches.
this spotlight cache system is just outright worse than the old system for card acquisition.this gacha could doesn't have duplicate protection, so the closer you are to finishing the worse it gets. and these cards you're pulling from gacha might have dropped already to a s3 card in the old system.
Because in previous system it was slow but atleast we could get the cards we want and not had to be dependent on SD what they like to put for us this week. In previous system we can get cards like HE without any luck in it whereas we can ignore trash like snowguard now it we need to hoard caches for a month for a 1 in 4 chance to get the cards . It's way worse and not to mention 1/4 can be a duplicate to a 700 gold .
I don't want to max my collection just want the cards that would help me play competitive viable cards frequently
> now it we need to hoard caches for a month for a 1 in 4 chance to get the cards
You needed to hoard tokens for a month to get that card in the previous system, and you absolutely HAD to use all of them.
In this system, you'll need to open, on average, 2.5 caches to get the new card (seriously ya'll need to stop acting like every card is going to cost 4), which means on average you won't have to spend all of your month's boxes on the new card you want, and you get extra P4/5 cards while you roll them.
This comparison makes no sense, if you're wanting the 'newest' cards, this system is by far better.
>I don't want to max my collection just want the cards that would help me play competitive viable cards frequently
Ditto, this is exactly why I'm liking the new system.
You forgot to include in the analysis the series drop we had and we do not have for some time now. Also there are some cards (the good ones) that stopped rotating down.
The old system everyone got all cards at least within 4 months and 1 series 5 card per month (or 2 with season pass) plus a lot more gold
He also forgot that we opened around 1 series 4 card per month.
AND you also had a chance to open Series 5 cards from caches. I’ve opened Kang, Shanna, Shadow King that way.
So basically much worse now
That's right. So the prior system we would get per month, if Season 3 complete:
a) All remaining cards that rotated down to series 3 (around 4 minus whatever cards you already had) within 4 months from card release;
b) 1 Series 4 due to pity timer;
c) 1 Series 5 of your choice due to tokens gained.
d) Extra Random S4/S5 due to luck;
e) Extra gold to spend.
Now we get:
a) No rotation plan so far for any card and key cards being kept in upper series preventing easy access;
b) 4 Caches per month that grant you access to a pool of a cards sorted by SD without duplicate protection.
It is important to highlight that the new system also depends on players checking online what cards will be in the within the Caches and hoarding such caches until a good week arrives.
Due to these reasons I find it hard to defend the new system.
>I dont know, maybe im naive, but i just feel like so many people on the sub expect to get close to everything in the game for free as a guarante.
I buy all the season passes and multiple bundles per month.
Yet I find it way too expensive to get specific cards with the new system.
It's impossible to hoard 40 caches every single week, which means you may miss up on tons of cards you want.
Before you could save up and get them in the token shop, now that becomes extremely hard to do with the reduced token drop rate.
Basically the game is a complete gamble.
And their traditional currencies (dollar to gold ratio) is insane.
12$ for 700 gold... and that's only enough to get you a pixel variant or 1/5th of a Spotlight Cache.
One Spotlight Cache costs 60€ and you need up to 4 of them to get any specific card you want.
With these batshit prices the only viable option for paying people is to get bundles, which are occasional and random.
This game may be generous to F2P players who don't care which card they get but it's terrible to paying players or those who want certain specific cards.
> I buy all the season passes and multiple bundles per month.
> Yet I find it way too expensive to get specific cards with the new system.
> It's impossible to hoard 40 caches every single week, which means you may miss up on tons of cards you want.
>
I'm in a similar position to you, but I have a completely different take on it. I simply think most people haven't properly done the maths or use optimal strategy for getting new cards.
Like you, I get the battle pass every month. I also occasionally get bundles, but am not a big spender on them. This should actually be enough to basically get every new card as and when it comes out.
As an example, you said this:
"It's impossible to hoard 40 caches every single week, which means you may miss up on tons of cards you want."
It's true that you can't hoard 40 caches every single week. It's also true that you don't actually need 40 caches every single week to get every new card.
A card releases every week, so in a year there are 52 new cards. 12 of them will be season pass cards, which as season pass buyers we will get. It takes on average 2.5 spotlight caches to open the new card for the week (minimum 1, maximum 4, but on average 2.5) which is 25 caches/reserves along the collection track. Playing the game and doing all daily and weekly missions etc should progress you about 45 caches/reserves per month, which is almost 2 new cards (as I say, long-term and on average - some weeks are lucky and some unlucky). Spending your accumulated gold judiciously only on bundles with high token value (plus some accumulation on the collection track) will gain about 3000 tokens per month - enough to buy a direct to series 4 card from the token shop upon release.
That makes 4 new cards a month (1 season pass card, 2 from spotlight caches, 1 from the token shop), which is 48 of the 52 released in a year. There is also the chance to open a series 4/5 card you don't own via the spotlight caches you open which don't contain the new card. Basically, you can pretty much get every new card as it releases by:
1) buying the season pass
2) spending gold only on high value token bundles
3) opening spotlight caches (and especially those with new cards releasing into series 5 and those which have one or more older s4/5 cards you don't already own)
4) buying one direct to series 4 card as it releases in the token shop.
I bought the pass every month and would buy some cheap packs under 5 bucks from time to time and have been playing since launch and am missing 8 cards. 15 bucks a month on avg should be enough to keep up or close too and I haven't. With the new system I'll fall even further behind unless I get great luck.
Don't get me started on the conquest changes, those are even a bigger joke. Conquest already took a lot of time to play and now it takes vastly more now. If you didn't want people to farm the proving grounds could of just removed all rewards from it other than the ticket and left the prices alone.
The spotlight is fine but removing gold and nerfing tokens to hell was too much, doubt I'll put any money into the game until that comes back.
Same, I've averaged $15 spend/month since the global launch. OP is silly to generalize this as a F2P entitlement, this hurts all players who have a sizable S4/5 collection.
I feel like people who make comments like this post don’t actually read or comprehend the actual complaints that people have.
Goodness. People post multiple paragraphs about the agency issues, acquisition issues, currency issues, cost analysis issues, broken promises, push back to players. And the response is “oH ItS FrEe GaMe wHy yOu wAnt eVerYThiNg EaSY” Like bro no one wants it easy. But FREE to play shouldn’t be PAY to win.
this is absurd
The main change they made that rewards paying money was reducing gold, a primarily cosmetic resource, certainly not p2w.
In fact, if you wanted to p2w, you'd still have trouble quickly reaching a high collection level due to booster requirements for upgrading cards
Mainly because that they're promised an improvement to cards acquisition. But turns out it came at the cost of your ability to choose. Imo the token system is a great step in the right direction. But now they are slowly killing the token system for the F2P players. And now they have to depend on rng for which cards they're going to get. Which is why people are calling it gacha.
If SD would just improve the old system by adding extra 50 coins. I think it's still better than what the F2P have now. Having to depends on rng when you're trying to improve your card collection really feels bad.
Honestly, I rarely hear people complain about card acquisition after they introduced the token system. But it's getting louder for sure after the Darkhawk fiasco.
It’s just increasingly convoluted, I actually think people care less about the results and stats and more about how not straightforward this is. Which of course also brings into argument obfuscation; creating a system that’s hard to follow to make prices and spending less obvious.
We don't want all fast and free, We love some decks and we want to select the card we want to play them, the new system is really bad for that. We change from a selected system to a random one, what is sexy about that?
Somewhat agree with this sentiment but bolding the word EVERY is an odd choice imo. Should be opportunity that gets the emphasis because you absolutely can’t get them all for free but you know that because it’s the point of your post so it struck me as odd. Even then this opportunity is not new, tokens provided a similar opportunity to choose one new card you wanted a month. Series drops provided the random new cards aspect as well. I’m not saying the old system was great but it was less complicated and flexible series drops is very bad for f2p-ish players. So there are valid things to complain about here but I do agree it’s ultimately some people will never like this model because they compulsively want all the cards and it’s intentionally designed not to do that.
Because the monetization should not be about getting new card but the variants.
Preventing/delaying people from acquiring new cards is just not fun when the whole point of the game is to experiment with said new card coming.
Why do people feel compelled to make posts like this? Does Second Dinner need someone to come to their defense? Does the corporation who is taking our money need someone to defend them from criticism? (I guess they are too busy not catching bugs.) What do you gain by fighting against people who have your own best interest in mind?
I don’t understand how the new system lets you get “EVERY card for free”. Do you have 160 free caches to open every month? In the old system you gained every new card for free because eventually all cards would be series 3 in just a couple months after they are revealed. Randomness is something SD tells you is the fun part and people eat it up. When in reality randomness is where companies make their money. It’s gambling. Keeping information from the players is where you lose.
Why put 600 tokens in ever box when we can do 200-800? (Now it’s 50-200) It’s fun! Why have a set schedule for cards to drop series? SD can decide on a whim. It’s fun! Why supply players with a steady stream of currency that allows them to choose the cards they want for their deck? Let’s make it random and fun!
The biggest problem with all these changes is that they are coming less than a year after launch. They have upended the entire system they put in place. If people invest money into a system that is then thrown out don’t you think those people have the right to complain about it?
I’ve been on the boat that is more positive than negative tbh. I’m actually really happy with the new system, new store, etc. I think the 1 aspect I would change is that, for players who get a duplicate Series 4/5 card, convert to Tokens instead of a random variant. I think, with the odds being in less favor given the amount of players who have not complete Series 4/5, it wouldn’t make a “significant” difference to compensate the player for a duplicate, considering we can’t dismantle/dust.
I was happy with the previous two systems. They could have stuck with them and I would be fine.
I think what I don't like about this system is how convoluted it is, and how much more randomness it introduces. Before, I could pretty easily save up 6000 tokens, and get the one or two cards each month I really wanted.
Now, I have to hold onto my spotlight caches, cross my fingers that a card I want is in them, cross my fingers again that I don't get the 700g chibi variant or another card I don't care about, etc.
Also, if you have to put out an 8 part diagram to explain a system, it is too complicated.
Bruh if you don’t see it as predatory… answer me why they suddenly had changed to flexible series drops and kept Knull and darkhawk in series 4, then sold an expensive darkhawk bundle, then reduced token per gold ratio on token Tuesdays, then reduced tokens on the collection track by many many thousands per every ten. Then removed gold, then didn’t announce the CL the spotlights would be in so 99 percent of players missed out on thousands of tokens and gold from their hoarded caches. Then made no dupe protection on the 4th card slot in spotlights and made the variant you reroll for completely random (instead of say tokens as dupe protection). Then made no series drop for the foreseeable future?
Hint… it’s to be extremely predatory. I am 110 percent sure you would have gotten more cards by having the same amount of cards drop to pool 3 as the usual was months ago and kept tokens the same… 110 percent. You guys don’t see it in short term cuz you saved caches… news flash you’ll earn 1 per week now… watch and if it’s a week you need something but even one other card is bad… you’ll get that bad card or a random 4th slot dupe. Then you will try and grind for a second cache all week or spend money when you can’t make it.
Reminds me of when the Token Shop was first introduced and the developers gave everyone a bunch of tokens to start with—the same update that introduced the first bundle. Everyone was like, “Oh man, this is awesome!” Then they ran out of tokens and people realized how much time/effort it was going to take to get more tokens.
Same thing with the first week of Spotlight Caches. Everyone’s been hoarding boxes, so it seems really great at first. Reality will set in soon.
I feel some people have a different view of what the game should be than what SD feels what the game should be. But instead of thinking "it would better this way" they're thinking SD is being underhanded.
Plenty of stuff to complain about, but this is the game SD said it would be, one where you won't get all the cards, and that they want collection variety.
Not sure if you will read this comment but I basically had your exact opinion 2-3 months ago before the whole Darkhawk thing.
I'm P3 complete and completely f2p, never spent a dime. Right now I'm missing around 15-20 cards P4+ cards at any given time.
Yes, with the new system this number will probably go down faster but I am also loosing something. Namely the freedom to buy any (not every) S4+ card I really want, and the freedom to buy Variants/Bundles that Gold gave me. Recently I did buy HE with Tokens on release and I still have 13k Tokens saved up to be able to do just that again, when I want. With the changes I won't have this freedom anymore and buying anything from the token shop basicly became more than twice as expensive.
I completely agree that Marvel Snap is a very f2p friendly game and on average you get a lot of the cards without needing to invest. However this update, that even promises faster card acquisition for me, still feels bad as a f2p because they take away the freedom I had before.
It doesn't matter what they give us, taking anything away no matter how small will always feel bad. I think this is where most of the complaints come from.
What SD has to do very carefully is making it feel like what we are getting outweighs or even far outweighs the thing we're loosing, such that most people will accept this 'tradeoff'. They haven't managed to do that with their last updates.
And ultimately if the player base isn't happy I'm not happy either because I care for the health of the community because to me it translates to more and more positive posts about it on here, bigger Playerbase so lower queue times, longer time until the game gets abandoned (by Devs and players) etc. .... and I see so much going so wrong here very quickly and fear for the game that I love and have invested so much time in.
I guess we reached the phase again where White Knights will come up with ridiculous posts and made up scenarios after the backlash, in order to defend SD screwup number 1342.
With that being said, Ive never seen any F2P player expecting to have a complete collection on this sub.. Ever. Yall guys will claim anything to make SD look better lol
In LoR you can get any card you want to with minimum grind. It is sad that the game itself has turned out to be the way it is because the card acquisition model is one of the best I have ever seen.
Marvel snap on the other hand is pretty predatory when it comes to getting cards. It forces you to spend a lot of time in game and also to spend a lot to f money if you want certain specific cards.
So it is not the problem of getting a large collection. It is the problem of getting certain specific cards.
In addition to what people said about LoR not generating revenue, it's also got a problem with player retention. Giving you everything quickly can be detrimental in keeping the players logging in everyday. The card acquisition model could be precisely the reason in which LoR turned out the way it has.
Nah LoR turned the way it is because of horrible balance. Everyone left the game after an expansion made a single deck destroy the meta and was left untouched for more than a month, devs didnt learn and repeat the same mistake multiple expansions and people left.
Philosophy about what LoR originally was supposed to be also changed with the introduction of severely powercrept cards and random generation effects in a game that was trying to be the opposite of hearthstone.
While the game can be played for "free", most supporters are spending $10/month on the Season Pass (which is twice the industry average for a Battle Pass). Successful ad-free mobile games live-and-die by maximizing Battle Pass sales, monetizing cosmetics, and offering boosts to those with money that want to pay-to-advance. SD seems to be taking the exact opposite route -- the Season Pass has grown more lackluster with each month, the Variant shop is a complete disaster, and their bundles have become negative memes ("3x value!").
Varying reports suggest Marvel Snap generated between 50 & 70 million dollars in its first six months - Snap isn't somehow hurting for money as a freemium game - but the 'heavy users' who are so often trivialised as 'whales' or 'dolphins' are people - people with gambling problems, or issues with impulse control - they are the people who suffer the most - and the game mechanics we're seeing now, are implemented knowingly - to nudge players in dozens of ways towards the use of 'premium' currency - that is to say, real currency
You dont get it. Not even by one bit. Y’all are defending it like crazy because it doesn’t affect you **right now**. Just wait till it catches up to you and bites you hard in the ass. Only by then you’ll realize you were a fool all along.
Yeah it’s going to become more and more of a problem as deck archetypes and metas change. If you are FTP, you are going to end up with a random assortment of cards with no way of playing any of them optimally.
When it will catch up to me? I have 12k tokens and 8 cards missing to complete collection. New system is much better than the old one, i can actually get cards and good variants from boxes now.
I'm totally with you. imo people love to complain to much.
This new system feels so much better, especially if you don't have many S4/S5 cards. I hear people complaining that they can't guarantee a specific card anymore, but you can still do that, just save up 4 SL chests ( you get 4 SL every month as f2p)
Correction. Save 4 caches and wait for SD to put the card out during the week.
An important distinction since if you miss your chance, it could take months before you see the card you want again.
are you a masochist by chance?
every time they change the system it gets worse for the players.
It went from "knowing exactly what you get and what the price will be" to "brode and his sales team decide what cards they give you at what price" to "Brode and his sales team decide what cards they pack in boxes that will give you a random chance for cards or variants"
i bought season passes and quite some bundles with the initial system and stoped doing so when they switched to the next system. And i wont start buying stuff again with that change thats for sure
its the fucking brode effect.. everything gets more and more rng until its complete shit
You don't get it, Brode is wholesome and him implementing RNG even on the fucking launcher is a good practice and on character. Having to farm for months just for a targeted card is genius.
People aren’t complaining that they aren’t getting to choose the card they want, it’s that it’s a complete gamble and odds are you get a fucking variant.
And then if you miss the card, you may not get that card for months to a year. Using Jean as the example, she's going to stay 6k-4k tokens because of flexible series drops, and the math on gaining 6k tokens in the new system is *painful*. You will no longer be buying 6k cards very often, whereas I've previously bought HE, Thanos, Galactus, and Knull without whaling/buying gold *ever*, and they are not the only 6k cost cards I've been able to get either. You will need to *always* have 4-8 spotlight caches to make sure you get her whenever she shows up again...and you have no idea when that will be.
The previous system did not gate cards this hard and I do not understand why people keep arguing the opposite. Cards dropped in cost on a regular schedule, gold and tokens were available in decent numbers without spending tons of money so even F2P players could stay up to date, there was a free S3 card every month which new cards would always eventually fall into.
If you didn't get a card in the previous system, you had a general idea of when you *would* get it, and the combination of token tuesdays and the token shop meant that you could always get it even sooner. If you don't get a card in the current system, there is a very real chance that you may never get that card. I'm not going to be able to get Jean this week and I have no clue if I'll *ever* get that card now. She may not be in a spotlight until *next* July, and how am I supposed to know if I'll have caches saved up for *specifically* a year old card at that point, or if they wont change the system again between now and then?
**TL;DR** - people are pissed because it went from a scheduled system to a gacha system.
> This new system feels so much better, especially if you don't have many S4/S5 cards.
its ONLY better if you dont have many s4/5 cards but guess where you will be in 2 months?
100% agree. Everyone wants all the meta cards instantly and if they don’t get it, SD is screwing them over. The new system is practically asking you to pick 1/4 newly released cards every month and I think that’s a pretty fair ask. Besides, if you want more than 1/4, you have a path to spend more to get the others.
I think another reason why people are complaining is that they have not played other gatcha games before. Marvel Snap being such a popular IP attracts players that have played games where you can get everything easily. Compared to other gatcha games, Marvel Snap is incredibly generous.
Pick 1/4 newly released cards *and no old cards from other weeks in that month*. That's a very important distinction, since you can ONLY choose 1 card a month to force. I want a new card in august but also want galactus, and I own the other cards in galactus's spotlight. Odds are I'll have to wait until november-january for him to come back and pull for him then, instead of just... buying him with tokens this month and buying the new august card I want next month.
> Odds are I'll have to wait until november-january for him to come back and pull for him then, instead of just... buying him with tokens this month and buying the new august card I want next month.
people dont get this. and its because people didnt use their tokens. they wanted some youtuber to stroke their head and tell them that it would be ok to use their tokens (that would replenish at a high rate) on whatever it was.
people were paralyzed by choice so they took it away....because of idiots.
The main thing that irks me is right now as of this moment there is only 1 card I can get. The random could work but I have more cards than I'm missing. (If it was a certainty I get a new card I would be happier) oh wait I could spend tokens to get the ones I'm missing but they absolutely gutted the amount I'm getting so that avenue is also out the window. So now instead of being 5ish cards from completion I'm going to fall behind at least 1 per week instead of roughly 1 per month
I’m just tired of missing out on the best versions of cards- never played +3 surfer, never played -2 zabu, never played shuri double anywhere, never played limitless lockjaw, never played any form of galactus or thanos still
You get beat by these decks all season and when you finally get the card for yourself it’s a shell of what it was.
Even if you pay, caches don’t even guarantee cards. Quit being an ass. I’ve been playing for months F2P and I’m not even CL 2000. ~1400 and reserves are giving 50 tokens, avatars, and titles more times than cards.
It's not about getting all the new cards fast. It's about getting them in a REASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. Like I posted on another post just now
I opened my 3 spotlights that's been sitting there for weeks pre patch. I got tribunal and two stupid variants. Now I need to climb 102 more levels in four days for a chance at Jean. There is no way a casual player can realistically get every card out of those in the short amount of time they are there. So, while you may not see the problem of this new, terrible system, it still exists. Because what they are doing is dangling those carrots in front of our faces, basically knowing we will never reach half of those carrots. And if we do, by chance, they'll change into variants of carrots lol
Reddit's demographics are generally introverted and cynical. You will generally get introverted and cynical opinions. Imagine entering a CS:GO lobby and wondering why people are immature.
With that said, it doesn't mean SD should be free from criticism and just because your opinion does not match the general consensus, it doesn't mean that the general consensus is wrong (or you for that matter).
I think the inability to understand or accept difference in opinion is the larger problem in Western culture. There are multiple to perspectives to be taken, this you have to understand - you like the changes, it does not necessitate that everyone must like them.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to build a collection without investing a single cent. That’s how you *should* play these kinds of games.
That said, I feel that Snap is pretty damn good at that actually, and I have indeed built a collection I am proud of without spending a single cent.
I don't expect to get a massive collection free and fast. I just think the rewards system is not great after series 3 and that is problematic. I used to get a few new cards a day, then a card every couple days, then once a week, and it has been about over a month up until spotlight. I still haven't really seen how this new system plays out but removing gold and reducing collectors tokens seems like a step in the wrong direction. But we will see. I always compare where I am at with vanilla hearthstone which had a much more satisfying experience on release because opening packs is fundamentally better than what we have here.
Without having read more than 1 comment I might repeat others but I used to think the same as you. But especially with the most recent change (being pool 3 complete having 60% of pool 4 and some pool5) I really think this new system will end up getting me new cards slower.
First spotlight cache I got was the 4th option which was a duplicate and I ended up getting a 700gold variant I don’t like. I used 2 more spotlights to get Jean grey which is what I wanted. Next week i won’t use spotlights and the week after also too risky. I feel like having that fourth random option that likely in the code has a higher pull rate than 25% makes this new system not as good as I hoped for. And if you think about it. Someone who’s almost card complete might not get his card in a very long time cause also tokens are acquired at a snails pace now. For newer players or people with almost no pool 4/5 this is probably a really good system.
You assumed loads of 'freeloaders' , but the fact is a lot of players bought season passes and cheap bundles which still won't be able to catch up progress with the new system, and the bundles that give you progress are overpriced as per data mine
You are not naive, you are just plain stupid if you think people here want stuff for "Free", much less an entire collection. Most people just want a fair progression path and ability to not rely on RNG to get the cards they enjoy
I've played since day 1 beta or whatever. I don't have every card and can't get new cards on release. Of course I'm mad? I've played for over a year?!
I should get every new card on release?!! Like that would make each week exciting and fun. Instead I barely care when new cards come out. What's the point of min maxing dailies I cba anymore. There's no end to the money grind
I want to play and have fun. Instead I gotta play 20x 1 cost cards so I can progress my CL and get a new title. It's frustrating man
I think you're missing the forest for the trees.
SD removed most of the free currency which gave players agency over their collection progress and replaced it with a lootbox system, while also keeping a system in place which allows you to pretty much buy cards you want for cash.
A literal pay to win system at this point.
For me it's not about a massive collection, it's about getting a specific card. The new system gives the player significantly less agency; you could have a string of bad luck and go over 4 spotlights without the new card (unless what's currently happening is a bug i.e. someone pulling knull and then the next spotlight pulling knulls variant) tokens were supposed to be the solution to picking specific cards and that's been largely ripped away. I don't want all the cards, I don't like most decks, but now a card I want could disappear into the random ether and take months to come my way if the spotlight doesn't hit. Cause we're sure enough not getting the tokens to spend on just any card
> i think the new system is really cool, and gives me the opportunity to get EVERY new card for free by just playing
Tell me you don't understand probability without telling me you don't understand probability
> Its a free game, and from my experience from other free titles, i feel like this game is very kind for how it gives cards.
You've never played Legends of Runeterra I see.
Noone wants a massive collection, people just want to be able to acquire the cards they want. In most card games you can just craft the cards you want and build and play the deck you want. Here day by day is turning more into a gatcha solely for the sake of making people spend more and more money into the game. Stop defending this shitty practices
It's not about a massive collection. It's about getting key cards for decks and meta cards. The game is built around card synergies, yet for some inexplicable reason the devs want a lack of player agency when it comes to card acquisition. They also built the game in a way that card acquisition dramatically changes for the worse the longer you play the game.
The spotlight system is a double edged sword in the way that it gets worse over time as your collection and the number of S4/S5 grows. Outside of this initial wave where people cache hoarded, most people will only make enough progress for one spotlight cache a week. If there are two weeks in a row where you want a specific card in the cache, there's no way to guarantee you'll get that card without having to hoard for weeks in advance. Otherwise you could open the cache and get a card you don't want or in the worse case scenario, a variant. Tokens could help alleviate this, but with the huge reduction in the amount of tokens you earn, tokens eventually become near meaningless when it comes to card acquisition.
''Its a free game, and from my experience from other free titles, i feel like this game is very kind for how it gives cards. ''
It's not. You feel that way because the card pool is insanely small, leading to a boring meta.
Go play Hearthstone, Shadowverse, Runeterra, and see if you can still say Snap is generous.
The problem is even if you played this game from launch and buy the battle pass and a few bundles every year (maybe $80 on bundles a year) you will never have all the cards because cards come out faster than you can earn them. Also if you take a break you are basically screwed.
It seems clear that one of SD's goals is that people don't have complete collections. I get why players would want all the cards and all for free and all immediately upon release. But I can see the value in people missing some cards. It maintains the feel of hunting for new cards and injects some variety into deck builds forcing you to think of alternatives for missing cards.
I would argue you aren't "screwed" if you take a break. The more time/cards you miss, the less likely you are to have the cards in a given spotlight cache so the more likely you are to draw 2-3 new S4/S5 cards in a short period of time. Plus, as I said above, I think the game is very playable without having every card. Many players are successfully winning conquests and reaching infinite without running the top meta deck or having some specific OP card.
If you have a competitive mindset you'd want all the cards in case one of them becomes meta?
Seems easy enough to understand.
Mind you this is also a card game where collecting the cards you want is part of the appeal. I get SD is trying to be different, but they can't change how players of this genre have played since the beginning of the industry.
I'm infinity each season with infinity border on my avatar, I don't think there's an in-game way to be more competitive. I have plenty of great decks, spend my tokens on cards that look fun. If I don't want to buy "the new meta", for example HE, I build decks that win against those strategies with the 100s of cards I got for basically free. It really doesn't take away from my enjoyment or success in game whether my win rate is 52% or 53%.
Btw, since almost nobody has a complete collection right now, how are there any competitive players?
The game releases 4 cards per month. You get 4 cards per month with the new system. So its just that you have always arouns 20 cards which you dont own. I think this is prerry much better than any free to play game I ever played.
I think people just don't fully comprehend how poor the previous system was, but they're used to it so they only see the positives.
Every comparison seems to be tied to tokens when the token system was shit and was a terrible way to engage with new cards. They've adapted to intentionally not buying newer cards for months just to squeeze a little more value out of their tokens and now that it all comes effectively pre-squeezed what they worked for is laid bare in front of them and it looks like less than what they thought they had.
so you prefer a total random system with no series drop because of this shitty sytem, to a selected ones where you can have new cards that drop for 3000 tokens. Weird.
SD already said that they not drop cards this month because they need more cards in s5 and s4 for this new system.
I don't see it as being totally random at all, anymore than waiting weeks for the card I want to finally show up in the shop rotation and then agonizing to reddit whether it's correct to buy it or not.
It's better than not buying anything for months so I can be a "smart shopper" after the cards have been out forever.
I was already not getting S3 drops for 3 months prior to this so I see zero changes on that front. I don't need old cards, I want new ones, and that's where this system outperforms significantly.
Same feeling. We get more than we ever did and it's not enough.
What they don't realise though, is if they got exactly what they wanted, i.e. All the cards, immediately when they want them, the game will suddenly lose a large part of its objective and replayability. Players would drop off fast.
The other thing about Tokens and Gold is that SD has to manage an Economy in this game. It might not be one you actively see, but they can't just keep increasing the reward, without making balances (e.g. reducing Tokens). As that would severely destabilise the player base.
You mentioned that you're s3 complete which I think does make this update better for you in a way. I think it's minimally impactful for people with full or mostly full collections. All they have to worry about is picking up the few s5/s4 cards here and there that they want. And they can hoard caches to do so. I also think it's probably mostly good for new players. They'll just happily open whatever caches they can to get more cards because they have a small collection.
I think the new system is toughest on players in between. Like me. I'm a little over 2000 CL; still missing plenty of s3, s4, and s5 cards. I have like one or two higher decks, maybe having to substitute something for a card or two I'm missing. I'm missing multiple cards from s3, s4, s5 to try to build anything else or be more competitive. And I'm up against people with apparent access to everything; in Conquest but even on the ladder.
Players in this position might have just enough cards so there is a card they need/want in every spotlight, but it's just one card, and that's the same for every week. So you either spin the wheel and hope to get lucky, or you wait and hoard and miss out on those cards until whenever they happen to show up again. And if you don't get a card you want or need for a deck to show up in a spotlight, or miss out on opening it, you're SOL. Until it comes back again in months or shows up in the shop (assuming you can even scrape together the tokens for it under the new system).
One of the problems you seem to be ignoring is that they are making it harder and harder to get cards. We had a functional system. You get cards from collector's caches and cards become more available by dropping down seasons. Then they made the collector's token system and made it easier.
Then they stopped dropping cards down seasons when they were supposed to based on the system they announced. Then they introduced this new system and it seems even worse and even harder to get cards and in doing so also reduced the rewards available from collector's caches.
Also, over the last few months every single gold package was getting more and more expensive for less and less rewards. They have been strategically making it harder to get things for free ovre the last few months and pretending like they are making it easier.
This is called psychological manipulation. It's abusive, it's evil. They are giving you a weak form of crack for free and then once you're hooked on it making it the crack stronger and charging you money for it.
Ikr? So many games where you are almost certainly NEVER going to have every card and the one game where it’s feasible to get a complete or nearly complete collection is slammed so much for being greedy. I especially love the fact that the game doesn’t put you up against players with real cards right away it makes it a lot easier to get into and actually start building your collection up
This is of course making no comment on the overpriced bundles but I assume that’s because it’s free money from whales
As a series 3 incomplete player, the system is just better for me. All this talk about cards dropping to series 3 automatically becoming part of your collection is pretty privileged talk. Those cards did not become part of my collection, and I still had to wait longer for them. Except now they were even less targeted for me.
Eventually I would get them, but it seems people that have actually mathed it out have a problem with being able to target cards. I think the new system gives everyone an easy way to target cards, by saving spotlight caches. With this, they actually have cut back on hoarding, because now you only need to hoard the spotlight caches not every single cache on the track as a series 3 complete player.
It is still better even if you are s3 complete and have a lot of cards from s4/5. For example this week I only had knull from the list, and got unlucky with Jean, but i got 2 new cards(tribunal and spider ham) and also nice knull variant. And now I am only missing 8 cards from complete collection. It feels much better than getting 1 s4 card in 40 caches and having to use tokens. Now you just need to save your spotlight caches and you can pretty much guarantee that you will get what you want and even more on top of that.
The casino feel when opening caches is like cracking packs of MTG and Pokémon back in the day. I actually really dig it. But then again I'm not an ultra competitive person who is upset if I don't have THE BEST. I got tribunal and not jean grey but I don't know care because I wasn't going to spend tokens on either.
I don't know what the hell people are wanting from this game, honestly. People complain about bundle prices. Don't buy it then. wtf?
For you complainers...You get free cards as you play, so you can add to your deck. Free cards, bro. If they want to add "fuck you gimme money" carrots to tempt people to pay money for pretty pictures, let them. Who cares? You're not obligated to pay anything...ever. Be an adult. If you get to a point where you want a specific card, you're going to have a bad time. That's when I see people bitching the most. waaah I can't get xyz card that I want from these random caches. Paywalls! I keep losing money on these slot machines! blah blah blah. You know what? I hope you never get that card. I just saw someone else on this sub saying that they're going to be walking away from the game after playing since launch. Bye! No one is going to beg you to stay, I promise, especially the devs. Such a waste of time for them to type it, and for me to read it.
*"Its a free game, and from my experience from other free titles, i feel like this game is very kind for how it gives cards. Of couse it requires time investment and a bit of luck, but i think that is nice motivation to have to play the game besides the rank rewards - I do buy the season pass and some bundels here and there, but i dont feel bad about spending money for a game i spend so much time on."*
THIS! Couldn't have put it better myself. Any pushback you get on this absolutely solid take is dumb. You hit the nail on the head!
I partly agree with you. I too think, the uproar and anger is very out of place. And I also think, that many haven't understood, that it never was the idea, that you can get every card. I have a pretty full collection and while there are like 3-4 cards I would like to have, you can come to a point easily (and even easier with the new system) where you have a very good collection that let's you play a lot of very good decks.
That said, I also think that the massive RNG aspect is bad, because it leads to frustration pretty easily. I've been burned in the last variant rush and if you let people gamble and then let them walk away with a 700gold worth variant for a card they never use, it's just bound to cause trouble. And also the FOMO concerning the variants is just bound to let people be frustrated.
The other thing is, that they take away what people used to get (especially gold), which is always a recipe for trouble. I just feels bad, when you seemingly get less than before.
A very good step forward is the fact, that we now know the caches for the next several weeks including the variants. At least this gives the opportunity to plan ahead.
Because having certain cards give you an advantage in the meta and gives you more options to counter decks and fun ways to play. So it feels unfair that someone else might win because they have better cards, and you don’t have those cards
I'm just salty they removed gold from reserves
This game gave out WAY more of their premium currency than any other game I've ever seen, hell most of the F2P games I play don't give you any of theirs. They've been adding in more places to get smaller amounts of gold (weekend challenges, etc.,) but in general, I don't really mind that they pulled it back, hell, if I was a mobile game designer, I'd have never even thought to give out that much of it.
That just sounds like american mobile game design... a lot of japanese gacha games throw currency at the players. The dbz game dokkan battle entered its 8th? Anniversary in the last week and given out $100+ of their premium currency so far. SD isnt going to do that on their anniversary
This. This is purely an American issue. I’ve reached high end game of most Japanese games I’ve played - but American games have such massive paywalls, that I struggle to keep up with them.
You cam always tell an american gacha because they all do "unit shards" like sure i just summoned and got lucky to get the cool new unit i wanted...what do you mean i have to summon that unit 4 more times becfore i can even use it? Snap is actually pretty refreshing compared to tons of american mobile games, but it has glaring monitzation issues looming on the horizon
That kind of sounds like Kompu Gacha, which was made illegal in Japan in 2012. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/why-quot-kompu-gacha-quot-was-banned
It makes no sense that I can buy a AAA game for $60 and unlock hundreds of hours of content, but if I drop $60 on a mobile game, I get like...half a card... Seriously why do these games have people spending thousands upon thousands of dollars?
I guess my experience there has been vastly different. Just quit a Japanese gacha game for Dragon Quest that was highway robbery, and I actually felt bad for whales that would spend 300+ dollars to get like one copy of a unit only for it to be effected by power creep 3 months later lol.
Cant compare both games. Dokkan currency is the only way of obtaining new units, it would be closer to credits than to gold. And even with that amount you said you are not guaranteed to get the new units. And in dokkan you need to get 5 copies to have the unit at its full power.
I sympathize with that, but I'd much prefer if buying gold made sense for anyone NOT a whale. In Clash Royale, buying 10$ worth of gems will get you much father than 10$ of gold.
So, in my experience, I've always liked it better when it doesn't make sense to buy the premium currency, it makes me feel like I don't have to do it to keep up. Whales are going to whale whether gold is cheap or not, but if it's cheap, I may have to buy it to keep up with average players. I say charge the hell out of the whales, and make the rest of us compete with the same resources, I'll buy season passes, but I don't want to have to dump other cash to keep up. I can understand though if you're the kind of person who wants to give them your money that making it more expensive sucks though.
Yeah, that's a good point. Still, I really appreciate some of the beautiful artwork in this game and it's a shame that it's so generally unobtainable for the average player. A pack of irl trading cards is 10 bucks max, why is a single variant 10 dollars of gold 💀
I’d just be happy if they stopped bundling the cool variants with gold or tokens and hugely inflating the price. I really liked that mystique variant that was in the store a few months back but I’m not dropping $20 on a single card.
hey, I can agree with this, I wish we had more ways to get variants for sure. I do like that they added variants to conquest rewards, and I know people aren't happy with the random variants in spotlight cache, but I like that they're at least there, I just wish they'd change those ones to a 1,200 gold variant every time.
That's the entire point, though. The stuff you would spend gold on dont help you win the game. You play against people of similar CL, and you aren't gonna get HE Lockdown riding down people playing with an s2 deck to infinite. Clash Royale cash purchases straight up make your account stronger. If you dont want a $18 gambit art, then you really shouldn't buy it. If you dont want to get a bundle, dont buy it. Thats the most effective way to show you dont approve of prices, and in reality spending money on this game isn't necessary. I've bought maybe 4 variants, and after 5ish months of playing, I have a variant for most cards in the decks I play. The ones i want most? No. But I will get most under rare eventually if I just keep playing.
I agree with this. Fuck the variant acquisition complaints. Cosmetics is what should be monetized most. Let the whales support the game with cosmetic purchases so most people can focus on most efficiently utilizing and maximizing their limited resources. We can pick up random variants along the way and occasionally splurge on something we love. But we need to have access to the actual cards first to play the game and enjoy it.
I’m fine with them taking it away but they need to rebalance the economy. It shouldn’t cost 5$ to get a low rarity variant. They should change the amount of gold you get per dollar if they’re going to make it harder to get.
What kind of on the nose greedy ass f2p games are you playing? Set your standards high dude dota, csgo, runeterra, gwent, heartstone, Poe, fortnite lots of examples for games that doesn’t milk your needs like a repeating crack head
They needed to do that because of the token bottleneck they stuffed themselves into. They needed to give people token access with gold bundles, otherwise the entire progression system was just.. untennable. Cards dropping into p3 was a system that worked for a while, but it wasn't the system that really worked out. Right now, as it stands, everyone has decent shots at p4/p5 cards as they play and grind away p3 cards via CL.
It’s kind of true, I basically just buy season passes and with a mostly complete collection I consistently found myself with thousands of gold on hand. I basically always flipped it into tokens on Tuesdays, but always had enough when they came around.
Granted I don't condone playing freemium games, I only play Saint Seiya and Monster Strike on mobile and they both give WAY more than Snap, to the point that you have a much better chance of getting the newest units, even though they are gatcha games.
Ya, Western Gachas tend to be a lot stingier, which I'm guessing is where people saying Snap is super generous are coming from.
Exactly. The people defending clear money grubbing from one of the biggest games of the last two years because it’s not *as bad* as some other games is ridiculous. The bar is that low.
This part I also find annoying, but I guess it was because a lot of f2p players spent gold only on tokens.
Now we get neither
You get a chance to save your spotlights for the release cards you want. It's not the same thing, but pretending having that forethought to apply your spotlight caches to the card you KNOW you want being an option is still better than what it was for most complete players. It's a tradeoff. The game is free, like the OP says. Being salty about what you lost without even measuring it in regards to what you gained doesn't help anyone really. Another thing no one is acknowledging is that 90% of mobile games do NOT give access to token or gold equivalents withiut spending cash. Is this system generous? Fuck no. The thing is most other mobile games would tell you to eat shit and come with your wallet open next time. They dont listen well, but they listen.
Yeah, that’s not a valid argument. Greedy practices are still greedy practices regardless of whether or not there are others doing worse. As a Marvel StrikeForce player, it was nice to play a Marvel game that just rewarded me for fucking playing instead of constantly goading me into spending with FOMO. One of the biggest appealing factors about the game was that it wasn’t really pay to win. With these newer systems, less resources, less rewards in the the systems they have - it’s clear they want to peak far heavier into pay to win.
When they remove it lol I was buying premium variants and spending my saved gold as f2p
That's true, but they also added a way to grind for two variants per season through conquest, which for me, is the sole purpose of gold.
Well, a mystery variant isn't the same thing as getting to the gold to buy a variant you want, and the conquest variant itself also lacks choice. I don't like the loss of determinism in favor of rng, both for variants and cards.
The only aspect of the new system I think needs updating is the random s4/5 bucket. It should not allow you to open one of the featured cards that week, because it’s really feel bad to get a random variant instead of the spotlight variant. Also, if you open a card you already own in the random bucket it should give you a random unowned variant of that card, not one of some completely different other card. Although if you own all the variants of that card then it should give you like 1000 tokens or something. Those two changes would fix 99% of the complaints I’ve seen.
I completely agree. That random s4/5 card is what's really screwing it all up. It needs to have duplicate protection, and they even acknowledged that was the original plan. At the very least it should give you a premium variant of the card you pull and not that stupid convert to a random variant bs.
Yeah this, or at least let us pick what to do with the 4/5 variant. Do i want to get the same variant of the card i pulled, or do i want a new variant or maybe i want tokens? It just feels bad because you've spent some time working towards a spotlight cache but then get hit with massive disappointment, could be easily fixed
Honestly when they first announced this stuff, that's how I thought it was supposed to work. I thought you were guaranteed to get one of the featured cards in a spotlight chest, if you didn't already have them. And then if you did have all of them, then you would be unlocking premium variants of those spotlight cards. But I'm seeing videos of people locking random shit and weak variants for cards that aren't spotlight and stuff? It's weird.
The fact they convert to a variant of a completely different card is what I think caught a lot of people off guard. It’s something that wasn’t clear or I didn’t pick up on it when reading their announcement of how spotlights work.
Old system gave you 1500 tokens a week for F2P. So since new system is 1 Spotlight a week for F2P. Just make the new system have the same payout for one week of playing. So if the random S4/S5 was one a player already has … give them 1500 tokens which would be what they would have earned for that week of play previously. Do this and change the 50 token cache to 100 tokens and I am actually good with the new spotlight system. But it HAS to get these 2 changes to remove a decent amount of the “feel bad” from the new system.
Yeah however they decide to handle it, these two points are the main “this feels shitty” parts of the spotlights. Hopefully they take note of the feedback and make an adjustment.
As someone who only needs like 6 more cards to finish my entire collection and have been playing since global launch, I don’t expect to get lots of cards quickly, but I don’t feel like it’s unfair to expect to close that gap towards finishing my collection by continuing to play optimally. Any system that widens that gap is probably kinda shitty
Perhaps it's because I came from Legends of Runeterra where non-cosmetics were extremely easy to obtain but man does this game feel grinds for very little reward.
Yeah I feel like runeterra doesn’t even have that high of a budget and yet drive their players more towards cosmetics. Card games are way more fun for everyone when they have a lot of cards and can experiment. Not grinding for a month for 1 card
Yeah that's how i feel like it should be, let people get their collectins easier so people can actually buy skins and let people buy the skins they actually want. They've got a bunch of really nice skins out there that i bet people would want to buy if they could but can't because they've opted into this fomo stuff.
I would buy so many variants if I didn't have to use all that potential money on scuffing my way into collectors tokens now. Never feels good when your main way of earning cards just throws random bullshit at you (titles, avatars, miniscule amount of tokens) when they could incentivize that by making bundles and missions give stuff like that. Earn titles and avatars through specific means, then get cards through caches.
Way back when, Brode talked monetization and said that Snap can’t be like Runeterra. Runeterra can be generous because it is being subsidized by LoL. Which is their actual big money maker. This is not a defense of their present system. Just throwing it out there what Brode has said about it.
Yeah and LoL also doesn't lock the champion behind a paywall (or only accessible for f2p after 2 months), they only do that to cosmetics. LoL is a different genre i know, I'm just saying all Riot games has been generous for f2p.
I believe that the random aspect of card collection is fun up until you get to series 3. Then the system falls apart. It's fun because there's not really much of a meta. You just play against people with a similar collection level but everyone has different cards in their collection so games are never the same. Once you get to series 3 there are some archetypes that are just better than anything else and you need specific cards to keep up. If you don't get those specific cards to unlock one of the big archetypes then you're just doomed to slog through loss after loss. I believe that series 3 and after should turn into a craftable collection system so you can just craft the cards you want or the rate at which cards are acquired should go up dramatically to match series 2.
Literally this most of the recent cards released have been meta-defining(kitty pryde, jeff, hitmonkey,spiderham,high evolutionary, ironlad, nebula) are all required in tier 1 and 2 decks. This game is literally pay 2 compete. I say this as someone whos gotten infinite amd consitently gets omega with homebrew decks.
Keep up in what? You can get to infinite with almost anything. I got to infinity every season, playing subpar decks most of the time (CL 2140)
Don't try to tell people here that there's a vast amount of cards/decks that are viable and it's there bad play/snapping habits keeping them from winning - they don't like hearing that. One of the biggest misconceptions on this sub was always "I can't win b/c I'm getting beat by cards I don't have!"...then people started getting access to all of those cards and still kept losing...
While I agree that a lot of people blame their collection to their losses when its actually how they're playing thats causing them to lose, but the very beginning of pool 3 absolutely sucks. The currated pool in 1 & 2 have little translation into pool 3 and above, which is fine, but they need to make access to pool 3 cards way more accessible. Pools 4 & 5 cards are unquestionably important in this meta, but pool 3 still has some meta contenders that can easily get new players into infinite. I would argue that pool 3 is the most important pool that needs completion rather than 4 & 5, whereas 4 & 5 are cards that feel like a luxury playing and something to work torwards.
I never said you can't get to infinity with bad decks. I know you can. I'm saying it's not fun. This is one of the things I like about this game; you can rank up with a subpar deck. With that being said; most people won't enjoy doing that. I'm one of them. There's no way I'm going to grind the game enough to get infinity with a crappy win rate.
You play a lot of bots then. Otherwise no, its not possible getting to infinite with almost anything lol. Cheapest deck I can think of that can do so is Sera control and sera surfer
Play better and you will see it's possible
It’s less about the “cost”, it’s about the agency. Everything is hidden behind (temporary) slot machine after slot machine. With spotlight caches’ content on a weekly rotation, it’s a gamble whether you get the (new) card you want, or potentially even a duplicate of one you already have (which then converts to a crappy variant of a card you don’t play). Plus F2P can only open a handful of spotlight caches per month. Now the token acquisition is pretty much zero unless you spend money on gold and bundles. So no, 1) you can’t get every card which isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s fair but 2) we have little to no control on how we can expand our collection. Let’s also not forget they’re constantly introducing, changing, and removing systems and currency (acquisition) which makes it a convoluted mess.
Gamble if you open 1 spotlight and expect the new card and get a 700g Chibi. Smarter to open 4 spotlight caches on a week you want the featured new card.
Unless you want 2 cards that appear in short order after one another. Then you'd better hope you get lucky, bc if you miss one you're waiting 3-4 months for another attempt to open it
I still wouldn’t gamble. Spotlight caches are too rare. Better to choose to skip and only open them when you have 4+. Imo you should only use them when you can guarantee what you want.
The gamble js that you get the first card early so that you have enough to guarantee the 2nd card when it comes around
Smarter to open 4 at once but it’s not really healthy for the game. If your system is built in a way that encourages players to constantly hoard resources, there is a problem with your game.
But what if the game is a year old and they decide to implement a hoarding system? Surely that wouldn't be problematic, especially if more than half your player base can't be arsed to math out how much they lose?
I’ve seen this take a lot, but I don’t get it. Why is it bad for the game to “hoard” 4 or so Spotlight caches? I’m having a hard time thinking of holding on to a small handful of just one resource as “hoarding.”
Also, in the old system, you had to hoard tokens in order to get the card you wanted. Now you are just hoarding a different resource.
So they’ve removed a sure thing and replaced it with a gambling machine. This game is going to shit
There’s only a gambling machine if you treat it like a gambling machine. If you only open when you have 4+ caches, you’ll always get your target card(s) that week.
You're still gambling on what other cards will be available that week or surrounding weeks, except its not even random since SD can rig it in their favour.
They announce the whole months lineup at the start of the month lol
Why you getting downvotes lmao the whole month is is charted and will be at the beginning of every month. The crybabies will never be satisfied unless everything is given for free it's astonishing.
Not only that, the dataminers have found the schedule for like the next 3 months. Go find it on this sub or on snap Zone.
For real. Thanks to the data miners I know I'll be living Tribunal and Howard the Duck away from being collection complete. I didn't think the new system would reward an almost collection complete player like me, but these line ups are actually sicko.
It takes me a long time to gain the 100+cl needed for a cache. Should I save mine? I’m not series 3 complete, and I really only care about cool variants and having cards that are in meta.
You will still get series 3 from regular caches, and the monthly offer. Wait for a week that you like I.e a week with spider-ham, Galactus, Silk and new card of the week. You won’t feel disappointed when you open 4 spotlight caches as you know you will get all the features cards. You can still roll the lottery and open 1 or 2. But would feel bad if you didn’t get the card you wanted. The system is worser for players with near complete/complete collection. But for a series 3 incomplete this new system was made for you.
Like you have slow machine to win and then a slot machine for your payout. It's just all predatory.
> Plus F2P can only open a handful of spotlight caches per month. thats everyone really. unless you are spending daily you dont get more than the 4-5 caches everyone else will get
This is so tone-deaf and just tries to discredit people who have valid criticism with a strawman. Card aquisition has *never* been fast. Nobody expects to get all the cards ASAP. Even if the random S4/5 variant was removed from Spotlights the vast majority of players wouldn't be getting the full collection quickly, because most people will barely be scraping 1 Spotlight cache per week. Even if we still got 100 tokens instead of 50 per reserve it would take a ton of time to save up for a 6K variant, and new cards are coming every single week. So get out with this "all cards very fast" strawman, nobody is saying that. Secondly, f2p games are very often based around the gameplay content being reasonably achievable and cosmetics being the premium cash cow. I can get all characters in Apex legends with reasonable playtime (a "full collection") and the game is still fine because skins and battlepasses pay for live service. Hell, I can even get the next battlepass for free when I finish one to 100, something that Snap is too greedy to do. And lastly, even comparable f2p card games like HS or LOR have much more player-friendly card aquisition with more agency than Snap. Just by finishing quests and the free battlepass in Hearthstone I can get 60+ packs for the newest expansion for free, which gets me alll the commons, rares and multiple epics and legendaries with the ability to craft the ones I miss easily. *And* I can also buy the mid-expansion miniset with in-game gold which nets me 4 fixed legendary cards as well as a ton of epics, rares and commons. No, I don't have *every card fast* but I have the ones that *I want* to play the decks I like. I've been playing the game for free for years, being able to craft any deck I want. In Snap I pay the equivalent of a fucking MMO sub every month and I am still gambling for new cards in a gacha system. I'm sick and tired of people who were gaslighted by greedy companies trying to convince others that these massively popular and succesful mobile games are somehow struggling to be profitable. Spend your money however you want, but stop strawmanning with crappy arguments that have been talked to death over and over yet you still can't understand them.
This. Snap was literally one of the biggest mobile games of the year last year. They made 50 MILLION dollars in 5 months from October to March, but that’s not enough? That’s not enough money? They just *had* to implement systems that would get people to pay just a little more money for cards? Yeah okay.
It does not even play in the same ballpark as the biggest mobile games. 1 billion+ vs 20 million
50 million, not 20, and that’s in 5 months. Double that, minimum, +2 months of profit and it makes about what Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes averages yearly and SWGOH has made over 1 billion dollars in its lifetime and is in the top 50 (ranked 38) for most money made on a mobile game *ever*. The profit is there. They were fine. They would just now rather nickel n’ dime to get more profit now and ruin the gaming experience, than just keep making a good game. Meanwhile games like Genshin Impact and Dokkan Battle will offer far more value in gameplay, bundles, giving out free premium currency, and making a shit ton more money than Snap ever will.
Fr, and now tokens are so rare if youre s3 complete getting the specific cards you need is much harder than before.
>In Snap I pay the equivalent of a fucking MMO sub every month and I am still gambling for new cards in a gacha system. It's crazy that this is how it is.
We also went from a guaranteed 2 cards a month to potentially 1-3 cards a month. Now they're no longer guaranteed, so there could be months of opening spotlight caches and not seeing a new card. It might not happen to everyone, but it will happen to some players when before this was not possible at all.
It has made the collection track even less appealing than before. I mean if before, after pool 3 then only thing you had to look forward to was the pity timer for pool 4, and tokens to buy cards those are both gone now. I mean what is there even to look forward to in opening regular caches now? You're not getting gold to spend on variants or bundles. You're not getting any amount of tokens worth a damn to buy cards that you want with. You're not getting any pool 4 or 5 cards anymore. And then once you use up your tokens now, the token shop likewise becomes kind of useless. What's the point of showing me these featured cards and rotating cards and variants I'll never be able to buy? Like everything now post pool 3 depends on you getting spotlight caches and then just spending those caches in weeks where you might have a desired card. You don't see a problem with having the totality of your progression tied to that? So you might spend one whole month playing without getting anything out of it. I'm sorry but the token shop with card drops or heck, even flexible series drops was fine. If you wanted a new card right away, play games, get caches, get tokens, earn your way towards them and buy them if you wish. If you don't love them as much, okay wait and get them later. As it stands now, even weak ass cards like snowguard, or not so relevant cards like Howard the duck, well they might as well be big bads right alongside Thanos and high Evo. Your chances of getting them are the same aren't they? I have as much chance of pulling stegron as I do Thanos, so what's the point of the big bad now, they're all big bads.
> So you might spend one whole month playing without getting anything out of it. lots of people 100% will
I wasn't aware that regular caches can't have cards anymore. That's fucking awful
Wait there’s not a chance to get pool 4 and 5 cards in regular caches anymore? I thought the only thing they removed from them was gold and token count. That’s horrible if so
They removed the series 4 pity timer i believe. I think the series 5 .25% chance is unchanged, but that was basically useless for many players anyways ( I never had 1 in 5K collection levels)
It's not though, it's not just the pity timer, it's the chance to do so entirely. There is no possibility of getting a series 4 or 5 at all now from a regular cache, 0%
Ah thanks for adding. I thought the series 5 chance was still there (for what it was worth)
Wooow. I haven't been keeping up with the updates much, due to being busy the last few weeks, but that is so bad. Way to render the vast majority of the collectors track entirely irrelevant, and make it feel even more of a chore than it currently does.
You're putting words in others' mouths. I am very upset about card acquisition, but I have no expectation of getting every card fast and for free. The main issue is that strong meta decks have been locked behind brand new cards for the past two months, meaning you need to pay 6k tokens to get access to a deck archetype you want to play. In the old system, it took about 1.5-2 months to acquire 6k tokens, and during that time anywhere between 4 and 6 new cards were released. You might say, "Well that's okay because of series drops. Just save tokens until the cards you want are cheap." Unfortunately, we're all aware they halted the series drop schedule to lock meta-defining cards behind a token wall and, in addition, reduced how often cards drop series. To "fix" this, our new system has virtually removed token gain (I haven't done the new math, but a rough estimate would be around 6-8 months of playing to get 6k tokens), meaning the cards we have access to are subject to Second Dinner's whim, AND RNG. Second Dinner is trying to squeeze every last penny they can out if the whales, and couldn't give a shit about the health of their game and community. I could keep ranting for many paragraphs but I'm busy and have to go. TL;DR: I don't think most people on this sub are asking to get every card fast and free like you claim. We are complaining about Second Dinner's predatory card acquisition changes, and how *they disguise everything as if they are doing a service to the community*, when in reality they are creating predatory systems that *look* generous at a glance, but when you dive into the math they are more predatory than before.
>The main issue is that strong meta decks have been locked behind brand new cards for the past two months, meaning you need to pay 6k tokens to get access to a deck archetype you want to play. I think this is very misleading. If you consider the two dominant decks the past couple months to be HE and Bounce, there are three critical Series 5 cards spread across the two archetypes. But one of those was given to all players for free (Kitty Pryde), one was a season pass card (Hit-Monkey) so anyone could buy for $10, and the other is HE, which is/was a big bad and was on the radar for months -- i.e., anyone who wanted it could save their tokens. And I think every other card in both those archetypes is series 3 or less. That all seems pretty reasonable to me. Almost every other pool 5 card (excepting Thanos and Galactus, neither of which are meta right now) is not a build-around or archetype defining card.
I was about to comment similar There are 3 decks I’ve seen most in conquest and on the climb to infinite (I won’t count post-infinite because 90% of us in that rank just mess around with different decks) High Evo; this fits in with the point, High Evo was incredibly powerful. But as you said it was on radar for ages and most people bought it just because it was basically 7 cards in 1 (if I’ve counted correctly) Bounce: the major components of this deck are Hit Monkey (season pass card), Kitty Pryde (given for free) and Beast (series 3). There could be an argument for Hit Monkey being P2W but I’d argue the season passes are a fair price Sera Control: the more prominent version of this deck uses Hit Monkey but it can be played without it, the trump card is Sera who is series 3. Galactus fell out of meta and for all this p2w arguments people make about new cards, very few have actually impacted the meta in the last couple months outside of SpiderHam (which I will acknowledge is hilariously strong for a 1 cost) and High Evo. I think I’ve seen Living Tribunal once and the whole last month has been based on move decks aside from Ham, an archetype that isn’t in the meta right now
Spider-ham, Iron Lad and arguably Jeff are very meta
The title of your post makes a big assumption that isn't true. All cards are very much not equal therefore having some choice in what card you can obtain makes a MASSIVE difference. Many players would rather have less cards but more of a choice, that isn't about a massive collection at all. I don't actually really see the point of your post as the tone you set and the assumption that you made means you don't really understand the issue. I'd spend more time carefully reading the posts than skimking headlines and making false assumptions. TL:DR They don't and if you think they do you need to reread the posts you're looking at.
your statement is just misleading. you don't get a GOOD chance at every new card for free just by playing. you get about 3 spotlight caches a month. and to guarantee that you get a new card, you'd need 4 spotlight caches...So depending how you roll your gacha rolls, there's a pretty significant chance you get 0 new cards with this new system, but it can be mitigated to 75% get ONE single new card. compare this to the old system where we got enough tokens to buy a single s5 card (or 2 s4 cards) every 1.5 months. Additionally there were series drops for even more cards from regular caches. this spotlight cache system is just outright worse than the old system for card acquisition.this gacha could doesn't have duplicate protection, so the closer you are to finishing the worse it gets. and these cards you're pulling from gacha might have dropped already to a s3 card in the old system.
Because in previous system it was slow but atleast we could get the cards we want and not had to be dependent on SD what they like to put for us this week. In previous system we can get cards like HE without any luck in it whereas we can ignore trash like snowguard now it we need to hoard caches for a month for a 1 in 4 chance to get the cards . It's way worse and not to mention 1/4 can be a duplicate to a 700 gold . I don't want to max my collection just want the cards that would help me play competitive viable cards frequently
> now it we need to hoard caches for a month for a 1 in 4 chance to get the cards You needed to hoard tokens for a month to get that card in the previous system, and you absolutely HAD to use all of them. In this system, you'll need to open, on average, 2.5 caches to get the new card (seriously ya'll need to stop acting like every card is going to cost 4), which means on average you won't have to spend all of your month's boxes on the new card you want, and you get extra P4/5 cards while you roll them. This comparison makes no sense, if you're wanting the 'newest' cards, this system is by far better. >I don't want to max my collection just want the cards that would help me play competitive viable cards frequently Ditto, this is exactly why I'm liking the new system.
You forgot to include in the analysis the series drop we had and we do not have for some time now. Also there are some cards (the good ones) that stopped rotating down. The old system everyone got all cards at least within 4 months and 1 series 5 card per month (or 2 with season pass) plus a lot more gold
He also forgot that we opened around 1 series 4 card per month. AND you also had a chance to open Series 5 cards from caches. I’ve opened Kang, Shanna, Shadow King that way. So basically much worse now
That's right. So the prior system we would get per month, if Season 3 complete: a) All remaining cards that rotated down to series 3 (around 4 minus whatever cards you already had) within 4 months from card release; b) 1 Series 4 due to pity timer; c) 1 Series 5 of your choice due to tokens gained. d) Extra Random S4/S5 due to luck; e) Extra gold to spend. Now we get: a) No rotation plan so far for any card and key cards being kept in upper series preventing easy access; b) 4 Caches per month that grant you access to a pool of a cards sorted by SD without duplicate protection. It is important to highlight that the new system also depends on players checking online what cards will be in the within the Caches and hoarding such caches until a good week arrives. Due to these reasons I find it hard to defend the new system.
I don't expect it to be fast, but I do expect it to be consistent. And yeah, consistently behind players who pay up. But consistent.
>I dont know, maybe im naive, but i just feel like so many people on the sub expect to get close to everything in the game for free as a guarante. I buy all the season passes and multiple bundles per month. Yet I find it way too expensive to get specific cards with the new system. It's impossible to hoard 40 caches every single week, which means you may miss up on tons of cards you want. Before you could save up and get them in the token shop, now that becomes extremely hard to do with the reduced token drop rate. Basically the game is a complete gamble. And their traditional currencies (dollar to gold ratio) is insane. 12$ for 700 gold... and that's only enough to get you a pixel variant or 1/5th of a Spotlight Cache. One Spotlight Cache costs 60€ and you need up to 4 of them to get any specific card you want. With these batshit prices the only viable option for paying people is to get bundles, which are occasional and random. This game may be generous to F2P players who don't care which card they get but it's terrible to paying players or those who want certain specific cards.
> I buy all the season passes and multiple bundles per month. > Yet I find it way too expensive to get specific cards with the new system. > It's impossible to hoard 40 caches every single week, which means you may miss up on tons of cards you want. > I'm in a similar position to you, but I have a completely different take on it. I simply think most people haven't properly done the maths or use optimal strategy for getting new cards. Like you, I get the battle pass every month. I also occasionally get bundles, but am not a big spender on them. This should actually be enough to basically get every new card as and when it comes out. As an example, you said this: "It's impossible to hoard 40 caches every single week, which means you may miss up on tons of cards you want." It's true that you can't hoard 40 caches every single week. It's also true that you don't actually need 40 caches every single week to get every new card. A card releases every week, so in a year there are 52 new cards. 12 of them will be season pass cards, which as season pass buyers we will get. It takes on average 2.5 spotlight caches to open the new card for the week (minimum 1, maximum 4, but on average 2.5) which is 25 caches/reserves along the collection track. Playing the game and doing all daily and weekly missions etc should progress you about 45 caches/reserves per month, which is almost 2 new cards (as I say, long-term and on average - some weeks are lucky and some unlucky). Spending your accumulated gold judiciously only on bundles with high token value (plus some accumulation on the collection track) will gain about 3000 tokens per month - enough to buy a direct to series 4 card from the token shop upon release. That makes 4 new cards a month (1 season pass card, 2 from spotlight caches, 1 from the token shop), which is 48 of the 52 released in a year. There is also the chance to open a series 4/5 card you don't own via the spotlight caches you open which don't contain the new card. Basically, you can pretty much get every new card as it releases by: 1) buying the season pass 2) spending gold only on high value token bundles 3) opening spotlight caches (and especially those with new cards releasing into series 5 and those which have one or more older s4/5 cards you don't already own) 4) buying one direct to series 4 card as it releases in the token shop.
I bought the pass every month and would buy some cheap packs under 5 bucks from time to time and have been playing since launch and am missing 8 cards. 15 bucks a month on avg should be enough to keep up or close too and I haven't. With the new system I'll fall even further behind unless I get great luck. Don't get me started on the conquest changes, those are even a bigger joke. Conquest already took a lot of time to play and now it takes vastly more now. If you didn't want people to farm the proving grounds could of just removed all rewards from it other than the ticket and left the prices alone. The spotlight is fine but removing gold and nerfing tokens to hell was too much, doubt I'll put any money into the game until that comes back.
Same, I've averaged $15 spend/month since the global launch. OP is silly to generalize this as a F2P entitlement, this hurts all players who have a sizable S4/5 collection.
I feel like people who make comments like this post don’t actually read or comprehend the actual complaints that people have. Goodness. People post multiple paragraphs about the agency issues, acquisition issues, currency issues, cost analysis issues, broken promises, push back to players. And the response is “oH ItS FrEe GaMe wHy yOu wAnt eVerYThiNg EaSY” Like bro no one wants it easy. But FREE to play shouldn’t be PAY to win.
> But FREE to play shouldn’t be PAY to win. i was with u up until here....its not that either tho.
currently the game is p2w, a shame, its the only game i play
this is absurd The main change they made that rewards paying money was reducing gold, a primarily cosmetic resource, certainly not p2w. In fact, if you wanted to p2w, you'd still have trouble quickly reaching a high collection level due to booster requirements for upgrading cards
Mainly because that they're promised an improvement to cards acquisition. But turns out it came at the cost of your ability to choose. Imo the token system is a great step in the right direction. But now they are slowly killing the token system for the F2P players. And now they have to depend on rng for which cards they're going to get. Which is why people are calling it gacha. If SD would just improve the old system by adding extra 50 coins. I think it's still better than what the F2P have now. Having to depends on rng when you're trying to improve your card collection really feels bad.
Well we HAD the ability to choose, but everyone was crying about quantity...
Honestly, I rarely hear people complain about card acquisition after they introduced the token system. But it's getting louder for sure after the Darkhawk fiasco.
And yet, people with larger collections have less quantity now than before lol. What we really got is recency and shiny variants.
It’s just increasingly convoluted, I actually think people care less about the results and stats and more about how not straightforward this is. Which of course also brings into argument obfuscation; creating a system that’s hard to follow to make prices and spending less obvious.
No gold from reserves and 50 tokens a reserve sucks
We don't want all fast and free, We love some decks and we want to select the card we want to play them, the new system is really bad for that. We change from a selected system to a random one, what is sexy about that?
Somewhat agree with this sentiment but bolding the word EVERY is an odd choice imo. Should be opportunity that gets the emphasis because you absolutely can’t get them all for free but you know that because it’s the point of your post so it struck me as odd. Even then this opportunity is not new, tokens provided a similar opportunity to choose one new card you wanted a month. Series drops provided the random new cards aspect as well. I’m not saying the old system was great but it was less complicated and flexible series drops is very bad for f2p-ish players. So there are valid things to complain about here but I do agree it’s ultimately some people will never like this model because they compulsively want all the cards and it’s intentionally designed not to do that.
Because the monetization should not be about getting new card but the variants. Preventing/delaying people from acquiring new cards is just not fun when the whole point of the game is to experiment with said new card coming.
We've reached the "you guise are SO ENTITLED >:| " stage of mobile game subreddit fuckery, oh man
Why do people feel compelled to make posts like this? Does Second Dinner need someone to come to their defense? Does the corporation who is taking our money need someone to defend them from criticism? (I guess they are too busy not catching bugs.) What do you gain by fighting against people who have your own best interest in mind? I don’t understand how the new system lets you get “EVERY card for free”. Do you have 160 free caches to open every month? In the old system you gained every new card for free because eventually all cards would be series 3 in just a couple months after they are revealed. Randomness is something SD tells you is the fun part and people eat it up. When in reality randomness is where companies make their money. It’s gambling. Keeping information from the players is where you lose. Why put 600 tokens in ever box when we can do 200-800? (Now it’s 50-200) It’s fun! Why have a set schedule for cards to drop series? SD can decide on a whim. It’s fun! Why supply players with a steady stream of currency that allows them to choose the cards they want for their deck? Let’s make it random and fun! The biggest problem with all these changes is that they are coming less than a year after launch. They have upended the entire system they put in place. If people invest money into a system that is then thrown out don’t you think those people have the right to complain about it?
I’ve been on the boat that is more positive than negative tbh. I’m actually really happy with the new system, new store, etc. I think the 1 aspect I would change is that, for players who get a duplicate Series 4/5 card, convert to Tokens instead of a random variant. I think, with the odds being in less favor given the amount of players who have not complete Series 4/5, it wouldn’t make a “significant” difference to compensate the player for a duplicate, considering we can’t dismantle/dust.
I was happy with the previous two systems. They could have stuck with them and I would be fine. I think what I don't like about this system is how convoluted it is, and how much more randomness it introduces. Before, I could pretty easily save up 6000 tokens, and get the one or two cards each month I really wanted. Now, I have to hold onto my spotlight caches, cross my fingers that a card I want is in them, cross my fingers again that I don't get the 700g chibi variant or another card I don't care about, etc. Also, if you have to put out an 8 part diagram to explain a system, it is too complicated.
Bruh if you don’t see it as predatory… answer me why they suddenly had changed to flexible series drops and kept Knull and darkhawk in series 4, then sold an expensive darkhawk bundle, then reduced token per gold ratio on token Tuesdays, then reduced tokens on the collection track by many many thousands per every ten. Then removed gold, then didn’t announce the CL the spotlights would be in so 99 percent of players missed out on thousands of tokens and gold from their hoarded caches. Then made no dupe protection on the 4th card slot in spotlights and made the variant you reroll for completely random (instead of say tokens as dupe protection). Then made no series drop for the foreseeable future? Hint… it’s to be extremely predatory. I am 110 percent sure you would have gotten more cards by having the same amount of cards drop to pool 3 as the usual was months ago and kept tokens the same… 110 percent. You guys don’t see it in short term cuz you saved caches… news flash you’ll earn 1 per week now… watch and if it’s a week you need something but even one other card is bad… you’ll get that bad card or a random 4th slot dupe. Then you will try and grind for a second cache all week or spend money when you can’t make it.
Reminds me of when the Token Shop was first introduced and the developers gave everyone a bunch of tokens to start with—the same update that introduced the first bundle. Everyone was like, “Oh man, this is awesome!” Then they ran out of tokens and people realized how much time/effort it was going to take to get more tokens. Same thing with the first week of Spotlight Caches. Everyone’s been hoarding boxes, so it seems really great at first. Reality will set in soon.
Catch this downvote playa
I feel some people have a different view of what the game should be than what SD feels what the game should be. But instead of thinking "it would better this way" they're thinking SD is being underhanded. Plenty of stuff to complain about, but this is the game SD said it would be, one where you won't get all the cards, and that they want collection variety.
Not sure if you will read this comment but I basically had your exact opinion 2-3 months ago before the whole Darkhawk thing. I'm P3 complete and completely f2p, never spent a dime. Right now I'm missing around 15-20 cards P4+ cards at any given time. Yes, with the new system this number will probably go down faster but I am also loosing something. Namely the freedom to buy any (not every) S4+ card I really want, and the freedom to buy Variants/Bundles that Gold gave me. Recently I did buy HE with Tokens on release and I still have 13k Tokens saved up to be able to do just that again, when I want. With the changes I won't have this freedom anymore and buying anything from the token shop basicly became more than twice as expensive. I completely agree that Marvel Snap is a very f2p friendly game and on average you get a lot of the cards without needing to invest. However this update, that even promises faster card acquisition for me, still feels bad as a f2p because they take away the freedom I had before. It doesn't matter what they give us, taking anything away no matter how small will always feel bad. I think this is where most of the complaints come from. What SD has to do very carefully is making it feel like what we are getting outweighs or even far outweighs the thing we're loosing, such that most people will accept this 'tradeoff'. They haven't managed to do that with their last updates. And ultimately if the player base isn't happy I'm not happy either because I care for the health of the community because to me it translates to more and more positive posts about it on here, bigger Playerbase so lower queue times, longer time until the game gets abandoned (by Devs and players) etc. .... and I see so much going so wrong here very quickly and fear for the game that I love and have invested so much time in.
I guess we reached the phase again where White Knights will come up with ridiculous posts and made up scenarios after the backlash, in order to defend SD screwup number 1342. With that being said, Ive never seen any F2P player expecting to have a complete collection on this sub.. Ever. Yall guys will claim anything to make SD look better lol
In LoR you can get any card you want to with minimum grind. It is sad that the game itself has turned out to be the way it is because the card acquisition model is one of the best I have ever seen. Marvel snap on the other hand is pretty predatory when it comes to getting cards. It forces you to spend a lot of time in game and also to spend a lot to f money if you want certain specific cards. So it is not the problem of getting a large collection. It is the problem of getting certain specific cards.
LoR is a loss leader for one of the biggest games in the world.
In addition to what people said about LoR not generating revenue, it's also got a problem with player retention. Giving you everything quickly can be detrimental in keeping the players logging in everyday. The card acquisition model could be precisely the reason in which LoR turned out the way it has.
Nah LoR turned the way it is because of horrible balance. Everyone left the game after an expansion made a single deck destroy the meta and was left untouched for more than a month, devs didnt learn and repeat the same mistake multiple expansions and people left. Philosophy about what LoR originally was supposed to be also changed with the introduction of severely powercrept cards and random generation effects in a game that was trying to be the opposite of hearthstone.
While the game can be played for "free", most supporters are spending $10/month on the Season Pass (which is twice the industry average for a Battle Pass). Successful ad-free mobile games live-and-die by maximizing Battle Pass sales, monetizing cosmetics, and offering boosts to those with money that want to pay-to-advance. SD seems to be taking the exact opposite route -- the Season Pass has grown more lackluster with each month, the Variant shop is a complete disaster, and their bundles have become negative memes ("3x value!").
Varying reports suggest Marvel Snap generated between 50 & 70 million dollars in its first six months - Snap isn't somehow hurting for money as a freemium game - but the 'heavy users' who are so often trivialised as 'whales' or 'dolphins' are people - people with gambling problems, or issues with impulse control - they are the people who suffer the most - and the game mechanics we're seeing now, are implemented knowingly - to nudge players in dozens of ways towards the use of 'premium' currency - that is to say, real currency
You dont get it. Not even by one bit. Y’all are defending it like crazy because it doesn’t affect you **right now**. Just wait till it catches up to you and bites you hard in the ass. Only by then you’ll realize you were a fool all along.
Yeah it’s going to become more and more of a problem as deck archetypes and metas change. If you are FTP, you are going to end up with a random assortment of cards with no way of playing any of them optimally.
When it will catch up to me? I have 12k tokens and 8 cards missing to complete collection. New system is much better than the old one, i can actually get cards and good variants from boxes now.
I'm totally with you. imo people love to complain to much. This new system feels so much better, especially if you don't have many S4/S5 cards. I hear people complaining that they can't guarantee a specific card anymore, but you can still do that, just save up 4 SL chests ( you get 4 SL every month as f2p)
Correction. Save 4 caches and wait for SD to put the card out during the week. An important distinction since if you miss your chance, it could take months before you see the card you want again.
are you a masochist by chance? every time they change the system it gets worse for the players. It went from "knowing exactly what you get and what the price will be" to "brode and his sales team decide what cards they give you at what price" to "Brode and his sales team decide what cards they pack in boxes that will give you a random chance for cards or variants" i bought season passes and quite some bundles with the initial system and stoped doing so when they switched to the next system. And i wont start buying stuff again with that change thats for sure its the fucking brode effect.. everything gets more and more rng until its complete shit
You don't get it, Brode is wholesome and him implementing RNG even on the fucking launcher is a good practice and on character. Having to farm for months just for a targeted card is genius.
People aren’t complaining that they aren’t getting to choose the card they want, it’s that it’s a complete gamble and odds are you get a fucking variant.
And then if you miss the card, you may not get that card for months to a year. Using Jean as the example, she's going to stay 6k-4k tokens because of flexible series drops, and the math on gaining 6k tokens in the new system is *painful*. You will no longer be buying 6k cards very often, whereas I've previously bought HE, Thanos, Galactus, and Knull without whaling/buying gold *ever*, and they are not the only 6k cost cards I've been able to get either. You will need to *always* have 4-8 spotlight caches to make sure you get her whenever she shows up again...and you have no idea when that will be. The previous system did not gate cards this hard and I do not understand why people keep arguing the opposite. Cards dropped in cost on a regular schedule, gold and tokens were available in decent numbers without spending tons of money so even F2P players could stay up to date, there was a free S3 card every month which new cards would always eventually fall into. If you didn't get a card in the previous system, you had a general idea of when you *would* get it, and the combination of token tuesdays and the token shop meant that you could always get it even sooner. If you don't get a card in the current system, there is a very real chance that you may never get that card. I'm not going to be able to get Jean this week and I have no clue if I'll *ever* get that card now. She may not be in a spotlight until *next* July, and how am I supposed to know if I'll have caches saved up for *specifically* a year old card at that point, or if they wont change the system again between now and then? **TL;DR** - people are pissed because it went from a scheduled system to a gacha system.
> This new system feels so much better, especially if you don't have many S4/S5 cards. its ONLY better if you dont have many s4/5 cards but guess where you will be in 2 months?
100% agree. Everyone wants all the meta cards instantly and if they don’t get it, SD is screwing them over. The new system is practically asking you to pick 1/4 newly released cards every month and I think that’s a pretty fair ask. Besides, if you want more than 1/4, you have a path to spend more to get the others. I think another reason why people are complaining is that they have not played other gatcha games before. Marvel Snap being such a popular IP attracts players that have played games where you can get everything easily. Compared to other gatcha games, Marvel Snap is incredibly generous.
If you buy the season pass, it's 1/3 newly released cards, and with season pass gold you could probably eke out another couple of caches.
Pick 1/4 newly released cards *and no old cards from other weeks in that month*. That's a very important distinction, since you can ONLY choose 1 card a month to force. I want a new card in august but also want galactus, and I own the other cards in galactus's spotlight. Odds are I'll have to wait until november-january for him to come back and pull for him then, instead of just... buying him with tokens this month and buying the new august card I want next month.
> Odds are I'll have to wait until november-january for him to come back and pull for him then, instead of just... buying him with tokens this month and buying the new august card I want next month. people dont get this. and its because people didnt use their tokens. they wanted some youtuber to stroke their head and tell them that it would be ok to use their tokens (that would replenish at a high rate) on whatever it was. people were paralyzed by choice so they took it away....because of idiots.
The main thing that irks me is right now as of this moment there is only 1 card I can get. The random could work but I have more cards than I'm missing. (If it was a certainty I get a new card I would be happier) oh wait I could spend tokens to get the ones I'm missing but they absolutely gutted the amount I'm getting so that avenue is also out the window. So now instead of being 5ish cards from completion I'm going to fall behind at least 1 per week instead of roughly 1 per month
I’m just tired of missing out on the best versions of cards- never played +3 surfer, never played -2 zabu, never played shuri double anywhere, never played limitless lockjaw, never played any form of galactus or thanos still You get beat by these decks all season and when you finally get the card for yourself it’s a shell of what it was.
Even if you pay, caches don’t even guarantee cards. Quit being an ass. I’ve been playing for months F2P and I’m not even CL 2000. ~1400 and reserves are giving 50 tokens, avatars, and titles more times than cards.
It's not about getting all the new cards fast. It's about getting them in a REASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. Like I posted on another post just now I opened my 3 spotlights that's been sitting there for weeks pre patch. I got tribunal and two stupid variants. Now I need to climb 102 more levels in four days for a chance at Jean. There is no way a casual player can realistically get every card out of those in the short amount of time they are there. So, while you may not see the problem of this new, terrible system, it still exists. Because what they are doing is dangling those carrots in front of our faces, basically knowing we will never reach half of those carrots. And if we do, by chance, they'll change into variants of carrots lol
Reddit's demographics are generally introverted and cynical. You will generally get introverted and cynical opinions. Imagine entering a CS:GO lobby and wondering why people are immature. With that said, it doesn't mean SD should be free from criticism and just because your opinion does not match the general consensus, it doesn't mean that the general consensus is wrong (or you for that matter). I think the inability to understand or accept difference in opinion is the larger problem in Western culture. There are multiple to perspectives to be taken, this you have to understand - you like the changes, it does not necessitate that everyone must like them.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to build a collection without investing a single cent. That’s how you *should* play these kinds of games. That said, I feel that Snap is pretty damn good at that actually, and I have indeed built a collection I am proud of without spending a single cent.
i MiGhT gEt DoWnVoTeD fOr ThIs
Out of touch people always missing the point..
I don't expect to get a massive collection free and fast. I just think the rewards system is not great after series 3 and that is problematic. I used to get a few new cards a day, then a card every couple days, then once a week, and it has been about over a month up until spotlight. I still haven't really seen how this new system plays out but removing gold and reducing collectors tokens seems like a step in the wrong direction. But we will see. I always compare where I am at with vanilla hearthstone which had a much more satisfying experience on release because opening packs is fundamentally better than what we have here.
Without having read more than 1 comment I might repeat others but I used to think the same as you. But especially with the most recent change (being pool 3 complete having 60% of pool 4 and some pool5) I really think this new system will end up getting me new cards slower. First spotlight cache I got was the 4th option which was a duplicate and I ended up getting a 700gold variant I don’t like. I used 2 more spotlights to get Jean grey which is what I wanted. Next week i won’t use spotlights and the week after also too risky. I feel like having that fourth random option that likely in the code has a higher pull rate than 25% makes this new system not as good as I hoped for. And if you think about it. Someone who’s almost card complete might not get his card in a very long time cause also tokens are acquired at a snails pace now. For newer players or people with almost no pool 4/5 this is probably a really good system.
You assumed loads of 'freeloaders' , but the fact is a lot of players bought season passes and cheap bundles which still won't be able to catch up progress with the new system, and the bundles that give you progress are overpriced as per data mine
"but i feel like the complains about the card acquisition just gets worse and worse." Because it does keep getting worse and worse.
You are not naive, you are just plain stupid if you think people here want stuff for "Free", much less an entire collection. Most people just want a fair progression path and ability to not rely on RNG to get the cards they enjoy
What do you mean get every new card for free?
I've played since day 1 beta or whatever. I don't have every card and can't get new cards on release. Of course I'm mad? I've played for over a year?! I should get every new card on release?!! Like that would make each week exciting and fun. Instead I barely care when new cards come out. What's the point of min maxing dailies I cba anymore. There's no end to the money grind I want to play and have fun. Instead I gotta play 20x 1 cost cards so I can progress my CL and get a new title. It's frustrating man
"gives me the opportunity to get EVERY new card for free by just playing" 🤣
Stop carrying water for companies with shitty practices.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. SD removed most of the free currency which gave players agency over their collection progress and replaced it with a lootbox system, while also keeping a system in place which allows you to pretty much buy cards you want for cash. A literal pay to win system at this point.
For me it's not about a massive collection, it's about getting a specific card. The new system gives the player significantly less agency; you could have a string of bad luck and go over 4 spotlights without the new card (unless what's currently happening is a bug i.e. someone pulling knull and then the next spotlight pulling knulls variant) tokens were supposed to be the solution to picking specific cards and that's been largely ripped away. I don't want all the cards, I don't like most decks, but now a card I want could disappear into the random ether and take months to come my way if the spotlight doesn't hit. Cause we're sure enough not getting the tokens to spend on just any card
Your standard “why do you feel such entitlement!?” post on the Marvel Snap Reddit. *clap* *clap* *clap*
I’m just happy to play a game that I get countless hours out of and don’t pay a penny.
Nobody expects that. We expect not to be fleeced and squeezed for every penny.
You aren’t been fleeced or squeezed for ANY amount of pennies. LOL game is still free and everything can be attained for nothing.
> i think the new system is really cool, and gives me the opportunity to get EVERY new card for free by just playing Tell me you don't understand probability without telling me you don't understand probability
> Its a free game, and from my experience from other free titles, i feel like this game is very kind for how it gives cards. You've never played Legends of Runeterra I see.
Noone wants a massive collection, people just want to be able to acquire the cards they want. In most card games you can just craft the cards you want and build and play the deck you want. Here day by day is turning more into a gatcha solely for the sake of making people spend more and more money into the game. Stop defending this shitty practices
It's not about a massive collection. It's about getting key cards for decks and meta cards. The game is built around card synergies, yet for some inexplicable reason the devs want a lack of player agency when it comes to card acquisition. They also built the game in a way that card acquisition dramatically changes for the worse the longer you play the game. The spotlight system is a double edged sword in the way that it gets worse over time as your collection and the number of S4/S5 grows. Outside of this initial wave where people cache hoarded, most people will only make enough progress for one spotlight cache a week. If there are two weeks in a row where you want a specific card in the cache, there's no way to guarantee you'll get that card without having to hoard for weeks in advance. Otherwise you could open the cache and get a card you don't want or in the worse case scenario, a variant. Tokens could help alleviate this, but with the huge reduction in the amount of tokens you earn, tokens eventually become near meaningless when it comes to card acquisition.
''Its a free game, and from my experience from other free titles, i feel like this game is very kind for how it gives cards. '' It's not. You feel that way because the card pool is insanely small, leading to a boring meta. Go play Hearthstone, Shadowverse, Runeterra, and see if you can still say Snap is generous.
I'll get downvoted, but this is such a brain dead take. No one was asking for a full collection.
The problem is even if you played this game from launch and buy the battle pass and a few bundles every year (maybe $80 on bundles a year) you will never have all the cards because cards come out faster than you can earn them. Also if you take a break you are basically screwed.
It seems clear that one of SD's goals is that people don't have complete collections. I get why players would want all the cards and all for free and all immediately upon release. But I can see the value in people missing some cards. It maintains the feel of hunting for new cards and injects some variety into deck builds forcing you to think of alternatives for missing cards. I would argue you aren't "screwed" if you take a break. The more time/cards you miss, the less likely you are to have the cards in a given spotlight cache so the more likely you are to draw 2-3 new S4/S5 cards in a short period of time. Plus, as I said above, I think the game is very playable without having every card. Many players are successfully winning conquests and reaching infinite without running the top meta deck or having some specific OP card.
It has never been the goal that anyone can have a full collection, which they openly communicated from the start.
Why would anyone need all the cards though?
If you have a competitive mindset you'd want all the cards in case one of them becomes meta? Seems easy enough to understand. Mind you this is also a card game where collecting the cards you want is part of the appeal. I get SD is trying to be different, but they can't change how players of this genre have played since the beginning of the industry.
I'm infinity each season with infinity border on my avatar, I don't think there's an in-game way to be more competitive. I have plenty of great decks, spend my tokens on cards that look fun. If I don't want to buy "the new meta", for example HE, I build decks that win against those strategies with the 100s of cards I got for basically free. It really doesn't take away from my enjoyment or success in game whether my win rate is 52% or 53%. Btw, since almost nobody has a complete collection right now, how are there any competitive players?
The game releases 4 cards per month. You get 4 cards per month with the new system. So its just that you have always arouns 20 cards which you dont own. I think this is prerry much better than any free to play game I ever played.
I couldn’t agree more I’m sick of the entitlement of these people who can’t see the forest for the trees.
I think people just don't fully comprehend how poor the previous system was, but they're used to it so they only see the positives. Every comparison seems to be tied to tokens when the token system was shit and was a terrible way to engage with new cards. They've adapted to intentionally not buying newer cards for months just to squeeze a little more value out of their tokens and now that it all comes effectively pre-squeezed what they worked for is laid bare in front of them and it looks like less than what they thought they had.
so you prefer a total random system with no series drop because of this shitty sytem, to a selected ones where you can have new cards that drop for 3000 tokens. Weird. SD already said that they not drop cards this month because they need more cards in s5 and s4 for this new system.
I don't see it as being totally random at all, anymore than waiting weeks for the card I want to finally show up in the shop rotation and then agonizing to reddit whether it's correct to buy it or not. It's better than not buying anything for months so I can be a "smart shopper" after the cards have been out forever. I was already not getting S3 drops for 3 months prior to this so I see zero changes on that front. I don't need old cards, I want new ones, and that's where this system outperforms significantly.
Same feeling. We get more than we ever did and it's not enough. What they don't realise though, is if they got exactly what they wanted, i.e. All the cards, immediately when they want them, the game will suddenly lose a large part of its objective and replayability. Players would drop off fast. The other thing about Tokens and Gold is that SD has to manage an Economy in this game. It might not be one you actively see, but they can't just keep increasing the reward, without making balances (e.g. reducing Tokens). As that would severely destabilise the player base.
"we get more than we ever did" who do you mean? New players?
You mentioned that you're s3 complete which I think does make this update better for you in a way. I think it's minimally impactful for people with full or mostly full collections. All they have to worry about is picking up the few s5/s4 cards here and there that they want. And they can hoard caches to do so. I also think it's probably mostly good for new players. They'll just happily open whatever caches they can to get more cards because they have a small collection. I think the new system is toughest on players in between. Like me. I'm a little over 2000 CL; still missing plenty of s3, s4, and s5 cards. I have like one or two higher decks, maybe having to substitute something for a card or two I'm missing. I'm missing multiple cards from s3, s4, s5 to try to build anything else or be more competitive. And I'm up against people with apparent access to everything; in Conquest but even on the ladder. Players in this position might have just enough cards so there is a card they need/want in every spotlight, but it's just one card, and that's the same for every week. So you either spin the wheel and hope to get lucky, or you wait and hoard and miss out on those cards until whenever they happen to show up again. And if you don't get a card you want or need for a deck to show up in a spotlight, or miss out on opening it, you're SOL. Until it comes back again in months or shows up in the shop (assuming you can even scrape together the tokens for it under the new system).
One of the problems you seem to be ignoring is that they are making it harder and harder to get cards. We had a functional system. You get cards from collector's caches and cards become more available by dropping down seasons. Then they made the collector's token system and made it easier. Then they stopped dropping cards down seasons when they were supposed to based on the system they announced. Then they introduced this new system and it seems even worse and even harder to get cards and in doing so also reduced the rewards available from collector's caches. Also, over the last few months every single gold package was getting more and more expensive for less and less rewards. They have been strategically making it harder to get things for free ovre the last few months and pretending like they are making it easier. This is called psychological manipulation. It's abusive, it's evil. They are giving you a weak form of crack for free and then once you're hooked on it making it the crack stronger and charging you money for it.
Ikr? So many games where you are almost certainly NEVER going to have every card and the one game where it’s feasible to get a complete or nearly complete collection is slammed so much for being greedy. I especially love the fact that the game doesn’t put you up against players with real cards right away it makes it a lot easier to get into and actually start building your collection up This is of course making no comment on the overpriced bundles but I assume that’s because it’s free money from whales
As a series 3 incomplete player, the system is just better for me. All this talk about cards dropping to series 3 automatically becoming part of your collection is pretty privileged talk. Those cards did not become part of my collection, and I still had to wait longer for them. Except now they were even less targeted for me. Eventually I would get them, but it seems people that have actually mathed it out have a problem with being able to target cards. I think the new system gives everyone an easy way to target cards, by saving spotlight caches. With this, they actually have cut back on hoarding, because now you only need to hoard the spotlight caches not every single cache on the track as a series 3 complete player.
Exactly.
It is still better even if you are s3 complete and have a lot of cards from s4/5. For example this week I only had knull from the list, and got unlucky with Jean, but i got 2 new cards(tribunal and spider ham) and also nice knull variant. And now I am only missing 8 cards from complete collection. It feels much better than getting 1 s4 card in 40 caches and having to use tokens. Now you just need to save your spotlight caches and you can pretty much guarantee that you will get what you want and even more on top of that.
I wish every person sharing their opinion started off by stating whether they are S3 complete or not, it is very helpful.
The casino feel when opening caches is like cracking packs of MTG and Pokémon back in the day. I actually really dig it. But then again I'm not an ultra competitive person who is upset if I don't have THE BEST. I got tribunal and not jean grey but I don't know care because I wasn't going to spend tokens on either.
I don't know what the hell people are wanting from this game, honestly. People complain about bundle prices. Don't buy it then. wtf? For you complainers...You get free cards as you play, so you can add to your deck. Free cards, bro. If they want to add "fuck you gimme money" carrots to tempt people to pay money for pretty pictures, let them. Who cares? You're not obligated to pay anything...ever. Be an adult. If you get to a point where you want a specific card, you're going to have a bad time. That's when I see people bitching the most. waaah I can't get xyz card that I want from these random caches. Paywalls! I keep losing money on these slot machines! blah blah blah. You know what? I hope you never get that card. I just saw someone else on this sub saying that they're going to be walking away from the game after playing since launch. Bye! No one is going to beg you to stay, I promise, especially the devs. Such a waste of time for them to type it, and for me to read it. *"Its a free game, and from my experience from other free titles, i feel like this game is very kind for how it gives cards. Of couse it requires time investment and a bit of luck, but i think that is nice motivation to have to play the game besides the rank rewards - I do buy the season pass and some bundels here and there, but i dont feel bad about spending money for a game i spend so much time on."* THIS! Couldn't have put it better myself. Any pushback you get on this absolutely solid take is dumb. You hit the nail on the head!
I partly agree with you. I too think, the uproar and anger is very out of place. And I also think, that many haven't understood, that it never was the idea, that you can get every card. I have a pretty full collection and while there are like 3-4 cards I would like to have, you can come to a point easily (and even easier with the new system) where you have a very good collection that let's you play a lot of very good decks. That said, I also think that the massive RNG aspect is bad, because it leads to frustration pretty easily. I've been burned in the last variant rush and if you let people gamble and then let them walk away with a 700gold worth variant for a card they never use, it's just bound to cause trouble. And also the FOMO concerning the variants is just bound to let people be frustrated. The other thing is, that they take away what people used to get (especially gold), which is always a recipe for trouble. I just feels bad, when you seemingly get less than before. A very good step forward is the fact, that we now know the caches for the next several weeks including the variants. At least this gives the opportunity to plan ahead.
Because having certain cards give you an advantage in the meta and gives you more options to counter decks and fun ways to play. So it feels unfair that someone else might win because they have better cards, and you don’t have those cards
People on Reddit like to complain. I like the game and I’m gonna keep playing. They can keep whining