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Legends of Runeterra | Posted by | 5 years, 7 months ago
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Is anyone else feeling stuck playing Labs?

I'm not sure if this is something I'm experiencing because I took a break from the game, or if it's just the nature of F2P in Legends of Runeterra, but it's a bit of a struggle to actually get cards on day 1.

It's a bit odd - LoR is generally one of the most F2P friendly CCGs out there, but specifically in the context of expansions, and because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards.

Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me? I like the fact that they ensured Labs meant everyone got to try new cards, but I want to make my own decks with the new cards but don't have the resources yet.

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  • I'm not sure if this is something I'm experiencing because I took a break from the game, or if it's just the nature of F2P in Legends of Runeterra, but it's a bit of a struggle to actually get cards on day 1.

    It's a bit odd - LoR is generally one of the most F2P friendly CCGs out there, but specifically in the context of expansions, and because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards.

    Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me? I like the fact that they ensured Labs meant everyone got to try new cards, but I want to make my own decks with the new cards but don't have the resources yet.

    • Quote From meisterz39

      because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards

      Because there are shards and wild cards for this purpose.

      • Quote From R
        Quote From meisterz39

        because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards

        Because there are shards and wild cards for this purpose.

        Extra champion cards produce 1/4 of the shards needed to craft them, Epics and Rares produce about 1/5, and Commons produce about 1/6. Perhaps if you consistently play the game, that will eventually add up to enough, but it's a very slow way to build up resources.

        By comparison, Hearthstone lets you bank up in-game resources if you're done spending them on the current expansion, and they give away some free packs on day 1 of a new set. That first one is important, because if Blizzard demanded that you spend all your in-game gold ahead of an expansion and only got new cards with dust, everyone would be stuck getting far fewer cards. It's the difference between getting full value out of your resources vs 1/4 the value (or, in the case of LoR, often worse than 1/4).

        • I hear your difficulty, but the fact is that anyone who has been playing the game consistently over the last two months has a ton of wildcards and shards lying around unused. I play less than 10 games a day, and I have about 150 wildcards and over 40k shards, plus owning the vast majority of cards before this expansion, all with only a total of 3 casual months playing daily, but not aggressively.

          If you haven't been playing much before this ... all I can say is that I have no idea why you would be expecting to get cards easily.

          And let's be completely serious here - the free cards that Blizzard throws at you when an expansion releases do almost literally nothing to help you build a deck, unless you are absurdly lucky.

  • Right now I can craft this whole expansion and the next one, while not even playing this game more than for vault lvl 10 (sometimes less, sometimes more). But I don't care about playing ranked while it's a mess. Playing Labs for several day is totally fine for me. It's relaxing. I'll collect some cards along the way... and continue to hoard insane amounts of resources, which is without any sense. ;p

  • Btw, does anyone know what's wrong with the labs? Why they closed it for reconstruction?

    • Quote From R

      Btw, does anyone know what's wrong with the labs? Why they closed it for reconstruction?

      ...It's working for me. Maybe restart your client

  • About the resources problem: its quite easy to story enough resources during an expansion to buy the next expansion completely. However i did not quite manage to do that since I crafted every card pre expansion and had only 20k shards to craft in mountain.

    But its not like i had to craft many cards for now. I just crafted taric, his support tribal, 3 copies of hush, bastion and the spellshield dragon...

    there we have it 80% winrate because current decks can't deal with it

  • You just play LoR and you are given one champion and one wild card every week. Also at this time shards are accumulating. In HS you don't get a legendary for free every week. I don’t know why you spend 1/4 shards for a champion. I don't play a lot, but it will take 1/9 of the shards to craft champion. And that's not counting the wild cards. Why don't you count them?
    I don’t understand what you don’t like. Both games have their own advantages. LoR is more F2P than HS in my opinion. But they also need to make money.

    It's also likely that the Riot policy prompted the Blizzard to think and change their reward system.

    • Quote From R

      You just play LoR and you are given one champion and one wild card every week. Also at this time shards are accumulating. In HS you don't get a legendary for free every week. I don’t know why you spend 1/4 shards for a champion. I don't play a lot, but it will take 1/9 of the shards to craft champion. And that's not counting the wild cards. Why don't you count them?
      I don’t understand what you don’t like. Both games have their own advantages. LoR is more F2P than HS in my opinion. But they also need to make money.

      It's also likely that the Riot policy prompted the Blizzard to think and change their reward system.

      I agree that in general, LoR is way more F2P friendly than other games. But I think GerritDeMan really hit the nail on the head here. On day 1, when you haven't had time to rack up rewards and get new champions, etc., it's hard to feel confident in how to spend your limited resources. You want to build decks you're sure that you'll enjoy, and ideally you'd like to build a deck that's at least a bit competitively viable. And while the game is very F2P friendly, and it won't be hard to rack up all the cards if you play regularly, it still weakens the impact of that day 1 launch.

      Regarding your questions about the fractions, I'm not referring to my personal pool of shards. Here's what I mean: when you get a champion card that you already have three of (assuming you have all champions), you get 750 shards. When you get an epic card that you already have three of, you get 250 shards (and a rare gives you 60, and a common gives you 15). These shards are far lower value required to craft new cards. Yes, you can get wildcards, but that's hard to account for since it's semi-random, so I'm just using shard values to determine crafting. That's admittedly a worst-case scenario, but without knowledge of exactly the odds of wildcard upgrades, it's hard to judge in any other way.

       

  • I think the point most people are missing here is that there is still a big difference between getting a whole bunch of random but new cards (from packs, chests, etc.), and crafting specific cards. In Hearthstone the first few days of an expansion are exciting (granted you have a reasonable amount of gold to spend on packs) because opening your packs gives you a whole bunch of new cards to play with without burdening you with the choice of which cards to craft, but you can still craft some cards you're missing for decks you're sure you want to play. In LoR, you can only get a small amount of new cards from the region rewards on the first expansion day, and after that you either play your old decks or you use your resources to craft almost an entirely new deck.

    That's the problem though, I think most people, myself included, don't want to have to decide so early on which deck they're going to craft. It can be hard to know which cards are going to be good or even which cards are going to be fun for you. I experienced the latter when I crafted a Nautilus deep deck when Rising Tides was released. I thought I was going to enjoy deep decks the most, but I actually got tired of them pretty quickly and instead I enjoyed keg control or twisted fate focussed decks much more.They solved part of the problem with the premade decks in the current labs which allow you to try out some stuff before crafting, but those are still not as fun as making your own decks, playing them and tweaking them as you learn its strengths and weaknesses.

    Don't get me wrong, I think LoR does a way better job at being free to play friendly than HS, but so far their expansion launches are just not as exciting as they could be. I think allowing players to hoard some experience could be a possible solution. I don't know about you guys but my weekly vaults have contained almost nothing but shards and wild cards for the past ~2 months, although giving up that free champion wild card every week would also kind of suck. Maybe they could allow you to save the exp that normally goes into your region rewards when you've already completed those, or if you choose not to continue them?

    • Quote From GerritDeMan

      I think the point most people are missing here is that there is still a big difference between getting a whole bunch of random but new cards (from packs, chests, etc.), and crafting specific cards. In Hearthstone the first few days of an expansion are exciting (granted you have a reasonable amount of gold to spend on packs) because opening your packs gives you a whole bunch of new cards to play with without burdening you with the choice of which cards to craft, but you can still craft some cards you're missing for decks you're sure you want to play. In LoR, you can only get a small amount of new cards from the region rewards on the first expansion day, and after that you either play your old decks or you use your resources to craft almost an entirely new deck.

      That's the problem though, I think most people, myself included, don't want to have to decide so early on which deck they're going to craft. It can be hard to know which cards are going to be good or even which cards are going to be fun for you. I experienced the latter when I crafted a Nautilus deep deck when Rising Tides was released. I thought I was going to enjoy deep decks the most, but I actually got tired of them pretty quickly and instead I enjoyed keg control or twisted fate focussed decks much more.They solved part of the problem with the premade decks in the current labs which allow you to try out some stuff before crafting, but those are still not as fun as making your own decks, playing them and tweaking them as you learn its strengths and weaknesses.

      Don't get me wrong, I think LoR does a way better job at being free to play friendly than HS, but so far their expansion launches are just not as exciting as they could be. I think allowing players to hoard some experience could be a possible solution. I don't know about you guys but my weekly vaults have contained almost nothing but shards and wild cards for the past ~2 months, although giving up that free champion wild card every week would also kind of suck. Maybe they could allow you to save the exp that normally goes into your region rewards when you've already completed those, or if you choose not to continue them?

      given that the progress is pretty fast in general i would not say that the system needs to be changed. We are 3 days into the expansion and i am already level 20 in targon what is easyly doable if you play some expansions.  I know many players dont play expansions but even then... you should be around level 8 at least already with a decent card pool available for being just 2 days into the expansion. After 1 week you should have access to every deck you want to play even if you started from 0 and if that is not generous enough for you... well then you should go play dota :)

      • Quote From TheTriferianGeneral

        given that the progress is pretty fast in general i would not say that the system needs to be changed. We are 3 days into the expansion and i am already level 20 in targon what is easyly doable if you play some expansions.  I know many players dont play expansions but even then... you should be around level 8 at least already with a decent card pool available for being just 2 days into the expansion. After 1 week you should have access to every deck you want to play even if you started from 0 and if that is not generous enough for you... well then you should go play dota :)

        I'm not saying the game isn't generous enough, I'm saying the expansion launch experience is flawed. Whether the developers want to change that is up to them, but I think there are possible solutions worth trying out. And you can't really say people 'should' be at certain levels, because the time people can/want to spend on the game differs a lot from person to person.

      • Quote From TheTriferianGeneral

        given that the progress is pretty fast in general i would not say that the system needs to be changed. We are 3 days into the expansion and i am already level 20 in targon what is easyly doable if you play some expansions.  I know many players dont play expansions but even then... you should be around level 8 at least already with a decent card pool available for being just 2 days into the expansion. After 1 week you should have access to every deck you want to play even if you started from 0 and if that is not generous enough for you... well then you should go play dota :)

        Are you posting this from the future? We're not three days into the expansion - we're not even two days into the expansion. It went live around 1pm EDT on Wednesday, so we'll be two days into it around 1pm EDT today.

        I don't know how much you play in a given day, but getting to level 20 in Targon in three days is not a realistic goal for most players. If you assume around 3600 XP a day (which is not too hard to do if you're playing your daily quests and XP farming), then you're still only getting to level 20 after about 11 days. I agree that getting to level 8 is much more reasonable in the couple of days, but that's not going to get you enough cards to make a deck. Not accounting for the shards you get (which are semi-random values), getting to level 8 should get you 27 cards in a given region, only one of which is guaranteed to be a champion.

        Perhaps most importantly, though, completing a region's reward road doesn't mean you have all the cards for that region. It may still require several weeks of vault openings to get what you need to have that level of completion. That doesn't mean you can't start playing fun new decks before that point, but I wouldn't describe that as "access to every deck you want to play"

  • Actually no, I made a diana/nocturne deck right off the bat have been hoarding some shards.. wasn't that active either..