I think that most of us will come out ahead this way. If you can get to rank 5 (4000 XP) in 2 days, you’ll earn a random champion and an extra expedition token, plus a few cards and shards. On the other hand, if we have a 9-day week then you need 4000-4500 extra XP just to earn 5 more cards and another couple hundred shards.
Lots of people try to earn every card back, even if they won’t use them all in decks. Others are so focused on earning golden heroes that they keep grinding for hours after it stops being fun. And of course, Blizzard depends on people spending lots of money on cosmetic items that don’t change the game in any practical way.
So while I hadn’t heard of collecting unopened packs before, it makes sense to me. I won’t be making fun of anyone who chooses to do that.
Ha ha. I’ve been supporting you on Patreon for a year, but it wasn’t until I won a month of Premium that I noticed I’d never linked this account to it. I just fixed that :)
Is there an article anywhere that explains how LoR’s ranked system works? Most of it is self-explanatory, and this blog post filled in a lot of the gaps. (I had not found a list of tiers or an explanation of season resets anywhere before this. I had seen a mention of cosmetic rewards before, but this post’s explanation that they are icons based on tier was more than I’d found.)
I’d searched the official LoR site and blog, the Out of Cards articles (though it’s hard to search news articles, so I may have missed it), and the LoL fandom wiki. Nothing.
At this point, I think my only remaining question is what “LP” means - probably “League Points”, but I’m calling them “lollipops” until I learn for sure. But it would be great to read an explanation to make sure I’m not missing anything that I didn’t think to ask. It would also be great to find out if there are any resources I’m overlooking, because this game is not as well-documented as Hearthstone is yet.
At the moment, Fiora is my favorite champion. For me, at least, she demonstrated just what Runeterra is about and how different it is from Hearthstone.
The first time I saw Fiora, I thought she was ridiculously OP. Then I saw all the support cards that could help her along, and I thought she was even more OP. But the reality is that with all the back-and-forth play that LoR offers, and all the chances to respond to your opponent, she’s actually very fair. Games with (or against) her are interesting and play out very differently than my Hearthstone experiences led me to expect. I’d definitely use a Fiora deck if I were demonstrating the game to someone who doesn’t play yet.
.04%? Do you mean, like, .04% of the total population of the state? California has a low death count so far because they did a good job of KEEPING people from getting COVID.
Last I heard, New York City had lost more than .25% of their population to this. And since most of the city still hasn’t gotten sick, the death toll is somewhat higher than that.
Besides, the focus on death rates is misleading. The thing that scares ME is all the survivors who are now injured for life. This causes strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure, reduced lung function, and who knows what else.
I really hope things can get back to normal soon. Most places have stayed steady since starting to reopen cautiously. But large public gatherings are going to be the very last thing to come back. I’ll be really happy if I can visit my friends again and run down to the local store without worrying. I can wait for a vaccine before I go to another convention.
I’m also new to Runeterra, so I follow the news updates but don’t have many worthwhile comments to make. But I’ll help fill up the comments section :)
I love the explanations we get for every balance change, and even for potential future changes. I wish Blizzard communicated that well!
Wow, that’s a long list of bug fixes. Hearthstone only has a tiny fraction of those, but gets torn apart by commenters every time they have to fix something.
I agree that Plot Twist Warlock has potential, especially if it can get a little more support later this year. However, I wouldn’t read too much into you beating other Warlocks at Diamond 10. I’ve been slowly climbing from D10 myself, and I’ve beaten every Warlock that I’ve faced. I had no idea that it was supposed to be a strong deck until I read this article. Apparently a lot of people at our rank are jumping on board without actually knowing how to play the deck. When we get to Diamond 5 it will probably be entirely different.
Your multiplier at the start of a month is one less than the number of ranked floor you reached the previous month. That means that reaching Legend only guarantees a 10x multiplier. The maximum possible is still 11, but that’s because if your MMR is high enough you’ll get a bonus. (The MMR details are not published, as far as I know.)
Also, my understanding is that once your multiplier goes away, you are matched against people at a similar rank rather than a similar MMR.
This has some subtle but important ramifications. As long as you have a bonus multiplier, you can expect to win about half your games regardless of rank, so you’ll progress. But before you reach the heights you reached last month, your multiplier goes away and you have to fight people who also made it to your rank. That guarantees that each rank represents a certain skill, and you can only maintain (or increase) your rank month-to-month if you’re able to stand up to other people of that rank.
I don’t think that Lackey generation feels that random. There is a small, predictable pool of cards to draw from. Of course there is a random event, but it feels less “random” to me than, say, trying to draw 2 cards for a combo from my deck.
Lackeys remind me of the Discover mechanic: A merging of randomness and strategy in a way that’s only possible in a virtual card game. Some people will like it and some won’t, but it’s fundamental to what makes Hearthstone different than Magic.
There are a lot of different opinions about how nerfs should be approached. If you see it differently, that’s fine. But I was very cynical about that round of Shaman nerfs when they were announced, and I was wrong. They ended up making the meta much healthier. Reverting Sludge Slurper now shouldn’t hurt anything, and will support additional Shaman strategies. I am comfortable with that
I like frequent balance adjustments. Leaving the meta stale and ignoring problems is what insults me as a player. Blizzard has gotten more proactive, and if that means there will be occasional course corrections, I think it’s more than fair.
The Standard meta is enjoyable right now, though I wish Blizzard didn’t consider weeks of the same static meta to be a healthy situation. Changes are fun!
This feels like a even worse deal because we’re close to the end of the Standard year. This is the point where we should be getting actual deals on old cards, not more expensive ways to buy them.
These packs would be a lot of fun if we could buy them for gold. We’d all do it to trigger the pity timer, or to try for specific cards we are missing in specific classes. And it seems that that would be good for Blizzard, because if they give us a reason to spend all our gold right before a new expansion, then more people will want to pay money for the next set.
I came to the comments looking for some Zilliax hate, but this surpasses my hopes. I’m so glad I’m not the only one.
Zilliax is “flexible” in the same way Superman is flexible. He has different powers to call on at different times... but the main reason he wins so much is that he’s more powerful than everyone else.
I started playing this game in March of last year, and I’m very proud to have climbed to rank 1 without ever crafting Zilliax.
(I’ll add that Zilliax isn’t horrible at the higher ranks. Everyone has solid decks, and people are prepared to respond to this card. Ranks 15 and up really suffer from this card’s existence. When everyone has holes in their collection, being able to throw Zilliax into your deck is devastating. It came close to driving me from the game in my newbie days.)
No one thing can make the game relevant for 10 years. I mean, think of how many “things” were necessary to make the game relevant for just a few years. 10 years is a LONG time in gaming.
If we’re going to assume that “10 years” is not just hyperbole, then they must be talking about a new mindset or strategy. It remains to be seen whether that mindset applies to esports, the F2P model, the fundamental game, or something else.
(For example, you pointed out that “Discover” did not make them relevant on its own. But Discover came out of their design approach that mixed strategy, randomness, and mechanics that depend on digital cards. THAT made them relevant for the first few years of the game’s existence.)
My money is on the 10 years thing being hype. But if you want to make guesses, think about more fundamental things than a single new mechanic or feature.
A new reward system. Despite what everyone says, Daily Quests give you great rewards for your first 2-3 games each day. Now we just need a way to get SOMETHING for game 4, 5, etc. There will (and should) be diminishing returns as you play more games, but nothing like the steep drop we see after a couple games today.
Regular meta mix-ups. I love the way last month’s solo content injected a few new cards into Standard every week. It’s not realistic to keep adding new cards every week, but I hope they find a system to maintain that feel.
A new competitive mode or contest format. Tavern Brawls are great for casual players, and I don’t expect them to go anywhere, but they’re unsatisfying to the more serious players. An overhauled Arena could work, but currently Arena isn’t fun OR rewarding to most players, and Hearthstone would need to solve both problems. I’d take tournaments or a new challenge mode.
A more forgiving way to craft cards. We could experiment with a lot more decks if it weren’t so expensive to commit to each Legendary you craft. For example, let you dust a card for 90% of its value if it was crafted in the last 2 weeks, or let us create one “trial” card each week, or something similar.
A new way to play with old cards. I don’t want to play fully Wild games, but I don’t want my old cards to be worthless either. As the set of Wild cards gets larger and larger, this becomes more important.
New groundbreaking cards. This is the one I’m confident we’ll see. The past year brought plenty of interesting new ideas to the game.
Fix the Priest! I’m surprised by how many people are asking for an overhaul in the classic/basic set, and I suspect that they want Hearthstone to be something different than Blizzard plans. However, everyone agrees that Priest has a bad design space - The cards are either useless or OP, and tricks like Inner Fire don’t leave room for subtle balancing.
Good catch. I see the same thing.
I think that most of us will come out ahead this way. If you can get to rank 5 (4000 XP) in 2 days, you’ll earn a random champion and an extra expedition token, plus a few cards and shards. On the other hand, if we have a 9-day week then you need 4000-4500 extra XP just to earn 5 more cards and another couple hundred shards.
Lots of people try to earn every card back, even if they won’t use them all in decks. Others are so focused on earning golden heroes that they keep grinding for hours after it stops being fun. And of course, Blizzard depends on people spending lots of money on cosmetic items that don’t change the game in any practical way.
So while I hadn’t heard of collecting unopened packs before, it makes sense to me. I won’t be making fun of anyone who chooses to do that.
Ha ha. I’ve been supporting you on Patreon for a year, but it wasn’t until I won a month of Premium that I noticed I’d never linked this account to it. I just fixed that :)
Thanks!
Is there an article anywhere that explains how LoR’s ranked system works? Most of it is self-explanatory, and this blog post filled in a lot of the gaps. (I had not found a list of tiers or an explanation of season resets anywhere before this. I had seen a mention of cosmetic rewards before, but this post’s explanation that they are icons based on tier was more than I’d found.)
I’d searched the official LoR site and blog, the Out of Cards articles (though it’s hard to search news articles, so I may have missed it), and the LoL fandom wiki. Nothing.
At this point, I think my only remaining question is what “LP” means - probably “League Points”, but I’m calling them “lollipops” until I learn for sure. But it would be great to read an explanation to make sure I’m not missing anything that I didn’t think to ask. It would also be great to find out if there are any resources I’m overlooking, because this game is not as well-documented as Hearthstone is yet.
I just started playing recently, and (other than tweaking the starter decks a bit) the first deck I crafted was the Midrange Bannerman.
At the moment, Fiora is my favorite champion. For me, at least, she demonstrated just what Runeterra is about and how different it is from Hearthstone.
The first time I saw Fiora, I thought she was ridiculously OP. Then I saw all the support cards that could help her along, and I thought she was even more OP. But the reality is that with all the back-and-forth play that LoR offers, and all the chances to respond to your opponent, she’s actually very fair. Games with (or against) her are interesting and play out very differently than my Hearthstone experiences led me to expect. I’d definitely use a Fiora deck if I were demonstrating the game to someone who doesn’t play yet.
.04%? Do you mean, like, .04% of the total population of the state? California has a low death count so far because they did a good job of KEEPING people from getting COVID.
Last I heard, New York City had lost more than .25% of their population to this. And since most of the city still hasn’t gotten sick, the death toll is somewhat higher than that.
Besides, the focus on death rates is misleading. The thing that scares ME is all the survivors who are now injured for life. This causes strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure, reduced lung function, and who knows what else.
I really hope things can get back to normal soon. Most places have stayed steady since starting to reopen cautiously. But large public gatherings are going to be the very last thing to come back. I’ll be really happy if I can visit my friends again and run down to the local store without worrying. I can wait for a vaccine before I go to another convention.
I’m also new to Runeterra, so I follow the news updates but don’t have many worthwhile comments to make. But I’ll help fill up the comments section :)
I agree that Plot Twist Warlock has potential, especially if it can get a little more support later this year. However, I wouldn’t read too much into you beating other Warlocks at Diamond 10. I’ve been slowly climbing from D10 myself, and I’ve beaten every Warlock that I’ve faced. I had no idea that it was supposed to be a strong deck until I read this article. Apparently a lot of people at our rank are jumping on board without actually knowing how to play the deck. When we get to Diamond 5 it will probably be entirely different.
You get the “latest expansion” packs when the month ends (just like the old system’s rewards), so the new expansion will be out.
A couple important corrections:
Your multiplier at the start of a month is one less than the number of ranked floor you reached the previous month. That means that reaching Legend only guarantees a 10x multiplier. The maximum possible is still 11, but that’s because if your MMR is high enough you’ll get a bonus. (The MMR details are not published, as far as I know.)
Also, my understanding is that once your multiplier goes away, you are matched against people at a similar rank rather than a similar MMR.
This has some subtle but important ramifications. As long as you have a bonus multiplier, you can expect to win about half your games regardless of rank, so you’ll progress. But before you reach the heights you reached last month, your multiplier goes away and you have to fight people who also made it to your rank. That guarantees that each rank represents a certain skill, and you can only maintain (or increase) your rank month-to-month if you’re able to stand up to other people of that rank.
A new game mode and an achievement system?! Those are more exciting (to me, anyway) than any of the other announcements. How did I miss them?
Since there is not even a link to go with those last items, I’m guessing there’s no more information?
I don’t think that Lackey generation feels that random. There is a small, predictable pool of cards to draw from. Of course there is a random event, but it feels less “random” to me than, say, trying to draw 2 cards for a combo from my deck.
Lackeys remind me of the Discover mechanic: A merging of randomness and strategy in a way that’s only possible in a virtual card game. Some people will like it and some won’t, but it’s fundamental to what makes Hearthstone different than Magic.
There are a lot of different opinions about how nerfs should be approached. If you see it differently, that’s fine. But I was very cynical about that round of Shaman nerfs when they were announced, and I was wrong. They ended up making the meta much healthier. Reverting Sludge Slurper now shouldn’t hurt anything, and will support additional Shaman strategies. I am comfortable with that
I like frequent balance adjustments. Leaving the meta stale and ignoring problems is what insults me as a player. Blizzard has gotten more proactive, and if that means there will be occasional course corrections, I think it’s more than fair.
The Standard meta is enjoyable right now, though I wish Blizzard didn’t consider weeks of the same static meta to be a healthy situation. Changes are fun!
This feels like a even worse deal because we’re close to the end of the Standard year. This is the point where we should be getting actual deals on old cards, not more expensive ways to buy them.
These packs would be a lot of fun if we could buy them for gold. We’d all do it to trigger the pity timer, or to try for specific cards we are missing in specific classes. And it seems that that would be good for Blizzard, because if they give us a reason to spend all our gold right before a new expansion, then more people will want to pay money for the next set.
I came to the comments looking for some Zilliax hate, but this surpasses my hopes. I’m so glad I’m not the only one.
Zilliax is “flexible” in the same way Superman is flexible. He has different powers to call on at different times... but the main reason he wins so much is that he’s more powerful than everyone else.
I started playing this game in March of last year, and I’m very proud to have climbed to rank 1 without ever crafting Zilliax.
(I’ll add that Zilliax isn’t horrible at the higher ranks. Everyone has solid decks, and people are prepared to respond to this card. Ranks 15 and up really suffer from this card’s existence. When everyone has holes in their collection, being able to throw Zilliax into your deck is devastating. It came close to driving me from the game in my newbie days.)
No one thing can make the game relevant for 10 years. I mean, think of how many “things” were necessary to make the game relevant for just a few years. 10 years is a LONG time in gaming.
If we’re going to assume that “10 years” is not just hyperbole, then they must be talking about a new mindset or strategy. It remains to be seen whether that mindset applies to esports, the F2P model, the fundamental game, or something else.
(For example, you pointed out that “Discover” did not make them relevant on its own. But Discover came out of their design approach that mixed strategy, randomness, and mechanics that depend on digital cards. THAT made them relevant for the first few years of the game’s existence.)
My money is on the 10 years thing being hype. But if you want to make guesses, think about more fundamental things than a single new mechanic or feature.
My wishlist, more or less in priority order: