A veteran's view on Faeria and Incentives

Feedback and Suggestions
#1

Hello,
I am a player who has spent a great deal of time in Faeria, close to 600 hours. I’ve played since closed beta and ranked God in the last few months and I have played enough to get the full collection of cards. As such I have noticed a few blindspots in the game’s design that I can feel can be easily improved, providing more incentives to:
-play more
-have more fun
-play more diverse things
-spend more time and money on the game

I. Daily missions

As it stands daily missions are, to be frank, pretty unimaginative and a waste of design space. They can be used for so much more and introduce positive change to the game.

-add gameplay:
Instead of the classic “play colour cards”, you can easily make the missions more specific - play flying creatures, taunts, jumps, last words, you name it. By encouraging players to experiment with decks you will not only help them discover the game and push them towards new decks, but add a little more diversity and fun factor to the meta which is always good.

-give jackpots
Right now the best you can get is “win 5 games” or whatever. It feels marginally OK. You can have huge mission jackpots that require players to invest time for huge rewards. For instance “For 24 hours Pandora gives double chests and gold”. “playing ranked gives tripple XP”. You get the idea.

-diversify
Having a bigger mission pool is always fun. They can be as generic or specifc as you want. Why not “Play 20 Yaks”? Why not “Heal for 40”? Why not “Play 10 special lands in a game”?

II. Shop and Monetisation

As it stands, the shop is pretty terrible. I want to spend money to support Faeria and I can’t, because all the deals are terrible, except the starter pack for the gems. I want to be incentivised to buy, I want to feel good when buying an item. And you know what? The Fugoro pack is cool, but it’s not worth 20euros. There’s no way I’d spent 20 on this and feel good about my purchase.

-rotate discounts, not items.
Rotating items makes no sense, if I want to buy an item most of the times I can’t. You’re preventing me from giving you money! Literally! And when I do buy an item, it’s usually with gold because the gems are so overpriced. Give discounts, that way you create this sense of “I’m saving money by bying it now” which generally drives sales, and more importantly, makes players feel good about their purchase.

-change the gold to gems ratio.
This goes with the above point. Cosmetics can cost a lot of gold, that’s even good as it gives a potential gold sink nce you have all the cards, but gems need to feel like I’m saving time by investing money, not like I’m wasting them. The human mind is addicted to optimisation. As it stands, GOKI isn’t even better than just using the gems to buy whatever. Like, seriously? At least give me a hefty reward for waiting a month.

ADD MORE VALUE.
Okay this technically isn’t that simple, but really if you want to make expensive stuff you need to make them worth it. More special animations, effects, voice, whatever.

III. Staying in the client

This is an easy one really.

add spectate a God button.
Streamers are few enough and many other games have similar functionality. Let players be able to watch gods play at any time.

-add decks of the week rotation
Player’s don’t all read Faeria Friday, and even when they do it’s easy to lose track of the decks. Make it easy and accessible to see new and itneresting decks.

I believe that by pulling the right levers and incentivising players to play more, more diverse decks and to invest in the community, Faeria can keep growing and improving in a healthy meta.

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The Triple Challenge - Done!
#2

I think it’s important to keep daily missions accessible for all players, stuff like play 10 jump/flying/taunt creatures makes it harder for new players to do their dailies.
If you’re going to introduce a lot of specific dailies like that there should probably be a “Choose one” mechanic added to the daily screen where you’re given the option of several choices (3 or more) so that players can more easily avoid missions that are less feasible for their collection to accomplish.
I personally like how easy it is to do my dailies, if I’m on a break from the game I can easily come in on the third day and I’ve even been able to finish all three missions in one game a few times, however I definitely see your point.

Additionally I agree with rotating discounts and allowing people to purchase anything in the shop at any time, it doesn’t make sense to keep shop content from potential buyers just to present it later as something “New”
With the fact that gems are given out freely in the login rewards I think there’s no pressing reason to lower the gem cost of bundles and cosmetics, but you could give people who are buying gems a slight boost.
As far as adding more value, all I have to say is please fix the adventure pouch cardback so that it has the animation before you come out with more animated cosmetics ;-; it’s been a while and I’m sure some people feel cheated.

Finally I completely agree with client functionality, the current information that’s presented is super outdated meanwhile the discord is updated very often, I’m sure there’s a lot of players who don’t even know what Faeria Friday IS! The more you can do without leaving the client the better, they’ve done a good job adding private chat and spectating, but there is certainly more to be added.

#3

It’s an interesting counterpoint about the dailies, and I also see the allure of simplicity. Just to clarify, I’m not suggesting to entirely replace them, just to add to the pool, and of course to fine tune with probabilities.

Giving people gems is definitely nice, and also it’s worth mentioning that Faeria is generous in many respects, the rerolls etc. However, when I visit the shop, there is a simple eqation - What I spend vs what I get, and at the moment it doesn’t feel satisfying at all.
Buying the Gems starter packs felt GOOD. It was value for your buck - even if it had a random aspect to it. As of know buying the Packs feels not only overpriced, but wasteful, as it’s quite possible that you already have one of the components from a Mythic chest. So if I want Magda’s set but I have the cardback already, it feels really bad.

#4

Unfortunately, I mostly disagree with you.

Daily Missions

If the daily missions make you play different, it just means that your opponents aren’t treated to a proper game by an opponent who only wants to win. The current missions are pretty inconsequential - you always want to damage gods and creatures, and play creatures and events. The play 10 cards of color X ones are closer to what you’re asking for, but I don’t see them as too negative - learning different colors is at least something you will need for tournaments etc. But requiring playing in a certain way just because daily says so means you can win games simply because the other person chose to do something they new wasn’t the best option but would score them some daily points - and I don’t like that feeling.

Jackpots - I don’t see a gain. It’s just giving more money sometimes and less other times for no reason.

Diversify - same as above. Just leads to players not playing their best.

Shop and Monetisation

If you’re not excluding card/chest purchases, then it sounds like you’re arguing for more P2W-ness (or P4AA - pay for any advantage). I did make a big post about my objections to this earlier. If you’re only concerned about cosmetics then I don’t mind.

I totally agree that stuff should always be available, rather than just at random points in time. If someone with a bit of money wants a cosmetic on a whim, that whim might be fleeting and they might lose money. And I’m 100% cool with people buying cosmetics. I bet they’ve lost a small amount of money already by not selling everything.

Gem and gold ratios vary for different things. For example, Goki is much better if you spend your money on pandora, but worse for cosmetics. I don’t really have a strong opinion on the ratio though as I personally don’t like the monetization method anyway.

More Value
More animations etc would be nice. I don’t know how much spare dev time they have, but some things shouldn’t take very long. My #1 would be just making different animations for different indirect damage types, like a flame projectile for flamespitter/seifers/hellfire etc.

Staying[?] in the client

Spectate gods - I’d be fine with it but people should be able to play private if they want. Making your games visible anonymously should be opt-in.

As for custom decks - IMHO you’re better off making your own. It’s one of the two core game skills. If you want to look at decks it’s easy already. I guess I don’t see any harm in adding it to the client though, except in lost dev time.

Of course, that’s all just my opinion (and I don’t think I’m very representative of people here) so I’d wait to see what everyone who wants to comment thinks.

#5

I agree with the general idea but with minor details adjustment.

I understand why cosmetics cost the same gems/gold with gold receiving no discount. It’s because people want to buy stuff now and not wait months and if you give discount for using gold then it’s encouraging people wait longer and feels like a bad deal when using gems, which is not a good idea when you want players to buy gems.

The shop rotation is just stupid. You can’t even buy what you want even if you want to spend, players will lose interest after awhile and forget about it.

Having played Gwent, I feel Faeria’s incentive system is not clear enough. Faeria is very generous overall, but new players have a hard time realizing it. The incentives in Faeria now give a lot of freedom on how (much) to play the game but doesn’t give clear goals and rewards, and relies on the players’ own initiative, which not everyone has. I know Faeria is not Gwent but Gwent gives clear goals and rewards, you play this much and you get a keg or two. It’s pretty straight forward. With Faeria, all the gold with playing/levelling and daily quest and pandora rewards are just too complicated for its own good. For example, if I play 10 games a day, what can I expect to get in return? Not sure. Having earned the gold, the most efficient way to spend it is actually not to buy chests, but to save it for solo missions and pandora. It’s just counter-intuitive and make new players feel bad when they spent it inefficiently. I guess it’s to encourage people to spend and buy gems but it gives a bad feeling overall once players found out there was a better way to go about it.

#6

Hm, interesting points that are raised and even if I don’t agree with all of them, it’s great to see a constructive post.

Daily missions:
On one hand I agree with the points made, but I do like that the current missions are inconsequential.

But say, 10 Jump creatures seems still somewhat doable with blue decks, but say 10 Last Words creatures? Interesting, but probably not the best idea and I agree with Xaxazak on that point. It just leads to players doing suboptimal things.
On the other hand, that is what Casual or even the Wild Mission Packs are for, in the end, and there are plenty of players doing silly things with the Metashaker anyway. I don’t think it would change much, except that players may play a bit more singleplayer here and there.

Jackpots are an interesting idea, and I like the concept, but not the way you suggested it. But I do not know how I would implement the concept myself, either…

The Shop:
I agree with cosmetics being available in the shop at all times. It makes no sense that this is not the case right now. Rotating discounts are nice to add into this as well, but they should not be that significant. People should feel better when they buy something during a discount, but not feel disadvantaged if they accidentially miss one.

And indeed, the “What I spend versus what I get” can feel a bit off and there’s little incentive to spend money on this game if you play actively, unless you do want to support the developers in what they do.

Client functionality:
Agreed on the former - especially for friends, but the latter is a bit awkward. Making your own decks is one of the most important skills in this game.

I also consider more animations in this category. They shouldn’t be in the shop after all. I don’t consider this something that should have a high priority, but it’s definately something that could use more polishing all the same.

I also agree with Xploring in that Faeria’s incentive system is a bit messy. Clearer goals should definately be visible.
And yeah, the Chests vs Wild Mission Packs is actually quite complicated, but the difference is smaller than Xploring makes it sound, considering doing those mission packs takes time of its own you can’t get other rewards.

#7

Hey guys, thanks for all the input and sharing your thoughts! Here are a few quick answers:

I understand where you’re coming from, but I want to be clear on one thing: this was exactly my goal. I don’t have the statistics to back up my opinion, but having played a ton of Hearthstone and a ton of Faeria, I feel that one of the negative aspects of Faeria is that it pushes away casual play a bit too much. It’s strategy driven and can be very cutthroat, the meta being often dominated by a handfull of super optimal decks. So I think that injecting incentives to play more for fun, for goals other than the highest win %, would actually be a good thing. Running into 5 blujumps and 4 crackthorns out of 10 games isn’t always very fun.

So in essence my daily mission suggestion was **exactly** aimed to introduce incentives other than playing net decks.

It’s a psychological incentive to play the game more. Not as dirty as a skinner box, but it serves as a huge reward for investing a lot of time when you get this. (Note this is supposed to be a RARE daily). And in the current state of the game, people playing more and for longer is a good thing.

For the shop, I’m talking only cosmetics.

I’m arguing for the opposite, actually. To make cosmetics cheaper with gems than they are with gold. At the moment it’s even, which makes no sense to me. Cosmetics can be very expensive with gold, I understand that, but if you want to spend gems on them there should be an advanatge for spending money, right?

Good idea! Also things like the orb cracking at certain health thresholds and stuff like that can increase the “intensity” of the match, at least visually.

I agree 100%. When it comes to generosity, Faeria is good. However the clarity of the incentives is not always there.

1 Like
#8

1 I actually like how non-specific the dailies are. This gives players a lot of personal freedom, and not everybody likes too much hand-holding.
2 Jackpots for specific game types sound like a good idea, in theory. In practice though, it probably isn’t. To use your example, let’s take “Double Pandora rewards”. Those people who absolutely Hate Pandora will have fewer people to play with in Battle mode on that day, and would feel disadvantaged; the ones who would, perhaps, benefit more from increasing their rank, would feel forced to play Pandora instead, because of better rewards, at least until their card collection is complete.
3 The shop Definitely needs a revamp! In one of my previous posts, I have suggested that clicking on a cosmetic set in the shop should open up a menu, allowing the player to buy any item in the set individually if they wish, for as long as the set itself is available in the shop.
4 Also, a choice of 4 individual cosmetics per week is ridiculously small… We don’t mind scrolling through a few pages - what we Do mind, is being able to choose exactly what we want (by clicking on our avatar), and then having to wait several Months for this particular item to appear, by which time we gave up and spent our gems on something else. And as more cosmetics get added to the pool, the problem gets worse and worse…
5 Some people play worse when they know they are being watched, so any God-spectating button should be an opt-in thing.
6 Decks of the week are, in my opinion, unnecessary. Decks are hard to rate, and beginner players, who don’t have a full collection yet, would feel disadvantaged. An option to filter decks by individual cards would be more useful. It is available, and works very well, but it’s not obvious - it should be included in the decklist filters in the Decks section of the Hub

#9

I’m not sure I understand you here - this is a personal daily quest that is just super rare, hence a “jackpot”. If you don’t want it you can reroll it, and I doubt any such quest could have a consequence on the number of people playing a mod.

#10

When I wrote my comment I assumed the daily quests are the same for everyone, but now, thinking about it, you are right - they are personal

#11

I am a new player also interested in spending some money in the game and I have to admit that I agree 100% with the SomniumProxy’s ideas.
I’m going to explain why, starting saying that I’m playing as f2p since a couple of weeks and I just leveled to 90, so still newbie but with a good understanding of the mechanics.

  • daily missions: I have so few cards that I have extreme necessity of the daily gold to get some purple cards that I can’t enchant obviously. My game is quite optimized but very monotonous because I’m going to use the same 5 decks (most of the time red deck). That is for an efficient use of the time in the first place, and because I need wins within pandora practice runs. So it’s very important that you understand that monotony kills games in less than a week normally and the ambition to master a game like this through a very long period of time (also required to complete the collection i suppose) is statistically rare. That makes most of you much stronger than an average player but also drain our players community continually (and this type of game is a niche). We could say that the natural selection doesn’t help at all here. So actually I haven’t an incentive to play different strategies or decks or builds or meta or whatever, because I don’t have cards and the only way I have to collect them efficiently is to play for a long time a very monotonous game. I’m not even sure I could complete the collection buying the big offer…

  • shop and monetization: I’m thinking to buy one of the biggest offers, but as I have just said I m not even sure it could be enough. Most of you are looking the problem from the wrong prospective where the availability of the cards could prevent players from playing more, with more fun and with different decks and strategies. But it’s not true, because in the most simple and complex strategic game both players have the same exact creatures on the table and requires years of application to master it (chess). What I can find in the shop then is something I really don’t want to buy: very expensive cosmetics and 84 battle chests (the equivalent of the biggest offer) that could or couldn’t complete half of my collection for what I know. Similar games sell several offers with packs of specified creatures, with specified composition to promote synergies and strategies while completing progressively the collection. So in those cases I could think about a strategy and buy the pack I need to implement it (hopefully with success playing it :smile: ).

  • Staying in the client: I totally agree with that too. I always hope to find some expert players to add in my friend list, just to have the possibility to see them play to learn something or just to watch a well played game :slight_smile:
    But it’s almost impossible for me to find such players because my opponents are very casual or around my level. And a couple also prevented spectators. So actually I can’t do something that I’d really love to do with a lot of interest. So I close the game and do something else…

I also agree with his conclusion, because I’m actually playing ranked match in a middle low tier and 50% of my opponents are from a different tier (lower or often higher). In both cases it’s a very bad thing, because stronger players prevents me to rank up in my tier (also I lose stars), and with younger players I m the one preventing them to rank up in their tier causing a penalty. And this is not supposed to happen, but it does because after 1 minute the mach making algorithm choose the nearest available opponent. So the active pool of players is too short at the moment, and the actual situation doesn’t help, on the contrary it makes casual players like me change game after a week (or write long post in the game forum :slight_smile: )

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#12

Hey RedPredator,

Thanks for the reply and the support. It’s good to hear from the perspective of a new player. Also, feel free to add me ingame if you wish, SomniumProxy =)

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#13

Thank you for such a thoughtful and constructive perspective! It feels great to join a community so committed to enhancing the experience for all players.

Re: store, your point about players wanting to pay the developers, but not being able to is so true, at least to me. I’d like to see most avatars, orbs, wells, and card backs always available to purchase independently. The “set” concept should still be available, but as a % discount from buying them independently. Individual purchases would be less intimidating to new players (like me) who can’t fathom ever saving 50K+ gold for a full set, while still wanting to develop my card collection. Right now, it’s very much “one or the other”. If all I want is a Ruunin avatar and I see it costs X gold, I can balance between buying battle chests and saving.

Re: building my card collection, it would be so helpful to see a “% completion” on each color of my collection screen as a visual reminder of how far I’ve come and how close I may be to collecting all cards in a certain color. Right now, I’m prioritizing green and I get such satisfaction when I get a new green card or complete a full 3-card play set. Adding a way for me to see the # totals and % completion would amplify that collectors’ satisfaction (at least for me!).

Thanks again for getting me thinking on this. I’m glad the responses are so constructive, even when they disagree.

2 Likes
#14

Thanks for spending the time to share your experience and thoughts here. Good point about targeted card package, that makes a lot of sense to help new players get into the game. I felt similar when I was building up collection but I was not as interested in constructed so played pandora most of the time.

You can find top players regularly at livestream on twitch. These are posted on Discord. Aquablad streams every weekend I think so may be try that out. You can ask questions during the stream and get help that way.

There are some very passionate players on Turn 4’s Discord too. They like to help players improve and discuss the game, so it should help. Most of them are good players already but I am sure they don’t mind someone who is newer.

And the other way to find top players is just to look at the top rankings in the ladder and monthly cup players.

Faeria official youtube channel and luuu90’s youtube have a lot of good guides that help new players learn the game too.

There is a live community on Discord so that’s the best place to be if you need questions answered or help with something quickly. Feel free to add me and I will try my best to help with any question.

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#15

Really thanks mate! And I have to say this is one of the best community I have ever found for sure :slight_smile: