There are a lot of people who enjoy the drafting of Pandora, but have no love for the random shards. And there are those who like the shards and randomness. I have an idea about how to “fix” it for most players.
The idea is to add a checkbox to the Pandora screen asking if you’d like to see the random effects on shards.
When the match is found in the queue if both players have this checkbox checked, then there are random shards in play, otherwise (if both unchecked or only one player checked) the game plays without the random shards.
-
The queue time would stay the same, as there is no splitting involved.
-
Those who like random have a kinda random chance that they’d get shards. Those who don’t like random that much would always get the predictable Pandora.
-
The value of the checkbox still could be used as a matchmaking criteria, just with a very low value to prevent it to cause any delays in the queue time.
-
This checkbox should be possible to check and uncheck at any time when you’re between the Pandora matches, so you could play some games with random, and some without.
-
This would allow developers to gather stats on which amount of players actually like the random shards.
The open question is what should be the “plain” Pandora be: should there still be shards and the Pandora “opening”, just without random effects, or the game should be just the same as in constructed, or there would be “Pandora opening”, just after a set amount of time.
