User blog comment:Chad Pattan/Mynet Wish List for Valkyrie Crusade/@comment-98.116.237.198-20160105062021

there are a number of problems with the proposed items, games have to be very careful:

1) Concerns about alting others have brought up are super legit and probably the biggest problem.  people will create alts/bot to farm cards.  often they are not wasting any time as a script does everything over 100 accounts for them.  This is especailly problematic given emulators. This puts the game company in a difficult position becuase they have to do the following:

(a) put in systems to detect bots/scripts and shut them down [this can be very resource intensive for the company, as there is a constant cat-mouse game between devs and people wanting to game the system]

(b) possibly ban emulators [this sucks for a lot of legit players who want to run the game on emu/switch devices between phone/tablet/emu],

(c) make dropped cards useless

(d) exclude dropped cards from trading/sharing systems [this defeats half your point anyway though].

(a) is impossible to do perfectly, so it will affect the economy and card availabity to some degree, depressing the value of premium cards.

(b) just sucks for a subset of players.

Failure to do (c) and (d) will significantly affect income stream as there is no incentive to otherwise pull for summon if people who have botted a million copies put them up on the market at min prices.

2) Even if we ignore 1 and assume somehow we magically ban all alts who affect the economy perfectly, let's talk about some of the other inherent issues of card tradiong.  Power creep will be faster.  Because the longer old cards remain viable, the larger the overall 'supply' of viable cards is, meaning the cheaper they get on the market, and so with each passing day the attractiveness of summons goes down relative to trading for useful cards.  If trading is more expensive than summons, what's the point even, lol.

Also, if dropped cards are good enough, they will very likely uncut summon prices (be cheaper relatively). This will 100% undercut summon income. Sharing and trading systems like those proposed also disincentivize players to spend.

In order to prevent this undercutting, companies over time have implemented a number of solutions (usually one, though sometimes both), and they all suck imo:

Solution #1: 'free' card drop rates are adjusted such that it is effectively impossible for free players to get useful versions of them on their own. Drop rates are tweaked or requirements are tweaked such that you only get a useful copy if you are exctremely lucky or 'grind' using paid-for resources in excess of what you are able to earn in a reasonable time frame. this acts as a resource drain and also ensures that all players somehow 'pay' for 'free' cards, either via summons or via items. This keeps down the supply of cards and prevents depressing the summon card market too badly, so the grind/summon trade-off is about equal for any given power level of card. In addition, power creep occurs faster in order to 'obsolete' cards already on the market faster, making up for any remaining deceift from depressing summon income and also prevents free players from assembling a viable end-game deck as power creep happens much fater than free resource accumulation to apply pressure to summon. In this scenario, at least, 'earned' cards remain viable, but basically 'paid' for one way or another. (see age of ishtaria for this kind of solution)

solution #2 'free' cards relative power are reduced, since they can be earned for free, you can't use them to rank or be viable vs endgame (FAW/LAW) without serious extra resource spend, making the f2p/p2p balance more skewed. This causes free cards relative value to drop with respect to summons since they are significantly weaker, so aren't comperable 'value' wise, and therefore preserve the value of summons over free cards. This makes it not worthwhile to do thinks like spend resources to awaken free cards, etc. which can devalue a sharing system in various ways too.

If neither of these are done, income can fall seriously and goodbye game.

All that said,  a limited sharing may be okay (maybe you can only bring one 'shared' card in your team), but it will still undoubtly still have an effect of reducing spending. A full sharing system (where I can build my entire deck from shared cards) would very much reduce incentive to summon for new players, as marginal benefit becomes much lower, and people will only pull for the art or not at all. This undoubtly have as negative effect on income stream, and all the problems that come with trying to find new ways to monitize. New players also will feel like they don't have much to shoot for in powering up. As soon as you reach a certain threshold of shared cards in an alliance, why would anyone need to do any content unless they want something for the art? This likely has a negative affect on engagement also, esp. for newer players.

Let's talk about the related power-adjustment proposals; solider arcana, removing caps, 'real strategy'

Solider arcana are a bad idea. I don't want to have another thing to 'max' and then a new 'meta' be built around it. This just means you need more resources to get a final viable deck. Everything will be rebalanced so that you need to have these upgrades to be viable. There is never any power creep that isn't met with appropriate challenge creep. If there is, the system becomes useless (no value in doing it), and therefore might as well not be implemented at all.

I don't see how removing caps (damage or skill uses) have an affect on anything either, this simply makes super buffers even more op, and any strategy that isn't just buff to infinity useless.

As to the skewed summon and drop rates:  I 100% agree seomething is fishy, however what I've seen is the game likes to 'noramlize' you after a while, so if you run into a really hot or cold streak you'll revert to the 'average' mean pretty quickly. this makes the game more consistant, and I appreciate consistency in reducing downside as opposed to 'occasionally getting ridiculously lucky'. This means grinding typically gets you want you want, given some time. Also means that it's less likely to get really stupid things (11/0 split between guarenteed URs in step-up summons, and ofc you want the 0 one.). summon spend seems to be relatively more consistant than other games I've played, and I really appreciate that. I may be wrong about how this system works, and would really like to know more about exactly what they do to the drops, but thus far I've seen it as capping downside, and I very much appreciate that.

Let's addrses 'real strategy' finally.

'real strategy' means just having the right cards. If skills are fixed, then I know exactly how to counter them, and it becomes trivial (debuff/field upon buff?  null.  ezpz.) you're simply developing a new meta, and if skills are 'fixed' then suddely there becomes an ideal, optimal strat against them, as since once we know the exact pattern we can 100% manipulate it. An an example: LAW wants to debuff or field every turn after 6 buffs? only buff 5 times ever. Or super optimally, buff 6th time 2 hits from death, use nuller to absorb field/debuff).  Once you know the ideal setup for each enemy, it's merely having the right cards to execute it.  Either you have them or you don't, the end.  A general setup can probably be developed, but it wont' be as efficient, meaning you'll either lose more fights (costing more resources overall to achieve same content) or won't overkill as much, or possibly both.

No matter how you adjust this, players will adapt an optimal solution, and then they will have to rebalance encounters so that content is not trivialized, otherwise as I mentioned above some systems become useless to engage in (an untrue, theoretical though exercise example: if awakening doesn't materially improve your odds of winning a fight, why awaken?). All you've done is changed what the meta is, nothing more.

If skills are random, I don't see how that changes much of anything.

I do agree that ammy skillspamming more is not really a good solution to balance, as it feels bad, but working on a solution that feels good without having huge adverse effects on power creep or increasing what it takes to get a viable team is hard.

I agree with all your quality of life improvements:

1) slimes, gold girls, medal girls, and important (ranking) amalgamation materials should be removed from autodelete on normal/make selectable/unselectable via their own subtype.

2) items you collect should go straight to your inventory automatically unless you can't.

3) choose UR/HUR/GUR art display

4) ATK+/DEF+ arcana purchase

So in conclusion:

1) Thumbs up to all quality of life improvement suggestions.

2) Ultimately I think a limited sharing will be okay (taste of power), trading is a bad idea as the adjustments necessary will destroy the balance of the game or alternatively destroy the income stream.  I don't want soldier arcana as that just means something (else) to cap as power is rebalanced to account for it, and any 'real strategy' just means 'new meta' where we figure out new trigger points and adapt new optimial cards/strategies.  power balance will always be on the edge of top tier (with some wiggle room) otherwise it makes certain subsystems trivial, as they provide no real benefit for their cost.

3) I think no trading acutally makes this game more f2p friendly, if f2p is willing to do some grinding and they are in an alliance that can support them, they will earn their drops.  once trading is introduced there is a lot of pressure to either devalue traded cards, make power creep faster, and/or make drop cards more 'expensive' to obtain resource-wise, or alternatively again income will a fairly significant hit.

4) And again, just to emphasize my very first point, the alt/botter problem will be HUGE.  I've seen economies totally ruined. All solutions that help fight this are damage QoL: ban emulators, have very rigorous 'device locking (think like rage of bahamut)', reduce free-resource handouts (people will bot for login bonuses, inflation will be a huge problem; again RoB had to stop giving out login tradable resources, AoI has huge inflation problems), and are still imperfect as you can't perfectly stop even a reasonable amount, and engages you in an infinite cat-mouse game against exploiters, and also opens up RMT black markets, gives incentives to 'hack' accounts and trade everything away, and generally adds huge support costs.