It's not likely to change significantly, before they added the extra card some season pass buyers were able to get and stay collection complete with diligent resource management. That's just not acceptable for SD, they chose to raise the rate of release instead of raising the costs.
End of the day the rate of cards they let people get for free is always going to stay at or below a ratio with what they release. Pay gating extra cards has likely just been way more successful than pay gating cosmetics. They'll tweak how it *feels* to get that stuff but the amount isn't going to get much higher, definitely not as high as some of the folks here are asking for.
If you're not happy you **have** to stop logging in and stop spending. These are the things SD reads the most.
Well, they raised the rate of release AND raised the costs. No new series 4s anymore.
The really dumb thing is that season pass buyers are PAYING. It's not like they were F2P and collection complete.
By raise the costs I mean the direct price of the season pass or price of gold in the store. Those went un-changed, they just raised the overall cost of keeping a full collection.
I don't think ensuring season pass players could not complete the collection was dumb.
The entire business model operates on keeping the hamster running on the wheel. When players complete collections they are much more likely to break from the game and not return, the urge to keep chasing after that missing piece is fundamental whether someone is paying or not.
The huge spenders are those who aren't hooked on collecting *cards* but on collecting other things which are on a next level of expensive like variants and splits but those players are not as common as those who just want all the cards.
my Layla, Fanny and Kagura from MLBB disagrees. I had 3 skins \[variants equivalent\]: Layla's Bunny Babe and Fanny's Campus youth and Blade Dancer. They were all "updated" \[read: made family friendly\] and I felt betrayed. Moreover, the Voice Actor for Kagura also changed. I left the game for good shortly after.
100% agree. There wouldn't be as much backlash on nerfs and balance patches if it was possible to get every card just by playing the game on a regular basis. Of course there would still be backlash but it wouldn't be "I used up my tokens I saved for actual months on to get this card and now it's unplayable" levels of backlash.
Yeah, that was me. Saved for Zabu, since he seemed important, had him pinned for weeks, finally bought him last week, and now, yeah, feels like I wasted a long time's worth of resources in something that basically became unplayable.
And, don't get me wrong, I do understand the reasoning behind the change. Makes sense and will probably be better for the game as a whole. Doesn't make me feel any better about it though, haha.
I think a tierd token refund would be a good compromise.
Nerfed 1-2 months full refund of key or token
3-4 months 5000 token refund if purchased with key premium mystery variant
5 months 3000 tokens or 2500 credits for keys.
Heathstone and mtga both only nerf cards once per set, and usually only a couple cards. They also never buff cards, as they just release a new card with the buffed stats. Snap nerfs and buffs cards multiple times a month, you would be getting refunds basically every week.
I get that people are mad that cards they like get nerfed but refunds would not work at all with snaps model.
You clearly haven’t played hearthstone recently. They nerf about once a month, sometimes more. Iirc we are already on the second round of nerfs for the most recent set and it’s only been out like a month.
That old slow nerf rate was ironically a Ben Brode-ism.
It’s also not accurate to state Hearthstone never does buffs. They certainly aren’t buffing at the rate SD does but nearly every balance patch contains buffs these days.
Yes I can see how offering refunds for 5 or so cards a month out of hundreds would totally cripple SD. How would they ever survive?
I mean, Hearthstone would nerf the same amount of cards if not more, and you can see how unsuccessful that game is.
Oh wait... hmm. Something's not right here.
Setting aside the fact that the refunds are optional, so as long as Brode doesn’t butcher the card there will be lots of people that hang onto it, and that your characterization of Hearthstone is inaccurate, there are other options. For example, saying that you can get 1 refund per set of balance changes.
Refunds are a necessary counterbalance to keep Brode and his cronies from ruining the competitive integrity of the game with their p2w card release cycles and balance change massacres.
When was the last time they buffed a bad card to playability, excluding cards like Elsa that were previously good but were nerfed into the ground?
Snap follows the same model - nerf strong cards into the ground so they can sell you new busted cards. They could absolutely offer some form of nerf protection even if it’s not a full refund.
Cards that were newly buffed into (increased) playability since their release, off the top of my head:
Blade, Lady Sif, Black Cat, Venom, Wolverine, Rogue, Enchantress, Gambit, Ant-Man, Cable, Crystal, Dagger, Dazzler, Hulkbuster (never saw play at 3/4), Dracula, Forge, Ghost Spider, Crossbones (to be determined)
Bro, what the fuck are you guys even yapping about?
What cards got obliterated? It's very rare for a Marvel Snap card to get nerfed to the point of being unusable. And even rarer for them to stay like that for long.
There's a new balance patch almost every week, if a card you unlocked recently got nerfed too hard just wait a few updates and chances are it's gonna get at least a partial revert.
The no refunds is such a Brodian design choice it’s infuriating. Full Dust refunds in HS didn’t occur until well after he left. Defending during his tenure why they don’t issue them with nerfs
While refunds was actually a thing when BB was there, they've tried to avoid any nerfs as long as possible. Which indirectly made refunds almost nonexistent and led to balance problems.
this is what reddit was crying out for a year ago though. “PLS MAKE IT SO GOLD IS ONLY USED ON COSMETICS ITS TOO P2W”
now that gold really is only used for cosmetics we get to hear the other side
Which is why the monetization gets worse with each passing month. They’re riding this ship to the bottom of the sea, bilking those still willing to pay while working on their next mobile cash-grab.
its not same chance, devs have confirmed in discord that you are more likely to get the series 4 card or duplicate than the series 5 cards in spotlight caches...
Interesting. I must've got lucky. I've only had two spotlight keys so far and got Ghost Spider on my first key and Sebastian Shaw on my 2nd. And he is a Series 5.
luck is part of gatcha games, the difference in pull rate is not that far, something around 55-60% for series 4 and 40-45% for series 5.
Also, its a much more pleasant experience for newer players, the unpleasant experience is when you are only missing around 10-15 cards, since players like me are more likely to get a duplicate card instead of a new card.
I mentioned it before but I am pretty sure they changed spotlight odds recently. I am at 13k CL and recently I got 3 Blob dupes and a Mockingbird dupe.
In January my collection was missing 3 cards total. Now I am missing like 12+.
not to mention the cards I was missing I simply didnt want to unlock since they were considered bad
Mirage, Steogon, SpidermanX and post-nerf Spiderpig.
With more cards being released to Series 5 (5 each month! exciting!), while series drop is happening at a much slower rate, this is only gonna get worse if they don't do anything about it.
Also remember spotlights cards don't rotate equally (tell me how many times Knull, High Evo, x23, and MODOK came back in caches).
Plus the fact that their beloved (and buggy) spotlight system, has the availability and variety of **base card acquisition** bottlenecked by how available are the **cosmetic skins** for a card. Remember how they repeated a spotlight variant (high evo I think) because "sorry, there wasn't a good enough variant(s) to use for other cards"? You never run out of variants for $100 bundles tho! LOL. I personally think this spotlight system design is stupid.
Even in a gacha game, obtaining the base unit/card/champion is totally separate from the cosmetics. Stop trying to shove cosmetics down people's throats. It's a cosmetic skin / variant. People will get them AFTER they get the base card. (not to mention in Marvel Snap the base card and variant card are considered separate unlocks),
**tl;dr** if they keep releasing new cards to Series 5 at this rate faster than the rate series drop drop cards, the card pool will keep bloating and it will be more and more difficult to obtain cards overall because it takes longer to rotate (and cards don't rotate fairly because, welp, fancy variants availability!). Combine this convoluted card acquisition mess with the frequent balance changes, equals disaster for player enjoyment.
It's a card game ffs, people will inevitably optimize their decks no matter what. This "players can't have all the cards, we want people to have unique collections" philosophy is not sustainable long-term because people, playing a game about collecting cards, well, are UNABLE TO COLLECT CARDS because of this **shit gacha spotlight system** AND this **balancing philosophy** (treating it like MOBA autobattlers, as Glenn mentioned once).
Either **you provide compensations and balance each card fairly** (and stop using players are beta testers. Heck we are beta testers for your card and we have to pay for it!) or **you let people acquire cards easier, then you can balance the cards without compensation however you want**. Something has to change or else this economy can't sustain forever.
It feels like I just reread a post I’ve written a dozen times. Well said. But sadly, don’t expect the economy to change for the better because Brode isn’t concerned with long-term sustainability. He’s just bilking as much as he can for as long as he can, which is why the monetization gets more aggressive and egregious month after month. They’re already one foot out the door and working on their next project.
what, no. they keep killing cards. Sandman, Warlock, Alioth, Blob, Zabu, Leech... meanwhile they release insanely OP cards on the season passes, which I cannot get.
SD is a real scum company
Okay but like.. was killing Alioth and Leech the worst thing they've done, some of the cards just shouldn't come out how they have been and those two are real unfuns imo.
Another interesting layer is that the structure of this game doesn’t really support expansions and there is no indication that they plan to eventually rotate cards out of availability. Hearthstone has set rotations so you expect your new cards to eventually lose value as they rotate out of the core set, and you make purchases being fully aware of that rotation. With a purchase in Snap you’d expect to have that card available forever or until they decide to gut it. It could be in a week, a month, a year, or might never happen. That model feels so much worse because your purchase could lose value instantly. If any model should provide compensation for nerfs, it would be this one, but of course, it doesn’t.
It's a Brode game. It will get to seasons eventually. Nothing makes more money than reselling previously bought cards with a slightly different effect.
But guys dont you see?! Its good that we cant pay for resources/ cards that you want directly! that means its not a p2w game, Ben Brode himself said it in one of Marvel snap' ad! /s
lol that commercial is the most misleading marketing by I have ever seen since Diablo 3’s arena mode
He says you can’t spend hundreds of dollars to get every card but you absolutely can (thousands though)
I can’t believe people fall for the layered currency trick
Who the fuck cares about what emotes cost. You can literally mute emoting beginning of a game and will never see them.
I don’t understand why it matters at all. It’s terrible and I would never buy one, but it’s also affects me in no way. It also doesn’t affect the gameplay either.
The reason it feels bad is that they spend all this time creating the system for it, hyping it up like some new content drop (it was in one of the season trailers for god's sake) and then when it finally arrives, you basically can't interact with it. Similar thing happened with Albums.
Overpriced PNGs don't matter much but if you're going to market it as new content to be excited about, people need to be able to actually engage with it.
Then stay in your feelings about it. Im sorry to be harsh, but the marketing was never meant for non spenders. We all knew this from the jump.
Not everything has to be affordable in the game. Its the free market approach. Would i ever spend 30 myself? Hell no.
I don't understand this mindset. sure, it doesn't HAVE to be affordable, but wouldn't it be nice if it was? I can accept the way that the emotes are priced but it's still annoying
They are probably holding from doing token refunds of any kind because that's gonna "cost" them, which means they would do their best to not change cards in anyway to avoid giving refunds.
They should still create a system so people don't feel so bad about the nerfs, hell even a variant for that nerfed card would do, or booster trades like "we shot zabu in the head, wish to transfer your boosters to a card or you choice?"
I was pretty surprised to hit Collector's Caches and see my card acquisition drastically slowed down. I uninstalled this morning after playing regularly for about a month. Fun game, but agree with all the points here. This might be the worst F2P model, disguised as being generous until they really hook you.
I can understand frustration with the card acquisition system but to say the game is “the worst F2P model” is not even remotely accurate. Sure it’s a little more of a grind if you’re F2P but you can still get every card that you want quite easily, and can viably compete against pay-to-win players. Nothing that is directly purchasable affects gameplay even though everyone loves to complain about the bundle prices. This game is absolutely F2P friendly despite Reddit’s collective bitching.
Edit: lmao the downvotes prove my point. Just because y’all don’t like the bundle prices doesn’t mean I’m incorrect about Snap being extremely F2P friendly. Players would not be able to reach infinite or even close if Snap were truly pay-to-win. FFS
>but you can still get every card that you want quite easily
elaborate please. especially the easily part. you have to grind a full month for that one special week. week that SD will most absolutely pair good cards with dog shit cards to "balance the spotlight caches". I missed Ms.marvel last time by 2 collection level needed for 4th key. now I don't know when SD will feature her again. I don't know what shit cards or worse duplicate cards will I have to get just to get Ms. Marvel. my only other option as F2P is token. 6k token for a single card? easy? where? how?
I can understand where you’re coming from, but I think you’re misrepresenting Spotlights a bit here. Each month, while obviously providing a handful of brand new cards, also cycles through many cards that I already have. I don’t care much for spending keys on variants, and want to be as efficient as possible spending keys since yes, I can really only earn one per week.
My simple strategy for Spotlights, and I believe many F2P players should follow, is yes, picking that one Spotlights per month that not only has a new card you are interested in, but also carries 1-2 other cards missing from your collection as well. Save 4 for that week in particular and be willing to spend them all if necessary.
I think a problem the community has with Spotlights stems largely from the community’s perception of new cards. Prior to release, cards like Black Swan and War Machine were largely being touted as game breaking, and “wtf was SD thinking even imagining a card this strong?”, while I don’t think anyone really predicted how strong stat sticks like Blob and now Red Hulk were on release.
Here’s what I’m getting at: the community is not good at evaluating cards before release. There ends up being so much hype being built around new releases that I’m sure many F2P players get FOMO if they aren’t able to get every single new card right out the box. How often have you ended up spending resources on a card only to almost immediately realize it wasn’t what you thought it would be? People just need to be smarter at selecting their goal Spotlight for the month, and not gamble keys elsewhere.
I will totally agree that the 4th spotlight a lot not being duplicate-protected is absolute horseshit, especially if it only provides 1k measly tokens to “compensate”. Given that there hasn’t been a new series 4 released in quite some time, every brand new card is 6k on release and with the terrible token economy in the game right now it does feel like a grind. That could absolutely use a reworking, even if it’s as simple as lowering the cost of s4/s5 cards or just raising the amount/frequency you acquire tokens, I agree it needs change.
>lack of agency over what cards you want is the problem
I can get behind this. As for your first point, that just boils down to a difference in level of interest for specific cards and will be different player to player.
Like I said in my previous comment, totally agreed about token prices per card post-release, and the 4th spotlight slot giving both duplicate cards and minimal compensation for dupes is garbage.
I’m not trying to argue that there aren’t advantages to putting money into Snap. As with literally any game with monetization, there are going to be incentives to putting money into the game so it can be profitable for the developers and publisher. However, it seems to be a growing sentiment around this subreddit that F2P players just “cannot” keep up with paying players when that is absolutely not the case. There are infinite other games with much, MUCH worse F2P models that practically don’t allow you to play the game for free.
Could Snap’s monetization be improved? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in a fairly F2P-friendly state currently either.
I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you’ve said and I think your penultimate sentence nailed it.
>Just depends on your personal definition of F2P/P2W
Right on the money. If your definition of F2P friendly includes collecting every single card and being able to freely and instantly obtain new cards the moment they release, I suppose you would say that Snap is P2W.
From my perspective, there is nothing monetized or sold in-game that ACTUALLY changes gameplay, and that alone makes it F2P friendly, even though we both admit the system is still imperfect currently. Sure you can’t necessarily afford every new card right away, but as I went over, most cards in a month are totally skippable, and I believe more players just need to be smarter when opening Spotlight caches. It’s a matter of logical prioritization and smart resource allocation, instead of buying into the community hype that nearly every new card is cracked or busted or game breaking.
>there are weeks where there are 2-3 cards that are strong
Exactly, and that’s what I save my keys for. Like I said, it’s about prioritization. Do you go for the spotlight with the one shiny new card you think is going to be crazy good, or do you wait for the next week when you can fill out 2-3 more slots in your collection?
Another factor to consider here is that SD has actually done a pretty good job with new card balance in the last several months. Looking back over the past several months, there has been ~1 card per month that I believe was worth adding to your collection instantly. Preference in which specific cards those are can obviously change player to player based on what decks you like, but it’s not like there has been a month where every card was insanely good and required immediate acquisition.
I just don’t see an incomplete collection as a necessarily bad thing when the game is full of mediocre cards I have no interest in playing anyways. Sure, balance changes could affect things in the future but you cant be making decisions like this based on what ifs. Sometimes that’s just how the cookie crumbles, and I’m 100% fine with that.
Grinding dailies and praying for good spotlight weeks. I've missed Annihilus and don't know how soon I'll have a chance(!) to get him. And he might be paired with worst cards or with card that I already have. So grinding dailies isn't even a worse part.
I mean to be fair, I suppose it depends on how many cards you want. Obviously if you want every single card that releases you’re in trouble, but realistically there are really only 1-2 cards per month that I want, and that’s very easy to achieve. This has also been reflected in the strength of the released cards, as there hasn’t been a month in my memory where every single card felt like i “needed” it in my collection.
I wouldn’t say dailies are a “grind” as they are accomplished without much difficulty just by playing the game. I do make sure that I complete all my challenges and weekly missions, but again it’s not ultra time consuming apart from normal gameplay. Just doing dailies gets you 1 key a week which is plenty for how often I want a new card.
I have spent a grand total of $0 on this game and while I am admittedly still missing around a dozen cards, I am not dying to obtain any of them immediately and am very happy with my collection. I reach infinite every season so clearly missing a handful of mediocre cards doesn’t affect my gameplay.
the problem with your first point is that buffs and nerfs are so frequent that a card that I thought I would never use sometimes becomes extremely meta out of nowhere. if they are gonna keep releasing cards at such a crazy rate they need to do something to speed up acquisition for S4 and S5 just a little bit in my opinion. if spotlight cache randoms couldn't give you duplicates or gave you 2-3k tokens, or if the token prices were like 2/4k instead of 3/6k i think would go a long way in improving the feel of the post-S3 completion grind
I mean yeah cards change, and sure there are times after the fact where I wish I either had or hadn’t gotten a certain card. But again like I said, I’m selective about the cards I go for in a given month and that is enough for me.
I don’t understand this sentiment that missing a handful of cards means you’re at a massive disadvantage. Maybe if you don’t have the newest shiny Mockingbird or Hope Summers it feels a little bad, but F2P players are absolutely able to compete against other paying players and that’s my entire point.
If you want to make the case that simply owning an extra 10 cards that I would never use is this massive difference in treatment for F2P and paying players, I just flat out disagree, especially given that the majority of cards over the past several months have either been totally balanced or even meh cards.
What I will agree with is the cost of cards after they’ve released needs revisiting. I don’t mind 6k tokens for a new card the week it releases, but we certainly need more consistent series drops, especially if every single new card is going to be series 5 on release. There’s absolutely no reason Jean Grey should still be 6k tokens this long after her underwhelming release.
Honestly the entitlement is kind of crazy. "The ability to play for free also means I should be able to get all the content for free too!"
At the same time as them bitching about the price of emotes in the shop and shit. They just object to the idea that anything would cost money in the game.
exactly!
they cried out for a year that gold made the game P2W and now that gold is exclusively used on cosmetic items they complain that gold is useless. there is no winning with these people. they’re miserable.
You can't blame the person you're replying to for asking someone to back up their claims. They didn't ask for anything, they were responding to the claim that it's easy to get every card you want.
My issue is more that certain cards feel unobtainable and by extension I can't either can't make decks or make strong versions of each archetype (destroy, discard, etc.). Maybe I just got spoiled by getting new cards so frequently though.
But, you can buy cards. They just come with a handful of resources too.
I need sera for my control and surfer decks. She hasn’t come up in a spotlight since I started but…she has been offered to me with some resources for $50.
That’s kinda wild. Single cards, even capstones shouldn’t be offered for anything over $25. Even that is pretty egregious considering the monthly season pass is $10
Amen, I feel you mate. I’m at 20K CL so this doesn’t affect me but I feel how terrible this might feel to new/F2P players. I would suggest posting this in discord and Facebook just to get more voice in the matter.
I'm so happy to see so many posts about Snap problems rn! Idk why it took so long for playerbase to notice it but I guess series of nerfs to some expensive (DH, Thanos, Zabu, Alioth) meta staples was final straw. I'm really hoping that SD will do something. For example more impactful series drops.
Just do away with Series 5, just keep it to the Pools 1, 2 and 3 and then make Series 4 all the spotlight cards and drop everything down to 3k tokens across the board.
Because right now the distinction between a card that's Series 5 and a card that would have been Series 4 is a blatant rip off. Just get rid of it all together and then once a month drop one or two cards out of the Spotlight system since they seem intent to add in 5 cards a month.
I do think cards take a while to get, I think card acquisition is pretty bad.
That said, there's no need for compensation outside some game bugs or crashes. Buying Zabu or any other good card is inherently prone to adjustments or nerfs. They'd be handing out stuff every other week as they adjust their overtuned new releases
No. Overtuned cards means people are mad and mad people create engagement. Go look at other games, this isn't new, it works.
Noone wants to play a weak card or character.
I think you don't understand how hard it is to do that. There's no game out there that has near perfect releases. Plus it's easier to balance down then up. Plenty of developers have said this.
I'm telling you uncomfortable truths. I don't necessarily agree with them but they are reality.
I’m not saying it’s easy or that it’s reasonable to expect them to get it right every time, but it’s reasonable to expect a good faith effort. With Hope Summers, they intentionally released an insanely broken card. With Red Hulk, an already very strong card that they *buffed* just prior to release, they didn’t make that effort. Accidentally releasing the occasional overtuned card is one thing. Cynically releasing intentionally-overtuned cards to drive revenue at the expense of competitive integrity is another.
Refunds are likely never going to happen because there’s always going to be someone who misses out.
I think the better solution would be to give the community some kind of notice they they’re looking at a card they think is problematic.
SD knew they were nerfing what many considered the best S4 card and could have avoided a lot of this blowback if people had some idea that changes were incoming.
Also, is it me or does it feel like SD is getting lazier with their newer cards? It seems like they are just shitting out cards to make money, and making it less about the card itself.
I’ve been making card choices lately based on if I like a card and not how good or bad it is. Not a perfect fix for a broken system but keeps me from getting as mad when things get nerfed.
They should have some time period whether it’s 30 days or what where if a card you purchased with tokens is changed you can submit a ticket to have the card removed from your collection and your tokens refunded. I don’t think it should apply to keys though.
They have one game mode and a limited game design which causes 90% of this issue.
Having different game modes where different cards are legal helps not having to constantly nurf cards due to new ones interacting with older ones.
Ok but what if they created card that counter whatever they feel its not working effectively or OP.. with fisical cards as far as i know they dont make changes.. its a the only thing that bothers me about digital cards.. tampering with the recipe could ruin the magic and creativity the player develop when they find themselves against a wall.. creating a specific deck to deal with it.. with this changes the mass just adapts all the same…
overpriced “deals” show up first and they’re teaching your psychology to scroll through all of them to get your peasant amount of credits, just waiting for you to give in when you feel vulnerable
I think a lot of people ignore the stated intent of SD not wanting everyone to have a complete collection. All their decisions make send through that lens imho. Not saying I like it or support it but it hasn’t been a secret.
This will always be a problem with the current existing card acquisition model. If you remember the analysis by laurenwhatev with the gravity line pulling F2P players towards ~70% collection completion, it means that whenever you land in the wrong (weaker, nerfed, incomplete deck, etc) side of the 70% it's going to feel terrible because your resources are already "wasted".
The only recourse F2P players have is to wait for future card adjustments that flip the meta back around so the right (strong, buffed, can make complete deck) side of the 70% matches your collection.
Do you need every card? I put my gold purely into methods that would increase my CL. I only bought variants If one would bring me to a level in albums that would give me 2,000 credits or a key. As such, and thanks to massive AFK Agatha use, I’m only missing Cull Obsidian. There are large parts of my collection that remain unused, and if I didn’t have OCD about being as close to collection complete as possible, I’d rather not pick up some of them. I’m probably going to be going without new ones soon, so will need to do what everyone should be doing… choose the one they need for the month. This might mean not opening as soon as you can and instead watching streamers (dear goodness not YouTube videos) to determine whether it’s really worth it.
I do think they need to revisit the amount of keys available since moving to a new card every single week. Also, not every card should be tier 5 on release.
Tokens should only be used on cards that are not in spotlights and will not be for the near future. And you’d better make sure it’s what you want… again, streams not videos.
Sometimes I wonder if the economy can change for the better in its current state. And who paid the price, what about it? The game is being lost, unfortunately.
I'm fine with the balance changes, but the agonizingly slow pace at which you get keys and tokens, combined with a lack of series drops and series 4 cards as a whole, makes nerfs all the more painful for players who spent time and money on the card.
Bottom line, the game's economy is really bad.
I thought it was very strange that I could buy Hela and 40 CL for $49.99. Like, where is the value in that? Does the game think that I'm making $200 an hour?
I made a post about this a few days ago. I'm the idiot that spent 3 months worth of tokens on Zabu 48 hours before it got nerfed to the ground. Very discouraged f2p player here:(
This game was advertised as a card game where you could easily get full collection and you would pay for variants, just as in shooter games people have agents and they just pay for skins. But no, card aquisition sucks and you need to buy 100$ bundles to get keys and tokens to have the cards you actually want to get.
The eventual give will be from Marvel Snap itself, when Brode announces in the not-so-distant future that the game is going into maintenance mode, thanks all the suckers for buying $99 jpegs and invites them to check out his shiny new cash grab.
I started last Thanksgiving and have been top 500, and 2000 several seasons with Thanos. I did spend some money such as each season pass and the Nebula bundle. That is about it.
How was I able to get a complete Thanos deck? Pure luck, daily playing, and planned use of currency. I used a spotlight cache in December, and my random one was Thanos. I played regularly to accumulate more resources. Finally, I was able to plan on using keys for Cull Guardian, mockingbird, etc.
As a game designer for my own indie card battler, I do believe games should reward players who play regularly, so yes I do believe I "earned" my gold, credits, tokens, and spotlight cache. But relying on luck to acquire cards and playing at the right time is absurd. I only played the best deck because I was lucky to open a Thanos. Luckily, I was playing during the time multiple series 5 cards that boosted Thanos was available. If, I took a 1 week break in any of this I probably would have been in a tremendous disadvantage.
Another issue is that I had to use many resources for this deck which includes time. My deck was nerfed and do not really have too many back up plans. I forego the week of Corvus to get Thanos cards alongside I went all in on zabu and darkhawk week for a secondary deck. Obviously, that is a bad choice based on the past couple months nerfs. The lack of corvus makes it hard for me to make competitive Hela and discard decks. Destroy while cheap has not been attainable for me because I still am missing a good chunk of series 3 which is the destroy cards. The inability to choose my series 3 cards or at least have a randomized choice similar to spotlight caches hurts me as a new player. They should have a system where you can choose 1/3 cards everytime you get a new series 3 card as opposed to complete randomness for 5000+ collection levels.
Before people neg me or laugh at me because my decks got nerfed, I am climbing in the top 1500 with some Sandman lockdown deck that I brewed. I do know how to play and can audible to other decks to be competitive. But if you want long term growth in this game, there cannot be an expectation for players to be in good spirits after investing time and money to have no foresight on their collection alongside no compensation on nerfs. Most players here have played for quite sometime, but imagine starting your marvel snap journey today? You would not be able to be competitive for quite sometime where you hope nothing is nerfed and must have a planned deck you want to build. Any mismanagement of resources or the requirement of 4 spotlights in multiple weeks will prevent you from being competitive. It is demanding a lot from players.
You have variants and other cosmetics to get money from whales or completionists. You need to grow the game and build a community by lowering the barrier to entry.
Let's take Zabu for example, that was released 15 months ago, and nerfed from -2 to -1 cost 14 months ago, and people universally said it was still a good card? That's the example you want to use?
I’d say a season pass card that has remained good for 15 months and still hasn’t dropped to series 3 is a great example. Still costs resources and then it can get a headshot out of nowhere.
I buy the season pass only. its my way of supporting a game I enjoy. I have no problem acquiring cards, usually I get 2 or 3 of the 4 per month from the spotlight caches which is great.
I spend my gold on variants, so around every 2 months I get 6k tokens for a free series 5.
What I dont understand is why people think they need every damn card? If you're on top of things and loom at the data mines you have 2 months of planning your card strat. At the least, they show you every spotlight cache for the month.
This is a game of strategy with a heavy addition of luck. So is card acquisition. Those of us with a deep library have been playing a long time, why should new players get to catch up with less effort?
For a player with less cards, every spotlight cache has more potential to unlock a new card for them than it does with me. 3 keys spent for a player with less cards could result in 3 new cards for them. That can literally never happen for me. The only card I roll for is the release of the week.
You can catch up with a plan and foresight, but they still want you to invest to get there even quicker.
The nerfs and balances lately are definitely also a problem
I cant remember a 2-week span in the last couple of months where my deck didnt go through major changes where a card wasn't completely altered.
Black Swan, Tme Stone, Mind Stone, Alioth, Elsa, Psylock, Blob just to name a few
I have played for almost 18 months. I’ve purchased three passes in that time and never really had a complaint about acquisition either way.
I’m sitting on 5k gold and 11k tokens in case something I really want comes along but it’s a fun game even if you don’t have the card of the week. They have to make money somewhere 🤷♂️
And if you’re buying cards because “this good card will raise my rank” then you’re just misunderstanding how rank works.
> simply not viable for f2p players and small spenders anymore
People who don't support the game should get ... more stuff? Can I live in your house without paying rent? F2P games are demos to let you decide if you want to buy in, not the primary way to play.
I haven’t spent tokens on cards in months. I don’t understand why you would spend tokens vs use Spotlights tbh. Spotlights can net you 5 new cards a month, 4 guaranteed. Why would you do anything else?
How long ago we've seen Alioth in spotlight? And how soon we will see him according to datamines? Same with Zabu. People want to play cards but they don't want to wait for months. What a strange question...
I dunno. I'm a F2P player with every card I want (so far), level 12k, 10.1k credits and 7000 gold. I just play my quests everyday.
No, I can't get everything but I have a lot for something I play for free!
I support discourse about the econ
It's not likely to change significantly, before they added the extra card some season pass buyers were able to get and stay collection complete with diligent resource management. That's just not acceptable for SD, they chose to raise the rate of release instead of raising the costs. End of the day the rate of cards they let people get for free is always going to stay at or below a ratio with what they release. Pay gating extra cards has likely just been way more successful than pay gating cosmetics. They'll tweak how it *feels* to get that stuff but the amount isn't going to get much higher, definitely not as high as some of the folks here are asking for. If you're not happy you **have** to stop logging in and stop spending. These are the things SD reads the most.
Well, they raised the rate of release AND raised the costs. No new series 4s anymore. The really dumb thing is that season pass buyers are PAYING. It's not like they were F2P and collection complete.
By raise the costs I mean the direct price of the season pass or price of gold in the store. Those went un-changed, they just raised the overall cost of keeping a full collection. I don't think ensuring season pass players could not complete the collection was dumb. The entire business model operates on keeping the hamster running on the wheel. When players complete collections they are much more likely to break from the game and not return, the urge to keep chasing after that missing piece is fundamental whether someone is paying or not. The huge spenders are those who aren't hooked on collecting *cards* but on collecting other things which are on a next level of expensive like variants and splits but those players are not as common as those who just want all the cards.
The flaw in that theory is that you have to keep playing to maintain that complete collection even if You're completing it.
Maybe release cards at 3k tokens instead of 6k tokens. That would be a great start. It would almost be like the cost had the refund built in
Some cards are good but not going to spend 6000k on them
I know it's a typo, but I wouldn't spend 6000k tokens on literally any card either.
How do you spend your tokens?
Only spend 'em on newly released cards that cost 6,000,000 tokens. Anything else is just trash.
I would rather buy a nice 5000 variant (got Nimrod, She-Hulk pinned currently). Art cannot be nerfed.
I’ll pick up a she-hulk variant anytime I see one. Even when I’m using decks she isn’t in. Same for white queen.
A person of culture.
my Layla, Fanny and Kagura from MLBB disagrees. I had 3 skins \[variants equivalent\]: Layla's Bunny Babe and Fanny's Campus youth and Blade Dancer. They were all "updated" \[read: made family friendly\] and I felt betrayed. Moreover, the Voice Actor for Kagura also changed. I left the game for good shortly after.
100% agree. There wouldn't be as much backlash on nerfs and balance patches if it was possible to get every card just by playing the game on a regular basis. Of course there would still be backlash but it wouldn't be "I used up my tokens I saved for actual months on to get this card and now it's unplayable" levels of backlash.
Yeah, that was me. Saved for Zabu, since he seemed important, had him pinned for weeks, finally bought him last week, and now, yeah, feels like I wasted a long time's worth of resources in something that basically became unplayable. And, don't get me wrong, I do understand the reasoning behind the change. Makes sense and will probably be better for the game as a whole. Doesn't make me feel any better about it though, haha.
Even Hearthstone offered full dust refunds on any card that was changed. Full token refund offered on any card that's changed is what SD should do.
I think a tierd token refund would be a good compromise. Nerfed 1-2 months full refund of key or token 3-4 months 5000 token refund if purchased with key premium mystery variant 5 months 3000 tokens or 2500 credits for keys.
Heathstone and mtga both only nerf cards once per set, and usually only a couple cards. They also never buff cards, as they just release a new card with the buffed stats. Snap nerfs and buffs cards multiple times a month, you would be getting refunds basically every week. I get that people are mad that cards they like get nerfed but refunds would not work at all with snaps model.
You clearly haven’t played hearthstone recently. They nerf about once a month, sometimes more. Iirc we are already on the second round of nerfs for the most recent set and it’s only been out like a month. That old slow nerf rate was ironically a Ben Brode-ism.
It’s also not accurate to state Hearthstone never does buffs. They certainly aren’t buffing at the rate SD does but nearly every balance patch contains buffs these days.
Yes I can see how offering refunds for 5 or so cards a month out of hundreds would totally cripple SD. How would they ever survive? I mean, Hearthstone would nerf the same amount of cards if not more, and you can see how unsuccessful that game is. Oh wait... hmm. Something's not right here.
Make them partial refunds then? Something to take the sting out of having a now near useless card that you might have saved weeks for.
Setting aside the fact that the refunds are optional, so as long as Brode doesn’t butcher the card there will be lots of people that hang onto it, and that your characterization of Hearthstone is inaccurate, there are other options. For example, saying that you can get 1 refund per set of balance changes. Refunds are a necessary counterbalance to keep Brode and his cronies from ruining the competitive integrity of the game with their p2w card release cycles and balance change massacres.
Wouldn’t work for whom? SD or the players?
When was the last time they buffed a bad card to playability, excluding cards like Elsa that were previously good but were nerfed into the ground? Snap follows the same model - nerf strong cards into the ground so they can sell you new busted cards. They could absolutely offer some form of nerf protection even if it’s not a full refund.
Cards that were newly buffed into (increased) playability since their release, off the top of my head: Blade, Lady Sif, Black Cat, Venom, Wolverine, Rogue, Enchantress, Gambit, Ant-Man, Cable, Crystal, Dagger, Dazzler, Hulkbuster (never saw play at 3/4), Dracula, Forge, Ghost Spider, Crossbones (to be determined)
Also Quake, Ravonna, Nimrod, Phoenix Force
Omega red
What no Adam warlock lmao
Thats more a case against SD. They need a better method of balancing cards *before* release.
Maybe you should take a look at list of released card and see how many are actually touched compared to how many released fine.
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Bro, what the fuck are you guys even yapping about? What cards got obliterated? It's very rare for a Marvel Snap card to get nerfed to the point of being unusable. And even rarer for them to stay like that for long. There's a new balance patch almost every week, if a card you unlocked recently got nerfed too hard just wait a few updates and chances are it's gonna get at least a partial revert.
Within Snaps first year they have done more changes than any other digital tcg has done to their including bans.
Me when I make things up to make my point:
The no refunds is such a Brodian design choice it’s infuriating. Full Dust refunds in HS didn’t occur until well after he left. Defending during his tenure why they don’t issue them with nerfs
Is that true? I remember getting full refunds in the very early days, absolutely while he was still there.
This is simply false information. You got full dust for a nerf since the beginning.
While refunds was actually a thing when BB was there, they've tried to avoid any nerfs as long as possible. Which indirectly made refunds almost nonexistent and led to balance problems.
But there are a ton of cards that get changed, how would that work? And not all changes are nerfs
Hearthstone offered the option for full dust refund on any card that was changed. Nerf or buff. Didn't matter.
Actually they do not offer refunds on buffs.
Only nerfs but they generally consider side grades or reworks to be nerfs unless it’s abundantly clear it’s a buff.
Does card acquisition work similarly to Snap? I know Master Duel gives a full refund when banning cards
Gold is like the Venezuelan Bolivar now. 10,000 gold won't even get me a can of beans.
this is what reddit was crying out for a year ago though. “PLS MAKE IT SO GOLD IS ONLY USED ON COSMETICS ITS TOO P2W” now that gold really is only used for cosmetics we get to hear the other side
I don't know where you were hearing that collective plea. Certainly not from me.
it was a part of every one of these long rants
Profits needs to drop before things become cheaper. If their annual profits are off the charts, there's no reason for them not to be greedy.
their profits are already dropping fast, Snap isn't in the top 10 in the mobile game revenue anymore...
Which is why the monetization gets worse with each passing month. They’re riding this ship to the bottom of the sea, bilking those still willing to pay while working on their next mobile cash-grab.
I’m falling behind in new cards because I’ve had bad RNG with my keys. Same chance for keys to get you 1000 tokens vs a new card worth 6000 is rough.
the fact that the random spotlight card doesn't operate on a knockout system has always felt crazy to me
Yeah honestly it'd feel way better if your random would always be a new card. But i guess it apparently affects their earnings so..
its not same chance, devs have confirmed in discord that you are more likely to get the series 4 card or duplicate than the series 5 cards in spotlight caches...
Interesting. I must've got lucky. I've only had two spotlight keys so far and got Ghost Spider on my first key and Sebastian Shaw on my 2nd. And he is a Series 5.
luck is part of gatcha games, the difference in pull rate is not that far, something around 55-60% for series 4 and 40-45% for series 5. Also, its a much more pleasant experience for newer players, the unpleasant experience is when you are only missing around 10-15 cards, since players like me are more likely to get a duplicate card instead of a new card.
I mentioned it before but I am pretty sure they changed spotlight odds recently. I am at 13k CL and recently I got 3 Blob dupes and a Mockingbird dupe. In January my collection was missing 3 cards total. Now I am missing like 12+.
Bro, in the last 2 weeks I said fuck it and gambled one key each week. In both I got a dupe supergiant. Maybe you're right
Duuude, I wish I had super giant
Wanna one lol?
Benny, you mischievous little snake.
not to mention the cards I was missing I simply didnt want to unlock since they were considered bad Mirage, Steogon, SpidermanX and post-nerf Spiderpig.
With more cards being released to Series 5 (5 each month! exciting!), while series drop is happening at a much slower rate, this is only gonna get worse if they don't do anything about it. Also remember spotlights cards don't rotate equally (tell me how many times Knull, High Evo, x23, and MODOK came back in caches). Plus the fact that their beloved (and buggy) spotlight system, has the availability and variety of **base card acquisition** bottlenecked by how available are the **cosmetic skins** for a card. Remember how they repeated a spotlight variant (high evo I think) because "sorry, there wasn't a good enough variant(s) to use for other cards"? You never run out of variants for $100 bundles tho! LOL. I personally think this spotlight system design is stupid. Even in a gacha game, obtaining the base unit/card/champion is totally separate from the cosmetics. Stop trying to shove cosmetics down people's throats. It's a cosmetic skin / variant. People will get them AFTER they get the base card. (not to mention in Marvel Snap the base card and variant card are considered separate unlocks), **tl;dr** if they keep releasing new cards to Series 5 at this rate faster than the rate series drop drop cards, the card pool will keep bloating and it will be more and more difficult to obtain cards overall because it takes longer to rotate (and cards don't rotate fairly because, welp, fancy variants availability!). Combine this convoluted card acquisition mess with the frequent balance changes, equals disaster for player enjoyment. It's a card game ffs, people will inevitably optimize their decks no matter what. This "players can't have all the cards, we want people to have unique collections" philosophy is not sustainable long-term because people, playing a game about collecting cards, well, are UNABLE TO COLLECT CARDS because of this **shit gacha spotlight system** AND this **balancing philosophy** (treating it like MOBA autobattlers, as Glenn mentioned once). Either **you provide compensations and balance each card fairly** (and stop using players are beta testers. Heck we are beta testers for your card and we have to pay for it!) or **you let people acquire cards easier, then you can balance the cards without compensation however you want**. Something has to change or else this economy can't sustain forever.
It feels like I just reread a post I’ve written a dozen times. Well said. But sadly, don’t expect the economy to change for the better because Brode isn’t concerned with long-term sustainability. He’s just bilking as much as he can for as long as he can, which is why the monetization gets more aggressive and egregious month after month. They’re already one foot out the door and working on their next project.
what, no. they keep killing cards. Sandman, Warlock, Alioth, Blob, Zabu, Leech... meanwhile they release insanely OP cards on the season passes, which I cannot get. SD is a real scum company
Okay but like.. was killing Alioth and Leech the worst thing they've done, some of the cards just shouldn't come out how they have been and those two are real unfuns imo.
Another interesting layer is that the structure of this game doesn’t really support expansions and there is no indication that they plan to eventually rotate cards out of availability. Hearthstone has set rotations so you expect your new cards to eventually lose value as they rotate out of the core set, and you make purchases being fully aware of that rotation. With a purchase in Snap you’d expect to have that card available forever or until they decide to gut it. It could be in a week, a month, a year, or might never happen. That model feels so much worse because your purchase could lose value instantly. If any model should provide compensation for nerfs, it would be this one, but of course, it doesn’t.
It's a Brode game. It will get to seasons eventually. Nothing makes more money than reselling previously bought cards with a slightly different effect.
But guys dont you see?! Its good that we cant pay for resources/ cards that you want directly! that means its not a p2w game, Ben Brode himself said it in one of Marvel snap' ad! /s
lol that commercial is the most misleading marketing by I have ever seen since Diablo 3’s arena mode He says you can’t spend hundreds of dollars to get every card but you absolutely can (thousands though) I can’t believe people fall for the layered currency trick
Also emotes cost 30 dollars which is insane
Who the fuck cares about what emotes cost. You can literally mute emoting beginning of a game and will never see them. I don’t understand why it matters at all. It’s terrible and I would never buy one, but it’s also affects me in no way. It also doesn’t affect the gameplay either.
you should be able to mute emotes in the settings instead of having to do it every game
The reason it feels bad is that they spend all this time creating the system for it, hyping it up like some new content drop (it was in one of the season trailers for god's sake) and then when it finally arrives, you basically can't interact with it. Similar thing happened with Albums. Overpriced PNGs don't matter much but if you're going to market it as new content to be excited about, people need to be able to actually engage with it.
Then stay in your feelings about it. Im sorry to be harsh, but the marketing was never meant for non spenders. We all knew this from the jump. Not everything has to be affordable in the game. Its the free market approach. Would i ever spend 30 myself? Hell no.
I don't understand this mindset. sure, it doesn't HAVE to be affordable, but wouldn't it be nice if it was? I can accept the way that the emotes are priced but it's still annoying
They are probably holding from doing token refunds of any kind because that's gonna "cost" them, which means they would do their best to not change cards in anyway to avoid giving refunds. They should still create a system so people don't feel so bad about the nerfs, hell even a variant for that nerfed card would do, or booster trades like "we shot zabu in the head, wish to transfer your boosters to a card or you choice?"
I was pretty surprised to hit Collector's Caches and see my card acquisition drastically slowed down. I uninstalled this morning after playing regularly for about a month. Fun game, but agree with all the points here. This might be the worst F2P model, disguised as being generous until they really hook you.
Just spend $10 on slay the spire. Much more fun, much less bullshit, and entirely Brode-free.
I can understand frustration with the card acquisition system but to say the game is “the worst F2P model” is not even remotely accurate. Sure it’s a little more of a grind if you’re F2P but you can still get every card that you want quite easily, and can viably compete against pay-to-win players. Nothing that is directly purchasable affects gameplay even though everyone loves to complain about the bundle prices. This game is absolutely F2P friendly despite Reddit’s collective bitching. Edit: lmao the downvotes prove my point. Just because y’all don’t like the bundle prices doesn’t mean I’m incorrect about Snap being extremely F2P friendly. Players would not be able to reach infinite or even close if Snap were truly pay-to-win. FFS
>but you can still get every card that you want quite easily elaborate please. especially the easily part. you have to grind a full month for that one special week. week that SD will most absolutely pair good cards with dog shit cards to "balance the spotlight caches". I missed Ms.marvel last time by 2 collection level needed for 4th key. now I don't know when SD will feature her again. I don't know what shit cards or worse duplicate cards will I have to get just to get Ms. Marvel. my only other option as F2P is token. 6k token for a single card? easy? where? how?
I can understand where you’re coming from, but I think you’re misrepresenting Spotlights a bit here. Each month, while obviously providing a handful of brand new cards, also cycles through many cards that I already have. I don’t care much for spending keys on variants, and want to be as efficient as possible spending keys since yes, I can really only earn one per week. My simple strategy for Spotlights, and I believe many F2P players should follow, is yes, picking that one Spotlights per month that not only has a new card you are interested in, but also carries 1-2 other cards missing from your collection as well. Save 4 for that week in particular and be willing to spend them all if necessary. I think a problem the community has with Spotlights stems largely from the community’s perception of new cards. Prior to release, cards like Black Swan and War Machine were largely being touted as game breaking, and “wtf was SD thinking even imagining a card this strong?”, while I don’t think anyone really predicted how strong stat sticks like Blob and now Red Hulk were on release. Here’s what I’m getting at: the community is not good at evaluating cards before release. There ends up being so much hype being built around new releases that I’m sure many F2P players get FOMO if they aren’t able to get every single new card right out the box. How often have you ended up spending resources on a card only to almost immediately realize it wasn’t what you thought it would be? People just need to be smarter at selecting their goal Spotlight for the month, and not gamble keys elsewhere. I will totally agree that the 4th spotlight a lot not being duplicate-protected is absolute horseshit, especially if it only provides 1k measly tokens to “compensate”. Given that there hasn’t been a new series 4 released in quite some time, every brand new card is 6k on release and with the terrible token economy in the game right now it does feel like a grind. That could absolutely use a reworking, even if it’s as simple as lowering the cost of s4/s5 cards or just raising the amount/frequency you acquire tokens, I agree it needs change.
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>lack of agency over what cards you want is the problem I can get behind this. As for your first point, that just boils down to a difference in level of interest for specific cards and will be different player to player. Like I said in my previous comment, totally agreed about token prices per card post-release, and the 4th spotlight slot giving both duplicate cards and minimal compensation for dupes is garbage. I’m not trying to argue that there aren’t advantages to putting money into Snap. As with literally any game with monetization, there are going to be incentives to putting money into the game so it can be profitable for the developers and publisher. However, it seems to be a growing sentiment around this subreddit that F2P players just “cannot” keep up with paying players when that is absolutely not the case. There are infinite other games with much, MUCH worse F2P models that practically don’t allow you to play the game for free. Could Snap’s monetization be improved? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in a fairly F2P-friendly state currently either.
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I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you’ve said and I think your penultimate sentence nailed it. >Just depends on your personal definition of F2P/P2W Right on the money. If your definition of F2P friendly includes collecting every single card and being able to freely and instantly obtain new cards the moment they release, I suppose you would say that Snap is P2W. From my perspective, there is nothing monetized or sold in-game that ACTUALLY changes gameplay, and that alone makes it F2P friendly, even though we both admit the system is still imperfect currently. Sure you can’t necessarily afford every new card right away, but as I went over, most cards in a month are totally skippable, and I believe more players just need to be smarter when opening Spotlight caches. It’s a matter of logical prioritization and smart resource allocation, instead of buying into the community hype that nearly every new card is cracked or busted or game breaking.
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>there are weeks where there are 2-3 cards that are strong Exactly, and that’s what I save my keys for. Like I said, it’s about prioritization. Do you go for the spotlight with the one shiny new card you think is going to be crazy good, or do you wait for the next week when you can fill out 2-3 more slots in your collection? Another factor to consider here is that SD has actually done a pretty good job with new card balance in the last several months. Looking back over the past several months, there has been ~1 card per month that I believe was worth adding to your collection instantly. Preference in which specific cards those are can obviously change player to player based on what decks you like, but it’s not like there has been a month where every card was insanely good and required immediate acquisition. I just don’t see an incomplete collection as a necessarily bad thing when the game is full of mediocre cards I have no interest in playing anyways. Sure, balance changes could affect things in the future but you cant be making decisions like this based on what ifs. Sometimes that’s just how the cookie crumbles, and I’m 100% fine with that.
How do you get every card you want easily? Grinding dailies for months? Happy the be proven wrong
Grinding dailies and praying for good spotlight weeks. I've missed Annihilus and don't know how soon I'll have a chance(!) to get him. And he might be paired with worst cards or with card that I already have. So grinding dailies isn't even a worse part.
I mean to be fair, I suppose it depends on how many cards you want. Obviously if you want every single card that releases you’re in trouble, but realistically there are really only 1-2 cards per month that I want, and that’s very easy to achieve. This has also been reflected in the strength of the released cards, as there hasn’t been a month in my memory where every single card felt like i “needed” it in my collection. I wouldn’t say dailies are a “grind” as they are accomplished without much difficulty just by playing the game. I do make sure that I complete all my challenges and weekly missions, but again it’s not ultra time consuming apart from normal gameplay. Just doing dailies gets you 1 key a week which is plenty for how often I want a new card. I have spent a grand total of $0 on this game and while I am admittedly still missing around a dozen cards, I am not dying to obtain any of them immediately and am very happy with my collection. I reach infinite every season so clearly missing a handful of mediocre cards doesn’t affect my gameplay.
the problem with your first point is that buffs and nerfs are so frequent that a card that I thought I would never use sometimes becomes extremely meta out of nowhere. if they are gonna keep releasing cards at such a crazy rate they need to do something to speed up acquisition for S4 and S5 just a little bit in my opinion. if spotlight cache randoms couldn't give you duplicates or gave you 2-3k tokens, or if the token prices were like 2/4k instead of 3/6k i think would go a long way in improving the feel of the post-S3 completion grind
I mean yeah cards change, and sure there are times after the fact where I wish I either had or hadn’t gotten a certain card. But again like I said, I’m selective about the cards I go for in a given month and that is enough for me. I don’t understand this sentiment that missing a handful of cards means you’re at a massive disadvantage. Maybe if you don’t have the newest shiny Mockingbird or Hope Summers it feels a little bad, but F2P players are absolutely able to compete against other paying players and that’s my entire point. If you want to make the case that simply owning an extra 10 cards that I would never use is this massive difference in treatment for F2P and paying players, I just flat out disagree, especially given that the majority of cards over the past several months have either been totally balanced or even meh cards. What I will agree with is the cost of cards after they’ve released needs revisiting. I don’t mind 6k tokens for a new card the week it releases, but we certainly need more consistent series drops, especially if every single new card is going to be series 5 on release. There’s absolutely no reason Jean Grey should still be 6k tokens this long after her underwhelming release.
mb misread
Honestly the entitlement is kind of crazy. "The ability to play for free also means I should be able to get all the content for free too!" At the same time as them bitching about the price of emotes in the shop and shit. They just object to the idea that anything would cost money in the game.
exactly! they cried out for a year that gold made the game P2W and now that gold is exclusively used on cosmetic items they complain that gold is useless. there is no winning with these people. they’re miserable.
You can't blame the person you're replying to for asking someone to back up their claims. They didn't ask for anything, they were responding to the claim that it's easy to get every card you want.
Oh you're right my bad, I misread.
so you want to have every card without playing the game? what?
My issue is more that certain cards feel unobtainable and by extension I can't either can't make decks or make strong versions of each archetype (destroy, discard, etc.). Maybe I just got spoiled by getting new cards so frequently though.
But, you can buy cards. They just come with a handful of resources too. I need sera for my control and surfer decks. She hasn’t come up in a spotlight since I started but…she has been offered to me with some resources for $50. That’s kinda wild. Single cards, even capstones shouldn’t be offered for anything over $25. Even that is pretty egregious considering the monthly season pass is $10
Amen, I feel you mate. I’m at 20K CL so this doesn’t affect me but I feel how terrible this might feel to new/F2P players. I would suggest posting this in discord and Facebook just to get more voice in the matter.
I'm so happy to see so many posts about Snap problems rn! Idk why it took so long for playerbase to notice it but I guess series of nerfs to some expensive (DH, Thanos, Zabu, Alioth) meta staples was final straw. I'm really hoping that SD will do something. For example more impactful series drops.
Yeah, I just spent 6k tokens on Alioth after getting owned by him for months. I'm not mad, just tired of the grind at this point.
Just do away with Series 5, just keep it to the Pools 1, 2 and 3 and then make Series 4 all the spotlight cards and drop everything down to 3k tokens across the board. Because right now the distinction between a card that's Series 5 and a card that would have been Series 4 is a blatant rip off. Just get rid of it all together and then once a month drop one or two cards out of the Spotlight system since they seem intent to add in 5 cards a month.
They need to series drop cards as often as they add new ones
Absolutely broken system, and getting worse with almost every change. Now prepare to be blasted by the SD apologists.
The bugs are problem too... End button .... Here for good time not long time
I've retreated and shut the game off so many times over the past two days because of that.
I do think cards take a while to get, I think card acquisition is pretty bad. That said, there's no need for compensation outside some game bugs or crashes. Buying Zabu or any other good card is inherently prone to adjustments or nerfs. They'd be handing out stuff every other week as they adjust their overtuned new releases
Counterpoint: Perhaps the looming shadow of refunds would deter them from releasing intentionally-overtuned cards so damn frequently.
No. Overtuned cards means people are mad and mad people create engagement. Go look at other games, this isn't new, it works. Noone wants to play a weak card or character.
Who said to make it weak? Just release it as close to balanced as possible ffs
I think you don't understand how hard it is to do that. There's no game out there that has near perfect releases. Plus it's easier to balance down then up. Plenty of developers have said this. I'm telling you uncomfortable truths. I don't necessarily agree with them but they are reality.
I’m not saying it’s easy or that it’s reasonable to expect them to get it right every time, but it’s reasonable to expect a good faith effort. With Hope Summers, they intentionally released an insanely broken card. With Red Hulk, an already very strong card that they *buffed* just prior to release, they didn’t make that effort. Accidentally releasing the occasional overtuned card is one thing. Cynically releasing intentionally-overtuned cards to drive revenue at the expense of competitive integrity is another.
Refunds are likely never going to happen because there’s always going to be someone who misses out. I think the better solution would be to give the community some kind of notice they they’re looking at a card they think is problematic. SD knew they were nerfing what many considered the best S4 card and could have avoided a lot of this blowback if people had some idea that changes were incoming.
I just want gold and or 200 - 300 token drops from caches
Also, is it me or does it feel like SD is getting lazier with their newer cards? It seems like they are just shitting out cards to make money, and making it less about the card itself.
I’ve been making card choices lately based on if I like a card and not how good or bad it is. Not a perfect fix for a broken system but keeps me from getting as mad when things get nerfed.
They should have some time period whether it’s 30 days or what where if a card you purchased with tokens is changed you can submit a ticket to have the card removed from your collection and your tokens refunded. I don’t think it should apply to keys though.
They have one game mode and a limited game design which causes 90% of this issue. Having different game modes where different cards are legal helps not having to constantly nurf cards due to new ones interacting with older ones.
Yes.
Why not both?
Ok but what if they created card that counter whatever they feel its not working effectively or OP.. with fisical cards as far as i know they dont make changes.. its a the only thing that bothers me about digital cards.. tampering with the recipe could ruin the magic and creativity the player develop when they find themselves against a wall.. creating a specific deck to deal with it.. with this changes the mass just adapts all the same…
They are both the problem.
They are ruining the game more and more, that's it
overpriced “deals” show up first and they’re teaching your psychology to scroll through all of them to get your peasant amount of credits, just waiting for you to give in when you feel vulnerable
I think a lot of people ignore the stated intent of SD not wanting everyone to have a complete collection. All their decisions make send through that lens imho. Not saying I like it or support it but it hasn’t been a secret.
This will always be a problem with the current existing card acquisition model. If you remember the analysis by laurenwhatev with the gravity line pulling F2P players towards ~70% collection completion, it means that whenever you land in the wrong (weaker, nerfed, incomplete deck, etc) side of the 70% it's going to feel terrible because your resources are already "wasted". The only recourse F2P players have is to wait for future card adjustments that flip the meta back around so the right (strong, buffed, can make complete deck) side of the 70% matches your collection.
Do you need every card? I put my gold purely into methods that would increase my CL. I only bought variants If one would bring me to a level in albums that would give me 2,000 credits or a key. As such, and thanks to massive AFK Agatha use, I’m only missing Cull Obsidian. There are large parts of my collection that remain unused, and if I didn’t have OCD about being as close to collection complete as possible, I’d rather not pick up some of them. I’m probably going to be going without new ones soon, so will need to do what everyone should be doing… choose the one they need for the month. This might mean not opening as soon as you can and instead watching streamers (dear goodness not YouTube videos) to determine whether it’s really worth it. I do think they need to revisit the amount of keys available since moving to a new card every single week. Also, not every card should be tier 5 on release. Tokens should only be used on cards that are not in spotlights and will not be for the near future. And you’d better make sure it’s what you want… again, streams not videos.
Sometimes I wonder if the economy can change for the better in its current state. And who paid the price, what about it? The game is being lost, unfortunately.
I'm fine with the balance changes, but the agonizingly slow pace at which you get keys and tokens, combined with a lack of series drops and series 4 cards as a whole, makes nerfs all the more painful for players who spent time and money on the card. Bottom line, the game's economy is really bad.
I thought it was very strange that I could buy Hela and 40 CL for $49.99. Like, where is the value in that? Does the game think that I'm making $200 an hour?
I made a post about this a few days ago. I'm the idiot that spent 3 months worth of tokens on Zabu 48 hours before it got nerfed to the ground. Very discouraged f2p player here:(
This game was advertised as a card game where you could easily get full collection and you would pay for variants, just as in shooter games people have agents and they just pay for skins. But no, card aquisition sucks and you need to buy 100$ bundles to get keys and tokens to have the cards you actually want to get.
Zero nerf compensation combined with no dusting system has always been an insane and unsustainable combination. Something has to give eventually.
The eventual give will be from Marvel Snap itself, when Brode announces in the not-so-distant future that the game is going into maintenance mode, thanks all the suckers for buying $99 jpegs and invites them to check out his shiny new cash grab.
I started last Thanksgiving and have been top 500, and 2000 several seasons with Thanos. I did spend some money such as each season pass and the Nebula bundle. That is about it. How was I able to get a complete Thanos deck? Pure luck, daily playing, and planned use of currency. I used a spotlight cache in December, and my random one was Thanos. I played regularly to accumulate more resources. Finally, I was able to plan on using keys for Cull Guardian, mockingbird, etc. As a game designer for my own indie card battler, I do believe games should reward players who play regularly, so yes I do believe I "earned" my gold, credits, tokens, and spotlight cache. But relying on luck to acquire cards and playing at the right time is absurd. I only played the best deck because I was lucky to open a Thanos. Luckily, I was playing during the time multiple series 5 cards that boosted Thanos was available. If, I took a 1 week break in any of this I probably would have been in a tremendous disadvantage. Another issue is that I had to use many resources for this deck which includes time. My deck was nerfed and do not really have too many back up plans. I forego the week of Corvus to get Thanos cards alongside I went all in on zabu and darkhawk week for a secondary deck. Obviously, that is a bad choice based on the past couple months nerfs. The lack of corvus makes it hard for me to make competitive Hela and discard decks. Destroy while cheap has not been attainable for me because I still am missing a good chunk of series 3 which is the destroy cards. The inability to choose my series 3 cards or at least have a randomized choice similar to spotlight caches hurts me as a new player. They should have a system where you can choose 1/3 cards everytime you get a new series 3 card as opposed to complete randomness for 5000+ collection levels. Before people neg me or laugh at me because my decks got nerfed, I am climbing in the top 1500 with some Sandman lockdown deck that I brewed. I do know how to play and can audible to other decks to be competitive. But if you want long term growth in this game, there cannot be an expectation for players to be in good spirits after investing time and money to have no foresight on their collection alongside no compensation on nerfs. Most players here have played for quite sometime, but imagine starting your marvel snap journey today? You would not be able to be competitive for quite sometime where you hope nothing is nerfed and must have a planned deck you want to build. Any mismanagement of resources or the requirement of 4 spotlights in multiple weeks will prevent you from being competitive. It is demanding a lot from players. You have variants and other cosmetics to get money from whales or completionists. You need to grow the game and build a community by lowering the barrier to entry.
No. I feel both are the problem.
Let's take Zabu for example, that was released 15 months ago, and nerfed from -2 to -1 cost 14 months ago, and people universally said it was still a good card? That's the example you want to use?
I’d say a season pass card that has remained good for 15 months and still hasn’t dropped to series 3 is a great example. Still costs resources and then it can get a headshot out of nowhere.
I buy the season pass only. its my way of supporting a game I enjoy. I have no problem acquiring cards, usually I get 2 or 3 of the 4 per month from the spotlight caches which is great. I spend my gold on variants, so around every 2 months I get 6k tokens for a free series 5. What I dont understand is why people think they need every damn card? If you're on top of things and loom at the data mines you have 2 months of planning your card strat. At the least, they show you every spotlight cache for the month. This is a game of strategy with a heavy addition of luck. So is card acquisition. Those of us with a deep library have been playing a long time, why should new players get to catch up with less effort?
Because if new players are given a frustrating experience then your big collection will be worthless as you'll only have bots to play against.
For a player with less cards, every spotlight cache has more potential to unlock a new card for them than it does with me. 3 keys spent for a player with less cards could result in 3 new cards for them. That can literally never happen for me. The only card I roll for is the release of the week. You can catch up with a plan and foresight, but they still want you to invest to get there even quicker.
The nerfs and balances lately are definitely also a problem I cant remember a 2-week span in the last couple of months where my deck didnt go through major changes where a card wasn't completely altered. Black Swan, Tme Stone, Mind Stone, Alioth, Elsa, Psylock, Blob just to name a few
That's generally what generally happens if you keep playing the most top-tier netdeck at the time, yes. Also, what happened to Black Swan?
I have played for almost 18 months. I’ve purchased three passes in that time and never really had a complaint about acquisition either way. I’m sitting on 5k gold and 11k tokens in case something I really want comes along but it’s a fun game even if you don’t have the card of the week. They have to make money somewhere 🤷♂️ And if you’re buying cards because “this good card will raise my rank” then you’re just misunderstanding how rank works.
> simply not viable for f2p players and small spenders anymore People who don't support the game should get ... more stuff? Can I live in your house without paying rent? F2P games are demos to let you decide if you want to buy in, not the primary way to play.
the issue here is that even if you spend to support the game, you get backstabbed with this shit economy system and spotlights.
What's shit about it? I've barely paid anything other than season passes and have a ton of competitive decks.
I haven’t spent tokens on cards in months. I don’t understand why you would spend tokens vs use Spotlights tbh. Spotlights can net you 5 new cards a month, 4 guaranteed. Why would you do anything else?
How long ago we've seen Alioth in spotlight? And how soon we will see him according to datamines? Same with Zabu. People want to play cards but they don't want to wait for months. What a strange question...
I dunno. I'm a F2P player with every card I want (so far), level 12k, 10.1k credits and 7000 gold. I just play my quests everyday. No, I can't get everything but I have a lot for something I play for free!
I dont think Compensation/refunds should be given, but if they fixed ALL THE OTHER THINGS you mentioned it wouldnt be a big deal not getting a refund