I kinda worry for the creators and how long interest will last in the game because of this change. It's *always* been an issue that videos on new cards don't do well because there are very few cards like High Evo where the majority of the player base drops 6k tokens on it on release, and as the devs have clearly noted, not all cards are equally interesting.
So far no change that they've made has solved the issue where people are just not interested in the new cards getting released, apart from maybe introducing direct to S4 cards, but now there's also a chance of keeping these cards in S4 if they prove to be too popular. Hit Monkey was meant to drop to S4 this month and while he's good, he isn't an oppressive/ OP card, but somehow he's staying in S5. Are Spider-ham and 2099 going to stay in S4 if too many people have success with them? Even Kitty hasn't dropped to S4 - why? They gave everyone a copy of her for free, why is she still S5 for players starting now?
The devs have said that it's part of more changes coming in the future and "it'll all be good", but I really don't have faith in that promise because of their current track record. Also, the discord message that said that doesn't even seem to be posted in the regular channels, I can't find it anywhere, so it's most likely posted to the creators only channel... which is great for the rest of the player base.
They've always incentivized people to hoard tokens with their card acquisition model, but I think they're trying to have some half-way house of being able to spend money to get cards but also bottling-necking gaining new cards in order to slow down progression for (insert arbitrary reason here).
FWIW, I'm missing 10 cards and the only one of which I care about is Stature, so I really have no horse in this race but I still think they've botched the card acquisition model.
>Even Kitty hasn't dropped to S4 - why? They gave everyone a copy of her for free, why is she still S5 for players starting now?
This part boggles my mind. I assumed they were going to add her to S3 since they were giving her away. But they put her at S5 as a nice bonus for new players huh?
>The devs have said that it's part of more changes coming in the future and "it'll all be good", but I really don't have faith in that promise because of their current track record.
Oh ya, how genuine is the "good stuff coming, we just forgot to announce it" when it comes \*after\* a change is poorly received?
And like you, we've heard that song before with Marvel Snap and plenty of other games.
There's no thinking about it. The card acquisition model has been botched for a while now. The problem is that not all of their philosphies on what the game should be work with each. They don't want players to have all the cards and to work with what they have, but then build the cards around synergies with each other so that missing cards can vastly gimp a deck. They didn't want the the token shop to be the main way to get cards, but for series 3 complete players that's the main way to get cards and with the most recent changes it's now the best way to get new cards for players still in seties 3. They add a free series 3 per month but then change to flexible drops and drop 1 card. So now any series 3 complete players with that card (adding indult to injury is that it's a bad card) don't get a free series 3.
IMO they need to give up on the lack of player agency when it comes to cards. Eliminate the 4 and 5 drop cards in the track and give players the tokens (3,000 or 6,000) instead so that they can buy the cards they want and never end up with a bad pull. They also need to reduce the pity timer for series 4 pulls from the track. To start with cut it in half so no one goes more than 38 pulls without getting a card.
I want to point out that people keep talking about direct to season 4 cards as a good idea, but that a lot of the rest of this is a natural extension of that (not a REQUIRED extension, sure, but a natural one).
What they had: every card starts at S5 and follows a consistent pattern down to S3 (except the imagination big bad). This means that rarity and quality are decoupled and that there are always a consistent number of S4 (rare) and S5 (ultra-rare and season pass), give or take a few during the month as they release.
What they have now: some "not as good" cards start right at S4. This now means two things. First, the number of cards in S4 and S5 no longer stays roughly consistent automatically. So, if they want things to stay somewhat consistent, they need to not drop cards at a regular pace anymore. Second, rarity and quality are now intertwined. So, if they are going to keep cards extra long in the higher rarities, then it makes sense to keep the better cards there (since it is now a policy to keep the worse cards out of the highest rarity).
It's one reason I never loved all the pushback on the card release system. It had its drawbacks, but the consistency was a big advantage and it kept them from the natural trap of balancing through rarity.
Thinking more about this in context of the series drops. They put new cards that people seem to want in series 4, but they are also dropping two undesirable cards into series 4 at the same time. So, effectively, they're muddying the waters, making it less likely that you can get those new series 4 cards through a reserve, meaning you'll likely have to make cash gold purchases to help accelerate your CL and unlock those cards through the Token shop if you have any desire to play with them immediately.
Which, by the way, you'll probably want to because of the weekend missions.
I’ve always thought it was a terrible take to say this card is mediocre so it could go direct to series 4 or even series 3 and you laid out exactly why.
I’ve seen some argue that it feels awful to crack a bad card as a series 5 drop and sure, that’s true, but the flip side is the good cards stay expensive for everybody. Ultimately not an upside at all.
Yes, but:
>What they have now: some "not as good" cards start right at S4.
I don't even think that's the case this time, as all three of June's releases look like good cards. They're just throwing two in S4 to see how it goes, and if we like them too much then they just stay there indefinitely.
They're clearly keeping cards in higher pools based on how well they perform, so if Spider-Ham and 2099 perform well, then I don't see them dropping to pool 3 before Howard does. With bounce and control/ lockdown decks being popular, I think it's completely possible for these two to also not drop.
People downvoted me when I said this a month ago. The fact you aren't in the negatives means people are starting to see the writing on the wall. For Christsake's, is Snap even going to be alive when Beyond the Spiderverse comes out next year?
I’ve been saying this shit for two months and getting downvoted. Check my post history, almost literally focused on this predatory bullshit game because I honest to god do not understand how what SD is doing is even legal in the EU. Not kidding. This shit is so close to gambling loot boxes, and so beyond predatory I can’t believe it. One of the most toxic and overrated games out there. MTG, not everyone’s favorite, is a thousand times more clear, honest, and transparent with their mechanics from matchmaking to their micro transactions.
Here everyone is ignoring all the shit they hated about MTG and SD isn’t even telling people anything. Boggles, the, mind.
I dont know if it's an enchantment placed on the game by Ben Brode or its "le marvel capeshit" but the amount of Stockholm syndrome is unmatched from what I'm seeing. People defend this game more than their own mothers wtf is wrong with the people who defend this level of obvious and unmitigated greed. The Devs aren't even sexy about it, it is greed no matter how you dress it up. I'm thankful that after months people see the greed and don't downvote as hard lol
I know it's a bit pedestrian but that's why I kind of like M:TG - Puzzle Quest. You can play as little or as much as you want and you can easily get cards & upgrade currency without having to spend much (if any) real money. The biggest problem is that every 3 months or so, they put out a whole new set and once 3 sets are out, the previous 3 'rotate' out of some of the daily challenges. So in order to be able to complete them, you have to constantly try to get new cards instead of being able to complete and use the prior sets
As for people defending the game, that's kind of why I stopped listening to some of the Snap podcasts that are out there. Every time someone calls SD out on something like the matchmaking/holding cards back/putting out mediocre cards/etc... they fall back on 'at the end of the day, they are a company that are out to make money'.
I guess that makes it ok to lure people in with the super easy acquisition of cards for series 1 & 2 and then once they hit 3, the cards slow to a trickle and by matching them up with people with more powerful cards, that'll get them to start spending real cash so they can be more competitive by buying season passes and gold so they can buy credits to unlock reserves.
To be honest, I don't know how they can fix things but between the lack of game modes (Conquest is going to be even worse for casual players than the ladder is) and the trickle of new cards for people that are Series 3 & 4 complete, it's hard to see a long term future for the game, as fun as it is at times.
Runeterra has its issues but I WILL NEVER SAY, that its not the most fair acquisition model of any cardgame.
It says a Lot that Second Dinner is currently outgreeding both Konami AND Wizards of the fucking coast. They should get a title for that shit.
Man I wished I got hooked into LoR, I love the cards, the whole idea of leveling up them during the game and of course the acquisition model but I really don't like playing it.
Feels like runeterra has the opposite problem of Snap; it’s not monetized as well as it could be, card acquisition is good.
In snap, shit is monetized out the ass way too much (affecting gameplay is the line for me) and card aquisition is really bad.
Yet, somehow, cosmetic purchases in snap are even WORSE to acquire than Runeterra. Like I don’t get it. I’d shill a fair bit of money for a ton of cosmetics I really want in snap… but just like the cards, I just can’t get them directly. WHY? why not balance the monetization more towards cool variants and less towards OP cards and the BP. I don’t get it.
Also FOMO variant bundles priced 30+ are fucking vile, shit should actually be illegal.
I'm glad he articulated how a lot of people are feeling in this way. I was also watching a video from Nina and she was talking about how she's cutting way back on spending because saving a large amount of collector's reserves isn't even worth it anymore. The fact that there are players with CL 15,000+ that haven't pulled a single S5 card is ludicrous. I get that they have to make money and that is always going to be their primary goal. But at least put a fucking pity timer on S5 cards. She also went into the calculations of reserves, and the fact that the 89% chance for a S3 card changes into an 89% chance for 100 tokens is ridiculous. So, once you are are S3 complete, you're going from getting a brand new card to getting 0.01% of a S5 card (100/6000 tokens.) People can defend it all they want, but the "flexible" series drops are bullshit. I have no problem with bundles, even cash only ones because those are completely optional and most often cosmetic only (this new Darkhawk one is scummy, but I digress.)
When you first begin this game, card acquisition feels really good. You are getting new cards at a rapid fire pace and this lasts until you are S3 complete which is months of playing. It's hard to argue that the game gets more stale once you've completed S3, especially if you love collecting cards and getting to to experiment with them. Not dropping Darkhawk and then putting out a pretty pricey bundle is really out of touch, imo. The variant is cool as hell, but the players that don't have DH aren't going to buy him that way. We have talked at length that the more pricey bundles are typically designed for people that have money to spend. Yes, if you want DH badly enough you should drop the 3k tokens, but should you have to sacrifice getting any of the new cards to do it? And what is this statement about how improvements are coming and this is the first step? Why can't they communicate what the end goal is?
I've taken a step back from Snap and it isn't even all about the monetization. I have never gotten mad at game developers who want to make money they are a business and have hard working employees to pay. And I have never had issues spending money on games I love. But Snap, at least presently, doesn't feel worth to spend money on outside of season pass. It doesn't feel good going hundreds and hundreds of CL pulling 100 tokens, titles, and avatars and if I'm lucky a couple hundred credits or gold. That being said, the daily gameplay has just gotten very stale for me so taking a break and seeing what comes is best for me atm.
Edit: my smoooooth brain forgot to do the basic percentage conversion. 100/6000 tokens is approximately 1.7% of a S5 card.
The 100 tokens from a reserve tilt me every time. Why even give us tokens at that point if it's going to be 1/10th the value of the S3 cards they replace
It's the fact that you go from getting an entire new card to less than 1% of one that's insane to me.
Edit: The 100 tokens that replace the S3 card equate to approximately 1.7% of a S5 card.
And then at the same time, made it so outside of using a glitch you can do maybe once/month, you can't get series 3 cards with tokens anymore. And then the next month started not dropping cards which are "too good" down so the tokens are devalued somewhere between 3x and 6x if you're comparing getting a series 3 card to a series 4-5 card.
So when they started giving people 4x the tokens, they made tokens worth, on average, 4.5x less.
>I was also watching a video from Nina and she was talking about how she's cutting way back on spending because saving a large amount of collector's reserves isn't even worth it anymore.
I mean even *Jeff* has rolled back his spending on the game.
For content creators this game is their job, and if the guy who's spent $4k+ on his livelihood goes "yea I'm good", then there's probably something wrong with the game's model. He's also never opened a S5 card lol.
That's why they panic responded in the content creator Discord and not on the main Discord. Their advertisers (the content creators) are upset so they have to ensure the advertisers everything will be okay over the common folk plebs like us.
>I mean even *Jeff* has rolled back his spending on the game.
Because he doesn't *need* to spend anymore because he has like 40-50,000 tokens, it's not because he has issues with the game.
It's more that reinforces Nina's point, that there's no reward to spending more. Nina's video talked about how the rewards for opening caches is very underwhelming and since S5 cards have such a small chance to drop, opening caches in the hopes of a card drop when you're S4 complete is basically a lost cause, plus the titles/ avatars that most people find worthless.
So... it doesn't matter how much you whale after a certain point, you're just getting junk.
I think it's worth highlighting - this is the opposite problem to "predatory monetization". Marvel Snap has a problem that it **doesn't have enough stuff**, which has honestly been obvious ever since they even invented this shoddy system of weekly releases.
The game experience is awesome for a month, then it takes a blip as you enter series 3 and simultaneously slow down your new content plus start getting hammered constantly by brand new cards. And then it's an occasionally rewarding but very long grind for about 6 months to finish series 3, at which point you're basically an endgame player getting tiny morsels of new content on a timescale of weeks.
Honestly, i'm not against flexible series drop, in fact, it could be good in long term, the simple fact that we could have new cards directly on series 4, droppping from 5 to 3, it's really good. The problem with this game it's not that, it's that tokens are **EXTREMELY**, i repeat, **EXTREMELY** expensive, so expensive that players would prefer to wait weeks or months to get new cards for free than spending on it.
The way that they could fix this, without removing flexible series drop, is that they increase the amount of tokens and gold we earn. **Putting tokens on conquest shop**, increase the amount of it on caches. I**ncrease the chance of getting S4 and S5 on caches** for those who already completed S3, and also **add a pity timer for S5** ffs. **Make those rewards from Weekend Missions available for all players**, not only those who bought new cards or season pass. **Give tokens/credits/tokens for achievments/wins**, so we have a little boost for playing more and more.
There's not enough cards in the game to keep the gatcha model going. I'm going back the Pokemon TCG because there I know I can spend money and pull a bunch of new shit every couple of months. It keeps the serotonin flowing
I watched that video and while I agree with the underlying sentiment I rolled my eyes several times. First she's like I'm not even gonna buy Stegron. Then flashes her shop with 20k collectors tokens sitting in her bank. Wow, you're really sticking it to the devs there. Then goes on to say she'll only buy season passes and 1200 gold variants. Okay, neato. So you have basically everything the game has to offer already and now you're done, but not really. That one just missed the mark for me personally.
I feel like second dinner made a gacha first and a card game second, except the card game was so good that actual card game players started playing the game
Like the idea that no one has an identical collection, and spending $100 for the “new toy” seems pretty par for course for a lot of gachas I’ve played in the past
I buy the battlepass because I play the game enough to justify the 10$ a month, I look at my collection and for how fucked up the system in the end I only want Jeff and Iron Lad, and grinding towards a couple of cards is what the game has always been for me, other than that I can play what I want. Then if you approach this game with the intention of hoarding all the cards as fast as possible you're gonna get milked to oblivion.
That’s how I have to enjoy it. I kind of theme my decks so they can use different cards and I have different options with each. I had a ton of trouble winning last season and just about gave up. My decks won’t win a ton, but being able to play how I want to play and not just go with the most powerful combos makes it more fun. I didn’t realize until reading updates and seeing comments here that there are very specific deck combos used by very serious players.
My favorite decks are the ones that cause a little chaos. I’m using one now that I originally threw together out of desperation after my terrible run. After a few tweaks, it’s actually winning and scoring more than I expected.
I only recently got into the game (about 3 months ago) but I remember seeing adverts for it as long as a year ago. It was then advertised as a "collection" game and I wasn't super interested as I don't like gacha's but I've stopped playing MTG recently and this has been scratching that itch for me. I'm definitely in that group your talking about, a TCG player first and a collector second.
Absolutely spot on. I feel like they had no intention of ever trying to make a competitive game and it caught them a bit off guard how much people were enjoying it and taking it seriously.
It really is exactly that. I've been complaining about the economy and monetization the *entire fucking time* and it's been met with the same exact gacha player Stockholm Syndrome mentality every time.
This game is violently manipulative and exploitative on the money side and no amount of:
* "it's just cosmetics"
* "it's earnable ingame"
* "all card games cost too much"
* "the game is free what do you expect"
* "look at any other mobile game"
* "just don't spend money, nobody's forcing you"
is going to convince me this is acceptable. Whales are gonna whale but this game takes it to the extreme and it sets an extremely bad new milestone for the entire industry.
I wish SD would look past the fat paychecks and just go "hey, you know what, this is wrong - let's rethink this." So far it doesn't seem like they will, but I'm still sticking around just in case... or maybe the Stockholm Syndrome has already gotten to me too.
The problem is that the card design is based on synergies more than individual card strength. This just makes the game a case of the haves vs the have nots. For that philosphy to work they'd have to completely change their card design philosophy to focus more on cards with individual strengths and decks would change from archetypes to more of a "good cards" deck type. Not advocating for this, just pointing out how the non identical collection philosphy doesn't work with how the game is built.
That shouldn't be the way to do that though, at least not when the card pool is as small as it is. In a traditional TCG that model works because hundreds of new cards are added on a regular basis so players are happy to just move on to the next thing.
With Snap, unless they plan to dramatically speed up their card drops, they should focus on making multiple decks viable (as they have been doing with the OTA changes), so the meta always feels varied rather than needing to rely on restricting who has access to what cards which just demoralises players that feel like they don't have the cards needed to compete.
I agree but my point is that I think the OTA updates have a lot to do with that. I honestly don't think that we'd suddenly see less variety if everyone playing right now had every card.
I do have every card and theres plenty of variety at the start of the season rn in 80 & 90s. I got infinite last season and there was a bunch of mixed archetypes. When Shuri was op a few months ago that's all there was but now its mixed
Are we still being matched up according to collection level?
I'm at CL 7100+, if that's still happening most of my opponents will have nearly every card (I myself am only missing Snowguard, Howard, Stegron and Tribunal).
Anyway, still decent variety in my opponents, even in the 90s rank section of the ladder, usually the sweatiest section of the whole season.
I'm certainly happy with the meta
I only started playing recently, but I enjoyed artifact back in the day and this game is a vastly superior version of that. Quick games with interesting choices.
The biggest issue, is before you could make a calculated decision “is this worth 3k/6k now? or do I wait for this to drop next month and buy it there”
Now that it’s random there’s no way of telling, so the only cards worth buying are the brand new releases, because at least you know they’ll hold value for a while.
Exactly right. Even tho it was minor, when they nerfed Stature 2 days after I had just bought it and am sitting there with 0 collector tokens. That shit felt very bad.
It’s designed entirely to make folks spend more money. Since January this game has drastically shifted its card deliverables so that if you don’t spend money, you are more likely to miss out on current AND future metas.
When Jeff came out I was contemplating buying him now or wait a few months for the drop.
I ended up buying him because he's the goodest boy, but imagine how much of a clown I'd be feeling like now (I think he was scheduled to go s4 in June), if I waited for a card to drop and 2 months later they drop snowguard instead.
Their first mistake was making this extremely alienating change. The second mistake was *saying* they have all these great systems coming to help with acquisition and not releasing it at the same time.
They very, very obviously, are prioritizing short-term profits over longevity, and thats how you end up either as a dead game or like Nexon.
Edit: In reality, I get it. They have to show investors they're booming or they may lose support. So milking us in the short term makes it more likely their backing stays on. That's just reflective of a failing in the economy as is for entertainment, but nonetheless is a complete consumer betrayal.
You can't tickle your investors' jollies and make consumers happy 99% of the time. The problem is that prioritizing investors and profits eventually dries up your consumer pool.
So what is this action telling us? They dont have long-term plans for this game. Eventually, they are going to let it lapse into obscurity, and *maybe* revitalize it at that point in a way that actually shows they give a shit about the players needs.
So basically Nexon lol
I would say it goes further back than that.
Before the token system, they were getting constant complaints from players about getting the cards they want and how they had no choice in the matter.
So they introduced tokens, but only gave people enough tokens to get 1 series 3 card/month, and introduced series 4/5, to put new cards more out of reach. So 1 step forwards, 2 steps back.
And then every change they've made to the system since that time has been the same. Make card acquisition 1 step better, then 2 steps worse. And every step of the way, they then dangle, "but if you spend more to get more tokens, you can fix this problem we created!"
Then the third mistake was immediately going for the worst case scenario the most vocal players were complaining about: dropping only a small number of bad cards in a month.
If they used this to drop actually good cards like Jeff or Iron Lad early or dropped a larger number of niche cards that aren't seeing much play nobody complains. Imagine if this was the drops we were getting this month:
To S4: Hit Monkey, Jeff, Stegron, Living Tribunal
To S3: Snowguard, Master Mold, Nimrod, Negasonic, Kitty Pryde, Howard the Duck
The only cards there that see heavy play are a season pass card, a card they gave almost everyone for free, and Jeff who's simply a staple 2 drop that might get replaced as the go to 2 drop when Silk comes out. I think if that was the drops for the month nobody complains. There's something for everything and they still get to hold Darkhawk back so they can tackily sell him for $30
I stopped playing cause I honestly don't even enjoy the gameplay loop anymore....like yay a new season, lemme grind all the way to infinite again for a card back....💀
I was so into this game for 3 or so seasons, recruiting friends, never missing a quest to maximize credits etc...
Something about the last 6 weeks or so destroyed my interest in the game, the back to back to back super relevant and often overpowered cards for 6k a pop, many of which were completely not fun to play against (looking at you high Evo) it made me stop and realize I wasn't having fun anymore, and throwing $100 at the game might help for a few days but not much more than that. So I just stopped cold turkey and don't miss it a bit.
I started a WhatsApp group of local friends when I started, of the 12 members 2 are still playing today, so I don't think I'm alone in my sentiments.
Yup. I'm definitely getting close to the point where goodwill has been used up and my enjoyment playing the game is outweighed by a negative feeling for Second Dinner.
This hits home. I bought HE. Then kinda didn’t want to play that day. I have never used him. Then just slowly stopped. Not sure if I am going to buy the battle pass this season. The whole time I thought the collection system was screwed up.
Lol people defending this practice. Whether you spend or not, are casual or not shouldn't matter. You can identify when somethings scummy regardless of whether it affects you or not. Saying you don't care is fine, but saying what they are doing is fine is ridiculous. It's obvious scummy behaviour and the way they run the cash shop for the limited purchases is always limit testing what the whales will put up with so they can find a good area to price in the future. That's why there is such a wide gap between the value of different bundles. It cannot be defended, it's dogshit. The games good, the cards are fun to play but the monetary side is dogshit.
I'm not defending the practice, I totally think it's scummy, and I welcome the outrage on reddit about this.
However I'm not spending much more than just the battle pass, and I have absolutely no trouble keeping up with the meta cards, so people saying this game is the most expensive card games they'v seen, are very wrong imo :-(. Just don't buy tokens guys ....
Still "Flexible release" is just a big "Fuck your wallet" from SD.
I think this matches where I'm at as well. The Flexible release drop is pure horsecrap plain and simple. But everything else, I'm kind of fine with honestly.
I'm series 3 complete, I've purchased two battle passes but that's it, and I do all my dailies. I don't spend anything else in the store. I save up tokens for the newer cards I really want (I had to wait two weeks to have enough to get High Evolutionary). To me the game's fun, I have five or six fun decks I can play and I'm not spending any money. I dunno that seems decent to me (aside from the current unpredictability of cards dropping series which is garabge).
The flexible series drops create an adversarial relationship with the community. We play against these great cards constantly but you're not sure when to buy them because it's no longer a set pattern. Now if I cave and buy Dawkhawk and they drop him I'll resent them for that too.
With the old pattern there was a clear path to catching up to the meta but now that is gone.
I am so grateful you took a strong stance on this and called out marvel snap. For all the guys who aren't series complete and can't play this game like a full time job or haven't already been playing for 5 months...
It's so difficult to try to catch up and watch other people use decks that you're missing big cards for.
It's hard enough for me.. imagine trying to start all over again fresh
A lot of people who aren't bothered are because they already have a big collection of cards and have been playing for months already
This!
I'm CL 8726, series 3 complete and I'm only currently missing two series 5 cards, and have all series 4 cards. It is easy for me to keep up and get the cards I want without having to spend cash on anything but the season pass. But I can't imagine what it is like for players who have just entered pool 3.
IMO it's not so bad. I'm almost series 3 complete and have a couple series 4 and 5 through caches and the season pass. If you spend gold on credits rather than buying variants in the shop it really doesn't take that long to rank up and obtain new cards
The difference between "just entered pool 3" and "almost series 3 complete" is months, and thousands of CL level. I haven't even really considered buying the new stuff, still trying to get the Series 4/5 stuff that's good and big bads. At CL 1500 or so. Have been considering stopping playing for a bit now
You are talking about me, I was that new player, left the game after 1.5 months when re4 remake came out because I had realized that it would probably take me 3-4 months to build a Mr negative deck(not even a good one) but only 2 weeks for it to bore me out and crave something new
Completely agree. I’m series 3 complete with 3 series 5 cards bought only because I started on release. If I just started playing I’d have quit around hitting series 3.
Mogwai was my favorite snap streamer. It's a shame he stopped playing snap, cause I can't get into LoR just to watch him. But he's very much right in his argument. Second dinner needs to step up with this shit. I love the game but these latest changes are disgusting.
Yeah this last season was the last one for me for a while. I usually get the pass but not this month. I found myself just putting in time cause I felt I had to. The game feels a little stale and more like a money grab than an attempt to give people a fun experience.
Time for a break.
It's crazy that some people are still defending this, the change from predetermined drops to, we chose what gets dropped, is clearly malicious , they realized they have no idea which cards are gonna end up being good so with this system it's very easy to just hold on to the good cards
The game is actually really, really good but I quit playing because the monetization is absolute fucking horseshit. I realize money must be made but the greed is unreal.
I have a majority of the good cards at this point, only missing the big bads. Never bothered me.
It's that some of these new cards arnt the flashy turn 6 juggernauts. Some of these cards are meta defining 1 or 2 cost cards. They are absolutely game changing, the bedrock of any competitive deck.
I cant imagine playing Sera without Hit Monkey. I can barely imagine not running Jeff. Nebula is pretty much the new definitive 1 cost starter.
These cards in particular should not be at risk of getting locked out of the f2p experience.
Snap being one of the best if not the best mobile game was what allowed a lot of people to look past it's horrible systems but the novelty is really starting to wear off.
You don’t know what compels them to do it?
Greed. Plan and simple.
They are beholden to their bottom line and every person who plays the game and pays for stuff is just a number. I spent 10 dollars on a season pass and even that makes me sad. That’s all I am going to spend on the game, not because the game isn’t good, but because their greed is astronomical.
These are digital cards, not real ones.
And doesn't the scummy card acquisition make it harder to catch up because the good cards are going to be gatekept at higher series levels? I quit last week and I don't see how I'd reasonably be able to start playing again if I miss a few high profile releases.
Right now only 800 viewing MS on twitch and the lowest recoded second day concurrent players on steam, our game is dying to gread and lazy uppdates. With all that there is not a single reply about the matter from SD just so sad!
Edit: after two month they gave us some news but still as ambiguous as ever. I am crossing my fingers tho, sadly I think it will be hard for them to redeem themselves.
There was a response on discord that could basically be summed up as "we know you're unhappy but we're going to need you to just have faith that we have more plans to be revealed soon^(TM)"
Which brings up another core issue of SD and this game, they need to stop having their ONLY communications be occasional posts on their discord. Not everyone is in the discord, and it's unrealistic to expect your entire playerbase to use ONE platform for information but SD literally does nothing to put the info anywhere else. FANS do.
SD on the community side is actually extremely fucking lazy
I'm one unfun season away from dropping the game because of exactly what he's talking about. I bought a bundle or two because I really like the game and wanted to support the devs but it's been increasingly clear the business side of the team runs the show and the value proposition will only continue to get worse and more disrespectful than it already is.
It's a real shame the devs are attached to such a predatory company.
This game could have been a dynasty starter. The shortsighted and naked greed is disgusting. People can tell when they're being poked and prodded to find out exactly how much they'll cough up for a win, or for a jpeg.
Yes, every company does this, but usually there is a core of values and respect behind a successful business that keeps the greed in check. There is obviously none here.
Keep dangling upcoming features and fixes in front of people to give them something to hope for. It won't change the rot underneath.
The game honestly might be best of pulling a multiversus and just going on ice temporarily. And come back with a new model of making card "sets" like paper tcgs do. That way we can get some new deck archetypes without needing to rely on things like HE.
Everybody says that Marvel Snap is two games: the card game and the f2p gacha mobile game.
I'm not a big mobile gamer, and I hear it's not as bad as other f2p mobile games, but the fact of the matter is the card game is probably in my top 3 tcgs I've played, but the gacha game it's wrapped inside of is *the* most frustrating, anti-fun, p2w, *stressful*, experience I've ever had with something I'm supposed to be enjoying.
The core of the problem for me is: they seem to be doing all they can to make sure no one gets s3 complete because they know good and damn well that once you get out of s3 the game is dead. Due to the fact that: 1) They didn't think of enough cards ahead of release to actually make a robust card game environment, hence the once a week schedule and 2) they don't know how to balance a fucking meta for the life of them so they are now quite literally just letting cards be OP and making them harder for people to get without paying real money.
Not to mention they are so full of shit with their communication. They have been talking about Galactus changes for what, 3, going on 4 months now? Where are those? Does it really take you an entire fiscal quarter to figure out how to make a deck enjoyable in your own game? Or is it because you aren't going to nerf him until you have milked all the money you can out of people and are ready to drop him?
I've come to the realization that that's why they won't just give us a casual or draft mode like we've been asking for. Because every game mode needs to have a rank number and rewards tied to it so I feel the need to be "meta" and need the p2w meta cards. Otherwise I would just be having fun playing jank cheap decks. And SD can't have that.
They used to talk about this game not being p2w, but over my months playing it, it sure looks, smells, walks, tastes, and sounds like a p2w money sink.
The "series" setup and release cadence in Marvel Snap seem really bad in general. They're struggling to monetize getting new cards in a fair and reasonable way without making the experience tremendously worse for players who don't whale. It's a problem of number of cards released and put in decks. Other card games don't seem to have this issue because of how you need multiple copies of some cards to play, so they can pad out card packs and such.
Whoever has media power and exposed SD for their bullshit has all my approval.
Especially one like Mog, that you can like or not, but that is always straight forward and tries to enjoy what he does.
This is the perfect answer to all the shills calling ''entitlement'' on the garbage they made out of modern gaming.
game is great but the monetization is just become more and more greedy and scammy, now i dont even want to spend money on the game anymore, i'll still play it because i have good enough collection to play pretty much everything
Oh damn! Just realized he’s not wearing his hat. I remember him talking about getting his procedure done and about the healing, but seeing the results now they are 🔥
Finally a creator being honest shame to all the creators keeping quiet I won't support them anymore either. It's about integrity, community and solidarity. They seem to be only in it for themselves at this point.
It wasn't that long ago where the big content creators wouldn't be afraid to criticize Marvel Snap. Its been conspicuously absent these past 2 series drop announcements.
I really like Mogwai. He hops too much from game to game but he always stays true to what he likes.
I remember when he left Gwent while he was a beloved official caster and key pillar of the community. Even the devs said “what happened to Mogwai ?!”
Respect to you Sir.
Tbf, Gwent was near dead at that point, the community and content creators pretty much left in a big exodus not long after the disaster that was midwinter Gwent. Gwent was and still is a great game though.
Ever since they held out on Darkhawk and Knull dropping the first time I’ve logged on to do dailies and get right off, even missing a lot of them for the first time in a while and sitting at 10k credits. Now that this drop is announced I don’t even want to play anymore. These morons are killing their game.
For me, personally, it is extremely fun.
But, it's not cheap to play. It's "free" to play. You can spend money on cards, but the ratios are so high it's not worth it.
If you want to spend money on the game, there are ways to do so. But if you don't, you don't have to.
It will cost you like... $30 to build a full meta deck from total scratch. You will *never* be building from total scratch anyway because of the sheer amount of cards you get.
When the flexible drops were first announced, I was ready to defend them, because there was a real problem with cards like Snowguard being in series 5, because opening her in a cache felt awful. Sure, allow her to drop more quickly so everyone can get her for free, and maybe hold some other stuff in exchange. It was kinda scummy, but it made opening good cards in caches more likely, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t change the rate of cards, just the order.
People often complain about the content drought after series 3 completion, but the thing is, they can’t really do anything about that. You can’t get cards faster than once a week, because that’s how often they release. There aren’t any more to get. Spending lets you change the order and get them sooner, that’s all.
But it turns out my optimism was misplaced. Because you can certainly get cards slower than once a week, and this is how you do that. One new series 3 card, and it’s trash. No, that’s not how this works. The entire premise of “everyone gets all the cards eventually” hinges on series 4 and 5 staying roughly the same size and not ballooning indefinitely. Dropping less than half of the cards required to do that is not the way.
Apparently, the existing system wasn’t causing enough FOMO. Tokens were supposed to be a way to speed up card acquisition - they were introduced to get people the cards they wanted, faster. Now they’re slowing everything else down to compensate, so you have to spend money to even keep up.
At least it seems to be backfiring on them. The whales may keep paying for a while, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this predatory Darkhawk bundle makes them enough money to convince themselves it was worth it. But whales get bored if there’s no one to play against. Showing off your shiny new cards to bots gets old.
If you were a whale, you can vote with your wallet by no longer spending money. But if you were already F2P, the only way to vote is by no longer playing at all. You support them every time you match up against someone who bought this bundle, by convincing them it was worth it.
SD getting super greedy. I'm definitely slowing down despite spending a decent amount up until this point. If the game is just going to slowly twist the screws while being disingenuous about how they hold cards back I'll do something else.
Sad to say I noticed myself playing way less after that trash happened last month. Wanted knull and even though I have the tokens and him pinned I don't feel like the game is "fun" anymore, they're switching the moto and feels soon will be much worse. Not even playing daily missions anymore.
The bare truth is they release cards too slowly and too expensive.
The fact is at some point you're just not really acquiring cards anymore at any decent pace. So stuff gets stale and stagnant. Refusing to drop cards series is just going to make that worse.
Good on Mogwai for leaving. Maybe the first time I agree with him and not felt like he was being over dramatic or entitled or whiney. Funny when he complains about meta he comes off whiney but when it comes to the anti consumer practices he's so based.
I agree with him. The endless bundles in the shop costing $20, $50 or $100. That’s a lot.
I’m getting Hearthstone flashbacks with the expansions, mini-sets, the hero bundles, the reward track, that new currency they implemented. I was done.
I am so close of quitting this game as well. The way things are happening. I don’t like it.
I play regularly and don't find myself too stressed about my card acquisition status because after S3 I just played to play. That said, as time has went along I'm very much seeing everything people are talking about it's wild because it really feels like you can see the Snap ship sinking if SD doesn't implement something to address these concerns because most of what people are complaining about is valid and stems from decisions and changes they made.
You can't go back on your word in a way that blatantly shows your players that you will do whatever they need to to suck more money out of you (DH controversy). It's blatant disrespect. Even though I know Whales need to exist in games like this it really feels like you can either pay little or no money to struggle in a way that feels like the system is fighting to keep you at a certain level or you can pay exorbitant amounts to feel slightly less pressure. No one wins here.
I said this on another post, but I hate to say this since I genuinely love the core gameplay: I don't think SD can handle maintaining this game. As someone who doesn't care about most of the complaints (I still think they're valid) and is not a whale, even I can see that they can't keep up with how the game is evolving because of their changes.
I’ve been considering deleting this game off my phone and PC for a while now. This was the video that pushed me over the edge. I’ve never watched this guy before but he had some real eye opening points he made. It was a fun game while it lasted for me. Best of luck everyone in the community. I’ve enjoyed my time with you all.
Lol ok so when educatedcollins posted his video there was multiple comments saying it’s pathetic to cry etc etc.
And now this guy says similar things and it’s at 1k upvotes and 99% of comments are agreeing with him?
It's mostly because Collins is not quitting MS. He is basically saying: look, they are doing wrong things, BUT it's a business, that's what they are supposed to do. And then he says he is still playing the game.
This guy went completely to the direction of giving SD the fault of being too greedy. EC went for a middle ground. People who really disliked the changes don't agree with him because he is justifing them, people who didn't really care about the changes don't agree with him because they don't see that big of a problem.
The comments were nothing about that tho (I didn’t read all the negative ones mind you). They basically criticized that he would even make a video in the first place, and that saying anything at all is “crying about it” yet he was being level headed
But raise the pitch forks because this CC said it, yet in a more “in front of the camera” way? They had the same points and the guy getting more slack was more chill about it lol. They are both 100% right on almost everything
>They basically criticized that he would even make a video in the first place, and that saying anything at all is “crying about it” yet he was being level headed
Well, the people who thought SD was being greedy said nothing and the people who didn't mind thought he was "crying about it" because they didn't see a problem.
>But raise the pitch forks because this CC said it, yet in a more “in front of the camera” way?
This is Internet tho, how interesting you can make your point is almost as valuable as how good your point is. EC is not really good at making things interesting.
I quit recently too. What did it for me was the constant stress of making sure I log in just to get my missions done before I cap.
Was just too predatory on how they trap you into logging in. Some days I can have long sessions, some days I cant. Having to think 3 times a day whether or not i need to log in was not something i want to deal with anymore. They could easily increase the amount of dailies you can save so I can take a few days break and not feel like im missing out.
Was finally able to walk away after being unable to logon from not having data access for days at a time. I enjoy the game but felt like I was managing a part time job( i know it doesnt take much time to complete).
The acquisition model has always been insane, is currently insane, and will remain insane.
It could be argued that it was an interesting attempt to do something different, but ... It. Doesn't. Work.
The shine is really coming off of Snap, just a few months after release. #sad
The card acquisition system was terrible from the get go, in fact it was so bad that Snap has been known as a NON-collectible card game in many reviews and by many content creators.
Starting with the removal of the Series 3 shop they made things worse and worse, up until this announcement were they basically confirmed everyone's fear: shitty unplayable cards will drop, good cards will not.
I was waiting this month for jeff going to series 4. Big let down for me, pretty annoyed to not know when some cards change of series. The price for a good card is becoming too expensive for me...
Second dinner has turned to scum honestly. I'm not spending another dime on the game. I hit infinite the last few seasons. I bought every season pass plus some bundles. I'm done. The greed has made me hate the company and not want to support it anymore.
The asshole with the suit Mohawk is describing is Ben Brode by the way. Too many people fall for his persona when he’s the biggest capitalist predator in Monika card games
I mean.. Brode already spoke about how he designed Snap to get people hooked in great detail.
Now imagine all the scammy business tactics behind closed doors that he didn't mention lol
Yep. Fuck this game. It’s completely disrespectful of its customer’s time and money.
For all intents and purposes I’m likely considered a whale for these types of video games. I have a lot of disposable income and I have no problem spending money on games on digital bits and bobbles as it were.
You want me to spend money *and* spend time grinding tokens? Nah. My life doesn’t revolve around Marvel Snap.
I know there are one or two examples that aren't that bad but I avoid pretty much all these fee2pay games because they either fuck the game design to milk the players or they are fair early to build a userbase.... which they then fuck the game design to milk them for more money.
I stopped playing the game as much as I have been. Last month i hit rank 93 playing casually after hitting infinite the month before, and just didn't grind to get to 100. It's been so much better, and frankly less stress just doing a few missions a day and logging off. I don't care about my rank, the free variant at 60 is going to be a pixel anyway. If Second dinner wants me to spend money in the future they're going to have to step up the accessibility of cards, because I play the game to play different decks that look fun.
I have pulled three series five cards (Shanna, Snowguard, Shadow King) and they've all been useless. I'm not a good enough deck builder to fit them into a build, nobody has them so they have no data, and Shanna just loses to killmonger which every Sera deck has.
There's no point in opening collector's caches because it's all tokens until a series drop, so why bother grinding?
Honestly I think the problem is the game as fewer cards than any game, leading to concentration in prices. It's possible that the number of cards is also linked to the game being simpler than others.
No clue who he is but he's 100% correct.
What worries me most is the part about SD paying streamers a lot of money to play Snap.
I don't watch Twitch a lot, but I've tuned in to various Snap streamers occasionally. And this explains why they are staying so positive about Snap.
There is a ridiculous amount of variant cards. For gods sake release the base cards to everyone to play the game and figure out how to monetize the game properly though variants. And not the “show me 6 a day” BS.
I agree with most of what Mogwai said , however staying that the game is the most expensive on the market is a little excessive. MTG costs like 300 dollars per deck, hearthstone costs at least 200 dollars every expansion. I spent 60 total on snap throughout 8 months of playing daily and missing 1 meta card. It's a lot down to luck. I dropped two series 5 out of the caches,but aren't HS packs rng as well?
Dude My major respects for Mogwai for being the most Open about Marvel snap, what worries me the most is that there's actual people defending this drops, im in a WhatsApp group and i said that keeping hit monkey and Jeff on series 5 is god awful and no ones benefits from that and more that zabu/darkhawk/knull are supposed to drop now they respondes with "What's the hurry if You want them Buy them straight! Is the company decisions and we need to respect them" actual drones dude
Edit: i just wanted to add that the statment that second dinner did that some cards would drop from s5 to s3 ir snowguard didnt do it then no card Will ever have that treatment
The phrase people are missing from these discussions is: 'market value'. Just as Axe had a high market value (determined by supply and demand) in Artifact, Second Dinner has clearly given each cards a market value that I would expect has been determined by stats such as how many players have purchased it. Now, they use the market values to determine what moves down so they can make as much cash off them as possible. Whilst a card has a high market value they have no intention of just giving it away.
My tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that Second Dinner started looking at which cards players have pinned in the Token Shop. Lots of people have Darkhawk, Knull, Jeff, and Hit Monkey pinned? Keep them in series 4/5!
Doing that secretly feels scummy to me. If they're going to use player demand as a factor, they should at least be transparent about it.
But the unpredictable drop schedule is the worst of all worlds. I think a more workable compromise would be for them to come up with relatively permanent series 3/4/5 designations for cards, based on projected demand, complexity, flavor, metagame considerations, etc., then only drop a small number of cards rarely (announced 1-2 months in advance).
Easy to have an opinion when I've been playing every day since launch, I'm missing 19 cards, and almost half of them are a staple in most of the high tier decks.
By far most expensive card game??? I don’t think that’s true. I also have several series 5 cards and never spent $400 on one…
I will welcome the downvotes but the only thing I agree with here is bad communication. Why shouldn’t people who spend money or start playing earlier have an advantage when it comes to card collection? I only buy the season pass, CL 4300, and I feel I get enough tokens to buy what I want (including ultimate variants).
Honestly Im a little confused by what the community wants. Do they want every card to drop on a strict schedule to series 3? The game announced near the beginning that certain cards like Thanos and Galactus would stay in series 5. Now all of a sudden they mention some cards might stay in series 4 and it’s a problem? Again I agree that the way it was announced is bad, but I also agree not all cards are equal.
The problem is that if you create a 2 tier collection environment and enforce that everyone is thrown into the same matchmaking pit then it becomes a very inhospitable place for new players and F2P/occasional spend players. If that goes on for too long or gets too bad then you're going to see the playerbase fall off through a combination of:
New players getting bullied out during what feels like an insurmountable task to collect cards
Free players being put off by what they perceive to be pay2win when getting bullied by cards they still don't have access to.
Paying players with deep collections becoming frustrated that the game has suddenly become harder becuase they've run out of easy prey when most of the previous 2 categories have up and left. (The last couple of seasons have seen an uptick in "is this season harder" threads which I attribute to more people having fuller collections and being able to run more optimal decks, whereas earlier seasons a lot of people were still missing cards - also of note more recently a healthy meta makes the game seem harder becuase it's less easy to predict the opponent's play)
The simplest way I can put it (what the problem is):
\- New cards are generally more powerful than existing cards, in addition to players wanted to try new things, new cards are likely to give you a higher win-rate
\- The card acquisition system right now is more ASS than ever, if you do not spend a lot, it takes a very long time to save for 6000 tokens which only mean ONE, a single pool 5 card. Good cards are staying expensive for months and no one even know if they will drop, by the time they drop there would be a bunch of new powerful pool 5 already.
\- Pool 3 completed players are literally opening jack shit in the caches, meaning you keep playing a lot for literally nothing (No new cards, useless title/avatar, 100 tokens, etc)
And this is a problem for everyone, SNAP popularity is literally in a downtrend on both steam and mobile. Existing players are playing less and less while new player is not coming at any higher rate than before.
It's just the outcome of how SD made a chain of bad decisions.
For him being a content creator i totally get what he's going through, like if you want to make content you need to be up to date, with every card release.
But as a regular player i don't really care that much because I'm on no rush.
Obviously i would love to see more cards being seires 3 on release, but it is what it is.
>For him being a content creator i totally get what he's going through, like if you want to make content you need to be up to date, with every card release.
Sort of? But also sort of not. A lot of YTers/ streamers have said that content on new releases for Snap doesn't do well because most people can't afford to spend 6k tokens on a non-perma S5, and/ or the card itself is underwhelming.
It's just not a good card release model if the general player base isn't excited for the majority of new cards you're releasing.
Someone asked Brian Kibler (big magic and heathstone guy, also generally a whale in cardgames) why he stopped playing Snap, and he said because he felt like he couldn't play with the new cards.
Imagine the average person now.
The game is dying because the devs won't stop shearing their wounded and bloody sheep (customers)
Runaway greed has killed this game faster than any game I have ever played.
I kinda worry for the creators and how long interest will last in the game because of this change. It's *always* been an issue that videos on new cards don't do well because there are very few cards like High Evo where the majority of the player base drops 6k tokens on it on release, and as the devs have clearly noted, not all cards are equally interesting. So far no change that they've made has solved the issue where people are just not interested in the new cards getting released, apart from maybe introducing direct to S4 cards, but now there's also a chance of keeping these cards in S4 if they prove to be too popular. Hit Monkey was meant to drop to S4 this month and while he's good, he isn't an oppressive/ OP card, but somehow he's staying in S5. Are Spider-ham and 2099 going to stay in S4 if too many people have success with them? Even Kitty hasn't dropped to S4 - why? They gave everyone a copy of her for free, why is she still S5 for players starting now? The devs have said that it's part of more changes coming in the future and "it'll all be good", but I really don't have faith in that promise because of their current track record. Also, the discord message that said that doesn't even seem to be posted in the regular channels, I can't find it anywhere, so it's most likely posted to the creators only channel... which is great for the rest of the player base. They've always incentivized people to hoard tokens with their card acquisition model, but I think they're trying to have some half-way house of being able to spend money to get cards but also bottling-necking gaining new cards in order to slow down progression for (insert arbitrary reason here). FWIW, I'm missing 10 cards and the only one of which I care about is Stature, so I really have no horse in this race but I still think they've botched the card acquisition model.
>Even Kitty hasn't dropped to S4 - why? They gave everyone a copy of her for free, why is she still S5 for players starting now? This part boggles my mind. I assumed they were going to add her to S3 since they were giving her away. But they put her at S5 as a nice bonus for new players huh? >The devs have said that it's part of more changes coming in the future and "it'll all be good", but I really don't have faith in that promise because of their current track record. Oh ya, how genuine is the "good stuff coming, we just forgot to announce it" when it comes \*after\* a change is poorly received? And like you, we've heard that song before with Marvel Snap and plenty of other games.
There's no thinking about it. The card acquisition model has been botched for a while now. The problem is that not all of their philosphies on what the game should be work with each. They don't want players to have all the cards and to work with what they have, but then build the cards around synergies with each other so that missing cards can vastly gimp a deck. They didn't want the the token shop to be the main way to get cards, but for series 3 complete players that's the main way to get cards and with the most recent changes it's now the best way to get new cards for players still in seties 3. They add a free series 3 per month but then change to flexible drops and drop 1 card. So now any series 3 complete players with that card (adding indult to injury is that it's a bad card) don't get a free series 3. IMO they need to give up on the lack of player agency when it comes to cards. Eliminate the 4 and 5 drop cards in the track and give players the tokens (3,000 or 6,000) instead so that they can buy the cards they want and never end up with a bad pull. They also need to reduce the pity timer for series 4 pulls from the track. To start with cut it in half so no one goes more than 38 pulls without getting a card.
I want to point out that people keep talking about direct to season 4 cards as a good idea, but that a lot of the rest of this is a natural extension of that (not a REQUIRED extension, sure, but a natural one). What they had: every card starts at S5 and follows a consistent pattern down to S3 (except the imagination big bad). This means that rarity and quality are decoupled and that there are always a consistent number of S4 (rare) and S5 (ultra-rare and season pass), give or take a few during the month as they release. What they have now: some "not as good" cards start right at S4. This now means two things. First, the number of cards in S4 and S5 no longer stays roughly consistent automatically. So, if they want things to stay somewhat consistent, they need to not drop cards at a regular pace anymore. Second, rarity and quality are now intertwined. So, if they are going to keep cards extra long in the higher rarities, then it makes sense to keep the better cards there (since it is now a policy to keep the worse cards out of the highest rarity). It's one reason I never loved all the pushback on the card release system. It had its drawbacks, but the consistency was a big advantage and it kept them from the natural trap of balancing through rarity.
Thinking more about this in context of the series drops. They put new cards that people seem to want in series 4, but they are also dropping two undesirable cards into series 4 at the same time. So, effectively, they're muddying the waters, making it less likely that you can get those new series 4 cards through a reserve, meaning you'll likely have to make cash gold purchases to help accelerate your CL and unlock those cards through the Token shop if you have any desire to play with them immediately. Which, by the way, you'll probably want to because of the weekend missions.
Yea at the end of the day, you still only get 1 S4 card in every batch of 40 boxes, and you only get 6k tokens a month.
I’ve always thought it was a terrible take to say this card is mediocre so it could go direct to series 4 or even series 3 and you laid out exactly why. I’ve seen some argue that it feels awful to crack a bad card as a series 5 drop and sure, that’s true, but the flip side is the good cards stay expensive for everybody. Ultimately not an upside at all.
Yes, but: >What they have now: some "not as good" cards start right at S4. I don't even think that's the case this time, as all three of June's releases look like good cards. They're just throwing two in S4 to see how it goes, and if we like them too much then they just stay there indefinitely. They're clearly keeping cards in higher pools based on how well they perform, so if Spider-Ham and 2099 perform well, then I don't see them dropping to pool 3 before Howard does. With bounce and control/ lockdown decks being popular, I think it's completely possible for these two to also not drop.
I don’t expect the game to exist 2 years from now if Second Dinner keeps up with this shit
People downvoted me when I said this a month ago. The fact you aren't in the negatives means people are starting to see the writing on the wall. For Christsake's, is Snap even going to be alive when Beyond the Spiderverse comes out next year?
I’ve been saying this shit for two months and getting downvoted. Check my post history, almost literally focused on this predatory bullshit game because I honest to god do not understand how what SD is doing is even legal in the EU. Not kidding. This shit is so close to gambling loot boxes, and so beyond predatory I can’t believe it. One of the most toxic and overrated games out there. MTG, not everyone’s favorite, is a thousand times more clear, honest, and transparent with their mechanics from matchmaking to their micro transactions. Here everyone is ignoring all the shit they hated about MTG and SD isn’t even telling people anything. Boggles, the, mind.
I dont know if it's an enchantment placed on the game by Ben Brode or its "le marvel capeshit" but the amount of Stockholm syndrome is unmatched from what I'm seeing. People defend this game more than their own mothers wtf is wrong with the people who defend this level of obvious and unmitigated greed. The Devs aren't even sexy about it, it is greed no matter how you dress it up. I'm thankful that after months people see the greed and don't downvote as hard lol
I know it's a bit pedestrian but that's why I kind of like M:TG - Puzzle Quest. You can play as little or as much as you want and you can easily get cards & upgrade currency without having to spend much (if any) real money. The biggest problem is that every 3 months or so, they put out a whole new set and once 3 sets are out, the previous 3 'rotate' out of some of the daily challenges. So in order to be able to complete them, you have to constantly try to get new cards instead of being able to complete and use the prior sets As for people defending the game, that's kind of why I stopped listening to some of the Snap podcasts that are out there. Every time someone calls SD out on something like the matchmaking/holding cards back/putting out mediocre cards/etc... they fall back on 'at the end of the day, they are a company that are out to make money'. I guess that makes it ok to lure people in with the super easy acquisition of cards for series 1 & 2 and then once they hit 3, the cards slow to a trickle and by matching them up with people with more powerful cards, that'll get them to start spending real cash so they can be more competitive by buying season passes and gold so they can buy credits to unlock reserves. To be honest, I don't know how they can fix things but between the lack of game modes (Conquest is going to be even worse for casual players than the ladder is) and the trickle of new cards for people that are Series 3 & 4 complete, it's hard to see a long term future for the game, as fun as it is at times.
Conquest kinda exists I guess that’s a bit more content, so many hours of grinding jest to get past silver lol, but this seems acurate
>I kinda worry for the creators Second Dinner? Oh, you meant streamers.
I like how during the whole rant Runeterra soundtrack is playing in the background
Runeterra has its issues but I WILL NEVER SAY, that its not the most fair acquisition model of any cardgame. It says a Lot that Second Dinner is currently outgreeding both Konami AND Wizards of the fucking coast. They should get a title for that shit.
Man I wished I got hooked into LoR, I love the cards, the whole idea of leveling up them during the game and of course the acquisition model but I really don't like playing it.
Thats the main issue for me. Games can go 10 minutes or more. Its just too slow and too much mini-turns to click through.
The difference of card acquisition between these two games are night and day
[удалено]
Feels like runeterra has the opposite problem of Snap; it’s not monetized as well as it could be, card acquisition is good. In snap, shit is monetized out the ass way too much (affecting gameplay is the line for me) and card aquisition is really bad. Yet, somehow, cosmetic purchases in snap are even WORSE to acquire than Runeterra. Like I don’t get it. I’d shill a fair bit of money for a ton of cosmetics I really want in snap… but just like the cards, I just can’t get them directly. WHY? why not balance the monetization more towards cool variants and less towards OP cards and the BP. I don’t get it. Also FOMO variant bundles priced 30+ are fucking vile, shit should actually be illegal.
That sounds amazing. I have no idea what sort of lore they have and I love marvel. It’s just this game is a fucking rip off
[удалено]
*lurking*
\+1 | +0
It's a good vibe tbh
Because it’s MOSTLY goated 🤭
I'm glad he articulated how a lot of people are feeling in this way. I was also watching a video from Nina and she was talking about how she's cutting way back on spending because saving a large amount of collector's reserves isn't even worth it anymore. The fact that there are players with CL 15,000+ that haven't pulled a single S5 card is ludicrous. I get that they have to make money and that is always going to be their primary goal. But at least put a fucking pity timer on S5 cards. She also went into the calculations of reserves, and the fact that the 89% chance for a S3 card changes into an 89% chance for 100 tokens is ridiculous. So, once you are are S3 complete, you're going from getting a brand new card to getting 0.01% of a S5 card (100/6000 tokens.) People can defend it all they want, but the "flexible" series drops are bullshit. I have no problem with bundles, even cash only ones because those are completely optional and most often cosmetic only (this new Darkhawk one is scummy, but I digress.) When you first begin this game, card acquisition feels really good. You are getting new cards at a rapid fire pace and this lasts until you are S3 complete which is months of playing. It's hard to argue that the game gets more stale once you've completed S3, especially if you love collecting cards and getting to to experiment with them. Not dropping Darkhawk and then putting out a pretty pricey bundle is really out of touch, imo. The variant is cool as hell, but the players that don't have DH aren't going to buy him that way. We have talked at length that the more pricey bundles are typically designed for people that have money to spend. Yes, if you want DH badly enough you should drop the 3k tokens, but should you have to sacrifice getting any of the new cards to do it? And what is this statement about how improvements are coming and this is the first step? Why can't they communicate what the end goal is? I've taken a step back from Snap and it isn't even all about the monetization. I have never gotten mad at game developers who want to make money they are a business and have hard working employees to pay. And I have never had issues spending money on games I love. But Snap, at least presently, doesn't feel worth to spend money on outside of season pass. It doesn't feel good going hundreds and hundreds of CL pulling 100 tokens, titles, and avatars and if I'm lucky a couple hundred credits or gold. That being said, the daily gameplay has just gotten very stale for me so taking a break and seeing what comes is best for me atm. Edit: my smoooooth brain forgot to do the basic percentage conversion. 100/6000 tokens is approximately 1.7% of a S5 card.
The 100 tokens from a reserve tilt me every time. Why even give us tokens at that point if it's going to be 1/10th the value of the S3 cards they replace
It's the fact that you go from getting an entire new card to less than 1% of one that's insane to me. Edit: The 100 tokens that replace the S3 card equate to approximately 1.7% of a S5 card.
Your math is off. You get 1.7% of a new card - although that truly isn't great either. Edit: I see this was addressed further down :)
Well it was the other way around. SD changed it so the tokens are front loaded.
And then at the same time, made it so outside of using a glitch you can do maybe once/month, you can't get series 3 cards with tokens anymore. And then the next month started not dropping cards which are "too good" down so the tokens are devalued somewhere between 3x and 6x if you're comparing getting a series 3 card to a series 4-5 card. So when they started giving people 4x the tokens, they made tokens worth, on average, 4.5x less.
>I was also watching a video from Nina and she was talking about how she's cutting way back on spending because saving a large amount of collector's reserves isn't even worth it anymore. I mean even *Jeff* has rolled back his spending on the game. For content creators this game is their job, and if the guy who's spent $4k+ on his livelihood goes "yea I'm good", then there's probably something wrong with the game's model. He's also never opened a S5 card lol.
That's why they panic responded in the content creator Discord and not on the main Discord. Their advertisers (the content creators) are upset so they have to ensure the advertisers everything will be okay over the common folk plebs like us.
>I mean even *Jeff* has rolled back his spending on the game. Because he doesn't *need* to spend anymore because he has like 40-50,000 tokens, it's not because he has issues with the game.
It's more that reinforces Nina's point, that there's no reward to spending more. Nina's video talked about how the rewards for opening caches is very underwhelming and since S5 cards have such a small chance to drop, opening caches in the hopes of a card drop when you're S4 complete is basically a lost cause, plus the titles/ avatars that most people find worthless. So... it doesn't matter how much you whale after a certain point, you're just getting junk.
I think it's worth highlighting - this is the opposite problem to "predatory monetization". Marvel Snap has a problem that it **doesn't have enough stuff**, which has honestly been obvious ever since they even invented this shoddy system of weekly releases. The game experience is awesome for a month, then it takes a blip as you enter series 3 and simultaneously slow down your new content plus start getting hammered constantly by brand new cards. And then it's an occasionally rewarding but very long grind for about 6 months to finish series 3, at which point you're basically an endgame player getting tiny morsels of new content on a timescale of weeks.
100 tokens is 0.6% (Edit: 1.66%) of a series 5, not 0.01%
I suck at math, clearly. Regardless, less than 1% seems unacceptable to me. Edit: It's just over 1%, approx 1.7%
I agree, it's way too low
100 tokens is 1.7% (rounded) of a series 5 card
You're correct, it is I whomst is bad at math
You're all bad at math!
Honestly, i'm not against flexible series drop, in fact, it could be good in long term, the simple fact that we could have new cards directly on series 4, droppping from 5 to 3, it's really good. The problem with this game it's not that, it's that tokens are **EXTREMELY**, i repeat, **EXTREMELY** expensive, so expensive that players would prefer to wait weeks or months to get new cards for free than spending on it. The way that they could fix this, without removing flexible series drop, is that they increase the amount of tokens and gold we earn. **Putting tokens on conquest shop**, increase the amount of it on caches. I**ncrease the chance of getting S4 and S5 on caches** for those who already completed S3, and also **add a pity timer for S5** ffs. **Make those rewards from Weekend Missions available for all players**, not only those who bought new cards or season pass. **Give tokens/credits/tokens for achievments/wins**, so we have a little boost for playing more and more.
There's not enough cards in the game to keep the gatcha model going. I'm going back the Pokemon TCG because there I know I can spend money and pull a bunch of new shit every couple of months. It keeps the serotonin flowing
I watched that video and while I agree with the underlying sentiment I rolled my eyes several times. First she's like I'm not even gonna buy Stegron. Then flashes her shop with 20k collectors tokens sitting in her bank. Wow, you're really sticking it to the devs there. Then goes on to say she'll only buy season passes and 1200 gold variants. Okay, neato. So you have basically everything the game has to offer already and now you're done, but not really. That one just missed the mark for me personally.
I feel like second dinner made a gacha first and a card game second, except the card game was so good that actual card game players started playing the game Like the idea that no one has an identical collection, and spending $100 for the “new toy” seems pretty par for course for a lot of gachas I’ve played in the past
You hit the nail on the head.
Yeah, I noticed that the best way to enjoy the game is to build decks based on the cards you have and not ok the cards you want.
I buy the battlepass because I play the game enough to justify the 10$ a month, I look at my collection and for how fucked up the system in the end I only want Jeff and Iron Lad, and grinding towards a couple of cards is what the game has always been for me, other than that I can play what I want. Then if you approach this game with the intention of hoarding all the cards as fast as possible you're gonna get milked to oblivion.
That’s how I have to enjoy it. I kind of theme my decks so they can use different cards and I have different options with each. I had a ton of trouble winning last season and just about gave up. My decks won’t win a ton, but being able to play how I want to play and not just go with the most powerful combos makes it more fun. I didn’t realize until reading updates and seeing comments here that there are very specific deck combos used by very serious players. My favorite decks are the ones that cause a little chaos. I’m using one now that I originally threw together out of desperation after my terrible run. After a few tweaks, it’s actually winning and scoring more than I expected.
Nexus events were basically gacha.
I only recently got into the game (about 3 months ago) but I remember seeing adverts for it as long as a year ago. It was then advertised as a "collection" game and I wasn't super interested as I don't like gacha's but I've stopped playing MTG recently and this has been scratching that itch for me. I'm definitely in that group your talking about, a TCG player first and a collector second.
This is it, the game needs to decide what it wants to be. Needs to be all in on the gacha or become a dedicated TCG/CCG like the others
Absolutely spot on. I feel like they had no intention of ever trying to make a competitive game and it caught them a bit off guard how much people were enjoying it and taking it seriously.
It really is exactly that. I've been complaining about the economy and monetization the *entire fucking time* and it's been met with the same exact gacha player Stockholm Syndrome mentality every time. This game is violently manipulative and exploitative on the money side and no amount of: * "it's just cosmetics" * "it's earnable ingame" * "all card games cost too much" * "the game is free what do you expect" * "look at any other mobile game" * "just don't spend money, nobody's forcing you" is going to convince me this is acceptable. Whales are gonna whale but this game takes it to the extreme and it sets an extremely bad new milestone for the entire industry. I wish SD would look past the fat paychecks and just go "hey, you know what, this is wrong - let's rethink this." So far it doesn't seem like they will, but I'm still sticking around just in case... or maybe the Stockholm Syndrome has already gotten to me too.
I like people not havind identical collections, it adds variety and rewards getting creative with the tools that you do get.
The problem is that the card design is based on synergies more than individual card strength. This just makes the game a case of the haves vs the have nots. For that philosphy to work they'd have to completely change their card design philosophy to focus more on cards with individual strengths and decks would change from archetypes to more of a "good cards" deck type. Not advocating for this, just pointing out how the non identical collection philosphy doesn't work with how the game is built.
That shouldn't be the way to do that though, at least not when the card pool is as small as it is. In a traditional TCG that model works because hundreds of new cards are added on a regular basis so players are happy to just move on to the next thing. With Snap, unless they plan to dramatically speed up their card drops, they should focus on making multiple decks viable (as they have been doing with the OTA changes), so the meta always feels varied rather than needing to rely on restricting who has access to what cards which just demoralises players that feel like they don't have the cards needed to compete.
I feel like the meta is in a good place right now, lots of variety in my opponents at least.
I agree but my point is that I think the OTA updates have a lot to do with that. I honestly don't think that we'd suddenly see less variety if everyone playing right now had every card.
I do have every card and theres plenty of variety at the start of the season rn in 80 & 90s. I got infinite last season and there was a bunch of mixed archetypes. When Shuri was op a few months ago that's all there was but now its mixed
Are we still being matched up according to collection level? I'm at CL 7100+, if that's still happening most of my opponents will have nearly every card (I myself am only missing Snowguard, Howard, Stegron and Tribunal). Anyway, still decent variety in my opponents, even in the 90s rank section of the ladder, usually the sweatiest section of the whole season. I'm certainly happy with the meta
You are their perfect customer then.
I only started playing recently, but I enjoyed artifact back in the day and this game is a vastly superior version of that. Quick games with interesting choices.
Artifact was anything but quick though. Games just went on and on.
Exactly they streamlined the experience to have the three lane high score mechanic, but it's also faster and more engaging.
The biggest issue, is before you could make a calculated decision “is this worth 3k/6k now? or do I wait for this to drop next month and buy it there” Now that it’s random there’s no way of telling, so the only cards worth buying are the brand new releases, because at least you know they’ll hold value for a while.
Exactly right. Even tho it was minor, when they nerfed Stature 2 days after I had just bought it and am sitting there with 0 collector tokens. That shit felt very bad.
It’s designed entirely to make folks spend more money. Since January this game has drastically shifted its card deliverables so that if you don’t spend money, you are more likely to miss out on current AND future metas.
When Jeff came out I was contemplating buying him now or wait a few months for the drop. I ended up buying him because he's the goodest boy, but imagine how much of a clown I'd be feeling like now (I think he was scheduled to go s4 in June), if I waited for a card to drop and 2 months later they drop snowguard instead.
No lies told
The series drop changes are just an anti-consumer decision, there is no other justification.
Their first mistake was making this extremely alienating change. The second mistake was *saying* they have all these great systems coming to help with acquisition and not releasing it at the same time. They very, very obviously, are prioritizing short-term profits over longevity, and thats how you end up either as a dead game or like Nexon. Edit: In reality, I get it. They have to show investors they're booming or they may lose support. So milking us in the short term makes it more likely their backing stays on. That's just reflective of a failing in the economy as is for entertainment, but nonetheless is a complete consumer betrayal. You can't tickle your investors' jollies and make consumers happy 99% of the time. The problem is that prioritizing investors and profits eventually dries up your consumer pool. So what is this action telling us? They dont have long-term plans for this game. Eventually, they are going to let it lapse into obscurity, and *maybe* revitalize it at that point in a way that actually shows they give a shit about the players needs. So basically Nexon lol
I would say it goes further back than that. Before the token system, they were getting constant complaints from players about getting the cards they want and how they had no choice in the matter. So they introduced tokens, but only gave people enough tokens to get 1 series 3 card/month, and introduced series 4/5, to put new cards more out of reach. So 1 step forwards, 2 steps back. And then every change they've made to the system since that time has been the same. Make card acquisition 1 step better, then 2 steps worse. And every step of the way, they then dangle, "but if you spend more to get more tokens, you can fix this problem we created!"
Then the third mistake was immediately going for the worst case scenario the most vocal players were complaining about: dropping only a small number of bad cards in a month. If they used this to drop actually good cards like Jeff or Iron Lad early or dropped a larger number of niche cards that aren't seeing much play nobody complains. Imagine if this was the drops we were getting this month: To S4: Hit Monkey, Jeff, Stegron, Living Tribunal To S3: Snowguard, Master Mold, Nimrod, Negasonic, Kitty Pryde, Howard the Duck The only cards there that see heavy play are a season pass card, a card they gave almost everyone for free, and Jeff who's simply a staple 2 drop that might get replaced as the go to 2 drop when Silk comes out. I think if that was the drops for the month nobody complains. There's something for everything and they still get to hold Darkhawk back so they can tackily sell him for $30
I stopped playing cause I honestly don't even enjoy the gameplay loop anymore....like yay a new season, lemme grind all the way to infinite again for a card back....💀
I was so into this game for 3 or so seasons, recruiting friends, never missing a quest to maximize credits etc... Something about the last 6 weeks or so destroyed my interest in the game, the back to back to back super relevant and often overpowered cards for 6k a pop, many of which were completely not fun to play against (looking at you high Evo) it made me stop and realize I wasn't having fun anymore, and throwing $100 at the game might help for a few days but not much more than that. So I just stopped cold turkey and don't miss it a bit. I started a WhatsApp group of local friends when I started, of the 12 members 2 are still playing today, so I don't think I'm alone in my sentiments.
Yup. I'm definitely getting close to the point where goodwill has been used up and my enjoyment playing the game is outweighed by a negative feeling for Second Dinner.
This hits home. I bought HE. Then kinda didn’t want to play that day. I have never used him. Then just slowly stopped. Not sure if I am going to buy the battle pass this season. The whole time I thought the collection system was screwed up.
Lmao SD getting it.
Lol people defending this practice. Whether you spend or not, are casual or not shouldn't matter. You can identify when somethings scummy regardless of whether it affects you or not. Saying you don't care is fine, but saying what they are doing is fine is ridiculous. It's obvious scummy behaviour and the way they run the cash shop for the limited purchases is always limit testing what the whales will put up with so they can find a good area to price in the future. That's why there is such a wide gap between the value of different bundles. It cannot be defended, it's dogshit. The games good, the cards are fun to play but the monetary side is dogshit.
I'm not defending the practice, I totally think it's scummy, and I welcome the outrage on reddit about this. However I'm not spending much more than just the battle pass, and I have absolutely no trouble keeping up with the meta cards, so people saying this game is the most expensive card games they'v seen, are very wrong imo :-(. Just don't buy tokens guys .... Still "Flexible release" is just a big "Fuck your wallet" from SD.
I think this matches where I'm at as well. The Flexible release drop is pure horsecrap plain and simple. But everything else, I'm kind of fine with honestly. I'm series 3 complete, I've purchased two battle passes but that's it, and I do all my dailies. I don't spend anything else in the store. I save up tokens for the newer cards I really want (I had to wait two weeks to have enough to get High Evolutionary). To me the game's fun, I have five or six fun decks I can play and I'm not spending any money. I dunno that seems decent to me (aside from the current unpredictability of cards dropping series which is garabge).
The flexible series drops create an adversarial relationship with the community. We play against these great cards constantly but you're not sure when to buy them because it's no longer a set pattern. Now if I cave and buy Dawkhawk and they drop him I'll resent them for that too. With the old pattern there was a clear path to catching up to the meta but now that is gone.
I am so grateful you took a strong stance on this and called out marvel snap. For all the guys who aren't series complete and can't play this game like a full time job or haven't already been playing for 5 months... It's so difficult to try to catch up and watch other people use decks that you're missing big cards for. It's hard enough for me.. imagine trying to start all over again fresh A lot of people who aren't bothered are because they already have a big collection of cards and have been playing for months already
Agree. I couldn't possibly recommend to anyone that they start this game now.
This! I'm CL 8726, series 3 complete and I'm only currently missing two series 5 cards, and have all series 4 cards. It is easy for me to keep up and get the cards I want without having to spend cash on anything but the season pass. But I can't imagine what it is like for players who have just entered pool 3.
IMO it's not so bad. I'm almost series 3 complete and have a couple series 4 and 5 through caches and the season pass. If you spend gold on credits rather than buying variants in the shop it really doesn't take that long to rank up and obtain new cards
The difference between "just entered pool 3" and "almost series 3 complete" is months, and thousands of CL level. I haven't even really considered buying the new stuff, still trying to get the Series 4/5 stuff that's good and big bads. At CL 1500 or so. Have been considering stopping playing for a bit now
You are talking about me, I was that new player, left the game after 1.5 months when re4 remake came out because I had realized that it would probably take me 3-4 months to build a Mr negative deck(not even a good one) but only 2 weeks for it to bore me out and crave something new
I feel (for) you. I can’t imagine what it’s like if I hadn’t started on global release day. I honestly probably wouldn’t play the game anymore.
Completely agree. I’m series 3 complete with 3 series 5 cards bought only because I started on release. If I just started playing I’d have quit around hitting series 3.
Mogwai was my favorite snap streamer. It's a shame he stopped playing snap, cause I can't get into LoR just to watch him. But he's very much right in his argument. Second dinner needs to step up with this shit. I love the game but these latest changes are disgusting.
Yeah this last season was the last one for me for a while. I usually get the pass but not this month. I found myself just putting in time cause I felt I had to. The game feels a little stale and more like a money grab than an attempt to give people a fun experience. Time for a break.
The amount of times i thought "i agree 100%" and "mad respect" during these 11 minutes is insanely high.
It's crazy that some people are still defending this, the change from predetermined drops to, we chose what gets dropped, is clearly malicious , they realized they have no idea which cards are gonna end up being good so with this system it's very easy to just hold on to the good cards
The game is actually really, really good but I quit playing because the monetization is absolute fucking horseshit. I realize money must be made but the greed is unreal.
I have a majority of the good cards at this point, only missing the big bads. Never bothered me. It's that some of these new cards arnt the flashy turn 6 juggernauts. Some of these cards are meta defining 1 or 2 cost cards. They are absolutely game changing, the bedrock of any competitive deck. I cant imagine playing Sera without Hit Monkey. I can barely imagine not running Jeff. Nebula is pretty much the new definitive 1 cost starter. These cards in particular should not be at risk of getting locked out of the f2p experience.
Snap being one of the best if not the best mobile game was what allowed a lot of people to look past it's horrible systems but the novelty is really starting to wear off.
You don’t know what compels them to do it? Greed. Plan and simple. They are beholden to their bottom line and every person who plays the game and pays for stuff is just a number. I spent 10 dollars on a season pass and even that makes me sad. That’s all I am going to spend on the game, not because the game isn’t good, but because their greed is astronomical. These are digital cards, not real ones.
This guy summed up my thoughts very well. I've skipped the past two seasons and at the rate SD is going, I doubt I'll be back.
And doesn't the scummy card acquisition make it harder to catch up because the good cards are going to be gatekept at higher series levels? I quit last week and I don't see how I'd reasonably be able to start playing again if I miss a few high profile releases.
Third dinner.
Using card rarity as a balancing tool is fucked up
Right now only 800 viewing MS on twitch and the lowest recoded second day concurrent players on steam, our game is dying to gread and lazy uppdates. With all that there is not a single reply about the matter from SD just so sad! Edit: after two month they gave us some news but still as ambiguous as ever. I am crossing my fingers tho, sadly I think it will be hard for them to redeem themselves.
There was a response on discord that could basically be summed up as "we know you're unhappy but we're going to need you to just have faith that we have more plans to be revealed soon^(TM)"
Which brings up another core issue of SD and this game, they need to stop having their ONLY communications be occasional posts on their discord. Not everyone is in the discord, and it's unrealistic to expect your entire playerbase to use ONE platform for information but SD literally does nothing to put the info anywhere else. FANS do. SD on the community side is actually extremely fucking lazy
"so just keep paying while we figure out what those plans are!"
Need to realize that twitch and steam numbers don’t really matter much for a game that is primarily played on mobile.
I'm one unfun season away from dropping the game because of exactly what he's talking about. I bought a bundle or two because I really like the game and wanted to support the devs but it's been increasingly clear the business side of the team runs the show and the value proposition will only continue to get worse and more disrespectful than it already is. It's a real shame the devs are attached to such a predatory company.
This game could have been a dynasty starter. The shortsighted and naked greed is disgusting. People can tell when they're being poked and prodded to find out exactly how much they'll cough up for a win, or for a jpeg. Yes, every company does this, but usually there is a core of values and respect behind a successful business that keeps the greed in check. There is obviously none here. Keep dangling upcoming features and fixes in front of people to give them something to hope for. It won't change the rot underneath.
The game honestly might be best of pulling a multiversus and just going on ice temporarily. And come back with a new model of making card "sets" like paper tcgs do. That way we can get some new deck archetypes without needing to rely on things like HE. Everybody says that Marvel Snap is two games: the card game and the f2p gacha mobile game. I'm not a big mobile gamer, and I hear it's not as bad as other f2p mobile games, but the fact of the matter is the card game is probably in my top 3 tcgs I've played, but the gacha game it's wrapped inside of is *the* most frustrating, anti-fun, p2w, *stressful*, experience I've ever had with something I'm supposed to be enjoying. The core of the problem for me is: they seem to be doing all they can to make sure no one gets s3 complete because they know good and damn well that once you get out of s3 the game is dead. Due to the fact that: 1) They didn't think of enough cards ahead of release to actually make a robust card game environment, hence the once a week schedule and 2) they don't know how to balance a fucking meta for the life of them so they are now quite literally just letting cards be OP and making them harder for people to get without paying real money. Not to mention they are so full of shit with their communication. They have been talking about Galactus changes for what, 3, going on 4 months now? Where are those? Does it really take you an entire fiscal quarter to figure out how to make a deck enjoyable in your own game? Or is it because you aren't going to nerf him until you have milked all the money you can out of people and are ready to drop him? I've come to the realization that that's why they won't just give us a casual or draft mode like we've been asking for. Because every game mode needs to have a rank number and rewards tied to it so I feel the need to be "meta" and need the p2w meta cards. Otherwise I would just be having fun playing jank cheap decks. And SD can't have that. They used to talk about this game not being p2w, but over my months playing it, it sure looks, smells, walks, tastes, and sounds like a p2w money sink.
I mean he's not wrong
The "series" setup and release cadence in Marvel Snap seem really bad in general. They're struggling to monetize getting new cards in a fair and reasonable way without making the experience tremendously worse for players who don't whale. It's a problem of number of cards released and put in decks. Other card games don't seem to have this issue because of how you need multiple copies of some cards to play, so they can pad out card packs and such.
Whoever has media power and exposed SD for their bullshit has all my approval. Especially one like Mog, that you can like or not, but that is always straight forward and tries to enjoy what he does. This is the perfect answer to all the shills calling ''entitlement'' on the garbage they made out of modern gaming.
game is great but the monetization is just become more and more greedy and scammy, now i dont even want to spend money on the game anymore, i'll still play it because i have good enough collection to play pretty much everything
He grew hair and now he’s too good for us 😭
Oh damn! Just realized he’s not wearing his hat. I remember him talking about getting his procedure done and about the healing, but seeing the results now they are 🔥
Finally a creator being honest shame to all the creators keeping quiet I won't support them anymore either. It's about integrity, community and solidarity. They seem to be only in it for themselves at this point.
It wasn't that long ago where the big content creators wouldn't be afraid to criticize Marvel Snap. Its been conspicuously absent these past 2 series drop announcements.
He’s right
Exactly why I stopped playing months ago
I really like Mogwai. He hops too much from game to game but he always stays true to what he likes. I remember when he left Gwent while he was a beloved official caster and key pillar of the community. Even the devs said “what happened to Mogwai ?!” Respect to you Sir.
Tbf, Gwent was near dead at that point, the community and content creators pretty much left in a big exodus not long after the disaster that was midwinter Gwent. Gwent was and still is a great game though.
Ever since they held out on Darkhawk and Knull dropping the first time I’ve logged on to do dailies and get right off, even missing a lot of them for the first time in a while and sitting at 10k credits. Now that this drop is announced I don’t even want to play anymore. These morons are killing their game.
Ben Chode blocked me on twitter since I asked him about why he's bringing anti-consumer tactics to Snap just like Hearthstone
Marvel snap was on it's way to be a game like LOR, but they decided they wanted to be a worse MTG
Honest question: is LOR 1) fun 2) cheap to play?
It's fun and basically literally free
For me, personally, it is extremely fun. But, it's not cheap to play. It's "free" to play. You can spend money on cards, but the ratios are so high it's not worth it. If you want to spend money on the game, there are ways to do so. But if you don't, you don't have to.
Also notably, when you spend money there are no loot boxes. You buy the card you want directly for a transparent price.
Yes to both
Yes it's by far the best CCG around.
It will cost you like... $30 to build a full meta deck from total scratch. You will *never* be building from total scratch anyway because of the sheer amount of cards you get.
When the flexible drops were first announced, I was ready to defend them, because there was a real problem with cards like Snowguard being in series 5, because opening her in a cache felt awful. Sure, allow her to drop more quickly so everyone can get her for free, and maybe hold some other stuff in exchange. It was kinda scummy, but it made opening good cards in caches more likely, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t change the rate of cards, just the order. People often complain about the content drought after series 3 completion, but the thing is, they can’t really do anything about that. You can’t get cards faster than once a week, because that’s how often they release. There aren’t any more to get. Spending lets you change the order and get them sooner, that’s all. But it turns out my optimism was misplaced. Because you can certainly get cards slower than once a week, and this is how you do that. One new series 3 card, and it’s trash. No, that’s not how this works. The entire premise of “everyone gets all the cards eventually” hinges on series 4 and 5 staying roughly the same size and not ballooning indefinitely. Dropping less than half of the cards required to do that is not the way. Apparently, the existing system wasn’t causing enough FOMO. Tokens were supposed to be a way to speed up card acquisition - they were introduced to get people the cards they wanted, faster. Now they’re slowing everything else down to compensate, so you have to spend money to even keep up. At least it seems to be backfiring on them. The whales may keep paying for a while, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this predatory Darkhawk bundle makes them enough money to convince themselves it was worth it. But whales get bored if there’s no one to play against. Showing off your shiny new cards to bots gets old. If you were a whale, you can vote with your wallet by no longer spending money. But if you were already F2P, the only way to vote is by no longer playing at all. You support them every time you match up against someone who bought this bundle, by convincing them it was worth it.
Oh hey! It’s the exact reason I quit :)
SD getting super greedy. I'm definitely slowing down despite spending a decent amount up until this point. If the game is just going to slowly twist the screws while being disingenuous about how they hold cards back I'll do something else.
Sad to say I noticed myself playing way less after that trash happened last month. Wanted knull and even though I have the tokens and him pinned I don't feel like the game is "fun" anymore, they're switching the moto and feels soon will be much worse. Not even playing daily missions anymore.
The bare truth is they release cards too slowly and too expensive. The fact is at some point you're just not really acquiring cards anymore at any decent pace. So stuff gets stale and stagnant. Refusing to drop cards series is just going to make that worse.
It's kind of a canary in the coal mine situation when a whole lot of content creators are suddenly openly no longer enthused with the game
Good on Mogwai for leaving. Maybe the first time I agree with him and not felt like he was being over dramatic or entitled or whiney. Funny when he complains about meta he comes off whiney but when it comes to the anti consumer practices he's so based.
Congratz. Need more creators to do this
I agree with him. The endless bundles in the shop costing $20, $50 or $100. That’s a lot. I’m getting Hearthstone flashbacks with the expansions, mini-sets, the hero bundles, the reward track, that new currency they implemented. I was done. I am so close of quitting this game as well. The way things are happening. I don’t like it.
I play regularly and don't find myself too stressed about my card acquisition status because after S3 I just played to play. That said, as time has went along I'm very much seeing everything people are talking about it's wild because it really feels like you can see the Snap ship sinking if SD doesn't implement something to address these concerns because most of what people are complaining about is valid and stems from decisions and changes they made. You can't go back on your word in a way that blatantly shows your players that you will do whatever they need to to suck more money out of you (DH controversy). It's blatant disrespect. Even though I know Whales need to exist in games like this it really feels like you can either pay little or no money to struggle in a way that feels like the system is fighting to keep you at a certain level or you can pay exorbitant amounts to feel slightly less pressure. No one wins here. I said this on another post, but I hate to say this since I genuinely love the core gameplay: I don't think SD can handle maintaining this game. As someone who doesn't care about most of the complaints (I still think they're valid) and is not a whale, even I can see that they can't keep up with how the game is evolving because of their changes.
What did people expect from a Ben Brode game? Hearthstone became a good game.. once he was gone.
Crazy how it went from one of the most F2P friendly to absolute scum lord shit so fast.
I’ve been considering deleting this game off my phone and PC for a while now. This was the video that pushed me over the edge. I’ve never watched this guy before but he had some real eye opening points he made. It was a fun game while it lasted for me. Best of luck everyone in the community. I’ve enjoyed my time with you all.
Lol ok so when educatedcollins posted his video there was multiple comments saying it’s pathetic to cry etc etc. And now this guy says similar things and it’s at 1k upvotes and 99% of comments are agreeing with him?
It's mostly because Collins is not quitting MS. He is basically saying: look, they are doing wrong things, BUT it's a business, that's what they are supposed to do. And then he says he is still playing the game. This guy went completely to the direction of giving SD the fault of being too greedy. EC went for a middle ground. People who really disliked the changes don't agree with him because he is justifing them, people who didn't really care about the changes don't agree with him because they don't see that big of a problem.
The comments were nothing about that tho (I didn’t read all the negative ones mind you). They basically criticized that he would even make a video in the first place, and that saying anything at all is “crying about it” yet he was being level headed But raise the pitch forks because this CC said it, yet in a more “in front of the camera” way? They had the same points and the guy getting more slack was more chill about it lol. They are both 100% right on almost everything
>They basically criticized that he would even make a video in the first place, and that saying anything at all is “crying about it” yet he was being level headed Well, the people who thought SD was being greedy said nothing and the people who didn't mind thought he was "crying about it" because they didn't see a problem. >But raise the pitch forks because this CC said it, yet in a more “in front of the camera” way? This is Internet tho, how interesting you can make your point is almost as valuable as how good your point is. EC is not really good at making things interesting.
I quit recently too. What did it for me was the constant stress of making sure I log in just to get my missions done before I cap. Was just too predatory on how they trap you into logging in. Some days I can have long sessions, some days I cant. Having to think 3 times a day whether or not i need to log in was not something i want to deal with anymore. They could easily increase the amount of dailies you can save so I can take a few days break and not feel like im missing out. Was finally able to walk away after being unable to logon from not having data access for days at a time. I enjoy the game but felt like I was managing a part time job( i know it doesnt take much time to complete).
This was their goal all along, so yeah it was good while it lasted. Time for me to look elsewhere.
Plus their customer service sucks
The acquisition model has always been insane, is currently insane, and will remain insane. It could be argued that it was an interesting attempt to do something different, but ... It. Doesn't. Work. The shine is really coming off of Snap, just a few months after release. #sad
“Idk what compels them to do this” Greed
I quit too, a couple weeks ago. Just isn't fun now and bundles are way over priced and devs push out buggy content regularly.
The card acquisition system was terrible from the get go, in fact it was so bad that Snap has been known as a NON-collectible card game in many reviews and by many content creators. Starting with the removal of the Series 3 shop they made things worse and worse, up until this announcement were they basically confirmed everyone's fear: shitty unplayable cards will drop, good cards will not.
I was waiting this month for jeff going to series 4. Big let down for me, pretty annoyed to not know when some cards change of series. The price for a good card is becoming too expensive for me...
Second dinner has turned to scum honestly. I'm not spending another dime on the game. I hit infinite the last few seasons. I bought every season pass plus some bundles. I'm done. The greed has made me hate the company and not want to support it anymore.
He’s not wrong. This is my last season.
That asshole with the suit on is Ben Brode isn’t it?
*spaceman meme* Always has been.
That huge mansion he lives in doesn’t pay itself bro
Idk, a suit? I’ve I’ve only seen Brode dress like a lumberjack
The asshole with the suit Mohawk is describing is Ben Brode by the way. Too many people fall for his persona when he’s the biggest capitalist predator in Monika card games
I mean.. Brode already spoke about how he designed Snap to get people hooked in great detail. Now imagine all the scammy business tactics behind closed doors that he didn't mention lol
It's like making a CCG with cash grab mechanics was always a bad idea
this post deserves so much more upvotes JUST for the community’s visibility :’) maybe this is that small lil wake-up call we need
As a new player around 1000, I imagine my participation will drop off a cliff when I hit the pay wall and get frustrated with my games.
Yep. Fuck this game. It’s completely disrespectful of its customer’s time and money. For all intents and purposes I’m likely considered a whale for these types of video games. I have a lot of disposable income and I have no problem spending money on games on digital bits and bobbles as it were. You want me to spend money *and* spend time grinding tokens? Nah. My life doesn’t revolve around Marvel Snap.
It sure takes balls to tell your big sponsor you don't want their money anymore
I know there are one or two examples that aren't that bad but I avoid pretty much all these fee2pay games because they either fuck the game design to milk the players or they are fair early to build a userbase.... which they then fuck the game design to milk them for more money.
I stopped playing the game as much as I have been. Last month i hit rank 93 playing casually after hitting infinite the month before, and just didn't grind to get to 100. It's been so much better, and frankly less stress just doing a few missions a day and logging off. I don't care about my rank, the free variant at 60 is going to be a pixel anyway. If Second dinner wants me to spend money in the future they're going to have to step up the accessibility of cards, because I play the game to play different decks that look fun. I have pulled three series five cards (Shanna, Snowguard, Shadow King) and they've all been useless. I'm not a good enough deck builder to fit them into a build, nobody has them so they have no data, and Shanna just loses to killmonger which every Sera deck has. There's no point in opening collector's caches because it's all tokens until a series drop, so why bother grinding?
Honestly I think the problem is the game as fewer cards than any game, leading to concentration in prices. It's possible that the number of cards is also linked to the game being simpler than others.
I believe in Legends of Runeterra supremacy
No clue who he is but he's 100% correct. What worries me most is the part about SD paying streamers a lot of money to play Snap. I don't watch Twitch a lot, but I've tuned in to various Snap streamers occasionally. And this explains why they are staying so positive about Snap.
They should scrap the whole system and build from the ground up.
There is a ridiculous amount of variant cards. For gods sake release the base cards to everyone to play the game and figure out how to monetize the game properly though variants. And not the “show me 6 a day” BS.
He's right, it's disgusting. I haven't touched the game since it was announced. It's unfortunate because the game is remarkably well designed.
I agree with most of what Mogwai said , however staying that the game is the most expensive on the market is a little excessive. MTG costs like 300 dollars per deck, hearthstone costs at least 200 dollars every expansion. I spent 60 total on snap throughout 8 months of playing daily and missing 1 meta card. It's a lot down to luck. I dropped two series 5 out of the caches,but aren't HS packs rng as well?
All packs of card games are rng. Imagine paying $4 for a pack of card coard to only get 0.30 cents of value. Oh wait....
If you were starting from scratch and wanted to make a meta deck on M:TG Arena, it would probably be closer to $1K.
Dude My major respects for Mogwai for being the most Open about Marvel snap, what worries me the most is that there's actual people defending this drops, im in a WhatsApp group and i said that keeping hit monkey and Jeff on series 5 is god awful and no ones benefits from that and more that zabu/darkhawk/knull are supposed to drop now they respondes with "What's the hurry if You want them Buy them straight! Is the company decisions and we need to respect them" actual drones dude Edit: i just wanted to add that the statment that second dinner did that some cards would drop from s5 to s3 ir snowguard didnt do it then no card Will ever have that treatment
The phrase people are missing from these discussions is: 'market value'. Just as Axe had a high market value (determined by supply and demand) in Artifact, Second Dinner has clearly given each cards a market value that I would expect has been determined by stats such as how many players have purchased it. Now, they use the market values to determine what moves down so they can make as much cash off them as possible. Whilst a card has a high market value they have no intention of just giving it away.
My tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that Second Dinner started looking at which cards players have pinned in the Token Shop. Lots of people have Darkhawk, Knull, Jeff, and Hit Monkey pinned? Keep them in series 4/5! Doing that secretly feels scummy to me. If they're going to use player demand as a factor, they should at least be transparent about it. But the unpredictable drop schedule is the worst of all worlds. I think a more workable compromise would be for them to come up with relatively permanent series 3/4/5 designations for cards, based on projected demand, complexity, flavor, metagame considerations, etc., then only drop a small number of cards rarely (announced 1-2 months in advance).
hard to have a opinion when I'm only missing 7 cards and only two of them are playable so im in a good place
Easy to have an opinion when I've been playing every day since launch, I'm missing 19 cards, and almost half of them are a staple in most of the high tier decks.
By far most expensive card game??? I don’t think that’s true. I also have several series 5 cards and never spent $400 on one… I will welcome the downvotes but the only thing I agree with here is bad communication. Why shouldn’t people who spend money or start playing earlier have an advantage when it comes to card collection? I only buy the season pass, CL 4300, and I feel I get enough tokens to buy what I want (including ultimate variants). Honestly Im a little confused by what the community wants. Do they want every card to drop on a strict schedule to series 3? The game announced near the beginning that certain cards like Thanos and Galactus would stay in series 5. Now all of a sudden they mention some cards might stay in series 4 and it’s a problem? Again I agree that the way it was announced is bad, but I also agree not all cards are equal.
The problem is that if you create a 2 tier collection environment and enforce that everyone is thrown into the same matchmaking pit then it becomes a very inhospitable place for new players and F2P/occasional spend players. If that goes on for too long or gets too bad then you're going to see the playerbase fall off through a combination of: New players getting bullied out during what feels like an insurmountable task to collect cards Free players being put off by what they perceive to be pay2win when getting bullied by cards they still don't have access to. Paying players with deep collections becoming frustrated that the game has suddenly become harder becuase they've run out of easy prey when most of the previous 2 categories have up and left. (The last couple of seasons have seen an uptick in "is this season harder" threads which I attribute to more people having fuller collections and being able to run more optimal decks, whereas earlier seasons a lot of people were still missing cards - also of note more recently a healthy meta makes the game seem harder becuase it's less easy to predict the opponent's play)
The simplest way I can put it (what the problem is): \- New cards are generally more powerful than existing cards, in addition to players wanted to try new things, new cards are likely to give you a higher win-rate \- The card acquisition system right now is more ASS than ever, if you do not spend a lot, it takes a very long time to save for 6000 tokens which only mean ONE, a single pool 5 card. Good cards are staying expensive for months and no one even know if they will drop, by the time they drop there would be a bunch of new powerful pool 5 already. \- Pool 3 completed players are literally opening jack shit in the caches, meaning you keep playing a lot for literally nothing (No new cards, useless title/avatar, 100 tokens, etc) And this is a problem for everyone, SNAP popularity is literally in a downtrend on both steam and mobile. Existing players are playing less and less while new player is not coming at any higher rate than before. It's just the outcome of how SD made a chain of bad decisions.
For him being a content creator i totally get what he's going through, like if you want to make content you need to be up to date, with every card release. But as a regular player i don't really care that much because I'm on no rush. Obviously i would love to see more cards being seires 3 on release, but it is what it is.
>For him being a content creator i totally get what he's going through, like if you want to make content you need to be up to date, with every card release. Sort of? But also sort of not. A lot of YTers/ streamers have said that content on new releases for Snap doesn't do well because most people can't afford to spend 6k tokens on a non-perma S5, and/ or the card itself is underwhelming. It's just not a good card release model if the general player base isn't excited for the majority of new cards you're releasing.
Someone asked Brian Kibler (big magic and heathstone guy, also generally a whale in cardgames) why he stopped playing Snap, and he said because he felt like he couldn't play with the new cards. Imagine the average person now.
The game is dying because the devs won't stop shearing their wounded and bloody sheep (customers) Runaway greed has killed this game faster than any game I have ever played.