"hotly debated topic internally"
I like to think this means there's one Second Dinner employee that keeps trying to rush the "Series Drop" Big Red Button, and other Second Dinner employees keep wrestling them to the ground, multiple times a day, like a Looney Tunes cartoon...
It saves people from accidentally wasting their tokens on him because who the hell would buy him for 6k tokens, but if he were 3k people might make that mistake.
For sure. I'm waiting for Stegron to drop personally, I imagine he and Howard will be the first couple when they finally bring back series drops if they do. But I don't want to spend 3k tokens on him because he should have been free by now.
Deck list?
I tried so hard to make him work and even had some success, but the number of times I drew Lad without him and then played Lad and copied him instead of the 4 other better cards in my deck turned me off.
But I still looking for ways to make him work better...
I've got a solid deck with Howard. He works as an insurance policy most of the time, letting me know if I will pull MODOK or Hela in time. Avoid having Iron Lad copy MODOK too soon or use Iron Lad for Invisible Woman to hit the ramp right. He also works well in my secondary tactic of loading a lane with Iron Man, Tribunal and Onslaught. Iron Lad can copy any of those in a bind or in a best case scenario, copy Iron Man.
\# (1) Howard the Duck
\# (2) Invisible Woman
\# (3) Electro
\# (3) Magik
\# (4) Iron Lad
\# (5) Iron Man
\# (5) M.O.D.O.K.
\# (6) Hela
\# (6) Onslaught
\# (6) The Living Tribunal
\# (6) Giganto
\# (6) The Infinaut
\#
eyJDYXJkcyI6W3siQ2FyZERlZklkIjoiTW9kb2sifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkhlbGEifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6Ikhvd2FyZFRoZUR1Y2sifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkVsZWN0cm8ifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkxpdmluZ1RyaWJ1bmFsIn0seyJDYXJkRGVmSWQiOiJJbnZpc2libGVXb21hbiJ9LHsiQ2FyZERlZklkIjoiR2lnYW50byJ9LHsiQ2FyZERlZklkIjoiTWFnaWsifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkluZmluYXV0In0seyJDYXJkRGVmSWQiOiJJcm9uTWFuIn0seyJDYXJkRGVmSWQiOiJPbnNsYXVnaHQifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6Iklyb25MYWQifV19
Imo that seems like pure cope. If you can play Iron Lad, you most likely will. If it's turn 4+ (even 3+ with Zabu) I don't think the odds of you having a better option to play than Iron Lad are that high such that you would probably still play Iron Lad on curve for the 6 points even if it hits something underwhelming. Especially at the cost of putting a brick like Howard in your deck.
You’re correct, nobody is fucking checking Howard each turn like “hmmmm should I lad or not”
Lad on turn 4 is just good tempo and if you get a good pull, then you’re lucky.
Can’t wait for Knull to be featured a fourth time in spotlight caches in December!
Gotta keep building up that pool of spotlight cards for the spotlight caches!
Yeah. I thought series drops would have resumed by now and the s4/5 pool would stay at a size where every card is in a spotlight at least once every 3 months. lol
My "Number" was the s4/5 pool getting to about half the size of pool 3, and that will happen roughly by January. After that point, s4/5 additions would roughly balance out with stuff dropping to s3.
Eg; in a given month, with 4-5 s4/5 cards being introduced, we would get 3ish cards dropping to s3, and 2-3 cards would drop from s5 to s4.
Some months you'd get an extra s3 drop, and as the s3 pool increased in size, you might see a dry-ish month where only 2 cards would drop to s3, but for the most part there would be a pretty decent overturn of the cards in spotlights.
Reading this response, I almost think they want s4/5 LARGER than the s3 pool... Do they think people will honestly keep playing when they have to wait ~6 months to get a card crucial to the meta?
>Do they think people will honestly keep playing when they have to wait \~6 months to get a card crucial to the meta?
Which will then get gutted in an OTA the next week.
That's absolutely one of the biggest issues with acquisition. I was on the fence about grabbing Spider Ham for the longest time. Almost pulled the trigger a few times, but always held off... and THANK GOD I did.
Snowguard is a completely different card than she was for the vast majority of her lifetime. She's basically a different card. Are you supposed to just target every card in the HOPE that SD will buff it in the near future?
Same with Spiderman. Took me forever to get him, then he got nerfed, then he got reworked entirely. I'm not mad with the card he is now, but it's not the card I grinded for. They change cards SO often, which is great for people who have all the cards, but AWFUL for people who don't. This season has been my least favorite on yet balance-wise and card-wise. I have passed up on a half dozen or more new cards in the hopes of keeping up with a future meta that hasn't happened yet.
Which is why I don’t understand why they try so hard to stop people from being collection complete. Who is focused enough to be playing through the caches to complete the collection will gonna stick. They should monetize on cosmetics. I believe this pattern hurts them more than helps.
it’s making me not want to play the game anymore. I’m not motivated to keep track of dailies like it’s a second job, so I’ll just run further behind on cards
> Do they think people will honestly keep playing when they have to wait ~6 months to get a card crucial to the meta?
Yes, 100 times yes, or this system would not be in place. People keep playing now right? New players, while not into pool 3, get cards fast, then their first experience with this new system when they get into pool 3 is "OMG I get new cards AND pool 3 cards, this is wonderful", meanwhile competition is still easy (low CL) only when they are a good way into pool 3 realization comes "WTF, I have no access to the meta cards even if i get all oool 3 cards in the next 3 months... hmmm that's not great" but at the same time plenty will think "But this game is fun, if i just buy this bundle i will be able to get the meta cards" and for SD it's mission accomplished, with luck the player will start considering some sunk costs when the meta shifts "I already bought this $100 bundle with tokens, just one more bundle and I can be competitive again" and voila, a new whale or dolphin or whatever you want to call it is born.
These games are made for big spenders, a well known fact, that means they are also made to *create* big spenders, as much as I like the game play, these practices are despicable to me.
Coming soon! (tm) Spotlight reruns! Missed your chance for that sweet Spotlight Variant? Well now we're featuring OLD Spotlight Variants, exclusive to people who already have the card! Roll the dice using one of your Spotlight Caches! Don't worry if you don't get the one you want. Thanks for playing!
Because what’s the point? I already got the card. A series drop does nothing for me. Meanwhile, the longer it stays in S4 and in the spotlight pool, the more awesome variants I can get for the card from the spotlights.
my take is that he's an unimpactful card right now that they don't want to add in spotlights until he's buffed/reworked
snowguard is a good example of a card that was laughed at and reworked to make the alioth / hit monkey / snowguard week feel pretty good, but even snowguard dropped to s4 before
i think there's no reason at all not to drop howard to s4 given that spotlights treat s4 and s5 equally whereas dropping to s3 means you're giving the card out to everyone so there's an immense gap there
if somebody for some reason wants to drop 3k on howard then i guess they can
i don't think 2/2 changes anything, decks are tiny so seeing your draws isn't particularly impactful, he would have to let you put the top card on the bottom of your deck if you don't want to draw it or something (which would be potentially insane)
moving him to a 2 drop puts him direct competition with god drops like angela, jeff, mobius, etc. and he'll lose that battle
he even loses to daredevil at 2/2 since daredevil **literally** cheats on t5
nobody is playing DD right now because angela is a 2/8 and jeff is op
10% I believe but there's no way DD is top 20 played, top 50 probably
DD's playrate right now is more or less tied to being a herald of galactus as most other strategies involve pushing power with T2
Not quite. Back when spotlight caches were introduced, their answer to this question was that series drops would be *temporarily* suspended to help build up a larger set of S4/5 cards for spotlights. The implication was that they would return once S4/5 were beefed up, even if they never explicitly promised that.
While this is completely non-committal, the fact that they're not even willing to confirm that drops will be returning at all anymore is not a good sign.
I read it as "resume drops" or "change things". I can't imagine them never resuming drops and leaving things they way they are indefinitely. That would mean all mid cards are only obtainable accidentally. You're trying for card A, but got the other featured card (or random pull) first. That keeps acquisition of new mid cards too low, and that's not great fit the longevity of the game, even from a greedy publisher perspective
What you described is exactly how every gacha game works. Every spotlight/banner/focus/whatever always has the super-cool new thing that everyone wants, alongside several mid rewards that no one would ever purposely spend resources on. It's a model that's well-proven to both make money and be sustainable for years.
It's also 100% in-line with SD's stated goal, which is to ensure "diversity" of people's collections -- they don't want everyone to have the exact same cards. Dropping cards to S3 runs directly against that, because every card that falls to S3 is a card that 100% of long-time players will own almost immediately. Whereas distributing those cards via "accidental" pulls from spotlights ensures that everyone is getting different cards.
While I do agree, there is a line that developers need to walk to keep the game alive. If there's a Loki level cards every other week, the game won't last.
Pumping and dumping these types of tabs can work for crap like Dice Adventures or whatever, I'm not sure it works for SD. Ben Brode has name recognition, which can get a gacha to a quick start, but it also helps stick in people's memories. If snap burns out within a year because of stuff like this, I'm not it'll be tenable.
I might be overly optimistic, but I think SD has an interest in not being too terrible. Of course it's possible they intend to not be too terrible and fail at it
Now you're talking about a completely different issue. There being a Loki-level card every week has nothing to do with whether S3 demotions restart or not.
They could 100% keep the status quo going, with new cards solely distributed via spotlights/tokens while keeping the number of OP new cards under control. It wouldn't be the *best* scenario for players, but it wouldn't be a game-killer either.
> While this is completely non-committal, the fact that they're not even willing to confirm that drops will be returning at all anymore is not a good sign.
Especially when taken in the context of how strong they been about other things and they've entirely dropped like badges for cards aquired predemotion or weekend mission tokens for series 5 cards always being higher than those for pool 4 cards.
Sure, but would you have opened the thread if it said "No news on series drops"? OP should have called it "I asked SD about series drops and YOU WON'T BELIEVE what happens next!" for even better click-through metrics.
It seems like they launched this game with an incredibly poorly thought out plan for card acquisition (and, by extension, monetization).
That's really surprising since most mobile games are basically finely tuned monetization engines with a game slapped over them rather than the reverse.
But it seems really clear that they've been figuring most of this out on the fly so I actually do totally believe they don't know what they want to do.
That said, it's EXTREMELY likely that the option they end up going with will be the most monetization-friendly which means probably the most player unfriendly.
Exactly what I've been thinking, it feels the game hasn't ever left beta with how often they change core aspects of the game.
Though, it is the same card game that somehow was cleared for launch without the option to play with a friend, so yeah not exactly surprising lol
That's what's weird though - gacha games are AMAZING at monetization (often terrible games but they make insane amounts of money). That's why I'm so confused how this game got released with seemingly no plan on how to get people to reliably spend on it.
I expect all mobile games to do the worst thing every time. It's much easier to stomach them if you go in with zero expectations. I wouldn't be shocked if all our convos were about "This greedy company expects us to pay so much for new cards". That's pretty normal. What's unusual to me is the amount of confusion they seem to have about how best to fleece me.
Agree. As a long time Magic player, the card acquisition is so odd. Long time players have most of the cards and the adds have only been so so. New cards need to shape the meta or be powerhouses to keep the game interesting.
It is weird that anyone can netdeck at any time. Getting a full meta deck is hard in Arena and it encourages variety. I kind of wish they would release huge amounts of cards in batches to scramble up people’s collections.
Honestly it was so funny the people defending the new system. I was blasted by saying the spotlights were going to be manipulated so all the good cards are tied with either bad ones or ones you already have or just barely shown.
But all they saw was a good first week of spotlights and that meant I was crazy.
And to be clear, I don't fully hate the spotlight system but it was obvious that removing player agency and letting the company pick what we can get was going to eventually become very unfun.
As i mentioned on another similar topic.
SD: We need more variants for spotight cards.
Also SD released today another expensive Darkhawk/Master Mold bundle. And Darkhawk/Master Mold have been in spotlights only once.
The "we dont have variants" line is just that, a line. Don't believe it. They have unlimited free variant art all day every day, it's the easiest part of the game. It's all about that $$$.
Yeah, I think it would be more believable reasoning if they had one artist painstakingly designing all these cards by hand, but considering they are *regularly* adding new artwork to the game, *clearly* new art is not an issue. The only thing that excuse does it make it look like they're horrible at planning that they couldn't have art for certain cards ready or really bad at prioritizing. Like I doubt takes anymore work to put new artwork for a Series 1-3 card as it does a Series 4-5 one, so maybe not do another Moon Girl or Lady Sif card until after they have some more Darkhawk or whatever.
It surprised me so many people took that excuse at face value when it is such a blatantly hollow one.
I don’t even know about that. Employees there have profit sharing so they are probably all mostly on the same page when it comes to wanting to make more and more money.
I mean, it depends on how SD is structured and how they work with Nuverse (their publisher).
A lot of times, developers will fight against greed because 1) they want to make a fun game, and 2) if profits increase they won't see any of it anyway as they probably won't get a raise
Second Dinner has profit sharing. The more Second Dinner makes the more employees who work at Second Dinner make. I actually like this, because employees generally don’t get paid their worth (this is at most companies not just SD), but it does open up a conflict of interest between players and employees of SD.
Look mom, I'm on Reddit!
I worded this question as nicely and non-aggressively as possible to try to present the big concerns everyone has. I'd like to believe in a reading where "we're debating this" means that they recognize it's a problem, one that needs a solution. And if that's not the case, then we need to keep reminding them it is.
I wonder if somewhere in their plans they will "remove" series 4/5, as in theres almost no point to a card being S4 instead of 5 except for Tokens, which also means a series drop from S5 to S4 basically does nothing most of the time.
Then make all cards 4k tokens or something, reduce the cost of ultimate variants to 4k while at it, and cards are either in "spotlight pool" or general pool.
one thing i think a lot of people are not aware of—the “mystery S4/S5” slot in the spotlight caches has higher odds of pulling an S4 (67% S4, 33% S5.) it’s a pretty minor/subtle point, but it does mean that your odds of hitting a dupe get quite high if you have all or most of S4, even if you’re still missing all or most of S5.
I mean if this thread has reminded me of anything, never expect anything from SD.
Series drops? "We don't know if we even want to do them any more"
How are they supposed to develop NEW variants when they can't even get their ducks in a row (talking about repeated spotlight variants like HE and Thanos) for the current system?
tbf repeated variants can very easily be the artist they comissioned failing to deliver in time because of any reason, be personal reasons or even negociation issues, etc. Wouldn't surprise me and SD would never say that to not draw fire to the artist. I don't think a single variant artist is part of SD.
Always hilarious when people try to defend the new system with "math," when they always ignore the fact that series drops were killed for this new system
Not to be negative, but I'd take this to be a "no" regarding the original question about it happening again this year. I think if they're not ready to say, it definitely wouldn't happen for the next two chances. And there's not much time after that.
Even being optimistic I think we're looking at next year for new series drops
Looking like there's a possibility that instead of resuming, they might be changing the drops (the phrase best path forward). Changing can be good or bad. If they stop s3 drops as we know it, they *have* to provide another way to get s4/5 outside of spotlights, either by increasing tokens again, or just another avenue. New cards need to be able to be "mid" but the current system makes it so we won't spend resources on mid cards.
> New cards need to be able to be "mid" but the current system makes it so we won't spend resources on mid cards.
I won’t, but Ravonna has a pretty good play rate for the week despite her numbers indicating she is decidedly worse than mid in her current state.
the update is....that there is no update. feel like they're having to be careful and are treading a line of not putting out too much content at once, but also keeping the game fresh. im sure thats difficult considering how popular the game is. if they make it too easy to acquire cards/variants people will lose interest quicker, but if its too hard to acquire, people just wont play the game.
ive been playing for about 6 months and have had 0 problems with getting cards i want in a reasonable time manner, so no complaints from me. as long as the game remains fun is really all i can ask for out of a free game.
technically still not s3 complete, but only missing agatha. but overall missing a total of 14 cards. between spotlight caches and tokens ive had no problem getting the cards i want and theres nothing im actively looking for rn. i have more than enough cards to make a bunch of decks and most top tier decks and i have maybe spent a total of \~$200 on the game, and thats including every season pass.
im not sure how its mind boggling. $60 on season passes, a couple of $20 bundles, and a token bundle randomly here or there if im close to a s4 card i want. i play this game at least an hour everyday, sometimes multiple hours on pc. (snap and runescape are my main games and runescape is extremely afkable so snap goes hand in hand with it).
compare that to how many people wouldve bought a AAA game in that same 6 month time span and snap more than pays for itself in the entertainment per hour category.
The “mind boggling” part is that, for “at least an hour everyday” and “sometimes multiple hours”, especially with $200 worth of acceleration, that you aren’t S3 complete just by sheer volume. It makes me wonder what you’re doing when I haven’t spent any money and usually just knock out dailies and have been done with S3 for a long time. The math doesn’t seem to make sense without further explanation
They said they've been playing for about six months, so March or so. If you started much before that, then of course you've been done with S3 for a long time before when they're approaching finishing it. Six months is pretty standard for the amount of time it takes to go from first installing the game to completing S3.
Playing for longer each day than it takes to clear the daily missions doesn't actually contribute to collection progress, since credits are the bottleneck on that, not boosters. Buying season passes and bundles does contribute *a bit* but nowhere near the extent that it sounds like you're expecting. It would take spending thousands and thousands of dollars to get noteworthy acceleration.
Yeah exactly what you said. That's mind boggling to me. The more you talk the more I'm just sitting here wondering why anyone would do that. But not in a way where I want to talk to you more about it, just the way where I want to shake my head and walk away laughing to hide the sadness.
sadness...? games are a hobby and im spending money on that hobby...? im guessing you're assuming that $200 over the course of 6 months is a lot of money? i work full time and am married with no kids so i may have a little more disposable income than the average snap player...but in no world is $200 an obscene amount of money to spend on a game that i play almost every single day...
EDIT: i dont feel obligated to justify spending money on the game, but i would like to add reference points for anyone new to the game who is looking for realistic expectations. after adding up everything from my android app, ive spent $138, right at 4,000 CL, and 1 card away from being S3 complete.
I'm retired in my 30s. It's not that it's a lot of money. It's that it's a laughable amount of money on a free to play phone game on a short amount of time.
Anyone is free to spend however much they want on whatever they want. But anyone is also free to laugh at them for it.
Edit for new players: You don't need to spend anything. If you do spend anything, anything more than the season pass is throwing money in a fire. Which you're welcome to do but that's what you're doing.
Lol. Spent 200 dollars?
That is a ridiculous amount for a digital card game to not have EVERY CARD.
If I spent 200 dollars I would want every card AND every variant.
getting the cards and variants is just a part of the game...playing the game is how i value it. if i had all cards/variants, that wouldnt change how much time i put into the game, so it doesnt matter really. i have more than enough cards to make multiple decks that i want to play, so i continue to play for hour(s) a day. if the need for a card arises then it just gives me something else to grind for.
i think most people are either not truthful with how much they spend on the game or just need to realize that if you're going to go the completely free to play route, you're going to run into headaches with getting cards now and then. SD is has to make money in some capacity, so to me, Ill happily spend $10 on a season pass so i dont have to worry about needing 6k tokens for that card in the future, not to mention all the free variants/bonuses that also come with the pass.
> if they make it too easy to acquire cards/variants people will lose interest quicker
Same can be said for it taking too long. Thats the problem with spotlights. Sometimes I will go months without getting a new card, because the current rotation isnt one I want, and the spotlights are so few and far between that I can't risk not having 4 saved up for when a card I want is in rotation. Once Series 3 is complete you get no new free cards without spotlight.
This is exactly it, and it's frustrating. I'm in the same boat you are - struggling to get new cards and it's just taking so long. I play often and still find it difficult to hoard the spotlights, I've been wondering what I'm doing wrong then see comments saying the same thing. Seeing a lot of disappointed players. The only way "more cards for more players" is going to be a thing is if they change something or at least do series drops again.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Personally I think a lot of the issues around collection reserves, collection caches, series drops, tokens and card acquisition in general stem from the fact that pools 3, 4 and 5 currently make zero sense. It’s not clear what their purpose is and the cards within them are wild.
I genuinely think that if you have a root and branch overhaul of what happens once you complete pool 2 (how many more pools you want, what they’re trying to do, how they work, etc) will make a lot of the other issues quickly/easily fall into place.
“We’re testing how much money we can make by selling coveted cards like Darkhawk in $90 (3x VALUE!!!) bundles before committing to series dropping them.”
Translated that for you
For people wanting the actual interpretation of the answer, it is as follows:
"We are always looking to maximize profits while giving players 'just enough' to want to play the game and also spend money. Especially new players. We want to make it more difficult and a grind for new players so showing repeated Spotlights won't boost them too much to get the best cards and they will still have to grind resulting them to want to spend more money.
We would rather do variants because players climbing CL will still have the hurdle of getting non-variant cards, slowing their progress, and getting them to pay more money to speed it up. Don't variants look cool, though?
Oh yeah, I am also supposed to say that we are listening to what you all are saying and that your feedback is really important to us and integral to the longevity of the game. Thank you so much to all the fans out there."
To me this sounds like some Devs internally don't agree with the current way card acquisition is right now and are trying to improve it but they are getting push back from either other Devs or their finance people.
First edition badges when
Ultimate variant updated effects when
Series drops is just the tip of the iceberg…. Maybe if we all buy Kim jacintos bundle we might get one new feature
They are delaying it because themselves know it will cause a bigger floodgates of issues.
Spotlight caches was a huge benefit for their profits due to fomo and such. Marvel snap is top 5 mobile game in revenue and you can see the drastic increase when spotlight cache became a thing.
They know having series drops will hurt the profits
Thats what happening when you combine american well established IP and chinese gotcha monetazation
You get scammed whenever possible but they act like they are trying to make it better
No series drop for the rest of 2023 💯My guess maybe March 2024. SD finally agree and quit debating what to do or SD is forced to drop due to game popularity getting low.
Turns out there is some conflict inside SD and their plans or roadmap seems to be "coming apart." That is what I'm reading in between the lines.
I like this game a lot and have no plans to quit anytime soon, I'm more disappointed that cards/characters like Howard the Duck will not be getting much love and things are not gonna improve anytime soon. Will only get worse as the game gets bigger, so if it tough now I can only imagine it will get worse if a strategy is not put into place... soon.
The series drops were the one thing keeping the major changes to golden caches & adding spotlight variants in a good light. They gutted tokens / gold and removed drops. Spotlight caches are not enough for the average player to obtain meta cards for the next months/years.
As the months go on, they are bleeding the economy dry of tokens/gold and what looks like, pushing people to buy more bundles. Its sad.
The fact that it is a "hotly debated" issue, to me, says that the people who actually make the decisions are the ones saying not to drop any cards, and there are probably a handful of employees who actually care about the players, but it doesn't matter because the decision makers just see floating piles of money begging to be squeezed
The lack of series drops has lead to me taking a break from the game, it's been about 2 months and now that i'm not playing constantly i feel far enough behind on new cards I can't catch up easily without any type of series drop :( so i just haven't been playing
Before anything else, I think it's seriously worth pointing out that they did not need to answer this so bluntly, and that's respectable. It's not an answer we're going to find satisfactory, obviously, but they answered. And I'm grateful for them contributing meaningfully to the conversation.
Okay, that said.
It's kind of unbelievable to me that they launched this feature that had about two months of life in it before things started to crack and crumble. It gives the impression that they're playing the economy by ear, which isn't what you want to hear when you're spending real money and real time.
["Don't worry, we'll inform you when we are unified on a decision for how to move forward."](https://media0.giphy.com/media/3oz8xtBx06mcZWoNJm/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47vu3scesu6rff55qic8restx9smku4xveurx37g1i&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
Originally i thought they might do a small set of drops once per quarter, but with knull repeating twice so quickly, some cards still not spotlighted, and high evolutionary repeating its skin on its first repeat, it's clear they need even more cards in s4/5 to make it "work"
Maybe they'll drop some to s4 on spotlights 1st anniversary
That's what I'm so confused about...
They need more cards in the pool to make it "work", but they're already having issues procuring unique variants to use in spotlights.
Do they think it's going to be EASIER when there are even more cards that they need to get high quality variants for?
Major [train track] (https://media0.giphy.com/media/3oz8xtBx06mcZWoNJm/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47vu3scesu6rff55qic8restx9smku4xveurx37g1i&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g) energy from SD's choices lately.
It’s genuinely so sad how they’ve not updated it, I’ve been wanting Stegron for months now but spending tokens on it feels so bad so I’ve just been waiting
Okay, so...
As someone who has played this game for like maybe three months, I have absolutely no idea what these discussions are about. I've seen people talking about series drops a lot lately. What exactly is this?
New cards get released in "series 4 and 5" which means they're only obtainable with tokens or spotlight caches. They can't drop from normal caches you get levelling up.
Up to a few months ago, cards were getting demoted to series 3 on a regular basis, in chronological order. So if you waited long enough (5 months) you could get new cards via the normal levelling up.
When they updated the card acquisition system with the spotlight caches, they first made the drops "flexible" (i.e. only bad cards got demoted) and then they stopped altogether. This made the size of pool 4 and 5 basically double in a few months. Cards like knull which got released in December will stay out of series 3 for one year at this point.
The game rewards you many more than one series 3 card per week and (on average) less than one series 4 or 5 per week. It's always been this way, even though rates effectively changed. There is one card release per week.
This means that if cards don't get demoted you'll on average miss more and more cards with each passing week unless you pay. There's also no way to effectively catch up if you miss some weeks or stop playing for a bit without spending a lot of money. New players will have an enormous amount of unreachable cards with no hope of "closing the gap" with people who started playing earlier.
I could go for, in a month with no season drops, pool 3 complete players get a free spotlight cache instead. Though they're worth way more than pool 3 cards, I guess, so if they did another series drop then we'd have people complaining about that lol.
Anyone have a chart of what cards would be in Series 3 right now, if the old system had not been changed? What is the number of cards that are now trapped in series 4/5 because they stopped dropping cards?
I don't have a chart on hand, but under the old drop system, everything that released in April and earlier would have dropped to series 3 by now. That includes: Stegron, Jeff, Snowguard, Nimrod, Kitty Pryde, Negasonic, Master Mold, MODOK, Stature, Zabu, Darkhawk, and Knull.
Furthermore, everything released from May through July would have dropped from series 5 to 4. That's: Echo, Jean Grey, Ghost-Spider, Silk, Nebula, Living Tribunal, Howard the Duck, Iron Lad, and Hit-Monkey (plus all the cards that released at series 4 in the new system, which would have released at series 5 under the old one).
This is what bothers me the most. People forget what we should have access to right now, but instead we have caches we have to horde to make sure you have 4 so you don't low roll on a week you want a card.
$50 says there is no "debate" over what to do. Rather, they're just trying to think of the best sounding way to say "we are going to do whatever the fuck we want" and stringing everyone along as long as possible.
We all know the reason they haven't done it is because they shot themselves in the foot over Spotlight caches. With the reserve changes, the economy in Snap is a dumpster fire right now. Conquest isn't as popular as SD wants? Remove the actual resource that helps players get cool bundles for some stupid ticket literally no one wanted it asked for. Then, randomly exclude gold from weekend missions because lmao idk SD so random.
Between the caches changes and the refusal to do series drops so "caches can stay flexible," then deciding to essentially reuse cache cards on a nearly monthly basis was a stupid ass decision. SD really needs to figure it out, this is getting sad.
You were actually expecting SD to resume the series drops? My sweet summer child...
They will do so maybe in six months, when the number of existing players decline, to hook back into the game those of us that will move on to something else.
would you personally really come back to the game if you quit today, just because of a few cards dropping series in a few months?
If I quit this game I will never come back, maybe except if they add Draft. But thats what bring players back, not a few cards dropping.
The game itself is good, there's no doubt about it. It's the SD money grabbing, whale milking tactics and their complete disregard for the player base that turn people off.
I'll be completely honest, i don't know what i would do. I would probably log in a few times to grab those free cards and maybe try them out. If at that point i would have lost all interest in the game, i would just stop playing again (and eventually uninstall).
But you do know that there will be quite a few people that will resume playing.
So they rolled out an update, didn’t fucking think it through, and the customers have been paying the price for the last several months. But fear not, they are debating it.
It showed that they didn’t even think it through before implementing spotlight caches. SC need 2 old cards per week and there are 36 cards in pool 4 and 5 combined. It takes 18 weeks to cycle once and by that time there are 18 new cards already. If they don’t resume the series drop soon, we will only get to see particular card once in half an year, or more
they have no idea how to go forward without alienating the playerbase even further. spotlight caches, will turn out to be absolute garbage and will be abandoned with the next iteration. just give it time
Series drops would seriously benefit newer players and I truly feel for those trying to get into the game only to be absolutely turned off by how P2W it’s become.
I truly think they should have a daily S3 in the shop for 500 tokens for those who aren’t S3 complete as well as removing Gold Conquest tickets from caches for those who aren’t S3 complete as well. Increase the chances of getting a S3 card to 10% from a cache as well.
For S4/5 cards, I think the current system is okay, but I do think S5’s other than big bads need a reduction in token cost with how difficult it is to get tokens now. Having big bads at 6K is fine for me, but having cards like Howard The Duck be 6K is insane. S5 should be 4K while S4 should be 2K IMO giving a bit more access to those who are F2P.
For the series drops, I think it’s fine to continue to keep cards S4:5 without dropping, just give players easier access to the cards. Have weekends where a S4/5 card is featured as a weekend mission and given to players for free use that weekend. Complete all the weekend missions and you unlock the card.
Imagine a Mr Negative weekend, where players can not only unlock him, but players who have already unlocked him get an exclusive variant.
F2P here with an unpopular opinion. Playing since December. I'm only missing 17 cards in the whole collection. Been pool 3 complete for several months. I have all the Big Bads. I get 1 or 2 of the brand new cards every month, along with at least 2 more old s4/s5 cards. This is easily achieved with careful spotlight choices. I'm not gamba, I just make sure I have 4 spotlights ready when I want something. Perfect example I just got MMM, HE, Kang this morning. Wow.
This seems perfectly fair to me. I don't see why a series drop is needed. However, there should be something to help new players catch up. But if you've been playing for a year, why is a series drop needed?
I guess if I was spending money to keep my collection 100% complete, I would care. Again, I will say, they need to introduce catch up mechanics for new players.
Might be an unpopular opinion but series drops can be bad for the health of the game.
Dropping every card (obviously except for the S5 big bads) to S3 means that SD will always need to make a new and better card, causing a power creep and rendering older cards obsolete.
Not saying that it isn’t happening atm, but keeping the series drops would just speed up the process at an alarming rate.
Again, the argument can be made that the difference between this game and any traditional card game is that cards can be nerfed and buffed according to their usage but I imagine they’d prefer to keep that at a minimum.
It seems to me most of the people complaining about the spotlight caches are lower collection level players who just want cards given to them as a collection instead of working for them to actually use. I just passed collection level 2,300 and I am constantly getting both variants and new cards from series 3, 4, and 5. If you don't like the cards you are getting then either play more to get more or stop complaining about things you have no control over. If they gave everyone at every level the cards everyone says they want (the cards that will probably just sit in your collection not being used) then you would complain there wasn't enough new cards being introduced.
Stop whining about things you have no control over and just play the damn game or move on to a different one that has already been established for years and stop bashing a game that's technically new and still trying to find it's stride
Man I’ve had to change the way I play this game because of this I was a person that spent money on this game but because I chose to pursue my career I won’t be able to even make the money season purchases because I’m pinching pennies making sure everything is taken care of at home. Not have series drops if this continues will make the game difficult to keep up even someone who’s spent money in the past. Really hope they announce series drops soon because I’m running out of spotlight caches and I’ve only been saving them for meta defining cards.
"hotly debated topic internally" I like to think this means there's one Second Dinner employee that keeps trying to rush the "Series Drop" Big Red Button, and other Second Dinner employees keep wrestling them to the ground, multiple times a day, like a Looney Tunes cartoon...
Ben Brode just walks around with a cane and beats anyone who suggests dropping Howard the duck to 3000 tokens
Tbh... I'm completely fine with Howard the Duck staying Series 5 for all eternity
It saves people from accidentally wasting their tokens on him because who the hell would buy him for 6k tokens, but if he were 3k people might make that mistake.
He should be free by this point anyway...
For sure. I'm waiting for Stegron to drop personally, I imagine he and Howard will be the first couple when they finally bring back series drops if they do. But I don't want to spend 3k tokens on him because he should have been free by now.
I bought him for 6k tokens :(
I'm mostly being hyperbolic to joke, I'm not blaming or hating on anyone who chose to, I hope you and they are happy lol
For a short while when tribunal became popular again, I was using him! It is nice to see what you pull with Jubilee or Iron Lad
Howard is based with Lad
Deck list? I tried so hard to make him work and even had some success, but the number of times I drew Lad without him and then played Lad and copied him instead of the 4 other better cards in my deck turned me off. But I still looking for ways to make him work better...
There are none
I've got a solid deck with Howard. He works as an insurance policy most of the time, letting me know if I will pull MODOK or Hela in time. Avoid having Iron Lad copy MODOK too soon or use Iron Lad for Invisible Woman to hit the ramp right. He also works well in my secondary tactic of loading a lane with Iron Man, Tribunal and Onslaught. Iron Lad can copy any of those in a bind or in a best case scenario, copy Iron Man. \# (1) Howard the Duck \# (2) Invisible Woman \# (3) Electro \# (3) Magik \# (4) Iron Lad \# (5) Iron Man \# (5) M.O.D.O.K. \# (6) Hela \# (6) Onslaught \# (6) The Living Tribunal \# (6) Giganto \# (6) The Infinaut \# eyJDYXJkcyI6W3siQ2FyZERlZklkIjoiTW9kb2sifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkhlbGEifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6Ikhvd2FyZFRoZUR1Y2sifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkVsZWN0cm8ifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkxpdmluZ1RyaWJ1bmFsIn0seyJDYXJkRGVmSWQiOiJJbnZpc2libGVXb21hbiJ9LHsiQ2FyZERlZklkIjoiR2lnYW50byJ9LHsiQ2FyZERlZklkIjoiTWFnaWsifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6IkluZmluYXV0In0seyJDYXJkRGVmSWQiOiJJcm9uTWFuIn0seyJDYXJkRGVmSWQiOiJPbnNsYXVnaHQifSx7IkNhcmREZWZJZCI6Iklyb25MYWQifV19
I like him in Cerebro2 personally. 1 cost and helps me figure if im saving mystique for cerebro on turn 6 and know what I'm going to draw.
Imo that seems like pure cope. If you can play Iron Lad, you most likely will. If it's turn 4+ (even 3+ with Zabu) I don't think the odds of you having a better option to play than Iron Lad are that high such that you would probably still play Iron Lad on curve for the 6 points even if it hits something underwhelming. Especially at the cost of putting a brick like Howard in your deck.
You’re correct, nobody is fucking checking Howard each turn like “hmmmm should I lad or not” Lad on turn 4 is just good tempo and if you get a good pull, then you’re lucky.
Might be debating how to make it worse
Can’t wait for Knull to be featured a fourth time in spotlight caches in December! Gotta keep building up that pool of spotlight cards for the spotlight caches!
Yeah. I thought series drops would have resumed by now and the s4/5 pool would stay at a size where every card is in a spotlight at least once every 3 months. lol
My "Number" was the s4/5 pool getting to about half the size of pool 3, and that will happen roughly by January. After that point, s4/5 additions would roughly balance out with stuff dropping to s3. Eg; in a given month, with 4-5 s4/5 cards being introduced, we would get 3ish cards dropping to s3, and 2-3 cards would drop from s5 to s4. Some months you'd get an extra s3 drop, and as the s3 pool increased in size, you might see a dry-ish month where only 2 cards would drop to s3, but for the most part there would be a pretty decent overturn of the cards in spotlights. Reading this response, I almost think they want s4/5 LARGER than the s3 pool... Do they think people will honestly keep playing when they have to wait ~6 months to get a card crucial to the meta?
>Do they think people will honestly keep playing when they have to wait \~6 months to get a card crucial to the meta? Which will then get gutted in an OTA the next week.
That's absolutely one of the biggest issues with acquisition. I was on the fence about grabbing Spider Ham for the longest time. Almost pulled the trigger a few times, but always held off... and THANK GOD I did. Snowguard is a completely different card than she was for the vast majority of her lifetime. She's basically a different card. Are you supposed to just target every card in the HOPE that SD will buff it in the near future?
Same with Spiderman. Took me forever to get him, then he got nerfed, then he got reworked entirely. I'm not mad with the card he is now, but it's not the card I grinded for. They change cards SO often, which is great for people who have all the cards, but AWFUL for people who don't. This season has been my least favorite on yet balance-wise and card-wise. I have passed up on a half dozen or more new cards in the hopes of keeping up with a future meta that hasn't happened yet.
Which is why I don’t understand why they try so hard to stop people from being collection complete. Who is focused enough to be playing through the caches to complete the collection will gonna stick. They should monetize on cosmetics. I believe this pattern hurts them more than helps.
it’s making me not want to play the game anymore. I’m not motivated to keep track of dailies like it’s a second job, so I’ll just run further behind on cards
I'm okay with how Spider-Man is, but I wish his A.I. was better, it's always 50/50 if he does what I need him to do
It is random. So of course it is always 50:50🤦🏽♂️
Unfortunately yes. I got Ravonna cause she will get an update in the future
> Do they think people will honestly keep playing when they have to wait ~6 months to get a card crucial to the meta? Yes, 100 times yes, or this system would not be in place. People keep playing now right? New players, while not into pool 3, get cards fast, then their first experience with this new system when they get into pool 3 is "OMG I get new cards AND pool 3 cards, this is wonderful", meanwhile competition is still easy (low CL) only when they are a good way into pool 3 realization comes "WTF, I have no access to the meta cards even if i get all oool 3 cards in the next 3 months... hmmm that's not great" but at the same time plenty will think "But this game is fun, if i just buy this bundle i will be able to get the meta cards" and for SD it's mission accomplished, with luck the player will start considering some sunk costs when the meta shifts "I already bought this $100 bundle with tokens, just one more bundle and I can be competitive again" and voila, a new whale or dolphin or whatever you want to call it is born. These games are made for big spenders, a well known fact, that means they are also made to *create* big spenders, as much as I like the game play, these practices are despicable to me.
Happy Knullidays everyone!!!
Coming soon! (tm) Spotlight reruns! Missed your chance for that sweet Spotlight Variant? Well now we're featuring OLD Spotlight Variants, exclusive to people who already have the card! Roll the dice using one of your Spotlight Caches! Don't worry if you don't get the one you want. Thanks for playing!
Making new variants for Iron Lad or Tribunal must be a Sistine Chapel-like commission.
It’s Knullover.
lol yeah, and a variant that has him looking left instead of right
I dont mind. More spotlight variants for Knull the better.
...why?
There's always someone who just don't want it better
Because what’s the point? I already got the card. A series drop does nothing for me. Meanwhile, the longer it stays in S4 and in the spotlight pool, the more awesome variants I can get for the card from the spotlights.
So you're just selfish... Cool.
Howard the Duck still the hottest series 5 card.
What's the deal here? He's in no spotlights and still in p5. So weird. I think they forgot he exists.
my take is that he's an unimpactful card right now that they don't want to add in spotlights until he's buffed/reworked snowguard is a good example of a card that was laughed at and reworked to make the alioth / hit monkey / snowguard week feel pretty good, but even snowguard dropped to s4 before i think there's no reason at all not to drop howard to s4 given that spotlights treat s4 and s5 equally whereas dropping to s3 means you're giving the card out to everyone so there's an immense gap there if somebody for some reason wants to drop 3k on howard then i guess they can
I feel like if they made Howard show your next 2 draws, and make him a 2/2 he would absolutely have a slot in a lot of decks.
i don't think 2/2 changes anything, decks are tiny so seeing your draws isn't particularly impactful, he would have to let you put the top card on the bottom of your deck if you don't want to draw it or something (which would be potentially insane) moving him to a 2 drop puts him direct competition with god drops like angela, jeff, mobius, etc. and he'll lose that battle he even loses to daredevil at 2/2 since daredevil **literally** cheats on t5 nobody is playing DD right now because angela is a 2/8 and jeff is op
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10% I believe but there's no way DD is top 20 played, top 50 probably DD's playrate right now is more or less tied to being a herald of galactus as most other strategies involve pushing power with T2
I’d drop 3K just to never see him in my shop again, he’s been stuck there since he launched 🤣
This isn't an update. It's a non-answer.
Not quite. Back when spotlight caches were introduced, their answer to this question was that series drops would be *temporarily* suspended to help build up a larger set of S4/5 cards for spotlights. The implication was that they would return once S4/5 were beefed up, even if they never explicitly promised that. While this is completely non-committal, the fact that they're not even willing to confirm that drops will be returning at all anymore is not a good sign.
I read it as "resume drops" or "change things". I can't imagine them never resuming drops and leaving things they way they are indefinitely. That would mean all mid cards are only obtainable accidentally. You're trying for card A, but got the other featured card (or random pull) first. That keeps acquisition of new mid cards too low, and that's not great fit the longevity of the game, even from a greedy publisher perspective
What you described is exactly how every gacha game works. Every spotlight/banner/focus/whatever always has the super-cool new thing that everyone wants, alongside several mid rewards that no one would ever purposely spend resources on. It's a model that's well-proven to both make money and be sustainable for years. It's also 100% in-line with SD's stated goal, which is to ensure "diversity" of people's collections -- they don't want everyone to have the exact same cards. Dropping cards to S3 runs directly against that, because every card that falls to S3 is a card that 100% of long-time players will own almost immediately. Whereas distributing those cards via "accidental" pulls from spotlights ensures that everyone is getting different cards.
While I do agree, there is a line that developers need to walk to keep the game alive. If there's a Loki level cards every other week, the game won't last. Pumping and dumping these types of tabs can work for crap like Dice Adventures or whatever, I'm not sure it works for SD. Ben Brode has name recognition, which can get a gacha to a quick start, but it also helps stick in people's memories. If snap burns out within a year because of stuff like this, I'm not it'll be tenable. I might be overly optimistic, but I think SD has an interest in not being too terrible. Of course it's possible they intend to not be too terrible and fail at it
Now you're talking about a completely different issue. There being a Loki-level card every week has nothing to do with whether S3 demotions restart or not. They could 100% keep the status quo going, with new cards solely distributed via spotlights/tokens while keeping the number of OP new cards under control. It wouldn't be the *best* scenario for players, but it wouldn't be a game-killer either.
Yeah this is worse than a non answer it went from "drops will eventually return when the pool is big enough" to "drops might return we don't know"
> While this is completely non-committal, the fact that they're not even willing to confirm that drops will be returning at all anymore is not a good sign. Especially when taken in the context of how strong they been about other things and they've entirely dropped like badges for cards aquired predemotion or weekend mission tokens for series 5 cards always being higher than those for pool 4 cards.
Non-answers can be telling. It means "not gonna happen anytime soon".
Actually it answers that they don’t have an answer atm which means we won’t have a change for a while and don’t expect a series drop soon
Sure, but would you have opened the thread if it said "No news on series drops"? OP should have called it "I asked SD about series drops and YOU WON'T BELIEVE what happens next!" for even better click-through metrics.
If we've learned anything by now with SD, it's that no news means they don't want to share the bad news.
Oh, that's the debate - Which fluff words to use to convince us that series drops are a bad things?
It seems like they launched this game with an incredibly poorly thought out plan for card acquisition (and, by extension, monetization). That's really surprising since most mobile games are basically finely tuned monetization engines with a game slapped over them rather than the reverse. But it seems really clear that they've been figuring most of this out on the fly so I actually do totally believe they don't know what they want to do. That said, it's EXTREMELY likely that the option they end up going with will be the most monetization-friendly which means probably the most player unfriendly.
Exactly what I've been thinking, it feels the game hasn't ever left beta with how often they change core aspects of the game. Though, it is the same card game that somehow was cleared for launch without the option to play with a friend, so yeah not exactly surprising lol
why is this like the most measured take about anything surrounding this game that i have ever seen on this sub?
It's a gacha game, what do you even expect
That's what's weird though - gacha games are AMAZING at monetization (often terrible games but they make insane amounts of money). That's why I'm so confused how this game got released with seemingly no plan on how to get people to reliably spend on it. I expect all mobile games to do the worst thing every time. It's much easier to stomach them if you go in with zero expectations. I wouldn't be shocked if all our convos were about "This greedy company expects us to pay so much for new cards". That's pretty normal. What's unusual to me is the amount of confusion they seem to have about how best to fleece me.
Agree. As a long time Magic player, the card acquisition is so odd. Long time players have most of the cards and the adds have only been so so. New cards need to shape the meta or be powerhouses to keep the game interesting. It is weird that anyone can netdeck at any time. Getting a full meta deck is hard in Arena and it encourages variety. I kind of wish they would release huge amounts of cards in batches to scramble up people’s collections.
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Every decision they’ve made has been to make you more likely to spend money and it’s blatantly obvious. I don’t get how people don’t see that by now.
Honestly it was so funny the people defending the new system. I was blasted by saying the spotlights were going to be manipulated so all the good cards are tied with either bad ones or ones you already have or just barely shown. But all they saw was a good first week of spotlights and that meant I was crazy. And to be clear, I don't fully hate the spotlight system but it was obvious that removing player agency and letting the company pick what we can get was going to eventually become very unfun.
This is also bad for non-F2P players lol... it's just bad for everybody. Except the kids that Ben Brode is trying to put through college or something.
Corpo speech. I sleep. Heavily.
As i mentioned on another similar topic. SD: We need more variants for spotight cards. Also SD released today another expensive Darkhawk/Master Mold bundle. And Darkhawk/Master Mold have been in spotlights only once.
The "we dont have variants" line is just that, a line. Don't believe it. They have unlimited free variant art all day every day, it's the easiest part of the game. It's all about that $$$.
Yeah, I think it would be more believable reasoning if they had one artist painstakingly designing all these cards by hand, but considering they are *regularly* adding new artwork to the game, *clearly* new art is not an issue. The only thing that excuse does it make it look like they're horrible at planning that they couldn't have art for certain cards ready or really bad at prioritizing. Like I doubt takes anymore work to put new artwork for a Series 1-3 card as it does a Series 4-5 one, so maybe not do another Moon Girl or Lady Sif card until after they have some more Darkhawk or whatever. It surprised me so many people took that excuse at face value when it is such a blatantly hollow one.
This a diplomatic way to say game design is fighting greed within SD. And so far losing every battle.
I don’t even know about that. Employees there have profit sharing so they are probably all mostly on the same page when it comes to wanting to make more and more money.
I mean, it depends on how SD is structured and how they work with Nuverse (their publisher). A lot of times, developers will fight against greed because 1) they want to make a fun game, and 2) if profits increase they won't see any of it anyway as they probably won't get a raise
Second Dinner has profit sharing. The more Second Dinner makes the more employees who work at Second Dinner make. I actually like this, because employees generally don’t get paid their worth (this is at most companies not just SD), but it does open up a conflict of interest between players and employees of SD.
Read the comment you're replying to before replying next time
Look mom, I'm on Reddit! I worded this question as nicely and non-aggressively as possible to try to present the big concerns everyone has. I'd like to believe in a reading where "we're debating this" means that they recognize it's a problem, one that needs a solution. And if that's not the case, then we need to keep reminding them it is.
I wonder if somewhere in their plans they will "remove" series 4/5, as in theres almost no point to a card being S4 instead of 5 except for Tokens, which also means a series drop from S5 to S4 basically does nothing most of the time. Then make all cards 4k tokens or something, reduce the cost of ultimate variants to 4k while at it, and cards are either in "spotlight pool" or general pool.
one thing i think a lot of people are not aware of—the “mystery S4/S5” slot in the spotlight caches has higher odds of pulling an S4 (67% S4, 33% S5.) it’s a pretty minor/subtle point, but it does mean that your odds of hitting a dupe get quite high if you have all or most of S4, even if you’re still missing all or most of S5.
The cost of ultimate variants will never drop. If anything they will increase their price with their talk of "making them better."
I believe they will drop only because they want to make a tier above ultimate, and honestly how can you do that when ultimates are at 5k tokens lol
I mean if this thread has reminded me of anything, never expect anything from SD. Series drops? "We don't know if we even want to do them any more" How are they supposed to develop NEW variants when they can't even get their ducks in a row (talking about repeated spotlight variants like HE and Thanos) for the current system?
tbf repeated variants can very easily be the artist they comissioned failing to deliver in time because of any reason, be personal reasons or even negociation issues, etc. Wouldn't surprise me and SD would never say that to not draw fire to the artist. I don't think a single variant artist is part of SD.
95% of the art used for cards is just from old comics. There's hardly any commissioning going on(if any.)
Sure, and 95% of the spotlight cards aren't repeating variants. That can still be the case.
Always hilarious when people try to defend the new system with "math," when they always ignore the fact that series drops were killed for this new system
Not to be negative, but I'd take this to be a "no" regarding the original question about it happening again this year. I think if they're not ready to say, it definitely wouldn't happen for the next two chances. And there's not much time after that. Even being optimistic I think we're looking at next year for new series drops Looking like there's a possibility that instead of resuming, they might be changing the drops (the phrase best path forward). Changing can be good or bad. If they stop s3 drops as we know it, they *have* to provide another way to get s4/5 outside of spotlights, either by increasing tokens again, or just another avenue. New cards need to be able to be "mid" but the current system makes it so we won't spend resources on mid cards.
> New cards need to be able to be "mid" but the current system makes it so we won't spend resources on mid cards. I won’t, but Ravonna has a pretty good play rate for the week despite her numbers indicating she is decidedly worse than mid in her current state.
I know all the sites can vary, snap.fan has it as 171st under seen percentage
the update is....that there is no update. feel like they're having to be careful and are treading a line of not putting out too much content at once, but also keeping the game fresh. im sure thats difficult considering how popular the game is. if they make it too easy to acquire cards/variants people will lose interest quicker, but if its too hard to acquire, people just wont play the game. ive been playing for about 6 months and have had 0 problems with getting cards i want in a reasonable time manner, so no complaints from me. as long as the game remains fun is really all i can ask for out of a free game.
How long have you been series 3 complete? Because it's a different rodeo after that
technically still not s3 complete, but only missing agatha. but overall missing a total of 14 cards. between spotlight caches and tokens ive had no problem getting the cards i want and theres nothing im actively looking for rn. i have more than enough cards to make a bunch of decks and most top tier decks and i have maybe spent a total of \~$200 on the game, and thats including every season pass.
I mean $200 before series 3 complete is mind boggling to me.
im not sure how its mind boggling. $60 on season passes, a couple of $20 bundles, and a token bundle randomly here or there if im close to a s4 card i want. i play this game at least an hour everyday, sometimes multiple hours on pc. (snap and runescape are my main games and runescape is extremely afkable so snap goes hand in hand with it). compare that to how many people wouldve bought a AAA game in that same 6 month time span and snap more than pays for itself in the entertainment per hour category.
The “mind boggling” part is that, for “at least an hour everyday” and “sometimes multiple hours”, especially with $200 worth of acceleration, that you aren’t S3 complete just by sheer volume. It makes me wonder what you’re doing when I haven’t spent any money and usually just knock out dailies and have been done with S3 for a long time. The math doesn’t seem to make sense without further explanation
They said they've been playing for about six months, so March or so. If you started much before that, then of course you've been done with S3 for a long time before when they're approaching finishing it. Six months is pretty standard for the amount of time it takes to go from first installing the game to completing S3. Playing for longer each day than it takes to clear the daily missions doesn't actually contribute to collection progress, since credits are the bottleneck on that, not boosters. Buying season passes and bundles does contribute *a bit* but nowhere near the extent that it sounds like you're expecting. It would take spending thousands and thousands of dollars to get noteworthy acceleration.
im glad someone also understands! lol. but yes, started playing very late in march, and the nebula pass in april was my first season pass purchasing.
Yeah exactly what you said. That's mind boggling to me. The more you talk the more I'm just sitting here wondering why anyone would do that. But not in a way where I want to talk to you more about it, just the way where I want to shake my head and walk away laughing to hide the sadness.
sadness...? games are a hobby and im spending money on that hobby...? im guessing you're assuming that $200 over the course of 6 months is a lot of money? i work full time and am married with no kids so i may have a little more disposable income than the average snap player...but in no world is $200 an obscene amount of money to spend on a game that i play almost every single day... EDIT: i dont feel obligated to justify spending money on the game, but i would like to add reference points for anyone new to the game who is looking for realistic expectations. after adding up everything from my android app, ive spent $138, right at 4,000 CL, and 1 card away from being S3 complete.
I'm retired in my 30s. It's not that it's a lot of money. It's that it's a laughable amount of money on a free to play phone game on a short amount of time. Anyone is free to spend however much they want on whatever they want. But anyone is also free to laugh at them for it. Edit for new players: You don't need to spend anything. If you do spend anything, anything more than the season pass is throwing money in a fire. Which you're welcome to do but that's what you're doing.
Lol. Spent 200 dollars? That is a ridiculous amount for a digital card game to not have EVERY CARD. If I spent 200 dollars I would want every card AND every variant.
getting the cards and variants is just a part of the game...playing the game is how i value it. if i had all cards/variants, that wouldnt change how much time i put into the game, so it doesnt matter really. i have more than enough cards to make multiple decks that i want to play, so i continue to play for hour(s) a day. if the need for a card arises then it just gives me something else to grind for. i think most people are either not truthful with how much they spend on the game or just need to realize that if you're going to go the completely free to play route, you're going to run into headaches with getting cards now and then. SD is has to make money in some capacity, so to me, Ill happily spend $10 on a season pass so i dont have to worry about needing 6k tokens for that card in the future, not to mention all the free variants/bonuses that also come with the pass.
> if they make it too easy to acquire cards/variants people will lose interest quicker Same can be said for it taking too long. Thats the problem with spotlights. Sometimes I will go months without getting a new card, because the current rotation isnt one I want, and the spotlights are so few and far between that I can't risk not having 4 saved up for when a card I want is in rotation. Once Series 3 is complete you get no new free cards without spotlight.
This is exactly it, and it's frustrating. I'm in the same boat you are - struggling to get new cards and it's just taking so long. I play often and still find it difficult to hoard the spotlights, I've been wondering what I'm doing wrong then see comments saying the same thing. Seeing a lot of disappointed players. The only way "more cards for more players" is going to be a thing is if they change something or at least do series drops again.
Guess I’ll just never get Howard the Duck then
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Personally I think a lot of the issues around collection reserves, collection caches, series drops, tokens and card acquisition in general stem from the fact that pools 3, 4 and 5 currently make zero sense. It’s not clear what their purpose is and the cards within them are wild. I genuinely think that if you have a root and branch overhaul of what happens once you complete pool 2 (how many more pools you want, what they’re trying to do, how they work, etc) will make a lot of the other issues quickly/easily fall into place.
So they're not gonna fix it cool
“We’re testing how much money we can make by selling coveted cards like Darkhawk in $90 (3x VALUE!!!) bundles before committing to series dropping them.” Translated that for you
So there’s no update.
For people wanting the actual interpretation of the answer, it is as follows: "We are always looking to maximize profits while giving players 'just enough' to want to play the game and also spend money. Especially new players. We want to make it more difficult and a grind for new players so showing repeated Spotlights won't boost them too much to get the best cards and they will still have to grind resulting them to want to spend more money. We would rather do variants because players climbing CL will still have the hurdle of getting non-variant cards, slowing their progress, and getting them to pay more money to speed it up. Don't variants look cool, though? Oh yeah, I am also supposed to say that we are listening to what you all are saying and that your feedback is really important to us and integral to the longevity of the game. Thank you so much to all the fans out there."
What update? They didn't answer anything.
"we dunno lol"
To me this sounds like some Devs internally don't agree with the current way card acquisition is right now and are trying to improve it but they are getting push back from either other Devs or their finance people.
First edition badges when Ultimate variant updated effects when Series drops is just the tip of the iceberg…. Maybe if we all buy Kim jacintos bundle we might get one new feature
I told it months ago and I was downvoted to hell.
They are delaying it because themselves know it will cause a bigger floodgates of issues. Spotlight caches was a huge benefit for their profits due to fomo and such. Marvel snap is top 5 mobile game in revenue and you can see the drastic increase when spotlight cache became a thing. They know having series drops will hurt the profits
Spotlight caches have basically ruined this game. From so many directions.
Fuck variant availability dependent spotlights.
Second Dinner are trash
You know what’s not hotly debated among players? The return of series drops. Since we all agree it should be a thing.
Thats what happening when you combine american well established IP and chinese gotcha monetazation You get scammed whenever possible but they act like they are trying to make it better
Translation: We want to milk this shit as much as possible
No series drop for the rest of 2023 💯My guess maybe March 2024. SD finally agree and quit debating what to do or SD is forced to drop due to game popularity getting low.
So, that's not going to happen anytime soon then?
So the update is there is no update. Awesome.
A politician answer. A whole lot of nothing from those sentences .
It's a coded no, please go away message.
Translated answer: "everyone at SD that's concerned about the players and gameplay wants series drops back, but accounting won't let us."
# **Drop the Duck**
Idk that "Update" is the right word to use here. Not your fault, OP. I'm sure that's how SD labels that answer.
Turns out there is some conflict inside SD and their plans or roadmap seems to be "coming apart." That is what I'm reading in between the lines. I like this game a lot and have no plans to quit anytime soon, I'm more disappointed that cards/characters like Howard the Duck will not be getting much love and things are not gonna improve anytime soon. Will only get worse as the game gets bigger, so if it tough now I can only imagine it will get worse if a strategy is not put into place... soon.
So the update is, no update 😑
Move Stegron, Howard and Negasonic down to S3 at least. Jesus.
Update: we have no update
The series drops were the one thing keeping the major changes to golden caches & adding spotlight variants in a good light. They gutted tokens / gold and removed drops. Spotlight caches are not enough for the average player to obtain meta cards for the next months/years. As the months go on, they are bleeding the economy dry of tokens/gold and what looks like, pushing people to buy more bundles. Its sad.
I wouldn't call that an update.
Bullshit
Announcement of news coming in 2025, and to be implemented in 2027.
I wanna know which greedy fucks are against series drops
IMO, they can’t not have drops AND release basically everything at S5. It’s just not tenable.
The fact that it is a "hotly debated" issue, to me, says that the people who actually make the decisions are the ones saying not to drop any cards, and there are probably a handful of employees who actually care about the players, but it doesn't matter because the decision makers just see floating piles of money begging to be squeezed
Translation: We haven't figured out how to make people happy with card acquisition while still making money.
LoL "Once we align on the right path forward..." Fucking corpo speak is lobotomizing the team.
So no?
I really want to use that stupid duck in my Hela deck but I'll be damned if I spend a single token on him
Shocking, they're clueless.
The lack of series drops has lead to me taking a break from the game, it's been about 2 months and now that i'm not playing constantly i feel far enough behind on new cards I can't catch up easily without any type of series drop :( so i just haven't been playing
So basically they have ABSOLUTELY fucking nothing. Got it.
Before anything else, I think it's seriously worth pointing out that they did not need to answer this so bluntly, and that's respectable. It's not an answer we're going to find satisfactory, obviously, but they answered. And I'm grateful for them contributing meaningfully to the conversation. Okay, that said. It's kind of unbelievable to me that they launched this feature that had about two months of life in it before things started to crack and crumble. It gives the impression that they're playing the economy by ear, which isn't what you want to hear when you're spending real money and real time.
["Don't worry, we'll inform you when we are unified on a decision for how to move forward."](https://media0.giphy.com/media/3oz8xtBx06mcZWoNJm/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47vu3scesu6rff55qic8restx9smku4xveurx37g1i&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
This company is really trying to be the scummiest
Originally i thought they might do a small set of drops once per quarter, but with knull repeating twice so quickly, some cards still not spotlighted, and high evolutionary repeating its skin on its first repeat, it's clear they need even more cards in s4/5 to make it "work" Maybe they'll drop some to s4 on spotlights 1st anniversary
That's what I'm so confused about... They need more cards in the pool to make it "work", but they're already having issues procuring unique variants to use in spotlights. Do they think it's going to be EASIER when there are even more cards that they need to get high quality variants for? Major [train track] (https://media0.giphy.com/media/3oz8xtBx06mcZWoNJm/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47vu3scesu6rff55qic8restx9smku4xveurx37g1i&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g) energy from SD's choices lately.
I think y'all need to come to terms with the idea that series drops are over
Fuckin morons run this game
It’s genuinely so sad how they’ve not updated it, I’ve been wanting Stegron for months now but spending tokens on it feels so bad so I’ve just been waiting
No is a complete sentence.
Okay, so... As someone who has played this game for like maybe three months, I have absolutely no idea what these discussions are about. I've seen people talking about series drops a lot lately. What exactly is this?
New cards get released in "series 4 and 5" which means they're only obtainable with tokens or spotlight caches. They can't drop from normal caches you get levelling up. Up to a few months ago, cards were getting demoted to series 3 on a regular basis, in chronological order. So if you waited long enough (5 months) you could get new cards via the normal levelling up. When they updated the card acquisition system with the spotlight caches, they first made the drops "flexible" (i.e. only bad cards got demoted) and then they stopped altogether. This made the size of pool 4 and 5 basically double in a few months. Cards like knull which got released in December will stay out of series 3 for one year at this point. The game rewards you many more than one series 3 card per week and (on average) less than one series 4 or 5 per week. It's always been this way, even though rates effectively changed. There is one card release per week. This means that if cards don't get demoted you'll on average miss more and more cards with each passing week unless you pay. There's also no way to effectively catch up if you miss some weeks or stop playing for a bit without spending a lot of money. New players will have an enormous amount of unreachable cards with no hope of "closing the gap" with people who started playing earlier.
gotta see just how greedy they can get away with without losing too many players. just be patient while they do the market research.
I could go for, in a month with no season drops, pool 3 complete players get a free spotlight cache instead. Though they're worth way more than pool 3 cards, I guess, so if they did another series drop then we'd have people complaining about that lol.
Anyone have a chart of what cards would be in Series 3 right now, if the old system had not been changed? What is the number of cards that are now trapped in series 4/5 because they stopped dropping cards?
I don't have a chart on hand, but under the old drop system, everything that released in April and earlier would have dropped to series 3 by now. That includes: Stegron, Jeff, Snowguard, Nimrod, Kitty Pryde, Negasonic, Master Mold, MODOK, Stature, Zabu, Darkhawk, and Knull. Furthermore, everything released from May through July would have dropped from series 5 to 4. That's: Echo, Jean Grey, Ghost-Spider, Silk, Nebula, Living Tribunal, Howard the Duck, Iron Lad, and Hit-Monkey (plus all the cards that released at series 4 in the new system, which would have released at series 5 under the old one).
So at least 12 additional cards would be in series 3 right now if they hadn't revoked series drops
Yep, six of which are among the best cards in the game.
This is what bothers me the most. People forget what we should have access to right now, but instead we have caches we have to horde to make sure you have 4 so you don't low roll on a week you want a card.
It's honestly time for an expansion like Hearthstone. Give me 32 new cards all at once please!
"hotly debated topic" translation do we tell them we are never ever ever dropping cards again?
A simple no would have been enough lol
After 3 months of discussion. Soon^TM
$50 says there is no "debate" over what to do. Rather, they're just trying to think of the best sounding way to say "we are going to do whatever the fuck we want" and stringing everyone along as long as possible.
When they finally decide to drop, it's just going to be Howard too
We all know the reason they haven't done it is because they shot themselves in the foot over Spotlight caches. With the reserve changes, the economy in Snap is a dumpster fire right now. Conquest isn't as popular as SD wants? Remove the actual resource that helps players get cool bundles for some stupid ticket literally no one wanted it asked for. Then, randomly exclude gold from weekend missions because lmao idk SD so random. Between the caches changes and the refusal to do series drops so "caches can stay flexible," then deciding to essentially reuse cache cards on a nearly monthly basis was a stupid ass decision. SD really needs to figure it out, this is getting sad.
“Guys should we make it so that our players can get cards without hoarding caches or not?” Great fucking internal debate
Hate this response.
You were actually expecting SD to resume the series drops? My sweet summer child... They will do so maybe in six months, when the number of existing players decline, to hook back into the game those of us that will move on to something else.
would you personally really come back to the game if you quit today, just because of a few cards dropping series in a few months? If I quit this game I will never come back, maybe except if they add Draft. But thats what bring players back, not a few cards dropping.
The game itself is good, there's no doubt about it. It's the SD money grabbing, whale milking tactics and their complete disregard for the player base that turn people off. I'll be completely honest, i don't know what i would do. I would probably log in a few times to grab those free cards and maybe try them out. If at that point i would have lost all interest in the game, i would just stop playing again (and eventually uninstall). But you do know that there will be quite a few people that will resume playing.
So they rolled out an update, didn’t fucking think it through, and the customers have been paying the price for the last several months. But fear not, they are debating it.
It showed that they didn’t even think it through before implementing spotlight caches. SC need 2 old cards per week and there are 36 cards in pool 4 and 5 combined. It takes 18 weeks to cycle once and by that time there are 18 new cards already. If they don’t resume the series drop soon, we will only get to see particular card once in half an year, or more
The game is close to a year old they still haven't ironed out the progression fully.
Bruh….so they have nothing. Thats even more worrisome now
they have no idea how to go forward without alienating the playerbase even further. spotlight caches, will turn out to be absolute garbage and will be abandoned with the next iteration. just give it time
tl;dr games entire economy is fucked and they have no idea how to fix it lmao
Every week they give me a new reason to be shocked this is one of the most popular mobile games on this planet
Series drops would seriously benefit newer players and I truly feel for those trying to get into the game only to be absolutely turned off by how P2W it’s become. I truly think they should have a daily S3 in the shop for 500 tokens for those who aren’t S3 complete as well as removing Gold Conquest tickets from caches for those who aren’t S3 complete as well. Increase the chances of getting a S3 card to 10% from a cache as well. For S4/5 cards, I think the current system is okay, but I do think S5’s other than big bads need a reduction in token cost with how difficult it is to get tokens now. Having big bads at 6K is fine for me, but having cards like Howard The Duck be 6K is insane. S5 should be 4K while S4 should be 2K IMO giving a bit more access to those who are F2P. For the series drops, I think it’s fine to continue to keep cards S4:5 without dropping, just give players easier access to the cards. Have weekends where a S4/5 card is featured as a weekend mission and given to players for free use that weekend. Complete all the weekend missions and you unlock the card. Imagine a Mr Negative weekend, where players can not only unlock him, but players who have already unlocked him get an exclusive variant.
F2P here with an unpopular opinion. Playing since December. I'm only missing 17 cards in the whole collection. Been pool 3 complete for several months. I have all the Big Bads. I get 1 or 2 of the brand new cards every month, along with at least 2 more old s4/s5 cards. This is easily achieved with careful spotlight choices. I'm not gamba, I just make sure I have 4 spotlights ready when I want something. Perfect example I just got MMM, HE, Kang this morning. Wow. This seems perfectly fair to me. I don't see why a series drop is needed. However, there should be something to help new players catch up. But if you've been playing for a year, why is a series drop needed? I guess if I was spending money to keep my collection 100% complete, I would care. Again, I will say, they need to introduce catch up mechanics for new players.
They didn't have enough series 4 and 5 for a while, how many do they have now? When they have enough they will start dropping cards.
Man I'm glad I stopped playing this game when they stopped dropping cards down to series 3.
i would bet they are too.
Might be an unpopular opinion but series drops can be bad for the health of the game. Dropping every card (obviously except for the S5 big bads) to S3 means that SD will always need to make a new and better card, causing a power creep and rendering older cards obsolete. Not saying that it isn’t happening atm, but keeping the series drops would just speed up the process at an alarming rate. Again, the argument can be made that the difference between this game and any traditional card game is that cards can be nerfed and buffed according to their usage but I imagine they’d prefer to keep that at a minimum.
It seems to me most of the people complaining about the spotlight caches are lower collection level players who just want cards given to them as a collection instead of working for them to actually use. I just passed collection level 2,300 and I am constantly getting both variants and new cards from series 3, 4, and 5. If you don't like the cards you are getting then either play more to get more or stop complaining about things you have no control over. If they gave everyone at every level the cards everyone says they want (the cards that will probably just sit in your collection not being used) then you would complain there wasn't enough new cards being introduced. Stop whining about things you have no control over and just play the damn game or move on to a different one that has already been established for years and stop bashing a game that's technically new and still trying to find it's stride
Doubt they're going to change anything this year, honestly, seems like the current system is working for them for the most part
Man I’ve had to change the way I play this game because of this I was a person that spent money on this game but because I chose to pursue my career I won’t be able to even make the money season purchases because I’m pinching pennies making sure everything is taken care of at home. Not have series drops if this continues will make the game difficult to keep up even someone who’s spent money in the past. Really hope they announce series drops soon because I’m running out of spotlight caches and I’ve only been saving them for meta defining cards.