Arena, or how to introduce shards without an active playerbase

[serprex]

Currently one can only farm upped SoFos off FG. Otherwise shards are only accessible from Oracle, with a lower drop rate than nymphs

I was considering options between T50 or Arena or an AI1/AI4 that has shards

For an arena, I'd implement something like oetg's arena, but remove decay. So after awhile it'd be 20 of the classic monosofr or monoaether or monodark or dbh or stallbow

Turlututu suggested instead of implementing an arena, it could be something like a curated set of decks. ie like FG except the decks would be tuned like plat arena decks, & they'd have shards

Curious for people's take on this, & any suggested deck lists for classic plat decks welcome

[Naii_the_Baf]

I like the idea of a curated set of decks. If we want to stay closer to the idea of arena we can pick a random card and build decks as if it was the oracle card for the arena deck. Plat decks in original were OP as it is, even with the bigger decks and sometimes jank.

The original forum has a section where players would post their decks: https://elementscommunity.org/forum/platinum-league-decks/

It could be an idea to grab some decks from there and build others with some of the cards that were introduced in oetg. Also gives a good base for what made for good and bad plat arena decks and decks can be tuned after that.

In particular, MrMuffin's thread has a lot of high-ranking decks.

[serprex]

It could be an idea to grab some decks from there and build others with some of the cards that were introduced in oetg. Also gives a good base for what made for good and bad plat arena decks and decks can be tuned after that.

This is Legacy, there are no new cards

But funny that I was flipping through dragonsdemesne's & my own arena decks thread without thinking to use thembas a source of arena decks

[Turlututu]

Reproducing the Arena exactly as it was does not seem doable since that would require players actively building new decks, and most of the legacy etg community has its attention rightfully turned to Sparklmonkey's project.

Instead, here's my proposal:
1) Have a "Top50" that's actually a collection of notable fully upped PVP decks. They'd have 100HP and no bonus, so they'd be like a much harder AI3.
— Ideally this would include OTKs and other complex combos, but I assume that would require giving the AI specific instructions for each of those decks. I don't know if this is doable.
— This category is centred on PVP nostalgia, so it doesn't have to be a good way to farm. In fact it could just as well cost 0 to play and give no prize.
(— Also, I want that in regular oetg too :-p)

2) Also have a separate option for farming rares, where every deck is centered around some rare cards (with a focus on shards). Decks would have varying HP and bonuses to make the most of their strategy, for example SoBr and SoFre decks would focus on draw and mark power to maximize speed while SoDiv and SoFo decks would focus on HP and deck size to maximize endurance.
— Bonus rare spin after every N wins in a row, let's say 3.

[Manuel]

the arena was one of the funniest features in etg but is impossible to replicate

i don't remember the drops in old etg, i remember i farmed shards on 30+ accounts with no problems at all

i would make them drop from normal, elders and half gods, like every SINGLE spin should have a 5-10% chance to drop A SHARD

level 0 has no spin
level 1 & 2 have 1
level 3 have 2
level 4 have 3 spins + upped cards

color of the shard is based on the elements used by the deck, winning against a deck can give sosac or sose and so on

also i can't find any link to access vanilla/legacy or whatever is the name, is this? http://testetg.dek.im/

[serprex]

also i can't find any link to access vanilla/legacy or whatever is the name, is this? http://testetg.dek.im/

No, on main site https://etg.dek.im after logging in there's a Legacy button at the bottom under Miscellaneous

I like that your idea is straight forward. Bronze Arena made shards pretty accessible. A curated set of decks would have the problem of not being self correcting so there'd be specific shard farm decks, probably rolhope into sopahope into whatever into specific decks to farm higher winrate for specific shards. I was initially thinking the target would have plenty of shard based arena decks, but that might limit the diversity too much, so something like the original's streak system or a flat chance for every target makes sense

Would you be fine with me using decks from your plat arena thread?

[Manuel]

also i can't find any link to access vanilla/legacy or whatever is the name, is this? http://testetg.dek.im/

Would you be fine with me using decks from your plat arena thread?

yes u can take them

i played legacy a little and there are some op decks (like pharaoh is unbeatable at the beginning) but the major problem is u don't win a lot of cards, i won less than 10 cards playing both ai 2 and ai 3

legacy is faster than the real etg so is good keeping the winrate of cards low but now is really too low, i have won 214 electrum and won 10 cards in maybe 50 games

in old etg with 50 games i was already able to build a decent bow and farm bronze league, maybe even silver

edit: queen and aether are so hard to win against

[Turlututu]

AI3 in legacy costs 10 e to play, winning seems to give 12~15 e regardless of spins (reminder: in original you had a bonus when the first 2 cards in a spin were the same).

If you are playing a crappy early-game deck (I know I am) with a 50% win-rate, it can easily feel as though your progress is stalling.

[serprex]

Odd, did Zanz tweak spin algorithm after 2011? I use same algo as https://elementscommunity.org/forum/general-discussion/card-drop-rate-31068/msg396069/#msg396069

Legacy code: https://github.com/serprex/openEtG/blob/43d1276bfcb00d18c0f5aef193a91ad1b96baf27/src/vanilla/views/Result.jsx#L52

Modification should actually increase card drops: unupped ppm are filtered out, & upped pillars are only rerolled once

Guess other difference is that I calculate a separate spin pool for each spin, but that shouldn't impact drop rates

[Manuel]

i remember the original ai 2 didn't drop a lot of cards, ai 3 was pretty consinstent at winning cards even if u was unable to spin most rares

maybe i was unlucky, buying a farm deck (5 nymphs tears + 25 pillars ) took me a while and after that keeps no time to buy psiontal and start farm ai 4

[Manuel]

after playing a little bit more both ai 3 and ai 4 this is the situation









i didn't sell nothing, other than the 2 death upgraded card i got 4 more (6 total upgrades), so this should mean to drop rate of upgrades is alright, what is lacking are the unupped cards

for the rares: i got 2 pharaos,  weapon,  weapon,  weapon and one squid, so imo other than shards there should be a way to also directly spin rare cards like happened in old etg after u win 5 matches in silver league

 i have 1368 electrums even if my winrate is decent is so slow to farm; i have no idea how much time it gets to buy a rol hope for fgs and i don't think is really worth farming them if the drop rates are so low

if every 5 win i spin an upgrade i probably end up losing money since that 5 wins maybe mean playing 15-20 games

[serprex]

Played some AI3 with basic unupped monos, drop rate seems high. Let's take some numbers
0: 13
1: 2

So won a card on 2nd win & 15th win. So maybe there's a bug. So I lifted Legacy's spin code into a console & ran 1000000 sims, getting ~430000 cards, so ~43% yield (will be a higher number of 0 wins to account for some wins winning multiple cards)

Let's try another 10 games
0: 6
1: 4

That's more like it. On one of my million sim runs I yielded 47%, so even at a million sims there's plenty variance. This variance being such a drag is why in oetg card spins were replaced with a single guaranteed card reward after every game