The game has reached a new stage of maturity. Over the last fifteen months, a large number of new cards have been added, the game is broadly functional and complete, and coarse balance appears to have been reached in both PvP and PvE. This is not to say that work on any of these things will cease - new cards will continue to be added, new features will be developed, interface and experience will be improved, and balance will be fine-tuned. However, the time has come to focus more on fine tuning balance instead of broad sweeping changes and massive dumps of new content.
To that end, patches containing balance changes or new cards will be moved from their current weekly schedule to an every-other-month schedule. The next balance/new card patch will occur on the first day of April, and subsequent ones will occur on every even-numbered month. Bug fixes, performance improvements, interface improvements, new quests, etc. will still be added in the interim, but things that will have an effect on the pvp meta or pve meta will only occur every other month. This is happening to allow for a more nuanced pvp meta to develop within each patch, and to allow larger scale pve tests to occur, so that balancing can be based more on actual results than theory.
Coinciding with this development change, we will be focusing more attention on player activity and in-game testing, in order to study the pvp and pve metas to fine-tune balance further. To that end, the pvp events schedule is being increased such that there will be more frequent asynchronous tournaments (hopefully multiple simultaneous events ongoing most of the time). Additionally, as we will be able to study pve decks more thoroughly, we will create OUEI studies to test pve performance of various decks and collect the results. The information gained from pve studies and hopefully-increased pvp activity will then be used to guide balance tweaks and new content going forward.
Please join us in celebrating this new stage in OEtG's life, please help us further fine-tune the game by participating in studies and events as you choose, and above all, have fun.