Unlockable things for new accounts

[Chapuz]

We don't want a new player to get frustrated going into DGs or Arena 2, right? Suggestions:

1- Start with locked: Mages, Champs, DGs and Arena 2
2- Unlock Mages when 3 Commoners are won
3- Unlock Arena 1 when 5 Mages are won
4- Unlock Champions when 5 Arena 1 are won
5- Unlock Arena 2 when 5 Champions are won
6- Unlock DGs when 10 Champions are won

This makes the new players have early objectives, besides completing the quests, and be more attached to the game.

[serprex]

CG's disagreed with this in chat when you've brought it up before

Laziness prefers this be "X PvE wins" if it were to be

[flyingcat]

Pretty sure new player isn't stupid enough to do DG more than once after starting.
I do like the idea of unlockables, although commoner grinding should be more advertised

[Chapuz]

Laziness prefers this be "X PvE wins" if it were to be

Well it's a start. Implementable?

[serprex]

One already has to start with Commoner as new accounts have 0 gold

[Chapuz]

What works as incentive for new players is seeing the "Locked until X", "Beat X for unlock", etc. That's my point. It's far better than just having a button that makes nothing, what makes the game look wonky (same argument as the Show All button in the sandbox)

[cg]

What you are asking for is an unskippable tutorial that forces every new account to play the way you believe the early game should be played in a game where the vast majority of new accounts do not need a tutorial and there are many other ways to play the early game than the one you personally enjoy.

Please write a subjective strategy article detailing the way you believe is the best way to play the early game, and then please try to convince new players to read your subjective strategy article and follow it. If you are right, they will get that same experience anyways, but the people who do not need any tutorial or do not want to play the game on-rails will not be inconvenienced.

Additionally, consider developing brief text snippets to be overlaid onto the AI menu that read something along the lines of "not recommended for new players" that could appear next to the buttons for higher level targets until a given account either has reached X games played, Y wealth, or goes into settings to disable the warnings.


edit: With regard to unlockables being desirable, the primary unlockable is cards, and there's an extremely large amount of unlocking to be done. Additionally, there are quests. If you want to instill a feeling of progression other than collecting cards, add more linear quest lines with good prizes at the end. If you want to incentivize collecting cards further, create more "puzzle" quests with deck type requirements, making people need to collect varying sorts of cards to be able to enter them.

[Chapuz]

There are NOT many ways of starting the game. You can't win Arena 1 or Mages with your starter decks; even if you manage to beat 1 or 2 decks, you will lose more than what you win. The game is (or should be) designed to play Commoners before Mages and Arena 1. Therefore, letting a new player play against Mages in their first 5 games can frustrate them.
In fact they should be more than 5 games, but let's let them play a couple of mages at the beginning (although not THAT very beginning) to make them feel less repetitive.

I do NOT want it to be seen as an unskippable tutorial, many people hate those when playing a new game.

What I propose is very easy: restrict the useless options when they are useless, so new players don't get cluttered with undefeatable opponents.

[cg]

You can obtain gold from quests and submitting arena decks. You can tune almost every starter into mage-capable out of the gate. You can complete more quests and skip straight to champions. You can tune starters plus starter packs into unupped champion farmers, beat commoner a single time, and skip straight to champions. You can enter colosseum and obtain large amounts of gold by beating commoners without ever attempting the commoner target.

I can run a forum event where people have to create a new account and are never allowed to fight commoners. I can run a forum event where any of those things above are the rules of the event.

The overwhelming majority of new accounts are either alts of existing players or vanilla veterans who are fully capable of deciding for themselves when a target is "too strong". True new players can be directed to a "early game strategy" article and dissuaded from out-of-reach targets by the warnings I mentioned.

[Chapuz]

After a bit of discussion, I'm ok at keeping it this way until the devs decide to advertise it somewhere else.