-
As Rarran recently stated, Twist is done a disservice by being frequently closed, only to bring back an identical format that didn’t do particularly well in the past. Twist doesn’t need to be seen as a potential competitor against the new set. Just have twist alternate between special things in the months between releases and have release months compliment the new expansion with special deck-building rules like this: During the release months of each of the last few expansions, you could have required that we build 30-card decks with 10 cards from Legacy, Core, and/or Caverns of Time+…:
10 from Showdown in the Badlands+10 from League of Explores.
10 from Whizbang’s Workshop+10 from Curse of Naxxramas and/or Goblins vs. Gnomes.
10 from Perils in Paradise+10 from Voyage to the Sunken City (and/or Throne of the Tides).
10 from The Great Dark Beyond+10 from Ashes of Outlands and/or The Boomsday Project.
or, most mechanically fittingly, 10 from Into the Emerald Dream+10 from The Grand Tournament.
In this way, Twist would heavily feature and require cards from the new set, without letting us just get cards from the new set. We would still need to either get cards from the other featured set from the past and/or Caverns of Time to play Twist, or get cards from Standard sets to play Standard. Currently, people forget Twist exists half the time and are usually disappointed to go back to something old after a long wait. Some things like Classic and Whizbang’s Heroes should either be always available or frequently returning, but some form of Twist needs to always be available and frequently new for people to care about it. -
There are way too many individual portraits which usually aren’t available and would take way too much time and money to get them all, which dissuades would-be completionists from wanting to try to collect them. I used to collect them when there were just a few portraits of new and mostly prominent characters being released from time to time, but for the past few years, so many goofy, mostly alternate art for existing character portraits have come out that portraits in general feel devalued. There’s also the matter of if you didn’t have time to play during a certain battlepass, some things like diamond cards aren’t available after that point and portraits might eventually be sold individually, but have costs as if they were full-cost portraits. Encouraging people to play during battlepasses and events makes sense, but once the associated sets rotate out of standard, or shortly before, you should make bundles with all portraits and diamond cards from each of those sets’ battle passes and events, which cost equal to the battle pass, so people who didn’t have time to get them before can get those things at the same price others did, just so much later that they can’t use them in Standard, and without the non-cosmetic cards and gold. Similarly, I’ve been playing since Beta, and I did technically have the opportunity to buy a golden Gelbin Mechatorque, but at the time, I’d opened around 35 packs without getting a legendary and didn’t want to cheapen the experience of having my first legendary be one that I bought. I think it would be nice if opportunities to buy limited-availability things would become available again at least once every 5-10 years or so. There are lots people who simply haven’t been playing at certain points in the game’s history or couldn’t justify doing certain things with their time and money at certain times. Fear of missing out is useful for getting people to want to spend time and money faster if they can, but there are also those who can’t, and then it becomes a double-edged sword where it discourages people who might have wanted to eventually become completionists or semi-completionists* from bothering to collect things if they know some things will be gone forever. *In my case, I’d like to try to eventually collect all functionally unique game components,portraits of unique characters, and reasonably priced battle-pass portraits. The alternate art ones I’d almost never spend money on, though I might spend small amounts of gold or complete difficult achievements for in order to have a possibility of completing the portrait collection.
-
I know most people don’t care about Classic and solo content, but for me, along with Wild, they’re what I care about the most. As I said, I’ve been playing since Beta, but other than a giftcard I’d been given, and a couple of Classic pack bundles, I never spent money on the game until Curse of Naxxramas, and continued to only spend money on adventures and portraits of prominent characters through One Night in Karazhan. I believe I then stopped spending money until it was announced that there would be occasional free adventure content, and I began buying special bundles and paid adventures. My first pre-order bundle was the Scholomance mega bundle for Kel’Thuzad and I also bought the Madness at Darkmoon Faire bundle for N’Zoth and the Old Gods-themed cards. I’ve gotten most battle passes, indirectly or directly bought every mini-set, the major Mercenaries bundles, a few more pre-order bundles at times when I was content with the state of the game, in addition to collecting the entire Caverns of Time set to support Twist, even though I don’t like that it has reprints and disenchanted all of my reprints. Since 2014, I’ve literally spent thousands of dollars on this game, and in terms of recorded transactions, it may look like adventures only made up a small percentage of that money, but it was the the ability to go back and replay Classic mode and old solo content in addition to occasionally getting various new solo content and other modes which kept me happy with the game. Now Classic (and the admittedly difficult to balance Duels) are gone, Twist is gone half the time and often repeating when it’s back, and the formerly mostly competent solo mode A.I. are broken with indication that they won’t be fixed and more solo content isn’t being made. If you’re going to keep having problems whenever new card come out and really don’t want to make the A.I. work with them, then please at least revert the A.I. to the last time they worked properly and lock the adventures into that time period’s wild format, until the next time you’re willing to fix the A.I. and sell solo adventures, especially the still-standard Trial by Felfire. To keep the A.I. generally “updated” what you really need to do is let the A.I. be able to distinguish between enemy vs, ally and which effects are harmful vs. helpful, perhaps with the A.I. usually trying to kill the lowest health enemy to clear minions when you have high health and kill you when you’re low health. Please also don’t think that there aren’t those who wouldn’t buy a completed March of the Lich King adventure or Battle of the Bands, just because the related sets have rotated out of standard.
Where I’ve spent thousands of dollars in the past, I haven’t spent any money on the new expansion, and don’t intend to spend any money in the future until I can once again enjoy the things which were the reason why I was spending money in the first place. Again, I know that most people don’t care about Classic and solo content, but I personally do, and I don’t need to spend money on something I’m not able to enjoy as much any more, just because others are mostly happy (which I gather won’t be until the next balance patch).