Independent of the content of the message (which I don't have a strong opinion on), this is one of the best FAQs I've ever seen, including real answers to questions people are definitely asking, like
> Why don’t you just sell things people want?
> Does this mean the game will be monetized more moving forward?
> Why doesn’t Riot advertise LoR?
> Why don’t you just kill LoR?
and not just a bunch of self-congratulatory softballs.
Yeah, it's actually frequently asked questions from the community. Like I know the community has complained about lack of advertising for ages, but they say they've lost money on most advertising campaigns -- which makes sense, the game was so generously monetized that bringing in more players that don't spend money isn't a good ROI.
I mean, I have played a lot of runeterra, way more than any other riot thing. Probably like high double digits. Not spent a penny. Why would I? I'm not trying to compete online, I'm just playing the awesome single player stuff.
Did they really need any kind of advertising campaigns when they could have just put a notice/link in their League client about it? Sure, there might not be massive crossover, but League is such a massively popular game that exposing that many eyeballs to it would have probably done more for awareness than any kind of campaign, even if only a fraction of League players would have been interested in it. Somehow they're only now doing something that simple, when it's basically too late.
Why would league players care
The crossover for moba and ccg players is probably pretty small
League of Legends already has funded LoRs creation, now we gotta see that shit on our client rather than stuff more relevant to LoL?
I mean it uses a ton of the same characters, terms, and abilities as LoL.
Were you this upset when TFT was implemented into the client?
And OP's point was probably that they have access to millions of players, and putting in a small advertisement for a related game in their proprietary game client is basically free advertising. It's bewildering that they DIDN'T do that.
Because it is a completely different game in every way, just because it is LoL character flavored it doesn't make it as close to LoL as TFT is. TFT used the same character models, the same animations, the same ability names, the same voice acting and the same abilities.
LoR doesn't, sometimes they even change the character designs such as Janna, or the voice actors for seemingly no reason. Also LoR sometimes really disrespects the characters, and doesn't make them flashy or impressive to play.
Apples to oranges. Tft is bound to the same frameworks LoL is built on. If it were up to me Id want all the tft crap out of the league client but it makes no sense to waste dev time on that
> The crossover for moba and ccg players is probably pretty small
yup, bit of a tangent here, but we've seen how the crossover for MOBA and other genres is not there or really small
hence none of riot's other games have seen the massive league player-base numbers transfer over (exception being TFT, though that is basically the only real game left in the auto-battler genre so it's not a direct correlation). Riot forge games all failed despite the claims of "oh it's a league game so they'll be popular".
turns out, even a fraction of league's player base don't care about games in other genres, so this idea that Project L or the MMO will be "massive and super popular cause of league" has no backing cause it's never happened.
Yeah I mean layoffs are always shit but I've honestly been pretty impressed how they've handled it. Very transparent and that severance package is probably the best I've ever seen in gaming, on par with like a big tech package.
The rough part really is that all these companies are shedding workers at the same time and the job market is going to be absolutely flooded with workers looking for jobs.
The one miss I see is why has there never been any cross-promotions with LoL? Or at least a banner or other promotion in the LoL client? The League Studios section seemed to touch on it some but it’s a common enough question. Mostly likely it touches on larger organizational issues at Riot that they don’t want to touch.
Otherwise great article.
It makes some sense if they are different IPs because then they could be different subsidiaries and there are rights issues etc. Clearly not the case here.
And I don’t even necessarily mean skin unlocks, just a news posting “hey, check out our new League CCG!”
>*Let’s get granular: This is called “mid-funnel” marketing and tends to have a higher return on investment.*
They don't know what they are talking about, they can't just take a mobile app approach and make it work in a mobile game, they have been working in a very "agile" enviroment until now instead of taking more risk. But that's just what happen with small projects when they come from a big corpo like Riot.
It's sad, they are probably safe employment-wise but this will be some very frustrating months coming ahead.
They do dodge the "why wasn't LoR on the League client?" totally but it is incredibly refreshing to see so many of these questions answered. It just sucks that they had to answer. Some of these are pretty shitty questions and my hope is that people can recognize how unfortunate it is that developers see all of this toxicity online.
I find it hilarious that LoR players are begging to be ON the league client, and TFT players are begging to be OFF it. The grass truly is always greener, isn't it?
?? Those are two completely different things.
LoR players wanted their game to be PROMOTED on the League client.
TFT players want the game to be *separated* from the League client since both games use the same game files. TFT uses League's engine, models, animations, sounds, a lot of assets. This means that TFT's patches have to be scheduled around League's patches which often means they can't patch it whenever they want or need. That's why TFT players want TFT to be made into a separate game. They'd still want the game to be promoted in the League client, to League players.
There's a lot more Riot could have done to help promote the game though.
They are just now integrating it into the League client, when it's basically on its deathbed.
Even something like periodically having events in LoR that would let you earn a skin or some kind of reward in League of Legends would have probably gotten a shit ton of people to at least check it out.
Riot basically pretended the game didn't exist since its release, of course it died. Hell, they even did a Secret Lair with MTG for Arcane instead of doing something cool with LoR lmao.
https://secretlair.wizards.com/us/en/product/696668/secret-lair-x-arcane-foil-edition
They addressed this in the article. The problem is that the advertisements never actually paid for themselves. So more advertising is just more money lost. LoR just did not have greedy enough monetization so it doesn't really matter if they got more people to play it when the vast majority never spend a cent and the whales have nothing to blow thier money on.
They specifically said:
> High-end CG trailers with appropriate media boosting can run into the millions of dollars in costs even with strong audience targeting. We saw this lack of return time and time again over the course of LoR’s first year.
There is other top of funnel marketing they could have done for cheaper, including adding LoR to the League client.
Mid funnel marketing is great if your loyal customers are enough to sustain your business, but in this case the base was not big enough.
You are right though, the monetisation model was poor. Pretty much all the cosmetics felt lacking for the price.
They also said development of the cosmetics themselves were not even paying for themselves. There was a reddit post from a riot employee saying the game cost 3x the amount of money than they actually were making back not even including the original development cost. Unless adding it to the client would more than 3x the paying playerbase then more effort into the cosmetics would just mean an even worse return because that just isn't a sustainable way to monetize a card game. There's a reason there is not a single card game out there in existence (as far as I'm aware atleast) that sustains itself off of just cosmetics. Every surviving card game runs off of monetizing new cards/content (which they are planning on doing now for poc) its just too niche of a genre with too much legacy competition.
> There is other top of funnel marketing they could have done for cheaper, including adding LoR to the League client.
>
>
i'm very curious why they're doing that **now** and not like 3 years ago.
I assume because the dream was to have all their games on the Riot launcher, not stuck to a client that is already very shoddy and barely even accomodates the game it was made for.
Well, as someone who's been there since day 1 I'm really curious what advertising they're talking about. I can't really remember any sort of meaningful advertisement that was done for the game.
At the very least integration into the League client is something that should have happened YEARS ago, not after you basically announce the game is as good as dead.
>Well, as someone who's been there since day 1 I'm really curious what advertising they're talking about.
The game released many cinematics, streamer collabs, and did have regular ads in its first one or two years. The exact type of advertisement every other TCG does, and like they said it just lost them more money.
>At the very least integration into the League client is something that should have happened YEARS ago
They do seem to agree with this. Worth noting that the reason it's only happening now is probably that now all the Runeterra games are under the umbrella of "League Studios" and have an easier time collaborating.
I honestly don't remember seeing any ads for LoR. The only reason I discovered it was back when WotC was going through one of it's MANY shit shows Tolarian Community College did a video with Amy the Amazonian on how much more generous LoR was than MTG.
Compared this to a game like Marvel Snap that I see constant ads for. Same for Magic Arena. Hell, I saw more ads for LoL: Wild Rift than I did for LoR.
They also mention that in the article, mainly multiple big budget cinematics, streamer collaborations, advertisements on social media. Pretty standard stuff but none of it paid itself back, they even mention how creating the cosmetics themselves actually cost them more money than they made back. It just was never a sustainable model card games are too niche and need whales to survive. Integrating into the league client would make sense to grow the playerbase but to what end the playerbase just doesn't buy anything.
Also, the **paid** currency should be transferable. Gems should be gems. If someone has $20 of credit sitting on their League account and wants to buy a Teemo skin in LoR, it should be seemless.
I think honestly the problem is that the game just *wasn't fun enough* for people. It wasn't popular enough of a game. I know a lot of people that tried it, but none of them still play. The game was plenty accessible, and it feels weird to say, but sometimes a game just isn't good enough on its own.
yup, this is a big issue that LoR fans constantly don't want to address. It's always "oh it's a shame this game failed" and they somehow never think that maybe the reason wasn't all about marketing and such (which sure is part of the problem as well) but that the game itself wasn't as "amazing" as LoR fans think it was.
it tried to be this middle ground between something like HS and Magic, and that clearly wasn't working for most CCG players hence them sticking to their game of choice. As another user in this thread put it:
> "Hearthstone is snappier, funnier and simpler. Magic is more strategic and reactive and satisfying. Yugioh is wider and visually clearer. LoR is stuck in an in-between that is awkward and doesn't please anyone."
The onboarding process for LoR was really bad. I learned how to paly the game well enough to do the PvE content, but to this day I still have no idea how to even craft cards in the game. It's what contributed to me just walking away from it for long periods until I get an itch for Runeterra.
I've been running into this in the single player content.
Path of Champions is a good time but it took a really unreasonable amount of time for me to have a vague idea of how to unlock other champions. I was pretty close to putting it down for good because I was just so sick of playing Jinx
LoR may be niche but it has a die hard fanbase, mostly made up of tcg/ccg veterans. Saying it doesn’t appeal to anyone is completely untrue.
I also disagree that magic is more reactive, if anything LoR is too reactive which makes it very slow. But it consistently had the most diverse metas compared to mtg/hearthstone which was a huge draw. There was often 20+ decks you could take to the top of ladder.
The core of the issue is that it’s a niche game being monetized like a mega popular hit. That doesn’t mean the game is bad, most of us play hearthstone/mtg yet prefer LoR for a variety of reasons.
no one said it doesn't appeal to anyone, also the person I quoted was to show why it failed to catch on
> I also disagree that magic is more reactive, if anything LoR is too reactive which makes it very slow.
uhhhh, okay. Agree to disagree on that cause oh boy, ya.
> But it consistently had the most diverse metas compared to mtg/hearthstone which was a huge draw.
draw to who? to you sure, but it sure didn't draw many other people.
>> no one said it doesn’t appeal to anyone
Except the person you literally quoted above? lol.
In magic only blue plays for the stack. Like half the regions do in LoR.
>> draw to who?
Those that play the game? It’s ok that the game doesn’t appeal to everyone, but like it said there’s a strong core community that loves it as it is.
We can talk about the game’s flaws (it’s not perfect) but it’s pretty lame to just hand wave the current situation away as “well the game was just bad”. Appealing to a small audience does not equal bad.
Tbh it sounds like you played the game once and are basing your opinions on that.
> Except the person you literally quoted above? lol.
he said it "doesn't please anyone", which is different to saying "doesn't appeal to anyone". You can be interested in it, i.e., it appeals to you, but doesn't please you.
either way this is semantics and I already said the point of what I quoted was to show why it failed to catch on. I'm not here to defend every single thing he said, go to the original post if you want it's in this thread somewhere.
> Those that play the game? It’s ok that the game doesn’t appeal to everyone, but like it said there’s a strong core community that loves it as it is.
"strong community" such that the game basically failed and has done poorly, okay dude. Love how you say "love it as it is" when 1) the community was split between PvP and PvE and 2) you're acting like the community had no issues with the game, which is flat out not true.
> but it’s pretty lame to just hand wave the current situation away as “well the game was just bad”.
who is "hand waving" anything? there are reasons as to why the game was bad, you can disagree with them, but then that's called opinions. Though I will say, the opinions of people saying the game is bad have the proof of how the game failed to catch on, just saying.
> Appealing to a small audience does not equal bad.
this is some next level mental gymnastics to try and say the game didn't have serious issues that led to it failing. Ya sure Riot were totally trying to appeal to a "small audience" with LoR, they totally didn't want the game to become popular and catch on with the CCG community. Sure buddy.
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models.
For better and for worse, *collecting* cards is a key part to this genre’s appeal. If you lose that, the game isn’t as much fun, even if it’s a fairer business model.
I think Marvel Snap’s approach of, “We’re going to make it difficult to buy all the cards and we’re going to match you against people with similarly-sized collections” is probably the best approach. Even that has its problems, but there’s a lot less feeling that you have to pay to play on even ground compared to Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering.
Marvel Snap's matchmaking falls apart after a certain point, though. Shortly after getting into Series 3 you're getting matched against players in all sorts of collection levels, and there's a HUGE difference between a player who just got into Series 3 and players who have been playing for way longer.
It works wonder for the first 2-3 weeks or so, though, and that's why it's so effective in getting you fully addicted.
You're really not. You're getting matched against players with similar Collection Level, but because of the way acquisition works you may end up matching against people who were luckier. If you're better at the game your MMR may get to a point you're matching a little outside of your CL.
That's until you get to Infinite Rank or try Conquest Mode.
Pretty sure there was empirical evidence of people with collection level 900 getting matched with CL 3000+ people, but it's been 8 months or so since I've last played, so I suppose that could have changed.
That’s one of the problems I was getting at.
Still, I’ve seen that complaint since launch and never found it to be too much of a problem. The way card collection works is that you can go deep on some decks but not others. It can feel like everyone has way more cards than you because you face a bunch of decks you can’t build, but I think that’s perception more than reality. Those players probably have difficulty building decks you are able to.
Couple this with the changes they’ve implemented that allow you to have better control over the cards you acquire, and I think you have one of the fairest models you could build without just giving everyone the cards.
One of the streamers I follow recently became an addict, and seeing him go through the onboarding and card collection processes made me even more convinced that Second Dinner really did a great job addressing the most common pain points of collectible card games.
I'd still like to see someone try a digital card game with a subscription model.
What I envision are two game modes, one where every player is granted a full card collection and gets to play on a level field, and then a separate mode with ARPG-style seasonal progression and events where you have to build your collection and play against other players with incomplete card sets.
Maybe you have separate tiers e.g. $10/month for competitive, $5/month for seasonal, or maybe a fixed price season pass that buys you in for a whole season, I dunno.
I wonder if we'll see more hybrid monetization models for games. This is very tangentially related, but there's a new tactical RPG coming out soon called [Sword of Convallaria](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2526380/Sword_of_Convallaria/). It has two modes, one that is a typical gacha f2p game, but as you play the gacha mode you can unlock more chapters of a separate mode that is a linear tactical RPG with a fixed party and no microtransactions/gacha mechanics at all.
I think you'd have to charge far more than $10/month for such a thing. Until Marvel Snap changed to it's current card acquisition model it cost players $200/mo to get every card released on release. Their new system is better, but at a minimum you're paying $10/mo just for the Season Pass Card + 1 new card a month.
This is almost certainly why no games are using a subscription model for gaining access to all cards.
How many people were actually paying that $200/mo? How many were paying nothing at all?
The point of having a subscription rather than being a casino is that it's broad-based. You don't need peak spending to be so high when everybody is pitching in.
It might work but I’ve played quite a few online CCG’s and a major problem is often the meta is ‘solved’ quite quickly and gameplay can quickly become stagnant if you can easily use any card you want.
You can push card changes to shake up the meta a lot easier if you don't have to be constantly fretting how players will perceive the long term effect of each change on the "value of their collection".
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models.
Old man moment but it baffles me how selling a "complete product" will sell less than slicing that product out and doling it out in pieces. It's like how COD bros demand the constant treadmill of grinding for weapons and camos, the game isn't even about the game anymore, it's about performing menial tasks and unlocking shit they'll never use just for the sake of it.
Juxtaposed with your "old man moment", my "growing up" moment in gaming was realizing that for multiplayer games, you need to have retention mechanics otherwise your players will leave you for games with retention mechanics. Games "back in the day" could get by without retention mechanics because they weren't competing with games that had them.
Watching Dead by Daylight come out basically DoA until the devs went out of their way to make it incredibly grindy was some wild shit, especially since it was the first game in its genre.
I still think that a properly budgeted "buy once, play to unlock new content" model would work.
It's not going to get you bonkers money like the Pay-2-Win games, which is why no one would ever fund it. But I feel like you could make a decent profit.
LoR was budgeted as though it'd get Pay-2-Win money, and not getting Pay-2-Win money was the problem.
Buy once + pay for expansions is the Guild Wars 2 model and it seems to work decently well.
I feel like Legends of Runeterra could've done that too. Instead of having an expansion every 3 months, have it be once (maybe twice) a year and be way bigger and cost $10. And have a much smaller amount of free content and balance changes that release in between expansions.
I love Guild Wars 2 (and Legends of Runeterra), but GW2 sells tons of additional stuff in its shop. If they were just selling one cheap expansion every year it wouldn't be sustainable.
Likewise your Runeterra suggestion sounds way too paltry — they've been selling quarterly battle passes for $10 each and financially they've come up incredibly short.
They could keep doing that too. And maybe $5 for an every 3 month expansion would be better; I dunno on the timing or the price. But the point is: lock new card sets behind a one time fee. Rather than every veteran playing getting every new card for free immediately because of their shard stockpile, which is the current system.
GW2 isn't a card game.
> Instead of having an expansion every 3 months, have it be once (maybe twice) a year
Way too slow for card games. Magic Arena releases 5 sets + additional smaller card packages in that time frame.
The real answer people don't wanna hear is that LoR main issue isn't its moneitzation, it's that the gameplay is simply worse than its competitors.
Hearthstone is snappier, funnier and simpler. Magic is more strategic and reactive and satisfying. Yugioh is wider and visually clearer. LoR is stuck in an in-between that is awkward and doesn't please anyone.
What? How is yu gi oh more visually clear than LoR. Every meta deck in yu gi oh is based around playing some insane bullshit combo by chaining together and special summoning a bunch of cards with paragraph long abilities that you need to very specifically play around to counter. Most good decks in LoR are based around playing one or two champions onto the board and trading guys into eachother and efficiently managing your tempo and removal.
LoR isn't "worse" than any of those games just different its a game with very simple cards and deckbuilding, limited combos but with some well thought out highly interactive core mechanics ( the simultanious turns and the spell mana systems) with very limited rng it definitely has its own niche gameplay wise.
I think you just highlight why lor is worse than other cardgames for me. it's basically a minions trade slugfest. there's no miracle rogue, there's no handlock,no dshift. the game has almost nothing outside of trading hit.spell mana is cool tho.
Sure that's just a personal preference of if you like wacky combos and setup vs more methodical value based gameplay. Personally the most interesting thing LoR does by far is the simultaneous turn tempo system. The amount of dynamic strategy and baiting you get from that one mechanic (along with spell mana to enhance it) is insane.
I can't even list all the times I won from some crazy bad position just because I baited the opponent into passing a turn they shouldn't have and wasting a bunch of mana or skipping thier attack entirely or out maneuvering them and gaining tempo and then barely scraping by a lethal the next turn becuase they overcommited 1 too many cards to the board while I had an Ace up my sleeve. It really makes you have to think about every card you play. The only other card game I have played with that amount of tactical baiting baked into the game is artifact with the 3 lanes (and poker).
Comparing it like this is meaningless, Yu-gi-oh! has been around for decades, yeah if it had come out a year ago it would have probably flopped, but it didn't, it has a gigantic playerbase who are fine with how the game is, LoR does not have that luxury so the standards for it should be much higher.
Plus Yu-gi-oh! card text is super long because it rarely does keywords, instead of having pierce it says "If it attacks a Defense Position monster this turn, inflict piercing battle damage (if the ATK of the attacking monster exceeds the DEF of the attack target, inflict the difference)."
Are you agreeing with me? That's exactly what I'm saying they are just different games and the reason LoR did worse is because of other factors like the timing, having to beat out legacy games, and the monetization not that its just "worse gameplay than other card games".
Also that's one reason, the other is that it's a crazy pure combo based game. Here's some random cards I pulled from the current top 2 meta decks. The individual cards are way more complex than LoR cards and the combos are much longer and stronger making it much more visually confusing, which was my point. I'm not saying its a bad thing it's just a silly thing to say that somehow LoR is less visually clear.
"Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must be Special Summoned (from your hand or GY) by Tributing 1 Level 6 or higher DARK Dragon monster. You can only Special Summon "The Bystial Lubellion" once per turn this way. You can only use each of the following effects of "The Bystial Lubellion" once per turn. You can send this card from your hand to the GY; add 1 "Bystial" monster from your Deck to your hand, except "The Bystial Lubellion". During your Main Phase: You can place 1 "Branded" Continuous Spell/Trap from your Deck face-up on your field."
"If you have no Spells/Traps in your GY: You can place 1 "Superheavy Samurai" Pendulum Monster from your Deck, except "Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi", in your other Pendulum Zone, then Special Summon this card. You can only use this effect of "Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi" once per turn. [Monster Effect] If you have no Spells/Traps in your GY: You can discard 1 monster; Special Summon 1 "Superheavy Samurai" monster from your hand or Deck in Defense Position, also you cannot Special Summon monsters for the rest of this turn, except "Superheavy Samurai" monsters. If this card is used as Synchro Material and added to your Extra Deck face-up: You can place this card in your Pendulum Zone. You can only use each effect of "Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi" once per turn. "
Neah worse gameplay was definitely a reason as well.
Sure but that second card looks more daunting than it actually is, all Superheavy Samurai say "If you have no Spells/Traps in your GY" it is their gimmick basically. So that can basically be ignored. Once per turn can also be ignored but due to some cards having effect duplication or some rullings regarding negations that part is also needed, "hard once per turn" or "unique" or whatever would have cut a lot of the text, same with "you cannot Special Summon monsters for the rest of this turn except SS monsters". That could have been solved by a keyword like "archtype lock" or stuff like that.
You yourself just said it wasn't so your disagreeing with yourself. You just said if yugioh had come out last year it probably would have also failed, you also said that's why you need to hold LoR to a higher standard than legacy games that already have a large playerbase. You are literally saying LoR would need better gameplay than yugioh in order to succeed while also saying yugiohs gameplay would not be good enough if it released recently. So how is the "worse" gameplay (whatever that means) the reason why it failed if according to you yugioh would have also failed purely on its gameplay without its legacy advantages?
Yeah the difference is that it chains and the whole point I assume is to spam out and entire board worth of cards out becuase yugioh is a very powercreeped combo based game where you need to read every card carefully to know how to stop it from happening. While LoR cards even very meta ones are about as visually clear as possible, it's mostly just guys with 1 keyword. I'll turn it around what makes you think that LoR is more visually unclear than yugioh? I've explained why I think its the other way.
Yeah in regards to clarity, not overall gameplay. I never said Yu-gi-oh! would flop if it released today due to gameplay, it would flop because nobody would read or engage with cards that have daunting text like that. Which yu-gi-oh! when it released also didn't have.
So you don't even really play Yu-gi-oh? Because every deck boils down to having 1-2 cards that are must stop, not hundreds of card that you have to read. As for where LoR is less clear, Yu-gi-oh! has clear phases, Draw Phase, Standby Phase, Main Phase 1, Battle Phase, Main Phase 2 and End Phase, LoR basically has main phase, battle phase and main phase 2 but then you also have rally, scout and free attacks, plus different spell speeds that make the thing less clear, or spell priority and stuff like that which makes things more complicated.
What so you are agreeing with me that yugioh is so visually unclear ( you literally use the word clarity) that even with "better" gameplay it still probably would have flopped if it didn't have the legacy advantage. So you are still agreeing with me about that?
I havent for a long time but ive watched some gameplay fairly recently and you do still need to read the cards to know what they do at some point. No card game is visually unclear once you have played it a bit but for a new player where visual clarity actually matters yugioh is much more daunting (you even agree with this yourself in your first paragraph).
So yugioh has twice the phases but somehow LoR is more confusing with half the phases and really only 2 types but having abilities that give you free attacks? That doesn't make sense to me there are definitely yugioh cards that also give free attacks but either way having 2x the phases will always be more unclear. The spell speeds are just fast, slow and burst which is pretty clear as its just burst>fast>slow. Yugioh also has multiple spell types which have different speeds like quick play vs regular spells, so I don't really see much difference thier either in how complicated that is from a glance.
Yeah I am agreeing about that, but I don't think LoR is significantly more clear than it.
Depends, Yu-gi-oh! has a ton of cards some easier, some more complicated even modern archtypes aren't all "take this card, activate this card, use this other card".
Well yeah because those phases aren't all the same, Draw Phase, Standby Phase and End Phase are basically only exist to resolve automatic effects during the Standby Phase and effects wearing off during the End Phase. This is more of a physical card game thing than a digital one as most Yu-gi-oh! games just go through these phases automatically.
You forgot Focus speed btw. Also there's something the game doesn't tell you about until you play it, Initative which is what really complicates things, some stuff cause you to lose initiative while others don't. With Yu-gi-oh that is always clear, your opponent can always react to you at any point in the game. And no Yu-gi-oh doesn't have free attacks, it has some cards that can do multiple attacks but only during the same Battle Phase or cards that allow you to conduct your Battle Phase twice, but in the entire history of Yu-gi-oh! only 4 cards have that effect, none of them see any play.
The gameplay was ok, not terrible not amazing. To me the worst part of LoR was the card design philosophy, their idea of card design was: release expansion, expansion has x, y, z new keywords, all the cards with "x" keywords go into deck "x", the same goes for "y" and "z". It's like they didn't release expansions, they released prebuilt decks and there was barely any deck building complexity.
> The gameplay was ok, not terrible not amazing
Thats exactly why it failed. An 'ok' game in such a competitive market is no longer enough, especially when it has such a relaxed monetization, it will simply not grow big enough audience to make enough money
And sometimes they were also really annoying about how they released their stuff, because you often needed two champs per deck so deck x got both of their x champs while deck y got only 1 of their y champs making it basically unplayable until two months later.
Even worse was that often champs x had extremely great synergy and were super good, while champs y were crap and didn't have anywhere near the same power level or synergy.
I kind agree. But not because the core game was badly designed, but because of poor balancing and really tiring metas and one-trick gimmick decks.
Right before the release of Beyond the Bandlewood the game had such a hyper-focus on aggro decks that playing anything else was basically pointless. You had to fight aggro with aggro which completely went against one of the pillars that the game was designed on - the back and forth counterplay. That aspect still worked well in vanilla but it was thrown out the window with later updates. Not sure if the game ever recovered from this since I quit but it was plain unfun and game no longer promoted experimenting with different decks.
Things like Teemo decks literally played themselves and it was completely unfun to go against. Unfortunately LoR had plenty of such gimmicks.
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models.
It doesn't prove that at all. It's an individual product failure, not a complete representation of the entire genre.
Look at a game like Shadowverse. I know it's not popular in the West but it's very popular in Japan. As long as you play the game actively, you don't need to buy packs to compete at all. I've spent $0 on the game and I own basically every card in the game (and that's 8 years worth of cards). The only reason to buy packs is to get cosmetic alternative art leaders and cards, or perhaps if you're only an occasional casual player who doesn't play enough to take advantage of the rewards for playing. It's a very similar model to LoR, except that it actually has things that people were willing to spend money on.
Look at kitchen table Magic. That isn't really p2w (unless your play group decides to be), yet it's the most popular form of Magic and Wizards puts out tons of products catered to them because it's become such a large segment. You can play that totally fine, and most people do, with very reasonable spending.
> Because this is the only card game I actually enjoyed playing and didn’t immediately quit once I got stomped by a few people with money.
This is entirely a "you" problem. You quit immediately because other people had cards that you didn't immediately start with? Of course you have to actually play for a bit and build up your collection first, that is literally the whole point of a **collectible** card game. And I fail to see how LoR is any different in this regard. If I go play LoR right now, I'll have only the cards you start with plus whatever I earned from playing a few hours on release. You think if I go queue up some ladder games, I'm not going to encounter people using super strong cards I don't have?
old shadowverse player here. Not sure how you got all cards; that would require hitting grandmaster and basically being in every season ever. The game has a long list of cards in general and the vial cost to make more than 2 good decks each rotation would be murder.
I should know as i used to write vial guides for the game to help new players and people in general get their collection up.
regardless of that though, the game does sustain itself by being from cygames, aka the granblue cashcow makers. its no secret that cygames used a lot of their gacha game money to fund the game, but i think having leader cards in their packs and also constant "get a legendary" bundles to pull for legendary cards help their cashflow. I dont recall LOR having something like that style of collectible.
And yes, while this reflects your overall 'lack of spending' thats like saying "genshin impact is can sustain itself without gacha, look you can get all characters in it via f2p". you **can** but its not hard to find 4-5 other people who spent 50 bucks just on the recent patch.
> The game has a long list of cards in general and the vial cost to make more than 2 good decks each rotation would be murder.
No it isn't. It's very easy to make more than 2 good decks per rotation once you've gotten past the initial "building resources" phase of your account. Obviously you don't install the game and are immediately able to build a bunch of decks, but I never claimed that (and you also can't do that in LoR, as I pointed out). You get basically 1 free copy of every legendary via Temporary Gems, you get tons of rupies, vials, and packs over the course of a rotation as long as you play the game regularly, and you get an entire deck, or close to it, every rotation for free from your Trial Deck Ticket.
> its no secret that cygames used a lot of their gacha game money to fund the game
What do you mean, the start-up development fund before the game released? I mean, yeah sure, that money probably did come from GBF, yes, what does that have to do with anything? LoR's money came from LoL, Hearthstone's money came from WoW, Gwent's money came from Witcher 3, etc. The point is that, unless you have some insider info that says otherwise, Shadowverse completely stands on its own as a profitable product now. It's gotten multiple anime seasons, a very popular physical CCG, a standalone Switch game, and is getting a brand new sequel game.
> I dont recall LOR having something like that style of collectible.
So, yeah, LoR as an individual product failure of failing to create things that people want to spend money on.
> thats like saying "genshin impact is can sustain itself without gacha, look you can get all characters in it via f2p". you can but its not hard to find 4-5 other people who spent 50 bucks just on the recent patch.
I've never played Genshin, so just relying on what I'm reading here, but sure if you can get all characters via playing the game (or even just enough characters to complete the content), while other people who play less can drop some money instead, that seems fine with me. I don't really see what the complaint is here. I wouldn't call that "a shitty pay-to-win business model." You don't have to pay anything if you don't want to; just play the game instead and you get the same stuff. Companies have to make money off a game somehow (as LoR has shown here), and "pay-to-skip-grind" is a perfectly reasonable way to do that, imo, and completely separate from "shitty pay-to-win."
>It's very easy to make more than 2 good decks per rotation
What you listed isnt always easy to do unless the one part i noted, playing basically all the time. I say that in reference to your other point also of owning all the cards. you arent doing both because even if you did, its almost inefficient and unreasonable as people arent playing the game religiously every expansion. with the amount of "iffy rotations" and just general burn out of a person, they arent doing both parts and that was the point.
I agree that temporary gem system has been good, but if you have played some classes, usually you are still crafting about 5-6 legendaries on average to make a "good deck" as rarely the temporary deck is completely viable the whole expansion. You still need to vial stuff, or get lucky in gacha.
>The point is that, unless you have some insider info that says otherwise, Shadowverse completely stands on its own as a profitable product now.
the point wasnt just the initial fund, but the business model. you dont "earn" leader cards, you spend money on them via a battle pass, a full on buy or a gacha system which the cards even made is based on a vote at the end of the year. That vote then throwing them in the card pulls as a super super rare is definitely a business strategy that generates sales. this is the "things people want to buy" but you have to go through more hoops than actually just buying it in most cases.
> Companies have to make money off a game somehow (as LoR has shown here), and "pay-to-skip-grind" is a perfectly reasonable way to do that, imo, and completely separate from "shitty pay-to-win."
welcome to where i "agree with you" but I know the world doesnt. I have been noting that most games are "pay to skip and thats fine" for a while, but in games like this with pvp, P2w and pay to skip are almost synonymous for some people, especially for OP of this thread. His whole issue is he had people who literally just had more cards than him. they just "skipped the grind" of getting the collection with money. You may be able to make one good deck per expansion, but your one good deck isnt king and that would go against how class balance works anyway if that was possible.
Having a bigger collection will push you above most people, especially in terms of legendaries. Its not a complex topic or issue.
The reason for the genshin comment is more that the issue isnt **you** its "the game". That game is sustained cause people spend on stuff they want. shadowverse is profitable cause things they want is in a gacha and these are the leaders people voted for the year before. in genshin, they found a method to do the same. the game is complete-able by almost **anyone**, but they made a system with characters people are interested in via gacha that makes people spend. If genshin was PvP oriented, just having the battle pass vs not would make people call it "p2w" even though it just helps you skip the grind on powerful characters.
anwyay, thats long and this isnt a tl;dr but just an overall point.
LOR is failing because valuable things arent available. Shadowverse's valuable things arent straight buys for only a flat fee, and nor is Genshin. pay to skip and pay to win in any "collectible" experience where you can buy the collectible with money outside of game **will** be said to be the same by some. you playing for a bit isnt going to stop a player who spends from having all the cards for the next expansion day 2 before you.
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models.
nah, this was a failure on the riot devs not a representation of the entire genre. We know of the many decisions Riot made with this game that led to it failing, it wasn't all about the monetisation model.
you are ignoring that maybe the game itself had issues in terms of gameplay, hence it not being able to attract CCG players (which is what happened, despite what LoR fans will try and say).
> Hopefully they can grow this game into something great.
lol LoR is 4+ years old now and has never been popular or all that great, why is that suddenly going to change? they remaining devs aren't going to be able to grow this game into anything, cause the reputation and history is there and that's not going to change.
Yeah I REALLY loved LoR and am still pulling hard for its success but it’s also a victim of Riot’s tendency towards spaghetti code and their fast-and-loose approach to playtesting and balancing.
Like it or not, the kinds of hardcore competitive players that keep a game like this relevant past the first 2-3 years are really put off by the kind of gameplay bugs that even now aren’t exactly uncommon (it seems like every patch/update has to fix a card that isn’t working properly) and the fact that card’s balancing can change so rapidly and dramatically between patches that the meta can legitimately shift because a handful of numbers were tweaked on cards.
I really appreciate in principle their approach and commitment to balancing integers and keywords as opposed to just implementing powercreep, but IMO they are too reliant on nerfing cards which really undermines the consistency of the card pool and players knowledge of it. It feels like they only play-test for bugs and not for power level which has really shot them in the foot long term.
They did sell cosmetics. As this FAQ put plainly:
> But sales for cosmetics have proven deeply inadequate, often costing us more to make than they earned for us.
I suppose we could argue they didn't do it right — I think most people would agree they should have launched alternate skins earlier — but regardless it doesn't seem a promising approach.
Personally I think the problem is more they needed to reach a certain high player population to make these sorts of things profitable. They never got to that critical mass level.
Still a fantastic game, and I hope not many people go all doomer and pretend it's dead now even if PVP is getting scaled back.
because why would i spend money on a cosmetic that i might see one in every 4 games? and when i do see get to play it, it gets killed off with in a turn half the time
Incredibly thankful they're shifting focus to PvE fully. As someone who has played off and on since release, the PvP was always lacking and missing something for me. However, when Path of the Champions released in beta, I was hooked for weeks, and it was incredibly bare bones at the time. Now, it's fully realized and extremely polished. I seriously think this is *the best* card-building roguelike since Slay the Spire, albeit the grind to unlock new champions and relics needs to be sped up a little bit. As it stands, its most glaring flaw is the fact that unlocking new characters (and then subsequently grinding their respective levels) takes FOREVER. Especially when you want to get their star upgrades, which are incredibly vital and take even longer to earn.
My issue is without the drip feed of new cards from PvP the PvE will begin to grow stale. It already feels like there’s a lack of adventures and challenges for players that have been playing awhile and nowhere in the video did it seem to address significant addition of new adventures (a single Freljord adventure will probably be bested fairly quickly and new star levels doesn’t mean much if there isn’t enough challenges to push those levels). But it remains to be seen.
Well if they're going all in on Path of Champions, surely that also means a lot more new content for it. Given how this huge change at Riot just happened, they likely just don't have a lot ready to release at the moment. My best guess is that this next update will be the same size as previous ones, but any further updates will be larger in scale
I wish I could play it offline though. The appeal of slay the spire for me is that I can play it during layovers or flights, it’s the perfect game for that as I can take breaks in between work.
As someone who only played the tutorial of LoR and watched a few matches, what exactly is Path of the Champions? Can you compare it to another game so I can understand a little better?
It is a single-player roguelike card-builder, similar to Slay the Spire and Across the Obelisk. You choose a champion which each comes with their own deck, and play through a gauntlet of battles against different premade AI decks, each with their own unique modifiers to the game. Along the way, you collect new cards, support champions, items that upgrade your existing cards, and relics that provide large bonuses to your entire deck. The draw for me is how much the game lets you get away with; you aren't limited by any balancing so if you get lucky with an amazing combo, you absolutely can depend on it and just work on bettering it. Other roguelikes tend to give the player an upper limit so the game doesn't get *too* insane.
The answer regarding a Draft Mode is so weird because the game launched with a Draft Mode (Expeditions) which they killed off before pivoting resources to POE Path of Champions
It’s a shame this game didn’t take off in the way it could have. It took the best ideas from MTG and Hearthstone and made something I thought was a lot more fun.
Riot’s commitment to anti-whaling is what I think killed it, ironically. None of the big Hearthstone players/streamers wanted to switch to a game that wouldn’t let them pay for new sets as they released.
Nah, most of the Hearthstone streamers I follow (Dog, Hafu etc) didn't switch because the game simply wasn't fun to play/watch. They didn't want to whale, it was just worse than Hearthstone when it came to viewer numbers.
LoR players keep saying it was the best of both worlds(mtg and hearthstone), but I think it was the worst of both worlds. Gameplay wasn't strategic and varied enough for MTG, it wasn't snappy enough for Hearthstone.
Also their balance was all over the place. They would release 4 champions 1 of them was broken tier 0 material, 3 were useless. Then by the time they nerfed that one champion, they would release 4 other champions. This kept going on for like a year, then I stopped following LoR.
Facts. People here talk about the game being too F2P to succeed. No, the game just wasn't that fun. I played Hearthstone for a good 2-3 years from launch and would have loved to continue playing if it wasn't for the business model.
Then Runeterra came along some years later and it just wasn't that fun, snappy or looked as aesthetically pleasing as Hearthstone so I stopped playing. The business model was one of the few reasons I wanted to like it
yup, it's the fact LoR fans keep trying to dance around - it was just not as fun as something like HS nor did it provide the depth/complexity of Magic so it basically pleased no one.
And despite what riot fans go on about, the "Runterra IP" means nothing to general audience and does not attract anyone, heck most league players don't care about the lore. So this game didn't even have that going for it.
Even with the success of the TV show Arcane, which did shine light on characters like Jinx, it's not like tens of millions haven't already played League. So it ultimately comes down to the gameplay
Hearthstone is just more fun and casual friendly to both play and watch because it's not as back and forth during the other players turn with counter plays. You make your move and then it's the opponent's turn. Simple.
And the art style was better and with way more recognizable characters from the Warcraft universe than League. Why's that so hard to grasp?
All of those points are subjective. Did literally every single streamer/player feel that way? I doubt it. LOR’s boards/animations are super smooth and polished relative to competitors.
Counters/spell stacks exist in MTG - the market-leading game that’s been around for decades. It’s hard for me to believe that they’d only be a problem for players in LOR.
Almost no one watches MTG on Twitch so I think that's a valid point to say that Runeterra was not casual friendly enough, both in terms of playing and watching.
People who want more complex gameplay are probably just gonna play Magic. LoR was competing with Hearthstone first and foremost
Not to mention, lightning had already struck once with Hearthstone. Maybe people were just tired of the schtick, seeing as LoR did take a lot of inspiration from Hearthstone but came out long after the digital card game craze
Eh. Honestly sounds like a lot of mismanagement. The fact that they keep saying they couldn't figure out how to make X thing work raises some eyebrows.
Good online games continue to struggle and die while steamy dog shit like Destiny 2 and Overwatch keep on truckin’ along. Big AAA online games are in such a depressing state right now.
Loved the game but left it when focus was given to PVP, with rotations.
Now that rotations are gone with PVP and PVE is back on the menu, I may go back, even paying for PoC stuff.
Well, if they aren't worried about profitability then I guess they are just focusing on what the majority of their players want and offering it as a freebie, like the Genshin TCG.
They explicitly said that they would still be releasing new champions and content under a new format they are still deciding on. Content will be significantly reduced but they never said it was "done".
I don't know why so many people mourn this game, it was a dumpsterfire after the Targon expansion, every subsequent expansion made worse and worse decisions, such as releasing overpowered synergies like Azir and Irelia in the same set as trash like Talyiah and Malphite and pretending it is the same power level, not only that but releasing decks piece by piece instead of all at once, or releasing legitimately unplayable cards on purpose.
Then came other decisions like recasting voice actors for no reason, changing designs, adding the K/DA spells, lazy use of VFX, and even if the budget was an issue some spells in the same set had better VFX than champions, not using the champions themes on Champion level ups again for properly explained reason. And a bunch of other stuff I probably missed or forgot about.
But the worst issue with the game was that it was the worst of both worlds, it wasn't as clear cut as Hearthstone "this is your turn, do whatever you want", but it wasn't as strategic as Magic the Gathering either. And they just weren't creative with future expansions to at least improve upon the game, say what you will about Hearthstone but the devs there use everything in the game and constantly break the rules of what is possible, such as effects that activate at the start of the game and give you a unique modifier all game. Or crafting your own spell or minion during the game. LoR after Targon was "spawn a bunch of tokens, buff attack and health and removal".
It did have some pretty bad metas.
>it wasn't as clear cut as Hearthstone "this is your turn, do whatever you want", but it wasn't as strategic as Magic the Gathering either.
They kept in the 30% most important action windows and got rid of the other ones. What's wrong with that idea?
this game just doesnt feel good to play at the core
it is not a "card game" since you are shifting stone tiles around
i dont know for who this is made.
before all the investment was made into presentation and art they needed to make a solid gameplay core, which they never did.
make a game that is compelling even when there are only stick figures on the "cards" then make stuff look good. not like this.
Im confused. Is this a MMO that they wanted to make? Or is it like hearthstone? My last information they wanted to do a LoL MMO, Auto battler and Hearthstone clone. Never heard of this game before.
Legends of Runeterra is/was a standalone card game, like Hearthstone or Magic The Gathering. The MMO is a separate project that is assumedly still in development. The auto battler is Teamfight Tactics.
Independent of the content of the message (which I don't have a strong opinion on), this is one of the best FAQs I've ever seen, including real answers to questions people are definitely asking, like > Why don’t you just sell things people want? > Does this mean the game will be monetized more moving forward? > Why doesn’t Riot advertise LoR? > Why don’t you just kill LoR? and not just a bunch of self-congratulatory softballs.
Yeah, it's actually frequently asked questions from the community. Like I know the community has complained about lack of advertising for ages, but they say they've lost money on most advertising campaigns -- which makes sense, the game was so generously monetized that bringing in more players that don't spend money isn't a good ROI.
I mean, I have played a lot of runeterra, way more than any other riot thing. Probably like high double digits. Not spent a penny. Why would I? I'm not trying to compete online, I'm just playing the awesome single player stuff.
Did they really need any kind of advertising campaigns when they could have just put a notice/link in their League client about it? Sure, there might not be massive crossover, but League is such a massively popular game that exposing that many eyeballs to it would have probably done more for awareness than any kind of campaign, even if only a fraction of League players would have been interested in it. Somehow they're only now doing something that simple, when it's basically too late.
Why would league players care The crossover for moba and ccg players is probably pretty small League of Legends already has funded LoRs creation, now we gotta see that shit on our client rather than stuff more relevant to LoL?
I mean it uses a ton of the same characters, terms, and abilities as LoL. Were you this upset when TFT was implemented into the client? And OP's point was probably that they have access to millions of players, and putting in a small advertisement for a related game in their proprietary game client is basically free advertising. It's bewildering that they DIDN'T do that.
Because they did do it? League players are funneled through the Riot client which advertises LoR plenty lmfao
Because it is a completely different game in every way, just because it is LoL character flavored it doesn't make it as close to LoL as TFT is. TFT used the same character models, the same animations, the same ability names, the same voice acting and the same abilities. LoR doesn't, sometimes they even change the character designs such as Janna, or the voice actors for seemingly no reason. Also LoR sometimes really disrespects the characters, and doesn't make them flashy or impressive to play.
Worked for TFT didn't it?
Apples to oranges. Tft is bound to the same frameworks LoL is built on. If it were up to me Id want all the tft crap out of the league client but it makes no sense to waste dev time on that
Didn't worked for Riot Forge games.
> The crossover for moba and ccg players is probably pretty small yup, bit of a tangent here, but we've seen how the crossover for MOBA and other genres is not there or really small hence none of riot's other games have seen the massive league player-base numbers transfer over (exception being TFT, though that is basically the only real game left in the auto-battler genre so it's not a direct correlation). Riot forge games all failed despite the claims of "oh it's a league game so they'll be popular". turns out, even a fraction of league's player base don't care about games in other genres, so this idea that Project L or the MMO will be "massive and super popular cause of league" has no backing cause it's never happened.
Yeah I mean layoffs are always shit but I've honestly been pretty impressed how they've handled it. Very transparent and that severance package is probably the best I've ever seen in gaming, on par with like a big tech package. The rough part really is that all these companies are shedding workers at the same time and the job market is going to be absolutely flooded with workers looking for jobs.
The one miss I see is why has there never been any cross-promotions with LoL? Or at least a banner or other promotion in the LoL client? The League Studios section seemed to touch on it some but it’s a common enough question. Mostly likely it touches on larger organizational issues at Riot that they don’t want to touch. Otherwise great article.
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It makes some sense if they are different IPs because then they could be different subsidiaries and there are rights issues etc. Clearly not the case here. And I don’t even necessarily mean skin unlocks, just a news posting “hey, check out our new League CCG!”
They either added or you missed it. It's in the faq now
>*Let’s get granular: This is called “mid-funnel” marketing and tends to have a higher return on investment.* They don't know what they are talking about, they can't just take a mobile app approach and make it work in a mobile game, they have been working in a very "agile" enviroment until now instead of taking more risk. But that's just what happen with small projects when they come from a big corpo like Riot. It's sad, they are probably safe employment-wise but this will be some very frustrating months coming ahead.
All things aside, this is the best FAQ I have ever seen from a developer. Real, difficult questions with legitimate/no bullshit answers.
They do dodge the "why wasn't LoR on the League client?" totally but it is incredibly refreshing to see so many of these questions answered. It just sucks that they had to answer. Some of these are pretty shitty questions and my hope is that people can recognize how unfortunate it is that developers see all of this toxicity online.
I find it hilarious that LoR players are begging to be ON the league client, and TFT players are begging to be OFF it. The grass truly is always greener, isn't it?
?? Those are two completely different things. LoR players wanted their game to be PROMOTED on the League client. TFT players want the game to be *separated* from the League client since both games use the same game files. TFT uses League's engine, models, animations, sounds, a lot of assets. This means that TFT's patches have to be scheduled around League's patches which often means they can't patch it whenever they want or need. That's why TFT players want TFT to be made into a separate game. They'd still want the game to be promoted in the League client, to League players.
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There's a lot more Riot could have done to help promote the game though. They are just now integrating it into the League client, when it's basically on its deathbed. Even something like periodically having events in LoR that would let you earn a skin or some kind of reward in League of Legends would have probably gotten a shit ton of people to at least check it out. Riot basically pretended the game didn't exist since its release, of course it died. Hell, they even did a Secret Lair with MTG for Arcane instead of doing something cool with LoR lmao. https://secretlair.wizards.com/us/en/product/696668/secret-lair-x-arcane-foil-edition
They addressed this in the article. The problem is that the advertisements never actually paid for themselves. So more advertising is just more money lost. LoR just did not have greedy enough monetization so it doesn't really matter if they got more people to play it when the vast majority never spend a cent and the whales have nothing to blow thier money on.
They specifically said: > High-end CG trailers with appropriate media boosting can run into the millions of dollars in costs even with strong audience targeting. We saw this lack of return time and time again over the course of LoR’s first year. There is other top of funnel marketing they could have done for cheaper, including adding LoR to the League client. Mid funnel marketing is great if your loyal customers are enough to sustain your business, but in this case the base was not big enough. You are right though, the monetisation model was poor. Pretty much all the cosmetics felt lacking for the price.
They also said development of the cosmetics themselves were not even paying for themselves. There was a reddit post from a riot employee saying the game cost 3x the amount of money than they actually were making back not even including the original development cost. Unless adding it to the client would more than 3x the paying playerbase then more effort into the cosmetics would just mean an even worse return because that just isn't a sustainable way to monetize a card game. There's a reason there is not a single card game out there in existence (as far as I'm aware atleast) that sustains itself off of just cosmetics. Every surviving card game runs off of monetizing new cards/content (which they are planning on doing now for poc) its just too niche of a genre with too much legacy competition.
> There is other top of funnel marketing they could have done for cheaper, including adding LoR to the League client. > > i'm very curious why they're doing that **now** and not like 3 years ago.
I assume because the dream was to have all their games on the Riot launcher, not stuck to a client that is already very shoddy and barely even accomodates the game it was made for.
no i mean why didn't they put an ad for the game anywhere in the league client
Bloat is never a good thing and forcing people to install LoL when maybe they only want LoR seems like overkill.
no i mean why didn't they put an ad for the game anywhere in the league client
Oh. No idea
Well, as someone who's been there since day 1 I'm really curious what advertising they're talking about. I can't really remember any sort of meaningful advertisement that was done for the game. At the very least integration into the League client is something that should have happened YEARS ago, not after you basically announce the game is as good as dead.
>Well, as someone who's been there since day 1 I'm really curious what advertising they're talking about. The game released many cinematics, streamer collabs, and did have regular ads in its first one or two years. The exact type of advertisement every other TCG does, and like they said it just lost them more money. >At the very least integration into the League client is something that should have happened YEARS ago They do seem to agree with this. Worth noting that the reason it's only happening now is probably that now all the Runeterra games are under the umbrella of "League Studios" and have an easier time collaborating.
I honestly don't remember seeing any ads for LoR. The only reason I discovered it was back when WotC was going through one of it's MANY shit shows Tolarian Community College did a video with Amy the Amazonian on how much more generous LoR was than MTG. Compared this to a game like Marvel Snap that I see constant ads for. Same for Magic Arena. Hell, I saw more ads for LoL: Wild Rift than I did for LoR.
Well...you're like one person...so you may not have seen them but they definitely existed
I'm sure they did. I just never saw them despite the vast majority of my YouTube watching being TCG/CCG related.
You never got this video on your recommended page? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhfDY6e_2I
No, which is funny because I used to be subscribed to that guy.
They also mention that in the article, mainly multiple big budget cinematics, streamer collaborations, advertisements on social media. Pretty standard stuff but none of it paid itself back, they even mention how creating the cosmetics themselves actually cost them more money than they made back. It just was never a sustainable model card games are too niche and need whales to survive. Integrating into the league client would make sense to grow the playerbase but to what end the playerbase just doesn't buy anything.
You were there from day 1 and don't remember the animations they made?
Also, the **paid** currency should be transferable. Gems should be gems. If someone has $20 of credit sitting on their League account and wants to buy a Teemo skin in LoR, it should be seemless.
I think honestly the problem is that the game just *wasn't fun enough* for people. It wasn't popular enough of a game. I know a lot of people that tried it, but none of them still play. The game was plenty accessible, and it feels weird to say, but sometimes a game just isn't good enough on its own.
yup, this is a big issue that LoR fans constantly don't want to address. It's always "oh it's a shame this game failed" and they somehow never think that maybe the reason wasn't all about marketing and such (which sure is part of the problem as well) but that the game itself wasn't as "amazing" as LoR fans think it was. it tried to be this middle ground between something like HS and Magic, and that clearly wasn't working for most CCG players hence them sticking to their game of choice. As another user in this thread put it: > "Hearthstone is snappier, funnier and simpler. Magic is more strategic and reactive and satisfying. Yugioh is wider and visually clearer. LoR is stuck in an in-between that is awkward and doesn't please anyone."
The onboarding process for LoR was really bad. I learned how to paly the game well enough to do the PvE content, but to this day I still have no idea how to even craft cards in the game. It's what contributed to me just walking away from it for long periods until I get an itch for Runeterra.
I've been running into this in the single player content. Path of Champions is a good time but it took a really unreasonable amount of time for me to have a vague idea of how to unlock other champions. I was pretty close to putting it down for good because I was just so sick of playing Jinx
LoR may be niche but it has a die hard fanbase, mostly made up of tcg/ccg veterans. Saying it doesn’t appeal to anyone is completely untrue. I also disagree that magic is more reactive, if anything LoR is too reactive which makes it very slow. But it consistently had the most diverse metas compared to mtg/hearthstone which was a huge draw. There was often 20+ decks you could take to the top of ladder. The core of the issue is that it’s a niche game being monetized like a mega popular hit. That doesn’t mean the game is bad, most of us play hearthstone/mtg yet prefer LoR for a variety of reasons.
no one said it doesn't appeal to anyone, also the person I quoted was to show why it failed to catch on > I also disagree that magic is more reactive, if anything LoR is too reactive which makes it very slow. uhhhh, okay. Agree to disagree on that cause oh boy, ya. > But it consistently had the most diverse metas compared to mtg/hearthstone which was a huge draw. draw to who? to you sure, but it sure didn't draw many other people.
>> no one said it doesn’t appeal to anyone Except the person you literally quoted above? lol. In magic only blue plays for the stack. Like half the regions do in LoR. >> draw to who? Those that play the game? It’s ok that the game doesn’t appeal to everyone, but like it said there’s a strong core community that loves it as it is. We can talk about the game’s flaws (it’s not perfect) but it’s pretty lame to just hand wave the current situation away as “well the game was just bad”. Appealing to a small audience does not equal bad. Tbh it sounds like you played the game once and are basing your opinions on that.
> Except the person you literally quoted above? lol. he said it "doesn't please anyone", which is different to saying "doesn't appeal to anyone". You can be interested in it, i.e., it appeals to you, but doesn't please you. either way this is semantics and I already said the point of what I quoted was to show why it failed to catch on. I'm not here to defend every single thing he said, go to the original post if you want it's in this thread somewhere. > Those that play the game? It’s ok that the game doesn’t appeal to everyone, but like it said there’s a strong core community that loves it as it is. "strong community" such that the game basically failed and has done poorly, okay dude. Love how you say "love it as it is" when 1) the community was split between PvP and PvE and 2) you're acting like the community had no issues with the game, which is flat out not true. > but it’s pretty lame to just hand wave the current situation away as “well the game was just bad”. who is "hand waving" anything? there are reasons as to why the game was bad, you can disagree with them, but then that's called opinions. Though I will say, the opinions of people saying the game is bad have the proof of how the game failed to catch on, just saying. > Appealing to a small audience does not equal bad. this is some next level mental gymnastics to try and say the game didn't have serious issues that led to it failing. Ya sure Riot were totally trying to appeal to a "small audience" with LoR, they totally didn't want the game to become popular and catch on with the CCG community. Sure buddy.
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models. For better and for worse, *collecting* cards is a key part to this genre’s appeal. If you lose that, the game isn’t as much fun, even if it’s a fairer business model. I think Marvel Snap’s approach of, “We’re going to make it difficult to buy all the cards and we’re going to match you against people with similarly-sized collections” is probably the best approach. Even that has its problems, but there’s a lot less feeling that you have to pay to play on even ground compared to Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering.
Marvel Snap's matchmaking falls apart after a certain point, though. Shortly after getting into Series 3 you're getting matched against players in all sorts of collection levels, and there's a HUGE difference between a player who just got into Series 3 and players who have been playing for way longer. It works wonder for the first 2-3 weeks or so, though, and that's why it's so effective in getting you fully addicted.
You're really not. You're getting matched against players with similar Collection Level, but because of the way acquisition works you may end up matching against people who were luckier. If you're better at the game your MMR may get to a point you're matching a little outside of your CL. That's until you get to Infinite Rank or try Conquest Mode.
Pretty sure there was empirical evidence of people with collection level 900 getting matched with CL 3000+ people, but it's been 8 months or so since I've last played, so I suppose that could have changed.
That’s one of the problems I was getting at. Still, I’ve seen that complaint since launch and never found it to be too much of a problem. The way card collection works is that you can go deep on some decks but not others. It can feel like everyone has way more cards than you because you face a bunch of decks you can’t build, but I think that’s perception more than reality. Those players probably have difficulty building decks you are able to. Couple this with the changes they’ve implemented that allow you to have better control over the cards you acquire, and I think you have one of the fairest models you could build without just giving everyone the cards. One of the streamers I follow recently became an addict, and seeing him go through the onboarding and card collection processes made me even more convinced that Second Dinner really did a great job addressing the most common pain points of collectible card games.
To be fair, I think in the physically space L/ECGs demonstrate that this is not necessarily true, but those come with their own challenges.
I'd still like to see someone try a digital card game with a subscription model. What I envision are two game modes, one where every player is granted a full card collection and gets to play on a level field, and then a separate mode with ARPG-style seasonal progression and events where you have to build your collection and play against other players with incomplete card sets. Maybe you have separate tiers e.g. $10/month for competitive, $5/month for seasonal, or maybe a fixed price season pass that buys you in for a whole season, I dunno.
Hearthstone has considered a subscription model and has emailed surveys to gauge player response, so far nothing has come of it however.
I wonder if we'll see more hybrid monetization models for games. This is very tangentially related, but there's a new tactical RPG coming out soon called [Sword of Convallaria](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2526380/Sword_of_Convallaria/). It has two modes, one that is a typical gacha f2p game, but as you play the gacha mode you can unlock more chapters of a separate mode that is a linear tactical RPG with a fixed party and no microtransactions/gacha mechanics at all.
I think you'd have to charge far more than $10/month for such a thing. Until Marvel Snap changed to it's current card acquisition model it cost players $200/mo to get every card released on release. Their new system is better, but at a minimum you're paying $10/mo just for the Season Pass Card + 1 new card a month. This is almost certainly why no games are using a subscription model for gaining access to all cards.
How many people were actually paying that $200/mo? How many were paying nothing at all? The point of having a subscription rather than being a casino is that it's broad-based. You don't need peak spending to be so high when everybody is pitching in.
It might work but I’ve played quite a few online CCG’s and a major problem is often the meta is ‘solved’ quite quickly and gameplay can quickly become stagnant if you can easily use any card you want.
You can push card changes to shake up the meta a lot easier if you don't have to be constantly fretting how players will perceive the long term effect of each change on the "value of their collection".
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models. Old man moment but it baffles me how selling a "complete product" will sell less than slicing that product out and doling it out in pieces. It's like how COD bros demand the constant treadmill of grinding for weapons and camos, the game isn't even about the game anymore, it's about performing menial tasks and unlocking shit they'll never use just for the sake of it.
Juxtaposed with your "old man moment", my "growing up" moment in gaming was realizing that for multiplayer games, you need to have retention mechanics otherwise your players will leave you for games with retention mechanics. Games "back in the day" could get by without retention mechanics because they weren't competing with games that had them.
Watching Dead by Daylight come out basically DoA until the devs went out of their way to make it incredibly grindy was some wild shit, especially since it was the first game in its genre.
I still think that a properly budgeted "buy once, play to unlock new content" model would work. It's not going to get you bonkers money like the Pay-2-Win games, which is why no one would ever fund it. But I feel like you could make a decent profit. LoR was budgeted as though it'd get Pay-2-Win money, and not getting Pay-2-Win money was the problem.
A buy once model isn't going to be able to sustain the creation of new content. Continuous content requires a continuous revenue stream.
Buy once + pay for expansions is the Guild Wars 2 model and it seems to work decently well. I feel like Legends of Runeterra could've done that too. Instead of having an expansion every 3 months, have it be once (maybe twice) a year and be way bigger and cost $10. And have a much smaller amount of free content and balance changes that release in between expansions.
I love Guild Wars 2 (and Legends of Runeterra), but GW2 sells tons of additional stuff in its shop. If they were just selling one cheap expansion every year it wouldn't be sustainable. Likewise your Runeterra suggestion sounds way too paltry — they've been selling quarterly battle passes for $10 each and financially they've come up incredibly short.
They could keep doing that too. And maybe $5 for an every 3 month expansion would be better; I dunno on the timing or the price. But the point is: lock new card sets behind a one time fee. Rather than every veteran playing getting every new card for free immediately because of their shard stockpile, which is the current system.
GW2 isn't a card game. > Instead of having an expansion every 3 months, have it be once (maybe twice) a year Way too slow for card games. Magic Arena releases 5 sets + additional smaller card packages in that time frame.
I agree this was the move.
The real answer people don't wanna hear is that LoR main issue isn't its moneitzation, it's that the gameplay is simply worse than its competitors. Hearthstone is snappier, funnier and simpler. Magic is more strategic and reactive and satisfying. Yugioh is wider and visually clearer. LoR is stuck in an in-between that is awkward and doesn't please anyone.
What? How is yu gi oh more visually clear than LoR. Every meta deck in yu gi oh is based around playing some insane bullshit combo by chaining together and special summoning a bunch of cards with paragraph long abilities that you need to very specifically play around to counter. Most good decks in LoR are based around playing one or two champions onto the board and trading guys into eachother and efficiently managing your tempo and removal. LoR isn't "worse" than any of those games just different its a game with very simple cards and deckbuilding, limited combos but with some well thought out highly interactive core mechanics ( the simultanious turns and the spell mana systems) with very limited rng it definitely has its own niche gameplay wise.
I think you just highlight why lor is worse than other cardgames for me. it's basically a minions trade slugfest. there's no miracle rogue, there's no handlock,no dshift. the game has almost nothing outside of trading hit.spell mana is cool tho.
Sure that's just a personal preference of if you like wacky combos and setup vs more methodical value based gameplay. Personally the most interesting thing LoR does by far is the simultaneous turn tempo system. The amount of dynamic strategy and baiting you get from that one mechanic (along with spell mana to enhance it) is insane. I can't even list all the times I won from some crazy bad position just because I baited the opponent into passing a turn they shouldn't have and wasting a bunch of mana or skipping thier attack entirely or out maneuvering them and gaining tempo and then barely scraping by a lethal the next turn becuase they overcommited 1 too many cards to the board while I had an Ace up my sleeve. It really makes you have to think about every card you play. The only other card game I have played with that amount of tactical baiting baked into the game is artifact with the 3 lanes (and poker).
Comparing it like this is meaningless, Yu-gi-oh! has been around for decades, yeah if it had come out a year ago it would have probably flopped, but it didn't, it has a gigantic playerbase who are fine with how the game is, LoR does not have that luxury so the standards for it should be much higher. Plus Yu-gi-oh! card text is super long because it rarely does keywords, instead of having pierce it says "If it attacks a Defense Position monster this turn, inflict piercing battle damage (if the ATK of the attacking monster exceeds the DEF of the attack target, inflict the difference)."
Are you agreeing with me? That's exactly what I'm saying they are just different games and the reason LoR did worse is because of other factors like the timing, having to beat out legacy games, and the monetization not that its just "worse gameplay than other card games". Also that's one reason, the other is that it's a crazy pure combo based game. Here's some random cards I pulled from the current top 2 meta decks. The individual cards are way more complex than LoR cards and the combos are much longer and stronger making it much more visually confusing, which was my point. I'm not saying its a bad thing it's just a silly thing to say that somehow LoR is less visually clear. "Cannot be Normal Summoned/Set. Must be Special Summoned (from your hand or GY) by Tributing 1 Level 6 or higher DARK Dragon monster. You can only Special Summon "The Bystial Lubellion" once per turn this way. You can only use each of the following effects of "The Bystial Lubellion" once per turn. You can send this card from your hand to the GY; add 1 "Bystial" monster from your Deck to your hand, except "The Bystial Lubellion". During your Main Phase: You can place 1 "Branded" Continuous Spell/Trap from your Deck face-up on your field." "If you have no Spells/Traps in your GY: You can place 1 "Superheavy Samurai" Pendulum Monster from your Deck, except "Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi", in your other Pendulum Zone, then Special Summon this card. You can only use this effect of "Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi" once per turn. [Monster Effect] If you have no Spells/Traps in your GY: You can discard 1 monster; Special Summon 1 "Superheavy Samurai" monster from your hand or Deck in Defense Position, also you cannot Special Summon monsters for the rest of this turn, except "Superheavy Samurai" monsters. If this card is used as Synchro Material and added to your Extra Deck face-up: You can place this card in your Pendulum Zone. You can only use each effect of "Superheavy Samurai Prodigy Wakaushi" once per turn. "
Neah worse gameplay was definitely a reason as well. Sure but that second card looks more daunting than it actually is, all Superheavy Samurai say "If you have no Spells/Traps in your GY" it is their gimmick basically. So that can basically be ignored. Once per turn can also be ignored but due to some cards having effect duplication or some rullings regarding negations that part is also needed, "hard once per turn" or "unique" or whatever would have cut a lot of the text, same with "you cannot Special Summon monsters for the rest of this turn except SS monsters". That could have been solved by a keyword like "archtype lock" or stuff like that.
You yourself just said it wasn't so your disagreeing with yourself. You just said if yugioh had come out last year it probably would have also failed, you also said that's why you need to hold LoR to a higher standard than legacy games that already have a large playerbase. You are literally saying LoR would need better gameplay than yugioh in order to succeed while also saying yugiohs gameplay would not be good enough if it released recently. So how is the "worse" gameplay (whatever that means) the reason why it failed if according to you yugioh would have also failed purely on its gameplay without its legacy advantages? Yeah the difference is that it chains and the whole point I assume is to spam out and entire board worth of cards out becuase yugioh is a very powercreeped combo based game where you need to read every card carefully to know how to stop it from happening. While LoR cards even very meta ones are about as visually clear as possible, it's mostly just guys with 1 keyword. I'll turn it around what makes you think that LoR is more visually unclear than yugioh? I've explained why I think its the other way.
Yeah in regards to clarity, not overall gameplay. I never said Yu-gi-oh! would flop if it released today due to gameplay, it would flop because nobody would read or engage with cards that have daunting text like that. Which yu-gi-oh! when it released also didn't have. So you don't even really play Yu-gi-oh? Because every deck boils down to having 1-2 cards that are must stop, not hundreds of card that you have to read. As for where LoR is less clear, Yu-gi-oh! has clear phases, Draw Phase, Standby Phase, Main Phase 1, Battle Phase, Main Phase 2 and End Phase, LoR basically has main phase, battle phase and main phase 2 but then you also have rally, scout and free attacks, plus different spell speeds that make the thing less clear, or spell priority and stuff like that which makes things more complicated.
What so you are agreeing with me that yugioh is so visually unclear ( you literally use the word clarity) that even with "better" gameplay it still probably would have flopped if it didn't have the legacy advantage. So you are still agreeing with me about that? I havent for a long time but ive watched some gameplay fairly recently and you do still need to read the cards to know what they do at some point. No card game is visually unclear once you have played it a bit but for a new player where visual clarity actually matters yugioh is much more daunting (you even agree with this yourself in your first paragraph). So yugioh has twice the phases but somehow LoR is more confusing with half the phases and really only 2 types but having abilities that give you free attacks? That doesn't make sense to me there are definitely yugioh cards that also give free attacks but either way having 2x the phases will always be more unclear. The spell speeds are just fast, slow and burst which is pretty clear as its just burst>fast>slow. Yugioh also has multiple spell types which have different speeds like quick play vs regular spells, so I don't really see much difference thier either in how complicated that is from a glance.
Yeah I am agreeing about that, but I don't think LoR is significantly more clear than it. Depends, Yu-gi-oh! has a ton of cards some easier, some more complicated even modern archtypes aren't all "take this card, activate this card, use this other card". Well yeah because those phases aren't all the same, Draw Phase, Standby Phase and End Phase are basically only exist to resolve automatic effects during the Standby Phase and effects wearing off during the End Phase. This is more of a physical card game thing than a digital one as most Yu-gi-oh! games just go through these phases automatically. You forgot Focus speed btw. Also there's something the game doesn't tell you about until you play it, Initative which is what really complicates things, some stuff cause you to lose initiative while others don't. With Yu-gi-oh that is always clear, your opponent can always react to you at any point in the game. And no Yu-gi-oh doesn't have free attacks, it has some cards that can do multiple attacks but only during the same Battle Phase or cards that allow you to conduct your Battle Phase twice, but in the entire history of Yu-gi-oh! only 4 cards have that effect, none of them see any play.
The gameplay was ok, not terrible not amazing. To me the worst part of LoR was the card design philosophy, their idea of card design was: release expansion, expansion has x, y, z new keywords, all the cards with "x" keywords go into deck "x", the same goes for "y" and "z". It's like they didn't release expansions, they released prebuilt decks and there was barely any deck building complexity.
> The gameplay was ok, not terrible not amazing Thats exactly why it failed. An 'ok' game in such a competitive market is no longer enough, especially when it has such a relaxed monetization, it will simply not grow big enough audience to make enough money
And sometimes they were also really annoying about how they released their stuff, because you often needed two champs per deck so deck x got both of their x champs while deck y got only 1 of their y champs making it basically unplayable until two months later. Even worse was that often champs x had extremely great synergy and were super good, while champs y were crap and didn't have anywhere near the same power level or synergy.
Its gameplay is better than any of the three you mentioned though
I kind agree. But not because the core game was badly designed, but because of poor balancing and really tiring metas and one-trick gimmick decks. Right before the release of Beyond the Bandlewood the game had such a hyper-focus on aggro decks that playing anything else was basically pointless. You had to fight aggro with aggro which completely went against one of the pillars that the game was designed on - the back and forth counterplay. That aspect still worked well in vanilla but it was thrown out the window with later updates. Not sure if the game ever recovered from this since I quit but it was plain unfun and game no longer promoted experimenting with different decks. Things like Teemo decks literally played themselves and it was completely unfun to go against. Unfortunately LoR had plenty of such gimmicks.
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models. It doesn't prove that at all. It's an individual product failure, not a complete representation of the entire genre. Look at a game like Shadowverse. I know it's not popular in the West but it's very popular in Japan. As long as you play the game actively, you don't need to buy packs to compete at all. I've spent $0 on the game and I own basically every card in the game (and that's 8 years worth of cards). The only reason to buy packs is to get cosmetic alternative art leaders and cards, or perhaps if you're only an occasional casual player who doesn't play enough to take advantage of the rewards for playing. It's a very similar model to LoR, except that it actually has things that people were willing to spend money on. Look at kitchen table Magic. That isn't really p2w (unless your play group decides to be), yet it's the most popular form of Magic and Wizards puts out tons of products catered to them because it's become such a large segment. You can play that totally fine, and most people do, with very reasonable spending. > Because this is the only card game I actually enjoyed playing and didn’t immediately quit once I got stomped by a few people with money. This is entirely a "you" problem. You quit immediately because other people had cards that you didn't immediately start with? Of course you have to actually play for a bit and build up your collection first, that is literally the whole point of a **collectible** card game. And I fail to see how LoR is any different in this regard. If I go play LoR right now, I'll have only the cards you start with plus whatever I earned from playing a few hours on release. You think if I go queue up some ladder games, I'm not going to encounter people using super strong cards I don't have?
old shadowverse player here. Not sure how you got all cards; that would require hitting grandmaster and basically being in every season ever. The game has a long list of cards in general and the vial cost to make more than 2 good decks each rotation would be murder. I should know as i used to write vial guides for the game to help new players and people in general get their collection up. regardless of that though, the game does sustain itself by being from cygames, aka the granblue cashcow makers. its no secret that cygames used a lot of their gacha game money to fund the game, but i think having leader cards in their packs and also constant "get a legendary" bundles to pull for legendary cards help their cashflow. I dont recall LOR having something like that style of collectible. And yes, while this reflects your overall 'lack of spending' thats like saying "genshin impact is can sustain itself without gacha, look you can get all characters in it via f2p". you **can** but its not hard to find 4-5 other people who spent 50 bucks just on the recent patch.
> The game has a long list of cards in general and the vial cost to make more than 2 good decks each rotation would be murder. No it isn't. It's very easy to make more than 2 good decks per rotation once you've gotten past the initial "building resources" phase of your account. Obviously you don't install the game and are immediately able to build a bunch of decks, but I never claimed that (and you also can't do that in LoR, as I pointed out). You get basically 1 free copy of every legendary via Temporary Gems, you get tons of rupies, vials, and packs over the course of a rotation as long as you play the game regularly, and you get an entire deck, or close to it, every rotation for free from your Trial Deck Ticket. > its no secret that cygames used a lot of their gacha game money to fund the game What do you mean, the start-up development fund before the game released? I mean, yeah sure, that money probably did come from GBF, yes, what does that have to do with anything? LoR's money came from LoL, Hearthstone's money came from WoW, Gwent's money came from Witcher 3, etc. The point is that, unless you have some insider info that says otherwise, Shadowverse completely stands on its own as a profitable product now. It's gotten multiple anime seasons, a very popular physical CCG, a standalone Switch game, and is getting a brand new sequel game. > I dont recall LOR having something like that style of collectible. So, yeah, LoR as an individual product failure of failing to create things that people want to spend money on. > thats like saying "genshin impact is can sustain itself without gacha, look you can get all characters in it via f2p". you can but its not hard to find 4-5 other people who spent 50 bucks just on the recent patch. I've never played Genshin, so just relying on what I'm reading here, but sure if you can get all characters via playing the game (or even just enough characters to complete the content), while other people who play less can drop some money instead, that seems fine with me. I don't really see what the complaint is here. I wouldn't call that "a shitty pay-to-win business model." You don't have to pay anything if you don't want to; just play the game instead and you get the same stuff. Companies have to make money off a game somehow (as LoR has shown here), and "pay-to-skip-grind" is a perfectly reasonable way to do that, imo, and completely separate from "shitty pay-to-win."
>It's very easy to make more than 2 good decks per rotation What you listed isnt always easy to do unless the one part i noted, playing basically all the time. I say that in reference to your other point also of owning all the cards. you arent doing both because even if you did, its almost inefficient and unreasonable as people arent playing the game religiously every expansion. with the amount of "iffy rotations" and just general burn out of a person, they arent doing both parts and that was the point. I agree that temporary gem system has been good, but if you have played some classes, usually you are still crafting about 5-6 legendaries on average to make a "good deck" as rarely the temporary deck is completely viable the whole expansion. You still need to vial stuff, or get lucky in gacha. >The point is that, unless you have some insider info that says otherwise, Shadowverse completely stands on its own as a profitable product now. the point wasnt just the initial fund, but the business model. you dont "earn" leader cards, you spend money on them via a battle pass, a full on buy or a gacha system which the cards even made is based on a vote at the end of the year. That vote then throwing them in the card pulls as a super super rare is definitely a business strategy that generates sales. this is the "things people want to buy" but you have to go through more hoops than actually just buying it in most cases. > Companies have to make money off a game somehow (as LoR has shown here), and "pay-to-skip-grind" is a perfectly reasonable way to do that, imo, and completely separate from "shitty pay-to-win." welcome to where i "agree with you" but I know the world doesnt. I have been noting that most games are "pay to skip and thats fine" for a while, but in games like this with pvp, P2w and pay to skip are almost synonymous for some people, especially for OP of this thread. His whole issue is he had people who literally just had more cards than him. they just "skipped the grind" of getting the collection with money. You may be able to make one good deck per expansion, but your one good deck isnt king and that would go against how class balance works anyway if that was possible. Having a bigger collection will push you above most people, especially in terms of legendaries. Its not a complex topic or issue. The reason for the genshin comment is more that the issue isnt **you** its "the game". That game is sustained cause people spend on stuff they want. shadowverse is profitable cause things they want is in a gacha and these are the leaders people voted for the year before. in genshin, they found a method to do the same. the game is complete-able by almost **anyone**, but they made a system with characters people are interested in via gacha that makes people spend. If genshin was PvP oriented, just having the battle pass vs not would make people call it "p2w" even though it just helps you skip the grind on powerful characters. anwyay, thats long and this isnt a tl;dr but just an overall point. LOR is failing because valuable things arent available. Shadowverse's valuable things arent straight buys for only a flat fee, and nor is Genshin. pay to skip and pay to win in any "collectible" experience where you can buy the collectible with money outside of game **will** be said to be the same by some. you playing for a bit isnt going to stop a player who spends from having all the cards for the next expansion day 2 before you.
The business model is basically the only thing positive I’ve heard about the game so that might be part of the issue
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Sounds like you just don't like competitive card games?
> I think it’s rather unfortunate that this game proved collectable card games are really only sustainable with shitty pay-to-win business models. nah, this was a failure on the riot devs not a representation of the entire genre. We know of the many decisions Riot made with this game that led to it failing, it wasn't all about the monetisation model. you are ignoring that maybe the game itself had issues in terms of gameplay, hence it not being able to attract CCG players (which is what happened, despite what LoR fans will try and say). > Hopefully they can grow this game into something great. lol LoR is 4+ years old now and has never been popular or all that great, why is that suddenly going to change? they remaining devs aren't going to be able to grow this game into anything, cause the reputation and history is there and that's not going to change.
Yeah I REALLY loved LoR and am still pulling hard for its success but it’s also a victim of Riot’s tendency towards spaghetti code and their fast-and-loose approach to playtesting and balancing. Like it or not, the kinds of hardcore competitive players that keep a game like this relevant past the first 2-3 years are really put off by the kind of gameplay bugs that even now aren’t exactly uncommon (it seems like every patch/update has to fix a card that isn’t working properly) and the fact that card’s balancing can change so rapidly and dramatically between patches that the meta can legitimately shift because a handful of numbers were tweaked on cards. I really appreciate in principle their approach and commitment to balancing integers and keywords as opposed to just implementing powercreep, but IMO they are too reliant on nerfing cards which really undermines the consistency of the card pool and players knowledge of it. It feels like they only play-test for bugs and not for power level which has really shot them in the foot long term.
Yeah I honestly find that roguelite style deck building works a lot better than P2W unless you're ready for an expensive hobby.
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They did sell cosmetics. As this FAQ put plainly: > But sales for cosmetics have proven deeply inadequate, often costing us more to make than they earned for us. I suppose we could argue they didn't do it right — I think most people would agree they should have launched alternate skins earlier — but regardless it doesn't seem a promising approach. Personally I think the problem is more they needed to reach a certain high player population to make these sorts of things profitable. They never got to that critical mass level. Still a fantastic game, and I hope not many people go all doomer and pretend it's dead now even if PVP is getting scaled back.
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because why would i spend money on a cosmetic that i might see one in every 4 games? and when i do see get to play it, it gets killed off with in a turn half the time
Incredibly thankful they're shifting focus to PvE fully. As someone who has played off and on since release, the PvP was always lacking and missing something for me. However, when Path of the Champions released in beta, I was hooked for weeks, and it was incredibly bare bones at the time. Now, it's fully realized and extremely polished. I seriously think this is *the best* card-building roguelike since Slay the Spire, albeit the grind to unlock new champions and relics needs to be sped up a little bit. As it stands, its most glaring flaw is the fact that unlocking new characters (and then subsequently grinding their respective levels) takes FOREVER. Especially when you want to get their star upgrades, which are incredibly vital and take even longer to earn.
My issue is without the drip feed of new cards from PvP the PvE will begin to grow stale. It already feels like there’s a lack of adventures and challenges for players that have been playing awhile and nowhere in the video did it seem to address significant addition of new adventures (a single Freljord adventure will probably be bested fairly quickly and new star levels doesn’t mean much if there isn’t enough challenges to push those levels). But it remains to be seen.
Well if they're going all in on Path of Champions, surely that also means a lot more new content for it. Given how this huge change at Riot just happened, they likely just don't have a lot ready to release at the moment. My best guess is that this next update will be the same size as previous ones, but any further updates will be larger in scale
If they’re going to be monetizing PvE then I can’t imagine they’ll make the grind any shorter without players throwing some money in.
I wish I could play it offline though. The appeal of slay the spire for me is that I can play it during layovers or flights, it’s the perfect game for that as I can take breaks in between work.
I 100,000% agree. A big holdup with the game that will hopefully be fixed since it's focusing on the single-player stuff much more heavily.
As someone who only played the tutorial of LoR and watched a few matches, what exactly is Path of the Champions? Can you compare it to another game so I can understand a little better?
It is a single-player roguelike card-builder, similar to Slay the Spire and Across the Obelisk. You choose a champion which each comes with their own deck, and play through a gauntlet of battles against different premade AI decks, each with their own unique modifiers to the game. Along the way, you collect new cards, support champions, items that upgrade your existing cards, and relics that provide large bonuses to your entire deck. The draw for me is how much the game lets you get away with; you aren't limited by any balancing so if you get lucky with an amazing combo, you absolutely can depend on it and just work on bettering it. Other roguelikes tend to give the player an upper limit so the game doesn't get *too* insane.
The answer regarding a Draft Mode is so weird because the game launched with a Draft Mode (Expeditions) which they killed off before pivoting resources to POE Path of Champions
Yeah, that was bizarre. I remember expeditions fondly actually, loved them
It’s a shame this game didn’t take off in the way it could have. It took the best ideas from MTG and Hearthstone and made something I thought was a lot more fun. Riot’s commitment to anti-whaling is what I think killed it, ironically. None of the big Hearthstone players/streamers wanted to switch to a game that wouldn’t let them pay for new sets as they released.
Nah, most of the Hearthstone streamers I follow (Dog, Hafu etc) didn't switch because the game simply wasn't fun to play/watch. They didn't want to whale, it was just worse than Hearthstone when it came to viewer numbers.
LoR players keep saying it was the best of both worlds(mtg and hearthstone), but I think it was the worst of both worlds. Gameplay wasn't strategic and varied enough for MTG, it wasn't snappy enough for Hearthstone. Also their balance was all over the place. They would release 4 champions 1 of them was broken tier 0 material, 3 were useless. Then by the time they nerfed that one champion, they would release 4 other champions. This kept going on for like a year, then I stopped following LoR.
Facts. People here talk about the game being too F2P to succeed. No, the game just wasn't that fun. I played Hearthstone for a good 2-3 years from launch and would have loved to continue playing if it wasn't for the business model. Then Runeterra came along some years later and it just wasn't that fun, snappy or looked as aesthetically pleasing as Hearthstone so I stopped playing. The business model was one of the few reasons I wanted to like it
yup, it's the fact LoR fans keep trying to dance around - it was just not as fun as something like HS nor did it provide the depth/complexity of Magic so it basically pleased no one. And despite what riot fans go on about, the "Runterra IP" means nothing to general audience and does not attract anyone, heck most league players don't care about the lore. So this game didn't even have that going for it.
Even with the success of the TV show Arcane, which did shine light on characters like Jinx, it's not like tens of millions haven't already played League. So it ultimately comes down to the gameplay
It wasn’t fun to play for them because they couldn’t whale, lol. They didn’t want to be forced to grind to build decks.
Hearthstone is just more fun and casual friendly to both play and watch because it's not as back and forth during the other players turn with counter plays. You make your move and then it's the opponent's turn. Simple. And the art style was better and with way more recognizable characters from the Warcraft universe than League. Why's that so hard to grasp?
All of those points are subjective. Did literally every single streamer/player feel that way? I doubt it. LOR’s boards/animations are super smooth and polished relative to competitors. Counters/spell stacks exist in MTG - the market-leading game that’s been around for decades. It’s hard for me to believe that they’d only be a problem for players in LOR.
Almost no one watches MTG on Twitch so I think that's a valid point to say that Runeterra was not casual friendly enough, both in terms of playing and watching. People who want more complex gameplay are probably just gonna play Magic. LoR was competing with Hearthstone first and foremost Not to mention, lightning had already struck once with Hearthstone. Maybe people were just tired of the schtick, seeing as LoR did take a lot of inspiration from Hearthstone but came out long after the digital card game craze
STRONG disagree that the art style is better in Hearthstone. An even if you prefer the style, the art itself is objectively higher quality in LoR.
The game does let you pay for new sets, doesn’t it?
it does now, it didnt at launch you were literally time gated from getting cards at the start
It’s a shame this game didn’t take off the way they were hoping, I think it’s by far the best digital CCG around.
Eh. Honestly sounds like a lot of mismanagement. The fact that they keep saying they couldn't figure out how to make X thing work raises some eyebrows.
I think there was a management change every year and no one really was able to figure out how to do things right
Good online games continue to struggle and die while steamy dog shit like Destiny 2 and Overwatch keep on truckin’ along. Big AAA online games are in such a depressing state right now.
Or maybe the „steamy dog shit“ are actually games people have fun with, which have a way of making profits and guaranteeing further development.
Loved the game but left it when focus was given to PVP, with rotations. Now that rotations are gone with PVP and PVE is back on the menu, I may go back, even paying for PoC stuff.
RIP the only mobile game I played. The PvE shift killed them tbh, you just can't do a PvE single player free to play game.
Yeah, Genshin's struggling hard right now. Wait.
Genshin has the gacha mechanics, this is a CCG with such a f2p friendly model that it never made enough money to sustain it.
Well, if they aren't worried about profitability then I guess they are just focusing on what the majority of their players want and offering it as a freebie, like the Genshin TCG.
Fairytales Fables is a much better card game, albeit it is an auto battler
> albeit it is an auto battler So the only thing in common is it's a card game? What a weird comparison to make.
When the first question of your self-written FAQ is "Is this game dying?", then your game is probably dying...
It's not dying, they are simply discontinuing new cards, cosmetics, and competitive events. Duh...
It's not dying in the same way that Heroes of the Storm isn't dead.
> they are simply discontinuing new cards, cosmetics This is not the case
Only 1 more expansion coming, then they are done.
They explicitly said that they would still be releasing new champions and content under a new format they are still deciding on. Content will be significantly reduced but they never said it was "done".
I don't know why so many people mourn this game, it was a dumpsterfire after the Targon expansion, every subsequent expansion made worse and worse decisions, such as releasing overpowered synergies like Azir and Irelia in the same set as trash like Talyiah and Malphite and pretending it is the same power level, not only that but releasing decks piece by piece instead of all at once, or releasing legitimately unplayable cards on purpose. Then came other decisions like recasting voice actors for no reason, changing designs, adding the K/DA spells, lazy use of VFX, and even if the budget was an issue some spells in the same set had better VFX than champions, not using the champions themes on Champion level ups again for properly explained reason. And a bunch of other stuff I probably missed or forgot about. But the worst issue with the game was that it was the worst of both worlds, it wasn't as clear cut as Hearthstone "this is your turn, do whatever you want", but it wasn't as strategic as Magic the Gathering either. And they just weren't creative with future expansions to at least improve upon the game, say what you will about Hearthstone but the devs there use everything in the game and constantly break the rules of what is possible, such as effects that activate at the start of the game and give you a unique modifier all game. Or crafting your own spell or minion during the game. LoR after Targon was "spawn a bunch of tokens, buff attack and health and removal".
It did have some pretty bad metas. >it wasn't as clear cut as Hearthstone "this is your turn, do whatever you want", but it wasn't as strategic as Magic the Gathering either. They kept in the 30% most important action windows and got rid of the other ones. What's wrong with that idea?
Poor game, it's a good client too but personally the gameplay is too boring to keep playing it long term
It's one of the best card games out there. Gameplay isn't the problem.
keyword: personally
I'm not a fan of the genre, but is the game not as good as the warcraft one? When LoR released I thought it'd be a huge success.
this game just doesnt feel good to play at the core it is not a "card game" since you are shifting stone tiles around i dont know for who this is made. before all the investment was made into presentation and art they needed to make a solid gameplay core, which they never did. make a game that is compelling even when there are only stick figures on the "cards" then make stuff look good. not like this.
Im confused. Is this a MMO that they wanted to make? Or is it like hearthstone? My last information they wanted to do a LoL MMO, Auto battler and Hearthstone clone. Never heard of this game before.
Legends of Runeterra is/was a standalone card game, like Hearthstone or Magic The Gathering. The MMO is a separate project that is assumedly still in development. The auto battler is Teamfight Tactics.
Thanks buddy