Tobold's Blog
Sunday, July 24, 2016
 
Is Magic Duels too generous?

Magic Duels released a new expansion, Eldritch Moon. Due to the special system of Magic Duels in which you never find a card you can't use in a booster, you only need to open 64 boosters to get every possible card. At 150 gold per booster that's 9,600 gold. And I had a bit over 11,000 gold saved up by playing since the last expansion. So I got all the cards for free. Although I am perfectly willing to pay for Magic cards, the game basically doesn't let me. Isn't that a bit too generous?

Expansions in Magic Duels follow more or less the release date of the real cards, so they can't get those expansions out any faster. The last expansion came out in April. And they fixed the bug where you wouldn't get a daily quest every day. As you can replace quests you don't want once per day. I was pretty much able to get a quest that pays 120 gold every day. That usually involves winning two games, which at high difficulty is another 30 gold earned per day. So in 3 months I can easily earn the gold for a full expansion without doing more than the daily quests.

In Magic Online there was an expression "going infinite" to describe the process of being able to play for free by earning all the cards you needed from playing. But in Magic Online going infinite was hard, while in Magic Duels I find it rather easy. In World of Warcraft, which I will start again in August, I also found it easy to go infinite. And my economics knowledge tells me that "free to play" games aren't supposed to be really free, especially not for the intensive users who might be most willing to pony up.

Comments:
Although WoW doesn't reset Gold between expansions it resets player power. Honor/Conq/Valor was always reset so you can't buy new gear with it and of course you have to level to the next max.

Magic Duels could have a new currency for every expansion so you'd need to farm again for new cards. If they don't do that maybe you are in the top 1% and generally it's not a problem because very few people hoard so much gold.
 
Wow isn't free because your free subscription cost somebody else $20. So in fact blizzard gets more money than if you paid money for your subscription

Some people just can't stand to make money in video games. I know someone with 16 characters who despite the incredible amount of gold he could've made still bought wow tokens for gold during Draenor.
 
Bryksom--- gold is about the same way as everything else. It gets super inflated every expansion. What was a nice solid chunk of cash in Burning Crusade would maybe get you full enchanted today... maybe.

And bill, yeah, I was one of those people who hated 'making money' in a video game, cause I was there to have fun. If I wanted to make money, I'd get a job. I find the people who save and run their little WoW businesses to be the weird ones. If you were getting paid cash to do such a tedious job, you'd be pissed to get minimum wage. But they change the currency to WoW gold, and suddenly ten cents an hour is worth throwing a year of your life on the AH.
 
Games - unless contain cash shop gear unavailable from playing - are naturally follow the original Magic the Gathering rule: good players are going infinite and bad players pay.

This is because payers DON'T pay for game access, they pay for power. The game itself is a mere marketplace for the power transaction. Either you buy from the dev (flat out pay to win) or from other players (PLEX, WoW token, illicit RMT)
 
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