My english is not perfect so please excuse all mistakes below if there are any
Bob (who recently started to play) managed to obtain Archmage Antonidas from classic card pack. However, he does not want to play mage and needs some cards to build his dream deck. Meanwhile, his friend Nick (who's already been playing for a month) is one step away from creating his mage deck and needs Archmage Antonidas card to finish it.
In normal situation both players would have to disenchant quite a few cards to get what they want, but what if they were able to simply trade their unneeded cards instead? This is a good deal indeed, isn't it?
How would the system work in general
There are sellers who are willing to sell their card(s) as well as buyers. Sellers can post a trading request through the market: [a card] or [a group of different cards] for [a card] or [a group of different cards] or [X gold] or [X dust]. Buyers are free to search for the card they want and obtain it according to the deal. On top of this, you can also trade with your friends privately without the use of the market (player 1 places the cards on the right side, player 2 places something on the left side, deal!)
Trading cards for cards is pretty obvious one: you can sell a single epic for a bunch of commons and vice versa.
Trading cards for gold is a fairly interesting one as it would allow experienced players to actually get decent profits. For example, you can 1) buy a card pack; 2) sell the unneeded contents of the pack for 100 gold; 3) buy another pack and repeat. This system would greatly benefit players who aren't willing to invest large sums of money into the game.
Trading cards for dust is beneficial too. For example, you can sell a legendary for 500 dust. Not only you would get more dust than from simply disenchanting it, but the buyer would greatly bebefit as well.
Free-to-play model issue
While market system is good and all, Blizzard still needs to earn their money somehow. The most optimal way to do so would be the following one:
The trading request can only stay in the market for a limited amount of days (this is an obvious one to prevent the market from getting cramped). The seller can select from the following options: request stays for 12 hours at the cost of 10 gold (regardless of how many cards they sell), for 2 days at the cost of 20 gold, or for 5 days at the cost of 30 gold. (Private trade offers between friends also have a 10 gold cost for the initiator.) This may seem like a fairly small fee, considering the fact that you can sell multiple cards without limitations. However, if you go too far, the cards may end up not being selled at all == you lose gold. This way, the amount of card packs that active trade market users can afford is greatly reduced which means that impact on Blizzard's profits would be quite small. Not to mention that new as well as rotating out expansions will still force the majority of the player base to continue buying new card packs.
TLDR: a new trading system that would benefit both new and veteran players while having small impact on Blizzard's profits. This system will likely attract more players into the game and convert it into the actual trading card game.
Because if they do such thing,they would lose tons of money and they want to do exactly the opposite,either you pay for cards either you watch streamers play em.That's 2 options chose.
If the trade values are user-defined (i.e dynamic), it will introduce some kind of "free market" into the hearthstone ecosystem, and people will abuse it by trading with their other accounts (or if not possible, use other account to inflate or deflate the market values to their main account advantage) or perform multiply trades to take advantage of arbitrage.
If blizzard decides the trade value then the whole trading market will be just a more complex dust system (it will be like setting different dust value to each card), which is not what blizzard (nor the users) want.
Can it really be abused so much? I mean, you would need to spend a considerable amount of time in the game to be able to use is at your advantage, and most people won't do it. I wonder because I wish to implement such a system for a card game I'm developing.
It depends on how you implement it, but in general unless the card values are fixed by the company it's possible to abuse it.
For example, trade cards by rarity (common for common, legendary for legendary, etc) won't work, because you can create many new account and open many beginners packs (or finish the high value beginners quest and buy packs) until you open the cards you desire and simply trade them with your main account low value cards.
Same thing will happen if you allow trades of cards for gold\dust, your main account will put overpriced crappy cards in the market, and your secondary account will buy them.
As long as new accounts are free to create and they can generate high value in short time (like beginners quest or free packs\cards) you can't really have a completely fair market (IRL TCG are possible because packs always cost money, in digital games you must give the playerbase free stuffs or they won't stay).
Another problem with digital trading market is outside sellers (like website that sells WoW gold for dollars), someone can open hundreds of dummy account and sell their "buying power" (they have enough gold to shift the price of a certain cards) for real money, that way the buyer get better value for his money than what the company offers him.
Maybe you can come up with some other market model that can't be abused for your game, but for hearthstone it's too late at this point.
People would just have 100+ accounts to get that free legendary with every new pack to trade to their main account for some shit common every time. Doesnt work.
Can it really be abused so much? I mean, you would need to spend a considerable amount of time in the game to be able to use is at your advantage, and most people won't do it. I wonder because I wish to implement such a system for a card game I'm developing.
When offering something to a mass audience, never EVER assume that 'considerable amount of time' will be a major barrier.
Creating a system that automatically makes mass accounts and sends their goods to a main account have been around for decades now. Since trading will exist, trading for cash will exist which provides plenty of incentive to keep running it even if you ban them. For something like hearthstone, where you are guaranteed a legendary within 10 packs and where you can manipulate which legendary you get based on what you are currently holding, it makes creating a full collection VERY easy.
TCGs get around this by NOT offering anything for free. Trading systems avoid saturation because they are limited by how much real cash you can spend. And while people love to talk about how much they earned back selling their MTG packs, they aren't accounting for the many many **MANY** packs that ended up being trashed. In the end, you will spend more than you earn in a CCG, which is fine if you are a player but worthless for folks trying to exploit the system. Note though that this effectively means the game isn't F2P at all as you HAVE to buy the cards.
CCGs get around this by NOT offering trade. You can get whatever you want for free and can even keep rerolling accounts until you get the legendaries you want to start out with. But it only works for your account. You can try to get into account sales (which IS a thing and why bots are around here now) but that's easier for blizzard to track and punish than trading systems and you are far less likely to catch innocents trying to stop them.
In the many many card games out there, trading, collecting, online, offline, so on, what you won't find is a system that combines the ability to obtain cards for free and the ability to trade those cards with others. If a trading game offers cards for free, it'll be guaranteed in some way so that everyone can get them, making them worthless in the trading market.
And can we really REALLY *#($#)($# REALLYY stop with the "Blizzard won't allow it because PROFITS!?" BS? They already have tried this in Diablo 3 via the Real Money Auction House. You can ask a D3 player how that worked out.
It is either crafting with dust system, or trading without the craft system. Pick one. Only a stupid company will do both together. It’s basic economy.
Crafting is definitely cheaper but has no value, trading is more expensive but the potential reward is higher. When it becomes a trading game, those so called f2p players are gonna be even more angry.
A trading system would require a extensive rework of the gold reward system, or more likely a removal of the whole free to play design entirely, as well as the development of an entire trading marketplace. In the end it would provide absolutely no benefit to Blizzard. They don't have any incentive to get rid of the trading system they already have for an entirely new one that would require considerable development and would cause a whole lot of abuse.
Another thing to think about is how new players are going to feel when they realize they got ripped off by predatory veteran players. It happens in every game with a trading system.
That will never happen because Blizzard wants you to buy packs to achieve your dream deck.
They are a for-profit business...they're not concerned with you getting what you want for free by trading.
If the scenario you described was available then everyone would be able to get the cards they want much easier than the current model...which is to buy them or earn them by completing quests and playing.
The crafting system provides a needed benefit for Blizzard: It siphons dust out of the system. With the differential between what you can disenchant cards for and what you can enchant cards for it provides a way for Blizzard to lower the amount of dust in circulation so that when a new set comes out most people won't have the dust to instantly craft the cards they want, which encourages people to buy packs. If dust never leaves circulation, only switches hands from one user to another, eventually most players would no longer need to buy packs to get all the cards they want. That means they would have to drastically reduce the amount of gold and dust added into circulation to make up for that, and that hurts new players.
What went wrong in D3 exactly? I started to play the game only after they changed the system.
Well a few things.
The nature of Diablo. The entire POINT to a diablo game is to be a dungeon looter. You go into a place, kill things to get loot. Survive with the loot. Check the loot to see what's good. Use the new loot to go to a harder dungeon to get more loot.
That's it. You have fun finding loot in order to get more loot.
Shops and auction houses are, in a sense, the 'dust crafting' element of the game to make bad loot useful. You convert bad loot into gold which, after enough of it, lets you buy something good at a store/auction. It's slower, but that's fine since it's just there to make sure you don't feel like you're wasting your time when loot runs don't give you good loot. Auction houses also mean that not all 'good loot' is loot you want: if you find something worthless to you but worthwhile to another you can sell that and get loot you want. Thus it increases the value of your loot runs, creates an economy that some people LIVE for, and adds to the community.
That falls apart once Real Money comes in.
Firstly, for many people, Real Money is unlimited and isn't based on loot runs. Thus they are free to buy whatever they want from the auction house without doing dungeon runs. Which, given the description above, basically means they skipped the entire point of the game. But this is a minor issue.
The bigger is that loot now has an easy to transfer cash amount. If getting a Perfect Diamond gives you $2 in the RMAH then the more often you find a Perfect Diamond, the more real money you make. Naive players stop the logic train there and go "more loot runs, more cash, YAY!" Not so naive players keep going and think "If I can use a system that costs $18 a day but nets me 20 Diamonds FAST...that's a PROFIT!" What would cost $18 a day? More computers to run automated bots in. A cheap building to house cheap labor in that's willing can be made to do runs all day. Thus the Bot Farm and sweat shops.
This is the BIG problem. Games like Diablo rely on players wanting to play the game. They aren't designed to become a place to mass grind as a business. The flood of gold/items that such places generate VERY quickly overwhelm the auction house and if you aren't sure of the problems there you'll need an economics class (or to play an MMO for a while) but for now believe that this ruins the system for regular players.
Then you get to other fun things. A Business, like Blizzard, is meant to earn money, a natural thing. When a new revenue stream appears, such as the fees from the RMAH, this means you are compelled to adapt the product to encourage that revenue. Which means less incentive to find items and more to buy them. That means protecting the RMAH from hacks (a major issue in past games which was mitigated by it being not having the auction house and it being primarily a solo game) by having it be online only. But the servers weren't stable early on, meaning people used to playing when they want, even offline, suddenly found they couldn't play at all.
We humans love to bash our intelligence, but in truth, we are extremely complex and smart creatures with brains a computer couldn't DREAM of having. We dont' just play games, we SOLVE them. We master them. We've made legitimate tournaments of rock paper scissors. We can abuse the subtle differences in coins that make them not truly 50/50. And we can BREAK a system if its to our benefit, or even if it's not (see speedrunning). Thus if you want to make a system like a Trading System, you CAN"T think of the scene you want to happen: that new player finding someone willing to give them a Ragnaros and, through that, finding a new friend.
That's SOME of the problems that happened with the RMAH. And what we DON'T want to see in Hearthstone.
What went wrong in D3 exactly? I started to play the game only after they changed the system.
Well a few things.
The nature of Diablo. The entire POINT to a diablo game is to be a dungeon looter. You go into a place, kill things to get loot. Survive with the loot. Check the loot to see what's good. Use the new loot to go to a harder dungeon to get more loot.
That's it. You have fun finding loot in order to get more loot.
Shops and auction houses are, in a sense, the 'dust crafting' element of the game to make bad loot useful. You convert bad loot into gold which, after enough of it, lets you buy something good at a store/auction. It's slower, but that's fine since it's just there to make sure you don't feel like you're wasting your time when loot runs don't give you good loot. Auction houses also mean that not all 'good loot' is loot you want: if you find something worthless to you but worthwhile to another you can sell that and get loot you want. Thus it increases the value of your loot runs, creates an economy that some people LIVE for, and adds to the community.
That falls apart once Real Money comes in.
Firstly, for many people, Real Money is unlimited and isn't based on loot runs. Thus they are free to buy whatever they want from the auction house without doing dungeon runs. Which, given the description above, basically means they skipped the entire point of the game. But this is a minor issue.
The bigger is that loot now has an easy to transfer cash amount. If getting a Perfect Diamond gives you $2 in the RMAH then the more often you find a Perfect Diamond, the more real money you make. Naive players stop the logic train there and go "more loot runs, more cash, YAY!" Not so naive players keep going and think "If I can use a system that costs $18 a day but nets me 20 Diamonds FAST...that's a PROFIT!" What would cost $18 a day? More computers to run automated bots in. A cheap building to house cheap labor in that's willing can be made to do runs all day. Thus the Bot Farm and sweat shops.
This is the BIG problem. Games like Diablo rely on players wanting to play the game. They aren't designed to become a place to mass grind as a business. The flood of gold/items that such places generate VERY quickly overwhelm the auction house and if you aren't sure of the problems there you'll need an economics class (or to play an MMO for a while) but for now believe that this ruins the system for regular players.
Then you get to other fun things. A Business, like Blizzard, is meant to earn money, a natural thing. When a new revenue stream appears, such as the fees from the RMAH, this means you are compelled to adapt the product to encourage that revenue. Which means less incentive to find items and more to buy them. That means protecting the RMAH from hacks (a major issue in past games which was mitigated by it being not having the auction house and it being primarily a solo game) by having it be online only. But the servers weren't stable early on, meaning people used to playing when they want, even offline, suddenly found they couldn't play at all.
We humans love to bash our intelligence, but in truth, we are extremely complex and smart creatures with brains a computer couldn't DREAM of having. We dont' just play games, we SOLVE them. We master them. We've made legitimate tournaments of rock paper scissors. We can abuse the subtle differences in coins that make them not truly 50/50. And we can BREAK a system if its to our benefit, or even if it's not (see speedrunning). Thus if you want to make a system like a Trading System, you CAN"T think of the scene you want to happen: that new player finding someone willing to give them a Ragnaros and, through that, finding a new friend.
That's SOME of the problems that happened with the RMAH. And what we DON'T want to see in Hearthstone.
Very interesting read, thanks! However as I understand it, what broke the RMAH was the opportunity for people to earn money. Changing real money with gold or dust, for instance, makes it less prone to economy flood. However, given the amount of free stuff HS offers to players now, I see how a trading system is complicated. It's too easy to create another account and trade cards to yourself for free, only using free boosters so that you don't spend extra money. I don't see yet how it is possible to supervise this, besides severely limiting free packs (which would harm the game a lot more).
Very interesting read, thanks! However as I understand it, what broke the RMAH was the opportunity for people to earn money. Changing real money with gold or dust, for instance, makes it less prone to economy flood. However, given the amount of free stuff HS offers to players now, I see how a trading system is complicated. It's too easy to create another account and trade cards to yourself for free, only using free boosters so that you don't spend extra money. I don't see yet how it is possible to supervise this, besides severely limiting free packs (which would harm the game a lot more).
That's the point. To turn the game into a trading game, you need to take out its F2P mechanics, effectively making it a traditional TCG. Which is fine, but a completely different audience and impossible to do once the game is already running. The entire game has to be built from the start to be either a CCG or a TCG. Otherwise you might as well add fighting game mechanics (press Forward, forward, back back to play Shudderwock)
How about a system where cards given for free cannot be exchanged ? You can still convert them into dust/whatever but only cards you bought, whether by gold or real money, can be traded with other players. I guess it would greatly protect the system, but would players feel good about it? It could cause confusion as well and the UI needs to be clever about it.
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My english is not perfect so please excuse all mistakes below if there are any
Bob (who recently started to play) managed to obtain Archmage Antonidas from classic card pack. However, he does not want to play mage and needs some cards to build his dream deck. Meanwhile, his friend Nick (who's already been playing for a month) is one step away from creating his mage deck and needs Archmage Antonidas card to finish it.
In normal situation both players would have to disenchant quite a few cards to get what they want, but what if they were able to simply trade their unneeded cards instead? This is a good deal indeed, isn't it?
How would the system work in general
There are sellers who are willing to sell their card(s) as well as buyers.
Sellers can post a trading request through the market: [a card] or [a group of different cards] for [a card] or [a group of different cards] or [X gold] or [X dust].
Buyers are free to search for the card they want and obtain it according to the deal.
On top of this, you can also trade with your friends privately without the use of the market (player 1 places the cards on the right side, player 2 places something on the left side, deal!)
Trading cards for cards is pretty obvious one: you can sell a single epic for a bunch of commons and vice versa.
Trading cards for gold is a fairly interesting one as it would allow experienced players to actually get decent profits. For example, you can 1) buy a card pack; 2) sell the unneeded contents of the pack for 100 gold; 3) buy another pack and repeat. This system would greatly benefit players who aren't willing to invest large sums of money into the game.
Trading cards for dust is beneficial too. For example, you can sell a legendary for 500 dust. Not only you would get more dust than from simply disenchanting it, but the buyer would greatly bebefit as well.
Free-to-play model issue
While market system is good and all, Blizzard still needs to earn their money somehow. The most optimal way to do so would be the following one:
The trading request can only stay in the market for a limited amount of days (this is an obvious one to prevent the market from getting cramped).
The seller can select from the following options: request stays for 12 hours at the cost of 10 gold (regardless of how many cards they sell), for 2 days at the cost of 20 gold, or for 5 days at the cost of 30 gold. (Private trade offers between friends also have a 10 gold cost for the initiator.) This may seem like a fairly small fee, considering the fact that you can sell multiple cards without limitations. However, if you go too far, the cards may end up not being selled at all == you lose gold. This way, the amount of card packs that active trade market users can afford is greatly reduced which means that impact on Blizzard's profits would be quite small. Not to mention that new as well as rotating out expansions will still force the majority of the player base to continue buying new card packs.
TLDR: a new trading system that would benefit both new and veteran players while having small impact on Blizzard's profits. This system will likely attract more players into the game and convert it into the actual trading card game.
Blizzard doesn't care about your dream decks, they want you to throw money at them for it, not trade for it.
It's a collectible card game not a trading card game.
Because if they do such thing,they would lose tons of money and they want to do exactly the opposite,either you pay for cards either you watch streamers play em.That's 2 options chose.
If the trade values are user-defined (i.e dynamic), it will introduce some kind of "free market" into the hearthstone ecosystem, and people will abuse it by trading with their other accounts (or if not possible, use other account to inflate or deflate the market values to their main account advantage) or perform multiply trades to take advantage of arbitrage.
If blizzard decides the trade value then the whole trading market will be just a more complex dust system (it will be like setting different dust value to each card), which is not what blizzard (nor the users) want.
Can it really be abused so much? I mean, you would need to spend a considerable amount of time in the game to be able to use is at your advantage, and most people won't do it. I wonder because I wish to implement such a system for a card game I'm developing.
It depends on how you implement it, but in general unless the card values are fixed by the company it's possible to abuse it.
For example, trade cards by rarity (common for common, legendary for legendary, etc) won't work, because you can create many new account and open many beginners packs (or finish the high value beginners quest and buy packs) until you open the cards you desire and simply trade them with your main account low value cards.
Same thing will happen if you allow trades of cards for gold\dust, your main account will put overpriced crappy cards in the market, and your secondary account will buy them.
As long as new accounts are free to create and they can generate high value in short time (like beginners quest or free packs\cards) you can't really have a completely fair market (IRL TCG are possible because packs always cost money, in digital games you must give the playerbase free stuffs or they won't stay).
Another problem with digital trading market is outside sellers (like website that sells WoW gold for dollars), someone can open hundreds of dummy account and sell their "buying power" (they have enough gold to shift the price of a certain cards) for real money, that way the buyer get better value for his money than what the company offers him.
Maybe you can come up with some other market model that can't be abused for your game, but for hearthstone it's too late at this point.
People would just have 100+ accounts to get that free legendary with every new pack to trade to their main account for some shit common every time. Doesnt work.
So it's important to have a system where trying to abuse it would be more time consuming than just keeping playing your main account.
When offering something to a mass audience, never EVER assume that 'considerable amount of time' will be a major barrier.
Creating a system that automatically makes mass accounts and sends their goods to a main account have been around for decades now. Since trading will exist, trading for cash will exist which provides plenty of incentive to keep running it even if you ban them. For something like hearthstone, where you are guaranteed a legendary within 10 packs and where you can manipulate which legendary you get based on what you are currently holding, it makes creating a full collection VERY easy.
TCGs get around this by NOT offering anything for free. Trading systems avoid saturation because they are limited by how much real cash you can spend. And while people love to talk about how much they earned back selling their MTG packs, they aren't accounting for the many many **MANY** packs that ended up being trashed. In the end, you will spend more than you earn in a CCG, which is fine if you are a player but worthless for folks trying to exploit the system. Note though that this effectively means the game isn't F2P at all as you HAVE to buy the cards.
CCGs get around this by NOT offering trade. You can get whatever you want for free and can even keep rerolling accounts until you get the legendaries you want to start out with. But it only works for your account. You can try to get into account sales (which IS a thing and why bots are around here now) but that's easier for blizzard to track and punish than trading systems and you are far less likely to catch innocents trying to stop them.
In the many many card games out there, trading, collecting, online, offline, so on, what you won't find is a system that combines the ability to obtain cards for free and the ability to trade those cards with others. If a trading game offers cards for free, it'll be guaranteed in some way so that everyone can get them, making them worthless in the trading market.
And can we really REALLY *#($#)($# REALLYY stop with the "Blizzard won't allow it because PROFITS!?" BS? They already have tried this in Diablo 3 via the Real Money Auction House. You can ask a D3 player how that worked out.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
Diablo 3 market was SUCH a headache for Blizzard they ended up dumping it. Nuff said.
It is either crafting with dust system, or trading without the craft system. Pick one. Only a stupid company will do both together. It’s basic economy.
Crafting is definitely cheaper but has no value, trading is more expensive but the potential reward is higher. When it becomes a trading game, those so called f2p players are gonna be even more angry.
A trading system would require a extensive rework of the gold reward system, or more likely a removal of the whole free to play design entirely, as well as the development of an entire trading marketplace. In the end it would provide absolutely no benefit to Blizzard. They don't have any incentive to get rid of the trading system they already have for an entirely new one that would require considerable development and would cause a whole lot of abuse.
Another thing to think about is how new players are going to feel when they realize they got ripped off by predatory veteran players. It happens in every game with a trading system.
That will never happen because Blizzard wants you to buy packs to achieve your dream deck.
They are a for-profit business...they're not concerned with you getting what you want for free by trading.
If the scenario you described was available then everyone would be able to get the cards they want much easier than the current model...which is to buy them or earn them by completing quests and playing.
The crafting system provides a needed benefit for Blizzard: It siphons dust out of the system. With the differential between what you can disenchant cards for and what you can enchant cards for it provides a way for Blizzard to lower the amount of dust in circulation so that when a new set comes out most people won't have the dust to instantly craft the cards they want, which encourages people to buy packs. If dust never leaves circulation, only switches hands from one user to another, eventually most players would no longer need to buy packs to get all the cards they want. That means they would have to drastically reduce the amount of gold and dust added into circulation to make up for that, and that hurts new players.
What went wrong in D3 exactly? I started to play the game only after they changed the system.
Well a few things.
The nature of Diablo. The entire POINT to a diablo game is to be a dungeon looter. You go into a place, kill things to get loot. Survive with the loot. Check the loot to see what's good. Use the new loot to go to a harder dungeon to get more loot.
That's it. You have fun finding loot in order to get more loot.
Shops and auction houses are, in a sense, the 'dust crafting' element of the game to make bad loot useful. You convert bad loot into gold which, after enough of it, lets you buy something good at a store/auction. It's slower, but that's fine since it's just there to make sure you don't feel like you're wasting your time when loot runs don't give you good loot. Auction houses also mean that not all 'good loot' is loot you want: if you find something worthless to you but worthwhile to another you can sell that and get loot you want. Thus it increases the value of your loot runs, creates an economy that some people LIVE for, and adds to the community.
That falls apart once Real Money comes in.
Firstly, for many people, Real Money is unlimited and isn't based on loot runs. Thus they are free to buy whatever they want from the auction house without doing dungeon runs. Which, given the description above, basically means they skipped the entire point of the game. But this is a minor issue.
The bigger is that loot now has an easy to transfer cash amount. If getting a Perfect Diamond gives you $2 in the RMAH then the more often you find a Perfect Diamond, the more real money you make. Naive players stop the logic train there and go "more loot runs, more cash, YAY!" Not so naive players keep going and think "If I can use a system that costs $18 a day but nets me 20 Diamonds FAST...that's a PROFIT!" What would cost $18 a day? More computers to run automated bots in. A cheap building to house cheap labor in that's
willingcan be made to do runs all day. Thus the Bot Farm and sweat shops.This is the BIG problem. Games like Diablo rely on players wanting to play the game. They aren't designed to become a place to mass grind as a business. The flood of gold/items that such places generate VERY quickly overwhelm the auction house and if you aren't sure of the problems there you'll need an economics class (or to play an MMO for a while) but for now believe that this ruins the system for regular players.
Then you get to other fun things. A Business, like Blizzard, is meant to earn money, a natural thing. When a new revenue stream appears, such as the fees from the RMAH, this means you are compelled to adapt the product to encourage that revenue. Which means less incentive to find items and more to buy them. That means protecting the RMAH from hacks (a major issue in past games which was mitigated by it being not having the auction house and it being primarily a solo game) by having it be online only. But the servers weren't stable early on, meaning people used to playing when they want, even offline, suddenly found they couldn't play at all.
We humans love to bash our intelligence, but in truth, we are extremely complex and smart creatures with brains a computer couldn't DREAM of having. We dont' just play games, we SOLVE them. We master them. We've made legitimate tournaments of rock paper scissors. We can abuse the subtle differences in coins that make them not truly 50/50. And we can BREAK a system if its to our benefit, or even if it's not (see speedrunning). Thus if you want to make a system like a Trading System, you CAN"T think of the scene you want to happen: that new player finding someone willing to give them a Ragnaros and, through that, finding a new friend.
That's SOME of the problems that happened with the RMAH. And what we DON'T want to see in Hearthstone.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
It would obviously be great.
But Blizzard will obviously never implement this. They are one of the greediest companies around lol
Top deck is cheat
Very interesting read, thanks! However as I understand it, what broke the RMAH was the opportunity for people to earn money. Changing real money with gold or dust, for instance, makes it less prone to economy flood. However, given the amount of free stuff HS offers to players now, I see how a trading system is complicated. It's too easy to create another account and trade cards to yourself for free, only using free boosters so that you don't spend extra money. I don't see yet how it is possible to supervise this, besides severely limiting free packs (which would harm the game a lot more).
That's the point. To turn the game into a trading game, you need to take out its F2P mechanics, effectively making it a traditional TCG. Which is fine, but a completely different audience and impossible to do once the game is already running. The entire game has to be built from the start to be either a CCG or a TCG. Otherwise you might as well add fighting game mechanics (press Forward, forward, back back to play Shudderwock)
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
How about a system where cards given for free cannot be exchanged ? You can still convert them into dust/whatever but only cards you bought, whether by gold or real money, can be traded with other players. I guess it would greatly protect the system, but would players feel good about it? It could cause confusion as well and the UI needs to be clever about it.