The future of V:TES

^^^ in response to this post below

Lönkka wrote:

Soonerborn wrote:

All us old 'Mr Suitcases' aren't interested in buying reprints anyway. Two of the local longtime players were dissappointed by the prospect of buying printed cards again, they were looking forward to the (free) PDF. Probably won't buy the new set (and certainly won't buy reprinted cards).

Just out of curiosity, are these same guys who didn't buy KoT when it was available? And who started yelling afoul when the set sold out and prices of the new and powerful cards began rising?

There are too many clans and too many disciplines.

But, I think the expectation was that you either play everything, like a lot of us do, or you trade away stuff you don't want for stuff that you do want. Not saying that's a good model, but it's a model that allows you to draw upon the tremendous variety in the source material.

But, even when there were seven clans, Caitiff, and 10 disciplines, there were problems with building decks. It has always, since day one, been an issue to have the right mix of cards you want.

What problems? Blood Doll and WWEF. Without those two cards, you were screwed. Sure, they were commons ... in 300+ card sets. Now, because Jyhad was so cheap, people like me got enough of those two cards, but think about what happens if you reboot the game exactly as it was produced historically except you don't have $5-$10 Jyhad boxes. New player goes to buy random starters and boosters, buys a couple of boxes, gets, say, five Blood Dolls and five Wakes. How many Jyhad-only decks are now viable?

Then, DS and AH get published with neither of those cards. Then, Sabbat gets published and we get more Blood Dolls, yeah! And, ... we get Forced Awakenings, boo!

The move to go to precons did address a massive problem with deck construction in the game - the need for copious quantities of staple cards. Even Freak Drive has been printed so many times in precons that if you just bought precons, you should have enough for normal decks.

Of course, precons didn't do enough of bringing the most essential cards to new players - every deck should have started with five or six Blood Dolls/Minion Taps and six WWEFs. Every deck with Auspex should have had at least six Telepathic Misdirections. Every deck with Dominate should have had at least six Deflections.

To forestall the argument that providing playable decks undermines sales, two things. One, if people don't think you can play the game with a reasonable number of cards bought, which is the primary argument of many posting in this thread, then you lost any sales to those people. Two, you don't want to encourage people to buy starters. Starters don't make money, boosters do. Sure, you could leave staple cards out and make them commons in some 300 card set to encourage booster sales over starter sales, but then, you run into the first problem - zero sales because people give up.

It is a balancing act, of course. The idea that a company should just sell you whatever you want for a modest fee seems completely unprofitable for the company and, really, the company isn't offering anything that players couldn't just do on their own. Or, if you see the company still being necessary for design, why would I design cards where I'm selling everything someone wants from the set for $30?

There are many ways you can compare and contrast with Magic, but I think most germane at the moment is that Magic is a game you can leave for a while and go back to. Limited play is huge, so if you wanted a trivial monetary investment, you can just play limited. You can invest in the current standard environment or block constructed, though the latter is kind of questionable valuewise. V:TES isn't alone in being a CCG where you want certain cards from every set. It's a very challenging model to have to keep up with a game forever to where the game tends towards diehards and minimal influx of new players.

Soonerborn wrote:

He just simply doesn't want to put any more money into a dead hobby.

This is totally relative to your perspective.
I'd hardly call this a dead hobby.
But not vigorously alive either...

Soonerborn wrote:

Print on Demand should be just that; on demand. If nothing gets printed until it's ordered, why force veterans to pay for cards they don't want (i.e. not in demand)?

Indeed so.
This also applies to other players than just veterans.

My daughter plays... she's 12 and really likes to punch things. She made her first deck a few months ago and when I went to put together some combat deck I was like "Where are my decapitates?" I flipped through her deck and she had no less than 9 of them in there with twice as many rushes( all of my deep songs), 3 fames, 4 helicopters, some rats, tastes, signposts, grapples, frenzies and whatnot. A crypt full of Nossies to go with the library and I was just like... who built this?!?!

She had been using stealth bleed decks others had made up until that point and evidently had gotten tired of the occasional wall she came across. Learning curve my ass. She learned by watching others, getting beat up sometimes teaches valuable lessons. Bleeding through three other players retained the interest. I did have to discuss table hate and balancing brutality with hope for your prey. We also talked some about how a deck like that would affect her grand prey and she was like "I don't have to just rush my prey."

I do like the idea of more focused boosters for new players though, clans would be a massive pain unless it were packs focused on 4 clans apiece or disciplines maybe 5 apiece. The Heirs starters are close to perfect in this regard, multiple clans, decent spread of powerful cards, the only reason they're so damned expensive is that the timing coincided with the end of printing and that compared to previous starters they were a huge step up. (the KoT Ventrue deck was no slouch though, I played it straight out of the box a few times in our group and it fared well)

As far as smaller sets go, the problem with those is the ration of rares to commons. I can't justify buying boxes for the smaller sets to get a half dozen cards. 19 card packs have been done before, 3r, 5u, 3v, 8c would rock. Larger sets could be distributed differently as well, 3-4 clans at a time, instead of one booster box per set, have three, same with starters.

Lönkka wrote:

This is totally relative to your perspective.
I'd hardly call this a dead hobby.
But not vigorously alive either...

Undead, perhaps?

A dead hobby from HIS perspective. I'm still trying to keep the playgroup active. Hell the guy I'm talking about still plays with us, he's just shifted his focus to other gaming interests. He's also selling off his copies of Enkil Cog (and others).

But I think you misunderstand me. The point I'm trying to make is that longtime veterans are (generally speaking) not your primary market for reprints. New(er) players are, be it guys we've recently recruited (deck borrowers) or the guys who joined within the last few sets (who are frustrated that there are so many cards that are effectively out of their reach).

It's always been a maxim of vtes that if your group isn't growing, it's dying. We're certainly proof of that, our group is the smallest it's been since '02. We're not able to replace the players we lose anymore. Player attrition has *always* been a reality but for the past 10 years we were always able to actively recruit new players. We still get prospects we just can't keep them. And the guys who entered within the last 3 or 4 sets seldom show up for games now out of futility (who wants to always play the same decks?).

What I'm asking for is to allow all players the ability to choose which cards they acquire based on production costs. Not a bogus sense of 'rarity'. Let the players decide what is junk and what is worth having. Let them go to the sight, design a deck and get it printed. In short a BETTER method for card acquisition.

If we're really talking about keeping and retaining active player bases. If this is really about keeping the game alive. It was when it was just the vekn doing it for nothing, right?

And I don't think anybody is saying POD will bring in 'a lot' of players, I don't recall anything ever brining in 'a lot' of players. But ANY are better than NONE, can we agree?