Introduction
This post was inspired by a comment by the streamer Y8Z on Discord:
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/457152051239976963/1329332930195099681
"WR is a super boring meta with embarrassing prizes, meanwhile formats just feel like a grind with no ladder or competitive atmosphere. Meanwhile sealed is a casino with all the rewards and no rank system at all."
I agree with most of this and I think the situation regarding the lack of a robust competitive environment was articulated in a very clear and expressive way.
The dev team should be finishing up the 2024 roadmap at the moment, where the server logic re-write and a new progression system are the last two undelivered features. I expect that once this chunk of the re-write is done, there will be a swift effort to close down the debug system that allows for deck peeking when a match starts. We don't know at this point if this is already part of the re-write or if it will require additional work.
This re-write will also allow closing other anti-competitive public API endpoints that enable third parties to inspect the Workshop (the list of decks) of any player, track Direct Challenge (private) games, and get the currently active deck. So this release is critical to ensure fairness and equal access to information for everyone in a competitive setting, which at the moment cannot be guaranteed.
Alongside this coding work, the card design team also diverts engineering resources during the preparation of a new set, which we should probably expect during the first half of this year...
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/567957189764055050/1270894666820091914
Short-term, simple improvements
So with all these high-priority tasks competing for attention, where does the support for a better competitive scene in GU stand?
The player base is historically low, and doesn't seem to be increasing. A sure way to attract people to a game is to scratch their competitive itch, but GU is not offering any regular, substantive incentives in that domain.
So here are two simple things that would be a good start to foster a better competitive scene:
Seasonal and all-time leaderboards, across all game modes;
Better rewards for top-performing players in all game modes, in line with what the game is already offering with DP&E.
The combination of these 2 changes seems like a low effort to high upside situation, in a context of a depressed and tired player population that desperately needs reinforcements. If nothing else, at least there would be more people buying packs and continue supporting development when the next expansion is released later this year.
Leaderboard rewards wouldn't improve the gains for the large majority of players, however there is another simple measure to make leaderboard rewards attractive to a larger number of players: have a leaderboard per rank (not just Mythic), with rewards adjusted to each rank.
The goal here is to attract competitive players, many of which left the game in part because of the lack of a tempting competitive scene. Better rewards should also help keep the existing ones engaged and interested in the game for longer.
Players in the top places would receive rewards once the 'season' ends. These could be weekly or monthly, for example. The weekly leaderboard could be split into two, one for the entire week and another just for the Weedend Ranked event. Or it could just be that the WR rewards would get an additional component to reward top performers.
Regarding implementation, I don't think the game team has to do everything themselves. GU Decks has helped GU on many occasions by setting up pages with data about the game, thereby releasing the dev team to continue working on other things that could not be easily delegated. @imx.center who develops and maintains https://gumeta.web.app/ also has the expertise to tap into the API, extract game data and present it to the players. Why not commission one of these community projects to develop the leaderboard UI and support webpages, while the game team works on the rewards structure and adapting existing code to automate their distribution?
Possible rewards
There isn't much the game can offer at the moment in terms of things of value.
Cards for the most part are low value rewards, and just giving away more Expansion packs similar to Weekend Ranked is not going to attract anyone. The GU team could buy desirable cards off the secondary market, but that just creates overhead with extra manual tasks they are likely trying to avoid.
Cosmetics are nice, but they'd need to be quite scarce to be worth anything, which will be difficult with regular prize distributions, such as weekly or monthly. Liquidity will probably be low as well.
So the best option is probably to distribute prizes in $GODS, expanding on the current daily distribution, with amounts that would be attractive enough to make players want to compete for the best spots on the leaderboards.
Potential drawbacks
The token allocation for DP&E and prizes should last for many years at the current spending rate, so there shouldn't be an issue with the availability of $GODS tokens. However, an increase in the distribution of tokens has the obvious consequence of increasing token supply that at least some players would want to cash out. With enough volume this could cause a decrease in the token price, which ultimately reduces the rewards for everyone and reduces the appeal of the reward. However, Discord user lolerino has pointed out that the overwhelming majority of $GODS tokens are in exchanges, so the release of more tokens as leaderboard prizes for a few people will have very little impact on the overall supply:
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/457152051239976963/1326892540284239894
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/457152051239976963/1329662431248519188
Another possible disappointing consequence is that the rewards do not produce a noticeable effect on the number of active players. In this case, I still think the leaderboard reward system should be kept in place, as it will help the game when other player acquisition efforts and retention mechanisms are set in motion.
The extra rewards could also add some overhead in the efforts to detect fraud or cheating. But those mechanisms are already in place and should be mostly automated. This could be an opportunity to make those systems more efficient and more automated. They're going to need to be efficient if the game starts growing in number of players again.
Desirable long-term features
These 2 improvements I discuss here are far from enough in an ideal competitive package. It would be great to see more features that have been part of the genre for a long time, like large multi-week tournaments, automated daily and weekly tournaments, observer mode to support tournament streaming, etc. Sponsoring streamers with a wide TCG audience to promote the game would be fantastic. But all this would require much more investment and engineering effort. I hope this will come eventually, but it doesn't seem realistic in the short to medium term.
Still related to the two improvements I mention here, there is something else that is not essential but would be nice to have somewhere down the line: a webpage to browse historical results and a user public profile indicating their accomplishments.
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I feel the Weekend Rank rewards being so obfuscated really hurts with player retention. A real UI showing your progress and reward tiers would be ideal.
Have the UI autofill the user's player ID.But the lowest of low hanging fruit could be to just have the UI Link To: https://gudecks.com/meta/player-stats?gameMode=13&userId=[PLAYER_ID]
I was playing over a month and in the discord for three weeks before I realized I was getting packs even at my low rank. It would have been big incentive to play even on my first weekend if I understood it, and rewarding new players quickly and consistently is a big part of player retention.
I linked this comment in a Feedback thread in Discord
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/1325147480475566110
I think that for the competitive scene, they should at least try to fix 85% of the mistakes in Gods Unchained Mobile.
Yea there are too many important things too fix and too few hands to do it.