Hey guys,
As a game believer and a botter myself, I think that we should try to encourage long term real players as much as possible. By active players, I mean players who believe in the game -having fun with it, holding assets...- either they are playing manually or playing manually and botting on the side.
Last year they reduced the quest rewards from Bronze and nerfed a little bit the DEC, but since there is no active players -real players-, rewards cards prices keep crashing -cards, dec and sps-, since the bots keep dumping the cards at market prices or below market prices and keep cashing out. Dont get me wrong, I do believe that bots can coexist with real players, but realistically a human player can not put 600 battles in 1 day, bots can, rentals keep being pushed down and active players dont grow. So should we ban bots? Absolutely not.
I, for example, own a 4xx CP deck, mid Gold, and I dont play that much manually, just rent my cards/delegate and bot. If I play by myself I would be able to reach Diamond, but is simply not worth the effort/fun enough. I can not imagine myself with 48k CP, for example, battling in Bronze/Silver, and how long will it take me to get to Gold, or push higher in the leaderboard. Thats why most of the real players dont want to play since rewards are too low or they are stuck in Bronze/Silver for too long. Even pucharsing 1k chaos legions packs, which is roughly 1k$, you wont get a competitive deck enough to achieve Gold. Maybe at the end of season you do, but your rewards during the way are waaaay too low. Imagine you get 15 pelacor bandits in rewards, you will probably sell them since the renting is too low and you dont get to use them if you dont have leveled up summoners. Since with your Harklaw, Chwala...
So what do you propose? Lets get straight to the point:
Airdrop/unlock a legendary promo dragon summoner which costs 4/5 mana and no abilities to anyone who OWNS 45.000 CP in cards, no delegated. 1 BCX. At current market rates, cheapest card is about 150CP/1 USD, so you would need to hold 300$ in cards to get the summoner. If you hold 1,2k in cards, you have a pretty competitive deck for Gold.
- Why 4/5 mana and no abilities? So players that have a long time deck dont lose any values in their cards, since this summoner wont be able to be used at top levels, but clearly will outperform starter decks in bronze/silver -because you can use higher level cards in the bronze/silver leagues-, and players/bots will start to accumulate CPs.
- What about me, that I have 1M CP and I invested 200k? - This is to increase the active player base, so ANYONE with a 300$ investment is guaranteed to at least be able to place in silver and get nice rewards. You would get 1xBCX each 45k CP, like the rest, and you will probably sell the summoner since you have no use with your 200k deck, but your summoner wont be worth a lot, or almost anything, since is a card that only will be nice if played manually, but underperform against older cards/summoners. In silver, 99 mana, your dragon wont do anything, but mixed with a Chwala that you keep at level 2, plus a naga assasin and the bonesmith+starter decks you will win 60-70% vs bots ;). But against the new CL legendary summoner, you will lose, and against a player with a same level deck for the rest of the summoners, you will lose too, and against a player with any other legendary dragon summoner, or even epic, you will lose too.
To avoid being exploited this airdrop needs some kind of antibottingring system, in which I keep transferring/delegating my cards and collecting the airdrop. Thats up to the devs.
Why I think the idea will work?
Because now, even if you spend 1k in chaos legion packs, if you are lucky enough you will have all summoners leveled up to 3. So you will reach Gold at the EOS if you are lucky, making pennies on the way. Real players get discouraged by this fact, and they dont stay around the game enough to see that is viable and competitive at higher levels with nice decks.
But with your new summoner there is incentive to hold all reward cards, since you will be able to use your legendary dragon, and also if you got a level 7 common from your packs you would be able to use it too. Since playerbase -manual players- will easily outperform botters with starter decks, dec rewards from bronze will go lower for the botrings since active players would move up faster to Gold draining the pool at the lower levels. Your dragon with a oshanus plus the fiend that you got from the packs and your leveled starters will win.
Longterm you want to aim for players that enjoy the game, either is F2E F2P or whatever you want to call it.