Triple Triad Tournament Tweaks

[Fluffster]

Right now, in my opinion, the Bi-weekly Triple Triad tournament and the exclusive FF Protag cards that are essentially locked behind it don’t feel amply rewarding at all. Every attempt is a two week wait in-between and if you have nothing else to work towards in the game right now, that feels like an eternity.

It’s become increasingly difficult to make it into the top 20 without every single one of your games being perfect or at least close to perfect, i.e you can barely draw against NPCs and you definitely cannot lose a single game or you can basically consider yourself out of the standings. Sure, you may get a couple platinum packs as a consolation prize but the chances to get even one of the special cards out of them is so exceedingly low that you need to devote your entire soul to The Twelve themselves to even have a slight chance of obtaining one.

So if you’re not lucky enough to be able to get a spot in the leaderboard despite doing decently, it’s a two-week wait for another attempt, or possibly even more if you're trying to get a specific tournament card. I don’t find competing against other players to obtain exceedingly rare cards to be very fun at all, leave that kind of thing to hardcore pvp-focused games. It is ESPECIALLY annoying when you’re doing so well in a tournament, only for your last few matches to go completely sideways, leaving you mere points away from the 1,600 threshold to give you 3 platinum cards and there's nothing you can do about it but suffer for two weeks before you can try again.

This is not even accounting for the awful rule-sets some of the tournament modes have (I’m talking about you Plus and Double-Roulette). If they’re in play, you might as well give up because they WILL destroy your matches and the AI abuses the seven hells out of Plus. Prideful Stag has sabotaged one too many of my matches with this. Unless someone can suggest a good deck and strategy that counters Prideful Stag entirely when plus is in play, I’m completely writing those tournaments off.

I should probably not even be stressing out about this because it’s not like I can complete my card collection anyway, unless a certain pvp-exclusive card becomes obtainable through other means, but I thought I’d still give my two gil pieces on this.

[Fluffster]

So I’m proposing some suggestions to make the tournament experience less stressful, SE/CS3 could do the following:

• Adjust how tournament scoring and rankings work so it’s not so frustratingly competitive.
• Increase the number of people that can qualify for the leaderboard and adjust the rewards accordingly so that everyone at least gets a fair chance.
• Set a fairly challenging but not too frustrating score threshold that guarantees you at least qualify for a bronze tournament pack even if you don’t make it onto the leaderboard.
• Disqualify suspected cheaters and win-traders from tournaments entirely to free up a leaderboard spot for a genuine player.
• Put people who already have the tournament-specific card into their own leaderboard so the ones without it have a better chance to obtain it without having to compete with someone who already has it.
• Make platinum packs less painful to obtain or adjust their RNG to make the special cards more likely. Or just remove the useless cards from the pool entirely. The platinum packs are hard enough to get in large quantities, they should at least be more rewarding.
• Remove Plus entirely from tournaments or fix the AI so it doesn’t abuse it to oblivion (if someone can suggest a good deck and strategy to me that counters Prideful Stag when Plus is in play, I’ll render this point moot).
• Increase the frequency of tournaments (like Lord of Verminion is every few days for example).

Even implementing just one of these tweaks could help the tournament experience not feel like such a slog and would aid in preserving my blood pressure if one of my precious 20 tournament matches was to go south and be effectively wasted. Part of the frustration definitely lies in your 20 matches feeling like an extremely precious finite resource considering how infrequent the tournaments themselves are so a single loss is a huge heartbreak and that should not be a feeling I experience for something that's supposed to be challenging but also fun. Big fishing is frustrating enough on its own due to some windows having an insane amount of downtime, the least that could be done is ensuring the other activities don’t feel equally as frustrating.

What are your thoughts?

[Tint]

Adjust how tournament scoring and rankings work so it’s not so frustratingly competitive.

Well it's a tournament, it is meant to be competetive.

Put people who already have the tournament-specific card into their own leaderboard so the ones without it have a better chance to obtain it without having to compete with someone who already has it.

Having two leaderboards wouldn't show you who is actually the best player. Why having a leaderboard when people are arbitrary removed from it?

Make platinum packs less painful to obtain or adjust their RNG to make the special cards more likely. Or just remove the useless cards from the pool entirely. The platinum packs are hard enough to get in large quantities, they should at least be more rewarding.

That I can agree on. And should be the solution if you ask me. Just let us buy Platinum Packs with MGP. But make them expensive, of course. Or let us buy the cards directly for like 5 mio MGP or whatever.

Remove Plus entirely from tournaments or fix the AI so it doesn’t abuse it to oblivion (if someone can suggest a good deck and strategy to me that counters Prideful Stag when Plus is in play, I’ll render this point moot).

As much as I hate Plus - removing it would be a huge mistake. Plus is the only thing which makes Triple Triad interesting and kind of fair.

Without Plus the player with the better deck will win. Or when both decks are equal it will end in a draw. You usually can't win because you are an amazing player, but because your opponent did make a mistake.

Plus is basically the only tool we have for skill expression - and should be active in every tournament.

But because I hate Plus (and Triple Triad in general) with a passion... Well, I would even agree with removing it. But it would be a mistake nonetheless.

It’s become increasingly difficult to make it into the top 20 without every single one of your games being perfect or at least close to perfect, i.e you can barely draw against NPCs and you definitely cannot lose a single game or you can basically consider yourself out of the standings.

That is because playing against NPCs only grants you a consolation prize. The tournaments are designed to be played against other players. But because people hate PvP they just play against the NPCs. And that means you have to wait forever for another player to show up to play against. Which means more people play against NPCs because they don't want to wait forever. Which then just increases the waiting time even more...

And win trading always was a problem as well.

Drawing against another player gives more points than winning against an NPC.

[Catastrophe573]

I think they did buff Platinum Triad packs? But I agree that some sort of "99 totems to get the mount" system would be appreciated. Maybe let me trade 50 unopened platinum packs for my choice?

I've got about 20-30 tournaments completed. I'll guess 26 because about a year feels right. Each time I plan on going 18-1-1 (estimated) against the NPCs for 1620 points (or whatever) just to get my guaranteed 3 Platinum Packs for 1600 points. And from these 26*3 packs I've obtained, in order: Firion, Firion, Firion, Cecil, and Lightning. (I was raging at the third Firion lol.)

I agree that top 3 is unrealistic. (And if it's not Tidus then I don't want the top prize anyway.) Placing 4th-20th may as well just award a 4th Platinum Pack as far as I can tell. I've opened several of these bonus boosters and I can't tell what makes them special. I assume it can drop the 4 good cards? Kind of funny to think that if I'm in 3rd place during a Firion week that I'd want someone to knock me down to 4th.

Anyway if you just keep at the 2 week grind it'll eventually work out. It's a long grind if you think of it as "1-2 years" but you can only spend 30 minutes on it. Or put another way, in my one year grind to obtain 3/4 cards, I've probably only spent 13 hours on the task. Or less than 5 hours per card. Not terrible. Some achievements in the Gold Saucer are meant to be long term goals, like the 1M from each cactpot.

[Mtarqueau]

I only played PvP, got 3rd position, got ALL the remaining cards I needed:
You obtain an Alphinaud & Alisaie card.
You obtain a Firion card.
You obtain a Cecil Harvey card.
You obtain a Lightning card.
You obtain a Tidus card.

with only 10/20 wins. 1867 pts.

and done.

[dspguy]

I only played PvP, got 3rd position, got ALL the remaining cards I needed:
You obtain an Alphinaud & Alisaie card.
You obtain a Firion card.
You obtain a Cecil Harvey card.
You obtain a Lightning card.
You obtain a Tidus card.

with only 10/20 wins. 1867 pts.

and done.

That's absurd luck. It took me at least 9 months to get the my missing cards from the tournament.