From time to time, our good friends here at Crits Happen take the timeto pen their thoughts, and as usual, our good friend Pojo has some interesting insight... enjoy!
"Suggestions From the Gingers"
World of Warcraft Minis players have spent what has felt like eons being the ‘redheaded step-child’ in the Upper Deck family. At simply no fault of our own, our game merely took on the punishing position of riding sidecar to the TCG, thanks mostly to UDE’s unbelievable decision to force players to choose only one game in which to play competitively. Being the more expensive of the two games didn’t help things a great deal either. As any WoW Minis player knows, our game had several hefty hills to climb from the get-go.
The initial burden to our playerbase was the entry price-point. While most of us know that our game is actually fairly cheap to play, new players to the game who might have been eyeing a booster pack were met with sticker shock at a $14.99 MSRP. Most collectible card games run boosters at $3.99, while even other miniature games (such as Heroclix) run boosters at $9.99. At $15 a pop and only three units inside, it almost seemed to suggest that each piece is worth roughly $5. Or, slightly more logical would be rares at $10, and commons at $2.50 each. The problem with both cost examples here is that UDE failed to make pieces ‘worth’ this much. This problem falls two-fold. The first is that the majority of the pieces look like they’re a $.25 toy you might find at the local Family Dollar store (have you actually LOOKED at Bolvar – his face looks more like a Murloc than a man). Sure, there are a couple of pieces that look very, very cool. But when 95% of your collection is something a toddler would get bored with, there’s a problem. The second issue of worth here is that hardly any commons are actually ‘worth’ being on the board. Sadly, the same goes for many rares. Monsters are a perfect example here as the majority of them will never see the light of day and seem to have purposely been made as ‘filler’. Filler is typically okay in collectible games, but when you spend $15 on nothing but filler, there’s a major issue. Every collectible game will have commons that simply won’t be played. It’s the nature of a collectible line in which not all pieces are created fair. Some have to be more valuable than others. However, most games balance it well. For every five worthless commons there will be two or three that are worthwhile. But with WoW Minis, the ratio is so unevenly fair that it skews the worth of the set as a whole. When the bulk of pieces you could pull aren’t worth more than $1, what’s the point of spending $15?
The next hill (ie, mountain) our game had to climb was the obvious caution of investing into a game in which you have very little control of the outcome. No one likes dice games. I’d like to strongly repeat this, just in case Blizzard is listening – No one likes dice games. Dice represent the obvious element(s) of chance and as such, they typically send up a red flag to any collectible gamer looking for a fun and skillful game to play. Dice bring to any game the unpredictability of actions. But most collectible gamers aren’t interested in investing lots of hard-earned money to play Monopoly. For as obvious as each decision can be for any skilled gamer, when you have to roll to determine whether or not the decision was a correct one, there is a problem. Statistics can give any skilled mathematician an edge, but as every mathematician knows – they’re just statistics. Instead of representing the unknown, or the dangers of taking a chance, the dice represent a restriction placed on the level of skill one player can exert during the course of a game. And while certain players exhibit perfectly how skill overtakes the disadvantage of dice (Ben Isgur, for example), there are many others who prove otherwise. In fact, Isgur’s success almost helps to raise the question of why dice are an element – for if one player can achieve such success against the odds of an uncontrollable outcome, why bother having them there? At the end of the day, no one likes dice rolling in a collectible game. The fact that they represent chance means that a player’s skill is getting downplayed. And that fact will never sell collectible games.
As time moved forward, we were stuck with the curse of constantly under-performing. But the above hurdles were never addressed as rocks helping our game to sink. Instead, attention was turned blindly to the fact that our numbers never reached the same height that our ‘older sibling’ achieved. To punish us for the Nationals fiasco (64 seats were guaranteed spots to Worlds and only 65 showed), our qualifications for Worlds were turned sideways. While 64 people qualified just for showing up, only seven players of Day 1 were allowed to move forward. UDE believed that the best way to achieve success was to restrict the amount of players to participate in an already hamstringed game. In an attempt to fix the horrifying problem of attendance, UDE consistently went out of their way to fumble, change, redo, limit, and botch all attempts of support. Instead of trying to patch, repair, and remodel the broken home in which they had created, they instead turned the blind eye and let the game’s problems build. The fact is that they had created something beautiful, but chalk full of problems. And rather than caring about it and finding ways to fix it and help it bloom – they drew the shades, turned off the lights, locked the door, and left it for dead.
And now, nearly a month after the announcement was made that UDE lost the WoW TCG license, we’ve come to learn that Blizzard has indeed picked up the Minis license as well.
At the DMF, several Minis players bombarded the Blizzard plain-clothes representative with questions upon questions to the state of our game. Only ten of us qualified for the DMF (and why would players travel to play in a tournament when UDE had already established a pattern of failing to pay several thousands of dollars in prize support to several players?) and all of us tried to stress that it wasn’t a representation of the state of the game, but rather a representation of what happens when a corporation turns its back on its players and, essentially, suggests that you should give your money and time to something else.
So, as players, we’re left with nothing to do but to ask that Blizzard take note of the fact that our game (and your investment) can be salvaged. It doesn’t have to be killed. You don’t have to take the collectability aspect away from us.
Show your support for this game, before it’s too late. Use the comments section of this post to voice your ways in which the game can improve. Use your strength in numbers to give Blizzard a reason to move forward, rather than backwards. The only reason they’ll have to kill us off at this point would be your silence.
~Pojo
