My consern is that with no money prize, as little as it may be in terms of getting you from point A to point B, who will go to the PCs if they are so far out of the way?

For at the very least a year, there hasnt been a high level event, such as a PC close by.

And I live in NJ.

I mean, Indy isn't a week's drive, but now with no money to help get there and even lower chanse of seeing a good amount of cash to go there, why go if it's a streach for me to go there?

Which, if Possible, i say increase the frequency of PCs so people, with their newly acchived high rating, have a place to play.

To retort to Dave's comments, I agree that the game should have been different from the get go. Less teams would have certainly been better, but I think the main problem with the game is that so many cards refer to certain phases or make you know exactly how the mechanics of a turn work. In Magic, they have upkeep triggers. They can be slightly confusing, but once you let someone know that the upkeep is before the draw and after they untap, they dont need to know much else. However, take Mr Mxy for example. To truly use a card like that to the full potential, you need to know exactly when the recruit step happens, etc. Xaviers Dream? You need to know that you check for endurance totals after the cards triggered ability resolves. There are many cards like this. The complexity of commons is really off the wall compared to magic as well. I think the longest worded commons in magic are about five lines or so, and if they arent, then they are often repeats of how other cards work (such as their CIP/Leave Play triggers from Vanishing or something). MTU did a much better job at this, but look at VS cards; the very look of them are intimidating to players on too many levels. Dont get me wrong, the complexity of cards is really what perks my interest, but I consider myself a competitive card player. For someone who is just casual, I think they would just want to avoid the 'scary' cards outright, even if they had nice pictures.

Completely restarting the game, however, is a horrid idea. You will lose too many players that way. I used to play Dragon Ball Z. When Dragonball GT came out, they essentially restructured the game and made it much worse with the GT name, but still compatible with the old game. They lost alot of players this way, and I only felt like I was playing the game anymore because I was winning at it. When the last GT set was cancelled (after about a 6 month hiatus), they released a new Dragon Ball Z game. While this game was arguably better (as stated by my friends) I never picked up the game out of frustration - fairly unusual considering I probably had the 3rd largest DBZ indiviual singles collection in the country at one time. That game died out after a few sets; their last World Championships with a $5000/2500/1000/1000 payout had something like 26 attendees.

Lol, that's actually a good question. :p

In theory, booster draft appeases some crowds. It won't please others though. Some people just want to play with their great creations that they've built. So Booster Drafts for $12-15 or do Constructed for $5.

And if you do constructed, just choose the format that the greatness number of players want to play. If it's mostly new people, run Modern. If the new guys are playing with all "hand-me-down" cards, run Silver or Golden so they can use the largest chunk of their card pool possible.

It's all about adjusting the format to fit the needs of the players and afford them the most fun in their tournament experience.

There's your problem right there. From the start the thing that hurt Vs. for casual play was the complexity. Even good players told me that they couldn't get play Vs. just for fun, as there is just too much thinking going on. Ramping up the complexity as things went on obviously didn't help, but the simple fact is that we have a game made by really good players, and when those players asked themselves "what would I like to see from a CCG?" the answer was "a game where the better player wins the vast majority of the time." A better answer would have been "A game where the better player wins enough over time to come out ahead, but everyone feels like they have a chance."

The fact that kitchen table players got headaches from the game led to the lack of the casual base of the game, which you need before everything else.

The fact that casual-tournament players both got headaches from the game AND quickly realized they were outclassed led to the lack of a sizeable local tournament base.

UDE tried to compensate with a top-down marketing approach, hoping that the intellectual property involved would be enough for the casuals, but you can only spend like a druken sailor for so long.

What I find funny is that with WOW, UDE made a game that got it more right, but did it with a property that demands a lot of time from its fans, which again severely limits casual-tournament play. In Toronto, there's tons of WOW being sold, but nobody comes out to non-regionals tournaments.

Sydney was and is a massive mistake. UDE should have stepped up sooner, admitted they had made a mistake, and never announced/canceled Sydney.

UDE had four pumps in their hand, and they just wasted three of them on turn three...

...Now that last pump has to get us through the rest of the game.

I just find it sad that I will not be able to play hobby league as casual, before I could bring whatever I felt like and not really worry about it because I was really there to have fun and my rating didn't matter much anyway! I pick up my points in ones and twos usually. I kind of laughed at some other players who came ultra competive to hobby and always talked about their rating and how important it was to not let it go down so they could get an invite. Personally I kind of saw the invites as the easy way in! But I guess they were right and I must now treat hobby league as my only way to a PC better start bringing my Teir 1 all the time and play my best even if they are a total newbie and trying to learn the game can't let my rating go down. I don't really think this is great for casual or pro play. I wish UDE would reconcider if their were still PCQ's just less of them the attendence would go up! It's hard to justify paying a babysitter every week for hobby league. I feel really bad for the people who don't have a hobby league in their area, at least before you could travel for a PCQ or 10K but I guess those days are gone to. At least bring back the 10K. Please keep some division between casual and pro play!:cry:

So upper deck has to understand that any sets they release now have to be god damn amazing, or else they might as well pack up shop now. Vs cannot afford another legion/xmen/superman. Worlds Finest and the legends sets have to be amazing.

i dont know about you kids but MTU really isnt that amazing, its got 2 teams and some crap in it. Untill you show me otherwise im stickign to that. The remaining sets of the year have to be amazing if you intend on selling me product.

Ok, I'm going to play the Raw Deal card.

I'm heavily involved with the game of Raw Deal, started casual and went to a point of being involved in playtesting and rules guru'ing, and judging events, etc ...

The game has been going for 6 years.

It currently gives out 16 prizes that ammount to a single ticket to Wrestlemania, a hotel room for the weekend of Wrestlemania and travel to the host city.

The Championships at that event then determine a World Champion that is able to design a card for a future expansion.

Everything else given as a prize, is product [either exclusive prize cards, or boxes/packs of product].

And it is based on professional wrestling, something that I think can be said to be more of a niche than comic book characters are, especially now. And especially as a comic book store is more likely to carry Vs. System than Raw Deal.

The game's structure for "Organized Play" is basically:

Tournaments run by managers [the equivalent of Hobby Leauges ... you buy the tournament kits, and distribute them to players at locally run tournaments] and larger events with larger prize support at certain conventions ... ussually placed around a qualifier [with the 'trip to Wrestlemania' prize].

So, I don't buy that a game can't survive with an extremely lean prize budget. The game is self sustaining in many ways as nearly ALL of the prizes are stuff that relates to the game itself which, as long as the game is doing well, you can actually sell and make some good money on.

The big difference with Vs though ... is that the tournament prizes are exclusive.

That might be something UDE needs to look into going forward. If they make certain events, like City Championships, have exclusive prizes that can drive attedance and give those players a 'pseudo' cash card. Not going to fall into the trap of 'what is good for one game is good for all games'.

Anyway, I'm just saying, Vs. System needs to find it's balance. Will reducing the prize pay outs drive some players away? Perhaps. HOWEVER, with a lower budget, they also have a lower 'expectation' for sales. If enough people keep buying that they exceed their expectations, they can then increase the prize budget. Once they get into an upward cycle, things should be good as long as players start getting pulled back into the game [or pulled into the game for the first time] when prizes start going back up.

Basically, they bit off too much, started choking, and had to spit it out. Now they are taking smaller bites.

Start with a small, reasonable budget for prizes. If that works out, slowly increase ... if sales increase as well, they can push a bit more on the throttle, etc.

It may take some time, but eventually they'll find the "sweet spot" of Vs.

I'm been serious about CCG's for more years than most and have a fairly good feel for the economics of it. Back in September I was predicting two PC's in 2007 with a prize fund of $500,000 and I would have been very happy with that (as it's the number I can normally find time to fully prepare for and travel to).

Instead we got an announcement of three PC's with a fund of $900K. At the time this sounded like excellent news but that figure now looks set to reduce to the $500K.

So my question for Jeff is why didn't UDE see this coming back in September and spread things more evenly for 2007? The US based PC prize fund is likely to be around $200K this year when it could easily have been much higher. That's going to cost a game I love a lot of players.

It's going to be very hard to justify paying to traveling from the UK knowing that I'd need to top 8 to break even. Guess I'll have to win the Silver Age Master's Challenge...

DTee

Agreed!

I think in a way this is enough of a reset button.

Hopefully it will reset back to the early days when people were not such jerks.

For a while there i was hoping that vsrealms would just ban general discusion all together.

He's a game store owner in Waco, TX. If you're ever in the neighborhood, you simply must stop by. I've lived and played in a lot of places, including a lot of good places, and I would kill to have a Game Closet in any one of those places. Dequan is not only a great store owner, but a fellow gamer as well as a friend to many who frequent his store. It's one of the few (read: only) things I miss about Waco.

Could not agree more. This all seems like terribly poor planning. What changed from September to February to have the OP plans so drastically diminished? From what I can tell the biggest change was UDE ignoring us! You can't tell me that in the last 5 months things changed that much from a customer point of view. It seems like UDE is just dropping the ball in numerous ways of late and the game can't really afford that. If VS started out w/ a strong hobby league and some $100K PCs then maybe it would have been seen as a great sign. However they already have players expecting large prize payouts and have burned a ton of bridges at hobby game stores. These changes might keep VS around but the game will never recover from it.

I have to admit I haven't read every single post in this thread, though I don't believe this has been officially addressed as of yet. Jeff made a point in his statement to ask players to support their local leagues and communities, and generally those who seek to support Hobby League the most end up being the judges for those events.

With this in mind, are there any plans to support those who support the game by judging these local events? Up to this point, UDE has taken the "your TO will be responsible for the judges" approach. However, judges for higher events (which no longer exist) were at least rewarded by UDE with hard to get EAs and the like. Will Hobby League/City Championship judges be receiving the same benefits?

I ask this only because, without PCQs and other events above the Hobby League level, will the Hobby League judge have a place to play? If they don't have an avenue to play, will they at least be rewarded for their sacrifice? If the answer to both is no, what benefit is there for someone to judge a game, and further, what benefit is there for that person to buy the game?

Personally, I'll likely buy this game for a long while regardless as to whether I have to judge as opposed to play, though I would like to at least have something shiny and rare to show for it. Also, I do like to play at least once a month, which I don't think is too much to ask.

Okay. I live in Jacksonville, Fl so when I refer to my area you know what I am referring to.

1. I feel that the reason 2006 was a slump for Vs was the sets. X-men was good for getting new players in my area to play. We lost all of those new players by 2007. Players want to play their favored characters and when Supes and Spidey are constantly defeated by random pile of locations held together by Ahmed they quit playing. Crisis was a really well designed set, however I had a lot of conversations that went like this.....

New Player: Hey tell me about this new Vs set.
Me: Well Checkmate is very solid with Ahmed and I think Shadowpact is fun to play, JSA and Secret Six are neat to fiddle with.
New Player: Who the **** is Ahmed?

Lather, rinse, repeat for Hog and Legion. (yes Hog had a few more named characters and Legion had Titans but neither one is a big turn on for the new player)

These sets should have been spaced out better. With more popular characters in them. Also getting me product that I was promised on time helps. I still don't have a Superman starter.

2. Hobby League in my area is not for newbs. We play to test out new decks to take to PC's, PCQ's, 10K's, etc. While we are not a team per se we actively help tweak each other decks to the point where they are better than the player playing them usually. (at least in my case)
At one point we may have had 8 casual players and 8 hardcore players. We may have 5 hardcore now and 3 casual. (those three all recently started)

So how do we make this enticing to new players? I mean we don't have enough players for amatuer HL.

3. I would like more detailed info on the ratings system. I think that they should be reset because when Points mattered I did not care about ratings and would try decks that I might not have otherwise. Some players have mentioned this earlier.

4. This is probably the worst time to make these changes. Again in our area a lot of MTG players are starting to ask questions about Vs because they are so dissatisfied with the last couple sets of MTG. We are trying to convert them. These announcements might not help with that.

5. What are some ways you guys have found to get noobs to the point where they can play confidently? this game is hard and most quit before they master it. I am asking because we lost a lot of players last year despite giving them cards, explaining play errors, drafting a lot and even having classes and discussions on how we draft and why we draft the cards we did. If any one has suggestions I am open to retaining new players.

6. I play to compete, whether it is for money, cards, pb&j sandwhiches doesn't matter. I have driven 5 states away for a 10k but now I can't. We need to have some big State and regional events. Money prizes are the least of my concern, but I would like prizes for my efforts. (Bad Prizes is one major reason my L5R cards are collecting dust)

7. What format are the CC's going to be? I might have missed this but after reading 20 something pages I began skimming.

8. By the way SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL STORE and it will support you. Ask your local owner if he is willing to cut you a discount to compete with online prices. My store owner does and we buy 4-6 boxes a set from him. IF he is unwilling to do so go to another store. We are fortunate enough here to have several stores to conduct business with.

9. For those of you that are whining about 15,000 not being enough. KISS MY ###! I go to college and work two jobs to support myself and just made over that amount LAST YEAR! So if that isn't enough money QUIT.The more pros and money grabbers that quit the greater my chances of gettin paid.

10. Thank you Jeff for reading all of our crap. Some of our ideas are awful some are brilliant. I trust you have enough sense to figure out which is which.