My first day was plenty fun, with me getting enough booster packs to keep it interesting. One can make a very effective deck from the starterMy first day was plenty fun, with me getting enough booster packs to keep it interesting. One can make a very effective deck from the starter cards they give you.
Without meaning to stroke my e-peen to fervently, I basically won the vast majority of matches I played, so I went to bed full of confidence, with an overall positive impression of the game, which I thought of as a more simplistic version of MMDoC, but still enjoyable.
The next day left me more pessimistic. One problem is that you quickly run into a wall as with a good winning record you start to get matched against people with vastly superior decks, i.e. those with multiple red star cards in them; the fact I call them "red stars" indicates that I don't have any to know what their actual designation is. It is here where the P2W factor is greatest felt.
To buy a faction starter deck is over $14 and anyone who plays TCG's realizes that buying a deck is no assurance you will get cards to build a competitive hand against non-starter deck players.
Moreover there are no rewards for losses so when you enter into a bracket where decks are significantly red star enriched you are going to lose frequently and can spend a fair amount of time trying to approach the 900 silver necessary to buy a 3 card booster deck at the rate of ~30 silver per win, with matches timing out at 20 minutes per side.
Another problem is how the community and timed matches negatively synergize. Firstly, don't do untimed matches as people seem to start one and then stop playing, waiting for one to get frustrated and concede.
As far as their timed matches go, they have an odd set up where individual rounds aren't timed, but you are given 20 minutes per side per match. Why is this a bad idea? Again because of the notoriously **** communities around TCG's.
As an example I recently finished a match where I played my 2 initial turns in under 30 seconds, and pretty much wiped the player’s units off of the board; this in and of itself can be easily overcome, but instead the jackass walked away from the match, waiting 15 minutes to play their next move, and subsequently letting the timer run down to zero. I think when people feel that they are going to lose they think, **** that guy I will make him pay for that win, and who knows maybe he'll either concede or have to stop playing for some reason. This unsportsmanlike behavior increases the later it gets into the evening.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, they also allow players to play multiple simultaneous matches, which means that even without overt griefing, many matches take far longer than they should as players pop in and out of matches, leaving their opponents waiting on their return; this in turn encourages one to do the same, grossly increasing the time spent in a given match. While this may be fun for others, it is too fragmented a way for me to enjoy playing.
So the bad community, exploitable timer mechanics, and the rapid hard wall threshold for getting new cards without buying decks in $14 increments makes SolForge unlikely to persist on my hard drive. If the decks were priced at $5 then I would throw in some money, but in this case, no way, as I anticipate by the time I put together a competitive red star enriched deck I will have spent more money than I want for this relatively light diversion of a TCG.… Expand
