The reason for DoC's decline may possibly have begun in Q4 2013 | Forums

[cucu99]

[cpcg101]

Pre BS2 balance was pretty good, imo before they changed the legendary interaction (which killed cool and complicated recursion decks like Asalah Pao recursion and Jkkk's Dhamiria) the game was the heathiest, all sort of decks worked: hard rush: Crag, Ishuma, typical aggro: Kelthor, Cassandra, midrange: Adar-Malik, and all kind of control decks from classic spell control to mill, recursion, lock and OTK. For instance, I enjoyed playing 1-1-5 combo Belias, really unusual, but working deck.

Kelthor was strong, but many decks countered him. I've made my own tweaks to classic Cassandra to have a positive winrate vs him, for instance.

All good, BS2 and financial changes were the first nail in the coffin but I've got to say I've enjoyed playing the game the most since the Time of Renewal expansion. It's been very well balanced IMO as a mid-skill champ 1/ weekly tournament player. Not too many bugs in-game and I've competed with all factions during that time and probably spent more time playing it than I have since BS2 came in. It makes this carve-up even harder to swallow.

[Zugman]

Zugman, what you are saying is correct, but just think about it - a new player comes to a FREE 2 PLAY game and he must spend 1000 seals! just to get a starter deck of one faction. Thats 15 euros per faction. And we all know thats way not enough if you want to progress, but at least you have the feeling that the game wants you to play and progress. When they changed it from 20000 in-game gold to 1000 seals the game was not quite free to play anymore. It would be kind of acceptable if it was 100 or 200 seals, but 1000... its like the game itself is against you.
The marketing here really sucks. They must make the new players to really love the game and then offer them to buy more. What they made - "Buy this and this, and this. You will like it, eventually"

Wasn't purchasing those starter decks optional? As long as you could still play the game without buying them for seals, then it would still be F2P. I mean, 1000 seals does sound like a ripoff, but players didn't have to buy them to be able to play, right? It probably just meant they had to do more grinding instead of shelling out the seals to start building a good collection.

However, I agree that the key is to make a game new players love, before trying to get them to spend more money on it. As I initially theorized in this thread, that inability to get new players to stay has probably been a big reason for why this game hasn't been able to sustain development.

[GenericManGuy]

I quit after the introduction of quests and other nonsense.