Welcome to Burning Questions! This week, we address the elephant in the room!
1) Why is the Marvel Snap acquisition system so bad?
At this point, discontent with Marvel Snap's acquisition system is clear. That reached a boiling point this week, with several creators expressing their disappointment with the most recent series drop announcement.
But how did it get to this point? Why is the economy structured this way?
First, it was never meant to be. If you recall, one of the initial models for card acquisition, which debuted back in the Beta period, was an event called Nexus Events, a gacha-style loot box system where you would pay gold for a (very small) chance at pulling a new card.
A terrible system made it extremely expensive to guarantee the new card. Why did they think this system would work? It's not significantly more predatory or expensive than the acquisition systems of other gacha-style mobile games. Second Dinner’s problem was that their game had attracted an audience that rejected this model. Players of traditional card games and those new to mobile gaming that the Marvel IP and excellent gameplay attracted wouldn't accept this system. In a way, their game's great design and popularity had become a problem for their economic plan.
Given the normal development process of a game, it's likely that they were working on and developing their acquisition model for months, potentially years, before the beta even began. Given the poor reception of Nexus events, they had to rework the economy while maintaining a live service game and have been chasing a sustainable system ever since. The system at the global launch was better than Nexus events but still awful. Series 5 cards felt totally unobtainable, only being available via the collection track at extremely low drop rates. Once again, Second Dinner had to modify the acquisition system. Collector's Tokens were introduced and definitely improved. However, this system still had serious problems. For one, it made acquisition significantly more unequal. For big spenders, staying collection complete was pretty trivial, while low spenders and free-to-play players were left behind.
The next acquisition rework was the introduction of Spotlight Caches. Despite being indisputably more generous than the previous system (especially for low-spenders), the new model was met with dismay and anxiety. It was a clear improvement, but because the change was poorly understood and communicated, it was a net negative for community perception. It quickly became clear that this system has two major issues. First, it only remained more generous than the previous system with regular series drops. Second, because it was luck-based, those who ended up on the extremely low end of the variance inherent in the system would be significantly harmed by this system as long as there was no pity system.
Furthermore, it became clear that the new system was initially too generous for Second Dinner. It's clear that this system wasn't meeting their internal economic goals, as we saw them shave the edges off the system by reducing the number of Series 4 cards released coupled with reducing free in-game currency. A system perceived badly by the consumer and not profitable enough for the developer is a tough place to end up after an economic rework.
In short, Second Dinner's initial concept for its acquisition system didn't work, so it has had to scramble and chase a new system on the fly ever since. It can continue to make positive changes to the system, but repairing community sentiment will be the larger issue.
2) What is the silver lining in all of this?
Despite the hysteria you may see on Reddit or Twitter right now, each acquisition change Second Dinner has made has been positive. Each system has been at least slightly better, from Nexus events to Collection track-only acquisition to Collector's Tokens to Spotlight Caches. Unfortunately, changing systems each time has resulted in additional negative community sentiment, especially the change to Collector's Caches. This has likely made the Second Dinner team more cautious about acquisition system changes.
However, (and I know you've heard it before) they claim to be working on some changes. The brightest silver lining here is their announcement that there will be “an even bigger Series Drop in the first quarter of 2025,” which is significantly sooner than the expected next drop, which would have been sometime next summer. I'm hoping that character mastery, first-quarter series drops, and some additional ways to get some free cards combine to improve the community’s feelings about the acquisition system.
3) What are the best Thanksgiving variants?
The Even Heroes Get Hungry album is full of the Food Fight variants that dropped this week, and there are a bunch of solid 700 Gold variants here! Wild Blue did a great job with these. Here are my four favorites. Maybe it's time to build a Moon Girl/Devil Dino deck to show them off!
Let's hop over to the official Marvel Snap discord and look at some developer explanations.
4) Q: In your last response, you said "Our ideal player is a happy player." Do you believe that the changes made to Deadpool's Diner for the second round resulted in more happy players? To be clear, I'm asking this because I was much less happy playing Diner the second time. I had some struggles the first time but was able to fight through and get Cassandra. The second time, despite thinking my collection and experience had increased a lot in the last three months, it seemed like I was being matched with much better players, with way better decks and ability to counter my moves, much more pervasively than the first time. IIRC, I never won a single game above the third table (Mac-n-Cheese) in the three days I played before I decided it just wasn't worth it. I guess I'm not your ideal player; but again, the question is whether the changes to Diner were intended to make more happy players or something else (higher engagement, higher profit, less gaming the system, etc.).
A: While I haven’t directly worked on Deadpool’s Diner myself, and it’s early to be sure of the outcome, I know more happy players was definitely the goal. Diner did well after a rocky start the first time, so we didn’t change much—plus, it was repeating quickly.
High bot encounter rates and an incentive to spend gold for the “bot queue” garnered universally negative feedback in v1. While we want some for queue times, the bots weren’t fun to play and were especially frustrating to lose to. The solution for v2—reducing bots, widening a couple matchmaking parameters, and using a “drop down” option for table stakes—had good intentions, but created some different frustrations. We made a hot fix to alleviate some of those, and have already begun reviewing how we could’ve executed better there.
Author's note:
The reduction in bots is the best change they made to this version of the Diner. You can get to a point (either through winning or Gold) where you can face Bots exclusively, which was one of the worst aspects of the previous Diner. If you're upset about fewer bots in the Diner, I'd propose you're actually upset about card acquisition and want to get King Eitri faster. If there were no rewards in the mode would you truly prefer to play more bots?
5) Q: In a Team Answers post, Glenn just shared: "For my part, I think HV went a hair too far—the gameplay was fun, but it was very close to making winning irrelevant and I think that had a negative effect for some players. So I wouldn’t expect many future game modes to go as far as HV did on that count."
This is extremely disappointing, as the game really benefits from having some casual and low-stakes modes to counteract high-effort grind requirements like Leagues and Deadpool's Diner. Even High Voltage had the flaw of not offering season experience points, but it was still quick and fun. Given that High Voltage was so popular, but Glenn's post seems to feel it went too far, will HV and other similar low stakes modes be provided in the future?
A: I don't think high stakes or grinds are necessary to make winning matter to players, though they can be useful and fun. Ultimately, an incentive for winning just needs to exist within each individual game.
High Voltage did tons of things well and was a great new mode for us. I just believe it was (slightly) too “winner-agnostic.” You’ll be seeing HV again!
Author's note:
Glenn's previous comment is being pretty badly mischaracterized. He made it clear High Voltage was successful and would be returning. Additionally, a weird thing seems to be happening this week: quite a few people are talking about how they hate Deadpool’s Diner and how much they love High Voltage. It's a weird bit of revisionism since people were saying the opposite near the tail end of High Voltage. This is another example of people's opinions about the game being weighed down by their unhappiness about card acquisition and the recent series drops.
High Voltage was certainly fun, but it's pretty inarguable that it started to feel like winning and losing didn't matter. I fully believe my opinion on it would have continued to shift negatively if it had been longer, and Second Dinner was smart to keep it at a week. One thing I can't entirely agree with Second Dinner is the need for a true casual mode. There are enough players who want to go through the motions of playing their deck and doing missions that they should just introduce a bot mode with no Snapping and Ruins for all locations. It would essentially be like one of the idle games where you tap to feed fish or make cookies or whatever, but there is, for better or worse, an apparent craving for this by the player base.
That's it for this week! Find me on Bluesky (scosco) and Twitter for decks, comic talk, and more! Hop into the comments and share your opinion (or use it to vent if you'd like!).