so, apparently the new rage is phantom farming. I'm all for there being lots of ways to earn phantoms. several ideas involving tournaments have been suggested and I think this would be great.

however, when those ways include playing games in under a minute on 5v5 boards or, even worse, "playing" tens of games simultaneously against the AI, I think it defeats the purpose of having phantoms. the spam under "Fighting!" of people having so many games open against the AI is also annoying. and, for the sake of the game, people are circumventing buying/earning cards by collecting hundreds of phantoms in this manner. like any trend to earn a quick buck, I expect the situation to get worse until something is done.

my suggestion would be that phantoms can only be won from the AI if you fight with the default map size and glory settings AND win. similarly with players, but attach further conditions to wins by resignation to discourage multiple accounts -- i.e., game must last at least R rounds, at least M minutes, etc.

and, I would strongly suggest not rolling out these changes until the new phantom-rewarding tournaments and/or quests are ready.

I have to agree with queeshai. I say make tourneys that give phantoms and either make them play default size/glory games for phantoms or limit x phantoms to be earned a day from playing normal games.It does seem to be a growing trend and although phantoms are a good way for new players to use a variety of cards, I don't believe this is how phantoms are supposed to be won.

Well, as many of you know, I'm one of the people guilty of Phantom Farming. I know that I'm probably one of the main people you're referring to as well. I farm Phantoms so I can be more competitive with other players. Let's be honest, the starting decks are extremely weak. I plan on joining the next Domain League, but until then I plan on farming phantoms.

I just played a computer game in which I beat the computer in under 2 minutes on normal mode. I followed it up playing 3 games at once in 5 minutes. Not a custom game, but an actual computer game on normal, with a regular size map, 20 turns, etc. It's actually very easy to play a speed game against the ai if you just load up on high vision buildings. It would be even easier if I played it on Easy, or with 9 flux nodes, etc. Try it or watch me sometime if you don't believe me.

The bottom line is that people will always find the most efficient (fastest) path to farm phantoms. I personally enjoy playing the sealed deck and drafts, but they are really terrible for collecting phantoms for the time invested. So in between waiting for ECs, sealed & draft games, sometimes I farm phantoms. I usually only do it a couple times a day for about 30 minutes each out of boredom.

If there was another method to get phantoms, like tournaments giving out a handful of them, then I probably wouldn't even bother with my daily grind of phantom farming.

Everything Psi said was true. I'm also one of the people guilty of farming, but I can name at least two people I know besides Psi and me that can farm very efficiently.

I like phantom farming because I can constantly refresh my cards and have a smaller possiblity of having my decks invalid'd.

The only other thing I'd say is this: I'm a little ripped between a phatom tourney and the old phantom farming, because although the tourney might be mroe enjoyable, I'd get more cards out of farming.

I'm all out for phantom quests though, may force a bit more effort and be more rewarding than the other two methods.

I've said my opinion, and it will expand when the public speaks.


Hope this helps, and long live phantom farming .

Well I am a redneck from the sticks, and I don't know why farmers are always getting a bad rap by the "smart" big city folk. And now apparently you cannot even do virtual farming without angering the 1337 bluebloods of the net! Enough is enough!!

All extreme seriousness aside, it makes sense to phantom farm if you are looking for goodies and such. I would like to highly recommend the idea of minor clashes 4 hours after every EC, with tastyl little phantom cards as a reward. It is an idea many have kicked around, and I believe it will be a nice positive for the community of TFW for generations to come. Let the MC action begin!

DarkJello, of the backlands

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the only reasonable justification I can imagine for playing simultaneous games against the AI is that the AI is so slow to respond. however, if this is the case, I would imagine that playing multiple games makes it even slower, further degrading performance for the system as a whole. the system as it is currently designed creates an incentive for this. I am suggesting that the system be changed to remove this perverse incentive.



no, that is your personal bottom line. for the game itself (which is what matters here), the bottom line is about attracting new users, retaining users, and encouraging some percentage of users to invest in the game.



frankly, I don't care how you choose to invest your time. however, we live in a copycat world. other new players are now being encouraged to farm phantoms to enjoy the game. the question for Jed is whether this behavior is desirable for the game and, if not, whether a change for the better can be made.

incidentally, as a suggestion to other new users who consider phantom farming a good investment of their time ... let's assume that you phantom farm one hour per day and be (very) generous in assuming that this is enough to let you average four power per day. let's also be generous and assume that you use the power instead of selling it (for a loss), so that you are earning 40g/hourFarming. at the game rates of $20/1000g, you are "investing your time" at eighty cents an hour. this doesn't count the time spent in ECs, which hopefully you consider fun.

Yeah I intend to shut it down pretty soon.

I rarely get any lag in TFW, no matter how many people are online, how many games other people are playing, or how many games I'm playing. About the only time I get lag is when I'm downloading something in the background.



No, this is what farming is. When I first started playing this game, several people suggested that I farm phantoms, figure out my play style and then buy cards that fit my play style or enter a league and use the domain I like the most. I thank them because it's very good advice. I've seen enough TCG's on the internet that seemed fun at first. For me, I don't like to throw money into a game and then find out a week or two later that the game isn't as fun as I thought it was. I've done that on more than one occasion and now I'm more cautious. Phantoms are a nice way to test drive the game.

Like I said earlier, I'm satisfied now that I really do like this game and want to invest some money into it. I'm just waiting for the next domain league.


Apparently, you do.



I don't think anyone is farming phantoms to make money. It's just not worth the time. I don't get the point you're trying to make here.

I'm afraid your math here is completely over exaggerated to the point of being way beyond "very generous" and you're making some big assumptions that favor your math as well. With only 21 Power going out per day and seeing who is finishing in the Top 3 in the EC's, I assure you that no one is averaging 4 Power per day via phantom farming. I've been playing this game every day for almost 3 weeks and only have 4 Power total. That's less than ¼ Phantom per day. I should also note that 2 of the 4 Power I've won was in a 6 player tournament in which I only won 1 game to make the finals and then proceeded to get destroyed.

DudeZ:

This post is getting a tad too contentious, IMHO. Having a system that allows newer players to "test drive" the game is great. If they like it, they will then spend money, turn in political favors, and offer some debauchery to Jed so that they can get "real" cards. That is all fine and dandy. And can be super duper awesome for Jed too. Of course, you don't want most players spamming/farming as their ONLY major source of card acquisition either. It does not move the game forward. I suggest donating to the DarkJello Foundation, a not-for-profit organization, and they will then save everybody and provide tons of services for free--just like the government does.

DarkJello

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I don't think its really very benefical for some to farm phantom cards. The randomness of the cards they get means that one would need to play a very large number of matches to find a card they were looking for (~900 games to get a particular uncommon). This means that a deck of phantom cards will largely be random commons. Plus once someone has gone through the work to get the phantoms they will disappear eventually anyway so really the only real use i can see for them is a starting point for players to get real cards since their benefit is quite small compared to being able to choose which cards to play.

Since the scripting system came out i've been playing more games against the ai to test out scripts i've made. I was also stuck in 3 games against the ai for a while due to a glitch. I don't use phantom in my tournament decks anyway.

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