Broken Game Design (not bugs!) will lose the TCG Live a lot of players

Every popular game has at least one core feature that makes it interesting. In the case of the pokemon tcg this is the possibility to build a virtually endless number of different exciting decks and playing them against this very variety of different decks, making the game exciting all over again as soon as you are able to test your new creation.

Unfortunately, the TCG Live prevents players, who do not invest a lot of money into code cards, from doing exactly this. Due to the extremely scarce rewards, building a new deck might take months of daily play, and there is no chance of reducing this time with increased play. This will (and certaily already has) lead many players to leave the game, as after a short while there is literally nothing more to do than grinding the same deck over and over again, waiting hopelessly for a time where new rewards are finally available to make the next tiny step towards building a new deck. I know that the chance that anyone, who actually has influence on the game design, will actually read this, but I still wanted to give my thoughts. As we all know, the hope that something improves dies last.

A quick disclaimer before I go into more detail: I know that the pokemon company wants to make money, and therefore the buying of packs is (and should be to some extend) incentivised by the game. But: Literally every free-to-play game maker knows that the basis of a good free-to-play game is a huge number of active players who don't pay, but who in turn improve the experience of those who do pay (for example by allowing for quick match pairing times due to the higher number of players, or by making the paying players feel superior because they can afford more decks or higher rarity cards). Additionally, there is no chance that someone just wakes up one day and decides to buy a bunch of pokemon cards. It is a process that starts with a good (!) free-to-play experience that, after a while, shifts into a desire to either get more out of the game by buying codes, or to buy the actual cards and play in real life. Playing a frustrating and unrewarding game is definitely not somthing that will cause this to happen.

The reason why the current game design is completely deterrent for non-paying players is the broken reward system. The game offers four different rewards:

1. Coins: Can only be used for avatar items. For me (and most likely for many or even most other players) these coins are completely useless after the character has been designed once. Players play the game to build decks and play the actual game, not to design their character! In this light, it feels kind of insulting that the game gives you these useless coins as one of the only two daily rewards, while you wait for something actually useful that allows you to actually build a deck.
2. Crstals: Are kind of useful, especially to buy the premium battle pass. But if you want to buy some of the actually helpful store items, you need to complete the daily quest for 25 days (!!!) to get a few cards and a few packs, or 4 days for only a single pack that most likely does not contain what you need! In summary, these crystals are a drop in the ocean with regards to building a new deck, making them ultimately pretty useless.
3. Packs: Do most of the time not contain the cards that you actually want. The crafting system is kind of useful, but you need to open a lot of packs before you can make any reasonable progress in terms of purchasing the cards you actually want, and the number of packs needed for this substantially exceeds the number of packs obtainable at the battle pass.
4. Credits: Ultimately the only really useful reward. Unfortunately it is at the same time the reward that is the hardest to get. No daily quest yields credits, the ladder yields (in most cases, explaination will follow later) about 1600 credits (which equates to about 4 rare cards per month, or less than two hyper rares) and the battle pass yields, after an initial boost of 2750 credits at level 0, only 1765 credits for the whole next few months! Without buying a lot of packs, crafting is unlikely to increase this amount significantly.

So lets compare this to the amount of credits that is actually required to build a new deck: I just now built a regi deck that required 13 rare basic pokemon (equates to more than 5300 credits) and a few trainer cards (about 200 credits, but only because I purchased many already for previous decks) as well as energy cards (also 200 credits). This deck alone already consumed over 90% of the credits that are obtainalbe by the ladder in a whole month and by the battle pass in multiple months! After exchanging all of the cards, I now know that I will not be able to build another deck for literal months! And also keep in mind that the regi deck is by far not one of the most expensive ones. I would also like to build arceus regidrago-vstar, which commonly requires 8 pokemon v and 6 pokemon vstar or vmax, meaning that almost 14000 credits are required. This is enough to swallow more than two battle passes and three ranked ladders! Should it really take more than three months to build a single deck?

Lets quickly discuss the ladder to see how I arrive at the numbers for the rewards. As soon as the ladder starts from scratch, you get a rather large number of rewards for completing the first tiers, because you already start off at a higher rank (for me it was around 600 or so, and I assume it is the same for everyone). The next reward is obtainalbe at 1320, which seems barely reachable. This feeling is actually based on math as well: The ranking system is symmetric, meaning that all points a player wins are points that another player loses. This means that it is mathematically impossible for more than a tiny fraction of players to advance past the level at which this symmetric system starts (I think also at 600). This can only be mitigated by introducing "free" points into the system, which is done only at the 600-point-rank, as it is impossible to drop below this threshold (meaning one player gains points while to other does not lose any). This helps a tiny bit, but overall it does not change the general situation much: Climbing up the ladder is almost impossible as long as you do not play one of the three top decks, and even then it is really hard because many other players do the same and there is mathematically no way that a large percentage will advance. This means that for many players the ladder rewards are capped at 1600 credits, which will be obtained directly after the ladder starts, followed by a long and boring downtime.

All of this can lead to the follwing situation: The ladder started a few days ago, and you can't make any real progress, so there is nothing to do there. The battle pass is extremely easy to complete in way less then its actual duration, so it is likely that there is also nothing to do for the next few weeks. This means that the total rewards that are obtainable from now on are those of the two daily quests, which are laughably easy to complete, and which give the prizes of useless coins, very few crystals, and battle pass points that can't be used any more. At this point, there is nothing more to be done until the new ladder starts, which again only offers excitement for a few days until the reachable rewards have been collected, and after that you can wait again for several weeks for the new battle pass. Even if ladder and pass arrive, you still know that they will not offer enough rewards to build the deck you want, meaning that you are left to grind the same deck over and over again for literal months until you eventually stop playing the game.

Is this the situation that is wanted by the developers? A situation the deprives people from the actual fun part of the tcg, which is building exciting new decks? A situation in which there is nothing to do for weeks? A situation that eventually will lead players to leave the game for good?

Now that I ranted a lot about the broken game design, lets discuss some improvements that would be quick to implement, and would instantly fix all of the problems:

1. Improve the ladder: I described how it is mathematically unlikely that many players will advance past the region of about 700 points. This could be resolved by introducing more "free" points into the system. One possiblity would be to track the highest rank of a player in the current ladder, and to never let them fall below 60 points less than this rank. This would introduce free points as soon as a player loses three times in a row, and most importantly it would introduce them across all ranks. This would still make it hard to progress as soons a you reach a high level, as you will face more and more challenging opponents, so the basic system stays intact, but it would generally allow more players to advance.
2. Get rid of coins as rewards: Coins are useless! You can give them as reward, but never as the only reward! Include them in the battle pass amongst other rewards, but do not make them the only thing you get for completing a daily quest or for leveling up!
3. Introduce actually useful level up rewards: Leveling up becomes harder and harder as more and more experience points are required. Before colleting a few level up rewards I assumed that they would be the most valuable rewards the game would give you, as leveling up is (in most games) seen as an important step. But here, the only reward is often only 50 coins! What kind of reward is that? And even if it is 200 crystals or credits every now and then, this is not enough for an event that only happens very rarely.
4. Inroduce more regular rewards: By this I mean rewards that do not run out (unlike the battle pass as soon as you completed it). In my opinion, playing more should lead to more rewards! If you want to grind to build a new deck, you should be able to do so, which is currently not the case! One possibility would be to re-introduce the rewards after every won game that existed in the tcgo. A few years ago, after every win, you would get a "present" that contained a few coins (but actually useful coins that allowed to purchase tradable packs), or even a pack. Later, this was reduced to a spin wheel which gave far less rewards, but at least it was better than nothing. I think random rewards in the range of 10 to 50 credits are suitable, and sometimes a random pack. This would still mean that you nedd to win (not only play!) 13 games to even purchase a single rare card, so it would definitely not be too high and would make winning more fun (and it would reward playing casual games).
5. Revamp the daily reward system: The tcgo had a daily reward ladder that offered rewards for up to 10 wins, which makes it much more fun to play actively. There should be rewards that yield some crystals, some credits (in my opinion at least 300 per day), and, if it really needs to be, even some coins.
6. Create an infinite battle pass: It is nice to have a "final" tier that gives you a lot of rewards. But after that the battle pass is simply useless! Just introduce an infinitely progressing system that, after the final tier, just gives the same one pack (at the regular pass) and a few credits (for the premium pass) forever. This way, the pass will stay useful the whole time.
7. Improve the crafting system: In general, the crafting system is nice. But it is crazy that you only get about one fourth of the value of a card! You should get the whole value of the card (as you would have if real trading was available), or at least you should get half the value. Additionally, there should be the option to activate an "I don't care about the rarity of the card" option. Right now, I have so many cards more than four times, but some of them are reverse, some of them are regular, some full arts, some secret rares. What am I supposed to do with all of them? You correctly recognized that one does not need more than four copies, but now you are stuck with way more anyways. All of this would have an easy fix: Just allow players to craft cards that they don't want, and not only those which they have four of. This would make packs an actually valuable reward, would fix the issue of many copies with different rarities, and would, for example, allow me to trade a full art supporter for a lot of credits, as I only play the regular cards anyways. This would also help the matter discussed above: Paying players could differentiate themselves by always having max rarity cards, which they can easily afford, while non-paying players would stick to the "cheapest" option. This is actually how the tcgo worked, with the difference that higher value cards like secret rares and full arts would have been traded with others instead of crafting them.

All these changes combined will still make it an endevour of around two weeks of extensive play to buld a new deck, which is more than enough to incentivise players to buy codes. The only difference is, that it is actually possible to play the game without buying codes, so that it will prevent players from leaving the game in masses.

Finally, a fix that I am not sure about how to implement it, so I don't include it in the "easy" fixes above: It should cost way less to build a rogue deck compared to a top deck, but right now the "less playable" pokemon V and Ex as well as the regular rares would still require months of rewards to build one deck. If this is the case, who will ever build them? The variety of the decks that are played takes a massive hit by the fact that building less popular decks costs so much. Why would I spend my two months worth of credits for a deck that is not one of the best? This makes the game way less fun as you run into the same decks over and over again, and it makes it less fun for everyone, paying players as well as non-paying ones.

I recently started playing the tcg live after having paused for about three years. I really looked forward to building all the new decks, and I even bought some codes to even be able to afford building them. I enjoy plaing, but the last thing I will do is buy more codes every two weeks to be able to build new decks. The only reason why I (in contrast to most new players) bought any codes in the first place is that I already had a strong attachment to the game from playing the tcgo for several years. I doubt that a significant number of new players will see the unrewarding game design of the tcg live and will also purchase codes. They will simply leave the game, and so will I if it stays this way. This would be unfortunate, as the tcg in general is a great game, and I sincerely hope that it will not happen.