Have you tried DP Meltdown on Live Server yet?

[Gondorian]

Note: The 30 most recent games shown on your screen in the Challenge section, when filtered by Meltdown, only shows Meltdown matches from the overall 30 most recent matches. So it might look like no one is playing Meltdown, but they are. Hopefully, the filter will get changed to show the most recent 30 Meltdown matches.

In the mean time, here is a quick poll to find out how much people have been playing it.

[Alzorath]

I plan on doing a few... but not a ton... I do meltdown more as a side-thing rather than to compete for the jackpot... mainly because my draw-luck sucks :P

[kurthektik]

Can't afford it now. Still some cards to buy

[Kip thorp]

Yeah, nows not the time to spend 200 gold to enter when there are to many tasty new cards out there to buy!

[iClipse]

Hmm. I find meltdown to be too luck based, so I don't really play it. In general there is little deckbuilding skill needed:
See if you have the cards, and the intent to play solo/stall. If you don't have the cards to stall, always follow this scheme:

1) Add all allies except maybe the crappy 1cc ones.
2) Add all decent board control abilities + weapons if you're a weapon user, or if the weapons themself are decent
3) Add some item destruction if you have any
4) Add some of the rest of the cards, till you reach your 30 card count, if you haven't already.

The following scheme is followed pretty much every game, so variance is very little when playing meltdown, even though you have access to all kind of cards.

Imo, meltdown could definitely be improved a bit. For example: both players get 8 boosters and make a 40 card deck. That way you will actually have some choices to make, as in which cards you actually want to add to your deck, instead of just always ALL the allies and ALL the board control abilities.

Just my 2 cents.

Edit: I'm also not really convinced about the reward system. Basically it just rewards who can play the most (and of course get a decent win rate), and not particularly the most skilled player. So I do feel that the reward system could definitely also be improved. And with improved I don't mean that it needs to give more gold, but maybe a different distribution.

[Maximont]

I haven't had the time to play yet though I will be ( I haven't even had the time to ladder climb yet )

But anyway, this is my feedback on meltdown...
- I like meltdown as a format
- I don't like the rating system for meltdown. It rewards quantity as much as quality; to get a payout you end up playing games because you feel you have to not because you want to. I would like to see a separate rating for meltdown similar to the QM one, which is based purely on win/loss, and not on quantity played (still have decay). This can be instead of, or as well as, the existing weekly rating system. This will give people something more tangible to aim for.
- someone had the idea (can't remember who) that instead of paying gold, you pay SC for your 4 booster packs and get to keep the contents. This was a good idea, and should be implemented. Could even do a special offer e.g. buy 4 packs for 300 SC.

[Warr Byrd]

I've played a handful so far. What I've encountered:

Very dependent on the heroes each player gets. I usually end up getting two weapon users, Victor, and someone else, and none of my rare cards are weapons and I have almost no Hunter abilities, so I have to rely on the fourth, whose been Ter Adun at least once.
Takes forever to get a match. Probably very few people playing for the reasons above (which are also the reasons why I don't usually play).
Dark Prophecies boosters have very few allies comparatively (I usually go 2 CotC and 2 DP).
There is way too much luck involved, in terms of the cards you and your opponent draw from boosters, the card draw order, and even saccing to a small extent because there is no way to predict which cards will be the most useful.

[Gondorian]

Thanks for the feedback on the format. I agree that some improvements could be made to make it a bit more skill-based, although they might only be added in the tournament version, where you buy packs with SC to take part, you keep the packs and you win SC prizes. The current one was meant to be for fun only, and the greater luck element than Standard Constructed means that less skilled players or those with smaller collections can have a better chance of winning a match.

[jazra]

I enjoy the format generally, but sometimes the small number of packs gives horribly skewed options. You can draw 5 allies or 20. You can draw 8 weapons, or none. You can draw very few allies and very few weapons, and very few crowd control, and very few direct damage all in the same set and just be way out of luck before the game even starts. With all these possible extremes lingering around, the matchups are sometimes drastically unbalanced.

Actually, after noticing that the game returns to booster selection, I started wondering if now we are now supposed to have 4 choices of card sets for each meltdown game. It might not be a bad idea, if they are all reset to new selections for the next game.

The reward system does emphasize number of games played a bit too much. It feels a bit like someone sat down and said, "How can we encourage lots of people to blow as much gold as possible, so they won't save up too fast?" I've been about breaking even (give or take a few hundred) for my first couple weeks, but I've also been putting in somewhere around 8,000 gold to play each of those weeks. While it's okay to do this just for fun, it's no real incentive for the time invested, it would be a prohibitively expensive distraction if I were into new deck building just now, and I would have to give up this lovely format for quite some time if I suffered a big loss in just one week. Granted I'm level 21 and one can fuss and say, "Well what path have you taken up until now to save cards," etc. but I don't think that much gold is a trivial savings account.

Speaking as someone who isn't tossing cash at the game right now, buying meltdown cards for crystals would not appeal to me. If I want to play more than one class in QM, I will still be buying starters and boosters with my few crystals for months. Nothing else, thank you. It would just make another section of the game more obviously skewed toward people who can pay right away to get oodles of cards. (I say "more" because it's already in their favor if they can pay to play more often.) I can see that dynamic already elsewhere, with some giant mill decks in QM. Perhaps a few people just played for months to build them, but I'm generally suspicious.

[soothslyr]

played a few matches, but haven't had the time to play as many as i'd like. i'll get some more in soon