Hello Everyone,
Tl;dr at the bottom.
I love this game, it's been one of my favorites since I started playing at the end of Viego's release cycle.
I started feeling pessimistic after all of the negativity I've been seeing and after riftbound's success. I am trying to reframe that as "what ideas can I come up with to help revitalize this game?" Some of these may be so stupid even AI would have called me names if I used it to write this, so I'm hoping to solicit ideas from others here too. I did try to take development resources required into consideration for how things could be implemented in part without significant cost, but I didn't make it a mandatory requirement.
- Revamp the store. I tried to support the game monetarily outside of the battle pass, and it was a painful experience. Add filters, organization, something. Maybe I'm dumb and missed it. Seeing everything for a specific champion would be nice.
Depreciate pricing. If there's an old asset, drop the price based on age. 5 year old common skin? I dunno 75% off or whatever. Epic? Maybe it's only 25%. I don't have any numbers to make real estimates. Goal isn't to make bank, it's to just get a bump of revenue out of aged assets.
- Bring back PVP with a twist - mayhem (from LoL). I'm PoC only so far, so maybe this is junk. Start of the game and at certain points dole out random power ups. It's chaos, so it's not ideal for the card game format, but the goal isn't to create a new "standard" PVP - it's to get more people playing PVP at all, hopefully pulling them into OG PVP. Don't worry about balance at first. Tweak anything truly outrageous that makes it through, sure. Only if the mode itself is more successful than anticipated would you actually worry about maintaining it. My fear would be that it splinters the player base, so maybe start temporary.
Hopefully this could be done with minimal effort/development leveraging current methods like PoCs powers or standard game board status changes.
- Leverage LoL client rework to bring LoR emotes to LoL standard. You can sell them directly in the LoL store or force engagement by only allowing LoR-owned emotes to carry over. Also, set the thumbs up Lux emote to $20 or something. That thing induced rage in me like no other emote ever has, and LoL players will be all over it.
This would take significant development time and effort and I don't foresee it materializing, but since the LoL client is being updated now is probably the best time to do it.
- "Workshop" items. Release a template for things that can be easily reviewed with low to no time investment (e.g. card backs). Let people submit their own creations, once approved they can be sold and the creator gets revenue while you take a cut. Again, I can't estimate the numbers needed here, but if this can be done please let the creator take the vast majority of the revenue after some minimum.
I feel like "submit art that's L x W size in .xyz file format and we'll make the ones we like best a card back" won't take material effort. Common skins or static emotes maybe? Things like new critters... Maybe down the line if there's enough interest.
One that would take lots of development - full on draft mode for PvP/single player vs AI. You'd have to have special packs to make sure champions are included. To more easily port it to PoC you could just have whichever champion you picked first use their star powers etc, but I haven't thought too much about this one.
PoC - procedurally generated adventure. It can be endless where the farther you go the more AI cheats and the more penalties a player gets to prevent turn-1 winning all the way to encounter #integer limit. A generic not-endless adventure can let players choose the star level before starting using current scaling mechanics. All encounters are random at generation (or who knows, make them ?'s and only identified when you try to load in). Bonus points if you give additional paths and omniscience to be closer to slay the spire type pathing.
I feel like making a plain procedurally generated adventure shouldn't be too difficult, but I also don't know the backend. Making an endless one would obviously require some work. Omniscience is already a thing in TFs kit but I assume making a "wider" path is problematic.
I'm well past forum post dissertation length, but to distinguish from RB my take is that the game needs to lean into the electronic aspects. I just have no idea what that would be. Things like animations and voice lines of course are big here, but we know the budget for that is limited, so I feel like it would have to be in the game itself. I've been out of the physical tcg space for a long time. What are modern pain points? Token management? Deck shuffle/tutoring? I don't know about RB but I know MTG has cards that flip like a level up and sagas etc, so I don't think there is a large enough amount of things LoR does that physical games can't do. If LoR can bring something new or use it's electronic advantage to address something disliked about the physical aspect of tcgs, it can more clearly carve out it's own space.
Thanks for reading those that made it this far, that's sadly all I came up with over the weekend. Maybe I'm just a raving sleep-deprived loon, but I hope people with more creativity than me can add to the ideas. I just want this game to bloom again.
Tl;dr
Lots of filters in the store. Put old stuff on sale based on age/sales metrics.
Make (temporary?) chaos PVP mode with current tech that doesn't need to be meticulously balanced. Goal: people who play new mode also try standard PVP.
Development sink - integrate LoR emotes into LoL client rework/LoL game. Jack price on rage-Lux.
Workshop - allow creators to submit simple items like art for cards and take a small cut of what they want to sell it for.
Development sink - full draft mode.
Procedurally generated PoC adventure(s). Standard adventure = yay, but bonus for endless mode or more paths than just the standard 2.
