The state of the game - Why I'm quitting YGO

So recently I've been debating quitting YGO. Well, I decided to go ahead and quit - Probably not permanently, but for quite a while, until the state of the game improves, something I severely doubt will ever happen. Where to begin. I guess I had best start with my biggest issue with this game: The card design. Yugioh's card design is very hit or miss. Cards are either too weak to be considered playable, outclassed by better cards ON RELEASE, making them filler at best, or too strong, and very little inbetween. What makes things worse is that it is almost apparent Konami designs cards exactly this way, with no intention to change. Granted, other card games do this too, but not to any extent that YGO does. Out of 7000~ cards, about 6000~ of them are completely useless. Maybe that's a gross over calculation, but you get my point.

It also angers me that archetypes are left incomplete and nigh unplayable for years and years on end, with Konami seemingly saying to the players "It's cool, we'll finish this in a couple years." Need examples? Volcanics. Crystal Beasts. Evil HEROes. Aliens. Fortune Ladies. Reptillianes. Spiders. Morphtronics. And so many more. While Konami believes some of these are "complete" they are no where near playable. On the other hand, we have archetypes like Lightsworn, Blackwings, Wind-Ups, Flame Stars and so on, the first two had been granted years and years of tournement success, and while I have no problems with this, I feel that other decks deserve support if these decks do. What Konami did with Harpies, for instance - Release new support cards to make the deck viable. I want to see more of this. Very rarely, does it happen.

There is of course, indirect support, but I'm talking about direct support. Even outside of this, some archetypes are clearly gimped. All in all, I wish Konami would stop designing archetypes and themes in such a way to make them clearly less superior to others. Overall, I would rather wait another month inbetween sets if there is clear effort to make a larger number of the cards from the set playable. What's the point of having an 80/100 card set if a good 65 or more of the cards are totally bloody pointless, and the other 15 are beyond rediculous? As a competetive player by nature, I understand that some cards will be better than others. This has to happen. However, the power gap should not be as big as it is.

Next to go hand in hand with this, I feel the general cost of the game is high. While it's true for all hobbies, I have other hobbies too and I feel it's annoying to have to put everything else down to only buy 1 card. While Konami does not control the secondary market, that is up to the players and nothing more - I feel Konami's TCG department influence it unhealthily, to the point where some decks become far too expensive for the average player to play. How do they do this? Rarity bumps. If you're unaware what a rarity bump is, it is when the TCG Print of a card is a higher rarity than it's OCG counterpart. Sometimes, cards go from Rare to Secret, a drastic jump of being a chance of being in any given pack to only being found once in every 24, a whole box. Amongst this, there's other secrets, and half of them, as stated, are garbage. This makes getting the secret you want out of packs, a nigh impossibility, and therefore - Supply and Demand states that these cards go for outragous prices.

Other times, cards go from Common to Ultra. This is rediculous. Why do I feel this is a problem? I understand that Konami is a buisness, and they must make money. But think this - Yugioh is the biggest, most popular card game in the world. The Guiness Book of Records confirms this. It isn't like Konami needs to make these cards outragous rarities to sell packs now. I feel this practice is worse when multiple cards have their rarities increased. For instance, Prophecies in TCG are almost nonexistant, because all their staple cards are all high rarity money cards for no reason.

Supply and demand in card games is already a colossal bitch without Konami fiddling with rarities to make it even more unbearable. I feel we should go back to the original ways secret rares were. 2 in a set. While they're still hard to get, they're significantly easier because you arn't pulling shit like Psychic Shockwave and Gladiator Taming everytime you go looking for Tour Guides.

And the final part. Please note I don't mean all of you, but you know the ones I'm talking about. The YGO Playerbase is AWFUL. It feels like you are totally unpleasable. Unfortunately, YGO's playerbase is inherently going to be younger children, whom are usually unpleasable annoying bastards with arrogance issues. This is most apparent on Dueling Network. Let me say this, I was a former competetive player and I used to play high caliber decks because I wanted to. I couldn't generally go a week without being called a "fag mermail player", having someone RQ on me, calling me a netdecker, or once, telling me to go to hell. Generally, I take these insults with a pinch of salt and laugh at them, but it seems the playerbase is completely and utterly unpleasable.

Players insult each other over trivial things, like their choice of decks. The community seems to function on "everything that beats me needs to be banned, everything else sucks" which is stupid. Either way, I'm sick of this. Speaking of Dueling Network... Half the people on there can't play properly, and I'm not professing to know everything, but please read a rulebook before beginning to play.

...well, I lost the will to write halfway through because I started listening to various remixes of Yukari's theme, but you get my point.

And that's why I quit Yugioh.

Well said, well said.

Completely understand the feeling. Almost made me want to quit halfway through reading.

Good news: you don't have to really worry about most of that here at WDA. If you do happen to find someone say something bad or stupid, we usually poke fun at them, call them meta-haters, and go on our way. A lot of us here play casually, and casually is a fine path to take. If you want to have fun with YGO, its always a good experience with friends!

Yeah, most people on here won't do anything you mentioned; we're here to play for fun, we will troll you for the funz of it, but that's okay as long as it goes without serious insults and because we know it's just a friendly game.

WDA != DN, WDA != IRL People, WDA != Ragequitters

Thanks :D

The above post for TL;DRers in a nutshell, Konami is lazy, fanbase is crazy. (Yes, that's supposedly meant to rhyme.)

Generally formats evolve in all games, so especially in a tcg, the metagame of which is determined by builds of separate product instead of individual new releases (meaning that a TCG constantly releases cards but you need many cards to build a deck. Something like a fighting game on the other hand will have a set roster of characters and on dlc or updates will release some others, infrequently though), cards are bound to be outdated and decktypes are bound to become useless. Some are just fan service so they were useless from the get-go. Some were failures, so they were useless too. You get how that works when you look at TCG exclusives card design where the card either breaks the game or is unplayable, sometimes card designers aren't competitive players to get it. But you can say the nature of the competitive player is also to blame for that. We take only the best, use only the best, and since things are not created equal, most are bound to be trash when compared with the best that competitive players are going to use.

As far as the game online is concerned, I don't mind where it is going. I still find it fun, I can leave old decks behind and I have a good time building new ones and playing with them.

Irl on the other hand, I play very infrequently, because I simply cannot afford the game. Especially in the TCG, ygo is very expensive. Even if I can build a deck for this format, I know for a fact that on the next format konami will need over 300 euros from me to keep it competitive, and I never have, nor I ever will, give that amount of money to card games.

In the OCG usually rarities are decided on terms of collectibility, that means the biggest, better looking cards or those that are popular from the franchise will be rarer (usually the bigger monsters for example, regardless of whether they are competitively good or not), with the highest rarity going to the cover card. For a trading card game, that makes sense. The rarest card should be the better looking one that you want to collect, if you know how collectibles work, you know what I mean.

In the TCG, rarities are decided on terms of playability. The statistical information gained from the OCG format is used, as well as prediction, to increase the rarity on the most vital cards of the most played decks. Rescue Rabbit, in the OCG, was released as a Rare, and looking at the card, that makes perfect sense. In the TCG, after seeing the OCG deck, the deck of rescue rabbit received additional support to make it even more playable, and the rarity of rescue rabbit was increased to secret rare, and not just regular secret rare, but a short printed one that was even rarer. The same thing happened with Pot of Duality, a staple to all decks at the time, which was super rare in the OCG, became a short print secret rare for the TCG (and that was back when regular secret rare ratios were still 1:31 instead of 1:23. Take 3 for every competitive deck and see how many boxes were sold). That is directly a policy to take as much money as possible from players from konami. When you take the most used card and make it so you can only get one in 16 boxes, your obvious plan is to sell 48 boxes per competitive player, you can't blame players or anyone else for that. It is that kind of policy that I neither can nor want to keep up with in ygo irl.

Most importantly though the reason I post is that I want to comment on this

EW_Zero wrote:

While Konami does not control the secondary market, that is up to the players and nothing more

I've heard this arguement come up a lot lately, but sorry, you have been tricked, because that's bs.

To begin with, the main reason we know konami will not put up any copyright claims for DN anytime soon, is the secondary market, and I'll explain what I mean.
Go to DN and check what the most common advertisements are. They are from the secondary market. At the same time, you are getting secondary market prices even in deckbuilding, which of course again is advertising (and very heavy and successful at that). Even in the case BLS is profiting from this (which he is, he is successfully advertising to thousands of relevant users every day, either he is profiting or he is being ripped off), konami can only be ecstatic about it.
If the secondary market is advertising, that means the secondary market is profiting from it further, since it costs money to advertise and you wouldn't do it if it was not increasing your profits by an acceptable amount.
If the secondary market is profiting further, considering that they are not further altering the prices of the cards and therefore their profit per card is the same, that means they are profiting more by selling more cards.
If they are selling more cards, that means more cards have been bought. The secondary market is not generating cards, them having those cards is a direct result of more konami product being bought.
Therefore, if they are advertising, that means more packs are being bought from konami.

Now let's look at who profits from this. The secondary market always gets a small marginal profit. That is because you buy the card at a set price and sell it at a small, higher percentage. Konami on the other hand who is selling the packs, is selling painted cardboard. The profit konami makes from this and the profit the secondary market makes from this, as you can imagine, is incomparable.

You cannot compare the secondary market of a competitive trading card game to other secondary markets which have just a normal marginal profit after production (i.e. cars, cars cost a lot, but they also cost a lot to make) or markets of product with a personal value dependent on the consumer (i.e. movie DVDs. I can buy a DVD, but I only need 2 hours to watch the movie. When I choose to watch it, is dependent on me, and after I watch it, the movie is meaningless to me, so I can give it to someone else with no loss on my part. The movie did what I bought it for, I watched it, done. Someone else can now watch it on his own time and we are all happy)
1. Trading card games, just like all markets of self produced collectibles, have a huge marginal profit. That means konami's profit is much higher than that of the secondary market, which has to make a marginal profit on konami's terms, decided by how the metagame is formed and the ratio of pulling certain cards.
2. The value of a card is not dependent on the 1 consumer who owns it. If I want to play, which is why I bought the card, the card has the same value to me throughout the format. When I enter a tournament with 11 friends of mine, we won't all be using 1 deck which we will be trading around. We will need to play at the same time, so we will need 12 different decks. At any given time, if I am playing this game, I need to have a deck. So that means the number of decks that have been sold is at least equal to the number of active players, while they actually are higher than that. The argument of the secondary market comes from video games, which is completely irrelevant, since I can finish a game alone and then give it to someone else without decreasing its value. In that case, like a book, yes, 2 people benefited from the same thing. In a TCG though, even if I sell my deck to someone else, I will probably be replacing it with another deck, while the other player probably had a deck prior to me selling the deck to him, considering that we are both players and we both need decks. End result is the same as if we both bought a deck from the source. In fact, 3 decks were bought for 2 people (the deck the other guy had before I sold him mine, my old deck that I sold and the new deck I am buying).

Let's take a recent example. For the new TCG format, mermails are probably the top deck by far (perhaps tier 0 considering the competition at the moment). You know that in a YCS, mermail players will be at around at least 20% of the overall players (yes, there are players who either won't be as good or will enter just for fun, and that's why tier 0 is pushed down to 20%. At the same time consider that many won't be making the trip to a YCS if they are not prepared for it). So, if you have 1000 players at that YCS, which is normal for one, 200 of them are mermail players. Mermails need 3 Abyssmegalo in their decklist (some could build it different, but that's how most mermails are built). Abyssmegalo is a secret rare. There are 8 secret rares in abyss rising with approximately 1 random secret rare per box (ratio is 1:23, while boxes have 24 packs). That means for every mermail player there, 24 boxes have been sold. 24 times 200 equals 4800 boxes sold for just the statistics of that one YCS tournament.

Those players did not directly buy those boxes, those megalos probably reached their hands through either other players, the secondary market or any imaginable form of circulation. But the fact remains, that since megalo is a secret rare, while secret rares are 1/8 per box, and since due to the way the new format is built, mermail is the top deck, needing 3 megalo for the deck to be built, in the end 24 boxes were sold for every mermail player as a direct result of all that. Thousands of boxes were sold, as it was calculated, profit was made, players got the cards. Secondary or market or not, it's all the same. The card being at 100$ in the secondary market is a direct result of the fact you need 8 boxes to get one with 90$ per box. It is true that the box has other cards in it, but it is just as true that you need 3 megalo. Megalo is not another card. Megalo is only megalo, and you will only get your playset if 24 boxes are bought. You can also say konami sold the same number of cards. However, when factoring both the usability and the varying rarities of other cards in the set, around 7/8 cards bought were useless (very generous estimate, buy packs and you'll see it's usually around 14/15), and due to the fact 24 boxes were bought for the playset to be complete anyways, with some quick calculations, due to the rarity of megalo, around 4.500 cards that no one will ever have a use of, were sold. In a way, it is gambling, because those 4.500 cards were basically overpriced paper.

In fact it is ridiculous to suggest that people selling cards and the secondary market hinders the business of a trading card game, when that is the whole point of it. You are not supposed to buy a bunch of boxes to get the cards in Trading Card Games. As the name suggests, you are supposed to Trade them. In fact, the secondary market helps konami because you have a direct way to translate your money into cards, which otherwise you wouldn't do (if you could not buy singles, the number of competitive players would be much smaller because you would only be able to get cards from your own area, which are very limited). While again, the secondary market does not conjure cards. They either buy them from players or buy and open boxes of their own if they consider they will be profiting off of it (if there is demand they cannot meet by buying from players, which happens often, then they would simply open boxes to meet it). If a card is in your hand, you can be sure that card was bought from konami. And you can also be sure that if you really need that card, every other competitive player needs it as well at the same time. So if you must have 1 card, and every other player must have 1 card, that means the card that will be sold from the source will be at least 1 for every competitive player, no matter how much they change hands.