Terrible game that I play quite often due the the interstellar bribery rewards.

I've been playing ToT a lot, but only because I wanted the furnishings and Brahgas as a houseguest. I haven't played since this happened. There's not enough incentive for me. I can gather more resources in the open world in 10 minutes than I get for a match ToT....

It's a nicely designed system, so it's definitely not a failure, but I think it only resonates with a small fraction of the playerbase, so I wouldn't call it a success either. Ideally the new system that gets indroduced with the chapter should be something that the majority of the players interact with; for instance, antiquities have mythics that are used by both pvp/pver's, as well as many furnishings and collectibles for casual players and RP fans. Companions, although lacking a lot in the customization and interaction department, also appeal to a lot of players, and even hardcore vets who can easily solo something do use them for the extra ease, and because they enjoy customizing them. In contrast, I think there are some players who haven't interacted with the card game at all, but moreso, I think the majority of players who interacted with the game, just completed the quest and achievements, and then never touched it again, so it became more like a niche feature. I'm in the latter category as well: I did the quests and got the rubedite rank, but afterwards never really played, or planned to complete the card sets, etc., because I personally don't enjoy mini-games inside the game.

I played it to get all of the achievements and rewards. But haven't really touched it since.

It just gets way too boring too quickly and there are only a handful of successful strategies.

The biggest thing that really keeps me out of it, and something I called out as a potential problem when the mechanics of it were announced, is the lack of actual deck building involved. You choose your decks and build your hands during the game, but it pits you and your opponent on an non-creative even footing.

The game would be far far better if it worked closer to MTG, where players can actually pre-build a deck and bring it into a match. Everything within the match could stay exactly the same, players bring their decks, their decks are shuffled, and players choose from the tavern. But that initial deck build phase would give the game a bit more strategy, a bit more creativity, and allow each match to feel far more unique as you will never know what cards your opponent has chosen for their deck or how they intend to use those cards.

As it is now, you know exactly what the strategy is going to be a few turns in, or even directly from the patron choices.

I can say with a high degree of certainty that once I've completed the achievements, I won't be playing again. Ranked matches are a joke, and NPC matches pose no challenge. Definitely not worth the time to play either way.

ellmarie wrote: »

I have not even attempted to play it yet. Someone said that you can get transmutes from playing? If that was the case I would try it if I got something more than achievements behind it.

If you're decent and can plow through NPC matches quickly, then it can be a good source of transmutes. Playing against other people is just too time consuming to be an effective way of farming crystals.

Think I’ve played about 4 games so far, one of which was during a regular quest in Galen. I never asked for, never wanted a card game to be added, I’m just not into them, and if I was, I’d no doubt already be playing a more accomplished stand alone one.

To me, this is not a success, but then to other people trials are not a success because they won’t touch them with a 10 foot barge pole. I personally would prefer all the effort that went into ToT to go into new group dungeons and trials.

ellmarie wrote: »

I have not even attempted to play it yet. Someone said that you can get transmutes from playing? If that was the case I would try it if I got something more than achievements behind it.

Yes you can, I've had to start reconstructing rings to store them. My only sources of transmutes are trials and ToT, as I rarely PVP or do dungeons

sPark101 wrote: »

I decided to give Tales of Tribute a try since this thread mentioned it. You seem to need some prior knowledge on how these obscure card games work because it is totally confusing to a new player. Like trying to teach calculus to somebody that doesn't know division.

I won the first 2 tutorial games merely by randomly clicking cards with no idea what exactly the cards do and the fact that you can't redo the tutorial makes the learning curve even worse.

I'd pass on this.

I also found it confusing at first, but I was intrigued enough to keep playing, and after a few matches against the NPCs it all started to click into place for me.

Now that I was hooked, I continued playing the NPCs but lost more matches than I wanted to. Rather than getting upset and giving up, I got upset and started paying more attention to what the NPCs were doing during their turns. That didn't always steer me in a good direction-- since the NPCs' AI can be rather dimwitted at times-- but I tried to at least understand why the NPC made the specific choices it did. And if I ended up losing the match, I tried to recognize whether I'd made any mistakes and, if so, learn from them.

Once I got good enough to win nearly every match against the NPCs-- except for the occasional matches where they wiped the table with me-- I decided to try playing against other players. My first matches were so traumatic that I almost gave up, but I decided to keep at it and eventually got to where I could win 50% or more of the matches. But after the season ended and the next season began, I played only a few PvP matches before deciding to stick with PvE matches for various reasons.

As with any game, you need to play it for a while so you can become better acquainted with it-- learning what each patron's ability(?) is and how to make effective use of it, becoming familiar enough with the cards in each patron's deck and what their combos are so you can make smarter (and faster) choices while buying cards from the Tavern, and so forth. And also as with any game, you need to maintain the proper attitude about it-- learning from your mistakes, turning each defeat into a chance to get better, and not getting angry and frustrated about it.

I don't see ToT as "taking me out of the game," because it's part of the gameworld. Does standing at a guild trader for several minutes while you interact with the guild trader's GUI screen take you out of the game? Does standing at a bank counter for several minutes while you manage your character's inventory and your account's bank account take you out of the game? Does standing at a crafting station for several minutes while you craft or deconstruct or research a number of items take you out of the game? No, I don't think it does.

Each player chooses which parts of the game they want to spend their time on, as well as which parts of the game they don't want to spend their time on, and that's as it should be. Personally, I'd rather spend several minutes on playing ToT than on shopping at a guild trader, but for other players it might be the other way around-- or both, or neither.