The Current DP System is Flawed

[J_Rares]

I’ve been playing Omega constantly since December of 2020. I appreciate the amount of effort the devs have put into this since then. However, the most glaring problem about Omega at the time was rarities, and it is still the biggest issue. Omega has a weird outlook on the currency for the rarities by making them neither f2p- or donator-friendly. Instead, you have to grind for hours every day for a chance at a couple DP in ranked and then do some tournaments for slightly more DP. (The ongoing tier 0 format really doesn’t help here but that’s out of their control.) Staff also have maximum rarity slots, which means it is more realistic for you to become Omega staff to get max rarity slots than playing Omega.

So, for the new rarities… the attribute rarities look nice, but they’re either locked behind a battle pass for $8 per month or you have to get one for 750 DP. Not going to get into why temporarily having rarities that get removed every month is weird. 750 DP is an insane amount to currently obtain in Omega. For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of the TCG and OCG tournaments with some friends. We do alright in the TCG brackets but top in the OCG ones since they’re at 1 am and no one’s on. On average, it’s about 5-10 DP per tournament. That means it’s 75 tournaments to get one of the new rarities if I do well, and each of these tournaments lasts several hours (let’s say 3 to be optimistic). That’s 225 hours to get a single rarity on 3 copies of a card. A lot of people never even play a game for that long. One of my friends who plays in a lot of the tournaments that I do only has 13 DP. Imagine how long that would take to get a single rarity at the current rate.

Sleeve rarities (besides maybe the lower end ones) aren’t realistic in an average human lifespan. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Especially attributes for 7,500.

I’ve casually brought up some of these points in the #ygo-discussion channel on the server, and everyone I’ve heard back from agrees that this system shouldn’t exist in its current state. Some of the moderators even allegedly discussed this in their private channel but 2 high-ranking staff (left anonymous) don’t approve of changing this system (again, I’ve only heard this from mods), even with different options like making people able to pay money for more rarities. The most recent mini-rant in the Discord led to a few mods telling me to just make a suggestion post since their opinions get overlooked when it comes to this.

So, how do we fix this? I have a few suggestions that have been brought up before but not really addressed.

• Decrease the price of each card and sleeve rarity or increase the current rewards for ranked and events. I’m not saying make them take a day to get, just make the most expensive ones a few weeks to a month instead of years.
• Add daily challenges and/or puzzles that give a realistic amount of DP. I put this in the suggestion channel a while ago and AMM said it was a great idea, but nothing really came out of this.
• Add a way for people to donate more money for DP. Hopefully this isn’t the only change if anything happens, but at this point something is better than nothing. It would easily cover server costs.

I hope whoever gets to this point has read all of what I had to say, and I appreciate if you did. If you are a non-staff member on the Omega Discord, I heavily encourage you to also suggest DP changes in #suggestions since staff wanting to change the DP system is apparently ignored for some reason. I believe this is an overwhelming silent majority of the playerbase and they will have to address it if enough people make their voices heard, or I guess “read” (be nice though ).

[DarkDove_End_Omega]

Staff member here. All my thoughts are my own and my statements here are only reflective of my personal knowledge and outlook.

There are two different sides of the coin here.

There is the side about being able to create a game that keeps having things for you to work for, and there is the side that this is a free game which means that the team is volunteer and isn’t paid to create this content.

The costs for DP are set in a way in which you shouldn’t be grinding everything out over the course of a week, even a month. Yugioh is a game about the long term. The release of an archetype takes years to be complete. Many formats last months to years sometimes. If you play a local tournament every week, say its 5 rounds, that’s 200 minutes or almost 4 hours.

Lets estimate a match in Omega takes 30 minutes, which would be a best of 3 ranked match, and you win 2 points. You could get 8 matches done in that same span of time, and don’t have to wait for a locals to start. This means you can get 16 points in the span of a locals. If you played 10 days, because you love yugioh, which isn’t unrealistic, you could have 160DP at the end of it. That’s less than a month to have completed half or a third of almost any rarity. If you play that rate for the next month or even rest of the month, you’d have any rarity from the original batch that never gets taken away from you and can be used in any number of decks.

Additionally, rarities are extras, they aren’t necessary for gameplay. They are meant as a reward for the players who play this game for years and years. Look at the length of time people have been using other Automatic Sims. Those sims haven’t had major changes, and have had player bases play hours and days on end. There is no reason to not strategically set the values to where you can get them over that life span of a sim.

Other sims have paid features to use even more basic functionality for their donations, and are also non-permanent rewards. This isn’t a comparison to them, more so to call out that Omega has a tiered systems essentially, a permanent and a non-permanent, with both being beyond that.

Now the reason why they “have” to be priced so strategically is that, I’m sure you’ve seen, its been years since new rarities have been added. The team isn’t a corporation that has the ability to continuously pump out content. The team adds in new fields, custom backgrounds, and music, all free of charge. The sleeves most likely won’t have a new version released any time soon. Though I don’t know, I’m not involved in that portion. With corporations who have the ability to have a steady supply of content, they can price their items lower as they can slowly drip feed the content and artificially “devalue” the appeal of their previous cosmetics. Looking more specifically at Master Duel, they have a rarity systems which is random, and is unchangeable. If you get a cool rarity on a card you will never use, or only use 1 of, you’re stuck with it. Want to get a different card a cool rarity, Try to pull it over and over, or try and craft it over and over. You can literally go forever without getting ANYTHING.

The 7500DP items are sleeve effects. They are gotten once and can be applied to every sleeve in your entire deck for every deck. That is why there is the higher value. There are members who grind out ranked to maintain their high ranking format after format, and they deserve to have something fancy to show for it. It isn’t a time limited item, its something anyone can get, so its not that you have a rush to get them.

The flip side of things is that if we did a $ to DP system that would run the grounds of legal issues which we do not want to do. Which is why the permanent donation reward is a gift of rarities, not a trade of donation for rarities. I don’t know the logic behind the pass, but I’m sure its something along the lines of the donation is being granted access to a service which has a temporary allocation of rarities.

In Conclusion: Yes, I agree with you. The rarities should have lower values. Its frustrating to see unobtainable items. They are long term goals and we don’t have any short term goals other than the Rare rarity, and think that should change. HOWEVER, the team has very little else to reward long term players with and because of that need to keep SOME rarities at the higher values. There isn’t anything the team can do to make donating over time a more effective way for rarity acquisition as we cannot give you the choice of points to spend how you want (to my knowledge), and there isn’t enough personnel to work to make things happen at a faster rate to “devalue” any of the previous rarities.

[DarkDove_End_Omega]

Regarding the staff members having access to all the rarities they want.

This is true. It is one of the rewards for contributing to the Discord and working on troubleshooting and handling issues during most people’s free time. I think there is only a handful of staff members who actually have the time to play and use those rarities. However, just because we have the rarity access doesn’t mean that we all have maxxed rarities. Full disclosure, I have given myself 1 of each rarity. But as a side note, when I play, half the time I build my deck and start playing, completely forgoing the application of rarities. Because I don’t have the time to do that.

As another note, I have more hours troubleshooting, viewing bug reports, than I do actually playing Omega, in any other capacity.

So sure, you could become a staff member and get all you could ever want. But if you are actually good for the staff position, chances are you won’t have the time to use them.