darkSpyro

Okay, I admit I do not have all the values, but I have enough values to make estimates here. All cards have a coin value to level up. Its the same value from levels 1 to 9 and then goes up incremently from level 10 up to level 19. There is no value to level up a level 20 card so it stops at 19. Common cards cost less to level than ultimate cards.

Before April 10th, I knew most of the values, give or take 10, for all the cards. Also, every time you had a card in your deck, whether a PvP fight, or a story mode fight, the card would go up 10 to 30 coins in the fight, depending on whether it was played or not. Then a recent update, at least to me, seemed to lower the threshold to 20 coins, so, it was 10 or 20 coins that a card was leveled up.

Today, its 5 coins a fight, period, at least for story mode. I need to do more checking for PvP mode.

So, look at this reality right now.

Lets compare two cards, a common card, say Rummage and an ultimate card, say Call to Arms.

Before April 20th. Rummage: Level 1 to 9, 50 coins per level...10 - 70 , 11 - 100, 12 - 130, 13 - 160, 14 - 190, 15-220, 16 - 250, 17 - 280, 18 - 310, 19 - 340
So that is about 2500 total coins and if you got say 15 coins a fight, the card would reach level 20 in about 170 fights.

Now after April 20th. The values have almost doubled. I do not have as exact values but I know level 16 has gone from 250 to 500. That is doubling. Level 18 has gone from 310 to 700. Etc etc. At 5 coins a fight, and only story mode, its now over 1050 fights to get level 20. That is a lot of fights, and that is just for a common level card.

An ultimate card? Call To Arms.
Its gone from about 1000 story mode fights to get to level 20 to 5700 story mode fights. That is almost 6 times as many.

And for an ultimate skylander? Even more. You used to get 30 coins a victory for a skylander itself used in a fight, but now with 5..it would take about 1000 fights to level up Tree Rex, but now it would take 11,000 fights to level up Tree Rex. Mind you, these are estimates, but should be correct relatively.

Whoever are the developers, I know the game is an ebb and flow and you are tweaking it a lot. I play this game probably more than most and I even think its a lot, I personally wish the coin values were lowered or the coins won per level was raised back a bit. It seems a really high value to level up cards to me.

Leveling up cards is nice. You get the cooler graphic versions. You also get more coins back when you get doubles. I probably play more than I should, but I bet most folks will not play this much, not sure how they can get level 20 minus a miracle gold hologram card.

My take.

Update, the pvp fights are gaining experience at a higher rate. Maybe they want to encourage PvP fights more than story mode. I got 30 coins for a pvp fight, the numbers above reflect story mode. Still a big jump though.

Yeah, the cost versus reward for leveling is a bit too ridiculous now looking at your calculations. You just get an animation and a cooler border, shouldn't be such an herculean task.

This sounds like I will hardly get any of my cards upgraded since I don't play near as much as you do.
I hope for some kind of Change or I might not find the game so fun to play any more.... I hate games where I don't get any where.

Update. I updated my post to reflect the fact that the coin values do seem higher for PvP fights. I just got 30 coins a fight, so perhaps they are encouraging pvp fights, but still, its not a lot for a story mode fight. I tried a couple of different realms and I tried say the 7th round vs the 1st round and got the same answer. I can see you getting more experience in harder fights perhaps if it was that.

Quote: Carin_82

This sounds like I will hardly get any of my cards upgraded since I don't play near as much as you do.
I hope for some kind of Change or I might not find the game so fun to play any more.... I hate games where I don't get any where.

You get places,as I said,there's only bragging rights and an animated card as reward, but the weird thing is that it's the difficult part instead of,say, getting Ultimate cards.

Well, as I said, one of the not talked about a lot reasons to get cards upgraded is you get more coins back when you have them upgraded and you draw them as a double whether a daily spin or a virtual pack. Its actually a huge incentive to upgrade cards.

Everything is currently experimental considering the game is only available in a few regions. It might change who knows.

I would love to see an incentive where you gain more XP depending on how many skylanders you kept alive for your victory. As always, a consolation is nice for the defeated player since if the primary incentive for winning PvP is just gold then XP is the only thing we have going.

my values for Tree Rex are too high. Unlike the old system, an ultimate level 1 skylander is now the same as say Touch of Darkness. Before it was twice as much. I need to adjust my values accordingly, its not as bad as I said to level up Tree Rex even though its more than before. However, I think the non-skylanders do not get this PvP bonus.

Just got a lot of packs yesterday so have stuff to recalculate all over the place.

At the end of the day. The developers need to monetise the game some how which is why I have the uncanny impression that the magic ticket system was invented for this precise contrariety. If the cards were that much of a cakewalk to level up, no one would bother buying the real physical packs to scan them since there's no need to level them up via your ticket tokens when buying digitally and grinding is more convenient. I can't say that this is their strategy for pigeon holing us to buying the physical packs but it does seem like grinding for XP would make collecting real life card packs seem moot.

We're quite fortunate since we've been playing in the early days of soft launch. Unfortunately for me Taiwan is virtually a country devoid of any skylander presence so it'll be difficult for me to get my hands on any physical booster or battle packs.

I guess that's true, and for the small benefit, it's not even close to standard monetisation these days. It's weirdly not greedy from Acti, though to be fair they were never crazy with it since LI and others always make the IRL money stuff time savers or prettier than usual at the most - if Battlecast was from someone else, you'd bet they'd keep you from reaching Rank 3 with virtual cards or something equally dumb.

...*knocks on wood*

I just do not see the reality of leveling cards at present though. 600 experience to level say my Ninjini to level 2. It would take 120 fights to just get level 2. Level 2. No experience from PVP mode. No extra leveling if I use the card in a fight, its just 5 regardless. To get the card to silver seems impossible. I want to spend my coins to actually take a chance to get the cards I am missing, not spend 700 coins to level up one card in a deck of 300.

I think its okay to increase the difficulty to level cards but I will admit, right now I do not even want to play much as there is no leveling for PvP and it seems near impossible to level cards. A balance yes, but right now, its too astronomical to level up my cards. The OCD person in me wants them level 20 each but not at that cost of winning the same story mode fights over and over. I imagine the PVP experience not being there is an error.

I'd see that with Sancho then. Unless they're planning for daily randomized story missions, if you can't level up enough characters in one or two runs of story mode there's something wrong.

Well, and you expect ultimate cards to level up slower than regular cards and you did have that before. I do not know what to think. I mentioned a little bit my leveling issue in the glitch thread but we have 2 guys here who work on the game, I figure if they are going to read it, they will read it.

And this may be paranoid, but I worry they increased the levels just after I documented it. If they looked up my account and took my success of getting levels as examples to everyone else, its not really fair as I play a lot more than the casual person. Even playing a lot more, its just daunting right now to level up anything.

The new update has more coin experience from fighting again, cool, I feel like I can level up my cards again!

And once again, somewhere in the last week, card leveling experience went down from 20 to 10. Hardly anyone is playing the game right now so not sure why someone felt it was the time to lower experience gained per fight. It was 20, now its 10. Thus, it would take Whirlwind 3000 fights to reach level 20 instead of 1500 the way its set up.

Not as bad as it was when I posted this originally but still, not sure the value to make this worse now.

There are some OCD folks who want to level up all their cards and this makes me not want to to play as much as it seems too daunting to get them all to 20.

I just did a test...its 20 per fight for Android users but only 10 experience per fight for IoS. Thus, its been lowered for Apple but not android. That is not fair. I would like IoS up if possible.

Yeah, I know the exact reason why this is happening.

Money.

You can instantly level up characters by scanning in cards, so you can either play 3000 matches, or pay a few quick bucks for a potential level up.

No, I think it was just an oversight. The problem has been fixed after I tweeted to Sancho. Both systems now are back to 20 coins each time you win.