Card Game Meta Is Annoying

I remember way back when I used to play Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering with my friends.  We would save up a little money, head down to the corner shop or the nerd store in central Manchester buy some boosters and play.  While it was frustrating to lose to a guy because his luck was better than yours there was something fun about being at the mercy of a booster pack.

Card games however are an expensive hobby so as I got older I drifted away from them.  I didn't have to give up completely though as thanks to games like Hearthstone, Shadowverse and Dragon Quest Rivals I can enjoy the TCG experience for free.  All of these games let you play for free and earn cards for free with the option to pay for boosters if you so wish.  

Now all of these games come with a ranked play mode and when I see that kind of thing of course I want to get as close to the top of it as I can.  While it is fun to collect cards, make decks and climb the ladder the higher you get the more dull these games get.  

There's a meta in each of games that, once you hit a certain rank, what decks you HAVE to use to see any kind of success.  If your not using one of these top tier decks that you can just google up you're basically doomed to sit in the middle of the ladder forever.  If your good you can get a bit higher but unless your a TCG god you ain't reaching the top without Professor Google.  

This is because getting boosters is just about playing a lot and instead of duplicates sitting in a shoe box for years they can be "dusted" which allows a player to craft specific cards.  So not only can you google a top tier deck but making it is a cinch so OF COURSE everyone is going to use them.  

That's not to say creativity is completely off limits.  Unranked play and the "random deck" modes keep the fun alive but the fact that ranked has to adhere to strictly to a meta makes things a little dull sometimes 

Code of Joker 2.0

When I go to the arcade I'm expecting to have a good time except recently my visit was turned into a rage session as a discovered that my favorite digital card game, Code of Joker, got a big update.  Granted it's not all terrible but generally speaking the update has left me disappointed and angry.  

For those that don't know and can't be bothered to search through old posts for the info, let me briefly go over what Code Of Joker is.  Code of Joker is a free to play arcade digital trading card game made by Sega.  Imagine if you smashed Pokemon, Magic and Yu Gi Oh all into one game and you'd get a vague idea of what the game plays like.  It's a lot of fun and the fact that you can play 2 games for free as long as you own the Aime card means that playing a couple of matches every day may just become part of your daily routine. 

So, very recently version 2.0 of the game came out and with that release came A LOT of changes.  Let's first talk about the good shit.  The interface is a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.  The old interface was very busy and while not difficult it looks a lot better now.  There are also 2 new characters each with their own special powers and one of them has even come with entire new color type of card thus raising the monster types to 5. The new color comes with a mechanic where you can fill a gauge to do bullshit OP shit but the fact you need a separate gauge stops the new type from being completely broken.  Code Of Joker has also taken the advance wars approach to gameplay and made all the characters fight in pairs now.  This means that you get 2 special abilities per game and even if you use a Joker mid match, the gauge will keep charging so you can do it again, whereas before you only got 1 joker use per game.  

But now for the bullshit because oh boy did this piss me off really fucking hard.  First, they reset everyone's deck to a new starter that's been rebalanced so that it's not completely fucking useless after all the updates.  This is sort of a good thing but the game didn't tell you that it had happened so I got rocked in my first game due to having a completely changed deck full of shit.  Granted, some of the new starters are really good but some warning would have been nice.  The game also has the currency that you get from playing matches that used to be called RP but now it's been changed to a different currency with the same function but you still earn from playing matches called AC.  The problem arises when it turns out that none of my previously stocked RP was converted, so I just had ALL my in game money taken away and now I can't buy any of the fancy new shit.  It's not my stock was turned into something else, it's just flat out fucking gone, and that's bullshit.  

Now all that is super annoying but not as annoying as having the game just take a bunch of my cards away from me.  When I went to make a new deck a good deal of my cards had been taken away.  Now I can't find online what had happened but I have two guesses.  1 is that due to the balance changes these cards do not exist anymore or the game just decided to take away any card that I earned for free.  I'm leaning towards option 1 but I won't be able to test until my wife tries to make a deck later.  This is complete shit though because imagine you had a Yu Gi Oh deck but some update comes out and some guy comes to your house, shreds a bunch of your old cards and throws you a deck of mishmashed shit cards, you'd be mad. This is the digital equivalent of that.  Once again, my cards weren't converted to anything, just removed from my possession so fuck you Sega 

Despite all this bullshit the game retains its core enjoyability and at the end of the day it's still free so I'm not going to stop playing it.  Just every card played will be filled with bitterness and rage