MArcomage

Me and my friend looked for something to do together. I got reminded of this great online card game with lots of customization, interesting gameplay and instant free access. So we made him an account so I could teach him the ropes and get to playing.
Except the game has changed since I played several years ago.

First off, the deck tab was closed off, non-existing. I wanted to show the vast wealth of deck customizability except he only had his three premade starter decks, which I bluntly told him sucked. At this point I checked the forum to see what was up, and found that a grind-to-unlock system had been implemented.
Well, that capitally sucked.

At first we kind of tried to cope with it. I made stupidly bad decks on my own so we could play at "even footing." However, this got boring real fast and his unlock rate was not fast enough, so I just made a spoof deck and deliberatley lost 30-ish games.

Now he is at level 10 and can finally start playing the game, which is a great thing, because we both like it. However it was a great frustration that the game has implemented this so obviously anti-usability feature. Do we not want the player base to grow, to promote new players to start playing the game? Punishing them with a grind-to-unlock scheme is doing the exact opposite.

Also it is a potential problem that every new player needs to find a veteran willing to lose games. At this moment winrates are not relevant to anything at all so it is not a problem for the veteran except time, but we got the feeling this kind of grind could warrant a ban, would the administrator want to. Making new players afraid to get banned just because they want to start playing the game is also a bad thing for growth.
Of course I do not think Mojko would ban anybody for this reason, but in other games it might be standard.

Anyhow, I think I have made it clear this would be a much better game for everybody if the grind-to-unlock feature was removed.

I never liked it, either. But then I was never subjected to it as a veteran player, so I tend to forget it was even implemented.

I figure a simple tutorial should be enough to ease people into the game without putting content off limits.

Sure, it has some disadvantages, but having it removed is worse. You have to take into consideration that most players, unlike your friend, don't have a veteran player to teach them how to play, therefore they are just flooded with the vast amount of content this game has to offer.

Also, you seem to miss one thing - you can play with AI to get to level 10. The AI difficulty is lowered so in half an hour you can be level 10 without effecting your score and without too much effort. New players are navigated to do this by flashing buttons via tutorial, which you probably skipped since you were teaching him to play.

I've been monitoring how the new players progress and according to my research the new tutorial is better than the old one. That means most player will get to level 10 just by playing the AI and they will start challenging other players after that because they will notice that they no longer gain EXP.