It must have been about three years ago I heard about it; it was right after the last baseball strike. A book by Bob Costas regarding the state of Major League Baseball and what simple things could be done to ensure the game would endure. He called the book, “Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball”. My immediate reaction to this was disinterest - what could a simple sportscaster have to say about how sports should run - but I eventually gave in and read the book (most of it, anyway).  He painted a picture where players could make their money, owners could make their money and fans would be able to enjoy the game without having to worry about how many weeks it would take for them to pay off the ticket price. It made sense; it was backed up with data and plainly stated why baseball should make changes.

I was thinking about the book this week while speaking with Captain Jack, a dear friend of mine and the man who brought over two starter decks seven years ago and got me into this game, and Jack told me that following the championship circuit this year, he would no longer be playing tournaments in our area. He cited many reasons for wanting to walk away from the game, including increased cost of cards, the sometimes over-zealous play and the like. It created a dilemma for me because I had never known Star Trek CCG without Captain Jack, as many of the Southern Betazed players have not. Its funny but almost every player in Connecticut can trace their roots in the game back to Jack, he taught me and taught the legendary ambassador Rom who in turn has literally introduced the game to hundreds of individuals.

But what can any one do? Is this an isolated problem or something that threatens the longevity of the game? So I decided to do a little background research into the players and Decipher. Researching Decipher proved to be difficult as it is a privately held company and therefore does not have the detailed analysis publicly traded companies have posted on the various stock websites. I decided a simpler answer might be found by researching player statistics and what I found was a little shocking. I found that Captain Jack is not alone in his desire to back out of the tournament scene. Of the current (3/27/01) Top 100 Players in the World in Constructed Tournaments, 41 have yet to have a sanctioned game in 2001; of those 41 players who have been inactive, 11 have not had a game since the end of 1999. Think about those numbers for a second, 41% of the top 100 players in the world have not played in a sanctioned Tournament in the last 3 months, 11% of those same Top 100 players have not played in more than a year. That’s a rather high number.  Now consider those 11 individuals who have been inactive for more than a year, my first thought on the matter was that these were fly-by-night players, they tried Star Trek and got bored or did not enjoy the game and left leaving only the briefest mark on the game with a high rating.  Nothing could be further from the truth, 2 of those 11 have more than 120 tournament games accredited to them, they average 67 games a piece and the median player in the group played 69 tournament games. That does not indicate a fly by night kind of player, that indicates a player that gets interested, plays and then leaves. Consider also we’re not talking about a random sample, we are talking about the Top 100 players in the world, individuals who have had to be active to attain their position in the game, they should be at the more loyal end of the curve.

These numbers do not bode well for the long-term futures of the game. If these numbers are a representative sample of the loyal players in the game, then the average tournament area is seeing a turn over of more than 50%. This alone has made me realize it is time for a player to make a public case to Decipher and appeal for some changes in the game that would go a long way in preventing these players from leaving. So with that in mind I present the five simple things, Decipher can do to more effectively maintain their player base while continuing to expand.

1) Simplify the Rulings: I personally have been harping on this for a couple of years now. While the Major and the rules committee does a fantastic job trying to maintain the spirit of the game and promote a competitive environment, many of the rulings have become obsolete or so common sense that they simply fill space and make it more difficult for new players to enter the game. In the beginning, a 363-card game required a small rulebook that probably amounted to 5 sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Now we have a 66 page Glossary that needs to state that zero is an even number, and that Zon can nullify Naucisaans where present (which is repetitive because its listed on his card). It has gotten too big, too complex, it's like reading stereo instructions and anyone who has ever had to program a VCR or has seen Beetlejuice (pardon the spelling) knows exactly what that’s like.

The game has grown and naturally the rules need to expand to keep up but when the rules grow beyond their usefulness, its counterproductive to the mission of selling the game to new players. The rules committee needs to sit down and evaluate areas where they can condense rules, reword rules to make them simpler to understand and eliminate rules that are out of date or useless in their current format.

2) Stay on Schedule with Releases: One of the biggest problems for players in my area is how Decipher frequently sets get a release date, and another release date, and another until the set releases sometimes two months after its initial anticipated release. Now this is to be expected from time to time in any corporation, delays occur, but its has become more the rule with Decipher as opposed to the exception. I started playing the game when Premiere released, fell out for a little while and rejoined when I finished college in 1997.  Since that time when I reentered the game, Decipher has not stuck to an original release date for any of its sets. That’s five expansions, two enhanced sets, an anthology and a Reflections set. That’s 700 previously unreleased cards released late each time. Players do get discouraged waiting for new sets when they are continuously pushed back and it eventually alienates players who would otherwise become loyal players. In many businesses a single late release can kill its chance for profitability, Decipher is fortunate that they can afford the delays, but to continuously accept these delays as a part of their regular business routine is poor business and not prudent for either the longevity of the game or the parent company.

3) Offer a Superior Prize Support System: When I began in this game, prize support was a starter deck for each player. That became obsolete when tournaments began to draw more than 12 people at a time and the case size was only 12, so they changed over to boosters. Then came the change to Q Boosters for whatever reason necessitated it, and then recently they changed over to the Foil format. I like the foil format, I can remember many players were not happy when they would get a common or uncommon foil in the Rare slot in their Star Wars packs (I don’t recall what set that was though, I remember hearing much ado about it), so offering foils of commonly used commons or uncommons is definitely a good idea at the tourneys. The problem occurs in that this came in conjunction with a termination of other prize support. Now lets backtrack here, we started with 12 prizes (Starters) a tournament, expanded to 36 (boosters) because there were too many players attending tournaments, and then narrowed it down to 2 (foils)? Doesn’t make much sense, you’re gonna have people going home empty handed and players who feel that they don’t get anything by participating, are not going to participate in the future.

Decipher needs to implement a prize support system that embraces the best of the above listed methods. I discussed this at length with a good number of players in Betazed and we came to a unilateral decision…Reflections boosters. Now it would be poor business for Decipher to send Reflections boosters as prize support seeing as they are expensive and will make the company money through the retail market, but what if you modified them just enough to make them decent prizes? Follow my logic here, instead of the normal assortment of cards you create a pack containing the following:

2 Premiere Cards
2 AU or Q Cards
2 Deep Space Nine Cards
2 Dominion or Blaze of Glory Cards
2 First Contact or Rules of Acquisition Cards

10 cards per pack, gives the player a small assortment of cards for new players to build off of and current players to potentially build up their collection. You do 24 packs in a Box and include two box toppers (not the traditional foils, but tournament foils like the Q-Tent and Dal’rok). This way you cover your TDs with adequate support up to 26 players and make the tournament more about gathering and playing a great game and less about a conquest of foils. It would potentially be no more costly than any other booster set they produce and would please more people.
 

4) Make Star Trek a Priority: Star Trek was the first CCG Decipher produced but it was shortly followed by Star Wars, one of its biggest and best sellers. Star Wars has enjoyed a great deal of success, mainly because Decipher has put a great deal of effort into marketing it and developing new sets for it. Let’s compare the two games: Star Trek has 10 sets (a Full 363 Premiere, a double expansion DS9, and 8 standard expansions), meanwhile Star Wars has 10 sets (8 sets and two unlimited revisions of previous sets). At first look that looks pretty even to me, then consider that Star Trek has one Reflections set and one OTSD Sealed Deck released, Star Wars has two of each. Star Trek has two enhanced sets, Star Wars has three. Star Trek has two anthologies, Star Wars has released three.

// Editor's note: some players might consider fewer "enhanced" products a good thing ;-)

Why is there such a difference in the release of these materials? The games have roughly the same number of regular expansions, but it seems like only Star Wars merits consideration in the OTSD, Anthology and Reflections sets. Decipher needs to put the same kind of emphasis on its Star Trek products. I recently read somewhere that Star Trek can barely pull enough people together to have its World Championships (from a Wars player on another website), while Star Wars does significantly better; if that statement is true, then what is Decipher doing about it? It appears nothing at the time, they need to make adjustments to try and balance this out between the games.

Recently we’ve experienced a lot of crossover players coming from Star Wars to Star Trek; there is interest in these players to learn Star Trek, but because the marketing is so strongly angled toward Star Wars, little is known about it. For those of us who love this game, this is very discouraging and it truly does seem like Wars is favored over Trek. If Decipher could give the attention to Star Trek that they offer to Wars then the game would be bigger and better than it is. If one wants proof of this, one need look no farther than the Star Wars Top 100, where only 11% of their players have not logged a tournament game this year, compared to the 41% Star Trek has experienced. Could it be that the additional attention Decipher lavishes on Star Wars would also benefit Star Trek?  I definitely think so. I don’t think Star Wars gets too much attention just a disproportionate amount, I would prefer to see an increase in Trek production to help the game than to punish Wars by slowing them down.

5) Get Back in Touch with the Players: Many players feel isolated in this game, like Decipher either doesn’t care or doesn’t listen. A good example of this came a few months ago when they revised their boards system. They created the Gameplay board to regulate those posting “nonsense” on the general board, but those people posting nonsense were usually trying to express their love for the game in the form of humor or trying to spur discussion on a variety of Star Trek topics or trying to make a recommendation much like the ones I’ve posted above…Their reward for this, constant comments from Decipher staff telling them to go to the off-topic board, which everyone knows that nobody at Big-D reads seriously. I tested this sometime back under an assumed identity and posted a question about a Decipher policy, my posting on the Gameplay board returned a reprimand within three hours, and my off-topic posting was never answered. Decipher can go to all the Cons it wants but until they start to realize that it’s the players that drive this game and they are losing more players than they are currently gaining, they’re gonna be in trouble.

In Conclusion, This is a wonderful game produced by a company who obviously has good people involved in it, but those people need to realize that this game is not going to support itself and only by properly organizing its rules, staying on schedule with its releases, offering a comprehensive prize support program, merchandise and support it as strongly as we know they are capable of doing and getting back in touch with the people whose money drive the game can it continue to expand; the game will otherwise experience a slow but definite decline in its membership and thus its profitability. It amazes me even still how few people grasp the big picture of an organization like this, I had a discussion with an individual online who argued that we don’t support Decipher’s Web site by purchasing cards, nor do we pay the salaries they provide their workers.  I attempted to explain the concept of overhead costs and how they factor into a product’s final price but to no avail. I only hope that Decipher has as good a grasp on it as I think they do and can make the necessary changes.

Well that’s it gang, a few ideas from a guy whose been around this game a long time. As I finish this rather lengthy commentary on Decipher, I can’t help but think back to the book Costas wrote and of Captain Jack. I look at Major League Baseball heading to a lockout sometime in the next few years and realize that they didn’t implement a single one of his suggestions, like he was preaching to the deaf ears of the ownership. I think of Captain Jack and his outstanding contribution to this game, I’ve never played a deck he didn’t help me build either through meta-gaming or by listening the crackpot deck idea, never attended a release party without him having the biggest stack of boosters in front of him, and so the thought that the Betazed Trek Community will lose such a person is a little tough to bear. I guess that’s why Costas wrote his book and I wrote this treatment, we’re both too saddened by the direction of what we love to do anything but voice our dissent. I only hope, this time for the sake of the 41 inactive players, players like Captain Jack, and just lovers of this game, that the ownership isn’t as deaf.

-Skullduggery

Writer’s Note: As always I invite feedback for commentary or lively debate but please direct it to the WNOHGB message board as my email has been a little flooded, I will check and respond to questions there. Thanks.