I think it is clear that ghosting takes up some number of GenCon tickets and those tickets could have been used by actual people. Those actual people could have been newbies who could have joined our community and helped to support the game. It is also true that it is possible for somebody to use ghosting solely to collect treasure instead of enjoying the game as it was intended, which also could devalue treasure due to an increased number of draws. I don't know how much that happens though.
Those are the only downsides to ghosting that I'm aware of, and the only problem that we might be trying to solve.
Eliminating ghosting would upset some veteran players who are used to it. It definitely impacts people who organize groups of 10 that might have no-shows, or people who want to do challenge runs. It would also limit the need to create powerful builds, since the most challenge one could have is 10 players on a Nightmare run (which we showed was possible at TDC with only 5 useful tokens).
It is also possible that eliminating ghosting could cause the tickets to *not* sell out at GenCon. But we wouldn't know that until it was tried. If that happened then eliminating ghosting would reduce total revenue for True Adventures.
I don't think ghosting should be eliminated. I could be convinced to moderate it a little bit as follows:
- Like today, every ticket gets you a wristband and a 10-pack of tokens.
- Unlike today, treasure is handed out to one person at a time (based on the new TE rules).
- Unlike today, each person may have a max of two wristbands.
This means if you had only 8 of your 10 show up, you could still ghost the two missing ones. It also means you could organize 5-person "double down" runs like you can today. If you want to do a solo run, however, you'd only get ten 10-packs, 2 completion tokens, and 2 full sets of treasure draws. You could still equip synergy items on the ghosts though (so total treasure draws would be a max of 38 currently, excluding artifacts).
Doing a 3-man run would be not too bad. Each player buys 3-1/3 tickets, and each player gets 2 tickets worth of treasure, and 3 10-packs.
My online token shop:
www.tdtavern.com
We buy, sell, and trade True Dungeon tokens. We also have a convenient consignment program where you can sell your own tokens.