Halloween Jack posted:

Spent a part of the morning tying my mouse to my hand by the cord and figuring out how tricky it was to get the thing back in my hand. Its not impossible...but its not a collective action.

Puppy Time posted:

Yeah, this. Nerds have done that poo poo since time immemorial, the difference is that now writers are more aware of it and for some reason ultrasensitive to that particular criticism.

Kurieg posted:

The new priest at my parents church is the kind of person that resents Vatican 2, and started hosting large wedding parties and the like last year pre-vaccine. The breaking point for my parents was when they started enforcing a dress code for Eucharistic ministers. Even subs. Even in the summer when everyone except for the captains were "subs". If there weren't enough people that were A) trained and B) properly dressed, you were supposed to just make do with whatever people you could find. The apparent end goal was to shame people into showing up to church in "appropriate" attire.

appropriate was a three piece suit for men and ankle length dresses for women.

Capfalcon posted:

As someone from a Catholic background, one of the biggest red flags is someone offering, unprompted, their thoughts on Vatican II.

quote:

On the podcast Board Games Insider episode 210 Stephen Buonocore reports from his unnamed but reliable source that the KF problems came about from a ransomware attack. Listen for yourself at about the 40:00 mark

quote:

Earlier this year FFG suffered a ransomware attack. This is 100% true, as I heard this from a number of employees at the time of the event. I was told that everything not on current employees work computers (which had been taken home due to offices being closed for COVID), or in actual production was locked and possibly lost. This included the art database (wonder why Unfathomable has so little art when it’s from an IP with thousands of previous art pieces they could use?), older games products, and the card database used to construct Keyforge decks.

I heard about this back in early Spring this year, so this news now totally tracks. FFG failed to back up their information properly, got hacked, didn’t get it back or got it back in a poor state, doesn’t want to publicly share that information (especially while Asmodee is trying to peddle itself for billions of dollars) and so is making up other reasons for various consequences of this event.

Kai Tave posted:

According to the reddit thread the guy who originally coded the Keyforge algorithm was laid off due to downsizing a while ago too which if true would be some hilarious karma, though there's also rampant speculation that he was involved in the attack, no he wasn't involved in the attack, well I heard, etc, so take that as you will.

e; basically there's a lot of poo poo that wouldn't be surprising if it was true, but reddit also thought they caught the Boston Marathon bomber too, so

Toshimo posted:

Is there something new or are you just reading the stuff from months ago?

Kai Tave posted:

So this article, posted in September of this year, discusses how the card game Keyforge is on hiatus. For those who don't know, Keyforge is a card game by Richard Garfield whose premise is that it's entirely sealed preconstructed decks, no deckbuilding is allowed at all, and every deck is unique due to an algorithm that creates them using some unknown series of formulas. And the reason the game is on hiatus is because the algorithm that makes the decks is broken. Per this article, the reason why the algorithm is broken isn't being disclosed, nor is there a timeline on when it'll be fixed.

Warthur posted:

I don't get this. What stops someone buying multiple decks and deckbuilding using them and then just saying "haha that's what the algorithm gave me, weird huh"?

Unless it's a game designed solely to played once per deck, so every game is played with a new sealed deck. Which I hear is a thing in the card game world, but is always baffling to me, largely because I find the sheer money-grabbing nature of that to be repulsive to me.

quote:

Each deck features a unique card back with the name of an Archon; thus, decks cannot be modified with cards from other decks.

Strom Cuzewon posted:

And by "programmatically generated" we mean "selected from a library that was not properly pruned for dodgy words"

Resulting in the infamous Farmer of Racism

Warthur posted:

I don't get this. What stops someone buying multiple decks and deckbuilding using them and then just saying "haha that's what the algorithm gave me, weird huh"?

Unless it's a game designed solely to played once per deck, so every game is played with a new sealed deck. Which I hear is a thing in the card game world, but is always baffling to me, largely because I find the sheer money-grabbing nature of that to be repulsive to me.

Kurieg posted:

Kai Tave posted:

I agree that it largely seems to be an attempt at exploring brave new worlds of monetization while also undercutting any sort of secondary market outside of "I got this super good deck and I will sell it to whoever pays me a bunch of money" maybe.

Kai Tave posted:

In addition to what others have said, it isn't overtly designed to be "disposable" in that sense, you can in theory buy one deck and play it forever, but if you want to play something other than the deck you've been dealt then yes, you have to buy a whole new one and you can't mix and match between them, that's sort of the fundamental premise of the game. I agree that it largely seems to be an attempt at exploring brave new worlds of monetization while also undercutting any sort of secondary market outside of "I got this super good deck and I will sell it to whoever pays me a bunch of money" maybe.

I dunno man, the last time the game came up in tradgames when it was new I vaguely recall people saying that it wasn't that bad but the entire thing really just does feel hugely wasteful and exploitative. I know some people don't care for deckbuilding but I would argue at that point the solution to that conundrum is not extending the concept of blind card packs to encompass the entirety of the game.

Panzeh posted:

I'm not really sure what the overlap is between people who want to play slot machine card games and people who hate building decks. I always found that aspect of keyforge weird, it just feels like a weird garfield tangent.

Then again, people keep trying to make "mtg but we made it all about fundamental attacking and blocking".

lightrook posted:

In that sense, if it's not possible to buy something like a self-contained cube draft game, then buying something analogous in power to a draft deck does have an appeal, although this would require a lot of trust in the publisher, which TCG experience should tell us is invariably a mistake. I haven't personally tried Keyforge though, so I can't comment on how well it holds up in practice.

Coolness Averted posted:

You might like epic if you haven't tried it out for a self contained drafting card game. You only need 1 of the decks, though I think it suggests buying duplicate card sets for bigger groups. I've only played it in groups of 2-3.

Leperflesh posted:

One thing I did like is that the game is (apparently) not counterfeitable? You can go onto their site/app and put in your deck, and it'll both validate that it's one of the real printed decks, and validate that nobody else has ever registered that deck before, and list the cards in the deck.

WaywardWoodwose posted:

I wonder if someone will ever propose a CCG backed by the blockchain?

CitizenKeen posted:

I liked Keyforge's mechanics (though its theme was terrible). The problem was that I stopped caring the moment the game was done.

Magic, Netrunner, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, Game of Thrones, and digital games like Eternal, Hearthstone, Runeterra... after I finish a game, I build a deck in my head. I think of combos I want to try. I see a cool card in my opponent's deck, and I want to get out in a deck of mine.

The whole deck building aspect is so compelling it inspired a genre of board games of its own.

Keyforged had none of that. You play your deck, put it back in a tuck box, and stop caring.

Notahippie posted:

I kind of like the idea (although lol on the execution) because it fits a nice niche for me - I find some games frustrating because there's such a short gap between "played enough to know the strategy and enjoy the game" and "thrown into the pit of people who have spent a shitload on rares and obsessively refined their deck so that there's no real chance of winning unless I want to devote the same time and money." In principle something like Keyforge could have a larger middle ground.

CitizenKeen posted:

I liked Keyforge's mechanics (though its theme was terrible). The problem was that I stopped caring the moment the game was done.

Magic, Netrunner, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, Game of Thrones, and digital games like Eternal, Hearthstone, Runeterra... after I finish a game, I build a deck in my head. I think of combos I want to try. I see a cool card in my opponent's deck, and I want to get out in a deck of mine.

The whole deck building aspect is so compelling it inspired a genre of board games of its own.

Keyforged had none of that. You play your deck, put it back in a tuck box, and stop caring.

hyphz posted:

Honestly what I recall from playing Keyforge with two decks I bought and a novice opponent was constantly running into rules that said we couldn’t do things. We kind of played things and then killed them and didn’t seem to make any progress because the rules (especially about only playing one colour per turn) basically meant we could never play enough to do more than tread water.

There apparently is a fan run online version though?

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

magic kind of got to that point organically but it had to deal with the constant tension between competitive and casual play, which creates negative play experiences every time someone loses the game basically before they've even sat down

hearthstone tried to minimize this by drastically reducing complexity, game length*, and by having huge swingy RNG effects that would attenuate the effects of skill over many games, plus a bastardized Elo system that prioritizes flushing smurfs out of the system more than actual accuracy, and i guess it sort of worked for a while but hearthstone has the opposite problem from Magic; it bleeds "serious" players constantly because the game is both really frustrating to try to actually be good at and because if you're REALLY good at this poo poo you could probably just play poker lol

occasionally you see a game like Duelyst where they aim primarily for the competitive side with maybe a few concessions here and there (battle pets ), which results in better-designed games in principle, but tends to mean they die within a year or two, because without the scrub penumbra matchmaking goes into a vicious cycle where the weakest players get sick of getting farmed and quit, leading to longer queue times (poisonous in and of themselves) + the next tier of player up becoming the new fodder


* it failed at this particular bullet point a lot but if you look at balance changes i think there's a pretty good argument it's what they were going for