|
Tuxedo Catfish posted: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 I kinda feel like adding a co-op or singleplayer format for some of these games might be a way to improve their life. I mean besides just a bad AI, you can stomp in practice mode to learn basic rules. Something more akin to the warcraft CCG's raid format, or that one year of Duels of the Plainswalkers's implementation of nemesis mode.
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 06:06
|
|
), 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
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 13:27 |
|
|
Kurieg posted:If memory serves the idea behind keyforge tournaments is that you collect multiple decks and try to paper rock scissors with your opponent over multiple rounds. So yeah, you're supposed to buy *lots* of decks in search of a few powerful ones.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 06:32
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Do you have any experience with the League of Legends card game? It looks like Hearthstone with a lot less swingy RNG, and while I'm loath to recommend anyone play anything League related, I'm curious to hear your thoughts if you have any (online card games are basically tabletop games, I swear it's on topic). Not Tuxedo Catfish, but in my opinion it's still a bit too new to get a good handle on how it handles its hardcore vs casual playerbase. It cares more about retaining serious TCG players than Hearthstone, but it's still only a year old. The biggest differences that are relevant for this thread are that it's one of the first digital card games to move away from the pack model as how it makes money. I mention this because traditional booster packs are, objectively speaking, kind of a hosed up way to sell people cards that we only accept because of the limitations of distributing physical cards and because it's already established. Digital card games remove those physical limitations, and so getting a reasonable collection in them is always kind of bullshit. Runeterra's cosmetics model of monetization isn't great, but at least if you play regularly you can easily make a new deck every month or so without having to worry about it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 06:40
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:Not Tuxedo Catfish, but in my opinion it's still a bit too new to get a good handle on how it handles its hardcore vs casual playerbase. It cares more about retaining serious TCG players than Hearthstone, but it's still only a year old. The biggest differences that are relevant for this thread are that it's one of the first digital card games to move away from the pack model as how it makes money. I think Runeterra also says that if you play regularly (completing dailies and weeklies, but not grinding) you're guaranteed to get a full set of the current release by the time the next set comes out.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 06:59
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:Not Tuxedo Catfish, but in my opinion it's still a bit too new to get a good handle on how it handles its hardcore vs casual playerbase. It cares more about retaining serious TCG players than Hearthstone, but it's still only a year old. The biggest differences that are relevant for this thread are that it's one of the first digital card games to move away from the pack model as how it makes money. I played Runeterra for free for a while, and how much free cards and crafting currency you got was far nicer than Hearthstone for example. It was far easier to get a deck going, and its drafting gamemode was easily available for f2p as well. Games have to make money somehow, and I'd vastly prefer it if f2p games mostly did it through cosmetics instead of gameplay payments. I think Runeterra even had a system in place to literally prevent you from spending too much money on the cards themselves?
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 07:13
|
|
|
Huh, well I have to say that while I'm not really a fan of the push in gaming towards "you MUST devote X hours of your month to this game to stay abreast" that basically wants to turn each game into someone's singular focus, doing away with booster packs is a great decision for all the aforementioned reasons that booster packs are awful. So it's basically more like an LCG then, known sets without any randomness in the acquisition thereof.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 07:13
|
|
|
can't you put keyforge cards in sleeves? who cares what the back looks like if nobody can see it
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 09:46
|
|
|
There is also a card printed with the deck list. Some people do play with sleeves and weird custom deck rules.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 10:25
|
|
|
Goa Tse-tung posted:can't you put keyforge cards in sleeves? who cares what the back looks like if nobody can see it iirc most of the questionable words were mostly gone by the second printing of the initial set. It's a shame the game is doing poorly, it reminds me of the Munchkin one that died in a year
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 11:08
|
|
|
Goa Tse-tung posted:can't you put keyforge cards in sleeves? who cares what the back looks like if nobody can see it The deck name was also printed down the bottom of the front card face. They thought the verification execution through (well barring 'where do we keep this critical algorithm') because it was clearly a grand marketing idea post-LCGs to try and make predatory whale money. Unfortunately they didn't concern themselves with things like "is the game fun" or "are aliens saying yo mama compelling as a theme"
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 11:58
|
|
|
Destrado posted:The deck name was also printed down the bottom of the front card face. They thought the verification execution through (well barring 'where do we keep this critical algorithm') because it was clearly a grand marketing idea post-LCGs to try and make predatory whale money. It got dropped pretty fast around these eastern canada parts due to the games taking way too long. poo poo on MTG if you want but there were KF games that took upwards of 60+ minutes to resolve regularily and that seems really bad.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 13:20
|
|
|
Runeterra is a good game but its design makes net decking so easy that you run into net deck RPS a lot earlier than you do in other games. It’s usually this time I get sad that Prismata died in the dark.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 13:58
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Huh, well I have to say that while I'm not really a fan of the push in gaming towards "you MUST devote X hours of your month to this game to stay abreast" that basically wants to turn each game into someone's singular focus, doing away with booster packs is a great decision for all the aforementioned reasons that booster packs are awful. So it's basically more like an LCG then, known sets without any randomness in the acquisition thereof. I feel... weird semi-defending Riot here, but honestly Runeterra does in my experience work out to 'if you play a lot, you get the cards you want. If you play sporadically, you can still buy the cards you want.' It is one hundred percent better than buying digital booster packs. The game itself is... fun? There's a couple of decks that dominate the meta but if you're just digitally card flopping for kicks you'll be fine. They also make sure there's a lot of ways to play that don't make you play against another person, if PvP's not your thing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 14:09
|
|
|
I enjoyed Keyforge just fine but didn't have any regular opponents to play against, so stopped playing. Keyforge is way less demanding than Magic in terms of money, time, and brainpower and I think that's its big advantage. 'Buy 2-4 decks and play' is casual in a way that all but the most casual deckbuilding games aren't.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 14:17
|
|
|
I dropped off it myself a good while back so I may be out of date on this but the Eternal online CCG put a lot of effort into keeping a stable of casuals like me logging in every few days, getting good players to play suboptimal decks, a bunch of ways to buy cards using the in-game currency you get for playing like card packs, both vs AI and PvP drafts, to just outright buying the card you're missing. Ah gently caress it I'm going to reinstall it this weekend aren't I. e: Anyone feeling like signing up last I checked there was a thead in Games with referral links in it to get some extra starting cards. Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Oct 16, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 14:22
|
|
|
Oh right, the point of that was that yes, absolutely, maintaining a solid playerbase, emphasis on the base, is absolutely vital for any social game to take off. To give the goofus to this gallant, NS2 launched in full esports mode to the degree that it's been out for almost a decade and they only implemented a matchmaking system about two months ago. Highly skilled players punking on casuals was always viewed as a feature, not a bug, and filling a server with people of roughly the same skill to just have a fun match against players of equivalent skill has always been anathema to their vision for the game. The new matchmaking system only does the 6v6 esports esport ESPORTS format when every community sever is 10v10 so no they still haven't learned anything.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 14:37
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Do you have any experience with the League of Legends card game? It looks like Hearthstone with a lot less swingy RNG, and while I'm loath to recommend anyone play anything League related, I'm curious to hear your thoughts if you have any (online card games are basically tabletop games, I swear it's on topic). nah -- honestly it speaks to my own resistance to learning that i played any other CCGs after playing Magic at a teenager, it's a worse vice than drugs or gambling -- but i think i finally learned my lesson 
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 17:09
|
|
|
I've been playing Magic for over a year on Arena and I'm swimming in unopened packs, unused tokens, unspent gold, and thousands of Standard-legal cards, and I haven't spent a dime. All that is necessary is to play regularly to earn xp and free packs. You get lots of tokens you can use to create specific cards, so any competitive deck is within reach: pretty much you only need to spend money if you insist on building multiple decks loaded with rares every season, or if you're unwilling to play much.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 17:31
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:I've been playing Magic for over a year on Arena and I'm swimming in unopened packs, unused tokens, unspent gold, and thousands of Standard-legal cards, and I haven't spent a dime. All that is necessary is to play regularly to earn xp and free packs. You get lots of tokens you can use to create specific cards, so any competitive deck is within reach: pretty much you only need to spend money if you insist on building multiple decks loaded with rares every season, or if you're unwilling to play much. Eh for constructed play, yeah but that didn't seem true about limited play. Once again, I only played for a long weekend, so maybe once you get enough f2p currency to enter once you get enough prize money to enter again quickly, but it seemed like you were only gonna get enough currency from dailies to play a sealed format maybe once a week. I had no interest in constructed, -especially since I started towards the end of a block, so that wasn't a good value for me.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 19:45
|
|
|
Yeah I'm definitely not playing tons of sealed, I find it to be too big of a chunked time commitment (a couple of hours) vs. just dropping into a random Bo1 match for 2-20m. That said, if you're good at sealed, you can play it pretty frequently because good finishes get you back your entry cost. Also, for constructed, you pretty much have to kickstart into the game by playing one of the free starter decks, probably on the unranked queue, for a while until you can get enough packs and wildcards to build a good list. (Or just never bother building a really good list - I prefer homebrew jank, and rarely bother with earnestly trying to climb the ranks. But I did hit diamond this month with a homebrewy jank deck so even then, it's an option). You can kickstart your way into the game with real money too. A lot of people do that. My point though is just that Arena free-to-play does have play modes that are genuinely free forever, and if you can do those for a while, you'll eventually be able to compete at the highest levels in standard or historic bo1, bo3; pauper for sure, and probably a few other formats. Draft formats being the hardest to do a lot of weekly for free.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 20:24
|
|
|
Having played both (Arena up until about a year and a half ago, Runeterra since about last December) there's really no comparison. Arena is massively more stingy with wildcards and the resources to build decks, and it's significantly harder to actually build fun or casual decks in Arena than it is in paper magic or Runeterra because of how the card structure works - what would be a junk rare or mythic rare to use in something fun and might cost you 25 cents or a dollar each is now priced the same as the chase mythics, and valued at a similar rate. By comparison even with intermittent periods of play I've got the ability to throw together pretty much any deck I want in Runeterra based on the weekly reward cycle. There's also far, far more card crossover in Runeterra than there is in Magic, so cards which are useful for one deck are much more likely to be useful for any deck that uses that region/'color' in magic terms, so you're much less likely to not get to use the cards eventually in a different deck. There's definitely a fair bit of netdecking but I feel like the issue is actually worse in Arena, simply because building a new deck is so expensive in terms of either time or past effort spent. If you build a deck and it doesn't perform well you're pretty hosed.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 21:16
|
|
|
I guess it depends on how focused you are at hitting mythic each month or whatever. On the play queue, I win 50% of my matches with jank fun decks. You can easily get to gold+ tier on the ranked queue with basically anything. Magic is fiercely competitive at high levels, it's true, you have to have one of the top 1-3 "tier 0" decks if you want to play up there, and that means looking up those decks and building them from wildcards and then you get to play that deck for a couple of months until the next set comes out, at which point you may be able to modify it and keep playing (rogues was good through like six releases last year) or you may not be able to, if a new card just totally invalidates the strategy. I haven't played Runeterra though, and I believe you when you say it's way better. My intention wasn't to deny that; just to point out that you can totally play Magic for free forever, I know it's true because I have been.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2021 22:19
|
|
|
I'm going to tie this back in to physical card games, I promise. I play Runeterra about as often as I poop. I pick one digital CCG, hit my dailies without fail, and about once a month I get high and play well into the early hours. My current game is Runeterra, before that it was Eternal, before that it was Hearthstone. I'm not going to sing the praises of Runeterra, that's been done. It's better than Hearthstone, faster than Magic, and the only clarification I'll make is that it's even more generous than Leperflesh indicated (which is relevant to my point). The killer economic feature for Runeterra, and the lack of which killed other games for me, is that Runeterra is deep in catch-up features. Runeterra has two catch-up features that I can think of:
The trick isn't to make a game free, it's to make it always free. I played Eternal for a long time. Then I took a break for a few months. This happens to every player of every game. Eternal's model was a little grind-heavy, but I was making about 80%+ on each set with my dailies. I had to be stingy with my resources, couldn't pursue jank too heavily, but I could keep up. Then I took a few months off. When I came back I had missed two sets. And I did some quick mental math and realized I'd never catch up. Not without spending a lot of time or a lot of money, neither of which interested me. Same thing happened to me in Hearthstone - once you're off the grind, you'll never catch up without spending money. Some players will spend money to catch up, but a non-zero number will walk away forever. And I think that's the slow death of a game. I'm hopeful Runeterra keeps trucking, because I like it. But if my work/family/other video game demands six months of my time? When I come back, I'll be caught up with my collection within a week, if not immediately. And this is even more true of new players. Try jumping in to Eternal or Hearthstone now as a free player - how long until your collection is big enough that you can reliably make the meta deck du jour without spending money? A new Runeterra player can do that within six weeks (not six weeks to have a meta deck - six weeks of dailies where they can make a new meta dominating deck every other week or so). Back on Topic I think this is what doomed the competitive physical LCG model. Because no LCGs (that I know of) had any cycling, the opportunity cost kept growing. The lack of cycling in Netrunner had balance issues, but that's a separate topic. But I remember when a close friend took a year off of Netrunner. To get back in to the meta, they were looking at ~$200. They just sold their collection instead. And for new players? Forget about it. I think it's why FFG switched over to exclusively co-op and Keyforge - the buy-in cost is essentially $15. The catch-up cost is very cheap. I remember when Netrunner was truly alive, and the first two cycles (the first one, Genesis, especially) were always out of print. They were hard to come by. And I remember wondering how much money FFG made off of the long tail. Was it a lot? Would they have made more money if everything two years or older was sanctioned with proxy play? By the time we got to the moon set (I don't remember what it was called off the top of my head... Lunar something?), it was basically impossible to get new players into Netrunner. Anyway - you have to make getting into a game as cheap as keeping up with the game, whatever that cost is. Magic's a laughably predatory model that's only tolerable because it's been grandfathered in, but at least I can say that I could keep up with 2022's standard meta for the same price as anybody else, even though I haven't bought cards since... Invasion?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 03:00
|
|
|
Yeah, it's funny that I used to really gripe about the way standard meant cards were constantly rendered worthless -from a play perspective, I know I could sell some stuff off I wanted- in Magic, but the way it keeps reseting stuff at least means you can relatively painlessly hop back in. By relatively I mean like 100-200 a year ain't bad for a hobby, and you can usually be viable with that in magic, but yeah it just feels pretty wasteful in print cards and downright predatory with digital.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 03:06
|
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:it just feels pretty wasteful in print cards and downright predatory with digital. I was always surprised that people felt digital Magic cards should be cheaper than paper ones. Is the printing cost imagined to dominate the sale price?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 03:10
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:I was always surprised that people felt digital Magic cards should be cheaper than paper ones. Is the printing cost imagined to dominate the sale price? When I buy a print card, it's mine to sell to others if I want to. If I buy a digital card, I get to play with it until Wizards decides to end my favored MtG client and replace it with a new one. If I don't get to own the product god drat straight it should be cheaper.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 03:20
|
|
|
As a loving goober who doesn't play MtG anymore and when he does just plays obnoxious blue control, the entire value of the cards is that they're pretty and I like buying a single booster pack and shuffling through them every couple years, or buying nearly worthless plastic boxes full of trash cards and laying them out on a rug and trying to come up with a deck or two on my own. I can imagine having fun playing a digital version as a diversion, but the idea of a booster of an equivalent number of cards costing the same amount of money as a real life pack is... really hard to imagine.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 04:15
|
|
|
Mystic Mongol posted:When I buy a print card, it's mine to sell to others if I want to. If I buy a digital card, I get to play with it until Wizards decides to end my favored MtG client and replace it with a new one. I thought video games had already shown us this was never going to be true.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 04:16
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:I was always surprised that people felt digital Magic cards should be cheaper than paper ones. Is the printing cost imagined to dominate the sale price? In addition to Mystic Mongol's point about decreased value, Wizards is taking home 100% of the purchase. You spend 3-4 bucks per 15 card booster, Wizards gets maybe 2 dollars at most from that. Not to mention had to pay to warehouse and ship those cards to their distributor and paper is heavy. I understand they can't completely burn brick and mortar stores, especially if they want to keep the physical edition of the game alive, but yeah I think a digital version of magic needs to share some of that extra cut with me. Something that's not Magic has an even harder sale to prove pack value for a booster. WotC is aware of this and with Arena has changed their pack model to kinda obfuscate and prevent direct comparison, which might be the best way to handle it tbh. Especially since stuff like wildcards and the ratio of rares and mythics and free currency for playing is a thing in Arena. CitizenKeen posted:I thought video games had already shown us this was never going to be true. This is very true too though. My favorite is when you see a digital copy of a game that's 4 years old still selling at original MSRP, when even the local gamestop might have a copy for a quarter of that price. Of course sometimes physical retailers will be selling their used copies of that old game for nearly full msrp too. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Oct 17, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 04:44
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:I think this is what doomed the competitive physical LCG model. Because no LCGs (that I know of) had any cycling, the opportunity cost kept growing. The lack of cycling in Netrunner had balance issues, but that's a separate topic. But I remember when a close friend took a year off of Netrunner. To get back in to the meta, they were looking at ~$200. They just sold their collection instead. And for new players? Forget about it. This is a really good point, imo. I actually brought up Netrunner and it's lack of cycling a while back, and to your point I'll add my own observation which is that Netrunner had a bonkers busy release schedule, new packs came out at a prodigious rate, which only served to compound the issue because nothing ever cycled out of tournament use, everything from the very beginning of the game to the latest release was always in use. On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the idea that set cycling is another part of the predatory model of CCGs like Magic, where chunks of cards are suddenly declared "not for use" and you have to start all over again if you want to engage with that part of the scene. On the other hand, never cycling led to a lot of cumulative issues with Netrunner that I think would have eventually started to cause compounding problems if the game hadn't eventually been killed. For instance, it meant that netdecking was, if not mandatory, much more highly encouraged simply because it was increasingly unwieldy to keep track of the sheer number of options available, growing with each set, and their various combinations and interactions. Netdecking in and of itself may not be bad, but if the alternative is diving into a database of thousands of cards, it begins to feel more obligatory, less like you're playing a game and more like you're doing homework. This was only exacerbated by that feeling of having to constantly stay on top of things you mentioned, if you took a break and came back and another bunch of sets had come and gone, you were that much more behind now. It also made it hard for the game to ever really be rid of some of the weightier balance issues hanging around its neck because, again, nothing was ever really gotten rid of. They eventually started issuing a banned/restricted list to help mitigate it, but a lot of the game's time was spent trying to deal with the fact that a lot of its most powerful and consistently meta-defining cards which constantly deformed the game and future card releases around them...were all in the core set. Cycling would have at least given them a chance to make a clean break and not have to constantly dance to the tune of Anarch icebreakers. They did eventually release a revised core set, but the game was terminated shortly thereafter so we never got to see any longer term effects it might have had.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 04:55
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:I thought video games had already shown us this was never going to be true. Now I'm sad.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 06:17
|
|
|
New Netrunner packs did come out fast (close to monthly) but each pack was only 20 new cards because you got a full playset of each. The revised core was part of the first rotation, since they used the new core to keep some rotating cards around. I find MTG much harder to keep up with, even with the ample online tools that range from suggestion engines to straight up net decking. WotC releases 300 card sets 4 or 5 times a year.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 12:17
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:This is a really good point, imo. I actually brought up Netrunner and it's lack of cycling a while back, and to your point I'll add my own observation which is that Netrunner had a bonkers busy release schedule, new packs came out at a prodigious rate, which only served to compound the issue because nothing ever cycled out of tournament use, everything from the very beginning of the game to the latest release was always in use. Netrunner totally had cycling, what are you talking about?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 13:13
|
|
|
The Deleter posted:Netrunner totally had cycling, what are you talking about? Netrunner's set rotation (that's the phrase I was looking for) only kicked in for a few months before the game died, right? Genesis and Spin were rotated out when Kitara launched, then the game was canceled.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 14:21
|
|
|
God I just remembered the rumors that FFG was going to pick up VTES and make it an LCG. They really dodged a bullet there.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 14:40
|
|
|
moths posted:God I just remembered the rumors that FFG was going to pick up VTES and make it an LCG. Didn't somebody else pick up that torch or is it not in fact Eternal Struggle but a different Vampire game?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 15:14
|
|
|
FFG announced a very strongly influenced game of vampire political intrigue, and then Black Chantry picked up the actual VtES. BC is printing cards (at a small scale) and you can get decks at Drivethru Cards, and there's supposed to be a new edition / expansion coming soonish. My local group seems to have fallen apart but I'm hanging onto my stuff because goddamn that was a great game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 15:44
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:Netrunner's set rotation (that's the phrase I was looking for) only kicked in for a few months before the game died, right? Yep, that's correct. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Oct 17, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 16:38
|
|
|
Black Chantry Productions got the rights to VTES and has been putting out fixed sets. Much of their output seems to be directed at the fan community, in case you were wondering why you hadn't heard, and is somewhat baffling as a result. They've announced a starter set, but it isn't out yet.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2021 17:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 13:27 |
|
|
WaywardWoodwose posted:I kinda like the idea of a game that straight up destroys your computer as you play it. Like maybe as you play on your phone its mining new cards, getting hotter and hotter till you can't hold it then the battery explodes in your face . I would go to my local game store to watch that super nerdy version of bloodsport. Late but here's the classic lose/lose, a shmup where each enemy is a file on your computer, and killing it deletes that file. If you run with admin privileges, you can play until you delete enough OS-critical files that your computer crashes!
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2021 04:48
|
|
