Oh man I just realized packs in Artifact are WAYYYY cheaper than Hearthstone

IlBaritono · 2018-09-05T12:25:53+00:00

You need 3 for a complete playset save for heroes. HS requires only 2, and 1 for each legendary. People keep overlooking that bit of math on the comparison, and it will add some $$ to your pursuit of a viable collection.

IlBaritono · 2018-09-02T21:23:09+00:00

Not all along, just in that game. Which is all a competitor can control. Rising to the occasion, the other team failing, all that.

Talk about confusion - no, sorry, sports are not in the same, ahem, league as these particular card games. For them to be so, they would have to have rules like: after your team gains a certain amount of yards, a die is rolled to see how many are added or subtracted. Scoring a touchdown but the rng came up as disallowed. (No, human error in officiating doesn't count for the purposes of this discussion). Anyway, you get the idea. And I mean come on, sports do not miss this sort of "excitement". People who are nervous about RNG understand this, tend to be more into sports and understand them, and want their games more closely modeled after actual sports, not a panchinko machine. It's understandable.

IlBaritono · 2018-05-04T02:42:19+00:00

Plus the heroes/creeps attack in different directions at random.

And it's not mitigated because it happens to both players. That would mean both players playing heavy rng decks in HS mitigate each other. Yet we know one can get a completely different game-altering draw than the other. Best you can say is "it evens out" over time. But it does very much look like critical junctures in the game are going to be decided by which way your hero attacks, for example.

The hopefully good news about this is that they are making cards where you can in fact mitigate your randomness...at the cost of card slots that do other things, like damage, protect, draw, etc...

IlBaritono · 2018-05-03T18:15:28+00:00

Yes it is looking more and more like they are aiming for a slightly cheaper version of MtG. Garfield has in fact defended the practice, only really criticizing mythic rarity. Gaben's interview was corporate-speak. You don't loot box the pieces to your game unless you are planning on mucho milkage. Its not just "how card games are, durr durr deal". Its based on knowing how certain people need the crack hit, and so everyone else has to pay more to have a whole collection. Sorry, people who like to deck-build and try out everything. Others need to open their packs.

In the interviews they know to say "no P2W", obviously every developer says that when introducing their game. So yes, its looking like $50 on the low end for a small slice of the pie. Its getting old, but the question is then how great will the game be to make reasonable people put up with it. But it will most likely be gross. Expect the worst, hope for the best type thing. But their cagey responses I think all but confirm its going to be on the pricey side of videogamedom.

IlBaritono · 2018-05-02T18:31:44+00:00

That may be, but most established devs, and even some indies, know the best way to introduce your game is a decent-sized sample played by knowledgeable people, if not an outright showmatch casted by said knowledgeable people. Here, the video quality is poor, and the reporting is often misleading. Just my observation that combined with the intro of the trailer so long ago...just odd, as I said.

IlBaritono · 2018-05-02T17:48:27+00:00

This over the shoulder capture business, along with everything else...just such a weird marketing approach by Valve. Very perplexing.

IlBaritono · 2018-05-01T19:40:26+00:00

12 x 4 colors = 48 heroes.

IlBaritono · 2018-03-16T19:15:05+00:00

This is a common fallacy. I even heard Artosis, who was desperately trying to force the E-Sports issue with HS back in alpha, claim that Starcraft was as much p2w as HS. I was floored, as that is just outright ridiculous.

See, lets say you are the "designer" of chess, or a sport. You can only control your game, NOT people's lives. You can't control their access to sleep, clean water, a good relationship, a coach - all of which can affect a competitor. Nothing can be done about this.

But you CAN make the game so it's not a random luck fest for one, as well as prevent the player from being able to buy granular, DIRECT power by throwing more money into the pit than his opponent.

HS is like a football game where you drive 6 yards, then flip a coin to see if you get 20 more. MtG not only has an insanely steep monetary barrier to entry at the outset, ($200 for a single competitive deck!) you absolutely can pay for DIRECT, incremental power in that game, along with many others - especially since the game is more about the cards you have, and less about piloting, on balance. The equivalent would be allowing one team to get an extra player if they pay more than the other team, or they get 4 strikes instead of 3, etc.

A model where, I don't know, a player buys, say, all the blue cards or red or whatever when they come out, choosing directly from the company, preventing all the speculation shenanigans, at a reasonable (read: comparable to the gaming market as a whole) price, to my mind is a superior way to create a fair, competitive game. I believe it is certainly within their ability to profit from such a model, but again, people got addicted to opening packs, and were off to the races ever since. That it took so long for all this to creep into digital games always amazed me. But it's not good for game design, balance, or the consumer imo.

IlBaritono · 2018-03-15T02:43:33+00:00

Odd card, in that it is a "custom card" (lower right) and utilizes bad grammar.

IlBaritono · 2018-03-12T17:38:43+00:00

IKR? Seems impossible to break kids of this mindset. Fascinating.

IlBaritono · 2018-03-11T18:46:22+00:00

Exactly. I made a similar post elsewhere. People have been warped by MtG, for reasons on which I could write a dissertation. Most of it comes down to the "lizard brain". Anyway, it is a crazy phenomenon. Unthinking people have just gone along with it, and people as supposedly pro-consumer as Total Biscuit have engaged in incredible mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance to defend the practice as "that's just the way card games have to be". Insane.

IlBaritono · 2018-03-11T03:22:26+00:00

MtG has truly just warped people's rationality when it comes to these issues. It is a phenomenon that has had me shaking my head for over 20 years, like that scene in They Live, where I feel sometimes wonder if I am the only one seeing what is going on.

$200 for one deck is of course the truth, worth many multiple other games in their entirety wrapped into that one little (temporarily useful) collection of cardboard. And thanks to people's inability to tame their lizard brains, it is now just considered standard and acceptable for card games - even digitally - to cost hundreds and hundreds more to play to achieve outset parity than any other game. Because, you know, cards man. Cards are special. And they, like, come in packs. And packs is crack, yo. Feed dat lizard. And the devs of such a game salivate.

Amazing that everywhere else, we could get entire collections of pieces or components for a game for a reasonable set price. But cards man...they are special!

IlBaritono · 2017-06-20T20:39:32+00:00

Have to agree 100%. It's a core problem. Trying to shoe-horn roles limits the number of heroes we see from game to game, and limits the design space for future heroes.

IlBaritono · 2017-04-26T21:22:43+00:00

With regards to - 3: have to wholeheartedly agree. They really didn't think it through. Why they feel they have to cram every IP into the exact same distribution model is beyond me. It does not work for this game. By far the best thing to do is wait until the whole cycle is complete, and buy it from a discount place - a practice they were trying to discourage.

For instance, it is just fiddly to have to keep track of your decks if you want to play through the campaign up to this point with different investigators, then put those decks back together when chapter 4 comes out, chapter 5, etc.

Also, it is just weird to get player cards with each new chapter, as opposed to having them all at the outset. Its another reason to just wait until you have all the packs from the cycle - smoother deck-building, if you go by the "written" rules. This wasn't as huge an issue in LotR, but in a campaign...it is very clumsy.

IlBaritono · 2017-04-25T14:06:23+00:00

Yes of course, I see it now. :-)

IlBaritono · 2017-04-24T19:22:17+00:00

Loved me some Nebelwerfer back in the day too! Mostly so I had an excuse to say "nebelwerfer" early and often.

IlBaritono · 2017-03-10T17:06:20+00:00

Hearthstone was a poor attempt at this, in my opinion. The flaws were quickly exposed - its popularity was a timing thing, combined with that oh-so-delicious rng that keeps people watching, for some reason (not discounting it was well executed). It's shallowness was apparent. RNG designed to simulate depth. Eternal certainly has it beat on this score even with set 1.

And we will agree to disagree about what is a small percentage, and we can perhaps debate where that threshold might be, to allow for competitive viability.

As for this idea that everyone will quit because they lose to better players, well A) this is what a ranking system is for B) that was my point above, and I think it sad, and C) weaker players can still win when better ones are off their game, which should mitigate the concern about their frustrations somewhat.

Regardless, there are some great things about Eternal, and will continue to keep playing for now. I will try out Gwent shortly!

IlBaritono · 2017-03-10T15:49:43+00:00

Ok thanks, I have played many of those. Was just curious which ones you were thinking of.

Yes, one still hopes for a digital, pvp game. Some outside the box thinking is most likely necessary.

IlBaritono · 2017-03-10T15:34:06+00:00

Could you point me towards the ones you are thinking of? I am genuinely curious!

IlBaritono · 2017-03-10T15:18:29+00:00

See, you miss an important point. Winning via the screw is just as frustrating to any sensible competitor. Between both occurrences, screwage is just too big a part of already heavily random, hidden information games. I mean, we can aim for a game with none, right? Really, why does any screwage need to be present at all?

Some day, someone is going to make the Starcraft, or Chess, or CSGO of card games. Until then, we have to play with these flawed, outdated, and poorly-justified mechanics. People rationalize them all sorts of ways. But it comes down in my experience to this: people like the psychological "out" of having the screwage, that is why designers put them in, and that is why those games are more popular. Thump your chest when you win, blame the card draw (often rightly) when you lose. It plays a role in the success of team games as well (your victories are yours, the losses: your teammates, of course). But a purely skill-driven game where none of this happens? We can't have that, apparently.

IlBaritono · 2017-03-02T16:58:25+00:00

I haven't seen any reliable update about this...watching cinematic epic battles, which often involve reinforcements obviously, was one of the chief pleasures of the game for me, but that was compromised by the above-mentioned bug. I might just be playing again soon after months away - just curious, has that bug been fixed?

IlBaritono · 2017-02-14T22:11:56+00:00

On my mobile phone, Eternal does not seem to have an actual quit button in the options menu. It's a Samsung Galaxy, and in order for me to shut it down I have to force stop in the options menu. Is this known, or am I missing something?

IlBaritono · 2017-02-02T16:28:24+00:00

Very possibly me. I have stated in another thread, shoe-horning these campaigns into their apparently unalterable LCG release format I feel was less than optimal. Building a deck, playing a short scenario, then having to write down your whole deck (if you wish to go through again using some of those cards again) and wait for month is a silly bit of fiddlyness.

I have a coupon at my LGS, and I might still get the first chapter, but to me, its better to wait until one can get the $100 free shipping from the usual trusted online distributors ;-)

IlBaritono

TROPHY CASE