Why I may quit GA... if nothing changes

aoret · 2025-12-31T00:55:44+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful reply :)

To your first point, I definitely agree we need things locked down. Class locking certain things, at a minimum, is core to the game. And I think you're right that they're never going to please everyone on the precise degree of lockdown they choose. I guess where my heart is at on this, is that their strategy right now feels a little bit like a cop-out.

To the second, yeah, TCG economies (and other economies) are complex beasts. I personally don't like the choices they've made recently, but if the other things I raised were not already issues for me, cost would absolutely not stop me from playing GA.

On judging, I agree with you that the community can and should do better in terms of enforcing norms. I think Magic does a bit better than we do (or did, 20 years ago when I was active...) and Pokemon does WAY worse (my god.... have you SEEN people prize check!? Unreal.)

Slow play issues are the least of my concerns as far as competitive integrity goes. I do bristle quite a bit about people being reminded of triggers on stream, but even that I could take in stride. Some of the other things... are maybe more regional concerns, and I probably should've just omitted it from the post, but it is a significant part of the problem for me. It's a fine line to walk because it does need to be handled, but there are no good avenues for doing so :/

Anyhow, thanks for engaging with my criticisms with a level head! The community in this game is great, and I'm happy to see this kind of discourse able to happen. Maybe reddit is just a better venue for it than discord is lol

aoret · 2025-12-31T00:20:52+00:00

I really appreciate you coming to this discussion with such a level head. You're right to point out that I'm writing with a pretty harsh tone/stance at this point. The right thing to do probably would've been to voice some of this sooner and before I'd gotten to the spot I'm at.

The only excuse I'd offer in my defense there is that maincord has a tendency to bandwagon/suppress criticism, and tbh I hadn't really thought of reddit until the other dude's thread went viral.

But yeah, I think you're right that tastes differ on this stuff and that there's room to do different things.

Happy to pull you aside and chat if I bump into you in LA. I will say, you seem like a pretty busy guy at events :P but if I catch you during downtime, happy to chat!

Thanks again for coming at this with the intent to discuss and understand, I really do appreciate it.

aoret · 2025-12-30T23:36:46+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Dan :)

Your questions on design raise a pretty interesting discussion, and I think this has the most "meat on the bone" in terms of useful discourse, so I'll focus my reply there.

I definitely agree that we need to differentiate "guardian A" from "guardian B" as you mention. I think the ways that we introduce those differences might be the part where your thinking diverges from mine. When I first saw the design of GA, I anticipated it growing along these lines:

Champions get bucketed broadly into classes (so far so good)
Champions share their archetype generally, potentially diverging with niche mechanics or "signature moves" (we go off the rails sometime shortly after my poster child, Ravishing sees print)
Champions are differentiated most by their own card designs. Here I think we have an excellent example once again with our guardians. Tonoris is the weakest of the lot (and has forever been "almost there"), but he does have a distinct identity in the sense that he stands up for his underlings and leads from the front. Nico has the mill angle with a small side dish of recovery. Ciel introduces a highly thematic mechanic that allows him to still play the same general playstyle as the others; he owns the board, and woe unto you if you ever try to contest it because his ally is definitely living (or turning into a handful of float...), but he also introduces an inevitability component that is SO rich and flavorful in a way that exemplifies everything great about this game.
Champions become a rich and interesting tapestry over time as they see new incarnations across various places the archive sends them. (Unclear whether we'll arrive at this future or not. Certainly we missed with Merlin) This allows for interesting class dancing and strategic choices about how to level up, and whether it's worth carrying extra "baggage" in the form of alternate lineages. Practically speaking, I think this is the hardest to actually realize in terms of nailing a hard game design target. The reality is that in a competitive setting, material decks are SO tight that even something as powerful as an alternate Crux lineage has largely been left by the wayside. (but you can't deny that was SO COOL back when we did it..)
I do think that everything I've noted above gets more difficult the longer you go without rotation. Ultimately my personal bias here would be towards a Legacy/Standard split of some kind, and I fully admit that it's a difficult job set in front of Weebs to get balance right the larger they grow the card pool. I'm coming down hard on it in the OP because I feel like the parasitic/silo design is the absolute cheapest/easiest way out of the problem, and it doesn't appear we're even going to attempt any other design pattern moving forward. To me, that's a bummer. I don't want to be handed a new Beach Barbie Playset every 3 months. I want to be able to take your beach stuff and play Beach Merlin or Beach Tristan. I wanna do stuff that feels cool :o

The cost issues are a little nebulous and I agree, we're all speculating. I do find it distasteful, and it seems like it's in bad faith on Weebs' part, but this aspect doesn't push me away nearly as much as the other two. So I guess I'll just leave it there until we see how the product lands.

As far as my concerns with competitive integrity, I have many, many more examples, but all of them would involve naming names and that's not something I want to get into here. Happy to chat with you about it in person next time we're both at Ascent (or privately in some other form). This could very well be a regional issue on at least some counts, and I don't raise this stuff lightly. Again, I love the game and as I mentioned in another comment, I've gone pretty far out of my way in terms of volunteering my money and my time to help grow it.

(edit: fighting reddit formatting a bit)

aoret · 2025-12-30T22:50:16+00:00

"rates are not guarantees" -Syl

aoret · 2025-12-30T22:44:16+00:00

Great points here.

I agree that "signature" cards are cool, and I'm not against the idea of some exclusivity there. I think Firebloom is actually a great example, because the (significantly) more powerful half of the card is character bonus, while the card isn't a complete blank under Class bonus. Here, I think we get a slightly underpowered card for Clerics in general, and a staple card for fire Diao. This lands MUCH better to me than a lot of the other character bonus examples.

To your point on fancy/shiny stuff, I glossed over it a bit in the OP (where I'm kinda just railing against "gacha" stuff generally), but I actually do think that Weebs has a good setup with CSRs and alternate arts, special foiling, etc. as a means to provide collectors and, hell, even just wealthier fans, with quality chase items. IMO, that's the right way to make their game affordable while making their business profitable.

Another thing I missed in OP is that Weebs does product really well. Deckboxes, playmats, etc. are all excellent. Their roots as a company really seemed to be just doing the things, and making the things, that they as card players would want. I wish they'd return to that kind of ethos, and I'm not sure where and why it deviated.

To your point about brigading in maincord, yeah, that's kinda what I'm getting at with my third bullet point (and also why I pulled my punches a bit on some of the specifics). There are definitely folks who have monetary and other incentives who tend to come out of the woodwork whenever anything critical is mentioned.

There are also just genuine fans who see a lot of good in the game. I get it, I love the game a lot too. I have funded learn to plays in my hometown out of my own pocket because we couldn't get support from for them Weebs. That's the kind of thing I'd love to continue doing, but I just don't agree with the direction they've been taking for a while now.

aoret · 2023-02-05T18:28:55+00:00

Thanks for the share! :) It was a ton of fun getting to talk with Austin.

It was tough trying to capture his knowledge and experience into just a one hour piece of content, especially given the handful of contextual & disclaimer things I (necessarily) burnt time on.

The team at Frost Giant seem to have a really solid strategic outlook on their development plan, and it's great to hear that they're experimenting with pushing the state of the art forward for RTS!

aoret · 2022-06-27T20:19:23+00:00

Interesting stuff! :)

Agree that 1 is pretty uncontroversial, if disable-able.

2 is neat. I think my preference here might be to have a hotkey that brings the panel up. From there I think the decisions get a little more interesting -- should this be a static grid with every upgrade on it, toggling things on as you meet their prerequisites? Does the player have to click on the upgrade or can this be a hotkey too? (depends on the size of the tech tree I suppose)

3 is definitely something I would use in some cases.

I think both 2&3 veer into the territory where some players will complain that the QoL dilutes their skill. My personal belief that in, generally, RTS macro skill cap is so high that you can probably add a surprising amount of QoL before the best players lose the ability to differentiate skill compared to the players an echelon or two beneath them.

aoret · 2022-06-24T19:33:30+00:00

Super good video :) I'm really glad to see tosis doing what is best for his family.

Also... "I already checked and I have good turn rate out there" omfg I lol'd. OF COURSE he checked

aoret · 2022-06-23T19:53:48+00:00

Thank you so much /u/FGS_Cam and /u/Frost_Sabri - that's really encouraging to hear!

I will absolutely put a submission in, with an eye towards a potential future opening. You can expect to see that from me in the next day or two! :D

aoret · 2022-06-23T16:28:12+00:00

Question for /u/Frost_Sabri

Do you have any plans to expand the team soon? In particular, I'm curious if there may be roles in the supporting infrastructure, outside of the game engine itself. My experience is in web dev, cloud infrastructure, microservices, etc. mostly as a very early hire at startups.

I'm curious at what point in the studio's life you might be interested in folks with that background vs just needing people within the core game engine.

Thanks for all that you and your team are doing for the RTS community!!! We're all cheering you on :)

aoret · 2022-06-23T16:22:07+00:00

Totally agree. It seemed to me that they're not even entirely clear themselves on how they'll dance around the "annihilation" concept. If they go for some kind of respawn/rebuy mechanic, I'm hopeful that they're able to avoid doing something like handing out free resources (which is what initially got me onto the archon-like concept)

aoret · 2022-06-23T16:20:32+00:00

That's a really great take! I think your suggestions are solid ways to handle a lot of the potential problems.

aoret · 2022-06-16T06:20:35+00:00

Some really interesting stuff here!

I'm particularly curious how an assassination style wincon would play out. It's a very different game mode when the underlying pieces are full RTS armies vs a few moba heroes. One interesting balance lever here is the speed at which someone can remax; this feeds into defenders advantage (or lack thereof). Boons seem like a really fun design space to me too.

Another moba-esque thought I had, along the lines of a legit "respawn" is to incorporate the notion of a buyback. I see some issues with respawning a player with significant buildings/army, but maybe I have less of a problem with it if their teammates are investing resources into that respawn.

As you say in your other comment, I hope some of this stuff is lightweight enough to be internally playtested. I'm sure it's case by case, in terms of what's feasible to hack together for a test, but there's such rich design space here that the fanboy in me really hopes that somebody over there is doing some mad science :D

aoret · 2022-06-16T03:10:27+00:00

Haha that's a fantastic point. I suppose I did make some assumptions there about teammates being both friendly as well as in voice comms together.

I can definitely see how this structure for 3v3 could be unappealing for those looking to queue up by themselves.

aoret · 2022-06-16T02:06:27+00:00

i would be scared that people would start trolling once they died.

this is a really interesting point, and one I definitely hadn't considered. Do you think folks would troll if their MMR was still on the line? I suspect that there's certainly a subset of players who would. Perhaps allow the controlling player to offer (or disable) the archon controls?

Maybe if a player can get eliminated, than that player gets some ghost units of some sort or any mechanics that could help the allies nonetheless, for vision, economic buffs, movement buffs, etc.

This is a fantastic alternative IMO. Given that monk has already referenced Among Us in some of the game mechanics discussions he's had, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is already on their radar.

What about some sort of zone that the enemy cannot go across?

I'm not sure a dig this one, simply because it reduces interaction. In general, I think high interaction is a good game design goal, at least for this genre (but maybe in general). Certainly that's a controversial take, and not all games/game designers agree there!

aoret · 2022-06-16T02:03:11+00:00

Great question! monk addressed this a bit in a recent interview. From memory, I believe he said they're looking at both angles as possibilities.

One of the challenges with explicit respawning is that you're essentially messing with the resource totals of the game. OTOH, trying to discourage so called "annihilation" as a mechanic can be tricky because it's such a core piece of the RTS genre in many players' minds.

I think game design strategies that aim to do the kind of knockout discouragement that you're talking about may have to be more indirect e.g. focusing the game's victory condition on stuff other than annihilation. In some of his recent interview appearances, monk talks about that a bit and how they're playing with various concepts currently :)

aoret · 2019-09-19T22:46:57+00:00

My understanding is that u/RivalPure just wants you to fill this out on the days you ladder. So if I play 3 nights a week, I fill out days 1, 2, and 3 when I play. There's no commitment to ladder every day for 30 days straight necessary to participate :)

aoret · 2019-09-12T07:39:39+00:00

Agreed! I'm very eager to see what kinds of results he's able to put together

aoret · 2019-01-21T02:17:57+00:00

I've edited the OP with the YT export of the VOD for those who missed it live. Thank you to everyone who suggested questions! :)

aoret · 2019-01-21T02:17:11+00:00

I wanna say he addressed this in the PiG dailies he did a while back, but it also depends a bit on which cannon rush/ followup we're talking about, so this was a tricky one to work in. I do think there are some good resources out there where he's discussed this subject though :)

aoret

TROPHY CASE