The state of competitive gaming--an inquiry [Archive]

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Lheticus

2013-12-21, 01:17 PM

MLai

2013-12-21, 01:23 PM

http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

Have you ever read this series of blog articles? It's actually a classic oft-linked treatise on the nature of competitive gaming.

gooddragon1

2013-12-21, 01:26 PM

Anyone who plays video games with me a few times will quickly get at least get allusions to the fact that, when it comes to people who play video games or TCGs, CCGs, or whatever else a card game with booster packs is supposed to be called...when it comes to those people, I am extremely jaded about the state of such things. There is an old, not now oft-used saying, "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." Over time, I've come to believe something similar: "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how epic the confrontation was."

It's seemed to me from my (admittedly limited) experience in competitive gaming, that instances of games where one side completely destroys the other, are common...too common. Personally, when I'm playing a fighting game, a card game, or ANY game under the sun, I don't mind losing as long as I put up a fight and made it interesting. But with my play style, too often, I run into an instance where the way I *want* to play is a way that is invariably going to lose, and furthermore I don't even put up a fight, when playing at any definition of a competitive level. This is because all "competitive" games that I know of have a certain few play styles that, done properly, will trump all others. Am I the only one who has a problem with this? A problem with the lack of more than a modicum of variety at the truly competitive levels of gaming, a problem with noobs meandering, possibly due to naivete, possibly because they simply do not really get to play for the most part otherwise, into these shark infested waters and getting torn to pieces? Are these problems somehow less harmful to gaming than I've indicated I suspect? Please...give my brain 2 cents from your pocket, anyone who can. (read: put your 2 cents in on this, I'm begging you.)

It's difficult for the designers of a game to make a system where all combinations are equally useful. I'd look into a more casual format of the game. The problem there is that inevitably someone's definition of casual won't be the same as that of someone else. The key may be in self actualizing with the inferior combination win or lose. That means that regardless of how far you progress or at least if you progress to some easily achievable point you will have had fun. For example: The critmeister build in dota. The build is 7 blades of attack and 1 boots (2 blades and 1 boots combine into phase boots, then 5 crystalis, then 5 buriza. It is horrendously ineffective in competitive gameplay but it is easy to farm (practically farms itself) and somewhat fun for DPS. Of course, the trashtalk that goes on at competitive levels really kills the fun too.

Skimmed that article: Not everyone wants to play what wins if that's not how they have fun.

I guess you have to make one adapt to the other since designing a game system that accommodates all strategies is unlikely. So strictly enforced casual leagues with tomes of houserules OR competitive leagues where you play to win or you lose.

I once had an idea for magic the gathering online (wouldn't work so well with paper cards...)

You and your opponent pick 40 cards from your mtgo collection and put them forward. Preferably you stick to 1 or 2 colors agreed upon in advance. Then you do a coin flip and you draft 1 at a time out of the combined pool of 80 cards a new pool of 40 cards. Then you get to pick 22 lands of your choice from an automatically generated separate pool of basic lands (you don't bring these). Thus you end up with 62 cards which are a combination of your opponents cards and your own. By it's nature it would be difficult for an opponent to rig the draft and vice versa. A degree of skill is involved as you must account for both your own cards and those of your opponent. The resulting match should be quite interesting. Since ownership is handled by mtgo you don't have a messy sorting process after the match. The one who wins the flip can choose to draft first in the draft or go first in the match.

The reason I thought of this is because people rigged the pauper format with all the best cards they could get their hands on. The only option was the f2p format where people were limited to certain decks. Thus I thought of this where it is balanced by the players themselves.

MLai

2013-12-21, 01:56 PM

Skimmed that article: Not everyone wants to play what wins if that's not how they have fun..
You can't dismiss the Sirlin article just like that with that one-liner. The "What about fun?" sentiment is well-addressed by the article.

However, he is talking about GOOD games (such as multiplayer fighting games) which thrive on balanced competition where only player skill should matter. The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game; it's a vehicle for WotC to print and sell ever more cards in order to keep the cash flow coming in. There is no point where WotC would say "We got this game to a perfect equilibrium now, this game is now at a perfect balance of fun vs skill; let's stop making more cards which might upset this."

Lheticus

2013-12-21, 02:22 PM

gooddragon1

2013-12-21, 03:18 PM

Um...woah. I think you just became my hero, sir. Magic the Gathering not a good game?! After that statement, you confirmed my suspicions about it, or at least some of them, but...wow. To say something like that...you sir, have cojones worthy of my utmost respect. I would love to discuss the concept of a "good" TCG with you further...but perhaps such an endeavor would be best taken to PMs. Expect one from me soon. :)

Read the article from your link just now--it was most informative--particularly one specific notion. Quoth the article: "a game becoming less fun because it's poorly designed and you just losing because you're a scrub kind of look alike."

In Magic the Gathering, I was constantly infuriated, nay, ENRAGED, by constructed formats, because there was always a "metagame" or whatever that was basically the game's way of saying to me, "you can't win ever with the playstyle you like, or without about 30 idiotically expensive cards because if you try, you'll suck." From that standpoint, Magic the Gathering IS a bad game--yet it's THE most popular TCG even today. I'm not really sure why that is, thinking from this viewpoint.

In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, on the other hand, I, as the article stated, began as a scrub. I was discouraged to extreme degrees starting out, but eventually, I DID notice myself coming up with strategies, counter-strategies, counter-counter-strategy strategies...and by then, I had indeed gotten a lot better.

...I think the root of my hostile feelings toward competitive gaming were microcosmically summarized in that one sentence. I got discouraged with Magic the Gathering. I got discouraged with Brawl. In Brawl, I was a scrub, in MtG, the game was bad...and I had no inkling that there was that difference between the two at the time. You sir, are DEFINITELY one of my heroes now--as is anyone who opens my eyes to see past a preconception I was not even aware of having. You have my deepest thanks.

But I love MTG :(.

Just evaluate my mtgo idea at least before coming to a conclusion.

Mx.Silver

2013-12-21, 04:39 PM

From that standpoint, Magic the Gathering IS a bad game--yet it's THE most popular TCG even today. I'm not really sure why that is, thinking from this viewpoint.
I've seen a few hypotheses on that one, but the most important thing to remember is that popularity is not necessarily dependant on quality. There are a whole range of other factors that contribute to success - the entire field of marketing exists for a reason, after all - not least of which is that market dominance can be self-sustaining. MTG is the card game nearly everyone has heard of and the one most people have played, and as such it's much easier to get into and find other players - despite how exploitative it is towards it's players. You see the same thing in tabletop wargaming and, from what I'm given to understand, RPGs.
There is also the fact that something can still be enjoyable in some regards despite it's flaws.

MLai

2013-12-21, 09:08 PM

Wow, my bluntness on this forum earned someone's respect. :smallcool:
That's a first. It was fully unintentional I assure you.

As for MtG... I'm not saying it's a bad game in fundamental design. I think the design (basic game rules) is awesome. I also think if theoretically WotC stopped making cards, took all its existing cards, culled grossly imbalanced cards (too strong or too weak regardless of rarity), you can eventually end up with a game that is decided by skill (and luck), not money.

That is the only real flaw with MtG, and most likely any commercial CCG: it's designed to be won based on the money you spend. You're allowed to use card combos/strats which grants you wins regardless of skill/luck, as long as you spend the money. It doesn't even take brains to construct said combos (just money).

Mx.Silver

2013-12-21, 09:26 PM

Wow, my bluntness on this forum earned someone's respect. :smallcool:
That's a first. It was fully unintentional I assure you.
It's a Christmas Miracle :smalltongue:

As for MtG... I'm not saying it's a bad game in fundamental design. I think the design (basic game rules) is awesome. I also think if theoretically WotC stopped making cards, took all its existing cards, culled grossly imbalanced cards (too strong or too weak regardless of rarity), you can eventually end up with a game that is decided by skill (and luck), not money.

That is the only real flaw with MtG, and most likely any commercial CCG: it's designed to be won based on the money you spend. You're allowed to use card combos/strats which grants you wins regardless of skill/luck, as long as you spend the money. It doesn't even take brains to construct said combos (just money).
Basically this. In fact it may be worse than that on the money front, because of how the cards are sold in random packs, so players most of the time aren't even going to have much say about whether they're even paying for the cards they want. The rarity system plays into this very heavily, since 'rarer' cards tend to be somewhat stronger than more 'common' ones.
It is not monetary system that benefits the players of the game. Although as a device for milking large amounts of cash from the customers, it's proven highly effective.

Lord Seth

2013-12-21, 10:43 PM

However, he is talking about GOOD games (such as multiplayer fighting games) which thrive on balanced competition where only player skill should matter. The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game; it's a vehicle for WotC to print and sell ever more cards in order to keep the cash flow coming in.Here lies your first error. How does that not make it a good game? All games are made to sell; the fact Magic has that purpose well doesn't make it not good. You say "it's not a good game" but you give no real reason for that.

There is no point where WotC would say "We got this game to a perfect equilibrium now, this game is now at a perfect balance of fun vs skill; let's stop making more cards which might upset this."
This is another big error on your part. A key part of Magic, and undoubtedly part of its appeal, is that it is continually changing. Something like Super Smash Bros. is static; when you buy a copy of a game in the series, it's that game forever. It never changes. There's never a point in any of the games where something gets shaken up by the introduction of a new character; it's static. Sure, every now and then they release a new game, but that occurs only once every few years and it's a different game that's incompatible with the old one.

Magic, and all the other TCGs that continually release new sets, are dynamic. They continually change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but they change. Now, sure, a big reason for that continued change is that it makes Wizards of the Coast money, but the game would become static if they just decided to not release any more cards. Now I'm sure some people like static games--heck, I'm a big fan of Chess, which has barely changed its rules in about 500 years--but all you're really doing is dismissing the game on the basis that it's dynamic and changes. That doesn't make it a bad game. It might make it one that you don't personally like, but to describe it as bad on that basis is nonsensical.

As for MtG... I'm not saying it's a bad game in fundamental design. I think the design (basic game rules) is awesome. I also think if theoretically WotC stopped making cards, took all its existing cards, culled grossly imbalanced cards (too strong or too weak regardless of rarity), you can eventually end up with a game that is decided by skill (and luck), not money.It already is decided by skill and luck, probably more by skill than luck.

One can argue that money plays a part, which is true to a point. But I despise this claim that somehow this invalidates the legitimate skill and luck factors in it (especially the skill factor) because it's not true.

That is the only real flaw with MtG, and most likely any commercial CCG: it's designed to be won based on the money you spend. You're allowed to use card combos/strats which grants you wins regardless of skill/luck,
No you're not, because those don't exist. I'd love to know what these imaginary combos or strategies which grant you wins regardless of skill or luck are.

as long as you spend the money. It doesn't even take brains to construct said combos (just money).
Even if we accept the idea that it doesn't take brains to construct the combos because you can just take the ideas from online sources, it certainly takes reasonable brains to play them. Even something like Sneak and Tell, often considered a "dumb" combo, requires some genuine strategy to play well.

From that standpoint, Magic the Gathering IS a bad game--yet it's THE most popular TCG even today. I'm not really sure why that is, thinking from this viewpoint.
Well, first, even accepting your complaints as valid, those apply to pretty much all TCGs, so being puzzled about why Magic would be the most popular when the others have the same supposed flaws seems nonsensical. Your issue isn't with Magic, it's with TCGs, period.

It's like saying you didn't like The Avengers because it has images in it (a dumb reason, but go with it for now), then wondering why it's one of the highest-grossing films of all time. ALL films have images in them, so the perceived flaw is utterly irrelevant to the question.

MLai

2013-12-21, 10:45 PM

In fact it may be worse than that on the money front, because of how the cards are sold in random packs, so players most of the time aren't even going to have much say about whether they're even paying for the cards they want. The rarity system plays into this very heavily, since 'rarer' cards tend to be somewhat stronger than more 'common' ones.
It is not monetary system that benefits the players of the game. Although as a device for milking large amounts of cash from the customers, it's proven highly effective.
Basic Skinner's Box exploitation of the customer base.
In the end, WotC doesn't really care about whether or not you think MtG is balanced or fun. The goal is to milk the customer base for as long as they're willing to pay.

Brother Oni

2013-12-21, 10:56 PM

Basically this. In fact it may be worse than that on the money front, because of how the cards are sold in random packs, so players most of the time aren't even going to have much say about whether they're even paying for the cards they want. The rarity system plays into this very heavily, since 'rarer' cards tend to be somewhat stronger than more 'common' ones.
It is not monetary system that benefits the players of the game. Although as a device for milking large amounts of cash from the customers, it's proven highly effective.

While I'm not disputing the assessment of WotC's business model, I believe it should be pointed out that they don't make a penny off the secondary card market which is where all the inflated value comes from.

That isn't to say they don't control the value of the secondary market with reprints (off the top of my head, Spirit Link dropped dramatically in value when it got reprinted in 4th), but it would be misleading to say that WotC make money selling overpriced cardboard directly to players.

In addition, most veteran players just buy the cards they want from retailers or second hand sellers which have already opened the boosters so technically speaking they do have control over what they buy.

In the end, WotC doesn't really care about whether or not you think MtG is balanced or fun. The goal is to milk the customer base for as long as they're willing to pay.

Given how important competitive play is to the longevity of MtG, I think balance concerns are very high up on their list. You only have to look at the restricted and banned lists for the various formats for proof of that.

MLai

2013-12-21, 10:58 PM

Here lies your first error. How does that not make it a good game? All games are made to sell; the fact Magic has that purpose well doesn't make it not good. You say "it's not a good game" but you give no real reason for that.
What?
The fundamental definition of a "good game" is not that it must sell, but that it is a fun activity.
If you love playing catch with your dog, then it's the best game for you.
What do I care how much money WotC can make? We're talking about game design fundamentals, not business/marketing.

This is another big error on your part. A key part of Magic, and undoubtedly part of its appeal, is that it is continually changing.
Think about why it's being continually changed, with players finding their old cards completely obsolete and they must go out and shell out money for more random new cards.
The goal isn't to make it fun for you, or to make the game better.

One can argue that money plays a part, which is true to a point. But I despise this claim that somehow this invalidates the legitimate skill and luck factors in it (especially the skill factor) because it's not true.
I'm a low level player. If Seto Kaiba gives me a suitcase of the rarest best MtG cards on the planet, and you get a random starter's pack, you will never beat me in a million years.

Contrast with a great Street Fighter player can and will *easily* beat me, using the weakest version of Dan vs me using the strongest version of Akuma.

Even something like Sneak and Tell, often considered a "dumb" combo, requires some genuine strategy to play well.
Now you're conflating things. I had already said the basic game design of Magic is great. So ofc it has fun strats that are rewarding to see come to fruition during a match. I had already said TCG/CCG can be fun. Problem is it all depends on the motives of the creator. With "impure" motives, a game that was great in design when it was born, will slowly be corrupted until it is an unplayable mess for ppl who aren't interested in falling for the Skinner's Box scheme.

Bucky

2013-12-21, 11:12 PM

Personally, when I'm playing a fighting game, a card game, or ANY game under the sun, I don't mind losing as long as I put up a fight and made it interesting. But with my play style, too often, I run into an instance where the way I *want* to play is a way that is invariably going to lose, and furthermore I don't even put up a fight, when playing at any definition of a competitive level.

I think the best advice I can give you is that you should separate your practice from your competition.

In practice, you are trying to learn something; you may even be learning a style that seams weak just in case some of it turns out to be useful, and it doesn't matter how often you lose on the way.

In competitive mode, forget issues of 'play style' and do whatever is most likely to win, given what you have learned in practice mode.

Brother Oni

2013-12-21, 11:15 PM

I'm a low level player. If Seto Kaiba gives me a suitcase of the rarest best MtG cards on the planet, and you get a random starter's pack, you will never beat me in a million years.

If Seto Kaiba gave you a suitcase with 4 copies of the top 10 cards in the game (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/arcana/432), you will lose to a random starter deck.

Even if you were given the current top deck in the Constructed format, chances are you'd still lose to a well designed and well played 100 dollar deck simply because you'd have limited knowledge of how your deck works.

This is aside from simple randomisation issues like being mana screwed/flooded.

ryuplaneswalker

2013-12-21, 11:28 PM

Think about why it's being continually changed, with players finding their old cards completely obsolete and they must go out and shell out money for more random new cards.
The goal isn't to make it fun for you, or to make the game better.

That is only true for two formats, in the eternal formats the meta-game rarely changes unless something truly ridiculous shows up, such as Jace 2 or Snapcaster mage which is the reason Standard/Extended/Modern exist.

You are right Magic the Gathering has a very strong core, and currently card power is a bit high, but that is not the games fault, that is the lead Developer who admitted he is a spike player, and even with him we do rarely get a format breaking card, the only two I can think of are Jace 2 and Archbound Ravenger.

Lord Seth

2013-12-22, 12:17 AM

What?
The fundamental definition of a "good game" is not that it must sell, but that it is a fun activity.
If you love playing catch with your dog, then it's the best game for you.
What do I care how much money WotC can make? We're talking about game design fundamentals, not business/marketing.Your argument was that it was not a “good game” because Wizards of the Coast uses it to make money. My point was that a whole lot of games are used to make money, so claiming Magic is not a good game on that basis is absurd. Even something like Chess is used to make money, even if it’s not proprietary.

In fact, your post here essentially disproves your claim! You were arguing it was not a good game because Wizards of the Coast uses it to sell more cards and make money. So… your argument was that it is not a good game because money is made from it. Now you’re arguing that all that matters is whether it's fun, which is irrelevant to the issue of making money from it.

Think about why it's being continually changed, with players finding their old cards completely obsolete and they must go out and shell out money for more random new cards.
The goal isn't to make it fun for you, or to make the game better.
Which is irrelevant, even by what you just said! You claimed that the criteria is whether it's a fun activity or not, which quite clearly, people think Magic: the Gathering is! The motivations here are, by your own logic, irrelevant; it's whether it's fun.

And of course, maybe you don't think it's fun. But "fun" is highly subjective, and to make a more objective statement such as saying something is not a good game because you personally don't find it fun is rather silly.

And you know what? I think that if they did just stop releasing new sets, people would lose interest in the game and quit because of it becoming static. The reason it's popular, I believe, is because of its dynamic nature. Even people who principally play eternal formats like Legacy (allows all cards in all sets printed except for cards that are banned--due to this, new sets tend to have less of an impact on it) would be getting bored with the game eventually if nothing changed.

And let's suppose that the goal in the end is not to make the game fun or better, but to just make money, as you claim. Do you know what makes money? Making the game fun or better! You might as well dismiss media in general by this argument you're trying to advance. Television? Their goal isn't to make a show people want to watch, it's to make money. Oh wait, the way to make money is to make a show people want to watch. Movies? Their goal isn't to make a movie people want to watch, it's to make money. Oh wait, the way to make money is to make a movie people want to watch. Books? Their goal isn't to make a story people want to read, it's to make money. Oh wait, the way to make money is to make a book people want to read. And so on.

This is the fallacy I see people often make. "Companies don't care about making a good product; they care about making money!" Even if their only goal is to make money, to succeed in that you have to make a product people like. Thus, even if their one and only goal is to make money, because of that goal they have to make the game fun and better.

Incidentally, I would be remiss to not point out that this is, at best, an argument against Constructed Magic. It has no bearing on Limited.
(to explain to people unfamiliar with the game: Constructed Magic is when you put together a deck from your collection and play it against other people. There are different formats that allow different sets of cards, but the basic point is that you make the deck out of cards you own or borrow. Limited Magic is when people open up a set number of booster packs and make decks using only those cards and use them to play against other people)

I'm a low level player. If Seto Kaiba gives me a suitcase of the rarest best MtG cards on the planet, and you get a random starter's pack, you will never beat me in a million years.
Wrong! It will be far less than a million years. Eventually your luck will simply run out and I will win a game; the best deck in the world can still fall to the dreaded "mulligan to 3" at some point. Not to mention that a deck made just of the rarest best cards would actually be pretty bad, because the best cards are actually not cards that will win you the game, they're cards that will help you win the game. Black Lotus might be broken beyond belief, but without something to cast off of it the card does nothing.

But let's assume your statement is hyperbole, and your argument is really just that someone with the "rarest best cards" would be able to beat someone with just a starter pack. You're missing several important factors here.
1) The "rarest best cards" are things like the Power 9. Those are cards that are rare because they realized early on how overpowered they were and stopped printing them, thus making them harder to get. And of course, there's also that pesky Reserved List that stops them from being reprinted. Though that's a discussion on its own...
2) Considering how much you keep harping on the "they're making money!" it's interesting to note that Wizards of the Coast actually makes no money off those cards. Something like a Black Lotus might be worth a ridiculous amount of money, but Wizards of the Coast makes no money from that. Not even indirectly by selling booster packs, because Black Lotus hasn't been in a booster pack they've sold for nearly two decades.
3) These "rarest best cards" tend to be playable only in Vintage (and are restricted to 1-ofs in that format). In anything else they're useless. Go ahead, get all the Black Lotuses you want, I'll still win any game in Standard because you lose due to not having a legal deck. This is especially pertinent because you mention a starter deck, which are generally made for Standard.

Now you're conflating things. I had already said the basic game design of Magic is great. So ofc it has fun strats that are rewarding to see come to fruition during a match. I had already said TCG/CCG can be fun. Problem is it all depends on the motives of the creator. With "impure" motives, a game that was great in design when it was born, will slowly be corrupted until it is an unplayable mess for ppl who aren't interested in falling for the Skinner's Box scheme.So you're back again to the issue that it making money (the motive) is bad, even though you said right in your first paragraph that the real issue was whether it was a fun activity, which when you get down to it has nothing to do with that.

I also highly question whether trying to make money off of something is somehow an "impure" motivation, but I suppose that's a separate issue.

You are right Magic the Gathering has a very strong core, and currently card power is a bit high, but that is not the games fault, that is the lead Developer who admitted he is a spike player, and even with him we do rarely get a format breaking card, the only two I can think of are Jace 2 and Archbound Ravenger.
Who is lead developer right now? If you're talking about Mark Rosewater, he's lead designer, meaning he has very little to do with the actual power level of cards.

MLai

2013-12-22, 12:25 AM

If Seto Kaiba gave you a suitcase with 4 copies of the top 10 cards in the game (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/arcana/432), you will lose to a random starter deck.
Those are not the type of cards I'm thinking of when I said "powerful cards."
I'm sure those cards have lots of flexibility when used with good card combos/strats, though. But ofc if you just give me a bunch of "good" mox cards and nothing else, I can't do anything with them.

Even if you were given the current top deck in the Constructed format, chances are you'd still lose to a well designed and well played 100 dollar deck simply because you'd have limited knowledge of how your deck works.
I said I'm a low level player, in that I mainly mess around with MtG Duels Of The Planeswalkers PC games and custom decks mods ppl make for those games. I do know how the game works. Gimme a powerful deck and I do know what strats it's supposed to use.
Also it says something that $100 nets you a deck of small cardboard that's considered basic, excluding the other cards (and the money you spent) that are trimmed away to give you this final deck of $100.

Bucky

2013-12-22, 12:36 AM

MTG has a pretty good game buried under the card acquisition metagame junk. But here are some things that shouldn't happen in a healthy game:

*I am forced to abandon my favorite Standard deck because they printed a Mythic that made it top tier, which I cannot afford a playset of.
*A large number of cards are designed to have a roughly 0% chance of ever being played in a serious Constructed deck. As far as I know, this includes every single common creature that cost 4 or more mana printed between M10 and M14. (Theros' Gray Merchant of Asphodel is the only recent exception).
*Primeval Titan and Yavimaya Wurm were in the same set. Yavimaya Wurm is either an idiot check or a wallet check.

MLai

2013-12-22, 12:48 AM

If you continue trying to argue with me while misrepresenting (or not understanding) what I explicitly say, this will be my last reply to you here. Also, try to be calmer. I'm not in the mood for a shouting match atm.

Your argument was that it was not a “good game” because Wizards of the Coast uses it to make money. My point was that a whole lot of games are used to make money, so claiming Magic is not a good game on that basis is absurd. Even something like Chess is used to make money, even if it’s not proprietary.
Making money is fine. The point is if you create a game with the expressed purpose of making money from it, rather than making a good game. Then objective drift is inherent in the system.
Ofc, in order to make money you'd first try to make a good game that is fun, so ppl will actually pay for it. That's why "the core of MtG is strong." But in order to make even more money, you will incorporate things like Skinner's Box, you will continue to make more and more cards for it, with some cards being redundant in everything except less-cost-more-power, you will institute power creep just slow enough so that ppl don't quit all at once in disgust, etc.
You are not doing those things to your game's strong core in order to make the game better... you're doing those things to make more money.
Perhaps your game's core is so strong that it can weather the small deleterious effects of those things you do. But over time the accumulated effects take a toll.
Therefore, nothing I said disproves my own claims.

And you know what? I think that if they did just stop releasing new sets, people would lose interest in the game and quit because of it becoming static.
While this is true, it is not a prerequisite to making a good game. A game can be bad or good whether or not it's dynamic. I never said it's a bad game because it's dynamic; I said it's bad because the dynamicism is predicated on the player shelling out more money to "keep up."

This is the fallacy I see people often make. "Companies don't care about making a good product; they care about making money!" Even if their only goal is to make money, to succeed in that you have to make a product people like. Thus, even if their one and only goal is to make money, because of that goal they have to make the game fun and better.
This is the fallacy. Just take a look a threads discussing "Why don't companies sell to women?" and you know this is untrue. Companies voluntarily do dumb things that hurt its own profits just because. Often, in order to compensate, they hurt the situation even more with marketing deluge trying to convince the consumers that the lower-quality product is what they should actually want/accept.

Incidentally, I would be remiss to not point out that this is, at best, an argument against Constructed Magic. It has no bearing on Limited.
I agree that when you take individual purchasing power out of the equation, MtG is a good game that's predicated on skill/luck.
Which is basically the same as saying if WotC's main goal isn't milking money, then MtG is a great game with a strong core.

NeoVid

2013-12-22, 03:53 AM

In my case, the more seriously I have to take a game, the less fun I have. I've only played in competitive events a handful of times, because I prefer fun over stress. The problem comes when I go up against a competitive player in a game where I'm not good enough to make up the difference.

A big example is a principle I've applied since I first played Street Fighter 2 in the arcade: I figured out a nearly inescapable chain with Blanka that would do 100% damage to most characters. After I tried it out a few times, my decision was, "I'm never using this against another player." Unfortunately, I have no way of keeping my matches limited to other players with the same mindset. Last time I played a fighter online, I was in one match that consisted of my using one poke, then getting trapped in a 168-hit combo and losing. All I could think was, "What's the point of that? My opponent would have had the same gameplay experience against a training dummy."

However, he is talking about GOOD games (such as multiplayer fighting games) which thrive on balanced competition where only player skill should matter. The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game; it's a vehicle for WotC to print and sell ever more cards in order to keep the cash flow coming in. There is no point where WotC would say "We got this game to a perfect equilibrium now, this game is now at a perfect balance of fun vs skill; let's stop making more cards which might upset this."

Man, I can't tell you how happy I am to have another logical reason that I can claim Illuminati New World Order is the greatest CCG ever. No new cards for a decade, but you can still get boxed sets with one copy of every card ever printed, including the promos.

ryuplaneswalker

2013-12-22, 04:32 AM

Who is lead developer right now? If you're talking about Mark Rosewater, he's lead designer, meaning he has very little to do with the actual power level of cards.

He however points the direction and has final say in what goes down, he makes many major design choices, I remember a year or two ago reading a series of articles he did explaining some of his positions about possible mechanics changes he was thinking about.

Also @Bucky many of those underpowered creatures are there for limited, also Mythic rares are rarely more expensive than a rare of similar power, where a good chunk of that 100 Dollar deck comes from is the rare lands, I do fully agree that rare lands have become utterly ridiculous in the past few years, since they make a set of Rare Dual Color lands in every Block now.

Knaight

2013-12-22, 04:50 AM

While I'm not disputing the assessment of WotC's business model, I believe it should be pointed out that they don't make a penny off the secondary card market which is where all the inflated value comes from.

They don't make a penny directly, but it's not like none of the money people make selling the rarer cards for ludicrous sums goes into buying more cards. The secondary market certainly shouldn't be treated as a full loss for WotC.

Brother Oni

2013-12-22, 05:12 AM

Also it says something that $100 nets you a deck of small cardboard that's considered basic, excluding the other cards (and the money you spent) that are trimmed away to give you this final deck of $100.

So play the very popular Pauper format then, which is only common rarity cards.

Boiling it down to a deck of small cardboard isn't a very good argument, given that you're typing this in on something consisting of a couple handfuls of sand.

They don't make a penny directly, but it's not like none of the money people make selling the rarer cards for ludicrous sums goes into buying more cards. The secondary market certainly shouldn't be treated as a full loss for WotC.

I agree that it shouldn't be counted as a full loss, but their revenue from the secondary market is still limited even when they try to sell directly - compare the various From the Vaults sets MRP to what they actually sold for.

MLai

2013-12-22, 06:42 AM

A big example is a principle I've applied since I first played Street Fighter 2 in the arcade: I figured out a nearly inescapable chain with Blanka that would do 100% damage to most characters.
If that's true, then you must be talking about the original SF2 which is buggier than subsequent editions.
For original Blanka, the easiest abuse was standing Medium Punch (Blanka 2-hit headbutts) and then simply walking forward and press Hard Punch (Blanka chews opponent's face off). Inescapable.

Last time I played a fighter online, I was in one match that consisted of my using one poke, then getting trapped in a 168-hit combo and losing. All I could think was, "What's the point of that? My opponent would have had the same gameplay experience against a training dummy."
168-hit combo? I have no idea what possible Capcom game this could be. Umm, MvC3?

So play the very popular Pauper format then, which is only common rarity cards..
Again, MtG game has a strong core, so if you take purchasing power out of the equation, and also limit the game to the sane portion of cards, then the game is VERY fun because it's all down to skill/luck.
You have no idea how many hours I sunk into Duels Of The Planeswalkers. And that's a neutered a version of MtG, not even the full play experience.
I was answering the OP who said the competitive aspect wasn't fun. The competitive aspect very much involves how much money you're willing to spend. Given his "I play for fun" mindset it's obvious he probably didn't spend enough.

Lheticus

2013-12-22, 07:31 AM

I think the best advice I can give you is that you should separate your practice from your competition.

In practice, you are trying to learn something; you may even be learning a style that seams weak just in case some of it turns out to be useful, and it doesn't matter how often you lose on the way.

In competitive mode, forget issues of 'play style' and do whatever is most likely to win, given what you have learned in practice mode.

Wow, you've rather missed my point here, I think. See, for me to have fun with a game, I've got to play it the way I want to play it, or at least play it in a way that greatly resembles the way I'd want to play it if I had total freedom to play it however I wanted. If I abandon that and "do whatever is most likely to win", the game becomes not fun for me. And if the game becomes not fun for me, the entire purpose of my "playing" a "game" is utterly defeated, and well, I stop playing it.

On another note, I was rather dismayed when I saw this thread turning into an incensing MtG debate--it seems to be cooling down now, which is good, but if it heats up again I will have a desire to figure out how to get this thread locked. I, as a person, support rational, calm discussion to resolve issues, NOT emotionally charged hostilities, which briefly, this thread seemed to be headed towards before it cooled down.

Keep yo tits calmed, ppls.

Brother Oni

2013-12-22, 07:52 AM

You have no idea how many hours I sunk into Duels Of The Planeswalkers.

Steam says 130hrs on DotP 2012 and 230hrs on DotP2013 (what no DotP 2014? :smalltongue:).

I was answering the OP who said the competitive aspect wasn't fun.
The competitive aspect very much involves how much money you're willing to spend. Given his "I play for fun" mindset it's obvious he probably didn't spend enough.

With regard to the first statement, since fun is so subjective, it's hard to dispute. For example, I would find going up against a black belt in free sparring fun, even though I know I'd get beaten thoroughly since I would learn from the experience.
Remove the learning element though and I can see why people would find competitive play not fun.

I would disagree with the last two points as Limited tournaments are fixed entry fee where luck of card pool and play skill are the key elements to victory.
Draft tournaments lower the luck element even further since you pick what cards you want out of a limited pool.

Returning back to the original post, what it might be is that his "I play for fun" mindset is holding him back from improving his gameplay, as the linked article indicates.

Someone who does martial arts primarily for fitness is not going to enjoy competitive fighting or even sparring, but they should acknowledge that people interested in competitive fighting are going to improve faster than they will and eventually, matching the them up is going to result in a massive skill disparity.
They then have two choices really - carry on as before and don't spar with the competitive lot* or change their mindset and improve their abilities.
Doing the first and saying that the competitive elements are ruining martial arts is not particularly constructive.

*Ideally the competitive lot should tone it down for opponents of lesser skill in casual sparring, but this doesn't always happen.

MLai

2013-12-22, 10:42 AM

Steam says 130hrs on DotP 2012 and 230hrs on DotP2013 (what no DotP 2014? :smalltongue:).
OMG nowhere to hide my shame.
It's more than that, even. When I use mods I have to play it outside of Steam so it loads.

I would disagree with the last two points as Limited tournaments are fixed entry fee where luck of card pool and play skill are the key elements to victory.
Draft tournaments lower the luck element even further since you pick what cards you want out of a limited pool.
If there are actual MtG tournaments where they sidestep the issues I listed via communal card pools of mundane rarity, then yeah that should be the type of competitive MtG the OP could enjoy.

Returning back to the original post, what it might be is that his "I play for fun" mindset is holding him back from improving his gameplay, as the linked article indicates.
Only if "play to win, because it's fun" involves the following:
(1) The deciding factor is skill. Luck can play a part but shouldn't be overriding.
(2) The competitors start off on equal footing in terms of assets.

That's why I posted the link but with the disclaimer that it doesn't apply to most commercial TCG/CCG (without special house rules, that is).

Bucky

2013-12-22, 12:27 PM

See, for me to have fun with a game, I've got to play it the way I want to play it, or at least play it in a way that greatly resembles the way I'd want to play it if I had total freedom to play it however I wanted. If I abandon that and "do whatever is most likely to win", the game becomes not fun for me.

Then play with the practice mentality all the time.

Lord Seth

2013-12-22, 01:12 PM

Making money is fine. The point is if you create a game with the expressed purpose of making money from it, rather than making a good game. Then objective drift is inherent in the system.
Ofc, in order to make money you'd first try to make a good game that is fun, so ppl will actually pay for it. That's why "the core of MtG is strong." But in order to make even more money, you will incorporate things like Skinner's Box, you will continue to make more and more cards for it, with some cards being redundant in everything except less-cost-more-power, you will institute power creep just slow enough so that ppl don't quit all at once in disgust, etc.All right, you claim I misrepresent you. So I will try to, with quotations of your own, evaluate what you are saying.

First, here is your definition of a good game.
"The fundamental definition of a "good game" is not that it must sell, but that it is a fun activity."

Literally what you said is that the definition of a good game is that it is a fun activity. So in this case, good=fun. In other words, a good game is a fun game. I'm going by exactly what you said in this interpretation. This point is absolutely critical for everything else.

Now, the argument you have tried to advance is that Magic is not a good game. Again, direct quote:
"The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game"

So you are therefore right there saying, in line with your other note, that Magic is not a fun game. That is, literally, what you are saying based on your statements. There is no misrepresentation here.

Yet in the quoted text, you state:
"Ofc, in order to make money you'd first try to make a good game that is fun, so ppl will actually pay for it. That's why "the core of MtG is strong.""

So, again going by exactly what you said, you are saying that because people will actually pay for Magic, it is therefore a good game that is fun. This contradicts your claim that it is not a good game because you just admitted it is fun, at least for them.

You are not doing those things to your game's strong core in order to make the game better... you're doing those things to make more money.Again, I see motivation as unimportant. What actually happens is important. If what they're doing to make money works for the game, by all means do it.

I feel the game being dynamic is a major strength. The fact that this state is due to them wanting to make more sets for people to buy is, in my view, irrelevant to the issue. Again: Your claim is whether the game is fun or not. A company's motivations do not make a game more or less fun. The actions those motivations lead to may cause such a thing, but you must do a more reasonable concentration on the actions rather than the motivations, which is what you appear to be focusing on.[/I]

Perhaps your game's core is so strong that it can weather the small deleterious effects of those things you do. But over time the accumulated effects take a toll.
It is interesting you make this claim, considering the fact that Magic: the Gathering has been booming over the last few years, continually growing in popularity. Right now I believe it's the most popular it's ever been.

Therefore, nothing I said disproves my own claims.
Except as I pointed out in the earlier portion, using your own quotes, you are admitting that Magic is fun, yet claiming it is not and that makes it not a "good" game. This seems a fairly obvious contradiction to me.

While this is true, it is not a prerequisite to making a good game. A game can be bad or good whether or not it's dynamic. I never said it's a bad game because it's dynamic; I said it's bad because the dynamicism is predicated on the player shelling out more money to "keep up."
And therein lies your problem. You are making two arguments:
1) A good game is defined as being a game that is fun.
2) Magic is not a good game because Wizards of the Coast keeps trying to make money from players.

There is not a logical connection between "Wizards of the Coast is continually making money from Magic" and "Magic is not fun." Even accepting that the way they make money from Magic is somehow different from all the other products/games companies try to make money off of, that does not make it not fun. Motivations behind making a game are not something that makes a game fun or not fun.

This is the fallacy. Just take a look a threads discussing "Why don't companies sell to women?" and you know this is untrue. Companies voluntarily do dumb things that hurt its own profits just because. Often, in order to compensate, they hurt the situation even more with marketing deluge trying to convince the consumers that the lower-quality product is what they should actually want/accept.
You're actually arguing something a bit different here. I said that in order to make money, companies must make a product people want to buy. You're just arguing that companies screw up and do stuff that makes them cost money by making things people don’t want to buy. That's a separate issue. Whether or not they succeed in making that good product is a completely separate issue from the fact that's their inherent goal.

There have been people who have made games with no goal of making money. They can, just as easily as a company that makes a game for a profit, screw up the game with a new release because they made a dumb decision that the players didn't like.

I agree that when you take individual purchasing power out of the equation, MtG is a good game that's predicated on skill/luck.
I actually find it questionable whether or not the cost of Magic is in fact a part of the game itself; certainly, one must buy/trade for cards in order to play, but this fact seems to be more on the exterior of the game. Kind of how in order to play a fighting game, you have to actually have the platform and the game for it.

Though even ignoring that, I find that the requirement to "buy in" to win is frequently overstated. Not to say it makes no difference, but the difference is often surprisingly small. The reason it's important for people in the big tournaments is that over the course of 6+ rounds those small differences can add up to make them lose a match they might have otherwise won.

Which is basically the same as saying if WotC's main goal isn't milking money, then MtG is a great game with a strong core.But again you are forcing the motivations into the center stage rather than a real examination of the actions due to said motivations as well as holding up an alleged flaw that I find questionable to actually be used in regards to whether the game is good or not.

You keep harping on goals and motivations, but you have not really shown how this somehow makes the game bad. You have shown how this makes the game dynamic, but have not shown why it being dynamic is bad (in fact, you have indicated that being dynamic is not bad), only that perhaps the motivation for it being dynamic is bad. But that's not an argument behind the game itself being bad, nor does it in any way somehow not make it fun, which is problematic because you stated that was the whole definition of whether it was good or not.

He however points the direction and has final say in what goes down, he makes many major design choices, I remember a year or two ago reading a series of articles he did explaining some of his positions about possible mechanics changes he was thinking about.Actually, he does not have the final say in what goes down. If you look at stuff on his tumblr, you'll quickly discover there's a lot of stuff that happened that he was either against or had nothing to do with. More importantly, he has essentially nothing to do with development for the most part (one exception being Rise of the Eldrazi, where he was on the development team--but not lead developer). As he mentioned once, design is what decides they want a common vanilla counterspell in the set. Development is what decides if that card will be costed UU (Counterspell) or 1UU (Cancel). I'm sure he's also in general agreement with development, but he doesn't have much to do with it. I'm not disputing the big impact he has on design--but again, he doesn't have the final say in what goes down, or else Hornet Sting wouldn't have been printed--but he doesn't do much in regards to development.

Mark Rosewater really gets credited/blamed for a lot of stuff he doesn't really have much to do with due to him being such the public face of Magic.

Lord Seth

2013-12-22, 01:51 PM

Now, to post something non-Magic-related, I should get back to the original topic...

Personally, when I'm playing a fighting game, a card game, or ANY game under the sun, I don't mind losing as long as I put up a fight and made it interesting. But with my play style, too often, I run into an instance where the way I *want* to play is a way that is invariably going to lose, and furthermore I don't even put up a fight, when playing at any definition of a competitive level. This is because all "competitive" games that I know of have a certain few play styles that, done properly, will trump all others. Am I the only one who has a problem with this? A problem with the lack of more than a modicum of variety at the truly competitive levels of gaming, a problem with noobs meandering, possibly due to naivete, possibly because they simply do not really get to play for the most part otherwise, into these shark infested waters and getting torn to pieces?
I think the problem here is that when you turn competitive for any game--TCG, video game, board game--is that by its very nature only a few play styles that will trump all others.

Let's look at Chess. Chess is often held up as the pinnacle of a skill-based game. After all, once a game starts, there is no luck involved and everything comes down to the skill of the players during that game. Additionally, each player starts equally with the same pieces and the same position. The only real luck in Chess is who goes first. But if you're trying to play Chess competitively, you're much more constrained in what you can do. There are 20 moves that can start a game of Chess. Most of them are worthless and only a few are ones a professional player would seriously consider. If your idea of fun is to get your Rooks out quickly, you're not going to do very well because moves like 1. a4 or 1. h4 are weak moves--unless you're Magnus Carlsen playing against Teimour Radjabov.

But even during the course of the game, this takes effect. Here's a point Jeremy Silman makes in How to Reassess Your Chess:
"From class 'E' to Master, I get blank stares when asking what plan they had in mind in a particular position. Usually their choice of plan (if they have any plan at all) is based on emotional rather than scientific considerations. By emotional I mean that the typical player does what he feels like doing rather than what the board wants him to do. If you want to be successful, you have to base your plans on specific criteria on the board, not on your mood at any given time!"

Emphasis original. To win a game of Chess, you have to ignore what you might want to play and instead play what would be the best move. There is certainly some wiggle room for what would be a better move based on play style (e.g. two moves can be considered equally good but one leads to a kind of game you feel you are better at), but unless your preferred play style is "make the best move every single turn" then you're not going to be able to be a competitive Chess player while sticking to a particular style.

And we're talking about a game that is almost entirely skill-based (again, the only real "luck" in Chess is who gets to play first). Not only that, as I noted, Chess is also extremely balanced; each side starts with the same position and the same pieces. Despite that, all you just said you had issues with competitive gaming seem to apply to Chess as well. The simple fact is, if you play competitively in any game, the rules change considerably. Most strategies/characters/moves/etc. get pushed away because they can't compete with the ones that end up being the best. You have to throw away ideas of playing a particular strategy because you want to and have to select strategies based on which ones are the best. If you're lucky there may be an intersection, but that doesn't undermine the premise.

Basically, if you want to play competitively in a game, then you have to accept that your pet strategies have a high chance of being invalidated and you have to do what are the best strategies, not necessarily the ones you find the most fun.

Lheticus

2013-12-22, 03:07 PM

Now, to post something non-Magic-related, I should get back to the original topic...

(sic)

Basically, if you want to play competitively in a game, then you have to accept that your pet strategies have a high chance of being invalidated and you have to do what are the best strategies, not necessarily the ones you find the most fun.

Indeed...that statement summarizes my problem impeccably. But see...here's thing thing about stuff like that. Whenever I see a "way things are" like that that I have a genuine problem with...I try NEVER to see it as a "way things always will be". From this discussion and another I've had elsewhere on the web, while they may not be as horrific as I thought, there clearly are problems that prevent entry to competitive levels of gaming for a lot of gamers. I'm glad...I've taken a few first measures at a personal attempt to fix this, and I'd be severely embarrassed to fix something that does not need to be improved upon. If anyone from this thread who has knowledge in such gaming design has had their interests piqued by this...PM me and we can meet in a chatroom or correspond over email or something, to discuss a certain TCG that I'm developing that is essentially how I plan to fix this.

CarpeGuitarrem

2013-12-22, 03:54 PM

I once had an idea for magic the gathering online (wouldn't work so well with paper cards...)

You and your opponent pick 40 cards from your mtgo collection and put them forward. Preferably you stick to 1 or 2 colors agreed upon in advance. Then you do a coin flip and you draft 1 at a time out of the combined pool of 80 cards a new pool of 40 cards. Then you get to pick 22 lands of your choice from an automatically generated separate pool of basic lands (you don't bring these). Thus you end up with 62 cards which are a combination of your opponents cards and your own. By it's nature it would be difficult for an opponent to rig the draft and vice versa. A degree of skill is involved as you must account for both your own cards and those of your opponent. The resulting match should be quite interesting. Since ownership is handled by mtgo you don't have a messy sorting process after the match. The one who wins the flip can choose to draft first in the draft or go first in the match.

The reason I thought of this is because people rigged the pauper format with all the best cards they could get their hands on. The only option was the f2p format where people were limited to certain decks. Thus I thought of this where it is balanced by the players themselves.
It's actually a real thing. :smallsmile: It's called a Cube Draft, and I'm a big fan of it, for exactly the reasons you state: it minimizes the money advantage by limiting the card supply. It's also a neat way to have a draft with a unique meta (because your pool is very limited) without having to buy new draft packs.

MLai

2013-12-22, 09:44 PM

First, here is your definition of a good game.
"The fundamental definition of a "good game" is not that it must sell, but that it is a fun activity."
Literally what you said is that the definition of a good game is that it is a fun activity. So in this case, good=fun.

Now, the argument you have tried to advance is that Magic is not a good game. Again, direct quote:
"The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game"
So far so good.

So, again going by exactly what you said, you are saying that because people will actually pay for Magic, it is therefore a good game that is fun. This contradicts your claim that it is not a good game because you just admitted it is fun, at least for them.
Starting from here is where you're trying to trip me up by taking my posts apart one sentence at a time. When I reply to ppl's posts, I reply to their entire post, not by separating them into discrete statements. Because I'm trying to understand their position not just trying to win an argument.

If you read and comprehend all of my posts in this thread, you would have understood that what I was saying was:
1. Magic is not a good game.
2. But if I agree it has a strong core, and is fun, why do I say it's not a good game??
3. Because even though it started out as a strong core, its continuing mission is to make money as the prime directive. THAT is why it's not a good game NOW.
4. But why does motivation matter? Only actions should matter.
5. Exactly. And look at all the actions surrounding the competitive play of MtG (I already described them in previous threads, as have other posters). Those actions stem from the primary motivation of making money, with the motivation of making the strong core better being secondary.

It is interesting you make this claim, considering the fact that Magic: the Gathering has been booming over the last few years, continually growing in popularity. Right now I believe it's the most popular it's ever been.
Monopoly is exponentially more popular. Does that mean it's miles above MtG as a game?

There is not a logical connection between "Wizards of the Coast is continually making money from Magic" and "Magic is not fun."
I actually find it questionable whether or not the cost of Magic is in fact a part of the game itself; certainly, one must buy/trade for cards in order to play, but this fact seems to be more on the exterior of the game. Kind of how in order to play a fighting game, you have to actually have the platform and the game for it.
My premise was that when part of being "more competitive" at a particular game requires that you be richer than the other player, even if that's not the entire requirement (you still need skill/luck while playing, ofc)... it makes that "competitive aspect" unsavory for MANY ppl.
But it doesn't apply to EVERYone. For other ppl, the financial investment makes the game more fun for them. It seems to for you.
But I wasn't addressing you. I was addressing the OP who found the competitive aspect of MtG not fun.

This doesn't apply to just MtG. For example, no self-respecting multiplayer RTS game makes payable DLCs affect online MP gameplay, they would either be only skins or SP-only.
The same principle applies to MtG, yet you're saying it's part of the game. So why isn't it part of the game that you must pay $5 (to use in a slot machine mini-game for a chance) to buy the Ultralisk/ Thor/ Mothership before you can use them in MP?

But see...here's thing thing about stuff like that. Whenever I see a "way things are" like that that I have a genuine problem with...I try NEVER to see it as a "way things always will be". From this discussion and another I've had elsewhere on the web, while they may not be as horrific as I thought, there clearly are problems that prevent entry to competitive levels of gaming for a lot of gamers..
Search within yourself. If the true reason the competitive aspect of a game is not fun for you is because you don't like the way it plays, then it just means that aspect of it is not a fun game for you, or you just don't like that type of competition in general. For example, you may prefer cooperative games more.

However, if the true reason is because you feel the other player won only because he was richer than you, or just more willing to spend extra money to win at the game not just to "play it and have fun", then that's what I was talking to you originally about.

Imagine if Starcraft 2 only cost $5. Great! You buy it for $5 and play MP online. Then you find out you can only build 2 units. Sure if you're playing against your baby brother, you can win using only 2 unit choices (yay skill). But not against any player equal to you. So you must pay more money to play a slot machine mini-game to have the chance to win more unit choices. Often you win basics units that you already have.

Does that sound like fun?

Rodin

2013-12-22, 10:45 PM

The problem that I have is that most online games don't allow this so-called "practice mode" outside of manually setting up a room and inviting specific people into it.

Let's say I'm playing a fighter online. I find a particular character that I like, with a playstyle that I like, and start playing. I'm reasonably decent, so I win my fair share of games. I'm in the "fun zone".

...But then the system starts ranking me up. Due to win streaks and loss streaks, I will almost never be in the fun zone. The system will auto-rank me upwards to the point where people see the character I'm using and call me a noob. I lose a large number of games in a row, and drop into lower ranks. I'm now facing people far less skilled than my actual skill level, and I get to feel horrible for destroying them and ruining their fun.

There are brief periods in the middle where I pass through the fun zone, but 66% of my games are un-fun from one side or the other.

All the above is why I rarely do competitive online games unless it's done on a random group basis (to level out skill differences between players) and a random character basis (to prevent people deliberately playing the most powerful character in the meta). A good example of this is League of Legends ARAM (All Random All Mid) - large enough pool of players to have a reasonable skill level associatian, randomized characters on a team basis to prevent super-combo shenanigans, and the strategy simplified enough that running an un-optimized build isn't going to raise eyebrows.

Bucky

2013-12-22, 11:33 PM

Basically, if you want to play competitively in a game, then you have to accept that your pet strategies have a high chance of being invalidated and you have to do what are the best strategies, not necessarily the ones you find the most fun.

In the other direction, any game with no bad strategies isn't a very good strategy game. Learning to put together a non-bad strategy is the same thing as learning the strategy part of the game.

At the same time, putting together a good strategy nobody's seen before generally earns you more respect than anything short of winning a major tournament, so there's something to be said for practicing pet strategies.

MLai

2013-12-22, 11:38 PM

The problem that I have is that most online games don't allow this so-called "practice mode" outside of manually setting up a room and inviting specific people into it.
Let's say I'm playing a fighter online. I find a particular character that I like, with a playstyle that I like, and start playing. I'm reasonably decent, so I win my fair share of games. I'm in the "fun zone".
...But then the system starts ranking me up. There are brief periods in the middle where I pass through the fun zone, but 66% of my games are un-fun from one side or the other..
What you're referring to is less about the nature of competitive gaming (it seems you do like human competition), but more about the specific game's balance and the ranking algorithm of the game.

If the game's balance isn't great, then it's going to show its seams once you rise above a threshold of player skill. This happens to all MP games.

Or maybe the game is balanced throughout all tiers of skill, but the gameplay emphasis changes above a certain skill threshold into something you didn't bargain for when you bought the game after trying the demo. That's specific to the game.

If the game doesn't sort player-matching very well, then you're going to get large oscillations between matching noobs and matching superior players. The point of matchmaking algorithms is to strike the "sweet spot (fun zone)" as much as possible based on your win/loss/play data. It also depends on the size of the player pool of the game you're playing.

Bucky

2013-12-23, 12:09 AM

The problem that I have is that most online games don't allow this so-called "practice mode" outside of manually setting up a room and inviting specific people into it.

Let's say I'm playing a fighter online. I find a particular character that I like, with a playstyle that I like, and start playing. I'm reasonably decent, so I win my fair share of games. I'm in the "fun zone".

...But then the system starts ranking me up. Due to win streaks and loss streaks, I will almost never be in the fun zone. The system will auto-rank me upwards to the point where people see the character I'm using and call me a noob. I lose a large number of games in a row, and drop into lower ranks. I'm now facing people far less skilled than my actual skill level, and I get to feel horrible for destroying them and ruining their fun.
There are brief periods in the middle where I pass through the fun zone, but 66% of my games are un-fun from one side or the other.

You can surf the oscillations to some extent. I can vouch for the method of playing lower-tier characters against worse players. Or you can treat the hopeless matches in either direction as "practice mode", using weaker players to hone specific aspects of your execution and stronger players to find holes in your strategies.

The system will auto-rank me upwards to the point where people see the character I'm using and call me a noob.

I have to call this out specifically. If a character is missing basic tools it needs to function at all, yeah, you're a newb for playing it and a bit of online research should be able to confirm it. Anything short of that... the sorts of players who call you a noob for playing an unpopular character are the sorts who don't understand what that character can do.

gooddragon1

2013-12-23, 01:54 AM

It's actually a real thing. :smallsmile: It's called a Cube Draft, and I'm a big fan of it, for exactly the reasons you state: it minimizes the money advantage by limiting the card supply. It's also a neat way to have a draft with a unique meta (because your pool is very limited) without having to buy new draft packs.

Much smaller than a cube actually. And it's both players bringing 40 rather than 1 player bringing 360. I suggest it for mtgo because then the two players can just pick a small sample of their cards and draft against each other.

Lord Seth

2013-12-23, 02:50 AM

For the sake of brevity, I shall be skipping over some portions...

If you read and comprehend all of my posts in this thread, you would have understood that what I was saying was:
1. Magic is not a good game.
2. But if I agree it has a strong core, and is fun, why do I say it's not a good game??
3. Because even though it started out as a strong core, its continuing mission is to make money as the prime directive. THAT is why it's not a good game NOW.
4. But why does motivation matter? Only actions should matter.
5. Exactly. And look at all the actions surrounding the competitive play of MtG (I already described them in previous threads, as have other posters). Those actions stem from the primary motivation of making money, with the motivation of making the strong core better being secondary.Then by all means, describe them. So far you really have not, you've simply claimed that the goal of making money has been screwing it up but haven't explained why. You need to explain what these issues with competitive play actually are and why they stem from the money motivation and not, say, R&D just slipping up and missing something. While I thought Avacyn Restored's Limited environment was bad, I don't think money motivation was the reason for them screwing it up. Tolarian Academy may have been ridiculously dominant back in the day, but I hold that as a problem of inadequate playtesting, not anything to do with money.

Monopoly is exponentially more popular. Does that mean it's miles above MtG as a game?
Well, first of all, Monopoly isn't even in the same genre as Magic: the Gathering, so such a comparison is already a bit moot. But more importantly, that's missing the point. You were claiming that these factors would wear down Magic and make it less fun, but it's become more popular than ever. The point was not to compare Magic to other games--especially not games that aren't even the same genre!--but to compare Magic to Magic itself.

My premise was that when part of being "more competitive" at a particular game requires that you be richer than the other player, even if that's not the entire requirement (you still need skill/luck while playing, ofc)...
Except you're wrong. Being more competitive at Magic does not require you be richer than the other player. Indeed, some of the more expensive decks actually have terrible matchups against some of the cheaper ones. For example, Jund is one of the most expensive decks in Modern right now. It also falls hard--very hard--to Red Deck Wins, one of the cheapest.

it makes that "competitive aspect" unsavory for MANY ppl.
But it doesn't apply to EVERYone. For other ppl, the financial investment makes the game more fun for them. It seems to for you.It actually doesn't make it more fun for me. However, even ignoring the fact that the financial investment is likely required to keep the game alive, I don't say it's a bad game because of it.

But I wasn't addressing you. I was addressing the OP who found the competitive aspect of MtG not fun.But you did not say that. You claimed it was not a good game. You didn't say "it's not a good game for someone like you." You made a far more objective statement.

This doesn't apply to just MtG. For example, no self-respecting multiplayer RTS game makes payable DLCs affect online MP gameplay, they would either be only skins or SP-only.I don't play multiplayer RTS's so I apologize, but I actually have no real idea what you're talking about here.

The same principle applies to MtG, yet you're saying it's part of the game.
How does the same principle apply? These are quite different kinds of games. This is kind of like saying "no Chess tournament would add a random factor to the game. The same principle applies to MtG, so why do they have a luck factor?" Different kinds of games. Though admittedly, my lack of familiarity with what you're talking about makes this harder to really discuss.

So why isn't it part of the game that you must pay $5 (to use in a slot machine mini-game for a chance) to buy the Ultralisk/ Thor/ Mothership before you can use them in MP?I assume this is supposed to be a booster pack analogy. First, I assume we're looking at it from a competitive angle, and not just "someone buys a few booster packs and has fun with friends." I was a lot less concerned with the quality of the cards I had back when I was just playing with my brother and a random other friend I knew.

Now, there are a few issues with this analogy. One is that booster packs really top out at $4, and my local store sells them for $3.50. Though that's pedantic, I'll admit.

The problem there is that if you have any desire to be competitive in regards to Magic, you don't get your cards by just buying booster packs and hoping you get something you want. That's a remarkably inefficient way of getting them; that's how you would go about getting cards if you're a casual player who just wants some random cards to make a deck with to play against other people who only have a few random cards to make a deck with. And, of course, if it's cards from an older (out of Standard) set, you're definitely not going the booster pack route. The far more efficient--and in fact, cheaper--is just to find someone who's selling the cards as singles and buy it from them.

But even if you don't want to go the route of just buying them all as singles, the smart thing to do is to play some Limited formats (which allows you to get a lot more fun for your money and, if you're good, get more boosters for the price you pay than if you had just bought them outright), then use the cards you opened/won to exchange for the stuff you want for a constructed format. It's easy to forget, but the T in TCG does stand for Trading.

MLai

2013-12-23, 03:57 AM

Then by all means, describe them. So far you really have not, you've simply claimed that the goal of making money has been screwing it up but haven't explained why. You need to explain what
(1) Sorry there's a typo. I meant "as discussed in previous posts in this thread by others", not "as discussed in previous threads." So if you want specific examples to tear open, go read those and talk it out with the relevant posters.
(2) As for me, I have no interest in debating MtG specifics further. I've stated my opinion. Some other posters agreed with me. I'm sure this is not some new controversial gripe never discussed before in MtG circles. You can go chase up specific examples with ppl who provided them in this thread.

The point was not to compare Magic to other games--especially not games that aren't even the same genre!--but to compare Magic to Magic itself.
No the point was you said it was popular (therefore it must be good). I was pointing out that popularity doesn't equate automatically to game quality/depth.

But you did not say that. You claimed it was not a good game. You didn't say "it's not a good game for someone like you." You made a far more objective statement.
Oh, is that so?
Okay then, here you go: It is my position that based on the grievances I have so far described regarding MtG, I had proposed to the OP that it is not a good game for someone like him (and me). As far as I am concerned, MtG is now a bad game*, and doomed to become a worse game.

*Excluding "house rules" which take the individual card purchasing/trading power out of the equation in a competition.

The problem there is that if you have any desire to be competitive in regards to Magic, you don't get your cards by just buying booster packs and hoping you get something you want. The far more efficient--and in fact, cheaper--is just to find someone who's selling the cards as singles and buy it from them.
I'm not a stranger to the mechanics of trading games. I used to play a tradeable miniatures game. In the end, I blew $2000+ USD on the whole setup. That is with trading + buying boosters (so that I have things to trade) + buying singles. I generally got "good" deals.

I don't regret it as I am an adult and I knew what I was doing. I'm even glad I supported the studio for giving me something I really enjoyed. But I know the milking scheme for what it is, and I wouldn't do it again. Ever.

Edit: The reason the above-mentioned TMG remained a good game was because it was a self-contained limited run, 3 expansions and that was it, no more. Even with that limitation, by the 3rd expansion we could already see clear power creep making some 1st expansion pieces obsolete. But the damage was limited because that was the end.

Brother Oni

2013-12-23, 06:39 AM

This doesn't apply to just MtG. For example, no self-respecting multiplayer RTS game makes payable DLCs affect online MP gameplay, they would either be only skins or SP-only.
The same principle applies to MtG, yet you're saying it's part of the game. So why isn't it part of the game that you must pay $5 (to use in a slot machine mini-game for a chance) to buy the Ultralisk/ Thor/ Mothership before you can use them in MP?

While I agree with your points within a specific range, you are referring only to certain competitive formats of MtG and ignoring the massive secondary market where you're able to buy what you need for those formats.
Proxying cards for casual play has always been available.

With regard to DLC having more than a cosmetic effect on multiplayer, the problem is that the biggest multiplayer RTS has done this: base Starcraft is not compatible with Brood War and I believe it's the same for its sequel and Heart of the Swarm.

Nearly all RTS games have done this to some extent - the only ones I can think of that don't are two Relic ones (Dawn of War and Company of Heroes), neither of which have picked up a competitive following anywhere near the size of Starcraft (although this is more due to game design and mechanics).

You could argue that they're expansions rather than DLC, but for all intents and purposes, expansions are just big DLC packs by a different name.

McDouggal

2013-12-23, 07:23 AM

I am a mostly casual MTG player, although I haven't bought a single card since Avacyn Restored since I was massively P.O'ed at the amount of competitiveness. This was 3 years into the hobby. At year 2, the only cardshop in town that still had casual nights went out of business (owner was 75, health failing).

I started as a Timmy. I loved putting down big numbers. I very quickly evolved into a Johnny-I loved making decklists, refining them, then tossing them out because I had a new, better idea.

The decks that I used for competitive events were a Mass Polymorph deck(Eldrazi spawn flip into 2-3 Massacre Wurm & Terastodon), a succession of crappy ideas that I threw together because I could, then my unequivocally best deck, an infect combo deck. It hinged on an Avacyn enchantment that gave creatures +3/+3 when they were the target of a spell until end of turn. It was pretty decent, letting me place 3rd twice. However, I really wanted (to the point of need) three more Inkmoth Nexuses. There was an opponent the second time i placed 3rd who came in with the exact same decklist, EXCEPT IT HAD A PLAYSET OF THAT LAND in place of 2 islands and the forests. I won the roll. Had to mulligan to 5 (creaturescrew followed my landflood), lost. He T 4'd me with an 10/10 Inkmoth Nexus.

I won the next one since he wasn't expecting me to Invisible Stalker into a next turn enchant followed by 3 Gut Shots.

I lost the next one due to him getting his combo off before i could get mine, since i had the draw.

I blame (somewhat irrationally) my lack of Nexi for losing that series. Usually, when those two decks went against each other, the one that wins the roll wins the series. But if I'd had the Nexii to increase consistency...

I haven't made a decklist since i finished my liquimetal coating deck about a month later. (that deck, BTW, 2-0'ed a legacy elves deck. I'm moderately proud of that.) the feeling of discouragement from the loss to the deck that was exactly the same except $80 more expensive for the <redacted> Inkmoth Nexuses winning the tourney was absolute <redacted>.

I don't think that as long as Magic has this sort of pay to win setup that we'll see competitive Magic make a return to TV. The barrier to entry for casual players to play competitively is ridiculously high, and lord help you if you want to get into a format other than Standard.

I have higher hopes for ESports though. Simply put, even when Magic was my major habit, i didn't care about the pro scene. It was simply out of reach for me, meaning that it was pointless to care about. I wasn't going to spend $400 on ordering a deck that would actually be competitive at that level. Whereas, when i look at LOL or Starcraft II, I can go play either of those right now without paying money (other than the initial purchase cost of Starcraft, of course). The delineation of skill vs. money is very clear. The only thing that money impacts is what hardware you play with. The only big difference between you and the pros is skill, so long as your hardware is somewhat up to date. It's a lot easier for me to care about the pro scene (go CLG!) in esports as compared to a TCG.

Brother Oni

2013-12-23, 08:06 AM

The only big difference between you and the pros is skill, so long as your hardware is somewhat up to date.

The only problem with Esports is that outside of the major tournaments where all the competitors are in the same physical location, your latency to the server can have a major effect (for something like a FPS, this would be critical).

After a certain point of hardware investment, the only way to reduce your latency is by physically moving closer to the server and switching from where you're used to a 50ms delay to a 180+ms delay* can be catastrophic when the finest margins of skill separate you from your opponent.

*Numbers are examples based on my latency from the EU West/US LoL servers.

MLai

2013-12-23, 09:47 AM

With regard to DLC having more than a cosmetic effect on multiplayer, the problem is that the biggest multiplayer RTS has done this: base Starcraft is not compatible with Brood War and I believe it's the same for its sequel and Heart of the Swarm.

Nearly all RTS games have done this to some extent...

You could argue that they're expansions rather than DLC, but for all intents and purposes, expansions are just big DLC packs by a different name.
Actually, the fact that Starcraft vanilla is not compatible with Brood War, or Starcraft 2 vanilla is not compatible with HofS, is a good thing that eliminates pay-to-win.

It means the game forces everyone to be on equal footing. Imagine if you can play against Brood War even though you only have vanilla... the opponent has access to units and techs you do not!

But, if say you like vanilla and you don't like the game changes made in Brood War, you're free to play vanilla against other vanilla players, without some BW player jumping in and ruining the fun for you guys.

So you see, RTS game expansions are the opposite of pay-DLCs.

Brother Oni

2013-12-23, 12:43 PM

So you see, RTS game expansions are the opposite of pay-DLCs.

I see you've neatly snipped my post of the two games that disproves your main point. :smallamused:

That said, I agree with your final statement with the proviso that it should be 'pay-to-win-DLCs'.

MLai

2013-12-23, 06:51 PM

I see you've neatly snipped my post of the two games that disproves your main point. :smallamused:
That said, I agree with your final statement with the proviso that it should be 'pay-to-win-DLCs'.
What? DOW franchise does not allow someone who only owns vanilla, to play with/against someone who has the later expansions. You're thinking of backwards compatibility, that is, what DOW has is:

If you only have say Soulstorm, but the opponent has every game in the franchise including Soulstorm, then you can only use Sisters or Dark Eldar in MP, but he can use any of the 9 armies including Sisters and DE in MP.

This does not impact balance since the armies are made to be balanced against each other (whether or not that's true isn't intrinsic to the game but to developer capability). You are not locked out of any units/techs. You are both still playing "Soulstorm rules." If he doesn't have Soulstorm he can't play you, because that would be unfair to him.

This is the same with CoH.

Bucky

2013-12-23, 09:47 PM

MLai

2013-12-23, 11:15 PM

Interestingly, it's possible for someone with Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty to play someone with the Heart of the Swarm expansion. In this case, the Wings of Liberty player has temporary access to Heart of the Swarm units to maintain a level playing field.
How could that work... unless Blizzard included the new units/code in a big patch distributed to everyone?
That's very brave... modders all over the world would pounce on that patch the second it comes out, in order to rip out the retail HotS extra content.

BeerMug Paladin

2013-12-24, 01:35 AM

On the topic of the original post, I generally have this problem with a lot of competitive games. That's why I tend to only play the single player modes of games that have a multiplayer competitive mode. I generally don't play the multiplayer version of the same games, unless it's some cooperative mode.

Also, generally, multiplayer games that require me to pass a certain threshold of playtime before I am able to enjoy the game are just as bad as tv shows, books, or movies that pull the same thing. If that basic experience is simply not fun, I'm not going to bother trying to 'push' through the time required to make multiplayer an enjoyable experience. There's plenty of other things out there to occupy one's time.

For something like Smash Bros (one of the few competitive games I've played a lot of multiplayer for), I turn on the auto-handicap features. I do it so that my comparatively unskilled friends can have fun with it as well. In that game, I also like the random slipping, the random items and stage hazards, etc...

I've heard that the competitive play players all hate that stuff because it's too random. For me, chaotic insanity is just another part of the fun. Players who request all such things get turned off so it becomes a 'real' game just annoy me. My favorite aspects of the game disappear with those restrictions. It's like competitive challenge is my anti-fun or something.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think for me, that illustrates what my problem with competitive play is. Whatever is 'fun' for me, competitive play usually gets into the way of it. Unexpected randomness seems to be what makes things fun for me, and while competitive games are good at providing it in certain contexts (as humans are better than AI usually), cooperative games usually provide a better environment with randomness in it where the actions of the other player makes the experience dynamic.

Also, there's the benefit of a cooperative game not having a steep barrier of entry for noobs (of which, I am almost certainly going to be in whatever game I play).

Lord Seth

2013-12-24, 01:41 AM

(1) Sorry there's a typo. I meant "as discussed in previous posts in this thread by others", not "as discussed in previous threads." So if you want specific examples to tear open, go read those and talk it out with the relevant posters.
(2) As for me, I have no interest in debating MtG specifics further. I've stated my opinion. Some other posters agreed with me. I'm sure this is not some new controversial gripe never discussed before in MtG circles. You can go chase up specific examples with ppl who provided them in this thread.But the problem is that the examples provided have, by and large, not actually supported your point. You keep complaining that the person who pays more money wins. I have pointed out how this is flat out wrong, even giving an example of a matchup that is extremely in favor of the significantly cheaper deck. There's plenty of decks way more expensive than the ones I play that my deck just stomps, meaning they've basically paid lots more money than me for the privilege of doing worse against my deck.

The bottom line is you keep asserting that Magic's problems stem from Wizards of the Coast wanting to make money, but you really haven't been able to accomplish the goal of (1) identifying those problems and (2) explaining how it ties back into the supposedly problematic motivation. Certainly the game has some problems, but you need to actually tie these claims together, which you haven't done.

Lord Seth

2013-12-24, 01:44 AM

I haven't made a decklist since i finished my liquimetal coating deck about a month later. (that deck, BTW, 2-0'ed a legacy elves deck. I'm moderately proud of that.) the feeling of discouragement from the loss to the deck that was exactly the same except $80 more expensive for the <redacted> Inkmoth Nexuses winning the tourney was absolute <redacted>.But it seems the problem is that the reason you lost wasn't really the Inkmoth Nexus, it was because you had to mulligan several times and drew poorly.

And when in the world would even a playset of Inkmoth Nexus run you $80? Ignoring the fact I don't think they were ever that expensive, you mention Wild Defiance from Avacyn Restored. Avacyn Restored was released in May of 2012. Looking at some price history charts, in May of 2012, anyone trying to charge you $80 for a playset would be going into absurd price gouging.

I don't think that as long as Magic has this sort of pay to win setup that we'll see competitive Magic make a return to TV.
That has nothing to do with the lack of Magic on TV. If it was a problem because of the expense, then we wouldn't see race cars on TV (which are quite expensive for obvious reasons) or golf (which is actually very expensive to play competitively). The reason Magic is not TV friendly is because it is not easy to quickly understand what is going on to someone unfamiliar with the sport. Let's look at some of the most popular TV sports and see how quickly we can summarize what you need to know to really get what's going on.
(American) Football: Each team wants to get their ball to the other team's side of the field to score points. Players throw and carry the ball to move it.
Football/soccer: Each team wants to get the ball into the other team's goal. Players kick the ball around to move it.
Baseball: The batter wants to hit the ball with the bat and then, while the other team is trying to get the ball, run around the bases.
Racecar driving: You cross the finish line before the other people.
Swimming: Do your laps across the pool faster than the other people.
Basketball: Get the ball through the opposing team's hoop to score points. Players have to bounce the ball around ("dribbling") while moving with it.

See how easy that is? Certainly, there are complex rules for many of these, but you don't need to know them to be able to tell very easily and quickly what is going on. You don't need to know what a quarterback is or how the penalty system works for anything to understand a game of Football; you just have to know that each team wants to get the ball to the other side of the field to score points. These sports are very easy to understand visually. For some of them, you don't even need it explained to you; you can likely watch football (American or soccer) and understand the basic objective of the game after a minute or two.

Even more abstract ones like gymnastics aren't that hard to grasp; in that case, the basic idea is just to do more impressive routines than the other people. You don't need to understand the more complicated scoring system to be able to watch it and just be impressed by the things these people are capable of doing.

Magic is not easy to understand in this way. Sure, you can say "get your opponent down to 0 life" (ignoring alternate win conditions and combos), but without being acquainted with how the rules work and the individual cards, you'll have no idea what's going on in a game. A player turning creatures sideways to attack is far less intuitive as a way to win than someone just running across a field holding a ball. Furthermore, if you don't know what a card does, it's an utter blank to you, so you'd have to look it up yourself.

The bottom line is you have to understand Magic: the Gathering a heck of a lot better to be able to enjoy watching it than you need to understand the sports that get put on TV to enjoy watching them. That's why it isn't on TV.

The barrier to entry for casual players to play competitively is ridiculously high, and lord help you if you want to get into a format other than Standard.Actually, the non-Standard formats can be cheaper than Standard, especially in the long run. Though a big part of the reason for their high price is how much the fetchlands currently are (the shocklands used to be a big issue for Modern, but their reprint in Return to Ravnica has brought them to more sane prices), which hopefully will be rectified in the next block if they're smart enough to bring them back. They seem to have finally picked up on the fact that bringing back popular but hard-to-find cards from previous expansions makes players happy and makes Wizards of the Coast money.

Though as I indicated, when it comes to barrier to entry for competitive play, Magic seems to have nothing on Golf.

Brother Oni

2013-12-24, 03:34 AM

How could that work... unless Blizzard included the new units/code in a big patch distributed to everyone?
That's very brave... modders all over the world would pounce on that patch the second it comes out, in order to rip out the retail HotS extra content.

Combining replies for both posts, it seems that its somewhat splitting hairs with regard to DoW as particular matchups are not balanced despite their efforts (try getting past the IG with Necrons for example), but I'll concede the point.

However much like SC2, someone with vanilla CoH only could play with and against someone with the Opposing Fronts expansion sides (Panzer Elite and British) and there was a fairly large patch to allow them to do so.
In fact, it was a major balance issue (still is I think) where the British made the Allied side overpowered (particularly in group games) due to their ability to get increased fuel production very early on.

Modding the extra units/sides in, is of limited use. You could play skirmish matches versus the AI or other people with the same mod, but there was no single player content nor could you play online versus anybody without the mod.
Generally if you wanted to play it online and actually get games, it was easier to just buy the expansion.

SiuiS

2013-12-24, 04:08 PM

Lheticus

2013-12-24, 09:08 PM

It is, in a way, silly to concern yourself that people who can win thousands of dollars by being the most vicious and successful person in a group of vicious and successful people does so. The problem, is that there is baggage attached to casual as a title. The problem is that people see competitive gaming and regular gaming as the same thing, and assume that the competitive gaming guys are jerks. In reality, this complaint is that people in one game, wander into the other game and assume it's the Grown Up (read: more respectable) version, and should be the benchmark of judging all versions of the game as a whole.

No one ever looks at a lifeguard and says "man, you're terrible, you'd never win Olympic gold, you're a scrub", and no one ever looks at Olympic swimmers and says "you're a jerk, and you're ruining it for the rest of us, making lifeguards look bad". So why assume that people who play a game as a competitive sport with an entirely different understanding of purpose, and pretend the two need to interact at all?

Hooooooo boy. Where to even begin with this? I fail to see how ANYTHING I said that you quoted is related to anything you said. The best illustration of my failure is the comparison you made with lifeguards to Olympic swimmers. This strikes me as a SEVERE apples to oranges fallacy. My problem, as you've quoted, is NOTHING like that comparison. I'll attempt to better illustrate what I'm talking about using another sport as a framework--I think tennis ought to do the trick. Look at Wimbledon--an extremely prestigious tennis tournament. For the purpose of this illustrative example, I'll focus on the Men's Singles division. Every year for a considerable amount of years, there have been sixty-four entrants into this tournament. In the kind of competitive atmosphere I can get behind, every single one of those entrants would have at least a greater than zero chance of emerging as the champion.

However, I can say with almost total certainty that this is not the case. I'll stick to examples that occurred after I was actually born here. From 1992 to 2000, Pete Sampras won Wimbledon in seven out of those eight years. Starting three tournaments after that in 2003, Roger Federer won five times in a row, and his name's been on the trophy two more times after that between then and today. During those six years, there was slightly more variety as to who won, but even then the other champions--Nadal, Djokovic and Murray--were top world ranked, highly seeded players. Clearly, not everyone who qualifies to ENTER Wimbledon has a snowball's chance in hell to win it.

When I entered my first Brawl tournament as a naive scrub, I basically felt like I was one of those 30+ people entering Wimbledon with no realistic chance of taking home the prize. I got better, I'd say I'm almost genuinely competent now, but it was extremely difficult to overcome the barrier of the thought that entered my head that day: "what the heck am I even doing here?" That article that MLai linked a page ago has an extremely helpful part to sum this up:

"In reality, the "scrub" has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He's lost the game before he's chosen his character. He's lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win."

Take it from a guy who still has a whole lot of scrub in him: The possible reasons scrubs do not play to win are myriad, but I believe most of them boil down to this: Scrubs play a game to have "fun", where so many competitive players play to have "victory". As the article says further on, and I agree with, playing for victory can have a fun all it's own, but it is one that requires time and effort to even be able to fathom properly, and it's my personal philosophy that people shouldn't have to work at having fun.

My problem is that, at my core, I'm not purely a scrub nor purely a competitor. Scrubs play games for fun, doing what they feel like doing solely because they feel like doing it. Competitors play for victory, developing strategy after strategy in the endless mobius strip of the metagame in order to reach the top and win the prize. However...I play for neither of those things. To paraphrase Julio Scoundrel, to me, "it doesn't matter if I win or lose, as long as the contest was really epic and awesome." Epic and awesome defined here as: my not totally destroying or "pwning" my opponent and not being pwned by my opponent either--actual results of the game being utterly irrelevant. I have found this scenario a ludicrously difficult one to create in real life. Much of the input thus far has given me great insight as to how to better do this, but I am still a long way from even a fully adequate solution.

I hope people take the time to read through that Great Textwall of China there--I feel it's clarified my position quite a bit, at the least.

MLai

2013-12-24, 09:16 PM

However much like SC2, someone with vanilla CoH only could play with and against someone with the Opposing Fronts expansion sides (Panzer Elite and British) and there was a fairly large patch to allow them to do so.
In fact, it was a major balance issue (still is I think) where the British made the Allied side overpowered (particularly in group games) due to their ability to get increased fuel production very early on.
This practice creates balance issues mainly because whenever you have an expansion, you're starting at square 1 again in regards to achieving fine balance. It does not mean this practice is inherently anti-balance. In fact, it's the company's way of ensuring inherent balance.

The company does not want to split up the online population, but it still wants to sell expansions. So it bites the bullet, and give free expansion material to vanilla owners, so that they can play with the expansion owners. This ensures everyone is on the same playing field (assuming all factions/armies are balanced).

In MtG terms, it would be like every time WotC publishes a new set, they mail to all MtG players a free batch of cards which updates old sets so that the old sets can theoretically handle this new set (to the best of the developer's balancing ability). All for free.

No one ever looks at a lifeguard and says "man, you're terrible, you'd never win Olympic gold, you're a scrub", and no one ever looks at Olympic swimmers and says "you're a jerk, and you're ruining it for the rest of us, making lifeguards look bad". So why assume that people who play a game as a competitive sport with an entirely different understanding of purpose, and pretend the two need to interact at all?
The premise put forward by Sirlin is that the competitive population makes the game better or more balanced for all of us. Because as casual players play the game more, they automatically graduate to become experienced players, which is equivalent to being competitive players.

If the game falls apart at this skill level because there were never any competitive players to help balance it, this game immediately becomes not-fun as soon as you get skilled/experienced with it, leading to low replay value.

erikun

2013-12-24, 09:54 PM

I think that point Siuis is trying to make is that people who resort to name-calling (scrub, jerk, "casual", "tourney") need to grow up (my words). In a real life, professional setting, such taunts aren't used. People who play low-level or casual chess aren't "scrubs", and aren't looked down upon because they prefer a casual game of chess without much strategy. People who participate in the olympics aren't "obsessive tourney-hogs" who make events unfun for everyone else.

A big reason for this is that official tournements and rankings tend to strongly consider the mathematics behind the ranking system, so that you don't have high-level players regularly matched against low-level players. Take a look at something like football (either version) where you don't pair high school or college teams against professional teams, and where the final matches are determined by preliminaries where the best teams are scheduled against the best.

In something like Magic: the Gathering or Street Fighter, you are far more likely to have a low-skill person run up against a high-skill person, which is frequently unfun for both (unless it is something like a teaching match). It is far more likely that you'll run into a random good player in a Magic game than it is in a game of chess, perhaps because official chess rankings are a thing and can be compared easily.

thracian

2013-12-25, 02:51 AM

Komatik

2013-12-25, 08:13 AM

Commenting as I read. Post will probably be horrendously long, sorry.

Anyone who plays video games with me a few times will quickly get at least get allusions to the fact that, when it comes to people who play video games or TCGs, CCGs, or whatever else a card game with booster packs is supposed to be called...when it comes to those people, I am extremely jaded about the state of such things. There is an old, not now oft-used saying, "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." Over time, I've come to believe something similar: "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how epic the confrontation was."

If epic confrontations is what you enjoy, you should seek to play games (or formats within games like Magic) that cater to that.

It's seemed to me from my (admittedly limited) experience in competitive gaming, that instances of games where one side completely destroys the other, are common...too common. Personally, when I'm playing a fighting game, a card game, or ANY game under the sun, I don't mind losing as long as I put up a fight and made it interesting. But with my play style, too often, I run into an instance where the way I *want* to play is a way that is invariably going to lose, and furthermore I don't even put up a fight, when playing at any definition of a competitive level. This is because all "competitive" games that I know of have a certain few play styles that, done properly, will trump all others. Am I the only one who has a problem with this? A problem with the lack of more than a modicum of variety at the truly competitive levels of gaming, a problem with noobs meandering, possibly due to naivete, possibly because they simply do not really get to play for the most part otherwise, into these shark infested waters and getting torn to pieces? Are these problems somehow less harmful to gaming than I've indicated I suspect? Please...give my brain 2 cents from your pocket, anyone who can. (read: put your 2 cents in on this, I'm begging you.)

It's next to impossible to make every random combination of cards be good - any game inevitably has things that just work better than others. Just as in a real world fight, there are things that are smart to do - attacking while not leaving myself open, for example - and things that are just dumb because they're easily exploitable.

What games gave you this experience? There's a wide variety of competitive games and sports with a really wide variety of things to do. In some, it's just a contest of who does what better. In games like MTG, the format being played matters a ton - some Standard formats have not been very diverse, while some have seen a cornucopia of powerful, competitive decks with wildly different play styles. Legacy is currently a format like that, as an example. But you should always realize that a game is a set of rules, and within that set of rules some things simply are smarter than others, and it's utterly unavoidable, no matter the game, at least if the game is to be any good for competition.

Most newbies also play horribly and routinely grossly misvalue options. As an example, the League of Legends developers basically have to make movement-affecting effects nearly brokenly good to get newbies to even consider them, while even very small boosts have pros salivating at the sheer power at their fingertips.

It's difficult for the designers of a game to make a system where all combinations are equally useful. I'd look into a more casual format of the game. The problem there is that inevitably someone's definition of casual won't be the same as that of someone else. The key may be in self actualizing with the inferior combination win or lose. That means that regardless of how far you progress or at least if you progress to some easily achievable point you will have had fun. For example: The critmeister build in dota. The build is 7 blades of attack and 1 boots (2 blades and 1 boots combine into phase boots, then 5 crystalis, then 5 buriza. It is horrendously ineffective in competitive gameplay but it is easy to farm (practically farms itself) and somewhat fun for DPS. Of course, the trashtalk that goes on at competitive levels really kills the fun too.

Skimmed that article: Not everyone wants to play what wins if that's not how they have fun.

I guess you have to make one adapt to the other since designing a game system that accommodates all strategies is unlikely. So strictly enforced casual leagues with tomes of houserules OR competitive leagues where you play to win or you lose.

"Casual" is an atmosphere, oftentimes a place. To say that casual is an MTG format, for example, just doesn't work because people's perceptions of it are so widely different. I play cutthroat tournament decks with my friends most Fridays - nothing on the line, just a bunch of people around a table, having fun, cracking jokes and such. Yet people can die on turn 2 in those games. It's just what we enjoy, and it's why we play that way. Others like big splashy things in a big multiplayer game. Those people at the shop play Commander instead of 1v1 Legacy.

You can't dismiss the Sirlin article just like that with that one-liner. The "What about fun?" sentiment is well-addressed by the article.

However, he is talking about GOOD games (such as multiplayer fighting games) which thrive on balanced competition where only player skill should matter. The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game; it's a vehicle for WotC to print and sell ever more cards in order to keep the cash flow coming in. There is no point where WotC would say "We got this game to a perfect equilibrium now, this game is now at a perfect balance of fun vs skill; let's stop making more cards which might upset this."

Magic IS a good game. It's interesting, deep, has lots of variety to it. And it's just a ton of fun. That has nothing with the Standard format shifting constantly, or the price of the game. The shifting is a quality of the format, and it's part of the reason the people that play it enjoy it. The constant shifting and big impact of new sets makes Standard a heaven for brewers who can constantly innovate new stuff.
I'm more of a refining-minded person and like to focus more on improving my own play than mapping out the format so I just don't play Standard. I play Legacy and Pauper instead - they move much more slowly, so I have more time to explore things in detail.

In Magic the Gathering, I was constantly infuriated, nay, ENRAGED, by constructed formats, because there was always a "metagame" or whatever that was basically the game's way of saying to me, "you can't win ever with the playstyle you like, or without about 30 idiotically expensive cards because if you try, you'll suck." From that standpoint, Magic the Gathering IS a bad game--yet it's THE most popular TCG even today. I'm not really sure why that is, thinking from this viewpoint.

In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, on the other hand, I, as the article stated, began as a scrub. I was discouraged to extreme degrees starting out, but eventually, I DID notice myself coming up with strategies, counter-strategies, counter-counter-strategy strategies...and by then, I had indeed gotten a lot better.

...I think the root of my hostile feelings toward competitive gaming were microcosmically summarized in that one sentence. I got discouraged with Magic the Gathering. I got discouraged with Brawl. In Brawl, I was a scrub, in MtG, the game was bad...and I had no inkling that there was that difference between the two at the time. You sir, are DEFINITELY one of my heroes now--as is anyone who opens my eyes to see past a preconception I was not even aware of having. You have my deepest thanks.

The price is just a price of admission. It has no bearing on the quality of the game once that (admittedly completely ludicrous) price has been paid. Magic is not a game where you can buy your wins. There's a threshold, but past that threshold more money does jack****.

As an example, in Time Spiral - Lorwyn Standard the undisputed best deck was Faeries. It cost about 400-500 dollars to build. Another deck in the format was basically a who's who of the most expensive cards in the format - the price reached $1000 - yet it was a worse deck. Further, Faeries was a deck that didn't crush most others very brutally - it had an edge against most of the format, and didn't lose horribly to anything. It was simply a smartly built thing that really allowed the pilot to outplay his opponents.

As to why people play it is because they recognize that the game is awesome. Yes, it's hideously expensive and I'd much prefer it if it cost way, way less to play, but the game has remained fun and tremendously interesting for years of cutthroat-competitive play for me, so...

Wow, my bluntness on this forum earned someone's respect. :smallcool:
That's a first. It was fully unintentional I assure you.

As for MtG... I'm not saying it's a bad game in fundamental design. I think the design (basic game rules) is awesome. I also think if theoretically WotC stopped making cards, took all its existing cards, culled grossly imbalanced cards (too strong or too weak regardless of rarity), you can eventually end up with a game that is decided by skill (and luck), not money.

That is the only real flaw with MtG, and most likely any commercial CCG: it's designed to be won based on the money you spend. You're allowed to use card combos/strats which grants you wins regardless of skill/luck, as long as you spend the money. It doesn't even take brains to construct said combos (just money).

http://www.bazaarofmagic.nl/deck/julian-knabs-elves-1695-bazaar-of-moxen-8-di-14092.html

Please take that to a tournament and see how far you get without skill. Hint: You won't get anywhere, despite piloting one of the most absurdly powerful,
resilient and versatile decks in all of Legacy.

I'm a low level player. If Seto Kaiba gives me a suitcase of the rarest best MtG cards on the planet, and you get a random starter's pack, you will never beat me in a million years.

Contrast with a great Street Fighter player can and will *easily* beat me, using the weakest version of Dan vs me using the strongest version of Akuma.

Again, price of admission as opposed to spend more = win more. Also, give me about $50 to build a deck with nothing but commons, I'll give you TES (http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=57060), a really solid and powerful combo deck. Chances are I'll win every game. The random starter decks suck not because they're cheap, they suck because they are bad decks. They're intentionally untuned messes of some good/great, some horrdendous cardboard. That $50 Pauper deck, though, can be tuned and built so it has a purpose and a plan and is built so as to best achieve that.

Your argument was that it was not a “good game” because

*SNIP*

Who is lead developer right now? If you're talking about Mark Rosewater, he's lead designer, meaning he has very little to do with the actual power level of cards.

Where is the upvote/like/this_post_is_officially_made_of_win button? I want to press it so bad.

In my case, the more seriously I have to take a game, the less fun I have. I've only played in competitive events a handful of times, because I prefer fun over stress. The problem comes when I go up against a competitive player in a game where I'm not good enough to make up the difference.

A big example is a principle I've applied since I first played Street Fighter 2 in the arcade: I figured out a nearly inescapable chain with Blanka that would do 100% damage to most characters. After I tried it out a few times, my decision was, "I'm never using this against another player." Unfortunately, I have no way of keeping my matches limited to other players with the same mindset. Last time I played a fighter online, I was in one match that consisted of my using one poke, then getting trapped in a 168-hit combo and losing. All I could think was, "What's the point of that? My opponent would have had the same gameplay experience against a training dummy."

Man, I can't tell you how happy I am to have another logical reason that I can claim Illuminati New World Order is the greatest CCG ever. No new cards for a decade, but you can still get boxed sets with one copy of every card ever printed, including the promos.

In games there are often situations that ask one player to improve before the other one does. As an example a bunker rush in Starcraft 2 is very easy against an opponent who doesn't know what to do: You make marines, you make a bunker next to the opponent's natural expansion (if he has even made one - many newbies don't) and put the marines in the bunker. You've probably just won the game disgustingly easily. The problem with this? Bunker rushes can in reality actually be very bad. It's easy to bunker rush someone who doesn't know what he's doing, but if the opponent knows how to defend properly, the attacker suddenly has to display a lot of skill to pull off his bunker rush successfully. If he doesn't, he'll simply be throwing resources to the wind and giving the opponent a backbreaking midgame advantage.
The end state is skillful play vs. skillful play, but the defender needs to level up first. This is the case in your long-combo example (from Marvel vs. Capcom 3?), or if the opponent was caught in Blanka's combo chain. Proper defense is one of the hardest things to learn when studying a fighting game. The genre also simply isn't for everyone.

Likewise, in MTG there is an old adage that threats are better than answers. You could hold a superlatively good removal spell - say, Abrupt Decay (http://magiccards.info/rtr/en/141.html), while I'm stuck with an Amphin Cutthroat (http://magiccards.info/m12/en/43.html) - an atrocious card by any measure. Yet you'll lose the game because my card is a threat, yours is an answer.

Wow, you've rather missed my point here, I think. See, for me to have fun with a game, I've got to play it the way I want to play it, or at least play it in a way that greatly resembles the way I'd want to play it if I had total freedom to play it however I wanted. If I abandon that and "do whatever is most likely to win", the game becomes not fun for me. And if the game becomes not fun for me, the entire purpose of my "playing" a "game" is utterly defeated, and well, I stop playing it.

How do you want to play, then?

For the sake of brevity, I shall be skipping over some portions...

Then by all means, describe them. So far you really have not, you've simply claimed that the goal of making money has been screwing it up but haven't explained why. You need to explain what these issues with competitive play actually are and why they stem from the money motivation and not, say, R&D just slipping up and missing something. While I thought Avacyn Restored's Limited environment was bad, I don't think money motivation was the reason for them screwing it up.

Besides, Limited being fun is the most direct "fun game = more money for Wizards" link in the game because every play is a purchase. People wanting to play more because it's fun need more packs. Boring formats get played less and WotC sells less.

MLai

2013-12-25, 10:15 AM

I could reply to you... but that would just mean repeating things I've already said in this thread, in different words. :smallconfused:
Let's just drop MtG derail. You haven't convinced me of anything. I have no intention of even trying to convince you of anything.

Lheticus

2013-12-26, 01:20 PM

Godskook

2013-12-26, 09:14 PM

The caveat here is that MtG is at its essence not a good game

At its essence, MtG isn't a game at all, but rather a vehicle by which you can play many different games. Calling it a game is like calling a 52 playing card deck a 'game'. There's quite a few games tied to playing cards, such as Hearts, Spades, Euchre, Poker, Blackjack, Pinochle, etc, but the deck itself isn't any of them exclusively. Similarly, MtG isn't a game, but has quite a few games associated with it, such as Vintage, Limited, EHD, and Pauper. Some of those game-types are stupidly expensive, and it doesn't help that new players are typically exposed to Vintage first(probably one of the worst formats for competitive MtG).

Komatik

2013-12-27, 08:57 AM

At its essence, MtG isn't a game at all, but rather a vehicle by which you can play many different games. Calling it a game is like calling a 52 playing card deck a 'game'. There's quite a few games tied to playing cards, such as Hearts, Spades, Euchre, Poker, Blackjack, Pinochle, etc, but the deck itself isn't any of them exclusively. Similarly, MtG isn't a game, but has quite a few games associated with it, such as Vintage, Limited, EHD, and Pauper. Some of those game-types are stupidly expensive, and it doesn't help that new players are typically exposed to Vintage first(probably one of the worst formats for competitive MtG).

I'd wager most new people are actually exposed to "Piles of whatever we have thus far" and "Standard" first, not Vintage. Especially not proper Vintage.

Godskook

2013-12-27, 03:35 PM

I'd wager most new people are actually exposed to "Piles of whatever we have thus far" and "Standard" first, not Vintage. Especially not proper Vintage.

"Piles of whatever we have thus far", with few exceptions, is Vintage, and honestly, Vintage isn't a good competitive game. Skill devolves the format into a arm's race for who can find the faster win condition.

Standard is decent, especially after a certain skill level, but I think the best formats for what the OP wants are Sealed Deck and Booster Draft. While skill is still a major factor in those formats, the margin of power between beginners and experts is significantly smaller than any other MtG format. It also has the greatest ease-of-access in terms of prep-work. Financial limitations aside, those would be my formats of choice in anything short of tournament level play.

"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." Over time, I've come to believe something similar: "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how epic the confrontation was."

These are very dissimilar things at their core. The first is a commentary about sportsmanship, and is directed at the individual; the second, on the other hand, is a desire to have fights be not only equally matched but also that skilled play still be a slugfest(either that or have the game be flashy, hard to tell) as opposed to rocket-tag.

There's two reasons that a match is a slug-fest. One being that both players are just bad at the game involved, and thus without the proper idea of how to win, it takes a great deal of slugging before one emerges victorious. The latter, however, is due to finding competitors of equal -and- exemplary skill who are both quite capable of remaining dangerous to each other despite even a significant advantage, and even then, this is a feat that can't be replicated across every game, maybe only one in ten games ends up being like this.

What it seems to me is that you want the awesomeness of skilled play without being willing to put for the drudgery of earning it. You seem to want to force games to just be epic by default, which isn't really possible short of denying skill in the game.

It's seemed to me from my (admittedly limited) experience in competitive gaming, that instances of games where one side completely destroys the other, are common...too common. Personally, when I'm playing a fighting game, a card game, or ANY game under the sun, I don't mind losing as long as I put up a fight and made it interesting. But with my play style, too often, I run into an instance where the way I *want* to play is a way that is invariably going to lose, and furthermore I don't even put up a fight, when playing at any definition of a competitive level. This is because all "competitive" games that I know of have a certain few play styles that, done properly, will trump all others. Am I the only one who has a problem with this? A problem with the lack of more than a modicum of variety at the truly competitive levels of gaming, a problem with noobs meandering, possibly due to naivete, possibly because they simply do not really get to play for the most part otherwise, into these shark infested waters and getting torn to pieces? Are these problems somehow less harmful to gaming than I've indicated I suspect? Please...give my brain 2 cents from your pocket, anyone who can. (read: put your 2 cents in on this, I'm begging you.)

Matching newbies against veterans is a problem that should be solved to a degree, but its one that is already being solved to various degrees in various games(League of Legends, for instance, is very good about this). However, this is really tangential to your goal of having 'epic' games, as the 'problem' games seen here should be as 1-sided as they are. Good competitive games should not provide epic matches between newbies and veterans.

Variety at the professional level is a bit of a problem, but it will always be a smaller pool than that of low-skill players. The reason for this is that you need to design different things for newbies as compared to veterans, such as the noob tube in CoD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5BkTruCmaBBZ8z6cP9KzPiX).

Lheticus

2013-12-27, 08:42 PM

These are very dissimilar things at their core. The first is a commentary about sportsmanship, and is directed at the individual; the second, on the other hand, is a desire to have fights be not only equally matched but also that skilled play still be a slugfest(either that or have the game be flashy, hard to tell) as opposed to rocket-tag.

There's two reasons that a match is a slug-fest. One being that both players are just bad at the game involved, and thus without the proper idea of how to win, it takes a great deal of slugging before one emerges victorious. The latter, however, is due to finding competitors of equal -and- exemplary skill who are both quite capable of remaining dangerous to each other despite even a significant advantage, and even then, this is a feat that can't be replicated across every game, maybe only one in ten games ends up being like this.

What it seems to me is that you want the awesomeness of skilled play without being willing to put for the drudgery of earning it. You seem to want to force games to just be epic by default, which isn't really possible short of denying skill in the game.

Matching newbies against veterans is a problem that should be solved to a degree, but its one that is already being solved to various degrees in various games(League of Legends, for instance, is very good about this). However, this is really tangential to your goal of having 'epic' games, as the 'problem' games seen here should be as 1-sided as they are. Good competitive games should not provide epic matches between newbies and veterans.

Variety at the professional level is a bit of a problem, but it will always be a smaller pool than that of low-skill players. The reason for this is that you need to design different things for newbies as compared to veterans, such as the noob tube in CoD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5BkTruCmaBBZ8z6cP9KzPiX).

You seem to be assuming that I'm dealing in absolutes here, and I am definitely not. I realize it would be outlandish to attempt to create a game where every single instance of that game played is epic, and even if it were possible it would be counterproductive to gaming to succeed. I have gone into more specific detail as to exactly what I want to have happen to increase how epic gaming is in general in responses to previous statements about my OP. I've noticed this from several of you, so this goes for everyone who considers posting to discourse with me in this thread going forward: Please do not assume that my OP is the entirety of my position currently, and please read all the posts I've made responding to people responding to my OP and others so that you may grasp the entirety of what there currently is to grasp of my position before you respond to that position. Thank you, and have a nice day or whatever.

MLai

2013-12-28, 12:25 AM

"Piles of whatever we have thus far", with few exceptions, is Vintage, and honestly, Vintage isn't a good competitive game. Skill devolves the format into a arm's race for who can find the faster win condition.
This here is my personal gripe with MtG, i.e. the game devolves into rocket-tag at "higher skill", and said "higher skill" involves being willing to put forward the money and time to find and buy the cards you want for your deck. Which is ever-evolving so your expenses in time and money never end, i.e. a hole you have to dig deeper and deeper for yourself in order to keep up.

If that is not the only competitive format (i.e. involves prize money), then okay you're right in that MtG is not a poor game as a whole.

Komatik

2013-12-29, 04:30 AM

This here is my personal gripe with MtG, i.e. the game devolves into rocket-tag at "higher skill", and said "higher skill" involves being willing to put forward the money and time to find and buy the cards you want for your deck. Which is ever-evolving so your expenses in time and money never end, i.e. a hole you have to dig deeper and deeper for yourself in order to keep up.

If that is not the only competitive format (i.e. involves prize money), then okay you're right in that MtG is not a poor game as a whole.

The game doesn't devolve into rocket tag - that is a misconception. Not to say rocket tag isn't possible, but even in highly powerful formats like Legacy it just isn't that common. One reason why is that in addition to these supremely powerful threats there are supremely powerful defenses available in those formats, so you won't just throw some broken combo out there, because if it gets answered you'll have lost so many resources you're probably done for. Some people still "play" glass cannon combo decks built to win on turn 1, but those decks largely lose to themselves. Thus, slower, more interactive, more resilient combo decks get player. And due to that, actual games of Magic.

So you're forced to run cards to pare down those defenses one way or another, or deny them the ability to operate, for which there are countermeasures. Suddenly, we have a game in our hands. It looks very different from two creature decks hitting each other in the face and maneuvering for advantage on the board, sure, but it's still deep, interactive and interesting in it's own right. I personally prefer to play on the board, but that's just me, and even then my deck is very much a rocket tag type of concoction.

In the more highly powered Vintage format combo isn't even that common anymore - mana denial decks are much stronger nowadays from what I understand, and the format has been undergoing a pretty historic shift in that truly creature-based decks have become very relevant for the first time in years.

Also, Legacy and Vintage games still have a large amount of meaningful decisions in them - they're just compressed into a smaller amount of turns. It stands to reason that with a combo deck that can temporarily generate a lot of mana and has a lot of cheap spells, fighting a disruptive aggro/mana denial type of deck packing a lot of free (mana-wise, they have other costs) counterspells and 1-mana spells for example, both decks can do a lot within a single turn.

And apart from that, Legacy and Vintage are far from the only playable formats - the commons-only Pauper format is varied, healthy and near completely devoid of combo decks. The blazing fast ones, certainly. It largely even lacks momentous cards that swing games and is mostly about grinding out and then utilizing small advantages on the board. A very different, still interesting experience, and way, way cheaper than any other competitive format in the game.

Standard, likewise, is largely devoid of combo and the current format is chock full of highly synergy-based decks that don't overly rely on the sheer individual power of their cards.

Brother Oni

2013-12-29, 05:07 AM

Can I get a Halle-fricking-lujah? Dropping the MtG derail is STRONGLY seconded by me.

It's not really a derail, it's just a very specific example of your enquiry regarding competitive gaming.

Building on Godskook's example, I wouldn't say that the various competitive formats of MtG are different games, but more like variants of the same game, like poker with 5 card draw, 7 card stud, Texas Hold Em, etc.

Edit: thinking about it, Poker is actually a better example than I thought since it has its casual and silly variants (Indian Head Poker which is a variant of blind man'd bluff where a player's river card is attached to their forehead) much like MtG.

BeerMug Paladin

2013-12-29, 06:28 AM

It has occurred to me before that the Mario Kart racing games generally level the playing field between players in a sort of automatic handicapping feature.

Not that a new player is going to beat a master, but the periodic bombardment of higher ranks with red and blue shells, combined with lower-rank-only items like lightning bolts and stars are there specifically to give the people behind a way to catch up. And gives the players in the lead some extra challenges to keep their rank. It seems to me to tone down the slight differences in player skill leading to an overwhelming beatdown.

Because of this, it seems like I've had a lot more matches in the Mario Kart franchise that were back and forth brutal fights to the end, where the winner only narrowly beats his competitor.

I didn't think to mention it earlier because it also just occurred to me that this kind of (auto-)handicapping feature is sort of rare for game design. Maybe this is the sort of thing that you (Lheticus) could look into, in the hopes of finding more games that can give that feeling of epic confrontation.

Unrelated side-topic briefly.
Actually, this reminds me that I heard something about Max Payne adjusting it's difficulty to match how well you played it on the fly. That game made me feel epic awesome every time I cleared out some insanely hard room with my evasion diving and hiding. Maybe an auto-handicapping feature is something you ought to be looking for? Even though it was single-player, it certainly seemed to work for that game.
As for Mario Kart, if I'm in last place, it still feels nice to peg the person that is all the way up in first with a blue shell. Sometimes it also means I get to choose who I want to win.

Thufir

2013-12-29, 08:22 AM

It has occurred to me before that the Mario Kart racing games generally level the playing field between players in a sort of automatic handicapping feature.

Not that a new player is going to beat a master,

Actually new player can and will beat masters at Mario Kart. Insofar as one can be a 'master' at Mario Kart, given how random and luck-based it is due to all the items. Mario Kart is not really a competitive game, and this is why.

Komatik

2013-12-29, 08:46 AM

McDouggal

2013-12-29, 08:53 AM

Nintendo 64 karting was fun. Played it with a few other kids back when the 64 was still the best thing ever. I was the undisputed master of racing. Sure, I'd lose to a blue shell on occasion, but in the tournament style matches we held, I would usually place first, and most people wouldn't move too far out of their normal spots.

What I'm trying to say is that skill does have an impact, even in a game where luck is a major factor.

BeerMug Paladin

2013-12-29, 08:59 AM

Actually new player can and will beat masters at Mario Kart. Insofar as one can be a 'master' at Mario Kart, given how random and luck-based it is due to all the items. Mario Kart is not really a competitive game, and this is why.

I've never really had that experience of the game. Becoming a master at the game boils down to the same elements that becoming a master in other games entails. Learning the things about the map and the characters that are not up-front. Valid shortcuts, item functionality, character quirks, etc... This is essentially the same as mastering a fighting game by memorizing combo chains, character reaches, etc.

A master can use the shortcuts, while someone unfamiliar is unlikely to know how. A master can mitigate harm other players can cause them while a new person is susceptible to basic tricks. It probably takes a lot less time to 'master' Mario Kart, though, which I think is actually a point in its favor.

As for your point about the competitiveness of the game, I suspect we just think of competitive games differently. For the record, I consider competitive games to be a pretty broad category: Games where the players are encouraged to compete with one another in some way, with winning conditions.