I think this prompt is too complicated. There should be more people posting ideas by this point :/ Anyways, I came up with a newer one which is hopefully less broken.
Prompt is pretty simple, i thought about making a submission, but i don't really care about battlegrounds.
I’m actually more fine with these than I thought I’d be. The art itself looks like stained-glass windows so it still kind of fits LoR aesthetic. The animations that play also could conceivably be magic spell mirages. Overall it’s less jarring than I’d thought it would be.
Does it take into consideration where cards interact. Like discounting effects (e.g. [Hearthstone Card (Sorcerer's Apprentice[\card]). Do they add weighting in your comparison?
Taking to a silly (and obvs theoretical) extreme, if I could get infinite hand size and infinite mana reduction, then one "fill my hand with spells" would win me the game. That would be the ultimate deck, no need to build anything else. So, presumably at some point the RNG + cost reduction + hand fill will take away skill. Is that point realistically not likely? Maybe you just run out of time trying to find the card you want in the 100s in your hand :D
I tried not to consider interactions between cards too much because they expand the space of card/game design so much that it becomes difficult to make any simple statements, but your questions actually go to the heart of how I view game design, which I now cannot resist blurting out. This is going to get pretty abstract, so brace yourself… (also, I'm putting this all into words for the first time as I write, so I'm sorry if it goes off on tangents).
You get and axis, and you get and axis. Everybody gets an axis!
If you like you can view the space of card game design as this vast, many-dimensional graph on which each card game sits in the little part that has the parameters that that particular game uses. In this viewpoint, the maximum hand size is viewed in a very similar way to RNG: they are both distribution functions along their respective axes of the graph. The hand size is a very narrow distribution (it would just be a single point if it wasn't for Valdris Felgorge), while RNG is more of a splodge because it has much more variance. Hearthstone sits entirely within the cross-section of the RNG splodge and the tiny hand size 'splodge'. As you go up into higher dimensions of game design (including everything from how mana works to general art style), you constrain what Hearthstone is more and more.
Similarly MtG has it's own overlap of however many splodges of design parameters there are, as do LoR, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon TCG, Blackjack, Poker, Snap etc. (the last few I include to make the point that different games can of course share a lot of design space).
Anyway, your hypothetical extreme essentially just moves HS around on the hand size axis, as well as the corresponding changes on the other relevant axes. From this abstract viewpoint do that is fundamentally the same as the explosion in RNG in HS that came when GvG was released, which gave HS a big old shunt along the RNG axis (a shunt it has never really come back from).
But where's skill in all of this?
That's all great, but here's the kicker: I am adamant that there is not an axis for skill. To make my point, there's nothing stopping 2 terrible chess players from playing chess, so there is never anything saying "you need X skill to play chess". Perhaps we should start by defining skill…
At first glance, a sensible metric for how skilful a game is would be the correlation between player skill and win rates: In the hypothetical perfect skill game, the player with the higher skill will always win, while in the hypothetical zero skill game the odds are always 50:50. The issue here is that there is no independent measure of player skill. Since we have nothing better, we say someone has higher skill because they have a higher win rate, so the whole thing goes around in circles.
A better approach would be to look at the spread of win rates across players. The higher the spread, the more 'tiers' of skill there are and the easier it is to tell good and bad players apart.
While the spread of win rates will depend on the splodge of game space a game occupies, it is not something you could realistically hope to deduce from the properties of the splodge. It is what I would call an 'emergent phenomenon', and is quite a lot like friction: there is nothing at the molecular level that would lead you to predict friction exists, but it certainly does when you zoom out enough. The second part of the analogy is that friction looks different for solids and fluids, so also depends on how molecules 'choose to use' the physical laws they are given.
Likewise, the phenomenon of skill is a real thing and some games are more skilful than others, but it only exists with the addition of players (not part of HS itself) who make choices which ultimately lead to the emergence of skill. A different series of choices might lead to different metas even with the same cards present, and those metas might differ in skill. Hence, it is important to distinguish between skill and a game's rule set (aka splodge in game space), even if they are connected.
To actually answer the question…
If you want to make a game that looks a lot like HS but moves it to the patch of space with infinite hand size and mana, and supply it with the extreme card you suggest, then that's not ridiculous at all from my abstract perspective. That said, it is basically just making a super convoluted coin flip, which is why it is so easy to know it will reduce skill to (almost) zero. Interestingly, your suggestion is a perfect example of what I was talking about with Monte Carlo simulations: there's so much RNG that you know exactly what it is going to do.
Returning to the effect of card interactions in the real version of HS, I now think I can confidently say that they are just as easy to factor into skill as a vanilla minion would so. In neither case do you have any idea until you look at the distribution of win rates of players. I guess the irony is that the devs are the one group of people we never hear discuss skill, but also the only ones who have the complete data set to actually quantify it with.
I think this prompt is too complicated. There should be more people posting ideas by this point :/ Anyways, I came up with a newer one which is hopefully less broken.
In all seriousness, I understand your pain given that I've kept LoR away from me with a 10 foot pole. These scavenger hunts aren't as fun when it becomes a chore of just clicking everything. Luckily, there is something on it's way soon that should help with about half of them. So if you do continue trying to go for the last 16, good luck but if you don't, 3/4ths of all the riddles is still really good!
I tried to make sure at least 50% of the LoR clues would be gettable even for someone who's never played the game if they were willing to search for matching keywords, and at least 25% required in-game knowledge. O:-)
I think the hate stems from K/DA itself and not just the lore break but I could be wrong. I for one don't love this event because K/DA all out is awful in my opinion I preferred the original, but if say we had battlecast event I would think it's neat, and my sentiment might be shared with the people who dislike it. On the other hand, people might still be up in anger about Battlecast since it isn't canon in LoL or maybe they love it who knows.
So yeah IMO I would be fine if we had the OG K/DA because I don't like the reboot but the reboot in LOR and LoL just feels kinda forced to me at least and maybe that's why others don't like it too.
All 3 have taken more time than previous seasons for me. It also seems to me like more were in reverse-order this time -- I wonder if Flux found some difficulty setting he pegged to max. :-P
I, for the life of me, will never understand why some people are so adamantly against K/DA appearing in LoR. Because it isn't canon to the LoL universe? Even if you do care about LoL lore, it's not like alternate universe cards appearing in LoR will "ruin" the lore in any way, and it doesn't mean they can't have more proper lore-focused expansions later.
People got a little up in arms when Ragnaros, Lightlord was revealed, but then they got over it and accepted that Hearthstone isn't canon to WoW, and now it's a pretty widely accepted (and even renowned) part of the game. Same would happen with LoR if Riot eventually did it. This feels like a good way to kickstart the game's spread outside of traditional lore. There are literally only upsides that can come from allowing LoR to do this.
By far the best of the five. The only other one that is even remotely playable is Feel the Rush, but this one is far stronger. The rest are memes at best.
I personally don't think we have any reason to be nervous about the new system. If it is greedy and stringent so that you need to pay money to keep up, then blizzard won't make money, they will just lose customers. And they know this. The people at blizzard aren't stupid, they want their game to be better, more accessible, and feel more rewarding to play.
Blizzard doesn't want to make things worse, and we have no reason to believe that they do. They are implementing a new system because it will be better, and if it doesn't work out that way, I am confident that they will fix it. Blizzard wants more people to play the game, not less, that is why they have been making so many positive changes this year.
Yes, the first reward system they showed us was bad, but we told them so and they listened and revamped it. Have some faith that the people at Blizzard know what they are doing.
I think you give them too much credit :D
The new ladder system is not F2P friendly.
When new content is added, it is usually OP - new BG heroes are only available to those that pay for a pass.
Duels is only available to those that purchased a bundle.
I don't think they want F2P. They want people to think they're getting a good deal. That is, hiding the good stuff away from F2P.
They do need to make money, they can't give it away.
They have changed things for sure. Whether it'll be suited for your purposes is hard to say. You can always try to collect hearts first and buy the pass later if you fear you won't be able to gather as many as you'd wish.
Why is the text on all these so long? I stopped playing for a while but has the text become that lengthy on all spells? I mean Go dead hard or whatever is like a solid paragraph
Why bring this one back so soon? I honestly think they should give every brawl at least a year to breath. They have enough now that they don't have to have frequent repeats.
Does it take into consideration where cards interact. Like [Hearthstone Card (Sorcerer's Apprentice[\card] effects. Do they add weighting in your comparison?
Taking to a silly (and obvs theoretical) extreme, if I could get infinite hand size and infinite mana reduction, then one "fill my hand with spells" would win me the game. That would be the ultimate deck, no need to build anything else. So, presumably at some point the RNG + cost reduction + hand fill will take away skill. Is that point realistically not likely? Maybe you just run out of time trying to find the card you want in the 100s in your hand :D
Kripp's Tavern: Duels Tournament Survival Guide - 16 Streamers Compete for Doritos, Twitch Drops Enabled for Duels Access
This post brought to you by Totino's Pizza Rolls.
New Neutral Minion - Darkmoon Rabbit
Sure, but I was just spit ballin', you wanted to know how to cheat it out and that was the first thing that came to mind
Oozefest
TY! :)
Oozefest
Thanks a lot!
I'm Rooting For You - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread
Prompt is pretty simple, i thought about making a submission, but i don't really care about battlegrounds.
K/DA All Out Event - New Cards, Event Pass, Quests, Boards, and More!
I’m actually more fine with these than I thought I’d be. The art itself looks like stained-glass windows so it still kind of fits LoR aesthetic. The animations that play also could conceivably be magic spell mirages. Overall it’s less jarring than I’d thought it would be.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
I tried not to consider interactions between cards too much because they expand the space of card/game design so much that it becomes difficult to make any simple statements, but your questions actually go to the heart of how I view game design, which I now cannot resist blurting out. This is going to get pretty abstract, so brace yourself… (also, I'm putting this all into words for the first time as I write, so I'm sorry if it goes off on tangents).
You get and axis, and you get and axis. Everybody gets an axis!
If you like you can view the space of card game design as this vast, many-dimensional graph on which each card game sits in the little part that has the parameters that that particular game uses. In this viewpoint, the maximum hand size is viewed in a very similar way to RNG: they are both distribution functions along their respective axes of the graph. The hand size is a very narrow distribution (it would just be a single point if it wasn't for Valdris Felgorge), while RNG is more of a splodge because it has much more variance. Hearthstone sits entirely within the cross-section of the RNG splodge and the tiny hand size 'splodge'. As you go up into higher dimensions of game design (including everything from how mana works to general art style), you constrain what Hearthstone is more and more.
Similarly MtG has it's own overlap of however many splodges of design parameters there are, as do LoR, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon TCG, Blackjack, Poker, Snap etc. (the last few I include to make the point that different games can of course share a lot of design space).
Anyway, your hypothetical extreme essentially just moves HS around on the hand size axis, as well as the corresponding changes on the other relevant axes. From this abstract viewpoint do that is fundamentally the same as the explosion in RNG in HS that came when GvG was released, which gave HS a big old shunt along the RNG axis (a shunt it has never really come back from).
But where's skill in all of this?
That's all great, but here's the kicker: I am adamant that there is not an axis for skill. To make my point, there's nothing stopping 2 terrible chess players from playing chess, so there is never anything saying "you need X skill to play chess". Perhaps we should start by defining skill…
At first glance, a sensible metric for how skilful a game is would be the correlation between player skill and win rates: In the hypothetical perfect skill game, the player with the higher skill will always win, while in the hypothetical zero skill game the odds are always 50:50. The issue here is that there is no independent measure of player skill. Since we have nothing better, we say someone has higher skill because they have a higher win rate, so the whole thing goes around in circles.
A better approach would be to look at the spread of win rates across players. The higher the spread, the more 'tiers' of skill there are and the easier it is to tell good and bad players apart.
While the spread of win rates will depend on the splodge of game space a game occupies, it is not something you could realistically hope to deduce from the properties of the splodge. It is what I would call an 'emergent phenomenon', and is quite a lot like friction: there is nothing at the molecular level that would lead you to predict friction exists, but it certainly does when you zoom out enough. The second part of the analogy is that friction looks different for solids and fluids, so also depends on how molecules 'choose to use' the physical laws they are given.
Likewise, the phenomenon of skill is a real thing and some games are more skilful than others, but it only exists with the addition of players (not part of HS itself) who make choices which ultimately lead to the emergence of skill. A different series of choices might lead to different metas even with the same cards present, and those metas might differ in skill. Hence, it is important to distinguish between skill and a game's rule set (aka splodge in game space), even if they are connected.
To actually answer the question…
If you want to make a game that looks a lot like HS but moves it to the patch of space with infinite hand size and mana, and supply it with the extreme card you suggest, then that's not ridiculous at all from my abstract perspective. That said, it is basically just making a super convoluted coin flip, which is why it is so easy to know it will reduce skill to (almost) zero. Interestingly, your suggestion is a perfect example of what I was talking about with Monte Carlo simulations: there's so much RNG that you know exactly what it is going to do.
Returning to the effect of card interactions in the real version of HS, I now think I can confidently say that they are just as easy to factor into skill as a vanilla minion would so. In neither case do you have any idea until you look at the distribution of win rates of players. I guess the irony is that the devs are the one group of people we never hear discuss skill, but also the only ones who have the complete data set to actually quantify it with.
) Not Found]I'm Rooting For You - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread
I think this prompt is too complicated. There should be more people posting ideas by this point :/ Anyways, I came up with a newer one which is hopefully less broken.
Send in the Murlocs!
This could be the new game mode. Mrgrgll.
Oozefest
Head on over to account management!
https://outof.cards/accounts/management
Oozefest
How can I activate the "forum title" I bought from the candys?
K/DA All Out Event - New Cards, Event Pass, Quests, Boards, and More!
"My grandfather's deck has no pathetic cards, Kaiba! But it does contain... A very lengthy novel..."
Oozefest
I tried to make sure at least 50% of the LoR clues would be gettable even for someone who's never played the game if they were willing to search for matching keywords, and at least 25% required in-game knowledge. O:-)
K/DA All Out Event - New Cards, Event Pass, Quests, Boards, and More!
I think the hate stems from K/DA itself and not just the lore break but I could be wrong. I for one don't love this event because K/DA all out is awful in my opinion I preferred the original, but if say we had battlecast event I would think it's neat, and my sentiment might be shared with the people who dislike it. On the other hand, people might still be up in anger about Battlecast since it isn't canon in LoL or maybe they love it who knows.
So yeah IMO I would be fine if we had the OG K/DA because I don't like the reboot but the reboot in LOR and LoL just feels kinda forced to me at least and maybe that's why others don't like it too.
Kripp's Tavern: Duels Tournament Survival Guide - 16 Streamers Compete for Doritos, Twitch Drops Enabled for Duels Access
Times are tough bro. Gotta fight for those snacks. Just don't get cheese dust on the keyboard.
Oozefest
I have absolutely no idea
Oozefest - An Eerie Runeterra Halloween Word Search Puzzle
All 3 have taken more time than previous seasons for me. It also seems to me like more were in reverse-order this time -- I wonder if Flux found some difficulty setting he pegged to max. :-P
K/DA All Out Event - New Cards, Event Pass, Quests, Boards, and More!
I, for the life of me, will never understand why some people are so adamantly against K/DA appearing in LoR. Because it isn't canon to the LoL universe? Even if you do care about LoL lore, it's not like alternate universe cards appearing in LoR will "ruin" the lore in any way, and it doesn't mean they can't have more proper lore-focused expansions later.
People got a little up in arms when Ragnaros, Lightlord was revealed, but then they got over it and accepted that Hearthstone isn't canon to WoW, and now it's a pretty widely accepted (and even renowned) part of the game. Same would happen with LoR if Riot eventually did it. This feels like a good way to kickstart the game's spread outside of traditional lore. There are literally only upsides that can come from allowing LoR to do this.
Kripp's Tavern: Duels Tournament Survival Guide - 16 Streamers Compete for Doritos, Twitch Drops Enabled for Duels Access
16 Streamers compete for Doritos
Well that's not what I was expecting to read!
New Shadow Isles Spell - Go Hard
By far the best of the five. The only other one that is even remotely playable is Feel the Rush, but this one is far stronger. The rest are memes at best.
reward details
I think you give them too much credit :D
I don't think they want F2P. They want people to think they're getting a good deal. That is, hiding the good stuff away from F2P.
They do need to make money, they can't give it away.
K/DA All Out Event - New Cards, Event Pass, Quests, Boards, and More!
They have changed things for sure. Whether it'll be suited for your purposes is hard to say. You can always try to collect hearts first and buy the pass later if you fear you won't be able to gather as many as you'd wish.
K/DA All Out Event - New Cards, Event Pass, Quests, Boards, and More!
Why is the text on all these so long? I stopped playing for a while but has the text become that lengthy on all spells? I mean Go dead hard or whatever is like a solid paragraph
Send in the Murlocs!
Why bring this one back so soon? I honestly think they should give every brawl at least a year to breath. They have enough now that they don't have to have frequent repeats.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
Great article!
Does it take into consideration where cards interact. Like [Hearthstone Card (Sorcerer's Apprentice[\card] effects. Do they add weighting in your comparison?
Taking to a silly (and obvs theoretical) extreme, if I could get infinite hand size and infinite mana reduction, then one "fill my hand with spells" would win me the game. That would be the ultimate deck, no need to build anything else. So, presumably at some point the RNG + cost reduction + hand fill will take away skill. Is that point realistically not likely? Maybe you just run out of time trying to find the card you want in the 100s in your hand :D
) Not Found]