Guest posts by Hodari

157

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: Zanzarino (Lead Developer) speaks about new features - updated 2011-03-16

« on: June 27, 2011, 03:49:18 pm »

Hopefully new rares will be added as well which can only be won from Arena(pretty sure the main thing preventing new ones from being added for a while now was the t50 farms making the "rare" part almost meaningless).  Otherwise, it's still pretty good electrum rewards if you win and worth it just for the challenge alone I think...constantly grinding fg's starts getting old after a while   Here you'll have to be constantly adapting your strategy both for the deck you submit and for the one you're using to play against everyone else's

158

Card Ideas and Art / Re: Ghost of the Future | Ghost of the Future

« on: June 26, 2011, 08:53:28 am »

no need for flipping coins here..this isn't M:tG
Either say "Random chance" or "50% chance to"

Also might want to raise the cost a bit more on the upped version as it could be too strong otherwise in a 60 card deck.  The overall idea looks good though

159

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 26, 2011, 07:52:26 am »

Looks spiffy!

I think "The Arena" is a much better name

Agreed...also means if there aren't 500+ decks for each league, you don't have to worry about changing the name

160

General Discussion / Re: What do I do with 54963 electrum?

« on: June 25, 2011, 10:32:05 pm »

Not sure if it's happening anytime fairly soon or not but it might be worth just saving it and waiting until t500 comes out and see what would be most useful then.  I'm assuming you have a few other decent decks already if you're having that much trouble deciding what to get next(if not, a decent AI3 or T50 deck might also be a good idea). 

161

Trio & Quartet / Re: You can't run away from your past (Trio PvP 1/2 and T50 deck)

« on: June 24, 2011, 02:24:21 pm »

It would probably be much better to get rid of the light cards entirely, take out the scorpions, replace the sundials with hourglasses and the sanctuaries with SoGs, and add in a couple shields and Eternity.  Steals and Siphon Life might also be good to add in as well.

162

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 24, 2011, 05:03:04 am »

There's also the fact that if a certain deck type becomes too popular, everyone will start using a deck which specifically counters that type and it will become less effective, thus there will be more of a reward anyway for coming up with strong but original decks.

163

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 24, 2011, 04:49:58 am »

This is a very good point (along with the rest of your message). Perhaps one way to avoid this monotony would be to have a counter that tallies the use of every card in every deck of a particular T500 league, then gives the pay out for successful T500 decks based off some sort of logarithmic scale where lesser used cards are worth significantly more rewards to the deckbuilder. If this were the case, it would far less profitable to use a carbon copy deck.

Calculating that for every single game(or even once for every time someone submits a deck) would probably be far too much work to be worthwhile

164

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 20, 2011, 03:33:58 pm »

I, for one, don't see t500 as the source of huge amounts of income, but rather as the source of endless fun.
I really don't (won't) aim for beating them most of the time (well, atleast not the platinum), but to see "what's hot", and to play fun games everyday.
Of course if I can come up with a tech that beats them regularly, all the better 

Yeah, it's unlikely to be a good option for electrum farming or for score.  The challenge and variety will probably be the bigger reason to do this, but hopefully it will also be there will also be some other rewards you can only get from here such as rare cards(maybe even nymphs if you can maintain a long enough winning streak?). 

165

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 20, 2011, 03:22:42 pm »

An idea I had to possibly fix this: What if your level not only determined the deck you can submit but also your options when you go fight against the T500. So you might fight against triple mark decks but at least you have a triple mark of your own. This seems quite exciting as it would really add another dimension to PvE deckbuilding.

Yeah, that would definitely work and would also encourage people to level up rather than sitting at level 59 so they can stay at the upper level of gold league rather than having to face platinum. 

166

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 20, 2011, 03:12:53 pm »

  Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to a new challenge, but balancing this could be tough.  The false gods are already difficult to beat more than say 50% of the time as it is(not counting oracle predictions).  The one thing that makes them at least somewhat manageable is that there are still a fairly limited number of them, so with a well-designed deck you can at least beat SOME of them most of the time.  Even then, for any given deck, there will always be some fg's that are virtually unbeatable(aside from the extremely rare case where you get a perfect draw and they get an unusually bad one).  With t500, not only will the decks be even harder, but there will be MUCH greater variety(and especially at the highest levels, these will even be continually adapting to the more popular counter-decks ).  It's not too hard to imagine some of these decks being almost completely unbeatable or at least only beatable at all by choosing exactly the right counter(which would then lose against 99% of the other decks).

  I'm not sure what can be done to balance this enough to make it at least somewhat possible to win.  Having some way to predict what deck you'll be facing would obviously help a lot but unlike the fg oracle predictions, just having a name wouldn't help you any since the decks could be changing every day...you'd have to know what the actual cards in it were.  Doing something like that would probably defeat much of the purpose of having t500 to begin with.  Adding some new cards might help, but of course this can also go both ways as those new cards will be available for the t500 decks as well.  Still something like Mark destruction(at least one mark should probably be untargetable to stop these from completelty shutting down a deck too easily though) or damage per card drawn might be nice as these would cut into the advantages the t500 decks would have.  Some other sort of restrictions might need to be placed on t50 decks as well to keep them somewhat manageable, though hard to say what these could be.

  In any case, it's safe to say that the days of mindlessly spamming the same CCYB-type deck all day will probably be over

167

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 20, 2011, 01:53:40 pm »

Come to think of it, high level players could actually directly copy existing Gods (except for Paradox)! *shudders at Hermes deck*

Yeah, I had also been worried about Hermes-type decks.  Rainbow copies would also be hard and also have the added advantage of being able to more easily work in whatever random card the Oracle gives you.  Has anyone come up with reliable counters to either of these FG's yet?  Also life or fire rush decks could be a problem..if those were already popular for t50 before, think how hard they'll be with a FG version.

168

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: A few details about T500

« on: June 19, 2011, 09:28:42 pm »

Can a player with a high score (e.g. lvl 40) generate decks for lower leagues (e.g. Bronze)?

This is something I am actually thinking about:

Letting high level player submit decks in low level leagues might cause a flattening in variety (bronze league have mostly lvl19, silver lvl39, etc.).
However, higher level leagues will yield more coins per win, giving players a reason to move to a higher league.

Not letting high level players in low level leagues might cause certain leagues to overcrowd over time. Right now the score limits are set to divide the entire game population in 4 fractions that are about 25% each; my guess is that the gold league will overcrowd over time.

The discussion about this particular issue is open.

hmm 2 ideas for this:

1. To prevent any one league form overcrowding too much, how about instead of having fixed score limits for each level, instead make it so the level requirement table is automatically updated every week or even once a month to maintain certain limits(such as ~25% in each league or minimum of 1000 players in each).

2.  In order to allow people to submit decks in lower leveled leagues, make it so the deck level determines which league it will be played in.  So for example if I have a score of 138k, that puts me at level 64 and would allow me to make a platinum league deck.  However if I wanted to compete in the gold league instead, I would have to use less upgrades so that my deck was level 59 or less(if you wanted to provide further incentive for people to compete in the highest level available to them and keep certain leagues from being all max level decks, you could even say that in order to compete in gold league like that, I would have to make no higher than level 55 instead, while people who were actually only level 59 could still use a level 59 deck in gold league, thus giving them some advantage).