Guest posts by sciroccorics

1

Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:50 pm »

Any kind of handicap system would be a really bad idea.

Handicap systems exist in many strategy games (even in good-old chess or go tournaments, you have an official handicap system) and nobody complains...

Even better solution would be to remove upgraded cards altogether but that's not going to happen.

Of course it's not going to happen, because the game is based on farming. An alternative could be to create a "non-upgraded PvP" and a "upgraded PvP" ? The non-upgraded PvP would be rather fairtrade, as everybody could buy most of the cards he wants within a couple of lvl3 farming hours (except the rare cards, of course)... So, no handicap is needed and the deckbuilting strategy would really be prominent.

Seems that this topic is more and more located in the wrong place... No moderator has complained yet... so far, so good 

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:50 pm »

But now I'm curious: how would you measure the resources available to each player?

Exactly the same definition as for any tax collecting department: your patrimony !!

Here it means the sum of the selling price for every card you own (not only your current deck) plus your remaining unused electrums...

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:50 pm »

Do you see what I mean?

I'm not sure to understand. If both players have access to the same resources, there is no reason to include some handicap for any of them, so the player with the best deck is likely to win the duel.

In my idea, the handicap should not be computed according to the quality of the deck, but according to the resources available to each player. And yes, this can be seen as a socialistic point of view... or at least as a "fairtrade" point of view. With such a mechanism, a player that optimizes his deck according to his resources is rewarded, which is exactly what good deckbuilting means.

In the current game, the player is only rewarded according to the number of hours spent on farming. Of course, the economical model of any physical CCG is to have the players buy as much boosters as possible, and similarly the economical model of any online CCG is to make the players spend hours on the site. Farming is a straightforward solution to achieve this, but there are many other solutions.

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:49 pm »

Slight modification?! Taking away 33% of it's power is anything but "slight".

And that mid-term solution is way too complicated. How would you write the text in the card? "During even number turns you will get.."

I meant "slight" in the sense that only one card has to be changed to totally renew the gameplay. The mid-term solution I have proposed can also be implemented as: "randomly generate either 2 or 3 arbitrary quantums per turn", which has statistically the same effect.

I actually thought about this last night. 3 different options come to my mind:

1. Nerf Quantum Tower
2. Make cards more expensive
3. Make expensive cards more powerful

I agree that your solution 2 or 3 would be interesting, but it involves a whole new game design, in order to correctly balance the cost vs. power for each card, which means a lot of beta testing and so on...

On the contrary, the modification I propose can be implemented in one line of code by the developpers, and I'm quite convinced that it would improve fun for players... But hey, I'm not the lead developper, so...

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:49 pm »

I have a feeling we've already been talking about this - not yet in the 'Decks'-section though:

http://elementstheforum.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,87.0.html (http://elementstheforum.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,87.0.html)

Oops. Sorry, I didn't saw the previous topic. I'm a newbie to the forum, so I misunderstand the classification... Sorry again...

Just to add my last two cents: for all trading card games, the strength of a deck it directly related to the "expected strengh value" you are able to summon in each situation (whatever the draw ordering for your deck). The expected strength value is defined as the card strengh (approximated here by its selling value) multiplied by the probability you've got the ressources (here, the corresponding quantums) to summon it for a given game turn. For Elements, it's quite easy to perform the maths as soon as you forget hasten cards which make the process a bit complicated. The effect of hasten cards can be included in the process, but it would require a computer simulation process instead of pure combinatorics computation. Of course, this implies that the selling value of each card is a good approximation of its strength...

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:49 pm »

Except we know that card prices and card quantum costs are not necessarily good indicators of their comparative strengths.

I totally agree, card prices is only a first approximation, but any (better) strengh evaluation would of course improve the process.

Plus, it punishes good deckbuilding which is the antithesis of CCG game design.

I do not agree with that one. What is fun in deckbuilting within CCGs is trying to get the best deck with a given amount of resources. If you duel someone who has access to higher resources (after having farming for hours), his/her deck would obviously be more powerful (unless he/she is a complete foul) and the result of the duel would be quite obvious. Moreover, there will be no fun either for the looser/newbie, nor for the winner/wizard. But if you counter-balance the difference of deck strenghes by some "fairing" process, the duel would be much more chalenging for both players. And of course, if the wizard wins despite his/her handicap, he/she should be rewarded accordingly, and not just a bunch of electrums...

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:49 pm »

Hi eveybody,

I discovered Elements about 2 weeks ago and played quite a lot since then. Using my experiment from other TCGs, I started with a mono-deck, then a dual-deck and finally a rainbow deck. Unfortunately after two weeks, I find the game quite boring, because rainbow decks are so much powerful compared to others that all "good" players have built up approximately the same deck, and consequently the game becomes very repetitive.

What I like in TCG is the fact that different users may explore many different deck builting strategies, and you never guess the deck content when fighting a new player. This is not the case here...

After having thought a little bit about it, I came up with the following simple suggestion:

>>> Why not reduce the Quantum Pillar to generate only 2 quantums per turn, instead of 3 ? <<<

This slight modification would drastically change the relative ratio of strengh between rainbow and mono/dual deck, and I guess it would offer much more variety in the weekly Top50 winning decks... and consequently much more fun when playing.

A mid-term solution could be to generate 3 quantums on even-number turns, and 2 quantums on odd-number turns...

Any comment about this proposal ?

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Quantum pillars from 3 to 2 quantum ?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:49 pm »

Going a step further:

The idea of randomizing the quantum generation by pillars could even become a practical solution to counter-balance the difference of strenghs between decks on PVP fights. The strengh of each deck can be easily estimated by summing the sell cost of each card and dividing the resulting value by the number of cards. This quantitative estimation of each deck can be used to tune the random generator for the quantum generation in the following way: mono-color (resp. rainbow) pillars randomly generate from 1 to 2 (resp. 2 to 4) quantums per turn, and the statistic law of this random generator is controlled according to the relative strengh of the two decks. So a wizard player (with a full deck of upgraded cards) fighting a newbie would get very restricted pillars, while the newbie gets boosted pillars.

Some testing should be done to find the statistical law that improves "fairness" but, here again, the idea is to improve fun, whatever the level you have reached...