A Heartfelt Plea to the Developers Regarding PVP

fruithead

Dear Developers,

I know there has been some bad feelings between us over my initial disappointment in this game. There still is - I crashed at least ten times in the last couple of days while trying to place on the PVP leaderboards, and those 30 ribbons would have put me in the running for a Fat Pack, and as it stands now i have almost no chance, i simply dont have the time to play that much.

Despite my issues , I still love this game, and I cant wait until until the bugs are ironed out. However, i feel i must at least beg one official time for the following:

Please implement True PVP.

Sure there are challenges. But it would be worth it. You see, without true pvp even the most hardcore player will get bored after a while. let's face it - the AI sucks, and it's probably a tremendous amount of work to get it really up to par. right now the games i play are either premade content where ai is given tremendous starting advantages or ridiculously op PW abilities to make it challenging OR fall easily into three flavors:

1) AI acquires mana at a slightly higher or similar (or lower) rate than/to me - i crush the ai and the time spent playing is a chore. does not tell me anything about my deck or skill (vast majority of games)
2) AI acquires mana at a MUCH higher rate than me (i mean mind numbing higher, with HUGE **** cascades) - AI plays too fast, i can sometimes recover by outplaying AI with skill but often my early losses are too high too overcome later in the match. (second most common game type)
3) AI acquires mana at a rate higher than slightly higher, but not much higher, rate than me - match can, if the AI plays it's cards well, be truly thrilling and a great challenge. i still almost never lose, but at least i feel like my skill was tested, and my deck composition mattered. these are the games i live for, and of course the most rare by far.

Because of this, the game becomes a "rewards for time spent staring at the game screen" game, which is frustrating to skilled players who want the game to be challenge based. The leaderboards - and it's corresponding rewards - reflect time wasted more than skilled gameplay. A player who has more time to spend will almost Certainly place highly on the leaderboards, despite lacking in skill (or cards).

What a depressing thought. Why bother putting in the effort to become great and spending the money on great cards when they are meaningless? Sure i suppose there is some satisfaction in creating innovative combos, but when playing against an AI that can be beaten with freely acquired cards (even when said AI has WAY better cards) and low skill play, the whole thing begins to feel kind of pointless, which serves to make one reluctant to spend more money.


NOW, let's talk about real PvP. Imagine, Just Imagine, a player who plays the AI and crushes, over & over. He fancies himself good. But then he tries PvP, and he gets his FACE CRUSHED IN by someone with a better deck, and who outplays him, hard. So he thinks, if i had just a few better cards and use them righhhhhtttt............... BOOM! off to the card store (or in this case, the vault), to buy more cards! JUST LIKE REAL MtG! So then he goes back to pvp, and some guy with a beautifully constructed deck built around some mythics and rares CRUSHES HIS SOUL INTO HIS CRUSHED IN FACE (yeah i used to play magic bros, i know hows it feel.) I CAN HEAR THE CASH REGISTERS RINGING ALREADY. Of course, this is aside from the fact that it would be fun. Fun like, the MOST fun thing a smartphone could ever do! I almost cant imagine anything more fun or addictive than true MtG:PQ PvP on a phone.

But Wait! what if there are no players on! What do, lest one sit and stare at the words "searching for match" forever on one's screen! Easy. implement a search while you play feature. Street fighter IV had this, and I LOVED IT, long after playing the AI had become boring. The implementation here would be different than theirs but still similar in concept. It's simple, you simply check a box saying "search for True PvP while playing vs AI" or something, and then just play as you normally would. Meanwhile, the game can ping the matchmaking service once every few seconds (or less? i have no idea really) while you play the AI. Then, when a match is found a little popup can say "Do you wish to quit your current game and play a live opponent?" and if you click yes, you go to a live game! The beauty is, even if no match can be found, at least you played a game of MtGPQ and had fun! Win-Win! Of course, that's not to say a "friends list" should not be implemented so you could prearrange matches with a friend and play against them. In addition, perhaps the number of players currently playing or searching live pvp could be shown so as to help with expectation management.

I am sure this is not a simple request, And i do not mean to minimize the complexity of implementing it. However, I truly believe the rewards monetarily would be worth it for the devs, and i think a real dedicated and addicted payer base would emerge.

Sincerely Yours,
Fruit
Head

P.S. if anyone has anything to add, do comment!

Brainstormin

This would be an amazing thing for them to implement. I had a friend who worked at Demiurge on MPQ and I asked him if they ever considered having true PvP. I think he said no due to something about data usage needed to communicate every move and turn (as opposed to only using data after the match ends to collect rewards etc)
That said, it seems like MtgPQ needs to be connected to the internet all the time to the internet so maybe this wouldn't be a factor?

I have to agree that the AI needs a lot of work. Small things include:
-Only seeing 5 matches *sometimes*
-Favoring matching MY color over their own even if it means less mana for them play things. It's not a strong strategy.
-Casting Reclaim with an empty hand.
-Direct damage spells to the face instead of the creature that will kill them next turn. To the AI it makes more sense to do 6 damage to my 80 life?!
-Boosting all their creatures when at least two of them are Disabled (summon sick)
etc etc

These AI mistakes really take me out of the game. I'd much rather lose to smarter AI or a real person.
Adding real PvP and establishing something with card duplicates would seem like the best way for them to get more player ($)

Irgy

True PVP would probably come with almost as many challenges to implementation as creating the entire game did in the first place, just keep that in mind. Implementation wise it might not have been twice the effort to do it in the first place but from where they are I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a lot of things which needed rewriting. You might think they'd save on the game design part, but then again balance would quickly become a big deal in a way that it isn't currently, since you can beat the AI most of the time with any deck that functions, but playing against a human in control of a powerful strategy will be a different experience entirely. So they may well find out that what they've got so far is the classic 80% of the design for 20% of the effort, and the fine tuning is going to take a lot of work.

I'd like it too mind you, not least because like many other people, for a little while I thought we already had it. But I'm not really expecting it. I'm not trying to talk them out of it here, these are all things they'd know themselves already if they're true at least. Just trying to be realistic, and maybe encourage them to prove me wrong at the same time...!

fruithead

Brainstormin wrote:

This would be an amazing thing for them to implement. I had a friend who worked at Demiurge on MPQ and I asked him if they ever considered having true PvP. I think he said no due to something about data usage needed to communicate every move and turn

I have to say i think is a small issue that could be easily solved via transparency. A simple message like "Please Note Live PvP May Use Large Amounts of Data when Not connected to WiFi" would suffice. for bonus points, the devs could post a note in the faq to the effect of "Q. how much data does an average live PvP game consume? A.an average match may consume up to 337 mb of data" (or however much it really is, i genuinely cant imagine it's even close to that)

Two more things to note: A) many people have so much data on their plans they could not care less. even if the data required was prohibitive, many (most?) people spend the majority of their day in an environment with WiFi nowadays, and could just turn off Live PvP when not in a WiFi zone.

Irgy wrote:

True PVP would probably come with almost as many challenges to implementation as creating the entire game did in the first place, just keep that in mind.

It's possible you may be right, but then again, at the end of the day it's all about the money. I really do think that they would make it back in spades with true Live PvP. there are so many people just waiting to become addicted to a game like this, to throw themselves against real enemies and challenge their skills. and then they would feel the only thing holding them back was better cards, and the money would just rain down. Just look at real life MtG! At least, that's what i think would happen.

fruithead

fruithead wrote:

Brainstormin wrote:

This would be an amazing thing for them to implement. I had a friend who worked at Demiurge on MPQ and I asked him if they ever considered having true PvP. I think he said no due to something about data usage needed to communicate every move and turn

I have to say i think is a small issue that could be easily solved via transparency. A simple message like "Please Note Live PvP May Use Large Amounts of Data when Not connected to WiFi" would suffice. for bonus points, the devs could post a note in the faq to the effect of "Q. how much data does an average live PvP game consume? A.an average match may consume up to 337 mb of data" (or however much it really is, i genuinely cant imagine it's even close to that)

Just a note, i know really nothing about programming and am talking out of my behind but two possibilities i thought of:

1) premapped game - have the matchmaking service randomly generate a map of 5000 gems and download the map to both phones (considering war and peace, with over 3.5 million characters, is 1.3 MB compressed, this should be what, .25MB?) even a lousy computer could generate such a map in .1 seconds.

2) map generator key/seed - i have seen a number of games use this. in this version, you have the gem "map" produce gems according to a logarithm (i think that's the right word?), with the variable being that the logarithm generates the map based on the key value. although the downside is the number of keys is fixed based on the maximum amount of characters in the key, this is less of an issue when you can make the key 50 characters long. in this case, once me and my opponenet both have the base game which includes the logarithm-based map generator, we need only have the matchmaking service produce a key - a mere 50 BYTES!

in either scenario once the game starts the only info need be transmitted is 2 simple sets of numbers - the horizontal & vertical location of the switched gem in it's before and after positions. the phones can then take care of the rest. so for instance H5V3 to H5V2. that's what, six bytes? a whole game would take under a megabyte in scenario one, and under a KILOBYTE in scenario 2.

too bad i have no idea how this stuff actually works though lolol.

EDIT: i realize i left out how the two phones would communicate cards - not a big deal either. simply apply each card a 9-digit number code (is the game ever getting over a million unique cards? obviously not) and have them start with a different letter for each card class. so support would be P and spell would be S and creature be C or whatever. then have the phones play the game - i.e. my phone picks a random card from my deck. i choose to cast, turn it off so it does not autocast, not cast, etc. each possibility can have it's own 3-digit "action" code, and attackers and defenders and buffs all have numbers and codes. when the turn ends (the processor knows what is going to happen before the animations play out) the phone sends all this info/data to the opponents phone.

even for cards and abilities that affect gems, this is all bytes of data - we are hardly talking about major pieces of info. so i use nissa to turn three random gems green - my phone carries out the action, and sends the relevant data, as text, the the opponent.

perhaps i am a dreamer, but none of this seems crazy hard to implement. for a talented team with lots of money at stake, what is this, mere days of programming? perhaps a week or two? the base game is already there!

loroku

This will never happen, and I can tell you one reason why: matchmaking.

Hearthstone has millions of players and they still get **** in their forums all the time about matchmaking. People hate it. And this is Blizzard - no offense, but a company a thousand times better at making games than this one - who can't please everyone here.

The issue is that the only way matchmaking works is if you have lots and lots of people. This game has thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. And that's just not enough. Nowhere NEAR enough, especially if "millions" is still not enough. We're talking 2 orders of magnitude, maybe 3.

And frankly, I like the game better this way. You can play whenever you want, which is pretty huge. And you win like, all the time. I know that's not fun for some people who love challenges, but I'm having a good time. And as someone else already mentioned: this game was released 3 months too early in an embarrassing pre-alpha state. They've taken months to work out the bugs. I would much rather them make this game work right now, than worry about adding huge new features.

EDUSAN

i wish real pvp was a thing but if it not, i still have fun withe game.
It does create some weird scene though... for instance, every player playing for real with a good deck have 80% or more winrate, that would never be possible in real PVP, a win for a player is a lose for another one. Thats how ladder is just a race to play as many games as you can, because when you lose no one wins, but when you win, you win.

But if the devs keep improving the IA, as happens with hearthstone, there is no real difference between a player or an AI on the other side.

I wanted to notice another bug the IA does, which is to favor doing a 4 gem match to clear a row/column when they could get a 5gem match in a L shape and get an extra movement.

BlackSheep101

fruithead wrote:

Brainstormin wrote:

This would be an amazing thing for them to implement. I had a friend who worked at Demiurge on MPQ and I asked him if they ever considered having true PvP. I think he said no due to something about data usage needed to communicate every move and turn

I have to say i think is a small issue that could be easily solved via transparency. A simple message like "Please Note Live PvP May Use Large Amounts of Data when Not connected to WiFi" would suffice.

The challenge is on the server side, not the player's.

Hibernum_JC

Live PvP isn't something that we are ruling out, BUT it comes with a huge caveat: if it does come, it won't be any time soon. It would take a huge amount of resources to pull it off great, and it's not something we can do at the moment.

As for the AI, we are constantly reviewing it and seeing how we can fix it so it is better. It won't happen overnight, but it is something we are working on, because it's incredibly important for the game.