Could you give us a heads up?

Lagartha
Lagartha Posts: 186 Tile Toppler
edited January 2017 in MtGPQ General Discussion
Many people have noticed by now that casting tokens, like from Not Forgotten or From Under the Floorboards, no longer count toward objectives in this Terror in the Shadows event. When you cast Deploy the Gatewatch and three spirits come out, you aren't credited with casting any.

I understand this means the way objectives are met has changed, and that's fine. It's something we can all adjust to pretty easily. All I'm asking is that the devs maybe include this update to the mechanics in their release notes. It would REALLY help up. Thanks!
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Comments

  • buscemi
    buscemi Posts: 673 Critical Contributor
    ...making constant changes to a ton of cards is not necessarily a desirable thing, since it ends up causing confusion towards a large portion of players (not you guys, the ones who are on forums, obviously) - if one day card X does a certain thing and the next day it does something different, you need to start relearning cards you are using. We have a lot of these players who do not frequent forums, do not read patch notes, do not get involved in the community (and this is perfectly normal) so we have to keep in mind that we cannot ignore these players. When we make changes to cards and Planeswalkers, we do so with the intent of balancing and fixing problematic cards when they absolutely need to be fixed.
  • Mainloop25
    Mainloop25 Posts: 1,959 Chairperson of the Boards
    Yeah but those aren't card changes, they are event changes.
  • Apparently casting a creature that triggers a meld doesn't count either. How can you be sure this is intentional and not a side effect of some other bug fix?
  • Lagartha
    Lagartha Posts: 186 Tile Toppler
    buscemi wrote:
    ...making constant changes to a ton of cards is not necessarily a desirable thing, since it ends up causing confusion towards a large portion of players (not you guys, the ones who are on forums, obviously) - if one day card X does a certain thing and the next day it does something different, you need to start relearning cards you are using. We have a lot of these players who do not frequent forums, do not read patch notes, do not get involved in the community (and this is perfectly normal) so we have to keep in mind that we cannot ignore these players. When we make changes to cards and Planeswalkers, we do so with the intent of balancing and fixing problematic cards when they absolutely need to be fixed.
    So basically they're saying they won't tell us when things change so that the players who don't care enough to read have an equal disadvantage to those who choose to?
  • With this, there two possibilities, both of which have significantly compromised this event:

    1. The secondary objectives now _actually_ mean 'Cast', although the text still says 'Summoned' - this is misleading and undocumented and changes the way the nodes are played quite a lot.

    2. The latest patch has introduced a bug that has this effect. So the text is still correct, but the game is not following the text.

    Either way, it means the event now has artificially introduced distortions in the scoring and should be declared invalid.
  • nexus13
    nexus13 Posts: 191 Tile Toppler
    Maybe this means they've fixed the objectives for other events so that when your werewolf gets turned against you and returned it won't count as your third creature and bust your objective.
  • buscemi
    buscemi Posts: 673 Critical Contributor
    Was this change more important than all the things in this thread?

    viewtopic.php?f=31&t=57380
  • ZW2007-
    ZW2007- Posts: 812 Critical Contributor
    Agreed Lagartha. The worst part is, the change is illogical. The objectives state "Win the fight and summon 2 Wolves or Werewolves" or "Win the fight and summon 2 Spirits or Zombies". Garruk's second ability states "Summon X 2/2 Green Wolf tokens." Not Forgotten states "Summon 2 1/1 White Spirits with Flying." In both Garruk and Not Forgotten's case, it clearly says summon while the associated objectives also say summon. Why doesn't this count? I can understand Deploy the Gatewatch because it fetches and places them onto the battlefield so at least the wording works there. The inconsistencies are killing me.
  • Lagartha
    Lagartha Posts: 186 Tile Toppler
    buscemi wrote:
    Was this change more important than all the things in this thread?

    viewtopic.php?f=31&t=57380
    It certainly don't think so.
  • Nitymp
    Nitymp Posts: 320 Mover and Shaker
    ZW2007- wrote:
    The inconsistencies are killing me.

    Inconsistencies are the backbone of this game.
  • Lightcell
    Lightcell Posts: 78 Match Maker
    nexus13 wrote:
    Maybe this means they've fixed the objectives for other events so that when your werewolf gets turned against you and returned it won't count as your third creature and bust your objective.

    Same happens if they use turn to frog on you.
  • madwren
    madwren Posts: 2,259 Chairperson of the Boards
    Great change, sure.

    BUT WARN US.

    Thank you.
  • Ohboy
    Ohboy Posts: 1,766 Chairperson of the Boards
    madwren wrote:
    Great change, sure.

    BUT WARN US.

    Thank you.

    Exactly. What's the point of having a new patch thread if this kind of major change isn't even mentioned.
  • majestyk5
    majestyk5 Posts: 16 Just Dropped In
    so now they have changed the objectives into summon non-token wolves / vampires and that's fine with me, however why there's no heads up before the event? I've chosen Garruk for the green node and his token wolves were good for the first few matches but I've just found out his token wolves doesn't count after the update which is in the middle of the event.

    I wouldn't use him if we know now the objectives needs non-token creatures.
  • Delnai
    Delnai Posts: 187 Tile Toppler
    I agree that notification would be nice if the change is intentional. However I think this must be a mistake. If it weren't a mistake, why not just change the in-game text of the description of the bonus objective? It would take two seconds to change, "summon two spirits" to "play two spirit cards" or "cast two spirits" or whatever templating they use for this. The fact that they didn't do that strongly suggests it's a mistake.
  • Steeme
    Steeme Posts: 784 Critical Contributor
    They made a code change and chucked it over the wall to the QA department (the players). Might as well test in production, speeds up the delivery cycle.
  • Ohboy
    Ohboy Posts: 1,766 Chairperson of the Boards
    Steeme wrote:
    They made a code change and chucked it over the wall to the QA department (the players). Might as well test in production, speeds up the delivery cycle.

    So pretty much sop for software development lol
  • Lagartha
    Lagartha Posts: 186 Tile Toppler
    My best guess is that they were sincerely trying to solve one of the problems that's been complained about a lot on the forums. The secondary objectives that require you to summon two or fewer creatures probably won't be counted against you when your opponent turns them into a moon. Or uses Turn Against. I like the mechanics better now, but even a tiny footnote in the update announcement would have been nice. And some consistency on the wording. 'Cast' versus 'summon.'
  • buscemi
    buscemi Posts: 673 Critical Contributor
    Lagartha wrote:
    I like the mechanics better now, but even a tiny footnote in the update announcement would have been nice. And some consistency on the wording. 'Cast' versus 'summon.'

    Paper MTG uses the keyword 'create' for token creatures.
  • Machine
    Machine Posts: 856 Critical Contributor
    Delnai wrote:
    I agree that notification would be nice if the change is intentional. However I think this must be a mistake. If it weren't a mistake, why not just change the in-game text of the description of the bonus objective? It would take two seconds to change, "summon two spirits" to "play two spirit cards" or "cast two spirits" or whatever templating they use for this. The fact that they didn't do that strongly suggests it's a mistake.

    I just don't understand the developers in this matter. I'm using Not Forgotten in the **** event and it was counting the two spirit tokens towards the spirit objective. Yesterday I installed update 1.9.2 (during the event!) and today I played the last round in the white node. I cast two Not Forgotten, creating 4 spirit tokens and won the game, only getting 5 ribbons. I had no clue what was going on, until I read this thread.

    It is absolutely ridiculous to change things during events! This is again (!) one of the many mistakes that takes the fun out of this game. When reporting this issue, I only receive some silly standard questions, while my story is absolutely clear.

    Jeez... I'm really sick of this...