Idea to Keep Players Involved

Mburn7

I had a thought today as to a way that Oktagon could keep the players happy and make the developers' lives easier at the same time.

Why not release their preliminary ideas for the Ixalan cards, and let us (the players) give feedback on them?  If they don't even have preliminary ideas, then give a list of the cards that they are planning on bringing into the game and we can figure out how best to do it.  Maybe make it a competition like the Planeswalker Decks.

It would give us something cool to do, it would make sure that new cards are fairly balanced (no more Baral/Omnicience/Deploy/Olivia...ect), and it would save them time once they get around to implementing them, since the design work would already be done.

So everyone, (and especially @Brigby) what do you think?  Obviously whatever they release would have the infamous *subject to change* label and they wouldn't have to listen to us, although I would not reccommend the latter without a good reason.

Sirchombli

My guess is that they don't want to turn the development process into a democracy. I also think that what you propose would slow down the development process by making it unnecessarily complicated. Reading through a few thousand proposals for each card would take quite a long time and they're already under the gun. It might work if they let us take a crack at 5ish cards

majincob

While it's a juicy idea from our perspective, they can't do that. There's no way they could get feedback with enough time left to do the programming/testing given that they can't reveal the cards before the paper set gets spoiled.

Brigby

@Mburn7 What Sirchombli and majincob stated are both correct. Unfortunately having that back and forth discussion about the development of an entire card set would indeed slow down the process tremendously.

The biggest reason though is simply because we can't reveal cards before the paper version is revealed.

Mburn7

Sirchombli said:

My guess is that they don't want to turn the development process into a democracy. I also think that what you propose would slow down the development process by making it unnecessarily complicated. Reading through a few thousand proposals for each card would take quite a long time and they're already under the gun. It might work if they let us take a crack at 5ish cards

I figured this would speed things up, since they don't have to do the design work themselves.  I guess we would have to filter and vote on the best ideas here to save them the agony of reading all the responses.  And I assumed that we would focus on the rares/mythics, since nobody really cares about the commons/uncommons too much.

majincob said:

While it's a juicy idea from our perspective, they can't do that. There's no way they could get feedback with enough time left to do the programming/testing given that they can't reveal the cards before the paper set gets spoiled.

Ixalan has been out for over a month, there is nothing left to spoil.  In the future that makes sense, but for this point in time where boredom is killing off the player base faster than outrage ever did, I figured this could be a good way to keep everyone involved and having fun

Mburn7

Brigby said:

@Mburn7 What Sirchombli and majincob stated are both correct. Unfortunately having that back and forth discussion about the development of an entire card set would indeed slow down the process tremendously.

The biggest reason though is simply because we can't reveal cards before the paper version is revealed.

Oh well, can't blame a guy for trying.  Although as I just said (simultaneous posts create redundancies), in this case the paper version has been out a while.  There's nothing left to spoil.

And you guys have been saying that the set is at least a couple months away, so I can't imagine we would slow it down any more

Brigby

Mburn7 said:

Brigby said:

Mburn7 What Sirchombli and majincob stated are both correct. Unfortunately having that back and forth discussion about the development of an entire card set would indeed slow down the process tremendously.

The biggest reason though is simply because we can't reveal cards before the paper version is revealed.

Oh well, can't blame a guy for trying.  Although as I just said (simultaneous posts create redundancies), in this case the paper version has been out a while.  There's nothing left to spoil.

And you guys have been saying that the set is at least a couple months away, so I can't imagine we would slow it down any more

Ah, I was more-so referencing future card sets, not this upcoming one. When it comes to the next card set specifically, feel free to submit, in Suggestions & Feedback, your ideas or opinions on how you envision certain cards to be designed. While we're unable to reveal which cards we're specifically introducing into the game, the developers will at least have the opportunity to review the player feedback, and take its design into consideration.

Kinesia

I've thought about "crowdsourcing' a lot. Crowds are best about revealing problems rather than agreeing on solutions. (Like in publlic encryption, you keep going until the public can't find a problem, but it's still the geniuses having the ideas).

What we actually need to have set up (rather than particulaar cards or card sets) is general policies on what certain effects cost. This isn't tied to time. This will apply to _all_ sets. While there are new things we need policies for the _normal_ things.

Like:
"doing 5 damage should cost x", "giving  choice between player/creature adds x"
"having to sacrifice a creature costs y less"
etc
etc.

These policies need to exist and be globally applied to commons _and_ rares equally. Special effects are a case by case basis but they _can't_ compltely break the policy, only adjust it.

We need this base level and we just have nothing like it. Look at the mana generating "lands", they are wildly inconsistant in ways they should _not_ be, htere is obviously NO policy currently. Not even vaguely, not even within the same rarity.

shteev

Kinesia said:

What we actually need to have set up (rather than particulaar cards or card sets) is general policies on what certain effects cost. This isn't tied to time. This will apply to _all_ sets. While there are new things we need policies for the _normal_ things.

Interestingly enough, in the early days of paper MTG, WOTC tried the same thing, and found that it didn't work very well... There's no substitute for having a team of smart people play with the cards a lot, and see what's overpowered and what's underpowered in practice.

The last thing I want is the designers from Oktagon to come on the forum and start spouting JC's nonsense about 'card budgets', or how mythics should be 8 times as powerful as commons.

Kinesia

Ah, but the bit about mythics being more powerful is antithetical to what I'm saying.

things need hand crafting and testing, but we don't -have- the luxury of testing like paper does, we have limited time and resources, so we _need_ rough guides for migration from paper to this. And they should be based on _mana_ balance not rarity.

But paper mixes things up sometimes, usually they have a reason, so you rely on _their_ testing. They made a giant spider that was just slightly different this time, maybe the slight difference had a reason? So we cost it exactly the same as a giant spider but then we -manually- look at the reason for the difference.

The cartouches and trials provide a great example. Final Destination costs 7 to destroy a creature in black, that is the price for this block. Cool. (prices adjust slightly per block). Trial costs 8 but is a support and has a _chance_ to be replayed, that isn't much of an increase but there are reasons to use each card, they are balanced and different.
Lethal sting costs 3, scandalous! But it needs -1/-1 on a creature and that restriction matters.

Policies can include all this. You have general overall policies then when you get a new set you look at how the existing policies fit with it and _then_ you cost the cards and then you play with examples as best you can, but unlike paper you only have a few internal testers, so you have to hope that paper testing stops the worst abuses.
(But then when the abuses inevitably do turn up you _do_ fix them because you actually have that luxury.)


You can use the paper testing to help, but _only_ if you have a policy structure to actually translate things across. It's _not_ a replacement for manually tuning things but it's an absolute requirement for the base level.

shteev

Brigby said:

@Mburn7 What Sirchombli and majincob stated are both correct. Unfortunately having that back and forth discussion about the development of an entire card set would indeed slow down the process tremendously.

The biggest reason though is simply because we can't reveal cards before the paper version is revealed.

Let's not forget that half an hour for the design, coding and testing for each card doesn't leave a lot of time for dialogue.

Kinesia

shteev said:

Brigby said:

@Mburn7 What Sirchombli and majincob stated are both correct. Unfortunately having that back and forth discussion about the development of an entire card set would indeed slow down the process tremendously.

The biggest reason though is simply because we can't reveal cards before the paper version is revealed.

Let's not forget that half an hour for the design, coding and testing for each card doesn't leave a lot of time for dialogue.

About the time Paper releases the "intro videos" on the new mechanics, you could say how you plan to implement them _generally_ soon after that.

Like Aftermath cards could have been said to turn up as special gems when they were in the graveyard. (Though just saying it like that is boring, the announcment needs pizazz!)