Battle of Four Tribes - An exercise in bad design

Brakkis

So shall the rant begin. To start off, this event was never designed well. Not in it's original incarnation, and not now with it having been broken up in to two parts. 

The original event had issues, and the most minor of those issues was it being five nodes. Sure, five nodes can be a bit much but if the fights within those nodes are designed correctly, including the objectives, it isn't much of a big deal. Look at Avacyn's Madness. It's five nodes and most people don't find an issue with it because of how the fights within the nodes are designed and how most of the objectives run counter to one another so that if you can' meet the secondary, just fail it even more and get the tertiary. The fights there aren't 15 minute long grinds, or longer. It lessens the perceived pressure by running objectives like that.

So what were the issues with the original event? The objectives were bad in some places, and the grind that some of the fights presented made the event feel obnoxious.

1.3 - Requiring 6 pirates was a bad objective. It wasn't a hard objective. It was a needlessly grindy objective. You had to run weaker creatures or hold creatures in your hand to meet the objective against an opponent with relatively low health and a node ability that caused you to steal her own pirates along the way. It just slowed the fight down unnecessarily.

3.2 - Taking 15 or less damage against an opponent that could deal that on Turn 2 was poor design.

3.3 - Having a permanent node support that makes casting spells beneficial while also having an objective to cast 3 or less spells was one of the dumbest things I've seen in this game.

4.x - Oh where to begin. This entire node, all 3 fights, were one of the two biggest issues people had with this god awful event.

• Mavren Fein's objective to kill 2 or less creatures while having the ability to kill his own creatures. Also meant keeping your own creatures low on power, thus turning the fight in to a grind.
• Having to run a creatureless grind against Vona because of the lose 3 or less creatures objective and her having untargeted, spammable, removal with her loyalty ability.
• Elenda. The grind to end all grinds. This fight dragged on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on... You loaded her up with lifelink creatures, a bunch of removal (including untargeted, because screw Hexproof), and loyalty abilities to create more lifelink tokens, grant lifelink to anything she has out without it, and degrade all her opponent's creatures. You basically made Sorin on speed and quadrupled his health.

5.1 - No one likes the Win with x or less HP objectives. It slows down the fight, it can easily get out of hand, etc. It required disable control because bounce kills now and killing was off the table due to the other objective.

5.2 - The other big issue this event had. The best counter to it was a card you couldn't get until you had gotten through this event once already, and done well enough when doing so. You gave it a loyalty ability that will instantly kill anyone, gated it behind City's Blessing, then loaded the bastards deck with cards that can get it City's Blessing by Turn 3. Did it always do so? No. But it was entirely possible and was a huge issue that needed to be resolved. But, that wasn't the only issue the node had. You also expected players to clear it 10 rounds or less while giving the node 4 cheap, spammable removal cards.

5.3 - Azor's ability is unique. Yay for unique? It also causes the fight to flow like molasses. No one wants that. We prefer fights that run like your body's digestion after a night of Taco Bell.

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So the question is - Well why weren't these issues that were brought up addressed? Instead of going in and just tweaking the decks and objectives to alleviate at least some of these concerns the players had with the event, Oktagon instead focused heavily on the issue of five nodes and thought to just, separate the event, but not even in a good way.

They didn't cut it down to 3 nodes and 2, or 2 and 2 and remove one of the nodes. They have us playing the 3rd node twice. Because that's sensible.

Most people had issues with the 4th and 5th nodes. Very vocal issues. Now we get to run the both of them together, without the 1st and 2nd nodes comparative ease to alleviate the tension.

They went and tweaked the decks and the objectives but those choices were hit or miss.

Battle of Four Tribes Part 1

1.1 - Pauper is fine. Speed pauper isn't.

2.3 - Nope. 6 or more dinosaurs is the same issue people had with 6 or more pirates. Unnecessary padding of the field leading to a slowed down fight in order to meet the objective.

• Also, the node support is bugged here, and has been forever. Isn't supposed to destroy land supports. Destroys land supports.

3.1 - Getting a little too high up there in health to be running pauper now ladies and gents.

3.3 - Oh look, the 6 or more creatures objective again. Original. Still not a good idea.

Battle of Four Tribes Part 2

1.1 and 1.3 (3.1 and 3.3 in Part 1) - Same issue

4.1 - What the ever loving... Pauper!? Seriously!? And you added Settle the Wreckage to this bastards deck!? This fight was awful to begin with and you went and made it worse with that objective!

• Amusing bit - The deck still runs Bishop of Rebirth. It has no creatures with mana cost of 8 or less. Her ability is useless in the deck.

4.2 - How do you make a creatureless grind fight worse? Make the objective require they cast high cost creatures so they can get beat down by spammable loyalty removal, the targeted exile, Vona's (the creature) untargeted removal, and the untargeted exile (that you added to the deck).

4.3 - Seemingly unchanged from the original incarnation of the event, the grind fest is back! With just as much grind as you remember! Have no fun!

5.2 - Adding Thaumatic Compass/Spires of Orazca to the mix, as well as an objective to cast weaker creatures, while maintaining the speed objective (from 10 to 12) and doing nothing to fix the issue of it achieving rapid City's Blessing was not the solution to this fight.

5.3 - His node support ability is still unique. That means it's still slow. You then added Willbreaker to his deck while there is a known bug with stealing creatures that can lead to a soft lock of the game and immediate failure of a fight.

Rewards & Progression

Progression for both parts was 300. The maximum points for both parts was 315. 1.x gave 10 points per fight, 2.x gave 15 points per fight, and 3.x gave 20 points per fight. That meant a single loss in 3.x prevented progression. A loss in 2.x with a single failed secondary or tertiary prevented progression. This is extremely poor design.

The original Battle of Four Tribes rewarded players with The Immortal Sun. Even if you already had it, it was a hefty chunk of crafting orbs. Why was this taken away? The event is literally the fight to claim The Immortal Sun.

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How you should have fixed this event

If you truly felt the need to break the event into two parts, you could have done a 3 node and a 2 node event. Not having us replay the 3rd node in the second part. Sometimes redundancy is bad. This is one of those times.

As far as the fights and the objectives, some of the changes were good, some were fine, and some were just bad. Here's a rundown of every node.

1.1 - Either pauper or speed, not both.

1.2 - Fine

1.3 - All you needed to do was reduce the number of pirates to 4. You did this. The objective change from taking damage to dealing damage was also a good decision.

2.1 - Fine

2.2 - Fine 

2.3 - Keep it at 4 dinosaurs. The change from take 30 or less damage to deal 18 or more damage is good. Also, fix the node support.

3.1 - Not pauper. At this point, pauper begins to cause too much slowdown.

3.2 - This was changed nicely.

3.3 - Lower the number of required Merfolk to 4 (again, 6 is too many). The change to build into the node supports benefits was good.

4.1 - No. Outright wrong. Pauper is an awful decision for this node. All that needed changing here was the removal of Slaughter the Strong from the deck, or the removal of the Kill 2 or less creatures objective. You could have swapped Slaughter the Strong with Settle the Wreckage and achieved this. (You instead swapped it in for Axis of Mortality so now he's running both Slaughter and Settle, against pauper).

4.2 - All you had to do here was increase the loyalty cost of her ability and change the lose 3 or less creatures objective to lose 3 or more creatures and left the deck alone.

• Yes, btw, Vona is a woman.

4.3 - Increase the cost of all of her loyalty abilities from 6, 12, 15 to 12, 18, 21. Swap Walk the Plank for Vampire's Zeal. Makes her still a challenge, but less obnoxiously so. If she can't readily spam her abilities, the grind miraculously becomes less of a grind.

5.1 - Good changes here.

5.2 - You had options to make this fight tolerable. You took none of them. Here's a handful of choices you could have made.

• Increase the cost of the loyalty ability to 30.
• Reduce the damage from 999 to 99. No longer an instant kill.
• Remove the largest culprits from the deck that granted it City's Blessing by Turn 3 - Treasure Map and Trove of Temptation. The gate shouldn't be spawning treasures in the first place.
• Remove the speed objective entirely.

5.3 - Get Willbreaker out of this deck. Not much I can think of to change Azor's permanent support. If the only grind in the event is the final fight, it's understandable.

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Okay, rant over. For now.

Mburn7

You forgot that the abilities and node support in 4.3 are still incredibly buggy.  Like, super not working right at all.

Also, I like the insta-kill possibility of the Gate.  Making the ability cost 30 is a fair balance.

Otherwise, Nice rant!  You seem to have covered everything.

Kinesia

It's weird having node 3 twice, I'm glad it has different requirements slightly.


I found speed pauper an interesting challenge that only worked because she has only 35 hitpoints. But given the reward s were so tight dropping objectives and not being able to practise against the right decks made it hard.

That there are still so many crashes meant there was no leeway.


With the number of creatures... 6 pirates was so hard because Brass didn't have many hitpoints. 4 is just right.
6 dinosaurs is doable because they have more health so you have longer to play new ones, but sure, 4 or 5 would get the point across enough.
6 merfolk is dead easy because of the way that node works, I think I played 18? Without trying? The mana and card drawing together just kept it chugging along.


Elenda's big thing is the -4/-4 to your creatures. So I found that if I had Elspeth or Gideon or Nahiri or Monajani then I would get my chance to build up, sometimes I'd need to restart but things like a blocking support and the Bodyguard to make the blocker invulnerable made it easy to churn through. (That strategy works on a lot of the merfolk too and a few other things. And A Gideon first strike or invulnerable blocker is actually easily done by new players too.)


With Azor's support, the shield count is over the first Saga Chapter counter, so you can never click on that to read it.


Overall I liked it much better than the first version. The main problem for me was just crashes... I legitimately lost 1 game and got only 250 points total because it crashed multiple times including on Azor.

arNero

Well said, well said, and thanks for taking time to write all these to summarize much of our displeasures.

Some points I totally agree with you:

1) Pauper objectives should not be on one of the later nodes; That Pauper on Mavren Vein was murder. (Having said that, Pauper + Speed is indeed also a poor combination, I agree)
2) Tone down the number of removals on Vona, Elenda, Azor's Gateway and Azor. Those bastards are already frustratingly powerful enough WITHOUT removals (especially since we no longer have Cast Out to shut them down reliably, and Cast Out is useless against Elenda and Gateway anyway).
3) And yeah, instant-kill ability at only 12 loyalty = bad, bad, BAD design. At least Uncage the Menagerie from RotGP's last ability, which can indeed be an instant-kill, costs 30, and can be circumvented with Gideon's Defeat, Defenders etc (whereas for the Gateway, if you fail to stop the ascent, you only have mythic cards to fall back to: Lich's Mastery, Sorcerous Spyglass and Immortal Sun, all of which have drawbacks which can kill you in a long fight)

What I don't agree with you:

1) 6 or more Merfolks isn't a major problem now that Kumena's objectives don't run counter against the passive support. Personally, the changes to Kumena was among the best thing to happen to this event.

ManiiNames

• I liked the pauper nodes.  Was a deck building challenge.
• Instant kill is a non issue if you either a). Win fast, b). Carry support control, since he can't instantly kill you unless he has city's blessing or c). carry Immortal Sun, which literally everybody owns because they gave it to us for free.

wereotter

ManiiNames said:

• I liked the pauper nodes.  Was a deck building challenge.
• Instant kill is a non issue if you either a). Win fast, b). Carry support control, since he can't instantly kill you unless he has city's blessing or c). carry Immortal Sun, which literally everybody owns because they gave it to us for free.

Support control for this event has gotten harder since it’s initial release is the main problem I’m seeing. I used to run a Samut deck with Manglehorn and By Force along with lots of single support destruction spells.

Now, the options to destroy supports are much more limited, and most new green support destruction spells won’t touch land supports, and are much less helpful in this fight. Additionally the only mass support destroy card is The Great Aurora, which runs contrary to the speed objective.

Lich’s Mastery and Immortal Sun help now, but also make it harder to meet the speed kill objective.

Elektrophorus

As someone who went near perfect on Bo4T chapter 2, I’m going to play devil’s advocate and say that Pauper on 5.1 is fair and fine, even for players with weaker card pools. None of my decks were super tuned for the event, owing to the special summoning requirements. The pauper objectives on x.1 actually felt fair, since commons / uncommons are the bulk of the game.

In fact, not much of the event was a challenge except Azor and his Gateway. The problem with Gateway is that it requires a significant amount of specific mythics and high risk gameplay to get the 12 turn window.

The biggest thing I’ll agree with you on is personal progression being too high. It is needlessly punishing to lose a single match and be disqualified from the progression reward. Otherwise, the challenge helps to rank players, not punish them. Your rank here is coalition-based anyway, so you don’t lose out on leaderboard progression, per se.

Machine

@Brakkis: The devs DID take measures to nerf 5.2. His loyalty ability was more expensive than in the original version and his mana gains were also nerfed (from +4 on all colors to +3 on all colors). I agree with @ManiiNames regarding 5.2. If you win fast, his ability is not an issue AND I was carrying the Immortal Sun just in case he gets lucky, which actually saved me during one run where he had the City's Blessing and was ready to shoot me.

I get that people could have difficulties with 5.2, but if every PVE encounter would be a walk in the park, a lot of people would lose interest quickly. There should be some challenging puzzles to crack!

Alanako

The only thing I think need change is the reward progression, although I get 315 in part 1 and was at 256 without the last 3 fights (45 points) that I could not do because I need to go bed before the nodes refresh

Pauper was fine. Cast 6 creatures was fine. And I have been playing for a little less that a year without spending. I have some good card because I've been targeting them both in crafting and with elite boosters.

5.2 took around 4 turns and I loaded inmortal sun for precaution

Azor, I done it in 6 turns 

But they need to fix bugs. Many of my coalition mates lost match(s) again azor because of the will breaker bug and I wasn't able to read the node effect because instead of description it shows the title of the database cell in which the description was

Overall, much better than the original because of the less time consuming

Tilwin90

My problem with the one-shot kill is in the context of MTGPQ being a very swingy game. Unlike paper magic we do not have the limitation of "one land per turn". It's even more consistent than paper magic since you are restricted to a 4x10 cards deck with no lands. There is no mana flood or mana screw.

Now naturally this is not a Christmas fairyland since we know matches can degenerate extremely quickly thanks to turn 1 wins being highly possible. But all such wins require a combination of lucky board state & the right hand being drawn. There is no 1-card combo that I can think of right now (even an Imminent Doom deck needs to drop it on the board before starting to loop through a gazillion of spells).

Azor's Gateway leads to one of the two situations, and both are swingy and luck based:
1) Degenerate race - win faster than your opponent. Plain and simple!
2) Have the right counter at the right time - And we are talking here about very specific counters in the form of Lich's Mastery, The Immortal Sun and Sorcerous Spyglass. Assuming you do own any of these cards (these are very specific and very few answers), you have to draw into them AND put them on the board (and they are not exactly cheap save for Spyglass perhaps).  

Now I know one might say this looks like super conspiracy theory, and indeed we are talking in the area of luck/unluck. The problem is the consequence of your opponent getting lucky and/or you getting unlucky - you one-shot lose! It's way too unforgiving when compared to other opponents such as Azor for example. He can wreak your board, he can stall your good spells for a turn, he can stop your creatures from finishing him off that next turn, but he doesn't one-shot kill you. "You win the game" cards in paper magic are very very rare, and for a very good reason. 

But I'm not going to be completely unfair here and not take into account the existence of City's Blessing clause. That clause can "save the day" if Gateway doesn't get to keep 10 permanents on the board at any point. The problem? Once they do assemble it, it doesn't matter that you get to clear the board before they activate their ability - you're going to get one shot anyway.

There is a reason why people hated playing against Omni (haven't seen it around in a long time), and they hate Gateway now. It's because of the burst factor that you either preemptively counter, win "before it happens" or you're toast!

N.B.: I did not lose to or miss any objectives in the last event, so this is not me holding onto some untold grudge. But just like 1.1 in the first part, every single match I felt I won and checked all objectives because I was lucky. And that's because I went the degenerate path while also preemptively combating the City's Blessing (Sarkhan3 with Rupture Spire & Scapeshift keeps the board nice and clean). But I could've gotten unlucky, start with a bad hand and a terrible board state (mostly white and black gems). And when you run into this situation against a one-shot opponent there's nothing you can do.

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Brakkis

All the talk of how you beat a fight and there are ways to beat a fight is pointless. Obviously theres ways to win every fight. That doesnt make the fight not problematic.

6 merfolk isn't hard. I dropped 12+ with ease. It's the least problematic of the 6 or more creatures objectives but it sets a bad precedent that is used in lower nodes to detrimental effect.

You can beat Azors Gateway on Turn 1 with the right starting hand. It can beat you by Turn 3 with the right starting hand and draws. You can get out Immortal Sun, Sorcerous Spyglass, or Lich's Mastery on your first turn with all three in your deck, or you could have all 3 in your deck, draw none of them, and get nuked before they come into play. You can try a heavy support removal deck and still get overwhelmed by treasure spam.

Did they increase the loyalty cost? A bit. Is it 30 where a one shot nuke should reasonably be? No. 

As for pauper objectives in fights, can they be beaten? Certainly. Should you have to run pauper against opponents with over 100 health? Not at all. Mavren is even worse with all the lifelink token spam. Its unnecessarily increasing the grind of the fight.

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Brakkis

starfall said:

Brakkis said:

Did they increase the loyalty cost? A bit. Is it 30 where a one shot nuke should reasonably be? No. 

Even if you make it 30, Greg still might get super, super lucky, and you still might get manascrewed and have terrible draws yourself. Let's not shred all the challenge out of this game on the offchance that randomness might go badly against you every so often. This is a match3 game and randomness is baked into it.

Of course every fight has some luck factor to it. That's to be expected. It's the fights capability to have frequent "bad luck" that needs to be adjusted.

Increasing the cost to 30 is one step. Removing the treasure spawners is another. You don't put an instant kill ability in, lock it behind City's Blessing, and then slam in some rapid treasure spawners.

I dont want them to take away the instant kill. I want the node to have to work to get to it. As it is and has been, it can sneeze it out.

James13

Frankly, the only issue I had with the event was the Willbreaker bug on Azor.  I got hit by it and wasn't expecting it.  It auto-failed me for progression.  But those were otherwise the only points I missed on parts 1 or 2.

Pauper on 4.1 (2.1 part 2 here) was bothersome, but still workable.

4.3 (2.3 part 2) has always been a bit of a slog, but it's fine and not particularly threatening.  Similar for Azor other than needing to keep an eye out for Willbreaker soft-locking you.

I found myself using Karn on almost every fight, whatever that means.

SolRing

One nice thing about a buggy event is our coalition score was good enough for a decent payout due to less competition.

Personally I'm less bothered by contradictory node requirements than I am about a 400+ hp opponent who will lock the game state on any given turn he gets to cast a few cards if one of those is willbreaker.

Volrak

I liked the event.  I didn't find it grindy.  The split is a definite improvement.

There's no doubt it's a challenging event - these nodes were specifically designed to be difficult - but that's something I like, though I know not everyone does.  It's also not the friendliest event for newer players, but I see nothing wrong with having a small number of events targeted at one or the other end of the spectrum.

One simple suggestion to improve the experience would be to set player expectations.  For many players, it may be just another event appearing on their events page, and they may have no reason to expect anything unusual about the challenge level.  If for example, a click-through at the start of the event told them something like "Expert Level!  This is an Expert level event.  The secondary objectives can only be achieved with high risk, and the enemies deploy cruel and unusual tactics.  Are you sure you want to join?", it may help to better prepare players for what's inside.

(Also, of course, the Willbreaker bug should obviously be addressed with high priority.)

Machine

Volrak said:

I liked the event.  I didn't find it grindy.  The split is a definite improvement.

There's no doubt it's a challenging event - these nodes were specifically designed to be difficult - but that's something I like, though I know not everyone does.  It's also not the friendliest event for newer players, but I see nothing wrong with having a small number of events targeted at one or the other end of the spectrum.

One simple suggestion to improve the experience would be to set player expectations.  For many players, it may be just another event appearing on their events page, and they may have no reason to expect anything unusual about the challenge level.  If for example, a click-through at the start of the event told them something like "Expert Level!  This is an Expert level event.  The secondary objectives can only be achieved with high risk, and the enemies deploy cruel and unusual tactics.  Are you sure you want to join?", it may help to better prepare players for what's inside.

(Also, of course, the Willbreaker bug should obviously be addressed with high priority.)

Fully agree with this. When I started, I wasn't able to beat Avacyn in the AM event. Gradually, I made progression and in the end I was able to beat her. That's a very satisfactory experience!

In other words: newer players don't have to be able to beat every encounter. Let them grow overtime... in the end, they WILL be able to face more difficult challenges.

Ampersand

I second what Volrak and Machine said. I really like the split, and while this event is tough, that's a good thing! Volrak nails it by suggesting some kind of disclaimer so players know what to expect. I think it's good for events to cover a range of difficulties from easy/beginner friendly like A World Reborn on one end and Battle of the Four Tribes pt2 on the expert/difficult end with the rest falling somewhere in the middle. It would be a problem if too many events were at one of the ends of that spectrum, but I don't think that's the case.

All that said, the Willbreaker bug REALLY needs to be fixed before this event runs again. 

Brigby

Ampersand said:

-snip-

All that said, the Willbreaker bug REALLY needs to be fixed before this event runs again. 

That will be fixed in 3.3, and the event doesn't seem to be scheduled again before then.

Brakkis

Volrak said:

I liked the event.  I didn't find it grindy.  The split is a definite improvement.

There's no doubt it's a challenging event - these nodes were specifically designed to be difficult - but that's something I like, though I know not everyone does.  It's also not the friendliest event for newer players, but I see nothing wrong with having a small number of events targeted at one or the other end of the spectrum.

One simple suggestion to improve the experience would be to set player expectations.  For many players, it may be just another event appearing on their events page, and they may have no reason to expect anything unusual about the challenge level.  If for example, a click-through at the start of the event told them something like "Expert Level!  This is an Expert level event.  The secondary objectives can only be achieved with high risk, and the enemies deploy cruel and unusual tactics.  Are you sure you want to join?", it may help to better prepare players for what's inside.

(Also, of course, the Willbreaker bug should obviously be addressed with high priority.)

Look, events being difficult and aimed towards veteran players is one thing and I'm all for it; I was unable to beat Trial of Zeal for the first several times it was run when I started and I understood that I simply lacked the cards and PW's to do so at the time. 

None of these issues are difficulty based. Not one. Every one of these issues can be surmounted. It's that either the objectives result in a grind (pauper, 6+ tribal creatures), the fight itself is needlessly grindy (Elenda), or the fight is designed extremely poorly with a devastating ability that is far too easy for it to activate (Azor's Gateway).

I beat Gateway on Turn 3. I lost to it on Turn 4 with the exact same deck. Why? Luck of the draw on both accounts. I can see losing to it by Turn 7-10 if it gets it's ability off. But giving the node the capability to achieve that ability in such a rapid fashion is absurd. That's not actual difficulty. Its artificial difficulty.