Back in January I tried to stream from my apartment in Toronto with no success. My internet didn't have a high enough upload bandwidth which caused me to drop all the frames. The game also lagged massively which may or may not have been related, or it may have been a CPU issue with LoL and all the things I had open. It wasn't worth looking into since I couldn't possibly stream with my internet as it was. I wanted to get it fixed, but I was too averse to talking to people to call up Rogers.
I'm now living in Riverview, and while it's still on Rogers it's a much better connection. My upload in Toronto was 450K when you need 1.5M to stream at a minimum. I was supposed to have 2M, but the connection sucked. Here we're supposed to get 10M and I actually get 11M, so huzzah! (Interestingly, my mother had to call Rogers to change plans so that we'd have a bigger download cap, and it turns out she was also grandfathered into an old, expensive plan. So the internet got faster, with a massively larger download cap, and was $6 cheaper. I hate people.
Anyway, I now have enough upload bandwidth to try streaming again. My right arm started acting up again the last couple days so I didn't want to try with LoL... I fell back to the game I was playing a lot when I hurt my wrist in the first place: SolForge! A nice, slow card game where I can click with my left hand just fine.
I ran into some issues with the game lagging out, but Chrome and Firefox were eating up a ton of CPU usage. I shut those down and pretty much just left OBS, SolForge, and chat programs open. That sped things back up fine, and I was actually able to get something out. I had some issues with sound, but I deleted those videos while I figured out what was going on. I'm streaming all sources of sound, it turns out, which meant when I had the stream open I was looping back on myself over and over again. But once I closed Chrome that all went away. I need to figure out a way to only pick up certain audio sources, or I need to figure out a way to get Twitch chat without watching my own stream.
There's got to be a way to do that, since Path of Exile could actually allow chatting on Twitch through their client. I think maybe they're just IRC channels? Something to look up tomorrow I guess!
Showing posts with label SolForge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SolForge. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
More SolForge
In the past week I've started playing SolForge again. It was just sitting there in my Steam game list, right under Path of Exile. Play me, Nick! You know you want to! I'm a card game with interesting drafts! The games are fast enough that you don't really care if you lose! All those things that drove you away before are fixed, honest...
So I went back in. I didn't have enough tickets to draft (I feel like I would have kept playing if that was true) but I figured I could do the dailies for a bit and then draft. They had changed it at some point so your first online win of the day was guaranteed to be a ticket so you get to draft once a week for 'free' assuming you're willing to play every day and can actually win games against people. I can win games, but not very consistently because it still matches by hidden rating and I took so much time off that my deck is mediocre compared to the people I get matched against. I still have 2 Zimus and I sometimes draw well and beat people, but I have to try a couple times and it isn't a ton of fun...
It's even less fun because of the feature implemented to let people play multiple games at once. Because I'm just trying to win one game and because I don't know what the cards do I'm much better off playing one game at a time. I need to read my opponent's cards and I like to understand the game state even if the game is simple enough that I don't really need to do it. But the people who play a lot and have good decks don't need to spend that time, so they play many games at once. They're just goldfishing their awesome decks... So not only do I frequently get crushed, I have to wait a minute between turns to get crushed. It sucks.
I build up enough to draft, and then I ran it. But because the only real way to get tickets is to win an online game once each day I feel obligated to stop playing my draft games after I win one. I'm more likely to be able to draft again if I spread my 2 or 3 wins out over 2 or 3 days instead of all at once. And once again they actually released a new set in the middle of my draft. So I once again got to lose a bunch of games to cards I couldn't have drafted! (In this case they added new cards that work better when they're underleveled. This is awesome in draft since it gives you good card advantage plays with your 'useless' level 1 cards in age 2. But since I didn't have any and my opponents did it was bad for me.
I was about ready to quit again when I looked in my inventory and saw they'd given everyone a coupon for a free draft. Ok, fine. I'll do your free draft. Now I get some of the good new cards! (Hurray power creep...) But I still feel like I need to spread my plays out, and I still don't like doing that. I play games a lot when I play games at all.
SolForge frustrates me. I think I should probably remove it from my list of Steam games so I stop trying to play it.
So I went back in. I didn't have enough tickets to draft (I feel like I would have kept playing if that was true) but I figured I could do the dailies for a bit and then draft. They had changed it at some point so your first online win of the day was guaranteed to be a ticket so you get to draft once a week for 'free' assuming you're willing to play every day and can actually win games against people. I can win games, but not very consistently because it still matches by hidden rating and I took so much time off that my deck is mediocre compared to the people I get matched against. I still have 2 Zimus and I sometimes draw well and beat people, but I have to try a couple times and it isn't a ton of fun...
It's even less fun because of the feature implemented to let people play multiple games at once. Because I'm just trying to win one game and because I don't know what the cards do I'm much better off playing one game at a time. I need to read my opponent's cards and I like to understand the game state even if the game is simple enough that I don't really need to do it. But the people who play a lot and have good decks don't need to spend that time, so they play many games at once. They're just goldfishing their awesome decks... So not only do I frequently get crushed, I have to wait a minute between turns to get crushed. It sucks.
I build up enough to draft, and then I ran it. But because the only real way to get tickets is to win an online game once each day I feel obligated to stop playing my draft games after I win one. I'm more likely to be able to draft again if I spread my 2 or 3 wins out over 2 or 3 days instead of all at once. And once again they actually released a new set in the middle of my draft. So I once again got to lose a bunch of games to cards I couldn't have drafted! (In this case they added new cards that work better when they're underleveled. This is awesome in draft since it gives you good card advantage plays with your 'useless' level 1 cards in age 2. But since I didn't have any and my opponents did it was bad for me.
I was about ready to quit again when I looked in my inventory and saw they'd given everyone a coupon for a free draft. Ok, fine. I'll do your free draft. Now I get some of the good new cards! (Hurray power creep...) But I still feel like I need to spread my plays out, and I still don't like doing that. I play games a lot when I play games at all.
SolForge frustrates me. I think I should probably remove it from my list of Steam games so I stop trying to play it.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
More SolForge Bitterness
SolForge has been making some changes recently, and they haven't been making me happy!
I'm not sure when the first change came in but they added the ability to quickly flip through games that are waiting for you to act. Instead of having to leave your current game, go back to the menu, and pick a different game where it's your turn you get a handy button in the corner to jump to the next game waiting for your attention. This sounds good except they still haven't added a proper mechanism to easily see what happened on a previous turn so if you want to pretend that the game is a real strategy game you need to play it in real time to see what gets played. But plenty of people have built decks full of legendaries that don't care what their opponent does, and they don't care if they lose any given game to a silly mistake if they can play three times as many games in the same period of time.
What does that all mean? It means some people with awesome decks just create a lot of games and have a worse winning percentage than they used to. Which means they get paired against me, and that they take a minute between turns because they're flipping through the rest of their games. I spent something like 5 hours trying to get my first online win of the day! Every game was slow and against people with better decks. It was not fun. I didn't want to do it, but if I won an online game I would have enough tickets to draft. I still like drafting, and I hadn't figured out the problem, so I kept pounding away at it. And getting more and more bitter.
The next day I had my tickets for a draft. I don't get to draft constantly and I need those first online win bonuses to keep going. The way I make sure that happens as often as I can is I partition out my three draft games. Play one game the day I draft, win it. Stop. Come back the next day, play until I win. This way I can get multiple 'first win of the day' bonuses out of a single draft. This is not the way I want to play, as I want to just draft and play a bunch, but it's better than having to play constructed ESPECIALLY after that first change.
Everything went according to play. I came back the next day to discover that there was a new draft queue in the lobby for 4 games instead of 3. Ok, sounds like it's a good thing, but I have my current draft to finish up. Play a game... My opponent played a card I'd never seen before. It turns out they'd also released a new set and they'd decided the best way to deal with existing drafts was to make me play against the new stuff. This is ridiculous for many reasons!
So I can play some more terrible constructed to get a chance to try out the new set and the 4 game drafts... Or I can get fed up and quit. I'm going with door number two for now, at least while I have puzzles to solve, FFX to play, and Path of Exile maps to run. This game is so very frustrating. It could be good and fun but they make so many stupid decisions. If they'd announced anywhere in the game that a new set was coming out I could have saved my tickets to draft then, not right before. Or I could have played out all my games. Maybe I could have read about the new cards instead of being thrust into a game against them without even knowing that they existed. And they really need to have a significantly shorter time limit option for constructed games so I'm not stuck waiting a minute between turns!
I'm not sure when the first change came in but they added the ability to quickly flip through games that are waiting for you to act. Instead of having to leave your current game, go back to the menu, and pick a different game where it's your turn you get a handy button in the corner to jump to the next game waiting for your attention. This sounds good except they still haven't added a proper mechanism to easily see what happened on a previous turn so if you want to pretend that the game is a real strategy game you need to play it in real time to see what gets played. But plenty of people have built decks full of legendaries that don't care what their opponent does, and they don't care if they lose any given game to a silly mistake if they can play three times as many games in the same period of time.
What does that all mean? It means some people with awesome decks just create a lot of games and have a worse winning percentage than they used to. Which means they get paired against me, and that they take a minute between turns because they're flipping through the rest of their games. I spent something like 5 hours trying to get my first online win of the day! Every game was slow and against people with better decks. It was not fun. I didn't want to do it, but if I won an online game I would have enough tickets to draft. I still like drafting, and I hadn't figured out the problem, so I kept pounding away at it. And getting more and more bitter.
The next day I had my tickets for a draft. I don't get to draft constantly and I need those first online win bonuses to keep going. The way I make sure that happens as often as I can is I partition out my three draft games. Play one game the day I draft, win it. Stop. Come back the next day, play until I win. This way I can get multiple 'first win of the day' bonuses out of a single draft. This is not the way I want to play, as I want to just draft and play a bunch, but it's better than having to play constructed ESPECIALLY after that first change.
Everything went according to play. I came back the next day to discover that there was a new draft queue in the lobby for 4 games instead of 3. Ok, sounds like it's a good thing, but I have my current draft to finish up. Play a game... My opponent played a card I'd never seen before. It turns out they'd also released a new set and they'd decided the best way to deal with existing drafts was to make me play against the new stuff. This is ridiculous for many reasons!
- Pretty much by default in a CCG the new cards are better than the old ones. They can't be worse or they wouldn't sell any packs!
- In SolForge in particular the way drafting is set up the better cards show up less frequently because people learn to take them highly and the algorithm adapts to that. This means that my deck has a bunch of legitimate 5th picks in it because I was forced to pick between two terrible cards in all six of my packs. A new set has no such data and therefore the commons in that set will show up more or less randomly. This means a deck drafted right after a new set is released rates to be significantly better than a deck drafted at the end of a set's lifecycle.
- I had no idea what cards my opponent could be showing up with and therefore couldn't possibly play around any of his tricks.
So I can play some more terrible constructed to get a chance to try out the new set and the 4 game drafts... Or I can get fed up and quit. I'm going with door number two for now, at least while I have puzzles to solve, FFX to play, and Path of Exile maps to run. This game is so very frustrating. It could be good and fun but they make so many stupid decisions. If they'd announced anywhere in the game that a new set was coming out I could have saved my tickets to draft then, not right before. Or I could have played out all my games. Maybe I could have read about the new cards instead of being thrust into a game against them without even knowing that they existed. And they really need to have a significantly shorter time limit option for constructed games so I'm not stuck waiting a minute between turns!
Monday, February 17, 2014
Back to SolForge
Last month I finally got fed up with constructed in SolForge and got annoyed with how rarely I could draft so I stopped playing the game. I moved on to Hearthstone where I could draft much more frequently and could play more games per draft. I quickly moved on from Hearthstone because I found the games to not have interesting decisions and to take way too long to resolve. SolForge has faster games and actual decisions to make during the games in terms of playing for the short term or the long term when choosing which cards to play and level up. They just wouldn't let me draft without paying them a silly amount of money.
My sister let me know a couple weeks ago that they'd changed the way they gave out draft tickets in SolForge. They turned the 'first online win of the day' bonus from being 1/40th of a ticket to being a guaranteed ticket. You need 7 to draft, so even if you never got another ticket in any other way you'd still get to draft once per week by winning an online game each day. They also added in a small prize for winning any additional online game (about 1/400th of a ticket) which isn't very good but it's better than nothing like it was before.
Of course getting that online win each day isn't exactly tons of fun. The problem is everyone who kept playing has another month's worth of legendary cards and I don't. So the people currently around my hidden matchmaker rating now have substantially better decks than they used to, which means I lose way more often than I used to. It's a little frustrating.
On the plus side there is an out... I can draft and then just play until I win one draft game per day! Drafting is still so much fun in this game that it's been worth doing for the last week. I like how fast the games play out so I can see how my drafting did. I don't like needing to play constructed for tickets but at least now it's less constructed and I can somewhat mitigate it by portioning out my draft games but that goes against how fast I can conclude a draft...
I'll probably get fed up again, but for now SolForge is back in my good books. Hearthstone is probably dead to me for reals.
My sister let me know a couple weeks ago that they'd changed the way they gave out draft tickets in SolForge. They turned the 'first online win of the day' bonus from being 1/40th of a ticket to being a guaranteed ticket. You need 7 to draft, so even if you never got another ticket in any other way you'd still get to draft once per week by winning an online game each day. They also added in a small prize for winning any additional online game (about 1/400th of a ticket) which isn't very good but it's better than nothing like it was before.
Of course getting that online win each day isn't exactly tons of fun. The problem is everyone who kept playing has another month's worth of legendary cards and I don't. So the people currently around my hidden matchmaker rating now have substantially better decks than they used to, which means I lose way more often than I used to. It's a little frustrating.
On the plus side there is an out... I can draft and then just play until I win one draft game per day! Drafting is still so much fun in this game that it's been worth doing for the last week. I like how fast the games play out so I can see how my drafting did. I don't like needing to play constructed for tickets but at least now it's less constructed and I can somewhat mitigate it by portioning out my draft games but that goes against how fast I can conclude a draft...
I'll probably get fed up again, but for now SolForge is back in my good books. Hearthstone is probably dead to me for reals.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Done With SolForge
A couple weeks ago I came to the conclusion that playing constructed in SolForge is a bad idea. The number of legendaries in a deck seemed to be a very strong indicator of who was going to win a given constructed game. I have a large number of legendaries but not as many as someone who would have paid a lot of money. This means I found myself in games where I didn't feel like I could win (people with 3 phoenix and 3 Zimus) and in games where I didn't feel like I could lose (the average person). Neither of those were terribly fun for me. Just like how I don't like playing League of Legends against a team full of diamond players, and I don't like playing against a team full of silver players. It just isn't an interesting challenge to stomp or get stomped. This does mean I need to lose some games, and I don't like losing a given individual game, but I accept that I need to lose some of the time to make winning a tight game something that can happen.
Unlike LoL SolForge doesn't have a good matchmaking system. It doesn't matter if I play in tournament or just random online matches... A large number of my games will not be interesting. So constructed is out. Drafting is still pretty fun though. Most people won't have any legendaries at all in a draft, and most decks will be of comparable power. Some people will draft badly and be easy wins, and sometimes I'll draft a sick deck and stomp everyone, but I expect to have fun games a pretty good chunk of the time. Enough that I want to draft more right now!
Unfortunately I can't draft right now. The system is not designed to let people draft constantly. SolForge drafting essentially uses the same content gating system that other free to play games use... You can spend a bunch of money or you can waste a ton of time to get what you want.
Now, I'm someone who is more than happy to spend money on a good game. I'm also someone with a ton of spare time to spend getting what I want. So why am I so unhappy with SolForge? It's the scaling involved. A draft costs 7 event tickets and will on average return 4.125 tickets. So each time you draft you need to come up with the missing 2.875 tickets. A ticket is about a dollar, so you can spend about 3 dollars on a draft. Alternatively you can sometimes get a free ticket from one of the 3 daily quests. I don't know the exact odds but they seem to be pretty low now compared to when they first launched. I had to play for 11 days to get the 3 tickets I needed since my last draft, and one of those was by cashing in 40k silver. So I can spend 3 dollars, or I can win 3 matches every day for a week and a half per draft.
When constructed still had some appeal to me winning 3 matches per day didn't seem like such a terrible chore, but now when I don't want to play constructed I really don't enjoy feeling forced to play for a week and a half per draft. On the other hand spending $3 per half hour seems pretty excessive too. I could sign back up for World of Warcraft and only need to play for a couple hours per month to have a better deal.
There's also the problem of needing a sufficiently large bankroll in order to actually keep paying 4.125 tickets per draft. The 4.125 only works if you get your 3-0 early in your stream of 8 drafts. If you kick off with the 0-3 or a 1-2 you're set way back. This is what happened to me. I went 1-2 a while ago with a pair of incredibly close losses. Then after I finally scrapped together 3 more tickets I went 1-2 again today. I'm now looking at needing to play a game I don't want to play every day for 2 weeks before I can get my 30 minute draft fix in again.
I'm not interesting in doing that, so either I spend a bunch more money or I'm done with SolForge. It would be so easy for me to keep spending money. Once I get started I'm unlikely to stop. I'm very prone to addiction and once those floodgates open I don't know that they get to close. I know from my Magic days in my teenage years that I am the whale these payment schemes are targeting. So I need to stay strong and not give in. I hate this payment scheme. Hate it. So even if I would have reasonable fun per money buying in for more drafts I just can't let myself do it.
So I'm done with SolForge. Maybe when trading comes in I'll be able to liquidate some cards for more drafts and I'll come back and draft for a couple weeks. I do like drafting. But I will not pay them any more money, and I will not continue to log in and annoy myself playing a game I don't want to play.
Unlike LoL SolForge doesn't have a good matchmaking system. It doesn't matter if I play in tournament or just random online matches... A large number of my games will not be interesting. So constructed is out. Drafting is still pretty fun though. Most people won't have any legendaries at all in a draft, and most decks will be of comparable power. Some people will draft badly and be easy wins, and sometimes I'll draft a sick deck and stomp everyone, but I expect to have fun games a pretty good chunk of the time. Enough that I want to draft more right now!
Unfortunately I can't draft right now. The system is not designed to let people draft constantly. SolForge drafting essentially uses the same content gating system that other free to play games use... You can spend a bunch of money or you can waste a ton of time to get what you want.
Now, I'm someone who is more than happy to spend money on a good game. I'm also someone with a ton of spare time to spend getting what I want. So why am I so unhappy with SolForge? It's the scaling involved. A draft costs 7 event tickets and will on average return 4.125 tickets. So each time you draft you need to come up with the missing 2.875 tickets. A ticket is about a dollar, so you can spend about 3 dollars on a draft. Alternatively you can sometimes get a free ticket from one of the 3 daily quests. I don't know the exact odds but they seem to be pretty low now compared to when they first launched. I had to play for 11 days to get the 3 tickets I needed since my last draft, and one of those was by cashing in 40k silver. So I can spend 3 dollars, or I can win 3 matches every day for a week and a half per draft.
When constructed still had some appeal to me winning 3 matches per day didn't seem like such a terrible chore, but now when I don't want to play constructed I really don't enjoy feeling forced to play for a week and a half per draft. On the other hand spending $3 per half hour seems pretty excessive too. I could sign back up for World of Warcraft and only need to play for a couple hours per month to have a better deal.
There's also the problem of needing a sufficiently large bankroll in order to actually keep paying 4.125 tickets per draft. The 4.125 only works if you get your 3-0 early in your stream of 8 drafts. If you kick off with the 0-3 or a 1-2 you're set way back. This is what happened to me. I went 1-2 a while ago with a pair of incredibly close losses. Then after I finally scrapped together 3 more tickets I went 1-2 again today. I'm now looking at needing to play a game I don't want to play every day for 2 weeks before I can get my 30 minute draft fix in again.
I'm not interesting in doing that, so either I spend a bunch more money or I'm done with SolForge. It would be so easy for me to keep spending money. Once I get started I'm unlikely to stop. I'm very prone to addiction and once those floodgates open I don't know that they get to close. I know from my Magic days in my teenage years that I am the whale these payment schemes are targeting. So I need to stay strong and not give in. I hate this payment scheme. Hate it. So even if I would have reasonable fun per money buying in for more drafts I just can't let myself do it.
So I'm done with SolForge. Maybe when trading comes in I'll be able to liquidate some cards for more drafts and I'll come back and draft for a couple weeks. I do like drafting. But I will not pay them any more money, and I will not continue to log in and annoy myself playing a game I don't want to play.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
SolForge: Tournament Changes
I mentioned on Monday that my brother told me all about going infinite in drafts but then my payouts didn't seem nearly as lucrative. Tournament payouts are random so I was chalking it up to some combination of Jamie being lucky and me being unlucky. I neglected to consider the other option which was that SolForge pulled a bit of a bait and switch. When he was playing at tournament launch the prizes were good enough to easily go infinite. When I was playing they were not. Because they secretly lowered the prize structure in the couple of days between when he got to start with his free tickets for being an early backer and when I finally decided to pay up to supplement my free tickets!
This is a little unbelievable to me. How do they not have someone on staff able to simulate the results of a given prize scheme? I used to do that at my last job for estimating the end result of a given sales contest and there I had to actually guess things. Here you know the inputs and you know the exact output function! Of course there is another option in that they DO have someone on staff and they knew exactly what they were doing and deliberately were trying to pull a bait and switch by priming the system to start and then lowering it to what they wanted. I accused Diablo III of trying the same sort of thing with their golden chest nerfs after the early adopters of act 2 inferno got enough weapons to prime the economy. I don't know if it's incompetence or nefariousness but both situations really make me angry because I know I'm smart enough to have avoided both situations if only I was in a position to stop them.
Anyway, they've actually gone and changed the prize scheme yet again which had me leaning more towards incompetence in this case. They completely removed the randomness of the prize split. 3-0 is worth 9 tickets and a premium pack, 2-1 is worth 5 tickets and a regular pack, 1-2 is worth 3 tickets and a regular pack and 0-3 is worth a full regular pack instead of the basic pack I got Monday when I went 0-3. Now you know exactly what you're getting yourself into when you sign up which is nice. Always getting a legendary card for going 3-0 is a big change as well and may well help deal with the constructed problem I ran into. Well, it may well let me get an optimal deck and smash people anyway.
They also gave all accounts a free 'draft coupon' which lets you do a draft for free. This seems like a really nice thing to do, even for people who haven't logged on in a long time. So if you played SolForge in the past you might want to log in and give a draft a shot because they're pretty fun. Drafts tend to be much slower than constructed and the level 3 versions of the creatures tends to be the important thing to look at. Well, level 2 also. I did die on turn 7 once but my opponent's deck was absolutely insane and he drew his aggressive legendary twice in the first 5 turns. (This was one of the games below...)
On the nefarious hand I noticed something from my free draft today... I got a legendary and 5 heroics. I hadn't seen a single legendary (mine or an opponent) in the 4 drafts I did prior to the free draft. I asked my brother about it and he said he's only had maybe 2 legendaries in his dozens of drafts. So maybe I just got lucky? Try this on for size... All three of my opponents in that draft also had a legendary. I then did another draft and didn't get a legendary but my first opponent did. I left after that to go visit my father and when I got around to finishing the draft out none of my opponents had a legendary. Nor in the next draft I did. Nor in the one after that.
My current theory is the free draft is rigged to feed people really good cards. Try to convince them to pay some money to draft for reals after the free draft only to discover that they can't actually have the absolutely sick decks they got in their free draft. Another bait and switch? Maybe! If you do log in to use your free draft coupon let me know if you get a legendary at any point in the draft.
This is a little unbelievable to me. How do they not have someone on staff able to simulate the results of a given prize scheme? I used to do that at my last job for estimating the end result of a given sales contest and there I had to actually guess things. Here you know the inputs and you know the exact output function! Of course there is another option in that they DO have someone on staff and they knew exactly what they were doing and deliberately were trying to pull a bait and switch by priming the system to start and then lowering it to what they wanted. I accused Diablo III of trying the same sort of thing with their golden chest nerfs after the early adopters of act 2 inferno got enough weapons to prime the economy. I don't know if it's incompetence or nefariousness but both situations really make me angry because I know I'm smart enough to have avoided both situations if only I was in a position to stop them.
Anyway, they've actually gone and changed the prize scheme yet again which had me leaning more towards incompetence in this case. They completely removed the randomness of the prize split. 3-0 is worth 9 tickets and a premium pack, 2-1 is worth 5 tickets and a regular pack, 1-2 is worth 3 tickets and a regular pack and 0-3 is worth a full regular pack instead of the basic pack I got Monday when I went 0-3. Now you know exactly what you're getting yourself into when you sign up which is nice. Always getting a legendary card for going 3-0 is a big change as well and may well help deal with the constructed problem I ran into. Well, it may well let me get an optimal deck and smash people anyway.
They also gave all accounts a free 'draft coupon' which lets you do a draft for free. This seems like a really nice thing to do, even for people who haven't logged on in a long time. So if you played SolForge in the past you might want to log in and give a draft a shot because they're pretty fun. Drafts tend to be much slower than constructed and the level 3 versions of the creatures tends to be the important thing to look at. Well, level 2 also. I did die on turn 7 once but my opponent's deck was absolutely insane and he drew his aggressive legendary twice in the first 5 turns. (This was one of the games below...)
On the nefarious hand I noticed something from my free draft today... I got a legendary and 5 heroics. I hadn't seen a single legendary (mine or an opponent) in the 4 drafts I did prior to the free draft. I asked my brother about it and he said he's only had maybe 2 legendaries in his dozens of drafts. So maybe I just got lucky? Try this on for size... All three of my opponents in that draft also had a legendary. I then did another draft and didn't get a legendary but my first opponent did. I left after that to go visit my father and when I got around to finishing the draft out none of my opponents had a legendary. Nor in the next draft I did. Nor in the one after that.
My current theory is the free draft is rigged to feed people really good cards. Try to convince them to pay some money to draft for reals after the free draft only to discover that they can't actually have the absolutely sick decks they got in their free draft. Another bait and switch? Maybe! If you do log in to use your free draft coupon let me know if you get a legendary at any point in the draft.
Monday, December 23, 2013
SolForge: Tournaments
SolForge recently patched in tournaments and I gave them a bit of a spin over the weekend. A constructed tournament costs 3 event tickets to join and a draft tournament costs 7 event tickets. You have a chance to get a ticket from each of the daily chests (log in, win a game, win 3 games) and it seems to average out to be about one per day. So if you stay on top of logging in and winning 3 games every day you can draft for free once a week. That's not so bad, especially since you get to keep the cards and are guaranteed to get at least one card of the second highest rarity per draft.
My brother let me know they have trading planned at some point and have an interesting setup for collection management. It turns out every object in your collection is tagged to show if it originated from a free source or a paid source. So all the cards you get from daily rewards and all the cards from packs in the daily rewards and any prizes/cards drafted from tournaments entered with free tickets will all be tagged as untradeable. Anything you paid money for gets tagged as tradeable which I would think has to eventually increase the value of them. At least for the most rare items, anyway? At any rate if at least one of the tickets used in the entry for an event is paid for then all of the drafted cards and all of the prizes get tagged as paid for.
I'd picked up 4 tickets from 3 days of daily rewards and was itching to draft. I'd played the game for 88 hours according to Steam and while some of those would have just been open in the background idling hours I have definitely played the game a lot. So I figured I should give them some money. It would accelerate when I could draft and it would tag the drafted stuff as tradeable should that ever matter. Unfortunately their pricing scheme sucks. They have the standard scheme of costing things in terms of 'points' instead of actual dollars, and they have the standard setup of giving bonus points the more you buy at once. $4.99 will get you 1300 points or $9.99 will get you 2750 points. Tickets costs 260 points each, or 10 for 2500. So you can get 5 tickets for 5 dollars, or 10 tickets for 10 dollars with 250 points left over. That's the one I went with since I figured 10 tickets with the 4 I already had would give me a couple drafts but now I have 250 points kicking around and it feels terrible. I can't buy anything of note for 250 points and have no way to get the 10 points I need to top up to get one more ticket. The smallest amount I can buy is that $4.99 package and it buys an exact amount of tickets... I'm stuck with this terrible uneven value and it feels awful. Especially since I know they did it on purpose to keep tempting me to pay more to 'fix' the bad number. If they sold points on demand I'd only need to pay about 4 cents for the 10 points I need and I'd do that in a heartbeat but they're trying to get more than 4 more cents and I hate it.
Anyway, I did get some tickets, and I did a few drafts. They were fun enough but the initial assertion of how easy it was to 'go infinite' from my brother seemed a little off. Part of the problem there is the rewards for winning are random. Going 2-1 could be worth 4 tickets, or 6 tickets, or possibly more. You also win packs along with the tickets but you can't do anything with packs except open them up. It felt like my rewards with smaller than expected tickets had a higher number of packs but that didn't make me feel much better since packs mean practically nothing and tickets mean more drafts. This reward scheme feels terrible the same way the point rounding does. It feels like it's set up to let people think they 'could' go infinite if they just put a little more money in and stop getting 'bad' rewards, and to occasionally make people feel great when they hit an awesome result. It's like a slot machine in a casino. Designed to keep people pumping in money!
I also gave constructed a shot despite concerns from my sister that I'd be up against a constant stream of legendary filled decks. My first game in my first tournament was just that. His second turn was two copies of the phoenix! I think he played one card the entire game that wasn't a legendary. My deck does have 8 legendaries itself and has pretty good synergy among the rest of the cards so I felt like it was pretty good. I ended up beating that super legendary deck because he didn't have a lot of thought behind his cards and had some bad draws in the 3rd age. My next two opponents didn't seem to have a legendary between them and got truly smashed. I went 3-0 and got a whopping 4 tickets and 2 packs. Not bad for an entry fee of 3 tickets, but not a big gain in terms of being able to draft again. I then went 2-1 also for 4 tickets and 1 pack. I did a few more and eventually went 0-3 for 1 basic pack and no tickets which made me very sad. I ended up running into a bunch of people with more legendaries and well built decks and it felt like I couldn't do much to beat them. A lot like those guys with no legendaries where I felt like I couldn't lose. So playing constructed feels very much like a crap shoot with play skill having very little to do with the outcome. Do I randomly get matched against people with better decks than mine or worse decks? If it's worse decks I go infinite. If it's better decks I just throw tickets away. Neither is terribly fun. Mostly I was doing it to try to get back up to enough tickets to draft.
Overall I feel like drafting was fun enough, but the cost and annoyance factor is pretty high. I liked constructed to get a feel for where my deck stands... But unfortunately my conclusion is that my deck is only flawed in that I don't have as many legendaries as other people. In both cases it feels like I really need to spend more money in order to play the way I want to and that feeling sucks. Drafting was fun enough that I'll probably set up a dummy deck and try to farm tickets for a while in order to draft every now and then but I'm not terribly happy about it. I hate those 250 points sitting on my account and I suspect I'm eventually going to end up needing to pay more money to use them up or quit in disgust. I hope I quit.
My brother let me know they have trading planned at some point and have an interesting setup for collection management. It turns out every object in your collection is tagged to show if it originated from a free source or a paid source. So all the cards you get from daily rewards and all the cards from packs in the daily rewards and any prizes/cards drafted from tournaments entered with free tickets will all be tagged as untradeable. Anything you paid money for gets tagged as tradeable which I would think has to eventually increase the value of them. At least for the most rare items, anyway? At any rate if at least one of the tickets used in the entry for an event is paid for then all of the drafted cards and all of the prizes get tagged as paid for.
I'd picked up 4 tickets from 3 days of daily rewards and was itching to draft. I'd played the game for 88 hours according to Steam and while some of those would have just been open in the background idling hours I have definitely played the game a lot. So I figured I should give them some money. It would accelerate when I could draft and it would tag the drafted stuff as tradeable should that ever matter. Unfortunately their pricing scheme sucks. They have the standard scheme of costing things in terms of 'points' instead of actual dollars, and they have the standard setup of giving bonus points the more you buy at once. $4.99 will get you 1300 points or $9.99 will get you 2750 points. Tickets costs 260 points each, or 10 for 2500. So you can get 5 tickets for 5 dollars, or 10 tickets for 10 dollars with 250 points left over. That's the one I went with since I figured 10 tickets with the 4 I already had would give me a couple drafts but now I have 250 points kicking around and it feels terrible. I can't buy anything of note for 250 points and have no way to get the 10 points I need to top up to get one more ticket. The smallest amount I can buy is that $4.99 package and it buys an exact amount of tickets... I'm stuck with this terrible uneven value and it feels awful. Especially since I know they did it on purpose to keep tempting me to pay more to 'fix' the bad number. If they sold points on demand I'd only need to pay about 4 cents for the 10 points I need and I'd do that in a heartbeat but they're trying to get more than 4 more cents and I hate it.
Anyway, I did get some tickets, and I did a few drafts. They were fun enough but the initial assertion of how easy it was to 'go infinite' from my brother seemed a little off. Part of the problem there is the rewards for winning are random. Going 2-1 could be worth 4 tickets, or 6 tickets, or possibly more. You also win packs along with the tickets but you can't do anything with packs except open them up. It felt like my rewards with smaller than expected tickets had a higher number of packs but that didn't make me feel much better since packs mean practically nothing and tickets mean more drafts. This reward scheme feels terrible the same way the point rounding does. It feels like it's set up to let people think they 'could' go infinite if they just put a little more money in and stop getting 'bad' rewards, and to occasionally make people feel great when they hit an awesome result. It's like a slot machine in a casino. Designed to keep people pumping in money!
I also gave constructed a shot despite concerns from my sister that I'd be up against a constant stream of legendary filled decks. My first game in my first tournament was just that. His second turn was two copies of the phoenix! I think he played one card the entire game that wasn't a legendary. My deck does have 8 legendaries itself and has pretty good synergy among the rest of the cards so I felt like it was pretty good. I ended up beating that super legendary deck because he didn't have a lot of thought behind his cards and had some bad draws in the 3rd age. My next two opponents didn't seem to have a legendary between them and got truly smashed. I went 3-0 and got a whopping 4 tickets and 2 packs. Not bad for an entry fee of 3 tickets, but not a big gain in terms of being able to draft again. I then went 2-1 also for 4 tickets and 1 pack. I did a few more and eventually went 0-3 for 1 basic pack and no tickets which made me very sad. I ended up running into a bunch of people with more legendaries and well built decks and it felt like I couldn't do much to beat them. A lot like those guys with no legendaries where I felt like I couldn't lose. So playing constructed feels very much like a crap shoot with play skill having very little to do with the outcome. Do I randomly get matched against people with better decks than mine or worse decks? If it's worse decks I go infinite. If it's better decks I just throw tickets away. Neither is terribly fun. Mostly I was doing it to try to get back up to enough tickets to draft.
Overall I feel like drafting was fun enough, but the cost and annoyance factor is pretty high. I liked constructed to get a feel for where my deck stands... But unfortunately my conclusion is that my deck is only flawed in that I don't have as many legendaries as other people. In both cases it feels like I really need to spend more money in order to play the way I want to and that feeling sucks. Drafting was fun enough that I'll probably set up a dummy deck and try to farm tickets for a while in order to draft every now and then but I'm not terribly happy about it. I hate those 250 points sitting on my account and I suspect I'm eventually going to end up needing to pay more money to use them up or quit in disgust. I hope I quit.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
SolForge: Drafting!
I haven't played SolForge in quite some time but I just caught wind on Facebook that the servers are currently down for a big patch. The patch is bringing in 24 new cards, a bunch of balance changes, an iPad version, and drafting. Yay, drafting!
Drafting in Sol Forge sounds like a mix between Hearthstone and Magic. You open a pack of 6 cards, keep one, and 'pass' the rest on. The draft is a solo experience so you don't need to wait for other people to start drafting but other people do impact what you get passed. Not in the sense that you get what some specific other person passed on... Instead the game generates a 6 card pack and removes one of the cards from that pack based on historical drafting trends from other players. So you should end up with a similar experience in terms of getting 'stuck' with bad cards towards the end of a pack without needed to actually have other people kicking around and making choice along with you. It's also set up such that once you have cards from two of the four colour you only ever see cards of those two colours for the rest of the draft. You play every card you draft so they really couldn't stick you with a third colour without breaking the rules of the game.
Games get played out whenever you want to play and you get paired with a random person with the same current draft record. You get to play three games and can play them back to back to back or spread out over weeks. Then you get to keep the drafted cards and you get prizes based on your record. The claim is the prizes will be sufficient to cover going 'infinite' while drafting if you're good enough. You can also earn draft tickets through the daily rewards so starting tomorrow I'm going to have to start logging in again to scoop up daily rewards in the hopes of getting some draft tickets.
Draften und spielen, ja? JA!
Drafting in Sol Forge sounds like a mix between Hearthstone and Magic. You open a pack of 6 cards, keep one, and 'pass' the rest on. The draft is a solo experience so you don't need to wait for other people to start drafting but other people do impact what you get passed. Not in the sense that you get what some specific other person passed on... Instead the game generates a 6 card pack and removes one of the cards from that pack based on historical drafting trends from other players. So you should end up with a similar experience in terms of getting 'stuck' with bad cards towards the end of a pack without needed to actually have other people kicking around and making choice along with you. It's also set up such that once you have cards from two of the four colour you only ever see cards of those two colours for the rest of the draft. You play every card you draft so they really couldn't stick you with a third colour without breaking the rules of the game.
Games get played out whenever you want to play and you get paired with a random person with the same current draft record. You get to play three games and can play them back to back to back or spread out over weeks. Then you get to keep the drafted cards and you get prizes based on your record. The claim is the prizes will be sufficient to cover going 'infinite' while drafting if you're good enough. You can also earn draft tickets through the daily rewards so starting tomorrow I'm going to have to start logging in again to scoop up daily rewards in the hopes of getting some draft tickets.
Draften und spielen, ja? JA!
Friday, August 23, 2013
SolForge: Technosmith
According to Steam I've put 24 hours into SolForge so far, which is a pretty good number for me in a beta. I hate betas in general and this one is no better than average. Server stability is flaky, it's incredibly light on features, and a crazy launch day bug kept me from getting the starting cards for about a week.
Yet I keep playing every day in order to get my three daily bonuses. One for logging in, one for winning a game, and one for playing three online games. Some days my online time synchs up with James, Josh, or Jamie and I get to play my three games with people I know who's name starts with a J. Most days I play games against random people. And then beyond that I'll pop the game open and play games against the computer for fun to see how my deck runs.
It evolves with the free stuff I get every day and with experience playing the game and it's gotten to a pretty reasonable spot. I don't think I've lost a game against a random opponent online. I'm not sure how much that's saying, because I figure most of the people playing random opponents probably are doing so because they need the random reward and therefore have questionable decks. But even when I play against people I know, I find I'm winning almost every game that makes it to the late game. I get blown out by good fast decks, though!
I have a couple of brutally powerful cards that have incredibly weak first stages. A dragon that starts as a 0/6 wall and ends up as a 24/24 mobility 2 guy who hits all opposing creatures for 5 when it comes into play and a robot that starts as a 1/1 armour 1 dude and ends up as a 20/20 armour 10 dude. These are cards I find fun, so my goal was to build a deck that could survive in order to level them up a bunch and then draw the powerful versions.
The problem is by default you only draw 20 of your 30 cards each time through your deck. In order to resolve a tier 3 guy on turns 9-12 you need to have drawn it both of the first times through your deck and draw it the third time through as well. That's less than 30% for any specific card! And I don't exactly have a lot of super powerful cards. So when I was first getting started I kept finding that I'd play a 0/6, and a 1/1, and die. I wouldn't get the goodness of those cards, but I would get all the terribleness of playing terrible tier 1 cards.
I've added a few things to my deck to try to smooth things out. There's a 5/4 guy who draws you a card when you play him and I'm running 3 of those. It doesn't sound like much, but the 5/4 body is big enough to trade with most other tier 1 plays and the extra card is deceptively good. Assuming I play two of these guys I'm up to drawing 22 cards each time through my deck, not 20. On it's own that brings me up to about 40% of playing a specific card each of my first 3 passes through the deck. It's actually even better than that, since the tier 2 version of that guy draws you 2 cards when you play him and the tier 3 version draws 3 cards.
The other thing I've added to the deck is Technosmith, which I think may be my favourite common. It's a 2/2 guy at tier 1 which is pretty terrible but he can sometimes trade with things. The key to him is that when he comes into play I get to discard a card from my hand and level it up. This lets me skip the terrible tier 1 aspect of some of my best cards while still getting them to a better stage. 2/2 isn't good, but it's better than 0/6! His upgraded versions have reasonable bodies (8/8 and then 15/15) while continuing to let me level cards up. On top of Technosmith I have a legendary card which is a 1/9 that lets me discard a card every turn to level it up.
What is Technosmith doing for me? Well, he's also sacrificing the early game by being only 2/2 but he's really powering up my mid game. With a normal deck you'll level up 8 cards in age 1. You expect to draw 5 of those cards the second time through as well, so your age 3 deck expects to be 19 tier 1 cards, 6 tier 2 cards, and 5 tier 3 cards. On the other hand if you get 2 free levels each age by running 3 Technosmith (I only own 2, sadly, but the legendary fills in) then you rate to level up 10 cards in age 1 and rate to draw 6 of those to level in age 2. So your age 3 deck expects to be 16 tier 1 cards, 8 tier 2 cards, and 6 tier 3 cards. That's a pretty significant swing in power level. Things can get fudged by drawing all your leveled cards in one hand and then drawing hands with no leveled cards at all, but the second set will weather those storms better than the first too.
Combine them both, with drawing extra cards and leveling extra cards, and I find any game that goes long is mine for the taking. I don't get hands where I'm stuck playing tier 1 cards and my opponent does. Tier 1 cards have no hope of fighting off a 20/20 with 10 armour, or a 24/24. Or even just the 15/15 Technosmith body, really.
I think I need to figure out a better way to survive the super early game. I need some way to kill multiple Echo Whisps in one go. (A 6/1 that comes with a copy!) Maybe I should add more Magma Hounds to my deck? (A 4/3 that does 2 damage to something when it comes into play.)
Yet I keep playing every day in order to get my three daily bonuses. One for logging in, one for winning a game, and one for playing three online games. Some days my online time synchs up with James, Josh, or Jamie and I get to play my three games with people I know who's name starts with a J. Most days I play games against random people. And then beyond that I'll pop the game open and play games against the computer for fun to see how my deck runs.
It evolves with the free stuff I get every day and with experience playing the game and it's gotten to a pretty reasonable spot. I don't think I've lost a game against a random opponent online. I'm not sure how much that's saying, because I figure most of the people playing random opponents probably are doing so because they need the random reward and therefore have questionable decks. But even when I play against people I know, I find I'm winning almost every game that makes it to the late game. I get blown out by good fast decks, though!
I have a couple of brutally powerful cards that have incredibly weak first stages. A dragon that starts as a 0/6 wall and ends up as a 24/24 mobility 2 guy who hits all opposing creatures for 5 when it comes into play and a robot that starts as a 1/1 armour 1 dude and ends up as a 20/20 armour 10 dude. These are cards I find fun, so my goal was to build a deck that could survive in order to level them up a bunch and then draw the powerful versions.
The problem is by default you only draw 20 of your 30 cards each time through your deck. In order to resolve a tier 3 guy on turns 9-12 you need to have drawn it both of the first times through your deck and draw it the third time through as well. That's less than 30% for any specific card! And I don't exactly have a lot of super powerful cards. So when I was first getting started I kept finding that I'd play a 0/6, and a 1/1, and die. I wouldn't get the goodness of those cards, but I would get all the terribleness of playing terrible tier 1 cards.
I've added a few things to my deck to try to smooth things out. There's a 5/4 guy who draws you a card when you play him and I'm running 3 of those. It doesn't sound like much, but the 5/4 body is big enough to trade with most other tier 1 plays and the extra card is deceptively good. Assuming I play two of these guys I'm up to drawing 22 cards each time through my deck, not 20. On it's own that brings me up to about 40% of playing a specific card each of my first 3 passes through the deck. It's actually even better than that, since the tier 2 version of that guy draws you 2 cards when you play him and the tier 3 version draws 3 cards.
The other thing I've added to the deck is Technosmith, which I think may be my favourite common. It's a 2/2 guy at tier 1 which is pretty terrible but he can sometimes trade with things. The key to him is that when he comes into play I get to discard a card from my hand and level it up. This lets me skip the terrible tier 1 aspect of some of my best cards while still getting them to a better stage. 2/2 isn't good, but it's better than 0/6! His upgraded versions have reasonable bodies (8/8 and then 15/15) while continuing to let me level cards up. On top of Technosmith I have a legendary card which is a 1/9 that lets me discard a card every turn to level it up.
What is Technosmith doing for me? Well, he's also sacrificing the early game by being only 2/2 but he's really powering up my mid game. With a normal deck you'll level up 8 cards in age 1. You expect to draw 5 of those cards the second time through as well, so your age 3 deck expects to be 19 tier 1 cards, 6 tier 2 cards, and 5 tier 3 cards. On the other hand if you get 2 free levels each age by running 3 Technosmith (I only own 2, sadly, but the legendary fills in) then you rate to level up 10 cards in age 1 and rate to draw 6 of those to level in age 2. So your age 3 deck expects to be 16 tier 1 cards, 8 tier 2 cards, and 6 tier 3 cards. That's a pretty significant swing in power level. Things can get fudged by drawing all your leveled cards in one hand and then drawing hands with no leveled cards at all, but the second set will weather those storms better than the first too.
Combine them both, with drawing extra cards and leveling extra cards, and I find any game that goes long is mine for the taking. I don't get hands where I'm stuck playing tier 1 cards and my opponent does. Tier 1 cards have no hope of fighting off a 20/20 with 10 armour, or a 24/24. Or even just the 15/15 Technosmith body, really.
I think I need to figure out a better way to survive the super early game. I need some way to kill multiple Echo Whisps in one go. (A 6/1 that comes with a copy!) Maybe I should add more Magma Hounds to my deck? (A 4/3 that does 2 damage to something when it comes into play.)
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
SolForge
Tonight I was in a Google Hangout session with my brother and sister and my brother started talking about a game he's playing that just went into open beta earlier in the day. The game is called SolForge and it's a free to play online collectible card game. He wanted to know if I was playing it. I'm against playing games in beta, and around launch time, and that have a bad free to play money scheme, so the answer was no. But then he had to go and play a quick game against the computer while I watched and got me wanting to play. He was on and it was working fine, so my big concerns with playing on launch day didn't seem to be an issue. And I'll always try a free game with someone I know. If the money making scheme sucks I can always quit!
It turns out that while playing against the computer worked fine, most of the other aspects weren't working so well. The webpage wasn't loading so I couldn't register for an account. A couple refreshes got through that hurdle. As the game was installing James and Josh sent me messages via Steam asking about my in game name and complaining about how multiplayer wasn't working so well. Eh, I was in the game by now, might as well give it a try, right?
We were able to play about 9 or 10 turns with some lag, but then things started going haywire. The solution James had was to log out and come back in and you'd be able to play another turn. That worked for us too, but it turned a 30 second turn into a 5 minute turn and stopped being worth doing. There's a 'first win of the day' bonus so I went and played a game with the computer. It's a CCG, but there are supposed to be a few different decks you can play without owning them. Turns out something is wrong so there's only one deck to use. Presumably the lag, the desyncing, and the deck issues will get worked out in a short period of time, but playing a game at launch is still proving to be a disaster. Then I was told they rushed the open beta to start for GenCon or something... Yay arbitrary deadlines?
At any rate, the game itself seemed somewhat interesting. When you play a card it gets removed from your deck, but you get a leveled up version in your discard pile for your next shuffle. So there's interesting decisions between playing a card that's good right now or playing a worse card that levels up in a better way. The combat itself reminds me of a Facebook game I played a while ago, but I don't remember what it was called. You have 5 lanes for cards. Each turn they attack whatever is in front of them, or the other player's life total if they're unopposed. Damage is permanent, so eventually a creature will die even if you have to put a bunch of chumpers in front of them. Each turn you get to play exactly 2 cards, discard the rest, and draw back up to 5 cards in hand. After 4 turns you reshuffle. So you'll see 20 of the 30 cards in your deck and then you'll shuffle the 12 discarded cards and the 8 upgraded cards in with the 10 you didn't draw. This makes games more random (if you build around a single card like the precon I can use, sometimes you lose when you don't draw it) but makes sure you can get your upgraded cards faster.
Ok, so it's a decently fun game and eventually I'll be able to play with other people without it sucking... How are they going to get money out of me? Well, every day that you log in you get some free cards. The first win (or first 3 losses) in a day get you some free cards. After one day I'm up to 7 cards. Given the way deck construction works I'll probably need ~60 cards just to build a legal deck. So in a week and a half if I stay on top of things I'll have a terrible deck of my own. There are 4 rarities of cards, and it really seems like I'll only expect to get commons and maybe a few rares. I got super lucky and got a legendary card for my first win of the day, but maybe that's standard? I'd guess before I could build a reasonable deck I'd be looking at a couple months of playing every single day.
What if I pay money? Well, for about $2 I can buy a booster with 8 cards in it. 5 commons, 2 rares and 1 heroic, with a chance of having one of the cards get upgraded a rarity if I get lucky. Or for about $11 I can get 10 cards. 3 commons, 3 rares, 3 heroics, and 1 legendary, with the upgrade chance again. My brother gave them some money a while ago when they were in alpha or something, so his account came with I think 60 of the $2 boosters. I think he's got full playsets (3 cards) of pretty much all the commons and rares and I know he got 3 of the same heroic he wanted to build a deck around. But I don't think he got even a single copy of the legendary dragon I randomly won. There's no trading, either.
I guess it's like Magic. If I wanted to go play constructed on Magic Online and if they'd turned trading off I'd be looking at needing to sink in hundreds or thousands of dollars to build the decks I want to play. That's how it feels here for SolForge. With no trading and no drafting (at least for now) it really feels like the idea of building real decks and of having fair matches is right out the window.
Not that I'm complaining about having a restricted cardpool. Shandalar was an awesome Magic game, and you really had a limited card pool when you started out there. But the ways to get more cards revolved around playing the game more and/or getting lucky with random event spawns. Not opening my wallet to shell out cash.
But I think about playing Magic as a kid, and I'm trying to find a difference here. But I can't. Magic was also fun with small numbers of cards, but it became very tempting to buy more and more packs to build better decks than other people. By the end of high school I was buying awesome cards in online auctions and starting to wreck faces with berserk and the like.
Clearly I am the whale, or at least I could be the whale here. But I don't want to be the whale. I don't think I'd be able to play constructed Magic the way I once did, and that's all there is in SolForge so far.
That said, the game is fun, even with just the one deck. So I think I'll keep playing, collect me free stuff every day, and see when I can eventually cobble a deck together. I doubt I'll be too happy playing with random people who own all the cards but maybe there'll be some way to play only against other bad decks? Or maybe they'll eventually implement drafts? Or maybe I'll get bored with the one deck and quit forever even though they'll eventually turn the game into something good for free players. Therein lies the problem for me with starting an incomplete game in a beta...
It turns out that while playing against the computer worked fine, most of the other aspects weren't working so well. The webpage wasn't loading so I couldn't register for an account. A couple refreshes got through that hurdle. As the game was installing James and Josh sent me messages via Steam asking about my in game name and complaining about how multiplayer wasn't working so well. Eh, I was in the game by now, might as well give it a try, right?
We were able to play about 9 or 10 turns with some lag, but then things started going haywire. The solution James had was to log out and come back in and you'd be able to play another turn. That worked for us too, but it turned a 30 second turn into a 5 minute turn and stopped being worth doing. There's a 'first win of the day' bonus so I went and played a game with the computer. It's a CCG, but there are supposed to be a few different decks you can play without owning them. Turns out something is wrong so there's only one deck to use. Presumably the lag, the desyncing, and the deck issues will get worked out in a short period of time, but playing a game at launch is still proving to be a disaster. Then I was told they rushed the open beta to start for GenCon or something... Yay arbitrary deadlines?
At any rate, the game itself seemed somewhat interesting. When you play a card it gets removed from your deck, but you get a leveled up version in your discard pile for your next shuffle. So there's interesting decisions between playing a card that's good right now or playing a worse card that levels up in a better way. The combat itself reminds me of a Facebook game I played a while ago, but I don't remember what it was called. You have 5 lanes for cards. Each turn they attack whatever is in front of them, or the other player's life total if they're unopposed. Damage is permanent, so eventually a creature will die even if you have to put a bunch of chumpers in front of them. Each turn you get to play exactly 2 cards, discard the rest, and draw back up to 5 cards in hand. After 4 turns you reshuffle. So you'll see 20 of the 30 cards in your deck and then you'll shuffle the 12 discarded cards and the 8 upgraded cards in with the 10 you didn't draw. This makes games more random (if you build around a single card like the precon I can use, sometimes you lose when you don't draw it) but makes sure you can get your upgraded cards faster.
Ok, so it's a decently fun game and eventually I'll be able to play with other people without it sucking... How are they going to get money out of me? Well, every day that you log in you get some free cards. The first win (or first 3 losses) in a day get you some free cards. After one day I'm up to 7 cards. Given the way deck construction works I'll probably need ~60 cards just to build a legal deck. So in a week and a half if I stay on top of things I'll have a terrible deck of my own. There are 4 rarities of cards, and it really seems like I'll only expect to get commons and maybe a few rares. I got super lucky and got a legendary card for my first win of the day, but maybe that's standard? I'd guess before I could build a reasonable deck I'd be looking at a couple months of playing every single day.
What if I pay money? Well, for about $2 I can buy a booster with 8 cards in it. 5 commons, 2 rares and 1 heroic, with a chance of having one of the cards get upgraded a rarity if I get lucky. Or for about $11 I can get 10 cards. 3 commons, 3 rares, 3 heroics, and 1 legendary, with the upgrade chance again. My brother gave them some money a while ago when they were in alpha or something, so his account came with I think 60 of the $2 boosters. I think he's got full playsets (3 cards) of pretty much all the commons and rares and I know he got 3 of the same heroic he wanted to build a deck around. But I don't think he got even a single copy of the legendary dragon I randomly won. There's no trading, either.
I guess it's like Magic. If I wanted to go play constructed on Magic Online and if they'd turned trading off I'd be looking at needing to sink in hundreds or thousands of dollars to build the decks I want to play. That's how it feels here for SolForge. With no trading and no drafting (at least for now) it really feels like the idea of building real decks and of having fair matches is right out the window.
Not that I'm complaining about having a restricted cardpool. Shandalar was an awesome Magic game, and you really had a limited card pool when you started out there. But the ways to get more cards revolved around playing the game more and/or getting lucky with random event spawns. Not opening my wallet to shell out cash.
But I think about playing Magic as a kid, and I'm trying to find a difference here. But I can't. Magic was also fun with small numbers of cards, but it became very tempting to buy more and more packs to build better decks than other people. By the end of high school I was buying awesome cards in online auctions and starting to wreck faces with berserk and the like.
Clearly I am the whale, or at least I could be the whale here. But I don't want to be the whale. I don't think I'd be able to play constructed Magic the way I once did, and that's all there is in SolForge so far.
That said, the game is fun, even with just the one deck. So I think I'll keep playing, collect me free stuff every day, and see when I can eventually cobble a deck together. I doubt I'll be too happy playing with random people who own all the cards but maybe there'll be some way to play only against other bad decks? Or maybe they'll eventually implement drafts? Or maybe I'll get bored with the one deck and quit forever even though they'll eventually turn the game into something good for free players. Therein lies the problem for me with starting an incomplete game in a beta...
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