Let's say you're playing a card game. In particular I'm talking about Campaign Manager 2008 but it could be any game. It could be Fluxx. It could be Magic: the Gathering. Whatever. It's a card game. One of the cards you can play in this game says 'Draw two cards and play one of them immediately, adding the other to your hand.' How would you assume the following interactions work? (For simplicity's sake I'm going to call this effect an Oprah after the Obama card in Campaign Manager 2008.)
- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard two cards in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?
- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard a card in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?
- You have only one card left in your deck and 5 cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. Do you get a card from your discard pile? If so, could you get Oprah?
- You have only one card left in your deck and no cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. The one card you draw also has, as part of its effect, draw a card. Do you draw Oprah?
In the first scenario I'd say there's no way to actually get the effect out of a card. You can't discard two cards to pay the cost for either one. Depending on how the cards are worded you'd either get to keep both (probably having to reveal them to prove you couldn't play them) or you'd have to play one with no effect.
In the second scenario it's tricky. When exactly do you add the second card to your hand? The wording of the card says you play one immediately and tells you to add the other to your hand later in the text. I could see it being ruled either way.
The third scenario is pretty clear I think. You draw the one card in your deck, shuffle the discard, and draw another card. Then you put Oprah in the discard. I can see other ways it might work though. Maybe you should get a shot at Oprah? Maybe you don't reshuffle. (A Few Acres of Snow change their rules such that you don't reshuffle in the middle of a turn, for example.) But in general I'd assume you reshuffle right away and can't draw the card currently drawing you cards.
What about the fourth option? When, exactly, do you end up discarding Oprah. I think Oprah can't draw Oprah because it's 'being played' while you're drawing those cards but is it still 'being played' when you play the second card? Does the answer to the second scenario matter? I'd say if you can't discard the second card then you either can't draw Oprah here (we haven't added the second card to our hand so Oprah has to still be 'being played') or you can draw it off of Oprah itself. If you can discard the second card then I'd say you should probably be able to cycle into Oprah off the second card but I could see it going the other way.
Well, how is it implemented online? You're forced to discard without getting the effect in scenario 1. You can discard the card to get the effect in scenario 2. You do reshuffle in the middle of the turn in scenario 3 (but get no shot at Oprah). Scenario 4? It works both ways depending on how you click...
If you play it out normally you don't get the card. Oprah is in the discard pile when you resolve the second card but the reshuffle doesn't happen. Here's where things get tricky... I didn't put any thought into it and just assumed I should get the card. I thought I must have done something wrong (why didn't I get my card?) so I clicked the 'Reset Move' button to do it again to make sure. It resets back to after drawing the cards off Oprah (and rightly so, after I see what they are I shouldn't be able to undo playing Oprah) and lets me pick which one to play. This time around it forces me to draw a card which has to be Oprah.
Something's wrong here, right? The implementation has to be buggy one way or the other. I did this once in a game last week and didn't even give it a second thought. Maybe I'd screwed up clicking the first time or something but I managed to make it work the way I instinctively thought it should so all is well.
Today I got into a stalemate in a game. We both had all of our cards but one in our hands and were able to cycle the same game state forever. I was wondering about what should happen. Could I have built my deck differently to beat his infinite combo? Did he have anything up his sleeve to stop mine? Did the rules have a chess style draw rule? I opened up the rules and browsed a bit to find the following...
"If a player wishes to draw a card but has no cards remaining in his Campaign Deck, his discard pile is first reshuffled to form a new deck. If this occurs in the midst of a player’s turn, any cards played earlier on that turn should not be shuffled into the new deck."
Hmm.
So the way I thought it worked was wrong. And by finding a way to make it happen I've been cheating...
I reported it as a bug. My opponent also noticed and asked how I did it. I told him I'd reported it and offered a draw since I'd been cheating. Also since the game was unlikely to progress even if I stopped cheating. The odd thing there is we both gained TrueSkill rating for the draw.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
League of Legends: Turrets
One of the new masteries added to League of Legends in season 2 is called Siege Commander. It reduces the armour of nearby enemy turrets by 10. I was wondering about how good this actually was (I have it in my Warwick spec) and tried to take a look at the armour of the enemy turrets in a game as I was walking up to them. The turret went from 250 armour to 50 armour as I walked up to it which was really confusing. It says it knocks 10 armour off! Why did it lose 200? Clearly some further investigation is required...
I did some searching and found that turrets actually have all kinds of weird rules surrounding them. I'd always just assumed they had static stats (possibly that scale as time progressed) and just shot for sensible damage. It turns out there are weird rules for how much damage they do and how much damage they take.
In terms of how much damage they do it seems that every consecutive shot on a single target does an extra 22.5% damage. So getting hit once will hurt but getting hit for a bunch of shots in a row is going to destroy you. Turrets also have 20% armor penetration and do only 94% damage to champions.
Defensively if there are no enemy minions within range of the turret it gets x3.88 ac and x2.47 mr. Presumably this is to make it harder to 'back door' without a creep wave present and is almost certainly why the tower lost 200 ac in my test.
And perhaps most interestingly... The damage a champion does to a turret is either her attack damage (the same as with every single other thing you can auto-attack) or 40% of her ability power. This blew my mind. I've always operated under the assumption that casters are terrible at burning down turrets! I popped in a quick replay from a game yesterday where I was Veigar. I had 109 ad and 690 ap. I was cracking a turret, post ac, for almost 200. Assuming the 40% number is right that means I do 2.5 times as much damage to a turret as I was expecting I would. Not bad! A true physical attacker is still going to do more since they're apt to build some sort of attack speed items and I'm really not with Veigar. (Or am I...)
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Super Rare Drops
My brother commented on yesterday's post about the 'infinite' victory Game Genie code and said that the thing he most remembered about it was getting a large number of rolls on the enemy loot table. There are some stupidly rare drops in the game and this was the first time we'd ever seen one of them. (Mage, I think.)
I mentioned that Rydia learned almost all of her spells via leveling but that's only true of white and black magic spells. Her call spells are learned in a wide variety of ways. She starts the game with one. She learns five more when she rejoins the party after growing up in the land of the summoned monsters. Most of the rest she learns by having the party defeat a legendary monster. Find Odin at the bottom of Castle Baron and beat him up to learn the spell. Brave Bahamut's Cave on the moon to learn that spell. Hit Yang on the head with a frying pan to learn Sylph. There are a couple spells that you can only learn by getting a rare drop from a random encounter. I don't think I've ever had Mage myself. I got Imp once from a monster in the final dungeon on the moon. Are there any other super rare drops? Lets see what gamefaqs has to say on the topic...
First of all it looks like every monster has a 5 in 96 chance to drop an item at all after you kill them. (Dr Lugae's second form has a 100% chance to drop an item as the only exception.) After determining that they'll drop an item there are 4 things they could drop. The first item has a 32 in 64 chance. The next has a 20 in 64 chance. Then an 11 in 64 chance. Then a 1 in 64 chance. The mage monster, for example, has a cure2 potion as the first three items on the loot table and the mage spell for Rydia as the last item. Which means that if you kill a single mage your odds of each outcome are...
5824 in 6144 (~95%) - no drop
319 in 6144 (~5%) - cure2 potion
1 in 6144 (~.016%) - mage spell
What?!?
How is that a sensible game mechanic? You fight mages in one dungeon. (The magnetic cave.) I can't find random encounter tables but it's a pretty short dungeon and you're probably only fighting like 5 of these guys in a given game. With 5 shots at the item you're at a mere .081% chance to get the item. How many times would you have to play the game to have even a 50% chance at getting it? 852. If you played the game 852 times and killed 5 mages each time then you're barely more likely to see the mage spell than not. How can this make sense? Is it really worth spending developer time on something that will come up that rarely?
This isn't the only item in the game with this kind of rarity, either... Here's a list of all the items that only come up in the 1/64 slot of a loot table...
Bomb spell
Medusa sword
Dragoon spear
RuneAxe axe
Artemis bow
Lilith rod
Cursed ring (I didn't know there was a cursed ring in this game!)
Crystal ring
Zeus gloves
Glass helmet
Imp spell
Mage spell
Pink tail
I've tried to get the pink tail before but now that I actually see the numbers behind it I'm pretty sure it's off the charts crazy to try for it. Estimates placed getting into a fight with the monsters that drop it at 1 in 64. I think you get to fight 5 of them at a time but that's still in the neighbourhood of 54528 fights before you reach a 50% chance of getting a pink tail. Holy crazy drop rates Batman!
I mentioned that Rydia learned almost all of her spells via leveling but that's only true of white and black magic spells. Her call spells are learned in a wide variety of ways. She starts the game with one. She learns five more when she rejoins the party after growing up in the land of the summoned monsters. Most of the rest she learns by having the party defeat a legendary monster. Find Odin at the bottom of Castle Baron and beat him up to learn the spell. Brave Bahamut's Cave on the moon to learn that spell. Hit Yang on the head with a frying pan to learn Sylph. There are a couple spells that you can only learn by getting a rare drop from a random encounter. I don't think I've ever had Mage myself. I got Imp once from a monster in the final dungeon on the moon. Are there any other super rare drops? Lets see what gamefaqs has to say on the topic...
First of all it looks like every monster has a 5 in 96 chance to drop an item at all after you kill them. (Dr Lugae's second form has a 100% chance to drop an item as the only exception.) After determining that they'll drop an item there are 4 things they could drop. The first item has a 32 in 64 chance. The next has a 20 in 64 chance. Then an 11 in 64 chance. Then a 1 in 64 chance. The mage monster, for example, has a cure2 potion as the first three items on the loot table and the mage spell for Rydia as the last item. Which means that if you kill a single mage your odds of each outcome are...
5824 in 6144 (~95%) - no drop
319 in 6144 (~5%) - cure2 potion
1 in 6144 (~.016%) - mage spell
What?!?
How is that a sensible game mechanic? You fight mages in one dungeon. (The magnetic cave.) I can't find random encounter tables but it's a pretty short dungeon and you're probably only fighting like 5 of these guys in a given game. With 5 shots at the item you're at a mere .081% chance to get the item. How many times would you have to play the game to have even a 50% chance at getting it? 852. If you played the game 852 times and killed 5 mages each time then you're barely more likely to see the mage spell than not. How can this make sense? Is it really worth spending developer time on something that will come up that rarely?
This isn't the only item in the game with this kind of rarity, either... Here's a list of all the items that only come up in the 1/64 slot of a loot table...
Bomb spell
Medusa sword
Dragoon spear
RuneAxe axe
Artemis bow
Lilith rod
Cursed ring (I didn't know there was a cursed ring in this game!)
Crystal ring
Zeus gloves
Glass helmet
Imp spell
Mage spell
Pink tail
I've tried to get the pink tail before but now that I actually see the numbers behind it I'm pretty sure it's off the charts crazy to try for it. Estimates placed getting into a fight with the monsters that drop it at 1 in 64. I think you get to fight 5 of them at a time but that's still in the neighbourhood of 54528 fights before you reach a 50% chance of getting a pink tail. Holy crazy drop rates Batman!
Friday, January 13, 2012
Game Genie: Final Fantasy IV
My brother had a Gamie Genie for the SNES when we were kids. It came with a book of codes you could enter to modify how games worked. Infinite lives, access to all the guns at the start of the game... Things like that. I don't know how it worked (I am curious though) and I don't remember ever actually using it on any game. Any game, that is, except for Final Fantasy IV!
I remember there were codes you could enter to change how much experience you earned at the end of a fight. Make each monster worth 1 xp. Or 10 xp. Or 100 xp. And so on. There was an obvious pattern to the codes and we toyed around with making things bigger and bigger. Eventually we stumble on a code which seemed to break the game. A fight would end and your characters would stand around doing the victory dance but it wouldn't list how much experience/gold you'd earned for the fight. Eventually we turned off the Game Genie (it had an on/off switch) and suddenly earned a ludicrous amount of experience. It was like the game was stuck in an infinite loop while it was turned on and it was constantly adding on the experience for the monsters over and over. Hello tons of levels!
We figured this out in the antlion cave near the start of the game when your party is Cecil, Rydia, and Edward. Gaining a ton of levels at once had two interesting consequences...
First, Edward has an auto-hide ability where if he's at low health he runs away from the fight. In the Japanese version he has a healing ability which he can use while hidden (in order to get enough health to actually stick around and fight) but in the NA version he just screws around hidden. Gaining 80 some odd levels raised his maximum health a lot. So high, in fact, that I couldn't heal him out of low health. It might have been a problem if I didn't have a super high level dark knight!
Secondly, Rydia learns spells as she gains levels so when she gains a ton of levels she learns all the spells. All the spells, that is, except fir1. She learns that spell as a plot point at the start of the next dungeon (you need Rosa to convince her to get over her fear of fire and burn down the ice blocking the party from walking to Fabul) so it makes sense that she wouldn't learn it from just gaining levels. What doesn't make sense is she does learn fir2. And fir3. So the scene where she's too afraid to melt some ice with a fire spell doesn't real gel with the fact I've been exploding enemies with fir3!
I don't remember actually playing very long with the stupid amount of experience. Cheating just isn't very fun it turns out.
I remember there were codes you could enter to change how much experience you earned at the end of a fight. Make each monster worth 1 xp. Or 10 xp. Or 100 xp. And so on. There was an obvious pattern to the codes and we toyed around with making things bigger and bigger. Eventually we stumble on a code which seemed to break the game. A fight would end and your characters would stand around doing the victory dance but it wouldn't list how much experience/gold you'd earned for the fight. Eventually we turned off the Game Genie (it had an on/off switch) and suddenly earned a ludicrous amount of experience. It was like the game was stuck in an infinite loop while it was turned on and it was constantly adding on the experience for the monsters over and over. Hello tons of levels!
We figured this out in the antlion cave near the start of the game when your party is Cecil, Rydia, and Edward. Gaining a ton of levels at once had two interesting consequences...
First, Edward has an auto-hide ability where if he's at low health he runs away from the fight. In the Japanese version he has a healing ability which he can use while hidden (in order to get enough health to actually stick around and fight) but in the NA version he just screws around hidden. Gaining 80 some odd levels raised his maximum health a lot. So high, in fact, that I couldn't heal him out of low health. It might have been a problem if I didn't have a super high level dark knight!
Secondly, Rydia learns spells as she gains levels so when she gains a ton of levels she learns all the spells. All the spells, that is, except fir1. She learns that spell as a plot point at the start of the next dungeon (you need Rosa to convince her to get over her fear of fire and burn down the ice blocking the party from walking to Fabul) so it makes sense that she wouldn't learn it from just gaining levels. What doesn't make sense is she does learn fir2. And fir3. So the scene where she's too afraid to melt some ice with a fire spell doesn't real gel with the fact I've been exploding enemies with fir3!
I don't remember actually playing very long with the stupid amount of experience. Cheating just isn't very fun it turns out.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Hunger Games: Training Days
At the end of 2010 I was at a local book store trying to spend a gift certificate when a board game caught my eye. It was a board game based off of a book trilogy (the third book had just come out) and was marked down 75% off. A quick look at the game didn't get my hopes up that it was going to be very good and I'd never heard of the book series. I decided to get the first book and then later pick up the other two books and the game if I liked the first one.
It turned out that the first book, Hunger Games, is awesome. Possibly my favourite book of all-time, though we know how hard it can be to compare things across years and years. At any rate, it's really good. I eventually went back for the second two books (sadly only in hardcover when I got them) and the game. The game was gone, however. Oh well...
I was out at 401 last month and saw they actually had a copy of it. I snapped it up and gave it to my sister for Christmas since I knew she liked the books as well. The board game, sadly, was a bit of a disappointment.
Now, without spoiling the book too much (seriously, go read it if you haven't) the basic idea is every year they hold a 'hunger games' where 12 districts each appoint a teenage boy and a teenage girl to enter the games. The 24 kids get put into an arena of sorts and battle to the death. Last kid alive wins food and stuff for their district. There's all sorts of crazy things that can go on in a death arena...
A board game based on that premise seems like it could have a lot of potential. I envision a dungeon that gets built as you're playing the game with players linking up randomly to fight. It would be an elimination game, of course, with different characters and stats. I'm thinking it could have a Scotland Yard style mechanic so you don't really know if you're following along behind someone else or not... There may be some clever way to have the game track that sort of stuff but it could work with a GM character who oversees the arena while the players compete to see who will win. (Maybe give the GM some 'cylon leader' style goals?)
Unfortunately the board game doesn't have anything at all to do with the arena. There is no battle to the death. The key is in the last part of the name... 'Training Days'. The game simulates being one of the kids and training to get ready for the arena instead of the arena itself. So you do weight lifting and archery and junk like that instead of actually fighting each other. The theme was rather disappointing after the expectations I had.
As far as the gameplay goes it's a hidden auction system. Each round you flip up a card for every player and then you bid face down tiles to try to win the cards. You have a 1, a 3, and a 6 to spend each round. On top of your tiles you have a character with stats that you get to add to the card check. So someone with a high agility would be better at the archery challenge and someone with high strength would be better at lifting weights. The challenges are all vaguely related to the book and all of the characters are from the book too so it is still flavourful... Just no killing.
It has some interesting gameplay as you try to figure out who cares about which card and how much you need to invest in a specific card in order to win it. But it has a random game end condition and there's not really any long term planning. There are obviously correct plays every turn and you just need to figure out who is going to deviate from the script to try to steal a card cheaply.
Overall I'm happy I played the game once but I don't have any real desire to play it again. I am intrigued by the prospect of working out a system to play out the actual arena deathmatch though...
It turned out that the first book, Hunger Games, is awesome. Possibly my favourite book of all-time, though we know how hard it can be to compare things across years and years. At any rate, it's really good. I eventually went back for the second two books (sadly only in hardcover when I got them) and the game. The game was gone, however. Oh well...
I was out at 401 last month and saw they actually had a copy of it. I snapped it up and gave it to my sister for Christmas since I knew she liked the books as well. The board game, sadly, was a bit of a disappointment.
Now, without spoiling the book too much (seriously, go read it if you haven't) the basic idea is every year they hold a 'hunger games' where 12 districts each appoint a teenage boy and a teenage girl to enter the games. The 24 kids get put into an arena of sorts and battle to the death. Last kid alive wins food and stuff for their district. There's all sorts of crazy things that can go on in a death arena...
A board game based on that premise seems like it could have a lot of potential. I envision a dungeon that gets built as you're playing the game with players linking up randomly to fight. It would be an elimination game, of course, with different characters and stats. I'm thinking it could have a Scotland Yard style mechanic so you don't really know if you're following along behind someone else or not... There may be some clever way to have the game track that sort of stuff but it could work with a GM character who oversees the arena while the players compete to see who will win. (Maybe give the GM some 'cylon leader' style goals?)
Unfortunately the board game doesn't have anything at all to do with the arena. There is no battle to the death. The key is in the last part of the name... 'Training Days'. The game simulates being one of the kids and training to get ready for the arena instead of the arena itself. So you do weight lifting and archery and junk like that instead of actually fighting each other. The theme was rather disappointing after the expectations I had.
As far as the gameplay goes it's a hidden auction system. Each round you flip up a card for every player and then you bid face down tiles to try to win the cards. You have a 1, a 3, and a 6 to spend each round. On top of your tiles you have a character with stats that you get to add to the card check. So someone with a high agility would be better at the archery challenge and someone with high strength would be better at lifting weights. The challenges are all vaguely related to the book and all of the characters are from the book too so it is still flavourful... Just no killing.
It has some interesting gameplay as you try to figure out who cares about which card and how much you need to invest in a specific card in order to win it. But it has a random game end condition and there's not really any long term planning. There are obviously correct plays every turn and you just need to figure out who is going to deviate from the script to try to steal a card cheaply.
Overall I'm happy I played the game once but I don't have any real desire to play it again. I am intrigued by the prospect of working out a system to play out the actual arena deathmatch though...
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Campaign Manager 2008
Campaign Manager 2008 is an interesting little game on Yucata simulating the 2008 US presidential election between Obama and McCain. The game is essentially a card driven wargame (you play one card each turn to impact the voting in a given state) but it has a couple twists. It's non-symmetrical in that each player has their own distinct deck of cards. It also has aspects of Dominion in that you build your deck at the start of the game instead of always having the same cards available each time.
As an aside, here's roughly how the game works... There are 4 states in play. Every state has two issue tracks. It's a tug-of-war style mechanic so if red gains a defense on this card he takes over the blue one. There's also a little meter on the left showing what the state actually cares about. If a state ever cares about an issue completely dominated by one of the players they immediately win the state. The demographics on the left are used on some cards to take all the white dots in one fell swoop. Score points for the state and then add a new state to the board. Keep going until someone has a majority of the votes. Each turn you get one action which can either be to play a card or to draw a card. You can only choose to draw a card if you have fewer than 5 cards in your hand.
The first twist isn't actually much of a twist. Each player has 45 potential cards to include in their deck and most of them are mirror images of the cards in the other player's deck. Gain support in economy and draw a card. Gain support in defense and shift the issue track towards defense. Get control of the media. Draw 3 cards. Draw 2 cards and play 1 of them. Campaign targeting women... McCain has a slight bias in his cards towards defense and Obama towards economy but by and large most of their cards are the same things. They let you do two unrelated things. Gain one support and shift the left track. Switch the key demographic and draw a card. But there are a couple cards with powerful and unique effects for each side...
Obama's first such card is essentially windfall. Play it as your action and then discard any number of cards. Draw a card for each card discarded. This can let you take some situationally powerful cards and discard them if they aren't useful to turn them into something else. It can also let you dig for specific cards if you need them. McCain's comparable card is a regrowth effect. Play is and discard one card to pick up a card from your discard pile. This does similar things but lets you double use your best card each time through your deck. It wastes two cards and an action though so it had better be a really powerful effect!
Obama's second unique card lets you discard a card to remove the last card McCain played from the game along with the unique card. He still gets the impact when he played it but it won't get reshuffled into his deck. When I first saw this it seemed overpowered. Killing off your opponent's best card is pretty sweet when you go through your deck over and over. Unfortunately McCain's second unique card trumps it. It also requires you to remove it from the game and discard a card to play it. It lets you take any card from out of the game and add it to your hand. Including the card Obama removed from the game. And since it puts the card in your hand you get to play it again next turn! If there exists a card which is really powerful then McCain gets to use it twice. If all cards are about the same power level then neither of these cards matter...
The second twist is that you build your deck before the game starts. Each player has 45 potential cards and builds a deck by drawing 3 cards and keeping 1 of them. Repeat this until you have chosen 15 cards and play with those cards. Want to build a deck focused on the economy? Draft a bunch of economy cards. Want a bunch of powerful but situational cards? You can do that too. It's a really interesting mechanic and one I think has a lot of potential. You build your deck in a vacuum without seeing anything your opponent does which I think hurts the strategic depth. I'm wondering if it would be better to show your opponent what you're taking? Or to maybe do a solomon style draft!
At any rate, I've played the game 4 times. Once we used the default 15 card decks and the game made sense. It was back and forth the whole way and I won by like 1 vote in the end. The other three games were complete blow-outs. McCain got into a situation where he seemed to be unbeatable. In the game I played against Andrew today I ended up with 14 of my 15 cards in my hand. Then every turn I was able to play a card which gave me a defense support in a state and drew a card. (My deck had 3 or 4 cards with the effect in it.) If he ever did anything that forced me to do more than that I could play one of my other cards and cycle back into it in two turns!
The problem is almost every card does 2 things. If one of those things isn't draw a card then you need to spend a full turn drawing a card. So over 2 turns you can draw a card and get 2 abilities. Alternatively if you play two cards which do a thing and draw a card then over 2 turns you can draw 2 cards and get 2 abilities. If you can afford to wait the second turn for the second ability you're up a full card. Even worse, the cards which do 2 things do unrelated things. If you don't need both abilities then you're behind a card and an ability over two turns!
But how do you build up a 14 card hand? If you could always draw a card as your action on a turn you'd just spend the first 10 turns drawing cards. Unfortunately you can only use the draw a card action when you have fewer than 5 cards in hand. So instead you need to make use of the "draw 3 cards" card and the "draw 2 and play 1" cards. This will slowly increase your hand size as long as every time you play a card it draws a card. This is yet another reason why you want your cards to replace themselves. On top of it just gaining a card every 2 turns you're setting up a bigger hand which provides more options each turn.
Why is it always McCain that pulled this off? I'm not sure. The "draw 3 cards" card seems to be the best card in either deck by a pretty large margin. The two times I played as Obama I nailed it with my exile a card card but they always just brought it back and got to play it again immediately. Coupled with the regrowth it seems pretty easy to build up a big hand. Possibly the windfall card from Obama can set up the same thing if you get proper discard tempo? I want to play again as Obama to see if I can put the deck together... But even then, if you just have two brutal decks going against each other is the game going to be interesting? It feels like it should just end up in a draw?
As an aside, here's roughly how the game works... There are 4 states in play. Every state has two issue tracks. It's a tug-of-war style mechanic so if red gains a defense on this card he takes over the blue one. There's also a little meter on the left showing what the state actually cares about. If a state ever cares about an issue completely dominated by one of the players they immediately win the state. The demographics on the left are used on some cards to take all the white dots in one fell swoop. Score points for the state and then add a new state to the board. Keep going until someone has a majority of the votes. Each turn you get one action which can either be to play a card or to draw a card. You can only choose to draw a card if you have fewer than 5 cards in your hand.
The first twist isn't actually much of a twist. Each player has 45 potential cards to include in their deck and most of them are mirror images of the cards in the other player's deck. Gain support in economy and draw a card. Gain support in defense and shift the issue track towards defense. Get control of the media. Draw 3 cards. Draw 2 cards and play 1 of them. Campaign targeting women... McCain has a slight bias in his cards towards defense and Obama towards economy but by and large most of their cards are the same things. They let you do two unrelated things. Gain one support and shift the left track. Switch the key demographic and draw a card. But there are a couple cards with powerful and unique effects for each side...
Obama's first such card is essentially windfall. Play it as your action and then discard any number of cards. Draw a card for each card discarded. This can let you take some situationally powerful cards and discard them if they aren't useful to turn them into something else. It can also let you dig for specific cards if you need them. McCain's comparable card is a regrowth effect. Play is and discard one card to pick up a card from your discard pile. This does similar things but lets you double use your best card each time through your deck. It wastes two cards and an action though so it had better be a really powerful effect!
Obama's second unique card lets you discard a card to remove the last card McCain played from the game along with the unique card. He still gets the impact when he played it but it won't get reshuffled into his deck. When I first saw this it seemed overpowered. Killing off your opponent's best card is pretty sweet when you go through your deck over and over. Unfortunately McCain's second unique card trumps it. It also requires you to remove it from the game and discard a card to play it. It lets you take any card from out of the game and add it to your hand. Including the card Obama removed from the game. And since it puts the card in your hand you get to play it again next turn! If there exists a card which is really powerful then McCain gets to use it twice. If all cards are about the same power level then neither of these cards matter...
The second twist is that you build your deck before the game starts. Each player has 45 potential cards and builds a deck by drawing 3 cards and keeping 1 of them. Repeat this until you have chosen 15 cards and play with those cards. Want to build a deck focused on the economy? Draft a bunch of economy cards. Want a bunch of powerful but situational cards? You can do that too. It's a really interesting mechanic and one I think has a lot of potential. You build your deck in a vacuum without seeing anything your opponent does which I think hurts the strategic depth. I'm wondering if it would be better to show your opponent what you're taking? Or to maybe do a solomon style draft!
At any rate, I've played the game 4 times. Once we used the default 15 card decks and the game made sense. It was back and forth the whole way and I won by like 1 vote in the end. The other three games were complete blow-outs. McCain got into a situation where he seemed to be unbeatable. In the game I played against Andrew today I ended up with 14 of my 15 cards in my hand. Then every turn I was able to play a card which gave me a defense support in a state and drew a card. (My deck had 3 or 4 cards with the effect in it.) If he ever did anything that forced me to do more than that I could play one of my other cards and cycle back into it in two turns!
The problem is almost every card does 2 things. If one of those things isn't draw a card then you need to spend a full turn drawing a card. So over 2 turns you can draw a card and get 2 abilities. Alternatively if you play two cards which do a thing and draw a card then over 2 turns you can draw 2 cards and get 2 abilities. If you can afford to wait the second turn for the second ability you're up a full card. Even worse, the cards which do 2 things do unrelated things. If you don't need both abilities then you're behind a card and an ability over two turns!
But how do you build up a 14 card hand? If you could always draw a card as your action on a turn you'd just spend the first 10 turns drawing cards. Unfortunately you can only use the draw a card action when you have fewer than 5 cards in hand. So instead you need to make use of the "draw 3 cards" card and the "draw 2 and play 1" cards. This will slowly increase your hand size as long as every time you play a card it draws a card. This is yet another reason why you want your cards to replace themselves. On top of it just gaining a card every 2 turns you're setting up a bigger hand which provides more options each turn.
Why is it always McCain that pulled this off? I'm not sure. The "draw 3 cards" card seems to be the best card in either deck by a pretty large margin. The two times I played as Obama I nailed it with my exile a card card but they always just brought it back and got to play it again immediately. Coupled with the regrowth it seems pretty easy to build up a big hand. Possibly the windfall card from Obama can set up the same thing if you get proper discard tempo? I want to play again as Obama to see if I can put the deck together... But even then, if you just have two brutal decks going against each other is the game going to be interesting? It feels like it should just end up in a draw?
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
"Elo Hell" Revisited
Two months ago I posted about the rating system in League of Legends and how my rating at the time was making the game unfun. I've been asked since then by several people about if I ever got out of "Elo Hell". I figured I should revisit the topic to see if two months of play has changed anything.
The first thing to mention is I still often see people in games complaining about being stuck in Elo Hell. It doesn't seem to matter what rating you're at; there's always people who are stuck at that rating and think they should be higher. I'm pretty sure this can just be explained by Illusory Superiority. Most people think they're above average. Pretty much by definition some of them aren't. Those people are going to reach their rating equilibrium point, believe it should be higher, but get stuck. And then since this is the internet they're going to whine about it. That people complain about Elo Hell in this manner doesn't mean it exists at all.
The second thing is that games have gotten better recently. There are still people who whine. People who make mistakes and play badly. Blame gets thrown around. But by and large everyone is still trying to win. I had one game recently where someone stated point blank that we had to give him solo top or he'd feed. (We gave him solo top and then he was bad and fed anyway...) Beyond that one game though I haven't had anyone threaten to play badly at the start. I haven't had people who intentionally join a game just to lose. Or who don't really join at all. Games, by and large, are fun.
As far as rating goes I had fallen as low as 1001. I started playing games almost exclusively with Robb and focused on playing a couple of champions well. In particular I stopped playing Vayne (8-16 record) and switched to Tristana (13-11 record) as my ranged physical attacker. I'm up to an overall winning record (120-111) and my rating is 1294.
Apparently Riot also implemented an automated banning tool which suspends accounts of people who routinely go AFK. Maybe that would help the matches down at the 1000 rating zone? I have my doubts. The Tribunal thing getting some press for actually banning people might be helping too. I posted about people flat out not caring about the threat of being reported and that may have changed? I kinda doubt that too.
But yes, I am out of "Elo Hell". Games are, by and large, fun. I'm sure my rating should be higher than it is since I'm obviously above average at the game but I'm sure that will come in time...
The first thing to mention is I still often see people in games complaining about being stuck in Elo Hell. It doesn't seem to matter what rating you're at; there's always people who are stuck at that rating and think they should be higher. I'm pretty sure this can just be explained by Illusory Superiority. Most people think they're above average. Pretty much by definition some of them aren't. Those people are going to reach their rating equilibrium point, believe it should be higher, but get stuck. And then since this is the internet they're going to whine about it. That people complain about Elo Hell in this manner doesn't mean it exists at all.
The second thing is that games have gotten better recently. There are still people who whine. People who make mistakes and play badly. Blame gets thrown around. But by and large everyone is still trying to win. I had one game recently where someone stated point blank that we had to give him solo top or he'd feed. (We gave him solo top and then he was bad and fed anyway...) Beyond that one game though I haven't had anyone threaten to play badly at the start. I haven't had people who intentionally join a game just to lose. Or who don't really join at all. Games, by and large, are fun.
As far as rating goes I had fallen as low as 1001. I started playing games almost exclusively with Robb and focused on playing a couple of champions well. In particular I stopped playing Vayne (8-16 record) and switched to Tristana (13-11 record) as my ranged physical attacker. I'm up to an overall winning record (120-111) and my rating is 1294.
Apparently Riot also implemented an automated banning tool which suspends accounts of people who routinely go AFK. Maybe that would help the matches down at the 1000 rating zone? I have my doubts. The Tribunal thing getting some press for actually banning people might be helping too. I posted about people flat out not caring about the threat of being reported and that may have changed? I kinda doubt that too.
But yes, I am out of "Elo Hell". Games are, by and large, fun. I'm sure my rating should be higher than it is since I'm obviously above average at the game but I'm sure that will come in time...
Monday, January 09, 2012
League of Legends Tribunal
8 months ago League of Legends brought in their tribunal system as a method to try to foster good behaviour amongst the player base. The basic idea is players can report people in their games and then a jury of their peers would vote on in the player behaved in a way that broke the rules and should be punished or not. I'd heard about it when it first came out but didn't pay much attention to it. I report people all the time but I never really cared about what went on after submitting a report.
A couple weeks ago I finally got around to signing in as a jurist to punish some bad players. It was interesting to see what actually gets submitted when a player gets reported. The jury gets to see the entire chat log from the game (but not the champion selection or game recap screens) with the offender's chat in a different colour to make it easier to find what they said. It also lists their final items, their kills/deaths/assists in the game, their incoming and outgoing DPS, and what level they finished the game at. It also lists every reason they were reported after the game and differentiates if it was a teammate or an opponent who reported them. It doesn't say which player specifically made which complaint.
The great part is it lists all the games they played where they got a complaint. You can browse all complaints to see if there's a pattern of bad behaviour or if people are just being really oversensitive or bitter when reporting.
I did a few and got an email on Friday saying that I got 8 cases right and they were giving me 40 IP for my help. I don't remember how many I did. It doesn't seem there's any way to see how many I did, so I don't know what my winning percentage is. I do know I pardoned more people than I was expecting...
I did some poking around today to see if I can work out what's exactly going on behind the scenes here. They posted some interesting stats last month... Apparently only 1.4% of players have been punished by the tribunal. But of people who get presented at the tribunal 94% get a punish vote. Half of those people get sent to the tribunal a second time and get another punish vote. Apparently most people who get reported are on the losing team and get reported by their teammates. (That makes sense since you're more likely to get angry and start raging at someone who you think is making you lose a game.)
I also dug into the forums and found some facts about how the system works. They refuse to give out specifics since they think offenders will be able to abuse the system if they know details. I guess that could be true but as the saying goes... Security through obfuscation isn't security at all. I'd rather they have a system that couldn't be abused but I guess they don't feel like they got that far. What they have said, however...
A couple weeks ago I finally got around to signing in as a jurist to punish some bad players. It was interesting to see what actually gets submitted when a player gets reported. The jury gets to see the entire chat log from the game (but not the champion selection or game recap screens) with the offender's chat in a different colour to make it easier to find what they said. It also lists their final items, their kills/deaths/assists in the game, their incoming and outgoing DPS, and what level they finished the game at. It also lists every reason they were reported after the game and differentiates if it was a teammate or an opponent who reported them. It doesn't say which player specifically made which complaint.
The great part is it lists all the games they played where they got a complaint. You can browse all complaints to see if there's a pattern of bad behaviour or if people are just being really oversensitive or bitter when reporting.
I did a few and got an email on Friday saying that I got 8 cases right and they were giving me 40 IP for my help. I don't remember how many I did. It doesn't seem there's any way to see how many I did, so I don't know what my winning percentage is. I do know I pardoned more people than I was expecting...
I did some poking around today to see if I can work out what's exactly going on behind the scenes here. They posted some interesting stats last month... Apparently only 1.4% of players have been punished by the tribunal. But of people who get presented at the tribunal 94% get a punish vote. Half of those people get sent to the tribunal a second time and get another punish vote. Apparently most people who get reported are on the losing team and get reported by their teammates. (That makes sense since you're more likely to get angry and start raging at someone who you think is making you lose a game.)
I also dug into the forums and found some facts about how the system works. They refuse to give out specifics since they think offenders will be able to abuse the system if they know details. I guess that could be true but as the saying goes... Security through obfuscation isn't security at all. I'd rather they have a system that couldn't be abused but I guess they don't feel like they got that far. What they have said, however...
- One report won't get your case presented at the tribunal. It takes several games with reports to get presented for voting. The percentage of games played compared to games with reports matters.
- Long term or permanent bans have to get approved by a Riot employee but everything else is automated.
- Your first time found guilty you get a warning email that doesn't tell you what you did wrong, just links to the code of conduct.
- The second time you get a short term ban (1-3 days or so) but still don't get told specifically what you did wrong.
- Even if you get permanently banned you don't get told what you did wrong.
- Riot employees who spot check random cases think the voters are too lenient. With a 94% conviction rate. Sounds to me like they need to start sending more borderline cases to the tribunal since if the conviction rate should be more than 94% I can't imagine it makes sense to actually review the cases. Punish everyone and move on!
- You can get reported for unskilled play but those reports don't get added to tribunal cases. The idea is to give people a way to vent without actually hurting anyone since people being bad isn't an offense. (With the rating system they should eventually fall out of your play range if they're actually worse than you!)
- The system had a lot more oversight built in at launch but they're pretty happy with how things are working so it's almost all automated now. The computer picks who gets put on trial. The computer tabulates the votes and decides when someone should be punished. The computer punishes them.
So it is entirely possible that, through no fault of my own, I could get banned. If enough of the people I play against randomly report me and enough of the jurists blindly vote to punish I'll get hit without any oversight. On the other hand it would have to happen in a lot of games. And since I really don't do anything bad and the jury does pardon 6% of people... I really have nothing to worry about. It's theoretically possible for the universe to align and screw me but it's really not plausible.
It seems sketchy that they don't tell people what they did wrong, but I've been a moderator for an online game. People who are apt to misbehave are also apt to whine and argue and try to rules-lawyer their way out of their punishment. I didn't really have all that much going on so I'd typically indulge them but it almost never went anywhere productive. They'd want to be able to swear. Or trade in the play areas. I'd always tell them specifically what they did wrong but the vast majority of the time they already knew what they did. They knew we didn't allow it. But they thought we should allow it so they were going to do it anyway.
The real key is they would gladly debate the facts for hours on end. They'd try to convince me I was wrong. And from their point of view it was just them wasting a couple hours. But from my point of view, when you get several of these people every day... Suddenly my whole day is wasted. (In reality I'm very good at multi-tasking chat and my side of the 'conversation' was pretty limited so I'd mostly just let them chat themselves out.) Even then, we had more chat moderators than Riot does. And fewer players. We provided better customer support for sure, but I don't know that Riot is doing things wrong. It doesn't make financial sense for them to hire a bunch of people to debate with people who are almost certainly going to get banned soon.
I do think it would make sense for them to provide a list of the reasons on their tribunal case. Add in a disclaimer about how they were reported for some of these reasons and be done with it. At least then people can rest assured that they weren't banned for unskilled play, for example. Getting an email warning saying you've been bad and to read the code of conduct is great and all but getting an email warning saying you were reported for 'AFK, AFK, AFK, AFK, AFK, Negative Attitude, AFK' gives you a pretty good idea what your problem is!
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