The new warcraft expansion is coming out and it has one particular new feature I have been thinking about - zone scaling. This new tech allows a zone to scale with player level so you can tackle the zones in the new area in any order you like. You won't outlevel the zones, and you can do the harder ones first if you want. The upside is that you aren't restricted in how you play, and you can also go back to do things afterwards without them being silly and trivial.
But I wonder if this is really the best way to go about it. One of the real problems with the game right now is that you level so quickly it is easy to end up halfway through the quests in a zone and gain so many levels that you cannot gain experience anymore. You have the choice of abandoning the zone halfway through the story or doing the story against trivial opponents that give you nothing in the way of rewards. Hardly a stellar set of options.
I think Blizzard should instead have taken a tack that helps with the problems they are trying to solve with the new zones but also helps with the older stuff. The real issue I see with the solution they are bringing in is that the game no longer would feel real. For one, gaining levels and being more powerful wouldn't actually make you better. It just isn't as much fun to realize that these rewards you are getting in the form of experience and levels actually make things harder, and sometimes that is going to be true. Also there is the real issue that the world no longer feels like a place you explore to find out what is there, but rather just an amusement park built for your convenience. If you go to Zone A at level 20 and kill a monster, then leave, and come back at level 60 and the monsters there suddenly do 20 times as much damage and have 20 times as much health it seems ridiculous to me. Just tell me how tough a gnoll in Westfall is, don't just ratchet it up as I level!
I think a far better solution would be to flatten the power progression and get rid of level influences on combat and experience. The game has always had this weird thing in it where monsters that are significantly above your level not only do a lot of damage and have a lot of health, but they start to randomly ignore your attacks. Get up to about 10 levels difference and you simply can't affect them at all. Also you can't get experience from low level monsters so you absolutely have to fight things right near your level. I think the world would feel a lot better if that wasn't the case anymore. If you could get experience for low level monsters you could at least finish zones where you were much higher level. It wouldn't be hard but at least it wouldn't feel pointless. If you could kill high level monsters you would have much more freedom to explore and test yourself, and the hardcore players could have fun trying to fight things that should be way out of their league.
Right now the game forces the player to do content in a very tight band based on their level. Rather than simply make every zone suddenly be the same level as the player, I think the better solution is to just widen that band. If you are level 45 right now, you can basically fight monsters from level 43 to 47. I would suggest that the experience penalty for fighting low level things be removed so you can fight really low level stuff if you like - sure, that level 30 monster isn't much of a challenge but you can still do it and get something. And that level 60 monster is quite the menace, but it isn't impossible, so if you can do it the rewards are quite something!
Doing it this way makes the world feel more real to me. The challenges stay there, ready for you to attempt, and you have a lot of freedom to do what you want within that world. Sure, top players in heirloom gear will happily slay monsters 20 levels above them and level up really fast - but so what? It will at least give them the chance to push their skills, rather than grind utterly trivial enemies instead. It will also mean that noobs or bots can just grind away on pathetic challenges if they choose to - but that isn't likely to be efficient, and who cares if they do? It is far more important to make levelling fun than it is to try to corral those edge cases that don't hurt anybody else anyway.
Monday, August 29, 2016
Thursday, August 25, 2016
A certain lack of celebration
The new adventure for Hearthstone called One Night in Karazhan has solo content just like all other adventures before it and so far I am not terribly impressed. The design of the encounters is interesting and there are lots of new mechanics that work but the fights are just so easy it hardly feels like my choices matter.
In the old adventures Naxxramas and BRM I had to do everything several times. It took a long while to build custom decks that could beat most of the heroic encounters and some encounters took dozens of tries to defeat. I had to spend a lot of time learning all the cards I had to face and evolving my deck until it was just so.
In Karazhan I just slap together something vaguely appropriate and then win right away. More than half the time I won on my first try, and many of those decks were deeply flawed because I didn't really know how the encounter worked or what I was facing. But those flaws didn't even matter and I just powered on through.
The hardest fight so far took me four tries to beat, and even when I beat it my deck wasn't good - I just got a passable draw and beat the computer up.
These fights leave me feeling pretty uninspired. I don't want to have to play for hours to get the perfect draw against a ridiculous fight, but I was hoping that I would at least have to put some modicum of effort into it. Winning with a deck that completely failed to address the encounter's core challenge takes any satisfaction out of it.
It wouldn't take much to fix things. The mechanics are quite good, and I especially like the chess encounter which was really interesting and new. All of the fights could be good ones if the computer just had better cards or some other advantage.
As an example, Nightbane has a Hero Power that makes both the player and Nightbane start with 10 mana crystals. This means that the best deck is basically just a bunch of extremely expensive legendary minions. Nightbane's deck isn't really equipped to handle that at all though, and it rapidly runs out of steam and dies. I didn't have to try at all, really, and any random pile of expensive trash would likely be enough. What I don't understand is why this encounter is such a joke. It should be that only Nightbane starts with 10 mana, but the player starts with 0 as normal. Or if not, maybe that the player starts with 10, but Nightbane does something bonkers like deal 10 damage to the player every time a minion of theirs dies. If the boss had a basically normal deck, and a Hero Power that equally helps both players, how is this a heroic encounter? Hell, I could probably win with just a regular deck, and that is pretty sad.
I guess Blizzard wants everyone to be able to win even if they suck and have no cards, but I don't understand why that is. Everyone should be able to beat the normal encounters and get their rewards, sure, but nobody *needs* to beat the heroic encounters. They don't need to all be as absurd as Chromaggus was in BRM, but they should at least require people to build a decent deck and play enough to figure out what the enemy does. I am quite sure that there are tons of cards and maybe even mechanics that I never saw in a lot of these heroic fights because I beat them so quickly and effortlessly. There should be real challenges for those people that like such things, as I do, and when there is nothing on the line except challenge, then the challenge should be there.
I don't feel good about beating up these bosses. It feels like beating up a six year old for lunch money. I want to feel like I did something hard, and that only comes when Blizzard puts in enough effort balancing that there is some actual opposition there. I hope the last wing of the adventure has some serious bosses in it because so far the cards are good but the solo content is a big disappointment. Good lore, good creative ideas, but really weak implementation.
In the old adventures Naxxramas and BRM I had to do everything several times. It took a long while to build custom decks that could beat most of the heroic encounters and some encounters took dozens of tries to defeat. I had to spend a lot of time learning all the cards I had to face and evolving my deck until it was just so.
In Karazhan I just slap together something vaguely appropriate and then win right away. More than half the time I won on my first try, and many of those decks were deeply flawed because I didn't really know how the encounter worked or what I was facing. But those flaws didn't even matter and I just powered on through.
The hardest fight so far took me four tries to beat, and even when I beat it my deck wasn't good - I just got a passable draw and beat the computer up.
These fights leave me feeling pretty uninspired. I don't want to have to play for hours to get the perfect draw against a ridiculous fight, but I was hoping that I would at least have to put some modicum of effort into it. Winning with a deck that completely failed to address the encounter's core challenge takes any satisfaction out of it.
It wouldn't take much to fix things. The mechanics are quite good, and I especially like the chess encounter which was really interesting and new. All of the fights could be good ones if the computer just had better cards or some other advantage.
As an example, Nightbane has a Hero Power that makes both the player and Nightbane start with 10 mana crystals. This means that the best deck is basically just a bunch of extremely expensive legendary minions. Nightbane's deck isn't really equipped to handle that at all though, and it rapidly runs out of steam and dies. I didn't have to try at all, really, and any random pile of expensive trash would likely be enough. What I don't understand is why this encounter is such a joke. It should be that only Nightbane starts with 10 mana, but the player starts with 0 as normal. Or if not, maybe that the player starts with 10, but Nightbane does something bonkers like deal 10 damage to the player every time a minion of theirs dies. If the boss had a basically normal deck, and a Hero Power that equally helps both players, how is this a heroic encounter? Hell, I could probably win with just a regular deck, and that is pretty sad.
I guess Blizzard wants everyone to be able to win even if they suck and have no cards, but I don't understand why that is. Everyone should be able to beat the normal encounters and get their rewards, sure, but nobody *needs* to beat the heroic encounters. They don't need to all be as absurd as Chromaggus was in BRM, but they should at least require people to build a decent deck and play enough to figure out what the enemy does. I am quite sure that there are tons of cards and maybe even mechanics that I never saw in a lot of these heroic fights because I beat them so quickly and effortlessly. There should be real challenges for those people that like such things, as I do, and when there is nothing on the line except challenge, then the challenge should be there.
I don't feel good about beating up these bosses. It feels like beating up a six year old for lunch money. I want to feel like I did something hard, and that only comes when Blizzard puts in enough effort balancing that there is some actual opposition there. I hope the last wing of the adventure has some serious bosses in it because so far the cards are good but the solo content is a big disappointment. Good lore, good creative ideas, but really weak implementation.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Complication
There are a bunch of really neat new cards in the latest Hearthstone expansion called One Night in Karazhan. One of the most interesting is a card called Barnes.
Barnes is pretty cool. He can certainly end up summoning a 1/1 with no relevant abilities, in which case he is distinctly below the line. Not disastrous, certainly, but Barnes isn't good if all he manages is a 3/4 and a regular 1/1. However, if you build your deck around him he can be absolutely nuts. Consider him with Ragnaros, for example.
A 1/1 copy of Ragnaros still hits for 8, so it is a monstrous beating if Barnes happens to choose Rag out of your deck.
The computation of how good a given minion is if Barnes hits it is simple. However, whether or not Barnes should be in your deck is actually quite a complicated affair. You have to consider that the fewer minions you have, and the more specialized and expensive they are, the better Barnes is. You can definitely build some degenerate combos with just Barnes and 1 other minion. Problem is, your deck can only have one Barnes. How many suboptimal minions can you afford to put into your deck to maximize the efficacy of Barnes? How few minions can you run before your deck becomes total garbage when you *don't* happen to draw Barnes in the early going?
I have no idea! It is too complicated, even if you narrow the case down a lot. It ends up being one of those things where you simply have to play Barnes in a deck for 100 games and see what shakes out.
This is one of the things that I think people don't properly recognize about Hearthstone and other games of its ilk. You can theorycraft all you like about what cards will be good, but even really talented players who play all the time are often horrifically, hilariously wrong about cards. Barnes in particular is hard to figure out, but minions don't have to be that complicated to be tough to get a proper value on. Trump, for example, who is a very strong player and well known, famously thought that Dr. Boom would be pretty much unplayed, and then Dr. Boom went on to be one of the most broken cards ever released, and the subject of constant 'please nerf boom' threads for literally years. Dr. Boom isn't even complicated, and doesn't require special deck construction.
Despite that it is obvious that properly valuing cards requires you to play with them a lot, people still desperately cling to the opinions they develop long before ever trying to fit cards into particular decks in particular metagames.
I think it is fine and good to consider how cards might be used and to try to think of how their value might be maximized even before they are released. But we should all take a deep breath and accept that we just can't get proper valuations on cards until we have good data to work with. A healthy acceptance of the limits of our own knowledge and computational power is needed here.
Is Barnes going to see play? I am confident he will. Is he going to be nuts broken? I kind of doubt it, because balancing your deck around a single card that wants to come out in the early game is sketchy. I think one thing we can say for sure is that Barnes has sufficient randomness in his possible results that we are going to see a lot of blowouts on Youtube highlight reels featuring Barnes. My guess is that he will be sort of like Yogg was; powerful, widely used, extremely random, but not broken.
But I could be wrong because I still lack sufficient information to be sure. Important to note that.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Sticking to the plan
Hearthstone has a new adventure coming out shortly called One Night in Karazhan. It is a bit of a silly adventure thematically, since rather than spooky old magic castle we have ridiculous disco party night in the magic castle. Bizarre, but whatever, I care about the numbers. The thing that interests me most about this adventure is three cards in particular that interact with Secrets.
The Avian Watcher isn't very good. If it hits on a Secret it is slightly over budget, but if it misses it is garbage. If you compare it to other good cards it gains 1 stat if it hits but is under by 3 stats if not. I don't think it is worth it and I doubt it will see any play.
Now we are talking! This card is only slightly under budget if you miss on the Secret condition, and it is way, way over budget if you hit. You stand to lose 1 stat if you miss, and gain 5 stats if you hit. Good enough to be a card that causes people to want to play Secrets.
This one is a lot harder to evaluate. Its best case is ludicrous, but in order to use it properly you really need a lot of Secrets in your deck. I don't think that this is the sort of thing that gets tossed in every Hunter deck, but I am confident that in a Hunter deck with lots of spells (especially Yogg Saron and Lock and Load) it would find a home and be really good. I don't know yet if that deck is a real contender though.
The overall picture is more interesting to me than the specifics though. These cards show that after the Mysterious Challenger and Mad Scientist debacles Blizzard is still interested in pushing Secrets, and they aren't going to make Secrets good on their own. They intend to leave them as is, which is to say they are marginal and occasional in Mage and Hunter (Freeze Mage is the outlier) but basically unused in Paladin. They only see significant play when there are Secret enablers that are powerful that let them do other interesting things. Both of the good cards above fit that description - they aren't as powerful as Mad Scientist, but they both really encourage using Secrets, and my feeling is that people will use them in competitive decks in exactly that way.
Back when Blizzard was setting up Standard and modifying cards I was concerned that they might simply decide to abandon Secrets and leave them as generally underpowered and uninteresting cards. Constantly putting out Secret synergy cards seemed like a thing they might not be interested in. I thought there was also an outside shot that they would buff Secrets a lot and stop printing Secret synergy cards, basically accepting that the Wild format would be ridiculous in terms of Secrets.
Looking at these cards I feel like their strategy is a good one. Secrets are going to be used sometimes, but not by everyone, and as the format rotates their usage will wax and wane. This is probably a good spot to be in. Wild will likely be absurd because Mad Scientist in particular is preposterous with Medivh's Valet, but that is pretty much what Blizzard promised. Wild will be unbalanced and silly, which I am pretty okay with.
The overall picture is more interesting to me than the specifics though. These cards show that after the Mysterious Challenger and Mad Scientist debacles Blizzard is still interested in pushing Secrets, and they aren't going to make Secrets good on their own. They intend to leave them as is, which is to say they are marginal and occasional in Mage and Hunter (Freeze Mage is the outlier) but basically unused in Paladin. They only see significant play when there are Secret enablers that are powerful that let them do other interesting things. Both of the good cards above fit that description - they aren't as powerful as Mad Scientist, but they both really encourage using Secrets, and my feeling is that people will use them in competitive decks in exactly that way.
Back when Blizzard was setting up Standard and modifying cards I was concerned that they might simply decide to abandon Secrets and leave them as generally underpowered and uninteresting cards. Constantly putting out Secret synergy cards seemed like a thing they might not be interested in. I thought there was also an outside shot that they would buff Secrets a lot and stop printing Secret synergy cards, basically accepting that the Wild format would be ridiculous in terms of Secrets.
Looking at these cards I feel like their strategy is a good one. Secrets are going to be used sometimes, but not by everyone, and as the format rotates their usage will wax and wane. This is probably a good spot to be in. Wild will likely be absurd because Mad Scientist in particular is preposterous with Medivh's Valet, but that is pretty much what Blizzard promised. Wild will be unbalanced and silly, which I am pretty okay with.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
The numbers
I am back from WBC and I was curious to look at how my numbers shook out for the week. I played a bunch of different games competitively, but it turns out my results don't look much like I would have thought. Heck, I can't imagine anyone would have picked how it would go. Mainly the strange thing is that the game I was best in I lost in the semis, and two games I only learned right before the heats I did very well in, one of which gave me a 2nd place plaque.
Games that I was really prepping for:
Puerto Rico
1st 1st SemiFinal 3rd
Total
2 1st
1 3rd
Games I thought I was competent but not great at:
Vegas Showdown
1st 1st SemiFinal 1st *Final 2nd*
Carcassone
1st 1st 2nd (Skipped SemiFinal due to conflict)
Agricola
2nd 1st 2nd (Missed SemiFinal due to tiebreakers)
7 Wonders
1st 1st SemiFinal 2nd
Lords of Waterdeep
1st (Skipped SemiFinal due to conflict)
Total
9 1st
5 2nd
Games I didn't know the rules to, or barely so:
Ra
5th
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
1st 1st Semifinal 1st *Final 2nd*
Thurns and Taxis
1st 1st Semifinal 3rd
Innovation
1st
Galaxy Trucker
3rd
Total
6 1st
1 2nd
1 3rd
1 5th
Super Random Dice Games
Can't Stop
1st 4th
Ra Dice
1st 2nd 3rd SemiFinal 3rd
Total
2 1st
1 2nd
2 3rd
1 4th
Grand Total:
19 1st
7 2nd
4 3rd
1 4th
1 5th
The pattern is consistent - I win a lot, but my wins have nothing at all to do with my preparation. I did just as well in each category in the skill based games, winning the majority of my matches no matter whether I had logged hundreds of games, a few dozen games, or zero games before playing at WBC. The super random dice games I was barely better than average, which really is about what you would expect.
I only missed advancing in two games, both of which I only played one match in. Galaxy Trucker I legitimately suck at, and Ra I took a big risk trying to place well and it blew me out. I am not *good* at that game, but I could totally win it.
If I really want to have a massive win percentage I think I would approach it by skipping all semifinal games and just focusing on playing as many heats in games I am competent in as possible. Far better to be in a heat in a game I am okay at than a semifinal in a game I am excellent at, I think.
Not that I am trying to maximize my win percentage that way, but that is how I would do it if I was aiming for that.
I definitely need to learn some more games before next year though. There were lots of gaps where I could have fit in more heats but I didn't know how to play the games at all. Lots of games at WBC were absolutely boring to me, either because they were extremely random or because they took a really long time to play. However, I am sure there are a bunch of games that fit in the 1 or 2 hour time slots that I would greatly enjoy so I need to get cracking so I have more options for next year.
I think it is happy circumstance that my best tactic for winning a lot of plaques happens to be the same as my best tactic for having a blast - learn to be pretty good at lots of games and play them all. I am really good at Puerto Rico and I lost. I think I was the strongest overall player at my semi final table, but I got beat. I watched the finals and I think I am as good as any of those players, but I didn't make it. Playing one game one hundred times makes you better... but I don't think it wins you nearly as many plaques as playing ten games ten times each, presuming you are good at games in general. And like I said, I will have a blast playing ten games ten times each and going in feeling good about each of them, because I have a good chance to get to the final table at something, even if I don't know what that something is. Also it means that I don't have to fuss about scheduling - I will just go to whatever heats I want and attend the semis of any game where I make the cut. Nice and relaxed.
I have a plan. It involves playing a lot of board games. Do it!
Games that I was really prepping for:
Puerto Rico
1st 1st SemiFinal 3rd
Total
2 1st
1 3rd
Games I thought I was competent but not great at:
Vegas Showdown
1st 1st SemiFinal 1st *Final 2nd*
Carcassone
1st 1st 2nd (Skipped SemiFinal due to conflict)
Agricola
2nd 1st 2nd (Missed SemiFinal due to tiebreakers)
7 Wonders
1st 1st SemiFinal 2nd
Lords of Waterdeep
1st (Skipped SemiFinal due to conflict)
Total
9 1st
5 2nd
Games I didn't know the rules to, or barely so:
Ra
5th
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
1st 1st Semifinal 1st *Final 2nd*
Thurns and Taxis
1st 1st Semifinal 3rd
Innovation
1st
Galaxy Trucker
3rd
Total
6 1st
1 2nd
1 3rd
1 5th
Super Random Dice Games
Can't Stop
1st 4th
Ra Dice
1st 2nd 3rd SemiFinal 3rd
Total
2 1st
1 2nd
2 3rd
1 4th
Grand Total:
19 1st
7 2nd
4 3rd
1 4th
1 5th
The pattern is consistent - I win a lot, but my wins have nothing at all to do with my preparation. I did just as well in each category in the skill based games, winning the majority of my matches no matter whether I had logged hundreds of games, a few dozen games, or zero games before playing at WBC. The super random dice games I was barely better than average, which really is about what you would expect.
I only missed advancing in two games, both of which I only played one match in. Galaxy Trucker I legitimately suck at, and Ra I took a big risk trying to place well and it blew me out. I am not *good* at that game, but I could totally win it.
If I really want to have a massive win percentage I think I would approach it by skipping all semifinal games and just focusing on playing as many heats in games I am competent in as possible. Far better to be in a heat in a game I am okay at than a semifinal in a game I am excellent at, I think.
Not that I am trying to maximize my win percentage that way, but that is how I would do it if I was aiming for that.
I definitely need to learn some more games before next year though. There were lots of gaps where I could have fit in more heats but I didn't know how to play the games at all. Lots of games at WBC were absolutely boring to me, either because they were extremely random or because they took a really long time to play. However, I am sure there are a bunch of games that fit in the 1 or 2 hour time slots that I would greatly enjoy so I need to get cracking so I have more options for next year.
I think it is happy circumstance that my best tactic for winning a lot of plaques happens to be the same as my best tactic for having a blast - learn to be pretty good at lots of games and play them all. I am really good at Puerto Rico and I lost. I think I was the strongest overall player at my semi final table, but I got beat. I watched the finals and I think I am as good as any of those players, but I didn't make it. Playing one game one hundred times makes you better... but I don't think it wins you nearly as many plaques as playing ten games ten times each, presuming you are good at games in general. And like I said, I will have a blast playing ten games ten times each and going in feeling good about each of them, because I have a good chance to get to the final table at something, even if I don't know what that something is. Also it means that I don't have to fuss about scheduling - I will just go to whatever heats I want and attend the semis of any game where I make the cut. Nice and relaxed.
I have a plan. It involves playing a lot of board games. Do it!
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