Last time I wrote about getting conceded to on the Blood Bowl ladder. It happened twice in a row and I was wondering what was going on. It turns out I was in the casual league where there are a LOT of concessions. I built a new team for the real league where concessions are limited and started again. This time I will get some real games!
In my first outing I was in some dwarf on dwarf action. Normally dwarf games involve a seething mass of hairy balls rolling around in the middle of the field, and this was no exception. My opponent took a bunch of really risky, aggressive plays and they paid off by taking out 3 of my dwarves. Then they walked the ball right to my goal line and sat around beating up my team until the end of the half. On my opponent's last turn, on their last opportunity to score with their dominant position, they decided to take some time first to bash my dudes. Each bash had a 2.8% chance of ending their turn and costing them the touchdown they had worked so hard for. On the fifth bash they rolled badly, fell down, and ended their turn.
Before I could click anything my opponent had conceded in a fit of rage. It was kind of hilarious because they were still in a dominant position with me down multiple players but they were apparently so angry they couldn't stay to beat me up for awhile and win the game.
I queued up again and ran into a Chaos team so I was due for another round of bashing. This time luck swung my way and I KOd some Beastmen and scored a touchdown, so we started the second half with me winning 1-0 and up 3 players.
And my opponent immediately conceded.
I am finding this a bit ridiculous. So far my team hasn't even managed to injure an opponent, I have scored 1 touchdown, and I have 2 victories to my name.
I queued up a third time and got another slow bashy opponent - Nurgle. We bashed each other around a lot and ended up in a 1-1 draw. When I stopped my opponent's final drive they decided to spend 3 turns telling me how horrible I was and bemoaning how all of their opponents get so lucky. They told me that people like me should be banned from the competitive ladder. They also said that they were going to immediately delete and restart their team after the game because starting off with a tie is completely unacceptable, and then complained about me wasting both of our time.
I tried to explain that my team got some experience and I had fun, but they told me that the point of the competitive ladder is not for fun and I should go away and play in the fun ladder. I guess the point of the competitive ladder is suffering and whinging? Also restarting teams over and over until you get a bunch of wins in a row.
Blargh.
I am glad I will be done with all of these sore losers soon. After my 7 starting games here I can join my friends in a private league and play against people who won't spend all their time quitting and complaining.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Run away, the dwarves are coming!
I am getting ready for a new season of Blood Bowl. I decided that I should play dwarves because I apparently love the idea of being incredibly slow and bad at football. My league allows us 7 preseason games on the open ladder to get levelled up a bit, so I started up a new team and queued up for a game. My first game was against Chaos, a team that is slightly faster than my dwarves and about equally terrible at actually doing anything with the ball. Bashy team vs. bashy team. Bash!
Both teams are pretty heavily armoured so we spent the entire first half bashing into each other accomplishing very little. Beastman knocks dwarf down, dwarf stands back up. Dwarf knocks beastman down, beastman stands back up. However, I managed to control the left side of the board and with a little luck I injured one enemy and ran my ball carrier to one space shy of the enemy goal line. My opponent made a desperate play requiring 3 rolls of a 6 sided die where each roll needed to be 2 or above, and made a block hoping to knock one of my dwarves down.
On the second 'please please not a 1' roll my opponent rolled a 1 and his player fell over, ending his turn and guaranteeing me a touchdown just before halftime. I was in a good position at this point with one enemy player out and me being up 1-0, but my opponent was going to receive and certainly had chances. I went to move the ball into the zone and score... and I couldn't enter the command.
Then I noticed that my opponent had disconnected, which prevents me from taking any actions. I had to sit for 5 minutes waiting for them to come back, and I couldn't just do something else because if the opponent did return I would need to be there to play the rest of the match. For the entire 5 minutes I looked at my ball carrier who had been told to score the TD but who was eternally stuck, waiting for an opponent that I did not need. Finally the clock wound down and I got the victory, and all of my opponent's bonus cash and experience that comes at game end.
Now it is possible that my opponent just randomly disconnected, but that seems extremely unlikely. Having just tried a desperate gambit to prevent me scoring and having failed it seems that my opponent not only wanted to concede the match but also wanted to annoy me by having me wait around for 5 minutes too. Either that or they just ragequit without any thought, hard to say.
I was credited with a 2-0 win but I didn't get the experience for scoring those 2 touchdowns. I did get 5 extra experience because my opponent conceded, but I would have gotten 3 experience instantly as soon as my dwarf scored the TD, so 5 isn't much of a reward. I got all of my opponent's winnings though, and at the outset like this a big chunk of cash is actually quite useful.
I netted 12 experience and 80,000 gold. That isn't amazing, but I didn't collect any injuries and I got a fairly normal amount of experience and a windfall of gold, so I shouldn't complain... but I am going to complain anyway. It sucks to have an opponent ditch on the game. I wanted to play! I fought for an advantageous position and I wanted to see if I could maintain it.
What really got me is that if I had realized my opponent was likely to quit I would have clicked really fast to get that TD first. I could have grabbed the points for the TD and then got all the bonuses for a concession too. Next time I am in that position I will make sure to be faster to avoid getting screwed.
In any case it was time to queue up for game 2. This time I was matched against orks, so it was bashy team vs. bashy team again. Round 2, bash! This game was a morass of orks and dwarves bashing each other in the middle of the field, and by the time the first half was over the enemy troll had injured itself trying to push over a dwarf and the fans had knocked one of the orks out cold. The ball never moved more than 1 space from where it landed on turn 1, so it was still 0-0. Lots of game left here, I thought!
Then the victory screen popped up as my opponent had conceded. At least this time they actually conceded instead of just disconnecting so I didn't have to wait for 5 minutes, and I wasn't about to score so I didn't miss out on much, but it was still frustrating. Again I had played well and gotten myself into a strong position and I wasn't able to have fun leveraging the advantage generated.
Don't get me wrong, having people concede to me on my first 2 games has been pretty good. I have no injuries, I have lots of money, and I have a reasonable amount of experience for being 2 games in. But it sucks to play chunks of games like this, and it makes me wonder if this is just a feature of playing on the open ladder. I would totally get it if a team was getting butchered and they wanted to get away from the bashing they were taking but both concessions had only one injured opposing player and they had real chances at winning the game.
My victories also just don't feel REAL. Sure I logged 2-0 both times, but I feel like I didn't actually win.
I was trying to figure out if conceding made sense when you were losing the game at halftime. You get nothing from the concession but you do get to queue up again right away and hope for better luck or weaker opposition. If you play another half game you get 35,000 gold and roughly 7 experience, 5 from the automatic experience and 2 from random stuff you accomplish. That also assumes you lose the game, and you could win and do better than that. If you quit and requeue you get 40,000 gold and 11 experience over a whole game. That requeue option takes twice as long and doesn't get you anywhere near twice as much stuff, so at first glance it seems terrible in terms of reward per unit time.
But!
Requeuing could make sense if you are in a league where lots of people concede. If you think you have a reasonable shot of being clearly in the lead at halftime then you stand a chance of your opponent conceding and giving you all the money and stuff in only half a game. In a heavy concede based metagame you are really incentivized to duck out of a losing game to try to get into a game where you do well early and get conceded to.
Conceding also helps you get out of games where you are being dominated, and that probably means lower injury rates for your dudes. Not a guarantee, but it helps.
In any case I hope that this conceding thing isn't a widespread thing. I want to play! I know that there is some restriction on conceding, something like 5 concedes per season, but I don't know what happens if you violate that limit. Are you kicked out of the league? Just can't hit the concede button but can still disconnect? I don't know. I definitely won't concede myself unless things are truly absurd.
Both teams are pretty heavily armoured so we spent the entire first half bashing into each other accomplishing very little. Beastman knocks dwarf down, dwarf stands back up. Dwarf knocks beastman down, beastman stands back up. However, I managed to control the left side of the board and with a little luck I injured one enemy and ran my ball carrier to one space shy of the enemy goal line. My opponent made a desperate play requiring 3 rolls of a 6 sided die where each roll needed to be 2 or above, and made a block hoping to knock one of my dwarves down.
On the second 'please please not a 1' roll my opponent rolled a 1 and his player fell over, ending his turn and guaranteeing me a touchdown just before halftime. I was in a good position at this point with one enemy player out and me being up 1-0, but my opponent was going to receive and certainly had chances. I went to move the ball into the zone and score... and I couldn't enter the command.
Then I noticed that my opponent had disconnected, which prevents me from taking any actions. I had to sit for 5 minutes waiting for them to come back, and I couldn't just do something else because if the opponent did return I would need to be there to play the rest of the match. For the entire 5 minutes I looked at my ball carrier who had been told to score the TD but who was eternally stuck, waiting for an opponent that I did not need. Finally the clock wound down and I got the victory, and all of my opponent's bonus cash and experience that comes at game end.
Now it is possible that my opponent just randomly disconnected, but that seems extremely unlikely. Having just tried a desperate gambit to prevent me scoring and having failed it seems that my opponent not only wanted to concede the match but also wanted to annoy me by having me wait around for 5 minutes too. Either that or they just ragequit without any thought, hard to say.
I was credited with a 2-0 win but I didn't get the experience for scoring those 2 touchdowns. I did get 5 extra experience because my opponent conceded, but I would have gotten 3 experience instantly as soon as my dwarf scored the TD, so 5 isn't much of a reward. I got all of my opponent's winnings though, and at the outset like this a big chunk of cash is actually quite useful.
I netted 12 experience and 80,000 gold. That isn't amazing, but I didn't collect any injuries and I got a fairly normal amount of experience and a windfall of gold, so I shouldn't complain... but I am going to complain anyway. It sucks to have an opponent ditch on the game. I wanted to play! I fought for an advantageous position and I wanted to see if I could maintain it.
What really got me is that if I had realized my opponent was likely to quit I would have clicked really fast to get that TD first. I could have grabbed the points for the TD and then got all the bonuses for a concession too. Next time I am in that position I will make sure to be faster to avoid getting screwed.
Then the victory screen popped up as my opponent had conceded. At least this time they actually conceded instead of just disconnecting so I didn't have to wait for 5 minutes, and I wasn't about to score so I didn't miss out on much, but it was still frustrating. Again I had played well and gotten myself into a strong position and I wasn't able to have fun leveraging the advantage generated.
Don't get me wrong, having people concede to me on my first 2 games has been pretty good. I have no injuries, I have lots of money, and I have a reasonable amount of experience for being 2 games in. But it sucks to play chunks of games like this, and it makes me wonder if this is just a feature of playing on the open ladder. I would totally get it if a team was getting butchered and they wanted to get away from the bashing they were taking but both concessions had only one injured opposing player and they had real chances at winning the game.
My victories also just don't feel REAL. Sure I logged 2-0 both times, but I feel like I didn't actually win.
I was trying to figure out if conceding made sense when you were losing the game at halftime. You get nothing from the concession but you do get to queue up again right away and hope for better luck or weaker opposition. If you play another half game you get 35,000 gold and roughly 7 experience, 5 from the automatic experience and 2 from random stuff you accomplish. That also assumes you lose the game, and you could win and do better than that. If you quit and requeue you get 40,000 gold and 11 experience over a whole game. That requeue option takes twice as long and doesn't get you anywhere near twice as much stuff, so at first glance it seems terrible in terms of reward per unit time.
But!
Requeuing could make sense if you are in a league where lots of people concede. If you think you have a reasonable shot of being clearly in the lead at halftime then you stand a chance of your opponent conceding and giving you all the money and stuff in only half a game. In a heavy concede based metagame you are really incentivized to duck out of a losing game to try to get into a game where you do well early and get conceded to.
Conceding also helps you get out of games where you are being dominated, and that probably means lower injury rates for your dudes. Not a guarantee, but it helps.
In any case I hope that this conceding thing isn't a widespread thing. I want to play! I know that there is some restriction on conceding, something like 5 concedes per season, but I don't know what happens if you violate that limit. Are you kicked out of the league? Just can't hit the concede button but can still disconnect? I don't know. I definitely won't concede myself unless things are truly absurd.
Thursday, June 22, 2017
A little bit of thievery
Lately I have been thinking about what I could do if I had a normal Blood Bowl team that could steal just one type of unit from any other team. This includes the number of those units, so normal Skaven can field 4 Gutter Runners, and any team that steals Gutter Runners can similarly have 4 of them on the roster. What is the best or most interesting thing you could do using this?
The obvious place to start is to pick a team that has glaring, nasty flaws and see if you can prop them up some. Blood Bowl restricts team to having either players with 4 Agility or 4+ Strength, but you don't get both. (Barring a single Big Guy). Adding high Strength players to an already high Strength team probably won't help much because you won't be able to afford them all and by the time you can your team value will be enormous and you will lack Block. You can surely make a better team this way, but not much better.
The real trick is taking a slow team that is awful at football and making it suddenly a terrifying threat for scoring. Gutter Runners are certainly the first unit I thought of stealing because they are maximally fast, have 4 Agility, and you get 4 of them. Dwarves are normally tough and slow but have no quick scoring threats and are unreliable at playing football. A dwarf team with 13 players including 4 Gutter Runners on it can still field 9 brawling type dwarves on defence and bench 2 Gutters and have plenty of punching power if they want, or switch it up and field all 4 Gutters to create some crazy passing plays if they don't have much time to score. That team would be terrifying, because they still have the normal slow cage progression tactic available but you have to break that cage FAST or a Gutter will dash in for a touchdown.
On the other side you have teams like the elves or skaven who are great at scoring and have lots of potential for big plays but they have huge problems with getting pushed around. They also have the struggle that their linemen are fragile and all units need constant replacement. There are a couple ways you could go there - you could grab Chaos Warriors to have 4 copies of 4 Strength and 9 Armour which would solidify their line immensely, or you could use 6 Saurus instead, which provides absurd amounts of Strength, though it is hard to develop all those Saurus due to them being clumsy.
If you want to go totally nuts you could recruit Ogres and get 6 hitters with Strength 5. That is the absolute pinnacle of beatdown but does have the huge issue of cost. At 140k you will only be able to add in 1 Ogre at most to a normal team so it would take a really long time to purchase them all.
When I try to figure out how I would add units to a midrange team like humans I come up short. They would like both Gutter Runners or Sauruses, as they could develop into a real scoring or bashing team depending on the pick, but no configuration is particularly scary. To do something awesome with this setup you really want a team that already has one thing they do really well, not a team that is mediocre at everything.
There are actually some teams out there that would make me consider taking linemen on as my choice. Ogres, for example, are super expensive and you can normally only afford them because they are accompanied by worthless Snotlings. However, if you grabbed Ork Linemen instead of Snotlings your money problems are worse (they cost 50k instead of 20k) but they actually have 3 Strength so the opponents can't just massacre them effortlessly and they still have 3 Agility so they are capable of playing the ball. They can't play the ball *well*, mind, but they can play as well as a Snotling and instead of being made of paper they are tough as nails.
On a team like Lizardmen I would be tempted to grab Dark Elf Linemen as my pick. They are good at playing the ball and have midrange armour so you could play a really serious bashing game with your Sauruses without worrying that every turn one of your squishies is going to die. You might use a pair of Skinks as dirty players or scoring threats potentially (because your elves can throw the ball) but mostly the team would be just Saurus beatdown and elf football.
In any of these configurations the trick is to make sure you don't commit to more cost than you can afford. Dwarves are expensive, for example, so swapping some of them out for Gutter Runners or even Elf Linemen is no problem. You can't just swap out cheap units for expensive ones though, so fixing up teams like Nurgle or Ogres takes more care.
Off all these options I think the dwarves with Gutter Runners scares me the most. They slot in easily because you can just skip out on buying Dwarven Runners at identical cost, and if you want 4 Gutters to start you just drop 1 Troll Slayer and 1 Lineman to start and you are good to go. You have a tremendous beatdown game and a sturdy core of players so when your Gutters die you should have spare cash around to buy new ones. You have a legit quick scoring threat, great caging ability, and a rock solid financial plan.
The obvious place to start is to pick a team that has glaring, nasty flaws and see if you can prop them up some. Blood Bowl restricts team to having either players with 4 Agility or 4+ Strength, but you don't get both. (Barring a single Big Guy). Adding high Strength players to an already high Strength team probably won't help much because you won't be able to afford them all and by the time you can your team value will be enormous and you will lack Block. You can surely make a better team this way, but not much better.
The real trick is taking a slow team that is awful at football and making it suddenly a terrifying threat for scoring. Gutter Runners are certainly the first unit I thought of stealing because they are maximally fast, have 4 Agility, and you get 4 of them. Dwarves are normally tough and slow but have no quick scoring threats and are unreliable at playing football. A dwarf team with 13 players including 4 Gutter Runners on it can still field 9 brawling type dwarves on defence and bench 2 Gutters and have plenty of punching power if they want, or switch it up and field all 4 Gutters to create some crazy passing plays if they don't have much time to score. That team would be terrifying, because they still have the normal slow cage progression tactic available but you have to break that cage FAST or a Gutter will dash in for a touchdown.
On the other side you have teams like the elves or skaven who are great at scoring and have lots of potential for big plays but they have huge problems with getting pushed around. They also have the struggle that their linemen are fragile and all units need constant replacement. There are a couple ways you could go there - you could grab Chaos Warriors to have 4 copies of 4 Strength and 9 Armour which would solidify their line immensely, or you could use 6 Saurus instead, which provides absurd amounts of Strength, though it is hard to develop all those Saurus due to them being clumsy.
If you want to go totally nuts you could recruit Ogres and get 6 hitters with Strength 5. That is the absolute pinnacle of beatdown but does have the huge issue of cost. At 140k you will only be able to add in 1 Ogre at most to a normal team so it would take a really long time to purchase them all.
When I try to figure out how I would add units to a midrange team like humans I come up short. They would like both Gutter Runners or Sauruses, as they could develop into a real scoring or bashing team depending on the pick, but no configuration is particularly scary. To do something awesome with this setup you really want a team that already has one thing they do really well, not a team that is mediocre at everything.
There are actually some teams out there that would make me consider taking linemen on as my choice. Ogres, for example, are super expensive and you can normally only afford them because they are accompanied by worthless Snotlings. However, if you grabbed Ork Linemen instead of Snotlings your money problems are worse (they cost 50k instead of 20k) but they actually have 3 Strength so the opponents can't just massacre them effortlessly and they still have 3 Agility so they are capable of playing the ball. They can't play the ball *well*, mind, but they can play as well as a Snotling and instead of being made of paper they are tough as nails.
On a team like Lizardmen I would be tempted to grab Dark Elf Linemen as my pick. They are good at playing the ball and have midrange armour so you could play a really serious bashing game with your Sauruses without worrying that every turn one of your squishies is going to die. You might use a pair of Skinks as dirty players or scoring threats potentially (because your elves can throw the ball) but mostly the team would be just Saurus beatdown and elf football.
In any of these configurations the trick is to make sure you don't commit to more cost than you can afford. Dwarves are expensive, for example, so swapping some of them out for Gutter Runners or even Elf Linemen is no problem. You can't just swap out cheap units for expensive ones though, so fixing up teams like Nurgle or Ogres takes more care.
Off all these options I think the dwarves with Gutter Runners scares me the most. They slot in easily because you can just skip out on buying Dwarven Runners at identical cost, and if you want 4 Gutters to start you just drop 1 Troll Slayer and 1 Lineman to start and you are good to go. You have a tremendous beatdown game and a sturdy core of players so when your Gutters die you should have spare cash around to buy new ones. You have a legit quick scoring threat, great caging ability, and a rock solid financial plan.
Monday, June 19, 2017
The stair gambit
When talking about Castles of Mad King Ludwig recently I opined that the Utility Card that gives bonus points for Stairs wasn't so great. It has substantial potential if you can effectively corner the market on Stairs, but otherwise it isn't exciting. A game of Castles recently saw me go turbo Stairs to test this theory, and it worked out superbly well giving me a 136 point finish with a wide margin of victory, largely on the back of getting 5 Stairs.
We had Kings Favours for both square footage and number of corridor rooms so the game was ripe for a hardcore Stairs opening. I started off with the Utility cards that benefit Utility rooms and 200 rooms, and after building 4 sets of stairs I scooped up the Stairs Utility Card! I would have built more Hallways than I did but one opponent went nuts and scooped up 3 Hallways in a single turn leaving my last Stairs looking lonely and sad.
My board doesn't look that super at first glance but my Utility cards are strong coming in at 10, 8, 6, 6, and 3 points. I also have 14 points from Stairs and Hallways, and the 200 stack emptied so the fact that I was collecting those was fantastic for me too. The last two King's Favours were doorways (where I scored 1) and purple rooms (where I scored 0). However, I cleaned up the two Favours for Corridors and Corridor square footage so I got a solid 17 points from Favours.
One thing that I was wondering was how good Basement rooms are in general. Clearly if you already have Stairs you might as well build Basement rooms if they look tasty, but are they really worth it? Do you give up much by simply not having any Stairs at all? The interconnectedness of the points of various rooms makes this calculation quite challenging, but I am going to have a stab at it on this board. It won't be easy to generalize it to all games, obviously, so take this as a data point, not a thesis.
I will assign points from cards to the Utility Rooms that generate the cards, not the rooms. The points from my starting cards will be assigned to the rooms. I will ignore the 350 Corridor I bought because it was obviously purchased only for King's Favours and isn't representative.
Utility Rooms: 12, 9, 5
Green Room: 5 + 10 coins
Blue Room: 4 + (empty 200 stack = 8 - 3.33 = 4.66) = 8.66
Yellow Rooms: 4, 4 + (2?) bonus turn(s)
Basement Rooms: 11, 7, 6, 5, 1 + 5 points + bonus turn
My upper rooms generated 6 points + 1.25 coins + .25 bonus turns.
My basement rooms generated 7 points + .2 bonus turns.
The difference between the two set is quite small. The basement rooms come out on top if you count the kitchen as not completing, but if you treat it as though it completed they are very much on par.
Looking at this board it appears as though my basement and upstairs were similar in scoring on a per room basis. In that case it appears as though Stairs were a fine investment even aside from the massive stack of bonus points they got me as I did well on basement rooms and having the flexibility to buy them was excellent. I am not yet convinced that being the third person into Stairs is strong in a game unless the Favours or Utility cards benefit Stairs, but I am eager to see what data other people have in this regard.
We had Kings Favours for both square footage and number of corridor rooms so the game was ripe for a hardcore Stairs opening. I started off with the Utility cards that benefit Utility rooms and 200 rooms, and after building 4 sets of stairs I scooped up the Stairs Utility Card! I would have built more Hallways than I did but one opponent went nuts and scooped up 3 Hallways in a single turn leaving my last Stairs looking lonely and sad.
My board doesn't look that super at first glance but my Utility cards are strong coming in at 10, 8, 6, 6, and 3 points. I also have 14 points from Stairs and Hallways, and the 200 stack emptied so the fact that I was collecting those was fantastic for me too. The last two King's Favours were doorways (where I scored 1) and purple rooms (where I scored 0). However, I cleaned up the two Favours for Corridors and Corridor square footage so I got a solid 17 points from Favours.
One thing that I was wondering was how good Basement rooms are in general. Clearly if you already have Stairs you might as well build Basement rooms if they look tasty, but are they really worth it? Do you give up much by simply not having any Stairs at all? The interconnectedness of the points of various rooms makes this calculation quite challenging, but I am going to have a stab at it on this board. It won't be easy to generalize it to all games, obviously, so take this as a data point, not a thesis.
I will assign points from cards to the Utility Rooms that generate the cards, not the rooms. The points from my starting cards will be assigned to the rooms. I will ignore the 350 Corridor I bought because it was obviously purchased only for King's Favours and isn't representative.
Utility Rooms: 12, 9, 5
Green Room: 5 + 10 coins
Blue Room: 4 + (empty 200 stack = 8 - 3.33 = 4.66) = 8.66
Yellow Rooms: 4, 4 + (2?) bonus turn(s)
Basement Rooms: 11, 7, 6, 5, 1 + 5 points + bonus turn
My upper rooms generated 6 points + 1.25 coins + .25 bonus turns.
My basement rooms generated 7 points + .2 bonus turns.
The difference between the two set is quite small. The basement rooms come out on top if you count the kitchen as not completing, but if you treat it as though it completed they are very much on par.
Looking at this board it appears as though my basement and upstairs were similar in scoring on a per room basis. In that case it appears as though Stairs were a fine investment even aside from the massive stack of bonus points they got me as I did well on basement rooms and having the flexibility to buy them was excellent. I am not yet convinced that being the third person into Stairs is strong in a game unless the Favours or Utility cards benefit Stairs, but I am eager to see what data other people have in this regard.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Cultural Divide
Recently I watched a video by Brian Kibler about the differences in culture between Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone. He correctly notes that Hearthstone has a culture focused around the idea that the game is all luck and skill doesn't matter, while MTG has a culture that supports the idea of skill being paramount.
These aren't all or nothing ideas! Obviously there are plenty of MTG players who whine about getting mana screwed and Hearthstone players who correctly acknowledge that the game has a pretty large skill ceiling. That said, the trend of Hearthstone players talking about RNG and MTG players talking about skill is real.
Kibler thinks that this is in part because of explicit randomness in a lot of good Hearthstone cards - cards that summon a random minion or make a random spell, for example. MTG has less of that. Also the average MTG player plays in tournaments, whether they be small scale Friday Night Magic kind of tournaments or Pro Tour Qualifiers. Hearthstone players play on ladder and only a tiny percentage take part in tournaments of any sort.
He also thinks that MTG content creators tend to write serious strategy articles while Hearthstone creators make silly decks to play on twitch and youtube and this changes how they are perceived. While Firebat may bring really tight decks to tournaments he still makes stupid Blood Bloom / Doom decks to play on his stream because those bring more viewers in, so people see top Hearthstone players doing stupid crap all the time and don't see the skill that goes into perfecting and practising a deck.
Kibler's points are right on, but there is more to it, I think.
I remember when I was playing MTG a lot back in Thunder Bay when I was a teenager and it was easy to see that skill was a defining factor. I won about 25% of the tournaments I entered, and one of my close friends won another 25%. Mostly anyone else who won was also somebody I knew because generally we were all in the top 8 in nearly every tournament. When much of your life in a hobby involves tournaments and you see the same people winning every time you really get the impression that skill is the dominant factor.
When I played against good players in top 8 situations I played tight and quiet but it was entirely different in the early rounds against newbies. If I rolled over someone whose deck really needed some tuning I would often sit after the match and go over their deck to give them pointers. We would talk about cards they needed, land ratios, what decks other people were playing, etc. Usually those people would leave some new ideas and also with the definitive impression that I beat them because I was better, not because I got lucky.
In Hearthstone you never get that experience. When you get beat you just lose and queue up again. Nobody who crushes you on their way up the ladder sits down with you to say "Hey, you know, your deck could probably use a couple more 1 drops and cut a few expensive dragons." You don't get people saying "You would have beaten me if you had just Fireballed me in the face on your second last turn." Lacking those cues it is easy for the player to just rail about getting unlucky and move on.
Hearthstone players also consistently play people of a similar skill level. The ladder pairs you against people who have won about as much as you, and tournaments are full of top tier players. You just don't have the newest scrub going into a big tournament, meeting a pro, and getting beat because the pro plays better, at least not nearly as often as it happens in MTG.
When you play against people who are equally skilled, *of course* the victory comes down to RNG. There is room for individual skillful plays, but on average against a similarly skilled player you would expect somebody's luck to break better and take the victory on that basis.
So while there is an advantage to pitting all the noobs against one another, it does make them think that the game is just RNG based, and the pros end up in the same boat. Hearthstone pros don't have as much experience at grinding through noobs as the MTG people do, so their games often come down to a single instance of good or bad luck because skill is already controlled for.
This isn't something that needs fixing. It is just an emergent, accidental property of the way the games are played, marketed, sold, and viewed. Both companies are doing it right, considering those considerations, but those choices really do affect the way players think about the games they play.
These aren't all or nothing ideas! Obviously there are plenty of MTG players who whine about getting mana screwed and Hearthstone players who correctly acknowledge that the game has a pretty large skill ceiling. That said, the trend of Hearthstone players talking about RNG and MTG players talking about skill is real.
Kibler thinks that this is in part because of explicit randomness in a lot of good Hearthstone cards - cards that summon a random minion or make a random spell, for example. MTG has less of that. Also the average MTG player plays in tournaments, whether they be small scale Friday Night Magic kind of tournaments or Pro Tour Qualifiers. Hearthstone players play on ladder and only a tiny percentage take part in tournaments of any sort.
He also thinks that MTG content creators tend to write serious strategy articles while Hearthstone creators make silly decks to play on twitch and youtube and this changes how they are perceived. While Firebat may bring really tight decks to tournaments he still makes stupid Blood Bloom / Doom decks to play on his stream because those bring more viewers in, so people see top Hearthstone players doing stupid crap all the time and don't see the skill that goes into perfecting and practising a deck.
Kibler's points are right on, but there is more to it, I think.
I remember when I was playing MTG a lot back in Thunder Bay when I was a teenager and it was easy to see that skill was a defining factor. I won about 25% of the tournaments I entered, and one of my close friends won another 25%. Mostly anyone else who won was also somebody I knew because generally we were all in the top 8 in nearly every tournament. When much of your life in a hobby involves tournaments and you see the same people winning every time you really get the impression that skill is the dominant factor.
When I played against good players in top 8 situations I played tight and quiet but it was entirely different in the early rounds against newbies. If I rolled over someone whose deck really needed some tuning I would often sit after the match and go over their deck to give them pointers. We would talk about cards they needed, land ratios, what decks other people were playing, etc. Usually those people would leave some new ideas and also with the definitive impression that I beat them because I was better, not because I got lucky.
In Hearthstone you never get that experience. When you get beat you just lose and queue up again. Nobody who crushes you on their way up the ladder sits down with you to say "Hey, you know, your deck could probably use a couple more 1 drops and cut a few expensive dragons." You don't get people saying "You would have beaten me if you had just Fireballed me in the face on your second last turn." Lacking those cues it is easy for the player to just rail about getting unlucky and move on.
Hearthstone players also consistently play people of a similar skill level. The ladder pairs you against people who have won about as much as you, and tournaments are full of top tier players. You just don't have the newest scrub going into a big tournament, meeting a pro, and getting beat because the pro plays better, at least not nearly as often as it happens in MTG.
When you play against people who are equally skilled, *of course* the victory comes down to RNG. There is room for individual skillful plays, but on average against a similarly skilled player you would expect somebody's luck to break better and take the victory on that basis.
So while there is an advantage to pitting all the noobs against one another, it does make them think that the game is just RNG based, and the pros end up in the same boat. Hearthstone pros don't have as much experience at grinding through noobs as the MTG people do, so their games often come down to a single instance of good or bad luck because skill is already controlled for.
This isn't something that needs fixing. It is just an emergent, accidental property of the way the games are played, marketed, sold, and viewed. Both companies are doing it right, considering those considerations, but those choices really do affect the way players think about the games they play.
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Two states
Being 'in combat' is a bizarre and ridiculous thing. When playing tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons there is usually a sense of combat time in which characters take turns doing things on a short time scale. People act sequentially, which is ridiculous from a realism standpoint, but is the only practical way to have tactical combat in this sort of scenario. It leads to all kinds of weird things - for example, two characters can't walk down a hallway together. One has to go first, then the other when it is their turn.
Outside this silly (but necessary for our purposes) framework things flow much more naturally in a state I call narrative time. People can do things simultaneously and even perform activities that don't fit into discrete six second chunks. You could, for example, give a speech without having to check if every person in the room passes their turn!
The other day Naked Man asked me a rules question that touches on this strange construction. He wanted to know how to rule it if a player was readying a spell over multiple turns. If they say "I shoot a Magic Missile at any enemy that walks around that corner" and nobody walks around the corner by their next turn is the spell lost? Can they just choose to continue readying it? Can they keep the spell and do something else? Finally, if they can do all these things, can the players just wander through the dungeon constantly declaring that they are readying spells to attack at all times so the instant they see an enemy they unleash a barrage of magic?
I know what my GMs in highschool games would have done to anyone who tried to ready spells for extended periods like that. They would have said "oh, rocks fall, you die" and then waited for the player to stop being an ass. Or they might have had low level spellcasters cast illusions of monsters that walked around corners so the players unleashed fusillades of spells at an illusory beholder.
However, if I want to answer the question of how to handle this in general for a wide swath of players I think I would like to be a bit more thorough and within the rules.
I would definitely allow players to continue to ready a spell against a particular circumstance should it not arise. If you ready a Magic Missile against an enemy coming around a corner and nobody does, I would say you can just abandon that and do something else next round without losing the spell.
But as soon as anybody says they are readying a Magic Missile during their entire walk through the dungeon, well now that is a different thing. Readying a spell is a combat action. It makes no fucking sense outside of the combat time construct, so any time the players are operating in narrative time rather than combat time I would forbid combat actions completely.
If a player said "I am keeping a special watch on that well in the corner in case anything crawls out of it to attack us" I would absolutely take that into consideration and perhaps give them a bonus on a surprise roll or a roll to notice the monster leaping out of the well. Could even just decide that if a monster does come out they are definitely not surprised. What I definitely wouldn't do is let them ready a Magic Missile against that eventuality, because they are in narrative time until combat starts.
And since I am the GM in this case, *I* decide when we are in combat time vs. narrative time.
That is kind of a ridiculous solution, but I think it is the only one consistent with the rules of the game. Combat time is silly but it is an intrinsic part of DnD and you should make use of it when it is helpful, and keeping players from doing silly things with combat actions all the time is exactly the sort of place where you want to enforce the strict duality of game state.
My solution has the nice benefit of feeling elegant (once you accept the combat time construct) and also keeping people from doing abusive things. Readying spells and then not using them in combat isn't powerful, so there is no need to try to quash it. After all, you missed an entire turn and did nothing! All we need to do is prevent players from doing dumb stuff like trying to ready actions for hours on end, and combat vs. narrative time solves that neatly.
Outside this silly (but necessary for our purposes) framework things flow much more naturally in a state I call narrative time. People can do things simultaneously and even perform activities that don't fit into discrete six second chunks. You could, for example, give a speech without having to check if every person in the room passes their turn!
The other day Naked Man asked me a rules question that touches on this strange construction. He wanted to know how to rule it if a player was readying a spell over multiple turns. If they say "I shoot a Magic Missile at any enemy that walks around that corner" and nobody walks around the corner by their next turn is the spell lost? Can they just choose to continue readying it? Can they keep the spell and do something else? Finally, if they can do all these things, can the players just wander through the dungeon constantly declaring that they are readying spells to attack at all times so the instant they see an enemy they unleash a barrage of magic?
I know what my GMs in highschool games would have done to anyone who tried to ready spells for extended periods like that. They would have said "oh, rocks fall, you die" and then waited for the player to stop being an ass. Or they might have had low level spellcasters cast illusions of monsters that walked around corners so the players unleashed fusillades of spells at an illusory beholder.
However, if I want to answer the question of how to handle this in general for a wide swath of players I think I would like to be a bit more thorough and within the rules.
I would definitely allow players to continue to ready a spell against a particular circumstance should it not arise. If you ready a Magic Missile against an enemy coming around a corner and nobody does, I would say you can just abandon that and do something else next round without losing the spell.
But as soon as anybody says they are readying a Magic Missile during their entire walk through the dungeon, well now that is a different thing. Readying a spell is a combat action. It makes no fucking sense outside of the combat time construct, so any time the players are operating in narrative time rather than combat time I would forbid combat actions completely.
If a player said "I am keeping a special watch on that well in the corner in case anything crawls out of it to attack us" I would absolutely take that into consideration and perhaps give them a bonus on a surprise roll or a roll to notice the monster leaping out of the well. Could even just decide that if a monster does come out they are definitely not surprised. What I definitely wouldn't do is let them ready a Magic Missile against that eventuality, because they are in narrative time until combat starts.
And since I am the GM in this case, *I* decide when we are in combat time vs. narrative time.
That is kind of a ridiculous solution, but I think it is the only one consistent with the rules of the game. Combat time is silly but it is an intrinsic part of DnD and you should make use of it when it is helpful, and keeping players from doing silly things with combat actions all the time is exactly the sort of place where you want to enforce the strict duality of game state.
My solution has the nice benefit of feeling elegant (once you accept the combat time construct) and also keeping people from doing abusive things. Readying spells and then not using them in combat isn't powerful, so there is no need to try to quash it. After all, you missed an entire turn and did nothing! All we need to do is prevent players from doing dumb stuff like trying to ready actions for hours on end, and combat vs. narrative time solves that neatly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)