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megraam's avatar
megraam
9 years ago
Solved

RNG-based block is a BAD design which should be reworked

Everything about this game design is bad: both 1 or 2 or 3 segments RNG block (damage negation) and 4 superpowers. It's easy: human nature is we remember our bad luck rather than good luck: and out...
  • megraam's avatar
    megraam
    9 years ago

    And this is what I have addressed in the OP from the very beginning. People tend to remember their losses based on random luck of their opponents or unluck of themselves much more than their wins based on the reverse outcome.

    It means if it's truly random and evens itself out you will have pissed off players from plants and pissed off players from zombies.

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
9 years ago

Trading Card Games will always have that drawing RNG in them and that cannot be taken away. That is not a reason or should not be an argument to defend some other RNG based effect in  the game. In a good, competitive game RNG based factor should be reduced as close to 0 as possible and in card games there should be no other random effects than the RNG of the deck and drawing. That is purely from competitive stand point.

MTG is a good and a bad example of that. MTG has close to none RNG effects (other than the drawing ofc...) and the cards that have RNG in them were printed way back and they don't do them any more. It's bad becuase it has mana as cards and that adds little bit more RNG to the mix than for example in PvZ Heroes. Other than that MTG is well designed game and the mana problem can be understood because it was the first TCG ever.

Back to the problem of other RNG effects of games, of course there are players other than competitive ones and the game like this should be designed for them too. Then more RNG effects tend to be good desing choice as you said in your other post. But as I said, you should never justify more RNG adding to a game by just saying "Card drawing is itself RNG".

Gabochido's avatar
Gabochido
Seasoned Veteran
9 years ago

Well no. The card element of trading card games is just a physical representation used in the real world so that people could manipulate the elements of the game, but there is no law dictating that shuffling cards needs to be a part of the game or that it can be the only part that depends on luck, so yes, it can be taken away. Mabinogi Duel is an example of a card game, very similar to PVZ Heroes, in fact, that does not have random drawing (you have a deck of 12 cards and you hold them all in your hand from the beginning). It is also wrong to think that luck has to be reduced to 0 to be competitive. You can read some of the articles that Mark Rosewater has written about game design to see how luck and game design can interact to make games both more enjoyable and competitive.

I don't know about the last couple of years of MTG, but last I played competitively, they were still printing cards that made you throw dice, though it's true that these where mostly more casual cards. However you are right, Hearthstone is a better, more modern, example of how a competitive game uses luck all over the place in its game design.

Anyway, you can't say that drawing cards is an integral part of card card games and that particular element needs to have luck, because that is not the case, it's just another gameplay element and thinking like that is just shutting down game design possibilities. It's important to be careful in the implementation of a luck based element for sure, but when its well executed it can be both enjoyable by the masses AND competitive.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    9 years ago

    Thanks for pointing out the Mabinogi Duel, I'll certainly try it out! Can you also link the Roosewater article as I didnt find it. 🙂 Maybe I should read it first before I comment more on this matter.

    • Gabochido's avatar
      Gabochido
      Seasoned Veteran
      9 years ago
      @Viiksisika wrote:

      Thanks for pointing out the Mabinogi Duel, I'll certainly try it out! Can you also link the Roosewater article as I didnt find it. 🙂 Maybe I should read it first before I comment more on this matter.

      Here is one of them: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/kind-acts-randomness-2009-05-04

      This paragraph is particularly relevant to the discussion at hand:

      [Randomness] allows players to react. One of the biggest arguments against randomness is that it takes away from skill, the idea being that having everything under your control rewards the better players. Turns out it doesn’t quite work that way. Let me explain. Random events happening in a game force players to do several things. One, they have to identify what is happening and what it means to the current game; two, they have to deduce how best to use the new variable to bend the game to their favor; and three, they have to maximize their other resources to take advantage of the new variable. It turns out that doing all this is pretty complicated and thus the more experienced players are much better at it. The more unpredictable, unknown variables that get added to a game, the more opportunity there is for the better player to take advantage of them. This is one of the major reasons, for example, that experienced Magic players have such an advantage in Draft formats. It turns out that the ability to react requires a lot of skill.

      • megraam's avatar
        megraam
        9 years ago

        You understand the difference between card drawing randomness and "choose one out of 3 at random" doubled? As in 1-2-3 segments and get one of 3 superpowers left when you block?

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