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Penfold3

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Posts posted by Penfold3

  1. Posted

    LordofBrewtown said:

     

    I was actually also inclined to think this at one point.  However, since the inception of this game (CCG days) to know, the local shops report that there are a number of people buying the cards who simply never show up for gaming nights - so the cards have some appeal to collectors fans/only.  

    Or maybe they are casual players who buy a core set and leave it at that. Sit at home with their SO or roomates, or in their college dorm with school mates and play it like a boxed set. I've run into far more people who do this than those who say they buy just because they collect... I mean, what is the point of collecting if you are not going to own one of everything. There is no secondary market worth noting here so it isn't about having copies of some chase rare are any kind of investment. I'm not saying you are wrong, about why people in may purchase a set and never show up, I'm just saying I know of only one person who has done this versus that dozens of posts here and on BGG each that say they have bought a core set for casual play and have no interest in deck building.

  2. Posted

    I think it would have to be out of print in order for that to be a reasonable possibility on the business end. No retailer or distributor would be happy with product they are holding suddenly becoming obsolete... not to mention if FFG has any product in their warehouse. The best likelihood of something like that happening would be if a new printing of older material was going to be done, say in Russian or Chinese (two random countries that I don't think have translated cards). I think even then it would need to be the players and international partners demanding old catalog reprints to catch up rather than just the new material. I have no idea what would be the pass/fail line on something like that money-wise.

  4. Posted

    I think that the fans would be much more likely to buy the myriad of other products available to own a piece of Westeros, the board game, Battles of Westeros, the art books and calendars all come to mind over the LCG.

    I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a card list would not be a detriment in any way to the game, but it is also not a selling point of the game. Casual gamers are just that. A full list of all cards, stats, effects, etc. just doesn't match that. Anyone who wants that would need to do a search to find it in general on the site or on google and one of the fan sites will come up, giving them what they are looking for.

    If someone here really feels that there needs to be an official one send an email to FFG support and ask. They may even have one they use in house... but there is is not much reason for them to produce or provide one if the community is already doing a bang up job, unless there are a number of requests asking for it.

  5. Posted

    LordofBrewtown said:

    I think that a strong case could be made that FFG would gain sales if they at least had card lists (even if they didn't have a searchable database). 

    So make it. Show us where FFG makes dollars and cents in this and remember that you are going to have to have someone pulling in a wage for time spent on this rather than on something else, which means any money generated by such a list, database, what have you does not just need to come in at the cost of the creation and maintenance of the thing, but it must be equal or ideally greater than what that person could be spending time doing.

    You say it is Marketing 101 (it isn't by the way), but this evaluation is business 101. If you could hire some HS or college kid to come in and do all of this for the ridiculously low rate of $12 an hour (roughly what an asst admin should make an hour) that list needs to generate a positive return in excess of that since any given employee's time should be returning an investment about three to five times greater than their wages. That same individual doing data entry, office work, or database management for the company on the office side, or that money instead used as part of the salary of another graphic or game designer is going to, IMO, easily generate a higher revenue than the card list... Is there anyone who disagrees with that?

    So then the question is, has anyone left a game or refused to play a game because there was no card list published by the company itself when said list was readily available from a third party?

    With this question it becomes very easy to see that the majority of people come to a game and stay with a game based on the game play. Replicating effort with no obvious increase in profit is a very questionable business decision.

  7. Posted

    It should be noted, this is an LCG and not a CCG or TCG. If you come to this or their others with the same expectations of a company that is bilking you and has all that extra cash to toss around for database developers and the like then you are going to be disappointed. If you come here expecting a bunch of ridiculously fun games that require a small investment for countless hours of enjoyment, and a company that really spends it time on producing the games and letting the fans decide the context in which they are played and how involved they want to be, you will be pleasantly surprised.

  8. Posted

    I would like to see a deluxe expansion for Greyjoy and Martell... but I just have this weird feeling that it isn't likely to happen.

    If not it is going to put both of them behind the curve in regard to number of cards... and sure an argument can be made that they are not weaker card power wise, lack of cards equals lack of options and lack of options does translate into an inability to make multiple deck types and possible solutions to problems.

    HOPEFULLY someone with some say in this reads this and connects the dots.

  9. Posted

    It is a three character swing in the case of a brotherhood deck. I have my Reinforcement character, your Brotherhood character added to my side, and you lose your Brotherhood character.. +2 to me -1 to you. Net 3 character swing... It would be interesting to see what someone can do with a MWnK melee deck, maybe out of Martell with Viper's Rage and Red Vengeance (running a high amount of events, and a low amount of characters), assuming that Brotherhood dcks start making appearances in melee.

    I'm just thinking that you can redirect challenges to yourself which you can afford to lose, and pop the reins in and grab someone's neutral badass. In theory it could work... of course that actually means very little.

  11. Posted

    Yeah, I get where you are coming from. I don't look to try and reach perfection in something that one could never know whether they had achieved their goal. Literally you could have already run across and dismissed the best deck and means of playing it because probability ran against you for fifty or sixty games (if anyone is interested I can give examples of how easy this is to do with some computer simulations of a MUCH simpler means of generating random yet finite results). Not saying you have mind you, just that the never knowing makes the quest pointless to me, now.

    I did used to play Magic the way you play this game... I just got bored with it (this is also how we are wired differently, I am not trying to state I'm on some more "elevated plane" or any crap like that, just illustrating differences). It was too easy to build broken decks that just ran over everyone if you had the money to spend so I started restricting my expenditures, and then eventually just stopped purchasing on the second market entirely.

    I have much more fun now taking decks that others consider substandard or break "rules" of deck building and still beating my opponents.

    I'd rather look at the cards, get a feel for what would be a fun deck and as an intellectual exercise build and then refine that deck single deck until I can get the results I want, and then I set it aside and work on something new. This usually involves 2-3 months of building, tweaking, testing, re-tweaking, and re-testing adding and removing cards until I'm beating my opponents about 5 to 2. This includes my own learning curve of playing the deck as well as I get closer to my end goal my opponents specifically tech-ing their decks against mine. When I can get it to 5:2 despite this meta-gaming I'm ready to declare myself the "victor" of that puzzle and move on. The decks that I care most about though are those who I can't seem to push past 2:5. I don't just fix on those decks I fixate on them. They are the challenge. How can I improve my own play and tweak those decks to get it to a 5:5? 5:4? The holy grail of 5:2? Admittedly it is pretty much an arbitrary ratio, but beating someone at more than two to one reliably and regularly is as close as I can get to knowing I'm there without making my regular opponents want to punch me in the face and burn my deck.

    I never give up on any deck. I never dismiss a deck. I only truly set it aside when I've tuned it to an inch of its life and my opponents no longer want to play it.

    My playgroup is about half competitive players and half social players, and that is a mix that I enjoy. If it was all about taking the proven top-decks and throwing them at each other all the time I'd get bored quickly because the fun social players would leave.

  12. Posted

    It is not stated in the FAQ probably because it is a synthesis of rules stated in the rulebook. Constant effects are just that constant. Because there is no point of triggering, they initiate before any action window opens up and before any new action chains can be started, as soon as their text becomes relevant. Forced effects are triggered by the game and also happen immediately upon their trigger being met, regardless of whether a player wills it or no. so saying the order is Constant, Forced, Action in precedence is supported by the rulebook, regardless of what the constant effect is (drawing a card, counting resources, resolving Cloud of Flies) because they are all the same thing as far as the rules are concerned. The Active Player will decide what order conflicting effects will resolve in in the case that multiple effects with the same level of priority initiate at the same time.

  13. Posted

    Remember though that non-combat damage is a triggered effect, and as long as it is not forced it can be responded to before it is resolved, meaning that while you may not play an action inbetween the assign and apply damage steps, you could play an action of your own that resolves before any damage is even assigned to your unit. In some cases this will have the same general effect as that in between action window, allowing you to save your unit, or sacrifice it for another effect before it takes lethal damage and is removed form play.

  18. Posted

    ddm5182 said:

    The best part of this is they just nerfed (banned) dwarves' only bad matchup. 

    Good start, still a long way to go.

    Question, how many decks that could potentially beat Dwarfs were discarded or never seriously considered because they would get eaten alive by thrower? Is it possible that there is not just one but a couple of decks that could challenge Dwarfs that no longer have to fear Thrower decks?

    Wytefang's Empire discard deck seems to potentially be a better idea now that Thrower is no longer as useful as it was and therefor no longer the ideal Empire build. Same resource engine, but no longer equal regard to development needs if I understand it correctly.

    I should say I'm not saying his deck is the match for Dwarf, I haven't tried it, I just remember it being dismissed because Thrower could do the same general thing with less moving parts andthere harder to disrupt.

  19. Posted

    ddm5182 said:

     

    Thanks for your condescending, arrogant, rude attitude aimed at the way we ("comeptitive" players) play games.  It goes a long way toward productive discussion when you dismiss people who disagree with you as "doing it wrong."

    Don't be a jerk.

     

    Words to live by.

    ddm5182 said:


    In the interest of actual communication, please consider that we approach games like W:I as puzzles to solve.  Each new format has a single "right" answer - which deck is best given the expected composition of the field, and likewise, each game state has one optimal line of play.  We play these games to find and make those optimal choices.  I completely respect your right to approach the game in a casual manner that is more concerned with the experience of playing than solving the puzzle, but I also think the competitive approach is legitimate and worthy of respect.

     

    The purpose of this post & posts like it is to communicate that some of the competitive players feel this game's design is ruining the experience of solving the puzzle by making it obvious and, even worse, boring and inhibiting to new ideas.  If FFG doesn't care, fine.  We'll play something else.  But it should still be said, and its still a valid point regardless of whether it affects you and your personal casual philosophy.

     

     

    I think you are wrong about a single right answer (though that may be why you put it in quotations), and about one optimal line to play, it is an unknowable thing. This isn't Chess where you are afforded perfect knowledge. Every piece is not on the board with clear understanding that each adjustment to position leads to potentially multiple paths to a checkmate but often only one which is the shortest, or the most assured based on the moves your opponent made before. Never knowing what cards your opponent has in their hand, will draw from their deck or whether placing it in one zone or another would have resulted in a different outcome means no person can deduce the true optimal line of play. At best you can play a few thousand games exploring different tactical choices based on the cards drawn and start to get an idea of it.

    Part of the problem is just how probability works. We can work out what the probabilities of any given card being drawn is based on how many cards are in the deck that are not that card and how many versions are, but until you start playing games counted in the hundreds if not thousands you won't see that number approached.

    We can see this with genetics, the odds are that one out of every two babies will be a girl. But only in a very large population will close to half the children born be girls and half boys. In any given family there may be eight girls and one boy.

    Each side of a die has a one-in-six chance of landing face-up. Based on these odds a computer can calculate the average outcome of a given number of throws. Because dice land in an unpredictable, random way, however, the average outcome predicted by the odds and the actual outcome are sometimes very different – particularly over a small number of throws. But over thousands of throws, fluctuations tend to average out.

    This demonstrates the laws of probability: the more times you repeat a procedure with a random outcome, the closer the average of your results to a long-term or theoretical average.

    What all of this boils down to is that the discrepancies between the empirical testing of one groups playing something and another groups playing that exact same deck, against the exact same decks is going to vary for any number of reasons, including but not limited to just "luck of the draw." Unless each player plays following the exact same strategy with no variance against the exact same decks, played exactly the same with no variance, over a thousand games, PER specific match-up, there is no way to accurately tell what the ideal play is and how a given deck is going to perform over time. IT is entirely possible that every instance of a deck being played within one playgroup is in fact an anomaly and that another playgroups experiences are truly fitting the average.

    Until someone devises a program that uses an AI to play both sides of a match-up a thousand or more times we're all just going off of gut and our personal experiences which need to be recognized as both subjective and questionable... and that is part of what makes these games fun, not knowing if you are making the optimal decision on what deck to bring, how you built it, what you will face, how those decks are built, and how you both play them, and of course what cards show up. As soon as you believe that you know the answer to those questions, that you have the best deck and know the optimal line of play, the fun goes away...  because why bother playing the game until new cards come out and add osme possible variation in the match-ups.

    I'm certainly not going to tell you how to play the game, but I'd posit that your approach actually leads to greater dissatisfaction without any greater end result than players who constantly approach the game as if it was open with multiple decks sharing the top level and multiple pths to any given victory. Just something to consider.

  21. Posted

    Bronn said:

    There's a big difference between environment-defining and environment-deforming cards.  The former are what high-level players put into decks and can swing a game but there's usually many answers for them.  A big Hero may define an environment or a mass-removal card.  And Thrower without the development spam of Dwarfs may have been defining as well.  But in conjunction with them, it was too much.  Casual players didn't want to play the game or banned the card in their groups.  Heck, high level players didn't want to play the game with it around either.  That's a card that needed fixing before irreparable damage was done to the game.  We lost half our local players during the Skaven era, and I'm sure our group wasn't the only one.  Thrower was having a similar effect.  I'm worried that Reclaiming the Fallen will also have a bad effect, as it reminds me of Wrath of Kali-Ma from L5R last year, a card that also dropped lots of units into play with no real answer and one that had to have errata to stop it from deforming the environment.  Its nice that the designers of Invasion want to push the envelope of power level, and hope that they continue to do so, but sometimes things get pushed too far and it needs to be fixed.

    Being played and not winning repeated tournaments does pretty much prove that the card was environment defining rather than deforming from a strict game view. Which is what Wytefang is talking about. You are referring to the meta-game however, where how a player aproaches deck-building, and thinks and feels about the game, where it was deforming.

    Sad to say perception is reality far to often. If three very vocal posters on here can convince everyone that card or deck X is abusive, broken, and not fun, people will start to see it that way every time the card/deck wins. People stop trying new decks examining the field and instead concentrate on the supposed card/deck as being the thing to beat. Now in this case there are several factors to consider, the RBT unitless decks were counter to the world of this game. Anything not thematic should always be examined as a possible target of errata. LCG's allow for a relatively immersive experience and something that pulls you out of that (or in this case kicks you in the teeth with it) needs to be addressed. The deck was not fun to play against, when it won its opponent often had the feeling that nothing they did mattered, no unit, tactic, or support would make any difference to the outcome of the game. The deck was a task to play, but that was more about managing your cards than worrying about what your opponent was doing. Those three things together warrant errata in some fashion, even if the card/deck is not winning every tournament. I could even argue that only those three things matter and that a card/deck simply being overpowered is not enough to warrant an errata. If it is fun to play, fun to play against, and thematic, let the meta sort itself out with the constant stream of new cards.

    Dwarf decks should be looked closely at and Mining Tunnels and Reclaim are high on the list... Banning? Nope. Errata? Maybe. What then? Counter-strategies. Cards for Dwarfs that demand a different strategy. Cards for Destruction that take advantage of what those cards do turning their use into a negative for the Dwarf player, or an advantage for them (say a Chaos unit that gains hammers when your opponent play a development, or a support that lets you corrupt a unit when your opponent plays a development in the corresponding zone). Neither of those are perfect, and they are both a little silver bullety but the idea of how to handle powerful cards/decks that don't run counter to the ideas of the game is a sound one.

    It is always good to know FFG is listening, and hopefully really giving some hard and honest looks at the game as a whole and not just the level of sound and fury being kicked up here.

  22. Posted

    Any product with duplication of cards would be a competing product though. You are just as likely to get new players who think that it is silly to buy a chapter pack with x3 commons when they could get x2 rares. Not saying this is valid thinking, but the retail psychology has little to do with common sense and far more to do with perceived value (take a look at all the people paying 2-3 x the price for an Apple product and then not using the product for anything that the Apple product does have an advantage in).

    Another option would be to sell entire cycles at x1 for reprints if you want to look at making things easier to buy for people just starting out and creating a low entry point for them. Whatever it is I'm sure it will make sense from a business perspective for them, and some segment of their customers are going to be very happy.

  23. Posted

    I don't see this happening as long as there are ways to buy these products sitting on shelves and in warehouses. I could see them instead reprinting cards in the x3 format, but not until their and their distributors warehouses are empty, because as soon as they announced this was being done, no stores would buy any more, and few players would.

    They would be competing with themselves and that is never an ideal way of doing business if you don't own the marketplace.

  24. Posted

    Probably more complicated than that. I suspect they have the rights to anything in the universe but can't publish any minis of anything in the GW warhammer universe.

    As to companies not reviewing or using player generated content/ unsolicited content, the company opens itself up to lawsuits when it does so without a signed waiver. The chances of a regular person winning such a lawsuit is probably pretty low, but it can tie up the property and funds for years while the entire thing is hashed out. That is why so many companies, publishers, producers, authors, directors, writers etc. have a strict policy about it.

    FFG allows champions to work with their designers to design a card. It shows they are open to player suggestions and ideas, but expecting the designers to comb the sites looking for ideas is probably a little far fetched. Doesn't mean we can't have fun doing it anyway though! :)

  25. Posted

    That is more or less what I've been trying to say.

    Fatmouse you are placing a judgment on what is and is not good design, based on your personal views regarding what makes a good game, what makes a good environment, and what makes a good card. The fact that the card by all appearances seems to be filling the niche it was designed for properly, not only not unbalancing games, or the meta, but putting a proper check that many players feel the game needs seems to indicate that it is well designed, if only by these rather arbitrary but, I suspect, universally recognized positive categories.

    A card should receive errata, IMO, not if it is unbalanced itself, but it is unbalancing. That hasn't been shown to be the case. It is entirely possible that at some point there will be enough cards that wipe out 2 STR characters, or Martell gets an over abundance of easy and repeatable character control that it needs to receive errata or be banned (is that the new form of rotation?), but until such a time, I'd leave it alone.

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