Game Design Question...
What if...
Inserts had been face up, turned sideways, and not shuffled it, but had come with instructions on how far down they should be sunk when played. Whould they still have been a bad idea?
And for you CK, I told the story of the Worlds we officiated today. The things I remember:
1. It was operative time.
2. I caught the 2nd place guy cheating in the final, and even though I wasn't allowed to intercede (thank you, CW!), I still actually saved the final from being won by a cheat by pointing out that Matt could count his opponent's differential to verify it...and I remember the look of "I don't get it" on his face when the total he got differed significantly (and by enough that it would have swung the match) than what MR (that cheating fuck) reported.
3. Didn't someone have an infinite loop deck there?
4. MAN, did I mess me up some Jedi testing rulings.
Anything else you remember about that weekend CK?
Inserts had been face up, turned sideways, and not shuffled it, but had come with instructions on how far down they should be sunk when played. Whould they still have been a bad idea?
And for you CK, I told the story of the Worlds we officiated today. The things I remember:
1. It was operative time.
2. I caught the 2nd place guy cheating in the final, and even though I wasn't allowed to intercede (thank you, CW!), I still actually saved the final from being won by a cheat by pointing out that Matt could count his opponent's differential to verify it...and I remember the look of "I don't get it" on his face when the total he got differed significantly (and by enough that it would have swung the match) than what MR (that cheating fuck) reported.
3. Didn't someone have an infinite loop deck there?
4. MAN, did I mess me up some Jedi testing rulings.
Anything else you remember about that weekend CK?
posted by Tom at 11:53 PM
13 Comments:
Are you talking '98? Are you kidding? There were many nightmares that weekend. You did save Matt from the Cheating British Bastard, that was the single shining moment.
1. Jerry threatened with physical violence.
2. That guy (Van De Meer? Something like that) with the broken deck that he told us he was gonna use. Then he played the Japanese guy, who got it immediately and they quit playing after 5 minutes.
3. I came into the hall and it was super quiet, and I said to Jason, "Any fist fights?" and he said, "Somebody just threw a chair."
That whole weekend seems like a horrible, unending bad dream.
Inserts sucked because they punished you for playing good cards. I told them that the first time I saw the game text on a spreadsheet.
They were an outgrowth of a mandate we had before the first set came out, which was to use the different card backs in interesting ways.
Inserting, and when they came up something happened, that's all good, but numbers was a completely stupid idea. Because they were badly implemented that one time, the mechanic was never fully explored.
Honestly, if we put down all the stories from the '98 worlds in one place, nobody would believe it.
Kathy brought up the Van De Meer incident. I'd forgotten about that. I think we were lucky that the tournament system didn't reward ties. Poor the Japanese guy though.
And, I forgot about the chair throw...I remember that at a convention once...are you sure that was at that Worlds?
And on inserts...
The numbers cards were wonderful gameplay pieces...and horrible marketing cards. They provided a drawback to the cards that were completely overplayed within the game system, without errata or a rules change.
But people wanted to play those overplayed cards, so they hated numbers.
I forgot that inserts were trying to use the card backs.
Oh, and Brigid says ";p000", which is what I get for typing with her in the room :)
My memories of that World Championships are kind of hazy, primarily because I was covering the Star Trek side of things for most of the con, and only barely caught the Star Wars problems.
My real memory as this little ditty goes, goes back farther to the first in-house Special Edition playtest, where the words were uttered "alright, these things are a little powerful now, but the idea is that we'll bring them back in playtesting, rather than trying to make them work in playtesting." Needless to say, that idea didn't work out so well.
I remember the guy with the blender at the Iron Man tournament. And I remember that I really wanted to write something about the Star Wars tournament, but really, you can only say "operatives" so many times. I do remember Ribolet attempting to cheat, several times, including the brilliant line "did I drop some cards on the floor," with him grinning like an idiot and not even looking at the floor.
Really, the number of bad decisions that went into that tournament was absolutely astronomical, and I'm somewhat surprised that the story got told by anyone ever again.
I think the heart of the problem was that, for the most part, design on Star Wars was carried out by a guy who was okay on design but horrific at balancing, and one of the two "new guys," with inherent problems therein. There were warning signs about that debacle for months before it happened.
3. I came into the hall and it was super quiet, and I said to Jason, "Any fist fights?" and he said, "Somebody just threw a chair."
(In Tony Soprano voice): I do not recall that.
For me, that weekend is still PTF: "If I fan..."
I think the heart of the problem was that, for the most part, design on Star Wars was carried out by a guy who was okay on design but horrific at balancing, and one of the two "new guys," with inherent problems therein. There were warning signs about that debacle for months before it happened.
I think the problem, as it is with many TCGs, is that if you don't get the balance right in the first set, you're paying for it the rest of your lives. Mains weren't balanced, so inserts were created to make them more balanced. Of course, it went a little too far. Then, later, there were the cards that made all the crappy aliens too good (just like Mission Specialists in Trek).
Not to mention Decipher being dead set against the three things that would have solved this problem easily: errata, banning, and card limits.
And then there were cards that made those crappy aliens bad again, or punished you for playing them.
It's a viscious cycle, unfortunately, there are times when rotation is relied on too heavily.
More decidedly on topic, I think the insert mechanic is viable, but flawed. The game, itself, is inherently random, and the focal point of winning decks is to reduce the randomness to a controlled environment.
Inserts inject more random elements, and therefore, are non-viable from a high end standpoint. The only way to make them viable is to make them wildly overpowered, which was somewhat what happened in SWCCG.
Two words that would have solved this whole thing (or prevented it from ever being a problem)...rotation.
Two words that would have solved this whole thing (or prevented it from ever being a problem)...rotation.
That's always bantered around, but it's a huge risk. While it's good for the long run, it does nothing but alienate the current fans and a percentage of them will quit the game immediately. This happened with Magic, with Mage Knight, and, I'd imagine, with LotR (or did you guys make it known from the start that you were going to do it this way?).
Then you're left looking at the population that's left. Is it enough to still sustain the game? If so, great. If not, too bad. It's a huge risk, and not something every game can do.
Was SWCCG still "big" enough that it could have survived this? Probably.
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