Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[funkdoc]

hello everyone, i just wrote a blog post targeted toward my friends & stream viewers explaining why my tastes have shifted over the years, and happened to think of something we could discuss here.

i'm not going to link the whole damn thing here, so i'll just paste the relevant part.

"Another question that I sometimes get is “why Dominion and not fighting games?”  Part of it is that traveling to tournaments is far less convenient now that I have a full-time job, and I haven’t gotten a console since my 360 died.  But the real reason, again, is that I just have way more passion for the former now.  Fighting games are meant to be disposable, and even the ones that last a while have major updates coming out every year or two.  These updates obsolete a lot of knowledge from the previous version, so I regard them as being somewhat like new games.  Since it takes years to master any competitive game worth its salt, these update schedules ultimately limit the potential of the game.

With a tabletop game like Dominion, on the other hand, expansions simply add to the experience instead of taking things away.  When Dark Ages comes out, the following year’s expansion doesn’t go back and nerf stuff from it (and trust me, Dark Ages has a few cards that could reeeeaaaaalllllly stand some nerfing); the Dark Ages cards are left as-is, and their presence is factored into the balancing of future cards.  Thus, each Dominion expansion gets time to breathe, as the strategy with its cards can evolve even while new cards keep coming out.  Dark Ages came out in mid-2012, and it wasn’t until late 2014-2015(?) that people began realizing Urchin was a legitimate god-tier card rather than “very good”.  If Dominion were a fighting game, the other Dark Ages cards that people hated from the beginning (e.g. Cultist & Rebuild) would’ve been neutered a year later, while Urchin would’ve slipped under the radar until the developers had moved on to Dominion 2 and it was too late to fix things.  Oh yeah, and Saboteur (a rather bad card, for those who don’t know) would’ve been nerfed at some point because “it makes the game unfun when it’s good”.

Dominion’s approach means you have a few broken cards that make the game less fun & interesting with their presence, but I’ll gladly take that when it allows the game to develop like competitive games should.  It even came out in the same year as Street Fighter IV and has another expansion due later this year, so I think it’s safe to say it will outlive the 800-pound gorilla of the fighting-game scene.  Since I’ve gotten pretty jaded toward compressed life cycles with age, this has a lot of appeal to me!

It doesn’t hurt that Dominion’s top players are the most welcoming and helpful you’ll ever find.  Players ranked top 5 in the world will watch any random scrub’s stream (*raises hand*) and drop all kinds of wisdom as long as you aren’t a dick.  It’s a refreshing change of pace, coming from a scene that prided itself on not helping others even before esports got involved.  These kinds of games also breed much more analytical top players, which is something I in particular need to break plateaus.  Picture a top 20 consisting entirely of Viscants, and you’ll get the idea."

i don't expect anyone here to know who viscant is, but i think you understand what i'm getting at there.  so i'd be interested to hear how you feel about this topic, how accurate you think i'm being with this, etc.  hopefully i didn't screw up the urchin point too badly!

[A Drowned Kernel]

I needed this.

[scott_pilgrim]

I think I agree with everything you said there, but it's interesting to think about why it's the case.  In Dominion, it's not the end of the world for a card to be broken, because it'll be ~20 games before you see it again.  In a fighting game, a broken character needs to be nerfed right away or the entire game will centralize around that character, even if there are a million other well-balanced characters to choose from.

[nate_w]

It wouldn't make me sad if Cultist got nerfed :-).

Only card in the game I actively dislike.

[funkdoc]

scott_pilgrim: nerfing is the easiest way to handle that, but a highly-talented designer can build the rest of the game around the broken stuff in a somewhat similar fashion to dominion.  imo the key is whether the broken stuff is cool or not - top tier in a given fighting game can be like butcher (a card everyone seems to like, from what i can tell?) or like the cards i mentioned in my last post.  i'm in a small minority with this opinion, mind you.

i really think a lot of the problems boil down to the shorter life cycles.  like man, i was jealous when i read about the twilight struggle players gathering 5 years of tournament data or whatever before they started adding house rules to buff the USA!  the closest thing to that in fighting games was the decision to ban meta knight in brawl, but that had a smaller sample size and they eventually went back on that anyway because brawl is ass no matter what you try.

more commonly, you get reasoned discussion like the community-wide meltdown over scorpion in injustice.  people hated that he kept his fast teleport in a game where you hold back to block, and were campaigning to ban him less than a *week* after he was added to the game.  they actually succeeded in getting at least one major to ban him unless he was patched, which essentially strong-armed the developer into nerfing the living shit out of him.  they ended up making him a legit candidate for worst character in the game, but that scene felt that was better than having to deal with someone who forced them to play a completely different game from the rest of the cast.  seriously, that was the main argument - not that he was horribly overpowered, but that "he breaks the rules of the game".

a lot of this is based on a fear that's not without reason, given that we have plenty of games with broken characters that were never fixed.  but knowing that netherrealm's games are on 2-year plans led players to overreact to anything and everything that could potentially be a problem.  MKX seems to have a longer-term vision, at least, but i don't even see that going past 3 or 4 years...

[funkdoc]

It wouldn't make me sad if Cultist got nerfed :-).

Only card in the game I actively dislike.

i thought about that right after i wrote that post, and i think we're pretty close on this one.  looking at the stuff usually ranked at the very top...

- i don't hate anything that thins your deck, because it's not your destination.  you don't have "chapel games", chapel just helps you do stuff way sooner than you would otherwise.  these games are defined by how cool the payload is.

- king's court, i mean why is this even up for discussion?  just so open-ended in terms of what you can do, and the biggest fulfillment of the power fantasies that are a huge reason 90-93% of us play this game!

- alright, goons is iffier than the above to me because it has such a strong snowball effect for the player who gets the early lead.  like ok that's lots of dominion games, but it just FEELS more oppressive with goons.  i don't hate it though, scoring 300 points has its charm~

- wharf, like CAMON BOY wharf owns

- i actually like mountebank less than rebuild???  i soften on rebuild as i play it more just because there's at least a lot of other action cards that help it in some way.  mountebank strikes me more as mini-cultist in terms of its effect on the average game.  but mountebank at least leaves open the possibility of a Good Stuff Deck (which is a Cool and Good thing) and you can't do that with cultist because you draw a hundred cards with them!!!


so maybe i hate 2 cards i guess idkkkkkkkkk

[theblankman]

i don't expect anyone here to know who viscant is, but i think you understand what i'm getting at there.  so i'd be interested to hear how you feel about this topic, how accurate you think i'm being with this, etc.  hopefully i didn't screw up the urchin point too badly!

Why don't you expect that, who doesn't know their mahvel evo champs?  

This is a comparison I've thought about myself, and I think IF Dominion were online only (i.e. no dead tree edition), or a video game, or if Donald X was willing to consider the online game a full-fledged spinoff, then I would expect updates to existing cards, in addition to expansions. 

In fact I think the buff/nerf cycle would work better than it does in fighting games for two reasons, both of which you touched on.  First, we're dealing with one long-lived game, rather than the relatively short cycles of say SF or MK, so there's time to let a card breathe in the wild before you change it, and even time enough for multiple long cycles with the same card. 

Second, in Dominion if a "top tier" card shows up on a random board, both players have access to it, so you're not all that worried about plain power.  It's more about whether a card limits the good decisions you can make which requires the card to both be powerful AND interact poorly with other cards. 

So I think the call for card changes would be somewhat rare, and when it did arise you'd be able to take a more considered approach than fighting games, and also make subtler changes that are about card interaction, not just power. 

Let's take Cultist as an example since it hasn't received much love in this thread.  Usually, I don't like it much.  A deck full of both junk and terminal draw has room for little else, so it interacts poorly with other kingdom cards.  UNLESS there is good enough trashing to lose the junk.  In those rare games where you can use Cultist as your draw card in an engine, I love how the stacking mechanic makes it unique among Smithy variants.  So suppose we want Cultist to interact better with villages.  There's a ton of ways we could change it but the simplest I've come up with is to add four words...
Currently: You may play another Cultist. Each other player gains a Ruins.
Changed: You may play another Cultist. If you do not, each other player gains a Ruins.
It junks quite a bit less now, but can still draw a lot, and can hand out multiple Ruins in a turn if there are extra actions available to let you play them "un-chained."  So it's still a really strong card, but I think that version would play a lot better with other cards. 

And I think most cards that got touched at all would have changes that small and simple.  Try fixing Evil Ryu that easily  

[Donald X.]

Currently: You may play another Cultist. Each other player gains a Ruins.
Changed: You may play another Cultist. If you do not, each other player gains a Ruins.

That's neat.

[AdrianHealey]

Another advantage: I permanently removed saboteur, spy and a few more cards from my custom made dominion box. That's easy enough.

[LastFootnote]

Another advantage: I permanently removed saboteur, spy and a few more cards from my custom made dominion box. That's easy enough.

I'm curious which other cards you removed!

[AdrianHealey]

Let me think.

Saboteur, spy, adventures, that terminal silver whereby you can discard your deck and feast.

Not thief and scout, which I am trying to get to work, but they'll suffer the same fate if my last ditch efforts don't work.

(I am having a mini tournament with friends the last Saturday of February and I have one deck with harem, coin of the realm and a self-made treasure/trasher, so thief is in there. (It also has trading post, to incentivize people to trash their own coppers.) And another deck with duke, heir (a card that uses vp cards) and frontier. Scout is in that kingkom.

[Awaclus]

Let me think.

Saboteur, spy, adventures, that terminal silver whereby you can discard your deck and feast.

Not thief and scout, which I am trying to get to work, but they'll suffer the same fate if my last ditch efforts don't work.

(I am having a mini tournament with friends the last Saturday of February and I have one deck with harem, coin of the realm and a self-made treasure/trasher, so thief is in there. (It also has trading post, to incentivize people to trash their own coppers.) And another deck with duke, heir (a card that uses vp cards) and frontier. Scout is in that kingkom.

I think that it's very good that sometimes there are entirely useless cards in the kingdom, it makes for interesting games where you have to make things work with a more limited number of good cards.

[AdrianHealey]

Let me think.

Saboteur, spy, adventures, that terminal silver whereby you can discard your deck and feast.

Not thief and scout, which I am trying to get to work, but they'll suffer the same fate if my last ditch efforts don't work.

(I am having a mini tournament with friends the last Saturday of February and I have one deck with harem, coin of the realm and a self-made treasure/trasher, so thief is in there. (It also has trading post, to incentivize people to trash their own coppers.) And another deck with duke, heir (a card that uses vp cards) and frontier. Scout is in that kingkom.

I think that it's very good that sometimes there are entirely useless cards in the kingdom, it makes for interesting games where you have to make things work with a more limited number of good cards.

I don't disagree, but for that, we have our online games (I have all cards on online dominion.) It's also not the case that I burned those cards. I just don't take them with me on a 'normal' day. Seems like a defensible way of playing and enjoying the game.

[LastFootnote]

I think that it's very good that sometimes there are entirely useless cards in the kingdom, it makes for interesting games where you have to make things work with a more limited number of good cards.

I mostly disagree. I find that a game where all the cards/events are potentially useful to be much more enjoyable. Mostly it's because it means the game is less likely to be a mirror match, but also because it means you have a lot more to think about each turn.