2 SUGGESTIONS: Qualities and Rarities [in a letter].

Dear Blue Manchu,

Right now, as we speak, there are hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of cards in CH, right now, and they all work in different ways; help you, hinder you, hurt you, heal you, burn you, burn your enemies, level the playing field, tip it in your favor; the options are nearly innumerable.

This begs the question--for me, anyway--of why there's only 7 Quality Ratings.

Currently, there's 7--Black, Paper, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Emerald, Amethyst--but, you know that story already, and right now, seeing as how you good folks only have CH going up to Level 21, currently, that's probably for the best. However, I do believe that the time will come that someone--whether it's someone reading this, someone at BM or by some miracle of hope, me--will think of things even MORE broken than Almighty Bludgeon and Super Team Heal and "Festering Guts" [FG is still Black Quality as far as I'm concerned] that will eventually be put into CH.

So, Suggestion 1: May I suggest that for future updates that the colors Ruby, Sapphire and Diamond be considered as qualities that make even Amethyst look up at them and go, "*sigh*, now I know what being an Emerald feels like."

Now, that said, let me get on to what is pretty much the most useless thing in this game.....besides having Fright in your deck: Card Rarities.

NO disrespect to anyone at BM, but, this is the truth: These are so skewered, unfounded and meaningless and the PLAYERS pretty much describe them as what I prefer to call "red herrings"; you'd think they mean something, but, they don't. Not even remotely. They're totally meaningless.

Now, I'd like to think I'm right in what I'm about to say, but, I know full well that I might not be: Ratings could be removed entirely, and no one would care. How do I know this?

Note this card:


See how rare it is?

Yes, I checked in game; It has no rarity, there, either.

Now, BM? I know better than to try to ask you to remove the rarities of SO MANY CARDS. You have, quite frankly, more important things to do, and i get that. However, this brings me to my 2nd suggestion, though, which is to leave the rarity category out of all future cards; I figure it may help you [well, more Jon than anyone else, since he's programming it all, but, it'll help all of you, I'd like to think] if you stopped trying to put a useless category on every card.

So, there. You don't have to change anything, NOW, just keep 2 things in mind for the FUTURE. =)

Sincerely, a considerate Cardhuntrian,
Mike.

 

Card quality is already more fine grained than simply 7 steps from black from amethyst. Black has assigned value of -3 and amethyst is value of 15, so there is actually 19 smaller steps. For example Bludgeon is Paper (0) and Able Bludgeon is Paper+ (1).

Card rarity is the core concept that determines item rarity. Chasing those legendary items and loot chasing in general is currently big part of the game. So are you suggesting that in the future BM should get rid of item rarities as well or do you want to change how items are assigned rarities?

 

@Pawndawan: It's not up to me at all, but, if it was, rarities would be determined not quite as much on formulae as it would by card qualities and by the complexity of the cards within.

Look at some of the following pairs of cards and tell me if you notice a pattern, here.

 

So you still want cards to have rarity, you just disagree with (some of) the current values, right?

 

Do you notice a pattern here:

(Penetrating Stab, Impaling Stab)


(Chop, Obliterating Chop)

(Trained Bludgeon, Strong Bludgeon)

(Penetrating Cut, Perforating Strike)

And I can go on. Because it is mostly arbitrarily you can find patterns you try to find.

 

@Kalin:

@timeracers: So could I, starting with 3 cards from your own post:



You know what else is arbitrary? Card Rarities.

 

So you want to assign cards a complexity value, then hide that value from players? Why not change the existing rarity values so they better reflect the card's complexity?

 

Do I understand correctly? You want legendary items to be more powerful (and complex) and common items to be more weaker (and simple) in general?

If so, I have to disagree with you. To give you a MtG analogy, there needs to be Disenchants, Counterspells, Swords to Plowshares and Lightning Bolts. Otherwise common cards (and items) are just a newbie stepping stones. Older players with bigger collections would get even bigger advantage than currently is.

 

I must say, when I heard card rarity is based upon card complexity, and then I noticed Strong Hack -- complexity amounts to "hit stuff" -- is Rare, my face went something like $F^ `

Frankly, Penetrating Stab is more complex. It's Melee at Range 2 plus Penetrating. But yeah, I've noticed (sadly) that a lot (not all, but a whole lot,) of card complexity vs. rarity is pretty arbitrary and meaningless. $:^ \

It would take such a system-wide overhaul to truly fix this issue, though...

 

@Pawndawan your mtg reference made me giddy, I agree.

 

@Kalin: Because there's SO MANY CARDS, and BM probably has better and more important things to do in CH currently than review the rarities of what has to be no fewer than 500 cards.

@Pawndawan: Think about this, then: Should Bejeweled Shortsword--a currently COMMON item whose total base damage is a whopping 58 [and that's not including the 2 spaces one can move with the 2 Vicious Thrusts]--cost only 5 gold? Seriously? Be honest.

@ParodyKnaveBob: Oh, trust me, I know. That's why I'm only suggesting to leave rarities OUT, and add 3 new quality ratings IN when it comes to making future cards; No matter what it is I think, @Jon has more on his plate than any of us could know. That'll ALWAYS be true.

 

Yes. Bejeweled Shortsword should be common. Most of it's cards are straightforward range-1 melee damage. Vicious Thrust is step attack, so it's uncommon.

If there are no common items to combat the high-end PvP decks, many new players will be discouraged. Especially in a loot-chase game that CH is, where getting all the legendaries will take years. I don't know any card game, where card quality correlates with rarity 1:1.

There should be bad and good commons, as well as bad and good rares (or legendaries). All commons should not be just stepping stones to more rare stuff.

 

I'm not sure why you're suggesting both that we don't have time to review individual card rarities (certainly, some are wrong!) AND that we remove the rarity system completely, ostensibly recoding a large part of the game (all the functionality behind the loot chase). Maybe I'm missing something?

 

@Pawndawan and @Flaxative: Vicious Thrust is all well and good, but, at the same time, Bejeweled is currently rated Common in a system that takes into account that both Powerful Hack and Powerful Bludgeon--cards that are Silver Quality and do 11 damage, each--are more common than, well....see for yourself.



The problem here is that Strong Hack and Strong Bludgeon are only ever found on items that are either Rare, Epic or Legendary [Strong Bludgeon, Strong Hack], while Powerful Hack and Powerful Bludgeon are each found in no fewer than 2 Common Items each, and NEITHER are found in Legendary Items AT ALL [Powerful Bludgeon, Powerful Hack]. This has at least something to do with their individual card rarities, as the game's formulae takes this into account. Why does Strong Hack get a higher rarity than Powerful if Powerful does more damage?
If the game didn't have to try to factor in the often obsoleted rarities of cards, items might very well be judged better in the inputted formulae--Bejeweled is not a common-quality item. Uncommon or Rare, perhaps, but, not Common. Weapons like Bejeweled that are more complex than face value [or the game, for that matter] suggests that can eventually cost 5 gold is part of the reason--seniority and occasionally horrifyingly awful matchmaking in Ranked, aside--MP is already kinda skewered against the beginner to start with.

Now, @Flaxative? As @ParodyKnaveBob stated, this is a seemingly massive, massive thing that could take BM a LONG time to fix, and I got that part. That's why I suggested--from here on, at least--nixing card rarities for all future cards; as it stands, this card rarity scale is the reason that so many Legendaries are subpar for their ridiculous price ranges.

...you gotta admit, gentlemen. Some Legendaries just aren't worth 2,500.

 

That's the point! Making rarity based on power is one of the biggest mistakes a CCG can make. We want top competitive builds to include some Common items. We want some Legendary items to be terrible things only a collector would want. And what would we gain be giving new cards a secret version of what we already have?

BTW, I noticed every example used in this thread came from the base set. Are there any cards from the expansions that you think have the wrong rarity?

 

@Pawndawan Your mtg references made me think even more. There's do many bad Rares in there (I'm looking at you, Trained Orgg and Mudhole) that a person can easily build a deck with 0 Rares or Mythic Rares and do just fine.
Obviously, this game shadows that (Elf Man, CoB, anyone?) as even a beginner, you don't need big money cards to win. Just like in Magic, you need strategy.
What this boils down to is working with what you have. Thinking on how to take down your opponent. Sure, cards seem very good in a vacuum, but are they? You'll only know by playing with them and finding out.
Rarity, shmarity, bring on the peasants!

 

There are some rare cards that shouldn't be rare. Basically everyone knows that. The devs have explained many times how we want rarity to work, and we haven't gone back to edit every single card rarity for a number of reasons. All the rarities you're hung up on are artifacts—remnants of past mistakes that aren't easy to fix (mostly due to feel-bad issues with folks who collected/paid for legendary items).

Nixing card rarities on all future cards would result in a lot of items with no rarity, and thus no way to show up in loot tables. I'm like 100% sure I'm missing something because this still just doesn't seem like a solution—even partial—to anything. I'm exactly where I was in my last post.

Kalin's question about the newer content is an important one. I think we've been pretty careful in adhering to our rarity design goals with recent content. And no changed approach to future content will make you happy about Strong Bludgeon

 

I'd disagree with this part of the post, as I don't think there's a lot of strategy to maneuvering elves. That's my biased opinion, of course. I could go on a long diatribe as to why wizards use so many burst attacks these days being in direct correlation to maneuvering elves, but no one want to read that. Trust me.

But ultimately, none of this stuff bothers me. I buy stuff and use it. If it works, it works. If it doesn't (and 99% of the stuff I try does not work), it doesn't. Oh well.

 

You must not be playing SP co-op with strangers then, I've seen more than a few low level wizards running EM.

 

I don't play single player.