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

@Kalin and @Flaxative: 6 comparisons below; 3 from each expansion. Feel free to speak up if more are needed. The AOA and ETTSC cards are all on the right side of each pairing.





While it may look like I'm TRYING to find things wrong, here, I.....am, really. This is but the answer to a question that a staff member [@Flaxative] was slightly interested in seeing answered. Nothing more or less than that.

 

Before Mikey's post above, this already came to mind. Okay. Look how long the description is on Mimetic Crown.



That's crazy talk. That makes sense at Rare, right? Yeah. That's spot-on. Now, let's look how long the description is on Mimetic Armor.



Same crazy complexity, right? That makes sense at Rare, right? Waaaaiiiiit, why is it Common. $:^ |

Each counts as Armor. Each triggers at a roll of 3+. One gives 1 more Armor point than the other. The other gives a bit more potential damage output than the one (4 & 2 vs. 6 & 4). Those are just quality differences, though, not complexity. The only other difference -- very subtle, very situational -- is that one gives potential Electrical damage (Hard to Block, damage boostable by current traits), whereas the other gives potential Arcane damage (currently no Immunity to it, block-evasion addable by current traits).

Game-player-fun-wise, I get why M.A. is Common -- so that many more people much more quickly can explore the crazy world that the Citadel brought -- but purely mechanically, these should both show the same complexity or at the very, very least be one rarity offset from each other -- as opposed to one being all the way up to Rare, the other being all the way down to Common. (Same goes for any card with potential Laser Malfunctions being Common...Erratic Damage, Rocket Dash...) What complexity should Mimetics get? Rare sounds realistic to me 'cause that's pretty complex. However, to compare, Elven Maneuvers is Uncommon and seems pretty complex, too; @Flaxative already mentioned above there are broken rarities, thus I'm not discounting that BM-acknowledged factor at all, but I just thought I'd point out that these might be on-par with EM and should each be Uncommon like EM for consistency (or EM be brought up to Rare for consistency).

I fully get the generosity of BM not wanting to hurt players' feelings on changing rarities. How would people feel after their long-sought-after Strongarms became Uncommon? (Five of the same Rare Common Range-1-Melee-Slashing card? Yeah, okay, Uncommon, cool.) If there could be any solution to that, too, it'd be yet more work for BM -- for example, awarding gold (probably not pizza) to players to the tune of the item cost differences after the big-huge-mega-all-the-card-rarities-change-up. This has potential for annoyance to someone, but at least the gold could then be used to purchase a (nearly?) equivalent amount of Rare+ items...

(Edit: Ugh. The gold thing could be so easily exploitable, though. Look how many of us probably already have max Legendary Copycat Spacesuits or other such similar gear.)

Regards,

 

@ParodyKnaveBob: Concerning your Mimetic Armor argument, a question must be asked. Let's say that Mimetic Armor is supposed to be Common. The problem then is that you have Mail as an Uncommon. Mail demands a roll that is not in your favor, doesn't create any cards when it blocks damage, nor does it allow you to move when it blocks damage, either, nor does it doesn't heal you or hurt your attacker, either. ALL it does is block 2 damage. That's it. Mail is basically the most vanilla Armor a player can acquire.
So, how come it's an Uncommon?
As for the rest of your post, This is why both of my suggestions have to do not with making any changes NOW, in consideration of the fact that BM has plans to spend that kind of time on things WAY more important.

@Flaxative: I completely forgot to address you concerning your missing something in this thread, so, I'll do that, now; I'm trying to suggest an alternate way of deciding item rarities than this formulae, since it seems to be broken [and not in a good way] since it's going on obviously obsoleted Card Rarities.
Since nixing the rarities of 500+ cards would be an inevitable chore, as would reviewing their individual rarities, and since items with no rarities seems to be a bad thing, I have another idea. This idea assumes that--by some miracle--card rarities are actually done away with for all future cards.
The idea is simply this: .....judging the rarities of items yourselves instead of leaving their rarities in the metaphorical hands of precalculated formulae.
Think about it this way: Who made the thing? BM. Who designed the thing? BM. Who fixes the thing when it's broken? BM. Who oversees the thing? BM. Who keeps the thing going? BM.
So, you'll forgive me if I believe that something as important as item rarities should be left not in the hands of the thing [especially since--on it's own--the thing comes up with more bad Legendaries than good ones] but in the hands of a capable team who could judge more sanely, more methodically and less ROBOTically.
....you ARE sane and methodical, right, Flax?

 

Personally, I always assumed that certain lower quality cards were higher rarity than their higher quality counterparts because quality is a measure of how strong a card is, and thus a paper card of a certain power level should be less common than a bronze card of around the same power level.

Of course, this clashes with the idea that rarity also represents complexity, but at low levels it is reasonable to assume that complex cards won't be as much of a factor and thus the rarity serves a different purpose than it does later in the game. This used to be more true, but expansions added rather complex low level stuff so it's a bit skewed nowadays.

 

Mikey, in short, I'm saying that card rarity and the resultant item rarity is a fine concept, just that (as Flax already acknowledged) there are some major discrepencies. Mail should be Common. It's Armor. It decreases some damage on a standard die roll. Very simple stuff. Common. I've really no solid idea how it got labelled Uncommon many moons ago. That's a question for BM's founders -- not me. $E^ b

(My somewhat unfounded guess is basically what Dargenom suggested: Maybe a lower marked quality card with a higher actual quality got called rarer. I don't know if that's what the original goal was, but it makes more sense than much of anything else. Another guess is that die rolls originally added complexity, and then BM changed it, but some rarities got through beta as artifacts and whoops now they're here to stay? ~shrug~)

 

Complexity is mentioned as one possible qualification for a Rare rating on a card.

I've never seen the other qualifiers disclosed, but I'm pretty sure "This card is trash" also made the list. I'm not referring standard trash like Weak Strike, because it's trashiness is obvious at first glance. I'm referring to trash like Shimmering Aura and Chain Harness, which actually have an iota of complexity about them that might delude the gullible into thinking they aren't trash. The Rare rating helps propagate the delusion.

It is imperative that we have trashy rare cards, because without them we'd have no trashy legendaries. The abundance of trashy legendaries clearly demonstrates that this was a conscious design choice. There is no conceivable way it could have been done by accident.

There is obviously at least one more qualifier for a Rare rating, because there are Rare cards which don't fit either of the aforementioned categories. I call the next one the "Let's make this card a <whatever rarity>" qualifier. These show up as cards which are basically identical to other cards of the same type, but with differing rarity values. Power and effectiveness have no real bearing upon which rarity value is assigned to which card in the sequence.

Personally, I don't have a problem with these methods. If everything was set up so the quality and rarity of each card was strictly and accurately quantified, it would be a very different game. Might be better, might not be. I consider this game to be almost entirely irrational and nonsensical. There is no way I could ever take it seriously, but I can certainly have fun playing it. If anyone reading this is the sort who feels compelled to find a logical and reasonable pattern to the way everything is done in Cardhunter ... well ... okay. Good luck with that. I hope you don't let it interfere with having fun.

 

This may surprise you, but actually because we pick which cards go on items, we do 'judge the rarities of items ourselves.' (Items are not generated by a machine.)

One reason some cards have wonky rarities is actually because the items they're on require cards of those rarities.

I think probably most of the items in the game have okay rarities.

 

In light of a huge rebalance coming, I thought I'd bump this topic with a particular thought in mind. In my reminding notes below, Flaxative and I were really directly addressing others at the time, but this works pretty well as-is:

(Re: the very most recent major content expansion...)

I have a new suggestion. It won't be a pretty one to undertake, but it might have a pretty outcome at least:

1. Retain all past item rarities manually for collectors' sakes -- like you did with Hu La Houp's Vicious Circle which is epic by the current rarity calculator.
2. Change all card rarities to consistently reflect the cards' complexities.
3. Consistently reflect complexity with rarity on all future cards.
4. Then, for future items, either...
   1. manually set every single one of them to what you feel they should be -- leaving behind arbitrary card rarity and replacing it with arbitrary item rarity;
   2. change the rarity calculator to handle fun edge cases -- which unfortunately would surely be a more complex algorithm than the present one;
   3. change the rarity calculator at least somewhat and feel freer to manually tweak certain items for collectable / flavorful purposes; or,
   4. EDIT: keep the rarity calculator exactly where it is and feel freer to manually tweak certain items for collectable / flavorful purposes.

 

I actually believe most rarities are spot-on and there are few mistakes in rarity.

Mimetic Crown as a rare in contrast to Mimetic Armor totally makes sense in my opinion. The armor provides more damage reduction but less attack potential, so it's more of a regular armor. The crown provides more attack potential and less damage reduction, so it departs from the regular armors more in that sense.

I could even understand the rarity of Strong Hack - it's there if you want cheaper attacks with modest damage and no tech, and the demand for that is pretty high. It's something those who play warriors could work toward. If you look at the bronze melee warrior attacks in the game, you would notice that the cards that "maximize" one aspect of the card are rarer because they are more flexible in practice. On the other hand, the silver and gold attacks which can create more possible advantage but are less reliable or are more flexible for that case are rarer. Obliterating Chop has greater possible damage than Mighty Hack but less damage when not maximized. The case is similar for cards like Unnerving Strike, Nimble Strike, and Lunging Bash. The trend is also present with wizard cards (Volcano and Accelerate Time). There are exceptions here, and these are the cards that either have poorly assigned rarity or quality rating or were not itemized properly (e.g., Skillful Strike, Pressing Bash).

There are some obvious issues with the quality and rarity assignment of a lot of cards in the game, but these are few and far in between. Skillful Strike and Feinting Strike have equal quality but one is clearly better than the other (Resolution: replace all Skillful Strikes on all MP items with Feinting Strike). Soothing Darkness is just too weak, but if it were any stronger its rarity would be justified.

As a general rule, I feel that rarity is designated based on three general criteria:

1. The flexibility of the card's use,
2. The potential of the card when used to maximum effect, and
3. The reliability of the card.

Also, there seems to be one conditionally applied criterion: complexity.

The outliers here are usually the cards that I feel were intentionally assigned lower rarity to make some strategies more viable with a limited collection (e.g., Vicious Thrust) or were assigned poor rarity or quality ratings. This would explain a lot of things, and is consistent with most cards in the game.