Cancelling Moves - Thoughts and Suggestions

This is counter intuitive to the rest of the game. I don't care what rules you use as long as they are consistent, and right now they aren't.

 

Yeah, but the thing is, right now, the mistake you refer to is playing Card Hunter. After enough occurrences of being punished for what feels like no reason, they'll learn their lesson and stop playing.

Kinda like me.

 

One way to help out the less attentive among us (myself certainly included): If you mouse over a movement card for an encumbered character, the card is tinted red if you won't be able to move, or yellow if you're just slowed. The subtle visual reminder would help me cut down on my encumber mistakes.

 

For Slowed, armor shows you the last roll made on it... so why not record the effect of Slowed on the card the first time you try to use it? If you cancel, then next time you try to use that move it will be done under the results of that roll.

For Maze of the Mind, allow the player moving to select where they will move to as normal, then after they have done so (and the animation would normally start) THEN you reveal Maze of the Mind, cancel the player's choice, and allow the enemy to choose.

Being unable to cancel a Step attack when you simply forgot that you have encumber is a HUGE loss. And some people have abysmal memories, so do this quite often (some people meaning me and hopefully anyone else)

 

I dont understand why the system doesnt treat movement reaction cards like every other reaction card.

For example: I want to move, and there is an enemy with "Maze Of The Mind" within 5 of me. I select my movement card, chose my movement location, and then the MotM card pops up and says 'Nope, you're going here'. It doesnt lock me into an attack card just because the enemy next to me has a block ability. I dont know he has a block, so I try to attack him. I'm then told that he has a chance to block my attack.

For something like Slowed, allow me to choose where I want to go. Then roll the die. Oh no, I've been slowed. Now instead of moving where I wanted to, I'm going to move less. Either move my character in the direction I was heading x spaces less, or let me re-pick where I want to go with the new information.

Am I missing any other card effects that would complicate this kind of fix? Allow people to cancel movement cards, and in return, there are movement reaction cards that will trigger once you've selected a movement location.

 

Reactive Trip plus the non-random ones (everything with Encumber and Energizing Move, Rushing Aura, Flight Aura, Teleport Self).

 

Again, I dont see why any of those cards cant be solved with this. With every one of those examples you can let the player 'lock in' the movement by selecting his movement location, then apply the effect afterwards. Theres no reason to lock the player into movement just by selecting the card. Lock them in by selecting the target and apply effects, just like every other card. At worst, this means that sometimes you'll have to re-select your movement to something different then what you chose, or have the game change your distance moved.

 

I don't wish to debate the point, but I wish to add +1 to the camp that would like it if moves could be cancelled. I would like to be able to cancel move cards after I have accidentally or intentionally clicked on them..

 

How about this solution: Move cards can be cancelled if there were no effects like "slowed".
This means that move cards are cancel able by default,but every roll die effect makes it lose the cancel option.

 

One possibility with slowed is to have the player click to roll the die; the move could be canceled before the roll.

 

Well I just want to add my voice of agreement to the fact that this all is a frustrating problem.

And though I don't know the best solution to the core problem, I do think that the one OBVIOUS thing that really needs to be done is to change hybrid Move/Attack cards (aka the Step attacks) so that on mouseover they show the MOVE radius (including as many modifiers as possible) instead of the attack radius. Clicking the card then realizing I missed an encumber effect and can't actually move (but also can't take it back) is super frustrating, as is having to manually calculate where I can reach around terrain and enemy threatened areas with the Step 3 and Step 4 cards. It's worth bearing in mind that the attack range on the VAST majority of these cards is 1, and attack range 1 is much easier to calculate than multiple square movement (which sometimes have to deal with encumbrance etc).

 

I'm just wondering if anyone on the dev team can tell us if a fix for this may be in the pipeline. I've done a bit of programming, so I can understand if this is a tricky proposition.

 

This has probably been mentioned many times in this topic but my main problem is not being able to cancel movement combined with encumber.

I don't know anything more annoying that Walk showing me that I can move 2 steps, and after I click the card, it says: "Just kidding, you have encumber and cannot move at all, ha ha! P.s. You lost both your card AND your turn".

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I have done that maybe 200+ times. Sure, you could argue that it's player "skill" to notice things like that, but I think it would be more fun for everyone if we didn't have to to stare at the screen 24/7 and be aware of everything. And the problem is not that the game is not giving me some information, the problem is that the game is giving me false information.

As for not being able to cancel movement.. I wouldn't have a problem with it if what I describe above would be fixed.

Short version: I don't have a problem with not being able to cancel movement but when I hover a movement card and it visually shows me where I can move, effects of encumber (or other similar modifiers) should be included.

This is an awesome idea and I hope the devs read it. Rarely do suggestions make this much sense.

 

Indeed, maybe it could show *known* effects from the beginning. If there is a die roll involved, maybe that could be hinted at too by showing the possible moves in a different colour, e.g. purple instead of blue. Good effects could be shown too, e.g. that card that makes all your moves into teleports.

Of course, that may make players rage all the more when they fall victim to a reactive trip or something...

 

Good points. It's not a matter of player skill at all—it's inconsistent and unintuitive and misleading game design, and the proposed fix would ameliorate it somewhat.

 

Since we're under new management... $;^ J

It's been years since I've read this whole thread, hence my apology now if I'm repeating someone else, but my short suggestion on how to fix cancelling Moves:

Let Moves be cancelled. It's just another card. Start card. Cancel card. Nothing happens.
Except. If any randomness occurs (die roll, Hypno/Mind, etc.), or any new card is revealed, set a simple variable to say, "Nope, can't cancel this Move now." It should be so obvious to a player why that can't get cancelled, that it shouldn't even need Gary to explain it. I would just gray out the Cancel button at that point. (However, the first ever time this happens, it could be pretty hilarious to have Melvin pop up, "Uh uh uh~♪" with a quickie "You can always cancel Moves like any other cards—unless anything affects your Move that you could not have known in advance." Ha ha, you could even split that into two messages to have a crushing "Ah ha!" emote on the "unless..." part. heheheheh But, I know, Melvin's generally nicer to you than to Gary, heh.)

Even if the first time you ever experience this were in a PvP match (Monkeys! or Hypno), then the 20 seconds maximum it should require to read Melvin's info should generally be enough, right? Not turn into a bunch of confused hard feelings, time wasted trying to discuss with opponent, etc. etc. (Not 100%, but a huge help, I would think.)

@Scared Little Girl and @Flaxative are right in that the game displaying wrong information is quite the culprit, but I suggest can_cancel_move = is_unknown_revealed; might be the simplest stopgap at least.

 

This is one of those things that doesn't get suggested nearly as often as "more races" or "rebalance werewolf form," but is probably way more important for new player retention... I hope fixes come down the pipeline!

 

I've read perhaps 5 - 10% of the posts in order to know what this thread is about, but I hate to be on the side of the Nay-sayers. No matter how bad the current situation is for some, I don't see a good way to improve this:

• Making moves cancelable in some instances but not in others is a real mess. And in my opinion is even worse than it is today. It's totally out of your control whether you can cancel the card or not. But I agree that it MIGHT be a good idea to apply some effects directly to the card texts. I never played Heartstone (or similar games) myself, but I know from streams that for example decreased mana costs are updated on all affected cards immediately. For effects that I already know about (encumber-attachments, encumber-effects on hand, ...), why do I have to keep track of those myself? Isn't this why I play card games on a PC in the first place, so that the game helps me with tedious tasks like keeping an eye on the rule book? Sure, the game can't take into account what the player can't know about (effects on opponent's hands or effects that depend on randomness).
• Forcing the player to play normally and then let the system have to correct you on your plans is a nice idea, but especially for MP a ridiculous approach, as you would have to (potentially) make each move twice. This is already an issue for AI that you can totally screw by encumbering a character. The resulting moves are not even close to good in these cases.
• Letting the player plan a move and then letting the system auto-apply encumber effects would be a reason for more players to raise their voices than are speaking up here. By clicking a target-cell, the game can't really tell, what my second to last movement step was (I regularly ask myself why I have to have a specific character orientation after some move, while I can freely choose my orientation if I don't move at all but stay on my cell), so if the system automatically would cut off the last move point because of some encumber-effect, on which cell would I end up on? So, I'd say the player has to be always in control of where a character will land on a movement action (except for Maze and similar effects).
• You can also mis-click with other card types so what's the big deal here? I, for one, have auto-target on because it saves me roughly 40% of the clicks I would have to do without it. Each attack or assist card may therefore end up as a mis-click. What ever different system you would like to have established for move cards would be by far more complex to explain and even then, some players (and I would say more than today) will still argue "Why can't I do THAT if I want to at this or that point?". And most players should only end up with a non-cancelable move card a few number of times.
• Have you all ever spend a thought on a halting card? This effect is also handled differently by the game and no-one will likely ask for this effect to be handled the same way as every regular move. Move cards aren't clickable anymore after your character got halted. Or Squeamish that also automatically prevents you from doing some actions.

So, all in all, the game could be assisting the player more with showing active effects when inspecting cards, but the game never treated all cards equally. There were always special cases where the player was completely blocked from some choices. So, demanding cancelable moves to achieve equality among the different card types is an illusion.

Imagine, any of the suggested changes were implemented and some new player would come to world chat and would rant that they got into a situation where their action was critical to their play but a mis-clicked move wasn't cancelable. In the current situation, one could respond that all moves aren't cancelable because of potential effects on moves. In such a future, you would have to explain that moves ARE in fact cancelable BUT NOT IF your opponent holds some specific cards or what not. Sorry, but I prefer a somewhat simple and elegant solution, and making a move cancelable depending on SOMETHING doesn't make a mis-click less frustrating. Perhaps, the underlying issue rather is, that new players just don't see such move-affecting things early enough in the campaign to get a feeling for them.

 

My memory of it is foggy at best, but I'm pretty sure that you could actually cancel move cards and step attack cards in Loot & Legends, which was heavily based on Card Hunter. Of course, that game didn't have PvP, so it only needed to consider behavior against the GM. Does anyone remember how exactly it worked in that game? Did the game just not have any cards that react on a movement card being played? (It's a shame Loot & Legends was ill-fated, it had some cool ideas, like the Psychic and Alchemy archetypes for Priests, 3-card end of turn hand retention and fully deterministic blocks and armor.)

I'm trying to think of how exactly the interactions would work in CH for a move card to be cancelled after being played, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to make the system work. The best I can think of is this: When the player tries to play a move card, all the relevant player attachments and player's cards in hands that can affect the movement trigger and the tile selection grid appears. The player can then still cancel the move. This will mean that the player can try to move, reveal something like Quickness Aura/Energizing Move/Heavy Armor in their hand and then cancel their move. This is definitely wonky and can have some weird interactions with cards that care about (the oldest) revealed card(s). Alternatively, the cards are only revealed to the enemy when the player does actually commit to the move, meaning the animations for the effects being revealed wouldn't be synchronized anymore. That's probably the less wonky of the two options in this stage.

Once the player does commit to moving towards the tile of their choice, enemy cards that can affect that move trigger, such as Hypnotic Beacon, Maze of the Mind or Reactive Trip. This would mean the design space for enemy reactions to movement has to be limited to effects that cancel, randomize or hand over control of the player's movement, non-attachment reactions that encumber an enemy's move wouldn't work here since the player's input could be rendered invalid. Alternatively, if a card that has a reaction that encumbers the player from the enemy's hand is implemented, the player could then be allowed to choose from a grid again, this time with the encumbered effect being considered and the move not being cancelable... Which brings us back to square one in this specific scenario! (It probably also sucks to play a card and choose a tile to move to and then have the enemy randomize/take control of the result anyway. Why does the game let you pick a tile if it doesn't end up mattering anyway? This makes such effects feel more frustrating.)

Eh, it all sounds wonky. It's not clean, but then you could also argue the way moves work currently are wonky and not entirely consistent with how Attack/Assist/Utility cards work. Honestly it's not a dealbreaker for me either way and I think the game hammered it into me to not play move cards recklessly pretty swiftly. I can't speak for how others think of the matter, but count me in the camp of people who care more about the balance of Form card pools and the addition of the ubiquitous small race that is so iconic to the fantasy genre yet is curiously absent from player parties.

I am, of course, talking about Goblins.

 

Yes, please!

This wouldn't actually help the issue of cancelling moves, though. And would be a lot of work to catch all the weird cases like Massive Chop, but it would make the game better. (And it would help the AI even more than players, since the AI is famously blind to attachments.)

The second option is my preferred solution to this issue. Also, Unstable Bolt would pop-up or something, but not actually roll its effect until the move is confirmed.

Yes it sucks, but does it suck more than clicking on a move card and immediately having your opponent or the RNG take control of your move before you can cancel? I feel equal frustration both ways.