The current card rarity system doesn't work and Card Hunter would be more fun without it

Whoa, wait. What's that thread title? Isn't that a bit extreme? - Yes, you read that right.

The current card rarity system doesn't work and Card Hunter would be more fun without it.

I'm arguing the extreme position on purpose here.

Before I start, let me say that Card Hunter has a very good balancing system, which is the formula that calculates item level by the quality of the included cards. Blue / Yellow token are then assigned to the item, and you are limited in what level of items you can bring to the combat.

The level / token system works really well. Card rarity doesn't and it only messes up that system. The short explanation of the problem is that legendary items are either boring like Antioch's Figurine or game changing like Vibrant Pain. In theory, rare cards are the same power level as common cards to keep items like Vibrant Pain from happening. The reality is that cards like Nimble Strike are still in the game. There already is a Vibrant Pain thread so let's not focus on that specific item / card. There are enough other cards that are off balance. Let's look at the big picture.

I'd rather propose a new item rarity system that is not based on card rarity at all. It's a harsh judgement but if after 3 years of hard work, card rarity still doesn't work, maybe the concept is flawed. To simplify the game, I'll start with removing it entirely.

So imagine the following:

1. Card rarity is removed from the game. Card quality is the only measure of card power.
1.1. Powerful rare cards are bumped up one quality level: Nimble Strike becomes gold, Firestorm bronze etc. (Or their power is reduced to be in line with other cards of the same quality)
1.2. All current cards are reviewed and the current quality inconsistencies are fixed. For example, cards with the same effect at the same quality level like Strong Stab and Potent Stab are merged.

2. Item rarity stays in the game, but it is now based on different criteria:

(A) How balanced the card quality is. Rarer items have more powerful cards for their level, but are balanced by having weaker cards or drawbacks.
For example, an item with just one difference in card quality like Plain Old Armor (Heavy Armor lvl 3, bronze / paper / paper) is common. An armor at the same level, but with silver / paper / black cards like Vassal Plate would be uncommon. With a gold card, it would be rare.

(B) Whether the cards are unusual for that item slot or not. Staying with the lvl 3 armor examples, Sharp Shell has Lunging Thrust, a move/attack card, which is rather unusual for armor, so Sharp Shell should be rare. (It also would be higher level because other bronze / bronze / bronze items like Tough Hide Shirt are level 9 instead...)

2.1. Items are priced by level (for example, level * 5 gold)

2.2. Legendary items are truly special. I don't have a good idea for them yet, but "legendary" should be reserved for items that break the rules in some significant way, such as having one more or less card than usual, or unusually high quality cards for the level or only cards that are not normally found on the slot. Or give effects that go beyond just cards, like bonus HP or extra draw. Or they could have some visible effect on the figurine.

Legendary items should give some special effect that normal items simply can't have. Otherwise I'd rather have no legendary items at all.

 

Some additions:
The item level formula should be simplified, straightened and strictly enforced.

Each quality is worth points:
Black -3
Paper 0
Bronze 3
Silver 6
Gold 9
Emerald 12
Sapphire 15

For 3 card items, total points = level. For 6 card items, points = 2x level. Level 1 = 0 points. No exceptions. Note that this is fairly close to the current level for most items.
(All item levels except 1 are multiples of 3)

3 card level 9 items have 1 blue token, level 18 items 1 yellow token.

For weapons, level 6 one blue, level 9 two blue, level 15 blue / yellow, level 18 two yellow.

---

Under this simpler system, Vibrant Pain would have 6 weapon gold cards, so it would be a level 9*6/2 = 27 common item.

 

Well, it seems to me that the correct approach would involve a bit of re-coding, so that the automatic values items get are only a suggestion, and can be overridden by the devs. That way things stay as they are until a card or item starts to cause problems, and then the devs can override the automatic values with new values.

Can't say it bothers me all that much, though. Maybe a legendary item is sometimes legendary for its badness.

 

Another problem of the current system is that too many cards are crammed into the narrow band of paper - bronze - silver. At the low levels, you'll want a bit more differentiation.

The best example are the move cards. Currently we have Shuffle and Walk as paper and Run and Dash as Bronze. That's bound to create problems.

My suggestion is to add another quality level at the low end: Silk, between Paper and Bronze. The color would be a between beige and white.

The move cards would be switched to:
Shuffle - black
Walk - paper
Run - silk
Dash - bronze

Silk would also take over current stronger paper cards like
- Reliable Hide Armor (1, 1+, keep) and Mail (2, 4+, keep) (compared to Cloth Armor and Weakened Armor),
- Officer's Harness
- Consuming Touch (dam 4) (compared to Draining Touch (dam 3) and Sapping Touch (dam 2))
- Blind Rage
- Fire Spray (dam 2) (compared to Ember Spray (dam 1))
- Stone Spikes
- Big Zap (dam 5) (compared to Zap (dam 4) and Little Zap)
- Firestorm

On the other hand, silk would also get the weaker Bronze cards:
- Lunging Thrust vs. Lunging Hack (paper) and Lunging Strike / Penetrating Lunge (bronze)
- Jarring Block and Hit The Deck vs. Weak Block and Block
- Acid Blast vs. Hot Spot
- Able Stab vs. Tricky Stab
- Short Spark (rng 4) vs. Powerful Spark (rng 6)
- Light Heal (3) vs. Minor Heal (2, paper) and Limited Heal (4, bronze)
- Twin Heals vs. Healing Pulse
- Kindler vs. Firestarter
- Charge vs. Bull Rush
- Simple Bash (no step) vs. Lunging Bash (Step 1)
- Trained Bludgeon (dam 6) vs. Strong Bludgeon (dam 8)

The point system I mentioned in the last post would be switched to
Paper 0
Silk 2
Bronze 4
Silver 6

The added bonus is that now you can generate any number 1 - 18 with the available cards.

 

Forget that. There are over 1500 items in CH (Category:Items). The absolute last thing you want to do is manually fiddle with the item levels. That's a nightmare you'll never wake up from.

First of all, it's going to be a pain to rejiggle all the manual changes every time you release new cards or do a major rebalancing.

Second of all, once the floodgates of manual adjustments are open, everyone will ask to see their favorite items bumped up or their most hated items bumped down. With the formula you have a strong argument to block off these requests.

 

He shouldn't forget it because it's probably the best solution for the problem. It's how I would do it as well.

Devs need to have a way to manually fix items. Why? Because human common sense will always beat any kind of automatic system. Like Gerry said, the automatic system should only be a default value that the devs can tweak if needed. This way you don't have to tweak thousands of items individually, but can make changes if needed.

Items should not be thought of as just a bunch of different cards. Items are a combination of cards, and different cards have different kind of synergy. Cards A and B could be much more powerful together than cards A and C, even if all the cards were the same power level. It's this synergy that the automatic system cannot see, which is why human intervention is sometimes needed. You won't be able to build an automatic system that is perfect.

I do agree that card rarity should be removed from the game because we deal with items, not cards. It is just completely pointless information that makes things more complex for new players. I personally didn't even know card rarity existed until a few weeks ago when someone pointed it out to me, and now that I know, nothing has changed for me.

 

Additional notes on item rarity:

The main criterion of item rarity should be the strongest card. Why?

Because even though an item with a very strong card for that level will be balanced by having weak cards, you can still get lucky and have your strongest cards at the top of your deck. The strongest card in the deck has the greatest potential to unbalance the game.

If you've played any of the drawback item challenges, you've seen how swingy combats can get with a lot of strong and weak cards in the deck. So really, you'll want people to use common = balanced items while they are learning the game and move to more extreme items later.

My suggestion for the item rarity calculation is based on the above added card quality = item level:
black -3 / paper 0 / silk 2 / bronze 4 / silver 6 / gold 9 / emerald 12 / sapphire 15

First, divide the level of the item by 3 to get the average quality. If the value of the strongest card is less than 3 higher than the average, it's a common item. If it's less than 6 higher, it's uncommon. Less than 9 higher, rare. More than 9, epic.

For a level 6 item, the average would be 2.
With 3 silk cards, the highest card is 2, so the difference is zero and it's a common.
With a bronze (4), a silk and a paper, the difference is 2, so it's still a common.
With a silver (6) and two papers, the difference is 4 and it's an uncommon item.
With an emerald (12) and two blacks the best card would be 10 higher than the average, so you'd have an epic item.

For a level 18 item, the average would be 6.
With only silver cards, the item would be common.
With at least one gold card, it would be uncommon.
With an emerald card, it would be rare.

 

There isn't just synergy between the three or six cards on an item, but between all cards in three 36 card decks that I bring to the combat. You can't just measure the synergy of a small set.

It's up to the individual player's deck building skill to decide whether any combination of 3 or 6 equally valued cards is more powerful than a different combination. In any case all you do is shift the deckbuilding skill from "find the glitches in the automatic level formula" to "find the synergy that the dev's haven't seen and adjusted yet". It just creates a spiral.

And to go back to Vibrant Pain, which is the poster boy for the problem - this card isn't powerful because of some clever synergy between six nimble strikes. It's powerful because nimble strike should not be a silver card. It should be at least a gold card, and as such a level 18 weapon should not have more than 3 on it.

Here's something I learned about game design:
The more complicated a ruleset is, the easier it is to abuse. If you want a balanced ruleset, the trick is to keep it simple and flatten all corners that can be used to build a min-maxed, overpowered combination. (By the way the same applies to tax systems but governments just don't understand that)

It seems to be the intuitive human reaction to address every little exception and balance every little detail but that just creates the opposite effect. With more exceptions and more detail you just give people more tools to abuse the system.

 

Of course you can measure synergy of a small set. Synergy does not require some fixed number of cards, even two cards can have synergy with each other.

Lets take Blood Locket as an example. It has three cards which work very well together. Even the negative trait is a good thing in most cases because it doesn't really interfere with WoW or PoK, and lets you draw a new card. Now if you made an item that had 3 random cards with the same power level, that item would most likely be inferior to Blood Locket because there probably wouldn't be as much synergy between the cards. The automatic card evaluation system would however assume that the items are equally powerful and adjust levels and costs accordingly.

An example of bad synergy in an item would be Arrogant Armor paired up with Mass Frenzy. It wouldn't be a completely useless item but there wouldn't be any synergy either. There are many other examples I could come up with.

That's what I meant when I said that automatic system would fail in certain situations. It just lacks the common sense to look at an item and evaluate how well that item performs compared to others.

Deckbuilding skill shouldn't be trying to find which items are universally better than others. Deckbuilding skill should be about combining different items that work well together to build decks. What you talk about there is making the game imbalanced on purpose and letting players use their "skill" to find those handful of cards that are worth using, while ignoring others.

Yes, but now we are talking about a different thing. Nobody ever said Vibrant Pain has great synergy.

 

You're probably looking for St. Portia's Mail.

 

I really hope something gets done. Because I love this game, but being competitive in MP means grinding out items which are too strong for their power token cost. To make matters worse, the most efficient items tend to be epics and legendaries.
On the other hand, a game can be more fun when uber-items exist. So maybe an alternate solution is to limit the amount of legendaries and epic items per build by some means other than just power tokens.

 

You're overlooking that each Wizard equips 4 arcane items. If Blood Locket had some sort of level or token penalty because of the synergy, you just shift the optimal build to Booming Ring + Runestone (or similar). It would give you the benefit of two Blood Lockets at a lower price. Each item is still just three (or six) out of 3 x 36 cards. You can always combine the right cards for deck synergy. If it's more expensive to get the synergy on one item, just use two different ones.

Which was my point. Yes, of course some items will be more powerful not because of the individual cards, but because they grant cards that mesh well together. It's the mark of a good player to identify and use this synergy and a collectible card game should reward that, not punish it.

 

Ok, back to the original topic!

Above, I suggested two factors for item rarity - the most powerful card on the item, and any cards that are unusual for the slot. I've outlined the first category above, so here is how the unusual cards work.

Let's go with an example first. I'll create two warrior weapons, both spears.
(1) Hoplite's Spear - 2x Stab, 2x Potent Stab, Able Stab, Shifty Stab
(2) Spear of Winter - 2x Stab, Chilling Rime, Cold Snap, Cone Of Cold, Icy Block

Intuitively you'd expect the first one to be common, the other to be epic or legendary. A spear that summons cold attacks is more unusual. So let's create a system that assigns rarity in that way.

First step, we assign a standard item to every card. For most of these, this is just making an explicit rule for the way those items are designed right now anyway.

Weapon - Most melee attack cards, Ouch!, Fumble, Obvious Maneuver etc.
Staff - Arcane attacks, like zaps, jets, sprays, sparks...
Divine Weapon - none of the current card set (but see below)
Helmet - Quick Reaction, War Cry, Wimpy etc.
Shield - Blocks, parries, Dropped Guard
Heavy Armor - most armor cards like Mail
Robes - Resistant Armor, Hover, Arcane Aura, Teleport Self, Reflexive Teleport
Divine Armor - Holy Armor, Inspiring Armor
Boots - Most movement cards
Arcane Item - Non-attack spells like Hot Spot, Arcane Feedback
Divine Item - All holy and unholy spells, like healing spells, Unholy Power, Demonic Miasma etc.
Elf Skill - Pathfinder, Slippery, Elvish Insight, Squeamish etc.
Human Skill - Leadership, team moves etc.
Dwarf Skill - Toughness etc.
Martial Skill - Slicer, Bruiser, Impaler, All Out Attack etc.
Divine Skill - Holy Presence, Altruism, Talented Healer etc.
Arcane Skill - Firestarter, Dimensional Traveler etc.

Next, each of the items can take a number of cards from another item category.
Each card on the item that is not assigned to the item itself, or part of the allowed slots below, increases the rarity by one step.
In other words, there will be items with unusual card combinations, but they will be more rare. As you would expect.

Weapon - 2 shield cards
Staff - 2 weapon cards, 1 shield card, 3 arcane item cards
Divine Weapon - 4 weapon cards, 3 divine item cards, 1 shield card
Helmet - 2 heavy armor cards, 1 weapon card, 1 human skill card
Shield - n/a
Heavy Armor - n/a
Robes - 1 heavy armor card, 1 arcane item card
Divine Armor - 2 heavy armor cards, 2 divine item cards
Boots - 1 heavy armor card
Arcane Item - 2 staff cards
Divine Item - n/a
Elf Skill - 2 movement cards
Human Skill - n/a
Dwarf Skill - 1 armor card, 1 block card, 1 martial skill card
Martial Skill - 2 weapon cards
Divine Skill - 2 divine item cards
Arcane Skill - 2 arcane item cards, 2 staff cards