Instead of waiting while the opponent choose his cards at the beginning, both players can choose the cards at the same time. I still don't get why i must wait while my opponent choose his deck in QD. Both players can choose the cards at the same time... saving 5 mins each battle this way.
If we had designed the game around QD in the first place then yes, we absolutely would have done this. It's a great idea from a design perspective. Unfortunately our battle networking was designed around the assumption that one player would play at a time, and that every other instance of the battle (on every player machine, spectator machine, and on the server) would wait for that player - and that player only - to play. This assumption greatly simplified the task of keeping all the battles in the same state, and given how much of a nightmare this has been on other projects I still feel it was the correct approach for us to take. Breaking this assumption for special cases on the other hand has proven to be very costly, as we discovered over months of repeatedly tweaking and fixing the Resign function, which effectively allows someone to end the game when it isn't their turn. Assumptions like this tend to have knock-on effects regarding how other systems are designed too, so off the top of my head I can already see that much of the battle timer system would need to be rebuilt to handing counting down both clocks simultaneously. And then we have to add support for stalemates, where both timers run out during the QD draw phase. And then we need to support stalemates in our match results and scoring and league leaderboards. And then... These things unravel fast*. So, yeah, I agree this would be great. But hopefully you can see now why it's probably not going to happen. * Fun fact: A similar unraveling occurred when adding co-op to the campaign. That's why co-op battles took only a fortnight to implement and yet co-op adventuring took about six months.
I see, a simple thing like that is very hard or imposible to implement with the current system of the game, i understand. Thanks.
Great synopsis of the challenges that revolve around what seem like "easy" suggestions to us players. I know someone at some point along the way suggested a change where during the draft process a player would immediately draw their next three cards upon selecting so they could start looking at them while their opponent made a selection. So basically it'd be: Both players draw 3 cards to begin Player 1 selects a card Player 1 draws 3 cards End Player 1's turn Player 2 selects a card Player 2 draws 3 cards End Player 2's turn ... Any thoughts on that?
I think this might give a large timer advantage to player 2 in situations where both players take similar amounts of time to think about their picks. While both players are thinking about their first pick, Player 1's timer is running. Once Player 1 decides on a card, Player 2 can select their card within just a second or two. Then it's back to Player 1's timer while both players think again. If both players take, say, 15 seconds per pick, that's an advantage of 13-14 seconds per pick to Player 2, which will add up to four or five minutes of extra timer for Player 2 by the time the draft completes.
That's actually an astute observation (and tangentially it's the same reason why I think fast players tend to appear even more fast against slow players, and slow players end up playing "even slower" against them). I do wonder if it would actually play out that way in practice. Many picks take very little decision time, usually it's only a few here or there that are particularly thought provoking, and depending on how these fall the "time thinking advantage" you describe could actually bounce back and forth between the two players multiple times during the draft.
