[Suggestion] The DRAFT

As some of you may already know a draft mode is already on the dev's wish list. But I have been thinking a lot lately about how to implement it into Cardhunter.

The Problem:
The main problem a traditional draft mode tends to face is the huge time commitment it requires from the players. A typical draft consists of three phases: the wait until a certain amount of players have signed up (most likely 4 or 8 players), the deck building process (where you can choose the cards for your deck) and the actual games. My estimate for the wait time would be around 15 minutes (hugely dependent on player base and entry fee), in the deck building part you would have to pick 30 items and assuming you have to wait for every player to finish his pick before you get to the next pick, that could take up to a minute each so in total between 20-30 minutes and lastly playing three games might take another hour. So in total you would need almost two hours to play a draft and this may be too big of time commitment for the casual player base.

The Suggestion:
My idea is now to allow players to take part in drafts in whatever time-frame they want.
In order to to this the deckbuilding process needs to be separated for each player individually. So one way to this is the following:
First you are presented with a choice between three random unique characters (e.g. Elve-mage, dwarf-mage and dwarf-cleric) and you are required to pick one. Afterwards you have to choose one out of three items for each slot, one slot after another. The order of which slots are presented first should be random and there is no going back and changing what items you've picked. Due to power token constraints, there have to be required properties for the items offered, in order to avoid trivial choices: Until you have used up all the available power tokens, there should always be one no token, one clear and one gold token item.
After that it would only offer items that can be used (e.g. if you have no tokens left to spend on your last item you would choose between three no-token items). I also suggest that in each pick all the items share the same rarity (incase you are allowed to keep drafted items, this becomes important). After you have picked your 10 items (9 in case of a warrior) you repeat the process for another two characters that you again choose from 3 random ones respectively.

The other part of a draft that is time-commitment heavy is the tournament style games. My approach here would be, to have it work similar to ranked games: Once you are done with the deckbuilding you can que to play other drafted decks (playing against ai wouldn't be an option in this mode). You can continue doing so until you have either lost three times or won 20 times, whichever comes first. After that you have to start over with a new deck. The reward system would be similar to ranked play but a bit more tail heavy (i.e. the first couple wins yield standard chests, 5th a double rare, 10th an epic, 15th an double epic and 20th a legendary). But note that the rewards you get, go directly to your collection and don't affect your drafted deck, which you are not allowed to modify once you have picked all the items.

The great thing about this proposed system, is that you can stop at any point (except the middle of a match obviously) and come back later (e.g. you can set up your first to characters and come back another day and finish the last one).

The Entry Fee:

This is a hard one to decide, so i'm just gonna introduce a couple different options:

1. Pizza/Gold: You can participate in the draft by either spending x amount of pizza or y of gold. But if you decide to choose pizza you get to keep your drafted items.

2. Draft tickets: In this case you have to pay x draft tickets (sort of a new currency) to participate. There are numerous ways to obtain draft tickets: Buy them for pizza, win them for winning a certain amount of draft games (additionally to the chests) and from daily quests (which I will discuss in another post). Here i would propose to allow players to keep their drafted items.

 

While interesting, if I understand you correctly, this takes away from the draft environment where you're playing against people that were pulling from the same pool of items. Also there is a potential for players being unable to find games against other drafted decks after a certain time period.

Certainly this is a different type of environment, more of a randomly constrained deck building process. It doesn't give me the sense of a tournament at all. My question is, how to you determine winners? Do you win if you get 20 wins, but not 19? So you could have a draft where nobody wins? Loosing would seems to be the logical outcome of most, if not all draft decks in this case.

 

I'm interested to know whether I'm the only one who is opposed to a draft mode rather than similarly structured shared card pool alternative. I understand many of the various draft modes from MtG and have played a bunch in the past. I think it kind of makes sense for MtG as there are very few limitations on playing any one particular card other than mana colour and quantity. However, for Card Hunter in addition to all the basic flaws of draft systems there are also the many limitations imposed by races, classes and item slots. I think I'll take some time to outline in detail the issues and my alternative, but in the meantime here are a few points.

* Use of items in Card Hunter is very restrictive and ideally every slot should be filled.
* Adds additional unnecessary constraints on deck building with little to no benefit.
* Card pool should be at least 25%-50% larger than the deck size to allow for tweaking either during construction or between matches.
* Add more randomisation to any already very random system and further dilutes the value of player skill.

The most important thing though is what skills should be tested when playing Card Hunter competitively? At the moment it is card acquisition, deck building (and all that it entails) and playing the game. Under your system we would replace card acquisition with item evaluation in vacuum ie. how good is item X when you don't know what other items you will have to go with it? While this is an interesting skill, it's not one highly value, I'd much rather a strong focus on deck construction and playing the game with the limitations of card acquisition removed. There is already so much randomness in the game why add more before deck construction even occurs? That just means that randomisation is having a much larger say over the outcome of a tournament than player skill, especially when you realise that changing the card pool is the one thing players cannot do on the fly (where they can change way they play and often tweak their decks between matches using a sideboard).

I'm not opposed to having some kind of draft mode after a tournament style mode (that includes deck construction) has been implemented, but I wouldn't want it beforehand. So by all means have a restricted card pool and even a randomised restricted card pool, but please give all competitors equal access to the cards in that pool for the duration of the competition, at least at first.

Here's a link to a brief discussion on the topic from a previous thread.
http://www.cardhunter.com/forum/thr...yer-without-the-gear-grind-o.1905/#post-21733

 

Sure, every player having full access to the exact same card pool (perhaps randomized) is great and I expect that to happen... but that's not a draft. Certainly with a draft there needs to be some tweaking of the card pools so that there is ample ability to fill out your crew and have extras to adapt. Evaluation of an item in a vacuum it is not though. You get to see a portion of the card pool when selecting your cards. You know generally what cards are decent and what strategies exist as possibilities already so you plan accordingly, constrained by what your options are at the time. That's draw of drafts in the first place.

 

Sorry I should have spelt out more clearly that all I am saying is that I hope that draft comes after whatever this core competitive mode may be.

I agree that there is additional strategy that drafts offer and I did play those down in that last post. Also I would definitely play drafts. But I think my general point that Drafts < Shared Pool Tournament mode stands, but it's up to each person to decide whether or not they agree.

Also my apologies if I have derailed the thread, I can remove these posts and start a new one if you like.

 

Any thoughts on "entry fee", rewards, and rounds per match? Best of 1 might be too random. Best of 3 might be too long? I'm worried about how much time commitment a player must allocate for a whole draft event (including drafting and deck building). It really all depends on cost and reward layout.

Edit. Will the card pool be something like Magic where it's something you can keep? Or will it be a separate pool of inventory?

 

The proposed draft mode isn't a tournament, much rather similar to ranked games. So like there is no "winner" in ranked games, there isn't one in this mode either. It's about making the best out of what you were presented with and getting as far as possible (kind of like a survival mode). I realize that some people would prefer a tournament mode, but i'm not proposing to have draft replace it but much rather be implemented as a third mode.

No i don't think that should be problem since you are not competing against decks that were drafted at the same time as yours, but rather against all drafted decks that are in play (i.e. the ones have lost less than twice and won less than 19 times).

In my opinion card evaluation and being able to adjust strategies to what you are presented with are exactly the skills that are detrimental in a draft format. Furthermore luck and randomness has always played a huge part in any draft mode, some like it some don't. And i understand that there are a lot of limitations to deckbuilding in cardhunter, but all i'm saying is that if you are going to implement a draft, this is a good way to deal with it. Also a lot of thing in this system may need fine tuning (e.g. wether after you drafted you're deck you get a few random "chests" and can make alterations with those to your deck).

That being said I really like your proposed system of tournament mode with random restricted card pools, equal for all competitors. But i just think those two are two completely different formats and shouldn't be pairwise excluding.

One last thing I forgot to mention is that drafts (if done right) are a huge source of income for the devs. In many ccgs the draft revenue even exceeds the one from booster sales.

 

Ultimately I think this won't ever be an issue. If you're picking upwards of 60 items, even if they're not optimal, you're going to have an interesting build. This is of course you pick toward a set of strategies for some group of characters, as opposed to random good items (I imagine many people may grab too many weapons...etc)

I agree with you on Items first, then characters, although if you haven't laid down the code architecture I suggest allowing for a decision for which process goes first.

I think there's some potential for fun to have to choose from a pool of characters, THEN draft around it.