Announcing: Card Hunter PvP Spring Season

Yeah, I'd be disappointed if only the ten best PvP players can get those skins. OTOH, those figures weren't "must buys" for me in the first place.

 

I am not interested in skins at all - would rather take 3 chests than 3 skins

 

@Kalin, @Lord Feleran: If you rank in the final seasonal standings, it will be up to you to bargain with Blue Manchu about the prizes. These are what they wanted to give, and I am not changing them at this time. Sorry, hope you understand

 

Nice. Love the warrior slimes. Too bad BM failed once again by not having event/general news on their main page. So stupid.

 

*ahem* That is entirely uncalled for.

 

BM is very busy pushing out new content and features. This is something I'm running with their blessing, but a large part of the point is that it's something they don't need to put work into.

 

It's more then their blessing as they chose the prizes structure. And puting on the main page a part where the important news and the current running events isn't really a hard and time consuming thing to do. It can even be done with simple html. Even I can do it.

Anyway, when do your weekly rankings reset? Same time as Randimar? Just to know when I can start trying my luck in MP after this lost week.

 

I agree with what many others have said about the top ~10. I haven't looked at the rankings much, but I do know there is a pretty stagnate group at the top of the rankings. Not to diminish their skill, but the content of the their decks are not matchable by the rest of us. So I'd like to see the prize structure stretched with a little less emphasis on the top as well.

 

Hey, I agree, if BM people see this and decide to put it on the front page that would be great. I don't know who runs the twitter account, so I'll just spam mentions here... @Jon @Farbs @Megadestructo @Ben_Lee

They reset a little more than a day after Randimar's.

So, to be clear—
1) The "Most Wins" category is there to reward players who can't make the highest ratings, but play a lot.
2) The "Highest Rating" category is to encourage high-rated players to keep playing.

The goal of the Highest Rating category isn't to give prizes to everyone in the Top 100. It's precisely to encourage high-ranked players to, rather than camp their ratings, remain active and keep playing, which is good for the health of the environment.

 

I like this. No, its not perfect. But this is the kind of thing that is motivating and needed. Right now card hunter is like a race that has no end, you just run for awhile, and say, hey look I'm really fast, faster than some, not as fast as others, than you get tired or bored and stop running, after all, there is no finish line. Your rating is in constant flux. Now the race has a beginning and an end and snapshots of where everyone is within it. The problem with this system though, that a guy that races more often can be much slower, and do better than a guy that races quicker, because the slower guy (weaker player) races more often (# of games played that week) and in a heat against slower competition (matched up via his ranking).

Rather than do it that way, I think a purer way to do it is that at the end of the thirteen weeks you take your top 130 wins (determined by the rating of the 130 opponents of highest rating when you defeated them) and divide that by 130. There is still plenty of incentive to play as often as you can to see if you can, as long as its within your top 130 victories for the 13 weeks its going to help you. Plus, when you get matched up against the 1700 guy you now have a whole lot more incentive to win because it may be your #1 win over the competition. If you lose it won't matter, and your ranking on any given day will not matter either. As it stands now a log of your ranking has too much randomness to it, many people fluctuate several hundred points in the ranking, you may be 1500 all week, lose a bunch of games and end up at 1300 when Flaxative factors that in, or vice versa, UNLESS there was a way to take your average ELO over the last 100 games you played.

I've always liked the idea (for this game or any ladder) of some sort of "Meta" ELO, where after every game it averages in your new ELO with your ELO of the last 99 games. This separate ELO is not used to determine who you are matched up with (people would move up and down painfully slow) but can draw out interesting stats such as who has the highest average ELO over the last 100 games or last 1000 games, things like that would, to me, be very inspiring, as long as there was a minimum # of games to be played in a given period, so people cannot just "roost" on the list and stop playing. But if a Meta ELO is impossible (actually that to me seems easier than the other idea) than the 130 wins works. As far as the weekly competition its your top 10 wins for the week. The average ELO of your top 10 wins each week. This abolished the impurities I mentioned above, yet will continue people to play which is what we want. Also, instead of bailing out quickly when you feel you are overmatched, you will have more incentive to give it your best shot for that precious high ranked win.

I suppose there are three issues. 1)Is it a total nightmare to get stats for Meta ELO and / or Highest ELO wins each week. 2)Will people start point trading to cushion their stats on highest rated wins 3)Will people start losing to weaker players because they know its not a game that will help their stats - probably not because that loss puts them further down the rankings making a game with a higher ranked opponent less likely.

The way it is set up now there is far too loose a connection between skill and reward, because it is being compromised to make room for # of games played. Also, the fact that # of games played is rewarded actually encourages tanking. I know you have standing to counter that, but still. I think a system that is strictly illustrating ranking in the comp based on skill is far, far more motivating. At least don't mix the two, its almost insulting, pardon my strong language. But think about it. Player A played competitively at 1400 all week long but only 20% as much as Player B who played non stop, at 1000 ranking. B crushed A in the competition because he......logged on and played more games but would get smoked by A whenever they met??? Really?

I think a purely skill based system is far far more interesting. Nobody and I mean NOBODY is impressed that you played more games than me, I really don't want to see a ranking with that factored in, its gross. Oh look, there are those top highly skilled players up their in the comp, that makes sense I've played thos guys they are the best, oh wait, who are those other guys up there, oh, they constantly queue up and play games, yes, very impressive. BUT, there is still PLENTY of motivation to log on and play your butt off because you can have a list of your top ten wins for the week and your top 130 for the month. If your 10th best win for the week is 1286 you are pushing like mad to find and defeat everyone 1287 and above. If your 130th best win for the 13 week comp is 1007, its the same HUGE incentive.

Don't take offense I used words like insulting and gross. Its just to drive a point home. Big respect out to Flaxative for doing this and BM for encouraging it.

But I'm telling you, you end up sabatoging what you are trying to achieve. You want top players - or to be even more accurate - players of all levels that find multiplayer engaging, to remain interested? Make your track meets based purely on who runs the best not the most often, and by doing so, you will draw the best runners back onto the track and create more interest AND inspire the lesser runners to play more often (which is what you wanted to do in the first place) and get better.

One last thing, I like the new figures but it will be a minor annoyance to know there is no relationship between the fun artwork and the cards they are running. They should have to run slime based cards

Edit: I'm not talking about me when I say draw the best back. Obviously I am not currently or historically the best or one of the top few. But the lack of structure in my opinion, wait, I know my opinion tends to lack structure....lets try that again with a comma, ahem, the lack of structure, in my opinion, discourages people, or a better way to put it, is structure with reward / incentive, skill based structure is a huge motivator for all of us. Me perosnally, the reason I take breaks sometimes is, well, my nick for the game is Crackhunter. Its hard to put down. but thats why I like it, the game, not the drug. Despite that negative connotation, I think this is a great game and I have truly enjoyed playing it.

 

@Stovepipe:

Unfortunately, your "purer" way is essentially impossible to actually implement right now.

You have some neat suggestions, but I think they are more for Blue Manchu to implement than for me (as I am not a dev, just operating a contest outside the game).

Hopefully, 3 months down the line, we'll have some more tools to work with when comparing players.

Since I think that concisely responds to your (constructive and appreciated) wall of text, I won't reply to all your points individually. That said, I'd like to say something about this.

I don't think there's any easy way to quantify 'pure skill' in a game like Card Hunter. There is so much luck involved, and items matter so much, that it's really hard. I can't think of a metric for this.

Next, in case this hasn't been clear... I said this in my last post here.

Similar to how there is a very clear goal for the Highest Rating category, I have a goal for the Most Wins category. I'm of the opinion that Card Hunter will do better the more games are being played by more people. You say you don't want to see people rewarded just for queueing a ton—I do, because those people enable other people to play PvP. Just think—if one person with 100 wins in a week and a 50% win rate didn't play as absurdly much as they do, that'd be over a hundred fewer games per week of Card Hunter. That's over 100 opponents who don't get to play. The precise numbers don't matter too much for my point: the fact is, people who play a lot enable a lot of other people to play. I think that people playing a lot—and thus providing a lot of people with an opponent—helps us in two ways.

First, more games means more players means more Card Hunters means more potential revenue for Blue Manchu means a better game.
Second, more games means more interactions means a faster and more dynamic environment means a healthier meta.

So yes, this season is definitely meant to encourage
A) players to play a lot (while not tanking)
B) high-ranked players to keep playing

You can probably say that you want to reward more than just A&B, and I'd probably agree with you, because I love rewards! But I hope that my reasoning for structuring this the way I did makes sense to you. Thanks for listening.

P.S. stats for week 1 should be out within the next day!

 

No, I get what you are trying to do. I don't know what is wrong with me. I read everything here, yet somehow thought you were factoring in the two things together, i.e. one list mixing the two categories, when in fact you aren't doing that at all. Despite my low reading comprehension oversight, I hope you can see how a random ratings snapshot can be misleading unless I misunderstood that as well. As to your other point, of course items and luck are factored in, but even so, its "purer" than mixing it with game frequency, which you aren't doing anyways, so its moot. But for me, and I think many others, and I think, the whole reason have these ladders in the first place, is a motivational one, so maybe the Meta ELO thing has some merit at least, although it may be some stat nightmare, I don't know.

The other thing is, lets say a guy climbs up 300 rating points beyond where he typically is. Won't he be discouraged from playing until the "snapshot" of his rating is taken. Thats another reason some sort of Meta ELO would help, but I recognize that that you aren't the person that can make that happen.

 

Yes, the system isn't perfect, but it is better than nothing (which is what we had before). I do think the prize structure is off... generally high Elo players don't want chests (they usually have all the items they need).

Also, running something like this when new content will be coming out (hopefully before 3 months?) will kind of throw it all for a loop. We'll see, but I'm just a bit hesitant about "special figures that are only for this" if they are so tightly distributed. But we still have time to discuss it with Blue Manchu and maybe fix it before it ends.

 

I have a list of 45 items I still want on Feleran and there are probably many more I'd buy if they appeared in Randimar's
Chests are good.

 

The thing is that chests are super random. You might want 45 items or something, but the probability of you getting one of them is next to nil. Maybe if the winner got "pick one item" or something that would be different. Right now the only item I'm looking for is a Strongarm and maybe another Vibrant Pain. Even somehow getting 200 chests would probably not even get me one of them.

 

I don't think any players, even the highest rated ones, have a perfect build yet. Everyone could still improve theirs with a few choice items. At least I've never seen one so far when playing or spectating high-level matches nor have I heard anyone mention they have one.

Low chances of getting one of them in a chest is another matter.

 

I think my current build is pretty close... I could use a few more items but I think it is near optimal. We might be missing one or two items, but we aren't looking for massive amounts of chests. At least I know I'm not.

 

"Close" and "might be missing one or two items" do not equal "they usually have all the items they need" .

 

It boils down to something like: "I have Blazing Shortsword which gives me range, fire, and 6.6 average damage (including 1 round of burn damage) but includes Combustable... or I can go for Strongarm and get 7 average damage with no weakness..."

Ultimately, the differences between the two is so minute that "missing one or two items" means still having a nearly perfect build, but room for very slight optimization.