Done with Card Hunter for now -- Here's some feedback

Look, just drop it, will you? It is pretty clear you are not convincing the community here nor the staff. If you think Blue Manchu is doing things wrong to grow the community, keep thinking that but stop wasting yours and everyone's time. People do not agree on everything, it happens. You tried to convince and failed. If you keep continuing this futile argument, people here will just see you as an troll. If you are not, JUST. FREAKING. STOP.

 

It's a discussion. The discussed points have evolved through the thread. It can be frustrating if you disagree with someone -- sorry if that's the case for you. Everyone has their own style, and I really don't like to address people directly in these kinds of conversations. There's nothing about this that's personal ... I'm not here to tell you how to be a mature poster or not. I guess I will just suggest that you don't need to call people trolls -- outright or by implication.

Anyhow I think the latest points are clear. Hopefully it's useful / interesting for anyone who cares to read through the thread and think about community management in this or similar games. I do know of a lot of game devs who read their forums once in a while to absorb information rather than every day ... so hopefully they will find something here that's worthwhile when they get around to reading, if indeed that's their style.

Thanks everyone for the interesting discussion. Cheers!

 

First of all, you're ignoring the point. Nobody is talking about a single player quitting on their team, they are talking about a team as a whole voting to quit (possibly with a unanimous vote). That is entirely and legitimately comparable to a single player quitting.

Second of all... is this you on another forum complaining about LoL surrender rules?

Hmmm....

 

... Given that there are thousands of games out there with single-player PvP I'm sure it won't be so difficult to find a better example than a team-play live-action non-card game in a certain situational outcome which is not the most common and probably more related to the ruleset for individuals in teamplay. Unless you want to make the argument that this different genre certain-mode team-play example is the only other one that exists.

I mean seriously. You can do better than that. It's a bad example and a false comparison ... and it only proves my point that this is not a normal way to handle things -- that you can't resign -- in a single-player game. If you want, I can list ... I don't know ... 50 maybe? other online card games where there is single-player PvP mode and you're allowed to resign whenever you want.

I am really all for conversation about whether no early resigns is a smart idea or not. But the argument that somehow it's a normal practice? That's insane. I've literally never seen it before and I've played more games in this genre than most people know exist.

@ your other question. I am familiar with LoL and have played it at a couple of conventions where they were presenting it, but I've never been an active member of that community much less posted to their forums. I think an argument that includes the logic that "no one subscribes ever" is suspicious either way.

 

I think the difficulty here is that you are asking/suggesting what you want, but claiming to do so for a nebulous larger group that you cannot claim to represent.
Early resigns have a consequence that is mild and relevant. You may not like it, you can even claim that it goes against the feel of a strategy game, using poker as an analog, but what you forget is there is no penalty to losing. In poker or backgammon, when you fold or quit you lose your ante or points, there is a natural penalty to quitting, the decision is the short term loss is better than the long term prospects. When you resign in CH the penalty is only a potentially longer wait since otherwise everyone would quit all the time if they don't get the right draw 1st round.
The second issue you raise is the PvE rewards. The rewards in PvP were changed to encourage more people to play MP. Comparing the 2 different modes is irrelevant, but doing in so, what you can see if that the devs decided to reinforce the motivation to play MP. If you enjoy doing something the reward should not matter, grinding for rewards to me is horrible and should not be encouraged, although there are some who think grinding should be encouraged, I do not understand why.
But I still don't understand exactly why you think it is an "unfriendly environment", when it is quite clearly a friendly community and a game that you seem to like... If you want to play SP endlessly you can. If you only want to play MP you can (although playing some SP is certainly advisable). The only real limits to growing this game is a very limited amount of advertising and the Flash issue (meaning almost no mobile compatibility). When this game is on Steam, it should grow just like it did when it joined Kong. There is no accounting for taste, but I have found people either like this game or don't and those who do see it is not perfect and that's okay.

 

The punishment for resigning aerly in a match is actually pretty bland. I think I've stated this countless times, but it looks like @Sir Valimont got the impression cops are gonna bang at the door as soon as you hit the resign button once...

In fact, almost every time someone blames the early-resign penalty (something which happens extremely rarely too, tbh) is because that person resigned tons of games in a row. The devs do understand very well that resigning is not always a bad thing, and that's why they designed a system which doesn't really penalize anybody in a major way, unless you throw up a whole lot of games. Moreover, you need to realize discerning throwing up a game deliberately from legitimately conceding a game is not that easy, so the devs made a mindful decision about acting about offensive behaviors (yes, the situation was that bad) even though that meant non-malicious users sometimes also get affected by the system.

As long as you don't realize that, you're pretty much talking about something you don't completely understand. Or you're outright ignoring stuff because all you care is blindly pushing your argument ad libitum.

Anyway, almost every competitive game with a respectful name explicitly mentions repeatedly throwing up games as a punishable offense in their EULA. That's regardless of whether or not they have an actual in-game system doing something about it.

In Killer Instinct (XBox One), they have a jail system for players who disconnect a lot. In StarCraft II, early resigning is a reportable offence and can lead to bans (temporary, most of the times, but also permanent if the behavior is reiterated).

Even then though, the point is not about how many games do things similarly to how CH does. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of games out there don't really do much about players early resigning or throwing up games, for the matter.

There's nothing smart about believing something is right/wrong just because "the vast majority of XYZ do/don't do that". CH is a pretty high quality game, especially by flash-games standards, and Blue Manchu achieved that by working hard on design, rather than doing stuff however the majority of other devs did. Following the general consensus "just because" is a sure way to being mediocre, at best.

Those interested might enjoy reading about the fallacies of that specific way of thinking in this wikipedia article.

More on the matter, implementing a very light drawback to resigning early most likely was a smart idea, at least judging by the end result:

• Not only did that get rid of tanking and other abusive behaviors almost completely (but Valimont only joined CH very recently, so I can't blame him for not knowing what the state of things was back in the days).
• The new system also means the devs need to spend much less time dealing with all the players who used to be reported for throwing up games.
• Ultimately, having a disinchentive to early quitting contributes to making the game's community and environment a much more pleasent place to be a part of. The fact a very specific kind of players might be pushed away by such a system could potentially be seen as a very welcome aftereffect.

 

Yes, I know that PvP rewards were changed to encourage more people to play MP. They're now better than PvE rewards. I understand the continued theoretic argument a lot of people are putting forth that if you play PvE you can do so, never play PvP, and just not care about the PvP rewards. But that's not how things work in reality. PvE players may not want to play PvP games but that makes them no less competitive-spirited than PvP players. Actually the opposite is somewhat true: PvE players tend to be more obsessed with collecting every last item (PvP players tend to be more interested in collecting items that are specifically effective to win matches). A PvE player plays for the game content whereas a PvP player plays for both the content and the interaction. So, in a nutshell, having an uneven drop rate may seem like it shouldn't matter to a PvE player but it actually is the thing that matters most to a PvE player. As such any perceived unfairness that PvP players have it better off is multiplied.

I totally agree that folks here are friendly and engaging to any new players! What's not engaging is the big-brother culture of "you can't resign." That's no knock on the people in the community though ... I've found them really very nice in general.

Of course you're right something is never right or wrong just because the vast majority of others do it.

... But there was a specific argument brought that no-resign-early was a common policy, which I argued with because that position was completely false.

... And also it's even less smart not to take it as a significant data point when everybody in an industry does A and you want to do B. There's a reason people are doing A. It seems like you're making the argument that BlueManchu is on the cutting edge and so we can assume they have a better policy than most other games. That's a fine position to take. I quite agree CH has some features that are best-in-industry, to be perfectly honest. Community management is definitely, definitely not one of them though.

 

Strongly disagree. I've been in a lot of communities for various sorts of online games of all kinds. This is one of the few where I felt like most players respected each other and player feedback was both observed and welcome. The maturity level around here is also a lot higher than in most games. If I have to trade away early resignation to get that, I happily do so.

Edit: Perhaps you just don't like being in a managed community. I personally don't mind if people who would habitually resign early are managed right out of the community. You've suggested before that some folks might be elitist around here - maybe that's the point. You can't have an elite community without making some sacrifices. The way I see it, if there even is a drawback to the policy, it is easily worth it to shape the community into what it has become.

 

Well, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. I totally get what you're saying, and it does make sense.

But surely you must realize if you look around at the community you're describing that it's not very broad. It leaves out a huge swath of players (which is why it seems to you like it's so different than other games). This is not an attack against people who are here. People who are here are great. I agree with that. But try to understand: the fact that people who are here are great does not mean that other great people want to be here. There is a very narrow type of player willing to put up with the big-brotherness of things like "you can't resign early." Yes, it's a good group of people: mature, respecting of others, etc. My point is it also eliminates a huge number of people, many of whom are good people.

If you want to make that tradeoff (it sounds like you do), all the power to you. But don't make the mistake of misunderstanding the tradeoff. It's not "only good people will stay here." It's "only a small subsection of all people will stay here" and that subsection happens to be great. There are plenty of other great people who don't fit the mold.

This whole conversation takes on the aspect of an argument only because I'm telling you that most of the thousands of card gamers I've encountered don't fit your mold here ... and personally I am someone who believes most people are good and worth having around, even if the majority of them are less mature or polite or respectful or good sports than everyone here. It's fine to be elitist but you miss out on a lot. Personally I like to be someone who upholds all those good-gameplay qualities, but I find it more meaningful in a larger context with more people of different walks. For one thing you can be a positive influence that way. For another, you broaden your own horizons and improve your own experience when you encounter different types of people.

 

Fair enough. If you figure out another more inclusive way to make a community this good, by all means let us all know. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the smaller but higher quality experience here. And if that means the devs have other more important considerations than just how much money can be milked by pulling the largest set of folks possible, then I'm all the happier to be in league with those who prefer quality to quantity. There's too little of that going around in the world these days.

 

This is not true. The rewards are actually about equal between SP and MP. Repeating this falsehood countless times still does not make it true. I can see why you have an overwhelmingly hard time abandoning this untrue statement as half of your argument is centered around it. Unfortunately for you, the truth bows to no agendas.

 

You don't understand.

You can resign early, if so you wish. Getting a bunch of seconds added to your queue timer is not that big of a deal.

Ofc playing a fair game and eventually giving the gg once it's clear you have little or no chance to come back doesn't usually get punished (as that isn't counted as an "early resignation" if the game has been going on for more than a few minutes or a couple victory points have been scored).

edit: and throwing game after game after game w/o even trying to play the actual game would eventually get you reported, and action would be taken against this offensive behavior, regardless of whatever disincentive is actually put in place.

 

For the customers in this thread:

One thing among many that Valimont doesn't seem to understand is this: the vast majority of our players only ever play singleplayer. This is the nature of games that offer SP & MP options—MP players usually comprise a tiny fraction of the playerbase. When I told him that we know that we're not losing MP players over our policies, I meant it: we know that. He dismisses everything I say as myopic and claims to speak for 'thousands' of nonplayers, but that's ridiculous and here's why:

1. We see the stats on when players drop out of our game, and we see the stats on when they play which modes.

2. Our MP playerbase is small because we don't do the marketing necessary to have a larger playerbase, plain and simple.*

There aren't thousands of people reading our match-throwing policy and then deciding whether or not they want to play Card Hunter. The world doesn't work that way. It works a bit more like this: People see marketing -> a fraction of those people try the game -> a fraction of those people like the game and stick to it -> a fraction of those people are interested in MP -> a fraction of those people play a lot of MP -> a fraction of those people—around five, in absolute terms—have actually needed warnings for match-throwing.

And, for what it's worth, none of those ~five players has stopped playing the game due to those warnings. (I think one of them might have stopped playing eventually, but it was many months later, and hey—sometimes a game has run its course.)

Prospective CH players usually don't even know there's a ranked mode. They certainly don't know anything about the match-throwing policies. People simply don't choose not to play the game because of said policies. There are four conversion points before a random on the internet becomes a ranked player, and the match-throwing policies don't play a part in any of the decisions on that path.

Have people stopped playing our game because of the match-throwing policies?

We can't know for sure, but we can have a pretty good idea. We can look at the average ranked game lengths of people who stop playing our game. Again, perhaps because only a handful have actually 'gotten in trouble' for match-throwing, the stats bear out the idea that people aren't trying to throw matches, realizing it's against policy, and then quitting. It just doesn't go that way.

*For a large number of reasons, we are not investing a ton in marketing currently. That's an entirely different topic, and probably one more for Jon to discuss than for me to try to explain. For now, assume our reasons are fair.

 

Thanks, Flaxative! It's very refreshing, sobering and into-perspective-putting to get actual facts in conversations like this one!

 

I understand the mentality of being a collector, but doesn't change the fact that the drop rates exist as they are. Go to a casino and complain that the quarter slots don't pay out as good as the dollar slots and you know what they will say... play the dollar slots. Not the best comparison since the only difference is the cost to play, but it comes down the to fact that systems of rewards are set up based on to reward the action desired. In the case of a casino they want you to play $1 slots, in the case of Blue Manchu they want you to play MP or at least to play it more than SP. They did recently increase the rewards for first time completions so there is something there, but I still don't quite understand the desire to play SP on an exclusive basis.

You can resign, no one is stopping you from resigning. But resigning quickly is discouraged.

I think at the heart of the matter is that you are either hyper-competitive, an obsessive collector or a combo of the 2. If highly competitive, joining a collecting game is tough since you are likely always behind the curve... even if it is A LOT easy to collect now than 1 year ago. I have acquired more legendary items in the past 3 months than I did for the first 6-9 months I played when I could play a lot more than I do now. If you are a collector you just want to get the rarest items as soon as possible, the improvement to the shops (adding the Daily Deal and increasing the number of legendary and epic items each week in Randimar's) has made collecting them all possible in a way it wasn't when this game started.

In my opinion you just want to guarantee success. I don't know if it is because you are a strapped for time, a poor loser, both or otherwise. Guaranteed success is not fun. If there is no risk you will lose what have you really won?

 

I actually feel bad that a member of the dev team needs to jump into a discussion like this and state the obvious. Big props to Flax, but I have a feeling this thread is not gonna stop at page 6...

 

One more thing I'll say about rewards in this game.

I've done a lot of grinding in my day as a CH player. Both PvP and PvE, though the PvE was grindier because when I play PvP I tend to try to win and play my best. PvE has always been easy to blitz with Firestorm/Volcano/Bejeweled, and there's something fun in winning a lot and getting a lot of chests, but to me grinding is, after a period, a grind. My enjoyment of it isn't a flat line, it's a wiggly line. Sometimes I want to grind PvE for chests, sometimes it's a chore. I've done a lot of it either way, over the course of the last 1.5 years, through all the changes in PvE drops and cards.

PvE grinding isn't worth it.
Of course, PvP grinding also isn't worth it.

I mean, they're both fine for getting items. But once your collection begins to fill up and you're less likely to find new items/items you want, grinding for gold is a pretty bad deal depending on where you live.

Assuming you're not a child, you have two options, generally speaking:
1) play an hour of PvE for chests at max speed (and remember, the gold rates equivalent to PvP but there's no variance because you don't lose)
2) work an hour of a minimum wage job, buy pizza, convert it to gold

The latter option will usually be better in terms of interacting with people, doing productive things, etc.; and it'll also generate more gold in your CH account.

So at the end of the day, if you're not a child, why grind CH for gold? Why not just play whichever mode of CH is enjoyable for you, for the sake of playing the game, when you feel like playing a game? (Maybe the mode you enjoy is grinding for gold. I'm not judging.)

I especially have come to a point where I can't afford to grind CH for gold. Sometimes I think about doing it, and then I remember that the community would probably be happier if I worked on the game instead of playing it—especially since grinding isn't a form of gameplay I especially enjoy. (Again: others may really like grinding! I'm not judging.)

But yeah in general I don't have that much sympathy for folks who are playing a mode they don't enjoy in order to get in-game rewards as an inefficient rate, then complain about said rate of loot. Play the game if you like it. Don't play it if you don't like it. The reason we don't officially support PvE endgame grind isn't that we hate people who want to do that, it's that our game just isn't structured for that and CH currently lacks an actually fun, replayable PvE endgame mode.

And if the mode of CH you want to play isn't in the game yet—say, an infinitely replayable PvE module with some randomization to keep it fresh—just say that, as many others have. We may or may not be working on something along those lines. I sure as hell want it in the game

 

From everything you said, that makes perfect sense. The biggest marketing bang for the buck at this point of probably getting your game on Steam, maybe get some badges on Kong.

But that's off topic for this thread.

 

Totaly unrelated to the thread, and I might be wrong, but I think the devs have little input in the process of getting badges added to a game on Kong. All which needs to be done is implementing the Kong Statistics API (which Blue Manchu has done already), and then it's pretty much up to Kong to decide if the game is worth of having badges added to it.

 

Correct.