[Suggestion] Hide cards during discard phase & remove item names

It's good that the item names are shown on the cards. They should definitely be shown in the battle log, too.

Showing them promotes awareness of commonly-used items. It helps in learning the game and the item strategies different players use. It serves as advertising for multiplayer-usable items and feeds the loot chase urge. It shows off your awesome item collection. What's the point of owning Blizkenripper's Fang if you can't flaunt it to your opponents?

Not showing the item names would bring more advantage to the users of speculative third party tools and would probably create much more demand for them than existed previously. It's much easier to keep track of possible items based on played cards with the help of software than it is to do it in your head.

It's bad design to add trackable but hidden information to games. It just adds tedium.

Hiding the item names would add a new layer to the strategy but it's a pretty tedious layer. Only very high-end players would bother to track the information to any large degree. Do they really need another advantage? Is Card Hunter an e-sport, tuned to the 1% of 1% of 1% of players? I don't think so. Card Hunter already has enough depth to it. It doesn't need more. All additions widen the divide between casual players and deeply committed ones.

I'd claim the basic philosophy of Card Hunter has so far been to provide meaningful depth while remaining accessible to most. It has enough randomness to witness this. It allows occasional new player wins against veterans while not being a coin flip. Inclusive territory. Hiding the item names would drag it uncomfortably toward Starcraft II. It's not supposed to be work to play a game competitively, not in the micro-actions taken in every turn of every match, anyway.

 

I don't follow this at all. By the time you've seen enough cards to build an accurate picture of someone's build without item names, you'd need to have seen almost all of their cards. With item names, you can potentially reveal a character's entire deck in as few as 9 cards. Either way you're encouraged to use a third-party tool to keep track of what's been revealed so far (because the game doesn't do it for you), but with item names available on cards the tool is able to accurately predict your opponent's build much sooner. Not to mention that the software for the later scenario is much simpler to build, and thus much more likely to actually exist in the future (hint hint).

This is exactly what having the item names on cards does! The information (cards) revealed by item names is easily trackable with an external resource, but in-game it's not shown (a.k.a. hidden). Until the game shows you the cards implied by each revealed item name and keeps track of them for you, it will be an unnecessary layer of trackable information.

 

This would be true if the items came from a pool of all the items in the game. They don't in multiplayer. The items actually used in multiplayer are a much much smaller subset. At high level, you can sometimes guess the opponent's strategy and most of their items from one crucial revealed card even without the item name on it (when combined with the always-visible race/class combos of the opposing team).

I don't think the practical difference in deck deducing time is as great as it would first seem but with hidden item names it would still be a lot easier to do it with software, leading to increased demand for it. The ease of implementation is a secondary concern. It has always been possible to build a tool like this but there has been no great call for it. Create a pressing need and the implementations will readily follow, technical difficulty notwithstanding. Necessity is the mother of all game tool invention.

I maintain hiding the item names would just make the game more tedious (it would not make the item deducing disappear, it would just make it a lot more work) and hurt the item promotion and knowledge-spreading aspects, which I claim are important aspects which should not be overrun by other concerns.

I claim the item names are not unnecessary. They make the itemization visible during matches. The cards are never available in a vacuum, they're always on an item. It makes the game much more understandable and fair-seeming especially to new players when one can see that oh, the opponent's super-duper card they just devastated you with actually came from a common item one hadn't thought of using oneself instead of left wondering where on Earth that dumb card came from and how in the ever-lovin' world is that cad cheating it into their deck.

I further claim that despite the name Card Hunter is not a card hunting game, it's an item hunting game. The items are at the heart of it. Showing the items during game play has value to the whole game concept. The items cannot be shown on the characters for practical reasons but they need to be shown somewhere. Well, one could have access to the party builder screen of the opponent during a match if we wanted to go to the other extreme. The current system is a compromise between showing everything and showing nothing. So far, the compromise has proven to be very workable.

 

Last time I checked, the items available in multiplayer were the same ones available in singleplayer. To address your point more seriously, I maintain that building an accurate picture of somebody's deck is still a much, much, much harder problem if you don't have item names available on cards, even to sophisticated software, and that you would in fact need to know most of your opponent's cards to build an accurate picture in any case.

Most cards are shared by at least several different usable items, even within a specific race/class combination. Many cards don't even have a single, "most likely" item that they appear on, but even for ones that do (Nimble Strike for example), you can't just have software guess what your opponent might be using, because it will either be too ambiguous to be useful or wrong too often to be worth using. Sure, that enemy warrior might be using Vibrant Pain, or perhaps that Nimble Strike was from Cat'Leth, or a Lochaber Axe or Nifty Halberd. It's simply not practical to tell a piece of software "when you see card X, assume item Y" because the usable item pool is still large enough that it will often be wrong until it's sampled a great deal of cards, and when it's wrong you end up basing decisions on inaccurate information, which actively puts you at a disadvantage on top of the one you already have from devoting time and concentration to an external tool in the middle of a match.

Making it a lot more work is important because in this case it translates into needing a lot more information to reveal your opponent's deck. I honestly don't even think the item names on cards do much to promote item knowledge. At least, I can personally vouch that it was never factored into my knowledge or decisions as a newbie. When I wanted to know how I could get a specific card, I checked its wiki page, and if I wanted PvP advice, I listened to the chat and read the forums. There was never a moment in the middle of a match where somebody played a card and I thought "Wow, I never thought to use that item" because the game doesn't tell you what the item actually consists of when it "reveals" it to you. In fact, the only thing I've ever thought to use the item names for was predicting my opponent's build in high-level play, which frankly, is quite lame. I shouldn't know that my opponent has 2 Defender's Blocks waiting in their deck just because they played a Weak Chop, and without item names displayed on cards, I wouldn't.

As I implied in my last point, itemization should not be visible during matches. If you desperately want to know what items your opponent was using, you should be able to find out after the match, but not in the middle of it. In fact, this information is actually available via the Card Hunter API after every match, and I have every intention of eventually making a software interface to view it (take note, tournament organizers).

Finally, I disagree that just because the current system is what we have means that it "has proven to be very workable." It introduces an unnecessary layer of trackable information and gives undue advantage to players that utilize it. If you disagree with this, consider how you would feel if somebody made software to keep track of shown items and the cards they revealed and decided to charge for it or keep it for themselves. Would you still feel that the system is fine? I wouldn't, and I don't.

 

Why not? Blue Manchu decided it is. The game could be either way. It was made this way. There is no pressing reason for it to be one way or another. Your arguments are good but they're based on the opinion that this information shouldn't be revealed. Well, that's an opinion.

It has been possible to make that software since the beginning. How do we know how many times it has already been created? We have no way of knowing. I'm not bothered either way. If someone takes the game that seriously they're welcome to it.