I posted it in: https://steamcommunity.com/app/293260/discussions/0/3132792921888214886/ On Steam, Sir Civil wrote: New classes are something that everyone is looking for . And I replied: I really don't want to write this. I wish I didn't read that! It's not easy to explain even MOST of the reasons it's so important. In short, PLEASE DON'T BREAK THE GAME! It's easy to break and hard to make! Don't add new player classes! Please read! Although I am a subset of everyone I very much am NOT looking for NEW CLASSES! (At least not new player classes! New classes for AI's... eh... whatever... already have more than we can keep track of, but sure, newer better PvE classes for new PvE would be cool. Even newer worse PvE classes would be... newer.) I think the most constructive thing I can say is that if you're thinking of changing the pay model or anything else big about Cardhunter, and want to add or more new classes, then very seriously consider making Cardhunter 2.0, rather than turning Cardhunter-Original into Cardhunter-Original/Broken! If need be, just make a new copy of the game and leave this one as is. (Which is not say don't add tournaments, new adventures or new leagues, all that stuff is fine. Great even! It doesn't unbalence or break existing PvP or PvE.) The make Cardhunter 1.1-BETA or 2.0-BETA or whatever, and add in your new classes, money models or whatnot. But something like new classes WILL break the game, and it just won't be a well-balenced MATURE product anyone. It almost certainly won't be able to hold player as long term as the existing cardhunter, so it'll need a new influx of replacement players anyways. What will a new class probably break? In PvP, it's probably break: 1. Wizards. 2. Warriors. 3. Priests. 4. The new class. 5. A lot of the existing gear. 6. A lot of the new gear. 7. The other balence and mature design of the game. PvE maps will get mucked with. But they're only good for first few play through anyways before we're overleveled, overgeared, and already know how to deal with the maps. But a lot of the charm of the cooler maps will probably be lost. Also.... it'll slow the rate new players can get gear for all classes. I guess you could give more of it to make up for that. And it'll fustrate vetern players because we have much of what we need and are looking for to rounf out of collections. A bunch of new gear that won't be useful until get enough of might be a bit annoying. A suggestion there is to maybe impliment a drop policy that gives more of the existing classes if the player is using them. Oh... another problem... unless you dump very large collections of new gear for the new class at once on people, all non-new players will have the weakest collection of gear for the new class. So either the class will seem weak, or you'll be tempted to make the gear better so that once people do advance the new-class collection, it'll be overpowered. And you'll either have everyone playing the new-classs vs. the new-class with who-can-grind-new-stuff-fastest, or you're gonna have to keep nerfing the new gear. It's a really safe bet it's not going to balence in first several years, and I'm guessing the game won't see a strong following for longer than that if it starts to fall apart. (Ok... it might not die, but why chance it?) But again, clone the game into Cardhunter 2.0 and you'll be good to go. The existing game won't break. The new game will be in a constant state of flux, and you can get tweaks, rules tweaks, buffs, nerfs, ever more classes, who-knows-what-promotions, and you'll have a new game and maybe it'll make it. Or maybe it won't. But at least it'll stand or fall on it's own without sacrificing a mature highly evolved product in the process. Perhaps the biggest example of mature game is Chess. It hasn't changed for as long as anyone has been alive and Grandmasters still haven't mastered it and the games don't get stupid or boring. But add a couple of extra rows to Chess, dump a few spots of impassable terrian on the squares and/or grab some pieces from Shogi to mix in. It won't be the same game, it won't hold seriously players for more than a tiny faction of the time real Chess does. And it'll be broken very quickly and it won't be long before it's not all that different that a whole bunch of other board-games out there. You'll "stupid repetative predictable" play, and people, at best, will either start messing around like crazy trying to balence it, or maybe the won't, and nobody will make Master, much-less Grandmaster without first get tired of having played more games than the new creation is good for. Very few players seem to able to appreciate just how balenced the standard PvP really are. Just how much of a MATURE product it is. It's very rare and as it breaks, it will almost certainly never get back to where it was. Sure, you can stuff, break stuff, tweak it to be less broken, but you're not likely to get anything like same level of balence that the game currently has. Cardhunter (current) is like Chess! =================================== Cardhunter a special treasure. And it's not just the way players feel about it. It's about how well it's done and subtle way that that effects it's players. As far a money, yea, the new devs have a player base they bought with the game. But it's a very small player bases that keeps coming back years after year after year after year after year. The aren't restricted lists on builds, or constant buff or tweeks, and still, play at most level PvP still continues to evolve and change and doesn't get stuck with people playing the same builds as each other all the time. And it doesn't end up with all the builds feeling like they're the same thing either. (Can a Melee Rogue be that different than Melee Warrior? Can an Archer be that different from a range-damage Wizard?) Sure, Werewolves messed it up a bit. Werewolves are effectively a new class as they draw from their own deck. I think they were a mistake, but there are a lot of worse things you can do. ALONZO'S ARONSAL WAS EXPLICTLY CAREFUL TO TRY TO NOT ADD IN NEW ITEMS THAT WOULD BE SIGNIFICANT TO CHANGE THE GAME IN A HUGE WAY. Still, "small changes" have annoyed many users with Revenge and many AI turn into idiots when faced with Ready-to-Strike. Why is the new team suddenly so capable of not breaking the game that they don't need to be nearly as cautious as AA was? (Ok... maybe "new classes" is going to be a much small type of chance than I sounds. I hope so.) Oh... btw... new classes might need new AI's. Ever noting that Cardotron3000 has better cards than Cardotron2000, and is supposed to be a better player? The problem is that it doesn't know how to play it's extra powerful cards and so it consistently ranks lower than Cardotron2000. What do you think a new class would do? How easy to do think it is to make AI's learn to play well with a new class? As is, the AI doesn't have the faintest clue how to deal with Ready-To-Strike or Cardotron3000's "Swap" card. (But I guess the adventures already have Archers, not that I'm going to want to queue for PvP many times if I keep getting a bunch of those idiot archers to keep playing against me again and again and again,) Of course, you can "balence" a new class with more new classes. But soon you won't have Cardunter anymore. So why not keep Cardhunter-Classic while you turn out Yet-another-board-game-with-dull-non-modern-graphics; um, I mean... Cardhunter 2.0! Again, Cardhunter is like Chess ================================ It's a very MATURE product. I tend to assume Richard Garfield's being on the early developement team did a lot to make this game so special, because he's a very special genious who works on very few new games. Not everything he's made is super-great (but it is good IMO), but Magic the Gathering is without compare in that it is what created the modern CCG, and it was created by Richard. Richards seems to like switching only to new types of games. He didn't do any Magic the Gathering expansions I know of, but he did do a Board Game called RoboRally. Cardhunter PvP is suspect, is combination of a CCG (by Richard) mixed with a board game (by Richard.) I didn't mention Jon and others in Blue Manchu when they were running the game because I wasn't worried about them leaving. But Blue Manchu (which might mean several very smart deisgners, or maybe soon good ones coordinated by Jon) were also very talented in their ability to make the PvE portion. In PvE, progress is steady. Balence. It's ussually interesting the whole way through the first one or few times through... across dozens and dozens of adventures. A lot talent, programing skill, patience, and intuition go into that. And strong understanding of how a good balenced game is made too. Compare to World Of Warcraft. Low level characters have like 200 HP. High level have, honest, I have no idea... are we still down in the hundreds of millions? I haven't played for year. Might be tens of billions by now. But Cardhunter PvE manage to go from around 14 HP to 40 HP. Maybe 90 for a really big bad boss. But that's an EIGHT-FOLD increase! Not LITTERALLY a 100,000 or Million-times increases! And guess what, World of Warcraft has a huge and very experienced team and it still turns out the way it does. (And WOW team or PvP anything would die very quickly if it had a small player base like Cardhunter, because you couldn't get players to get good matchups until they were fully leveled.) Again, I really don't want to write this. It's very complex. It's very hard to fully explain. Some of it I'm sure I haven't figured out yet, but I know it works in ways that other game, although every other game, doesn't! Ever heard of Yugioh? They have a huge dev team with decades of experience. And they keep turning out "Tier 0 decks"... decks that you have to use to win, until the work their ass off to change restricted lists, and card balences, and they soon after get stuck with more Tier 0's. Again, Cardhunter, I believe, hasn't NEEDED to be tweaked in years, and yet, players still keep coming back after years, or after breaks of serval years, and it's still good! Oh... there was also MAgic the Gathering: Tactics. It's a CCG. You know, a collectable card game where there were guys moving on mixed up boards with spots of impassable terian and the like. It was done by Wizards of the Coast... that huge company that been making sooo much Magic the Gather for so many people for so many years, and have so many Magic players to advertise it to. I think they might have been trying to copy Cardhunter. Know what happened to it? It died. Dead as doorknob. And if you payed, they kept your money despite the shutoff. Oh... the way the Loot Fairy, the daily chests, the Leagues and the matches against AI's when human opponents are really well done too. ELO is pretty suffistaticated to, but I think I know just how that got something so well tuned. (ELO was copied from chess.) Again, SERIOUSLY, I don't want to type all this. It's hard to explain. It's harder to figure out what order to put this in. And I'm dsylexic and don't want to take hours proofing this myself, nor do I want to take my assistant away from proofing my other stuff that she needs to proof to help us with our money and other RL issues. So please.... go easy with the real Cardhunter. And if the dev's want to run an idea past me, and give me a few weeks or months before I can put together a responce, that's pretty cool. But the though the MAYBE new class are getting addedf to PvP (or even standard PvE adventures) just isn't cool. At least not in Cardhunter-Classic. Go for Cardhunter-2.0 and maybe prove me wrong! If you (devs) wanted some serious advice, I might find time for it. A lot of is some of the serious stuff like, um.... lookig at your stats! There's a lot of data there to see player patterns, recriutment, retainment, how the game does or doesn't retain players, and does or doesn't profit well. It's not simple. Jon isn't simple. Richard isn't simple. And I'm pretty sure they didn't jump into making Cardhunter without a lot of thought as they went over a long period of time! (Plus Jon had Richard in the beginning, and Richard had Jon while he was there... so you chances of being able to make something as good via messing-around and tweaks is, well, kinda scarey.) But compliments: Tourney.. creative Tourney. Very good. Congrats. New levels, Loot Fairy tweaks... I think I might have suggested both, but still, glad you were able to do them! So.... um.... how about Cardhunter 2.0? Or maybe Cardhunter 1.0? There's a lot more than I wrote here that I should have been writing for court instead. I don't know when I'm going to need those filing but I hope taking the time from that to write this instead was worth it! Good luck!
This is a good idea. What if half the items in each chest were guaranteed usable by someone in the active party? That would help new players desperate for something, anything, they can equip. It also helps veteran players searching for specific items.
Unofficial AA Entry Type: Weapon for the New Class I don't want Name: A Modest Proposal (We can get crazy later)
When CH was not available to me, I once touched on mobile game Traitor's Empire, which was built on a similar premise. Unfortunately, it lacked two particularly crucial game mechanisms: Turns within a round and Zone of Control, which made it much less of strategy and more of burning everyone in one round. However, it had one thing I think CH could adopt: the Archer class. In Traitor's Empire, Mages are the premier Burfft class, staple in PvE farming. However, their mediocre single-target damage makes them less effective against bosses, and they are the least mobile class in the game, which makes them hard to keep alive. Archers on the other hand hardly have any multiple target attacks, but gets much stronger buffs in return. They also have pretty good mobility, and can outrun most melee characters unless they are cornered. Elven Wizards in CH were always in a sad shape, and they are only usable in specialized builds to date. This is because they can't even stay in firing position. I expect if their signature attacks such as silver could get around LoS, they could see more use. Speaking of mobility for ranged characters, Surging Bolt occurs in my mind. That card could use a buff, but more importantly, if we are to introduce mobile ranged archetype, there should be a card that lets you move after attacking because that's the true counterpart of melee Step attacks. That is, Hit and Run attacks. Certainly, not all of these may be fun or interesting to play in practice, so thorough balancing and testing should be done before we even decide whether to incorporate these mechanisms. Even so, there is no reason new classes can't possibly exist. I recommend to KotU that they keep giving it tries, internally, but don't rush it.
