Quest mode improvements

[PineApple]

Hello this is my first time posting. I just stumbled upon forge a few weeks ago. It is extremely impressive with all the work that has been put in it. I'd also like to contribute to this project. I've got a few years of programming under my belt and this looks like a blast. I had a few ideas for improvements and wanted to hear any feed back before I started to work on these.


Travel
While playing quest mode I feel as if something is missing to truly make it feel like a quest. My suggestion is to add limits to portions of the mode. Mainly the free travel between worlds sticks out. Making it so the player can only change worlds after X conditions are met would help make them stick in one place to enjoy the compiling list of decks created for each world. It also fixes the shop refreshing each time you travel and changing out opponents. The conditions would be variable so that when creating a world it can give just a bit more control over the game.

The types of conditions that could be used are wide spread. Number of wins can force a player to stay in one world through easy to mid ranged opponents. Meaning the deck they would have would consist mostly of the starting pool and world they are on. When doing the number of wins you can make it free travel after X wins or travel is available every X wins. Paying gold to travel offer more freedom with slight punishment. Even a combination of both would be great as well.

Also like the challenge duels you could have a boss duel that needs to be won in order to travel. Giving the player another goal. It may even be so that each boss you beat lets you unlock one world. Free travel between worlds unlocked. This way even allows you to add story in if needed. Although it would be mostly on the bosses only.

Opponents Choice
Being able to play different levels of opponents is great. Being able to go back to the easy or medium opponents after you've ascended to the next tier lets you avoid being stuck on hard opponents with a deck that is lackluster. The cost of dueling people you are higher level than would be less reward cash. Doing that prevents from grinding out large amounts of money,even though it would take forever as is.

Making opponents available based on what level the player is will let you craft scenarios. Giving certain opponents at certain levels with story flavor as the opponent descriptions. Guiding the player through a world and adding a little bit of immersion.

I was wondering if anyone else had thoughts on these ideas. I want to help make the quest mode more appealing to all players. Thanks for the read too.

[friarsol]

Yea, on a different thread I've talked about adding both a cost to traveling, and a limitation to how often you could travel, but haven't found the time to add either one. Traveling (and Worlds) are a fairly new addition to Quest, so hasn't had as much time to be streamlined into the other bits.

There was a recent request to allow dueling of lower level opponents, especially if you get partway into your quest and want to switch decks, but don't have enough to actually play against the opponent size you reached. While I think it's a valid point, I'm not sure what the best way to accomplish this is. We could just bump the available duels to 5, and spread the range out (1 Easy, 1 Medium, 2 Hard, 1 Expert). But then you'd only get a pick of 1 easy duel when you're sandbagging, which I'm sure people would complain about just as much. I guess we could do what Diablo 3 does now, and you could self throttle your difficulty backwards. Although we'd have to be careful, because that type of feature would allow users to easily regenerate matchups, which we don't want.

I'm not sure what you mean by opponent availability by level. That's exactly what's happening now, both in a difficulty of duels aspect, and a availability of challenges aspect. (X challenge is available at level 4, Y challenge is available at level 6, etc)

[Xyx]

We could just bump the available duels to 5, and spread the range out (1 Easy, 1 Medium, 2 Hard, 1 Expert). But then you'd only get a pick of 1 easy duel when you're sandbagging, which I'm sure people would complain about just as much. I guess we could do what Diablo 3 does now, and you could self throttle your difficulty backwards. Although we'd have to be careful, because that type of feature would allow users to easily regenerate matchups, which we don't want.

How 'bout a hybrid form where you generate two matchups for every difficulty but only display the ones in a bracket that corresponds to the player's selected difficulty? That way players can adjust the difficulty without regenerating matchups.

[PineApple]

I'm not sure what you mean by opponent availability by level. That's exactly what's happening now, both in a difficulty of duels aspect, and a availability of challenges aspect. (X challenge is available at level 4, Y challenge is available at level 6, etc)

The normal duels you can choose from would be selected based on your levels and not your current wins.
i.e.:
at level 1 you would get
-- Easy deck 1
-- easy deck 2
-- easy deck 3

at level 2 you get
-- easy deck 2
-- easy deck 3
-- medium deck 1

at level 3 you get
-- boss deck 1

Each world would have to select which decks would be available at each level. It would add more time to world creation, but would also allow you make it so at certain levels the player plays the decks you want. You can still do the challenges with these as well. A boss deck in my mind would be a difficult deck, but not one that would be as difficult as the challenge decks. To prevent from getting stuck at levels where none of the opponents can be beat there may have to be a button that allows you to go back 1 or 2 levels and play previous opponents.

And sorry for the double post of ideas. I read a ton of the forums already and didn't see anything on it.

[friarsol]

The normal duels you can choose from would be selected based on your levels and not your current wins.

Well, your "level" is already based on your amount of wins, so they aren't really different. It's not like you earn experience based upon the difficulty of your opponent. Are you saying you'd have a different level based on the world you are in? I'm not really sure I get your differentiation here.

Each world would have to select which decks would be available at each level. It would add more time to world creation, but would also allow you make it so at certain levels the player plays the decks you want. You can still do the challenges with these as well. A boss deck in my mind would be a difficult deck, but not one that would be as difficult as the challenge decks. To prevent from getting stuck at levels where none of the opponents can be beat there may have to be a button that allows you to go back 1 or 2 levels and play previous opponents.

So you're basically trying to create a storyline of what decks you had available to play? Wouldn't that limit the flexibility and make quests feel more repetitive since each time you start a new quest you could only play the same short list of decks? (This is the difference between re-playing a railroaded game, vs re-playing an open world game.) It feels like you're almost trying to subdivide difficulty even further, which seems a bit convoluted to me. In primary Forge Quest, we have.. at least 400 different decks. It seems like it's a lot of overhead to create this type of script instead of just using the Easy/Medium/Hard/Expert that's already in place. Plus whenever a deck is added that person would have to make sure it gets tacked onto the level list along with what difficulty it is.

If the goal is to just limit how you can travel away from a world, I'd think some type of cost (like $500) some amount of time (like 5 matches to "recharge") would be plenty to prevent people from just World hopping. We could even make it a Quest Preference for the people who find the time too short.

[Jaedayr]

I came here today to make a new post, but found this thread already started so I will add to it.

I have a quest going where I have two or three decent decks. Decent that is until I hit hard and very hard opponents. Now I have one deck that can win maybe half the time. The rest of them are extremely lucky to win a game, let alone a match. I will admit I am not an expert player, there are a lot of cards I don't know how to play until I see them used against me.

Given the current mechanics of quest advancement here is what I see. By the time I get enough cards to make a good deck, the difficulty has outpaced my ability to be competitive. I am constantly behind the curve. And trying to create a different deck is even harder, since it is weaker. While getting more cards every match is nice, questing is not a lot of fun when you know you are going to lose the next 10 or 20 matches just so you can hopefully get enough cards to compete again. I changed the preferences so medium, hard and expert opponents come at 98,99 and 100 wins. That gave me about 100 games before I hit the big time wall.

Medium opponents I can deal with. Hard ones are really hard and unless I get a perfect draw it is game over. I tried some very hard opponents and let's just say I have no clue about how to go about making a deck to compete with some of them.

I think the quest as it is should remain, I know there are folks who can snooze through it with ease. However, would it be possible to provide more options to make it easier for us casual players?

[friarsol]

I think the quest as it is should remain, I know there are folks who can snooze through it with ease. However, would it be possible to provide more options to make it easier for us casual players?

Yea I think that's exactly what we were saying earlier in the thread. In Xyx's example there would always be 8 duels available to a player. But at any one time some (maybe 5 using the choice of 3 standard of today) would be hidden based on how you have your "Duel Confidence" set. The options for your "Confidence" would be Default, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert. Default would work the same way it does today. And the others would work the same way a player at that ladder point.

PineApple, is this what you meant by "Level" not level as Forge refers to levels, but the range of opponents that you would play as options?

[PineApple]

I was referring to the level that is stated at the top of the screen on quest screen. I was unaware of how the level was determined, but assumed it could be used in the method I was thinking. What Jaedayr is talking about is one of the things I was hoping to help with.

I can just toss away what I was thinking about levels and making certain opponents available at player levels rather than a slew of people at less stages. Your right that it would be counter productive. Maybe as you stated giving the "duel confidence" option would help. Being able to go back to easy opponents may cause sandbagging and would not help. Giving diminishing returns on payout if you went back constantly may solve the sandbagging.

So you're basically trying to create a storyline of what decks you had available to play? Wouldn't that limit the flexibility and make quests feel more repetitive since each time you start a new quest you could only play the same short list of decks? (This is the difference between re-playing a railroaded game, vs re-playing an open world game.) It feels like you're almost trying to subdivide difficulty even further, which seems a bit convoluted to me. In primary Forge Quest, we have.. at least 400 different decks. It seems like it's a lot of overhead to create this type of script instead of just using the Easy/Medium/Hard/Expert that's already in place. Plus whenever a deck is added that person would have to make sure it gets tacked onto the level list along with what difficulty it is.

If the goal is to just limit how you can travel away from a world, I'd think some type of cost (like $500) some amount of time (like 5 matches to "recharge") would be plenty to prevent people from just World hopping. We could even make it a Quest Preference for the people who find the time too short.

Maybe what I may be wanting is another mode altogether. Incorporating a story into the quest mode may also be a option. Making it so that once you reach a number of wins, or w/e conditions, it allows you enter into a story arch. My main interest is to add another goal for players to attain in quest mode. Open world games are fun for while, but interest falls off after a while. Many mainstream games have leaned towards a open world game play with stretches of controlled play at optional points. Different arches of story, ending with medium to high rewards for the player, and being isolated to worlds would make travel limits more dynamic as well. As a player would have to monitor when a new story arch would be available and on what world.

[Jaedayr]

One *ultimate* quest mode would be to collect one of every card in Forge. Or even every card in a set. Maybe defeat every AI opponent, quest and challenge who dared to oppose you at least once.

[Xyx]

I'd like to point out that it is currently possible to regenerate matchups simply by clicking "New / Load Quest" and then "Duels".