How to make Forge a much more fun game

[Papagelos]

Amazing Community, I must say.
Im used to post at Blizzard Forums, and I would have been flamed to death long ago, instead of beeing helped.
You guys surely rock!

[mtgrares]

Getting boosters even for losing is indeed strange - and it conflicts with what is said in the preferences: "WINS for booster". The other preferences "Wins for XY" do account for wins only.

I guess it was changed at some point to prevent players from getting stuck - imagine you have bad cards and the enemies get too good so you can't win against them at all. At that point you would be stuck if you wouldn't get a booster also from losing.

I was worried that questing might be too hard but it isn't, so winning new cards only when you win makes sense. The quest mode isn't balanced, it just has a bunch of features.

[Roujin]

I was worried that questing might be too hard but it isn't, so winning new cards only when you win makes sense. The quest mode isn't balanced, it just has a bunch of features.

Will/did you change it then?

[friarsol]

I was worried that questing might be too hard but it isn't, so winning new cards only when you win makes sense. The quest mode isn't balanced, it just has a bunch of features.

Will/did you change it then?

Rares doesn't work on the code-base anymore, he's just talking about how he originally decided to handle quest mode.

[Roujin]

Oops, sorry.
Should have known this, guess I didn't really read the user name, but just thought "ah, differently colored user name -> a dev".

Edit: Actually, I'm wondering.. how is decision making organized in the project? Does everyone just commit what he feels is right, or do you discuss about some things? Who has the "say" about e.g. where you should get a booster for every match or only if you win?

[Chris H.]

Oops, sorry.
Should have known this, guess I didn't really read the user name, but just thought "ah, differently colored user name -> a dev".

Edit: Actually, I'm wondering.. how is decision making organized in the project? Does everyone just commit what he feels is right, or do you discuss about some things? Who has the "say" about e.g. where you should get a booster for every match or only if you win?

`
Rares is the original dev for the forge project but he burned out and turned it over to the open source community a few years ago. DennisBergkamp became the head of the project for a year and a half or so and he added a large number of new features to Rares' original quest mode.

DennisBergkamp has been busy with his job and a young child and has not been active in the project for some time. He, like Rares drops by this forum on rare occasion, reads the messages and sometimes leaves a brief response.

Rares, DennisBergkamp, Rob Cashwalker and Chris H. are currently the Group Leaders for the Developers – Forge group on CCGH and these four can give commit status to new people who want to join the dev team. These four also serve as moderators for the Forge forum. There are a sizable group of people who belong to the Developers – Forge group, 18 at this time.

That being said, we do not have a person who serves as the head honcho and is in charge of everyone else. This group is more of a democracy than it is a dictatorship.

The devs tend to work on different areas of the project and this makes sense since we have different talents and our skill levels can vary greatly from one person to the next.

Quest mode is the result of a large number of people and we try to make adjustments in a careful fashion as we do not want to drastically unbalance this portion of the game any more than it is at this time.

And we do on occasion add new features when someone comes up with a really good idea.

[friarsol]

Who has the "say" about e.g. where you should get a booster for every match or only if you win?

I think I've been doing the most tweaking to the balance portion of quest mode of late.

I'm fine with this change. The one change I'd make would be to have "Easy" difficulty still provide boosters for wins and losses. Every other difficulty can give boosters only on wins.

[Roujin]

That sounds like a reasonable compromise, though I feel that then there should be a note somewhere (at/near the difficulty choice?) explaining this difference.


@Chris H.: Thanks for the detailed explanation

[Rob Cashwalker]

That being said, we do not have a person who serves as the head honcho and is in charge of everyone else. This group is more of a democracy than it is a dictatorship.

That being said, there are some things that come up that during the course of a discussion, which need some leadership role fulfilled... to strongly suggest how the course of development should go.

[friarsol]

That sounds like a reasonable compromise, though I feel that then there should be a note somewhere (at/near the difficulty choice?) explaining this difference.

The problem is people can change their preferences, so then we might have incorrect explanations. Right now there are a lot of subtle differences in the default settings for Quest Difficulty (Easy and Normal give a pack every win, Hard and Expert give a pack every 2 wins. Easy gives the most cards at the start of a Quest, Expert gives the least, etc)

I don't think difficulty is something we need to spell out in the UI. It would make more sense in a readme or a FAQ.

When you start playing a First Person Shooter and you choose Easy, you know that you'll probably find more ammo, heal faster, be able to receive more damage, and be able to deal more damage.

In Forge when you choose Easy, you'll get more cards, deal with easier opponents longer, etc.

[Roujin]

If you intended to make it a per-difficulty preference, rather than a hardcoded thing, I agree not to put a text. But then it would appear on the preferences tab, so it would actually already be visible ingame.
If on the other hand it were a hardcoded thing, it is not changable in the preferences tab, so putting a text that explains this change will never result in wrong information.
It's just my stance that there should be no "hidden" features, that a player has to guess or look in the code to learn about them.

--

While we're at the topic of the different difficulty levels: Inspired from my small patch in that area, I have thought about the current implementation of these tweakable settings and I feel that the current system is a bit weird.


For example, the per-difficulty options are kinda redundant. Easy, Medium and Hard are really presets, rather than individual settings.
Also the fact that the values are not saved in the questData. So you cannot easily have multiple quests with differently tweaked properties (without remembering and tweaking the settings back and forth all the time). Or transfer your "savegame" to somewhere else without also transferring the file where the settings are stored.

What I would suggest:
I would get rid of the easy, medium, hard variants of the settings and instead implement these difficulties as three different defaults. In the preference tab there would then only ever be one field per setting, but instead of a "revert to defaults" button three buttons: "revert to Easy preset", "revert to Medium preset" and "revert to Hard preset".

Also I would start saving the preferences in the questData. The preferences tab would then be used to display the preferences of the currently loaded quest and changes you make there would only apply to that quest (not ALL quests).
For starting a new quest, I would add a "Custom" difficulty option that allows to specify your own settings - easiest way to do this is just making the game switch to the preferences tab after creation, instead of to the "play" tab. As a bonus, the "Custom" option could make the quest start out with the previous quest's settings, to allow easily "cloning" the current quest's settings.


--
Okay, this got way longer than I intended. Please understand that I only want to provide suggestions that would in my opinion make the game even more awesome than it is, not dictate anyone of you what he should do
I would also go forward and code it myself (or at least try ), if I didn't have work to do. Actually I spent too much time on this post already, damnit!

[Papagelos]

You dont need to code, imo. You already done more than enough. My quest mode is TONS more fun now that the shop has 25 boosters worth of cards.

Even though I still only found 4 cards to my tinker deck after playing some 40 matches.

Anywyas, I dont know if its your patches fault or not, but now the green dungeon challenge crashes (the one where computer starts with card that allows mana to carry between phases).
It crashes when he has about 6-7 lands out and tries to play something, with the error msg "Mana not needed G to play this spell" or something similar in the log.

[Roujin]

That is very very unlikely to be caused by my changes. Make sure to report the bug in the Bug reports (snapshot builds) Thread, so the devs can fix it. Don't forget to state what version you're using.

[delirimouse]

If such a mode is to exist I would love it if it were possible to do drafts and sealed events within the mode. Keep what you draft, then win prizes if you do well. It would be a lot of fun to do a draft/sealed and pick up some cards for my standard deck, then go run off and play that.

[lugaru]

I would love to see something like this... especially if it has a tounge in cheek aspect. You are going to various silly game shops, ordering from parody online sites, battling various uber nerds... I think it would be a chance to make something that is a fun and funny take on the magic gamers experience that would really stand out from other software.