Standard in Quest Mode

[stalik]

First - long time lurker - first time poster - kudos to those that donate their sweat and talent to this project!

Second - question - I'd like to limit the card pool to those available in standard for quest mode. My initial starting deck should also be pulled from those cards.

I know about common / uncommon / rare.txt in res, res\quest and res\draft and have modified accordingly but no matter what I do forge always pulls from all available cards.

I've also tried the set editor program to no avail at this point. I've tried both the last public release (11-28?) and the latest board version (12-22?).

Thanks tons in advance!

[Rob Cashwalker]

The set information added recently will become useful for such purposes, however it is becoming increasingly difficult to actually make the set information used by those features. The old text files aren't used except for draft, and the set editor doesn't edit sets, it edits those files...

[stalik]

So to translate - no way to do it - currently?

No big deal - will wait until the new set code is ready

[Chris H.]

So to translate - no way to do it - currently?

No big deal - will wait until the new set code is ready

`
The only way to do it now is labor intensive for the user. Sigh.

Look in the cardsfolder directory and open one of the card files in a text editor. One of the lines starts with:

Code: Select all

SVar:Rarity:

`
You can delete the entire line or or just the rarity value following the "SVar:Rarity:" portion. You can also comment out the entire rarity line by placing the "#" sign at the start of the SVar. So it would look like this:

Code: Select all

#SVar:Rarity:Uncommon

[friarsol]

I would just wait till we got around to it. Sets were only very recently added, and there is a lot of things planned around them. But they all take time.

[stalik]

Interesting - thanks for the awesome tip.

I was a coder way back but have been out of the "biz" for about 10 years. Still handy enough with macros, Excel, SQL, Databases and Delphi to jerry-rig something together for these types of tasks. (I had actually created a spreadsheet to parse out common, uncommon & rare into the text files containing only the cards I wanted based on set, etc using a join to my magic suitcase DB for set validation but that ended up as a bust when I discovered the files were no longer used hence my original post... LOL)

I'm going to see what I can do.

[friarsol]

Well, if you plan on going the scripting route I would suggest something like this:

for each file in res/cardsfolder/
loop through the acronym of the each set in standard (ZEN, WWK, ROE, M11, SOM)
search for SetInfo:<TLA> where <TLA> is the current acronym of the set you are looking for
if that's found continue on to the next file in the main loop

after the set loop is finished, that means the card doesn't exist in a set in standard so then
replace SVar:Rarity with #SVar:Rarity for each each time it occurs in the file.

And that might do the trick. I'd still suggest waiting though.

[Chris H.]

I'm with Sol on this one. Putting together a script and trying it out to see if it works would be a fun experiment for some people.

But for most people waiting until these features are added would be best.

[lazylockie]

you'd also need to edit almost all quest decks to make them Standard. Current Quest decks are all Vintage, so most decks would be unusable.

A future idea would be giving different card pools for AI and player. Say AI has access to Extended and the player has access to Standard. The problem with Standard and Extended on Quest mode though, is that people need to constantly keep the decks up to date, since the metagame changes basically every 3 months.

[friarsol]

you'd also need to edit almost all quest decks to make them Standard. Current Quest decks are all Vintage, so most decks would be unusable.

I think that's only true if he deleted files, not if he just commented out rarities.

[lazylockie]

you'd also need to edit almost all quest decks to make them Standard. Current Quest decks are all Vintage, so most decks would be unusable.

I think that's only true if he deleted files, not if he just commented out rarities.

But then he'd access only Standard pool while AI has access to full Vintage? Seems quite har... challenge accepted!

[lazylockie]

it's been a while since I don't program in Java, but here's my parser (attached) for Standard on Quest mode. It's very simple and everything is hardcoded, but it's a start.

Unzip the contents into your res/cardsfolder. I recommend you recompiling it with javac and then running with java through console command. Also, it's highly recommended to have/make a backup of your cardsfolder.

Some cards don't have the SetInfo, so I guess there's no fix for them right now.

On an additional note, I sense this mode will be very challenging, I'll reply with info later. Although the chances of getting Jaces and Titans are much higher now heh

[Rob Cashwalker]

I see a benefit to this - consistency. The user will start with a card pool more likely to contain multiples. The card shop and match win packs will be more likely to help complete the collection. Also, 4x of Standard is only 4-5000 cards. 4x of our current 6000++ is 24000++ cards... quite likely to break Forge.

[stalik]

AWESOME - THANK YOU - and yes I'm fine with playing against the extended / vintage / legacy stuff - since the AI is lacking it's like giving myself a handicap. Really helps to learn the cards intimately! Plus let's me tweak things without having to go back to my boxes constantly (um I have a card or 90k.... O.o) which is a complete pain in the ass! Instead I can make multiple revisions to a deck easily and I even ended up in a few mirror matchups & faceoffs against my own decks. I actually have found watching the AI play decks I've built rather fascinating...