How to make Forge a much more fun game

[Papagelos]

Unfortunately I am unable to code, or I would have presented a program instead of an idea:

Please implement a CARIEER mode in the following fashion. It must give the sense of starting at the bottom and working your way up. It must simulate the JOY of finally beeing able to afford that one card, or the JOY of opening a booster and getting a foiled Sorin or whatever, and also simulate the joy of taking care of your collection and trying to expand it. Of sorting it, putting it in the binders... Magic is so much more than the actual game at the table. The carieer mode must be infinite, and not like the quest mode 200 rounds or whatnot. Even if you rise and become world champion, you must try to defend the title, year after year.

1. You start as a happy teenager who just discovered MTG, with 30 dollars in your pocket and 20 Standard boosters you just received as a birthday present from a friend.

2. You build a deck and enter the local Friday Night tournament with it. Or maybe they have sealed this week. Or booster draft. It will be different every week. If you win you can collect more boosters as prize. If not, you can spend your 30 dollars in the store where the tournament is held - they sell single cards for their current real life value (fetch price list from a website that sells cards for real cash).

3. As you win matches your DCI ranking rises and the 1st every month you also get 50 more dollars as allowance which you can spend to buy more cards. If you get enough money saved, by selling cards or winning tournaments, you can maybe afford the bus ticket to a Pro Tour Qualifier or GP or similiar big tournament.

Im sure you get the idea. Its a simulation of a person who loves MTG and tries to advance in it, all the time beeing restrained by things such as not beeing rich and having to "start at the bottom".

I believe this will take Forge to a totally different level - as a GAME and not just a MTG simulation.

[Roujin]

What you are suggesting is basically the quest mode with a couple of additions / changes. I don't really see it being implemented as a new mode as it's too similar.

The quest is already infinite, there is no such limit of 200 games or so. The UI displaying such a number (depending on chosen difficulty) is afaik a relic of older versions where there was a limit. But that's long gone, you can play a quest as long as you want and improve your card base


Starting with some boosters and a bunch of dollars (here credits), winning money and boosters by playing games, being able to buy boosters or single cards with the money corresponding to real life prices -- these are ALL features implemented in the quest mode.

The only suggestion that we don't have in the quest mode right now is tournaments of all sorts. And that is a great suggestion, unfortunately I've read a similar suggestion before in these forums. The good news though is that IIRC someone from the dev team reacted positively to that suggestion, so chances are that at some point it will in fact be implemented and included in the quest mode. It just takes time and effort to implement...

So if and when that happens, quest mode will be pretty close to your envisioned career mode, only switching some real life terms (dollars, dci ranking, bus ticket to tournament) with fictional ones (credits, level, zeppelin).

edit: a difference to your vision is that there is no time progression with a small amount of money given every month - instead you get a small amount of money for every won game.

[Papagelos]

Thanks for your feedback.

The reason I discard the Quest mode is because it is so far from a real career.

In reality you do NOT get a booster as reward when you LOSE a match. Give me the option in prefs to remove that "feature".

In reality you DO NOT go to a shop that only has a handful of cards to choose from. Never a playset, only singles. You can visit that shop over 100 times (which takes several real days - to win 100 games to refresh its stock)and still you will not be able to get playsets to build the deck you want.
I started out my Quest mode dreams with "Im gonna build a madness deck. I'll buy the Upheavals, basking rotwallas, Mongrels etc and slowly build it."

Guess what, after a 49-2 record I found ONE of the cards - a Mongrel....
Give me the option to "Card shop amount of cards: 5000" and now we're talking. The amount of money you have should be the limiting factor, not the availability of cards in the shops.

Other than that, I love the quest mode, and I love forge.

And I thank you for your feedback.

Sorry if I sound bitter.

[Roujin]

You raise a couple of valid points.

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, afaict.
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.

But I agree that at least an option to disable this would be nice.


About the shop: Well, if it had all the cards in stock, it would probably be too easy. You'd have your dream deck in no time, if you sell all the other stuff to get money. The current appeal of the quest mode is that you kinda have to go with what you get, not that you go buy exactly the cards you want.
In any way, this is another thing that could (and imo should) be changed to a preference. Currently the shop is hardcoded to offer about 4-5 boosters plus the same worth of single cards at the start of a quest, then dip down to 1 or 2, later increase again to a higher number.
This should ideally be a preference, with the current behaviour as default, but then people like you, Papagelos, who want a different kind of quest, could change it to whatever they like.

edit: An alternative that I have read somewhere else as a suggestion for quest mode, is introducing an additional shop later in the game (possibly needs to be unlocked with a bunch of credits) which offers every single card, but at a significantly higher cost than if you had found the card by chance in the existing "random shop". This is a nice suggestion too imo, but likely a fair bit of coding work

[Roujin]

So that shop thing intrigued me, and since I'm familiar with java I thought I'd go and set up a developing environment for forge and see if I can work out anything myself

The relevant code is in QuestUtilCards.java, line 361 onwards.
This is what happens right now:

levelPacks = a number of Packs granted for having a low level.
It is computed as 4 / level (read 4 divided by level). For level 0 it is set to 4.
So starting from level 0, you get: 4, 4, 2, 1, 1, 0...

winPacks = one Pack per every 10 wins.

Add those two up to get the number "totalPacks" (max. 6).
This number is used for three things:
- That many Precon Decks are for sale.
- That many Boosters are for sale (Randomly chosen, 40% Standard, 35% Extended, 25% Vintage).
- That many custom boosters (from all editions) with 7c/3u/1r cards are created and their contents made for sale as single cards.



So what parts of this can be converted into a property..? I have a few ideas:
- The cap for totalPacks (currently 6). If you set it to 0, it counts at "no cap".
- The number of c/u/r per "totalPacks" sold as single cards (currently 7/3/1). Increasing these values would greatly increase the number of offered single cards.
- The divisor for winPacks, in other words you get one more pack every X wins. (currently 10)
- The starting number for levelPacks (currently 4).

If these values were read from the properties rather than hardcoded, people like Papagelos could customize their quest to have a much better supplied shop

[Papagelos]

Thanks Roujin, for your effort in working the numbers out. Hopefully, some dev will become interested in letting players customize their game experience even further and allow the changing of these values.

I must say with this version, the quest is much more fun - solely due to the fact that there now are preconstructed decks. It was quite boring having to use a deck for more than 100 games that STILL consisted of 23 random cards with minor synergy, instead of a nice conceptdeck with playsets. Now I can buy those for 1200 credits, and even if I didnt construct them, I can atleast tweak them a bit.

although I still would prefer to be able to - in the timespan of say 100+ games - be able to aquire a few playsets of my favorite cards, instead of never seeing a single of them on sale in the shop.

[friarsol]

Papagelos, I find my quest deck picks up a lot of synergy really fast (within 20 games). I think the main thing is that you can't go into the quest deciding what type of deck you want to play. You have to tailor your cards to a suitable deck and then focus on improving that deck. Now with the precons you could technically create your own precon with whatever cards you like, and then purchase them from the shop.

Here's an example I have of a synergistic deck at 54 games. Playing for Ante is a great way to pick up staples like Dual Lands and Moxen.

GUw Draw | Open

3 Forest
3 Island
2 Hinterland Harbor
1 Flooded Grove
1 Glacial Fortress
1 Halimar Depths
1 Mishra's Factory
1 Misty Rainforest
1 Slippery Karst
1 Tundra
2 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
1 Path to Exile
2 Brainstorm
1 Birds of Paradise
1 Elvish Fury
1 Powder Keg
1 Counterspell
1 Earthbrawn
1 Naturalize
1 Jhessian Infiltrator
1 Mimic Vat
1 Spawnwrithe
1 Edric, Spymaster of Trest
3 Lorescale Coatl
1 Trygon Predator
1 Chastise
1 Questing Phelddagrif
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
1 Spike Weaver
1 Gush
1 Mulldrifter
1 Thornling

We have had a fair amount of discussion about having a "Singles Shop" where you would ask for a particular card and the Shop would charge you more for it than it's base value. While all these ideas are great, development takes time and not everyone is focused on one particular area. Not to mention that we all have real jobs that take up much of our time. (Particularly, I haven't been able to code up anything large lately, despite having a huge list of features I want to add).

While I see your point of wanting to have playsets, I much prefer the feel of a limited deck come to life. (Restricted card pool from unrestricted card pool) It makes me find new cards, and fill holes with cards I wouldn't normally play. Now I'm not saying my way is "right" and your way isn't. I'm just saying I don't think the Quest should be "changed" to what you are suggesting. We already have a fair amount of flexibility with the preferences, so if we add a few more preferences in spots like Roujin talks about, and find some time to make the shops that are planned, I think it should be enough to better fit what you picture as the "best" way.

[Chris H.]

When Rares first added the initial version of quest mode to Forge it was fairly simple and not as developed as it is at this time. The total number of card in Forge at that time were about 1500 and they were spread out into different sets.

Various additions were made by different people and the current quest mode tends to take on a fantasy story line which somewhat resembles the old Shandalar game. It is fun to discuss various ways to extend this fantasy quest mode.

A career mode that mimicked real life experiences with FNM tournaments and the occasional regional tournament sounds like it would be different enough from the fantasy quest mode that it would require a new mode.

A realistic career mode would not have a bazaar. We would need something to make it different enough from the fantasy quest mode that a career mode would stand on its own.

[Roujin]

I have gone forward and implemented the change from hardcoded values to preferences, like I mentioned in my previous post.
I'm providing a SVN patch here, so if any dev feels I did a good job feel free to apply and commit it.

The new preferences, their min and max values, and their defaults are:

Maximum Packs: 1-25, default 6
Starting Packs: 0-15, default 4
Wins for Pack: 1-25, default 10
Common Singles: 0-15, default 7
Uncommon Singles: 0-15, default 3
Rare Singles: 0-15, default 1

With the default settings, behavior is unchanged.

I decided to scrap the idea of Max Packs 0 == no limit. It's more sensible to have some (high enough for everyones tastes) limit. With the highest configuration of these settings, you can have 25 boosters, 25 precons, 375 rares, 375 uncommons and 375 commons in the shop. I think this should fulfill everyone's needs, right?

So here's the patch. Oh and it contains a fix for this bug, since I encountered it while testing my changes here...

[Rob Cashwalker]

I don't see any reason another quest format couldn't be implemented at some point. Like we have "realistic" and "fantasy", we could implement it as an alternative mode. If and when the adventure mode is implemented, attending tournaments in towns was considered a likely feature.

It's not nice to declare your idea as more fun than any other way though. The Forge following is very diverse. We all enjoy using Forge for our own individual habits... While questing is fun for me, I much prefer using Forge as a quick solitaire game in between my more productive times...

[Roujin]

Just wanted to jump in to notify Papagelos and anyone else interested that my patch was put into trunk in r13820. In other terms, the daily builds and betas released from now have those new preferences I was talking about.
Edit: The 02-05 daily build already has it. Get it here: forge-1.2.4-20120205.122738-2.tar.bz2

While it's far from the completely new mode you are wishing for, maybe you can meanwhile get some more fun out of the quest mode by tweaking the preferences more to your liking.

[Papagelos]

You are right Rob, I ment "more fun for me", as I was looking for something similar to Real life mode instead of fantasy bazaar mode

And Roujin, your modifications will keep me - and hopefully many others - happy for a long time. More customization to the people! Long live Roujin!

As a living example of the human nature - always wanting for more - I just discovered that with 25 packs its quite time consuming to actually find the cards you are looking for. Any chance of the Deck editor filter beeing put into the shop as well? So i can browse the shop for i.e "white cards, enchantments".

Hugz!

[Roujin]

That would indeed be cool, but meanwhile, you could sort by these things by clicking on the title bar of the corresponding category.
For your example, click on "type", then on "color". This way you will have all the cards in blocks: first a block of white, then a block of blue... and so on.
Within these blocks, you will have sub-blocks of different types: first probably artifacts, since they're starting with "a", then I guess artifact creatures, then creatures..., and at some point, voilá, all the white enchantments one after another.

[Chris H.]

Once the new UI work is finished for the battlefield, home screen and quest mode the plan is to then use the experienced and tools gained to redo the various deck editors and the card shop.

I would expect that all of the various deck editors and the card shop would receive the filters seen in the constructed mode deck editor. I also expect that the old style of filters seen in the quest mode deck editor would be brought up to date by using the graphical based check boxes as seen in the constructed mode deck editor.

[Doublestrike]

Once the new UI work is finished for the battlefield, home screen and quest mode the plan is to then use the experienced and tools gained to redo the various deck editors and the card shop.

I would expect that all of the various deck editors and the card shop would receive the filters seen in the constructed mode deck editor. I also expect that the old style of filters seen in the quest mode deck editor would be brought up to date by using the graphical based check boxes as seen in the constructed mode deck editor.

That, and a few more ideas of me own This great moment is getting closer! When it's done, we'll be fully UI-d - can't wait.