Quest Mode Drafting

[timmermac]

Lots of work done today! Knocked out a pile of bugs and finished the deck editing screen:

TournamentInterface.jpg

The tournament is now able to continue if it's interrupted for some reason. It'll pick up after the last finished match and resume games from there. I've also built in all the prizes (for now), which also means that the entry fee is enforced. The game mode itself is now complete, with just UI enhancements and bug fixes to go!

I'll take a look at removing the UI for AI matches soon, but that might not be something that's easily done. It'll definitely involve digging deeper into the code.

Instead of removing the UI, would it be possible instead to dramatically speed up the AI vs. AI matches?

[Sloth]

I've just tested a Draft in quest mode and it's a lot of fun. Great addition Krazy!

The only thing that i noticed is that the cards that i drafted and used in my draft deck weren't in my quest pool afterwards (the deck was there though). Is this intentional?

[KrazyTheFox]

Instead of removing the UI, would it be possible instead to dramatically speed up the AI vs. AI matches?

Where your Ok and Cancel buttons are there should be a 10x faster button when watching AI matches. Haven't figured out how to make that the default yet.

The only thing that i noticed is that the cards that i drafted and used in my draft deck weren't in my quest pool afterwards (the deck was there though). Is this intentional?

Not intentional at all. I added the code for that late last night, so it's entirely possible I missed something. I'll have a fix for that once I get back to my computer.

[friarsol]

How do the built in prizes work? I just finished my tournament (the one I started when I reported the can't continue issue), and now that I just won my last match, I'm just stuck with a finished tournament bracket, and the screen says start or leave tournament. Start doesn't do anything, and I'm worried leaving the tournament will fail to award me with sweet sweet tournament prizes. Is this an issue of when I started the tournament?

[KrazyTheFox]

How do the built in prizes work? I just finished my tournament (the one I started when I reported the can't continue issue), and now that I just won my last match, I'm just stuck with a finished tournament bracket, and the screen says start or leave tournament. Start doesn't do anything, and I'm worried leaving the tournament will fail to award me with sweet sweet tournament prizes. Is this an issue of when I started the tournament?

It's a wording and UI problem at the moment that I'm fixing soon. "Leave Tournament" currently awards prizes correctly (though you may want to wait for r26128+ when I fix a potential problem with cards not getting put into your card pool). It also asks you to make sure that you really want to leave the tournament if you accidentally click it (when you have matches left to play).

Edit: If you're reading this now, the problem is fixed in r26128.

[KrazyTheFox]

Tournaments now rotate out every 5 wins (keeping them alive for 15 wins if you don't play them). You now also only start with one tournament instead of three. I'm still trying to figure out how to best display the brackets without taking up too much space. I just can't find anything that works right, though I'm definitely getting closer to something that will. I'm also getting a lot more familiar with the way the UI works, which will be extremely useful for adding new things in the future.

[KrazyTheFox]

Since I keep running into situations where a complex rotational system doesn't work, how about I keep the rotations fixed (every tournament sticks around for 15 turns exactly, unless played) and a new tournament is created every 5 turns? Then, instead of limiting tournaments to 3 at a time, you can "buy" extra tournaments with tokens you get from winning tournaments or getting win streaks.

This makes it so that you can generate new tournaments if none are available that you want to play and it still awards tournament winners with a new tournament to play immediately.

[serrasmurf]

This is very very cool!
Hoping for something like this for quite some time. Many people have posted ideas to get quest to a higher level, here my 2 cents:

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1516&p=107768&hilit=vision#p107768

This is a big milestone for that!
I assume that entering a constructed tournament will now be relatively easy to build, friarsol already made it possible to play with preconstructed decks (tibalt vs. sorin), so it will then become easy to recreate past official magic tournaments which you can enter in your quest. After that it becomes a matter of filling Forge with more content and finally create 1 extra quest mode that has a fixed configuration, is well balanced and where it is your job to complete everything, just like in a normal game

In this system Forge needs to have code and keep track of everything you have achieved, are allowed to do and have to do before you are completely done. An alternative approach could be to award "quest points" for everything. With dimishing returns for repeated achievements (your 100th win with your P9 deck gets you far less quest points then your 1st theros sealed tournament) . This could be implemented too in the free quest mode, without hampering it.



I'll do some testing tonight, thnx!

[KrazyTheFox]

I'll be finalizing the UI tonight and polishing up a few mechanics so that this is ready to be released by tomorrow. I think I have a solid list of all the things that need changing/fixing and a good idea of how to display the tournament itself. If you have any suggestions, now's the time to let me know.

[friarsol]

I think the biggest thing I've noticed is the awkward Drafting scenarios that get provided, several times I've seen something like a block for draft, except it's 2 of the 2nd set, and 1 of the 3rd. Drafting 2 packs of a small set feels really repetitive. I think one of these scenarios was Mirrodin block, but I didn't actually get to draft Mirrodin. Obviously this isn't a UI thing, and I'm not sure how the packs are being generated, but there definitely feels like there needs to be some tweaking there.

2-3 packs from any "large" set is fine. But 2-3 packs from a "small" set is just too much repetition of cards.

[KrazyTheFox]

I think the biggest thing I've noticed is the awkward Drafting scenarios that get provided, several times I've seen something like a block for draft, except it's 2 of the 2nd set, and 1 of the 3rd. Drafting 2 packs of a small set feels really repetitive. I think one of these scenarios was Mirrodin block, but I didn't actually get to draft Mirrodin. Obviously this isn't a UI thing, and I'm not sure how the packs are being generated, but there definitely feels like there needs to be some tweaking there.

2-3 packs from any "large" set is fine. But 2-3 packs from a "small" set is just too much repetition of cards.

I'm not really sure how to differentiate between big and small sets, but I'll look into it. Right now, if you click on the regular draft menu, then start a new draft and click "Block / Set", that list is what the tournament drafts are picked from. Once it selects a block/set that works for the quest, it selects a booster configuration in the same way, generating a random arrangement of boosters from within a block. I'll see if I can't separate the small sets out and limit them to 0-1 per draft.

[friarsol]

I'm not really sure how to differentiate between big and small sets, but I'll look into it. Right now, if you click on the regular draft menu, then start a new draft and click "Block / Set", that list is what the tournament drafts are picked from. Once it selects a block/set that works for the quest, it selects a booster configuration in the same way, generating a random arrangement of boosters from within a block. I'll see if I can't separate the small sets out and limit them to 0-1 per draft.

Ahh.. I think the booster arrangements from the Draft dialog is just every possible arrangement of packs, which provides way more possibilities than what would commonly be seen for that block.

See more info: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/A ... ily/ld/192

I'm pretty sure we don't specify which is Large and which is Small, but we do order when the sets come out in the block, which might do the trick just as easily.

Personally, I'd much rather only see the following arrangement for the typical three block set, as it represents the three stages of a blocks lifecycle:

1-1-1
1-1-2
1-2-3

(I guess technically it should be the reverse these days, since you draft the most recently released set first to make the newer cards more meaningful for your deck.)

[Chris H.]

I'll be finalizing the UI tonight and polishing up a few mechanics so that this is ready to be released by tomorrow. I think I have a solid list of all the things that need changing/fixing and a good idea of how to display the tournament itself. If you have any suggestions, now's the time to let me know.

 
Ah, great!

Could you add a few sentences to the changes.txt document describing what you have accomplished?

[KrazyTheFox]

Ahh.. I think the booster arrangements from the Draft dialog is just every possible arrangement of packs, which provides way more possibilities than what would commonly be seen for that block.

Yup. Seemed like a good idea at the time. You can probably tell I've not done very much drafting.

I'm pretty sure we don't specify which is Large and which is Small, but we do order when the sets come out in the block, which might do the trick just as easily.

Yeah, there's no indication of set size right now, but I've gotten around that by considering all sets under 200 cards "small". Although I do like the chronological order idea, so I'm going to use that instead.

Personally, I'd much rather only see the following arrangement for the typical three block set, as it represents the three stages of a blocks lifecycle:

1-1-1
1-1-2
1-2-3

(I guess technically it should be the reverse these days, since you draft the most recently released set first to make the newer cards more meaningful for your deck.)

That would work great, actually. Keeps things simple to code and fun to draft. Can always switch things up later if need be.

Could you add a few sentences to the changes.txt document describing what you have accomplished?

I shall once I've got everything completed so that I know exactly what's going in. It's the last thing on my check list.

[friarsol]

Is Ante not currently being overridden? I don't remember it happening earlier, but it definitely just happened today.