The Orgnum Mindset - Attitudes, Skill, and Design

Personofsecrets · December 2022

As recent as last night, I had the pleasure of getting forced into a game with another bad actor. In this case, I've played against this person a number of times in the past and never really had a problem with them before. I don't know exactly how many games it has been. Maybe 20 and perhaps with them winning 0% to 5% of the games. At some point I noticed that they began to always choose Orgnum as a patron. It's annoying, but maybe not a problem. As early as last night, they also decided to start having incredibly bad manners. They decided to make all of the plays for their turn and then not press the end turn button for every single one of their turns. I realized that what they were doing is best described as the Orgnum Mindset and that isn't just because of their habitual Patron choice.

As always, they eventually lost the round. This time they rage-conceded after they played themselves into a corner by not working on their economy and instead focusing on spam usage of the magic Orgnum Patron button. The number of games where the opponents have found ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is surprising. The game isn't always as canned as it seems, but this opponent is trying to treat the game as though it is. If they can just get a power generating card and then use the Ogrum button over and over, then that is the kind of game that they are going to play. It's the Orgnum Mindset.

And what happens when said players fails time and time again with this strategy? Nothing changes. They apparently think that doing the same thing over and over will at some point achieve a different result. It's the Orgnum Mindset. What happens when failure apparently aggravates said player? They move from trying to get an easy win thanks to the mechanics of Sorcerer-King Orgnum to trying to get an easy win through use of a bad manners technique. You guessed it, this is all so obviously part of the Orgnum Mindset. Maybe it's not about winning because they lose over and over. Maybe it's not about the time component involved with playing a long game out because they will gladly waste plenty of time through their bad manners. It's about their mindset, their Orgnum Mindset.

At some point, what is happening is that the player isn't even playing Tales of Tribute any longer. They are stuck in their own head, playing their own game, and they are owned by the Orgnum Mindset. This is where I make an appeal to designers. You cannot design a game for everyone because there will inevitably be players that are trapped within the Orgnum mindset. Such players do what they do not out of any motivation informed by wanting to enjoy a healthy strategy game. The more easy a strategy is to play and understand, the more it will have appeal among a lowest common denominator. That means that the game will have more appeal among those who are possessed by the Orgnum Mindset.

Maybe you ought not design strategies that are too esoteric with too narrow of an appeal, but it's obvious that there is also a toxicity associated with those who are motivated by the Orgnum Mindset. The Orgnum Mindset is a toxicity that, at it's core, undermines Tales of Tribute. It's not about playing, enjoying, or winning a round of cards, it's about being an Orgnum player and whatever psychic benefits that come with being such a players. I can only venture to guess what those "benefits" are, but I'm sure that they aren't conducive to having an elevated experience.

If you are making an offering to the broader public, such as the design of a card game, then you should avoid appealing to players that have the Orgnum Mindset at all costs. It should be plainly clear from the above example that no game can be made which appeals to everyone. The players with the Orgnum Mindset wants to play their own game. This is a story as old as Elder Scrolls Online itself. My friends list is a graveyard of the months gone by. You may think that the new thing or the new change is doing something neat, but it is really marginalizing a more core audience who has no choice but to up and decide to play their own game because they are not an Orgnum player. It obviously the case that appealing to a wide audience can have a result of having a larger net number of players, but the point is that there is a cost to such an appeal. The cost is the enervating mindset that starts to set in and become prevalent.

rbfrgsp · December 2022

That's a lot of words to say you beat someone. Not sure I would care that much if I got a win out of it.

But I get your main point. Spamming the patron isn't even the real power of orgnum, but players are taught that because of the broken way the NPC AI has been programmed.

There seems to be some foundational NPC logic that prioritises acquiring cards - which is why you see them buy useless tithes or extra cards in the opening rounds when they cannot make use of them.

The way the orgnum patron gives cards seems to trip that part of the NPC logic and make it hit it every round - bypassing strong tavern cards to make it happen.

Players tend to learn decks against NPC's so some people think that spamming orgnum is the power move when in reality it results in paying three gold for ~2power most rounds. Ie: the same as one of those *** treasury cards with the sword on it.

SeaGtGruff · December 2022

I don't agree with the suggestion that the AI teaches people to spam the Orgnum patron (if I understood that correctly).

Yes, it seems to come across that way at first, when you play against an Expert NPC and they win by spamming the Orgnum patron. Or it could be that you prefer not to play against the NPCs and that you first ran into the Orgnum-spamming strategy when playing against another player who used it to win.

But if you start using that strategy yourself, you will see that it doesn't always win the match for you. And if you start to look for ways to defend yourself against an opponent who's using that strategy-- instead of just mindlessly counter-spamming the Orgnum patron yourself-- you will see that it doesn't always win the match for your Orgnum-spamming opponent.

Conclusion: Spamming the Orgnum patron can win the game, but it doesn't always win the game.

A thinking, curious, and reasoning person will want to start paying closer attention to what's going on during each match where Orgnum is involved, to try to analyze where mistakes are being made-- by either player-- in order to determine when it's a good idea to call on the Orgnum patron and when it's a bad idea to keep calling on the Orgnum patron because there is a better move available. They will want to more fully understand how the Orgnum patron can be either wisely used or unwisely abused-- by either side of the match-- so they can better use Orgnum themselves as well as better counteracting Orgnum if it's being used by their opponent.

The problem that the OP described is that some players don't seem to be thinking, curious, and reasoning individuals when it comes to Tales of Tribute. Their misunderstanding and inefficient abuse of the Orgnum patron is just one example; they likely make similar mistakes with other patrons and their decks. If you read through this forum, you can occasionally see posts in which someone says that they decided to try the card game, but they had no clue about which cards to buy-- or they felt that it didn't matter which cards they bought because they perceived the game to be totally random and that skill had nothing to do with it-- so they just clicked randomly on cards in the Tavern without putting thought into it. For whatever reasons, it seems that they "just don't get it" with the card game, and don't seem interested enough to even try to get it, so they just fall into a pattern of trying to mindlessly mimic moves they've seen their opponents make, or just mindlessly clicking on random cards, because they're apparently too frustrated and "brain-tied" to do anything else.

It isn't confined to the Orgnum patron, nor is it confined to Tales of Tribute, but it does seem to show up there a lot.

spartaxoxo · December 2022

Some people are just sore losers. They are in every competitive game since pretty much they existed. It has nothing to do with Orgnum.

rbfrgsp · December 2022

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I don't agree with the suggestion that the AI teaches people to spam the Orgnum patron (if I understood that correctly).

That's just my take on it. Where do you think it comes from, if not the weird NPC programming for that deck? Orgnum is the only patron that players seem to spam heavily (other than Rahjin, which rarely helps to win a game directly so most give up on it. (Plus Rahjin spam is dead rude)).

I remember first time I played orgnum was against an NPC before I'd unlocked it. They did their usual spamming and absolutely wiped me. I was like wtf just happened. But then, like you say, if you take the time to learn the deck you realise spamming the patron is the suboptimal playstyle. So it's always been my assumption that other players have taken that traumatising 'L' against an NPC and assumed that the strategy was some OP way to win or something.

There are loads of ways to combat it in a PvP match, my main gripe about it is it looks impolite.

Necrotech_Master · December 2022

when ive played npcs using orgnum, they seem to have a few nuances with it

they wont start hitting it at least until they have converted all of their single coin cards to writ of coins
they will start hitting it if you hit it first earlier than they finish their conversions
at least with novice npcs, they do not fully spam that either, i have noticed them try to counter spam your spam, but sometimes will stop after a few turns and then maybe hit it occasionally after that
they seem to want to spam it more if it is neutral or favored, but sometimes ignore it when its unfavored

my strategy with npc orgnum is to try to get a strong economy before they start hitting it (high gold yield cards such as grand larceny/pounce and profit, or the psijic one, or hlaalu ones) so if/when they start using orgnum i can counter it while at the same time keeping up my deck building

the only other patron ive seen the npc semi spam is hlaalu, but they always sacrifice too many cards or cards that are still useful to them lol

SeaGtGruff · December 2022

rbfrgsp wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I don't agree with the suggestion that the AI teaches people to spam the Orgnum patron (if I understood that correctly).

That's just my take on it. Where do you think it comes from, if not the weird NPC programming for that deck?

As I said in my original reply, some players might prefer to play against other players rather than against the NPCs, and those players might have first seen that tactic when another player used it.

But that was actually a side point. My main difference of opinion is about the suggestion that the AI "teaches" that tactic-- or any other tactic, for that matter. In other words, I don't think there was any conscious attempt by the devs to have the AI which controls the NPCs' moves function as a "teaching" mechanism. It's true that human beings and other animals frequently learn by the "Monkey see, monkey do" method-- and sometimes it's intended, where one person or animal is demonstrating how to do something so their students or offspring can watch and learn. But I don't think the devs necessarily intended for the NPCs' AI to be mimicked by the players. I think it's more of an unintentional thing-- and, in line with the meanings of that old saying, the mimickry is too often done without any real care or logic, such that it frequently ends up being ineffective.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

when ive played npcs using orgnum, they seem to have a few nuances with it
they wont start hitting it at least until they have converted all of their single coin cards to writ of coins

they will start hitting it if you hit it first earlier than they finish their conversions

at least with novice npcs, they do not fully spam that either, i have noticed them try to counter spam your spam, but sometimes will stop after a few turns and then maybe hit it occasionally after that

they seem to want to spam it more if it is neutral or favored, but sometimes ignore it when its unfavored

my strategy with npc orgnum is to try to get a strong economy before they start hitting it (high gold yield cards such as grand larceny/pounce and profit, or the psijic one, or hlaalu ones) so if/when they start using orgnum i can counter it while at the same time keeping up my deck building

the only other patron ive seen the npc semi spam is hlaalu, but they always sacrifice too many cards or cards that are still useful to them lol

I disagree with the first observation. I regularly see Expert NPCs initiate the Orgnum spamming as soon as they've bought one or more Power or Prestige cards, even if they haven't converted all of their 1-gold cards into 2-gold cards. I actually wish that they would wait, because it would give me more time to build up my deck while they're converting their Money cards. But it's usually a guessing game about how long I can wait before hitting Orgnum myself without having the NPC hit it first. Yes, they usually do like to convert all of their 1-gold cards before doing anything else; but it isn't as predictable as that, especially with the Expert NPCs.

Your other observations agree with mine, although I'm confused about the last one. When you say "unfavored," do you mean that Orgnum favors the player rather than the NPC? If so, my observation is that they'll usually hit Orgnum if that's the case. They might stop spamming it if the player isn't counter-spamming it, especially if certain cards are available in the Tavern-- the ones that the AI seems to be programmed to buy no matter what (assuming the NPC has enough Money). But most of the time they will continue to spam it even if the player isn't counter-spamming it and there is some other move which would give them much more Power or Prestige-- such as hitting the Crow or Hlaalu patrons instead of spamming Orgnum.

Another patron or tactic that I see the Expert NPCs use inefficiently is the Red Eagle or "remove a card" tactic. If they have a card that lets them remove one or more cards from the Tavern, they will do that even if it's a stupid move for them, such as removing a really good card during the early half of their turn even if the rest of their moves would have given them more than enough Money to buy the really good card that they stupidly removed. I will often buy those 1-gold "remove a card" cards but then not actually remove anything, just to keep the NPC from using it.

Necrotech_Master · December 2022

@SeaGtGruff i was mostly coming from the perspective of the novice NPCs, sometimes they do hit it early, but in most situations they usually will convert 80% or more of their coin to writs before actually hitting it, unless they happen to get some powerful gold generation cards on the first turn (i think they usually like to generate 7+ coin in a turn before starting to spam the patron, if they make 6 its a gamble, and 5 or less they rarely hit it unless they are countering you)

the different difficulty AI NPCs do function a little bit differently with the patrons

i have honestly never seen the NPC use any patron other than orgnum or hlaalu (they used to use crow very quickly when it was available, but now they dont even touch it lol), but i agree that they use card removals very poorly (i frequently use rahjin which also has card removals, and ive seen them pick that and then remove one of their own agents still in play lol)

there have been times when i was playing the npc and they were not hitting it while it was unfavored, but it could be at that time i had them pressured in a way they couldnt afford to hit it, and sometimes they make a dumb tavern purchase instead of the patron

lately though ive been really enjoying playing the druid king + rahjin against the novice npcs, so orgnum is never in play much

SeaGtGruff · December 2022

@Necrotech_Master, I've never played against a Novice NPC using Orgnum, because I haven't collected it yet myself and can't use it unless my opponent selects it, and I only play against the Expert NPCs. But from what I recall of the Novice NPCs-- yes, they tend to have a very predictable tactic of converting all of their 1-gold cards into 2-gold cards before doing anything else.

The NPCs' AI is "predictably inept" in other ways regarding the patrons or specific cards. For instance, if they have a Psijic card which lets them discard any cards ahead of time from their draw pile, they'll frequently play it last but spend their Money first to buy some card, even if the Psijic card us about to combo with an earlier Psijic card and give them a bit more gold, such that they could have bought a much better card by waiting until after they've played that Psijic card.

They can also use the Crow patron ineffectively the same way, by hitting the Crow patron before they've played all their cards, such that they end up with a bit more Money at the end if their turn that they can't spend because it isn't enough to buy any of the cards in the Tavern, and that they could have converted to Power instead. On occasion that tactic will allow them to buy a useful card after they've hit the Crow patron, but from what I've seen it typically ends up being a waste.

Necrotech_Master · December 2022

since they changed the NPC AI, i rarely see them ever use the crow patron anymore (at least with novice npcs) when its available lol, the novice npcs even rarely use hlaalu now too lol

i also noticed this about their psijic card use, they definitely always play the psijic cards last after playing and buying from the tavern, and they dont even discard stuff efficiently, its a random amount of the allowed, and the choices never even make sense sometimes

i think the overall difference between the npcs AI is pretty small between novice and expert

(i usually play the novice ones because there isnt really a reward incentive to play the expert ones, as any match against an npc gives the same reward)

Neoauspex · December 2022

Not a fan of of Orgnum spam, def not a fan of the behavior OP described, but I will say that right now I use it as a direct counter to Druid (especially against really good players).

IncultaWolf · January 2023

Neoauspex wrote: »

Not a fan of of Orgnum spam, def not a fan of the behavior OP described, but I will say that right now I use it as a direct counter to Druid (especially against really good players).

I agree with this, so many people right now are using the meta psijic/druid king deck combo, that whenever someone picks it, I usually choose the orgnum patron if I can, and I end up winning a lot of the time. These matches are always super sweaty and I've actually gotten a few hate whispers from players upset that I beat them, but I will typically only pick orgnum if someone chooses druid king first

Necrotech_Master · January 2023

IncultaWolf wrote: »

Neoauspex wrote: »

Not a fan of of Orgnum spam, def not a fan of the behavior OP described, but I will say that right now I use it as a direct counter to Druid (especially against really good players).

I agree with this, so many people right now are using the meta psijic/druid king deck combo, that whenever someone picks it, I usually choose the orgnum patron if I can, and I end up winning a lot of the time. These matches are always super sweaty and I've actually gotten a few hate whispers from players upset that I beat them, but I will typically only pick orgnum if someone chooses druid king first

i actually find psijic to be a good counter to druid, because of the patrons ability to kill agents, which is where druid gets most of its power from

my personal favorite combo is rahjin + druid lol

WitchyKiki · January 2023

I only pick orgnum to counter red eagle/crow comboers. I find the endless drawing of cards boring, so orgnum usually takes care of that.