This game is a poor design. Each player should have their own deck and be able to play games vs equally matched opponents. That way at least the RNG would be build around your own deck.
The issues you're seeing are with the balance of the game, not the design.
Sometimes. I've had a lot of games that lasted for quite a while without a clear favorite to win, and were quite close even at the end.
Other times, the first 2 rolls on the tavern are just too oppressive. Last game I picked up 2 good Pelin cards - the +4 and +5 power ones - and knew it was over for my opponent. I was just spamming Rajin patron until the end to annoy him further, it was so brutal.
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »[snip]
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »So, Tales of Tribute, you can claim that there is strategy, and mechanics, and an ability to win being the better player… but that is simply, blatantly, and unequivocally not true. It’s RNG, plain and simple: And HONESTLY it’s usually who goes second, but definitely who gets the first GOOD card. Just one, that’s all it takes, and the match is over; only it’s not, you still need to suffer through 15 to 30 minutes of the loss that happened 2 turns in.
Since this is an INARGUABLE FACT, is there any way to just let an RNG coin flip decide the winner at the beginning of the match? I have no desire to sit through as many hours as ‘completion’ (whatever that maybe) or farming is going to take when this RNG monstrosity could literally just state who wins when it decides such… AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MATCH!
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »And I just conceded a match in the third round, because it was obvious even that early on… and I’m slapped with a desertion penalty and not allowed to queue? I understand battle grounds or dungeons. But this is by definition concession, and shouldn’t be penalized.
NeuroticPixels wrote: »Sadly, I agree. I still have fun with ToT. But there are games where I see players get certain cards and I’m like, “Great. They’ve won.” when we only just got started. I still try my hardest and try to be crafty, but still usually lose when I notice them obtaining certain cards. Ones that come to mind are the red “armory” and “rally” cards.
SilverBride wrote: »Certain cards from certain decks are almost always a sure win. I have learned that the only way to win is to build a deck with as many of these cards as possible and try to get several of them to play in the same hand by moving them to the top of the play pile.
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »So, Tales of Tribute, you can claim that there is strategy, and mechanics, and an ability to win being the better player… but that is simply, blatantly, and unequivocally not true.
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »...is there any way to just let an RNG coin flip decide the winner at the beginning of the match?
And it is just getting boring, do you feel it too?
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »And HONESTLY it’s usually who goes second, but definitely who gets the first GOOD card. Just one, that’s all it takes,
Those strategies still require RNG. I mean when you're pushing on the leaderboard, everyone knows how to play. Everyone knows the strats. ToT is not that complicated of a game. The tavern's RNG lowers the skill ceiling significantly and allows basically anyone to win because 3-4 draws per game usually decide it. This is further magnified by the poor balance job on duke and pelin or the orgnum patron. If someone chooses duke, you have to choose pelin or orgnum. And vice versa. Even then its RNG on who gets the better cards, but those three just increase the chances of a both sides getting OP crap. I just had a ranked game where there were 2 luxury exports + a currency exchange on round 1 tavern. Guess who won that game? They got 2 luxury exports and a currency exchange by their third turn. They'd basically buy whatever they wanted after that. I tried to play the cards I was dealt, but thanks to bad RNG and bad balance it screwed me over. I had to spend the entire game trying to play catch up to them where they'd could rotate half the tavern board and still be able to purchase anything they wanted.
Is it possible to counter this OP crap? Yes, if you get lucky and/or the other opponent gets really really unlucky. The RNG wouldn't be nearly as bad if cards were properly balanced. By the power/prestiege generation of duke, pelin, and orgnum's patron ON THEIR OWN is absolutely off the charts. Basically every single other deck is supporting to those three cards. And people always say "Oh well bla bla bla I fought someone who got early good cards and I was able to come back with a strat with green/orange/black". But they always leave out that this "strat" they used also containd duke/pelin cards or they used orgnum patron. Ansei can be good, requires a ton of set up to be able to reach the potential of pelin/duke/orgnum. Every time I see people say they won with an ansei strat, it wasn't anseis power generation that was the main thing. They used the CD manipulation to set up duke/pelin cards on top of what green cards they had. And yes I had some games where I won purely with the Ansei power generation combos. But the opponent got unlucky. They didn't get any pelin cards. They didn't get any good crow cards. I got lucky early on, denied what I could, bought what I could, and reaped the benefits of the opponenet not being able to pull good cards.
They shoulda done a balance pass before they did this season. Personally it devalues the trophies knowing that season 1's balance was done poorly and had these cheese strats. It doesn't surprise me either that I'm getting 3-7 min queues on ranked vs at most 1.5 mins at unranked. People get in the top 10% and don't want to play anymore because they know its not about skill. They get a bad hand and boom; you're now down 50 positions and may take you days to get back up.
You're talking about a completely different genre of card games (i.e. classic CCG/TCG PvP games with constructed decks, like TES:L). Whereas here we have a standard PvP deck builder which functions differently. The genre is well established, going back 10+ years with games seeing deck building as part of - or the only - mechanic in the game and it works well.
The issues you're seeing are with the balance of the game, not the design.
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Yeah I definitely don't think RNG needs to be completely removed. RNG is a major foundational brick of card games. ToT did a few things right. The tavern system and shared deck system heavily helps prevent P2W and one player from having a huge knowledge advantage when building a deck. Everyone is on the same playing field. The heavy RNG overall just helps lower the skill ceiling significantly. It doesn't matter if you've been playing for a day or years, as long as you have a basic understanding on how the game works/decks work/patrons work; you have a pretty equal chance of winning. Like yesterday I went on a winning spree. I started out the day in position like 800 and something in ranked because I went on a 4 game losing streak the previous day. I ended up fighting people in the top 50 of course (since not as many people queue). Not all of them were, but 3 out of the 5 games I won were with people in the top 50. If you were to just look at the rankings, you'd think there's no way I could win with 750 positions between us. But nope. I got some good draws, opponent got some bad ones. We were both playing well. We both understood the game, what the cards did, valuable ones, etc. I know I simply won because I was able to get a few major game changing cards and the opponents were not able to. I'm finally back in the top 10% again thanks to that win streak and I know those 3 I faced probably had their score destroyed thanks to losing someone that low in the bracket. But that's just the way the game works. The RNG really helps level the playing field. Its quite genius if you ask me because it makes the game significantly more accessible to people. And in a MMORPG that's super important. I just think they need to add something that gets the tavern moving if people aren't drawing cards. Help speed up games and give players more of a chance to enact a strategy instead of spamming the same 2-5 cards to win as soon as you can.
What is important in MMO or RPG or MMORPG is skill and knowledge of the game not RNG mate. If you base anything around pure luck you might just as well play russian roulette.
AwakeOhSleeper wrote: »
THIS!!!!!!! But, this is just par for the ZoS course, they truly obviously gave ZERO thought to balance, ZERO thought to putting leads and stuff behind a trash-wall, ZERO thought to the fact that this is so broken with no foreseeable way to fix that it will die and thusly make aforementioned leads literally impossible to get… and EVEN IF (IF, IF, IF) they do attempt to balance it, I’m sure they’ll just do like they do everything else: Not balance it at all, just nerf it into oblivion so that it’s just useless code in an already bloated game.
I saw “Card Game” and prayed that it wouldn’t be a large chunk of content, and I thought to myself… “this is them ‘jumping the shark’, they don’t care anymore… all bets are off”. But, it’s a HUGE chunk of content; and it’s terrible… and, alas, they DON’T seem to care anymore.
Im not sure what you mean by its rng, all card games are rng. The deck is shuffled, of course counting cards and making sure your cooldownpile is small and efficient or large and boisterious is a skill of alot of card game.
NeuroticPixels wrote: »Sadly, I agree. I still have fun with ToT. But there are games where I see players get certain cards and I’m like, “Great. They’ve won.” when we only just got started. I still try my hardest and try to be crafty, but still usually lose when I notice them obtaining certain cards. Ones that come to mind are the red “armory” and “rally” cards.
And I also agree that the dailies shouldn’t progress with only wins. At least the one against other players. I’m sure they could put in a failsafe that wouldn’t allow it to progress if the player conceded, because obviously that could be abused.