The State of Balance is Disgraceful

Personofsecrets

It's just a game and all, but it's also disturbing that game designers can look at game effects that are assymetrical in extreme ways, creating wins and losses for no other reason but their power level alone, and... just be okay with that? Come on. Like... besides just being interested in games because they are cool, it's your job to minimize bad balance. If not for the love of the game, and I know you love the game, then have good balance because it's your duty.

While I don't mind being a minority opinion, and often am, I've found a huge number of players that actually agree with me about certain balance points. As I just referenced, being a minority or majority opinion isn't a problem in and of itself. Balance should be more about truth.

Maybe though, the players who I have encountered with similar thoughts in mind indicate that certain parts of the game should be reviewed. There haven't been any Tales of Tribute balance changes in well over a year. The last balance changes were even in stealth. So do the designers think that their game is perfect?

That should be a rhetorical question. Nobody should ever think that their game is ever perfect. That's because no game is perfect. But here we are with nothing that shows further good will with Tales of Tribute. And the last two deck releases evoke such abysmal strategies, that I don't want a new ToT deck ever again lest another finger on the Monkey's Paw curls.

Based on that statement, it should be clear that I think ToT is far from perfect. Being even just solid is on the distant horizon due to some balance issues being so incredibly glaring. So, I don't know, maybe read some of the theory that people write here, the pain points, and take it into consideration for ToT. Even when we sometimes have different ideas about how something should improve, there is general agreement about a number of the games aspects that should be improved. And, again, that's based in truth.

And I can frame this in terms of other game aspects too. Look at jewlry crafting, transmuting, and scribing. These were all big changes to the game, but they are very basic in their concept. To me, these things are like barebones necessities that the game should have had all along. Okay, so baby steps. That's where we are with Tales of Tribute. There are some things that are so blatantly obviously of poor balance that, once they are finally changed, we will look back and see how things should have been that way all along. But there isn't any indication of improvements in the works.

Honestly, with the clown fiesta patrons that have been released as well as the poor balance changes that happened before those patrons, as well as the silence, it feels like Tales of Tribute was prepared for the big sleep. It feels that way with Infinite Archive too. Release some wacky goofy stuff, do so in the name of replayability (due to variance), and the game is ready to maximize engagement while minimizing development effort. To the contrary though. Variance is not fun. Variance is a substitute for development effort. It's like when a family member hallucinates how much their young nephew or whatever will really enjoy this bundle of socks. Okay, but it could have been better. In Tales of Tribute, it should be better. And I know that the developers are hard workers who give it their all. So again... what gives?

Personofsecrets

ToT is just a lovely game of the rich getting richer with 0 recompense. The developers apparently think that dynamic is "fun."

If it's not fun IRL, it's not fun in a game. FYI.