Comment by Agentlien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Agentlien | Hacker News Reader

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This really resonates with me, especially since he mentioned Master of Orion. I grew up with Master of Orion 2 and I can't even make an estimate of how many sessions or hours I played. Another game which I still play actively is Magic: The Gathering. I mention this, because I think the contrast between these two games highlights the subject at hand.

I have experienced more incredible stories unfolding in both MoO2 and MtG than I could possibly remember. Both are games where careful strategy and tactics combined with randomness can lead to some unbelievably epic moments. Here's the thing, though: in MoO2, despite a lot of random events, I can't remember a single time I played a session which wasn't exciting or didn't feel fair. In Magic, this happens routinely. Just Google "mana screw" or "mana flood" for more results than you can read, complaining about randomness leading to boring matches where you, as someone put it, "don't get to play Magic"[1].

I still play Magic on a daily basis, and I still love the game, but I've spent a lot of time damning the frequency of these boring matches and wondering if there was a simple strategy or rule change which would fix this, while still leaving the soul of the game intact.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4c2f65/what_funda...

I've heard it argued that Netrunner avoids the worst of those problems by always giving you the option of drawing a card. Of course the flipside is making the game less random which has its own impact on the meta. Take that to the extreme and you have Mage Wars, which a friend described as "Netrunner chess"; there's almost no randomness, which makes for a more strategic game - but in its own way that makes it less fun, particularly between players of different ability.

Have you heard of David Sirlin's game Codex? It's not out yet, unfortunately, but I think it takes an interesting approach to this (I've yet to see how it actually plays).

The basic rules resemble Hearthstone, but rather than building a deck beforehand, you just pick one of seven 10-card starter decks, and 3 of 20 "codices", and then at the end of each turn you take two cards from your codices and add them into your deck. So there's still luck of the draw, but not to the extent of having to shuffle a 30 or 60 card deck beforehand. (Also you go through your cards Dominion-style rather than one-card-per-turn Magic style, but I'm honestly not sure as to whether that counts as an increase or decrease in luck!)

I've heard this compared to Mage Wars, but looking that up, it looks like that just lets you cast spells straight out of your spellbook, no deck at all. Is that right? So I guess Codex is another intermediate step there.

(As regards "mana", it doesn't follow Hearthstone, but rather takes the fairly-common approach where any card from your hand can also be turned into a mana producer (this permanently removes them from your deck, so you can remove cards as well as adding them).)

> The basic rules resemble Hearthstone, but rather than building a deck beforehand, you just pick one of seven 10-card starter decks, and 3 of 20 "codices", and then at the end of each turn you take two cards from your codices and add them into your deck. So there's still luck of the draw, but not to the extent of having to shuffle a 30 or 60 card deck beforehand. (Also you go through your cards Dominion-style rather than one-card-per-turn Magic style, but I'm honestly not sure as to whether that counts as an increase or decrease in luck!)

Sounds very similar to Dominion et al then - just slightly hybridized. I take against Sirlin based on his writings and his emphasis on reading your opponent which isn't a mechanic I find fun; I enjoy deckbuilders but there are plenty of them out there.

> I've heard this compared to Mage Wars, but looking that up, it looks like that just lets you cast spells straight out of your spellbook, no deck at all. Is that right?

Yeah - each turn you choose two cards from your spellbook and maybe play them.

Yeah Dominion is an obvious comparison, but I don't think it's a very accurate one, because you don't need to spend your resources deckbuilding; you just add in any two per turn. So while I guess building your deck during the game ultimately comes from there, I don't think Codex really falls in the deck-builder genre that Dominion started. Hence why I've seen it compared to Mage Wars, but I guess it's not quite that either. (Anyway Sirlin already did a Dominion take-off, it was called Puzzle Strike. :P )

> I take against Sirlin based on his writings and his emphasis on reading your opponent which isn't a mechanic I find fun

Huh, I'm surprised. There's a lot of dislike of Sirlin out there obviously but I haven't seen many say it's his writings they don't like. I think they're some of the best writing on game design I've seen! To the point that I'd basically count myself as a "Sirlin fan" even though I've only played two of his games of which one is pretty mediocre. :P (Namely, Flash Duel. Kongai, though, was great, back when people actually played it...) I don't think there's anything too advanced in most of what he writes -- a lot of emphasis on such notions as even playing field, cutting out extra steps that get in the way of playing the real game, the focus on contested skill rather than unconstested skill, that yes strong competitive balance is achievable -- but these are basics that all too often go neglected, IMO, so it's good to see someone explicitly talking about them. There seems to be this philosophy out there of "Well, we don't really need an even playfield..." or "C'mon, nobody can actually make a balanced competitive game with that many characters" and I'm glad to see somebody countering that. Whether he's good at it or not, Sirlin is, to my mind, somebody who gets what game design should be. Would you mind elaborating on what about his writing you don't like?

I'm aware of Puzzle Strike. He wouldn't be the first designer to release similar games.

Writing... I find him pretentious/self-important/self-impressed, and he doesn't seem to acknowledge the validity of other points of view.

Hearthstone fixed this mana issue by having the mana automatically increase by 1 each turn, up to 10. This means that every card you draw will be a spell you can cast or a minion you can play - you at least get to play 'hearthstone' during the match.

The link I provided as reference was actually a reply to this very suggestion. It's something I found interesting when trying Hearthstone, but it does remove a lot of the interesting tactical decisions involved in playing cards which require different colors of mana.

Another interesting idea was a format which someone suggested[1] in which any non-land card can be played as if it were a land producing colorless mana and any land has cycling 1 (for 1 mana you can discard it and draw a new card). I found this a fascinating idea, but I feel like this would completely wreck the balance of the game, especially when played with decks specifically built to abuse these new rules.

[1]: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-...

They also went with 30 card decks (max 2 each card) rather than 60 card decks (max 4 each type) which further reduces variance of hands.

Top-decking is still very real in both games, sometimes you just need that 1 card to win or you'll lose next turn.

Unfortunately, Hearthstone's card design has aggressively worked against their randomness-mitigation in the game structure.

In their search for 'dramatic' cards, they've started introducing "triggers on draw" effects, "get a random creature from your deck" effects (maybe it'll cost 2 mana, maybe 10!), and my favorite - "play this card, then shuffle it back, then play it again, then all your creatures become different ones".

The card designers have consistently chosen exciting events over stable gameplay, to the point where it's far more random than MTG.

Sure, there are decks where you must pray to RNGesus that you get the effect you're looking for. Those decks will not get you far up the ladder, however. Nearly every player above Rank 10 is using a predictable deck. Elise/map/monkey isn't a game-winning card.

Also, if you're still seeing top decking in Hearthstone, you haven't progressed enough in the ranks to see the long-term players. There is rarely any top decking going on past even rank 15.

I definitely haven't gone to the highest ranks of Hearthstone lately - it wasn't worth fighting up the random parts of the ladder when so many other games exist. I did well with it for a while around the Nax release, then abandoned it because I wasn't interested in paying for the expansions and didn't want to keep up with the power creep.

I don't think the core, high-ladder gameplay is broken, but I think a lot of their design efforts are badly counterproductive. MTG's long-term survival can largely be credited to fighting power creep and strong-but-random effects, and I think Hearthstone's design looks more like a shorter-term cash in on those effects.

The new "standard" mode doesn't allow Nax or GnG cards in your deck, which levels things out a bit. Maybe you would like giving it a shot now? My advice: use gold to play arena. You'll always get a card pack, and get to practice with cards you don't otherwise have available to you. It's worth the extra 50 gold (which you'll likely earn back if you make it to three victories anyway) for the exposure to other cards/combos.

There are still RNGesus decks in the lower rungs of the ladder - I play one. But above 15 or so and most decks are using predictable cards with few random effects.

Woah, that's a huge change since I played. Some of those cards were definitely frustrating me, as was the fact that the card pool made the 'random' effects hard to anticipate. My biggest complaints were probably about League of Explorers and Blackrock cards, but it's still progress.

Arena was definitely my preferred playstyle - it had a lot of variance, and I never felt punished for not having all the right legendaries. On the main ladder I felt like I was hitting a ceiling where I played lots of netdecks I couldn't "afford", and just lost interest. Maybe it's worth another look!

Elise is a staple in most control warrior decks I've seen, and often the lategame comes down to who gets the best monkey RNG

True, I do see Elise in control warrior decks on lower rungs, but less so in higher ones. Mostly classic stand-by cards, and/or Reno Jackson.

I do agree about the general feeling that Hearthstone is a bit too random in odd and spectacular ways. However, could you expand on the "triggers on draw" comment? Which cards do this in a bad way? I know there are Magic cards with effects which trigger whenever a player draws a card, without harming the game.

> I know there are Magic cards with effects which trigger whenever a player draws a card

The cards he's talking about trigger when they're drawn, not when another card is drawn while they're in play.

For example, Flame Leviathan[1] which deals 2 damage to all minions when drawn. Or Iron Juggernaut [2], which shuffles a 'mine' into the opponents deck, dealing 10 damage when drawn (personally I think this one's ok, as at least you can plan to mitigate it most of the time)

  [1] http://www.hearthpwn.com/cards/12290-flame-leviathan
  [2] http://www.hearthpwn.com/cards/12295-iron-juggernaut

Exactly it, thanks. I don't really object to Juggernaut - I've seen several other deckbuilding games with similar effects, it's something you can plan for (and in some games, avert with lookahead and reshuffles).

Flame Leviathan annoys me a lot, though - it's a complete board rebalance that neither player can anticipate. It's not even a good card (I wouldn't expect to see it high on the ladder) but it's aggravating to have such high variance on a zero-mana outcome.

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