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>That being said, I would be more amiable to a system that used player skill as a matchmaking tool if it didn't report those numbers to players. Almost all of

>That being said, I would be more amiable to a system that used player skill as a matchmaking tool if it didn't report those numbers to players. Almost all of these games have an "unranked" mode in matchmaking that doesn't publicly report your rank. >Hearthstone is a good example here. Hearthstone has brilliant design, but its ladder system is horrible and dumb. Hearthstone is probably the worst collectible card game I've ever played. The actual gameplay of it is poor and heavily RNG reliant. It's not bad if you put in an inordinate amount of hours into it, because then you'll get a feel for what the opponent likely has and how likely you are to succeed, but this is generally not something you can just easily reason about without an absolute metric ton of experience. That's why net decking is so common - it's too difficult for most players to figure out near-optimal combinations, because they don't have as full of an overview of the game as the experienced players. The search space is just too large.

danShumway 7y ago
> Hearthstone is probably the worst collectible card game I've ever played. :shrug: I'm not going to argue about what games are good. Substitute out another online card game you like, I promise 90% of the time it will have the same problem. My experience with MTG Arena has taught me that net decking there is just as common, and I consider MTG to be a much more skill-based game than Hearthstone. Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes. > it's too difficult for most players to figure out near-optimal combinations Take a step back. Why do most players feel that they need to find near-optimal combinations? We have a ton of research on card-game archetypes going back over a decade. It is generally understood by every designer in the field that competitive optimizers are one player archetype of many, and often not even the largest one. But the design of our ranking systems explicitly encourages players to become competitive optimizers to the exclusion of every other archetype. Of course, everyone wants to build good decks, but the experience of playing paper MTG with people even in semi-competitive settings is often very different than the experience of playing MTG Arena -- the "need" to optimize is on a whole new level. It's the same game, but the incentive structures of the metagame that surrounds it changes how the players act. That's not to say that competitive players don't exist, but it is to say that in every area of card-game design, we recognize that the design space needs to be wider than that. And in our ranking systems, we don't. It's also not to say that stuff like tournaments are bad. It is to say that every online card game I have ever played suffers from these problems, and every one of them uses the same exact ranking system, and maybe the problems are related to that common element.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes. Is it that the game designers sat down and deliberately designed a system to get you to play more ranked or did the players demand rewards for ranked (or the designers anticipated such a reward)? I've seen the latter happen in an online game. The players in World of Warships demanded more rewards after seeing the initial competitive game mode (team battles). Eventually the developers gave it to them.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    That's very possible -- a lot of game features come out of that process. But, I would say the responsibility of a designer is to be able to parse player feedback and disregard bad suggestions. If your players knew how to design a game, they would be game designers. One of the big reasons design is so hard is because you're trying to understand another person's motivations better than they themselves do. Feedback shouldn't be ignored, but neither should it be implemented verbatim. Players just aren't good at sussing out their own motivations -- they'll tell you, "we want more rewards for ranked" instead of "we don't want to feel obligated to dip into unrelated game modes", or "we want to feel more like we're progressing towards something." Players also aren't good at giving feedback about what feels wrong, their feedback instead takes the form of half-thought ideas of how to fix what feels wrong. Responding to that feedback means digging under it to find out the actual problem and addressing that specifically. Note that this isn't just me talking. Rosewater himself has talked about this phenomenon a lot in his design blog on MTG, and he has a good quote on this[0]: > The key is whether or not what the players want will in the end make them happy. Players ask for things all the time that if we actually gave them would make the game less enjoyable for them. We do spend a lot of time trying to understand what they players want, though, because when we are able to give players things they want, we do. The point being, I have no doubt that if MTG Arena announced tomorrow that it was getting rid of ranked rewards and seasons, the playerbase would be livid. I still suspect an alternate system for rewards would be better in the long run. [0]: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/say-when-2014-12-08 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/s...

danShumway 7y ago

> Hearthstone is probably the worst collectible card game I've ever played. :shrug: I'm not going to argue about what games are good. Substitute out another online card game you like, I promise 90% of the time it will have the same problem. My experience with MTG Arena has taught me that net decking there is just as common, and I consider MTG to be a much more skill-based game than Hearthstone. Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes. > it's too difficult for most players to figure out near-optimal combinations Take a step back. Why do most players feel that they need to find near-optimal combinations? We have a ton of research on card-game archetypes going back over a decade. It is generally understood by every designer in the field that competitive optimizers are one player archetype of many, and often not even the largest one. But the design of our ranking systems explicitly encourages players to become competitive optimizers to the exclusion of every other archetype. Of course, everyone wants to build good decks, but the experience of playing paper MTG with people even in semi-competitive settings is often very different than the experience of playing MTG Arena -- the "need" to optimize is on a whole new level. It's the same game, but the incentive structures of the metagame that surrounds it changes how the players act. That's not to say that competitive players don't exist, but it is to say that in every area of card-game design, we recognize that the design space needs to be wider than that. And in our ranking systems, we don't. It's also not to say that stuff like tournaments are bad. It is to say that every online card game I have ever played suffers from these problems, and every one of them uses the same exact ranking system, and maybe the problems are related to that common element.

Mirioron 7y ago
>Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes. Is it that the game designers sat down and deliberately designed a system to get you to play more ranked or did the players demand rewards for ranked (or the designers anticipated such a reward)? I've seen the latter happen in an online game. The players in World of Warships demanded more rewards after seeing the initial competitive game mode (team battles). Eventually the developers gave it to them.
- danShumway 7y ago
  That's very possible -- a lot of game features come out of that process. But, I would say the responsibility of a designer is to be able to parse player feedback and disregard bad suggestions. If your players knew how to design a game, they would be game designers. One of the big reasons design is so hard is because you're trying to understand another person's motivations better than they themselves do. Feedback shouldn't be ignored, but neither should it be implemented verbatim. Players just aren't good at sussing out their own motivations -- they'll tell you, "we want more rewards for ranked" instead of "we don't want to feel obligated to dip into unrelated game modes", or "we want to feel more like we're progressing towards something." Players also aren't good at giving feedback about what feels wrong, their feedback instead takes the form of half-thought ideas of how to fix what feels wrong. Responding to that feedback means digging under it to find out the actual problem and addressing that specifically. Note that this isn't just me talking. Rosewater himself has talked about this phenomenon a lot in his design blog on MTG, and he has a good quote on this[0]: > The key is whether or not what the players want will in the end make them happy. Players ask for things all the time that if we actually gave them would make the game less enjoyable for them. We do spend a lot of time trying to understand what they players want, though, because when we are able to give players things they want, we do. The point being, I have no doubt that if MTG Arena announced tomorrow that it was getting rid of ranked rewards and seasons, the playerbase would be livid. I still suspect an alternate system for rewards would be better in the long run. [0]: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/say-when-2014-12-08 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/s...