Hello Duelysts and Duelystas –

this seems like the most appropriate time to dwell on this particular topic. I’m going to approach it as a mix of player and designer – we already have a lot of the player-end output on Reddit and such, so it is prudent not to repeat a lot of it but to focus on key ideas. It’s actually quite long so I don’t expect you to read all of it in one go (do it because you find it interesting ) – just get to your topic-of-interest and respond to it. (Some of this content will be familiar to you if you read my posts around January/February, but if not, it’s all good stuff! I also credit a few designers along the way, as not all the text here is mine.)

Let’s get the easiest one out of the way

Mechaz0r! –

Every so often we see a post about how this is imbalanced. There are a few things underlying here – Mechaz0r! is a fairly strong example of the randomness argument that we see, even if it isn’t always obvious. Mech decks reward packing 10-12 (often not all 15) mechs and some supporting spells to try for a quick overwhelm before the opponent can stabilise. It is inherently ‘dependent’ – everyone who’s played a mech deck has lost games with 4 mechs at turn 5 – (and apparently everyone who loses to it does so on turn 2) – and it is dependent even in its most reliable answers – Crossbones, Hollow Grovekeeper, Sunset Paragon – and in factions like Vetruvian or Abyssian, your best line of defense is one that is at the mercy of drawing randomness.

Replace helps, a fair amount in terms of raw percentages, but at its heart the whole thing is a multi-turn combo deck which is only problematic in the lack of dedicated spell-shield removal for some factions. There is an argument that some factions should keep this as a weakness by design – but perhaps a healthier Mechaz0r! may yet be possible. (Most of this incidentally pertains to newer players – which is a group we are most interested in keeping around – but actually Mech decks are preferred by many established players to climb the ladder, so the game is at a point where mechs are viable.)

There is something decks like mech do bring to the game – an ability for a potentially weaker player to win over a stronger player who is not prepared for such a strategy. This ties in with something that is asked in development as well – How often should a weaker player beat a stronger player despite the difference in skill? – and while the most competitive players will answer closer to 100%, there is a reason developers ought not to let that happen. Brings us nicely on to a concept that Magic: The Gathering, among other games, uses (Thanks to Mark Rosewater):

Catch-Up Feature

There needs to be a way for players that have fallen behind to catch up. A game becomes frustrating if a player feels like he or she has no chance to win.

Another way to think of this requirement is the idea of investment. In order for a game to function at its best, all its players have to care. If they don’t then the core of the play group’s attention will shift from the game. How do you keep focus on the game? By keeping all the players invested in it. The biggest reason players disconnect from a game is because they no longer have any investment. The number-one cause of this is a belief that you can’t win. The point of the game is to complete the goal of winning. Once you are no longer able to do that (or, more importantly, once you no longer believe you can do that) the game stops having any pull over the player.

The classic way to do this is to build something into the game that allows players that are behind to catch up. There might be some random event with a huge swing. Players in the lead might pick up handicaps. The game might be built such that the gains made in the game get larger as the game progresses. No matter how you do it, it’s important to make sure that players always have something to hope for even if that hope is a small one.

Because cards have variance based on where in the game they are drawn, they make sure that there are always good and bad draws. This swing in utility allows players who are behind to make dramatic comebacks. In addition because the draws are hidden information it helps keep players in the game because there is always the hope of a drawing a card that will swing the game in their favour.

A word about Chess –

some of us like that game a lot, find it exciting even. General perception though, is that its a boring game. The result in chess, more than any card-based game, is decided when we begin it – usually both players trot out moves, the weaker player makes a small mistake (simply improper positioning of pawns to much worse), the better player accumulates advantages, gets a favourable endgame 20 moves in and plays 20 more moves to get the win or the concede. Catch-up or game finisher cards and draw randomness avoid this ‘boring’ feeling, but those same cards also bring people who call it ‘devaluing skill with RNG’.

Types of Randomness

Looking at randomness itself – there are a few distinct types we can separate out into: Absolute – pure coin flip – Wild Elemental

4 mana 8/8

Minion

When you summon Wild Elemental, flip a coin. If tails, destroy it. Total disaster. This is the type of card we, as players, hate. We, as spectators, hate. No way you can manage this situation with skill, no way you can influence it unless the game allows you to rig coin-toss outcomes. Avoid. Execution – difficult in card games generally, as this is in regard to a mechanical skill. We actually get an indirect form in Duelyst where players don’t Replace at the start of their turn and potentially miss a better move or move sequence – this is actually surprisingly underrated as an improvement factor too. I still find players who Replace at strange times throughout their turn and often this decreases optimal play. Positioning for random spawns is another example. Yomi – mind-reading. Not a joke, I swear – Yomi is a pure form of meta-gaming your opponent, if you will. Often not tested as much on ladder, it is highly respected in tournament games. This is the sort of ‘luck’ that sees you packing in a Crossbones expecting a Mech deck, or Hollow Grovekeeper. When it fires, your opponent calls you lucky.

In a game I played against a very strong Burn Abyss player, he brought me down to 4hp, I had 5 cards in my hand and knowing he’d played 2 Dark Seeds and 2 Revenants already, I could gamble with 4 hp to their 7hp and pull a win next turn. I played Ironcliffe and Martyred it, instead of Ironcliffe + Holy Immolation to bring then down to 3hp so I could kill their General next turn. That extra 10 hp helped immensely when I got hit by their Revenant next turn. I’d won by not getting the dmg in that would be a win next turn by ‘reading’ what the other player was doing. There is another good reason for having more Yomi in games – When it comes to outwitting your opponent, you won’t have enough time to counter your opponent’s move if you wait until it animates on the screen; you must predict what your opponent will do in order to counter it. Games rich in yomi often provide a multitude of options to players: safe plays, risky gambles, all-ins, hard counters, soft counters, and the ability to trade resources for information (for example, by scouting with a worker in StarCraft). The blending of play skill and yomi luck can create a complex web of interaction that rewards experienced players. Many yomi situations allow experts to crush new players by exploiting their natural tendencies or lack of understanding. However, in expert vs expert games where both players have a mastery of the rules and mechanics, yomi situations often devolve into purely arbitrary outcomes that depend highly on luck rather than skill. Nevertheless, this can have some benefits: players feel accomplished when they ‘outplay’ their opponents, even if they simply got lucky. I may have gotten lucky with my ‘Martyr the Ironcliffe’ decision, but I sure as hell feel like I outplayed my friend

Now we come to what Keeper is like

– a soft form of controlled randomness that often (not always) improves deck-building strategy. Now I admit that sounds ludicrous. So, ENHANCE!

Let’s examine, Keeper provides a form of ‘input randomness’ (both players are aware of which minions have already died and thus the available pool from which the random card is selected). The deck-building strategy part is the minions chosen for the deck. If I throw Keeper in to a Mech deck, I’ll get mostly stat-efficient results but not necessarily strategy-efficient results. The randomness will be high if I run this deck but choose to run Archons in it. If I design a deck with six 2-cost minions and expensive high-impact minions, I am instead, in a controlled manner, gambling at getting a copy of that minion for 5 mana with a bonus Keeper body on the side.

This mechanic is why I and some others preferred a change to its body rather than the concept behind it, because the body was far too durable to also warrant my other (ideally) more important minion to accompany it. The downside was too little, rather than the randomness being too high. This is incidentally also what I think about Sworn Sister L’Kian – the downside of drawing 2 random cards is too little when the replace mechanic is taken into account (nod to /u/The_Frostweaver on Reddit, who I would have responded to in a thread but didn’t want to comment further on a thread which by its nature offered little room for constructive discussion).

This below is another important tenet – over a large number of games, the player must not feel like he is not in control of the outcome of his games. To an extent we are fine with losing control in single-player games, but the perceived threat of losing control to a random roll in a multi-player game exists because of the negative outcome. Conversely the higher the perceived lack of control, the more likely we are to blame external factors for our loss.

Something worth noting – even in games with no demonstrable randomness,

beginners thought they lost because they were unlucky.

This pertains to a game where you start off with resources, but instead of drawing cards for minions, you have your chosen set of minions and you pay the appropriate resource to summon your chosen minion. The game allows you to therefore rush with cheap guys or wait and summon a big unit. And yet they didn’t blame themselves for losing, choosing instead to term the other player ‘lucky’ for happening to choose the correct counter unit. (Thanks to Prismata Dev)

Randomness may increase output of skill without affecting outcome of game

A quick jump over to Faeria for a moment – to demonstrate another random effect that enhances skill-based game play – Bold Bargainer vs Less Bold Bargainer. Bold Bargainer – 6 faeria

When you summon Bold Bargainer, reduce the cost of a random card in your hand by 6.

3 attack, 3 life Faeria is the game’s core resource. You stockpile it over your turns and use it to play your cards. Playing Bold Bargainer means that a random card in your hand is going to get its cost reduced by 6. This is a huge discount. If you can take full advantage of it, you get a decent creature for free. However, you can’t reduce a card’s cost below 0. If the Bold Bargainer’s ability randomly selects a card in your hand that costs only 1 faeria, you’re going to lose a lot of value. This simple design has deep strategic implications. The first thing it affects is your deck construction. Bold Bargainer is clearly best when everything in your hand costs 6 or more, to ensure that it will hit something you want it to. Cards that cost less than 6 faeria are suddenly significantly worse in your deck than normal. Meanwhile, more expensive cards naturally become more desirable. But it doesn’t stop there. Bold Bargainer also gives you strategic decisions to make while playing. Because you can’t really afford to just run cards that cost 6 or more faeria, you’re going to have to include some cheaper cards in your deck. When deciding which cards to play each turn you might want to keep higher cost cards in hand when possible. This will maximize your eventual chances of hitting a good target with Bold Bargainer.

Now let’s compare it to a version that doesn’t use RNG.

Bold Bargainer – 6 faeria

When you summon Less Bold, choose a card in your hand. its cost is reduced by 6.

3 attack, 3 life Less– 6 faeriaWhen you summon Less Bold, choose a card in your hand. its cost is reduced by 6.3 attack, 3 life The Less Bold Bargainer doesn’t take much skill to play well. You can put it in just about any deck that has at least a few high cost cards. Just wait until you draw just one to combine with it. You don’t have to think about hand-management nearly as much. Also, when you do have several high-cost cards in hand you’ll just reduce the cost of the one you want to play sooner. That’s a decision, but it barely adds anything to the normal decision-making process of what you want to play. Fewer deck-building decisions, fewer game play decisions, overall a much less skill-intensive card. (Thanks to Dan Felder, Faeria Dev)

Additionally, getting a hand with absolutely no cards that cost less than 6f, while you also have enough resources to play the Bargainer, can be difficult. You might realize that playing the bargainer before you can ensure its value is actually the best move. Sometimes you need an extra creature on the board right now, or you just have to accept the risks of not reducing the cost of the card you really want.

Now for the field I have experience in – human psychology. Players tend to credit their victories to their skill and blame their losses on bad luck. This is a well-documented psychological effect, and it lets people feel better about themselves while playing your game. nearly everyone thinks they’re above average in a lot of things. At my workplace, in my school, college, uni – I always think I am the top percentage. And yet, that can’t be right or I’d be in a little more demand than I am now Maybe I haven’t found my field yet, who knows, eh? Even here I can attribute my current life state to factors outside my control rather than at my inability to grasp ample opportunities. That’s all of us in a nutshell.

When I lose a game of HS, I can blame luck. When I lose a game of chess, I can only blame myself. This kills the game for me, game by game. Enough shots to my ego and boom! I stop playing Chess. With HS, I can still claim that with the right Huffer spawn or say playing a Combo Sabotage on the enemy Paladin with a Tirion and a Silverhand Recruit in front of me and hitting the Tirion would have got me a win. I’m happy to try again because ‘I’m that damn good’, my opponent is happy because they beat my RNG with skill and the game dev is happy because we’re still playing and buying packs. The problem is when randomness actively impacts the game on more than 2 or 3 turns out of 10, leading to an increasingly fragmented game where turn-to-turn decisions become less relevant because one big random swing ends the game.

I’ve had people go “But even a 3 year old child with one lung can see how broken this is omgwtfbbq (korean bbq for bonus pts)” about various things – suffice to say, if developing and balancing any game were that simple, you and I sir would be veterans at that business! The other thing of course is, we could be right – and the devs may well be testing something already that we aren’t aware of. Incidentally this is my biggest gripe with Counterplay – they don’t tell us their overall final picture, and seeing small fragments of it feels like terribly made abstract art to most of us as a result!

As a final note, let me refer to a game that by all means should have been the holy grail for non-random card games. The game is introduced very well –

Spectromancer!

A turn-based online fantasy card game, co-designed by Magic: The Gathering’s Richard Garfield and Alexey Stankevich, creator of Astral Tournament and Astral Masters, Spectromancer allows players to participate in a magical duel against other mages by strategically summoning creatures and casting spells.’

The HS player Kolento I believe still plays this one. This game has no randomness – none – and suffers for it. Players, given the chance, blame everything but themselves for their loss (you and I both) – RNG, better cards, Devs giving streamers stacked decks (yep, this too) and when none of these can happen – as in Spectromancer –

‘Each of the twenty cards in your deck has some different effect. So do your opponent’s cards. The winner ends up being the person who has the right one card in their deck of twenty to counter the other player’s attacks.’ – the very design of the game. The game itself is deep, but it fails to hold the attention of the casual gamer – not because its complex – but because the winner is in fact, the better player.

In today’s market, randomness has a rather non-random place to hold in games. We don’t want too much of it, sure, but pleasing everyone is not just difficult, it’s impossible. And keeping people playing the game is and should definitely be a higher priority.

Oh, and as for Grincher – gonna do a qualitative/quantitative analysis of its outcomes soon, we still got a few days before our armed squirrel comes out, right?