Redefining Development

Before I begin I want to say that this article started out with me just wanting to give some context about the Patch v829 changes, but slowly became a meta-theory article about patch changes with regards to card design and development.  I didn't want to just scrap the whole thing, and I think it's an important conversation.  Hex is trying to bridge two mediums (MMO & TCG) that have never been crossed, and when those two mediums clash in their approach to solving a problem, I think it's worth it as players to take a deeper look into the dynamic between the two.  As such, this article is less zany highlander fun and more of my personal thoughts on power re-adjustment and the scope of development.  

One of the advantages to digital games is the ability to change an element of the game after it is released.  Games like League of Legends release patches that constantly buff or nerf champions or items to address balance issues and keep the game fresh, but also for the development team to exercise a level of control over the metagame.  This is something that printed games have problems doing.  Even a highly rated board game like Agricola contains Occupations and Minor Improvements that one of my friends refuses to play with, since he feels it creates too much imbalance to the game.  For casual games with friends around a coffee table (or for Hex, I guess a LAN), there is generally some agreement about what should and shouldn't be allowed in your games.  For competitive play however, there are two ways for them to deal with problem cards: Errata, or Banning/Restricting their use outright.

Cryptozoic seems to have enough faith in their design and development team that they do not plan to retroactively change cards once they are printed, and that in the off-chance of an overly problematic card creating imbalance in the format, they'll stick to the traditional CCG roots and simply ban it for the abused format(s).  This is an admirable goal, and the impetus behind it seems to be about creating faith that the product will function exactly the same every time you play it.  Many times in League, a few weeks after a new champion is out it is deemed to overpowered and subsequent nerfs will impact its play in game.  This isn't too egregious when you're only spending a few bucks on a champion, but if the central card of an entire archetype gets nerfed to the ground, you may have to invest not just in another card of comparable value, but its support system, the rest of the deck.  A company of more dubious intent could purposefully rotate the viable archetypes through these bans and nerfs to the point where a single player would eventually have to own four copies of every card in the set to remain competitive at every shift in the metagame.  This isn't saying that Cryptozoic doesn't want control over the metagame, but that this control will be enacted speculatively and through development and design.

However there are a few potential snags with this that I don't feel have been addressed much in the community.  One has to deal with potential rules changes and errata.  As the game becomes more complex, older rules may need to be reworded out of necessity.  In MTG's long life span this has been done several times in varying degrees.  What's interesting is that these rules changes can ban or nerf a card without actively changing the text on it.  One example was the elimination of mana burn in MTG (a mechanic not present in Hex).  In Mirrodin Block constructed one of the cards that saw play in the Big Red decks was called Pulse of the Forge.  Pulse dealt 4 damage to a player, and returned to your hand if they still had more life than you.  Savvy players would intentionally burn themselves down to low life totals against decks that didn't have direct damage, generate a lot of mana through Seething Songs and use Pulse of the Forge to finish their opponent off.  Using the rules in this way was a viable strategy.  When Mana Burn was eliminated, it also eliminated a very narrow window of utility that made Pulse of the Forge powerful.  While the card was never game breaking in any format, least of all one crawling with egregiously broken cards like Skullclamp and Arcbound Ravager, I think this example illustrates how even by not changing individual cards they can still be the subject of very targeted bans and nerfs through rules changes.

All right bunny army, into the swirly vortex thingy!

I think this example is also present with how MTG has become a grounding for how people evaluate cards.  Crush not going through a Bird O Plenty or Flock of Seagulls was always how the rule was intended to work for Hex according to the developers, but it was perceived as a change from MTG rulings, albeit minor, that did have an impact on people evaluate these two cards.  If Cryptozoic implemented priority for certain effects into the game, it would also be a buff to those cards as well, without ever changing their wording.  As of right now I run a deck with Prime Ruby Gem of Intensity (the discard hand, then draw 3) and Cerulean Mirror Knight.  If one of my troops that was inspired by the Knight dies during the same combat as the Eldritch Dreamer deals damage, who is socketed with the Prime Ruby Gem, I will draw the card from the fallen troop, but immediately have to discard it from the Gem trigger.  If priority rules were changed so that Quick Actions could be played before the Ruby Gem resolved, or that you could stack the abilities in such a way that you discard your hand before you draw the extra card from the slain troop, this would be a utility buff to the both the Gem and the Knight, but importantly it would be a buff that doesn't change the wording of the card of the intent of its design, but nevertheless impacts the functionality of the card.

Now what the hell does "intent of design" mean?  Intent means the implied function of the card as it was designed, that occasionally becomes obfuscated through other internal factors.  Take Cosmic Transmorgifier, which I discussed a bit about last week.  Now the intent of design around this card is that it transforms your troops into something completely random, but what happens through the coding currently is that instead of being truly random it tends to gravitate towards the card's resource cost when determining what it transforms into: my 7-cost Echoes of Lodegan have a much better chance of becoming Malice Demons than your Battle Hoppers.  Now imagine this problem wasn't addressed until some time down the road after it is officially released (it's not exactly pressing, all things considered).  If they change the way the randomization works for this card so it's truly random, that the above scenario of favoring my Echoes is no longer applicable.  It seems that despite not changing how the card reads, they've nonetheless changed how it functions in game.  How is this then not a buff to your Sapphire-Wild Shin'hare Transmorgifier deck?  Truthfully it is a straight buff to the deck, but this is a situation where Cryptozoic can say that the specific change wasn't made from a balance standpoint, from from an "intent of design" standpoint, where a cursory reading of Cosmic Transmorgifier in no way implies favoritism to one or the other; it was always the intent of the card to transform everything into something completely random (or as random as the coding allows).

So what does any of this mean?  In short, it means that even though Cryptozoic will maintain the integrity of what is printed on a card with regards to its wording, there can still be functional changes applied to any of the cards via changes to the overall rules.  Now I should point out that this is not a criticism of Cryptozoic, but rather an explanation of how power fluctuates in CCGs on a grander scheme: they obviously know that any rules changes will have a snowball effect on multiple cards in the game, and in turn the metagame, and in turn the secondary market.  When people think about straight buffs and nerfs, or power re-adjustments, they typically think along the lines of the Patch v829 Development Highlights which were released last Friday.  As I understand it, once a card is available for purchase, changes like "Xentoth's Inquisitor's cost is increased from 3 to 4," and "Dream Dance's cost is reduced from 3 to 2" will not be avenues they take for balancing.  Rather, balancing will take place entirely within design and development for future sets.  If there is a problematic archetype, an answer will be added into the next set: the MTG example of this might be Kataki or Obstinate Baloth, or any sort of hate cards in general that is introduced into a format to specifically counter an existing strategy, usually gaining a dedicated slot in Reserves lists.

But this raises an interesting question: if there are avenues (and there must be) for Cryptozoic to work within design and development to exert control on the metagame, then they are still capable through design and development of out-and-out adjusting the secondary market value of card via this control (if they wanted to, and I doubt they would).  If anything, the potential value of your cards shouldn't factor into your feelings about whether or not you would want Cryptozoic to apply straight buffs or nerfs to cards.  Most of the resistance to this seems to be the idea that there will be degenerate formats available, where the craziest, most degenerate decks can be played, and where a card that is out-and-out banned in every other format could still be used to sow frustration against the unsuspecting.  This may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black (or the Cosmic Transmorgifier calling the Tinker degenerate), but I feel this is an equally a poor excuse, since the digital medium also 

C'mon, he just has that Bard feel man.

Personally, I think Cryptozoic should reserve the right to make some sort of changes to a card after it is released, specifically when it is done from a design standpoint.  If Cryptozoic decided a few years down the road they want Bard to be a class (and I would love them for eternity if they did), someone might look at Puck Dream Bringer and determine that he really feels more like a Bard from a design standpoint.  Now this may hurt Puck if being a Cleric was actually important for a couple cards, but it's the sort of change I think is defensible, specifically because these sorts of changes are usually instigated by the need for more design space: perhaps a class-themed set where readjusting the classes of existing troops allows them to create a metagame beyond what solely what is in the set.  So in order to make the "Bard Deck" viable beyond just the new set, they change some older cards that already seem to fit the bill to give the player more options. 

This approach is vastly different than retroactively balancing the game through changes though, but even in this stance I feel they could allow themselves more leeway.  One of the constrictions of a paper CCG is that you have to wait for a new set to correct problems with the metagame.  While stagnant metagames are forgiving of this approach, volatile metagames can actually drive players away from a game: many people I know quit MTG (some temporary, others permanently) during Mirrodin's reign in Standard from the sheer degeneracy of Affinity, which is what initially drove them to ban a multitude of cards late in the Standard format in early 2005.  I use this example because I feel it conveys a danger inherent to CCGs, where banning the cards necessary to correct the format had nasty side-effects on more innocent archetypes, where players were no longer able to pitch lands to Thirst for Knowledge, or Shrapnel Blast a Great Furnace in a Big Red deck.  Now this isn't to say that I think Cryptozoic's R&D team is going to botch as big as Affinity did, but this is a case study in how volatile banning cards can be.  If the format could have been solved by slight buffs or nerfs to cards as opposed to banning eight of them, I think that would have been a better option.

In the end I feel the faith that Cryptozoic wants to cultivate will show itself outside of absolute statements about whether to break out the nerf bat once every blue moon (certainly not to the extent we've seen in Alpha).  I also don't want to come across as if I think banning or restricting cards is a bad option, since it will likely be the most effective tool for solving a volatile metagame problem, but rather that by keeping the option open they have more options open to them in extraordinary circumstances.