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[PATV] Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 10: Collectable Games (Part 2)
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[PATV] Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 10: Collectable Games (Part 2)
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However, Hearthstone does this differently. Instead, the commons are your bread and butter and the rares and legendaries fill a situational purpose, if I may paraphrase totalbiscuit.
However, if you are of the achiever type and/or explorer type, yea... The best way to take it is as that it is an inherent flaw of the game you can live with. If you can't, the best way to cope with it is to play a different game where all the choices are laid out in front of you.
As for collectibles... Well, a small game of it could be fun, sure. But if you make costumes collectible and they are never permanent, then I'm turned off by the game. Nevermind that costumes should never be rentables to begin with, because they are purely cosmetic... See freejack as a way not to do it.
I just wish they went into more detail on HOW collectible games can function as a positive thing.
Okay, first the only difference between sealed/draft formats and the full collectable game is the distribution of things allowed to each player. This is something that isn't dependent on the actual manner of distribution of the cards, and in fact players have been known to construct their own packs of cards from their own collections and then play with those so as to limit cost. Whilst this is difficult, and buying boosters so as to make the CCG company do it for you is easy, I do not see this as added value because of the system itself.
If you want the player to play with a certain distribution of things, you could just as easily prescribe the random distribution to them through the ruleset, without needing the collectable model sitting in the background eating all the money.
Also the sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply to collectable games.
This is because every collectable game I know of has forced obsolescence built in to both update the ruleset and metagame as cards cycle through and also drive new card sales. This means that at some point the cost that a player has sunk into the game will be also removed from the main game.
So while sunk cost might be a motivator to collect all the cards/objects in a certain set, as soon as that set falls from the rotation, or even when a new set comes out and supersedes as the newest thing, that motivation evaporates. Sure, you might have spent all that money and feel you have invested all this time into the game, but at that moment you realise that you are once again at square one, at least in terms of material to play with. And that's what breaks the sunk cost fallacy so very completely. You have no investment in this new set, and so there is no investment to drive you forward. And in fact, there is a very large zero worth investment in the old set to make you feel bad and prevent you from playing.
This is like the exact opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. You stop playing because, although you might understand the meta better, your time and money investment has been annulled.
Aside from these criticisms, I'd also like to say that card boosters for some reason smell ridiculously good when opened. There is most definitely a booster scent of foil and ink that I think electronic collectable games would have a hard time matching with whatever visual or audible cues they pack with their collectable distributions.
Just putting that out there because I don't think the discussion of how opening a booster is great is complete without someone mentioning the unique smell.
Okay, first the only difference between sealed/draft formats and the full collectable game is the distribution of things allowed to each player. This is something that isn't dependent on the actual manner of distribution of the cards, and in fact players have been known to construct their own packs of cards from their own collections and then play with those so as to limit cost. Whilst this is difficult, and buying boosters so as to make the CCG company do it for you is easy, I do not see this as added value because of the system itself.
If you want the player to play with a certain distribution of things, you could just as easily prescribe the random distribution to them through the ruleset, without needing the collectable model sitting in the background eating all the money.
Also the sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply to collectable games.
This is because every collectable game I know of has forced obsolescence built in to both update the ruleset and metagame as cards cycle through and also drive new card sales. This means that at some point the cost that a player has sunk into the game will be also removed from the main game.
So while sunk cost might be a motivator to collect all the cards/objects in a certain set, as soon as that set falls from the rotation, or even when a new set comes out and supersedes as the newest thing, that motivation evaporates. Sure, you might have spent all that money and feel you have invested all this time into the game, but at that moment you realise that you are once again at square one, at least in terms of material to play with. And that's what breaks the sunk cost fallacy so very completely. You have no investment in this new set, and so there is no investment to drive you forward. And in fact, there is a very large zero worth investment in the old set to make you feel bad and prevent you from playing.
This is like the exact opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. You stop playing because, although you might understand the meta better, your time and money investment has been annulled.
Aside from these criticisms, I'd also like to say that card boosters for some reason smell ridiculously good when opened. There is most definitely a booster scent of foil and ink that I think electronic collectable games would have a hard time matching with whatever visual or audible cues they pack with their collectable distributions.
Just putting that out there because I don't think the discussion of how opening a booster is great is complete without someone mentioning the unique smell.
Okay, first the only difference between sealed/draft formats and the full collectable game is the distribution of things allowed to each player. This is something that isn't dependent on the actual manner of distribution of the cards, and in fact players have been known to construct their own packs of cards from their own collections and then play with those so as to limit cost. Whilst this is difficult, and buying boosters so as to make the CCG company do it for you is easy, I do not see this as added value because of the system itself.
If you want the player to play with a certain distribution of things, you could just as easily prescribe the random distribution to them through the ruleset, without needing the collectable model sitting in the background eating all the money.
Also the sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply to collectable games.
This is because every collectable game I know of has forced obsolescence built in to both update the ruleset and metagame as cards cycle through and also drive new card sales. This means that at some point the cost that a player has sunk into the game will be also removed from the main game.
So while sunk cost might be a motivator to collect all the cards/objects in a certain set, as soon as that set falls from the rotation, or even when a new set comes out and supersedes as the newest thing, that motivation evaporates. Sure, you might have spent all that money and feel you have invested all this time into the game, but at that moment you realise that you are once again at square one, at least in terms of material to play with. And that's what breaks the sunk cost fallacy so very completely. You have no investment in this new set, and so there is no investment to drive you forward. And in fact, there is a very large zero worth investment in the old set to make you feel bad and prevent you from playing.
This is like the exact opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. You stop playing because, although you might understand the meta better, your time and money investment has been annulled.
Aside from these criticisms, I'd also like to say that card boosters for some reason smell ridiculously good when opened. There is most definitely a booster scent of foil and ink that I think electronic collectable games would have a hard time matching with whatever visual or audible cues they pack with their collectable distributions.
Just putting that out there because I don't think the discussion of how opening a booster is great is complete without someone mentioning the unique smell.
The upside is all on the developer's end and, as others have pointed out, doing drafts and sealed is entirely possible without the collectible stuff added on.
This isn't to say that collectible games are inherently evil, but collectible games with randomized purchasable elements are always going to be about gambling without "running afoul of gambling laws".
That said, I think I will just opt out of anything 'collectable' in the future. Though now that I think about it, I haven't played a 'collectable' style game in over a decade and the mechanism seems to serve as an active discouragement to my interest anyway, so I guess that's not much of a change.
I actually remember kinda ranting about this in the PAR article on Hearthstone, where they basically said, "Yeah, it's collectable, but that's okay!" and I basically went off and said "No it isn't! The whole model is a scam and the fact that M:TG uses it doesn't make it okay!" That was a strangely unpopular opinion, because...Blizzard.
Giving these cards a different border or alternative artwork allows people to establish themselves as frequent players/purchasers without ruining the competitive meta as a whole. Furthermore, releasing random assortments of cards at a time allows players to try each piece they receive in a set - testing it's strengths and weaknesses - BEFORE the time to crunch for serious deck-building is upon them and the vast majority of commons are thrown by the wayside.
@discrider It's a sunk cost fallacy if the players choose to continue because of money spent on the project. If the money becomes ill spent later on, yet they choose to continue because of that (failed) investment, they're only falling deeper into the fallacy. If they choose to leave because their investment is rendered worthless, then they weren't falling for it in the first place. They were legitimately working towards something of value, and up until that point had no reason to strain against logic to fund it (other than the logic of "this money could go towards something else").
Cosmetic collectables are a pretty good and decent model.
Having boosters that slowly drip feed players the entire set, alongside releasing the entire set, would also be good and justified. But such a model need not have the artificial rarity scale (common, uncommon, rare, etc) that most collectable games include. Every card could be common, and this idea would still work but without the terrible and necessary purchasing of a thousand commons just to complete a rare set.
Also with the sunk cost fallacy, it comes about when the weight of spent investments behind a player is a consideration in expending more money to achieve a goal. As such I can see players falling on this to drive the completion of a set of cards. And I could also see it potentially driving the first players of the game to collect all the cards ever made.
However, for the average player, there is no easy way to collect the things that were released before they were players. So the completion drive can only extend to the sets they've participated in. Any future sets have to set up the sunk cost fallacy all over again. And any past sets tend to be bought in entire sets, which tend to cost far too much when compared to the player's already existing outlay.
So while the sunk cost might drive sales of existing sets, you have to get the players interested again through other means (new mechanics, hype, pre-release game days) so they reinvest in any new sets and get caught all over again. And in the meantime you have to somehow dissuade them from looking back and seeing their old investments being turned to dross.
So in short form, the sunk cost fallacy relies on players purchasing small amounts based on the large amounts they've already spent. But players haven't bought any of the new sets and are watching you burn their old sets, so it's unlikely to keep the model going at all.
I invested heavily in City of Heroes. In all honesty, it was kinda to collect things to make yet another awesome character, but the benefit was more high quality content produced faster. CoH went for quite a while between new power sets and new/updated zones before it went F2P and then they came out regularly. With one exception, all the costume sets were ready to buy without going through random cards, though 'super packs' were added which included a costume set among other things (enhancements, invention recipes, components and even a few vanity pets). To make them feel like less of a problem, subscribers could use 'Veteran tokens' which went into a veteran tree for different awards to buy five packs, so you had an option to, in a sense, get packs for free.
Of course, the strongest advertisement was always other players who had acquired a costume set or power set and I did on a few occasions decide to buy sets I had originally snubbed because I saw someone with a great combination of the items.
NCsoft made big news that most people who hadn't played the game shrugged and went 'meh' at, but the shut down meant publishers could shut down even popular and profitable games that people have put a lot of money into without a blink of an eye, even when plenty of options to keep it open are on the table (maintenance mode for one) if they think they can make 0.0001% more money by effectively forcing their audience onto another game.
They all do have one thing in common though: It was hard to collect *everything*. With cards it was just random what you would get per pack. With comic books you had to buy every week/month and if you missed an issue well then you'd have to take extra effort to find the issue you missed.
Keep in mind too that many of those collectable experiences don't even have a game attached to them. The only part of the game was literally collecting, and that was it. We also have two existing models for collectable games: Card games (like M:TG) and mini-figures (Warhammer) in where one is randomized and the other is a time-sink (both require money)
The games that get the least bit of flack for being a 'collectable' are the ones in where they monetize the collectables that aren't random (vanity items), and turn the randomized collectables into a time-sink (achievements & equipment)
The games that get the most flack for being a collectable are the ones that reverse the above, turning non-randomized elements into a time sink and monetizing the randomized elements; and the only thing that has to change is what's monetized and what's a time-sink, even when the game is exactly the same.
This discussion isn't exactly a new one, and has existed with physical versions for a long time. With both the randomized and time-sink models, players have always found work-around to make things fair if the rules are left to them to create a fair gaming environment. That is until the video game era in where players are forced to go by the rules the developers give them. This is why systems such as bans, draft, or point-limits are inserted to collectable games: To even the playing field so that people with the most time or money don't by default win. A bad collectable game is one where there's no system of equalization, or encourages/promotes the imbalance created by the system.
In essence, the people who *want* to pay for more cards, rarer cards, a complete deck, etc. are subsidizing me playing for free. And given that I would not be playing this game *except* that it's free to play, that is the benefit for the consumer. It is a way to provide the full game free-to-play (as opposed to games which are free-to-play, but without access to all of the content), and still recoup your investment.
@Tarrker
That's not a "fail" that's how the game is set up intentionally. If it was set up to allow you to blow through packs and get only legendaries which worked with your preferred character or your preferred playstyle, it would do basically none of the things that the videos are listing as benefits. The whole point is for you to go try out the content that you got, even if it's not the content you wanted.
But you are a good example of my above point. If Blizzard didn't think it could make money through you buying decks (including decks with cards you don't like), it would not allow me to play without paying anything.
At the VERY END of this episode, you BRIEFLY touched on it. Can you please give us some examples of CCGs that are "doing it right?" All I see when I look at CCGs is one slot machine after another. You're the industry insider, Extra Credits. Prove me wrong. Show me a non-exploitative CCG. Show me a CCG that isn't pay-to-win, that isn't a Trap.
I have never seen one, ever.
There's a base collector instinct to catch them all, and as you catch them, it enables new play possibilities because of the composition of your team. So the collectible aspect is meaningful. Then for min-maxers/competitors, there are variations within the individual Pokemon that you can modify through training, breeding, combat, etc.
Right?
But, yeah, it applies in the same sort of way that Peace Walker does, or Borderlands, or Warcraft, etc, etc. Randomised drops. It's not really touched on here, because it's not asking you to spend more money to do it.
But then, what do I know? I've all but given up on random Magic boosters in favor of Duels of the Planeswalkers and the Netrunner & LotR LCGs.
In fact, investment was always my chief argument against the flat psuedo-argument of "it's just a game." I would say, "Pac-Man... Checkers... these are games. At $50 per software, several softwares deep, a monthly fee of $15, and who knows how much in character services/store purchases, this is an investment."
Ironically, when WoTC went berserk with Magic: The Gathering's rules, it was easy as pie for me to walk away despite having all the best cards and being a successful tournament player for some time.
This change would significantly alter the limited formats, possibly bringing them to a terrible end. As noted by the video, limited formats actually utilize rarity to great effect as part of the game. Each pack has a guarantee of one rare/mythic and three uncommons - receiving more than this in one pack is exceptionally rare. WotC considers draft and sealed settings when designating card rarities, and thus rarity allows them to exercise a bit more control over the limited formats than they would otherwise be able to.
Your suggestion seems somewhat based on an idea that rarity is arbitrarily assigned, but it's not: uncommon and rare cards are often better than comparable commons in most situations, assuming there are even any commons that might be considered "comparable" in the first place. Look at Vastwood Gorger vs. Duskdale Wurm vs. Elderscale Wurm, for instance, and think about drafting M2013. Any moderately experienced player will be able to look at these cards and tell you which one is common, uncommon and mythic with little trouble even if you remove rarity. True, there are always strong commons that are near snap-picks and gimmicky rares that will wheel twice, but WotC actively uses rarity to put some powerful cards into a set while ensuring they won't dominate limited formats entirely. You can often rely (assuming you aren't getting cut or something) on getting a copy or two of a given common in a draft, but the same is never true of rares or mythics, and only moderately so for uncommons.
But setting limited aside and considering people just cracking open packs: you're right, removing rarity would make collecting a whole set easier. WotC knows this. Hell, the introduction of Mythics at least quadrupled the minimum number of packs you had to buy to complete a set. Buying boosters hasn't been a cost-efficient way to complete a set in MTG for a long time, if it ever was. I don't know that this is really a problem, though. MTG is different from the sort of exploitative online games discussed in this video in one important way: you can trade/buy cards from other players freely. Players who want to complete a set have always had a viable workaround in MTG to gambling on packs, so I don't see this disappointment actually chasing many people away - those that get fed up with the random nature of packs simply enter into this parallel market, but keep playing the game and don't lose out on much. So while the attitudes encouraged by the rarity system are similar to those seen in online games, the end result is much less harmful to players, so I'm generally okay with it.
Limited formats exist to level the playing field between those who have sunk a lot of money into the game (and time to a certain extent by only looking at current sets) and those who have not. Removing the rarities, whilst it would lower the investment needed to have a complete set and thus remove some of the entry barrier to constructed, doesn't eliminate the need for this entirely. So limited formats would still exist, and likely would still exist in their current formats.
As for the picking metagame, removing the rarities doesn't change the relative power of the cards. So the good rares would still be picked up fairly quickly, and worst case is everyone has better cards in their deck. As everyone is on a level playing field this wouldn't matter at all. Commons would be rarer though, to make way for the now common rares and uncommons, so filling out the deck with less specialised cards might be harder.
But overall, what it would do is completely eliminate sub-par cards from the pool. There is no reason for a rare to be artificially more efficient or superior to a common. All it does is place that dissatisfaction barrier squarely in your face, showing you that unless you cough up more money for more boosters (or the specific rares), your deck will be slower, or have less versatility, or do less overall damage than someone with the right rares.
For physical games, I'm mostly leaning towards the Netrunner style of games where I can just buy a playset of cards in a fixed pack. No worries about unused cardboard, and don't have to worry about having to buy tons of random product keeping up with the Joneses when I might only get to play a game once or twice a month.
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You say it wouldn't change limited, but then acknowledge that it would lead to an increase in power level. This is changing limited. Draft has many purposes and appeals to many people for many reasons, only one of which is its inherent accessibility as a format that anyone can jump into. I like draft because it effectively enforces a significantly lower power level than standard or other constructed formats. As I noted before, WotC monitors the power level of limited formats when designing a set, and uses rarity to mediate it: they know they can print a card that would totally wreck a draft, either because it's too powerful or it's too combo-centric or whatever, if they just put it at rare or mythic so that the odds of it showing up are slim.
I like having a deck that has a couple awesome cards and a bunch of "meh" ones, because it forces you to step out of your constructed element and not only use unfamiliar cards, but use ones that are fundamentally different (weaker, blander, whatever you want to call it) than what you play with when you can choose from anything. Letting me build a draft deck that looks much more like my constructed deck is not improving draft, in my opinion. I know a lot of people who feel the same way.
Let's look at the numbers a bit to see exactly how much the power level would change. If you didn't mess with the number of cards at each rarity, it would be pretty drastic. Looking at recent sets, it seems like the average number of rares and mythics combined comes to around 30% of the total number of cards in the set. Apply that to a standard booster without rarity and you're talking about four or five would-be rares or mythics per pack, instead of the current mandate of one. That's a huge shift in power for draft. Thinking about Sealed, I have to imagine you'd be able to reconstruct standard-level decks so reliably that I think I'd completely lose interest in the format at that point. So they'd clearly have to alter the number of cards they printed at each rarity, but to maintain even a semblance of the power level Draft and Sealed have today they'd have to print either an unreasonable number of commons or seriously reduce the number of rares and mythics. So I'm absolutely opposed to this idea because of its potential impact on limited, a format that I enjoy largely because of its power level.
The reason MtG and other CCGs use rarities is rather simple. Essentially, the price of a common is orders of magnitude lower than the price of a mythic rare. This means that a cheap deck of mostly commons can be $10-ish, while collecting a deck of only mythic rares could probably reach $1000. It's true that the strongest decks aren't mythic rares-only, but the distribution is a lot more top heavy than what you get in a booster.
This means that Wizards can sell MtG to more casual players who aren't willing to spend more than a regular tabletop game costs, while they can still have more dedicated players investing hundreds or thousands of dollars. Of course, they have made sure to make rarer cards generally more powerful, which means that wanting to improve your deck or enter the competitive scene will keep tempting you to move up into ever pricier ranges.
The rarity scheme is how MtG can hit the big spenders - and hit them hard - while still offering a somewhat reasonable product to the masses and gradually condition them to think $20 for a playing card is fair. It is purely a business decision, though they would much prefer for their customers to not realize this. Note in particular how they introduced the mythic rarity and tournament staples such as Sphinx's Revelation and Geist of Saint Traft just happen to to be mythic.
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On the other hand, I've seen this done VERY well once in a game you might not expect: Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer. ME3's multiplayer was superbly designed so I never felt that I *had* to spend money on packs, I also didn't feel bad about it the couple times I did.
Heathstone is getting close. I think they've put their packs just a little too far out of reach, because I start to feel like I have to grind in order to get enough gold to buy packs without spending money, but the model feels pretty robust overall. And being a CCG, Hearthstone does have a certain element (like MtG) of "he who has the most cards probably has the better deck" - I think they are probably trying to address this with the matchmaking, but we will see!
There are obvious examples, such as games where you are encouraged to buy the slightly better thing.
But there are trickier examples. Many CCGs can become "pay to win" accidentally by including too many overpowered, rare combos. Heritage MTG has (arguably) approached this model.
Levelling systems also walk this fine line. LoL, for example, gates many of the best character building content and lets users pay money to advance to that content more quickly. I wouldn't call LoL "pay to win," but I find it difficult to say precisely why. Because eventually you unlock all that content, and then the game ceases to be "pay to win"? How long can it wait to let you have all the content for free before it becomes "pay to win"?
It's a difficult line to walk down, and I think it would be nice to see EC address the issues involved.
I played Shadow Era for a time... never actually spent any money, but I went through their offers and managed to get a really solid deck together. The only reason I don't play anymore is that in the online play, I had trouble finding players that wouldn't flake out on me. The single player could only last so long before I wanted actual real players...
I think comparing this model to the old guys hitting slot machines in Vegas is a disservice to the model and an insult to the players.
I normally really like your videos, but this one was a bit off the mark in a few key areas.
Don't forget that traditional, pay 2 play, MMOs equate time to money since you need to subscribe.