In Poker, if you are starting, you may find yourself in situations where you are unable to enter the tournament you want without a serious investment.
Not owning an Xbox + SF4 is just as, if not more serious than not owning xx card for my deck. I remember when SF4 came out, I was homeless and didn’t have the game. I couldn’t buy the game because there were higher priorities in my life like food and shelter. Is it the games/// competitions fault that I got bombed on at tournaments because I was dumpster divin? Fuck no.
Money is valued differently by different people, what might be a lot to you, might not be shit to me and visa versa. Fact of the matter is, MTG is a COLLECTIBLE card game, and there are a helluva lot more expensive COMPETITIVE hobbies out there, like say… stock car racing.
MTG can be an incredibly cheap game, I could go to a comic store some weekend and buy a half dozen decks to play with my friends for under $20… a quarter of what I’ll spend at the bar that night.
EDIT: I used to have a ton of respect for Sirlin, but these comments are just nasty. This thread should really be about how Sirlin gave THawk a throw whiff but not Honda, WTF kind of stupid shit is that?
you can play poker at home and divide chips evenly amongst all players without using money. Aside from the deck of cards and the chips, you don’t have to spend extra on them. It isn’t like companies are selling you DLC for colored decks, the jokers, extra lettered cards or some other gadget you need for the game. Your analogy is flawed in that sense.
Let’s say, for example that I developed a new board game for consoles. I sell the initial game to everybody for X amount. Suddenly, I decided to add DLC options for colors; not a big deal. Then I upgrade things so that if you spend money, you can buy extra pieces that weren’t in the original game. You would be able to use these pieces against regular people who hadn’t bought them and they provide some advantages. If I keep doing this, I start to sacrifice the integrity of the game and I’m more or less nickle and diming people until they have bought the whole thing. It may be entirely possible to win with the original game against people who have the upgrades, but you would always be at a serious strategic disadvantage because you have less options to choose from.
The problems presented in this thread is that companies are moving away from selling you a complete game up front and moving towards constantly selling small parts of the game to make more money. That is more or less the problem to discuss in the thread. The initial argument was over whether or not M:TG can be accused of this and on whether or not Sirlin should stop using it as an example in so many places whether he thinks they fit or not.
Please note that selling full upgrades to the game that add all the pieces at once is different than selling them individually. Sirlin is not against adding on to the game, but instead the hustling of little shit constantly.
“you can play poker at home and divide chips evenly amongst all players without using money. Aside from the deck of cards and the chips, you don’t have to spend extra on them.”
You absolutely can do this with MTG too.
The money might go to different places, but in the end the money is simply a barrier to entry in the highest form of competition for whichever game, MTG or Poker. There really isn’t anything wrong with that barrier, its simply a part of the game. And millions of people playing around the world means Sirlin or anyone else has got a long way to go in proving that it is “bad.”
It is really funny to me how those not familiar enough with MTG find the rotating format system for competitive play to be a bad thing. The rotating format is the biggest reason as to why MTG can say strong, interesting and keep a semblance of balance while every other collectible card game out there flares up and fades away.
I understand where Sirlin is coming from in that fighting games were a bastion of closed systems for the sort of player who is interested in that. And the idea that Fighters might move away from that is heartbreaking in the same way that the drive in theatre down the street I used to go to went out of business, even though it was the most satisfying way for me personally to watch a film. That said, his comments on MTG are simply incorrect.
If you love something it is your responsibility to show your honest support for it, with your wallet or your actions. No one is going into your bank account and stealing your money except the government.
You’re barking up the wrong tree when it comes to M:TG stuff because it is very obvious at this point that you understand why M:TG fits into part of this category, why it doesn’t at times and because rotations have killed an amazing format. You can’t just go and say Sirlin is incorrect if you don’t even understand what he is referring to. I’ll add more later but you need to re-read the thread.
It’s either they rotate out sets in M:TG (which makes WotC more money), or they introduce slightly stronger cards during each set, which will eventually kill the game due to power creep.
Gems seem balanced because they won’t stop someone getting murdered. But as skill levels increase and games get tighter, gems are going to get more important. When you’ve got a sliver of health each, gems could be the deciding factor.
IMHO anything that increases the size of the decision tree should be available to anyone immediately. In Gotham City Impostors you can buy a temp. XP boost. The devs said it wasn’t unfair because unlocks weren’t staggered, iirc, so I could buy a level one or ten item with my XP. The XP boost just gave me more options on what to buy, not more powerful.
But having more options does make you more powerful, because it increases the tactical choices available.
I’ve played nearly every trading card game out there and the one thing they all seem to have in common which lead to their demise is a lack of rotation.
In addition to this, its a collectible card game, I can’t understand why people insist on downplaying the fact that there are collectors out there and the game is for both them and the players.
I understand both sides of this arguement. My friends and I played Street Fighter on the SNES for years and years constantly and we were always finding new ways to take advantage of the system and, in turn, counter that cheese. There’s something to be said for that, for sure.
Magic: the Gathering being a huge buy-in to play Standard is a fairly recent development, like with the Ravnica dual lands. Having to spend over a hundred dollars to play a in a tournament is stupid, no doubt, particularly when you factor in that the cards may very well become worthless in a year or so as they rotate out or are banned (if they’re TOO good). The thing about Magic is that if you can find a few friends and each only buy about ten packs and some cheap singles a year, it’s just as fun as playing in tournaments. I’d say it’s more fun, because you’re more free to try odd card combinations.
The system isn’t inherently flawed, it’s the fact that they’ve figured out that making chase rares (and now mythic rares) sells packs like crazy and Friday Night Magic that have made it this way. Drafting doesn’t help either. All of these things drive up the prices of singles, which sells more packs. I don’t buy packs unless there are plenty of good commons and uncommons in the set myself, but the case of Dark Depths shows that one money card in a set will make packs sell fast. Dark Depths was a silly card from Coldsnap, but when a powerful combo was discovered for it, the packs went from $2.50 to $6.00 and sold out almost instantly. What are the odds of getting that one card out of a pack?
All that said, the collectible card system doesn’t belong in a fighting game to me, at all.
Nah, I didn’t play any CCGs until 2001 or so, which is when I started off with the totally busted DBZ CCG. Holy shit, the power creep and expensive cards in that game were off the charts. When I quit, I sold off my Uber’ed out Namekian Piccolo the Trained deck for $1500. Probably could have made more if I waited another couple of months.
Edit: Wow, this quote from Wikipedia sure brought Urza’s brokeness into light:
Power Creep is the hilarious nonsense to hit M:TG because some sets are great, others are shitty and it kinda goes back and forth. Invasion block still has as many good cards as Ravnica, as does Mirrodin etc. Only sets that were purposefully meh were Mercadian Masques because it was right after Urza and Champions of Kamigawa which was just meh (still had good cards but the whole legends deal was kinda shitty).
The"shitty" sets are the ways that power creep are controlled in MTG. It lets you reset the level and start creeping back up, rather than constantly outmoding every card printed earlier. There have also been more sets designed to lower the power level than just the ones you listed, the only issue is they might have had 1 or 2 really good cards that keep people from thinking about them in that light.
I played the DBZ TCG aswell, (Piccolo the Trained was one of the most fun decks in that game) and watched as they had cards that did:
Physical attack +2 damage… then Physical attack +3 damage, then Physical attack +3 damage + an effect, then Physical attack +5 damage then Physical attack +3 damage and you could use it twice etc etc etc. Power creep is more apparent in that game then any other I’ve experienced because the designers didn’t explore the design space very much. A rotation would have done wonders for that game, because it really did have a good, unique design.
Eh…I don’t think Champions was purposefully underpowered because it had a lot of bangers.But overall it was kinda meh because they were working with the legends bit.
Either way this discussion has strayed so far away from the point that it might as well not even be here. I’ll try and get this back by putting, probably one of my favorite games that I get to play never, into the fire. Hive is a game about bugs and good stuff and comes with a full set of pieces for both players. Since the initial offering they have released two expansion packs that introduce pieces into the game. You get one for each side so the board remains equally equipped on both ends.
On the other hand, with the way games are being developed, one can buy the initial offering and then have a multitude of additional purchases that each present strategically impacting options to the game. This is a bad trend since it means that more games are not being released as full games, but instead as a kind of mini game plus a cash shop ( this is a bit of an exaggeration but it is only meant to illustrate, not as a means to insult the initial game being offered).
While in some games, the whole game is just pieces that you assemble and disassemble (like M:TG has been since inception), other games are instead being moved towards purchasing upgrades that provide you an advantage but that your opponent will not have access to unless he pays for them. The fear for fighting games is that those characters whom you need the extra money for will become substantially better than those offered in the initial game, thus creating the “pay to win” situation.
Imagine if you were playing Starcraft and you were not allowed access to Seige Tanks and Banshees because you didn’t buy yourself the “Superior Tech” upgrade all the while your opponent had access to this because he bought them. Similarly if your opponent bought perks like improved barracks that had your marines start with the +1 weapons/ +1 armor upgrades already there. This may seem grossly exaggerated but entirely possible considering how things are moving they are not farfetched (and the fact that in LoL runes do somewhat similarish things to characters like improved speed and whatnot).
The cool thing about SFxT is it’s exactly what you guys are preaching for.
Customization good. Grinding bad. Good thing gems aren’t unlockables and there’s certain cets of pre-order only DLC gems that we’ll be able to entirely disregard as they won’t be allowed in tournament.
Yay! Everyone’s happy. Sirlin goes back to googling his own name, SRK’s members actually consider playing a fighting game.
SFxT is the start of the problem. While normally what I am about to write would fall under a slippery slope argument, Capcom has already admitted that they are testing the waters towards adding more customization to fighting games. Which means that the success of this title and the gems DLC could have a very definite impact on the way these games are enjoyed in the future.
SFxT has already made it abundantly clear that there are more than one gem which we will have to pay for and some more possibly under way. This means that one person who purchase these will have an advantage over those that don’t online. This is what we actually do not want in games; for some games it works but for fighting games it is horrible.
Hey, we all know THawk was overpowered, Honda NEEDED stored Ochio and no throw whiff to be competitive, and Bison deserved the 20 buffs more than Chun.
