Online gaming vs loyalty.

By kempy, in Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game

Already finished WH40K Conquest OCTGN tournament reminded me about one thing. Mostly all online tourneys in LCGs have a rule that allows you to change deck between rounds. Sometimes there's requirement to lock your faction. For someone who played lot of L5R online tourneys it was shock to discover this system. For years in L5R 3-4 months long meta allowed online tourneys to simulate real ones. You had to build best static universal deck that could try beat everything in the field. In LCG your loyalty could be curse in such tourneys, because everyone, who will know you as loyalist can easily adopt/meta against you.

Edited by kempy

Online tournaments just take too long to keep the same deck when new cards come out every month.

5 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:

Online tournaments just take too long to keep the same deck when new cards come out every month.

Another good reason to have them release bigger sets every 3-4 months! ;)

25 minutes ago, kempy said:

Already finished WH40K Conquest OCTGN tournament reminded me about one thing. Mostly all online tourneys in LCGs have a rule that allows you to change deck between rounds. Sometimes there's requirement to lock your faction. For someone who played lot of L5R online tourneys it was shock to discover this system. For years in L5R 3-4 months long meta allowed online tourneys to simulate real ones. You had to build best static universal deck that could try beat everything in the field. In LCG your loyalty could be curse in such tourneys, because everyone, who will know you as loyalist can easily adopt/meta against you.

You hate the game already, why do you even care about responses?

6 minutes ago, Kakita Shiro said:

You hate the game already, why do you even care about responses?

To read such stupid questions like this.

Edited by kempy

That actually seems like a pretty valid question. Why, if you have already decided you do not like what the game will likely be, do you persist in being a part of the community that has not decided yet? That just seems like you are being contrary for its own sake.

Seriously? It's another stupid question. Besides being OT.

This seems like a problem(?) with some easy work-arounds.

1. You can do the same thing against other people...

2. Wait until a full cycle is out. Then run an online tournament, permitting only cards through the completed cycle (none of the new cards coming out).

3. Or just lock decks at the start of the tournament.

Also, in my experience, trading card games with random boosters promoted faction loyalty from a financial perspective, but didn't guarantee viable strategies. Since "keeping up" with an LCG gets you all the cards, you don't have that problem. You'll always have the cards for a viable strategy if you keep up.

Also, bonus points to people questioning the purpose of the post. Another way to ask the question would be: "You posted this on a discussion forum, but there's not a clear direction for discussion. What are you hoping to discuss?"

16 hours ago, Khudzlin said:

Online tournaments just take too long to keep the same deck when new cards come out every month.

One month is lot of time.

And there's question, what tournament should provide. A testing ground for many evolving ideas, or maybe test of environment reading and simulate real, local, tourneys. For me LCG vs CCG online tourneys are like

- promotion of scouting, applying silver bullets, chaos

vs

- environment reading skill, fair play

If you have a urge to to play your brand new deck with fresh cards, go to OCTGN/Jinteki and test it every evening.

Let me explain more. Few days ago finished Black Crusade Winter tourney in Warhammer Conquest. For all familiar with WH40C the're two lists of winner:

His swiss deck: http://www.traxissector.com/en/deck/?deck=370&public=y

His finals deck: http://www.traxissector.com/en/deck/?deck=365&public=y

It's clearly visible he rebuilt his final deck to be more competetive against Kaloo who, what was not a big secret, played big Elite Orks deck. Also modification of deck contains few totally new cards, that entered meta two weeks ago (cards designed by Champions).

8 hours ago, zoomfarg said:

This seems like a problem(?) with some easy work-arounds.

1. You can do the same thing against other people...

2. Wait until a full cycle is out. Then run an online tournament, permitting only cards through the completed cycle (none of the new cards coming out).

3. Or just lock decks at the start of the tournament.

Agree, ther're well known ways to do it, but question is - why they don't do it?

8 hours ago, zoomfarg said:

Also, in my experience, trading card games with random boosters promoted faction loyalty from a financial perspective, but didn't guarantee viable strategies. Since "keeping up" with an LCG gets you all the cards, you don't have that problem. You'll always have the cards for a viable strategy if you keep up.

In my experience playing one clan in L5R CCG was enough, becasue ther're were so much various decks/ideas in the environment that being familiar with them with your personal 2-3 same clan decks was enough to keep you loyal and focused on optimalisation. Also, people gathered in small playgroups, like mine, just built (with help proxies of chase rares to avoid moving cards from one sleeve to another) lot of T1 decks to test against becasue there'e lot of spare cards to create them.

8 hours ago, zoomfarg said:

Also, bonus points to people questioning the purpose of the post. Another way to ask the question would be: "You posted this on a discussion forum, but there's not a clear direction for discussion. What are you hoping to discuss?"

Hope this post helped a bit to understand idea behind this thread.

Edited by kempy
16 hours ago, Kakita Shiro said:

You hate the game already, why do you even care about responses?

10 hours ago, Horiuchi Nobata said:

That actually seems like a pretty valid question. Why, if you have already decided you do not like what the game will likely be, do you persist in being a part of the community that has not decided yet? That just seems like you are being contrary for its own sake.

Being biologist you may hate everything about deadly effects of viruses, but it doesn't stop you to be fascinated how these viruses keep alive, how they spread, how mutate, what diseases they cause.

its not coming back. Its not changing the way YOU want it. You will be happier the sooner you accept it.

1 hour ago, kempy said:

Agree, ther're well known ways to do it, but question is - why they don't do it?

That I can't answer... But that's a problem with tournament organization, right? Not With the actual LCG model.

(I'll admit, I'm SUPER biased against CCGs. To me, an LCG or similar distribution model makes the genre more palatable)

Edited by zoomfarg
2 minutes ago, zoomfarg said:

That I can't answer... But that's a problem with tournament organization, right? Not With the actual LCG model.

Read Khudzlin's answer. Because it seems this statement (not valid imho) is just justification of such behaviours.

Edited by kempy

Yeah that seems like slow online tournament time confronted with frequent releases. So the tournament can just treat each cycle as a "release" for a tournament (#2 of my earlier suggestions). Problem solved.

21 minutes ago, kempy said:

Read Khudzlin's answer. Because it seems this statement (not valid imho) is just justification of such behaviours.

You make it sound like someone's committing a crime, not running a tournament in way different to how you would prefer it to be run.

2 hours ago, Vlad3theImpaler said:

You make it sound like someone's committing a crime, not running a tournament in way different to how you would prefer it to be run.

Sad, you got this impression. And this crime comparision. :D

Tournament rules are always based on the way the organizer wants the tournament to be. I've hosted a WHFB tournament with different rules that the group used to run, simply because there was some stuffs that I felt wasn't great. Some liked the change, others don't. At some point, it's really a matter of opinion.

I'll agree that if the tournament takes a while, let's say 3 weeks to complete, it may be interesting to change the deck based on the new releases and the change of gameplay. Sometime, it's even worst, specially since there's a change and the player must keep 2 mindset, one for the lenghty tournament, the other for the common gameplay. Mixing both gameplay, may harm the player's performance, since everything is based around knowledge of your own deck in a tournament.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing? It really depends on the length of the tournament. However, for me, when the tournament is too long, I lose interest. So knowing that online tournament are usually slow paced, I don't even care about those.

In the end, what's the most important thing? That everyone follows the same rules. If it's possible to change your deck, in between match-up, it should be allowed to everyone, as long as it stays within the established rules. Just like some CCG tournaments that allows side-decks to adjust your deck between games.

Like it, play it. Hate it, organize it.

47 minutes ago, Crawd said:

Tournament rules are always based on the way the organizer wants the tournament to be.

I wonder if anyone even tried to organize such tourney in LCG?

47 minutes ago, Crawd said:

Is it a good thing or a bad thing? It really depends on the length of the tournament. However, for me, when the tournament is too long, I lose interest. So knowing that online tournament are usually slow paced, I don't even care about those.

So it seems that for you there's no problem with tourney ruleset, but its length. As majority of LCG tourneys are long-term ones (3-7 days per round) so you're just not a typical online tourney player.

47 minutes ago, Crawd said:

In the end, what's the most important thing? That everyone follows the same rules.

I'm just pointing that such ruleset promotes - in my opinion - controversional behaviors.

47 minutes ago, Crawd said:

Just like some CCG tournaments that allows side-decks to adjust your deck between games.

As i understand side-deck concept but i don't know a tourney card game that allows you to change whole deck between rounds.

47 minutes ago, Crawd said:

Like it, play it. Hate it, organize it.

I organized plenty of online L5R CCG tourneys starting with Egg of Pan'Ku, through OCTGN and finally in Sun and Moon. All of them were made same way - one deck per tourney.

Edited by kempy

Nevermind.

Edited by Kakita Shiro

Should probably be amended to 'they or their loved ones have contracted'.

I wonder whether it might be fun to have a tournament just when a new set is released. Perhaps first half a week before release and then the second half a week later.

One deck per half, but obviously you'd be allowed to bring in a new deck for the second half.

Edited by Myrion

Personally, I have always preferred tournaments with just one deck, no modifications. When changes are allowed in a tourney it just seems to cheapen the competition to me for some reason. I feel like the deck building aspect is lost a little bit. It's easy to build a deck specifically to counter one particular type of deck (Elite Orks from Kempy's example, or maybe a Mantis Ranged Attack deck) if you know you're coming up against that. It's a lot harder to build an efficient, strong deck for anything you might come up against within the meta, and that is what I think should be winning tournaments. I know the counter argument to that is 'you could change your deck too', but this is just my preference that a well built overall deck should win out over a deck designed for that one match.

Do you think having sun and moon up and running again for the lcg is a realistic goal? Were both @Sparks Duh and @kempy involved with Sun and Moon? Any idea? :D

33 minutes ago, Moto Subodei said:

Do you think having sun and moon up and running again for the lcg is a realistic goal? Were both @Sparks Duh and @kempy involved with Sun and Moon? Any idea? :D

First, last time i talked with Drew (programmer behind SnM), he's not interested. Secondly, afaik his server allows no more than 100 players to play same moment, so there're technical limitations. Thirdly we don't know how new game will look, if it will be familiar, there's always an option to create own database (as people do for various casual L5R projects) and use SnM in current form to play. It might be a bit clunky btw.

Edited by kempy

stuff similar to jinteki or throneteki should be the way to go

Just now, Dovla said:

stuff similar to jinteki or throneteki should be the way to go

Yep. In AGoT full fanmade visual (photo) spoiler was at the Gencon already. Then appeared OCTGN plugin. That's i expect to see in L5R as well.