Just played a game of Emyn Muil... and I have to ask...

I know the Scoring system has taken a lot of flak from the community and I agree that it is rather weak... but now with Emyn Muil it seems we are adding yet another dimension to this.

One would think that the Difficulty of any given scenario would have some kind of bearing on how high you could score... (or how "low" you could score, as it were) at least was my thinking before Emyn Muil... now... I'm not so sure.

Making Victory Points (a very high such) part of the Requirement to finish the game and stacking the Encounter Deck so full of them that you can barely stand up... sort of tilts the relation ship between Difficulty and Scoring... at least I had a hunch there was such a relation ship.

We ended up with 32 victory points after our first game. Even with one dead Hero we scored an average of 28 points per player thanks to that... and it's impossible to make it without at least 20 vp's.... even that a sum I've never seen before.

What do you guys think about this? Have you reflected upon it?

/wolf

Forget about the points, they are completely worthless.

The only use points have, as far as I can tell, is to tell how you're doing as compared to other attempts with the same quest, with the same decks, and with the same number of players. That's about as far as it goes. Even comparing scores with other players isn't meaningful unless both are running Spirit, or both are not.

guciomir said:

I agree. When you look at all the quests they are simply pass/fail. You don't actually win any of the current quests by reducing your threat to a certain level. The reason to reduce your threat is to manage the encounter deck better, which makes threat reduction more of a game mechanic rather than a scoring mechanism.

To be honest I think they made a mistake by creating this "score" system. I realize they probably added it because there is a certain demographic of players who like to measure levels of success and a score of some kind is required to do this. Personally I am not this type of player. Going back to the player archetypes FFG posted in May I am much more of a Pippin or Bilbo, interested in thematic decks and weird mechanics not simply victory.

As you pointed out, there are players who like to count points and having lower score gives them satisfaction. But this is only for them and for noone else.

Actually ss we can see not much players like the current score system. Im personally also dont like it. So maybe with time they will replace it or develop some another system. Still on the tournaments is only 1 thing how you can determine the winner. But maybe can be better.......

I actually dont mind the scoring system for myself, personally. I like being able to track how well I did on a particular quest and the scoring system does that to a certain degree. I believe with some tweaks scores will reflect how well a team did more accurately. They need to find a way to minimize the effect threat has on final score to alleviate the Galladriam's Greeting/Dwarven Tomb/Will of the West cycle that denegrates the scoring system. I just got done with a 2-player game where I could have drawn it out for another 10 turns and lowered mine and my partner's threat all the way down, but we didn't want to draw the game out and waste time just for an epic score.

Like most people, I stopped using the scoring system quite early on. Hanging around just to reduce your threat level seemed artificial. When I started making my own scenarios, a couple used a simple Minor/Moderate/Major victory system nicked from other games. For example:- In my 'Saurons Campsites' scenarios, the aim was to find and search as many 'Gladden Field' locations as you could. In the 'March of the Trolls' the 4 'Carrock' trolls were added to the encounter deck with the 2 'Hill Trolls'. You had to destroy as many trolls as you could.

This type of graded victory system could be used in future scenarios. You then decide if it is safe to try a little longer to do an extra difficult task. No scoring system will ever be perfect as there are just too many variables, but some sort of player decision to risk a bit more for a better result would be nice. Time should be a problem. The longer you stay out in dangerous territory must be a risk, not a chance to arbitarily reduce threat. Threat reduction is a necessity during the quest, but not a way to show you have 'done better'. Cheers!

I use it but mainly because I'm a solo player for the most part, and it's nice to try and beat that score where I can. I don't see it as anything important to the enjoyment of the game.

Puzzle said:

I'm personally much more interested in winning against a quest, though I certainly enjoy combos and mechanics. But even then, I find no use for the point system. It is simply so irrelevant to how well you may have done that I don't see how even competitive players derive anything from it. Stalling turn after turn to lower your score is simply ridiculous. My own preference would be to see a scoring system based on the number of turns. That way, the person who was the most efficient and aggressive and finished the game in the least amount of turns wins.

At any rate, I'm not even sure that a scoring system is necessary. This game seems to be far more geared towards casual playing than competitive. If we ever have tournaments, they may still be of secondary importance.

I guess I'm the only one here who use the point system then.

I agree with you all that it certainly has its flaws. And I do NOT encourage stalling just to lower the score.

We DO however sometimes lower our threat's with Gandalf and such just to get a better End Score.

And we DO keep track to see how well we can do on certain quests.

I Also compare to Community Average on the Quest-Logger.

Doing this we know what to expect in terms of final score, was it good, was it bad? etc.

And we also got a feeling for how much is "good or bad" depending on Difficulty.

(Number of players goes without saying)

But Emyn Muil.... sort of breaks that. I get the feeling that this can only be compared to itself and not to other Quests of the Same Difficulty. Since you will certainly have a whole bucket full of VPs.

/wolf

I play to win, score be dam(ned). I do tally up my scores for games I win, but have never and will never hold off from ending the game to use a threat reducer next turn. Most of the time don't even bother healing up heroes even if I can for an extra 2 or 3 better score.

Dam said:

This is the approach I take. I don't disregard the scoring system, in fact like GhostWolf I am an avid Quest Log user. I just don't look for ways to maximize the final "score" and instead focus on different card combos to reach a victory.

I use the Quest Log like Wolf and Puzzle. I would like to see a community average for each individual quest, because that's the most accurate measurement. I agree that the scoring system isn't perfect, and I would like to see it be refined a little, but how would they do it without adding in an extra counter? That's one of the things threat does. It increases every turn, thus raising your score every turn. The scoring system also seems more geared towards multi-player games, and not solo. Perhaps it's just because I only use one core set, but it's no small task to pull both GG, a Dwarven Tomb, and a Gandalf when you have 50 cards to go through. And when your score is increasing by 2-4 each turn, stalling to draw another threat reducing card can be counter productive. I think it does what it's supposed to. If I beat a quest easily, my score is lower than the time the quest nearly killed me. Now if I was able to get a lower score when I almost die compared to the time I breezed through the same quest, I would definitely say the scoring system was crap. As it stands now, I think it functions, not perfectly, but it functions well enough.

In regards to how they determine a difficulty level; I thought it was a combination of what starts in the staging area, and how nasty the cards in the encounter deck are.

radiskull said:

If that's the case then there would be a problem in tournament scoring as they will be comparing scored points to determine who's the winner among players playing same quest but with different players, decks, and player cards.

On the subject of scoring... I've been trying to come up with a good alternate scoring system, but it's tough.

What about something where higher is better though? What are the important elements that should contribute to the score? I've got:

• Remaining heroes/life on heroes
• Number of turns
• Quest difficulty
• Victory Points
• Threat, to an extent
• Number of players

The current scoring system takes all of these except for number of turns and quest difficulty into account in some way. Is there any other variable that we could use? If we're just using the same things to calculate score it's not going to be much different than the current system.

If we want to get complicated we could do something like:

(Quest Difficulty x 10) + (VP) - (# Turns) - (threat cost of dead heroes) - (# damage tokens on living heroes) - (threat) - (10 x # players)

Of course, this is still somewhat similar to the current scoring system. It does incorporate quest difficulty and number of players/turns (although number of players may be unfairly weighted). It still suffers from the fact that delaying the game to score VP and reduce threat can be beneficial... although not AS beneficial. You could add in unspent resources maybe, but that also lends itself to delaying the game for more points.

Svenn said:

I really like the idea of quest difficulty playing a part in the scoring system. I'm not sure I really like making extra players affect your score since the score gets harder to improve when you have more players anyway.

The way that algorithm is set up, the scores are all going to be really low or in the negatives, unless it's a really good score. What if you left it as lower is better? Maybe something like:

(total threat of all players) + (# of damage tokens on living heroes) + (threat cost of dead heroes) + (# turns) - (VP) - (quest difficulty x 2)

Adding # turns to the equation won't fix the stalling issue, but it will discourage it more. I still feel like raising your threat is supposed to function as the turn counter, but that is also where the main issue is. Multiplying the quest difficulty by two gives it more weight than a victory point card. (unless it's Passage through Mirkwood)

While it mitigates problems with the current scoring system, the basic flaws of the system have not been addressed. The scoring system still privileges a certain deck archetype, (recursive threat reduction) at the expense of everything else. As it stands, you can win various scenarios with multiple deck archetypes. Until we find a way to create a scoring system that allows for multiple archetypes to compete with each other, the entire scoring project is a bust.

Is it a better system? yes. But you are just plugging holes in a boat that still can’t float.

I started looking at threat reduction, and how it ultimately accommodates stalling to affect the score depending on how many players are in the game. Once you get to 3 and 4 players, stalling is generally more detrimental to your overall score than just finishing the game. The only way to beneficially stall in a 3 or 4 player game is to spam Gandalf using Sneak attack at least twice each turn, and that is a hard strategy to maintain. If FFG makes their tournaments 3 or 4 player teams there should be no issue with the scoring system as is, outside of the luck of the draw, but that exists in every card game.

I haven't crunched the numbers, but let's assume your supposition is correct, that the prosposed scouring system might function in the current environment for three and four player games.

However, the system itself is still broken. It works in the current environment because we have two threat reducing cards, and the one that is easiest to play recursively (Gandalf), is unique. But, as the card pool grows, additional threat reducing cards will allow the problem to return to the fore. Again, its a patch on a system that is fundamentally flawed.

Yeah, I just tossed that together without actually calculating a score. I did it after and realized the negatives problem.

So let's remove number of players because that's kind of built in already.

If threat is a problem we could remove that completely. Another option would be to set it up such that you can't do better than your starting threat score wise. If your threat was 0, and your starting threat was 29... you count 29 instead. Not a great solution, but it negates quite a bit of the effect of threat reduction.

Again, I think the first thing to do is decide all the important variables that relate to your performance.

In an effort to not be complete negative-nelly, I will say that capping threat scoring at starting threat is one of the best ideas I have seen. It would create a very interesting bidding mechanic in selecting your characters.

Since threat reducing cards have such a powerful effect on the scoring system FFG will probably have a very limited number of threat reducing cards. I doubt that we'll see another threat reducing card until after the dwarrowdelf cycle, unless they start releasing a lot of player cards that require you to raise your threat. So far FFG is one for one on their threat reducing vs. threat raising cards (Gandalf and GG/Frodo and Boromir), and the threat raising cards aren't limited in their use. Not to mention Boromir's discarding ability. That may do a lot of damage, but your overall score will take a hit of 11 and you only get 2 resources a turn from that point on.

Yes, scoring threat using a minimum of your heroes threat cost isn't a bad idea. That way threat can still affect the score, but using threat reduction just to lower your score will have a limit.

I'd still like to fit difficulty in... so maybe we could use the default formula, put a minimum value on the threat of your starting value, and subtract 2xdifficulty level.

I'd still like a way to normalize scores across number of players. As it sits the more players, the higher your score. We could also track individual player scores within a game (using the same formula). Maybe make the score in team games the average score of all players in the game, thus putting the score on equal level with a solo game while keeping the integrity of the formula.

Hrm, if we can come up with a formula that everyone agrees upon I could potentially toss together an unofficial Quest Log for anyone who wants to use these. My website is set up so I can create an infinite number of sub sites... so I could look into putting up sub section specifically for all this. I'd want it to have more details as well... like tracking not only your heroes but the heroes of other players in the game, or the decks used.

Thoughts?

Svenn said:

have you been to the internet before