Wafflecopter said:

The problem is a double-edged sword. Without character onlys, certain characters lose the only chance they'd ever see play - because of a strong card only they can use. However, with them, deck creativity can stagnate.

Honestly, at this point, who would play Dan in B3 Standard if it wasn't for the Dragon Punch that can pretty much reset a game to the advantage of the Dan user? That means no promo Dan folks.

Does that mean a character should be underwhelming because it's character only is killer? No. However, it means that characters that are considered underwhelming (I'm looking at you, Kim) could be made playable if they had a strong character only to back them up.

Immortal-JyNxX said:

Immortal-JyNxX said:

So... I play fighting games. I wouldn't say that I'm great at them, but quite often I can hold my own.

This is what I know:

In Soul Calibur if you press G+A, or G+B you throw the opponent. Depending on where you stand in relation to them, will depend on which throw you do.
Now my favourite way to finish someone in Soul Calibur is with Sigfried's curb stomp. If I could have another character perform Sigfried's curb stomp, or Astaroth's back back, hold B, unblockable trash half a person's life bar, I'd be a happy camper. Really more so the Curb Stomp, because nothing says embarasing like finishing someone by Curb Stomping them.

I know that in Soul Calibur, Tekken, Mortal Combat, and Virtua Fighter Forward Forward + Random attack button will more often then not do some sort of a move. I also know that in many situations Away + Toward + random attack button will generate an effect.

Whether you call it "Forward Forward + B (or Triangle, or whatever)" or "Franks EXTREME Nipple Twister <FENT>" it helps me dispatch my opponent. Now whether it's Ivy in Soul Calibur, Roger in Tekken, Shazam in Marvel Vs. DC, or Pai in Virtual Fighter FENT is pretty much the same move to me.

Additionally, people are already complaining that certain characters are not powerful enough. (See page one of this thread) If everything was character specific except for a couple of moves, it would really hurt the collectability or desirability for many of the cards in many of the sets (See highlander where there was countless character specifics). It would also create serious power level issues between characters, where there would be definate top tier characters, and would relegate even more characters to unplayable status. (See Raw Deal)

So while I respect your opinion, I can't agree with it.

I suppose I should've thought a little harder about the cards we've been getting lately before posting that, lol. Character Only can certainly have a place in this game {Dan seems like a pretty good example -- his character is a little weak, but he has a nice trump card, and that seems to vaguely match his status in the games. I'm no SF buff, don't hurt me }, but that place is NOT every other attack in every set. Stuff like Remykick makes a compromise between keeping the game universal and faithful to the source material.

Wafflecopter said:

Nah man. I think i've had a few people get frustrated in a similar way. Even after buying a few starters and several dozen packs they expect to start placing at some place that is not last. And then we give them tons of commons and uncommons and a few rares here and there, we give them advice, they completely ignore it, think they've hit some ultimate strategy and it gets ruined by No Memories, or something. Man. Poor guys... and so then we stop seeing them.

Worse is when they just start learnign the game HAVE spare income, buy some singles on cool stuff (like 4 Lord of the Makai... I kid you not) and then build a Ken deck featuring it and his multiple attack, but that was about it as far as things go. Little consideration to other concerns... no concern about control and other such. So yeah. TCG community fostering always this tough? From my VTES experiences... yes. But that game you could always blame your failure on bad table seating and other people's bad choices, leaving you and your deck blameless.

Immortal-JyNxX said:

Present us, the community, in a new thread preferably, with how you would design a TCG, that is collectable and acquirable and not horribly depressing to collect cards for a character, with the design that you are somehow implying...

... what move sets would you provide all people? What foundations? etc... please explain yourself. In another thread maybe please, thanks ok.

Ah, reflection, I always knew such a thread would come...

1. The best time of this game, in my opinion, was before the cycle hit, and when we had the first sets of Shuriken. Almost every single symbol could compete, either by their symbol's sheer power, or because of certain posterboys (lol Fire ***Adon***). Either way, you had so many options, and that made it so that nothing was truly broken, because anything that was got banned. Once the cycle hit, we saw an instant power slant and turn for the worse...

2. The year of 2008 was UFS' worse by far. The product being sold to FFG, and FFG's inability to tell us they were too busy to talk to us, or to even so much as send a representative to tell us they're too busy to talk to us, John Ledezma saying Higher Calibur wasn't a broken-ass card, the game pretty much going from one banned thing to the next due to the lack of competant people who could take action and swing the banhammer madly. We waited forever for Set 11, and it ended up being garbage, even after James Hata looked into it. We kept hearing "delayed delayed delayed" over and over again from FFG. It was a sad time

Either way, the trip's been fantastic. I'll never forget my key moments...

1. Randomly being obsessed with "Alldo" (All *Voldo*) and building a newby-ass deck with him yet winning a tourney against top-tier players (God his R was so GODLY! >:|)
2. Building Good *Yoshitora* in a time when Good was considered bottom, if not the worst tier. It went undefeated, was a counter to almost every popular character, and could not be properly countered. The only way to beat it was simply to just beat it.
3. Building a **Mai** that almost took our AoP. It wasn't until after Worlds that I realized her potential with Bitter Rivals, and that that combo alone might have won me worlds if I decided to take Goo's offer and room with him =/
4. Being offered a room by Goo. I've never once spoken to him, and he offered me a place for worlds. However, I didn't go because going would've put me in a financial strain I wouldn't want to be in.
5. Before the cycle, having hour-long UFS matches with people. Our game used to be that good. My favorite match was my *Yoshitora* versus my friend's Earth *Twelve*. Using Twelve's response, he would either copy my Nadeshiko's F, or my **Yoshitora**'s E, and it lead to troubles. It took us all of lunch to finish, with me just barely pulling out a win.

Either way, this game is still the best card game ever made, and I will continue to play for as long as I can.

Hey my games are still going 45 minutes strong sometimes too. Game on.

Homme Chapeau said:

See me April 18 at the Path of the Master Event. Beat me with Dhalsim against my Ryu or Bison I'll give you 100 bucks! Prove to me a charcter like that can possibly be better...

vermillian said:

My comments don't belong in another thread. We're looking back at what wasn't done right. And UFS not having that much of a distinct feeling between playing charcters since the card pool is widely avalible to everyone. It turns away players having Basara capable of a Psycho Crusher. As I mentioned earlier Hatta has moved forward already with making special attacks of each charcter more personalized look at Double Sumersault Kick, Double Typhoon, Giggas Breaker, Pyscho Crusher EXTRA, Hoyoku-Sen, Hugo's Body Press and I bet a bunch more I don't know about.

Just because I gave my opinion and you didn't agreeI didn't expect you try to direct me out of your disscussion..

At one point one of our card overlords (I believe former actually) stated that the UR's were given that rarity because they had a very narrow scope ability-wise. Things like Addes Syndicate only stops responses, therefore it is a narrow card. I can almost see the logic in that statement and practice but, sadly it puts that much more demand on said card. When a card is created with such an ability, everything on that card is geared towards doing that one task, what this means is that, unlike the many multi-purpose Commons we see, it does one task and it does it very well, and that is what turns the narrow scope UR's into such high demand money cards.

Adding Character only to cards narrows the scope of the card, and rightfully so. When a card is created and given the character only treatment it is usually quite the card. This is, for the most part, true. There are some character only cards that are really sub-par, this lack of ability generally drives down the deman of the character as a whole, generally when a character saving grace turns out to be mediocre, it gives no reason for a player to ever use that character. Then there are some cards that never get character only, and it makes no sense. The very first Spin Drive Smasher was busted with the Legacy discard decks and Dhalsim, which could make you discard your hand very easily and blast you with it, usually killing you or starting the kill turn. I personally like the direction character only is headed in, cards with decent abilities and character only abilities, prime examples are Hoyoku-Sen and Psycho Crusher EXTRA they are both very good stand-alone cards, but when player with a specific character, they become superb. Hopefully with the new distribution we will see more UR's and UFS will become less of a "money" game than it is right now.

So, to continue now to something I think is a problem with character design. The reason why maybe 20% of the characters we have right now are playable, and the other 80% pretty much suck. Characters should be designed and playtested in a "vacuum", and for those of you saying "What are you talking about?" what I mean is that a character card should be designed without any of their support in mind. Yes, you do have to make the character abilities and their support abilities (attacks, foundations, etc.) sync well together however... if a character is not good unless you are using their support cards, then it is not a good character. A character needs to be good, even if you are using 0% of thier support, and then be better if you are actually using thier cards. I do not believe that characters are designed with that thought in mind. Most typical decks will only use 1, maybe 2 of a characters support cards and sadly... if they are not using a well designed character, it will feel like they are using a bad character. Wheras characters such as Ibuki, Chun-Li, Donovan and the now banned J. Talbain are perfect examples of characters who need 0% of their support to be good, and only a little to be great. Then characters like Balrog, Elena and T. Hawk really need just about all of their support to be even near decent. I personally hope that in the future characters will be designed with that in mind.

Right now, players are losing faith in FFG, I have seen it here, and I'm pretty sure scouts are seeing it, but aren't as vocal and strightforward as I tend to be. Players are leaving the game because the Block 2 format has gotten old and stale, with the same decks showing up over and over again, and the same decks winning, people just want Block 3 to start. It started with UFS deciding it was a big enough game to force people to "Qualify" for Worlds, which ended up being worthless because so many people decided not to show up last year, they had enough room, that should be clue 1 that you have done something wrong, because it will only get worse if you stay on the same course, hopefully this year, there will be no "Qualifying" and Worlds attendacne will go back up. It got bad when FFG announced that some releases would be a month off people were saying "Ok, with the transition to the new company, things are backed up, but they will get it back on track." Then FFG announced that the release schedule would be pushed back a month and that was the new schedule, then it was "So we have to endure another month of the current block?" Now with the announcement of this next release being yet another monet late, I have lost players. I am confident that FFG knows what they are doing, even though it might not seem it right now, but it would be nice if they would just be up-front about it. A little honesty goes a long way. This next release promises us the beginning of a new block and a new day for UFS. It is (I think) the first set designed by James Hata and, if it lives up to the hype, will be a huge boost to UFS as a whole. Here's to hoping that April bings us the start of something good, I think it will.

Ender

Immortal-JyNxX said:

Woah there... he's not saying that your comments don't belong in another thread. He was wanting you to create a detailed post of "How Jynx would create a character based CCG" Which in theory would be fairly detailed, and would possibly derail this conversation.

He wanted to see your thoughts expounded on without derailing the direction of this thread.

Ender Dragon said:

Fact Check:

Gencon told STG that it was only giving them enough space for 128 players. Faced with expecting over 200 players, and having to come up with some method of fairly turning players away, they decided to require qualification to make it past day 1 and into day 2.

UFS had no choice in the matter, unless the moved the world to Thursday or Friday.

But that is no reason to have to qualify for an event, every other big event there just takes sign up until they run out of room, why should this be any different? With the exception of M:tG, the only card game that has proven itself to be a big enough game to make players "qualify" for big events.

Immortal-JyNxX said:

Is there really anything more to be said here? Nerdrage in 14 words.

Ender Dragon said:

The reality is that with the gencon rules, it would have been possible for one person to go out, buy slots in the world championship and "artificially fill it" There isn't "First come first serve" on the day of the event. There would have been 128 tickets available for purchase in advance. If you hadn't purchased them prior them selling out, sucks to be you.

They thought that the qualify would have been the most optimal option. Considering this was organized by someone who was loosing his job, and still did his best job to put the entire program together, I still think it was the best that could have been done on short notice.

Last year was a 1 year unsual situation caused by the impending demolition of the RCA dome.

one of the greatest things that has happened to this game besides the last 2 sets and hata doing a bang up job is that around our area here in arizona is the fact that konami and upper deck went to war over yugioh and damaged the popularity of the game...so now we've been turning kids and other yugi players over to THE DARK SIDE and showing the how kick ass this game really is...and to think the best that UFS has to offer is still yet to come...it can only go up from here...........................................chun li is broken!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jynxx you misunderstand. I am not trying to kick you out of the coversation, but that what I'd quote you as saying would happen in SFIV if you were restricted to just E Honda's moves for e Honda... how would you design that TCG? Would it be collectable? And so on... I think logistically it is not possible. Your statement that you think it should work like "X" is perfectly valid in this conversation. The details of how it should work like "X" probably might take up quite a bit of space (already two posts now). Your comments about "things that have no gone right for UFS..." are welcome. Details on "this is how I would design and collate this game for my suggestion" might take up a bit too much room. Hence a new thread request. Make sense?

vermillian said:

From the comment I highlighted, badly. It wouldn't take years to figure out that "X character will always be better than Y character", which would kill any sort of interesting deckbuilding.

#10 is true.

I attended Nats 07 at Wizard World Philly. They closed SHARPLY at 5pm. Nuff said.

Antigoth said:

I think you need to check your facts. Rotation definitely was NOT common knowledge until several years in. Had it been I would have been a LOT more conservative in my purchasing. Maybe YOU knew about it, maybe the knowledge was spread via word of mouth to a select few, but it sure as hell wasn't printed anywhere, or released on the website, at least not until spoilers for the 3Shurikan came out. When details were finally announced I was one of many who STRONGLY asked STG to provide support for the Legacy format, and was lied to and told that it WOULD receive considerable support. Had I known how little support STG was actually going to give towards Legacy format, I would have quit playing (or at least stopped leasing new cards), but by the time I realized that they didn't give a **** about Legacy I'd already invested enough in the next sets, and then the announcement of the change in owner ship came, and it was again suggested the FFG might support Legacy.

Lack of Legacy support and crappy card design, lack of proofreading, and poor rulings has long been my biggest complaint with this game. I mean things like Cleansing Nirvana, Double Typhoon, Makoto, etc. I don't care if a ruling is "good for me"... if it's good for me, it's good for my opponents as well. I care about the rules being logical, internally consistent, etc. Math should follow standard arithmetic procedure, and where it doesn't either it should be written out so that it's explicitly clear, or effort should to made that the English used EXPLICITLY sets out how the function is supposed to be resolved. English language should be checked for grammar, spelling, punctuation and consistency by a professional as well as playtesters. AND the playtesters should be listend to when they list poor wording or misspelled words.

---

It was also mentioned that Magic had problems in it's infancy. This is true, but it's out grown them, and MOST games these days take the lessons that MTG had to learn the hard way and build them into their game from the start. UFS tried so hard to pretend that Magic didn't exist, that it's reinvented some of the huge problems Magic had and dealt with. Look at games like On The Edge, I:NWO or EVE, they never had problems anywhere near what UFS has. Why? Proper playtesting, solid rules, awareness of other games and the history of CCGs. Now a large part of UFS's problem was Dave's conviction that he could do no wrong, and this has left UFS w/ a legacy of issues, which hopefully the new ruleset, and diligence on the part of Mr. Hata can undo and move past. I'm not holding my breath though, as that's a towering task, and I would certainly be daunted to undertake it. It is possible to design a game well, with minimal need for errata or bannings, but it requires a fair amount of forethought, playtesting, and a deep understand of the ruleset (as well as the ability to design a good rules document from the get-go.

I love this game, hell I was trying to design something like UFS back in high school (I still about a couple dozen of my playtest cards) back before magic even was released. I love card games, and I love fighting games, the two combined is a joy. I just really wish this game was better. And by better I mean the rules, and templating. I think, and hope that Mr. Hata can pull off fixing that.

We also need to quit blaming dave for every bit of this game's woe. It may have been that dave HAD to pretend like he could do no wrong. ... and stuff. But yes. Perhaps Dave Freeman could have been a part of the games problems... just chock that up to #18 or something... and we'll debate its relevance in PMs or something. (sorry. I have a soft spot for Dave...)

vermillian said:

My point is that part of whats wrong with UFS is with an almost 100% open card pool it doesn't have a distinct feel between playing different charcters. Like fighting games do and thats something UFS is supposed to be trying to recreate as a CCG. It would be really hard to have so many exclusive character attacks I understand that. But its still a problem and Hatta & co has started to make moves toward a middle ground with the attacks playable to all but with character specific abilities. If it wasn't a problem this shift wouldn't be happening.

I know this was already mentioned very briefly by someone a couple pages ago, but I think UFS needs more single support. Relying on that certain "cool" site for UFS singles is like leaning on a crutch. What if they: Run out of stock? Have to shut down temporarily/permanently? Have to liquidate their UFS singles? The site does so much, it's essentially what changes UFS from a scattered outcropping of isolated playgroups trying to trade online to a fluid supply/demand secondary market. And like any conundrum our solution is the problem. I don't think there are many in line to step up to the plate and sell UFS singles online. It takes a lot of money to both secure the product and re-engineer an online companies database to accomodate UFS.

A temporary fix would be having that "cool" site be more aggressive. That is to say open more boxes for singles and expand just a bit more on the buylist (including picking up peoples large collections). It's not just the top-shelf c/unc/rares that are selling out even random filler from set 10-11 is flying off their shelves. I personally asked one of their employees in an email once if they restock and he said they pretty much never open boxes except on a release, they just depend on their buylist and collections. Maybe if we put a little pressure on them, show them just how much interest is still alive in this game and how much we are willing to spend on singles that might coax them to make a move.

While we're in rant mode, I have one more thing. Normally I would not blatently compare UFS to another CCG, but for the sake of reason lets take a look at Magic: The Gathering. They make a lot of good decisions that have helped grow their game that I believe Fantasy Flight Games could emulate. For starters large events are both widely publicized and covered in-depth by either a professional writer working for them or a verteran player (or both). This is a BIG appeal for many, many players. It allows them a glimpse of what fast-paced, friendly but competitive UFS playing is like in different areas of the world. Implimented right this could be cost-effective over the long run and a big boon to the company. The second item on the agenda is the mechanics of the game. Now before you go hitting the reply button, itching to tell me Hata's working on it; be patient ( I know your finger is already there btw), there are a couple issues which need to be covered regardless of whether Mr. Hata can/will get to them in the future. Even though I've never met him, from peoples opinions and character statements he seems like he will bring a lot of good to this game so I'm definetely not going to call him out. In general I'm thinking about the golden rules of CCG's. The first we, for the most part, already follow: If a card contradicts the games predefined rules, the card always wins. This allows for evolution in the game. The second is grammatical and mechanical consistancy. We need a comprehensive rule book that defines in great detail every possible action and interaction in the game. This includes the basics, activation abilities, static abilities, when you can use responses in the damange step/attack resolution, how floating enhances work timing wise with said responses, exactly what side of a split card is a viable target in every zone it could possible be in, a non-copyrighted term for the psudo-zone you put a card before you make a check, and much more. In addition cards need to have standardized wording for abilities. If there are two different responses that you can play after the resolution of an attack, they should never be so differently worded such as a judge would have to interprete that they could be played at different times. He should be able to look at the rule book, point out a passage detailing the type ability or interaction, and make a ruling. As new mechanics come out, update accordingly. Presidence is god. Last one, we could use a more minute breakdown of turn order. Not just Combat phase, or even enhance/block step, but damage resolution step ( R window opens) and attack resolution step (another R window opens).

That concludes my little rant. Sorry for the long post

I know for a fact that that certain cool site has quite a bit of good singles from each set...I mean when Addes and Revitalize were both banned they went from being Sold out to having 20+ copies of EACH. They just hold on to them for some reason and only release a bit every once in a while.

Tader Salad said:

Are you comfortable waiting until April 8th? Because you'll have that by then.

Well the fact that promos are still printed that aren't found in packs is pretty annoying.