The 'Metaban' Project - A rolling ban project for VTES Tournaments

Non-existant user wrote:

One could also impose more constraints on the ban pool to make sure it affects the whole metagame, such as no more than 1 card of any discipline/clan.

Which more or less ensures that stealth-bleed comes out the other side relatively stronger. You get to meta-ban precisely one Obfuscate card, one Dominate card and one Dementation card, and I can still bleed you for oodles each turn at a lot of stealth. (And if you were to choose to meta-ban Deflection, you don't get to meta-ban Govern, Mind Rape, or whatever.)

Whereas meta-banning some combination of Villein, Freak Drive, Giant's Blood, Voter Cap and Parity Shift would screw with a number of very popular and powerful decks - but also take the legs out from any less viable deck using bloat as a survival mechanism. (And very few of those cards are really needed/used in significant quantities by stealth-bleed decks, which can just use any of a few dozen different common cards.)

Suoli wrote:

In the interest of planned, effective and synergistic bannings I suggest that the ban list should be composed by the design team.

Seems to me they have their hands full right now.

A popular vote produces an average quality decision at best. Factor in the complete lack of organization and a poll becomes statistically worse than picking a decision maker at random.

This isn't true. Getting perspectives from the widest possible audience assures the best decision. Poor organization and poor execution are separate issues from best decision-making strategies.

Jeff wrote:

This isn't true. Getting perspectives from the widest possible audience assures the best decision. Poor organization and poor execution are separate issues from best decision-making strategies.

The democracy is not the best system ; it's just the less worst when abused.

I never seen the crowd assuring the best decision. Crowds are often smarter than what they are credited for, but they absolutely can produce insanes and stupid decision. If you don't think so, just see what kind of crook are sometime elected in democratics country.

But since the idea is both against the spirit of VtES, highly conductive to drasticly lowering deck diversity, and prone to drama, I believe it can simply be ignored completely.

Or, you could say the crowd isn't going to be big enough and is going to be weighted towards those who hate particular cards.

A survey, like the marketing one that went out, could help get a broader group of opinions. But, the survey would be incredibly involved to where I think few would bother putting the effort into listing 20 cards to kill. After all, if you make mention of any cards, you bias results. If it were simply a matter of killing one card, then I could see a list of cards proposed with whichever gets the fewest votes to "save" being smited.

Btw, as an example of how folks don't agree, I think the simplest ban ever is to just ban promo cards. Yet to hear anyone else suggest this, so again, I just see individual efforts for individual storyline events and/or house rules that creep in due to dwindling importance of official rules.

Jeff wrote:

This isn't true. Getting perspectives from the widest possible audience assures the best decision.

I'm not sure if your choice of words was deliberate or not but decision by polling is not the same as getting perspectives. That would be a survey. Surveys are fine for informing design goals. They're terrible for designing.

Poor organization and poor execution are separate issues from best decision-making strategies.

Why do you say that? I'm arguing that to increase the depth of the game requires vision and complex thinking. Given that premise, a large, unorganized crowd of visionary geniuses has close to no vision or capability to process complex problems. I would say that recognizing this flaw has everything to do with decision-making strategies.