Share ideas how to use community more in new card design

Ashur wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Creating cards by ouija board wouldn't necessarily be bad. Creating cards by having monkeys hit typewriters wouldn't necessarily be bad.

I don´t even bother to answer when the argumentation is at this level. If you don´t agree, fine.

The point being made was that Aaron was pretty clearly determined to read any response as agreeing with him. Trying to force people to "support" his position by creating heavily loaded questions is disingenuous.

If you think challenging heavily loaded questions is somehow bad, then I don't know what the hell kind of discussion you want. One where Aaron asks trick questions and gets pointless answers and nothing improves?

(This, you see, is also a loaded question - by attempting to create a plausible-sounding false dichotomy, it guides people into picking one side. Much like weasel-words that attempt to force everyone into the plausible-sounding 'community design will be fine', by twisting everyone's words into 'community design won't necessarily be bad'.)

Ashur wrote:

OK. I myself want to clarify my opinion. It is NOT 'community design will be fine', but rather 'the design team should try to involve the community as a whole in the design process of one card and see how it works out'.

Sure, involving the community sounds good. Having the community make final decisions (via votes or whatever way) sounds like a bad way to me.
Having a subforum where people post their ideas and the design team looks for inspiration sounds like one of the best solutions to me, and that's how it seems to work at the moment.

Ashur wrote:

If it don´t work, let´s go back to Backstab and Twisting the knife with backstabbing and twisting knives school of design

Pretty sure a bunch of the old crappy wallpaper cards were created for different reasons than playability. Companies want crappy cards to fill up boosters in order to sell more. There's no need for that with community created sets that won't generate any income. On the other hand, there's also no real danger in having cards that are only playable once in a blue moon, since you can just not print them out if you don't like them.

Ashur wrote:

OK. I myself want to clarify my opinion. It is NOT 'community design will be fine', but rather 'the design team should try to involve the community as a whole in the design process of one card and see how it works out'.

The 'create-a-card' experiment that was run several years ago by LSJ was quite instructive in that regard.

There was a significant swell of support for "Let's kill weenie decks quite hard please" (which is an understandable motivation, certainly at the time) which was locked onto a mechanism that wouldn't remotely accomplish their goal without massive deck stacking. The mechanism (negative transfers for each minion you control) would have also had significant collateral damage onto star vampire + helper decks - if the star needs replacing later and you now have no transfers with which to do it, things are pretty bleak. Similarly, if you're playing a sort-of-star vampire deck (like the 3/12 Matthias+Dominate weenies deck that I've seen done a few times), you want to bring out the not-quite-star when you get lucky, but the deck works fine without - very difficult to do when bringing out even a single weenie completely kills your ability to dig for Matthias! It would have also had a fairly deleterious effect on people using (say) superior Govern, and similar mechanisms, to fuel their pool. Possibly warranted for Govern, but would the knock-on effect to Nosferatu Kingdom be worthwhile.

But a quick scan of the options by an excited player would easily lead you to think that option was a good weenie hoser - and that's what happened in the discussions. Want to kill weenies? Pick this option.


So, based on this experience, how would you improve the level of critical debate such that card effects are well-understood, the knock-on effects are well-explored, and votes (or other 'community approval' mechanisms) are cast based on a considered understanding of the proposed effect?

That is, there's not a lot of point in re-running something substantially similar to the later rounds of the 'create-a-card' contest without attempting to improve the process based on that experience. So how would you deal with the problems it raised?

Aushur, that test was from a time before both Scourge of the Enochians and Arenthebes, not to mention Neonate Breach.