Share ideas how to use community more in new card design

Perhaps as the first set Playtest Co-ordinator (so not a designer or IC member I can add some colour for Ashur)

as a quick set of statistics there were 25 playtest groups for round 1 - the majority of these were drawn from the open forum on this website (infact everyone who replied 'i'd like to playtest' was sent an invite for round 1).

These 25 groups represent ~ 125 players. We asked the groups to rate the cards on a scale and from 1-7 in addition to providing testing notes and decks and ended up with standard deviations of up to ~1.7. To try and replicate this process over an even larger portion of the community would be extremely difficult as you'd quite simply end up with too much non-numeric data to analyse effectively - and this data is the value add stuff.


The playtesters are key to making any set work but too many would have as many issues as too few.

In terms of how it's best for the community to add to initial ideas for the design team - I think the forums here are a great place to add ideas for consideration - perhaps some codified suggestions of what/how/why in relation to new cards would be useful (e.g. this set is likely to be related to doing XYZ what cards could fit that)

Robert wrote:

henrik wrote:

Ashur wrote:

By making it counciling for the design team, not the actual, final call. This is a way to include the community, creating an interest for the game, instead of locking some elite in an ivory tower to decide everything.

Still not seeing how this is different from the current way, with a design team and a forum for card ideas.

Not sure where to put this but it should be noted that V:EKN has already moved in the direction of greater participation versus how WW/CCP sets were created.

In the past LSJ had full and final authority on card designs and in the sets I participated in, he accepted a large number of my card submissions (though always with the complete authority to modify them to fit his vision--which I was quite happy with). Playtest was also a report directly up to LSJ with no sideways communication between playtest groups.

This set has already attempted to expand the number of people involved in design and there is also a playtesters forum here on vekn.net for discussion.

Of course, this may still not be enough community involvement for some (some may even prefer a completely public design) but I think it is worth noting that the V:EKN leadership did take past complaints into account when this set's design process was conceived.

-Robert

All that and the fact that this set having only 35 cards is a clear sign that VEKN is experimenting new ways to Research and Develop that have more and more people involved.
It is very nice they don't go all public in this first set.
They are trying mid way.
Maybe the set after that will be more open to the public.
Remember guys: that poses new challenges and nobody can really predict it's full implications.

BTW, my idea of other CCG's R&D tells me this set was much more open to debate than it should.
The future will tell if my fears are right, but certain things should never be ruled under open democracy.

Ashur wrote:

I don´t think this applies to VTES. The serious players should be able to agrue and show why certain ideas is good or not good.

And yet, despite the fact that changing the rules to ban certain forms of deal-making is totally impractical (and in some ways outright harmful), you still get players asking for it. Time and time again.

Look at the incredibly hostile reaction to the card back change, back when Jyhad became V:TES. Serious people could explain why it was good (better brand awareness = easier to attract players), and yet it went down very badly among a sizable contingent of people.

Look at the extremely hostile reaction to 7/7. (6/23 had some controversial elements to it, but nothing like 7/7.) Serious players could explain why the changes were good, but the reaction was incredibly negative in many quarters. While explaining at a tournament how the rewritten aggravated damage rules worked I recall personally being told that 7/7 had been created by an 'AIDS victim' (their words, not mine).

The Imbued attracted massive, massive hate for years, with people wanting to ban the whole set - never mind that that would render many players' investment in potentially hundreds or thousands of cards worthless overnight. Many serious players explained why that was a bad thing, yet still the "Ban the whole set" complaints came. It didn't matter that playing bait and switch on customers would be a huge negative publicity coup for the game ('give us your money... but now you can't play with any of those cards, suckers') - let's just call for banning.

Gehenna events provoked comparable (though generally lower) levels of antagonism and shouting.

The create-a-card experiment had many serious players pointing out "This effect that you think will nerf weenies? It won't, and it will do a lot of unrelated bad stuff" - and yet players were still voting for it in order to nerf weenies. The serious player explanations? Probably not read by a lot of people. Why read a long thread when you can click on the shiny, shiny vote button?


Since outraged and uncritical behaviour has happened many times before in the history of V:TES, why do you suddenly think human nature has changed so much?