VtES history

Lönkka wrote:

Which is a real shame as it was selling really well and especially the starters Ben designed were finally top notch starters -the ones the game would've needed years earlier.

I think most important part of HttB starters were 2 villeins and several other value cards in each.

elotar wrote:

Aging player base may be a factor, but we have to understand why it is so as well as somehow explain movements of the tournament attendance at other directions (said 2010-2013 as well as 2004 and 2007).

Playerbase of every game ever created ages. Players getting married, with children, have careers to pursue etc, will inevitably reduce the amount of time they can invest to the game.
This is a given, no news here.

What we must concentrate on are reasons why the playerbase is not getting REPLENISHED with new players. Sure gehenna may have caused some old players to quit playing (I will later address why), but it is still not the important thing here. Regardless of the amount of old players we must get new players to keep the game alive, because playerbase will always age.

Important things in my opinion:

- Recruitment drive; Here in Finland some players always demo VTES in the country's largest RPG convention, ROPECON. Hats off to them. However, this is only once per year, and while helpful, its not really optimized. In my opinion we should organize games in locations where there are players of OTHER card games. I think those people would be the most open-minded for trying out a new cardgame (well, maybe not Yugi-oh..). Simply go to your local gamestore and organize a game with your normal VTES playgroup. Look for people to come ask "Excuse me, what is this game?" Then tell them about the game and ask them to try it out with some decks to loan.
Idea is exposition. As long as we play our weekly games in a dingy bar, chances of getting new players interested to the game randomly in such an environment is infinitesimal. If you want replenishment, better go to the Rack instead of the Barrens..

- Availability of Product. This may not seem like a big deal, since proxies can work and are allowed in several tournaments, I think that most players would prefer to play with real cards. Having a game product being sold at a game store makes it look "more worthy of your time". There is just something special about fiddling real playing cards in your hand.

Fun fact: My homecity of Helsinki has one of the few places in Europe (afaik) thats still selling VTES product off the shelf (we can thank Lönkka for that ), Fantasiapelit. Next weekends tournament(proxies allowed) has currently 13 pre-registers. Correlation or no?

- What kind of game would new players be stepping into? This has a relation to why people quit when Gehenna launched imo. The issue is FUN. Games should be fun and engaging so that players who try the game would continue playing. This is a card design issue which I would like to write more about some other time.

Something that I observed playing MtG casual multiplayer format: Commander. Since the format is not played in tournaments, its players are playing it purely for fun. While players idea of fun may differ considerably, I did notice an important trend about what kind of games/decks made people quit and walk out the most. Cards that restrict what player can do during his own turn are BAD, and we should be very careful about designing such cards in the future. Simply put: its not fun to not be able to do anything and be forced to sit at the table twiddling your thumbs in game you have already lost (or even worse, cards screw up EVERYone, and nobody is in a better position to win). Magic had lots of cards that did this long ago. Cards that hose specific colors, destroy all lands, etc. The "old" magic card design, which unfortunately VTES has copied a lot.

It is important to note that Magic developers moved away from this sort of design over the years, and such cards are nowhere to be found in modern magic sets. Developers found out that such cards, while they may have been valid strategies for winning, were simply not fun to play against (and often with). These cards made people quit magic rather than entice new players.

VTES has LOADS of cards and other design factors that can cause this same effect (because it copies the 'old' magic the gathering in many ways). For example, if you have no minions, you can basically do nothing. Game is no longer fun. It doesn't help that there are also cards that mess up the game for everyone, and several of these cards came from (incidentally) Gehenna expansion. Veil of darkness, fall of the camarilla, recalled to the founder, restricted vitae, blood weakens, etc.

In other words: its much more fun to be proactive, and play decks that do their own thing in a cool fashion (bleed, vote etc) rather than prevent other players from doing their thing. We should also consider a gentleman's agreement of not playing such decks in casual gaming nights with new players.

As we design new VTES cards, we should keep this in mind. I admit I made this mistake myself by suggesting the card "at the gates". It is design that we should in general avoid.

As an anecdote: Couple years back, in our local games, a person played a deck that stole all of my minions with chameleon. I could do nothing, and was forced to sit an hour twiddling my thumbs waiting to get ousted, and after that even more to get back my powerbase montreal that had been stolen(reminding why this rule is also not great). This made me extremely angry (not that such cards existed, but that somebody would bring such a deck to a casual gaming night) and I stormed out of the establishment and essentially quit playing VTES for six months. I harbored enmity toward that player for a longer while afterwards (I've since gotten over it). If you want to drive new players away from the game, I suggest no more than playing cards that suck fun out of the game. That was closest I came to quitting VTES altogether.

my 10 cents worth of wall of text

Suddenly, I agree with everything BloodArtist said

Small side note - one card, which sucks fun out of the game, and is presented by like 4 copies per average table is Pentex Subversion.

Bloodartist wrote:

In other words: its much more fun to be proactive, and play decks that do their own thing in a cool fashion (bleed, vote etc) rather than prevent other players from doing their thing. We should also consider a gentleman's agreement of not playing such decks in casual gaming nights with new players.

What others think about this? Do somebody have a list of such decks/strategies? I, for example, never thought that chameleon is a problematic card.

Bloodartist wrote:

We should also consider a gentleman's agreement of not playing such decks in casual gaming nights with new players.

The flip side of that is why would anybody want to play a CCG where you can't play any deck you want to build? Restricting what decks can be brought to a game flies in the face of the CCG model. And that, in my view, is the main problem with VTES. It's a shitty CCG, but a great game despite this, if that makes sense.

Couple years back, in our local games, a person played a deck that stole all of my minions with chameleon. I could do nothing, and was forced to sit an hour twiddling my thumbs waiting to get ousted, and after that even more to get back my powerbase montreal that had been stolen(reminding why this rule is also not great). This made me extremely angry (not that such cards existed, but that somebody would bring such a deck to a casual gaming night) and I stormed out of the establishment and essentially quit playing VTES for six months. I harbored enmity toward that player for a longer while afterwards (I've since gotten over it). If you want to drive new players away from the game, I suggest no more than playing cards that suck fun out of the game. That was closest I came to quitting VTES altogether/

But that's most CCGs. Sometimes your deck gets unlucky, and with VTES, sometimes you sit around for 2 hours not being able to do anything because your deck got unlucky (this is precisely what makes VTES a shitty CCG). And this is not likely to change either. People can still buy Jyhad and make viable decks today. Those unlucky games are going to happen unless there's a complete overhaul. The only thing you can do is realize those unlucky games are part of VTES, learn from the experience, and factor in that you may see that deck again the next game.

What problems with gentelmen's agreement I've witnessed - if you agree to not bring "aggressive" decks than the field start to dwindle to some slow useless tolboxy-combat monstrosities, which lazy hit each other for two hours with no satisfying result.

"Open" game is still too hard for the new players thou.