Recruitment Exercise - Good for the Black Hand?

Jeff wrote:

"...the secrecy and ill communication from Spring 2012 is still very much part of the backstory of what is going on. Specifically, you and Ben were unable or unwilling to keep the Design Team together, and that precipitated any "split" in the player base.

Why, Jeff, why do you keep ripping this scab off this wound? It's been shown time and again that you come onto vekn.net with the honorable goal of discussing a reasonable issue and then YOU choose to sabotage yourself by using hit-and-run tactics to discuss Johannes, your firing, the current Design Team, or some other issue other than the one you came to discuss.

If I were a psychologist, I'd say that you WANT to bring this upon yourself so that you continue to get attention from those who no longer want or need you, and the more disgusted with your behavior those people get, you sabotage yourself in even more obvious ways.

Jeff, you getting fired by your boss after you threatened him, saying that Inquisitors-based cards must stay or "bad things would happen", and then you and your other two partners creating "PCK" cards and then PCK sending a Ceae-and-Desist order to your former boss and his organization was the cause of the split. You know it, I know it, and the VTES community knows it, since it was all completely public; there are no sources other than the public messages themselves.

So why can't you OWN it?

Please tell me why, Jeff, PCK can't just apologize to the VEKN and the community at-large for what they've done, publicly rescind your C&D order, and come back to us as friends and colleagues? Think about all that you've invested in your bitterness, lies and paranoia. It's been YEARS that you've invested in this crap, Jeff. YEARS.

I continue to hope, and as with any addict I wish the best for you, but it now appears that you've invested too much of yourself into this fairy tale and that coming away from it will damage you enough that you are fearful of tearing yourself away from it.

You can choose otherwise, if you want to. I'll help you. I'll forgive you. I'll stand up for you afterwards. But not until you stop living in the darkness and seek out light and Truth.

Count wrote:

However, your reactions and that of the VKEN have been extremely unprofessional and childish. This situation could have been handled if you had actually addressed Jeff's original complaint (lack of development on the set and then the designer throwing out the work done while absent) in even a slightly appropriate manner.

so off topic - but Jeff was fired/left [depending on your perspective of constructive dismissal] because he couldn't accept that Inquisitor cards could not be made to work

Here are some notes from the playtest report
[21 groups indicated cards in R1 were too long or much too long with no groups disagreeing]:
"A large amount of feedback was written by playtesters indicating that they all believed the set contained too much text or much too much text and this was often a symptom of cards doing ‘too many things’ and being complex.

Playtesters have suggested a number of rewordings but the worst offenders are the Inquisitor Cards which have a number of functions and these are harder to reword.

A number of playtest groups have reported struggling to read through all of the card text on certain cards citing both length of text and size of text. This is likely to result in issues with printing and playing these cards. It was noted that not all playtesters or players have English as a first language and card complexity and text is a barrier to entry to the game.

Here are the notes on the Inquisition concept - all the playtester comments were open text for the design team to read but this is the summarised view:
Playtesters had mixed feedback on the Inquisition Concept. The largest portion of voting groups thought the concept was interesting but should not be used in the first set.

The cards are hard to effectively test due to the inherent issues in becoming Inquisitor (one vote, 3 playtest vampires), card text and complexity has been off putting for others. However a number of groups have successfully built Inquisitor decks and tested them around key Inquisitor modules.

Key comments include (from different groups):
• The three 'Inquisitor' vampires and the six Inquisitor-based library cards strike me as a neat, fun idea that has no place in the first VEKN set, a set which was publicly-stated -- correct me if I'm wrong, here -- to be filling gaps and shoring up clans and disciplines that were missing needed lynchpins.
• The Inquisitors don't add as many deck possibilities as they could. Their cards are like strong, global buffs but they don't inspire you to pursue any particular path. They feel like an attempt to make toolbox-type decks more playable, which is fine, but the fun part of making toolboxes is figuring out the small-but-efficient card modules and fitting them into one deck. With Inquisitors, you pick the cards that say Inquisitor and let the star vampire's special and disciplines dictate the rest of the deck list. It feels slightly too generic or prepackaged. To address this, we'd like to either see better ways to make Inquisitors or give them an incentive and tools to specialize more. Otherwise, all Inquisitor decks might look too similar.
• I always felt that one of the weak points in v:tes is that many ideas see release that are left unfinished. Instead of making such a new idea playable or just adding some variety to it new unfinished ideas see release. Therefore my reaction was: "what the hell is this?". I don't think we need another unfinished idea, especially one that only few vampire can play. The most euphemistic thing I can say is that this Inquisition stuff is premature, regardless if they are balanced cards or not.
• A number of cards target heretics very strongly. While I understand it fits the theme, I'm not generally in favour of effects that do nothing and then suddenly hurt a particular clan (Baali making up the majority of heretics) really badly so I'd like to see the anti-heretic aspect used more sparingly. When have inquisitors ever limited themselves to questioning (and torturing) the bad guys?

In summary the cards look interesting, focus too much on heretics (so either have no impact or too much impact), but add nothing to the Sabbat in general or the majority of decks and players.

It was also noted that there is some crossover of the Spanish Inquisition with the Sabbat Inquisition on these cards e.g. ‘Grand Inquisitor (or Grande Inquisidor in Spanish) and ‘Holy Inquisitorial Crusade’, this may not be appropriate and there may be some concerns given that original name of the game was ‘Jyhad’.

Jeff couldn't accept the playtester feedback and after PCK tried to fix the cards hurriedly but had failed it was decided to drop inquisitors as a concept at least for now. Then he er left the design team. If he wants to use Johannes/Ben/Spaghetti monster as his crutch sure - but I've read what he wrote and seen how he reacted to 20 playtester groups saying too much text, too difficult to read and too complex right now

Count Orlock you should know this being a playtester, even if you don't accept it

Ah for those struggling to understand "Heretic" the Design Team initially were adding a new keyword which include demon/infernal/baali as it's target.
The concept being to have an anti-lilith's blessing card or two....

Squidalot wrote:

Ah for those struggling to understand "Heretic" the Design Team initially were adding a new keyword which include demon/infernal/baali as it's target.
The concept being to have an anti-lilith's blessing card or two....

Email from squidalot:

Squidalot wrote:

It was also noted that there is some crossover of the Spanish Inquisition with the Sabbat Inquisition on these cards

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Jeff wrote:

Can anyone think of a two-card combo usable by a certain class of vampire which shuts down infinite bleeds for 2 at 1 stealth by 1-cap vampires?

What I can think of are several one-card combos that completely shut down decks based on a two-card combo usable by a certain class of vampires, said 2-card combo shutting down (until one of my 1-card combos is brought up) infinite-bleeds-for-2-at-1-stealth-by-1-cap-vampire-decks.
And I can also think of a 1-card combo that destroys my 1-card combos. Dang. This seems to be endless.

Existence of card (resp. combo, ruling, meta, ...) that would make your deck bad when facing it doesn't make your deck bad, unless that card (resp. combo, ruling, meta, ..) is faced. Let's say at least once a game is a good idea of how often I consider this as a trouble.