The future of V:TES

Count wrote:

then why not storylines? Themed tournaments? Something to show the player base that the game is still viable.

Isn't that up to the princes? I'm running a Dallas storyline-based game at the annual anime convention. Nothing from VEKN required. Other than using some rules from previous storylines.

ruiza97 wrote:

Count wrote:

then why not storylines? Themed tournaments? Something to show the player base that the game is still viable.

Isn't that up to the princes? I'm running a Dallas storyline-based game at the annual anime convention. Nothing from VEKN required. Other than using some rules from previous storylines.

It's up to princes to get individual games running, but it seems like the VEKN could develop further events to distribute to their underlings. Isn't that the whole point of this hierarchy? Shouldn't leadership actually do some leading?

kombainas wrote:

In order to shake up the enviroment, if no new cards come out, we can start banning effective ones. Now that would bring a change in the metagames . E.g. ban Theft of Vitae, and whole new world of possibilities would open in THA combat strikes selection. Forcibly .

up.

this was discussed a while back. why not change rulings every year or something. (EG. 1st strike is 1st strike. yes yes. that again.)

let's see how the metagame will change. then at the end of the year. vote on what rulings should stay or not. and add new ones.

really no point in saying it would be very hard for new players as there arent any

If you want to do that, start a 'Metabans' Project - A rotating list of say.... 20 cards that are banned that 'season', maybe every six months or year, and change from year to year all in the name of keeping the game fresh.

Individual Tournament Organisers can then choose whether a given tournament is following the 'Metaban' system, and VEKN could potentially adopt it as a tournament option purely to keep us nicely ticking over.

Actually, that sounds way better than I expected it to.

Shockwave wrote:

If you want to do that, start a 'Metabans' Project - A rotating list of say.... 20 cards that are banned that 'season', maybe every six months or year, and change from year to year all in the name of keeping the game fresh.

How much playtesting is there for the new environment? Banning 15-20 moderate-to-high profile cards is likely to do some considerable damage to a variety of competitive deck types. (If most of them aren't moderate-to-high profile cards, banning them will have close to zero effect.)

As with many suggestions, stealth-and-bleed has relatively little to fear. It has so many duplicate cards, and you're extremely unlikely to ban all of them. Okay, I can't play Govern and Lost in Crowds, boo hoo. Yet it would be relatively easy to take out the defensive legs of many a tier 1.5 or tier 2 strategy by banning cards that are key to their survival - say, the only (useful) bleed bounce or bloat tool they had available. Tools that combo exceptionally well together for a Tier 1 monster are sometimes, separately, just good enough to make a difficult deck viable - a ban hurts both, but when a Tier 1 deck gets worse, it's potentially still viable. Do we just find ourselves making Stealth-Bleed better?

And yes, players could ditch an optional tournament, but for some people in some areas it might not be all that optional. Other people may very well want to play it, and therefore want to prepare for it. (This is why, de facto, the vast majority of players I've ever encountered play with 90 card decks and standard tournament rules.) Type 1 and Type 2, and things like that, can work okay for something like Magic when it had huge numbers of players, such that a very large number of players would be able to find whichever tournament type they wanted a reasonable distance from home. For V:TES? Not so much. The occasional storyline is different - I have to sit out precisely one tournament when I really can't be arsed to build a groupless Kiasyd deck. I'm not generally sitting out multiple tournaments for six-twelve months, and maybe finding my home game splintering as well.

It's also somewhat more difficult to re-attract former players on a casual basis. "Yeah, we're playing the DeflectoShift ban block now. You can't come and play your favourite Ventrue Princes Group 1-2 deck, Bob, all the main cards are banned, sorry."

Following up on the problems James mentions with actually testing changes, people just don't agree on what the problems are, as seen in the forums any time any card gets mentioned.

While people's opinions in a local meta might be more similar, they are still going to differ. And, my experience is that other groups don't trust results from a single, local meta that isn't somehow tied into the inner circle of the game, so no one will ever adopt your changes, anyway. So, what's the point?