It honestly makes little difference whether 1 player has access to a particular skill or 0 players do in a game that is striving for a massive playerbase. Chances are you are never meeting a player with a unique skill card anyway.

This is also true. If we are talking about OP unique cards it will likely be in an extremely limited number (10? 20? i don't know). It's impossible right now to form a proper opinion without knowning more details like the aquisition modes, if they are cosmetics only or not and (since PVP will be a thing eventually) how do they intend to balance them.

Whatever it will be, i'm still convinced that having players constantly (or at least periodically) fighting for them would be far more interesting, expecially for when other houses will be introduced.
 
Well, that way frustration lies. The deal with randomly generated loot is that generally most of it is complete and utter trash, a portion of it is somewhat useful but might as well not have half of the randomly rolled affixes on it and in some extremely rare occasions you get the perfect drop or create it through multiple affix rerolls. With loot it is kind of okay to have that kind of system because you do need trash to sell to vendors and you have just a few random affixes and in most modern games you can reroll those in some manner.

To have such a system for a skill tree that would contain 20 to 30 nodes is insanity for me. You would need quite a lot of skill card drops and you would need a bunch of time to inspect each and every skill tree to see it if benefits you in some way more than the one you currently have equipped. IMO it would create quite a lot of frustration to players and it would take a lot of development time to create that kind of system for little benefit. Besides, yes, it would make the skills unique but you do really want that kind of uniqueness that is based on random chance?

Still, I think I would love to see that kind of system implemented in a roguelike game where you start over again and again as it might be good for making things less repetitive and the kind of randomness that forces suboptimal play is a staple for the genre.
to actually expand on the thought - Denis said the longer the you have the card the more powerful it gets... so maybe in later ages you obtain more nodes to use... in my totally epic MS paint drawing there i used 11 nodes...

lets pretend Dance Macabre has a total of 50 skills total.
1st Age you start with 11 nodes
2nd age if you used it all the time and maxed it out you unlock say 5 more nodes. if you don't use it. it will not grow.
and it will continue to grow each age until it reaches max.
 
This is also true. If we are talking about OP unique cards it will likely be in an extremely limited number (10? 20? i don't know). It's impossible right now to form a proper opinion without knowning more details like the aquisition modes, if they are cosmetics only or not and (since PVP will be a thing eventually) how do they intend to balance them.

Whatever it will be, i'm still convinced that having players constantly (or at least periodically) fighting for them would be far more interesting, expecially for when other houses will be introduced.
Can't help but agree tbh. Personally I see nothing wrong with not being able to get All the cards l. That's how real life works too. And thus is a free to play so you are not missing anything you payed money for
 
to actually expand on the thought - Denis said the longer the you have the card the more powerful it gets... so maybe in later ages you obtain more nodes to use... in my totally epic MS paint drawing there i used 11 nodes...

lets pretend Dance Macabre has a total of 50 skills total.
1st Age you start with 11 nodes
2nd age if you used it all the time and maxed it out you unlock say 5 more nodes. if you don't use it. it will not grow.
and it will continue to grow each age until it reaches max.
Well, more powerful does not necessarily mean more nodes and even if it does I don't see that as a problem. My main gripe with the proposition is the randomness.

Can't help but agree tbh. Personally I see nothing wrong with not being able to get All the cards l. That's how real life works too. And thus is a free to play so you are not missing anything you payed money for
Well... that's how real life works is not necessarily a great argument for something working a particular way. I am not sure that this system is not going to frustrate far too many people and bring enjoyment only to a few. Inequality is part of life - that is true but then again it is also not very fun to think about. I would personally prefer a system that feels good for the players over one that is realistic or brings uniqueness but does not feel good.
 
Well, more powerful does not necessarily mean more nodes and even if it does I don't see that as a problem. My main gripe with the proposition is the randomness.
It's just theory crafting and throwing other possibilities out there. The randomness would almost ensure there would be little to no meta-game possibilities, but yes it would suck to be the one who finally picks up the card they have been looking 5 months for. only to have none of the skills they were hoping to gain from it, then those skills not be unlocked for another year or whatever.
 
...I am against having unique cards altogether but if they do exist then I'm okay with more powerful cards and against the ability to lose in some way unless it is specifically tied to gameplay and I'm strongly against them being tradeable. Also unique animation makes no sense to me as the animation is tied to the gameplay. If you mean unique effects animation then I would put that into the "skin" category. If the card does have unique gameplay elements then I'm against it existing.

It honestly makes little difference whether 1 player has access to a particular skill or 0 players do in a game that is striving for a massive player base. Chances are you are never meeting a player with a unique skill card anyway.
These comments seems at odds. the second makes the first seem irrelevant doesn't it? if it doesn't matter then it doesn't matter. but my real question is why prefer a unique card that is more powerful that someone cant get vs. just a unique type of animation? A skin is a skin and not being able to get every skin is something we see in games all the time. but to be excluded from a gameplay element seems way worse. (This is assuming unique cards would be allowed in pvp)
what if the cards themselves were all unique in a way though then EVERYONE will have unique cards :D

but jokes aside - here is a "What if" situation...

what if say person A picked up dance macabre and it had skill tree type 42
then person B picked up dance macabre and it had skill tree type 104
then person C picked up dance macabre and it had skill tree type 82

Basically each of the different cards having an RNG base to where / what skills are allocated to them
Pretend these are all the same named card. but upon pickup they had different paths and some common skills and other uncommon / rare skills....
they all have 11 skills here and all start at the Green one.
View attachment 856
Course this would lead to grinding / farming for the "perfect card type for meta gamers"
but what if each card was unique in the fact that no two trees will ever match

but it is an interesting "what if"
This is a really cool idea, however, I think it goes against a fundamental that Denis presented. "If you are going to make cards, make them look good, front and back" (paraphrased of course) So to have random tree arrangements could mean that "ugly" cards could be produced this is only following what you mentioned of EVERYONE having a unique version of a card.

I am for the idea though presented here also, of a set number of Talent tree variations, that have a kind of randomness to them. So long as they followed rules it could be cool . Maybe every Dance Macabre has +1 Attack, but they are found in different places on the Talent Tree. While other things stay the same because maybe the necessarily follow a progression (i.e. to get skill B2 you must have skill B1 first)

the last part I think goes against something else Denis said, and that was if done correctly you should never get a copy of a card. This leads to a question of if grinding for a certain version of a card is even a thing. I would assume no.

Well, that way frustration lies. The deal with randomly generated loot is that generally most of it is complete and utter trash, a portion of it is somewhat useful but might as well not have half of the randomly rolled affixes on it and in some extremely rare occasions you get the perfect drop or create it through multiple affix rerolls. With loot it is kind of okay to have that kind of system because you do need trash to sell to vendors and you have just a few random affixes and in most modern games you can reroll those in some manner.

To have such a system for a skill tree that would contain 20 to 30 nodes is insanity for me. You would need quite a lot of skill card drops and you would need a bunch of time to inspect each and every skill tree to see it if benefits you in some way more than the one you currently have equipped. IMO it would create quite a lot of frustration to players and it would take a lot of development time to create that kind of system for little benefit. Besides, yes, it would make the skills unique but you do really want that kind of uniqueness that is based on random chance?
This touches on what I just said about Copies of Cards. Denis said we shouldn't get copies, so the idea of affixes or prefixes in my mind shouldn't be a thing when finding a card. they may however apply to some sort of crafting or growing a cards potential in the future. that could ultimately lead to uniqueness.

To your second point..isn't that the reason people search out new power, to do exactly that, find something that is more beneficially or greater for their purpose. We know each class has 78 cards. 20 nodes on each card doesn't seem to crazy in that case. Especially if some of them are more in the sense of added stat boosts to different things while the card is applied.
For example, I would imagine any kind of offensive attack card is going to have many +s to the attack itself or in general to the player. that could mean several less nodes to actually have to worry about in terms of inspecting
 
Well... that's how real life works is not necessarily a great argument for something working a particular way. I am not sure that this system is not going to frustrate far too many people and bring enjoyment only to a few. Inequality is part of life - that is true but then again it is also not very fun to think about. I would personally prefer a system that feels good for the players over one that is realistic or brings uniqueness but does not feel good.
It's just one card bro. Just one or two out of the 78++. Saying that this will lead to people not enjoying the game or becoming frustrated just for a couple of cards is going a little bit too far imo. I personally preffer when I can't get access to everything in a game. Limitations lead to creativity as they say. That's why I also don't want for players to be able to max all the points in the cards, it will cause people to start to specialise but that's a different topic
 
@Varik Keldun yes, of course it is :) Sorry if I seem overly negative, I love theory crafting and looking at both sides of everything :)

@Rx_Bishop_MD I don't think the comments are at odds - I am against having unique skill cards. If we have them I am not against the unique skills being just skins. I am also not against the unique skills being just skins with numerical buffs because I don't really care that much about power - I care about gameplay possibilities being inaccessible. Honestly, balance is overrated anyway - everyone has different playstyle and amount of time to play the game, they started playing at different times, they chose different skills to specialize in first and the progression is nigh-endless - of course there will always be someone more powerful than you are. The value of the system comes from having those legendary high and mighty figures that you might never meet, let alone be, but that you know of and are looking up to - why not let them be more powerful, at least marginally.

To your second question - the whole thing is a hypothetical if we have multiple unique randomly generated cards that have the same skill as a base and randomly generated skill tree around them. In that case it is not the search for power that is the problem but how much time it would take to evaluate if a new card that you find is more powerful or not than the one you currently have equipped. Most aRPGs stop at 7 or less random affixes on an item and have a rarity system to quickly compare items for this reason. Moreover each affix is usually a single short line of text. With skill nodes though if we have 20 to 30 nodes per skill card then just reading through all of them constitutes an effort in itself and some of those nodes might have complex effects that morph the skill in some way that might sound good on paper but are not in gameplay or vice-versa. Of course if the base skills are all unique and only the tree is randomly generated then the system constitutes a whole different kind of problem - a player can be stuck with a very crappy version of a card they enjoy because of random chance.

@antonismar2 it is about perception mostly. Not being able to acquire all of the nodes in a card means you choose what you want to specialize in. A choice in how to develop your character is actually an empowering fantasy and a fun process. On the other hand depending on how the unique card system is implemented it might mean that people are feeling cut-off from content or designated to being inferior because of random chance. And that's frustrating and kind of how the real world works sometimes. Not a good feeling when you are chasing escapism in a video game. Of course if the system is implemented well then such a feeling might not really be present but we don't really know because we have very limited information on the topic.
 
Just to clarify my position, i have no problem with godlike powers and overpowered players roaming around as long as the power ladder remain climbable and functional.

Of course this is a story driven game but it is also an RPG and character progression is one of the fundamental elements of the genre (there will be always characters stronger than you and characters weaker than you unless you are part of the very best).

The way Denis talked the power levels players may be able to reach could be insane, my hope is that everyone is potentially able to strive to that even if it means being one of the many that falls in the attempt and more importantly even if i wasn't one of the few who found themself by luck in the right place and in the right time before anyone else to pick up a card from the floor.
 
I have been playing Outriders a little bit in my very little spare time right now, but it has made me appreciate the skill card idea even more. The game gives you three skill trees which generally break down for every character to be gun damage, tank, or abilities. You are allowed to respect for free at any time to try various paths. But in the end, there is only one path for all four characters - gun damage. The game lets you heal by doing damage and the gun buffs are so good the best path is to out damage the enemies. While the gameplay is fun, it totally kills the idea of a unique build even if you have a different character class. In the end, it becomes cosmetic and the real change is if you do poison, fire, slow time, or bleed buffs to your bullets.

The skill cards and randomness of the drops really have a chance to have unique builds but please make sure that most cards are viable and don't end up with most people hunting for the same cards because there is only one way to min/max.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Denis Dyack
I'm more skeptical of any time cards are involved... I don't like card shaped things because it automatically conjures this notion:

BUY MORE BOOSTER PACKS.

Even if it's clearly marketed that this isn't the case, it still sends that message.

I also don't enjoy the notion of power being tied to randomness and/or in game purchase.

I can however, accept that cosmetic alterations could be cool for various stuff...

IE, your fireball is green instead of red or whatever, and that's a super rare thing you have to fight to acquire. Sure.

But once it starts adding base power to a character, the whole thing devolves into either P2W, or if not tied to money but play time, THIS GAME IS NOW YOUR LIFE, otherwise don't bother... it's the problem I have with PoE and EVE online. Both games essentially require you to play 8 days a week, 25 hours a day if you want to be at the upper echelons, either that or you just get extremely lucky for no reason. To me, both games require too much investment even as an avid gamer that has many 1000s of hours in many games. Ultimately for me that level of investment becomes frustrating.

If you want to have X cosmetic item be super rare in game... cool... but consider also adding it to the cash shop (and NOT in a loot box). This way the player has agency in how they obtain it. Do I really want to spend $5 on a single card or do I just want to grind it out for 6 hours? I have the options, power is mine to choose. Maybe I just want to play the game so I choose to grind it. Maybe I am just frustrated that I'm not advancing because I've already been grinding for it for 10 hours when average grind time is 6 hours... the option lets me choose.

I do think however, that making tiers of the cards make sense.

Lets call a card "fireball"

Fireball is a base card you get with X class, but it's level 0. You can then spend an in game resource to upgrade it over time, but really what you want to do is get the next tier, tier 1 fireball, which starts off a little less powerful than a rank 10 tier 0... but it goes much further beyond the max cap (in this case 10 ranks) if you rank it up (maybe by combining the same card or spending some other inventory based currency like death essence or whatever you want to call it).

For example, lets say Tier 0 rank 0 does 1-4 damage, rank 1 does 2-5 damage until you get to rank 10 which is 11-14 damage... but Tier 1 rank 0 does 9-12 damage... so until you rank it up your old gear isn't useless but your new gear needs investment, and with investment it becomes ultimately more powerful with a max cap at rank 10 of 19-22 damage... putting this up to max tier and rank also means we're also still looking at the most powerful players having plenty more power than tier 0 characters, but also not so much so that a few tier 3ish characters can't still put them down, meaning the power disparity isn't so insane that we need to retool the whole game.

This allows that you could say, get up to maybe Tier 5 (for 6 tiers total) and Tier 5 being especially difficult to get, but not unreasonable to obtain if you target grind it (ie, I really never like drop tables with 1% or less drops, that's never cool, it feels bad as a player, since the loot is too diverse for a given thing and you're bound to end up with all kinds of garbage you don't want or need before you ever get your thing).

This also allows that the amount of currency you invest (ie cards or death essence or whatever) can become an upward sloping scale each interval, making the highest levels hardest to obtain.

Additionally, for rarity, you could say, well yes, it drops your Tier 5 card at this boss... but... it has an X% chance to start at X rank, meaning it feels more special to get a rank 2 Tier 5 card than a rank 0 Tier 5 on the drop, which is also inherently more valuable to the player.

Ultimately, this allows players to upgrade over time, limits the max capacity of powers and spaces out how fast they can speed run to max power of everything (ie being done with the game) while also adding complexity and utility...then it also makes those rare cosmetic cards valuable, because you can fuse them into an existing set to gain the trait or level them up, and have set of max rank, green, blue and red fireballs... which allows you to have different cosmetic options and adds longevity to your loot collection career via cosmetic.

What I would definitely not like to see is that Tier 5 anything or unique ability anything be limited edition only, as that presents all the problems of predatory fomo.

Another way to manage some more diversity would be to add augment/meta cards...

IE, your fireball card now has +1m AoE or +2 damage or +3 m range or +1 fireball, -.5 sec cast time, +2 seconds ignite time, etc.

It requires you have the target ability equiped of course. This allows the characters to build to their playstyle by increasing power of certain things while diminishing their overall utility... so if you just wanna be the spam caster you totally can, or if you want a big boom cannon, you can do that, or if you want to reign death from above across the whole battlefield you can do that if you want to sacrifice all your other utility...

The major consideration here being that things still need to have a max cap, meaning you can't reduce your cast time to less than say .3 seconds or something even if you have the cards to do so otherwise you end up with stun lock range casters and such and that's never fun.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Temuldjin
@klokwerkaos you should probably take a look at how the system is supposed to work in this stream. It is not a system where something rare is dropped with a small chance from a boss but a system where doing something really hard and unique might result in a altered skill card.
 
I'm more skeptical of any time cards are involved... I don't like card shaped things because it automatically conjures this notion:

BUY MORE BOOSTER PACKS.

Even if it's clearly marketed that this isn't the case, it still sends that message.

I also don't enjoy the notion of power being tied to randomness and/or in game purchase.

I can however, accept that cosmetic alterations could be cool for various stuff...

IE, your fireball is green instead of red or whatever, and that's a super rare thing you have to fight to acquire. Sure.

But once it starts adding base power to a character, the whole thing devolves into either P2W, or if not tied to money but play time, THIS GAME IS NOW YOUR LIFE, otherwise don't bother... it's the problem I have with PoE and EVE online. Both games essentially require you to play 8 days a week, 25 hours a day if you want to be at the upper echelons, either that or you just get extremely lucky for no reason. To me, both games require too much investment even as an avid gamer that has many 1000s of hours in many games. Ultimately for me that level of investment becomes frustrating.

If you want to have X cosmetic item be super rare in game... cool... but consider also adding it to the cash shop (and NOT in a loot box). This way the player has agency in how they obtain it. Do I really want to spend $5 on a single card or do I just want to grind it out for 6 hours? I have the options, power is mine to choose. Maybe I just want to play the game so I choose to grind it. Maybe I am just frustrated that I'm not advancing because I've already been grinding for it for 10 hours when average grind time is 6 hours... the option lets me choose.

I do think however, that making tiers of the cards make sense.

Lets call a card "fireball"

Fireball is a base card you get with X class, but it's level 0. You can then spend an in game resource to upgrade it over time, but really what you want to do is get the next tier, tier 1 fireball, which starts off a little less powerful than a rank 10 tier 0... but it goes much further beyond the max cap (in this case 10 ranks) if you rank it up (maybe by combining the same card or spending some other inventory based currency like death essence or whatever you want to call it).

For example, lets say Tier 0 rank 0 does 1-4 damage, rank 1 does 2-5 damage until you get to rank 10 which is 11-14 damage... but Tier 1 rank 0 does 9-12 damage... so until you rank it up your old gear isn't useless but your new gear needs investment, and with investment it becomes ultimately more powerful with a max cap at rank 10 of 19-22 damage... putting this up to max tier and rank also means we're also still looking at the most powerful players having plenty more power than tier 0 characters, but also not so much so that a few tier 3ish characters can't still put them down, meaning the power disparity isn't so insane that we need to retool the whole game.

This allows that you could say, get up to maybe Tier 5 (for 6 tiers total) and Tier 5 being especially difficult to get, but not unreasonable to obtain if you target grind it (ie, I really never like drop tables with 1% or less drops, that's never cool, it feels bad as a player, since the loot is too diverse for a given thing and you're bound to end up with all kinds of garbage you don't want or need before you ever get your thing).

This also allows that the amount of currency you invest (ie cards or death essence or whatever) can become an upward sloping scale each interval, making the highest levels hardest to obtain.

Additionally, for rarity, you could say, well yes, it drops your Tier 5 card at this boss... but... it has an X% chance to start at X rank, meaning it feels more special to get a rank 2 Tier 5 card than a rank 0 Tier 5 on the drop, which is also inherently more valuable to the player.

Ultimately, this allows players to upgrade over time, limits the max capacity of powers and spaces out how fast they can speed run to max power of everything (ie being done with the game) while also adding complexity and utility...then it also makes those rare cosmetic cards valuable, because you can fuse them into an existing set to gain the trait or level them up, and have set of max rank, green, blue and red fireballs... which allows you to have different cosmetic options and adds longevity to your loot collection career via cosmetic.

What I would definitely not like to see is that Tier 5 anything or unique ability anything be limited edition only, as that presents all the problems of predatory fomo.

Another way to manage some more diversity would be to add augment/meta cards...

IE, your fireball card now has +1m AoE or +2 damage or +3 m range or +1 fireball, -.5 sec cast time, +2 seconds ignite time, etc.

It requires you have the target ability equiped of course. This allows the characters to build to their playstyle by increasing power of certain things while diminishing their overall utility... so if you just wanna be the spam caster you totally can, or if you want a big boom cannon, you can do that, or if you want to reign death from above across the whole battlefield you can do that if you want to sacrifice all your other utility...

The major consideration here being that things still need to have a max cap, meaning you can't reduce your cast time to less than say .3 seconds or something even if you have the cards to do so otherwise you end up with stun lock range casters and such and that's never fun.
@klokwerkaos Great thread and thoughtful feedback but I believe I can put your worries to rest sentence:

If it affects gameplay, you will not be able to purchase it, thus putting all your fears to P2W ease.

Tarot cards are collected in-game and not through platinum.
 

Luckily the tarot cards will function more like a "skill tree" than a single buff. ( So not like this: Version 1 makes fireball green, version 2 reduced damage but increased AOE range, version 3 add a dot effect)

A tarot card will have " x " options available, where you only have " y " amount of options to customize it, so you cannot max out every single option, you have to pick and choose how you want to tailor make your individual tarot cards to how you want your character to be potentially making it unique in the process ( unless some options just ends up being vastly superior to others, which would result in: Tarot card "fireball" needs " Cookie cutter " points allocated to be "optimal" )