Warscale - Model store
by Guimo · 08/21/2008 (9:44 pm) · 4 comments
Hi everybody!
I had an accident this week which prevented me to progress as much as I wanted. The said accident was finding a piece of bone in a nice, tasty, juicy, large and slightly burned BBQ meat (and I must say here in Australia they have really good meat). Anyway my tooth suffered the nasty encounter and I lost the weekend in a bearable but anoying pain.
That prevented me of coding, but allowed me for some wild thinkering about the unit balance and pricing... or when a unit should be considered a common, uncommon and rare unit.
As you know, this week I was working with the marketplace. Of course a lot of doubts assaulted my mind.
There are two ways to sell units in this game.
a. Sell them in closed booster packs or boxes.
b. Allow the players to pick their units and pay a set price for them.
Both have their pros and cons so let me describe the options.
In the first case, the open market, you sell the player a group of units but the player has no control over what he will get. The player pays an ammount for this surprise box and is guaranteed that the pack holds common, uncommon, rare and exotic units usually in a scaled probability. Something like a 70/20/9/1 proportion. The business here is that in every set there are the usually the same number of cards of each type, like 30 common, 30 uncommon, 30 rare and 30 exotic. So in order to get the 30 rare units you need to buy at least 30 packs. Of course getting the 30 rares or exotics by buying just 30 packs is almost the same than hitting the lotto so you need to buy more and more packs. On the end you are swimming in common and uncommon cards and if you consider you need to get 4 of each type of units then continuing to buy packs may not be the way to go. Of course it has all the thrill of opening a pack and... maybe get that unit you were looking for and which is valued way more than the pack you paid for, but usually you get really crappy units.
So the player may decide to stop buying units by boosters and start trading. So the player comes to trade cards and may find some nice pople who makes a fair deal, but usually what they find are a lot greedy people that makes their lives by trading and have no problem at all in cheating a new player. I have seen a lot of kids getting ripped of their best units and cheated. I was banned from a couple of stores just for trying to stop some guys to practically steal the units from some childs.
Thats how life works you may say but I really dont like to make Warscale a place where you feel frustrated.
Thats basically how I get to the second option. A controlled market. In this case the units are always available in the marketplace and you may search for any unit and when you find one you like you pay for it. If you are tired of some units you can go to the marketplace and sell them for 75% of the original price so you may buy new units and use them. This way you create your army anyway you want and if you get tired of you army, sell everything and buy new units. A nice thing is that at least you wont get stuck with mountains of common units you really dont have any use for except for making some armies as a gift to some cousin.
I must say that I was even tempted to change the idea of marketplace in order to be able to sell the units in packs, thats more money after all, but after a lot of thinking I decided to stick into my decision to allow the players to pick their units and pay an appropiate price for a unit. I feel this is the right way to do it. Maybe its not as profitable as the other method but for me its a nice way to do it.
Which leads to define the price of the units.
I must say I have learned a lot while designing Warscale and this is one of this things. At first I considered the rarity of a unit should be the same as the unit level, and its close but its not the same.
For example say we have different versions of a fire spell.
Fire Dart, Cost 1 mana. 1-6 fire damage to a single target. Price: 50 gold.
Fire Blast, Cost 3 mana. 3-18 fire damage to all targets in a 3x3 area. Price: 500 gold.
Fire Ball, Cost 6 mana. 6-36 fire damage to all targets in a 5x5 area. Price: 2000 gold.
Greater Fire Ball, Cost 10 mana. 10-60 fire damage to all targets in a 7x7 area. Price: 10000 gold.
So, which one do you consider has a greater rarity?
Answer... none. All are common spells.
Why? Because they all follow a simple and common rule. 1 mana allows you for 1-6 damage gradually increasing the area. None of these spells break this rule, so, this is a common spell no matter If I decide to create the Star Storm spell which costs 20 mana and deals 20-120 damage to all targets in a 10x10 area. Thats still a common spell.
The rarity of a spell comes from the ability to break the rules. Say I create:
Fire Rain. Cost 3. 3-18 fire damage to all targets in a 5x5 area. Price: 5000 gold
So I have a spell which costs the same 3 mana to invoke as the Fire blast and deal the same damage as the Fire blast, but in a larger area! Thats an uncommon spell. Now think about this one:
Fire Spikes. Cost 2. 1-6 fire damage to 3 targets of your choice. Price: 500 gold.
So, a spell with a slightly higher cost than the Fire Dart but allows you to pick up to 3 targets instead of one of the fire dart!
Finally consider this one:
Finger of God. Cost 1. 1000 fire damage to all units in the game. Price: 50000 gold. Awesome spell... extremely rare, extremely costly, combine this one with some kind of protection against fire and your enemy is done. Completely justifies its cost. This is a ultra-super-extreme-guimo-only-spell so dont expect to see this in the game, but its an example of how a spell is rare. If this spell would cost like 50 mana to play then it may not be rare at all.
And thats the point in this kind of games. Uncommon and rare spells are not about more powerful spells. Its about being able to do more things for the same invested resources. And in Warscale the most important resource is time. Time allows you to get more mana, mana allows you to get larger creatures and spells. Thats it.
Its a simple concept when you think about it.
So, after all this verborrea, here I present you a shot of the current state of the unit store.
Screenshot
The plan for this week
I thought it may be easier but the store is taking more time than I previously thought. Lots of code in all the editors have been simplified and cleaned. The good part is that everything is on its place now. So the plan for this week will be focusing on sinchronizing the code so that it works networked again.
Luck with your projects!
Guimo
I had an accident this week which prevented me to progress as much as I wanted. The said accident was finding a piece of bone in a nice, tasty, juicy, large and slightly burned BBQ meat (and I must say here in Australia they have really good meat). Anyway my tooth suffered the nasty encounter and I lost the weekend in a bearable but anoying pain.
That prevented me of coding, but allowed me for some wild thinkering about the unit balance and pricing... or when a unit should be considered a common, uncommon and rare unit.
As you know, this week I was working with the marketplace. Of course a lot of doubts assaulted my mind.
There are two ways to sell units in this game.
a. Sell them in closed booster packs or boxes.
b. Allow the players to pick their units and pay a set price for them.
Both have their pros and cons so let me describe the options.
In the first case, the open market, you sell the player a group of units but the player has no control over what he will get. The player pays an ammount for this surprise box and is guaranteed that the pack holds common, uncommon, rare and exotic units usually in a scaled probability. Something like a 70/20/9/1 proportion. The business here is that in every set there are the usually the same number of cards of each type, like 30 common, 30 uncommon, 30 rare and 30 exotic. So in order to get the 30 rare units you need to buy at least 30 packs. Of course getting the 30 rares or exotics by buying just 30 packs is almost the same than hitting the lotto so you need to buy more and more packs. On the end you are swimming in common and uncommon cards and if you consider you need to get 4 of each type of units then continuing to buy packs may not be the way to go. Of course it has all the thrill of opening a pack and... maybe get that unit you were looking for and which is valued way more than the pack you paid for, but usually you get really crappy units.
So the player may decide to stop buying units by boosters and start trading. So the player comes to trade cards and may find some nice pople who makes a fair deal, but usually what they find are a lot greedy people that makes their lives by trading and have no problem at all in cheating a new player. I have seen a lot of kids getting ripped of their best units and cheated. I was banned from a couple of stores just for trying to stop some guys to practically steal the units from some childs.
Thats how life works you may say but I really dont like to make Warscale a place where you feel frustrated.
Thats basically how I get to the second option. A controlled market. In this case the units are always available in the marketplace and you may search for any unit and when you find one you like you pay for it. If you are tired of some units you can go to the marketplace and sell them for 75% of the original price so you may buy new units and use them. This way you create your army anyway you want and if you get tired of you army, sell everything and buy new units. A nice thing is that at least you wont get stuck with mountains of common units you really dont have any use for except for making some armies as a gift to some cousin.
I must say that I was even tempted to change the idea of marketplace in order to be able to sell the units in packs, thats more money after all, but after a lot of thinking I decided to stick into my decision to allow the players to pick their units and pay an appropiate price for a unit. I feel this is the right way to do it. Maybe its not as profitable as the other method but for me its a nice way to do it.
Which leads to define the price of the units.
I must say I have learned a lot while designing Warscale and this is one of this things. At first I considered the rarity of a unit should be the same as the unit level, and its close but its not the same.
For example say we have different versions of a fire spell.
Fire Dart, Cost 1 mana. 1-6 fire damage to a single target. Price: 50 gold.
Fire Blast, Cost 3 mana. 3-18 fire damage to all targets in a 3x3 area. Price: 500 gold.
Fire Ball, Cost 6 mana. 6-36 fire damage to all targets in a 5x5 area. Price: 2000 gold.
Greater Fire Ball, Cost 10 mana. 10-60 fire damage to all targets in a 7x7 area. Price: 10000 gold.
So, which one do you consider has a greater rarity?
Answer... none. All are common spells.
Why? Because they all follow a simple and common rule. 1 mana allows you for 1-6 damage gradually increasing the area. None of these spells break this rule, so, this is a common spell no matter If I decide to create the Star Storm spell which costs 20 mana and deals 20-120 damage to all targets in a 10x10 area. Thats still a common spell.
The rarity of a spell comes from the ability to break the rules. Say I create:
Fire Rain. Cost 3. 3-18 fire damage to all targets in a 5x5 area. Price: 5000 gold
So I have a spell which costs the same 3 mana to invoke as the Fire blast and deal the same damage as the Fire blast, but in a larger area! Thats an uncommon spell. Now think about this one:
Fire Spikes. Cost 2. 1-6 fire damage to 3 targets of your choice. Price: 500 gold.
So, a spell with a slightly higher cost than the Fire Dart but allows you to pick up to 3 targets instead of one of the fire dart!
Finally consider this one:
Finger of God. Cost 1. 1000 fire damage to all units in the game. Price: 50000 gold. Awesome spell... extremely rare, extremely costly, combine this one with some kind of protection against fire and your enemy is done. Completely justifies its cost. This is a ultra-super-extreme-guimo-only-spell so dont expect to see this in the game, but its an example of how a spell is rare. If this spell would cost like 50 mana to play then it may not be rare at all.
And thats the point in this kind of games. Uncommon and rare spells are not about more powerful spells. Its about being able to do more things for the same invested resources. And in Warscale the most important resource is time. Time allows you to get more mana, mana allows you to get larger creatures and spells. Thats it.
Its a simple concept when you think about it.
So, after all this verborrea, here I present you a shot of the current state of the unit store.
Screenshot
The plan for this week
I thought it may be easier but the store is taking more time than I previously thought. Lots of code in all the editors have been simplified and cleaned. The good part is that everything is on its place now. So the plan for this week will be focusing on sinchronizing the code so that it works networked again.
Luck with your projects!
Guimo
#2
You comments in the metagame are interesting but this way still allows to build a community and allow them to discuss strategies. Consider some games like Warhammer. There is no random buys at all in that game and it completely successful.
One of the things that I forgot to mention in this blog is that unlike MTG Online or similar games is that Warscale allows you to earn gold pieces by successfully winning games. This may unbalance an economy like the one in MTG but will work fine in this case.
Anyway, your ideas on the market control by santioning some trades is completely interesting. I will check on that. I'm still considering the idea of lowering the return value of the store, like offering 30% cash back only if the player wants to return a unit but in this case, create a Marketplace tool which may allow the players to trade the units between them so a player may get a better price if he wants to sell a unit. Also, units may change their price over time so if a unit is extremely sought after, then the game may increase the value of the unit.
Again thank you for your comments, lots of good ideas.
Luck!
Guimo
08/22/2008 (6:11 pm)
Thanks for your comments Devon. Warscale is still in development stage so there is nothing which prevents me to change my mind. You comments in the metagame are interesting but this way still allows to build a community and allow them to discuss strategies. Consider some games like Warhammer. There is no random buys at all in that game and it completely successful.
One of the things that I forgot to mention in this blog is that unlike MTG Online or similar games is that Warscale allows you to earn gold pieces by successfully winning games. This may unbalance an economy like the one in MTG but will work fine in this case.
Anyway, your ideas on the market control by santioning some trades is completely interesting. I will check on that. I'm still considering the idea of lowering the return value of the store, like offering 30% cash back only if the player wants to return a unit but in this case, create a Marketplace tool which may allow the players to trade the units between them so a player may get a better price if he wants to sell a unit. Also, units may change their price over time so if a unit is extremely sought after, then the game may increase the value of the unit.
Again thank you for your comments, lots of good ideas.
Luck!
Guimo
#3
As far as I see it there are 2 types of miniature games, ones like warhammer where you just buy any unit you want, and you need to because you use squads, or ones like d&d minis where you get booster packs. Both of them are of course limited by your army build points that you allow per match, so you still get strategy in that, but with the warhammer way the excitement comes from the ability to customize your units by painting them and configuring their weapon loadout. In this method this is the only thing that can really make you stand out as a player. I think that both ways are fun, however, in a computerized version I think it will be much harder to set it up so that the player can paint their units to stand out. Sure you can have several different texture sets or even allow players to upload textures, but you do lose that metagame that Devon was talking about.
I think as far as the trading goes, that you should not restrict trades. Sure there will be people who will try to abuse the system, but I think there are many cases where you might *want* to make what would be considered a poor trade. If there is a unit for instance that is very rare or even if I just want it really bad, I would be willing to do an unfair trade to get it. I think that the main way to fix it is knowledge. The reason that it would be OK is that I would *know* the value of my units going into the trade, and I would make my own judgement call on it. So, in the case of an uninformed player (child or not) you simply keep them informed. A simple message saying something like "The estimated value of your units vs. the units that your trade partner is offering differs greatly, are you SURE you want to make this trade?" could be enough to make things still "fair". You could even do something like a estimated value listing that players could look at for all available units. I know that there is a lot of fun just in that for the collectors and metagame players to see that a unit they own has a high value. "Wow, this guy I just got in this booster pack is worth 1000 gold! SWEET!" Then the wheels start spinning, I could use this unit in my army or I could trade it for a ton of slightly lesser units and really expand my strategy options.
One other thought is about how you were saying that the army sets would have the same amount of units in each rarity: 30 common, 30 uncommon, and 30 rare I think that I disagree with that. I think that it should be more like 50 common, 20 uncommon and 10 rare in a set. This way these units more reflect their rarity. You can still give a rare out in every booster (and I think you should), but do it something like each booster gives you: 8 common, 2 uncommon and 1 rare. Yes, you will end up with tons of commons, but that is why they are common. Typically when you have army points the rares are so expensive that you cant ever have more than 1 or 2 in an army (without sacrificing strategy) anyway, so you'll need lots of commons to fill up the ranks. Besides, I think that strategies involving the use of more common/weaker units carry a certain amount of prestige with them that people enjoy as well.
Anyway, great job on what you have done so far, these are just my thoughts, you of course can do whatever you think is best :)
08/22/2008 (6:36 pm)
I have a few thoughts on the matter as well. First, I think that you should go with booster packs. If you don't do booster packs, all of the units lose their rarity, there will be no such thing as a common, uncommon, or rare. If anyone can buy any unit that they please, there will be no excitement from seeing a "rare" unit. It will just be "oh you bought that one". Also, another downside is that you end up with the rich players that just buy all the best units and the poor players have no chance of competing against them.As far as I see it there are 2 types of miniature games, ones like warhammer where you just buy any unit you want, and you need to because you use squads, or ones like d&d minis where you get booster packs. Both of them are of course limited by your army build points that you allow per match, so you still get strategy in that, but with the warhammer way the excitement comes from the ability to customize your units by painting them and configuring their weapon loadout. In this method this is the only thing that can really make you stand out as a player. I think that both ways are fun, however, in a computerized version I think it will be much harder to set it up so that the player can paint their units to stand out. Sure you can have several different texture sets or even allow players to upload textures, but you do lose that metagame that Devon was talking about.
I think as far as the trading goes, that you should not restrict trades. Sure there will be people who will try to abuse the system, but I think there are many cases where you might *want* to make what would be considered a poor trade. If there is a unit for instance that is very rare or even if I just want it really bad, I would be willing to do an unfair trade to get it. I think that the main way to fix it is knowledge. The reason that it would be OK is that I would *know* the value of my units going into the trade, and I would make my own judgement call on it. So, in the case of an uninformed player (child or not) you simply keep them informed. A simple message saying something like "The estimated value of your units vs. the units that your trade partner is offering differs greatly, are you SURE you want to make this trade?" could be enough to make things still "fair". You could even do something like a estimated value listing that players could look at for all available units. I know that there is a lot of fun just in that for the collectors and metagame players to see that a unit they own has a high value. "Wow, this guy I just got in this booster pack is worth 1000 gold! SWEET!" Then the wheels start spinning, I could use this unit in my army or I could trade it for a ton of slightly lesser units and really expand my strategy options.
One other thought is about how you were saying that the army sets would have the same amount of units in each rarity: 30 common, 30 uncommon, and 30 rare I think that I disagree with that. I think that it should be more like 50 common, 20 uncommon and 10 rare in a set. This way these units more reflect their rarity. You can still give a rare out in every booster (and I think you should), but do it something like each booster gives you: 8 common, 2 uncommon and 1 rare. Yes, you will end up with tons of commons, but that is why they are common. Typically when you have army points the rares are so expensive that you cant ever have more than 1 or 2 in an army (without sacrificing strategy) anyway, so you'll need lots of commons to fill up the ranks. Besides, I think that strategies involving the use of more common/weaker units carry a certain amount of prestige with them that people enjoy as well.
Anyway, great job on what you have done so far, these are just my thoughts, you of course can do whatever you think is best :)
#4
Warscale is work in progress and I'm just reaching the prototype-complete stage so nothing is set on stone and can be altered. I will consider all this and maybe I can get this working. This kind of comments improve the game so keep them coming!
Thanks!
Guimo
08/23/2008 (4:13 am)
I really thank your comments on this subject. I find them completely interesting and bring a new perspective. Being a single developer can make you lose your focus or partialize with a wrong point of view. Sometimes you need fresh air.Warscale is work in progress and I'm just reaching the prototype-complete stage so nothing is set on stone and can be altered. I will consider all this and maybe I can get this working. This kind of comments improve the game so keep them coming!
Thanks!
Guimo
Torque Owner Dusty Monk
Windstorm Studios
Here's why. In any TCG, there are two games -- there's the game itself, and then there's the metagame -- the game you play when you're not playing the game. The metagame is huge. Reading up on strategies, figuring out your deck, and trying to get the cards you want to make your deck. Trading with other players is a huge part of that game -- the metagame. Trading promotes community, and an active community is key to the success of your game. So yes, certainly some people will make a career out of just trading, but because you can control the market, you can limit somewhat the potential for abuse. For instance, your database keeps a history of trade amounts, and your auction house shows last five or ten amounts traded for a card. People will see then if they're trading something for far below what it's worth. Or even more so, your auction house can use its transaction history to flag potentially abusive trades, and put a hold on the trade until a league commissioner can approve it. Fantasy football leagues do this all the time.
The other nice thing about booster packs is they allow for different game types -- like sealed deck, and limited draw. Around my office we always have people that win every game because they've spent hundreds of dollars cherry picking all the best cards off of e-bay. But sealed deck tourny's even the playing field. Everyone opens three boosters, you build with what you got, and go. Even if you decide not to sell your merchandise by way of booster packs, you might still consider implementing booster-pack functionality in your Auction house, if for no other reason than to be able to provide for that style of game.
Just random design thoughts. Good luck, and careful with those steaks!!