I'm supposed to write a paper going over the positive impacts of gaming, as a counterpoint to the perspective that gaming teaches people to waste time, lose the ability to prioritize, and lose touch with society.
I want to argue that the real issue that causes those problems is backlash against people who have no respect for an art form that is compelling to a certain kind of person, but I was reading a thread in this forum about reasons for the popularity of the last generation of consoles, and one major reason given for why the WiiU is lagging is because the games designed for it aren't single-player-friendly enough and that there aren't enough time sinks to get people really committed to it.
Now, I want to stress that this thread is not about console wars. The only reason I bring it up is because I'm wondering: do games, as an art form, depend on people who exhibit the unhealthy aspects of gaming culture in order to exist as a viable business, or is gaming culture a thing apart? What would the stereotypes about gamers be, if they weren't that they waste time and never go outdoors? If we lived in a world where a non-gamer could find out that someone was a gamer, and be impressed by it, why would they be impressed?
(As an example, for me, if someone tells me they like Yoga, I don't think they're weird for wanting to hold still in uncomfortable positions for long periods. I interpret it as them being fit, relaxed, and centered. Yoga has good PR, so to speak.)
Also, is the common perception of a gamer a result of the people who play games, or a result of game designers encouraging certain behavior in the first place? Can games appeal to the target demographic of "gamers" without encouraging them to lose themselves in the game, or is that immersive-ness too much a part of the appeal in the first place?
You are finally, at long last, asking the correct question.
If it's a question to which the answer seems obvious and has been stated multiple times in the thread, does it really need to be explicitly asked?
The answer offered is that the Wii was marketed to an audience of people who aren't, and never were, going to become committed gamers who buy every console that Nintendo produces. Nintendo made a good console that appealed to lots of new people, but it little to build up a fanbase for them the way the PlayStation and XBox have done.
As a direct result, the demand for such a console has been exhausted, and repeating the exercise with a new, even more gimmicky casual console was a strategy doomed from the start.
You may not agree with that argument, but let's not pretend it hasn't been made...over and over and over...in this thread.
Personally, I loathe the idea that gaming culture can only expand with the production of long, grindy games that involve playing by yourself for hours and hours on end. I really hope Nintendo finds a niche apart from that where they can successful. But as it stands, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to draw, that people don't become "gamers" from playing games like Mario Party.
I have never lost to a Bow, so maybe my impression of it is a little skewed by that, but it has always seemed clunky to me. Just too easy to outpace to call it a bomb. Not to say that I think it's an actively bad card or anything, but in a world full of combat tricks, an on-the-board +1/+1 isn't exactly a game-breaker, and the other abilities might have a lot of potential, but are all very situational. Green decks are not fast enough for the deathtouch to reliably matter, also, and a 3 mana spell that doesn't impact the board doesn't help.
The biggest reason to like the Bow is because people misplay into it a lot.
Kruphix is capable of far more broken plays, and is more reliably useful (since it costs you no tempo to cast it on turn 5). The mana cost is a turn off, but as a P1p1, you shouldn't be committing to your colors immediately anyway, and Kruphix is splashable even if you don't end up with green as a main color, let alone blue.
The standard has been a 3/3 split with the large block (i.e. 3 Theros, 2 regular JOU, 1 seeded).
Considering this is what they did just now for BNG, I see little reason to think it'll be anything else for the next one.
They do 3/3 splits because small sets tend not to play very well by themselves. They don't do 2/2/2 splits because the point of a prerelease is to get more exposure for the new set.
You have to return it before the Ordeal will trigger. Declaring attackers happens before any "whenever this attacks" triggers can happen, and an Ordeal has to be returned to your hand before Floodtide Serpent can be declared as an attacker.
This is not a new rule. All cards that have costs associated with declaring attackers are worded this way, and work exactly the same.
Wow - have you considered a career in politics? You make it sound like four decks with winning records, whereas actually it's two decks with two wins between them!
Heh. I actually did specifically point this case out as anomalous, though, a couple posts up.
That does more to highlight exactly how small this sample size is than to say that Pseudofate's deck is amazing (or bad), regardless. If the alternative is to say that Red is virtually unplayable outside of RW, there's definitely a lack of nuance born of too little data.
It took me a while to realize that using old orange items or set pieces was actually dragging down the item level of the final product. That was disappointing to realize. Kinda makes me wonder why they even have those 8-piece set bonuses all over the place, when they're so impossible to farm. And orange stuff is even more frustrating. There are lots of 2-piece ring sets where I found one of them and then blew a bunch of transmutes trying to find the other, hopelessly.
Anyway, I guess I've vented enough.
When I first got the game, I decided I would only play in hardcore mode/hardest difficulty just to see how far I could get. I made it as far as the Forsaken Vaults (Act II dungeon guarded by the Sphinx, it's the first dungeon with the blades coming up out of the ground) with an engineer. I have yet to actually make it that far again.
I think an interesting question is, assuming people went into this particular draft knowing all the information available in this forum, how would it impact the way they draft? Would knowing that your second pack had Anax and Cymede lead you into RW even though your first pack is weak? Would you first pick Reaper of the Wilds knowing how many Keepsake Gorgons are opened in the first pack around the table? Would you cut white hard in the second pack in hopes of getting people to pass the three Wingsteed Riders that were in the third pack? Would you avoid playing blue if you didn't get to first pick a Gorgon?
I realize that all of those questions are based completely on the sort of perfect information that we never actually get in a draft, but I think there's a lot of opportunity to explore deep strategies that way that we'd never get to look at otherwise. I'd actually love to draft this exact same set of packs again and see how all this information impacts how people approach their picks.
I scored Dorvan as having a 1-1 finish, since he didn't actually play his last game (according to the results post here). 1-2 isn't above average in terms of actual win percentage for any seat.
Pseudofate's GR deck was also red and successful for its seat. Both red decks that performed above average in Seat D did not include white.
Because I didn't rank it by number of wins, but percentage of wins among actual played games. Pseudofate got a 1-2 result, but Pseudofate's deck won every match it played, and it seemed pretty silly to count his deck as having gone 1-2 when there's zero evidence of any result beyond his first. My own deck went 1-1, which I feel is not indicative of its quality at all, but the data we have is the data we have.
I realize that a sample size of one match is way too tiny to say Pseudofate's deck is better than anyone else's in that seat, but a small sample size is better than none. The data as it stands has a very low level of certainty regardless of how you score it, but at least this method has some meaning. Counting games against his deck that his deck didn't play actively introduces bias for no other reason than ego. If everyone had played three matches, then there would be no difference, but as it stands, lots of people didn't, and so just counting wins isn't helpful.
I also realize there's still some bias in that going 2-1 by going win-win-lose is likely to be a more impressive performance than going lose-win-win, but I can't think of a way of actually accounting for it. There's no quantifiable way of measuring the quality of opposing decks that doesn't directly depend on measuring the quality of the original deck. And in any case, at least in Swiss queues, the results amount to the same thing in terms of prizes, so failure to account for it should have a negligible effect on the conclusions you decide to draw.
There's also a playskill bias, but that's completely impossible to quantify. I'm assuming it amounts to white noise because there's really no other option, but the reality is that if you took the same decklists and gave them to different people with different levels of skill, the results would probably be dramatically different. In the same vein, drafting skill makes a huge impact. You can see even in the few cases we have where two people in the same seat drafted the same archetype, like, say, Hardened and Tahn, that the individual choices made for very different decks. And this isn't random selection of a couple possible draft paths, either. Those particular paths were deliberately selected because they were believed to be likely to outperform the others. Statistically speaking, that's a terrible way to select.
And also, of course, there's the fact that all of this data is only directly relevant to the specific collection of cards we all used. Without performing a duplicate draft at least a few more times, we have no basis for comparison for how the specific mix of rares and whatnot we saw made an impact. It seems likely to me that, for example, the number of Keepsake Gorgons being abnormally high both made a higher than normal number of people try to make black decks work, and allowed them to succeed. That's unfounded in every way, but it's my suspicion nonetheless. There are probably hundreds of similar artifacts like that in this experiment, and while a lot of them may cancel each other out, we have no way of verifying which do not.
The sample size is just way too small to actually do anything about any of that. So take any analysis you see, including mine, with a big ol' grain of salt.
Why? You can't get more than one heroic trigger off of Bestows or (most) pump spells. Curving Skyguard, Rider, Bestow means you have a huge flier and a 1/1 flier. Grats?
Lash of the Whip is playable, but it needs the right kind of deck.
If you're looking for a card to help you stabilize, you're probably not drafting stuff like Pharika's Cure highly enough. A big thing to realize about Theros draft is that once the game gets going, you are generally not going stabilize at all. Your means of winning with a black deck will be by gaining life while doing indirect damage with Gray Merchants and maybe a flier or two. Cards like Keepsake Gorgon and Lash of the Whip and Sip of Hemlock don't need to stabilize for you; they just need to be enough to slow the opponent down while you drain them to death.
BW, BG
UR, GB
WR, UR, GW
GB, GB
BU, BU, BR, BU
BU, BR
WR, GU, BW
WR, UR, GU
In terms of decreasing win rate by color pair:
Seat A:
UB, WB, WR, BG, BW
Seat B:
GB, GB, GB, UR, GB
Seat C:
RW, GW, WR, UR, GW
Seat D:
GR, GW, BR, GB, GB
Seat E:
BU, BU, BU, BR, BU
Seat F:
BW, WR, BW, BU, BR
Seat G:
WR, WR, WR, GU, BW
Seat H:
GB, GB, WR, UR, GU
By color, each is represented in the "best performing" deck per seat:
White: 3 times
Blue: 2 times
Black: 5 times
Red: 3 times
Green: 3 times
By color pair, the best performing archetypes were UB, GB, and RW (two "top placements for their seat" each), with WB and GR making an appearance once each.
Seat C won 2 pods (LazyBuffalo, Pod 2, and Blake, Pod 4). This was the seat with the highest amount of variation in picks in pack 1 (mostly due to Blake's unconventional forcing of red), and the highest win rate (in terms of whole events, not matches), and the two decks that won were not especially similar.
LazyBuffalo's first four picks were:
Sylvan Caryatid
Voyaging Satyr
Divine Verdict
Nessian Courser
Blake's first four picks were:
Coordinated Assault
Lightning Strike
Titan's Strength
Minotaur Skullcleaver
The remaining people in that seat went 0-1, 1-2, 0-1, in terms of actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winners were Magma Jet, Lash of the Whip, and a second Voyaging Satyr.
------------
Seat E won 1 pod (Hardened, Pod 3). This was the seat that opened Whip of Erebos and almost everyone ended up in UB.
Hardened's first four picks were:
Whip of Erebos
Erebos' Emissary
Lash of the Whip
Shipwreck Singer
The remaining people in that seat went 0-1, 1-1, 1-2, and 0-0, in term f actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winner were Lightning Strike, Keepsake Gorgon, Horizon Scholar, Coordinated Assault, Disciple of Phenax, and Read the Bones.
-------------
Seat F won 1 pod (LordAndrew, Pod 5). This seat was dominated by black, with BW decks twice, BU and BR both appearing once, and RW appearing once.
LordAndrew's first four picks were:
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Keepsake Gorgon
Disciple of Phenax
Coordinated Assault
The remaining people in that seat went 2-1, 1-1, 1-2, and 2-1, in terms of actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winner were Phalanx Leader, Nessian Asp, Nessian Courser, Borderland Minotaur, Horizon Scholar, Read the Bones, Whip of Erebos, Disciple of Phenax, and Coordinated Assault.
--------------
Seat H won 1 pod (Hungerstriker, Pod 1). This seat saw two GB, a RW, a RU, and a GU deck.
Hungerstriker's first four picks were:
Heliod's Emissary
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Griptide
Nessian Asp
The remaining people in that seat went 2-1, 0-3, 1-2, 0-2 in terms of actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winner were Phalanx Leader, God's Willing, Hammer of Purphoros, Borderland Minotaur, and Flamespeaker Adept.
---------------
Of the remaining four seats, the final standings by actual played games were as follows:
(I guess my next step is to check which players drafted decks which performed better than their average win rate by seat, and then rank those by the archetypes they played.)
One thing that's at least good PR for this is that it gets a lot better the better your deck is. If you have a crazy deck, Conscriptor is going to be an all star a lot more easily than if you have a kinda slow deck without a lot of gas. As such, whether the card is truly a complete gamebreaker or not, we'll be hearing stories of it doing amazing things until M15 comes out.
I want to argue that the real issue that causes those problems is backlash against people who have no respect for an art form that is compelling to a certain kind of person, but I was reading a thread in this forum about reasons for the popularity of the last generation of consoles, and one major reason given for why the WiiU is lagging is because the games designed for it aren't single-player-friendly enough and that there aren't enough time sinks to get people really committed to it.
Now, I want to stress that this thread is not about console wars. The only reason I bring it up is because I'm wondering: do games, as an art form, depend on people who exhibit the unhealthy aspects of gaming culture in order to exist as a viable business, or is gaming culture a thing apart? What would the stereotypes about gamers be, if they weren't that they waste time and never go outdoors? If we lived in a world where a non-gamer could find out that someone was a gamer, and be impressed by it, why would they be impressed?
(As an example, for me, if someone tells me they like Yoga, I don't think they're weird for wanting to hold still in uncomfortable positions for long periods. I interpret it as them being fit, relaxed, and centered. Yoga has good PR, so to speak.)
Also, is the common perception of a gamer a result of the people who play games, or a result of game designers encouraging certain behavior in the first place? Can games appeal to the target demographic of "gamers" without encouraging them to lose themselves in the game, or is that immersive-ness too much a part of the appeal in the first place?
If it's a question to which the answer seems obvious and has been stated multiple times in the thread, does it really need to be explicitly asked?
The answer offered is that the Wii was marketed to an audience of people who aren't, and never were, going to become committed gamers who buy every console that Nintendo produces. Nintendo made a good console that appealed to lots of new people, but it little to build up a fanbase for them the way the PlayStation and XBox have done.
As a direct result, the demand for such a console has been exhausted, and repeating the exercise with a new, even more gimmicky casual console was a strategy doomed from the start.
You may not agree with that argument, but let's not pretend it hasn't been made...over and over and over...in this thread.
Personally, I loathe the idea that gaming culture can only expand with the production of long, grindy games that involve playing by yourself for hours and hours on end. I really hope Nintendo finds a niche apart from that where they can successful. But as it stands, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to draw, that people don't become "gamers" from playing games like Mario Party.
The biggest reason to like the Bow is because people misplay into it a lot.
Kruphix is capable of far more broken plays, and is more reliably useful (since it costs you no tempo to cast it on turn 5). The mana cost is a turn off, but as a P1p1, you shouldn't be committing to your colors immediately anyway, and Kruphix is splashable even if you don't end up with green as a main color, let alone blue.
Considering this is what they did just now for BNG, I see little reason to think it'll be anything else for the next one.
They do 3/3 splits because small sets tend not to play very well by themselves. They don't do 2/2/2 splits because the point of a prerelease is to get more exposure for the new set.
This is not a new rule. All cards that have costs associated with declaring attackers are worded this way, and work exactly the same.
Heh. I actually did specifically point this case out as anomalous, though, a couple posts up.
That does more to highlight exactly how small this sample size is than to say that Pseudofate's deck is amazing (or bad), regardless. If the alternative is to say that Red is virtually unplayable outside of RW, there's definitely a lack of nuance born of too little data.
Anyway, I guess I've vented enough.
When I first got the game, I decided I would only play in hardcore mode/hardest difficulty just to see how far I could get. I made it as far as the Forsaken Vaults (Act II dungeon guarded by the Sphinx, it's the first dungeon with the blades coming up out of the ground) with an engineer. I have yet to actually make it that far again.
I realize that all of those questions are based completely on the sort of perfect information that we never actually get in a draft, but I think there's a lot of opportunity to explore deep strategies that way that we'd never get to look at otherwise. I'd actually love to draft this exact same set of packs again and see how all this information impacts how people approach their picks.
Pseudofate's GR deck was also red and successful for its seat. Both red decks that performed above average in Seat D did not include white.
I realize that a sample size of one match is way too tiny to say Pseudofate's deck is better than anyone else's in that seat, but a small sample size is better than none. The data as it stands has a very low level of certainty regardless of how you score it, but at least this method has some meaning. Counting games against his deck that his deck didn't play actively introduces bias for no other reason than ego. If everyone had played three matches, then there would be no difference, but as it stands, lots of people didn't, and so just counting wins isn't helpful.
I also realize there's still some bias in that going 2-1 by going win-win-lose is likely to be a more impressive performance than going lose-win-win, but I can't think of a way of actually accounting for it. There's no quantifiable way of measuring the quality of opposing decks that doesn't directly depend on measuring the quality of the original deck. And in any case, at least in Swiss queues, the results amount to the same thing in terms of prizes, so failure to account for it should have a negligible effect on the conclusions you decide to draw.
There's also a playskill bias, but that's completely impossible to quantify. I'm assuming it amounts to white noise because there's really no other option, but the reality is that if you took the same decklists and gave them to different people with different levels of skill, the results would probably be dramatically different. In the same vein, drafting skill makes a huge impact. You can see even in the few cases we have where two people in the same seat drafted the same archetype, like, say, Hardened and Tahn, that the individual choices made for very different decks. And this isn't random selection of a couple possible draft paths, either. Those particular paths were deliberately selected because they were believed to be likely to outperform the others. Statistically speaking, that's a terrible way to select.
And also, of course, there's the fact that all of this data is only directly relevant to the specific collection of cards we all used. Without performing a duplicate draft at least a few more times, we have no basis for comparison for how the specific mix of rares and whatnot we saw made an impact. It seems likely to me that, for example, the number of Keepsake Gorgons being abnormally high both made a higher than normal number of people try to make black decks work, and allowed them to succeed. That's unfounded in every way, but it's my suspicion nonetheless. There are probably hundreds of similar artifacts like that in this experiment, and while a lot of them may cancel each other out, we have no way of verifying which do not.
The sample size is just way too small to actually do anything about any of that. So take any analysis you see, including mine, with a big ol' grain of salt.
If you're looking for a card to help you stabilize, you're probably not drafting stuff like Pharika's Cure highly enough. A big thing to realize about Theros draft is that once the game gets going, you are generally not going stabilize at all. Your means of winning with a black deck will be by gaining life while doing indirect damage with Gray Merchants and maybe a flier or two. Cards like Keepsake Gorgon and Lash of the Whip and Sip of Hemlock don't need to stabilize for you; they just need to be enough to slow the opponent down while you drain them to death.
I'm ignoring splashes for the sake of simplicity.
The decks which performed better than their average by seat belonged to the following players, in order of increasing delta:
Seat A: markino, carpeanmentum, Semantics
Seat B: Rhand, jmm765psu, Battle
Seat C: LazyBuffalo, Blake
Seat D: Dorvan, Voynich, Pseudofate
Seat E: Hardened
Seat F: Dolphan, CommiePuddin, LordAndrew
Seat G: Calavera, Lanxal
Seat H: Misting, Hungerstriker
WR, WB, UB
GB, GB, GB
GW, RW
BR, GW, GR
BU
WB, WR, BW
WR, WR
GB, GB
The decks which performed worse than their average by seat belonged to the following players, in order of increasing delta:
Seat A: R_O_L_E_S, rujasu
Seat B: Puddlejumper, TGSovereign
Seat C: ThrivingMagpies, mirrorentity, ExpiredRascals
Seat D: Scout, creampuffeater
Seat E: Tahn, Axelrod, bakgat, lolaser
Seat F: AntiC7, klein
Seat G: magicmerl, bateleur, incominggame
Seat H: Cynthaer, posertom, Ferenczys
BW, BG
UR, GB
WR, UR, GW
GB, GB
BU, BU, BR, BU
BU, BR
WR, GU, BW
WR, UR, GU
In terms of decreasing win rate by color pair:
Seat A:
UB, WB, WR, BG, BW
Seat B:
GB, GB, GB, UR, GB
Seat C:
RW, GW, WR, UR, GW
Seat D:
GR, GW, BR, GB, GB
Seat E:
BU, BU, BU, BR, BU
Seat F:
BW, WR, BW, BU, BR
Seat G:
WR, WR, WR, GU, BW
Seat H:
GB, GB, WR, UR, GU
By color, each is represented in the "best performing" deck per seat:
White: 3 times
Blue: 2 times
Black: 5 times
Red: 3 times
Green: 3 times
By color pair, the best performing archetypes were UB, GB, and RW (two "top placements for their seat" each), with WB and GR making an appearance once each.
Seat C won 2 pods (LazyBuffalo, Pod 2, and Blake, Pod 4). This was the seat with the highest amount of variation in picks in pack 1 (mostly due to Blake's unconventional forcing of red), and the highest win rate (in terms of whole events, not matches), and the two decks that won were not especially similar.
LazyBuffalo's first four picks were:
Sylvan Caryatid
Voyaging Satyr
Divine Verdict
Nessian Courser
Blake's first four picks were:
Coordinated Assault
Lightning Strike
Titan's Strength
Minotaur Skullcleaver
The remaining people in that seat went 0-1, 1-2, 0-1, in terms of actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winners were Magma Jet, Lash of the Whip, and a second Voyaging Satyr.
------------
Seat E won 1 pod (Hardened, Pod 3). This was the seat that opened Whip of Erebos and almost everyone ended up in UB.
Hardened's first four picks were:
Whip of Erebos
Erebos' Emissary
Lash of the Whip
Shipwreck Singer
The remaining people in that seat went 0-1, 1-1, 1-2, and 0-0, in term f actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winner were Lightning Strike, Keepsake Gorgon, Horizon Scholar, Coordinated Assault, Disciple of Phenax, and Read the Bones.
-------------
Seat F won 1 pod (LordAndrew, Pod 5). This seat was dominated by black, with BW decks twice, BU and BR both appearing once, and RW appearing once.
LordAndrew's first four picks were:
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Keepsake Gorgon
Disciple of Phenax
Coordinated Assault
The remaining people in that seat went 2-1, 1-1, 1-2, and 2-1, in terms of actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winner were Phalanx Leader, Nessian Asp, Nessian Courser, Borderland Minotaur, Horizon Scholar, Read the Bones, Whip of Erebos, Disciple of Phenax, and Coordinated Assault.
--------------
Seat H won 1 pod (Hungerstriker, Pod 1). This seat saw two GB, a RW, a RU, and a GU deck.
Hungerstriker's first four picks were:
Heliod's Emissary
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Griptide
Nessian Asp
The remaining people in that seat went 2-1, 0-3, 1-2, 0-2 in terms of actually played games.
In the first four picks, the picks of the players who performed worse that varied from the winner were Phalanx Leader, God's Willing, Hammer of Purphoros, Borderland Minotaur, and Flamespeaker Adept.
---------------
Of the remaining four seats, the final standings by actual played games were as follows:
Seat A:
1-2, 1-1, 2-1, 2-1, 0-1
Seat B:
1-1, 0-2, 2-1, 2-1, 1-1
Seat D:
0-2, 1-1, 2-1, 1-2, 1-0
Seat G:
2-1, 0-2, 1-2, 0-3, 2-1
Overall win rates (per match) are as follows:
Seat A: --------41.7%
Seat B: ----------50%
Seat C: ------------63.7%
Seat D: ---------45.5%
Seat E: -----------55.6%
Seat F: -------------64.3
Seat G: -------35.7%
Seat H: ---------42.9%
(I guess my next step is to check which players drafted decks which performed better than their average win rate by seat, and then rank those by the archetypes they played.)