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Thread: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

  1. #141

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
    I'm still not sure why more complexity = a better game.

    .
    - I do agree with this point. Complexity != better game.

    Also, for those disregarding my point about the secondary market, if WoTC truly didn't care about them, they would have never kept the Reserved list for this long.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Heh, that's funny Mike. I also played WoW in a high end raiding guild, and was very actively involved in pvp. I became frustrated with WoW for similar reasons, such as when you reached the pinnacle of competitiveness in pvp, it really comes down to grinding out the minuscule stat advantage which took an absurdly large amount of play time to achieve.

    Similarly, I feel that reactive strategies in magic are also being pushed out. As time goes on, the diversity of the broken decks will continue to increase, making it more and more difficult to answer these decks with a sideboard of 15 max. This is true of control decks, and will be even more true of aggro decks, as most of them simply don't have any efficient answers to the common broken decks. Combo decks have the advantage in that there are only a few cards that directly interact with them, and can build a sideboard to address those limited amounts of cards. Combo's sideboard can be super tuned to beat exactly what beats them, while everyone else sideboard simply is not large enough to answer the diversity of broken decks.

    I don't believe that this is the direction that wizards should take legacy, and why printing a powerful answer card that was available to anyone who want it was a step in the right direction. Perhaps the implementation of mental misstep was flawed, but the concept was not.

  3. #143
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by DragoFireheart View Post
    - I do agree with this point. Complexity != better game.
    Complexity gives a game the chance to have depth and staying power. The best games are ones that have as few rules as possible, are easy to learn, but hard to master because they also have a hidden sense of complications that arise. Chess is an example of this, as well as Quorridor. You have the objective, how pieces are allowed to be played and you can pick the game up in an hour, even if you aren't good.

    Magic, however has a ton of 'pieces' through it's card pool, and invariably has to have that many more rules to govern them. Making things simple here is very difficult, and I think the core sets do a fine job of that. We have already committed to complexity through the inherent nature of the game pieces, so what we need to do is allow our pieces to not be so one dimensional. You reward the better player this way.
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by DragoFireheart View Post
    - I do agree with this point. Complexity != better game.
    Quote Originally Posted by DragoFireheart's Signature
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    Seems a bit like a mixed message :)
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  5. #145

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by nayon View Post
    Ok, then let's make a new format called "Starter Magic" where spells and abilities can only be activated during your own main phase. Those who don't want complexity can play that format. And those who want complexity can play Magic cards the way they were printed.
    Right, because clearly the way to deal with the complexity issue is to spin Magic off into two games, "Hurf Durf: the Derpening," and "Right and Proper Gentleman's Olde Game of Magicks," where there are no creatures and all the cards are blue, have flash, and have, "As an additional cost to play this spell, draw three cards, then put two cards from your hand on top of your library in any order."

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
    Right, because clearly the way to deal with the complexity issue is to spin Magic off into two games, "Hurf Durf: the Derpening," and "Right and Proper Gentleman's Olde Game of Magicks," where there are no creatures and all the cards are blue, have flash, and have, "As an additional cost to play this spell, draw three cards, then put two cards from your hand on top of your library in any order."
    I think you just described Standard and Vintage there.
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Admiral_Arzar View Post
    On a related note, I also don't understand the pervasive belief that new players find *insert x strategy here* unfun (which has been driving their design for years now, and has also driven me away from all the rotating formats).
    If it's coming from WotC staff, it's because they have a ton of market data that they don't share with the public. So when they say, "<enough> players hate land destruction" or "hate having their 7 mana creature countered for UU," I believe them. I mean, if WotC relied on the typical user of this site to keep them in the black, I don't there would have been a 4th edition printing.

    Quote Originally Posted by DragoFireheart View Post
    - Now they piss off the secondary market and they wonder what other dumb shit WoTC will do. Stores will lose faith in WotC and buy less products from them. People that had stocks invested in them will pull out
    What exactly is your argument?

    And as usual, I agree with Aggro Zombie's points. He's saying what I'd like to say, but, you know, better.

  8. #148
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Eh, I think(and most Legacy players I believe) that complexity=more fun. Elsewise, we would be defending standard a little more on this thread.

    The eternal formats, with their complexity and unfair turn one kills, are a reminder of what magic used to be. It is why people graduate from standard to Legacy, not too often the other way around. The complexity is what keeps people playing these older formats.

    However, complexity is not very good for the newbies. Standard and Draft are great to bring new people. At the same time though making the game into Magic : the Yugio is driving older players out of Standard. There should be a balance which I think was reached in Ravinca block.

    Also, Draener was right about Mental Misstep, the implemention was off, but had good intentions.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    You guys are seriously underestimating the complexity of standard. In fact, cawblade with Jace and mystic was quite possibly the most difficult deck I have ever played. The sheer number of decisions that had a substantial impact on the game was mind blowing.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Draener View Post
    You guys are seriously underestimating the complexity of standard. In fact, cawblade with Jace and mystic was quite possibly the most difficult deck I have ever played. The sheer number of decisions that had a substantial impact on the game was mind blowing.
    Which is why Jace and SFM got banned...
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Bardo View Post
    If it's coming from WotC staff, it's because they have a ton of market data that they don't share with the public. So when they say, "<enough> players hate land destruction" or "hate having their 7 mana creature countered for UU," I believe them. I mean, if WotC relied on the typical user of this site to keep them in the black, I don't there would have been a 4th edition printing.
    If it were as simple as say, the color of your car, it would be one thing. You could say "annual sales of Sourcemobile GT in blue average 6,000 and annual sales of Sourcemobile GT in yellow average 7200". Then you know that you need to produce automobiles in roughly that ratio.

    However, because of the insane complexity of the game, with it's unfathomable number of potential interactions, you can't look at the percentage of affirmative respondants to "do you dislike having your land destroyed?" and base your future designs around that. It's a meaningless question. Who *does* like having their land destroyed? But the question is, do you like having your land destroyed more or less than you like being incapable of building a midrange deck because there is no solution to Valakut besides "race it" or "have counters for Primeval Titan"? That's not the kind of question that they ask and it's not the kind of question that Average Joe Mouthbreather is really equipped to answer. I don't think 90+% of the people on the Source have a firm grasp of macro-strategy and I think this site is the goddamn Rolls Royce of the world's Magical forums.

    What people say they want and what will actually make them happy are two entirely different things. And frankly, despite TLP's protests today to the contrary ("We're professional game designers..."), Wizards doesn't have the first fucking clue how to give people what they want. If they did, Extended wouldn't be such a clusterfuck. Modern would've been right the first time, instead of having 3 different ban lists in less than a year and *still* being an unmitigated disaster. Standard wouldn't be so dominated by a single strategy that multiple major tournaments consecutively feature 32 copies of the same win condition in the T8.

    The fact that people are running full-tilt towards Legacy, this boom of Legacy's popularity, has as much or more to do with how much the rotating formats SUCK because of piss-poor design and implementation than it has to do with Legacy's "fun-ness". I don't find modern Legacy to be any more fun than I found Masques/Invasions T2. In fact, I still play MM/Inv with my old roomate sometimes. Because despite the fact that Wizards is doing everything that their marketing research tells them that people find fun, the sets they're making aren't fun.

    The fact of the matter is that people don't have the first clue what the hell they want out of life. If they did, you wouldn't have to date and/or marry dozens of people before you found the right one. You'd get it right the first time. But while I've always been most attracted to blondes, I always have the best sex with brunettes. Why? Because apparently the little voice that says that blondes are better is dead wrong.

    I said it a few pages ago. It's not all Tom's fault. I'd still like to shoot his testicles off, but he's not the only one that's fucked up the party. It's the players too. They're incapable of looking at underlying factors, seeing only the surface. They see that their Lure/Craw Giant deck gets rocked by Counterspell and Spell Blast and they think that Lure would be great if only Counterspell wasn't around. They don't realize that Channel is still an infinitely better green spell.

    It's Wizards job, if they're trying to make a game that's fun for everyone, to interpret the results of the marketing research. But they'd have to be asking the right questions, and since nobody finds the rotating formats fun, they're obviously not. And frankly, I doubt if Tom "Great Sable Stag" LaPille has any clue about macro-strategy either. He probably figures that people play the decks they do just to make him look bad. It's a giant conspiracy. I mean, if mono-green infect dominated the FFL, the only explanation for it not having made a peep in Standard is that there is a 'gentleman's agreement' to avoid playing such a dominating deck. Truly, however, Glistener Elf should be banned, if we're going on raw power level alone.
    Quote Originally Posted by Draener View Post
    You know who thinks it's sweet to play against 8 different decks in an 8 round tournament? People who don't like to win, or people that play combo. This is not EDH; Legacy is a competitive environment, and it should reward skill - more so than it does.
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  12. #152

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by SpikeyMikey View Post
    Because despite the fact that Wizards is doing everything that their marketing research tells them that people find fun, the sets they're making aren't fun.
    And yet Innistrad is projected to be the best-selling set of all time.

    Huh.

    I think what you're saying here is that the sets Wizards is making aren't fun for you. But you play Magic on MWS and Cockatrice and don't buy cards anymore. Wizards' sales data and market research data are clearly telling them they're doing things right: Zendikar sold like hotcakes, the Innistrad prerelease broke previous attendance records, and the game currently has the largest following of any point in its history. Most players don't think in terms of optimization and macro strategy and game balance. Most players think in terms of, "It sucks when I have this sweet Titan in my hand that I'm eager to cast but then my opponent Stone Rains me, Acidic Slimes me, and then Molten Rains me and I sit here frustrated because I wanted to do something cool but now I'm dying to a 2/2 because I'm not drawing any more lands." Or, "I have this totally awesome combo that I want to show off that starts with Tooth and Nail and results in me winning with Near-Death Experience but then my opponent counters all my spells and does nothing but mill me with a Merfolk Mesmerist and I sit here frustrated because my chance to show off was totally blown by this guy who's doing nothing."

    Yeah, you can argue that those people are idiots and should build better decks, blah blah blah, people who aren't Spikes must be mouthbreathers, etc. But you know what? You have admitted you don't buy cards anymore. You have admitted that you play only online on free programs that rip off a company's IP and don't compensate it for that. Your opinion on set design doesn't matter because you are not contributing to the discussion in any way that Wizards considers meaningful: set sales and market feedback. So why should they listen? People are showing up and handing them cash for their game despite how stupid it is to spend money on purely discretionary things in a bad economy.

    And if that's not a sign of success, what is?

  13. #153
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    @Mikey - You should really stop using the term Mouthbreathers. It's starting to make you sound like a pompous ass.
    I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by SpikeMikey
    I don't find modern Legacy to be any more fun than I found Masques/Invasions T2.
    And again, beaten to it by A_Z...

    It goes without that fun is subjective. One person's fun is another's misery, boredom, or aggravation. But you only need to look at their sales and prerelease attendence, in the midst of this rotten economy, and see that WotC is being successful and selling an entertainment product that is presumably enjoyable.

    They're incapable of looking at underlying factors, seeing only the surface. They see that their Lure/Craw Giant deck gets rocked by Counterspell and Spell Blast and they think that Lure would be great if only Counterspell wasn't around. They don't realize that Channel is still an infinitely better green spell.
    I think we were all there at one point.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by DragoFireheart View Post
    - Semantics.
    Are you actually under the impression that "archetype" and "deck" mean the same thing?
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  16. #156
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
    Most players don't think in terms of optimization and macro strategy and game balance. Most players think in terms of, "It sucks when I have this sweet Titan in my hand that I'm eager to cast but then my opponent Stone Rains me, Acidic Slimes me, and then Molten Rains me and I sit here frustrated because I wanted to do something cool but now I'm dying to a 2/2 because I'm not drawing any more lands." Or, "I have this totally awesome combo that I want to show off that starts with Tooth and Nail and results in me winning with Near-Death Experience but then my opponent counters all my spells and does nothing but mill me with a Merfolk Mesmerist and I sit here frustrated because my chance to show off was totally blown by this guy who's doing nothing."
    Casual players will usually get crushed by competitive players, regardless of strategy. If you make land destruction unplayable, then the better players will claim an edge a different way. Bending over backward to support the casual player at the expense of the competitive player would be a terrible way to operate. Magic didn't start out simple. It doesn't need to be simple. Casual players can use whatever cards they want, and if they're playing on the kitchen table, they may even have house rules against land destruction or counterspells or whatever.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by ESG View Post
    Casual players will usually get crushed by competitive players, regardless of strategy. If you make land destruction unplayable, then the better players will claim an edge a different way. Bending over backward to support the casual player at the expense of the competitive player would be a terrible way to operate. Magic didn't start out simple. It doesn't need to be simple. Casual players can use whatever cards they want, and if they're playing on the kitchen table, they may even have house rules against land destruction or counterspells or whatever.
    Moreover, the #1 marketing strategy for MTG has been the Pro Tour - the idea that anyone could play at the top tier professional level. Are we to believe that year after year R&D is designing cards for the Casual crowd or for the PT crowd? I don't think it's polarized to either, but it's very easy to spot cards that belong in either camp. The big point of contention that I have with Tom LaPille stating his abhorrence of Dredge and Storm is that is a design of the PT camp based on cards designed for casual appeal. For instance, taken in a vacuum Bridge from Below seems to be an odd card. Same too with Steamflogger Boss. Is R&D going to go ahead and ban the latter too when Contraptions become too overpowered within the constructs of the game?
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
    And yet Innistrad is projected to be the best-selling set of all time.

    Huh.
    Black Lotus sells for more today than it did in 2003, so the format must be more popular now than it was then, right?

    Here's the evidence I'm looking at. Extended was so bad off, they had to create a new format in the hopes of replacing it because nobody would play it if it weren't a PT format. During Extended season, people play more Extended than they do Legacy, but that doesn't mean it's a more popular format. There is more than 1 factor driving what formats people play.

    Yeah, you can argue that those people are idiots and should build better decks, blah blah blah, people who aren't Spikes must be mouthbreathers, etc. But you know what? You have admitted you don't buy cards anymore. You have admitted that you play only online on free programs that rip off a company's IP and don't compensate it for that. Your opinion on set design doesn't matter because you are not contributing to the discussion in any way that Wizards considers meaningful: set sales and market feedback. So why should they listen? People are showing up and handing them cash for their game despite how stupid it is to spend money on purely discretionary things in a bad economy.
    Aggro, did you read about *why* I don't buy cards anymore? I'm not contributing to sales in part because I don't approve of their set design. Or anything about the company really.


    I don't care if casual players play casually. I've got some friends that play kitchen table Magic. Wouldn't want to play competitive decks if you gave them listings. They *enjoy* their wonky interactions and turn 12 6 card combos. And I'm happy for them. When I play with them, I tone it down, build something similar and play big multiplayer games. But removing the elements that seem most unfair to guys like that from competitive play doesn't make competitive play any closer to kitchen table Magic. The turn 12 combos still aren't competitive. The difference is that by shifting the advantage from the more defensive decks to the more offensive decks and by cutting out tools that were necessary for game balance in favor of what is supposed to be fun, they're creating environments that actually *aren't* fun. For me or for the kitchen table crowd.

    When I say mouthbreathers, I'm not talking about the kitchen table crowd. What I'm saying is, if the ruling body of Chess decided to change the way the knight moved because it's current pattern was too difficult for some people to grasp, I would say they're trying to open the game up to mouthbreathers. It has nothing to do with whether or not you want to play a game a few times a year with your kid or whether you're trying to become a grand master. If you're not smart enough to intellectually grasp the mechanics of the game, GTFO. I'm not trying to say I want casual players forced out of Magic. That's ludicrous.

    And Richard, I appreciate the thought, but if I were try to avoid using any phraseology that offended people, I just wouldn't write at all. No matter what I say, someone is going to think I'm a dick. I don't really care. If I sound pompous it's because I'm confident that my opinions are usually largely correct.

    Wizards' sales data and market research data are clearly telling them they're doing things right: Zendikar sold like hotcakes, the Innistrad prerelease broke previous attendance records, and the game currently has the largest following of any point in its history.
    The game is growing on inertia. And make no mistake, right now, it's a bubble. Eventually, it will either be deflated or it will pop hard. I'm not going to tryn and explain why I think that in a forum post, but I firmly believe that to be the case. Anyway, there have been plenty of bad sets before and the game still grew, even through those periods that people agree upon as bad. I've heard plenty of stories of people getting out during Urzas because it was such a bad time in Type II. I got in during Urzas. There is always an influx of people, and the bigger Magic gets, the bigger the word of mouth advertising campaign gets. The reason Star Trek or VS or any other card game died is because none of them were ever as popular as Magic the Gathering. You have to be vastly superior to an existing product if you want to be able to capture their market share and surpass them. It's the same thing with D&D or any other iconic game. There are plenty of D&D clones out there, many with better gaming systems. But since D&D is more widely played and recognized, if you want to play an RPG, D&D is the easiest one to find games for. So whether the changes made to the D&D system are good or bad, D&D continues to grow through each edition. Inertially.

    Most players don't think in terms of optimization and macro strategy and game balance. Most players think in terms of, "It sucks when I have this sweet Titan in my hand that I'm eager to cast but then my opponent Stone Rains me, Acidic Slimes me, and then Molten Rains me and I sit here frustrated because I wanted to do something cool but now I'm dying to a 2/2 because I'm not drawing any more lands." Or, "I have this totally awesome combo that I want to show off that starts with Tooth and Nail and results in me winning with Near-Death Experience but then my opponent counters all my spells and does nothing but mill me with a Merfolk Mesmerist and I sit here frustrated because my chance to show off was totally blown by this guy who's doing nothing."
    Again, my point is that Wizards job, if they want to improve the game, is to move beyond what most players are thinking they want and getting to what players *actually* want. That is, cool effects on tournament worthy cards. If Warp World were somehow costed to be a playable constructed card, Timmys the world over would rejoice. But removing Counterspell from Standard doesn't make Warp World playable. It just makes Titans playable. But Timmy doesn't like getting blown out by Primeval Titan either.

    Good set design, QUALITY set design, would incorporate things that keep the kitchen table crowd happy without completely fucking the tournament scene. I mean, let's be honest, the tournament players are going to continue to play either way. If the next set released was a remake of Homelands, Gerry Thompson would still be at every motherfucking SCG Open, because he makes money doing it. But ideally, you could make tournament formats that people want to play, instead of tournament formats that people play only because they can't make money playing EDH.
    Quote Originally Posted by Draener View Post
    You know who thinks it's sweet to play against 8 different decks in an 8 round tournament? People who don't like to win, or people that play combo. This is not EDH; Legacy is a competitive environment, and it should reward skill - more so than it does.
    Quote Originally Posted by Borealis View Post
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  19. #159

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by rukcus View Post
    Seems a bit like a mixed message :)
    A game shouldn't be complex for the sake of being complex.

  20. #160

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Because more packs sold = the game is better. If we apply that same mentality, Justin Bieber is the best artist ever.

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