Suggestion to hand limit and drypass problem, please read

+
*THE HAND LIMIT PROBLEM*: The hand limit needs to be gone. I know that it's there to discourage drypass and make other rounds besides R3 more important, but its doing exactly the opposite right now. Most of the time you end up with having to play 2 or 3 cards to not discard your draws on the next round, sometimes even when you opponent had already passed and thats just awful. And even worse than that, hand limit makes card advantage not a thing and thats bad because CA is one of the most "gwenty" concepts of the game ever. Being able to get back CA when you're like 2 cards down just because of how the hand limit works (doesn't need skill or anything) is not a healthy thing to the game. Now, before giving the solution to this problem I need to talk about the "tactical advantage" for a second.

*TACTICAL ADVANTAGE*: The concept for this card to fix the coinflip is really great and I think it really works, but its kind of OP in its current form and give WAY more advantage, than it should, to decks that run order based engines that needs to stay alive. So, my suggestion is to rework the tactical advantage into a immune artifact that transforms into a unit instead of boosting any unit and also reduce it's power to 4 for not making high tempo openers too abusive (I"ll get on that later).

*DRYPASS/HAND LIMIT SOLUTION*: First of all, with the hand limit already removed: makes that neither players can pass on their first turn of each round. Then, whoever player that starts R1/R2 starts the round with the reworked tactical advantage (TA), that I cited before IF they have less or equal cards as the other player in his hand. How this chage things? Well, at the start of R1 each players will have the same ammount of cards in the hand so whoever goes first will get the TA no matter what, not being able to pass on the first turn consequently (and obviously) blocks the drypass option and that is fine because the extra thempo of the TA will help the blue coin player to at least got out of R1 losing with 1 card ahead. At the start of R2 if the players that goes first (have won R1) has equal or less cards in his hand he will get the TA too like I mentioned before. And how that will work on R2? If the player that starts R2 has 1 less card in his hand that is because he won R1 with 1 card down (of course) and nothing being able to pass in the first turn of R2, because the restriction we imposed, could really hurt his R3 if he not manage to get his card back; and that is why he gets the TA: for helping him in thempo to try to get that card back. And the same goes for the player that starts R2 with even cards (managed to won R1 on even) the extra thempo of the TA will help him to try to get a card of advantage as he would normally do by just drypassing R2, but with the drypass block and the TA's extra thempo he's encouraged to play the round in order to get that CA, and the same goes for R1 dry pass and R2 drypass with a card behind that I cited before. The last possible case is that if the player who starts R2 have more cards in his hand (managed to won R1 with 1 card ahead) and in this case he doesn't need the TA to help him for thempo since he's already a card up and would probably just 2-0 the opponent with that extra thempo, and that is why the condition of having equal or less cards than your opponent in you hand to get the TA when starting a round. For R3, of course, the TA doesn't exist wich is the whole point of encouraging players to play for R1 and R2 to get any advantage on R3. Also, I can see not having the restriction of having less or equal cards in hand for the player to get the TA since this just affect the last case I mentioned above and you can make the argument tha if he managed to won R1 he deserves a chance to go 2 cards up R3 like he would normally do by drypassing.

But I know this solution can be a so much abusive, especially for high thempo openers like witchers + roach + reworked TA. But, it still possible to balance the game around that; like reworking roach to something like "on turn end if you played and/or summoned only 1 gold card this turn play this card from your deck" to espcially avoid this thempo madness with witchers.
 
Last edited:
In other words....

1. Explicitly forbid passing on the first turn in R1/R2 for each player.
2. Replace the free boost points for getting blue coin with a free unit, worth 4 points instead of 5.
3. Incorporate this free unit into both R1 and R2 as a conditional bonus, where a player gains it if he goes first and has less or equal cards relative to the opponent (always in R1, conditionally in R2).

Am I understanding you correctly?

Drypassing ceases to exist without neutering the CA dynamics. Unless I'm missing something, sign me up :).
 
That's exactly it man! Thanks for summarize it this way xD, especially the last line. I tried to put in those words but I couldn't and wanted to exemplify all possible cases. So, what do you think about it?
Post automatically merged:

In other words....

1. Explicitly forbid passing on the first turn in R1/R2 for each player.
2. Replace the free boost points for getting blue coin with a free unit, worth 4 points instead of 5.
3. Incorporate this free unit into both R1 and R2 as a conditional bonus, where a player gains it if he goes first and has less or equal cards relative to the opponent (always in R1, conditionally in R2).

Am I understanding you correctly?
 
Last edited:
So, what do you think about it?

After HC changes were announced the hand limit was the greatest concern IMO. I still think it's the most pressing area CDPR needs to look into. The impacts to the card advantage meta game, which was/is a staple of Gwent, were/are too great. A solution to eliminate dry-passing without the hand limit would be an improvement. Your idea appears to do so with limited potential for drawbacks. So it sounds like a good idea.
 
I was originally opposed to the hand limit, but what I realized I was actually opposed with was that Round 1 was dictated to be at least 6 card plays long, and made Round 2 feel like there was a lot of potential to be abused with the hand limit to make card advantage irrelevant. I did like that tempo took a back seat to engines for a few turns though, so it wasn't completely without merit.

My suggestion is pretty simple:

"At the start of each round, draw a card for each card you played in the previous round, to a maximum of 3 cards."

What does this accomplish? Two things:

1) It makes Round 1 get honest a little faster than it does now. By turn 4, you're either seeing your engines come to fruition and pushing some tempo, or you're risking card advantage against an opponent with a less greedy plan.

2) It prevents a dry pass in R2 from regaining CA. Very simply, you aren't going to draw back into 10 cards and regain card advantage by just passing with 7 cards in hand. Also, if you enter Round 2 on even cards, you can't drypass to force the down another card, as they'll play a card and draw one, where you draw none. R2 becomes as meaningful as Round 1, and should always see at least 4 plays just like R1 did.

I think this would go a long way to making coinflip feel better (as losing on even cards is brutal, and incredibly hard to balance). It's as ideal as coinflip gets, and at least you'll know you have 4 plays to try and recover your advantage.

The biggest thing to take away from this is that when the game starts with 10 cards, you won't ever find it back at 10 cards again for Round 3, which is why a lot of people felt the game was arena-like.

Feel free to discuss, I feel like this suggestion has a lot of merit.
 
I agree that hand limit needs to go. It makes round 1 absolutely pointless, you would have to play at least 7 cards to actually gain card advantage...
 
I'm still undecided on the whole hand limit concept. Forcing each player to play at least 3 cards doesn't feel that bad. Of course that's open for discussion, but I think I may kind of like it.

What I know for sure is that I really dislike 2nd round dry-pass in HC, which allows you to draw 6 cards in one go. That is just too much and as stated by many people it makes the game become zero-stake for too long. But there is more than one way to fix this without outright removing the hand limit completely - fiddling with numbers of hand size and draws between round is the simplest but far from the only one.

And I also know for sure how I dislike in current Gwent that 2nd player can immediately get control and advantage just by playing a bit more points than 1st player. Of course in HC Tactical Advantage is there to balance this. If we remove the high tempo openers as you suggested, it may just well be enough to deny this for of couple rounds at least.
(And I think it should be done anyway: no-setup high tempo plays are complete BS and have no place in HC Gwent. Some players recommend increasing provision cost, but I think Witcher trio and Roach should just be reworked.)

But if we accept this and enforce it, your suggestion may not really deny dry-pass, just make it a 1 card move instead of a 0 card move.

I like @Howlmoth 's suggestion better on first glance, I'll give it some more thought later.
 
I was originally opposed to the hand limit, but what I realized I was actually opposed with was that Round 1 was dictated to be at least 6 card plays long, and made Round 2 feel like there was a lot of potential to be abused with the hand limit to make card advantage irrelevant. I did like that tempo took a back seat to engines for a few turns though, so it wasn't completely without merit.

My suggestion is pretty simple:

"At the start of each round, draw a card for each card you played in the previous round, to a maximum of 3 cards."

What does this accomplish? Two things:

1) It makes Round 1 get honest a little faster than it does now. By turn 4, you're either seeing your engines come to fruition and pushing some tempo, or you're risking card advantage against an opponent with a less greedy plan.

2) It prevents a dry pass in R2 from regaining CA. Very simply, you aren't going to draw back into 10 cards and regain card advantage by just passing with 7 cards in hand. Also, if you enter Round 2 on even cards, you can't drypass to force the down another card, as they'll play a card and draw one, where you draw none. R2 becomes as meaningful as Round 1, and should always see at least 4 plays just like R1 did.

I think this would go a long way to making coinflip feel better (as losing on even cards is brutal, and incredibly hard to balance). It's as ideal as coinflip gets, and at least you'll know you have 4 plays to try and recover your advantage.

The biggest thing to take away from this is that when the game starts with 10 cards, you won't ever find it back at 10 cards again for Round 3, which is why a lot of people felt the game was arena-like.

Feel free to discuss, I feel like this suggestion has a lot of merit.

Seems to be a pretty good solution too, honestly I just want them to fix this because it was the worst part of ptr for me.
Post automatically merged:

But if we accept this and enforce it, your suggestion may not really deny dry-pass, just make it a 1 card move instead of a 0 card move.

I like @Howlmoth 's suggestion better on first glance, I'll give it some more thought later.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I know this but at least is it gives a chance to the other player out thempo him blocking the 1 play pass. Otherwise any other solution is fine to me tho since they fix it.
 
But if we accept this and enforce it, your suggestion may not really deny dry-pass, just make it a 1 card move instead of a 0 card move.

This. this is the problem. because it already is exactly like this for RED. red never looses on even.


Also, I'm not a fan of the relative condition of free points. Gwent is an equation, and its imbalanced to give either player free points. What I gather is that free points are ultimately the same as phantom points, and I think its a bad idea.
I don't mind the suggestion Howlmoth put forward, but I think its making the best of a bad change. Why even embrace it?



I made a post on the feedback thread i'd like to quote, and share my new answer to drypassing.


On reflection the extra draws and hand limit are creating a weird dynamic of 3 turn skirmishes for the first 6 cards to enable dry passing.


So you can absolutely not take an opportunity to pass until you play 3 cards (typically for as much thinning as possible usually including witchers, so its actually easier to drown somebody in tempo since they CANNOT pass BEcause of card advantage).

You cant dry pass r2 unless you played at least 6 cards round 1 (so i'd push out my bronze core in a second "skirmish" of 3ish cards before either pushing for a win -1 or even; or so i'm not playing myself into a corner develop a Ciri [for +6 or with combat advantage +11 point potential card advantage play. If you don't get a card out of it you get a round out of it; both of which would be absurdly strong in open beta 15 point meta if you could actually stick it.]).

So the first problem is the first 6 cards you play aren't just against your enemy, their also against your own deck and its perhaps a bigger priority to the game in the "first period" of 3-6 cards. Second Red coin still never looses on even; even if blue passes on exactly their 4th card AND had more value on the first "skirmish", WHICH Red STILL knows exactly how many points they need even if blue used their combat advantage. AND even if red cant put forth enough points to deny a good pass, their still pretty happy to go -1 if blue does take the pass. AAAND Even if phantom points didn't force you to play a card, their still telegraphed so a good player on red wouldn't pass if blue can close it for free.


now the remaining factor is the extra mulligan, which is blues last advantage. Considering the overall reduced amount of mulligans, if you can get through R2 without "dying" and save mulligans for R3 you can acquire a quite steep advantage in card/mulligan efficiency. the issue therein is its more expensive to get a good pass, and if you spend it earlier your less likely to have a clean R2. However it also exposes the actual #1 problem:


**************
Blue and Red are now Literally playing different games and one game can be won before the other. I don't like to say the H word, but now we're just playing hearthstone without leader health, where one person can actually be dead in the water. and worse yet the game doesn't even end like when you Die in HS, you have to agonize for another 4 minutes until your out of cards or until its so painfully clear that your toast do you just smash esc. enter.
**************

in conclusion Phantom points are not an acceptable solution to the coin flip. I'm sorry so much time and faith was put into it. but I'm even sorrier if it gets pushed to live.


I have a new suggestion after playing the PTR.
Lean into dry passing, by adding a punishment. If you dry pass your opponent gains an advantage to r3 that diminishes with the length of R2. 10 points -1 for every 2 cards played in round 2.

The floor would be zero if both players drypass because both would start r3 with 10 possibly immune points. The floor would be 5 if blue chooses to bleed r2 and looses a card but gains a short round. If blue plays a single card on R2 which is the easiest to overcome in the short term, the ceiling would be 10 for R3, which without considering archetypes, can be overcome in the long term curve of your deck. Especially if you achieve card advantage by winning r2 clean. this way your edit:CHOOSING giving away points to achieve a long round vs spending points to achieve a short round; think of it as negative carryover for card advantage. Most importantly its a skill based decision that diminishes as you bleed round 2 to correct for over bleeding and round 3 length.



1. There needs to be a cost for people who refuse to pay for their first round, but it cant be pure punishment, there needs still to be a reward which in this case is still card advantage

2. The value of a dry pass needs to be more carefully weighed and tested, on open beta maybe its more like 15 - 1/turn
3. It needs to cancel out if both players dry pass
4. it needs to be disabled if round 1 is played. Whoever pays for round 1 gets a free dry pass if they don't have less carryover.

***5. This is not enough to inclusively solve the coinflip. In conjunction with a few other factors it would contribute to a proper coin flip solution.
 
I made a post on the feedback thread i'd like to quote, and share my new answer to drypassing.
Sorry but I don't think I completely follow either your arguments against free/phantom points or your new suggestion.:confused:

As you also said Red has the advantage in current Gwent, so I think it's fair to give some advantage to Blue as well. Whether points are the best kind of advantage and whether it's enough to make the game balanced is of course can be debated.

But what I gather from your suggestion, you actually want to leave everything as is and punish the Blue player for dry-passing. Getting Blue is bad enough, dry-passing is often just mitigating your disadvantage. Getting punished for it actually makes things worse in my opinion.

What I think I managed to understand is that you don't like this:
Blue and Red are now Literally playing different games and one game can be won before the other.
I think the best option to make both players' experience the most similar is one of these very old suggestions:
overcold_ice;n10501552 said:
Second Player Rule:
"A player that went second on a round can't declare a pass just after the other player declared one."
TrompeLaMort;n10534562 said:
1. Coin-flip solution: Yield! If you go first, you get a Yield card/token. It states: Draw a card and lose the round. Banish self at the end of first round.
Apply either of these for first round only.
They result in pretty much the same: both players (so not just Red) can always give up first round with +1 CA.

Of course this would pretty much eliminate the possibility of winning CA in first round, which is apparently "Gwent's identity" and whatnot. But actually the case in reality is that this possibility is only open for second player, so I'd be very happy if Gwent lost this "identity" of being completely imbalanced.

Gave some more thoughts to @Howlmoth 's suggestion, but now I'm not conviced by that either. I think it would be pretty much the same as @Rajael 's but instead of denying dry-pass for 1 turn it would do it for 3 instead leaving the core issue intact.

Right now the best I can think of is getting rid of hand limit and leaving dry-pass alone, but making playing first compelling enough that you won't automatically defer to a dry-pass.
It can be done by free points as with current TA solution or better yet actually leveling the playing field by eliminating the "win on even" scenarios with one of the suggestions I quoted.
 
Gave some more thoughts to @Howlmoth 's suggestion, but now I'm not conviced by that either. I think it would be pretty much the same as @Rajael 's but instead of denying dry-pass for 1 turn it would do it for 3 instead leaving the core issue intact.
You know it isnt drypassing anymore if you play 3 cards, right? The hole point for this discussion is, that a round isnt skipped anymore because its not worth to compete around. If you are soft-forced to play card you commit you in a way or another, so you may not lose this round. Even if the "3-Card Drypassing" is a thing then, we get at least a little bit of game in round 2.
Nobody want you to go all out in round 2, you can still pass if you are at disadvantage.
 
You know it isnt drypassing anymore if you play 3 cards, right? The hole point for this discussion is, that a round isnt skipped anymore because its not worth to compete around. If you are soft-forced to play card you commit you in a way or another, so you may not lose this round. Even if the "3-Card Drypassing" is a thing then, we get at least a little bit of game in round 2.
Nobody want you to go all out in round 2, you can still pass if you are at disadvantage.
You can call it whatever you want. :) What I mean is if you have zero incentive to play into a round you're still just gonna look for a way out the first occasion the rules allow you. Except it may already be too late because you're already behind and bound to lose CA.
I don't see forcing first player's hand in any way to play into a round a good thing right now, especially if the game is "rigged" to screw him with a high chance if he does so.

And actually I don't see how it makes the game better to force everyone playing into every round to some extent. Someone somewhere made up his mind, that this is "how it's supposed to be", but I haven't seen any meaningful arguments for it so far.
For me it's a non-issue people trying to solve with denying dry-pass.

The real issue here is that going first is ultimately worse than going second. If they can balance this somehow then dry-passing won't be such a compelling option.
That said if they actually manage to balance it, I wouldn't mind that much if they force you to play for any arbitrary number of rounds, if it makes someone feel better.:p
 
The real issue here is that going first is ultimately worse than going second. If they can balance this somehow then dry-passing won't be such a compelling option.
That said if they actually manage to balance it, I wouldn't mind that much if they force you to play for any arbitrary number of rounds, if it makes someone feel better
You already saw the measurements they took, no reason for "they will balance it" They wont, if we dont give them some ideas how to. I like the PTR-methode over the current coin-flip, but i prefere the Howlmoth solution, just because they grant a fight each round. And if it wont change anything tactical i even prefere it more, because no tactic change but more gameplay.
 
As you also said Red has the advantage in current Gwent, so I think it's fair to give some advantage to Blue as well. Whether points are the best kind of advantage and whether it's enough to make the game balanced is of course can be debated.

But what I gather from your suggestion, you actually want to leave everything as is and punish the Blue player for dry-passing. Getting Blue is bad enough, dry-passing is often just mitigating your disadvantage. Getting punished for it actually makes things worse in my opinion.

Sorry I'll try to respond more clearly this evening, but in short I absolutely would Punish blue (and in the crux of the game not the set up round/s, like TA or the free point suggestion) for taking a dry pass. The question is just by how much in my eyes?
 
Completly disagree. Hand limit is a HUGE IMPROVEMENT and part of the reason why going on blue coin doesn't feel like sht on homecoming PTR (the other being tactical advantage).

Why having to play cards on a round is a problem in the first place? That's how the game is SUPPOSED to be played. The only reason there are drypasses in the first place is an exasperation of the CA problem of the current gwent.

The biggest up is that now you can actually PLAN THE ROUND. Yes, now opening with Cynthia+Golem (Tempo Calveit), Yaevinn -> Cleaver (broover "coinflip abuse"), etc... won't make you lose the game outright if you face them on blue.

In fact now it's completly pointless to open with those tempo plays and i freaking love it. Now you can actually play for value instead, trying to establish your game plan and forcing your opponent out of the round later on.

A lot of people still play HC with the same mindset as the old one. FORGET IT, it's a different game now (imho better). You have to change your mindset.

So don't complain if you passed too early, your opponent catched r1 in 2-3 cards and then managed to get r3 at 10 cards (drypassing r2). It was YOUR mistake to allow him to control r1 that early.
You'll eventually get more used to it and learn.


Forget about tempo opening plays, CA spies, drypasses and so on. The change was made to make full use of the 3 rounds system.
 
In fact now it's completly pointless to open with those tempo plays and i freaking love it. Now you can actually play for value instead, trying to establish your game plan and forcing your opponent out of the round later on.
No. That is the giant problem. You CANT play for value the first round. You play to remove your weakest cards.
If you play for value first round while your opponent plays trash you lose the two other rounds.
 
No. That is the giant problem. You CANT play for value the first round. You play to remove your weakest cards.
If you play for value first round while your opponent plays trash you lose the two other rounds.
That's wrong. You always want to win round 1 to dictate the tempo of r2 and r3 and getting a favorable pass to retain CA (which is still an aspect of the game still relevant, just not as exasperate as it is now).

If you play your garbage and your opponent win, he can do whatever he wants. That doesn't mean you spam your best golds while your opponent play garbage bronzes.

It simply means that you have to commit enough to win r1 but not too much. That's also skill.
 
That's wrong. You always want to win round 1 to dictate the tempo of r2 and r3 and getting a favorable pass to retain CA (which is still an aspect of the game still relevant, just not as exasperate as it is now).

If you play your garbage and your opponent win, he can do whatever he wants. That doesn't mean you spam your best golds while your opponent play garbage bronzes.

It simply means that you have to commit enough to win r1 but not too much. That's also skill.
It depends on the deck a bit, really. I mainly used decks with junk on the one side and high end stuff on the other side, and it didn't matter much to me; I did give my opponent advantage to dictate tempo and last say but that usually did not help them, as I won both R2 and R3; and if you are on the red coin then your opponent cannot even try to punish you for this at all.
 
It depends on the deck a bit, really. I mainly used decks with junk on the one side and high end stuff on the other side, and it didn't matter much to me; I did give my opponent advantage to dictate tempo and last say but that usually did not help them, as I won both R2 and R3; and if you are on the red coin then your opponent cannot even try to punish you for this at all.
That is because they are still not used to it either. It will takes time to fine tune the new mechanics of gwent, and in the mean time people will experiment and try, as it should be.
 
Top Bottom