Adding an option to accept or reject the opponent match up

[Nathan277]

Broken/horrid decks to play against are far from a 'Homecoming' thing. Hell, in closed beta there were even worse ones out there. Thing is though, eventually they bothered to address them. Consume, Casino Dwarves, Brouver coinflip, Fringilla nonsense and so forth. Broken fundamentals in beta Gwent were blue coin and blacklisting. The amount of broken mechanics in Homecoming has multiplied tenfold and complaints often go beyond specific cards, decks and combos.

I suggest looking at the control deck of old, Alchemy Nilfgaard, and comparing the amount of removal in there with an average meta deck today. This game started as hyper control (Eithne artifacts) vs point vomiting (Woodland Monsters) and in essence apart from new shiny statuses and cards the game, in my opinion, has not genuinely evolved from that as much as it should have.

As far as OP's idea goes, I get the frustration and the fact you have that idea. But of course it doesn't solve anything.
They added defenders with what I assume was the intention to safe guard people from removal but have unwittingly buffed it (as removal engines/orders now hide behind it) the same thing would happen here. Players playing loathed decks would simply avoid their bad matchups and harass those who don't have their own filter turned on.

It's like if you made the coinflip alternate between blue and red for you every other match. It wouldn't solve the issue, people would simply make coin specific decks knowing they're guaranteed blue or red.

Take poison for example, a mechanic seemingly loathed unanimously, how are you to avoid that through blacklisting a faction? 3 Factions are abusing it. They happen to be the 3 strongest factions at that. Are you gonna (be allowed to) blacklist all of them? No, the mechanic itself should be worked on instead.

 

[Guest 4398794]

Can you now see why it's a bad idea? If not, try to refute my points.

Yes, I can, and I understand all, and understood before too.

But the fact is, that it would impact only casual unranked classic mode.

The real deal, where players are competitive, meaning Ranked mode, would still be the same.

Imagine like that:
Car race with F1 cars, but your tired of Ferrari wins all, so you choose the "unranked" street race mode and you don't allow in any Ferrari because you're annoyed and don't have chance.
The race would still be fun with shiti cars too, and ferraris could still have their thing in their ranked "f1" mode.
That's all I'm saying. Not that I want to win all, or ruin every op or just annoying decks in the game.
Just difrent place for different people for different reasons with different stakes and goals.
Btw. I didn't meant to be a solution for broken things in game, is a solution to still have will to play the game until the mess is not that big mess.

 

[4RM3D]

Yes, I can, and I understand all, and understood before too.

If you truly understand my points, then you would have also understood it applies to casual too (as well as ranked). BTW, your analogy doesn't work either, for those same reasons and more. However, I am not going to repeat myself. In my previous post, I've explained it all. That's all I have to say about it.

 

[Guest 4398794]

If you truly understand my points, then you would have also understood it applies to casual too (as well as ranked). BTW, your analogy doesn't work either, for those same reasons and more. However, I am not going to repeat myself. In my previous post, I've explained it all. That's all I have to say about it.

Yeah it was a bad example.
All I'm saying is that we can have both in the game in two different modes of the game, and everyone is happy.
Because let's be realistic here, the game will never be balanced, and there will always be some broken things in the game, and until the current broken is fixed or the future broken things will be fixed, there will always be a place to chill

 

[4RM3D]

All I'm saying is that we can have both in the game in two different modes of the game, and everyone is happy.

You cannot know if everyone is going to be happy. Like I have said, it's possible players are going to hate the fact that their deck/faction gets blacklisted more than the alternative. They are going to notice because of the other reasons I have explained.

As an alternative, you could suggest to create a separate casual mode with blacklisting (having two casual modes). This, however, unnecessarily splits the player base. The devs cannot make a new game mode for every deviation because players do not like one aspect thereof.

So, you, personally, think it's a great idea. However, you have to look at every aspect and think about how other players would feel about such a suggestion. I know that's not an easy thing to do. That's why I am not blaming you. I just want you to keep an open mind.

Controversially, hypothetically speaking, if the vast majority wants a blacklist/reject mechanism in casual and this is a proven statistical fact, then by all means, go for it. Even when it's still a bad idea, just let the players have what they (think they) want and it will sort itself out as either a failed experiment that needs to be undone or something that does indeed make the players happy.

 

[Guest 4398794]

Controversially, hypothetically speaking, if the vast majority wants a blacklist/reject mechanism in casual and this is a proven statistical fact, then by all means, go for it. Even when it's still a bad idea, just let the players have what they (think they) want and it will sort itself out as either a failed experiment that needs to be undone or something that does indeed make the players happy.

I could buy in that.

 

[replayNinja]

Take poison for example, a mechanic seemingly loathed unanimously, how are you to avoid that through blacklisting a faction? 3 Factions are abusing it. They happen to be the 3 strongest factions at that. Are you gonna (be allowed to) blacklist all of them? No, the mechanic itself should be worked on instead.

Realistically the mechanic isn't going to be balanced anytime soon. Ppl have been complaining about it for some time now and it's only gotten worse with double ball. 3 factions are not abusing poison....with SY and ST the issue isn't so much poison as it is the factions themselves that need balancing. If SY coin system was balanced then poison would not be an issue and it's a similar situation with ST where it's the other OP mechanics surrounding poison that is the issue. NG however is a clear culprit. No one is saying the poison mechanic shouldn't be balanced but we know that will not happen anytime soon, if at all since the Devs have clearly opted not to make it a priority so having an alternative option would be welcomed in my book

 

[Archbandit]

I've just had the classic: "Do nothing until the last second every F***g turn" game. It is incredibly annoying and the person on the other end is doing it deliberately and so is ... (apparently you can only praise people yet the amount of invective thrown around indicates there are - at least some, as some may be unjustified - people who cause such ire).

I'm still undecided on the vote, however, as I think it masks bigger problems the same as 'net decks'. I have avoided these and pretty much other things like the tactic above unless I get too annoyed and reciprocate because ...well, they have time on their hands, I'll read a book. I do consider that there are too many people who 'have' to win out there and, I suspect, none of them are likely to end up competing at the highest level. I've played good players and they don't rely on cheap tricks or gamesmanship; they're just good.

 

[Celadyl]

Gwent needs matchmaking filters. who doesnt know the situation. you may want to fool around with an off-meta deck or some meme deck, or maybe you just want to take a step back from the ever repeating ranked matchups and queue some non ranked. maybe you're thinking "anything but SW SK" or "anything but NG" and what happens... yeah you get queued up against the same decks as in ranked over and over and over again. sometimes this happens to an extend that actually makes me angry, in a game I want to have fun in.

I hereby suggest adding matchmaking filters to gwent, so you can in a way "ban" certain factions or leaders when queuing non ranked.

seriously it's annoying me to no end why people play the same top tier decks even in unranked. why? is it that fun playing the same netdeck for weeks on end?`
guess my rant comes to an end here. I guessed I could just as well make a suggestion to make the game more enjoyable.

 

[4RM3D]

Gwent needs matchmaking filters.

No, it most certainly does not. It's a terrible idea for numerous reason, which have all been mentioned before. So, without further ado, thread merged.

 

[Slizzl]

This would basically be admitting they can't balance a CCG and have given up. Definitely not.

 

[Six-Sided-Prism]

This would basically be admitting they can't balance a CCG and have given up. Definitely not.

They may not have given up, but CDPR has all but admitted that they know absolutely nothing about balancing a CCG. They might as well add additional filters for Casual mode, so players can attempt to avoid the overpowered meta decks. It honestly couldn't make things any worse.

 

[Menelaus234]

I wouldn't mind being able to reject a matchup in unranked when i'm testing a new leader and run into lockdown NG or SW but saving less than a minute of time is pretty marginal compared to just forfeiting vs. the effort needed to code this into the game.

 

[Aris_Tarkus]

I wouldn't mind seeing something that would balance out the factions of opponents if possible, if only to avoid playing 50% of my games against NG.

 

[Archbandit]

I've just come across a type of player (because it is a type of player, one who copies) with the Demon/Gernichora fruit combo a few times. If I don't have the cards I can't stop that. Not quite legalised cheating but it makes NG seem positively fair and there are too many bad gimmicks around this game. In casual, I think you should either make a better game (we know that won't happen) or we allow the chance to bail because all it does is waste your time while someone acts like an arse. Not just with this combo; you get it a lot. I think in the game proper (the competition), you get what you're given. In casual, as there seem to be a ton of people who want to win, but not compete (that's the modern world for you) you should be given the chance to avoid them and possibly even a list (would have to be infinitely long) of people who you could say you wouldn't want to play again once you'd played them.

Alternatively they could fix the game as in put some work into it, but see the above and many other comments made in that vein. The thing about this game is that after the intial 'rush', the more you play the more you see the flaws and how unenjoyable it is. It's most enjoyable when you are matched against someone of comparable skill (and card set) and when there are no shenanigans. Yet that happens very infrequently and the control of that is in CDPR's hands as much as the players (shenanigans).

So initially I voted against this. Several weeks later I now vote for it. That's bad because the very idea is divisive and counter to what the game should be about but if playing it is terrible then it becomes a case of that or the ultimate case of simply leave.

 

[4RM3D]

[...] allow the chance to bail [...]

That's already in the game. It's called forfeiting.

In casual, there is no penalty to forfeiting. So, if you see you cannot beat the opponent, just forfeit and move on. But I would at least wait and see if the opponent plays the deck you think (s)he's playing and whether or not (s)he has a bad hand.

 

[Gimme_a_break]

I've got over 2000 hours of Gwent play, so you would think I like playing this game very much, and that is true to some degree. What I like the most is getting reward points, unlocking nodes in reward book, collecting cards, building decks based on a random idea. The latter is what I consider the biggest advantage of this game, as it gives so many options to combine various ideas. Now I do understand, that most people are the type of competitors, that value wins over fun, but I am curious of your opinion, whether these people aren't dragging this game down. The biggest (IMO) asset of this game is being constantly diminished by the common use of netdecks. Bear in mind I'm not talking about pro rank here, where it's understandable to use the most effective deck(s), as by definition the end result (ranking position) matters. I'm referring to lower ranks, casual and seasonal games. I would assume these are the games where you would expect to see a wide variety of decks based on dozens of different ideas, yet since long ago we keep observing the spread of 'netdeck pandemic' (netdeck is like a virus - effective, spreads fast and makes a lot of damage to the body (Gwent playerbase)). The result of this is (in my case, but I believe in case of many other people) the disinterest, boredom, frustration. In 'pre-pandemic' times I could spend entire day playing gwent, but since many months doing just 1 round of daily crowns is a tiring experience. No matter if I play casual, or seasonal modes, in 8/10 cases the matchmaking will draw me a netdecker. After being 'entertained' by a swarm of netdeckers, you close the game, check out your favourite Twitch streamer, and the netdeckers are already there waiting for you to watch how they 'play' (quotation marks used intentionally, as I don't consider this a play, but merely an execution of a strictly defined sequence of laying down the cards - a bot or monkey could do that).

So when the pleasure of playing a game is diminishing, the outcome may be the efflux of players. Of course the fact that myself and many other people do not like, or consider the netdeckers as players, won't cause them to suddenly disappear and make the game enjoyable again, but maybe we could collect some ideas here that would get noticed and hopefully implemented in the future.

(below refers just to casual and seasonal modes)
What if we had some way to:
- blacklist a player - let's say a season long temporary blacklist would prevent being drawn against the same individual, or
- blacklist a deck - say a deck has some hash number (some number calculated based on cards IDs), then if at some point you played against that deck several times and you're bored/disgusted with it enough already, then you could blacklist it, so next time the matchmaking detects, that someone uses a deck with the same hash number (meaning the same netdeck built of the exact same cards), it will make sure you won't get drawn against it.

This in my opinion could decrease the 8/10 ratio and bring the joy back.

Your thoughts on pandemic and vaccine?

 

[bojerbela]

My thoughts: it's a shame, that PRO RANK PLAYERS play Tier 1 netdecks in Casual! Go Pro and play your netdecks there and let the others play for fun! Something must be done, because this game becomes unplayable for players, who don't play competitive. I don't play Ranked, I want to play for fun, but it is recently impossible: in Seasonal you can see the same 4-5 decks; in Ranked other 4-5 decks only. Some can think, good I play some Casual for fun...but NO! Pro players with T1 netdecks there!

I'm really upset now...I can't play a normal match anymore.

 

[Nerevarine228]

I feel you, OP.
My solution to this was to design several decks whose sole purpose was to grief the hell out of netdeckers. I don't care they're kinda bad in some unusual matchups, humiliating a t1 abuser is a win in itself. Here's the general pattern - you need to pointslam R1 as hard as possible, so go for tempo and best engines available, and in R3 you play as low-unit as you can and serve them last second annihilation (dragon's dream, Heimdall, Crushing Trap, Surrender, Double Tinboy, Yrden, anything goes, even Cadaverine is a fair game), while preparing some kind of big value reuptake (Aglais does it best, Dagur is possible as well, Jutta+Resto cheese can work with some protection, you name it).

Cancel their engines value with Yrden, deny them removal targets, use movement wisely and nuke them into oblivion with generous amounts of row punish. Obviously, skip Yrden against Warriors.
Toxic decks deserve toxic answers.

 

[judgecsk]

I've got over 2000 hours of Gwent play, so you would think I like playing this game very much, and that is true to some degree. What I like the most is getting reward points, unlocking nodes in reward book, collecting cards, building decks based on a random idea. The latter is what I consider the biggest advantage of this game, as it gives so many options to combine various ideas. Now I do understand, that most people are the type of competitors, that value wins over fun, but I am curious of your opinion, whether these people aren't dragging this game down. The biggest (IMO) asset of this game is being constantly diminished by the common use of netdecks. Bear in mind I'm not talking about pro rank here, where it's understandable to use the most effective deck(s), as by definition the end result (ranking position) matters. I'm referring to lower ranks, casual and seasonal games. I would assume these are the games where you would expect to see a wide variety of decks based on dozens of different ideas, yet since long ago we keep observing the spread of 'netdeck pandemic' (netdeck is like a virus - effective, spreads fast and makes a lot of damage to the body (Gwent playerbase)). The result of this is (in my case, but I believe in case of many other people) the disinterest, boredom, frustration. In 'pre-pandemic' times I could spend entire day playing gwent, but since many months doing just 1 round of daily crowns is a tiring experience. No matter if I play casual, or seasonal modes, in 8/10 cases the matchmaking will draw me a netdecker. After being 'entertained' by a swarm of netdeckers, you close the game, check out your favourite Twitch streamer, and the netdeckers are already there waiting for you to watch how they 'play' (quotation marks used intentionally, as I don't consider this a play, but merely an execution of a strictly defined sequence of laying down the cards - a bot or monkey could do that).

So when the pleasure of playing a game is diminishing, the outcome may be the efflux of players. Of course the fact that myself and many other people do not like, or consider the netdeckers as players, won't cause them to suddenly disappear and make the game enjoyable again, but maybe we could collect some ideas here that would get noticed and hopefully implemented in the future.

(below refers just to casual and seasonal modes)
What if we had some way to:
- blacklist a player - let's say a season long temporary blacklist would prevent being drawn against the same individual, or
- blacklist a deck - say a deck has some hash number (some number calculated based on cards IDs), then if at some point you played against that deck several times and you're bored/disgusted with it enough already, then you could blacklist it, so next time the matchmaking detects, that someone uses a deck with the same hash number (meaning the same netdeck built of the exact same cards), it will make sure you won't get drawn against it.

This in my opinion could decrease the 8/10 ratio and bring the joy back.

Your thoughts on pandemic and vaccine?

- I agree 100% with what you're saying.
Let's think about it though, you can't rationaly expect for people to stop using Netdecks completely, all you can hope for is that there are *proper* foundations to promote this behaviour (from the dev side).

Imo and from what've read about the game, people have been using netdecks in casual for a long time now, the latest journey just exacerbated the issue since people need to grind more (almost 2 hours/day if not more).
That one thing on it's own takes the "netdecking issue" to a whole new level, considering that most of players that play gwent wanna play it casualy (play 1-2hours/day tops, maybe skip a day in between).

- I expect this "netdecking phenomenon" to subside a bit after the journey is done, atm imo it feels exactly like the last day of a game week (people rushing to finish weeklies), every one is rushing to get as many lvls they can to reach the pretty tall journey level of 175.