Developing Prope Concepts for Card Evaluation and Balance Discussion
The Beta has is upon us and heated discussion about Balance has already begun. The goal of this Thread is to improve this sort of discussion by providing basic concepts for card evaluation and a basic outline of the concept of "Balance" itself.
Over the life span of most other collectible card games (or tradeable card games) the playerbase develops concepts in order to help them understand how good/bad a card really is. If you are familar with the genres you will have heard of them. Examples are "Vanilla test", "Card Advantage", "Tempo" among a myriad of others. These concepts are often applicable to almost all games of the genre since the games are often similar enough (Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone are prime examples of this). Gwent however is a another case, the framework is fundamentally different in a couple of ways:
- Cards are your only ressource (there is no such thing as Mana)
- You can only play one card per turn
- You have to play a card every turn
- Card draw is very limited
- Cards on your side of the board have no basic mechanic to interact with your opponnents side of the board
- The basic game mode is a best of three, but played with one hand (no such thing as player life count etc.)
- others (honestly there are too many to list them in a )
Since Gwent is so different concepts that were developed for other games do not work for Gwent. We have to develope our own. I do have some ideas which should be a good starting point but I am sure they can be improved upon, which is where the rest of the community (you guys) comes in. Here we go.
I believe that two core concepts should suffice for very basic card evaluation. I label them as "strength differential" and "turn cost" for now (if anyone has a better name, feel free to suggest them
) These two concepts should make many different cards comparable, even cards of different types (such as Spells and Units).
Strength Differential
The goal of a game of Gwent is to gain more strength than your opponnent, in 2 out of 3 rounds. So the first important part of a card is to consider how much strength it adds to your side or how much strength it detracts from you opponents side when played. The more it does of either of those things the better the card is.
Basics
The simplest example is plain hero card such as Geralt. Geralt adds a 12 strength to your side so he has a basic strength differential of +12 when played.
The other way to affect a cards strength differential is by decreasing the strength your opponnents has on his side of the board. Imagine you opponent has 2 Dun Banner Light Cavalry (2 plain 7 strength units) in play , you have none. If you now play Scorch you remove 16 (2*8 )strength from your opponents side which results in a strength differential of +16 for you (-16 for your opponent).
Scorch is a great example to show that strength differential is not static. If you play Scorch on an empty board it has a strength differential of 0. So strength differentialbe is variable. It depends on the particular game state a card is played in. Variables that influence the game state are cards on the board, cards in the two decks, cards in the two hands, cards in two graveyards and the two faction leader abilities.
Floor/Ceiling
Two concepts that are important to consider here are the "floor" and the "ceiling" of a card.
The "floor" of a card refers to its worst case scenario. For Geralt the Floor is essentially +12 since there are no cards in the game right now that decrease a gold cards power when it enters the board. For Scorch this would be -X if you control the unit(s) with the most power.
The "ceiling" of a card refers to its best case scenario The ceiling for Geralt is somewhere in 200+ (if he brings back a buffed roach for instance). For scorch the ceiling is theoretically somwhere above 1000.
Variance and Card Flexibility
Now that we know what floor and a ceiling mean we can talk about the variance of cards. Think of the floor and ceiling of a card as two ends of a spectrum. In between them there are many different possible game states in which particular cards has different strength differentials. These include all possible game states which are a ton for every card. Geralt seems like a simple card but as mentioned above his ceiling can be much higher than his basic strength differential. Still his variabilty pales in comparison to Scorch which has a floor of somewhere around -1000 and a ceiling of somewhere around +1000.
The first question we have to ask: Across all possible game states how often and by how much does a cards strength differential actually differ?
As described above Geralt has a pretty high ceiling but in the vast majority of possible game states he is going to have strength differential of +12. Compared to other cards that is still pretty good. Cards that have are good (have a high strength differential) in most different game states can be described as "flexible".
Scorch on the other hand is all over the place. There are many scenarios where playing scorch would actually decrease your strength total. Cards that have different strength values in most game states are "inflexible".
The second question we have to ask then is: How likely is it for these different possible game states to occur?
Remember there are 9 variables that affect the game state: cards on the board, cards in the two decks, cards in the two hands, cards in the two graveyards and the two faction leader abilities.
Four of the players can affect before a match starts. The cards which they include in their decks and the Leader they choose. For ease we call the combination "deck". Players will always consider some decks better than others. Most often the number of decks which are considered good is fairly small. Most players will actually try to use decks that are considered good. Also often some decks might differ slightly but be centered around the same archetype containing mostly the same cards. The collection of these dominant archetypes is commonly refered to as the "meta".
Thes factors the narrow number of possible game states that are likely to occur down considerably. Players can further directly impact the 9 variables mentioned above during play (to what degree depends on the deck choices) decreasing the number of likely, possible game states even more.
This means that cards that are considered highly inflexible on paper can be very flexible within a given Meta. Take Clear Skies for example. In a Meta where many decks run weather cards this card is going to be very flexible, it is going to have a strength differential in many of the likely game states. However if no deck in the Meta runs weather cards then Clear Skies will not have a high strength differential in many likely, possible game states.
Turn Cost/Advantage
In Gwent every card in your hand represents a turn. You can only play one card per turn and you have to play a card if you don't want to pass the round. Having more turns available to you is generally advantageous. Imagine you have won the first round and you have more cards in hand than your opponnent. You can essentially run him/her out of cards since they can't pass without risking losing the game on the spot.
A good way to think of this is that the majority of the cards have a "Turn Cost" of -1. By playing them you decrease the number of cards in your hand by 1. But there are some cards that add cards to your hand. The good old Decoy for instance has Turn Cost of 0, you play it (--1) and then get a card back to your hand (+1).
These concepts should suffice to evaluate cards. In order to compare Card Combos and Groups of Cards you just have to calculate the values for both concepts and add them up. How important Strength Differential in comparison Turn Cost is (and vice versa) is hard to tell without playing the game so we will have to wait till October to answer that question.
Properly evaluating cards is important for understanding the game, deck building and tactical decision making. However it is also important when talking about balance. In order to understand how card evaluation factors into balance. To make this easier the next section is about the basics of balance and what questions are interesting when talking about the balance of Gwent.
Basics of Balance
Balance is a complex topic and an attempt to explain it fully would take far too long (and probably bore you to death). So we are going to focus on capturing and understanding the core idea of balance.
Most people base their conception of Balance on the idea of Fairness. Fairness is concept that is used in many different situations but when it comes to games it is mostly used in relation to competitive games (e.g. Counter Strike, League of Legends, Chess). In those games players directly compete with each other and such a game is fair if every competing player/team has an equal chance to win the game. This is easily achievable in symmetrical games. In these games every player has the same set of starting options. It gets more problematic in asymmetrical games where players have different sets of starting options (e.g. in chess white moves first). So far so good but why should (or do) we care about fairness/balance?
A good place to start the search for an answer to this question is a quote from Sid Meier (creator of the Civilization Series, Pirates, Alpha Centauri and other great games):
If you are making a decisions you choose in between at least two options. If only one option is viable then the decision becomes redundant since you will choose that option every time. Such a decision can not be interesting.
So for a decision to be possibly interesting you have to have at least two viable options. This does not mean that if you have two viable options the decisions is interesting but that if you don't, the decision can not be interesting.
What makes an option potentially viable? It has to be as good or better as any other option in at least one situation from a certain perspective. That perspective is often the "playing to win" mentality, whose primary goal is to win the game (in competitive games).
So how many options need to be viable for a decision to be interesting ? All possible options ? 90% ? 55.58% ? At this point we get into difficult territory. One thing we can say for certain though: If an option is never viable it is redundant and if all options are equally viable in every situation the choice becomes meaningless. If an option fulfills this condition it is not necessarily viable but if it does not fulfill this conditions it can not be viable
Gwent (like almost all games) has several levels of decisions. Before you play a game you choose a faction, then you choose a character, then you choose which units to put in your deck. The top of those levels is the faction choice. Here the answer to question raised above is simpel. Ideally all factions should be equally viable. From here you can go down the chain. It is important to remember that is most useful to compare different options of the same choice since they are in direct competition.
To sum this section up: Balance is about identifying the viability of options. Identifying is the key here. Balance poses problems but does not answer them, that is the job of design as a whole. To clarify this issue think of a game as an equation with many (and I mean many) variables representing all the parts of the game that influence a certain balance issue. When thinking of balance you want the equation to have a certain outcome lets call it: "Balanced". Often when people make suggestions that aim to make a game more balanced they act as if a ton of those variables are constants and their suggestion is the only way to achieve the wanted outcome. The assumed constants however are in fact variables and worse they also represent parts of the game that influence other important aspects of the game (such as "Thematic" or even the most important of them all "Fun"). Balance is a condition that is necessary (to some degree) but not sueffecient for a good game.
This thread is essentially a necro of a thread I made september. I have updated the whole thing and added the Variance section. Still this thing is very much work in progress so feedback of all kinds is much appreciated
The Beta has is upon us and heated discussion about Balance has already begun. The goal of this Thread is to improve this sort of discussion by providing basic concepts for card evaluation and a basic outline of the concept of "Balance" itself.
Over the life span of most other collectible card games (or tradeable card games) the playerbase develops concepts in order to help them understand how good/bad a card really is. If you are familar with the genres you will have heard of them. Examples are "Vanilla test", "Card Advantage", "Tempo" among a myriad of others. These concepts are often applicable to almost all games of the genre since the games are often similar enough (Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone are prime examples of this). Gwent however is a another case, the framework is fundamentally different in a couple of ways:
- Cards are your only ressource (there is no such thing as Mana)
- You can only play one card per turn
- You have to play a card every turn
- Card draw is very limited
- Cards on your side of the board have no basic mechanic to interact with your opponnents side of the board
- The basic game mode is a best of three, but played with one hand (no such thing as player life count etc.)
- others (honestly there are too many to list them in a )
Since Gwent is so different concepts that were developed for other games do not work for Gwent. We have to develope our own. I do have some ideas which should be a good starting point but I am sure they can be improved upon, which is where the rest of the community (you guys) comes in. Here we go.
I believe that two core concepts should suffice for very basic card evaluation. I label them as "strength differential" and "turn cost" for now (if anyone has a better name, feel free to suggest them
Strength Differential
The goal of a game of Gwent is to gain more strength than your opponnent, in 2 out of 3 rounds. So the first important part of a card is to consider how much strength it adds to your side or how much strength it detracts from you opponents side when played. The more it does of either of those things the better the card is.
Basics
The simplest example is plain hero card such as Geralt. Geralt adds a 12 strength to your side so he has a basic strength differential of +12 when played.
The other way to affect a cards strength differential is by decreasing the strength your opponnents has on his side of the board. Imagine you opponent has 2 Dun Banner Light Cavalry (2 plain 7 strength units) in play , you have none. If you now play Scorch you remove 16 (2*8 )strength from your opponents side which results in a strength differential of +16 for you (-16 for your opponent).
Scorch is a great example to show that strength differential is not static. If you play Scorch on an empty board it has a strength differential of 0. So strength differentialbe is variable. It depends on the particular game state a card is played in. Variables that influence the game state are cards on the board, cards in the two decks, cards in the two hands, cards in two graveyards and the two faction leader abilities.
Floor/Ceiling
Two concepts that are important to consider here are the "floor" and the "ceiling" of a card.
The "floor" of a card refers to its worst case scenario. For Geralt the Floor is essentially +12 since there are no cards in the game right now that decrease a gold cards power when it enters the board. For Scorch this would be -X if you control the unit(s) with the most power.
The "ceiling" of a card refers to its best case scenario The ceiling for Geralt is somewhere in 200+ (if he brings back a buffed roach for instance). For scorch the ceiling is theoretically somwhere above 1000.
Variance and Card Flexibility
Now that we know what floor and a ceiling mean we can talk about the variance of cards. Think of the floor and ceiling of a card as two ends of a spectrum. In between them there are many different possible game states in which particular cards has different strength differentials. These include all possible game states which are a ton for every card. Geralt seems like a simple card but as mentioned above his ceiling can be much higher than his basic strength differential. Still his variabilty pales in comparison to Scorch which has a floor of somewhere around -1000 and a ceiling of somewhere around +1000.
The first question we have to ask: Across all possible game states how often and by how much does a cards strength differential actually differ?
As described above Geralt has a pretty high ceiling but in the vast majority of possible game states he is going to have strength differential of +12. Compared to other cards that is still pretty good. Cards that have are good (have a high strength differential) in most different game states can be described as "flexible".
Scorch on the other hand is all over the place. There are many scenarios where playing scorch would actually decrease your strength total. Cards that have different strength values in most game states are "inflexible".
The second question we have to ask then is: How likely is it for these different possible game states to occur?
Remember there are 9 variables that affect the game state: cards on the board, cards in the two decks, cards in the two hands, cards in the two graveyards and the two faction leader abilities.
Four of the players can affect before a match starts. The cards which they include in their decks and the Leader they choose. For ease we call the combination "deck". Players will always consider some decks better than others. Most often the number of decks which are considered good is fairly small. Most players will actually try to use decks that are considered good. Also often some decks might differ slightly but be centered around the same archetype containing mostly the same cards. The collection of these dominant archetypes is commonly refered to as the "meta".
Thes factors the narrow number of possible game states that are likely to occur down considerably. Players can further directly impact the 9 variables mentioned above during play (to what degree depends on the deck choices) decreasing the number of likely, possible game states even more.
This means that cards that are considered highly inflexible on paper can be very flexible within a given Meta. Take Clear Skies for example. In a Meta where many decks run weather cards this card is going to be very flexible, it is going to have a strength differential in many of the likely game states. However if no deck in the Meta runs weather cards then Clear Skies will not have a high strength differential in many likely, possible game states.
Turn Cost/Advantage
In Gwent every card in your hand represents a turn. You can only play one card per turn and you have to play a card if you don't want to pass the round. Having more turns available to you is generally advantageous. Imagine you have won the first round and you have more cards in hand than your opponnent. You can essentially run him/her out of cards since they can't pass without risking losing the game on the spot.
A good way to think of this is that the majority of the cards have a "Turn Cost" of -1. By playing them you decrease the number of cards in your hand by 1. But there are some cards that add cards to your hand. The good old Decoy for instance has Turn Cost of 0, you play it (--1) and then get a card back to your hand (+1).
These concepts should suffice to evaluate cards. In order to compare Card Combos and Groups of Cards you just have to calculate the values for both concepts and add them up. How important Strength Differential in comparison Turn Cost is (and vice versa) is hard to tell without playing the game so we will have to wait till October to answer that question.
Properly evaluating cards is important for understanding the game, deck building and tactical decision making. However it is also important when talking about balance. In order to understand how card evaluation factors into balance. To make this easier the next section is about the basics of balance and what questions are interesting when talking about the balance of Gwent.
Basics of Balance
Balance is a complex topic and an attempt to explain it fully would take far too long (and probably bore you to death). So we are going to focus on capturing and understanding the core idea of balance.
Most people base their conception of Balance on the idea of Fairness. Fairness is concept that is used in many different situations but when it comes to games it is mostly used in relation to competitive games (e.g. Counter Strike, League of Legends, Chess). In those games players directly compete with each other and such a game is fair if every competing player/team has an equal chance to win the game. This is easily achievable in symmetrical games. In these games every player has the same set of starting options. It gets more problematic in asymmetrical games where players have different sets of starting options (e.g. in chess white moves first). So far so good but why should (or do) we care about fairness/balance?
A good place to start the search for an answer to this question is a quote from Sid Meier (creator of the Civilization Series, Pirates, Alpha Centauri and other great games):
If you are making a decisions you choose in between at least two options. If only one option is viable then the decision becomes redundant since you will choose that option every time. Such a decision can not be interesting.
So for a decision to be possibly interesting you have to have at least two viable options. This does not mean that if you have two viable options the decisions is interesting but that if you don't, the decision can not be interesting.
What makes an option potentially viable? It has to be as good or better as any other option in at least one situation from a certain perspective. That perspective is often the "playing to win" mentality, whose primary goal is to win the game (in competitive games).
So how many options need to be viable for a decision to be interesting ? All possible options ? 90% ? 55.58% ? At this point we get into difficult territory. One thing we can say for certain though: If an option is never viable it is redundant and if all options are equally viable in every situation the choice becomes meaningless. If an option fulfills this condition it is not necessarily viable but if it does not fulfill this conditions it can not be viable
Gwent (like almost all games) has several levels of decisions. Before you play a game you choose a faction, then you choose a character, then you choose which units to put in your deck. The top of those levels is the faction choice. Here the answer to question raised above is simpel. Ideally all factions should be equally viable. From here you can go down the chain. It is important to remember that is most useful to compare different options of the same choice since they are in direct competition.
To sum this section up: Balance is about identifying the viability of options. Identifying is the key here. Balance poses problems but does not answer them, that is the job of design as a whole. To clarify this issue think of a game as an equation with many (and I mean many) variables representing all the parts of the game that influence a certain balance issue. When thinking of balance you want the equation to have a certain outcome lets call it: "Balanced". Often when people make suggestions that aim to make a game more balanced they act as if a ton of those variables are constants and their suggestion is the only way to achieve the wanted outcome. The assumed constants however are in fact variables and worse they also represent parts of the game that influence other important aspects of the game (such as "Thematic" or even the most important of them all "Fun"). Balance is a condition that is necessary (to some degree) but not sueffecient for a good game.
This thread is essentially a necro of a thread I made september. I have updated the whole thing and added the Variance section. Still this thing is very much work in progress so feedback of all kinds is much appreciated