How did you work out that the "vast majority" of Gwent players are number crunchers?
By observing this community for a long time. People here (and, by extension, Reddit, Twitch streamers and their chats) have always loved to nerd over minutae such as two or three point advantages of a card over its alternatives. Maybe it's a vocal minority, but I find it unlikely - the game inself heavily promotes and even necessitates number-crunching (well, it used to...).
Maybe I can be described as a casual player, so to see that in action I'd have to play a lot of ranked matches?
That as well. But you have to be observant about what they do to even try to draw any conclusions about their personality...if they know what they're doing in the first place, which isn't always the case.
I do seem to come across a variety of player types. Sometimes I get the impression that opponents insta-quit against me because what faction I'm playing and just assume that I have some sort of dominating meta. I don't!
That's just a short-fused player type, which has no correlation with their playstyle whatsoever. Our only remaining major streamer Spyro is one of these people, too.
As for point swings, I wasn't a fan of Kolgrim and lately when I've come across him, he always has a defender to protect him. He has been nerfed though, although maybe with the new exponential growth available to the new cards, he needs to be unnerfed to make such decks competitive?
Kolgrim is a bad, bad card. It can only ever be useless or broken as hell. Even at his best, he's a tech check card - if your opponent has the right tech, you lose, if they don't, you win. And it all boils down to just one card - not to mention drawing well r1, because later your deck gets clogged hard. They should've just reworked him into something else entirely.
re Maraal, he was just an example of a simple mechanic to counter opponent's purifying your targets. When I tend to play him he's easy prey though, since the matchmaking system is rigged to always match me with opponents who have me covered and always draw better than me.
They've always denied the part about the rigged matchmaking, and yet I have, too, on multiple occasions noticed how the choosing a different deck radically changed my opponents. Could be like 20 netdecked NG opponents in a row, but then I switch to counter that (or even just add Decoy to my deck) and lo and behold! - magically not a single Joachim in sight anymore. And happened far too often to think this a coincidence.
Isn't Yrden OG? I'm assuming he always had that deploy ability until recently.
Yes. But also - what I said about necessary evil applies to the entire period of time since his release. At times he would just fall out of meta because it wasn't tall enough (so there would be no reason to consider remaking him) or be indispensable part of the game (so remaking him would upset people greatly). That's how he survived all those patches up until that one.
Which reminds me, where did you go to get that info about the changes to Puffball? Wouldn't mind having access to the source of info like that.
Some kind of database I googled up. Pretty much by "gwent database" keywords.
Whenever I've played Igni my opponents always have the ability to make only one unit on their side the tallest. Because the game is rigged that way. I really feel that I should be playing Yrden a lot with these new cards but haven't gotten around to it and the nerf makes it look a liability. Weird to nerf that card. If they nerfed the Michael Bay exponential growth engines you wouldn't need to pack Yrden. Just goes to show how the devs think. In other words, Yrden is an even more 'necessary evil' in the current state of play, and that's unnerfed too.
They just don't really care anymore, and it shows. It's all a pretense now. Have always been a bit sloppy and slow, but now they just aren't really trying to get anywhere with those changes - just create an apperance of something changing for the better as this final consolation or something.
Master Mirror
You never did get around to answering my last question about whether there are CTG which aren't broke.
I honestly have no idea. But it's enough for me to know that this one didn't have to be, and that's all that matters.
Maybe you liked pre-MM Gwent because it was broken to your liking?
It was broken to anyone's liking. In that almost anything had a fair shot, no matter your preferred playstyle. Very few cards were truly "dead" and pointless.
I still like my idea of using simulations to test cards and decks. Wonder why they don't do it as it can't be that complicated, you'd think.
...but that's only assuming you actually care about the player experience and future of the game.
By "rigid", I just meant some general, formulaic features of deck building. Perhaps it could be along the lines of you getting to choose a certain number of units from a certain number of tiers and the same for special cards.
With all due respect, no. The whole point of the provision system is that was that you could distribute your total points any way you wanted - either hyper-polarize your deck, or make it more rounded, and that worked just fine when that total amount of points was roughly the same for every deck, regardless of the exact proportions of gold/bronze.
Wonder if things like not having a deck made exclusively of units should be a thing too. When the community is in charge, there will be a chance for creativity. With some constraints on mods, perhaps there could be some interesting 'new' special cards say which can vary effects in useful ways. E.g. varying a 6 point damage card to have a variant which maybe damages an opponent by 3 and boosts one of your own units by 3 or some other set of 'split' effects like that.
All-special/artifact decks used to exist in the past...those were some of the stupidest metas ever. Amusing, but stupid nonetheless. Ultimately, gwent is built to work around units, and more than just one you would drop in the end to win.
Is Pro Rank going to be a thing when the community takes over? I feel cheated by CDPR because I fulfilled the gameplay requirements of obtaining that rank but it wasn't give to me.
You needed to tick the prorank regulations in your options. as you probably know now. Yeah, not super obvious, but nothing that broke the game.
I supposed the ability to chat with them could be useful, as in suggesting that you both play slow decks each other but I never found that practical and there's the obstacle of typing using a controller which is a pain in the arse.
...and then we'd steal the title of the most toxic community ever from DotA, heh...
Easy to learn, hard to master for me. The new abilities just adds to the sum of knowledge you need to learn to play effectively and I really can't be arsed doing that.
That, however, is inevitable with card games! They can't exist without printing new stuff...It just doesn't have to be as contrived as tricky Infusions are...and so strong as to push older archetypes out of meta effortlessly.
Maybe those new abilities are some sort of IQ test for nerds but they're nowhere near as fun as those language based tricksy cards that you read as working in a certain way and when they don't, you feel cheated by them but then realise that they're just doing what they say do. That's a sort of IQ test and you don't have to constantly learn about new abilities etc.
And to that I say - to each their own! And that it was possible to strike some sort of balance between those, they aren't antonymic in any way.
By "improved", I was referencing my comment about apps and websites being improved so much that they break. Do you have that happen to a lot? Something needs to be updated for 'improvements' and it bricks your whatever and breaks it? I'm wondering if the provision cap has been lifted recently. Just an impression that it may have been.
A while ago I asked a question on this board about contracts and skins. Maybe you know the answer? I'll try and find a link to this and add it below.
I.e. when choosing to pick a leader, I see that some options have one or two skins seemingly available to choose but when you choose them, the choice won't save. I've asked this question here some weeks ago [...]. So, where do I post this question? I'll give more details once I know where to...
forums.cdprojektred.com
My question on contracts concerned the "Choose your poison" contract. I'm wondering if that was limited to a certain event or time as I've met the criteria many times over and it still hasn't dropped. From memory, a contract with the same criteria except needing more wins was unlocked by me, which makes this one not unlocking passing strange.
No idea, unfortunately.
