December 7, 2010
Recently, I got to spend a Sunday attending DMF Los Angeles, the first competitive event that used Worldbreaker. I love watching players enjoy new cards; each card set exists as this abstract Excel file for so long that I often forget the cards will turn into something real one day. Watching people have fun with the end result is the best part of my job (besides hearing Ben Cichoski quietly sing along to whatever pop song is coming through his Pandora feed).
I got a lot of positive feedback about the set from both familiar faces and new players, or at least new to me. Even factoring in some leeway (someone has to be pretty angry to go up to a stranger and tell them they think their work sucks), the conversations I had were overwhelmingly positive. Goblin, Worgens, Stash, Dragons—people were talking about how much they enjoyed these mechanics in Limited and how they couldn’t wait to start building around a couple of choice cards in Constructed. However, there was one bit of negative feedback I heard a few times: “Why are all the quests so bad?”
This was no accident—the quests in Worldbreaker were intentionally scaled back. While a couple of the quests that are tied to themes of the set are of a comparable power level to quests of years past, the power of the generic ones has been pushed down. Why do this? After all, most players can digest power creep more easily than they can the opposite, and prior to Worldbreaker, our quests had been ramping up in power level.
There are numerous reasons why we wanted to scale down. In short, we feel the game is too consistent, too extreme in play patterns, and just less fun overall with quests at their previous power levels. Quests were also responsible for who won and lost in more games than we liked. We want the game to be about your class and faction—the cards you’re actually casting—determining the winner, not the fluidity of the generic card draw. At first blush, this sounds like a strange argument. After all, everyone can play the same quests, so isn’t it balanced? But after much time spent observing and playing with Worldbreaker-style quests, I can assure you the new era of quests creates a significantly better play experience.
Let’s look at Innervate. Back in the day, Innervate saw a lot of top level play. This is because it drew cards at a far superior rate to the quests that were available at the time. Now compare Innervate to Rise and Be Recognized. Both convert one card into three (either three cards drawn, or resource+ two cards), and this is without factoring in things that reward you for quests, like Mounts or Green Dragonkin. One is a class-specific rare, a named ability that saw plenty of play in its time, and now it’s probably worse than a generic common that isn’t even especially good as far as quests go. This is why I chuckle every time I read a forum post that complains that “class X doesn’t have card drawing.” But this isn’t really about Innervate, or Life Tap, or any other old class-specific card drawing that has gone the way of the dodo. Really efficient generic card drawing from quests has all sorts of insidious effects on the game.
Quest Screw
Drawing up hands with no quests feels bad. Rowing face down often feels like losing, especially when your opponent is playing a bunch of quests. In the world of The Key to Freedom, this isn’t actually the case. Yes, it’s generally important to draw quests (or some form of card advantage) at some point in the game, but since your opponent won’t be questing until much later in the game, you have time to find your quests before the disadvantage becomes overwhelming.
However, when A Question of Gluttony and friends are the baseline, you actually are losing when you don’t draw quests right away. These quests are so good that they enhance, rather than detract from, the fluidity of your draw. They also have the habit of finding more copies of themselves, causing this effect to snowball. Quests were originally intended to grease the wheels and give players easy decisions when rowing early in the game, but they have evolved to a point where players are winning and losing a significant number of games based on the number of quests they draw early in the game, which is not where we want the pressure of the game to be placed.
Trait Map
Just about everything in the game engine is traited to one or more classes. If your class can’t do something, generic options exist to help with the problem, though they will do it at a much worse rate than the classes that do those things well. If you want to blow up some gear, play Warrior. If you want to play another class but you still want to blow up gear, maybe there’s an ally that can help, though it should be worse at this task than the Warrior abilities are.
Card drawing is another thing that’s traited in various ways to classes, but our best quests just dwarf the rate of all but the very best class-specific card draw. This is the opposite of the way it should be, and we would like to get back to the point where the Innervates of the world feel like cards special to their class, in the same way great dispel effects are to Priest or readying allies is to Shaman.
Consistency
Simply, there is such a thing as too much consistency. The WoW TCG already has so many things woven into the game engine to ensure consistency (you can always place a resource each turn, every resource can be used to play every card, the mulligan rule, and so on) that too often, things play out too similarly from game to game. This is one reason that some matchups in WoW approach 85/15 or 90/10 type percentages. While we think it’s desirable for people to play their cards each game, we don’t think it’s desirable for them to play the exact same cards in the exact same order each game.
Mid-Range Cards
Back in the day, plenty of mid-range cards found their way into Constructed decks. As time has gone on, decks have become more extreme, generally playing only cheap threats or expensive cards that win the game outright or come close to it. I believe the improvement to quests is a large part of why this is the case. Mid-range cards represent a huge tempo disadvantage when met with a cheaper reactive card; this tempo loss is crushing when your opponent can use the “difference” in resources spent to draw cards.
Imagine the following situation: It is turn six, and you want to play Thrall against a Mage player who has six resources up. You are worried about Nether Fracture interrupting your Thrall. Now let’s see what happens with two different sets of quests for you and your opponent. In one variation of this scenario, both of you are playing nothing but unlimited copies of “1: Draw a card” as your quests. In another, both of you have nothing but unlimited The Key to Freedom.
So, first of all, what are the odds that your opponent has the Nether Fracture? In the first scenario, it’s almost automatic, assuming he’s found spots in his curve to complete a couple 1-cost quests. In the other one, the odds are much lower. Then, there is the issue of consequences. In the first scenario, the tempo loss if your Thrall is interrupted is devastating. You’ve spent your entire turn doing nothing, and your opponent will be able to draw three cards with his remaining three resources. Here, it’s best to just use your resources drawing cards, assuming you have some late-game close-out in your deck that can’t be answered by something like Nether Fracture. This is compounded by the fact that the efficient quests make it easy to draw your win condition and easy to make all of your resource drops. In the second example, your opponent can’t follow up with any card drawing off his quests, so even if he does have the Nether Fracture (and again, the odds are much lower), he isn’t spending the remaining resources efficiently unless he has another card to follow up with in his hand.
These dynamics result in decks moving in one of two directions—either kill your opponents before they can make use of their quests, or play a win condition that circumvents any sort of removal (master heroes are the best example of this). Top level Constructed decks have been moving in this direction for a while now, even if players would never cite quests as the reason this has been the case. We would like our mid-range cards to have a home in top level Constructed alongside our Offender Goras and Illidans, but exceptional quests do a lot to prevent this from happening.
Game Duration/Complexity
Playing a 15-turn game where both players have full hands and make all their resource drops the entire time until someone plays a lockout is not fun for 99+ percent of people. Not only that, these games cause matches to go well into time at sanctioned tournaments, which is also the opposite of fun for everyone involved.
What should matter?
It would be one thing if quests were adding a lot of depth to the deck building process, but they don’t. You want to play roughly 10-18 of them, and it’s pretty easy to identify the good ones. Most players don’t really want to think about it, and new good quests only generate excitement for the most serious of players. This is especially true since they are purely generic cards. I guess there’s some fun if you’re the first person to figure out A Question of Gluttony is good, but once everyone has that information and there are four copies in every deck, what good is the card doing?
We have the option of living in two worlds. In the first, what matters is drawing cards at a slightly better rate than your opponent, playing an incrementally more efficient attrition game, and getting to your end game a half-turn faster. Or we can live in a world where the text boxes on the cards you are playing are what determine the outcome of games. We in R&D feel the game has been veering too far in the first direction for too long, and we want to slide it much closer to the second.
We know some people will be upset with the nerfing of quests. Keep in mind that we will still be making some good ones, but for a reason—a theme of a set, a cycle of class quests, and so on. But the era of A Question of Gluttony and its ilk is a thing of the past. The full effect won’t be felt for a few years in Core, and never in Classic, but please keep a few things in mind. First, since quests are generic, everyone is impacted by this exactly the same way. And two, we in R&D been playing in this “new world” for a while now, and the game is significantly more fun this way. While the transition may take some getting used to, we firmly believe it’s in the best interest of the game to ratchet the quests down from where they have been the last few years.
-Patrick Sullivan
Lead Developer, World of Warcraft TCG
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