Discuss all of your questions, concerns, comments and ideas about Second Edition.
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By The Prefect (Michael Shea)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Prefect
2E Sector 001 Regional Champion 2023
#599853
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 7:18 pm
3.) I tried to tell everyone how awesome The Process era was, but @Latok, @The Guardian, @monty42, @GooeyChewie, and a few others all told me I was wrong.
Between you and I, only one of us in this conversation actually worked under The Process. As best I can remember, we designers didn't necessarily disagree with you that The Process was "awesome", we just disagreed with you that it was uniquely so. We also had a more nuanced view of The Process than you did (or do), since we were actually part of it and saw both its strengths and weaknesses in action.
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 - Beta Quadrant
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#599854
Subjected Planet came out after "The Process" so I don't think we can necessarily fault their designers (whoever they were) for not foreseeing interactions with a card that hadn't existed yet.

I don't think that Dial-A-AA is "broken" per se, but there seems to be almost no use case for his "intended" ability. Indeed, as far as I'm aware no one thought anything of him until Ross brought up this issue on his podcast.

In any event, I didn't say that every card in a set should help weaker decks. What I am saying is that design needs to be aware that the game seems to be in an unbalanced state right now and take the right actions accordingly to make that situation better and not potentially worse.
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By The Prefect (Michael Shea)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Prefect
2E Sector 001 Regional Champion 2023
#599856
@abargar7510 I'd be interested in knowing what evidence you're seeing that tells you the game is in a state of imbalance. Or, at least more so than it ever has been. And, what do you mean by "balance"?

I think these are fair questions. Because, going back as far as 2013 there were players who put out affiliation/faction rankings, the mere existence of which suggests lack of balance in the strictest sense. So, when you say "imbalance" what do you mean?

Not trying to be argumentative. I honestly want to know, so we're not talking past one another. Please note: I'm not disagreeing with you re balance, as I don't know what you mean by balance yet.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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#599858
The Prefect wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 9:08 pm @abargar7510 I'd be interested in knowing what evidence you're seeing that tells you the game is in a state of imbalance. Or, at least more so than it ever has been. And, what do you mean by "balance"?

I think these are fair questions. Because, going back as far as 2013 there were players who put out affiliation/faction rankings, the mere existence of which suggests lack of balance in the strictest sense. So, when you say "imbalance" what do you mean?

Not trying to be argumentative. I honestly want to know, so we're not talking past one another.
Yeah the guy who put out the affiliation rankings had a good thing going.

I wonder what happened to him?

Sarcasm aside, the affiliation power rankings were an informative tool and the fact that nobody "on the Inside" picked up that ball and ran with it when John left is a missed opportunity. Having an idea what's getting played and what's not is key when planning future design.

Yet another point toward my lack of strategic vision concern.
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By The Prefect (Michael Shea)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Prefect
2E Sector 001 Regional Champion 2023
#599859
@Armus You don't have to sell me on the importance of and value of rankings. I was always a fan. I was encouraging John to keep to doing them even after he gave up, before his departure. Maybe you should pick up where he left off?

But, that brings me back to my question re balance. Doesn't the presence of a ranking indicate lack of balance? And, if so, what do people who worry that the game is currently imbalanced mean?

I am assuming we can all agree that having a playing environment in which literally every affiliation and faction would tie for #1 in the ranking is not a reasonable expectation, or even necessarily a healthy game state. Certainly, that state has never been achieved in the entire history of [2E] , from the Decipher days to present. So, what do we mean by "balance" and "imbalance."

One way to start to approach an idea of the game state might be to see which affiliations or factions are winning the big events year after year... I'll see about putting together a table and posting it later. Might be informative in the discussion...
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 - Beta Quadrant
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#599860
It's a good question and it's not one that's easy to articulate an answer to. Unfortunately, the quantitative evidence you're asking for isn't easily attainable. I would argue that the CC should add average placing and margin of victory to the affiliation HQ for better (and more transparent) analysis of these kinds of issues.

I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions on this, but qualitatively - there seems to be certain affiliations and factions that already have a base amount of power, where the additional of a certain card that may be innocuous or well-intentioned on it's own, adds to that strength like lighter fluid to a match.

Some examples:
Tricia Jenkins/Plasma Storm Depths and 5SV
Cardassia Prime Subjugated Planet
Accumulated Knowledge/Jupiter

Although I agree that "perfect parity" isn't desirable, each faction/affiliation should have a place and a purpose. There are very few good counters against the decks listed above. I would argue that enabling decktypes that have little potential downside of playing is poor balance and needs to be taken into consideration when designing any new cards to release (or perhaps, more importantly, not to release), or any new affiliations to release. For example, I think a Xindi affiliation could be a great opportunity space with Trek-sense to serve as a foil against any player playing Earth as an HQ, as those decks will inherently have advantages.

Hopefully that helps.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
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#599861
The Prefect wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 9:50 pm @Armus You don't have to sell me on the importance of and value of rankings. I was always a fan. I was encouraging John to keep to doing them even after he gave up, before his departure. Maybe you should pick up where he left off?
You realize that *you* just asked *me* to pick up one of *John's* ideas, right?

Bit ironic, wouldn't you say?

Besides, I'm already running Hall of Fame. If John is the only one with good ideas and you want him back, talk to the board... they're the ones with the buttons.
The Prefect wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 9:50 pmBut, that brings me back to my question re balance. Doesn't the presence of a ranking indicate lack of balance? And, if so, what do people who worry that the game is currently imbalanced mean?

I am assuming we can all agree that having a playing environment in which literally every affiliation and faction would tie for #1 in the ranking is not a reasonable expectation, or even necessarily a healthy game state. Certainly, that state has never been achieved in the entire history of [2E] , from the Decipher days to present. So, what do we mean by "balance" and "imbalance."

One way to start to approach an idea of the game state might be to see which affiliations or factions are winning the big events year after year... I'll see about putting together a table and posting it later. Might be informative in the discussion...
So, ideally you want a low standard deviation between the best deck and the worst deck relative to the average. Your bell curve should have a very high peak with very steep slopes.

Put another way, given two players of roughly equal ability, a reasonably built deck with the "worst" affiliation should still expect to win 1/3 games vs a reasonably built deck with the "best" affiliation.

If you have decks that are dominating, balance and design should be looking at why that is and determining the best course of action regarding new cards and/or issuing errata. If you have an affiliation that nobody is playing, or nobody is winning with, same thing. Though I'd guess that in general, Design would likely handle boosting the underpowered affiliations while Balance would handle reining in the overpowered ones.

There's a lot of specifics to fill in, but that's the general concept.
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By The Prefect (Michael Shea)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Prefect
2E Sector 001 Regional Champion 2023
#599862
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:55 pm
You realize that *you* just asked *me* to pick up one of *John's* ideas, right?

Bit ironic, wouldn't you say?
I'm not the reason John is gone. If he agreed to abide by the CoC, I'd have no objection to him returning if that's what the Board decided. But, as far as I am aware, John hasn't actually asked the Board to reinstate him. So, I suppose I fail to see the irony.
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:55 pm
Besides, I'm already running Hall of Fame. If John is the only one with good ideas and you want him back, talk to the board... they're the ones with the buttons.
That's a lot of words to put in my mouth. I don't think John was the only one with good ideas. Not even John thinks that. I never said I wanted him back. But I would offer no objection if he expressed a desire to come back and agreed to abide by the CoC. I also fail to see why HoF would preclude you from also publishing power rankings - in fact it seems to me those two activities would have a great deal of overlap. Didn't John run them both simultaneously?
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:55 pm
So, ideally you want a low standard deviation between the best deck and the worst deck relative to the average. Your bell curve should have a very high peak with very steep slopes.

Put another way, given two players of roughly equal ability, a reasonably built deck with the "worst" affiliation should still expect to win 1/3 games vs a reasonably built deck with the "best" affiliation.
I agree with that. Can you tell me for certain that we don't have that now? And, if so, can you tell me when was the last time that condition existed?
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:55 pm If you have decks that are dominating, balance and design should be looking at why that is and determining the best course of action regarding new cards and/or issuing errata. If you have an affiliation that nobody is playing, or nobody is winning with, same thing. Though I'd guess that in general, Design would likely handle boosting the underpowered affiliations while Balance would handle reining in the overpowered ones.
I agree with this too. Can you tell me why you think Balance and Design aren't trying to do those things now? Or, if you concede they are trying, can you tell me what you'd have them do differently if you were 2e Director?
Last edited by The Prefect on Tue May 30, 2023 11:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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By The Prefect (Michael Shea)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Prefect
2E Sector 001 Regional Champion 2023
#599863
abargar7510 wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:19 pm It's a good question and it's not one that's easy to articulate an answer to. Unfortunately, the quantitative evidence you're asking for isn't easily attainable. I would argue that the CC should add average placing and margin of victory to the affiliation HQ for better (and more transparent) analysis of these kinds of issues.

I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions on this, but qualitatively - there seems to be certain affiliations and factions that already have a base amount of power, where the additional of a certain card that may be innocuous or well-intentioned on it's own, adds to that strength like lighter fluid to a match.

Some examples:
Tricia Jenkins/Plasma Storm Depths and 5SV
Cardassia Prime Subjugated Planet
Accumulated Knowledge/Jupiter

Although I agree that "perfect parity" isn't desirable, each faction/affiliation should have a place and a purpose. There are very few good counters against the decks listed above. I would argue that enabling decktypes that have little potential downside of playing is poor balance and needs to be taken into consideration when designing any new cards to release (or perhaps, more importantly, not to release), or any new affiliations to release. For example, I think a Xindi affiliation could be a great opportunity space with Trek-sense to serve as a foil against any player playing Earth as an HQ, as those decks will inherently have advantages.

Hopefully that helps.
Certainly, it does.

Would it be fair to read your answer as being, essentially: you can't really provide data to support the assertion that the game is in an undesirable state of imbalance, but you feel strongly that it is even if you can't articulate precisely why you feel that way. Is that right?

Because, if so, I get the sense that several players here feel that way too. So, I think there must be something real driving this feeling. I confess I don't know what it is. Are there experiences you are having in your local play group? Or online? Or when you travel? Or are you basing this feeling off of what you read here on the forums? Something else? I'm honestly asking - I don't know and I would like to.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
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Community Contributor
#599865
abargar7510 wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 7:46 pm Subjected Planet came out after "The Process" so I don't think we can necessarily fault their designers (whoever they were) for not foreseeing interactions with a card that hadn't existed yet.

I don't think that Dial-A-AA is "broken" per se, but there seems to be almost no use case for his "intended" ability. Indeed, as far as I'm aware no one thought anything of him until Ross brought up this issue on his podcast.

In any event, I didn't say that every card in a set should help weaker decks. What I am saying is that design needs to be aware that the game seems to be in an unbalanced state right now and take the right actions accordingly to make that situation better and not potentially worse.
While you're correct that the Designers of AA couldn't anticipate NeuNeuDominion being a thing, the opposite is not true. The existence of AA and its synergy with the new HQ was either wildly underestimated or completely missed.
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By The Prefect (Michael Shea)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Prefect
2E Sector 001 Regional Champion 2023
#599870
The common narrative seems to be that the game went off the rails after John left in 2019. So, I wanted to see if I could find any quantitative data to support the assertion that the game has slipped into an undesirable level of imbalance since 2019.

The problem is that COVID killed live events in 2020 and 2021, and this hampers analysis.

So, here's what I could find:

For 2022, Dominion (NueNueNueNueNue or any other variety) did not win a single event for Regionals or higher. Nor did TNG Dissidents so far as I can tell. And, so far for 2023, Borg has the highest win percentage. So, if the game is imbalanced to a dire degree, maybe we're worrying about the wrong affiliations and factions?
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 - Beta Quadrant
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#599872
Because, if so, I get the sense that several players here feel that way too. So, I think there must be something real driving this feeling. I confess I don't know what it is. Are there experiences you are having in your local play group? Or online? Or when you travel? Or are you basing this feeling off of what you read here on the forums? Something else? I'm honestly asking - I don't know and I would like to.
I play online only. There's no such thing as "local" playgroups anywhere but a few places in the world now. As an example, I just got done playing in an online regional, where 3 out of the top 5 decks were Dominion. I would estimate that roughly 1 out of every 3 games I've played in the last 6 months have been against Dominion. That includes online casual play where you're not going to have decklist data.

You can't just look at percentage of tournaments a deck wins. That's going to have small sample size bias that doesn't give you a complete picture of how successful the deck tends to be on average. You also have to look at how does it place relative to all others on average. Average win differential might be another important datapoint.

You also can't just toss out 2021. 2021 is when NeuNeuDominion came out, including coming in both 1st and 2nd place on Worlds Day Two. It did lose popularity last year (IIRC, to NeuDominion which seems to have had the most success against NeuNeuDominion).

I'm not a good player, and I don't mind losing, but there's very little creativity going on in deckbuilding right now. It's what flavor of Dominion HQ do you want to run, or, if you don't want to do that, are you playing 5SV or Starfleet? That type of environment is boring as shit to play in, and a big reason why I'm more interested in the Draft and Hall of Fame formats these days.
Last edited by abargar7510 on Wed Jun 07, 2023 8:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
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By Danny (Daniel Giddings)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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2E British National Runner-Up 2021
#599873
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 9:31 pmHaving an idea what's getting played and what's not is key when planning future design.

Aren't the stats drawn from the tournament results that are compiled in the Affiliation HQ pages exactly this (sans unlisted games)? Don't we already have a way to see what is and isn't getting played?
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By monty42 (Benjamin Liebich)
 - Delta Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
2E World Quarter-Finalist 2023
Chancellor
2E European Continental Runner-Up 2023
2E German National Champion 2022
#599876
This is actually quite an interesting discussion (if one manages to suffer through all the saltiness)
abargar7510 wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:19 pm I would argue that the CC should add average placing and margin of victory to the affiliation HQ for better (and more transparent) analysis of these kinds of issues.
This might actually be a little more difficult than it sounds. You cannot base such an evaluation on just a HQ alone. People are trying a lot of different things with different HQs. I for example have a Subjugated Planet deck that worked very well but I also have a Subjugated Planet deck that failed miserably and I have an entirely different build in my head that I haven't gotten around to playing yet.
So you see raising any statistical data from just the HQ is most likely not gonna be very conclusive.
For gathering the information that I think you're looking for, you'd have to make an evaluation by certain deck type. With that however you'd get into the weeds of what constitutes a certain deck type. How do you quantify which deck is a Dial-AA deck and which isn't.
I'm not saying that's impossible but I think there's a lot more going into that than just entering some numbers somewhere.
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:55 pm Put another way, given two players of roughly equal ability, a reasonably built deck with the "worst" affiliation should still expect to win 1/3 games vs a reasonably built deck with the "best" affiliation.
I agree with most of your points but this is a vast stretch because a game between two players of roughly equal ability happens as often as it doesn't.
Therefore any statistic based on that can be diluted very quickly.
For example, MvB wins with the weirdest shit (because he's crazy). Does that mean if he wins a couple of times with such a deck, that deck has a high probability of winning? Statistically yes. Realistically probably not.
On the other side, Tj lost a bunch of tournaments with extremely good decks because he's unable to maintain his concentration for a long time. Now does that mean those decks aren't good because they didn't win? Statistically yes. Realistically probably not.

I'm not trying to make a stance or come down on either side of the argument. In fact I don't think there is a black or white answer with this because all of these factors and more play into it.
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By edgeofhearing (Lucas Thompson)
 - Second Edition Art Manager
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Community Contributor
#599879
monty42 wrote: Wed May 31, 2023 3:39 am This is actually quite an interesting discussion (if one manages to suffer through all the saltiness)
abargar7510 wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:19 pm I would argue that the CC should add average placing and margin of victory to the affiliation HQ for better (and more transparent) analysis of these kinds of issues.
This might actually be a little more difficult than it sounds. You cannot base such an evaluation on just a HQ alone. People are trying a lot of different things with different HQs. I for example have a Subjugated Planet deck that worked very well but I also have a Subjugated Planet deck that failed miserably and I have an entirely different build in my head that I haven't gotten around to playing yet.
So you see raising any statistical data from just the HQ is most likely not gonna be very conclusive.
For gathering the information that I think you're looking for, you'd have to make an evaluation by certain deck type. With that however you'd get into the weeds of what constitutes a certain deck type. How do you quantify which deck is a Dial-AA deck and which isn't.
I'm not saying that's impossible but I think there's a lot more going into that than just entering some numbers somewhere.
Armus wrote: Tue May 30, 2023 10:55 pm Put another way, given two players of roughly equal ability, a reasonably built deck with the "worst" affiliation should still expect to win 1/3 games vs a reasonably built deck with the "best" affiliation.
I agree with most of your points but this is a vast stretch because a game between two players of roughly equal ability happens as often as it doesn't.
Therefore any statistic based on that can be diluted very quickly.
For example, MvB wins with the weirdest shit (because he's crazy). Does that mean if he wins a couple of times with such a deck, that deck has a high probability of winning? Statistically yes. Realistically probably not.
On the other side, Tj lost a bunch of tournaments with extremely good decks because he's unable to maintain his concentration for a long time. Now does that mean those decks aren't good because they didn't win? Statistically yes. Realistically probably not.

I'm not trying to make a stance or come down on either side of the argument. In fact I don't think there is a black or white answer with this because all of these factors and more play into it.
I endorse this take.
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