Re: Smash_the_Hamster - Drama & The Community

[thematsjo]

Drama & The Community

Impetus

This is a response to @Smash_the_Hamster’s recent two videos he posted to his Youtube channel. The first one about RNG in Delyst I’ll be covering tangentially and I’ll devote the brunt of my attention to the second one, in which he talks about the state and problems of the Duelyst community overall. I want to talk generally about why I believe Duelyst isn’t doing as well on the media side of things as we might expect and what, if anything, we might do to improve the situation

Smash’s Argument

You should really watch the videos yourself but allow me to attempt a summary. The crux of Smash’s thesis is that the Duelyst community is turning people away from the game due to a bias towards negativity. “We” as a fan-base overall focus heavily on complaints, problems and negativity and engage far less with all the fun and good news that Duelyst brings. He illustrates this by pointing to his own metrics which show that his videos complaining about an aspect of the game or discussing problems generally tend to draw a lot more traffic than his dozens of videos that just show him having a good time. Duelyst game play videos just don’t seem to gather a lot of attention and this turns content creators away from the game over time. After all, why make content if so few people are interested in watching it? We’ve been losing @mogwai for a little while now due to the simple fact that videos on Gwent and Shadowverse pull traffic a lot better overall. And so Smash concludes that we are our own worst enemy and should instead try to focus our attention more on all the things that are going well rather than harp on our grievances to the point that we ignore positive content in favor of negative content and as a consequence turn the subreddit and these forums into complaint pits where people might not enjoy spending their time as much.

Overall I think that this is solid advice and a good starting point for discussion, but I also believe a huge part of the picture is missing from his analysis. I’ve resolved to try and bring these other aspects more into focus to try and get a grasp on what’s actually going on. So let’s go.

Before I get into things I want to acknowledge that Duelyst doesn’t need to be and probably shouldn’t try to be a blockbuster CCG. It’s a title from an unknown publisher with a relatively high skill floor and ceiling with a specific art style and with limited waifu fodder for nerds to drool over. It doesn’t need to be ‘the next big thing’; having a good, solvent CCG is already a high bar to set and a great accomplishment for CPG. This thread isn’t about ‘making Duelyst great again’, it’s about figuring out how to encourage positive engagement and rewarding content creators for their effort to keep the game healthy over time.

Legitimate Concerns

It’s easy to lay blame at the feet of the community for being too negative, and urging us to be more positive is always an easy thing to do. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that Duelyst has a remarkably mature audience overall and negative posts don’t just magically appear out of nowhere. There are legitimate grievances and concerns at the heart of most of these posts and videos and many of them should be taken seriously. Any community is going to have a few grumps (I miss @raqyee too sometimes) but a community where those grumps get a lot of support gives off an indication that something is actually awry. CPG has a tendency to be very indirect and vague with their responses over time, but simultaneously tends to be a little too responsive to the community. Reacting to community concerns is wonderful but unless you’re very authoritative and clear about why you’re doing what you’re doing it gives off the impression that they’re not sure themselves, and this encourages community members to petition CPG for changes. Maintaining an image of authority is easy if you’re unresponsive, but if you’re responsive (the better choice imo) you need to commit and actually explain and justify your decisions with conviction, precision and something that at least sounds like honesty. If the community isn’t convinced CPG knows what it’s doing you can be sure to see a lot of threads with people making suggestions, which we do, a lot. The Enfeeble and Meltdown episodes have certainly not helped maintain an image of competence, and the disastrous Joseki interview has made the community wary about the notion that CPG perhaps wants to take the game in very different directions than the existing fan-base would appreciate. Speaking of which…

Splitting the Fan-Base

I believe CPG is coming off a period of time where they’ve been trying to more actively woo different gamer demographics. Duelyst was heavily touted initially as a more intelligent CCG(/board game hybrid) without the Hearthstone RNG crapfest, and this drew in a very specific set of people who were looking for an experience like this. Over time however the amount of new entrants started going down, and CPG had to look for ways to keep new blood coming, and understandably so. This led them (I believe) to designing and publishing more of two types of cards: cards with more dramatic random effects and cards with dramatic game-swinging effects. The first was meant to lure more Hearthstone-esque gamers that enjoy the whole ‘oh I wonder what silly thing will happen this time’ aspect HS provides, and the second to draw in the big swing-turn lovers that currently play games like Shadowverse which offers very explosive swing turns using their Evolution system.

The issue is of course that HS and Shadowverse already do these aspects well and differentiate themselves from other games on those fronts, and Duelyst wasn’t built from the ground up to accommodate that kind of game play. To make things worse, this functioned as a betrayal of the existing community that is/was explicitly nót interested in a game with a lot of RNG and swing. Duelyst has a tactical board, and this board almost mandates a kind of game where you can actually fill up those tiles with minions over time: playing for the board should be the bread and butter of a game like Duelyst, but instead CPG has tried to make the game more exciting for new audiences by catering to their interests. Now we have a game where you can’t play fair decks (using Smash’s phrasing in his first video on RNG) because there are so many powerful uninteractive cards that beat you down by negating all the effort put into developing a board or just bursting you down in a turn or two while ignoring the board entirely. Duelyst isn’t built on minions that can act right away the way Shadowverse is built on them so any strategy that doesn’t rely on these ‘slow’ minions tends to be more powerful unless you actively design against it, something that CPG hasn’t done enough.

Interactivity

Smash suggests that Duelyst doesn’t have an RNG problem, but rather an interactivity problem. I’d compromise by saying Duelyst has a problem with both. Interactivity is all about having different options to deal with a given situation, and Duelyst is in a state now where you have very few options to deal with a board state. There are so many ‘answer or die’ cards and effects in this game now that your best recourse is typically to either play your own ‘answer or die’ threats first or negate the opponent’s, and this leads to very stale game play. Either you answer the threat immediately or you just lost the game. Part of this is due to CPG’s stated goal of keeping matches short and sweet, but I believe it is also an unintended consequence of designing a lot of high-impact cards to generate excitement and draw in new audiences.

Because here’s the rub: losing to uninteractive cards or RNG feels far worse than winning with them feels good. Victories aren’t as satisfying as losses are frustrating if the match was defined by RNG or uninteractive game play. There’s little pleasure in just stomping an opponent with cards they can’t defend themselves against and there’s even less in losing a game in which you didn’t feel like you even had a chance. And that just FeelsBadMan. And we don’t play Duelyst to feel bad. Bad feels cause negative comments, and the good feels just aren’t intense enough to overshadow the bad ones. Our brain hangs on the most prevalent emotion we experience to make up our mind about an experience and in Duelyst the plentiful fun times just make less of an impact. And that goes for potential spectators as well…

Not a Spectator Sport

My final point: Duelyst is effectively just more fun to play than it is to watch. It has a very ‘mechanical’ feel when compared to the very personal and friendly competitors out there. Gwent, Shadowverse and of course HS do a great job at making matches enjoyable to watch through excellent audiovisual feedback. I remember being made fun of for suggesting that HS’s compatibility with YouTube content creators is an important element to its continued success, but I believe I’ve been vindicated over time. Those three games have distinctive artwork and animations that stick with you, cards emit little soundbites that tell you everything you need to know about the figures they represent: everything has character. You don’t need to read the lore to grasp the kind of guy Grommash Hellscream is, the art and audio simply evokes it and you understand on an emotional level. Duelyst is zoomed out, the action takes place from left to right rather than towards and away from you and there is a lack of impactful sound and animations. Cards like Tempest give great feedback but a card like Obliterate that should feel awesome often doesn’t because when you finish a match the animation doesn’t briefly linger for you to enjoy. CPG’s inability to understand these factors became most clear to me when they introduced card back animations to mimic HS. I’m not bothered personally because of @t2k5’s wonderful scripts, but these animations slow down the action to the point that the game becomes less pleasant to watch: we’ve lost the snappiness to the action and this drags down replays to no end as well. Having a good flow to the action on-screen is absolutely key to having a good spectating experience and Duelyst just does them worse than the competition. I don’t even play HS, Gwent or Shadowverse but I watch content creators play them all the time because the on-screen action is so enjoyable! It’s little things like that adding up to make Duelyst feel more distant, more like chess than most of the other CCGs. And all that isn’t necessarily an issue by itself, but it makes Duelyst matches relatively uninteresting to spectate. Other games offer a better viewing experience, even if they’re not better games from a game play perspective. HS can always fall back on random RNG nonsense to generate entertaining ‘you’ve got to be kidding me’ moments, Shadowverse has shameless anime pandering and explosive Evolution turns and Gwent is so inherently combo-based it naturally offers intense swing turns where single cards chain into match-defining events that are great to see in action.

Since the two-card-draw change Duelyst has been a game about generating incremental advantage over time through clever use of resources and positioning, and when it tried to instead wear the clothes of other games and remained squeezed into the ‘matches must stay under 10 minutes’ box the experience suffered and the game’s flaws started garnering more attention than how great the game still is. A combination of imo misguided design decision and a failure to respect the existing audience for the game are key in understanding why its communities have become more jaded and negative over time and why talking about the things that aren’t perfect has become more popular than just talking about the fun we’re having.

Conclusion & Personal Note

I’ve undoubtedly claimed things in this thread that are incorrect or just too broadly stated and I look forward to gaining more clarity on this topic as your comments (hopefully) roll in. I’m not some kind of expert or veteran, nor would I ever claim I’d be able to do any better at making an f2p game independently in this day and age. I have a great respect for CPG overall and do not intend to crap on their work and pretend everything is simple. They’ve already thought about everything I’ve just written about years ago and are more familiar with the issues than any outsider could hope to be, but I hope that this discussion is at least useful for everyone looking from the outside in.

I’ve noticed that my own desire to actually play on ladder has been strangely waning for a while now and when I log in I just tend to play a few matches in Practice rather than braving yet another tilting match against the bullshit cards that my dumb Johnny decks aren’t capable of dealing with. Wins aren’t as fun for me as the losses tend to feel bad, so the stress of laddering just isn’t as ‘worth it’ to me as it used to be. N=1 of course so I’m not going to draw any conclusions from that (it could just be me) but that’s a big part of the reason why Smash’s videos spoke to me and compelled me to write out this long, unstructured diatribe. I hope to hear his thoughts specifically as well because I really appreciated his thoughts in the videos.

Cheers, and have a nice day.

[terrarius]

I disagree with Duelyst beeing worse to watch…
But that might be personal preference…(well done pixelart looks best in games atleast to me…but i guess alot people realy enjoy handdrawn images and realistic graphic,explaining why many dont agree with me believing duelyst to be one of the best looking tcg out there)
The rest is something i cant argue with at all…and is unfourtanetly a result of counterpplay questionable decisions and behaviour
Its unfourtanate that there no more skillbased CCG than duelyst on the market(which is why i play it…the high impact skill hascompared to other CCG)(and even duelyst isnt that skillbased at high level)

[eurasianjay]

I’d like to take a moment and interject that one of the defining reasons for players such as Lifecoach (HS) and Mogwai (Duelyst) migrating to Gwent, balance and direction aside, IS the game’s insistence that skill be rewarded above all else, so claiming that Duelyst is somehow the only skill centric CCG on the marketplace is disingenuous at best.

[mmf]

Wins aren’t as fun for me as the losses tend to feel bad, so the stress of laddering just isn’t as ‘worth it’ to me as it used to be.

Damn. Reminds me of @sylvermyst’s video where he talks about the balance of feelings maintained by a game (especially a competitive one).

The psychological impact of RNG in CCGs

This is a "101" video. Concepts were intentionally presented in a style for anyone to be able to understand. Apologies in advance if some of the definitions/explanations toward the beginning were already understood by some of you. I felt this was relevant with so much discussion on RNG lately and several folks asking "What does RNG mean"? Anyhow, thanks for watching! :slight_smile:

[terrarius]

I didnt play gwent…but if thats true i stand in your debt for poiting my direction at a CCG im realy looking for(until duelyst i just played CCG like yugioh where both played their uninteractive combos and in the end the one with the stronger combos wins

[baharoth]

I can understand where this “we shouldn’t be so negative about the game” train is coming from, people fear that the game they like (more or less) will die eventually but the way i see it, all the negativity isn’t the fault of the community and it’s not the job of the community to fix it.

Personally i believe that the negative environment isn’t even because of the game as such. I’ve been with this game for a year now, and it always had it’s flaws. There was always something “wrong” with the meta or the balance. And yes, a year ago we also had topics where people complained about it. But, at least as far as i can remember, there weren’t so many of them. And most of the time the responses to these topics were positive, people argued against them instead of agreeing with them. Another thing that’s new are all the players, well known players, that turn their back on the game.

The game and it’s problems didn’t really change during this last year, what changed, however, was the communities faith in CPG to deal with these problems. Dealing with a bad meta isn’t that much of an issue if you trust that the problem will be solved soon and in a decent way. But if you think “Oh dear, how long do we have to deal with this shit this time, and what kind of horrible fix is coming afterwards” then you won’t be able to just “keep going”.

I think that’s the real problem, and it’s also the reason for all the negativity. Most of the community have lost hope that this game will ever become what they hoped it would, but they don’t want to admit it to themselves for different reasons. So they get desperate and make topic after topic trying to get CPG to do what they think should be done. Or they just quit playing the game.

The only ones who can save this game at this point are the developers. They have to try to regain that lost trust otherwise this game is doomed and there is nothing we can do about it.

Mark Rosewater once said those wise words: “Adjust your game to your players, not the other way around” and unfortunately, CPG has been trying to do the latter this entire time. They are making a game that they might think is cool, but almost no one in the community does. And i don’t think there is a community for this game at all. Because the kind of player who likes stuff like Meltdown is playing Hearthstone, and there is nothing duelyst can offer him to switch.

Now some of you will come at me and tell me: “But they learned, they nerfed Meltdown!!!” and yes they did nerf it, but they didn’t learn from it. They still think the card is “fun”. That’s why they nerfed it instead of just adding the simple word “nearest” or “nearby” into it’s cardtext. Meltdown was a viable card but for most players it was unfun to play with/play against.
Now CPG had the choice, make the card fun and viable by adding some skill/decisionmaking to it’s use or keep the card unfun and make it unviable. They decided for the latter. Call me Mr. Negative, but as long as they maintain that line of thinking, i doubt this game can ever become what people want it to be. It will always have that bad feeling attached to it and this will make people quit sooner or later.

[thematsjo]

To be clear on that point: I personally love the game’s art style and I think Duelyst looks great. When I say it’s not as good to watch I’m not referring to the art but rather the action happening on-screen. It was a bit of a vague thing for me to say but I hope that clears it up a bit.

[kopiuyt]

Your post is just spot on, dude.

[sviel]

I think @baharoth nailed it.

As a player that started early, quit a while later due to imbalance then came back and essentially quit again, I get the feeling that whatever direction the game is going in is not the one I want it to. The two paths are so divergent that it’s beyond tolerable.

At the same time, they’re close enough together that I want to hope. There are other games where I just leave because I have no hope for them–with Duelyst, it was close enough to draw me in but not close enough to keep me.

Hence, I’ve made a thread or two in the past and still hang around, hoping.

[chrishaehnel]

Spot on, completely agree. They keep limited design space instead of capitalizing on possibly amazing mechanics.

[destroy666]

Yep, Baharoth pretty much nailed it. Unfortunately there are people that wear rose-tinted glasses and “help” CPG to believe that everything is perfect…

I didnt play gwent…but if thats true i stand in your debt for poiting my direction at a CCG im realy looking for(

Yes, it’s true. Gwent at the first sight looks very straightforward, but in fact it requires a lot of thought and planning. Open beta that will come out in 2 days should push it even further.

[tsevech]

This summarises a lot of my feelings too. I have been playing also for one year and I think the developers have become more disconnected with their own game during this time. I perceive some laziness from their side, which may be wrong, but that’s my feeling.

The next expansion and the mobile release may give indications on how the game will do in the future, but I fear they might just confirm the recent trend.

[Smash_the_Hamster]

just saw the ping.

So, if I could redo the community video, I would have approached it a bit differently but the argument would broadly be the same.

people being frustrated is fine, people talking about that frustration is fine. BUT, the problem in my eyes occurs when these views dominate the discussion.

So, the more precise version of my argument would be

1. “there is a time and place for everything and criticism (as part of a balanced diet) is great.”
2. This threads/posts/videos are less useful compared to other types of content.

Expanding on point 2. My RNG video may have given a voice to some common grievances (a good thing), but, could a dev really learn anything from watching it? Did I really offer a unique insight? OR did I just take 30 mins to explain some basic crap that could have been summed up in a sentence or two? This isn’t a an attempted at faux-modesty either; I’m genuinely unsure whether the video is actually good or not.

Anyway, one of the main defences of negativity I’ve seen is that we, as a community, need to ensure the devs “get it”. Well, as I say, I’m not convinced my videos (or other peoples for that matter) are going to be eye opening experiences for devs. I think they know this shit; they have heard it, seen it and played it.

But lets be somewhat generous and suppose my video’s were useful for the dev team. Even in this (unlikely) case I think I can still successfully argue that, in the long-term, a more beneficial use of my time would have been to produce ‘actually good’ content (tiers lists, meta discussion, game replays, etc). The example I used was f8’s video (tourney cast). By my estimation, we need more of this sort of video than we need trash talk vids. It takes F8 (et al) time do this sort of stuff – did reddit reward him with dat sweet sweet karma? Well, no (at least not initially).

And I think that expresses my own resentment toward the success of my own trash talking: I could spend the next three hours putting a lot of effort into some bit of quality content (lets say a tierlist), But, I’m very much saddened by the very real prospect that an unscripted “why this game sucks” rant would ultimately get more viewers/community response than the former.

To some extent, I actually speak from experience here. The last time I submitted to reddit was this thread:

Control-Hai (S#4) Decklist + Guide • r/duelyst

Now, this post WAS well received, “Top player shares deck with guide” = 28 upvotes. Not bad, not bad.

My recent RNG rant (that, fyi, someone else posted) got 24. On the face of it it looks like good content trumps the trash talk but that’s before you factor in the the control-hai post took a fair bit more effort to produce.

In short “game is crap rants” feels like low hanging fruit and we need quality posts a lot more than we need another trash talk vid. But alas, the low hanging fruit seems to be rewarded by a community with a penchant for outrage.

In conclusion: I feel that as a “top player” and a platform on youtube I’m in a position to actually offer something of value ) to this community (and most of the time I don’t think I fall far short of that goal) but actually it feels as though the community would rather hear why I (at times) hate this game rather than hear my tips for learning to play the game better.

I’m not a reddit whore by any means; I don’t judge the merits of my content by the number of likes/views etc. Moreover, I have 0 ambition to do youtube full time currently. So yeah, for the most part I dont care. But other content produces really do care about that stuff; and what if they also come to the same conclusion as I just have? The message we seem to be sending (that outrage trumps quality/effort) is a dangerous one.

[thematsjo]

In conclusion: I feel that as a “top player” and a platform on youtube I’m in a position to actually offer something of value ) to this community (and most of the time I don’t think I fall far short of that goal) but actually it feels as though the community would rather hear why I (at times) hate this game rather than hear my tips for learning to play the game better.

I don’t believe that your conclusion is unreasonable, I just believe that the reasons for it entail more than what you discussed in your video. It’s part drama bias, but development history and the nature of the game should factor in as well, and those aren’t things you can really help through an appeal to our more positive nature. If you’re looking to get views (not saying you are) then yeah, it might be more beneficial to overrepresent ‘bad news’ videos in your schedule. The fanbase is currently a tad jaded and the game is not naturally as enjoyable to view as others are.

And I’m sad that some people aren’t able distinguish between you saying ‘we shouldn’t just whine to the exclusion of everything else’ and ‘complaining is not allowed in our glorious Utopya comrade’.

[phyvo]

On the one hand this has always been a problem with content generation. People are naturally more attracted to negative stories than positive ones. But I think thematsjo is right. Duelyst has a history, and it matters, even if the individual issues sound stupid to different people (the timing of the humble bundle vs steam release, shimzar orbs, 2 draw, whatever). The lack of trust and faith towards CPG is obvious and real, and, honestly, that’s CPG’s fault. Customer and community goodwill is a resource that a company can choose to ignore or to engender. CPG tried to engender it but, at least for now, they have failed.

So I don’t think you can separate the community’s current feelings from the history. For instance, CPG may be correct when they say things like “We don’t have a problem with player retention”, but because of the community history that actually feeds into negative perceptions. People don’t trust CPG which makes them believe it might be false, and the implications from that are obvious. But even if the statement is true then it just continues another negative narrative that the community has also bought into: that CPG doesn’t give a whit about the opinions of the veteran players who left, let alone random reddit members, and that CPG doesn’t have a realistic vision for the game beyond the 200,000 casuals they cited at GDC.

Unfortunately, the negativity of the community is part and parcel of the relationship between the community and CPG. If the community were a small, unified group of people we could perhaps reach out to CPG to repair the relationship. But we aren’t. We’re decentralized. We don’t have community meetings where we decide on community statements, we don’t really have spokespeople either (well, we kind of did, but most of them left). So the best hope for improving community feelings comes not from us, but from CPG itself, even if it’s only CPG designing the game to be more fun than it currently is.