Ya think?

EDIT: Since this is non-rp, editing to avoid trolling.

Yes, you’re right. I’m glad they switched.

BINGEBOT 2015 Posted:

For future rounds perhaps it’s worth removing bumhole (adding Shotgun) and raising the cost of cards to 6 (or something like that)?

I like this idea; I was screwed with bumhole cards around 10 times D:

In the end I just gave up earning scoops.

The_Steel_Cretin Posted:

That is just going to the other extreme. Who is going to buy a card for 6 scoops in the hope of damaging someone else for 2? It would just end up being the no card round that Inertia advocates i.e. longest pistachio streak wins.

Fine by me, cards annoy me!

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

With the addition of a few more card types (card stealing, card destroying to go with the destruction theme?) there’d be enough cards available for the bumhole to be rarer and therefore less damaging. Add shotgun back, possibly peeping tom. Then make a decision about peeps, switcheroo and thiefs (should keep one of switcheroo and thief, but not both)

The bumhole card needs a small nerf anyway (down to 8, or based on the ratio between your scoops and your targets)

Also next time, work out the average damage an bumhole card does based on the number of cards in the pool, bumuming it’s picked at every opportunity. Multiply the damage it does by 3, divide by the number of cards to choose from.

The other option, for a really limited card pool, would be to reduce the options to pick from to 2 instead of 3, which would again affect the average damage per card played.

Meeeeeeeee is mostly correct. In a normal round, there are currently 8 cards in the pool from which 3 uniques are drawn. One then can find the likelihood of drawing any one card (37.5%). You can do the same math with any different numbers. However, this doesn’t quite explain the whole picture when calculating average damage.

If an bumhole is NOT picked, the player can pick, say, a Thief. This destroys 1 scoop, but also gives scoops back to the player. This ups the “average damage per card” rate because of being able to buy MORE [damage?] cards with the returned scoops. Any time a player can be reasonably bumured that, on average, any of the below conditions are met, the user has incentive to card down exclusively until the end, repeating the pointless aspects of this Roid Week again:

* He can do more “average card damage” to someone else in return for his four scoops than the cost of the card

* With sub-optimal draws, he can pick enough scoop-adding (thief, Modest) cards to give him more opportunities to buy more [attack] cards, effectively upping his extended damage ratio above the cost of the card.

* He can do the above, but there are additional benefits that make even buying cards more expensive than damage done worthwhile (likelihood of drawing shields to be used to protect scoops from being blasted, and Modests to be converted or win mins).

In most cases, the bumhole at 10 breaks this to where most users have incentive to card down until the end. In Roid Rage week, the incentive is so clear that there really is no room for any other factor than playing at the last moment.

I believe the bumhole was balanced at 6. It should go no higher than 7 under the current format. If left at 10, for future Roid Rage week I’d suggest the old format, but with one addition: A Shield. This slightly lessens the chance of drawing an bumhole but allows incentive to protect one’s scoops, sometimes through buying shields rather than bumholes. I don’t think a Defense card goes against Roid Rage week; steroid freaks are basically tanks, right? They should be able to defend themselves.

This is a very simple addition that comes near other more elaborate solutions in terms of adding strategy and balance.

scullyangel Posted:

Roid Rage as a theme was just about as meaningful as whatever week we had where cards cost 1 scoop. I didn’t even play the last half hour since the lag was horrible and randomly won a medal with 1 scoop. It’s cool to have a random win from time to time, but I don’t think any of the serious players want to spend a week planning visits and whatever and have it come down to the roulette wheel landing on their number.

As to the power of destruction. It was noticeably stronger due to the limited card pool, but I agree, we could use a change to The bumhole.

The bumhole used to be in play at 10 scoops damage, but could only be used if the person playing it had less than four scoops. The card was very strong, but the sacrifice required if there weren’t a bunch of people playing destruction would rarely win the round. (And that was before we had anywhere near this much pistachio or vanilla.) As it is now, it is seriously overpowered because there is no sacrifice. If someone is ahead of you, let him take the hits and when you are ready just hammer him out of the way. Sure there is a strategy to it, but it’s not an interesting one, imo.

The bumhole at 6 scoops with the ability to play at any time, is simply too weak to do any worthwhile damage. If you have a less than 40% chance of getting The bumhole when you turn in scoops there is never going to be a time when it makes sense to turn in scoops to play from an offensive stance (the exception being when you aren’t playing for medals during a given week, but rather helping a buddy.)

Now a combination of the two? That might be interesting. Right now if powerful damage isn’t available the only viable strategy is high end pistachio. Maybe under 4 scoops it hits for 10, 4 or higher scoops it hits for 5.

But with the introduction of the Destruction medal, carding down to nothing is no longer a sacrifice, how would you balance against that?

scullyangel Posted:

It’d only be one medal, that alone is very limiting. When you go for Maximum scoops you might also be able to pull fav flava or mins, sometimes all three. You also can look at the scoops/cards your opponents have and gain a fairly accurate impression of how many more scoops they will potentially earn.

A destruction based medal would be hard to bank on since it would be impossible to track what your opponents have destroyed.

We currently have 3 medals for building scoops. The proposed medal thread includes some extremely cool alternate medals as well, all involve earning and building scoops. BB2 has said that ideally he would like to see brackets ending up with around 8 – 9 medals, all unique and some conflicting so that players cannot just mindlessly sweep inactive brackets.

I do think if we see anything destruction based a small raise in the card limit should be considered, to perhaps 40 – 45 cards.

Still I think that carding down to nothing is not a sacrifice if by doing that make you more able to medal in destruction. So I think it deserves no enhanced power. Also, people going for destruction will of course card down to nothing as much as they can anyway, so no need to further encourage them down that road.

3:10 onward

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

Finally, if there is a destruction medal, I imagine there will be scoops destroyed counters visible for each player. That hasn’t been discussed here though as far as I’m aware. Should this information be secret?

Maybe just visible via Peeping Toms? It’s currently one of the worst cards so it could use some extra power.