MArcomage

Reading all these recent woes over the imposed limitations before level ten, I have an alternate suggestion to make.

Implement a quiz on game mechanics. If the player can answer all of the question, they get an instant promotion to level 10. I suspect many players never bother to read the manual. Offering a shortcut past the tutorial as a reward for doing so might prove worthwhile to some.

Even if someone were to cheat to discover the answers, why not reward that amount of ingenuity?

I mean, if the worst that can happen is that someone gets to cheat to play with the big kids without knowing what they're doing, they'll get their just deserts in the end.

And since I was the one raising the woes, I will probably need to be the one to draft the quiz after I've finished grinding my remaining <s>8</s>UGH levels. That way I can't possibly get any benefit from these changes I still strongly support.

(K, I have [10] and 3/4ths a bar now, so this is overdue.)

Thinking about the problem, if we're going to have a quiz that corresponds to more levels which are supposed to correspond to experience, we should not use questions that are just regurgitations of the manual, but instead questions using situations that tends to trip up new players. Different orders of effects (like how a card checks for your resources after its cost has been paid), order you should play a small set of cards in to maximize their effect (given you have time), something exemplifying the immense usefulness of cards that let you discard more than one card at a time, and probably more things I could find by listening to players who [remember being new/have watched new players] or by looking at dumb questions around parts of the forum. Hmm. Let me stop here for a bit.

You've put a lot more thought into this than I have, and I'm liking the results. =D

Actually, I made a quiz-like application prototype back at the university as a side project. The quiz described a situation and presented the card choices. The user had to select a card best suited for that situation and he had to select reason why he chose that card. The reasons were also in a form of a list to choose from. The correct answer was a combination of a card and a reason.

On the presentation the teacher said that the app works fine, but he didn't pass it. So I got an A, but failed to teach him MArcomage.

EDIT: OMG! It's still hanging around on my website. If you are interested you can view it here. It was created in 2009 and it was only a prototype, so the presentation is rather poor (optimized of 800x600 resolution, minimizing browser window will actually improve layout).

For the tutorial I think that it shoul be in the form of a one ore more brief and guided duels, in wich your tutor gives you some suggestion like: "watch your tower or I will destroy it with my catapult", and you have only one card that can save you (e.g. lookout towers). You can select other cards but the a.i. will stop you from play them. It should be a skippable tutorial, but if you complete it you'll be rewarded with a quantity of gold and experience proportional to the number of right answers