MArcomage

(Another one of those conversations [3 now].)

Djinn on 02:43, 14. Jun, 2014
_I think some of the flaws in my decks can be explained by I was testing them against the Cheater AIs; this one didn't work nearly as well against the production/tower/wall cheater.
[different game]
Djinn on 02:44, 14. Jun, 2014
_And this one didn't work nearly as well against the Dragon Cheater.
[/different game]
Djinn on 02:45, 14. Jun, 2014
_Although, (continued from other game,) I have this nice deck that managed to take out one cheater AI so far, but it seems super haphazard.
sillenia on 02:46, 14. Jun, 2014
_yeah, i don#t like the cheater ai's ... but maybe at some point i should learn playing them ...
Djinn on 02:48, 14. Jun, 2014
_I...wouldn't reccommend it if you have plenty of human players. The style of deck you need for each one is different, and the fact you can't use rares makes it neccessary to use strategies that are really silly for the main game. Like how Nature, Illusion, and any summoning is pretty bad.
sillenia on 02:50, 14. Jun, 2014
_yes, you are right of course and that is the reason i do not play them so far :)
sillenia on 02:51, 14. Jun, 2014
_by the way - did read that thing about learning - is rather interesting, thanks
Djinn on 02:51, 14. Jun, 2014
_Mind if I make this another conversation I post on the forum? (With the fragment I sent in the other game.)
sillenia on 02:54, 14. Jun, 2014
_no, not at all - go ahead :)

(Oh, and it turns out I completely missed sil's line of thanks. Welcome, sillenia!)

It's true that the AIs are labeled "challenge", so although you're asking them to do something difficult when you play them, and although the massive cheating they use for that purpose is implied in their descriptions (although the texts are inconsistent; some of them are very specific, like Grofgul, and some are super vague, like Gilgamesh), the restriction upon the player's rare use means that any deck you make for these AIs has to be made to avoid and discard rares whereas any normal deck is built to search for and summon rares.

I suggest that the rare-use limitation be removed, and then, if needed, the non-rule-based advantages of the AIs be made more extreme.

Removing the rare-restriction on challenges in favor for a higher benefit for the ai would tend to make these games more luck dependent because of the following reasons:

-Many Rares are game-breaking, like zeus, tornado or Zis. Playing any of these could just almost one-shot an ai-opponent. While this is also true for a real opponent, a real opponent can play around this card or play with more foretelling (like playing discarding for the odds of drawing a discard card).

-You got a small chance to draw a rare, although you can summon some with some cards. Here the cards can almost be like "random free swings"

-You can really hate an opponent out with rares, if you know against who you play. For sophie, for example, take return to the bedinning, zeus, etc. For grofgul, take tornado, devestation and other.

-Higher stats for the ai would tend to lead to faster wins. This would imply that you either need to have luck and draw a game changer or die a horribly death.

-Rares aren't that useless at all in these games. You can feed them to vulture and the ai still priorize them at highest for discard-

All in all, restricting the game on uncommons and commons made these challenges more skill-testing (You need now to build your deck really properly and linear for a single challenge, you just cannot build a general deck and try to beat this challenges.) because of the absence of "free wins".

Has this been discussed before? Could you link it?

Here you go:

http://arcomage.net/?location=Forum_thread&current_thread=1649&thread_current_page=0

It was one of the first features added to the challanges for some reasons :)

Huh. I guess the suggestion now should be "make no-rares an option for normal player games".

An interesting idea is to have a "no-rare" mode for PvP also.

Well, it was be told about it in the first 1-10 posts (The first post by dindon was addressing this) and noone ever said something against it because the challenges were too easy before (The reasons for this were at the first page).

Lord_Earthfire wrote:
All in all, restricting the game on uncommons and commons made these challenges more skill-testing (You need now to build your deck really properly and linear for a single challenge, you just cannot build a general deck and try to beat this challenges.) because of the absence of "free wins".

I don't think most of us don't want to build decks that are single-purpose / AI-defeating only. We'd prefer to be testing our best general-play decks against the AI.

I often want to test my decks on the AI challenges, but by default they disallow rares which cripples me when testing general purpose decks. And the normal AI is just too poor.

We need something in between. Can I suggest that we have AI challenges that allow toggling use of rares on/off? When rares are enabled, you get no gold reward for winning, of course.

P.S. I'm a games dev by profession, also experience with web including PHP, so happy to pitch in on dev sometime.