MArcomage

So there used to be a huge thread in general where people suggested new card ideas, and it was just chaotic. All the card suggestions were mixed in with commentary, and it was many many pages long, and reading through it was kind of intimidating. So then we got the "Concepts" section, and the process is much cleaner and more streamlined.

Yet, I feel like balancing existing cards is even more important than adding new ones. There are too many cards in the game that just never get used (a lot of them having interesting mechanics, but just being too weak or expensive). And on the flip side, there are some cards that are still just too good (though these tend to get fixed much faster than the former category).

Should there be some systematic way to suggest balance changes to cards? Maybe as a subsection of "Concepts", or a new section, or even just a new message board. Right now, it seems the only way to do this would be to either make a big thread (like the old card ideas thread) to house them all, or post a new thread in General/Development for each balance suggestion, which would be really spammy...

Thoughts? Also, someone please tell me how to add newlines on the boards. I can never get spaces between my paragraphs (even when I try inserting HTML), and I have no idea how people do it. >_>

Edit: Ah, got it. Normally you would expect [blah]\n\n[blah] to result in a blank space between the lines, without needing anything in between the newlines.

Rather than the dashes you're putting in the lines you wish to have blank, type a space.

I think your suggestion has merit. It should have its own forum section adjacent to Concepts.

Suggestions:

1 - new section to the Forum for balance changes. New thread for each card that requires balancing. Manual creation of threads.

2 - new section "Cards" that will allow you to browse current card database, similar to concepts section, but you will not be allowed to add new cards or modify them in any way. It will have the same mechanism for creating threads as in concepts to the corresponding section of the forum (balance changes). It can have overlapping functionality with https://netvor.sk/trac/arcomage/ticket/25

Creating topics manually probably wouldn't be a problem for most people, but if the second option is the only way to have a generated link to look at the card (much like Concepts threads have), then that option is preferable. Having that way to see the card being discussed without having to slog through the Decks section would be crucial.

I think the second option is perhaps slightly preferable.

Here is the preview of the new balance changes section:

http://helppage.3dfx.sk/fendek/cards1.png
http://helppage.3dfx.sk/fendek/cards2.png

Any ideas for improvement?

perhaps remove the card effects as shown in http://helppage.3dfx.sk/fendek/cards1.png
they are already visible on the card. Perhaps replace them with card Keywords and allow players to sort them according to Keyword as well

It looks like you already can filter by keyword. It looks good to me. I especially like the fact that the code is included, since it makes it a little more transparent in case of ambiguous card text (without having to dig into the source itself).

Sort by keyword? Do you mean filter by keyword? Don't mix the two, since they are completely different things. All filters that are used in the deck section are present. Additionally, card rarity filter has the option to show all card rarities (unlike in deck section).

no i mean sort by keyword alphabetically. ok I didn't see the list buttons above. so my mistake there.

it's a good layout

I would also like to voice my approval of seeing the card code. I think it looks great.

Now that I look at it again, one thing I should have asked: is the default when you go to the page going to be to show all cards? Since we have over 500 cards, and about 5 cards takes up one screen length, that's going to make a huge scrollbar. Also, loading >500 images is kind of taxing. It takes my browser about 2.5 seconds to load one page of the concepts section, and more than half of that is spent getting the images. Maybe it should be split up into pages if your query results matches more than a certain number of cards?

Since people will generally be looking for cards by name, and not by any other qualities since they're not building decks in that section, perhaps it would be sensible to have cards separated by the first letter of their name. With a clickable alphabet at the top, Clicking A will generate a list of all the A cards, B for B cards, etc.

Currently the default is the "Common cards", so it won't load all cards. Actually, the load times are the same as in deck section. Note that once you enter the deck section and have your images load once, then they are cached and reused, so the browser doesn't need to load them multiple times.

From the data point of view we load the whole XML file anyway, since selecting separate data is slow. All card data is loaded and only then the needed data is filtered out.

I think it should be fine, since this mechanism was tested in the deck section for a long time.

The 'View discussion' button will lead to a new forum section?

Indeed.