Didn’t he claim there was a post-rotation play tester group?
Desp-Testing (and Bank Job-ing, Laundry-ing) Criminals are more than enough on their own to punish asset spam, and Astrolabe + Paricia is perfectly reasonable Shaper tech (especially with Hayley and Tech Writer in the card pool). I, for one, long for a metagame in which the faction with the best ice destruction is a little soft to economic pressure via trash costs.
To be honest, I think I might agree with Damon. I think “the agenda flood problem”, and Jackson’s necessity as solution to same, is overstated.
However, the Noise problem is a different story. Especially as strong as Noise is right now, it’s essential for the metagame that a Noise silver bullet be playable in triplicate.
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If we have the time frame right (mid 2018) and iirc it was said they generally design cards around 2 years out. Given those are true then they should be in the middle of the first cycle post rotation development about now. Now how many playtesters are that far out, versus working on finalizing the next cycle is another question.
Sure. And FFG claims the rest of Mumbad is “on the boat” or “at the printer”.
They desined the first two years of stuff at about the same time, but that no longer holds true for future products as those are designed one at a time and not all at once.
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Scorched Earth.
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I’m sure they are hard at work testing and collecting data without cards that will rotate, as well as designing and testing the next cycles in the context of how rotation will affect them, but there’s really just no way they have actual data with three cycles still between us and rotation. That would require the cycle after Mumbad, the cycle after that, AND the cycle after that being in development in some fashion, and a good amount of those cards being near-complete in order for the data being collected on testing such a card pool to be actually meaningful. And that’s not including any big boxes they might consider releasing if they continue to do them.
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I keep wishing this thread would move past the balance complaints we share elsewhere. I take your point, but would you understand if I said that I’d rather let people decide whether or not to wait patiently on their own? Instead of punting ahead to whenever this playtest might actually happen, I think we could get the same benefit without losing momentum in the thread by describing the design playbook as slim. Wouldn’t this – at least – set us up for a much less grinding course of patience during the game’s development?
Even as competitive players, I think our sense of appropriate balance still has less to do with “real data” at any stage than it’s formed from ideas about how design should exhibit symmetry. I’m talking generally about how good players react to complaints about runner/corp win rates, or the over or under-representation of certain cards, factions, or strategies. I think that mindset is obviously common among game-players at virtually every level, so I get frustrated when the largest set of posters in this thread counsel patience instead of delving further into the concept. Many speculation threads boil down to a back-and-forth over where Damon will take the game, and I don’t think I’m alone in finding that stifling after a while.
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I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.
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Ehhh, clarifying myself seems like risky territory. I’m telling you off over a vague feeling I have, which is probably dumb. You were talking about what we know about the playtesters, and that if a post-rotation group exists then it’s probably not collecting any “actual data.” I think it’s a little destructive to imagine the playtesters as any kind of methodical quality inspectors, and not – as ours could be – a broadly exploratory meta from which the design team could learn.
More to the point, I agreed with your point about the difficulty of meaningful analysis of the post-rotation environment from where we are now, but I didn’t like where it left the discussion. Your comment (and many other, essentially correct posts like it in this thread) leave us with very little room to speculate; something along the lines of “we’ll have to wait and see.” I get a similar sense from a lot of the most active community members around balance complaints: there seems to be no point trying to suss out for the fearful whether Jackson is too far above the curve, or Faust, or if Weyland is too weak, or – matter at hand – what effects rotation might have, etc, because we don’t have good data from which to draw specific conclusions. But someone’s made a thread to talk about it now either way, and I want that to be an opportunity to practice thinking critically and creatively about this difficult game with the tools I have now.
I am given to understand that they’re about 2 releases (cycle / box) ahead at any given point in time. The internal design team is probably somewhat ahead of that as well. So that would jive with the thought that live data is probably still in the future, w/r/t rotation.
I ran basically the exact same build (sans melange and a reasonably different ice suite) to a store champs win recently too. It really has game. I’m also super interested in ‘De-Jacksoning’ my brain in prep of rotation.
Honestly you really don’t (for this Argus). This build is typically able to score out by turn 7 or 8, every game, without fail. As a long time Noise player, the only answer I have is to go full-mill. And then it’s just slot machine time. The tightest games I’ve had so far are Keyhole Siphon spam ideas, and even then an RnD Archer (which is usually doable in the first couple of turns anyway) just sorts that right out.
Anyway, this is all totally fine for Argus, sort of for PE, not really applicable at all for anybody else, but I do think there are very strong, workable ideas without the ‘King in Yellow’
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