of course they do,,, cuz mtg doesn't skimp out on info like pox does.. mtg does an excellent job of guiding new players to become competitive, , pox does not.. the point of my post bruh. @Voidtrain , the question is are new players picking up pox all the time? and/or staying?
There have been what, 10 new players in the last week alone? The Discord has been super active with new players learning the game, which I am also proud of our community of veterans helping them out.
I see eth and a few others def do what they can,, and thats encouraging of course. And 10 players sounds great (although dont know how official these numbers are). but you must consider retention ,how many,if any stay? I use to dl 2 new games aday if free,, doest mean I stay. I remember back when I seen some newb struggling, , he liked kf,,, game him some decent cards. nothing crazy,, menalous,, couple low level exos and rares get him started, , never seen him again. lol. the loss to me was the player,, not the runes. so we'll see....I do hope yer right and im wrong tho.
Without turning this into a long effort post: Pox is based around a really good set of fundamental decisions that haven't been replicated yet in another competitive multiplayer game. Those fundamentals are why people still play this game and dedicate a lot of time to the community and to helping new players that want to get into the game. The solid fundamental design is surrounded by a lot of poor supporting design, and those limitations aren't the type that you could predict in advance. The text-based combat log is still a pain to navigate even when it does work properly, and there aren't any other sources of in-game documentation. It would be great if the new client, which nobody is really paying for, was fully polished but even then it would still suffer from 10-year old sensibilities.
From what I hear MTG has lost roughly 40% of its playerbase in the last 3-4 years due to some large issues. I'm not totally versed in what those issues are but I believe it has to do with card huge card quality issues and also the move away from hobby establishments. I only play MTG once a year when I visit my brothers family, still have the old collection though, really need to sort it and price it.
There's a reason why I have been on a sort of crusade for awhile now in regards to consolidation and streamlining. The game's overall design is already a fairly heavy burden (combining deck building, card game and tactics), but over time, the game has gone in many different directions. This has been exacerbated by the fact that it has had MANY design leads over the years. Even from the beginning, Pox has had some confusion as to what kind of game it was supposed to be - things like Nora Drain and Drown honestly don't make a whole lot of sense in a tactically oriented game, but they do in a deckbuilding card-based game. So when I came back to Pox and had a lot of freedom to do what I wanted in terms of design, I started doing a lot of things. Of course, this bothered people as well, as changing hundreds of runes each patch created a massive burden of knowledge, and if the game was massively more popular this might not have been a great idea. But at this point in the game's cycle and with a fairly loyal userbase, it seemed like it was worth doing. In summary, the kinds of things I am talking about are: Consolidating similar abilities into one Sometimes it's difficult tho, especially when players have a lot of emotional connection to some, for example Arrow Eater and Elusive is one such consolidation that I never did, but I'd never put those 2 in the same game personally (there IS room for similar functional goals that behave differently, but in this case one is just a slightly better variant of the other) Reducing the number of ranks Templating of abilities This is stuff like creating standard AEs for abilities so that players aren't constantly having to juggle many different AE sizes Of course, this is only an issue in a game with a spatial element (MTG only has to deal with "target" or "all", basically) Reducing the number of abilities on champions in general Getting rid of garbage/fluff abilities Reducing the complexity of abilities Abilities have been reduced in complexity while attempting to preserve their essence Of course, most of these are on-going. And yea, the combat log sucks. I want the visual combat log, but I honestly would settle for some code time to just make it so that the log just accurately depicts every action that occurs, similar to the way damage and healing are auto triggered. The way it is done right now each and every ability/effect has to send its own text to the log - and any errors/omissions in that means no text. There are also many aspects of Pox that are simply the result of many years of code on top of one another and a lack of an overall design vision which handcuffs fixes and design (for example, see all the problems I have had with trying to "fix" Pounce and all the attack vs basic attack nonsense - these are basically core to how Pox works, but it's just a jumbled mess, same with terrain and overlay effects). Ultimately, I am not sure if these efforts aren't in vain without bigger more systemic changes, but I am not one for sitting around and doing nothing.
From a coder's perspective rather than a gamer's, when I was looking through the pox dlls, I was struck by how much of a difference in code style and coherency there was even between two methods of the same class, or two classes of the same module. In some places there were interfaces defined for every behavior, good functional separation, consistent naming etc. but in others it was as if all this scaffolding that was built was disregarded completely for some nebulous reason. I suspect many of these bugs arise not from holes in logic but rather from rogue pieces of code doing their own thing and not using the functions already defined for their behavior. It's immediately evident that the code has been through many different hands and perhaps cleaning this up would solve some of the issues.
Although it's been a slow grind I will say that for the last couple years the overall design direction of the game has been largely positive. Since I would guess that the bulk of the lifting power has clearly gone into working on the client and cross platform integration I would guess that the bulk or entirety of that has fallen on you. Given the challenges you've mentioned I'm sure you've had more than few brain bleeds making the changes that have been done. For what it's worth I appreciate your efforts. Were you a part of the original design team?
Thanks for the kind words. And yes, you would be right about the other stuff. @Wraith has done a lot as well when he could and wasn't busy with other work. Nope, originally designed by Gedden and his partner in a garage I joined in a junior capacity after the SOE purchase. Eventually I went to work in San Francisco, but r
It's a little of both in that a more strict design vision and better design planning would have provided a better set of base rules and core structure to the way things should have been coded. As it was, many later design decisions contradicted previously established precedent and required creative programming to solve. However, it is true that the methodology on the tech side did change over time as things were learned. For example, in the original set of abilities we had things like Flame Armor and Frost Armor, which are abilities that cost AP and gave you a Damage Shield. The problem is that instead of coding it to use the abilities of Damage Shield, the effect on these abilities were recoded into the Flame Armor and Frost Armor. Thus, now we have 2 sets of Damage Shield abilities, each with an independent codepath. Ultimately, the two diverged and caused confusion as players wondered why one Damage Shield didn't work like the other. Is this a programming problem or a design problem? It depends, but either side could have improved it by being more aware of the bigger picture.
