Crow missing from selection on 4-2 Card feat upgrade

[Longshot11]

Possibly, other cards too, can't confirm.

 

Crow is AD0 card and should have been available for selection. Unless - not quite -intuitively- the Basic/Elite culling for scenario cards also applies for Deck Rebuild. However, I had quite a lot of cards across the categories to chose from - more than I would expect if the above theory is correct..

[Ethics Gradient]

Took some verification, but you appear to be correct.

 

Deck-repair-eligable cards are drawn from the scenario vault, which was previously subject to the culling algorithm in the setup phase.  As an AD0 Basic, Crow has about an 80% of being pulled from play in AD4.

[Longshot11]

Well, that can throw a wrench in the 'scroll-user' characters' wheels (get a Spell feat without having Arcane/Divine, get a Cure, banish it during play, retrieve it at Deck Rebuild). I suppose you're right and the code works as intended, but this is yet another boar game option being ham-strung.

 

If it matters, I believe the Basic/Elite culling should be disregarded on the Deck Rebuild screen, as the intent is players can control if and which boons they remove from game. I wouldn't remove cards I intend to re-draw later in my deck.

[Ethics Gradient]

If it matters, I believe the Basic/Elite culling should be disregarded on the Deck Rebuild screen, as the intent is players can control if and which boons they remove from game. I wouldn't remove cards I intend to re-draw later in my deck.

Yeah, in the tabletop game there were a handful of Basic boons that we never discarded.  They were just too useful to give up, and were nice to fill gaps in the deck if you end up banishing a card or two.

 

Digitally though, there's no simple way to "un-cull" cards.  There are a few ways the devs can go about it, but right now, it's probably a question of: Are you ok with basic Basic/Elite cards falling out of circulation every now and then, or shall we take a chance on vault modification and see what funny downstream bugs will likely result?

[Kiirnodel]

I haven't gotten far enough in the game for the mechanic of removing cards to take effect. Does the app game allow to choose not to completely remove boons? Because as far as I'm aware, it should...

[Longshot11]

I haven't gotten far enough in the game for the mechanic of removing cards to take effect. Does the app game allow to choose not to completely remove boons? Because as far as I'm aware, it should...

I doesn't allow you a choice. Instead, for each scenario, a specific (and allegedly growing) percentage of Basic cards (BOTH banes and boons!) is removed from the pool for creating location decks. So, yeah, if you're playing a Card Feat reward scenario, and you were hoping to fill your new slot with a Basic card that just happened to be randomly culled just then - you're out of luck.

[Kiirnodel]

The culling is random? That seems odd and not in-line with the rules of the original game. Do we have any developers that would like to comment on why the change?

[Ethics Gradient]

The culling is random? That seems odd and not in-line with the rules of the original game. Do we have any developers that would like to comment on why the change?

Yes, the digital culling process is a fairly big divergence from tabletop rules.  The problem is those rules don't translate too well for digital play across the different game modes.  I can't find it, but there was a post explaining the decision a couple months ago.

 

The culling process is entirely random, but also non-permanent.  At AD4, for instance, 80% of all Basic cards are removed from the game before play.  On the next AD4 scenario you play, all the cards return to face the same 80% cut.  They'll never go away entirely, they are just increasingly filtered as you move up in AD.

 

The digital card box ("Vault") isn't static like in tabletop play.  It is rebuilt dynamically every time you load up a scenario.  Applying the cull "filter" is just one of the many steps the app goes through as it preps all your decks for play.

[Kiirnodel]

Not sure, it seems like it could be handled the way they handle cards in the character's decks. Like how if you take two character that have previously played separately they can't bring into a single game more copies of a card than there are in the Vault? Similarly, each character could also "carry" a list of the cards that have been culled for that character, and compare it with the list for all of the other characters. Cards they have in common would only take the highest number of culled cards between the two (so if both characters culled the Crow once, it is still only culled 1 copy; but if one character culled 2 of them, 2 are culled in the final). The compiled list of all the characters playing determines the full list of culled cards.

 

Or if that is too complicated for Quest Mode, just do that in story mode. The list of culled cards could be tied to the party, which I know is already tracked at least somewhat differently from the individual characters. The divergence from the way the original game handled it actually removes some of the tactics that the game has. I know that when we played through it physically, there were some boons that we never completely removed. It was a conscious choice, and one that the game explicitly has the players make for boons. While through prolonged play, the weaker banes eventually all get removed (and you can't avoid that).

[Hannibal_PJV]

The problem is that characters cull cards from different "game boxes" so it would not work...

The only option would be to force player manually cull those 80% of cards in the Beginning of each scenario, and that would be really tedious task... maybe a couple of years more time Until next ad?

Or the option to move characters between croups aka different game boxes have to be removed. So big part of the game mode should be rewriten... a long task... while not doing any other coding in the meanwhile.

Who knows, maybe in the far a way future, but there Are parts that Are not compatible. Manual culling vs dynamic vault vs dynamic Gaming parties.

[Ethics Gradient]

Easiest path, if implemented tabletop-style, would be managing banished Basics by campaign party.  Stuffing banished Basics in the character save would work, but might add something like an additional 50% overhead per character.  An extra few KB here and there doesn't sound like much, but the PlayFab API does place some limits on the amount of data each player can store in the cloud, and the frequency of updates it allows. That being said, I don't think the technical side is the key driver.

 

Multiplayer may be a million versions in the future (probably less, but it seems that way), but I think the culling implementation has some basis on it being potentially really difficult to reconcile which Basics may have been banished when you're playing in an online campaign or a pick-up group.  The easiest solution they came up with was just to gradually filter the Basic (and eventually Elite) cards as you progress in AD/Quest Tier.

 

I'm okay with the implementation for two reasons.  1. The more Basic cards exit the vault, the better the chances of seeing high-level campaign or treasure cards.  And 2. If there's some Basic card I really want to get back, I can always chose an earlier scenario (unless in Quest mode, but that's all about "onward and upward," not looking back).

 

The original rules also didn't really account for scenario mobility, and the game-as-designed was fairly linear where you'd maybe have a chance to banish 2-3 dozen cards in the entire Adventure Path.  In digital, should you be able to banish boons in every scenario played, no matter how many times you'd replay them?  Just the first playthrough?

 

I know it feels nice to have some control over which cards get banished, but as you approach AD5 and AD6, the growing size of the card pool makes the difference between an automatic cut of 80-90% Basics and manual curation almost insignificant.

 

The only problem I do have with the culling mechanism is that it also filters out Basic treasure cards.  I know, there are only maybe a dozen or so Basic treasures, but it feels like a downer that unlockable content you may have never seen (potentially acquired with real money!) may never come up in the course of play once you're outside the window they will likely appear.  Treasure cards have a hard enough time being selected for play in the first place; it seems like an extra little indignity for them to make the vault then get cut before ever having a chance at being dealt into a location deck.