(See previous Days of Yuletide here.)
(This blog post was written by ketura, so if you see “I” referenced, you know who to blame.)
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk about errata.
A year and a half ago, the Player’s Council released a video at our debut discussing various pillars or facets of our organization that we aimed to work on in parallel. At that time, we showed a graphic outlining our vague progress goals:
Of the four pillars shown, leagues have progressed the most consistently and are now sitting at the point we said they would be “long-term”. V-sets took a lot longer than we originally expected, but they too were worked on consistently and with the announcement of V1 we are at last closing in on finishing that pillar’s “short-term”.
The Wiki sat unaltered for a while, but earlier this year the work was put in to quickly launch it past “short-term” and “medium-term” and it now comfortably sits in the “long-term” column
The PC rather quickly managed to work our way through reviewing all X- and R-listed cards and figured out errata for each of them, both on the design side and on the development side of importing them all into Gemp. This brought the Errata pillar past “short-term”–but then progress halted.
There’s some organizational reasons why this happened, but a more fundamental reason was a lack of an answer to the question “what’s next?”.
As a result of our efforts, we now have some institutional knowledge. We know how to get cards implemented in Gemp, we have a review process more or less in place, and we have some design experience under our belts. So where do we go from here?
Before we can reasonably answer “what’s next?”, we have to ask “what’s the goal?”. What are we working towards?
Let’s do that by imagining ourselves 10 years from now, as if everything the PC ever planned went horribly right, and what “winning” might look like.
First we might imagine how many more cards there are, how many more ways there are to play, how improved Gemp and the Wiki have become. Fanciful, but let’s put those aside.
Imagine how many formats there are; not the 20+ legacy Decipher formats–those will always be there–but the 3 PC formats. Are there more? Or perhaps are there fewer?
Can you imagine a PC that has managed to reel in the excesses of Expanded, and brought low the ravages of power creep? Can you imagine there being some deft solution that solves the problem of disparate site paths? Can you imagine perhaps that there’s only one major format left, PC-Open, that permits all cards because there are no infuriating OP combos left that drive people away?
A lot of people can’t imagine that, actually, so you’re not alone if you don’t. It’s easy to see the 3500-card catalogue we’ve got, 20 mutually exclusive formats, 4 different site paths, a mess of incompatible power levels, an overall decline in card quality, and wonder how anyone could ever possibly hope to disentangle it all in our lifetimes.
I certainly can’t see the exact path forward (if I did, I would write a blog post about it). But I can see the shape of it, the rough shadow flickering across the window. And more than that, I can see what machine we would have to build that could do the disentangling for us.
Here’s how it works:
- First, decide what elements in the game are “problematic”. For instance, the PC decided that having an X-list was problematic, and worked towards abolishing it. Perhaps this definition might also include “no cards that nobody puts in their decks”, or “no cards that win 70% of the time when included”, or “no cards that feed an infinite loop”.
- Write tools to identify what the state of the meta-game is by analyzing replays to see how cards perform. These tools are currently under construction, and should hopefully have meaningful progress by early next year.
- Use the replay analyzer from step 2 to identify which cards violate the rules decided in step 1.
- Alter the offending cards. Nerf them, or buff them, or rework them if need be, and put the new versions out on Gemp.
- React to the downstream ramifications of the altered card (was it overused because it was slapping down an even more annoying card?). Continue following the dominoes, repeating steps 4 and 5 until the dust settles.
- Wash, rinse, repeat. If step 1 no longer defines any cards that exist, find the next issue with the game to address.
This entire process can simply be called “The Errata Process”. Sometimes a given issue is best addressed by adding more cards rather than altering existing ones, and that’s fine; we’re allowed to have finesse and use our heads in those situations. But by and large, a card being overused is probably an indicator that the card is overtuned–not that it lacks a specific counter.
This philosophy or overarching strategy requires that the PC look at the game as, well, a video game. That means regular balance patches, continuous tweaking and reacting to the metagame as it develops. This in some ways may seem anathema to the idea of a CCG, which traditionally is set in stone (or cardboard) and only alters cards as an absolute last resort.
To that, I would respond that there were 7100 games played over the last month on Gemp:
Were there 7100 games played on kitchen tables across the entire world in that same time span? 230 games played per day, every day, on average? And that’s down from it’s peak; at the height of the pandemic there were more than 10,000 games played per month (330 games played per day)!
I think looking at this data, all I can conclude is that the LotR-TCG already is a video game, and it just happens to include a legacy cardboard mode that people occasionally indulge in. I say it’s high time that it be treated like one.
So. With the titanic, herculean goal of “refine all cards everywhere into a playable state in a single unified format”, and the 6-step Errata Process above, and the mindset of maintaining this game as if it were a video game, leveraging the Gemp platform to its utmost, we have all the tools we need. All that’s left is to do it.
The first wave of new errata will be issued to PC playtest formats on UTC 19 December, and will be included in the Yuletide League that starts the same day. This batch will be small, but I think it will be memorable, and it will certainly be a new step forward into completely uncharted territory, which neither past player groups nor Decipher themselves ever embarked on: it will include buffs to existing cards.
Is there a more appropriately titled card to start with than this one?
If while reading the above you were inspired and feel like you want to be a part of this process, know that we are in desperate need for playtesters, reviewers, and in fact a dedicated Errata Lead to contribute to and execute this process.
If you would like to join the Player’s Council in this capacity, please do not hesitate to contact ketura in the PC Discord Server here.
Keep checking back here every day for the next 12 Days of Yuletide update!
The White Council 