Extremely confused about the line in particular "Playtesting and tech quality/keeping bugs down becomes significantly harder."
How does rotation solve bugs? All it does is offload them onto Eternal formats. And if the goal is to ensure that Eternal will be supported... wont you have to solve those bugs anyways? Or will it just be ignored.
That's a list of stuff that makes the overall game more difficult to manage as more cards are added to the game. Rotation doesn't solve all those bullet points, but the presence of those factors increases the need for tools that make managing the card pool easier overall.
Basically, imagine you have a kid and so you know your expenses are going to go up as a new parent. So you decide to save some money by eating at home more often than going out to dinner. This doesn't make the need to buy diapers disappear, but the cost of diapers is one reason it's important to look for ways to save elsewhere.
Rotation isn't supposed to remove the need for bug fixing, bug fixing was just brought up as one of the many increasing costs of development time as more cards are added.
I appreciate the insight here, but I'm not sure the analogy fully holds. From a player's perspective, Riot are the ones who are ultimately in charge of maintaining the quality of both the restaurant (Eternal) and home-cooked meals (Rotation). As a player who will only be interested in the Eternal format because that's the only place I will be able play my favorite champion, it is unclear to me how "cutting costs" by focusing more on the meals at home doesn't lead to issues with me continuing to eat my favorite dish at the only restaurant I can still go to.
In this analogy, bug fixing is the diapers - not the restaurant.
I can't follow your analogy because for me it looks like this: I have a kid (Eternal) that is going to school soon, so I know the associated costs will go up beyond what I can sustain. How will having a second baby (Stanard), which has its own, admittedly lower, cost base reduce my overall child raising costs? The only way this is possible, if I decide to abandon my older kid going to school (Eternal), which is a rather cruel analogy, but you started it! :P
Maybe I have a flaw in my logic, so happy to be convinced otherwise, but that is causing the core issue I see a lot of people fearing: Their favourite champion will rotate into an abandoned format.
You, i.e. Riot, wisely decided to tap into the investment done into making champions into characters that players can and want to get attached to for gameplay, presentation, and/or lore reasons, but the downside is that LoR players now care a lot more about champions in LoR than MtG players about certain Planeswalkers or Hearthstone players about certain Legendaries.
I'm hoping to be wrong, but I see a significant amount of players being very disappointed if their favourite champions gets rotated, and these are most likely people who not only have emotional but also financial investment into that champion; unless you manage to make both formats feel equally supported, but then rotation won't help with the QA and balancing issues an ever increasing card pool causes? And just to be clear, I don't envy you at all. This is a very hard decision because an ever increasing card pool truly comes with ever increasing dev resources needed to maintain the same level of QA and balance.
Hmm, not sure how else to explain my comment. I'm just clarifying that rotation isn't supposed to remove the need for bug fixing, bug fixing was just brought up as one of the many increasing costs of development time as more cards are added.
I think the main question is more along the lines of, wouldn't those bugs still exist and therefore need to be fixed because of the eternal format?
This just means the bugs are of less quantity specifically in the standard format, but it feels strange for rotations to use the reasoning that it presents less bugs, when those bugs will exist regardless due to the eternal format.
That leads to a lot of us fearing that the eternal format is expected to be more of an afterthought, and bugs addressed less frequently there. Or that we should expect a large spike of bugs and issues in the eternal format essentially on every release due to a heavier focus exclusively on standard.
Yes, the bugs would still exist. That’s why I keep saying rotation doesn’t eliminate the need to address bugs. This is a list of the many reasons the game gets more time consuming to manage over time (which is why rotation wasn’t needed at the beginning but is very valuable now).
New cards being added introduces a bunch of challenges that make the game take more time to develop. Rotation makes some of those issues easier, giving us more bandwidth to manage the others that it does not make easier.
It’s all the same team, as the time we spend managing bugs increases we have less time to do other things. Rotation reduces the time it takes to do some of the other things (not bugs).
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for this clarification, but I think it speaks to how the original analogy is a bit flawed. There's a real concern within the playerbase that splitting the formats will mean Eternal gets less attention on foundational issues like bug fixing, and the phrasing both here and in the article only accentuated those concerns.
Bug fixing feels like the one factor that shouldn't be evaluated when determining whether a Rotation format is helpful, and I hope future messaging makes it clear that bug fixes/technical concerns will be taken as seriously for the Eternal format as it is in Rotation.
I totally understand folks are concerned that eternal would get ignored. I don’t think that will change until we prove otherwise. I’m simply clarifying that this is being taken out of context, we made a list of the many reasons the game becomes more expensive to develop over time. This is not a list of things we plan to ignore thanks to rotation.
The reason for this list is to explain why the costs have been rising over time, so finding ways to make the game more manageable overall is valuable now, when it wasn’t necessary at the start. This is why noting the increased complexity of testing the game for bugs is part of the list, because that increases the overall need for scope savings elsewhere.
Not sure how else I can explain what we meant when we wrote that. I feel like I keep repeating myself.
I mean, something that could change it is clear communication. For example, stating that eternal will have permanent ranked modes, that it will have tournaments at exactly the same frequency as standard, that it will get exactly as much balance attention as standard and QA attention as standard and that cards will continue to be printed designed for eternal in every set.
The problem is, what we were told, says that none of that is planned. Eternal wont have permanent ranked mode. It will see far less attention (since otherwise the supposed benefit of "hey, balancing gets easier" disappears). It wont get new cards designed for it. It wont get as many tournaments. It simply screams of Eternal being like HS' wild. A format that only exists so that technically its rotation instead of deleting old cards, but a format that is fully intended to not be played by anyone.
It will see far less attention (since otherwise the supposed benefit of "hey, balancing gets easier" disappears).
There's a lot here, but I want to clarify something on this - since I've seen this assumption in a few places.
One of the reasons that balancing and design gets easier while caring about two formats is because there are two formats. Some players want to play with azir/irellia and have it be powerful. Some people want to stop playing against azir/irellia, or have room for other decks in the meta that pair with azir in other ways.
It's difficult to have your Azirellia and eat it too. If you have a single format for all these conflicting players that want opposite things, there is no balance point that addresses both of them fully. Some people want to preserve their favorite decks from the past and see them be top tier meta contenders, some want to see new champions and archetypes take center stage.
The advantage to eternal formats is that you can both preserve the decks of the past so their biggest fans can continue to enjoy them, while making room for other play patterns within standard. If new champions aren't as powerful in eternal right away, but are still great to play in standard, that's potentially fine. The new cards are still cool somewhere.
This doesn't solve all balance difficulties of course, there is no game design cure-all that solves all balance problems I'm aware of (if you know one, please send it to me). It does help with solving some of the problems though.
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