Dan_Felder

Seraphine and I are pretty good work-friends, but you'd be surprised how passive-aggressive she can get in hexstagram comments.

“Historians will call them room mates”

"Your deckbuilders were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should!"

Piltover is advanced enough that they have belts with pouches that hold other belts, so they don't need as many visible belts as you might think.

It changed. You can check out Trail of the Behemoth here. :)

This is a side-project made with a friend over weekends to be clear, nothing to do with Riot.

Ezreal basically shoots magic too

If players ask for them enough anything is possible. I think it’d be more likely to put big effort into more Path stuff than a separate experience like you describe right now. Never know what we might cook up in a lab to experiment with of course.

I personally also love pve challenges like that. Did a bunch in faeria too. :)

Deal.

Hmm, good question.

To be fair, I only designed a few of the Boomsday project puzzles. I pitched the feature though, based on the faeria Puzzles I did originally design. :)

The idea is older than that of course though, from chess puzzles that inspired the MTG duelist magazine puzzles, and the yugioh videogames that included similar puzzles too.

The really neat innovation of the Boomsday ones were the Mirror puzzles imo. Lots of very cool open-ended ones there.

Thanks. :)

We work a loooot further in the future than you think :)

Digital cardgames have a lot more tools than physical ones, for certain. They also have other problems of course (don't run into as many bugs as physical cardgames, you don't need to make specialized UI flows for something like Fact or Fiction, etc.

However, adding text to cards to prevent combos as they arise makes them unmanageably complex real fast. The number of redesigns and exceptions that exist to prevent cards from comboing how you expect they would if you know the previous cards gets out of hand real fast, and isn't always apparent how you can do it in the first place.

On the other hand, in eternal formats Vampire Hexmage suddenly made a previously forgotten card super exciting. If it had been prevented from working as a combo with bonus text, Dark Depths would be getting complexity creep just to stay the same; still restricting design space but in reverse as you have to redesign old cards to make room for new ones... And often end up breaking many 'fair an...

This is a really good summary of the concept of design space.

A good example from MTG might be how the card Dark Depths was an obscure land that did something pretty unique - it came into play with 10 counters and let you remove one for 3 mana. Once you removed all 10 it gave you a 20/20 super-powerful monster.

This design was cool, but it also restricted the space for designs that removed lots of counters from a card. Much later the card Vampire Hexmage was printed, a 2-cost card that could remove all counters from something. It was an interesting option for answering planeswalkers (a powerful cardtype that relies on counters). However, it ALSO was an insanely broken combo with Dark Depths, allowing a turn 2 summoning of the 20/20.

This combo was exciting in eternal formats, and is still played today. It's a classic at this point. However, it never broke standard; because Dark Depths had rotated out before Vampire Hexmage was printed. In standard, Vampire H...

Commander is special because every playgroup has their own effective ban list, and it’s a multiplayer format where you can gang up on the person winning. People intentionally match the powers of their decks to each other, decide what they don’t want to play against (Armageddon and winter orb may be legal but good luck being invited back to most playgroups if you use them a lot). The commander rules committee that manages the format’s bank list makes a strong point that they expect playgroups to be self-policing in many cases.

Rotation in LoR isn’t planned the to be automatic based on time of release like in magic though. It’s planned to be a curated list based on cards that we think reduce the design space or archetype variety in standard, but want to preserve for eternal. If we want to weaken a card in all formats we can still just nerf it. If removing a card from standard ends up causing unforeseen issues, we can bring it back in.

I love commander! The main difference between commander and other eternal formats is that commander is a social format where playgroups follow their own agreements about what is too powerful and what they want to play against. Many cards that are legal are banned in most casual playgroups by telling the group “I don’t want to play against winter orb, it’s not fun”. Players tend to rate the power level of their decks and intentionally don’t bring “high power” decks to a “low power table” if they want to be invited back. In fact, the people trying their hardest to win with the strongest cards available are a subset called “cedh” or “competitive edh” (edh is another term for commander). This is not how most tables play.

Additionally, commander is a multiplayer format that makes it possible for multiple players to gang up on a stronger one.

Also, many commander players are strongly against wotc printing new cards specifically for commander as they often prefer a more st...

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 t...

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.

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).

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.