I hope no one takes this as any kind of personal attack or attack on what the PC is doing. I know a lot is going on behind the scenes, and live behind some of those scenes myself.
If anything I mention here is already going on, please, tell us about it. If things aren't, then lets figure out why and try to get things moving in the right direction for 2021 and beyond.
Meta concerns
-This is something I sent to various advocates (I've edited slightly) after the live Endor event this year:
-Taking out our team members (who play a good amount of No Idea), No Idea is winning 60% of its games in the OCS over the last 3 months (107 game sample). Its doing too much. I don't have the answer, but some themes keep popping up over and over with regard to what is deemed overpowered: +2 modifiers (or 2s in general, ie Stardust), pulling characters integral to the deck, canceling destinies (rather than targetings), too much text on characters. No Idea does all of these.I think effort should be focused on why DS can't compete anymore. Its generally small stuff (look at Corran vs Isard or Nute v vs Padme v, or Anakins Saber vs Dooku's/DJLv) so I don't know how much of that can/will be fixed. But each little new LS thing that has come out has hurt DS and their cards they've been getting is more to catch up with LS than hurt LS, if that makes sense. And the 'power cards' that traditionally has made DS better (EPP Maul, Blizzard 4, ZIMH) are not nearly as playable right now because of various counters.
----People have talked about what the deck does too well here (viewtopic.php?f=304&t=74759) including some good ideas here (viewtopic.php?f=304&t=74759&start=180#p1309791)
-Again, taking out team members, CCT (65% WR over 60 games), IE (61% WR over 104 games), and Watto (68% WR over 47 games) are also over-performing. I would guess CCT is feasting on TRM, but the intersection of force pile searches, resource denial or stealing (R'tic), and general buffing of cards that need to be in decks (like the Console) is something to watch for. Watto, on the other hand has 2 major problem cards in Sebulba and R'tic. Its one thing to take a strategy of force denial using Jawas and Broken Concentration (which has a bullet now), its another to do it every turn with a character who's difficult to kill because he's never alone. Sebulba also runs contrary to the idea of the deck- putting a card down in Used Pile to cause damage should be a cost, not come with a reward. Not to mention he's a pullable 1/0 that can't be drained at and gets attrition +1 AND deploys free on top of that. Greg said it best here:
I think we're too far gone to do anything about IE at this point, to be honest, but I would hope when we have our next reset that we don't bring back virtual objectives that start ships on the table.stealtheblind wrote: ↑June 15th, 2020, 3:35 pmIs there not a difference between Ozzel and Sebulba? Ozzel is a body that accomplishes Watto's cheap set up. After that, he's forfeit fodder. Sebulba is also pullable and d0, so checks the setup boxes...but he adds a card to your hand in deploy phase the turn he's deployed and on subsequent turns when LS loses 2. Oh, and he adds a force generation, too. Those are two incredible upgrades relative to Ozzel, but you don't have to pay a steeper cost.
-Yes I know that its ironic to complain about how LS cards are better than DS cards and then show that 3 DS decks are winning at too high of a rate.
-You might notice I've left ISB off this list. ISB is sitting at a 53% WR over 186 games so I think that's working as it should. Our team is playing it with more success (70% WR over 66 games) so it does need looking at. I think you actually have a simple fix for ISB, and that is to not allow SSAv to work when you start a Coruscant site. That either takes activation away from the version that plops Gideon to the Square or moves the deck to starting the system. Either way, you still have to find more generation, which eats into starting effects. I was told this would kill the deck though, so others have suggested fixes for Gideon, like the one below.
-Other random erratas I'd (personally) want to see (a non-exhaustive list): Wokling not allowed to pull Projection, Escape Pod v allowed to pull Projection, Old Luke not pull Force Projection, Gideon pull a trooper at full price only if he deploys to a battleground, R2-D2 not going Used, and (likely a controversial one) banning Simple Tricks and Nonsense.
-Has there been any further discussion to something I've seen Jarad mention all the time in Slack, which is doing away with 'sets' and releasing cards in smaller batches? This would keep us from long downtimes between set releases where the meta is starting to be solved (due to the sheer volume of Gemp games, which is a good thing) and keep options fresh.
Tournament/Logistics concerns
-One of the biggest issues we have is a lack of redundancy. We have plenty of people willing to help with things, but they don't know where to go where they will be best utilized, or some people feel like they have to do more than they should and refuse help. It would be good to identify who is serving in what advocate roles and who is working with them on a team. For each event that we have (live or otherwise) we should be identifying a primary director, a secondary director, etc. Basically nothing should be 1-person deep because that person is going to inevitably burn out/leave the community/fall asleep on stream/etc.
-I think its time we created a position of stream coordinator. It shouldn't fall to the TD to direct who should be on stream and who is streaming it. This person can also provide links to the community, can answer people who want to stream with who/what they should be streaming, etc.
-Commentary should be looked at under the lens of teams. I'm not going to sit here on a 16-person team and tell you that we're doing everything right, but we should really look for this in live events where decks can't be changed as frequently. Top players doing commentary is fantastic, but
maybe a player shouldn't be doing commentary for a match where the winner will play their teammate (if you follow that).
-Pod play is good. Its increasingly likely that we will be running Worlds (or something similar to it) online, and we should make every attempt to accommodate players in different time zones that want to play. Even if not for 1 big tournament, running a 'major' starting at 5am EST would allow for Europeans to play while still possibly bringing in some East Coast players and Kyle (who will likely be up from the night before still). Additionally, running an event on West coast time would make it so they don't have to get up as early for an event. (Bastian has since raised a good point about making sure all players are subject to the same competition. While that is something I can definitely get behind, we wouldn't be the only game to run Day 1a/Day 1b of Worlds, even if we might be the smallest).
Communication concerns
-We as a community tend to react rather than plan ahead. We should be better about announcing things well in advance so people have plenty of time to see them (and there's time to have it trickle to the social media community, the players that aren't on there, the players that show up once a month, etc). Obviously Covid has thrown a wrench into these plans, but we know that there will be tournaments in 2021, so we should be developing and announcing plans for the 2021 tournament calendar along with backup plans for if/when these in-person events get canceled. We know they will need prizes, so we should be determining those now.
-In that same vein, it would be nice to know that each advocate has a plan for their position with regards to what they're looking to do in the next month/6 months/year/whatever. I think just getting this out will help them realize the number of people they might need to reach the goal or communicate early that they can't. I think a lot of the issues that pop up can be mitigated by this practice and a lot of criticism with regards to hitting goals can be answered.
-What does the PC need help with? Every once and awhile we see a call for volunteers, but especially taking into account redundancy, is there more that can be done?
-How often do different advocates/teams talk to each other? Is the prize team working with playtesting to maybe develop foil slips of cards that haven't been released yet? I know getting LSRSv at Endor was fantastic and we should be pushing more of that. Is D&D working with the tournament committee (or really just Adam and his stats, or a recreation of the CBT) to see what is dominating the meta and designing cards accordingly?
-One of the things the AGOT PC did was to collect e-mail addresses from everyone who wanted to be a voting member (they vote advocates to fixed-length terms and such as well, something else I've been told by several players we should look into). Then, they have used this collection to send out surveys about different legalities of cards, how often people play, what was a problem in the meta, etc. We should do something similar probably yearly or at least every 2 years to address reset considerations, banning vs erratas, tournament timeframes, tournament styles, etc.
Again, all I'm looking to do is start civil conversations about how we as a community can move forward in 2021 and beyond, and welcome all discussion.
