Yups. A question well posed, which I've raised and will continue to raise for a little longer. This far I share your notion though.verbalshadow wrote:While trinity does sound like an interesting resource method I feel it fails on a few points.
1. Complexity not to the gameplay itself but for us the designers. Why have to balance 3 resources when you can easily express those costs in a single resource.
I agree it will make playing certain card types faster, but keep in mind that the player who always has zero cards in hand or near zero is also at a disadvantage in several ways. Just playing all you have always"because you can" is probably a guaranteed loss against a more experienced player that would hold on to a couple of well selected cards. Knowing all this one might argue that it will shift the meta-game and the deck building, so that what you suggest won't actually happen.2. It will make the game play much much faster. The first 5 or so rounds i only put out creatures to provide defence. As soon as I hit my magic combination of Resources I flood the board with creatures and the win will quick. Of course the other player is doing the same thing. So what happens it becomes a race to the magic number very little strategy. Making each pile deplete fixes this but removes the point of have 3 different resource types.
I also think it is very hard to draw conclusions from scenario-examples like the one you gave, simply because they are only true if a deck can only be built in one way or the game favours it.
As an example we could use that "the magic number of resources" in your example leads to an ultimate combo of creatures. It could, but if properly designed it could lead to plenty of other stuff happening instead. In a sense the criticism is also valid for all games, at any given time the resources are optimized for the specific deck, isn't it? What I mean to express is that you could pick any deck in MtG right now and come with the same criticism. It only states that "when resources are optimal for conditions x y z to be true, then effects a b c will be triggered by cards in the deck (given I have the cards a hand or in play)"
I agree we're long long overdue with a freeze, but given the fact that I'm more or less the only one working on it, at least in the long run, it can't go any faster and there hasn't been any serious amount of time put on it last couple of months. That is about to change now as I'm unemployed as of today. ...hence I'll have much more time to put into it. Long story short, there won't be a freeze until we have a good system and it has been somewhat tested. Currently we don't have a good system. It lacks in several regards, but I'm honestly hoping that many of the questions and some kind of soft freeze could be in place before new years.3. Lastly this change is basiclly forces us to start from scratch to utilize it properly. I think we need to call the stats we have frozen and do gameplay testing.