In my last Gods Unchained post about the Season 2 Battlepass I discussed being a little underwhelmed by the quest designs. So I thought I'd take a look at a few of the existing quests and see how they could be re-jigged to be a little bit more fun and a whole lot more fair, and come up with some new ideas based on the raw match data that is publicly accessible from the GU API.
In my mind, a quest that excludes one or two decks is fine, but a quest that only be accomplished by one or two decks is just going to hurt for 90% of the people out there. The good news is that with a few tweaks I think we can make these accessible for a whole lot more players while still retaining the challenge of adapting your deck or playstyle on a per-quest basis.
Source: Kling AI
What is a Match?
Here's a pared down example of a match return (for the sake of brevity I've ommitted things like start/end time and match id):
{
"player_won": 1111111,
"player_lost": 22222222,
"game_mode": 7,
"player_info": [
{
"god": "magic",
"cards": [2938, 2497, 2955, 2952, 2442, 896, 2505, 909, 2432, 1156,
831, 2825, 2498, 2442, 1042, 1043, 1100, 1111, 1161, 1167,
1172, 1186, 1206, 1235, 1245, 1294, 1757, 1771, 2458, 2828],
"health": 30,
"status": "connected",
"user_id": 1111111,
"god_power": 100127
},
{
"god": "light",
"cards": [2401, 824, 2927, 885, 913, 2410, 2537, 2826, 916, 2805,
2838, 2911, 1064, 1120, 1121, 1188, 1191, 1195, 1201, 1224,
1226, 1234, 1254, 1277, 1282, 1291, 1292, 1292, 1295, 1751],
"health": 8,
"status": "conceded",
"user_id": 2222222,
"god_power": 100117
}
],
"total_turns": 22,
"total_rounds": 11
}
So what have we got here?
Information about the match...
- Winning and Losing player ID
- Game Mode (7 is Sealed, 13 is Ranked)
- Total Turns and Rounds
...and information about each player.
- God and God Power
- Connected/Disconnected/Conceded Status
- Health at Game End
- Cards in Deck
Now that we know what we're working with, we can sit down and determine what we can and can't do. Of course just because you can do something, doesn't mean you have to -- we'll just have to use common sense and lean toward missions that are more accessible, and that can be accomplished with multiple decks.
Health and Turn Count
Right away we can see there's some unused design space available to us, particularly in regards to Turn Count and Health which are as yet virgin territory.
Some obvious low hanging fruit there:
Win a match with 8 or less health remaining
Win three matches with 25 or more health remaining
Win a match before Round 6
Win three matches before Round 7
All of these are doable with multiple decks, and while some of these may be impossible for a specific deck, none can be won only by a specific deck. Fun, fair, and very easily achievable with a minimum of programming effort. And hey, not everything has to be about winning, we could modify that first one:
Complete a match where both gods have 8 or less health remaining.
Even if you lost, at least you gave almost as good as you got! That's gotta be worth something, right?
Gods and God Pairings
We have quests to play with 3 or 6 unique gods, and we have quests for using either one of two specific gods. I actually don't mind the 'one or the other' style ones, at the very least they're divided up such that best Sealed mode god powers are spread across them. The win with 6 unique gods though is just silly. Very few people are going to be capable of that without tanking their ranking.
You know what everyone is capable of?
Win a match against 3 unique gods
Win a match against 6 unique gods
All of a sudden we've turned something that was either impossible or a slog, to something that (at least on paper) looks fun and exciting. Of course, there's an element of chance to meeting all 6 Gods, but when you finally land a match against number 5 or 6 on your list it's suddenly a high stakes affair. And that's a very good thing.
Tribes
This one is an incredibly easy fix. Take
Win two games with 15+ vikings in your deck
Win two games with 15+ dragons in your deck
Win two games with 15+ amazons in your deck
Win two games with 15+ atlanteans in your deck
Win two games with 15+ olympians in your deck
and make one good one!
Win two games with 13+ creatures from a single tribe in your deck
Bang! Now everyone can play. It's still going to be a bit of a challenge, but we've just eliminated a whole slew of 'always skip' quests for each player. Plus for good measure we can easily throw in something like
Win two games with creatures from at least 5 different tribes in your deck
Easy peasy! Winner winner, chimichanga dinner!
What is a Card?
Since we're obviously already scanning through the players deck for these tribes, lets take a quick peek at a card and see what other fun options we have:
{
"id": 2465,
"name": "Jawbone Scuttler",
"effect": "Afterlife: Deal 2 damage to a random enemy character.",
"god": "nature",
"rarity": "common",
"tribe": {
"String": "wild",
},
"mana": 2,
"attack": {
"Int64": 3,
},
"health": {
"Int64": 2,
},
"type": "creature",
"set": "tides",
},
We have our God, we have our Tribe, Mana/Health/Attack. We have rarity, type and set. We've seen a lot of these used, but IMHO they have skewed way too heavily towards the impossible for too many.
I think they've mostly done okay here, but there's a bit of fun to be had still:
Win x games with no Epic or Legendary cards in your deck
Win x games with no Neutral cards in your deck
Win x games with no 1 or 2 mana cards in your deck
Win a game with at least 10 cards each from two different sets
Most of those look pretty decent, although for me in particular, I would always re-roll the 1/2 Mana one -- but that's okay! Each player is meant to have a few they want to re-roll every time, the point is that there should be more that are worth playing than not.
Honestly, I'll just be happy if they fix the tribes thing. So GU if you're reading this, you know what to do!
If you don't know what to do, the answer is probably: Get in touch with me, and offer me a hefty sum of $GODS to redesign the system and recommend/identify other UI/UX issues before they get pushed to prod!