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Why Card Copying May Not Ruin Eye of Judgment
Last week it was revealed that the cards used in Sony's interesting new CCG/Videogame hybrid Eye of Judgement can easily be copied and reused. The large symbols on the cards that register with the game also make them prime candidates for counterfeiting. It may sound dire, but weizur writes with a link to a post on the Zen and Games site that theorizes this may not be the end of the world for the game. "Ultimately the rules of the game change. No longer is it a game about collecting and skill begins to play a much larger role in the game in the long run since personal wealth and ability to acquire cards becomes a non-factor. What Magic has taught us though is that this isn't really a bad thing and much fun can still be had when the game becomes a game of skill and less a game of chance, this is of course in theory as Eye of Judgment probably doesn't have the depth and finesse that Magic has and ultimately the game design of Eye of Judgment and it's ability to be a fun game will be the ultimate test."
To me the game just seems a gimmick, I can't possibly see people wanting to buy a game then hundreds of cards just for the fun of it. Surely once you buy the game that's all you should need, instead this way you have to keep buying every few months or your cards are too weak and useless in such a cutthroat place like online gaming.
I like muppets.
but quite frankly, the eye scares the crap out of me.
The original generic sig.
When did Magic become a game of skill instead of personal wealth?
I used to play Magic a lot, and this is certainly great for players on a budget. With my friends I used to play with proxy decks (i.e. cards with labels instead of the cards themselves) because I couldn't afford the hundreds of dollars I'd have to spend to get the right cards (either through getting rares out of packs and trading them or just buying the specific card I needed). However, this absolutely sucks for Sony, who is now only going to make money through the sale of the Eye and the game itself. Unless it comes up with some extremely clever way to entice people to keep buying the actual cards themselves. (Each box has a unique super card that can only be registered once or something.)
That's the CCG model, just updated for online-play. Having to buy the latest cards hasn't made M:TG die.
Having cards actually be rare is a good thing, if they could pull it off. Games get boring when everyone has access to the same spells and same powerdecks. Sure, the even-playing field means that there's now a skill-requirement (a good thing, as well), but only at the expense of variety. Too bad R&D didn't give the idea more than 2 seconds of thought.
I've always said that MTG is just an MMO where the only method of character advancement is to buy from the gold farmers. If you take away the grinding aspect of an MMO, you might lose some strategic element (different character arrangements grind faster), but because you can always make it up with more time or by gold farmer purchases, it doesn't amount to much.
The situation is even clearer in customizable card games: There was never any strategy involved in the "leveling" (here card obtaining) process, just money. So when you eliminate it, you have't removed any strategic aspect of the game; its still about squeezing as much as you can into limited deck size constraints, and then playing that deck properly. The only people who lose when you take the second C out of CCG are the bean counters.
Would it have been too expensive to print unique IDs on every card? Card copying is only an issue for online play, after all. Make the UID a hash that gets sent back to the servers, then you could have stopped all casual piracy.
To further reduce the problem, simply track hash failures and duplicate UIDs, then wait a bit for the cheaters to get confident before banning all rampant cheaters for a month, sending angry messages to all moderate cheaters and deleting all offending cards from the database.
Combined technical hurdles and fear tactics would wipe out practically all significant cheating, leaving only the soldering gun / hex editor crowd who you're not going to stop anyway. For them, as TFA says, there's only so far a hacked deck can take you.
I don't see how this is any different from other CCGs. People can play those with fake cards just as easy, if not technically easier. The enforcement in those games is that other players won't want to play against people with fake cards (which, you can tell with the camera in this game, right?) and that some people simply enjoy the act of collecting the cards for investment purposes. The mechanisms are identical.
And I keep seeing people recommend "register once" cards. This would ruin the CCG model more than anything else. It gets rid of the ability to trade or sell cards at a later time.
Given that Sony seems to be selling the camera separately (or at least making plans to do so), and retailers don't know what to make of it in the first place, the game is probably already doomed to being an odd little gimmick. If they really wanted to go with a collectible game, they would have been better served by something that was wholly online and digital-- the chance of counterfeits goes down substantially there, and the players are only a step away from the card store whenever they turn the console on.
It ruins it for SOny and Wizards of the Coast.
The whole point of the game was for them to sell the collectable cards. There by making more money. Kinda like the subscription of an MMO, this game was designed so the developers will get more money after the initial sale.
Is the game still going to be playable? Of course it is. As mentioned, all the various rules and restriction keep it from becoming too unbalanced.
But Sony's market for buyers of expansions has now gone into the toilet. If you'd hoped this would be a game with lots of new and interesting cards coming out in the future, that's gone. The market just won't be there when piracy is so much easier.
The only chance for long-term expansion of the game is if Sony patches it to include some sort of unique identifier on future cards, so that they can only be uploaded once.
If the game is good, it'll be ok, otherwise it won't?
Or am I misreading the summary?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
For people who actually play the game it may or may not be the end, but for the people who sell the cards it's a disaster. Depending on how many cards were printed, there could end up being a huge unsold stock for ages.
While a good many gamers might care less about the problems of retailers, this also means that a game using the same sort of mechanics as Eye of Judgment is unlikely to be made in the future as it would be very difficult to sell the idea to retailers after getting burned. Especially if they can look in their stock room or on their shelves and still see unsold Eye of Judgment cards.
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast will likely disagree with your definition of of "ruins the game." To be more specific, their definition will be "anything that prevents people from buying piles of our cards that we invested lots of money into at Sony's word that it'd be a good move." I'm not saying that people printing copies for use in the game is a bad thing for the reasons stated in the post, but Sony's business model was poorly planned if they didn't take this into account. It hasn't been ruined for the players, its been ruined for Sony and WoC.
On another note, the probability of them being motivated to release limited edition cards they may have developed will be close to nil. What is the value if high-res copies will be online the moment its released? And will they want to put money into creating and releasing infinite expansions that would expand the playability of the game, like Wizards is known to do? Nope. So it might be argued that any future potential this game had via expansions has, in fact, been killed.
I've been playing this game all weekend. I'm pretty sure I've only encountered one copied deck. At this moment, you can be pretty sure it's copied if every card has an interlocking mechanic. The guy I fought had a ton of mana steal/spring cards, and I'm pretty sure it's a net-listed deck. The guy didn't play a single card from the starter deck, which is a pretty big sign to me since the booster supplies have been constrained nearly everywhere. Yes, he won, but it wasn't an easy game, and in the end, he won more because of a misplay on my part than his hot deck. Even if it wasn't a copied deck, it really proved to me that even with a pocket full of cash and boosters, a good player will make you play 30 turns no matter what, at which point you haven't really gained much over the standard deck or playing fair and buying boosters.
That's what is really cool about this game, and it's something that Penny-Arcade mentioned as well. The game isn't like magic where having a string of beatdown will help you. You are trying to take and hold squares on the board; there are many ways to make a very low cost, common creature neutralize the advantage of a huge cost "I win" card. The fact is, a card copier will still have to beat their opponent, and so will a rich kid who bought a whole set and carved a "perfect deck". I've played some of the top ranked players (I'm in the top 100 myself), and they beat my ass with mostly un-boosted standard decks. This is a game of strategy and a struggle over the board, not a queue up of hp/def that you just launch at your opponent's dome.
So, I'm pretty much as regular a player of this game as can exist atm, and I don't really care about copying that much. The game isn't all about rare cards. In fact, I relish the notion that I have a good chance of beating a card copier and making his cheater heart eat itself.
Maybe I am just showing my age, but I think the concept of this game is kind of weird anyway. I want to play card games when I don't want to play a computer game. When I am playing a computer game, needing physical cards seems like a cumbersome non-sequitor.
I suppose the idea was to sell a game that generates renewable income by requiring players to keep buying more components for it...but in order for the players to perceive some kind of value to their purchases they needed to have the cards be a physical product rather than just an electronic unlocking. The end result is a mixing of genres that is just outright weird.
Is it very popular? I really don't see the appeal, but that may just be a matter of taste.
Is there any mechanism online for managing your collection?
Is there any mechanism online for trading?
If you trade a card to someone else, can they register it?
Do you both then have the card registered online?
Could you just share your cards with your friends and all have the same cards registered? I ask because of my kids and if they could have their own accounts with the same cards.
How many cards do you actually get in the box with the game?
How many cards are in a booster pack?
How many boosters would you say you need to buy in order to be competitive online?
How does the game play offline vs. online? Is it as fun?
Don't you wonder why they didn't just do a Magic Online or use their existing IP?
Thanks for taking the time to answer!
Reminds me of the Barcode Battler, where shops in Japan would report sudden shortages of less popular items simply because they created characters with unusually strong attributes.
Looking back, I wonder why nobody bothered trying to print out their own barcodes.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
There are many classes where cars are as close to identical as possible. It is called Spec racing. It all comes down to skill and not money. The sad thing is that Nascar is getting to the point of being spec racing:( Back in the day the car makers would produce cars just so they could race them in Nascar. Cars like the Dodge Daytona Charger, Plymouth Superbird, and the Ford Talladega. Spec racing makes for some very exciting racing but doesn't really help advance the state of the art. Doesn't really come into play when you are talking about CCG.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If you think back to the beginning of Magic: The Gathering, the card balance was horrible and similarly lacked finesse. WotC handled this by banning cards and creating structured competitive environments.
Eventually, any collectable game can become popular enough that the 'top tier' collectors are not limited by availability. If you want to encourage them to continue playing, you have to develope the game into one that rewards tactics and/or strategy.
I wouldnt cheat in the first place, and I have been enjoying this game immensely vs others online over the past weekend. But honestly? Id rather have the real cards because i am too lazy to download, print copies. I dont think and i hope that the majority of gamers will go the route of copying. As others have pointed out its not really the cheating that will hurt the game, its the lack of card sales that would hurt it. Maybe there will be some resolution in a future patch, although how it could be resolved I do not know. Perhaps later editions will have some anti-counterfeit measures that will at least make copying cards not worth the effort except to the extremely determined.
It's not "cheating" to copy the cards. It doesn't give you any sort of advantage- it just levels the playing field. Now, everyone's got access to every card regardless of how much money they've spent, and gameplay comes down entirely to skill (and the luck of deck randomization). This is a good thing.
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