Viewing Single Post From: The Great Ban/Errata Divide

Viewing Single Post From: The Great Ban/Errata Divide
HeroComplex	Jun 8 2009, 09:12 PM
Senior Member Posts: 131 Group: Member Member #7,609 Joined: February 5, 2009	This will hopefully be the first in a series of threads about how the community and the council should approach game mechanics post-UDE. Given community sentiment, the first issues on the agenda are bans and errata--- In setting up how the community and council should consider errata, bans, and rules changes, the first thing that we need to do is lay out the ways that UDE would use them in the past. From there, we can determine not only the way that UDE would deal with new dilemmas, but also when the community needs to depart from UDE's precedent. With that in mind, below are the six situations in which one or more cards need to be addressed, and the traditional type of solution. 1) Oops: This is the easiest kind of errata, not very controversial at all. Scarlet Spider simply wasn’t meant to refer to himself---errata fixed the typo. This kind of errata is only used to fix mistakes, when the text of the card doesn’t match the design text (Scarlet Spider) or the card has some sort of typo (Sentinel Squad ONE). These are the types of errors that generally get fixed in the FAQ with simple errata, and so should primarily come up for new community-created cards. I know that some people would like certain changes to older cards---merging the Ghost Riders, distinguishing the Chameleons, etc. Those seem worth discussing, and some may be worth implementing---distinguishing the Chameleons would be fairly straight-forward, for example, as would merging Black Widows. But for some others like Ghost Rider and Venom, there probably needs to be a presumption against new alterations. Those characters have complicated histories/identities, which could lead to whole new arguments about their proper representations. Further, where UDE made conscious choices about how to represent a character, and chose not to reverse their decisions, we should probably not leap to second-guessing too quickly. In the future, we can set up a thread for players to nominate cards/characters for this sort of treatment, but we will probably focus on more pressing types of errata first. 2) Juggling Templates: When the current template switches between “defends” and “becomes a defender,” a lot of cards can receive errata for consistency. Generally speaking, these errata should not change how the card works at all; they are just meant to promote consistency across cards, while keeping them all the same. I suspect there will not be any need for these errata with community-created cards, as it should be easier to conform to the existing card base than it would be to create new templates for old cards. 3) Ch-ch-changes: Just because a card works properly when it’s released doesn’t mean it will work properly forever. Rama-Tut’s erratum is a great example of this---in MOR, there were no ways to bring him into play unless he’d been recruited, so his power was de facto limited to recruitment. When new cards allowed you to bring Rama-Tut in without paying his recruit cost, all of a sudden Rama-Tut was going to cause tremendous problems. (Dr. Light was first, but Hard Sound Construct was right behind!) Rama-Tut’s erratum came about because of power level problems with Light Show, but it’s important to realize that this change was adapting Rama-Tut to changes in the structure/possibilities of the game. If Rama-Tut had been released in the same set as Dr. Light, so that there was already a possibility of being put into play without being recruited, I’m sure that this wouldn’t have been UDE’s response to Light Show. Bizarro World did not lead to errata, but introduced similar changes---for most of the game, it was impossible to have two names at once. Once that became possible, there was a serious question about how earlier cards should accommodate it. In the end, CRD updates included new rules limiting the impact of multi-named characters, but different circumstances could have led to errata---changing cards like Four Freedoms Plaza, which check for multiple names, to explicitly require distinct cards. Though addressing a powerful interaction, the potential errata and the actual CRD addition are really just updates to deal with previous impossibilities. This sort of change actually could still arise; as new cards are created within the community, some new mechanics or novel effects might justify errata to old cards. And because we do want to encourage new ideas, we should all be willing to consider errata for old cards, required by structural/mechanical changes by new creators. That said, the community and council should be careful that this sort of errata isn’t used to justify simple changes in power level---a new type of mechanic justifies this type of errata. But a new card that just works well with old cards doesn’t---for that type of interaction, see #5 below. 4) Take Two: Some cards just confuse people. Adding “directly” to Elektra had no impact on how the card worked, but a lot of players slept easier afterwards. Death Times Five is another---the erratum is not any sort of change, but it clarifies the text for players by making the wording more explicit/straight-forward. I don’t predict many existing cards needing new errata in this vein, but as with error errata, we can have players nominate cards for clarification at some point in the future. 5) Not Working Right: This is the type of errata that gets the most attention and causes the most argument. If a card is being used in a way that it was not meant to, that needs to be addressed---but many pages have been spent arguing over the type of address. Setting up thousands of triggers with Parademon certainly was beyond the card’s intent, hence his errata, which attempted to fix him while changing as little as possible. Time Gem is another example---the card’s original wording did not fully take into account the timing of triggered effects, so that a player could be required to discard far more cards than intended. The change did alter the card’s functionality, but certainly not because it was incredibly powerful---because it was not working as intended. But errata isn’t the only solution to this type of problem. Remember Attend or Die! and DSM’s Mr. Mxyzptlk---a complexity of the rules for replacement modifiers meant that Attend or Die! allowed an infinite loop. Such an interaction was clearly not intended, the card’s wording had specifically tried to eliminate such loops. But there weren’t really errata that could fix the problem without greatly changing the cards; the problem arose from a complex rule, so the situation was best solved with an exception to the rule. But sometimes, neither errata nor CRD changes are the appropriate fix. Rules changes are often not practical fixes---you don’t want to change the basic triggered power rules to fix one problematic interaction, for example. UDE’s policy always aimed to fix problems while changing as little else as possible. Here’s how I once heard the errata issue phrased---if the card were errataed, what % of the its usage will change? For examples like Parademon (or Rama-Tut from #3), when the card is only problematic in a limited set of interactions, the errata should have no impact on the vast majority of times the card is used. Under one standard, this type of errata would only be appropriate if the card was unaffected 95% of the time.. This serves dual purposes of a) minimizing the amount that players need to memorize in order to play, and b) preserving the card’s intent by excising only the unintended aspects. 6) Plain Ungodly: If a card is excessively powerful, but is working exactly the way that it is supposed to---a card being used and abused, but not misused---then the UDE policy was to ban it. No erratum could appropriately fix a card that was simply too good. Overload is the classic example of this type of decision---it was tremendously powerful in concert with other cards, but in a sense it was doing exactly what it was supposed to. Unfortunately, Overload is also the classic example of a problem that blurred the line between #5 and #6. By stunning over-pumped characters, the card did exactly what it was supposed to; but by incentivizing you to pump your opponent’s characters, it was (sort of) doing more than intended. But my read of UDE’s decision to ban Overload was that this was still largely a case of being too good, rather than being misused; the argument that Overload needed an intent-based errata was a bit tenuous, and as a result could require a lot of changes to balance properly. Dr. Light is another example worth looking at. Initially he was errataed---maybe intended as a #3, given how easy it became to abuse Dr. Light as the card pool expanded. For example, the proliferation of team-ups and leaders made it a lot easier to use him twice. But since Marvel Team-Up and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters both existed before DGL, enabling characters of other affiliations to be readied, this was probably not truly a #3 candidate. Nor does it seem like #5, as the card was doing exactly as intended---bringing in low drops. The fact that Dr. Light was good at his job (and that his job was powerful) doesn’t mean he was being misused. He was probably more accurately a #6 example, as shown by his eventual ban; the attempts to errata him are probably best seen as anomalies. (Though the changes to Rama-Tut were legitimate #3s.) Valeria, Nenora, Detective Chimp---all examples of cards that were just too good. They weren’t being used improperly, they were just being utilized well enough that they were dangerous. For that reason, no change could eliminate the abuse without altering the card’s intent; the abuse was really just an extension of the card’s intent. We could certainly find examples of #6 in new sets, which could require that cards in new sets be banned---hopefully that won’t be the case, but it’s a possibility. Separately, though, we need to look at whether certain cards from Marvel Evolution fall into this category and require a ban. Certain cards have garnered enough attention that they very well could fall into #5 or #6, and we should look at which rationale for errata resembles those cards most closely. Furthermore, if some of those cards appear to be #5, there is still a question of what the appropriate solution appears to be; if a card can be fixed with minimal enough changes, then that is preferable. But if all solutions change the card too much, then bans would be necessary. And that's my list. I encourage you all to respond to this thread with your recommendations for cards or interactions that you think should be addressed in categories #5 and #6. If you recommend a card, though, I'd ask that you explain which category you believe the most accurate, the solution that you feel is most appropriate (given the above guidelines), and your thought process to get there. If your proposed solution to a problem clashes with UDE's traditional way of addressing it above, that's also fine---but if so, it would be very helpful if you could elaborate on why you feel the community should respond differently than UDE would have. The goal is to get as much information about the community's thoughts so that we can consider the best way to proceed; the more insight you provide, the better. I'll be reading every post here, and after everyone has had a chance to make recommendations I'll try to summarize the community's thoughts. For now, if someone makes a suggestion that you disagree with, I'd also ask that you not post just to quote and disagree with them---there will be time for that, I promise, but I'm afraid this thread will be less useful if gets entrenched in back-and-forth debates. Feel free to post a different solution, or to give your reasoning for why a particular card doesn't deserve to be addressed, of course, but hopefully the full-on debates can be kept in existing threads. Thank you.


The Great Ban/Errata Divide · Vs. System General Discussion