The Effects of Using Tactically Aggressive Strategies in a Multiplayer Environment

or Being the Villain (It may be more appropriate to use 'Being the Midboss'.)

Does your multiplayer group contain people who love to go in swinging? Or is it filled with people who hang back and see how things develop? A mix of both? In my opinion, a mix is probably the best possible choice. Why? Well, the downside revolves around nothing happening and games dragging on for too long if no one in the group starts swinging to get things rolling. I'm not sure what would happen in a group filled with aggressively attacking players; my best guess is that it would feel very similar to the 'Attack Left/Right' variant. Everyone's going in swinging anyway, right? Well, my group is basically filled with people who have a distinct tendency to hang back; no one wants to be the one who starts swinging (In fact, I made a deck to capitalize on this tendency).

About two weeks ago, I played a 3-man game of Commander. It wasn't a very big game and it had been a while since I played in one; it was nice playing some multi again. Commander itself is a sort of long, wait and see, wipe everything and restart repeatedly, kind of format. It's not too awesome for the ol' swing every turn, if only because everyone has twice as much life to start with. I started swinging anyway. Someone's usually (perhaps always) open. This proven to be the case in this match, so I swung at him. I think it's a tactically sound choice to do. Thanks to the Great Mana Screw, he was unable to respond, and I had a much larger creature than my other opponent (As a note, this seems much like kicking a man while he's down: tactically sound, but possibly distasteful. LD decks are basically keeping them down and raining blows in this analogy) . This left me in a dominant position for the early game.

I don't know about your group, but mine tends to to gang up on on the one who establishes this kinda hold early: perhaps it's why they don't like initiating hostilities. Very few people enjoy being ganged up on. But despite my early game lead, I ended up as the first to fall: my hand dried up in finding larger threats (not to mention that most of removal was rendered useless due to the 'nonblack' clause and they both played black), while my unmanascrewed opponent was able to drop several to keep me off of him and the other ate the brunt of my attacks. Had we had 20 life instead of 40, I still would've lost, though they both would've been in the low single digits and I probably would've rushed more than I did. It was not an unexpected outcome, really. And despite being first to fall, I actually enjoyed the game immensely.

But sometimes, I wish that someone else would take that role. My natural style isn't actually too aggressive at all, actually: I'm also inclined toward the 'wait and see' method (In fact, someone outside my current play group once remarked something along the lines of 'he can't do anything but weird decks that are slow and cumbersome'). I've tried it a few times, going closer to that. But I don't enjoy those games nearly as much as when I start attacking. It's not as if I actively dislike constantly sending my guys into the red zone; I'm rather fond of the general method of defeating your enemies. But almost always, no one else will start swinging until they've prepped considerably. Everyone will silently build up their forces, a cold war. I do not find that to be too enjoyable at all. Nothing's happening. It drags.

I'm guessing this general reluctance has something to with not wanting to be the first to fight: no one wants to fire the first shot. No one want to look too threatening in the beginning, possibly because they don't want to be ganged up on. But for something interesting to happen, someone has to step up: someone has to throw the first punch, fire the first shot, or commit the first crime.

Something has to shake up the status quo to begin the story. And in this case, that something is generally first attack. It's a risk: you may be leaving yourself open to reprisal, and much of white's removal suite is for attacking creatures. You're actively declaring hostilities against a person. You may seem more threatening for being willing to commit to an early attack. Before your attack, despite the ultimate goal of the game being the annihilation of your opponents, things are cold. You ignite things with a consistent choice to go on the offensive. At least one other person has something that's pounding on them, forcing them to think, decide, and act. And this will very likely put a few crosshairs on you.

But if you're like me, that doesn't matter. Those attacks will start something bigger. Your last moments may be laughably miserable as you get killed by an alliance of your opponents creatures, but that is good! For that moment, the old lie is truth: it is glorious to die in battle. Your threat may unite others against you, but the alliance will fracture: the end goal is the obliteration of one's enemies, after all. But through your actions, you upset the balance of power: They will have expended differing amounts of resources of eliminate you, and balance is lost: it will probably never be restored. There is no going back. This game will not be one of a slow buildup of forces that results in a draw from mutual boredom and unwillingness to start the attack. You have seen to that, and that is worth it.

For those of you who take this role on themselves and those of you who are naturally inclined towards this, I thank you for making multi a much less boring experience. Those of you who manage to consistently win despite this, you have my admiration.

For those of you who kill us, I leave you this:



On the Procurement, Amassment, Management, and Eventual Exchange of Tools Necessary for Continued Survival in a Hostile Environment

or On Limited Storage Space in Video Games.

Or, more specifically, that I hate it. I admit, I'm something of pack rat. I hate throwing things out. I like keeping old things, even if I use them infrequently, or in case of decorative items, not at all. But I do not understand at all the purpose of having a limited storage space at all in video games, particularly loot driven games, like Diablo, Torchlight, Borderlands or Dungeon Defenders.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the latter three games (my memories of Diablo are a bit fuzzy, but I'm fairly certain I enjoyed it as well.), it's just that the storage limit always annoyed the hell outta me. I hated throwing away the one piece of good armor or weapon that I used for 5 levels because I needed more space to store other, alternate pieces of equipment that were statistically better, or awesome items that you always manage to get for the other classes and want to pass on to another one of your characters or a friend. In fact, the first mod I installed for Torchlight was one that gave me more chests to use as storage. I did the same thing for STALKER because I got tired of lugging weapons back to the shop to sell. And don't tell me that I should've just "dealt with it, it's apart of the the game" because I did. I before I added those chests and increased the weight limit I sold that piece of gear, and for an hour I ran weapons back to the dealer. I did the same thing in Human Revolution, running guns back to the dealer instead of picking them up for 2-3 pieces of ammo.

So the question is why this is necessary in the first place? What prompted them to put limits on storage space to begin with? The technical difficulties in  the actual coding of inventory in general remains mostly speculation as I have no real programming experience and the problems inherent in item storage coding are a mystery to me. However, with various games storing items by weight (Oblivion, STALKER, etc) it seems as if it isn't technically infeasible to implement a basically infinite capacity in storage. For example, Demon's Souls storage seems basically unlimited (not to mention nicely sorted). It does limit what you can carry with you (by weight), but that isn't what important here. Perhaps it's because it isn't a loot driven game? The same annoyance pops up in various MMOs: You only have so much inventory space but seems especially egregious when your crafting items, various tickets you need to enter dungeons, and vendor trash all share the same low number of available slots. It's a rather annoying money grab in these "free" MMOs.

I can't think of a good reason for it, at all. A reason for a limited available inventory, perhaps, but nothing comes to mind when I try and find a rationale for limiting storage. It just seems to stem from habit and convention: Diablo did it this way, so we're going follow it. But even then, people made mule characters to store their items. What's the point in continuing this if it doesn't enhance the experience? Does anyone actually like chucking away their items, or being unable to pick up loot when they're full? Is it just for pacing? Did they find that people would usually pick up around X items in Y time frame and set the inventory limit on a rough sketch of that so people would go back to town to hock their stuff? Is (in multiplayer games) to stop people from automatically running around looting everything? These are still just reasons for a limited available inventory, and try as I might, nothing comes up for why you would ever implement limited storage at all (not counting technical problems in implementation.). Am I just missing something that's enjoyable about this process?

This post in particular is mostly from playing Dungeon Defenders and their 10 page shared Item Box space (No mules allowed!). If the supposed 24 Characters maximum is attained, each individual character will have a mere 5 Slots for alternative gear, and no room for extra pets. I suppose they're counting on people never reaching that many characters, like the ol' Conga Line of Doom for the Magic 2010 change. But it seems rather strange, because once you fully upgrade an item you get to name it and selling a loyal friend you've named just seems like a terrible thing to implement and promote.

An Experiment in the Use of Pseudorandomly Generated Availability of Components in the Construction of Mechanisms for the Elimination of One's Enemies.

or 15 Random Cards.

Restrictions breed creativity. A blank check induces inaction through the sheer number of possibilities. Action Paralysis. The basis of this alternative Magic format is the result of several bored afternoons and is need of refining. Let's get started.

The (Current) Core
15 Random Cards is an alternative magic format (or just a possibly amusing deck building exercise) that, as you may have guessed has 15 random cards.

Guidelines are as follows

• Pick 15 Magic Cards somehow. (I use MagicCards.info)
• Of those 15, You must use at least 7 in your deck and at least half of the nonland cards must consist of this pool.
• Find the set latest printing of the first 4 random cards. Those sets are what's legal for the rest of the deck
• You can have up to 4 copies of any of the cards in your random 15, and up to 2 of any in your set pools.

Now, to put this into practice. Let's get our 15 cards.

The Cards!
1. Counterspell
2. Loxodon Warhammer
3. Crystallization
4. Winter Blast
5. Tarox Bladewing
6. Kaervek the Merciless
7. Giant Spider
8. Demonic Hordes
9. Demystify
10. Coordinated Barrage
11. Oblivion Ring
12. Vulshok Sorcerer
13. Sorin Markov
14. Springjack Knight
15. Armageddon

And for this pool, the sets for the rest of our cards are: 7th Edition, 10th Edition, Alara Reborn, and 5th Edition... This might be interesting, eh?

On the Assigned Purpose of Blog Unit 002 (Dubious Reasoning!), its Schedules of Content Generation, and Other Miscellania.

Hello and welcome to Dubious Reasoning!, my blog on all of my general geeky interests, including but not limited to: board games, anime, manga, video games, Magic: The Gathering, books, and pen and paper roleplaying games. In addition to these, you'll get the prententious sort of scientific sounding titles all for the low, low cost of absolutely FREE. I hope to update with content of some sort at least once weekly. That's it, over and out.