Hearthstone's newest adventure is announced, Ghost in the Shell: First Assault has moved into open beta, all that and more, I’m Zach Sharpes and this… is Free To Play Weekly!...
Free to Play Cast: More CCGs, Toxic Game Communities, and Atlas Reactor Ep 190
On this week's show we are totally confused by the direction Atlas Reactor is taking, we debate the CCG genre's future, and we chime in on how you can help make a game's community just a little less toxic All that and more on this week's Free to Play Cast!
Discussion Timestamps:
01:45 Trion Worlds and Atlas Reactor
15:46 Are CCGs a Bubble Ready to Burst?
26:42 How to Handle Toxic Game Communities?
38:17 Weekly Bombs (DA-Bomb / A-Bomb)
47:13 Questions and Answers of the Week
If you have submissions for the show's Weekly Bombs, have questions for the panel (nothing is off limits!), or just ideas for what you want covered you can now send them to magicman@mmobomb.com. You can also be a guest in the show, just send us why you want to host, and what topic or game you would like to cover.
Free-To-Play Cast is the official podcast (and videocast) of MMOBomb.com about free to play multiplayer online games. Free-To-Play Cast takes on the week's biggest news with plenty of opinion, weekly bombs, community feedback, guests, laughs thrown in for good measure and much more. Have fun and expect a new episode next week!
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#1 - Don't let them WRITE/SPEAK!
Hearthstone and other CCGs don't allow it and you just have those general emotes. You can adapt that to your moba/arena shooter by doing the same and with help of map pings and with general emotes, tactics can be given at a surprising speed and efectiveness even boosting player's atention to the game instead of the rants in chat.
#2 - Don't be "punisher" be a "promoter"!
Hate generates more hate, even if you're constantly punishing someone, he knows he's going to be punished for doing so and he'll go "EFF IT I DON'T CARE!!!" and will continue to do the same because in a way people in that state of mind are entitled with reason from a certain perspective. The obvious way to deal with this is not to punish bad behavior but instead to promote good behavior (much like for example an alchoolic's 30 day badge) you can offer bigger and bigger rewards for it.
#3 "You're getting my money!"
When you are getting payed to do something people always believe that they have the right to rant about what's wrong with the service you're giving them and up to a point they are right but NEVER forget its your game (it's your house) and this balance between what you want as a dev and what people want as community MUST be achieved for it to all to work out well (yes it means to think REALLY well how will community management work), otherwise you'll either come across a nazi or your game will be total anarchy.
There you have it 3 basic rules I believe should work to atone some toxicity.
PS.: I don't think yellow/red cards work all too well or even community juri style either because ONCE you have someone "on the stand" with a little bit of flare or success ( be it a twitcher or a youtuber or even a sucessful known player) people will band up together and make a "show" out of baning/punishing that person just for the views, dispite the fact that he's inocent or guilty and I'm not even going to focus on recurring players and the feeling of "Oh it's this guy again => instaban!".
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On the CCG thing, I'm with you Magicman, I played some pretty religiously when my PC went down and all I had was my old laptop, but that's partly because that was all it could handle. Physical CCGs can house a larger group, and there's something about the excitement of getting new cards... somehow it's just not the same in digital form. Sadly I have to rebuild my Magi Nation collection due to a flood in my garage. A-bomb to flooding, at least my hyren deck was safe.
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To clarify, in Archeage, when someone steals something or kills someone, they leave behind a blood pool or footprints accordingly which can then be clicked on to report the player, with a box to describe the offense. Once someone gets enough reports, they are ported to the courtroom where there are a jury of players who can read over the offenses and cast their vote. Depending on the result, the player is either let go, or sent to ban jail for x amount of time based on the offenses. And no, they can't just log out to circumvent it. I actually really like this idea, I don't know how effective it really is, but it is a lot of fun. Additionally, the new silence system implemented in HoTS and WoW has a lot of potential to be good, but that depends on if they actually review the reports.
A good card game that I liked was Eye of Judgement on the ps3. it used the PS Eye to scan the card and even had animations on screen for said card you used. I think it was ahead of its time as far and CCGs go. That's the gaming community for though, always screaming for something new and "innovative", yet the moment a company does that the game gets shitted on.
So if we look CCG yeah all CCG games have base mechanics, spending resources to play card, but the way it plays, cards, strategy's are very different.
I think that CCG games are going to be future, cause you dont have to spend alot of time to enjoy all point of the game.