Right. This card is mostly a thought experiment to convince yourself there is a theoretical card that could destroy player agency completely, and it would be accomplished through power creep taken to an unreasonable extreme.
I’m in agreeance with your general take that such extremes will likely never exist (I hope.) however, where I disagree with you is that this is a continuum, it may not be linear, but it’s not a step function either. I have no idea if a quadratic function would approximate this continuum better, but we actually just need that the function that describes power creep vs loss in player agency to be non decreasing. That is enough to “prove” this relationship. Quantifying the relative magnitude of changes in each (ie derivatives assuming smooth function) can be a later exercise.
Point is, there already exist cards like this, if a druid ramps into Marin first in a mirror, or even drops Dorian on curve, these cards are such power spikes that they don’t necessarily guarantee a win, but they spike win rate by 10 to 40 percent in some cases. That to me is nearly as effective as a “win the game” card albeit at 7 and 4 mana respectively.
There’s many more examples of such I win cards in many different contexts (ie matchup comps).
Look, all I need to do to prove the ridiculousness of your argument is to use the same logic on the opposite conclusion, by going “full Shuyin.” The forumer Shuyin, as you may recall, likes (liked?) to mock whiners by saying that they want to nerf everything until every card remaining is Wisp. Well, let us consider the “thought experiment” of literally every card literally being Wisp. This would ALSO destroy player agency completely. Therefore, we “should” conclude that reducing power level always reduces agency, and increasing power level always increases agency.
Your thought experiment isn’t even a thought experiment. It’s just pure raw confirmation bias, disguised as thinking.
This so called wisp thought experiment is fundamentally different.
In what I propose, I allow all mechanics of the game and future mechanics of the game to be ever implemented to exist, as well as any card ever to be printed to exist.
In the wisp experiment you need only minion mechanic and attack plus hero power.
These though experiments are not comparable on that basis.
Also, the thought experiment was just that, you are getting hooked up on it way to much. It’s simply meant to establish an asymptotic extreme point exits. Nothing more.
I gave you two examples and can list many more of cards printed that, in limited scopes, are effectively I win cards similar to that described in the thought experiment.
It shouldn’t take a genius to see that the two are analogous.
Here’s a theoretical extreme that we established completely destroys player agency.
And here are limited existing examples of such extremes that currently exist in the game, that are less extreme than the theoretical case, but nearly just as impactful.
I realize this may not be clear, I may have to spell it out clearer.
The point of the thought experiment is to show, that no matter what effects they print, no matter how fun or cool or whatever they are, they are pointless if they print the zero cost win the game immediately card.
Basically every meta after such a card is printed will immediately devolve into one where every deck that is competitive simply draws as many cards as it can in as short a time as it can. No other mechanic or decision matters, even though a multiverse of them may exist, they are all invalidated by power creep of one card.
You cherrypicked instead of considering all instances where power increases. Like I already said,
You have not at all established that power creep is the number one reason for loss of player agency. You haven’t established what agency is, or how to measure it. You are not being curious or scientific about this. You just hate power creep and you’re rationalizing that hatred post hoc.
The point of the thought experiment is to show, that no matter what effects they print, no matter how fun or cool or whatever they are, they are pointless if they print the zero cost win the game immediately card.
This highlights the oppressive nature of power creep, it literally doesn’t matter what else they print, if a few cards + their support are outliers. In the “wisp” thought experiment, likewise no decision matters, but due to no other card existing. That is what differentiates the two and makes them incomparable.
Correct, and all such examples now and any that will exist in the future WILL be cherry-picked precisely because that is how power creep works. It funnels all the “weight”, “importance” or “impact” onto only a few cards or modes of play (only one in the extreme.) That does not invalidate this argument whatsoever.
Correct. And if I asked you to define exactly what it means to be “happy” would you have a clear definition for me? I’m guessing no, even though you would understand the meaning I’m trying to convey. This is exactly the same, player agency is rooted in emotion, it is how much I think or feel my decisions had impact on the game. That is not a precise definition. Much in the same way you would not be able to give me a precise definition of what it means to be happy, even though we both understand what it means from experiencing it.
That’s not to say we can’t make an effort to establish what this means, it just means that any such attempt will be flawed. Show me one scientific study of what it means to be happy that can say with absolute certainty that the definition of “happy” they use is “correct”. And I will show you a bunch of BSers.
If we both agree on a definition, then we can proceed with a fruitful conversation, but lacking that, we can still understand what the other means based off of personal experience.
This I agree with. I’ve stated this without proof, and I appreciate your skepticism, much like I hold skepticism for all your retorts.
If I were to attempt to “prove” this, it would be by:
Defining a simpler game that shares similar properties to hearthstone. For example, the card draw, mana per turn, and basic mechanics would still exist, and instead each card would read deal X damage with Y probability.
Assuming some definition of “player agency” that could be proven. See discussion above, it would have to be one that has general acceptance, and is no easy task to define.
Prove, mathematically, as power creep increases in this simpler game, that “player agency” as defined above decays (perhaps reaching an asymptotic limit.)
You may or may not find that convincing, and I really don’t care. But it might be interesting enough for me to undertake at some point.
Once proven for this simpler game, any modification can be made to the game to bring it closer to a better approximation of HS, and proof may be repeated. So on and so forth. This is simply a proof sketch.
Once this is iterated enough times, one could switch from proofs to computer simulations, thereby allowing a much more high-fidelity approximation of HS as the basis to run the simulations on.
While obviously not as good as a proof, computer simulations of a better approximation of HS might be more convincing to most readers.
I think the issue you would have is whether or not you would want to run the tourist. I dont know how useful spell cost swap would be in that deck, i am not even sure what spells you are running in it.
Cards can be powerful by simply offering more options.
In fact i would say that the correlation with player agency and powercreep is very low to the point it should not even be considered in player agency discussion because you need extremes that will never exist to influence it enough.
Also there are many instances on this game where player agency was delivered via powercreep.
Agency Espionage seems OP, but probably not in the way our initial intuition implies. It’s probably OP only if you are a “Draw/Shuffle Rogue” or similar deck.
This is amplified by the fact that hearthstone does not allow interactions during your opponent’s turn.
Other games can manage it better by scaling interactions to match the power of the game.
Since hearthstone has to wait until after the big play happens to do anything about it, you lose even more agency as direct damage becomes more and more powerful.
Agency will probably never be completely destroyed across the game, but I feel like we are already at a point where it is unacceptably low as power cards have more and more absurd win rates attached to them.
Not being able to interact with your opponent turn reduces player agency in fact.
But other than that the rest of the text can be threw in the trash bin.
When you have 100% agency over what you do then you have no reason to not pick always the same option.
And while that player agency is in fact high you get to the problem of not getting new situations to force you to exercise it.
The only enviroment that make you able to exercise player agency for real is one where not everything is under your control either.
That line is very blured and hearthstone isn’t really better or worse than most card games.
It’s just on the other side of the spectrum where the ideal situation is between both sides.
Mabye not in hearthstone but in magic the gathering (in their timeless/historic mode) and apparently in yu-gi-o the powercreep is so bad that you can get turn 1/2 consistent kills
Theres not a whole lot of player agency in that nonsense and their wont be in hearthstone when they get to that point. Dont think it will ever happen… well theres that one taven brawl where cards cost health instead of mana which allows druid to OTK pretty easily in 1 turn. Not quite standard/wild but this development team has no qualms about introducing mana cheat to the extreme so I’m sure they’ll get there someday.
This isn’t true. If you give people the agency to pick the experience that they like, and they get bored, they’ll just pick a different experience voluntarily. There is absolutely zero need to force them, they’ll decide when to switch off on their own.
It’s like, if you went to the supermarket and they didn’t have your favorite variety of spaghetti sauce, that’d just be downside unless you wanted to change. And if you wanted to change, then they wouldn’t need to not have your favorite.
Player agency is the number of branches in a decision tree a player can choose from at any given turn, which are likely to make the situation better rather than worse for the player.
From this, we can talk about “average player agency” in a certain meta to help us describe if the meta is fast (lower average agency) or slow (higher average agency).
We can also talk about “marginal agency per turn”, which states that the longer the game/the slower the meta, the less every turn has agency over the game outcome, because each card played narrows the number of favorable “branches”, aka decisions.
The “powercreep” phenomenom, in this framework, can be observed indirectly by measuring the speed of the meta (average turn per win). The higher the average turn per win, the slower the meta, aka lower the powercreep.
Now, this isn’t strictly so, because it may be that the game equally powercrept all its elements to the point where their individual effects cancel out, but in that case, there’s no point in blaming powercreep for anything. It’s no longer something to avoid, it’s meaningless.
So the only scenario left is the one where “bigger powercreep = faster games”, and in that scenario, speed of the meta speaks volumes about the powercreep levels in it.
P.S. Took me less than 5 minutes to think this through