I wouldn’t necessarily call duelyst players entitled though. Coming from a macro perspective i believe a huge chunk of any games player base are entitled. At least specifically American gamers imo ( Btw I’m American and have lived here my whole life).
Should Challenges Be Challenges? [Poll]
Same with Germans - they always find a fault anywhere to complain about. (I’m German - I’m allowed to say this. 
)
Like i said multiple times already, i don’t find it challenging at all.
Rather just cheese contest, especially the last boss. The boss gets huge tempo advantage and stronger cards from all factions and the player can make a deck that counters the stupid AI and just wins.
My regular decks just got crushed, forcing me to just make some variax deck and cheese it for the orb. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t challenging, just get the abyssian cards going and he can do nothing about it. Which is also not fair for newer players. Not everyone has cards for a variax deck lying around, maybe if it wasn’t limited by time it would be ok as they could just grab it when they get the cards.
As it is now it is just too easy to cheese and plain boring with how much advantage he gets yet plays poorly and still gets crushed. If they made it more reasonable with a preset deck given to the player it could be made challenging by preventing the cheese strategies without giving the boss too big advantages and everyone could have a chance at succeeding.
You brought up dark souls as an example, there are some differences though:
- in dark souls bosses don’t despawn, you always can access them.
- you don’t need any particular weapons or build to handle most bosses, very few exceptions.
- you could get a sun bro if you wanted to get it done the easy way.
- you don’t even need a good weapon or armor or anything, with some practice you can learn the attack patterns and just dodge everything with rolls. It will just take longer if your weapon is unupgraded(some people make lvl 1 runs to ng+7 in dark souls), it won’t become impossible like the bosses in duelist seem to be if you don’t make a deck to counter them specifically atleast the last boss, previous could be dealt with by playing regular ranked deck.
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The real question is should everyone get a trophy for playing.
How can a boss fight be made for Newbies. A boss fight isn’t something you just walk into when u start a game. You work up to a boss fight or else u get ur butt whooped.
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Most-voted for answer seems pretty impossible to achieve to me.
This would mean all starter decks should be able to beat all coming challenges.
I do not like such a limit imposed on the challenges to be honest.
It’s also fun to grow and collect and overcome a challenge by playing and in playing collecting cards.
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There are three ways of making Boss Battles hard:
- Give them a decent meta-deck and an AI better than a human player
- Give them an unfair deck full of overpowered cards and an overwhelming starting position and an imbalanced BBS.
- Give them peculiar weaknesses that have to be exploited by clever deckbuilding.
1 isn’t possible, and it it were you might as well play ladder. 2 isn’t fun: to beat them you either need all the legendaries or all the luck, or both.
3 is where the game play potential is at. You should never be able to take your ladder deck and beat up a boss, because what’s the point in that. Something like “Can only move one space” is an excellent way to create a challenge, because there are ways you can use that to run rings around it, and then you give the boss a tonne of health and bonus starting mana to make sure that strategies that ignore that are punished.
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How about if i think it should be manageable based on skill and card access
It was so not challenging that it forced you to make a deck.Okay.
Also so what if new players can’t do it that easy ,They have something build to not every piece of content has to be every group of players.I don’t think people realize how hard it is make content that challenging enough for veterans but easy enough for new players.
The first Boss you saw tons of complaints it was too easy,This last Boss you see complaints that it was too hard because of artificial boost stuff. The Boss would be more difficult if A.I. was more intelligent but programming A.I. for this game has so many x-factors because of positioning.This game has so much nuance that gets overlooked how do program the ai when is the right time to play holy immolation.
If you can’t make the A.I. smarter yet how do make something more challenging for someone who has most of cards in the game? What’s larger group of people? If you don’t make content that challenges most of older playerbase then your new content is pointless.If the content slightly alienate new player base but some what challenging the older base then content has some use.
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If they can develop an A.I. that is smarter than a human in this game, then the developers are in the wrong business. Not an impossible task, but still…
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The wording on the poll was confusing and I’m not sure that the one I voted for was truely the one that I believed was right. Nevertheless, boss battles should be difficult because, as their name suggests, it is a BOSS battle. You aren’t fighting a mere mid-level mob character, but instead are fighting a foe that is feared for a reason. Though I wish for their rewards to be more prominent (the pay-to-open system doesn’t appeal to me) I welcome the chance for Duelyst devs to be able to flex their creativity without openly affecting core gameplay, that being the ladder. Thus the boss battles should stay hard to beat so long as devs use the knowledge they gained from it to make even better expansions and cards in the future! 
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Should be possible for everyone, but not mindlessly simple. Caliber0 was simple: you could throw anything at him and win. He was fun, but just didn’t have the same feeling of accomplishment. Boreal is the right way to do bosses, imo. He’s tough, but can still be defeated with a basic deck and a skilled pilot (and a little luck). It felt good to beat him. It was a test of skill (unless of course you cheesed him with a more gimmicky expensive deck, but that’s always an option that should be available)
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It forced me to make a deck but it wasn’t challenging at all with that deck.
The AI in general seems very weak to abyssians so very likely that same deck would easily beat the next boss as well so i’m keeping it for the next time i need to cheese a boss not even going to try regular deck.
Is this what you call a challenge?
I call that a chore…
Daily challenges atleast required some thinking and made you a better player, this just teaches you to abuse the weak AI, there is nothing more to it.
How they could make it challenging with the current AI?
Like i said earlier, just give the player specific premade deck that has cards that the AI can deal with reasonably and maybe slight tempo advantage, not just give him the strongest cards of each faction and hope for the best.
The AI as a whole shouldn’t be much more complicated than chess, you don’t need to calculate many turns ahead just a 1-2 should be enough. Considering the opponent’s faction the AI could reduce the number of cases that need testing by alot. Worst case they could just make the AI know exactly with cards you have in hand and top of your deck and just play around them. That advantage alone would make it reasonably hard opponent (while still resembling an actual player).
Without any cheese tempo advantages given to him.
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I really like the premade deck idea. That could make some ridiculously thematic fights based on the lore, which I would love to see expanded. Imagine a battle between Rasha and Valknu…
Could be a fun challenge and a great way to build the world.
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What if you could make your own deck but with limitations? For example what if you could only use battle pets?
But… Of course challenges should be challenges. They can’t not be? It’s a tautology.
maybe if they made some rotation of different concepts.
having to play only battle pets all the time would get boring.
Chess has no variables, duelyst has many. Such as the card draw and the cards played by the opponent. Programming AI for every situation, both based on the opponents cards and your own is nearly impossible. The fact that this boss replaces impresses me, im very curious about how he chooses to replace.
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actually there are no variables.
if you take a proper design for the case:
each card has an effect, can be played on tiles x12, x21,… if you ran a simulation of the effect, for example draw a card or 2, you only need to run a heuristic search, maybe min/max algorithm of all possible orders of playing all cards on all reachable positions.
it seems very possible to do in 90 seconds predicting opponent’s move for just 1 turn, but i didn’t do the math on the number of possibilities you have to test in worst case it could be an astronomical value unfortunately. i guess they could replace some calculations with heuristics, or something like that if needed. maybe use something like dynamic programming, many board states are bound to be repeated and don’t need to be recalculated each time. for a regular game with just ~3 minions on board for each player it should be fine for sure.
it is the abyssian swarms that fill all the board that can get it stuck for way over 90 seconds i guess even best solution found near the timeout would be enough, don’t need to find the absolute best possible positioning if there is not enough time…
They are so many variables, the most basic example is who your playing against. You have to make so many different decisions not just based on what general your playing against, you would defiantly keep tempest if your playing against a Lilith, but in a lyonar Mirror it might not be that good so you’d replace. This is just the surface of variables, before your turn even starts.
So? You could define a weight function of value to keep card in hand based on cards the opponent played + maybe some fix for meta, could be autogenerated based on statistics of played cards per faction or something like that. (First card being his general)
It wouldn’t be easy but i fell like if serious thought was put into it, it could work. The current AI just seems to play like a battle pet most of the time. It really can’t be much worse.
They could make an API for AI and make an AI tournament or atleast challenge and use the winning one in game. That would be an interesting challenge, actually hard. Maybe encourage people to study something on the way.