It’s not hard to balance it if you treat it like open source software.
It is even if you balance in an open source environment. “Closed source” successful games still have to invest substantial funds to playtesting. In an open source system, you are developing in the open. This is going to split the game already into beta and stable. You also probably aren’t going to get individual cards approved since you need to design around the interactions between cards.
If you don’t like the direction the official game is going, you can “fork” it, call it a fork of the original if the license requires it, and you are now the owner of that fork, able to make whatever changes you’d like.
So now you have multiple versions of the game floating around with sets of approved cards. Unlike M:tG, these sets are developed to not be compatible and it may be difficult to figure out what sets are legal in the version you are playing.
To that end, you can suggest balancing changes to the game project, and the owner of the project can approve or deny it.
And you still have the development process, which is hard to fix once you print cardboard.
If someone wanted to create a higher-quality card, they could.
I’m not talking about foils, but categorically better cards. You are going to have card developers with a vested interest to make sure their cards get played, and that generally means making cards at a higher power level.
sebinspace@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think a lot of what you’re saying is coming from the perspective of a profit motive. That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but I personally wouldn’t start something like this with a profit motive. Personally, the “cool factor” alone would be motivation enough for me, but this would require the game as a whole operating in a way other TCGs do not.
I also was talking about overall card quality, not specifically foils. Other than that, power creep is always going to be a thing, regardless of the motives of the project owner.
But the nice thing about open source is that if you don’t believe it’s a good idea, you don’t have to participate.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 10 months ago
But it is a major problem for closed source systems which can be made worse if open source methods are used on cardboard. Is someone going to want to keep playing a game when they buy some boosters but find out that some of the people they play with won’t play with those cards? Even worse, there isn’t a uniform way to define formats?
But no one else is participating either. There are fan made TCG’s, but none of them adopted the open source model. There is one body that designs cards and I don’t see that changing. Even then, the trading or collecting part of that hobby goes away; they become Living Card Games instead without the collectable nature of more traditional distribution systems
sebinspace@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If no one’s done it, we don’t know if it’ll actually work, we can just theorize. I don’t see the harm in anyone trying, and I don’t particularly care for defeatism.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 10 months ago
This isn’t defeatism, but pointing out potential flaws in a system being developed. If designers can’t address potential fatal flaws, the system won’t progress.