Policy

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I been playing this game for about 2+ months now and I figured I should make a bit of an addendum on the original post as I've learned quite a few things about the systems and the community since then.

In my original post, I praised the game for it's ease of access for unlocking the cards. This ended up being mostly true, with 1 rather startling exception. While the hearthstone rarity system of Commons to Legendaries is there, and the overall time to unlock all those cards is significantly lower, there is 1 rarity I didn't recognize: The Determination Cards.

This is a special rarity level that you cant unlock through dust, instead you get DTs through collecting DT shards, and the way you get those shards is through doing monthly quests and getting high enough on the ladder at the end of the month. You can also get them through being high enough level at the end of the month. If you are legend rank you get enough for a determination card but the card you get is actually a random new one out of the determination pool.

The Determination cards are meant to be these special unique hard to get cards that change you relationship with the game. The problem is that often the effects they give you along with their stats make them insanely undercosted most of the time. For example the card omega flowey costs 11 G to play and then lets you load the board state with a followup spell. What this means is that from 1 card you get a serious board swing that you can reactivate with ease whenever you want. What this means is that if you dont have a determination card and the other player does you are very unlikely to win the game. Worse, not all determination cards are created equal, some have relatively weak effects so even once you have one, which would make you far more likely to beat a player without one, it means that the player who has the best determination card will beat you.

Now the trick about determination cards is that you can only run 1 in your deck, but the community generally openly admits the statline of these cards are already overpowered because 'they are supposed to be', when you combine that with their extreme rarity the result is that long time players who have all the DT's are naturally rewarded at the expense of new players.

This issue is made even worse by the fact most DT's are cards you have to build your deck around, so all of the top players end up building decks that are meta defining that most other players dont have and end up crushing them and creating envy. The result is that I have to resign my original commendation about the ease of access to getting all the cards. Unless you play the game obsessively it would probably take the average player over a year to get the full card collection if not more. I think the concept and cards themselves are not actually a bad idea, but the way to gain them is so totally dumb, they could have just made them cost a lot of dust but instead to make them seem special they had to lock them behind a lootbox system. The problem is that most of the cards are build around so often you find yourself in this frustrating place of having an idea for a deck that you cant entirely build because you dont have the Determination card for it. A system intended for mystique instead turns into one of gloating and frusteration.

Now I want to move onto talking about the other big realization, one that plays quite heavily into the discussion of instrumental play that I mentioned in my Eco insight about instrumental play (or the play behaviours of the 'hardcore' player). Instrumental play has an interesting relationship with UC for a few reasons. For one, most of the the demographic of the player base is on the younger side, teens to early 20s. Most people in that demographic tend to put a lot of their identity into being good at the game and other people not being good at it. Because of the fact you have clear access to the number of games any player has played and their winrate, rank, and # of games in a month, its really easy for these players to mock and degrade newer players for 'highrolling'. Here, the IRC function ends up becoming a bit of a beast. I can not in good conscience tell anybody who might be interested in playing this game to open up the IRC function. Just play the game and ignore any chat, treat it like hearthstone in this way. Granted the issue then is you'll never know how to build a good deck because most of the decks that are uploaded are actively bad and the discord for talking to other players about how to 'improve' your deck makes you culpable to their derision and elitism. At some point then it becomes a curious situation of being unsure how much of the actual game I'm even reccomending. If I take it seriously for a second I'd have to come to the realization that most people would get a kick from playing the game a bit before giving up due to the lack of inviting paratext. In hearthstone, you have several theorycrafting sites and popular internet icons giving you aid on the improvement. There's only 6 rarely active UC youtubers, and all your theory advice comes from bitter teenagers.

The top players are all super annoyed over players they see as 'worse' than them making 'suboptimal' play decisions. Not all equally and all the time but in general the culture is dominated by a discontent towards less established players. This is fairly normal of an issue in most games that promote competition, but I think there's one interesting factor that enhances this:

Most of the players perceive the ladder in UC as completely broken and able to let 'bad' players climb to master rank with ease. Due to how the system currently works, you can get to legend with a 45% win rate, which even in theory angers people. Thus the issue becomes 'elo inflation'. Everyone is good and so in the eyes of these players you need some other set of distinguishing factors besides the ladder rank itself for reasserting how bad a player is (often in an unconstructive way). Those factors are gloating over WR differences and making a big deal about playing for a long amount of time and consistently being in top legend, but more often then not this becomes a cudgel for good players to justify why they are good and humiliation bad/new players. It's videogame elitism at its finest but the issue is because of the scope and size of the game this is suffocating it. I was told that the same number of players play this year as they did last but my assumption is that its not new players, its people who've been playing the game for 3 years with a chip on their shoulder. It should also be mentioned that eventually good players are at a reasonable Elo level anyway that reflects their ability. In legend you have increasing elo similar to chess. So eventually in order to retain a 2150 elo you'd need to win at least 60% of the games you're playing. These players are taking out their occasional losses on those lower ranked players due to the hedonic treadmill of eventually getting to a point they can no longer climb higher from and lashing out at other players and systems as a result. Since these instrumental players are the top players this response is seen as an impressionable way to get better and fit in and suddenly next thing you know everyone after a certain rank threshold is complaining every third game about the other player 'highrolling' you.

There's one other interesting factor to, the higher rank you are the hard it tends to be to match in games because the player base is only around 20 players on at a time and most those players are not in legend. So what ends up happening is that the queue searches for around 4 minutes for another legend player, gives up, and matches you with a non legend player instead so suddenly your losses mean more and you're playing the game even less. Thus the backsliding of hedonic enjoyment with the game hits hard and if you follow the community energy the best way to replace that is through snark. This is not a result of the game its a result of the small size of the player base. This is not something that can just be magically fixed, and every attempt at fixing it is met with a degree of subconcious hostility by that established player base.

The kicker to me at least is that the community seems to actively misunderstand why the current ladder is so effective in the first place. It's literally more rewarding to new players more quickly, giving people a carrot system for continuing to play. Recently in the past few months the end of the month rewards were doubled, and while elo inflation is certainly a thing, the result is inflating more materials for better play to new players more quickly. The fact that people instead see the ladder system as it is as a bad thing reflects the culture surrounding the game. Which really sucks because this is probably the best card game I've ever played in terms of allowing for player creativity. Unfortunately all these hurdles get in the way and make play difficult. I would still reccomend the game immensely but just...dont open the chat. Embarrassingly I must admit through much of carrying myself with confidence and questioning established players knowledge, along with how many games I played, I've become a bit of a laughing stock in the 'community'. It feels humiliating to see one of my favourite games of the year weaponized against me like this.

Overall it's just sad to see a game being self cannibalized by a petulant and rude player base that's out of control. It's also sad to see this because community and warmth is the soul of Undertale, so the fact it became a place for humans to express their cruelty is tragically ironic, to say the least.