Something new on the blog today. I’m trying to recover / revive some of my creative projects. First up is The Lante’lei – stories and character sketches about two all-female elven tribes struggling for survival in a dangerous forest.
Deity Wars is the primary game that I play each day. It’s the first one I login to and the last one I check at the end of the day. As you’ll see in the details below, it’s not necessarily the game play is that revolutionary, I think it’s because I really like the cards / artwork design. Also the ways that you can improve your cards are a little more interesting than average.
My Referral Code: TJL2537
Deity Wars is a fantasy based game where you choose one of three factions as you sign up. You can choose to be a “knight” in service to Heaven, Hell, or Earth. I chose Earth. Don’t remember why any longer. From what I’ve seen, choosing one over another isn’t that big of a deal since you can still acquire cards from any of the 3 realms and use them equally well.
Let’s say you have an Elven Archer card that is a Normal (N) rarity. Her max level is 20. So you Enhance that card until it reaches level 20. When you do, you get a Material which provides +500 Attack.
Then, you find another Elven Archer card, you use that to evolve the first one, creating a level 1 Elven Archer+ card, which is also Normal rarity. You enhance that card up to level 20, and now she generates a +750 Defense material.
This occurs again at Elven Archer++. When you level her to 20, you get a +1000 Defense Material.
Finally, you get your fourth Elven Archer card, you evolve your Elven Archer++ (Normal) to a [Sureshot] Elven Archer (NN). She has a max level of 30; so you enhance her again up to that level and get another Material which gives a card +1500 Attack.
With that final material, you’ll also get something called a “Composite Material”. The Composite Material is actually part of a collection. Doing this process often enough with your cards eventually earns you some nice rewards like special items, tickets to draw rare cards, etc.
Now, I’m not 100% sure that the rewards are going to be worth it in the long run for all of your cards. After all, in that example you put 90 levels of XP into that one card. But it does give you an optional goal to reach for.
Also, as I mention in the Material section above, the number of material slots per card can vary randomly. This can mean that even once a card has reached its “final form”, you may decide to evolve it further to increase the number of material slots available.
Let’s continue the example from above, say you have your [Sureshot] Elven Archer (NN), but she only has 2 slots to handle materials. Then you find another Elven Archer (N) card that has 5 material slots. You can evolve the new card with the fully evolved one and you’ll end up with a [Sureshot] Elven Archer (NN) card with 5 material slots. Granted, she’ll be back at level 1, but if you haven’t leveled her yet, it would definitely be worth it!
I consider Deity Wars to be a good example of the Free-to-Play model. So far, I haven’t found very many things that you need to spend money on. Granted, buying card packs or life potions can help. And you may not be very successful in PvP battles without the super rare cards that are easier to find via the purchased card pack tickets, but I have even found a Rare card using the free card packs they give you each day.
The events so far have been really good. The story lines are engaging, the progress is fairly quick, the raid bosses are challenging, but not obscenely so. I have had fun with them for sure. I do think there have been a few too many (as I mentioned above), but I’ve enjoyed them nonetheless.
Overall, I guess you can tell that I like Deity Wars. It’s not by accident that it’s the first MTCG I’m reviewing. I’d recommend it as a good example of the genre for anyone who is interested. The Quest and combat systems don’t blaze any new trails, but the card style and the way you can enhance them via Materials are a nice twist that keeps things interesting.
As I started writing my first Mobile Trading Card Game (MTCG) review, I realized that there might need to be some general information to help a new player understand the terminology I’m using. Rather than needing to explain that information multiple times in each review, I decided to create a topic for it instead. Note that most of the terms I use here are the way I think of things, not necessarily the way a specific game refers to them, for instance I may think of the list of cards that I’ve discovered as an Archive, but a particular game may call it Codex or Roster or something else.
When I review a new MTCG, one of the first things I notice about it is the type of client that it has. I divide this into two primary types: Framed Web and Full clients.
When I say something is a “Framed Web Client”, what I mean is that the program does have client software which is installed on your mobile device. However the reality is that most of the functionality of the game happens within a web browser window housed within the game’s frame. This type of client has an advantage of having less of a storage impact on your mobile device. It also means that the developers can easily deploy new functionality without requring large client update downloads. However, the disadvantage that I’ve found is that you’re also subject to the problems you have with any web browser based game, network latency, overloaded web servers, etc. Also, in my experience, it seems that these types of clients require a great deal more network traffic. I have to make sure that I close and kill these clients when I’m done playing or else I drain my phone’s battery and chew up my data limits quickly.
As opposed to the Framed Web Client, the Full Client style games have a more traditional client/server architecture for them. They probably still interact continually with a server on the backend, however the client on the mobile device has more of the game functionality built into it. The benefit I’ve seen to this is that the game normally feels more responsive on whatever device I’m using. It also doesn’t seem to need as much data transfer as the Framed Web Client style since graphics, etc. are kept locally. However, it does mean that this type of client requires more storage on the local device. Also an update to the game means an update to the game client, requiring additional download.
There are several ways to refer to the cards in the game. My terms mostly come from how I view them, the concepts are usually present in each game, however the terminology of how that game refers to them may use slightly different names.
When I think of the “Deck”, this is my current collection of cards. Some of them may be actively used in a Team, some of them I may be holding on to for other reasons. Unlike the physical games where “deck” usually refers to the set of cards you’re bringing to a particular game / battle, in this case I use Deck to refer to all of my cards in my collection.
I think of the Team as being the set of cards I’m using for a quest / raid / battle. In standard card games, you might call this a “hand”. Various games have different limits on how many teams you can define and how many cards make up a team.
I call the record of all the cards I’ve ever collected the Archive. This is probably just because the first MTCG I played called it this. A card listed in the Archive just means that I have seen it at some time. If I sold it or used it for Evolving / Enhancing (see below), it isn’t in my Deck anymore as it’s not available to me, but it would still be in my Archive. Most games have some sort of achievements attached to the numbers of cards you have in your Archive, numbers of max level cards, etc.
Most of the games I’ve played have one or more ways to improve the cards after they’ve been found. The terms I use for them is based, again, off the first game I played; so it’s how I think of the various improvement methods.
Evolving is usually done by combining two cards of the same type to create a new version that is more advanced. For instance, I might combine a card called “Elven Archer” with another “Elven Archer”. When I do this, I lose the two Elven Archer cards, and get an “Elven Archer+” card instead, which probably has better statistics than the Elven Archer. Some games allow this to occur multiple times until the card reaches a “final form”.
Enhancing is similar to Evolving, but when I enhance a card, I’m sacrificing the donor card to give xp to the card being enchanced. In most games the cards don’t have to match types. So I can use an “Orc Fighter” card to level up my “Elven Archer” card. In this case you lose the donor card(s), but the target card remains, just with more xp / level. This typically gives a more minor boost to the card’s abilities than Evolving does.
There are some other terms which are fairly common among the various games I’ve played. I’ll define them here so that you can refer to them when I talk about them in the reviews.
Action points constrain how many actions you can take within a certain time. Various games call this something different. Some call it Energy or Stamina. Basically any task you take in say a Quest (see below) requires a certain number of Action Points. Once your AP pool is empty, you either have to wait for it to refill or use a potion to refill it automatically.
Some games which allow Player vs Player combat use Battle Points to limit how many times you can attack. Often the BP pool is also used in Raids to control how often or how hard you can attack raid boss characters. Like the AP once the pool is empty, you have to wait for the BP to refill either with time or some consumable item until you can battle again.
Teams are often constrained in how they are built by the number of Attack or Defense points you have. For instance, if you have 100 attack points and a particular card has a “cost” of 20 points, then when you add that card to your Attack Team, you have 80 points left for other cards.
One thing to note, most games that have this mechanism allow you to build different teams for different purposes. Since calculating the “best” team for a particular purpose can be difficult, they also tend to offer “auto” or “suggested” team buttons. What I have found is that the method they use to calculate this is often flawed. The math behind this gets a bit difficult (probably deserves it’s own post), but suffice to say that if you spend the time building your teams by hand, you can sometimes significantly improve your performance in PvP battles.
Quests are the typical way that you advance in one of these games. Through quests you’ll find money, items and new cards. Quests usually have multiple stages each of which needs to be completed (sometimes requiring multiple steps for each stage). One thing you’ll see prominently in my reviews is how I feel about the current standard when it comes to MTCG quests … let’s just say I’m not a fan. 
Many games have special items as the reward for completing a quest line. Sometimes these items are random drops which occur during the quests, sometimes they always drop when you complete the final stage. Collecting an entire set of these items usually provides some soft of a tangible bonus in terms of items or cards or money. Collectible items are also typically the target for PvP battles. One frequent “pass time” for MTCG players is to get 4 or 5 of a 6 item collection, then go try to steal the missing items from other players.
Events are special occurances that happen for a limited time in the game. They usually have special quests or raids associated with them. Often they are also used to introduce new card collections. While events are definitely fun and add a lot to the game, keep in mind as well that Events are a primary way to entice you to spend money on the otherwise “free” game. They like to use the “for a limited time only…” tag to get you to buy special cards, etc. which may only be available during the event.
Raids are fights against special “boss” style monsters. Often taking down these special creatures requires assistance from other players. No matter how advanced your Deck/Team may be, killing a boss with 10,000,000 hit points is probably beyond a single player (at least without spending a lot of real money on potions and other items). The advantage, however, is that there are usually special rewards for helping your friends take down a boss.
I’ve noticed that MCTG’s have kept the Card Pack nomenclature despite the fact that cards aren’t actually sold in packages wrapped in plastic or anything. Basically getting a Card Pack really means that you can ask the game to give you a random card. There are all sorts of variations on how this works, but the concept is generally similar. You click on a button, watch an animation, and the game gives you a random card. Cards given in this manner usually vary in the rarity of the card, with the more rare cards being restricted (or at least more common) for those who have spent more of their real money on getting the Card Pack. Almost every game claims that you “can” earn a super rare card via the standard card packs, but in reality I’ve found it very difficult to actually achieve.
Most games want to encourage you to be loyal to their game. It’s a solid concept. If you’re logging into my game at least once a day, you’re more likely to spend money on my game. So I offer you something to entice you to do that. These rewards usually come in terms of items, card packs, currency, etc.
The social aspect of MTCGs is also important to how they are designed. While they may have various terms for how they refer to them, most of them have very similar concepts.
Most games allow you to define a set of other players who are your allies. This is usually limited in number in some way, often tied to your level in the game or some other achievement. These friends typically provide a couple of different benefits. First, they can be sent some sort of support message which earns them (and you) points (see Supporting below) which can be spent in varioius ways. Second, when the game provides raids, you can typically call on your allies to assist you in taking down the raid boss monster.
Some of the games allow you to go beyond having an allies list and allow you to join guilds or some other similar player-run organization. The usefulness of these guilds varies widely between games. Some games allow the guild leader to spend guild points (earned through the actions of the guild members) on some sort of perk which provides benefits to all of the members. For instance a perk which adds 5% to everyone’s defense strength. Some games also have events designed for guilds to participate as a group. Wars between guilds is a popular option where the guild earns ranking points when its members defeat the members of other guilds.
As mentioned in the Friend / Allies section above, one of the benefits to having allies is being able to earn Ally Points. Games call these wildly different things. Some that I’ve seen include Ally Points, Rally Points, Yell Points, etc. In most cases, accumulating a certain number of points allows you to exchange them for something else in the game. For instance, you may be able to spend 200 Ally Points to get a free Card Pack. In games where there is a significant benefit to doing so, sending (and receiving) these Ally Points to (and from) your allies may be an important part of advancing in the game.
Recently I’ve gotten into playing some of the trading card games on my Android phone and tablet. I figured I’d offer some of my observations here about the various games I’m playing (or that I tried and decided not to continue). I guess you could consider these “reviews”. Hopefully something I have to say helps someone else who is looking for this sort of thing.
I’m only playing the games on my Android devices. I have a Samsung Galaxy 3 phone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.2 device that I play on. So anything I say about the performance of the game comes from that standpoint. It also means that I don’t play any games which are exclusive to the iOS platform.
Also, I tend to play games which are published through Mobage. I like the fact that I can spend $10 on some Mobage coins (their version of in-game currency) and be able to use that on any of the 5 or 6 games I’m playing at the time.
That doesn’t mean that I have never tried any other games, but since Mobage is a pretty major player here, you’ll find most of my reviews relate to their games.
I’m writing these reviews for a couple of reasons. First when I first got into this hobby, it was hard to find information about the games. Granted the Google Play marketplace has reviews on it, but those are usually fairly limited. Hopefully by talking about some of these style of games that I’m playing it will help others as you make decisions about what you may want to try out.
Second, I have in mind (and have started on the system design) my own TCG. So by reviewing the various games critically, it has helped me think about what features I like and dislike in the games. So I guess by reading this, you’ll get a feel for what I may put into a game of my own.
The grandaddy to these sorts of games are the physical trading card games like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon. In translation to the mobile device, they’ve had to make some adjustments, however. For instance, most of the games don’t really have the back and forth “battling” like you may be used to in the physical games.
However, several features are there. Like the idea of a “rare” card. In a physical game you buy packs of cards hoping to find some rare card in one of them. In the mobile versions there are usually several ways to get cards (see the Free to Play? section below) and the scarcity of certain cards and the thrill of finding a rare one exist there too.
Most of these games are listed as “Free” in the Google Play marketplace. Now, as you might suspect, some of these games have large studios of artists and developers behind them. So they obviously have to pay those people somehow, right? The standard way is to offer premium items through their in-game shop. For instance you might be able to buy a potion which refreshes your Action Points (allowing you to keep playing longer).
The most common way to get money from you is to offer cards. These typically take the form of some random pick from the pool of available cards. The higher the cost of the card pick, the more likely that you’ll get a rare card in the draw.
One of the parts of my reviews will be to discuss how viable it is to think that you can play the game successfully for free. Most of the games you can play for free. However your ability to be successful in battle, the rate of your progression through the game, however will be more or less limited by how much money you’re willing to spend.
I’ve often said that “Free to Play” is a misnomer. Game companies are in the business to make money. If all they just give away 1000s of hours of work, they won’t be in business very long. I’ve often found that “free” game developers are usually very good at finding ways to entice you to spend money on the game. Mobile TCG’s aren’t the first time that I’ve disocvered that I spent more money on a “free” game than I ever have on subscription based MMOs (for example).
So, my plan is to use the following basic structure for each of my TCG reviews…
Note that if the game has a referral system, I’ll also list my referral code here. Most games encourage the players to recruit others. By using a referral code when you sign up for one of the games, it gives you a special card / item and it would also give your referrer something too. There is no difference to you in using my referral code or someone else’s.Ok, that’s enough about my plans for now. I’ll try to add some reviews over the next few days. I’ll create some category tags so it’s easier to find these on the blog. Also, if you have any suggestions on what I might want to try, I’d be willing to hear them. My current list of games that I plan to review are:
So there are several great places to go to get information about selecting skills for your character builds. My personal favorite is TSW Guides: TSW Build Page. But a question that comes up over and over again on The Secret World Newcomers Forum is about how to spend the skill points. Since skill points come at 1/3 the frequency of ability points, it’s a legitimate area to be concerned about. So I thought I’d write this up to explain how I allocate my skill points when I start a new character.
To explain, I was in the Closed Beta portion of testing and each new build I would create a new character from scratch; so this approach comes from a few dozen character rolls that I did during that time.
Skill Points (SP) are used to allow you to equip ever more powerful equipment (weapons and talismans). Since your major increase in strength comes from the gear that you can wear, allocating your skill points to maximize your potential is an important part of character building. You gain a new SP every time you completely fill your experience bar. Another way to measure it is you get one skill point for every 3 ability points that you earn.
There are a couple of important things to keep in mind about skill points.
If you are going to do the PvP minigames, keep in mind that your bracket that you’re assigned to is based on your highest SL. So, if you rank your Major Talisman skill all the way up to 10 while the rest of them are still 3′s, you’re going to get royally pwn’d in the PvP arenas. Current recommendations are to to hold off going to QL 10 until you actually have the QL 10 gear to equip.
You open the Skill Point tree by pressing () in-game. You can also get to it from your Ability Wheel (N). The SP tree is divided into weapons on the top half and Talismans on the lower half. A full discussion of weapons and talismans is really beyond this guide. Suffice it to say that weapons are how you enable your character to use abilities tied to those weapons and talismans are the stat generating gear typically associated with armor in other MMOs.
Each Weapon is futher divided into two categories. The first is always Damage. Allocating SP in the Damage category will enhance your damage dealing skills with that weapon. Read the descriptions for each weapon to see exactly what each weapon skill enhances. The second branch for each weapon is going to either be Survival, Support, or Healing. The buff assocated with allocating points in this branch usually help with tanking, buffing/debuffing, and healing abilities respectively. The following list is a summary. See the in-game tree for details.
Talismans are divided into Head, Major, and Minor categories. These correspond to talismans that fit into the following slots on your character:
I break this down into three phases of the game.
The part of SP allocation that I want to focus on here is how I spend my first 32 SP that I earn. I’ll provide some overall guidance following that, but let’s hit those first 32 first. I’ll lay out the table of how I do this, then follow up with some discussion.
| SP | Allocation | SL |
| 1 | Major Talismans | 1 |
| 2 | Minor Talismans | 1 |
| 3 | Head Talismans | 1 |
| 4 | Primary Weapon (Damage) | 1 |
| 5 | Secondary Weapon (Survival/Support/Healing) | 1 |
| 6 | ||
| 7 | Major Talismans | 2 |
| 8 | ||
| 9 | Minor Talismans | 2 |
| 10 | ||
| 11 | Head Talismans | 2 |
| 12 | ||
| 13 | Primary Weapon (Damage) | 2 |
| 14 | ||
| 15 | Secondary Weapon (Survival/Support/Healing) | 2 |
| 16 | ||
| 17 | ||
| 18 | Major Talismans | 3 |
| 19 | ||
| 20 | ||
| 21 | Minor Talismans | 3 |
| 22 | ||
| 23 | ||
| 24 | Head Talismans | 3 |
| 25 | ||
| 26 | ||
| 27 | Primary Weapon (Damage) | 3 |
| 28 | ||
| 29 | ||
| 30 | Secondary Weapon (Survival/Support/Healing) | 3 |
| 31 | Primary Weapon (Survival/Support/Healing) | 3 |
| 32 | Secondary Weapon (Damage) | 3 |
The first 2 points go to my weapons. Whichver I’m using for damage, gets a point in it’s Damage category. The other gets a point in the supporting branch. This will allow me to equip up to QL 2 weapons, which gets me through most of Kingsmouth Town.
The next points go in order to Major Talismans, Minor Talismans, and then Head Talismans. I choose Major first because it also buffs my HP (which everyone can use more of) and it supports 3 crucial talisman slots on my character. Minor comes next because it covers 3 more talisman slots. While Head talismans account for bigger bonuses than the others, since they are also more rare, I leave those for last.
Once I have everything at level 1, I proceed to get my 2 weapons and my talisman skills up to SL 3. This will allow me to equip up to QL 4 which gets me past Kingsmouth and well into the Savage Coast.
Finally, just before I enter the mid-game part of my strategy, I put one point (and ONLY one point) into the “other” branch of my weapons trees. The reason I do this is because the first point is usually a significant buff for whatever skills that weapon is supporting. Subsequent points will raise bonuses from 5% to 5.5% or something similarly trivial. But that first 5% bonus for 1 SP is worth it in my book.
Well, that depends. In my case, I decided I wanted to diversify from my Blade/Fist build which serves me well for soloing and work on a tanking build using Blade/Chaos. So I started putting some points into those skills. I’m also slow playing the whole game (I’m still on Solomon Island with 2.25 days of /played time). so I don’t need gear that can handle Egypt yet, which allows me to branch out and look at some healing and other builds as well. For me, going back and running through the Kingsmouth Town quests with new weapons is kind of fun.
On the other hand, if you’re sticking with the weapons you have, then you could just continue the pattern. Major, Minor, Head, Primary, Secondary until you reach SL 9/10 (PvP’ers remember that caution about SL 10).
I hope this was helpful to someone. Let me know if anything is unclear (or even worse incorrect).
Now that we’re reaching the 30 day mark for The Secret World being live, I figured it was time to give the final analysis of the number of potential character builds based on the current ability wheel in-game.
I’ve made several posts over the last months in regards to why I think that TSW’s build system is unique and offers some challenges and opportunities for those of us who like to crunch numbers. Here is the history of those posts…
On the live wheel, there are 9 weapons and 3 “general” ability segments. These are:
The weapons each have 24 Active and 24 Passive abilities plus 5 Elite Active and 3 Elite Passive abilities as well. The general ability segment each have 3 Active, 3 Passive, and 1 Elite Active ability in their segment.
As mentioned previously, a build in TSW consists of 7 active and 7 passive abilities. You’re allowed to have 1 Elite ability in each Active and Passive parts of the deck. For Active abilities, you’re further restricted that they have to be either tied to one of the 2 weapons you’re allowed to equip or part of the general segment of the ability wheel. Passive abilities can be equipped no matter what weapons you’re using.
With 2 weapons, and 3 general segments, there are 13 potential Elite Active abilities. There is also a pool of 57 normal active abilities from which you can build your deck. Assuming that you want to use 1 Elite ability if it is available, that leaves 6 active abilities to be selected from the pool of 57. The math works out as follows:
1 Elite Active out of a pool of 13 = 13 combinations
6 normal actives out of a pool of 56 = 36,288,252 combinations
13 x 36,288,252 = 471,747,276 combinations for each weapon pair
Since there are 36 ways that you can select 2 weapons out of a pool of 9 options…
36 weapon pairs x 471,747,276 active combinations per pair = 16,982,901,936 possible ways to select your 7 active abilities at the end game.
Passives are a bit easier since they aren’t dependent on weapon selections. There are a total of 27 Elite Passive abilities and a pool of 225 normal passive abilities to select from when creating your build.
1 Elite Passive out of a pool of 27 = 27 combinations
6 normal passives out of a pool of 225 = 168,488,720,400 combinations
27 x 168,488,720,400 = 4,549,195,450,800 possible ways to select your 7 passive abilities
So with 16,982,901,936 different ways to select Active abilities and 4,549,195,450,800 ways to select passive abilities, you end up with …
16,982,901,936 x 4,549,195,450,800 = 77,258,540,228,633,700,000,000 potential builds
If, once again, we use 1 millionth of 1 percent as our viability estimator, we still end up with 772,585,402 potential ways to build your character.
With over 772 million possible builds, I’m pretty sure that balance should end up being a non issue.
Once again I’ve uploaded my spreadsheet that I used to come to these conclusions. One number you could play with is the “synergistic sets”. For raw number purposes, I assumed that all 36 weapon combinations could potentially work. You could look at it and decide that only 10 of those weapon choices are actually likely to work together. But if you do that, I’d recommend you adjust the Viabilty factor as well.
Just a quick note that I have created a blog site for my main The Secret World character. David “Daeyong” Young is a 28 year old Korean American who is currently enroute to bury his grandfather (and hapkido teacher) in Korea.
In previous posts, I’ve talked about the vast number of skills and combinations (decks) there of which can be used to customize your character’s skill sets. For background on this, I’d refer you to:
In reviewing some recent comments from developers and players at the PAX East conference, I’ve come across two things that have made me revise my model:
Each of the 9 weapons has an Elite Active and Elite Passive ability. However, in your build deck, you are only allowed one of each. I’ve made the assumption (which I feel is safe) that the elite abilities will be strong enough that one will want to have them included in your build deck. This has the following effects on your skill selections:
I’ve seen a couple of comments which go along these lines:
“There are 9 abilites in each cell of the skill wheel which alternate Active then Passive”
If this holds true, then the split of active to passive skills should be 5 to 4. So I’ve adjusted my respective pools using those numbers for now.
With this new information, my calculations break down as follows:
Select 1 of 2 Active Elite abilities, giving you 2 possible Active Elite combinations.
Select 6 of 60 Active Standard abilities, giving you 50,063,860 Active Standard Combinations.
Multiply and get 100,127,720 potential Active Builds
Select 1 of 9 Passive Elite abilities for 9 possible Passive Elite combinations.
Select 6 of 226 Passive Standard abilities for 168,488,720,400 possible Passive Standard combinations
Multiply to get 1,516,398,483,600 potential Passive Builds
Multiply the Active Builds and the Passive Builds and you get 151,833,522,774,325,000,000 potential character builds. Using the 1 millionth of 1 percent number that I’ve used to filter for viability, that still represents 1,518,335 potential viable builds!
While each bit of information that we get reduces the raw numbers of builds that we can use, I think it stands to reason that this number is still staggeringly diverse and should allow for an extremely high degree of customization for our TSW characters.
For those of you who wold like to disect my math model, I’ve uploaded my latest version of the spreadsheet as well.
Excel 2007/2010 format: TSW-SkillBuilds-v3
Excel 97-2003 format: TSW-SkillBuilds-v3 (2003)
This isn’t a post so much as a notice that in my links section, I’ll be linking to forum topics and other blogs / sites that have information about the numbers and math behind The Secret World. I’ll try to keep the link section as up to date as I can.
This is actually an update to my previous post Balance, Diversity, and The Secret World. Please take a look there for the basic information about how character abilities are built into a “deck” for your character.
In a dev blog entry from Martin Bruusgaard, lead designer for The Secret World, Martin shares some additional information about how abilities work, the syngergies between them, and refines the numbers slightly. Read the full article at: Martin Bruusgaard explains character development
For purposes of the math I’m about to do, the salient points are:
Total abilities a character can unlock: 525
Starter skills (not associated with the weapons in the game) : 3
Weapons (used to categorize abilities): 9
Abilities / Weapon: 58
A character can have up to 2 weapons equippped. The seven active abilities in the character’s deck are selected from the pool of abilities for those two weapons.
Passive abilites are not restricted to the equipped weapon, and therefore any passive ability can be selcted to be part of the 7 passives each character can have in their ability deck.
My main assumption is that the split between active and passive abilites is 50/50 and consistent across weapons. If I get additional information about the ability design, I can revisit this to remove said assumption.
If I can select 7 abilities out of a pool of 58 (2 weapons * 29 active abilities each), then there are 300,674,088 different combinations of active abilities to choose from.
Since I select 7 abilities out of a pool of 264 total passive abilities, there are 16,366,799,252,232 different combinations of passive abilities to choose from.
To get the total potential builds, we multiply the number of active ability combinations by the number of passive ability combinations. This means there are 4,921,072,438,643,940,000,000 total potential character builds. If you’re having issues counting the commas, that’s nearly 5 million trillion potential character ability decks!
Now, gamers know that all builds are not created equal. It wouldn’t do any good to have a build where all of my passive abilities are improving conditions that my active abilities can’t take care of. Viability numbers are often a point of contention. I’ll decide that only 1 trillionth of 1 percent ( 1 / 100,000,000,000,000 ) would be good enough to be considered “viable” by most gamers.
In that case, from our pool of 4,921,072,438,643,940,000,000 builds, we’d be reduced to “only” having 49,210,724 that actually work. In other words there would still be over 49 million ways for you to build your character’s ability decks which would be useful to play the game. And that’s assuming that only 1 in 100 trillion builds were useful!
Ok, Karl, the math is mind boggling. Even the government doesn’t consider those types of numbers. But what does it mean to game play?
Well, one of the fears that MMO gamers often express is ”Will the classes be balanced?” This is especially true for Player verses Player (PvP) players. Since they don’t want to choose a Warrior only to discover that Rangers are kicking their arse each time they step on to a battle field.
The beauty of a system like what Funcom is using for The Secret World is that they don’t HAVE to balance classes. They don’t even really have to balance abilities. If it turns out that one of the Hammer abilities is really good, any player can pick that ability up and use it too.
And with almost 5 million trillion ways to build a charcter, I still say that I have a really hard time believing that there will be a character build that is SO overpowerful that there’s no way for another player to counter it.
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