What is the scope of the moddability of the game?

Question

How much are we going to let people mod the game, what are the conequences of it?

My own intent would be to only allow players to create their own cards (with own effects, etc.), subsequently they should all be added into the game via a central gateway, such that we can track their cards. I disagree with people being able to add cards client side, as then we have no way to track and balance them in case automated algorithms fail.

Take as example the Nuclear Explosion card, which sets of a timer that lets the player win the game, unless within the timer another player uses a specific card to cancel the Nuclear Explosion effect.

This is all fine and all, we have a player created card, we have a counter effect that prevents the card from being overpowered, but how are we going to make sure that the other player has access to the Nuclear Explosion cancel card? How exactly does that work out?

Answer 1

Personally I would agree with the things skiwi says in the question.  I undertand the desire to make something moddable, but I do not think that this is really within the scope of the TCG idea as it currently stands.  

I think the most unique and interesting aspect of the game is the players creating the cards.  We are expecting the playerbase to participate in this as a basic part of the game itself, at a minimum.  We should not be expecting them to program a mod for the game in order to do so.

Even if we had fully working moddability, as skiwi suggests, it would be a balancing nightmare.  It's already going to be very difficult to balance the cards that players create, even if we decide on all of the potential effects ahead of time and do our best to balance them before the game is released.  If we allow players to add new effects in code, it will put this fragile balance completely out of whack.

Despite this I am not saying that we cannot try to make the game in a way that allows for modding in the future.  But especially because this is an online multiplayer game, I don't think it fits with the main idea at the moment.  Imagine if Hearthstone allowed the players to modify the game in any way?  It would be pure chaos :)

Answer 2

I see this working in a different way. Set aside the idea of players creating their own cards for a minute and just think about what moddability usually means. Think of games that have had a lot of support from modding communities now and in the past...  Minecraft, Half-Life, Doom, etc. Each player generally isn't making their own mod; instead most players just play the game (and the mods) and a small percentage of players team up to create the mods.

It's up to the groups of players who create the mods to balance their own mods (and promote them, and so on). Sure, modders can have the ability to create a mod where the only card is the "I win" card, and whoever plays it first wins. But nobody would play that mod, so nobody would make it.

In general I think if you give people a nice foundation to build on and a lot of creative freedom, many of them will make things that are pretty cool, not things that don't make any sense. The best mods will naturally become the most popular, and mods that have balance issues will either get fixed or die.

Now, if we wanted to come back to players creating their own cards within mods, there are ways that could be handled (we can start another question for that), but we shouldn't confuse the average player having the ability to create cards with moddability. These should be two entirely separate things. 

TL;DR: Mods are not the same thing as player-created custom cards. There is no reason to try to control the balance of mods, just let people do things however they want. If they make a good mod, people will play it, if they make a bad mod people will ignore it.

Comments

I totally agree with this.

Answer 3

The way I feel about moddability is fairly straightforward. Setting aside character creation (Dad Gum/DaggNabbit will create a separate post for that and we discussed it in chat) basic moddability, such as creating your own decks, cards, effects, etc. would be a matter mostly of giving the modder a blank/generic copy of the database and let them hammer it out, make their own graphics, cards, etc.

And then they can host their own mod on their own server and self-promote, as long as they keep some form of link back to the source TCG which we are creating (that is common practice in creative commons/open source type of licensing) we should be OK. If they want to modify some of the game behavior as well, again, they can do so, as long as the code we provide is well documented throughout as to which section of code affects which value or behavior it should make it simple enough for them.

I trust we are all careful programmers and all the code will be clean and easy to follow. (because that's what we do, right?)

Comments

The mods that people make does not have to alter the existing core game code, mods should be independent files that gets loaded into the main game. Therefore, I'm not sure I understand your "giving the modder a blank/generic copy of the database" and "as long as they keep some form of link back to the source TCG which we are creating (that is common practice in creative commons/open source type of licensing) we should be OK" comments.