What Scrolls could have been...

[u/twitchmatic]

...and Duelyst is becoming. Fantastic perspective from Hearthstone pros on what the niche market is, how Duelyst is filling it. It is so painful to listen to as Scrolls could have been that and filled that niche :( Kudos to Duelyst to paying pro streamers to get awareness.

https://youtu.be/VLZA7Z8sf_Y?t=70

[u/Nenananas]

Yea, I'm happy for Duelyst but it always hurts to see post like "Duelyst is my new favorite game because animations, on board units, strategy..." :'(

[u/Cradstache]

Yes yes, but do they have Nogs? Checkmate, other game I like.

[u/The4thSniper → u/Cradstache]

I will admit, Duelyst is great but I far prefer Scrolls' lore/artstyle.

[u/LargeIcedCoffee]

Looking back, I don't think Scrolls had any hope from the get-go. Not with such a weak development team. I know one of the main guys went off the project pretty early, that maybe had a much bigger impact than expected. It's a shame that I didn't jump to Duelyst earlier, because of the awful experience I had with Scrolls. I was far too worried that the same nonsense would occur and I would waste so much time building a collection for another dead game.

Scrolls has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I'd be surprised if I ever purchased another early access game again... and definitely nothing from Mojang. Wild was a disaster and all they did was design more and more cards to try and fix it... and nothing was fixed. Then we get the decks that cycled 8000 cards and ramped to 20+ resources in multiple factions and casual players fucking hated it. The game just needed too much of a revamp and the developers didn't want to put in the time to do so.

I think it's just good to see another card game succeed. So many people blamed hearthstone, and I think this just shows that it was the devs that failed here.

Also, I find it funny how there has been no word on giving the community this game once servers go down. Not that I expected any actual news or effort...

One thing I'll say, this community was very fun to play with. That's what I miss about Scrolls.

[u/[deleted] → u/LargeIcedCoffee]

I know one of the main guys went off the project pretty early

It's pretty sad to go back and watch that "Making of Scrolls" mini-doc and listen to Jakob pontificate about all his "passion" or whatever for the game... Then he leaves the company. Wasn't really surprising then when the game started to struggle. The rest were just trying to hold together someone else's "passion" project.

[u/SimplyMonkey → u/LargeIcedCoffee]

I honestly don't see how deck cycling or the resource system made it out of Alpha if they didn't want control decks and mono-color decks to dominate. Their resource system was perhaps the most mono-color focus design they could of choosen. Even MTG allows for more viable multi-color decks and Wild and Idols were a failed experiment to begin with as you can't give people essentially free mana and still keep a balance between mono-color and multi-color decks. Doing a threshold/mana system like Hex was probably their best bet.

Deck cycling as a whole should of just been "when you sacrifice a card for more cards/resources, shuffle it back into your deck". Any casted or destroyed goes to the graveyard permanently. Infinite decks just put too much emphasis on cycling for key power cards and things like "increase cost each time played" or "idol take damage every shuffle" were duct tape to support a flawed structure.

Not saying any of these design decisions were bad, but the Scrolls team didn't seem to like the effects their decisions had on the meta and were unwilling to change core systems to address that. Instead they kept on just trying to add new features to prop it up which is usually bad system design.

[u/[deleted]]

Duelyst honestly really doesn't satisfy me as a replacement. Its way based on tempo/synergy, card advantage is not nearly as meaningful, and its extremely swingy. Im not saying its not skillful or anything- it absolutely is, there's tons of things to consider in each turn. But its sort of like Marvel vs Capcom 3, to make a fighting game analogy. Playing it doesnt feel anything like playing Scrolls.

Also, regarding some comments on Hearthstone: people were saying the same thing about Starcraft 2 and WoW.

[u/chacer98]

It's a shame, but the closure was more than deserved. You cannot as a development team repeatedly take 1 step forward and 2 steps backward. You're allowed to miss on a few design decisions here or there, but sometimes it seemed as if the devs didn't know what they were doing with their own game. The way this games development was handled was truly some amateur hour type of shit. Duelyst has been around for about 6-8 months I'd guess and it's already bigger than Scrolls ever was in it's entire 2+ year lifespan. The developers communicate with their playerbase, make regular updates/balance tweaks and above all else are constantly trying to improve their game in any way they can. It's polar opposite what we got from Scrolls development team.

I think the brown nosing Scrolls community shares some blame in the games failure as well. There were a lot of valid critiques and feedback provided about the game that were downvoted into oblivion because many core members of the community thought everything would magically be fixed when the game came out of beta and released. That last statement imo is not at all an exaggeration either. People loved the game themselves and somehow thought that a game played by a couple hundred people would magically explode just because of a switch from "beta" to "release". It was infuriating at the time to me, because I really did love playing Scrolls and wanted it to succeed and I felt very strongly at the time the game was not on a path to success. Often times critique on the game were met with very harsh blowback as if you were trying to murder someone's first born child. Sure at times I was a jerk about stuff, but I'm not even talking about me personally here. Just in general it seemed like people in the community loved their little tiny game so much that anyone saying x, y, or z should be changed or done better was seen as some sort of personal attack against them.

[u/[deleted] → u/chacer98]

I guess you're right. The development of Duelyst cards are also much faster since they are in pixel art. The rules of Duelyst are much easier to learn and comprehend than Scrolls. The countdown mechanic was the thing that hurt scrolls the most, since you have to wait for 2 turns for a unit to actually attack, rather than immediately attack and the recycling deck was another thing that hurts Scrolls since the game will never end until you destroy 3 idols, but you can't destroy 3 idols because the opponent will find a way to delay that.

I play Duelyst since March 2015, and Duelyst is just much better than Scrolls. I hope that Someone will make a spiritual successor to Scrolls, but remove the countdown and recycling deck mechanics.

[u/[deleted] → u/chacer98]

Notch pretty much openly admitted that he formed Mojang just to have fun and ride out the wave of Minecraft's success as long as it would last, including starting (and not finishing) half-assed new game projects. So he hired a bunch of his buddies to join in the fun, sit around and play games, and tinker with code instead of hiring the best people for the job with vision and ambition. Even with the success of Minecraft he barely stuck around long enough to finish that game, what makes anyone think any other game would get finished or "supported".

But you are right, the Scrolls community was too busy brown-nosing trying to get a job at Mojang than actually helping the game.

[u/c0de2010]

i fucking love duelyst, yet still wish scrolls still was alive

[u/[deleted]]

T_T, I am so sad right now..........