On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 10:52, Kerim Aydin<ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > > > Just some comments on these options: > >> 1. Destroy extras - The current system. If you have too many cards the >> extras are randomly destroyed. This requires a lot of extra work on >> the Dealors part, and also makes it difficult for players to 'store >> up' cards for certain purposes. >> >> 2. Prevent draws - Players don't earn draws when their hand is full. >> This gets messy when it becomes difficult to determine who owns which >> cards, and since cards have 4 different recordkeepers it may be a >> frequent problem. > > First, a question for you: Given your automation, was I wrong to > separate out three recordkeepers for basic decks? It looks like one > high-priority office could handle these (though Major Arcana - > concerned with the speaker - and Salary switches - could be tracked > separately). > > The old system was a mix of the above two. Players earned "pending > draws" which could only be satisfied if your hand limit was below the > limit. (In addition, powerful cards could actually take more than one > "card slot" in the hand, adding to strategy). If you had too many > cards in your hand, you held your pending draws until you didn't. > > Pending draws built up like currencies. They were never made tradeable, > but players would offer pending draws, e.g. "I pledge to transfer you > whatever card I get from my Nth pending draw". (The attempt to make > draws tradeable broke cards for the umpteenth time, which is when we > repealed the whole edifice). > > Periodically (quarterly or less) there was a general reset in which all > cards except 1-2 were (randomly by dealer) discarded, so a whole set of > new cards could be drawn from the pending draw pool. In between those > resets, you could discard and draw and play and get the killer hand. > > It took some fiddling to get the balance right between draw rate, hand > limit, and reset frequency, but it did reach a reasonable balance > between strategy and reasonable game reset rate. > > The key was that all cards came out of one deck with one tracker; we > chose this time to prefer the added strategy of allowing choice of > decks to draw from. If we re-unify the dealer into a single office this > could still work, though. I wanted to go with that system, but it seemed > (at the time) incompatible with three decks. But if those three decks > all had the same dealer... > While it's possible to have one officer track it all (and I wouldn't mind given the automation I have set up), it would be a big task...and while I've been trying to provide automation for the sake of easing recordkeepor burdens I still wouldn't want to complexify recordkeeping to the point that it couldn't be done manually lest Agora fall into disrepair without the automation.
On a side note, I've been tracking pending draws (as you describe them above) behind the scenes on my web-interface. The primary difference at this point seems to be that dealers are obligated to deal pending draws now instead of the player being able to initiate them at a time of eir choosing. BobTHJ
