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Today I updated my NVIDIA drivers to 310.90 (released today) and the problem went away. My deck builder now works without any lag. I'm don't think that my previous drivers were out of date, but I can't be sure. In any case, hopefully this is no longer a problem for me or anyone else!

A while ago I posted here concerning deck builder lag. The problem has continued to get worse, and now I am completely unable to use my deck builder. Loading a deck causes my Scrolls game to stop responding. FYI, my specs are as follows:

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz
8GB RAM

I don't see how reducing Quake from 4 damage to 2 has helped the metagame. Growth only (GO) and growth/energy/memorial (GEM) were the two strongest decks pre-patch, and a big reason why GEM was able to compete against pure growth was that it could try and survive until a Quake could be played. Pre-patch I would say that GEM had a small to moderate advantage over GO decks.

Now that Quake has been nerfed GEM is hard countered by GO. The reduction in Quake's cost does not properly balance the reduction in damage. Whereas before it cost 7 growth to do 4 damage, it now costs 6 growth to do 2 damage (I'm not taking into account 3 damage to structures because this was never an issue in the GO vs. GEM matchup and this is the matchup I'm concerned with). So to do equivalent damage in version 0.79 it costs 12 growth and two cards (of which there can only be three total in a deck). This means that in order to inflict equivalent damage with Quake in patch 0.79 it takes:

• 1.7 times the resources
• 2.0 times the scrolls
• 2.0 times the turns
• An average of 20 scrolls drawn (to get 2 Quakes) as opposed to a pre-patch average of 10 scrolls drawn (to get 1 Quake)

Carnalizer mentioned (in a previous forum post) that he was sympathetic to the fact that small balance changes can have large effects. He's just one dev, and not necessarily in charge of game balance, but I would assume that this sentiment is shared among whoever is. This is NOT a small change.

That isn't to say that changes NEED to be small (especially with this being beta) or that GO vs. GEM is the only matchup to consider. But this has completely flipped what was previously the most pivotal matchup upside-down. Maybe this has improved the metagame in other matchups that I'm less familiar with, but to me it seems that Quake was nerfed too heavily... I would much rather have seen Quake keep its old cost and simply had its damage reduced to 3 overall.

Edit: I did not mean to sound so bitchy :p I appreciate the great work devs! Please keep it up. I'm curious what everyone's (Mojanstas and players) thoughts are on the Quake changes.

I've had mixed experiences with how "fast" the deck builder runs and I'd be curious to know what other players' experiences have been. Prior to a couple of patches ago (sorry, don't remember the version number) the deck builder ran very slowly for me. Doing any sort of filtering, deck loading, or browsing (via the scroll bar) was extremely choppy and slow. A couple of patches ago this changed for me and the deck builder began to run VERY smoothly. No lag whatsoever and a pleasure to use.

Since then it had gone back to its old, sluggish behavior (it's almost unusable). I don't know if this change coincided with a patch release or not. This sounds like a memory management (as opposed to latency) issue so I can't be sure if the issue lies with my computer or with Scrolls. I've experienced this slow behavior on both my laptop and my desktop (which have 4GB and 8GB of memory respectively) so it seems more likely to be a Scrolls issue.

Have other players or devs experienced this?

1. I've encountered an issue where clicking on the Ranked Match button does not insert me into the queue. Clicking the button appeared to do nothing and I had to restart Scrolls in order to regain functionality of the button. I've only encountered this bug once and I don't know how to reproduce it. FYI it occurred immediately following a ranked match.

2. Sometimes when I'm sitting at the "Waiting for your opponent to accept the match" screen I will be told that my opponent declined. Other times, however, the message simply disappears without any explanation. I'm not sure if this is intended or not, I had never observed this behavior until 0.79. I don't know how to reproduce.

3. An opponent challenged me to a match. I did not take any action. After some amount of time I automatically declined my opponent's challenge. Upon declining, another message popped up saying "Hasu declined your match." I'm assuming that the message was meant to alert me to the fact that I had declined my opponent's challenge, but the way it is worded does not intuitively convey this information (it sounds as if someone with my own username declined a challenge from me).

Any chance of getting additional information on the new rating system from a Mojangsta? On the face of it I find it very confusing.

The changelog states that our old ELO ratings are now hidden but used for matchmaking, while our actual rating can be built up until it reaches our hidden ELO. It also appears that losses do not negatively affect our rating (unless, I assume, someone's rating is equal to their ELO in which case a loss would reduce their ELO and therefore their max rating). I guess I don't see what the benefits are are having this ELO-capped, non-decreasing rating on top of an actual ELO rating. ELO ratings have an established mathematical theory for being "good" rating systems, but this current system seems a bit bizarre (to me).

It seems especially strange that although an ELO rating is used to quantify our skill (in matchmaking) what gets displayed is just an approximation of this value. It's also less predictable how ratings are going to change on a match-by-match basis. Previously, I could think to myself "Okay, there is a difference of X between my and my opponent's rating. This means that we each stand to gain/lose Y points if I win and Z points if my opponent wins." Now it appears that the winner's rating will increases by approximately 93-95 points regardless of relative ELO ratings (unless a player has hit their ELO cap). What I'm most interested in is how my ELO rating is or will be affected by a match result, but now this information is hidden from me. All-in-all, I find the current system extremely unintuitive. But maybe that's just because I don't understand what's going on behind the scenes.

On a related note, ratings are no longer displayed in the chat rooms. Again, I'd simply be curious to hear what the motivation is for this. It can be a bit annoying to have to check everyone's profile in order to view their rating, whereas before all of that information was available at a glance.

One thing that I would really like is for a notification sound to play when a match has been found. Especially with the way the new matchmaking works (and especially for anyone with an outlying ELO) it can be frustrating to not be able to minimize your Scrolls window while you're waiting in the queue. Doing so inevitably means that you'll miss your match when it finally pops up, whereas playing a notification sound would solve this problem completely.

Type: UI
Description: I played a ranked match. When I returned to the lobby after the match I could no longer resize my chat window and the collapse/expand tab was missing from the chat area (see image below). Clicking on a player's name no longer brought up the profile/trade/challenge menu. I could still chat and otherwise play normally.

Type: In game, reconnection
Description: While playing a match I briefly suffered from a poor internet connection. The "attempting to reconnect" message appeared and after 10 seconds or so I was able to reconnect. However, after my reconnection the game was unplayable from my end. On my opponent's screen the game was progressing normal (aside from the fact that I wasn't do anything on my turns). On my screen it was permanently my turn, the timer was stuck at 0, I could not end my turn or play any cards, and cards that my opponent played appeared at the top of the screen as if I had played them. I could not quit the game or do anything except chat with my opponent.

Quote from carnalizer »

I think Growth should be nerfed a tiny bit. Leaning towards taking Quake away from growth. But I also want to see what the new energy scrolls will do. Once you get an ogre going with blast strike and iron whip, that should be quite spectacular.

Quote from tinfox »

I think Carnalizer makes a good point that Growth is a bit overpowered and I would agree that Quake is the culprit.

I think that either (1) reducing Quake to 3 damage (and possibly lowering its cost) or (2) increasing the cost of Quake to 8 or 9 is the most effective way to balance the scroll. I strongly disagree with anyone who says that Quake is grossly overpowered and I can offer a few reasons why.

(1) Many players simply haven't figured out how to play against Quake.
There are roughly two situations where it makes sense for a player to use Quake. One situation is that the player was attempting to gain board control but eventually gave it up to their opponent. So they would like to "reset" the board. At this point in the game they are either behind or on even footing with their opponent, so resetting the board is not going to wildly tip the scales in their favor. Furthermore, their opponent will have the best opportunity to repopulate the board with units following the Quake, so again they are placed at a disadvantage. So it's tough to argue that Quake is OP in this situation.

The second situation is that a player has been building a resource and/or scrolls advantage (through the use of memorials, Heritage, Fertile Soil, etc.) and as a result they've fallen behind on board control. So again they would like to reset the board, after which they can use their resource and scroll advantage to establish their own board control. THIS is the situation that's likely to frustrate their opponent and solicit cries of "OP," but in my experience it's very likely that their opponent played incorrectly. Someone who plays memorials and works on increasing their card count is necessarily sacrificing board control (or at least must playing super-defensively) and this is what their opponent needs to exploit. Namely by inflicting idol damage as opposed to unit damage. There is no point in attacking memorials and structures if everything will eventually be wiped out by a Quake. In fact, I usually hope that my memorials and structures tank a fair amount of damage for my idols until I can play my Quake. The most exciting games I've played are where I BARELY survive long enough to cast my Quake and then have to crawl my way back into the game while protecting low-hp idols. So I would argue that aggressive decks which concentrate on inflicting idol damage can be effective versus Quake.

Another disadvantage of memorial/Quake decks is how many scrolls they require. Suppose you're using a 40-scroll order/growth memorial/Quake deck. Six memorials and three Quakes take up 9 cards right off the bat. Add Heritage, Fertile Soil, and 3-6 structures and you're already down to 19-22 scrolls remaining. If you want to include Rallies and God Hands, you might not even have enough creatures in your deck to (or be able to get enough of them on the board) to make it worth the inclusion of Rally/God Hand. So someone who wants to counter your decks should (1) be super aggressive (especially when it comes to dealing damage to your idols), (2) exploit the fact that they have more/stronger creatures than you, and (3) take advantage of the fact that they have Rally/God Hand if you don't. Decks with more than 40 scrolls or fewer memorials have their own weaknesses.

There are other answers to Quake as well. I've been beaten by some cool decks that load up relentless creatures with Magma Pack and other +atk scrolls to simply bypass my defenses. I'm not saying that it's easy to play against Quake, but it is possible.

(2) There is a mental bias towards claiming Quake (as well as other cards like Rally and God Hand) are OP.
This is somewhat related to my first point, but Quake necessitates that you play a particular way against it. If you don't know how to play against Quake it can be pretty frustrating to have all of your units wiped out in a single turn. So it's understandable how a less experienced player (or even the majority of players) could feel like something unfair occurred. The same phenomenon occurs if you repeatedly lose games that end with your opponent playing Rallies or God Hands. It's instinctual to look back on the game and say "this is the point where I lost, and up until this point I stood a fair chance."

This is why decks with Quake are called "Quake decks." It's easy to become fixated on particularly powerful end game card and imagine that the entire game revolved around it. And in some sense the game did. But suppose that I'm a player who is playing a memorial/Quake deck. To me the entire game revolves around surviving the early and mid game (where I am the weakest) in order to reach a point in the game where I can eventually play my Quake or other end game cards (at which point I have set myself up for the "easy win"). In fact, with my current Growth/Order memorial/Quake deck, it's never my sole intent to reach a point where I can play Quake. So I wouldn't consider my deck "Quake-centric" even though my opponents might.

(3) Decks with Quake are FUN.
The last thing I would say is that decks with Quake (I'm specifically thinking Growth/Order memorial decks) are a blast to play. Even when mono Growth was the only way to go, I couldn't bring myself to stop playing Growth/Order decks because they were so enojyable. So I'm worried that any major nerf to Quake will impact the viability of these decks.

---

Now, with all of that being said, almost all decks that are consistently successful at the highest levels of play make use of Quake in some way. Certainly this is undesirable; an ideal situation is one where a variety of decks are viable. But it's also important to remember that small changes can shift the meta game in ways that are hard to predict. So I would prefer small changes to large ones.

I mentioned a couple possibilities above (reducing Quake's damage and cost or increasing Quake's cost slightly) but another possibility is to simply buff other resources in order to give players more answers to Quake. Energy, for example, would be a good response to Quake (since Energy units are so beefy) if only it had a better late game. Suppose that Energy was given something on par with Fertile Soil or Heritage. This would make memorial-based Energy/Growth and Energy/Order decks more viable, meaning that Energy-inclusive decks would have a stronger late game and could potentially stand up to Order/Growth decks.

Quote from tinfox »

I'm sure this will come up in the Podcast that I am shamelessly plugging as a thing that is going to come out soon, but I wanted to get some of this stuff out of my head so that I could go to sleep at reasonable hour instead of just thinking about it all the time.

 If you're looking for someone to offer Quake-nerf counterpoints I could easily do so! ^_^

Here are five bugs that I've observed since the release of 0.77. Unfortunately I do not know how to reproduce any of them.

Type: Game crash
Description: My opponent played a Desperation scroll. The square image on the top half of the scroll was missing. I clicked on the scroll and my game crashed. An error message read "Too many heap categories" or something similar.

Type: In game
Description: On two separate occasions I sacrificed a scroll to gain two additional scrolls but I was only given one.

Type: In game text
Description: On two separate occasions my opponent sacrificed a scroll to gain two additional scrolls but the in game text read that they had sacrificed to gain a resource. (EDIT: This is the only message that is every displayed. The text will never read "Your opponent sacrificed to gain scrolls.")

Type: Match making
Description: I joined a ranked match and waited for my opponent to accept. The message telling me that my opponent had not yet accepted was displayed for several minutes with no change. Since there is no way to exit this message I was forced to close and restart my game. Upon returning I found that I had been issued a loss for the match (which never took place) including loss of rating.

Type: Rating system
Description: My rating was 1496 and my opponent's rating was approximately 1050. We played a ranked match and I won. However, as a result of the match my rating dropped 25 points.