Eternal - An Introduction

Eternal Card Game

I’d like to introduce you to a game I’ve played quite a bit lately, Eternal.

I am going to talk a bit about how to play, but many people have done that already, so what I am going to focus on first is why you should give this digital card game a shot.

Summary:

• The economy is excellent.  You will not find better value for your time than Eternal, or value for any money you choose to spend.
•  

• The play modes are all very good, and most are extremely time-efficient.

• Play vs the computer to learn and experiment, a very low stress experience.

• An excellent all-human draft mode.

• Ranked leveling up that is not much of a grind.

• Very easy to learn, with or without a MTG background (my wife is pretty good at all the game modes, and has no prior CCG experience)

• Great digital effects.

• A ton of excellent cards, build-arounds, for all deck archetypes and colors.

• A great engaged community

Give it a try, it is one of the best games I’ve played.

The Economy

This game is extremely free-to-play friendly.

 

Your first win each day gives you a pack of the most recent set. 

You get a quest each day that can give you 500 gold worth of quests, and maybe a pack.

You are not pressured into playing a bunch each day to collect rewards, but you can get reasonable rewards for your first 3, 6, 9 wins in ranked each day. (around 300 gold per 3 wins)

The vs AI modes are actually moderately profitable, and super-fast (more on the AI modes later)

You can destroy cards you don’t want, to make cards you do, at a ~4:1 rate.  Premium (foil, shiny) versions of cards roughly make any other card of that same rarity.   MTGA has a rate of roughly 100:1, which is absurdly bad in comparison.

You get “Shiftstone”, the card crafting material just for opening packs, which helps you craft the cards you want.

My wife and I each put $40 into the game, just because your first purchase gives you quite a bit of rewards, and we wanted to give back to Dire Wolf for making such an amazing game.  This is by no means mandatory, but I have no regrets (closing in on 100 days played in steam…)

You can spend money to speed things up if you want, but I haven’t found that necessary at any point, beyond my minor investment described above.

The only thing that requires dollars to be spent are cosmetic items.  Everything else can be bought with Gems (the real money conversion in the game) or gold.   There are some cool items, like your personal avatar, card backs, “totems” (statues that sit on the battlefield and are interactable), that are gems-only, but they are not required in any way to have fun playing the game.

Magic: Arena is a joke compared to Eternal from the economy perspective.  Multiple studies have been done comparing the cost of building a budget and competitive deck in the various competitors, and Eternal is roughly a factor of two more efficient than the competitors.

The rank-up benefits through the first few tiers of vs-AI mode are extremely generous.

The cost to enter events is generally similar to the cost of buying packs from the store directly (don’t buy packs from the store directly), and then you get some kind of bonus, either even more packs from playing the games, gold rewards, cosmetic items, random cards of high rarity if you do well, and so on.   

In other game systems, you pay a premium to enter an event, and you have to do extremely well to break even.  It is hard to find a game mode in eternal that is not far superior to buying packs directly, when the opposite is so often true elsewhere.

VS-AI Modes – Excellent!

One of the hardest things psychologically in online PVP games is that someone has to lose.  

Also, it can be very intimidating as a new player to go into a game against a faceless opponent who likely is far more experienced than you, has more cards, more knowledge of the system, and you have to overcome quite a bit before you can get to a point where you are winning more than you lose.

Eternal solves this to some extent with the VS-AI modes.  They have a gradient of difficulty through the ranks (Unranked, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Master, and a secret high master rank where the AI gets more powerful cards the more you beat it).  

These modes are quite generous in their payouts up to the Master rank, which can fuel forays into other modes, and generally serve as a way to get gold into the economy and ramp up new players on mechanics, in a safe environment.

After Master difficulty, they are still a good psychological result (you can have a high win rate vs the computer).  They serve as a sandbox to try things out (Gauntlet) or build your collection (Forge) in a very low-pressure environment.

The VS-AI modes are extremely play at your own pace.  The computer gives you as much time as you want to make all decisions (nothing is timed, unlike player-vs-player modes), and acts extremely quickly, to the point that I can often complete a Gauntlet (7 games) in the time it takes me to play two games in ranked.  There is no queue, no waiting, and if you need to take a break to take care of your daughter, eat dinner, or whatever other real-life thing intervenes, you can basically pause and come back.  This is extremely helpful.

The computer behaves quite predictably in what it does, so you can take advantage of this with certain cards or strategies.  Victory is by no means certain, but it is fun to win, and there is a strong psychological bonus to beating the stupid computer =)

The only place it feels a bit unfair (at Masters) is in the Forge environment, where you roughly have as good a deck at Masters, as Bronze, but you can be facing multiple very difficult to defeat cards or strategies from the AI.  Still, you have a loss to give even in that mode, and even with these handicaps, I believe it is possible to average high enough to make even this a profitable long-term play mode.

Draft – Excellent!

Eternal uses a “asynchronous draft” system.  Every pack you get passed is the result of a real human interaction with a pack, and the same chain of humans is upstream of you with each pack.  This continues in whatever direction you want to perceive it as until the first pack is over.  Then for the second and third packs, the same thing happens in a different direction (from a different upstream chain of real players).   Pack 4 you’re back to the pack 1 chain of players, and that’s the draft.

This is in almost every way superior to a “traditional” draft.  It has the following advantages:

• Pick at your own pace.  You have as much time as you want to make a pick, in case you need to think, or real life intervenes.

• There is no waiting whatsoever between picks.  You can finish the 48 picks in a draft in 1-5 minutes if you are fast, good luck finishing a human-MTG draft in less than 30 minutes.

• “Wheeling” is replaced by every pack being new, which I have found to be far better than wheeling anything.  You can get high pick quality cards in the later picks, which is something that will just never happen in a real draft.

• You are making 45 card decks (instead of 40), but you have more cards (48 vs 42), more rares/uncommons (4 packs vs 3), and as previously mentioned, if you read well you can get at least a playable out of the last 4 picks in a pack, something quite unlikely in a traditional draft.

• You don’t have to wait to start the draft, you don’t have to wait until x players are ready.

The “Downsides” are

• The lack of wheeling (irrelevant IMO, or even a upside)

• When you swap to pack 2, they use an algorhythm to choose what historical real pickers they should choose as your effective downstream players.  So, if you don’t pass any , it is more likely that the people that pass to you won’t have had any in their pile after pack 1.  It’s not the actual same people on the swap from pack 1 to 2+3, but it is pretty reasonable.

MTGA can’t figure out how to do human drafts at all, and MTGO can’t do them efficiently, but Eternal has been doing them for years in a truly excellent player experience with asynchronous drafting.

The cards themselves are great for draft, it feels like there are quite a few playables, good fixing for formats that need it, and aggression, control, ramp, are all reasonable strategies.

"Rare drafting” for the Shiftstone is a viable strategy, especially for new players, to maximize growing their collection.

Play skill is a strong factor, you see the same players in the top of the standings each month, and it is possible to make Masters (for the shiny legendary at the end of the month) with some dedication (10-15 drafts or so).

The Influence System.

You know what’s fun?  Not figuring out how to tap your lands to cast your spells, or have the computer do it wrong for you.

Eternal keeps it simple There is Influence (the colors/symbols with numbers under them), and Power (the 7/7 or 8/8 in the image above).  Influence is a prerequisite, that is not spent at any point, but always available to meet the requirements of your cards.  Power is a pool that refreshes each turn to play your spells.

This system is phenomenally better for drawing out of poor power/land situations.  If you had no Red/Fire for the first few turns, and then draw one (even a depleted Fire), you can immediately start casting all of your single-influence Fire spells.  With MTG and the tap-your-lands system, you will be waiting several turns to play your spells, which increases the number of non-games (in MTG, vs Eternal)

I like the variety of power/lands that are available.  There are good power for unit decks, control decks, midrange decks, two color, three color decks, one color decks….  There are payoffs for being single color, or spell-lands.  It’s just great.

The Defender-Chooses-Blockers system.

In Hearthstone, the attacker chooses where the damage is going, which is incredibly powerful for whomever is attacking.  Magic does it better, in my opinion, and Eternal reuses this mechanic.  This increases the interaction between the players, and helps the defender out a bit, which is something that is probably net positive for a game like this.

The Battle Skills/Abilities.

There are a ton of useful, viable, intriguing battle skills/Keyword abilities in Eternal.

Don’t know what they are?  There is in-game hover text for everything that is keyworded.

Don’t know what a card created by a card is?  Hover text.

You can even tell that an ability has been used, because it is greyed out.  Simple, straightforward.

Want to see some tips and tricks for using them?  There are a whole lot of “puzzles” in the game that explore the possibilities with certain mechanics.  I personally like them quite a bit, they seem like a great teaching tool.  (and they should add more!)

There is something like 15 “battle skills” and quite a few keyword abilities.  I can talk for quite some time about each, and it is quite difficult to even say what the top 3 would be.  I just keep thinking of more of them that I like!

There are also several battle skills (Overwhelm (trample), Quickdraw (first strike)) that only work on offense.  For Quickdraw especially this prevents some board stalls from stacked “first strike” blockers.

The Digital Environment.

Eternal does a good job of utilizing the digital environment innately.  They get quite a bit of benefit in the design space for not having to deal with a paper implementation.

Abilities like Warcry, Revenge, Aegis, Silence, Berserk, Destiny, Fate, Echo, Killer, persisting information in zone changes, tokens going to the void, would all difficult to implement in a game like MTG.

If you are a fan of streaming, Eternal has done some serious work to enable a great viewing experience by allowing you to hover over cards streamers are playing on twitch, see their deck-lists, it’s amazing!

Best of One + Merchants.

 

Fast, powerful, versatile, very interesting from deckbuilding, and with new flavors coming out in recent expansions, this is a really good system for Eternal, and I would dub it superior to best of 3 + sideboard.

Eternal had a sideboard for a while, but no one is talking about sideboards now that markets exist.

It is just better to play three games with half a sideboard then play a very long single match, and then try to play in a tournament with that extremely clumsy scheduling of “the speed of the slowest person”.

Eternal does have best of 3 or best of 5 for big tourneys, but I would not want to play best of 3 for ranked, draft.  It’s just too slow, and what is the benefit?  The good player or match-up “wins for real” slightly more?  That is not a benefit for half the players, who would rather be on to the next game, where they have a better shot of having fun.

The Deckbuilding Possibilities.

There are so many synergy cards, build-arounds, that I always have something to think about.

There is real, credible competition for most slots, where you might choose one creature over another for one aggro deck, but for another aggro deck with a slightly different overall strategy, you might play quite a few different creatures, even in the same color combinations.  That is truly impressive.

There are aggressive, midrange, control, and ramp tools in every color, each with their own outlook, flavor, advantages, and disadvantages.

As you will see in future posts in the topic of Eternal deckbuilding, there are a TON of directions you can go, and options for each point on your curve.

Constantly Evolving Meta

Every month or two there is a new card released as a free daily quest reward.  There are new sets at a reasonable frequency.  They have campaigns, or mini-expansions about once per set release.

Every week or two there is another mini-Event, generally a riff on the existing format, with a rules change that shakes everything up.  This is an excellent opportunity to build new and interesting decks for that rules set, and it is difficult for their to be a "best" deck and for that format to get boring before it wraps up.

They can make adjustments to the power level of cards, and tend to buff as much if not more as they nerf, which is a good design philosophy.

They are very generous when they nerf, giving full disenchant values for even side-grade changes to cards.

The Community

There are multiple active "teams" putting out content for the various PVP modes.  Twitch support is great, so solid streaming content is always available.  The Eternal SubReddit is active and engaged in trying to make Eternal a better game, giving feedback to the developers and helping each other learn from one anothers Drafts, Event Deck-Building, and so on.

 Summary

Eternal really is an excellent game.  You should really give it a shot.  It is exceptionally free, exceptionally respectful of it’s players time, and has a truly stunning pool of cards begging to be put in decks, to become the next Tier 1 monstrosity.

Why haven’t you heard about it if it’s so great?  Well, one of the community complaints is a lack of advertising to make more people aware of the game, but this historical trend is starting to reverse itself.  You may have seen ads for Eternal on ChannelFireball.com, and other locations.  Louis Scott-Vargus, CFB VP is one of the designers/developers of Eternal, as well as well-known Magic: The Gathering professionals Patrick Chapin, Patrick Sullivan, Conley Woods, Josh Utter-Leyton, Michael Jacob, and many more!

You can expect to see more Eternal content in the coming weeks and months, the floodgates are about to open =)

Hearthstone - Rogue Legendary Quest

I opened three packs of the new hearthstone expansion, and happened to open the rogue legendary quest, which seemed quite powerful to me.

The way the quests work is very interesting. 

You always start with them pre-mulligan (though I assume you can mulligan them away, not sure why you'd do this).

They all cost 1 to play, and they all trigger on some semi-hard thing to accomplish.
You can't (likely) counter the first ability, but you could in theory set up a counter for the second spell (since it costs 5, you could in theory have a mage secret up or whatever)

The rogue secret reward is pretty strange, the in play minions, the minions in your hand, your bounced minions, etc, etc, are 5/5.  Now, once they take damage post-this, they can go down from 5/5, but it is still a phenomenally powerful ability.

Triggering the quest:

Hearthstone has a limit of the cards you can have in your deck of 2 of any particular card name, so at first glance it seems impossible to play four of one thing, since you'll only have two in your deck.

But it's not, clearly, and here's how we go about it:

What these cards do is let you return your own cards to your hand, so you can play them again, and trigger the quest one more time.

It's important to have a good number of these in the early game, because you cannot trigger your quest normally without these cards, and the quest is what turns your otherwise junk minions into real threats.

Shadowstep is actually probably the most powerful version of this, because despite doing nothing on it's own, it is the cheapest.  It enables combo well, and it makes the minion replay cheaper.  Mana is tight if you want to go off early, so shadowstep is really 4 mana less than these other options.  It also makes it a lot easier to charge people to death in one turn.

The Payoffs.

The payoffs are these crazy charge minions, because you can play them for one or two mana post-quest, hit something for five right away, or just hit face, and then use your other bounce-self spells to bounce your guy, replay it, and hit them for five again, and again, and again....

Charge is really critical, as is the mana cost.  The version dog used to make rank 1 legend did not use Bluegill Warriors, likely because they cost two and it is harder to combo-kill with them, because as I said earlier, mana is very tight in the final turns.

I like it, but it is the worst charge minion here, so if you were going to cut one, this is the one to cut.

Random Spell Enablers:

Mimic pod is pretty good, because it is a cheap enabler.  It gives you two copies of a random card, which means you need your deck to have a high concentration of enablers, because drawing more random stuff is a relative disaster.

3 is the largest cost so far, which means this is a full turn for the most part in the early game, but if you draw an enabler, you're pretty much good to go.

One note is that this does pay you off a bit for having prep in your deck, more uses for a card is generally good.

Preparation may not look like it does much, because there aren't exactly many expensive cards in the deck, but it critically reduces the cost of the quest reward.  It's much more possible to kill someone when it costs 2, than when it costs 5, it can save you a whole turn.

In addition, it does reduce the cost of some random cards in the deck, like Mimic Pod, Eviscerate, or Thistle Tea (when I was playing a single copy of that)

Cycling:

Fan gives you a bit of interaction, especially with agro decks (which tend to run x/1s), and Novice gives you something to bounce that does something (sortof).

Swashburgler is better because it's cheaper, but worse because it's going to draw you something stupid (a non-enabler, non-copy of a card in your deck, etc).  But it is cheap, so it's an okay thing to cycle.

Options like loot hoarder are terrible, because you don't want your enablers to be deathrattles.  You're going to bounce your stuff, not get it killed.  This is also why I thought the Igneous Elemental (or whatever) was stupid.

It's somewhat important to cycle cards, because you only have so many enablers.  Drawing multiples of the same creature doesn't hurt either. 

Interaction:

 

Interaction is a bit overrated.  You're not going to face for four with Eviscerate, you'd rather have a bluegill for a variety of reasons (it's a 5/5, and you can bounce it, etc), so I'm not super sold on Evisc for this deck.  Backstab is good interaction early, and can enable combos.  I liked it quite a bit when I was running SI:7, and since you dagger quite a bit on turn 2, it can kill a three toughness guy turn 2 or 3.

These do combo somewhat with the spells-matter portions of the deck, if you use those (Violet Teacher, Edwin Van Cleef)

Misc:

Dog played a copy of each of these legendaries.  I don't have Patches, but I did play with Edwin and he can be big, but he seems to be much more of a backup plan than a primary plan, and I'm not sure it's amazing really, but it's fine.  Violet Teacher is another backup-y card, and it is probably good post-quest.

Moroes is another way to generate 5/5s, but doesn't seem a ton better than a bluegill, so I'd probably replace patches and moroes with bluegills.  I do have Moroes, so I could use it if I want.  I probably won't craft patches since having singleton non-combo minions seems like it greatly reduces the likelihood of the quest working in the first place.  I've played a couple dozen games with various versions of the game, and have had a hard time losing when I completed the quest.  I was playing with a single Thistle Tea, against low rank opponents, and some pretty random decks, but things like taunt, healing, and so on didn't do much against what was basically a one-turn kill for n 5/5 hasting creatures.

Other Other:

The problem I ran into was not drawing enough enablers (which is why I liked Thistle Tea), and would kind of like some actively playable creature I could play. 

SI:7 is amazing for general board control/interaction, and it's pretty easy for me to envision playing this instead of Eviscerate, especially with Backstab, and a bunch of 1 cost stuff.  Perhaps it's too slow, but it's the best creature I can think of to play a bunch of times.

Fire fly gives me something I can play with the early two cost bouncers turn three.  I can develop, get more copies of cards to play.  There is really something to be said to just be able to do anything whatsoever to advance your plan, and Firefly doesn't cost you much.  I think this card is probably better than smuggler, since it is a more credible creature (harder to kill), and it gives you another creature (which is likely better than giving you some random spell), but I could easily be wrong here.) 

Thistle Tea sets up the quest, but it is extremely slow.  I do like it a bit more with prep*2 in the deck (something I did not originally have), but it is totally a random inclusion.  I feel like professional players are winning on turn 4-5 with this deck, so the idea of spells that cost 6 is not amazing.

Same story most likely with SI7, which is grindy, but you could just win instead.... 

I really like this deck, it seems super powerful, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was nerfed in some way.

7 Wonders Duels Tournament at Uncles Games

Uncles:

Yesterday Uncle's Games in Redmond had a 7 Wonders Duels tournament, which was very cool.   Kristina and I both signed up at $5 each, getting a promo wonder (Statue of Liberty, 5 VP, look at the top three set aside cards in the age, choose one for you, one for your opponent, and discard one), and a chance at some very cool metal coins and a metal military marker for first place.

Uncles had a well-run tournament, they did basically a simple tree structure for winners playing winners and losers playing losers, they didn't match Kristina and I up because they realized we were married, they seemed to match people in the first round based on perceived skill.  (Helping Kristina and hurting me, but that's fine =)).  They started the next rounds fairly promptly, they had about half experienced players, and half new players among the other 6 people, all friendly and good sports. 

The organizer explained the rules well in terms the new players could understand, and the other experienced players helped out with some clarifications.  They had the new players play a practice age one and two, which was fine, and then we got down to business =)

They gave two points for a win, zero for a loss, and a bonus point for a science or military victory, which I think is a good tourney rule.  (It encourages actually trying to win, rather than just denying their instant victory)

7 Wonders Duels

If you haven't played 7 Wonders Duels (hereafter 7WD), and like normal 7 Wonders, I would highly encourage you to give it a try.  It is a two-player only game, with vastly superior iconography to the original, less confusing rules, customized science and military victories that are great for two player play, and is just a really well adapted version of traditional 7W.

BGG

Kristina and I have played at least 50 games of  7WD, perhaps 100.  So we were each certainly in the top three experience-wise, and certainly I'd say we were favored in any game.  (We also seemed to have a better card-count understanding than the Uncles veterans, especially with science)

We did get informed of two rules by one expert rules guy there, that I thought I'd share:
1) The discarded cards are discarded face down, but apparently in the next sentence of the rules, it says they can be "examined" by either player at any time, which they interpreted to mean that you could look at the cards, which I think is a reasonable interpretation.  Now, why do you discard them face down then?  That's kind of strange.  Anyway, less card memorization, which is probably a good thing.  Especially for "The Mausoleum" (at Halicranassus) players going for science or military victory.

2) When there is a military tie at the end of an age, the person who took the last card, goes first.  This we knew, but what we did not know is that they cannot defer this move, like the first player normally could, they just have to go first, which can be marginal in the second age especially.

My Game Commonalities

There were A few things that were common across all my games:

I went first every game.
I would call this an advantage, though not an amazing one.  I was able to set the pace of the game, especially since some science showed up early, and I always took it.  (the newer players didn't seem to understand science as well).

I had Piraeus (wonder) every game.
This is one of my top three wonders (free move, flask or paper, 2 points), because it's cheap to build (only basic (brown) resources), it means you don't really need advanced (grey) resources that much (maybe one per game), gives an extra move, which is one of the best wonder bonuses, and so on.  I first picked it twice, and the opponent passed it to me once.  There are similar powered wonders (12 gold and an extra move, 6 VP and an extra move, 9 points), and Halicranassus (go through the discard pile, build one for free) can be excellent for science or military victory, so I would place that as a generally underrated one for the special victory conditions.

I had three wonders I wanted to build each game.
This is relatively common, but I typically only get to build three wonders when playing with Kristina (she's fairly aggressive with wonder construction, and I tend to sit back for endplays in age three, which sometimes work and sometimes don't, but I will build 4 wonders less than 10% of the time when playing vs Kristina).  I always had some stupid military building, but that rarely matters with my playstyle.

I always got science early.
There was science to take, and I prioritized it.  I got the first circle in every game, I had 4 science cards minimum after age two in all the games, and in two of the three I had more like 6 (4 types), which strongly threatens science victory in age three.

I had low resource availability.
My max was three total cards that actually produced resource, my min was two.  I had at least one yellow card for buying brown resources, and Piraeus, so I could get what I wanted for the most part (for some money), but I was not strong in resource production.

I took the Economy circle (green) every game, and it was wrong every game.
I think this was my most valuable take-away from this tournament.

Economy is a green circle that means if the opponent has to pay money costs to buy resources (via yellow cards, for building wonders, for building cards, etc), any money costs other than direct money costs for buildings (like the 8 gold for 3 military building in age three) get paid to you rather than to the bank.

Economy is not a bad circle, it can be very punishing to a resource-screwed opponent, or if you don't have ways of getting money.  It also encourages your opponent down a certain path, which can open opportunities up for you.  But where it does not work well is when you do not have any resources.

Remember how I had low resources every game?  Well, those resources I wasn't taking had to go somewhere, and where they went was my opponent's play pile.  I believe in the first game, I earned 2 gold from Economy.  I earned 1-3 in the second game, and 4 in the third game, which was absolutely abysmal for a green circle (average of ~1 point).  And I took Economy as my first or second circle in every game!

Now, in my defense, at the time I took economy (typically the first or second move of age 2), my opponent was typically poor in resources too, but what I should realize is that once I take that circle, the opponent is going to strongly prioritize resources, and I am already weakly prioritizing them.  I know my average resource cards taken in age two is something like 0 Brown, and 0.5 Grey.  So my opponent is just going to catch up fast, and the card is going to be worth nothing.

Maybe it forced my opponent into picks they would not have made, but I would think normal people will make those picks anyway, so I don't think I got more than a point of true game value for each circle taken, and I just kept taking them.   I didn't realize the bolded section above, until the last game, where I was actually paying 4 gold per stone, 3 gold per flask multiple times in the game.

In the first game, I believe it directly contributed to me losing, because I had two opportunities to take mathematics (3 points per green circle), and did not, eventually having my opponent take it, which was a 21 point swing in final score.  I lost by 6.

So, Economy is good, but not usually for me, and certainly not for my typical playstyle.

I discarded perhaps 6 cards a game for gold.
Sometimes more, never less.  There were just not productive actions for me to take, and/or I was very gold-poor in the games/had no resources/took stupid economy and my opponents paid me 1-4 gold a game once I didn't need it.

I don't think this was a mistake, but it was a commonality.

Ben's Games

The first game
I played against a very amiable rules expert (Kevin?  I'm terrible with names).  He was probably the most rules-knowledgeable gentlemen in the place, and that's where I got the clarifications I list above.

I started out strong with science, getting a pair early in age two (taking stupid Economy), since I was behind on military (common for Ben in 7WD).  I had one other science, and my opponent got a pair of science as well (taking something useful), with one additional science.  Law and mathematics available to be taken, and I had the green-circle wonder (with 7 points, 4 points and 6 gold, and some other good stuff not available)

So I took economy over (A) potentially win the game with science (Law) or (B) win the game with points (Mathematics)

At this point, I was extremely skeptical that I could actually win with science, because I would have to get specifically the science he had from age one, and also get another pair (either the science I already had, or three of the sciences in age three), both of which are pretty unlikely.  So I played to get the one I had already (taking some irrelevant circle again, something that was not Mathematics (9 points between my economy circle, the math circle, and the circle form my unbuilt wonder). 

At this point, my opponent was locked out of a science victory, since I had two pair of symbols.  Since there are only 7 types (including law), and I had two of them to myself, they could not get the requisite 6 for a science victory.  They did not realize this until the end of the game, which benefitted me, but it is quite understandable unless you are an expert card counter/strategist for this game, since there were quite a few science symbols left, they had the law circle, and so on.

Unfortunately for me, this actually worked against me, because they did end up getting one more pair (since I was perhaps too strongly not caring about science), and that got them math for 6 points, etc, etc.

In any event, this game came down to the points, and they Kevin got me by 6-8 points fair and square.  (~65 to ~59)


The second game
I played against Max, a friendly fellow eager to talk about some tradeoffs of plays strategically.

Max started out with 4 wonders that did not give an extra turn, including the get-a-green-circle one, and the green circle for adding an extra turn to all your wonders was available to be chosen (so he could not get it with his wonder).  He said out loud:  "I really need that circle", and I said to myself "there's no way I'm giving you technologies to get that green circle".  Luckily for me, for the first two ages, my inner voice won out.

I had six technologies going into age 3, with two pairs, Economy (obviously) and Strategy. (+1 military per military card)  I was two techs from winning the game (Law not available for the 7th type), and ~5 military from winning the game (any two military cards in age three)

An experienced 7WD player will tell you that I am quite advantaged here to achieve either science or military victory.  My opponent had one tech (which they could not pair), and not a ton of anything else, no wonders built.

I deal out the age three cards, with Max with the option to play first (I am ahead militarily) and I deal two different science cards to the first available row, meaning that Max, with first action, was basically forced to either trash or build a science.  The other two science were visible in the third-most-available row.  There was also a military in that row.

He builds the left science (5 in the above image).

I said to myself again, I have one chance after he builds one of those two sciences, I have to build the other, and then also get the other one (which is 50/50).    Unfortunately, I didn't think about this very well.  I could have built the science (6), and then he is endplayed.  He has no extra moves from his wonder, so he can do whatever he wants with the next row.  If he builds the left one, I wonder build the center to reveal 5, then build it and win the game.  If he builds the center, I wonder build the left for an extra turn, and build the revealed 5 to win the game.  If he builds the right, I do whatever to the grey square, and then we're in the same position as before, where he builds left or right, I use the other for my wonder, and take the 5.

I was fixated on being so close to victory on both dimensions, that I didn't think about just winning with science in a guaranteed way, I decided to put the pressure on with the military building.

So what I did was trash the revealed card ((left ????), which was not a military) to build a extra-turn wonder, in order to build the military card (red XX) that was under it.  This killed my opponent's 5 gold exactly, and threatened a military victory with any military card.

They built the other science building, revealing not-military cards on top of the two sciences previously discussed.I did something stupid like build the center card, after which he build the science, for the extra turn for all his wonders building.

This gave him 4 extra turns for the rest of the game, while I had 0-1, and it became a points race (which I won, because I just built the points buildings in age 3), but it was an easy win with science that I just passed up because I was looking to apply pressure on more than one front.  I was worried about revealing military in the center or right face down cards, and not thinking about how I could endplay them guaranteed, since I had an extra move and they did not.  I guess I was trying to win the game twice, instead of just securing one win, ha!  (due to the format, this cost me a point, which cost me a tied for second instead of a tied for third, shoot!)


The third game
I played Grady for the third game in the 1:1 bracket.  I had a bit of economy, 3 science (all that there was) going into round two, and picked up three more science in the second round (the missing one, and two pairs, again taking stupid economy).  Grady had me in a difficult spot, because I had zero stone, and he had three built, which meant I was paying 5 apiece for stone, and three for either flasks or paper (but I did have Piraeus for one or the other).  I think I discarded something like 6 cards just in age 1 and 2, for 2 gold apiece, so I was in a strong position for science, but there was no law symbol to take, and I had to spend quite a bit to build things.

To my credit, I did take a gold-generating symbol in age two, which kept me afloat into the start of age three.  I dealt a science to the top of the pile, which I took (behind in military or tied, I don't recall), and there were two matching symbols in the center of the third row.  I had four unbuilt wonders, two of which gave an extra turn, and Grady had one extra turn wonder, but because of the way the science was positioned, he could not win.  He did destroy one of my very few resources, but I had 15 gold or something from all my discarding, which was enough to pay ~7 for my 12 gold and an extra turn wonder, and then buy the science for free due to linking.

He just couldn't get rid of enough stuff.  If he goes after one side or the other (the blue, or the left ???) I just follow down that side calmly, so he has to play the left ??? and the blue square no matter what he does.  Then I play the right ???, and at that point he can't win (due to my extra move), even with his extra move.  I have to get one of the 6's and win.

The game ended unfortunately, because he thought I needed 7 science to win (and I was in absolutely terrible shape outside science), because, you know, there are a lot of 7's in this game, and it'd be reasonable to think that you'd need 7 science, but that's not how the rules work, you just need 6 of the 7.  He took it well though, Grady played quite well for a first time player, I was in very bad shape economically, and typically that leads to a loss (as it did in my first game)

Kristina's Perfect Play:

I finished my third game, cleaned up, and went over to see how Kristina was faring in the (likely) championship round.  She was up against another first-time player this evening (though they were 2-0 at the time!), and it looked good for Kristina, though not in the bag.

She had two science, with a double and the strategy token (+1 military per card) with a strong military presence, but no military cards showing, and her opponent had ~3 science with no extra turns from wonders.  Kristina had no extra turns either, but had Halicranassus to build, and enough economy and gold to do whatever at first glance.  Think about what you would do....

It may seem like Kristina is in a great spot, but there are actually quite a few ways she can lose this game. 

It is her pick right now  She puts the 6  VP building under Halicranassus, getting the 1 military building back (counts as two due to strategy), killing Evil's 5 gold (they are not in great shape economically)  This limits their options, and increases the chance of a point win by them building the 6 VP building, or the money removal not getting anything because they spend it.

Evil discards the revealed grey card for 3-4 gold to try and get some freedom back.

Kristina discards the ??? guild card (1 point per coin at the end of the game), which seems critical.  It brings her up to 7 or so gold, which means one more discard and she can guarantee building anything that is revealed militarily. (and there is one more discard to do it in)

Evil builds the tech because they can (free)

Kristina discards the yellow for 5 gold, because that was better than building it, and critically takes her over the 8 gold threshold for military buildings.  It also basically forces Evil to take the other science (irrelevant) and reveal the guild.

The guild is 5 VP and 5 gold, so Kristina builds it this time, because she can stay over 8.

Evil thinks about things quite a bit at this time, but he has basically no move that matters.  He puts the 2G/wonder + 3 VP under his military wonder, killing off one of Kristina's resources (double brick), which is pretty irrelevant, but the best he can do.  He also gets one point of military, but that only means he's dead to any 1+ instead of any 0+ military building, and there are only 2's and 3's in age 3.

Kristina flips the two cards up, and one of them is a 2x military, that she has enough money to buy.  Victory!

There were two military cards left from age 3, and two hidden and three discarded cards, so Kristina had only a 3/5 * 2/4 = 30% chance that neither of the military cards were in the left two facedown cards, so a 70% chance of victory, and she hit that 70%.  The points were pretty even, so that would be a coin toss if the military gambit failed, but she did everything in her power to ensure that she could take advantage of that very likely situation, and it occurred, so excellent play all around there!

Conclusion:

Overall this was an excellent event, and I look forward to trying to take home some more swag from these tournaments in the future.  I'm very happy Kristina won, and I'm very glad I learned some things from my losses and my wins.

Hopefully I won't take Economy AGAIN with no resources, ha!

Path Of Exile

For a couple weeks while my wife was in another state visiting her family, I had a bunch of time to myself, and used it playing around with a new game (to me), Path Of Exile.  I spent a ton of time playing Diablo I, II, and III, so this seemed like a natural fit to mess around with for a while.  After about 200 hours of playtime, I feel like I'm now qualified to express some opinions about the gameplay, and so on.

So here we go!

The Passive Skill Tree:

One of the selling points for the game in my opinion, the passive skill tree is quite impressive.
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree

The sheer magnitude of this is quite daunting.  There are 1200+ nodes, and you'll get access to ~110 of them in your character's lifetime.  You start in one of seven locations based on your class, and spiral out from there in a web of awesomeness, gaining access to various bonuses as you go.

Things you need to know about it:
"More" is a multiplicative bonus.

"Increased" bonuses are added together, and then get multiplied, so a statement like "5% more health" are all added together and multiplied by your base health.

The +stat point nodes are basically filler.  You take them because you have to to get from point A to point B.

You're often going to value bonuses that are NOT your primary stat, just because you're going to have so many (semi-useless) points in your primary stat, while you'll need quite a bit of secondary stat to level up gems, equip items, etc.

The Good:
The sheer number of possibilities.

The different ways to get to the same place.

The huge circles (Keystones) that change the way the base game works.  You can often "drive by" these build defining abilities, not spending a single point to take them, or you can go 10+ points out of your way to pick one up, and that's' interesting design space.  "Hiding" some stuff behind keystones is also quite interesting, because those bonuses often further amplify the power of that ability, or mitigate some of the downsides.

The bonuses to certain things are often distributed to different areas of the tree, sometimes with mini-caches of good stuff.  This means you need to get from point A to point B of the web, and there tend to be a ton of ways to do that.  It's good to have the caches, and it's good that they're separated.

Jewels are a fantastic riff on the talent tree.  You go a little out of your way, and as a first-level result, you get to put in the gems you find/craft, which are basically super-points, which is already great.  The second level of this is the various unique jewels, which do .  The third level is jewels with a radius of effect, which I think is the best implementation.  Changing what things do, powering up based on the other stuff you have socketed, and so on, is just awesome.

Paragon points are great.  They further differentiate the various starting classes, they give cool, flashy abilities (sometimes), and they are a reward from a cool different interesting encounter (which I'll talk about later).

What I'd Do To Improve It:
Pretty much the first question anyone would ask after spending n points on in the tree is "well, how much of do I have now?  Their current "solution" is for you to count it up, and that's not exactly a trivial thing to do.  For +health there are 4's, 5's, 6's, 8's, and so on, and you need to add up dozens of said numbers.  So an easy thing to do is just having a little legend, which is dynamically populated with your total +% to all the things you have +% to.

I want to be able to see the whole tree at one time, and that is basically not enabled.  This is especially important when searching for other similar nodes.  Just let me zoom out more.

When searching for "similar nodes", the game assumes you mean identical nodes.  +8% armor +4% life, is not a similar node to +4% life.  +5% life is not similar to 5% life, 8% armor.   Perhaps we need two levels of highlighting, where you get your exact match, and your proximate match, but something like that should be implemented.

The unique jewels are pretty terrible  I think socketing a gem for +100 int -80 strength is not something I can really get excited about, but it's the cost of doing business apparently.  (the same for +100 int -80 dex).  I had a jewel socketed for +1 melee range (and 8% increased damage), when I had no idea what my melee range was to start with.  I've found perhaps 40 unique jewels.  1 was interesting (the range one), 30 or so of them were absolutely terrible, and 10 might be interesting for some other character, since I don't necessarily know what is good for them.

I want to be able to craft my yellow jewels.  This seems like a clear extension of the existing crafting system, so just open it up for jewels.

I want to see the effect of a talent point in micro-text before I take it.  This doesn't seem that hard.  5% increased health (+181 HP) that would help me decide to take it or not based on what it does, because what it doesn't do is add 5% more hit points.  The same for armor (+armor amount, +physical DR estimate), OR +8% melee physical damage (1.3% damage), etc, etc.  Just more transparency is a feature I'd want to see implemented.  Even just changing your numbers while the points are assigned and the menu is open would be something.  (just ensure they don't actually take effect until they are applied)

You get some "rerolls" while leveling, which is generous of them, but I want more freedom here.  I want to pay n points to reroll the whole tree.  Or some other resource.  Or just do it for free (Diablo 3).  I feel like there are some huge decision points that the player is put into, and you just are not sure how well it will work out until after you've spent 30-100 points, and the real solution at that point is to just make another character.  That's a solution, but a clunky one to me, and it doesn't solve the 3rd, 4th, 5th idea (without spending a bunch of playtime again just to experiment)

Make paragon points easier to respec.  10 respec points per point?  And only after the labyrinth?  Does it really need to be that punishing?  I want to try some stuff out, but I feel like I have to make the one right decision the first time.

Initial Leveling/Questing/Plot:

What you need to know about it:
Use this to figure out what your abilities do, it's easy to get the first few levels of abilities, and you can often tell if you like the style of them without terrible investment.

If an item looks strange, you might want to save it, because it's possible that there isn't really a way to get it other than that quest.  (and selling items is mostly worthless)

The Good:
It's relatively fast, I was to the end of the content in a few days of playing.  I feel like I could level up additional characters, and it wouldn't be _too_ high of a cost.

Dialogs are skewed slightly to your character's class, which is a good feeling.   They kept telling my barbarian he was a big dumb idiot, and I kept agreeing.

It sort of tells you which zone to go to in the quest menu.

It's cool that there are some quests where you have to make a decision between great results, but can only pick one.  This sort of thing makes your decisions relevant, etc.

What I'd Do To Improve It:
D3 shares paragon points across characters (which I didn't realize until a friend told me), which is a superior mechanic, and lets you play alts without feeling like you're wasting your time.

There were a lot of very strange words in the plot, names, places, gods, etc, and I only started to understand what might be happening on the third play-through.  My friend summarized it astutely, saying "In D3 I knew the plot:  Diablo Bad."  I did like it to some extent (the third time through), but it didn't have much impact on anything to actually understand it.

If they don't tell you what the quest rewards are on the bandit quests, they should tell you that up front.  I don't recall.  This is one of the coolest parts of the quest system, but it's also hard to know what to do.

I want to say make it easier to change your choices, but I haven't felt like I've needed to do that yet, and I do like that _some_ things are a decision you've made and so on.  (and you can change it in theory, I haven't looked into how to do that)

That the underground zones are the same zone on the mini map as the above ground zones is a bit confusing, especially when you have a quest, or need to find a way point, in "that" zone.  The zones themselves are also quite large, branching, etc, so it takes some time to fully clear them, to be sure you haven't missed a way point (and then the game crashes, which happened to me several times while leveling, but not much since)

Crafting/Masters/Items:

What you need to know about it:
Don't just invite the second guy you talk to after you unlock your hideout (your new level 3 has to be one of the options to get things rolling), to your hideout.  Your hideout can only hold so many masters.  Make sure you leave room for the map lady once you encounter her, since she's the best one, and hardest to level.

The master you create the hideout with is the one that sets the tileset you are using.

Equip a switch weapon, debind the hotkey to switch your weapon (so you don't hit it by accident, disabling critical abilities and remapping your hotkeys typically), and put a bunch of gems there, so you can level them up, either for vael-ing, secondary auras, or the like.

Don't save up non-quality stuff, and expect it to be worth anything.  I had a page of jewels, and they vendored for something like 5 scrolls of wisdom.

Pick up scrolls of wisdom, they are probably the single loot item you will loot the most of in your career.

The Good:
You have your own hideout, and it has great customization, and it gets bigger, and you can buy stuff for it, cool!

You get daily quests from your masters, cool!  (I didn't know about this until a friend told me about it though)

The masters show up while you're mapping, and give you mini quests there, always feels like a nice bonus (especially the map quest lady)

Being able to specify some mods to your stuff is super-critical to allow their crafting system to work at all, so this is good.  I can't imagine trying to find a good item as-is without the ability to at least add one good thing to an item.

I do like that uniques CAN BE good, and that rare items are the very best (if this was the case, it's actually not for a lot of slots for a lot of builds).  This is a methodology that leads to people continuing to play/farm, rather than get lucky on one unique drop to be "done", with relatively fixed stats. (and no ability to enchant)

I like that you can pay a bunch of resources to ignore luck.  I like that there is some stuff in your control.  I just want this to be much, much, much more of the system.

I like sockets, I like linked sockets.  I don't mind the system of your skills being your gems, rather than your talent points or whatnot.

What I'd Do To Improve It:
Make your hideout hold all your masters.  Or at the least, don't penalize you for making a mistake here, since there's really no way to know that you are making a mistake.  Make switching them easier, etc.  Just having them all there, but only being able to do quests from some of them, would be an improvement, or only being able to do n quests, and you could choose each day which you do.

I don't really know how I'm earning "favor" to buy things.  I'd just like to know.

I should be able to use other people's crafting benches.  That I can't feels clunky.  Just make it so that I don't have functionality at their bench that I don't have at mine.  It's not like I don't have access to the bench (unless I don't have any hideout at all), just expose my functionality in whatever hideout I'm in!  But no, I have to go back to my hideout to enchant my gear, create links, colors, buy maps from the map lady, etc, etc, etc.  I suppose part of the reason is to disable people from overwriting your map bench, just lock the map bench though, and not the other stations.

When I craft something in a crafting station, put it in my inventory if I have room.  I don't think there were more than a few times over my entire career where I actually remembered to take the item out of the crafting station (including trading in divination cards) when I closed it, and there was certainly no time where I actually wanted the item to stay in the bench when I closed it.  I do want it to stay in there while it's open (because you often have to craft multiple times), but why keep it in there when I walk away?

Things really take for-freaking-ever to level up with the masters.  Maybe add more levels, that don't take as long, or distribute some interesting rewards, etc.  Do I have the same hideout/masters across my characters?  If not, that feels like a SUPER punish.  Also, show me the things that I will eventually earn, but grey them out, with a master level requirement, so I at least know what leveling guy x up does (in the game)

I must have spent four or five "columns" of Orbs of Alteration (perhaps 1200 materials) trying to make a weapon.  I saw a "tier one" +%damage zero times, a tier 2 +%damage perhaps once (perhaps zero times), and a tier 3 +%damage once.  Perhaps two other times I saw said buff along with some other useless buff, which made the item immediately unusable.  The second step is to add another bonus to it randomly, and hope that it is also a tier 1 +physical, which is probably a 1/500.  Since I haven't even been in that situation three times, it feels quite unlikely to me.  I've started with some kind of +damage perhaps five times (and haste another 5 times, just out of boredom), and never yielded anything remotely resembling an item half as good as some legendary I equipped for a trivial cost from the AH or Pandaras chest (1000 coins, 1 chaos, etc).  The entire result of everything I've saved up and crafted into this weapon is basically nothing, which is not a motivating factor.  I'd like to try to make a armor piece, ring, or something along those lines, but I feel like I'm not even 1% of the way towards crafting a weapon, so what the heck is the point.

I have something like 9,000 pandaras coins, and no way to really spend them.  In D3, the gambler guy is always in town, and you can gamble away to your heart's content....

I hate seeing the low level mods on the high level gear.  It feels like it's just a waste of everyone's time.  There are just so many terrible items, absolutely terrible.  One item in a hundred, or a thousand, is worth looking at, and it's not like I have amazing gear by any stretch.  You can kill a mirrored pack, have them drop like 12 rare primary weapons, and it is likely that no more than one or two of them has a bonus to physical damage, making those "good ones" about 1/4 as good as the weapon you have equipped.  Given this, it's pretty hard to get excited about 99% of the item drops you see, and my friend and I have to have a mod, hide the 99% of "drops" that can't possibly be useful, just because they clutter up the screen, or you might pick them up by accident. (and thus have to manage your inventory)

I keep going back to D3, but their blood shards is a way better mechanism.  Do stuff, get blood shards, spend blood shards, get items of that ilevel, of the type of your choice.  You're not farming for an hour to get 10-20 shots at rerolling some dumb blue mod, without some other blue mod.  D3 also let you up-level your items with a similar recipe system, that was just superior in every way.  Since you get them so fast (you do NOT get alterations fast, and they are just the first step in a very, very, very long chain of low probabilities), you're always getting something with the potential to be actively good.  All that said, my friend did get lucky and craft a very good bow in his first few hundred attempts, which is great.

I hate that sockets can be unlinked.  It feels like a waste of everyone's time.  It also feels bad that if a 5-link item drops, it's basically the same as a zero-link item, since every reroll you start from scratch on the linking.  I also have in the neighborhood of 1500 material components (75 stacks) of creating sockets materials, and perhaps 50 (5 stacks) of creating links between sockets materials.  Supply and demand problem there.

The hideout management feels pretty clunky.  I don't even know how you'd do the things I have seen from other people's hideouts.

Let me pay something steep to remove a targetted mod from an item.  It's not like this would make getting items easy, likely no easier than it is now (aka impossible), (especially since multi-mod requires you to go down to three innate mods, and the specific crafted mods are not up to the scale of a dropped mod), but it would be a feel-good, instead of a (random) feel-terrible.  Limit it to one per item for power reasons, etc. 

Having to scrub everything and start over is such a feel-bad with crafting, since the incidence of a good mod by itself is apparently super-rare.

Items of different sizes is a mechanic that benefits noone.  I like tetris as much as anyone, but it's likely not even worth it to pick the items up at all at a high level of play, without the complexity of not being able to fit the items into your inventory.  Automatically picking items that are 1x1 up with the same internal logic as items that are 4x2 is also quite silly.

One way items in this game are inferior to D3 is that you have no idea what a good item looks like for other classes.  I don't know what items my friend might want, what items a caster might want, and so on, because I have no idea what stats would even matter.  I assume from looking at the 100+ absolutely terrible unique items that some things that look bad to me must be good for someone, but I have no way of knowing what that might be.

Terrible uniques is a pretty bad letdown too.  And this is apparently something like 99% of unique drops.  It feels like a broken promise to me, and a betrayal of my excitement/expectations.

Experience Penalities/Highest Levels:

What you need to know about it:

Don't die.  Except ~half your deaths you cannot control, and the other half, you likely also don't have a ton of control over.

The Good:

I do like that fighting into the highest difficulties is not REQUIRED for your class working.  (but I can't help wanting to do it, so I can't help running into the problems below)

I do like there is a nice reward for people who want to grind endlessly for L100.

The labyrinth is a very cool, very different zone, that tests you in different ways, and has a cool reward.

The unique maps feel different, and are a good experience.

What I'd Do To Improve It:

Eliminate the large majority of the effect of the experience penalty mechanic.  I feel like it has no redeeming qualities, does nothing positive for the game play, and actively hurts multiplayer play.  Penalize me in some other way for death, but it's just so time-expensive to die, you have to not risk it, and that is simply not possible at any high (or even medium) level of play.

EverQuest gave you a 10% experience penalty on death (in vanilla), but a priest could spend a good chunk of change, and give you 96% of it back. (or something).  EverQuest is one of the most punishing game systems in memory, but it still gave you your stuff back if you jumped through the hoops.  Make the experience penalty twice as large, but give you 80% of one death's worth of loss back when you overcome the encounter that caused the death.  It's still a risk to go into that multi-piety room again, but it might be worth it if you can win, instead of just being some useless item drops on the + side, with 2-3 hours of your time on the downside.

A game with instant death mechanics that are semi-unavoidable should not have experience penalties.  Reflect mobs off screen, corpse explosions, teleportation, debuffs with no warning other than a rapidly decreasing health bar, etc, etc, etc, are not good mechanics for a experience penalty game.  Perhaps it's me getting old, perhaps me having naturally slow reactions, or this being the wrong type of game for me, but I'd much rather things (including myself) taking 10x longer to kill, and there being things I can do to recognize in real time what the heck is happening in the game.  (and the experience scaling up to have the same leveling time)  They have so many cool "bloodline" mods, moster abilities, and so on, but everything dies in a split-second, so it is all irrelevant.  It took my friend and I a couple hundred hours of playtime to recognize the reflect mechanic, since it happens so infrequently, and kills you almost instantly when it appears (sometimes).  The corpse explosion mechanic has basically no way to recognize it before you are dead.  The melee guy that jumps on you and one hit kills you is not a super-avoidable mechanic, or the guy who shoots you for your full health when you are standing in melee range of him with no way to actually avoid the swing you didn't even see coming.

As a simple solution, just have more timed encounters (to steal more from D3), where if you die you've got a setback for sure, that you might be able to overcome, but two deaths is too much.  They even have some timed stuff set up already, it's just a matter of using it more.

In general, I'm far more a fan of a positive reward, that you should play riskily/strive/rush for, than a negative, that you have to dread continuously for your entire playtime.  I failed plenty in D3, but never felt as bad, for all of those actions, combined, as I did for any one stupid death I had in this game.  The only encounter that approached the positive feelings of D3 was a timed treasure encounter, where I was ALSO constantly in fear of my own death, and the terrible map UI and monsters that hide/run away from you made it quite stressful to catch all of them.  Still the best encounter by far I've seen in this game, and it's a shame there are not more like it.

The Auction House:

What you need to know about it:
If you're interested in having the good gear on your guy, just use this, and probably don't even pick up the items that drop for you normally.

The Good:
Once you can find it (it's not exposed in any way by the game), it is a direct access to items far better than you will see in your characters entire lifetime, for resources that it will take on the order of hours to obtain.The cost/benefit of the AH is off the charts in the buyer's favor, to the point where I'd leave 500 rings on the ground unidentified, in favor of spending some chaos orbs to buy a reasonable one off the AH, and probably have a better one than any of the ones that dropped.

What I'd Do To Improve It:
Integrate it into the game itself.  I imagine that it already has to be partially integrated from what I've heard from my friend with premium tabs, which is a good cash-flow-driver for them, which I can understand, but there's really no reason to have to go to a website outside the game to find the items in that game.  You can still have all the real money features, with a in-game search tool.

Multiplayer:

What you need to know about it:

Good luck.

The Good:

Your friend can kill monsters that are basically immune to you.  Just try not to die too many times while they do it.

What I'd Do To Improve It:

A shared mini-map system.

Larger aura radius's, to let you feel like you're contributing to the team.

One curse per player should not translate into one curse per mob.  This leads to unnecessary stress between party members priorities.

Either you or your friend will be dramatically more powerful than the other (in a particular situation), the other can enjoy the status of being a pack mule/experience drain on their friend.

You or your friend will be in different stages of immunity to experience drain (because you've just leveled, vs being halfway through a level (aka 12 hours away from leveling), meaning that one of you will be paranoid/panicked about death, and the other will be carefree, which is a very stressful situation, or a situation where one of you feels useless because you cannot risk positively contributing at the rate the other player can contribute.  Since it takes on the order of 10-100 hours of playtime to gain a level at the high end, this adds a unnecessary level of stress to what should be a fun time with your buds.

If one poor fool dies, he feels terrible for the group, and worse for himself (experience penalty), because you use up portals, that the other guy could probably use to just win the encounter when they randomly die.

UI

What you need to know about it:

Play a character/use abilities that are not dependent on where the monsters happen to be.

Have a teleportation skill to allow you to ignore mechanics.

The Good:
Pay for glitter is a good mechanic.

There are certainly some powerful AOE spells, AOE spells are very good in this game, since the sheer volume of stuff is high, and the ability to instant kill everything is also fairly straightforward even with aoes.

What I'd Do To Improve It:

Ground effects that cover up other deadly ground effects is not a good idea.

I had several boss fights where I could not tell where the boss was, this needs to be improved (either my eyes, or something)

There must be a setting somewhere to control the minimap, but it was very difficult to use by default.  I couldn't tell where doors were, bridges looked like lava/impassible terrain to me, the map blocked out the ground effects, etc, etc, etc.

Be able to zoom out more.  That a primary mechanic is firing ranged weapons off the screen is not a sign of a game where you can see far enough.

Some of the female character models are profoundly offensive to me.

Don't become stuck on ground objects when cycloning.  Just create a path for the whirlwinding barbarian, and follow that path, instead of taking the desired input, and throwing it in the garbage can.  The same for leaps, just put me anywhere that is the closest to that location, because if it doesn't do that, I am very likely to die.  Often you cannot even see the ground effects that you are stuck on, which is also a UI "issue", which is hyper-magnified in certain maps, where it is just difficult to figure out how to move at all.  (Especially with loot items covering the screen, until we got that mod to turn them off)

Overall

Best mechanics:
The passive skill tree.
The labyrinth.
6-linked items. (having them, not getting them)
Crafting on to existing items.  (Paying to avoid luck)
Jewels. (with radius or without)
The auction house (once you find it)
Free to play/what you pay for/monetary system.
Crafter quests, daily quests.

It feels like you could play this game for a long, long, time, and still have undiscovered plans, new ideas, new things to try, and so on.  I think if just a few things were less terrible, this would be a game I could play for a while.

Worst Mechanics:
Experience penalties.
Everything related to multiplayer.
Unlinked sockets.
Terrible items (aka most items)
Pathing on cyclone.
Lack of high level maps.
Maps with a terrible layout. (exemplifying pathing problems, etc)

The crafting system is super terrible/low yield.  Not being able to turn my resources I don't need into resources I desperately do at any kind of a reasonable rate.  I really want the crafting system to work, it is so close to being good.