Duel of Champions (MMDOC): Introductory thoughts

I like to pronounce it MMMdock.

I've played a fair number of card games over the years, and the rise of the "f2p" CCG market has interested me. I have a MTGO account but after a run of trying to enjoy it a couple years back I realized that magic, online, is just not really a good translation. A friend has dragged me kicking and screaming back into real life Magic, which is actually great since we happened to bumble into a comic store in Oakville - a one Comic Connection - and the store is just fantastic, with a really great location and an awesome owner. So I do actually play Magic via Duels of the Planeswalkers and now in real life, but not on MTGO, because it's awful. I've had conversations with other players and many of them agree that regardless of the convenience of drafting without pants, MTGO is simply too terrible a platform to sink money into. Not that everyone feels that way.

Anyway so I do get the card playing bug here and there, and the MMDOC thread has floated around on the front page of Games on SA for a while. I'd read bits and pieces of the thread for a while, and recently it came up that the game would be launching an 'easier to get into' new base set with a new format centered on that set. Figuring what the Hell, I finally installed the game and gave it a try. This is a review of the game before the new base set launches and I'll explain why I started playing

I should mention that yes, there is a HoMM sucks now tag and yes, I have found Ubisoft's attempt at the franchise rather miserable. I haven't tried 6 yet, but the dev videos made it look somewhere between awfully generic, pointless watered down and incredibly weeaboo. I've played about a thousand hours of HoMM3 and I've always found it sad that the franchise has been treated so cruelly, but I'm not going to hold it against this game. Or even six, really, it just hasn't been cheap enough to bother playing a game that is supposedly super buggy.

I do admit that I really don't understand why they bought the IP only to basically use little beyond the name. MMDOC doesn't remind me, IP wise, of Homm3 at all.
Upon installing and running MMDOC you are immediately thrust into a playing tutorial with very little fanfare. It just sort of seemed to happen. The tutorial guides you through how the board and resources work, letting you figure out some of it yourself and basically it is quite solid. MMDOC's systems are surprisingly brilliant translations of Heroes of Might and Magic mechanics, with ideas like events, retaliation, archers and so on all working in a very simplified yet robust, manner. The tutorial probably works best for someone like me - a person who has played too many CCGs - but it did seem effective and well made. Compare this to MTGO, where you should essentially buy another product to get a tutorial...

I started playing because of that tutorial. My intention had been to save up a couple weeks of daily rewards, which you get for logging in every day for a week in a row. The game was enjoyable enough that I've logged a couple matches a day consistently since, but I'm stuck unable to really spend currency since I'm waiting on the next set to launch in late March. So, as such, my view of the game is pretty basic. I don't know much about the higher end metagame (although I have played against said metagame, given the surrender nonsense thrust me up to upper level elo), and even nearly forty hours in people are still putting down cards I've never seen before. I have opened the packs I've gotten from promo codes and achievements, so my deck isn't quite the Haven starter but it is pretty close to just being a starter deck. I kinda regret going Haven, but hey, oh well. By the time I chain through all the gold and seals I've saved up to buy base set 2 cards it is pretty unlikely my starter selection will matter. Though I do wish I went Sanctuary or Inferno at this juncture, as weeaboo dorky as Sanctuary is I still find it is more the "White" deck than Haven is.

And Inferno has succubi, which is after all every man's favorite ... uh, bus...?

As I said, the game attempts to translate elements from Heroes of Might and Magic. Which may no longer even be named that, given it is likely the more popular core title from the franchise at this juncture, so forgive me if it's confusing. Regardless, the game's main board is a large selection of slots. You each have a hero card - hero cards seem to be a thing in DCGs, which just makes me think of Legends of the Five Rings or MTG's wayward vanguard premise - and then eight rows of creature slots, an enchantment slot for each row and column, then a pair of cards revealed randomly from both players "event" decks. The arrangement of the slots is easily readable and the game is good about telling you where attacks are going, or highlighting most elements you deploy.

The creatures replicate the mechanics of HoMM fairly well. There are few basic melee creatures, and instead a multitude of other types, from "shooters" to flyers to magic melee to magic flyers and that might be everything but maybe not! Creatures punch heroes and each other, and have rules for retaliating or not retaliating as the case may be. Early on combat is very much about 'big pushes' in the mid to late game, where you stack up abilities to push through defenders without taking losses yourself. That might change, but there's an interesting feeling of gambling in early MMDOC, and I like it.

Overall GUI elements are decent. I am playing on a notebook, giving my poor desktop a rest, and the game can be a little difficult to read. Some elements of the card design are unnecessarily smaller than they need to be, and the game lacks 'pointers' that display where an ongoing effect is influencing the board, which is a bit juvenile looking. The combat log is also too small and sort of wastes time scrolling pointlessly long messages. It could use more conveyed information, especially stuff like 'melee guard' not displaying in the onscreen damage would help newer players. I notice people at lower ELOs smashing into my melee or flyer guard idiots and not understanding what happened. The combat log, I should note, doesn't need to mention the player using the ability, since players are passive during their opponent's turns. That alone could shave off lots of useless text, and simplifying some of the messages but also cleaning them up would help.

The game's art is good. It is nowhere near the best Magic art, but it is definitely very good on average. There is an attempt to have similar creatures that are better versions of each other, and the unified style works well for that. There's nothing amazingly creative mind you, and the game feels to me almost like the art from golden age computer game manuals. On the other hand it's pretty unrealistic to expect Magic level artwork from anything, let alone Magic itself. Magic level art costs something like a thousand to two thousand a piece, to my knowledge, which doesn't sound like a ton but each MMDOC set would run them an additional 80,000-160,000 dollars of development money to do it at that level. I don't know how much MMDOC is making, but just going with consistently decent in-house art is an understandable compromise. Some of the art is really great, too, sometimes simple is better you know?

My only real complaint is the necropolis art - I really just do not understand the point of spider tits and zombie tits. I can totally appreciate the idea of putting in some generic sexy ladies, that's fine. You get your Budd Root cavewoman style barbarian lasses and your demonic 'bus ladies (heck, there's even an incubus, how many games have managed that? You know you want to do more than look) but the tits on the necropolis cards are just sketchy. It's a freakish spider hybrid, the big gazongas just look needy and desperate to me. I understand there's going to be a portion of the market offended by sexually loaded artwork no matter what, but I feel like there's a balanced point the audience can appreciate more than they're offended, and this just kinda slips that away.

I mean unless you're actually going for body horror, which they clearly are not.

I do like how everything is full art, but I do feel like several of the elements on the cards should be larger. The expansion symbol for example could easily take up a good eighth of the lower right card box, perhaps applied as a transparency, since its very hard to read as is and often floating in blank space. The two main damage vectors on creatures - attack and retaliation - is poorly designed and rather amateur. I mean the icons, being a spiky ball and a spiky diamond. They're not colored or easy to tell apart main body text, which is irritating. Cost requirements as well should be larger, and I do not believe the GUI is capable of the moving elements that MTGO is. It's hard to admit something MTGO does is superior to properly everything on the market, but readability is never a concern with mtgo - Hell, I can usually read cards on my friend's stream better than I can MMDOC's card facing. The game also probably could have done with learning the early lesson magic did where you don't keyword things unless those keywords are absolutely necessary. Not only does MMDOC pointless keyword everything, creatures can be granted a keyworded ability by a spell ... And the spell won't explain what the key word does.

Keyword, if you're not used to CCGs or DCGs, is a term for shortening a phrased ability "wolf bites with sharp teeth" into a key word "Sharpteeth". This was done on Magic to shorten the amount of text on cards, make room for flavor text and help unify themes of colors. On MMDOC almost everything is keyworded but then followed by a description, which essentially misses the point. Also the flavor text is straight out of 7th edition of MTG, which I'm not going to explain but I assure you it was an idea they quickly dropped.

I am not entirely certain of the core game's balance. As I said, I am waiting on a new patch to launch before heading into the tournament scene or even expend resources towards acquiring more cards, so I've plateau'd at about 750~ ELO with the starter deck and a couple packs from achievements, like winning ten ranked games in a row. I've bounced between 600 and nearly a thousand since then, which is a huge variance. It does heavily feel like the designers have suffered from the same malady of the mind as early magic did, offering spells far far too powerful compared to upper curve creatures. It looks like you basically play a rush of quick little monsters or spell based control, which is fine if the game wasn't set on a grid and meant to emulate HoMM. Since it is, it's a little disappointing, since maneuvering and outflanking an opponent is pushed aside when you can just blow everything up or steal it and whatever else. Control magics as an aside - A spell which grants control of a given creature from its controller to you - have historically been very problematic in Magic and it's mind-blowing to see how ridiculously good they are in MMDOC. There's nothing on the level of good old Treachery mind you but given MMDOC is a creature based game it's a bit wild they exist at all. The game also manages to have hymn to tourach, albeit in a somewhat different form, but still like really? Why you do this?

But like I said, I'm waiting on baseset 2, which does seem like it at least acknowledges these issues and has a lower power level set up. Of course there will be new expansions going forward that could tip it back, but maybe by then I won't be playing anyway? I'm not certain how long it takes for them to launch new sets.

Balancing oddities aside given the game's surprisingly deep system and interesting, unmagiclike nuances, I'm pretty impressed with MMDOC. The game has tons of tactical lines and when two decks are matched up evenly the battles are pretty fierce. In ranked play, you are rewarded almost as much for losing as winning - actually, I've had loses pay out more than wins - when the battles are close. As f2p "rewards" go, MMDOC does require quite the grind to get over the initial hump of needing a big pile of cards, but it does allow you to set goals via the "altar of wishes" and "infernal pit" to curb the randomness that no trading allowed would otherwise enforce brutally. The inability to cash out or really generate any income off tournaments is a bit dismal, but the system Magic online has, essentially allowing you to not only play for free but make money in the exchange, is a rare one to get into. It's also insanely expensive to play if you're just starting out.

Oh, and the game does feature achievements and wonder of wonders the achievements all pay out some form of value to the player. Admittedly these are likely the usual suspects of f2p 'luring' which reward you for having more cards or playing in more tournaments, but as long as you're patient they don't cost you anything. It's nice to see them be fair with that, and on the spectrum of f2p and p2w I have to agree with the SA thread that the game is pretty kind. I will admit that I do find the amount of cash you need to put in to see much of a benefit strikes me as odd in terms of incentivizing putting money in. Usually when I put a good twenty plus hours into a f2p game I start think it is ok to put a little money into it, I certainly don't regret the steambux I put into PoE for example, but the net benefit of putting five or ten dollars into MMDOC is a couple seals, which while very time consuming to grind, get you a couple packs.

The actual conversation works like this - Five USD purchases you 250 seals. If you've done any reading on f2p schemes, you know that it is intentional that seals are a step removed from your actual dollar, as buyers have difficulty "doing the math twice".* Essentially, we'll call 10 seals = 20 cents. As such, $3.50 gets you a pack which is reasonable compared to MtG, but rather mediocre when you realize "that's it". With Magic, a pack can be opened into a mythic that trades into more packs, or just currency, resulting in a snowballing effect - or maybe not, admittedly Magic's low end variance is much worse - but there is the option to cash out in some capacity. MMDOC doesn't have that.

Also $5 doesn't get you enough seals to buy tournament tickets, which is kinda gross to me, given that's sort of what I imagined if I got into the game enough to play it a ton I'd want to buy. Then again, $5 gets you five mtgo tix, which is ... Not enough to enter any real event.

I think the only really big problem with the game is the elo system used in ranked games and how it pertains to 'elo basements'. There are supposedly tiers where it is very difficult for a player to lower their elo below a certain point, which isn't really a big deal though I'm largely uncertain as to what it is supposed to combat. Regardless, the end result is people get stuck at certain tiers of player, rather than than naturally getting sorted to their respective rating. As such, you see a great number of people just snap conceding games, which wastes your time and forces your elo up. There's lots of possible suggestions for fixing this, but I think the elo basements are probably a bad idea in general.

So anyway, to summarize, as someone just getting into MMDOC I'm pretty solidly impressed. The GUI is good, the art is mostly a good consistent quality and the gameplay is a very enjoyable adaption of HoMM ideas. The game's progression is probably too slow for most people to really enjoy without dumping in money, but it's still very reasonable for f2p and the game is nice for just playing a match or two while drinking a coffee, which should keep me playing a little here or there for months to come.

In April I will report back how higher level play feels, assuming the baseset 2 patch launches on time. I don't expect to really break through and become some sort of big deal player, but I feel like once I have a larger collection doing a tournament every day - which looks about possible - will give me a decent hour of gameplay a day without any further major investment of time. I have a pretty big pile of gold saved up for the incoming packs, which I'm hoping they don't do anything weird to invalidate.

If they do mannnn will I ever write the angriest posts on their forum.

* To step aside from the review process here, people often like to imagine they are nothing but rational actors who never make math errors or screw up mental gymnastics. Truth of the matter is, we're all idiots some of the time and you need to learn to place coping mechanisms when you deal with f2p stuff. The first rule of all f2p interaction is to math out how much the currency actually costs and always work with real dollars in your head. If you find this irritating, maybe you're an easy mark and you should rethink playing f2p stuff at all. Remember, there are people sifting through research documents every day of the week trying to gauge how to get the most money out of you with f2p. There's a reason the market has flourished, and that reason is: Everyone has too much damn arrogance to go around.