Why Are Game Designers Not Allowed to See Unsolicited Designs?
General forum
Posted on April 28, 2020, 5:12 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
Employees of WotC have stated that they are not allowed to see unsolicited ideas for cards from players, and this apparently is a rule for any game designers, not only them.
Why does that rule exist? Given how rarely game designers actually ask for input from the players, they could be missing many awesome ideas, so what reason could there possibly be for having such a rule? What does everyone else say about this?
Yep, same reason fiction authors can’t read their fanfiction. Without the proper authorization first, they can be accused of purposefully or accidentally being inspired by those designs.
April 28, 2020 5:37 p.m.
JANKYARD_DOG says... #4
Really... Imagine our cards from the 'Card Creation Challenge' and 'Ability Challenge' forums coming to life. XD. That'd be great.
April 28, 2020 6:02 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #5
Pervavita, abby315, I personally think that it is ridiculous that there is such a massive disconnection between the people who make the game and the people who play it; the game designing process should not be so insular, and, if I had the ability to do so, I would ensure that there was much greater transparency between the designers and the players.
Also, if writers are not allowed to read fanfiction of their own stories, how do you explain in Bleach (the manga series) the fact that numerous ideas that the fans had became canonical (such as Yammy's number changing from 10 to 0 or Yachiru being Kenpachi's zanpakuto spirit)? Have you read Bleach?
April 28, 2020 6:16 p.m.
Dunno why you are being arguementative. You asked and got a reply.
There is also plenty of precedent of this happening. Marion Bradley lost a story due to legal conflict relating to fanfiction. If you are found to have looked at someones work and then released something similar you are very likely to lose the case and all that stuff can come out during discovery.
There also is no need for them to look and no disconnect because they get their information from surveys. Player feedback. Sales figures etc. Why look at custom cards when you have all this actually useful info.
Also. The bleach stuff was foreshadowed. Or talked about in interviews etc. Also pretty damn obvious in a lot of places.
April 28, 2020 6:27 p.m. Edited.
DemonDragonJ says... #7
LeaPlath, surveys and sales figures are great, but they are indirect information, whereas a You Make the Card contest is direct information, so I wish that WotC would hold such contests more often; why do they not, anyway? Do such contests really take that much time and effort?
April 29, 2020 7:14 a.m.
Define indirect and direct information in your eyes. Cause I feel if we continue without this definition we will be talking across each other.
April 29, 2020 8 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #9
LeaPlath, by 'indirect," I mean that WotC sees what players like and dislike, and create new cards according to their perception of the players' preferences, and by "direct," I mean that WotC allows players to submit their own designs.
April 29, 2020 8:04 a.m.
If WOTC were to accept custom card submissions they would get a lot of submissions that would take a huge amount of time and resources just to sift through to find what would be only a few valid ideas. Take the card creation challenge thread as an example, there are over 500 pages with over 20 submissions per page. That translates to over 10,000 cards. Now sit down and sift through that to find something of value to turn into a card, ya you could do it and get some good cards but the time for just one person to do this would be what 2-3 weeks working 40 hours a week on nothing else and that is one game designer giving up all else. Not to mention at the onset of the competition every submission would need to be accompanied by the proper legal document handing over your idea to WOTC as now WOTC's intellectual property. This part isn't the biggest issue but it is an issue.
From WOTC's stand point this just isn't a realistic thing to do when they have such a large player base and have such a skilled R&D, this translates into a lot of work for little added value from there perspective.
April 29, 2020 10:22 a.m.
I've said it before on your threads, and I'll say it again: Laypeople are always idiots who don't know what they want.
Yes, that statement is a bit facetious, but the essence is true. When designing a new card, there are a whole bunch of considerations to take into account. How will this new card interact with the 20,161 Magic cards already printed? How will this new card interact with the sets that will be in Standard contemporaneously with it? How will this new card work in limited? How will it work in the format it is designed for? How will it work with the other cards being developed for this particular set/product? How will it work with the cards being developed for sets/products already in the pipeline?
A whole lot of that information is not available to players--after all, Wizards does not want to spoil details of the current set/details of upcoming sets so players can design custom cards.
Even the information that is available is hard to process unless you live and breath Magic--sure, there are some players who can likely process that information, but, as Pervavita mentioned, the number of people who could would be far eclipsed by submissions from people who cannot.
The game developers are professionals with greater access to information than individual players and even they make mistakes. They have better things to do with their time than sort through the chaff to find the wheat.
April 29, 2020 10:52 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #12
Pervavita, is that why there has not been a "You Make the Card" contest in many years?
April 29, 2020 12:12 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #13
A few things:
First, as noted, it would take A LOT of time and resources for WoTC or ANY company to take into consideration playerbase suggestions in most cases. Personally, Wizards could totally send ban polls to LGSs and get player opinions on bans, or even allow LGSs to have their own pseudo-banlist. But that's another topic for another thread.
Second, Wizards is fairly incompetent when it comes to card design. Now, they're not horrendous, I'd rather play MtG than Yugioh or Pokemon(power creep galore), but they're definitely not perfect. WoTC makes mistakes constantly, although most of them are easily overshadowed by the minority of massive mistakes like Oko. Really, this is because WoTC doesn't have the staffing power. The amount of money needed to fully study every card to it's fullest extent is huge.
Example: one match would take ~1h. Paying $8, that might seem rather insignificant at first -- until you realize that you have to test EVERY play pattern with EVERY deck order possible, which only gets crazier with the addition of things like fetchlands, planeswalkers, looting and random effects. That means you'd have likely, millions upon millions of possible games, just between two exact decks. Add to that that there's millions of possible decks, not including having more than 60 cards or less than 15 sideboard cards, and there's EDH which has millions more, you're looking at a project that could last an amount of time that easily rivals the age of the universe. Possibly far, far more.
You can cut it down significantly(maybe you only want to play 100 games between two decks, and see the result, or you can say that decks have to be at least so many cards in difference to be called different decks) but the time needed would still exceed many generations.
Tangent TLDR: Wizards will never have the resources to test even their own content, let alone the playerbase's.
Now, consider the playerbase: We have millions of people, and we can learn things about cards that Wizards never thought of in a matter of hours. It's easier for Wizards to throw stuff out and see what happens.
Now, to get to a point that's actually relevant to this thread, let me start from a dev's point of view:
In any development process, to be successful, you need to preplan most of the project. It's likely that, whenever people call for changes or complain about something, the company has already spent so many resources on that product that changing it would mean bankruptcy. Yes, devs want to make their fans happy. Yes, they do everything they can to make that happen. But at the end of the day, it costs too much to do everything needed to fix mistakes, to make sure something is perfect before release, to guarantee that there won't be a problem. No artist, no author, no game design team on earth will ever have the resources needed to do that.
April 29, 2020 12:33 p.m.
JANKYARD_DOG says... #14
I think it could be done like this: Open submissions w/guidelines whatever they may be. Understandably they won't spoil the next sets by giving out themes and such, however submissions can be made with tags that you intend the card for (I.e. Modern, control, Azorius, Stax, creature type). Submissions are then stored in a database so when they make new sets they can plug in whatever tags they want cutting down on sorting time. If they find anything that fits the current set then they can use it. Be nice if they could give credit where it's due, but if they are worried about lawsuits they can add a clause stating that the ideas submitted become the property of the company and that you will be notified if/when yours is selected instead of having your name printed on a card. Frame the email, stick it on the wall maybe... XD.
As for time/resources, what I suggest shouldn't take all that long from what they normally do. I think it'd be a great idea promoting community involvement. Realistically though from a business standpoint then old saying goes "time is money" and if time spent doesn't equal profit then it's not worth the time. Would community involvement generate more sales? Chances are slim to none. But if they can find a way to profit from it somehow then it could be possible, though less involvement likely if so.
Dropped my 2 cents, there ya go.
April 29, 2020 5:24 p.m.
"Not allowed to" heavily implies legal requirements. And while there are corner cases, WotC have clearly set the disclaimer so that they don't get stuck in that grey zone. Could you imagine the implications if they did? Imagine having to do a product recall on trading cards (yes, there are other ways of settling a lawsuit too, but that is one of them).
And on top of that, I think that Caerwyn hit the nail on the head - most custom magic cards are terrible. No balancing, no set context and have clearly been designed to be played with, not played against. A 5 minute stroll through MTGCardSmith and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Having somebody wading through all of this just seems like a huge distraction, rather than being helpful.
April 29, 2020 8:53 p.m. Edited.
TriusMalarky says... #16
Oh, yeah, most player-built cards are imbalanced as all getout. It's really hard to balance that, and random game-design normies trying their hand at something that, done properly, should require a team of statisticians and data scientists doesn't bode well for balance.
Pervavita says... #2
I suspect it's due to copy right laws. The last thing a company wants to do is get entrenched in a lawsuit over even the interpretation that they used some one else's intellectual property.
April 28, 2020 5:22 p.m.