You may not know that Bethesda’s Pete Hines, VP for Marketing and PR, is an avid CCG player, having participated in multiple sealed-play and limited-play tournaments for Magic: The Gathering. He’s even responsible for running some of the sealed tournaments at Bethesda’s studio.
So during the development of The Elder Scrolls: Legends, a CCG adaptation of the Elder Scrolls series that’s currently in open beta, Hines provided insightful feedback—perhaps jokingly “more than they want”—to the developer Dire Wolf Digital and he’s played hundreds of matches in ESL for both work and pleasure.
But if there’s one thing that players hate in ESL—and other digital CCGs like Hearthstone—is facing other players who spam the emote, waste time trolling, or otherwise go out of their way to be a jerk. And if anything could be clearer in my private interview at PAX West with Hines, he hates it too:
There’s definitely some people I’ve played against where I’ve resisted the urge to write down their names and go back and be like ‘I don’t know who this person is, but they’re an ass.’Honestly, it’s unfortunate and to whatever extend our players face it and are frustrated, I assure you I do too, because I play it all the time and it makes me insane when people behave poorly.
Hines shared some examples of BM (Bad Manners) he has experienced in ESL so far:
They take the entire turn without passing it just to troll folks, [or] they’re dead on the board and they just sit there the whole time and spam the emote. Or actually the one that drives me the craziest, and maybe it shouldn’t—you get me down to two life, you pass the turn, I have nothing else that I can do, like I’m just dead, and I can concede but you got it, you deserve final damage. And so I’ll just not play anything, I’ll just pass the turn back, and the person will inevitably like do 4 or 5 things instead of just swinging and killing me.Like hey, I’m trying to be nice, I’m trying to be a good sport. You win, just attack. But instead they can’t seem to do that, they gotta do this [and that]. I know you won, that’s why I passed without doing anything. You also wanna be a good sport and just take the win? Or do you have be a jerk and take an extra 45 seconds to do all this stuff where they go and attack all of my creatures. I mean, it’s so pointless, and it’s so unnecessary, it makes me crazy
While Hines isn’t entirely sure how the developers will help curtail this type of bad behavior, be it with an auto-mute function or temporary emote-blocker, he wanted to emphasize that they didn’t want players to have a bad experience because of trolls. On a separate but similar issue involving cheating, where some players exploited a bug that allowed them to concede without counting it as a loss, the developers made sure to stamp out those who abused it:
We didn’t just fix it. We went back and looked at accounts for people who repeatedly abuse that ability and basically punished them for it. Because we want to find people who are doing stuff that’s making a bad experience for other people. And it’s not like, ‘oh, well I accidentally did it’; like if you did it once, fine. But when we can see on your account that you’ve done it 5, 6, 7 times, all right you’re doing this on purpose, and you deserve to be punished for it.We don’t want that kind of behavior. We don’t want those kind of players.
Of course, Hines knows that every game’s community will have the good and the bad:
Video games are not smart bombs. You can’t just attract only the good people who are classy and good sports. You’re gonna get some assholes and idiots in the process. We want to try to prevent those people from spoiling everybody’s else’s good time however we can.
In the game’s current form, Hines believes that ESL is mainly a direct-attack game where creatures need to be played and attack or defend. He’s not sure whether they would open the game to provide other avenues of winning, like milling decks (having no more cards in the library), poison counters, or strictly direct-damage spells. He also thinks that a co-op variant mode like Two-Headed Giant from
MTG would be “tricky” to adapt, but it’s still possible in the future.
Considering the success of ESL in the PAX Gaming Arena (see him playing the game above), Hines hopes to see ESL become an eSport of some kind, but he knows that it will be an uphill climb:
Our goal is always, like it’s got to be a really good game. If it’s fun to play and it’s fun to watch, then the eSports stuff will come. But if we go jumping ahead and go “Oh, we need to be an eSport,” then I don’t even know what that means. Like if I told you, “Go into work tomorrow and make the game a better eSport,” you’d be like “What the hell does that mean?”…You can’t just say the word and it happens, and I think we’re self-aware enough to know that ultimately it has to be a good game.
Last but not least, Hines doesn’t imagine Bethesda ever printing out paper, physical versions of ESL since the digital nature of the game allows them to fix errata and update cards easily. That said, they will be creating promotional versions of the cards for events. I mean, check out the snazzy, foiled “Miraak, Dragonborn” card I got at the Bethesda booth!
