Do you sometimes do game design or balancing in your head for fun?

Do you sometimes do game design or balancing in your head for fun?
Not that I'd actually take the effort to complete a game or even a mod, but I do idea guy stuff a bunch.

team 5 is beyond shit

Fucking constantly. I'm studying by myself to make a game in the near future just to try stopping living in my head with this shit so much.

Hopefully more than for fun with my degree in game design, but yeah especially if I'm not occupied with something ideas are plentiful. Like a post-apocalyptic zoo management game, or soulslike game with the nemesis system, or a party-based metroidvania brawler. Once an idea exists, I'll get pretty much constant new ideas on how to do a specific element of it.

Yeah, I write stuff down even but I never actually make any games. It's just fun to think about what works in a game and what makes it work. I'm particularly interested in all kinds of risk/reward systems from games based around getting a high score (arcade games basically) and thinking about how to implement them in games which aren't about scoring. Ie how to motivate players to git gud without some sort of scoring/grading system

>Like a post-apocalyptic zoo management game

When Spore came out, I started making a game where you are in some advanced space opera setting, and capture aliens to keep in a zoo. It was a generic tycoon game, but the randomly generated aliens had different needs for food, environment, cages, etc.

I got exactly zero work done, because lazy.

not for rock dumb mtg clones

Tie unlocking new gameplay mechanics to achievements.
Shoot 10 people in the head -> unlock scopes. Blow people off an edge so they fall to death -> unlock new type of grenade.
Of course you can include some more gitgud tier unlocks, like jumping and killing 3 enemies before you fall, etc.

Yeah I don't even know how I'd start with that one, other ones are hard as fuck but at least I understand what kind of engine I'd use and such. Too lazy to do it still though.

With all of the "summon random card" effects in the game, having some "bad cards" in the mix actually makes those random summons more balanced. Sometimes a Moonglade Portal gives you a Sylvannas Windrunner... sometimes you get the 1/1 Big-Time Racketeer.

Some of those changes you posted would make sense. Light's Justice having lifesteal would be buffing Muster for Battle though and that card is strong enough.
And Yetis aren't Beasts, they are humanoids.

You can skin Yetis in World of Warcraft. They are furry, growl, don't speak, don't use weapons, don't wear clothes.

That just makes the game more swingy and retarded. I don't know what your goals are with balance here but I'd hope it's not that.

And yet... they are still classified as humanoids.

that succubus is imbalanced as fuck you literal fucking moron

Thats a dumb argument. There are golems in Hearthstone that are no tribe, or that are mech, or that are elementals. These coexist. They are probably a different thing in WoW.

>2 mana 4/3 without drawback
ayy

Why would a non-DK Paladin weapon have lifesteal?
That succubus change already exists as a card.

>4 mana 5/6 without drawback

OP as fuck, in every deck.
Meanwhile, any 3 health minion dies to 2 drops and most spells.

>any 3 health minion dies to 2 drops
Do you even play the game?

Ah yes scaling things up is linear and tempo is not a thing

I wish Paladin was not horrible outside of Murlocs. Call to Arms is pretty fun though.

In WoW it matters a lot less if a monster has the appropriate tribe than in Hearthstone. I'm sure if they had the Demon Hunter ability that specifically gives you bonuses to a tribe back in Vanilla they would have been a lot more careful and consistent with how they were labeled. But before that, the only things that mattered were crowd control spells, specifically.
That said, every single Yeti-type monster in World of Warcraft is flagged as a Humanoid with two exceptions. There are some battle pets which are tagged as such, and there is one Yeti tagged as a "beast" in the Thok fight in Siege of Orgrimmar... but I'm thinking that was an oversight or done to be in line with the rest of the monsters in that room.

>2 drop that trades evenly with many 2 drops, and almost every single 3 drop, and hurts you for 4
>4 drop that trades favorably with almost every other 4 drop, and even many 5 drops, and hurts you for 5

The negative effect doesn't scale linearly at all, and the board control (which is what big stats are for) is better on Pit Lord.

>I'm sure if they had the Demon Hunter ability that specifically gives you bonuses to a tribe back in Vanilla they would have been a lot more careful and consistent with how they were labeled.

There were skills and items with bonus vs beasts, or vs undead, and spells that only could target humanoids or undead, and the polymorph/banish spells too. It was a thing from the beginning.

Did you just stop reading at that sentence? I just went on to say that the very next one. Yes, Paladins had Exorcism, too, which they later changed to effect demons... then everything... and then they removed it from the game.

The problem with that is that after unlocking the stuff, you usually end up having easier time playing with your stronger, unlocked equipment, which means that you don't need to play as well anymore. The second problem is that the player only unlocks those things once: after they're unlocked, the player has no motivation to play well anymore, especially if the unlocks make the game easier.

I think that it's better when gitting gud is something that you have to apply to your playing all the time instead of just doing once. Systems which give some sort of damage bonus or something as long as you can keep playing skillfully are something which I really like. For instance point blanking enemies in shmups makes you damage them faster, but also puts you to the most dangerous place on the screen. Head shotting also kinda falls into this - you can do more damage but there's also a greater chance of not hitting anything at all. I guess that the bigger problem is that games often aren't challenging enough to make risky moves worthwhile so safe and slow playing is generally the better strategy, especially since survival is usually the only thing that really matters in non-scoring games.

Some loot-em-up ARPGs have have "mutators" or other cards that make levels more difficult, while giving more reward.
Like before entering a level, you spend the cards/runes/mutators/whatever you collected to alter the level, giving more enemy spawns, or more enemy HP/Damage, or enemies explode or revive, etc, random or crafting recipe buffs to the enemies, or penalties to the player, while increasing reward.
You could go that route, letting the player loot or otherwise gain different pieces that they can combine to craft mutators according to recipes, and alter levels? And in multiplayer, the host can advertise what an awesome mutator he has for the level, so others can join his game.