I'll put in a plug as well for Baalorlord who is extremely friendly and explains his moves very well. I've watched tooons of his videos
https://youtube.com/c/Baalorlord
Lifecoach is an odd one, he's a fantastic deeply analytical player who just doesn't seem to understand why anyone would play a game in any other way, and as the article points out is just rude about people who don't conform to his ideas about the "right" way to enjoy things.
you're right, I missed that. I had hoped for more details on game design/tournament structure so skimmed the second half. But I thought possibly still worthwhile to share links to actually see people in the community.
Jorbs in TFA comes across has having a really fragile ego. If he’s so interested in competitive STS, why is he willfully ignoring lifecoachs results who are unmatched?
Yes, it is interesting how sensitive many of the elite players are. not just this one - many elite players in public are dismissive of each other's skills. Doesn't seem objectively rational.
If you dont track win rate how can you be elite? I would say jorbs is just a good for-fun player. its much harder to dismiss someone when results are there
Finally picked this game up and I love it. Recently popped the A20 achievement (with The Ironclad) after about 250 hours and definitely still feel like a beginner - this game definitely has plenty of depth.
I really recommend not consulting any strat guides / watching any expert playthroughs / etc if you pick this up. So much of the fun is in figuring stuff out on your own. Games are a space where, unlike at work, you can allow yourself that luxury - so enjoy it!
P.S. I also think this game's potential as an honest-to-goodness esport is underappreciated. Not all esports need to be PvP!
I used to top leaderboards with a couple of friends in the 6 years between 98-2004, mostly with RTS and FPS games. What really ruined 'competitive' games for me was World of Warcraft, i think. even though i logged over 800 hours in games like COD4:MW, All the Battlefield games from 2 through 4 (including 2142 and BFBC2, which IMO is the best one), and the like, i wasn't ever able to break top 100. My wife did manage to become either the best or top 2 worldwide with the M249 in bf4, having played about 3 times more hours than i did.
Because of all of that, and the general burnout from Wow 13 years ago or so, i have a hard time caring enough about any game to play it through legitimately; i also no longer play any competitive games at all. I read this article and have added the game to my wishlist for a future purchase, even though, in general, deck building games have never interested me. Since there's thousands of hours of gameplay and banter about the game online, the 'hook' of the article actually got my attention.
I'll never be #1, or top 10, or even top 100 of any game again. I'm mostly ok with that.
I just have to say you shouldn't let your past experiences with grinding skill in old games destroy your ability to enjoy new ones. Slay the Spire is one of the best games to come out in the last three decades in my opinion. It's just that good.
The mobile version plays exactly the same as the PC, my only real issue is the UI elements are really small on my iPhone 11 screen and can be tough to read descriptions. You get used to it and memorize a lot of things over time through sheet reitition so it’s not that big of a deal though.
That's kind of judgmental to say how they should or shouldn't feel about it yeah? You don't generally just decide to feel that way about something that used to be a big part of your life, and you also don't undo feeling that way on a whim.
And nothing about the experience they described centered on the quality of the games, so it also doesn't feel relevant that this one is apparently particularly good.
I didn't take any issue with it, in fact i had already wishlisted this game based just on the article, even though the article had next to nothing to do with the game itself, in my view.
I never realized how much time it took me to get good at those games. I had a period of dominating every game in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but playing any such game now sees me losing every single round.
I’ve had a period of the same with League of Legends more recently, and I especially appreciate that those games take a maximum of 1 hour, but even that is now 10 years in the past.
I think I am content to stick with mostly factory games, and no competitive games now.
One missing part of the STS community is a problems site. I've speculated on creating this:
* capture entire game state in a string
* be able to view the state
* be able to sub in and out the random seed state (in legal ways)
then subject top players to the same fight, with random (but possible) seeds for how it goes from there.
i.e. this excludes "hindsight" where you know/learn the seed state by seeing shuffle order.
If you could do this you set up problems for 100 tough fights, have elite players play them (multiple times each, varying seed), and actually get a comparison function for a subcomponent of the game. i.e. with this current draw and this deck in this fight, under all possible playouts, who has the best results, each playing a random seed N times.
A corollary to this idea would be: as streamers were playing, they could capture the game state into a hash, to share, which someone else could load. i.e. as you are watching someone play a fight load the exact same state into your app and play from there. Hopefully, with a new random seed so there is no hindsight info leaking risk.
This also leads to an interesting game safety improvement: rather than using a seed which never changes from the start of the game (iterating as you play), at every floor, feed your seed in from a central server. This way cheaters would have a much harder time running this scam: in-memory read the game seed and share with a confederate. Confederate invisibly matches your play, then in a tough fight, plays beyond where you are to see what is upcoming in later floors, and relays the info back to you. The dispatching server would know who it gave what seed, so submitted runs could still be fully replayed with the changing seeds. Cheating would still be possible, but somewhat harder.
This would also enable "duplicate STS" more safely where 100 streamers all play the same seed, but since seed changes every floor, hindsight would be less valuable.
I want to splice in an extra hook for this article.
> Around twenty years ago, as a teenager, I was building decks for Magic: the Gathering pro tours, and proudly reached #1 in the world in constructed rank and #3 in the world in limited rank on Magic: the Gathering Online. I later dropped out of college to play poker online, and became one of the strongest No Limit Hold ‘Em cash game players on Pokerstars between 2008 and 2011, easily earning enough to pay for travel and living expenses for most of my 20’s.
For Android users who enjoy Slay the Spire, I recommend checking out Rogue Adventure. I just found it a week ago and I'm hooked. (In fact it's the only game I've been playing since I installed it.) It's free with ads, but the ads are 100% optional and you can pay $5 to get the same rewards.
I won't claim it's anywhere near as well-designed or as well-balanced as StS, but there are 12 classes and it looks like there's a similarly deep replay value.
> Its non-competitive merits are superlative. Competitive card games of comparable complexity have existed for decades with incredible popularity — Magic: the Gathering, Hearthstone, Poker — and Slay the Spire removes the need for those games to have an opponent for you to play against.
Slay the Spire is a great game, but comparing it's complexity to Magic the Gathering is laughable. It is a MUCH simpler game.
> As such, it is my opinion that it is fairly easily the most valuable game in the world for people who are interested in complex card games but disinterested in competition.
So we start by establishing a unproven premise, and then justify the rest of the essay based on this.
> I later dropped out of college to play poker online, and became one of the strongest No Limit Hold ‘Em cash game players on Pokerstars between 2008 and 2011, easily earning enough to pay for travel and living expenses for most of my 20’s.
Paying for living expenses is a questionable bar for success. I paid for living expenses delivering pizzas for Domino's. And I probably worked less hours.
Not to pick on the poster. I just think this essay could have a better introduction. Why bother establishing premises that you could never hope to actually establish in the first place?
"I was a competitive Magic the Gathering player, and also a professional online poker player. With this credentials established, I will tell you why I enjoy Slay the Spire more and present to you a history of world records in Slay the Spire.
Pushing that it is a simpler game is a bit of a non sequitur. In many ways, chess is also a simpler game. Wouldn't make sense to claim it is laughably so, though.
Similarly, paying for things with an hourly job is very different than doing do so with a competitive job where pay is not guaranteed.
I get the impression you are asking if the credentials make him an authority. No idea, there. They do give a good reference point to how much they liked card games, though.
>Paying for living expenses is a questionable bar for success. I paid for living expenses delivering pizzas for Domino's. And I probably worked less hours.
Success obviously depends on the objective. Paying for living expenses is successes for billions of people. Doing so in a zero sum (or negative sum) game of skill is a valid definition. More so if winnings cover your living for a decade after you stop playing. I'm guessing that delivering pizzas didn't allow you to retire and travel in comfort for years after.
It means you play through the four characters in order in four successive runs, e.g. ironclad -> silent -> defect -> watcher, rather than e.g. just playing the watcher (the character generally considered the easiest to win with at high skill levels) 4 times in a row.
That was my best guess too. But I feel like there could easily be some other meaning that makes sense to someone who has obsessively played thousands of games of Spire.
There must be something I'm doing wrong. I've logged a lot of hours in this game and I'm nowhere near as good as what this player describes. Out of 10 runs I can make it to the end probably 3 times.
Slay the Spire is a really hard game because you rarely get immediate feedback on your decisions. As human beings, we thrive on rapid feedback loops and can very quickly learn to do a task when they are present. It takes an entirely different sort of thinking to look back and say "all those attack cards I took in Act 1 just ended clogging my deck in Act 3!" when the two situations may be an hour and a half or more apart.
Another really challenging aspect to StS is that the immediate feedback you do get may be entirely unhelpful or even counterproductive. Taking all those attack cards in Act 1 can make your deck feel a lot more powerful... in Act 1. But essentially you've sacrificed the long-term viability of your deck for short term strength.
I found watching and reading a couple of good videos to establish some 'framework' about the game really helped me out here. Before I learned about the game, I had a similar win rate to you.
After learning about the game, however, the non ascension runs almost felt too easy. This is because I had misconceptions on how the game should be played: I found that the cards I thought were valuable were actually bad. With this new knowledge I could easily pick out the 'right play' and come out ahead in situations where I would have normally perished.
I've lost interest around ascension 10. But this experience really made me realise how much we stand on shoulders of giants for thinking about literally everything, from programming to an indie card game. In the essay, the author says he'd rather say he has "extended" win streak records rather than "broke" the win streak records and I think this captures my feeling exactly.
Go watch Jorbs play (the author). In particular his "over-explained" runs on YouTube are good for getting in-depth breakdowns.
There's a bit of an unavoidable learning curve initially in learning the cards in each deck, because so much of the strategy comes down to analysing what your deck can currently do, and what adding (or not adding) a card to it will change.
He's played close to 10000 hours, and has an obvious talent for games. I know a lot of StS players, and it typically takes people a few hundred hours to be ready for Ascension 20 kills (hardest difficulty). None of the players I know have even half the win-rate of someone like Jorbs. It's taken me over 300 hours to get to two characters on Ascension 19 and one on Ascension 17. I'm genuinely mediocre, but it's just a tough game.
Well, this guy was a #1-ranked MTG player, so it's not a fair comparison for most of us mortals. It took me hundreds of tries and some very good luck to beat A20.
Around twenty years ago, as a teenager, I was building decks for Magic: the
Gathering pro tours, and proudly reached #1 in the world in constructed rank and
#3 in the world in limited rank on Magic: the Gathering Online.
So that's world number 1 in M:tG Online. From experience, M:tG Online is (was?) a less competitive game than the physical-cardboard game and I'm not even sure that even in the cardboard game DCI rankings (the "rank" in the article) is exactly correlated with being one of the top players at sanctioned tournaments, like Pro-Tours and World Championships, or their qualifying events. I think it's possible, oddly enough, to have a high rank in DCI points without being a pro. For example I seem to remember Friday Night Magic tournaments conferring DCI points for wins (and taking them away for losses). But it seems the whole system has been discontinued by Wizards of the Coast so I can't easily check how it works anymore (or check my own rank...).
I called it good at ascension 2 and uninstalled, doesn’t the novelty and enjoyment wear off long before you’d hit ascension 20? I guess this is maybe why I’ve never really been an expert at anything just pretty good.
> doesn’t the novelty and enjoyment wear off long before you’d hit ascension 20?
I don't think it's a problem at all that you didn't enjoy it after A2. Some folks do (like Jorbs or your comment's parent) and some don't.
If your line of questioning was more along the lines of why it didn't wear off, I can give my own anecdote. I found that the increase of difficulty makes the game more interesting to think about because you have to be much more methodical in how you craft your deck and play it. There are a lot of variables to manage and account for too.
I kind of feel like by A2 I’d have figured out where the optimizations are, and it’s just a matter of finding them, not sure if I’d have the energy to actually try them in game.
No, that's backwards. On low difficulty you can indeed force a strategy chosen in advance, but as the game gets more difficult you need to make choices that trade off the late-game power of your deck against the needs right now (so you can get to the late game at all)
To transliterate your comment into an equivalent context:
I feel like after 12 or so hours of chess I'd figure out how to not hang pieces. From there, how to find the best moves is just a question of dedicating energy into finding them in game.
I'm not sure why anyone plays more than 100 or so hours of chess. Doesn't it get boring?
Until you've actually played at A20 it's hard to understand how different the game is. There are picks for cards, relics, shop purchases, etc, that are absolutely crucial to get an A20 heart kill that you would never even consider picking at A2.
You could always "cheat" and skip straight to A20 (I assume there is a way to do so, at least). I find the difference between low ascension and A20 to be rather large, so while it's true that optimal play at A20 will work at A2, I'm not sure I was capable of that when I was at A2.
I like watching people play Slay the Spire online. I can see that it's very deep and sometimes quite suspenseful.
It's weird to me as a NetHack and DCSS player that people view it as a "roguelike" (though I think "roguelite" is more common). I've spent thousands of hours playing those games and won at both of them, though not anywhere near a competitive level. And Slay the Spire feels extraordinarily unlike them to me.
Like, it's turn-based, and has hitpoints, permadeath, and a randomized map. But (apart from the graphics question), it has no grid, it has a discrete combat mode, almost everything dangerous occurs only during combat mode, your inventory is only useful during combat mode, you access different parts of your inventory at different times due to the deckbuilding mechanism, you can't usefully retreat to a cleared area or otherwise cause enemies to move or not move on the map, and you have no character stats, skills, or intrinsics except max HP (although relics could be viewed as providing an equivalent to intrinsics), and there's no equippable armor, melee weapons, or ranged weapons.
Is "roguelikeness" enough of a flamebait topic by now that I just ought not bring this up?
I don't know that it's a flamebait topic, I just don't see people using the term in such a strict manner as it was originally defined. But I also don't play games like NetHack.
I know "rougelike" to mean a game with permadeath, some amount of randomization to vary gameplay (typically manifested in levels and items), and various levels you progress through one-by-one. So there isn't a restriction on 2D vs 3D, turn-based vs realtime, etc.
"Rougelite" to me means a rougelike with permanent upgrade mechanics. It's a little nuanced, but the idea is that in a game like Hades (a rougelite) you gain points after dying to upgrade your health, attacks, etc., whereas in a game like Slay the Spire (a roguelike) you just unlock additional cards or characters to choose from (I'm going to ignore the Neow bonus... again, it's subjective).
All said, I still see games on Steam classify themselves incorrectly, so perhaps the distinction I make between "-like" and "-lite" is itself more pedantic than most people care about.
In whatever way these terms will eventually crystallize, I think the addition of meta-progression to the permadeath+randomization combo is important enough to call the result a new genre. It’s a very fun and addictive combination.
I’m also going to say that unlocking cards qualifies as progression. Unlocking pure cosmetics is not progression, and unlocking starting options (like available character classes) that are intended to be mostly balanced is a grey area.
One thing classical roguelikes had was local highscore lists (they were intended to be played on a shared mainframe), which would be meaningless with meta-progression. I find it interesting that Spelunky, which follows the old formula a lot more closely, also has a mode with daily leaderboards. That’s not really something for me, but I think many people really enjoy that kind of fair competition.
>> In whatever way these terms will eventually crystallize, I think the addition of meta-progression to the permadeath+randomization combo is important enough to call the result a new genre. It’s a very fun and addictive combination.
I see it more as an attempt to balance out the harsh penalty imposed by permadeath in the original roguelikes, like Nethack. I remember when I first played Nethack, I was really annoyed by that, and I really didn't see the fun in having to start all over again everytime my character died, even given the procedural generation (which means that you at least don't have to go through the same level every time). And I was really curious to see how the game developed. But I didn't have the time to grind, Grind, GRIND. So... I savescummed.
Btw, one very popular game that has permadeath and procedural generation, and where the only between-game reward is unlocking new characters, is Don't Starve. But, somehow, I never see it included in the roquelikes even though it sticks much closer to the original formula than, say, Slay the Spire, Hades or Dead Cells, etc. I don't want to use the word "hardcore" but Don't Starve is fucking hardcore, compared to those other games and I never felt like I wanted to savescum in any of the other games, while I routinely savescum in Don't Starve (I even have a shell script to do it quickly).
I think that progression is not necessary a disqualifier for roguelikes, depending on implementation.
Many games use unlocks essentially as a tutorial, after which there is no metaprogression.
Many games also have unlockable difficulty levels as a form of metaprogression.
Slay falls into both these categories, but I don't think this is a disqualifier. All cards are unlocked after perhaps 20 hours of play, but most players will never have the skill to unlock the highest difficulty levels.
From what I can tell, your description of "roguelike" is the common usage today.
However, 20 years ago, a "roguelike" was a turn-based RPG of the lineage of Rogue—which usually meant it was a single-character top-down game with permadeath, grid-based movement, ASCII graphics (and maybe also a tileset or two, by then, but still quite simple compared to something like StS), and a procedurally-generated dungeon that you had to fight your way to the bottom of. (Some also required a subsequent ascension; others didn't.)
I believe the transition in terminology occurred some time around when The Binding of Isaac came out/became popular.
It can be a bit frustrating sometimes for those of us who grew up playing the old-style roguelikes when we want to go find ones we haven't played before, because most of what searching on the term turns up these days is the new-style ones.
People use the term to mainly mean procedural generation, permadeath, and random upgrades.
But it's like arguing whether something really is "deep house" or not on electronic music forums. At a certain point you have to accept that not everyone's definition is the exact same, appreciate the common themes, and try to enjoy the show anyways.
If you play real roguelikes then you are probably old enough to remember the days when games starte to add "RPG Elements" to their genre description. "RPG Elements" meant then that there was some way to level up and gain stats or skills or something like that. Nowadays these games usually just tack on the word RPG if they really want to emphasize that skill trees are a meaningful part of gameplay.
A similar thing happened here, originally a few games were "inpsired by roguelikes" and then had "roguelike elements". Nowadays if it has procedural generation and some form of permadeath it is a roguelike. Recently I've heard that it was common to use "roguelite" if there's some important meta-progression where you get significantly more powerful between runs (like Rogue Legacy) and "roguelike" if the meta progression mostly just unlocks new stuff for runs and doesn't make you significantly stronger (arguably like The Binding of Isaac). I won't be surprised if the meaning changes even further before really settling.
I think this is a bit like how US people call orange-fleshed sweet-potatoes "yams". If I understand correctly, the orange-fleshed sweet potatoes were introduced to the market later than the white-fleshed ones and there was a need to diversify them the better to sell them as something new, so they were called "yams" by sellers and growers, I suppose. This is confusing because "yam" is a completely different plant:
Although the soft, orange sweet potato is often called a "yam" in parts of North America, the sweet potato is very distinct from the botanical yam (Dioscorea), which has a cosmopolitan distribution,[8] and belongs to the monocot family Dioscoreaceae. A different crop plant, the oca (Oxalis tuberosa, a species of wood sorrel), is called a "yam" in many parts of Polynesia, including New Zealand.[9]
And of course sweet potatoes, of any kind, are not potatoes at all. It's just a name that people give it that sounds familiar and that perhaps helps figure out how to use it.
For "roguelikes" (or "rougelikes"? That seems to be an established spelling now) I think one important effect is that it helps direct gamers who hate permadeath away from games that have it.
That's sort of the point of the 'roguelite' term, to describe games that are not what people used to call 'roguelikes' (i.e. games pretty similar to actual Rogue). The key element is repetition (a game that has 'runs' as a core part of its gameplay) - there are others but most things with that mechanic are called 'roguelites'.
As interesting as it may be, I can hardly accept the argument that it is in any way competitive. Playing against static mobs with a finite game-tree is inherently...not very competitive? And not particularly entertaining either.
It's not like the game tree is infinite. The mobs and their attack patterns are all known in advance.
At some point during the win-streak, aren't you really just competing against the seed generator for a more favorable bunch of seeds that let you have the longest win-streak?
An achievement, yes, in the same sense that a speedrun is an achievement, and improving it is also technically an achievement.
But in my mind, the title of a competitive game are reserved strictly for games where the gameplay itself is performed against another player or a team.
Not to belittle his achievement, I'm sure it's very meaningful (to him).
You just argued that running (100m, marathon, etc) is not competitive, that weightlifting is not competitive, that bowling is not competitive, that target shooting is not competitive. Just achievements.
That's fine, you can humpty-dumpty words all you like, but everyone else thinks that those things can be competitive.
However, note that literally the entire point of the author of the blog post is that he doesn't want to be competitive and does not see his own behaviour as competitive, but rather as collaborating on achievement, so it's super weird that you're snarking on him.
> You just argued that running (100m, marathon, etc) is not competitive, that weightlifting is not competitive, that bowling is not competitive, that target shooting is not competitive. Just achievements.
Absolutely not. You misread my argument (whether intentionally or unintentionally).
> That's fine, you can humpty-dumpty words all you like, but everyone else thinks that those things can be competitive.
You can humpty-dumpty words all you like, but "everyone" is just you.
Is trying to beat the highest depth of stockfish in chess not competitive? It is a sequence of deterministic, open-information multiple-choice actions.
It's not that deterministic, multiple choice games can't be competitive, it's that they need different things from your average solo sport to make them competitive.
Beating STS is a test of adaptability; the game is hard, and getting long winstreaks is not an easy feat (or winning at all).
The game has enough variety that getting a streak of "favorable" seeds is not going to happen. You might get a truly heinous seed that is basically unbeatable no matter what you do, but most seeds will be beatable exactly because you know the possible challenges so you can make decisions that give you the best chance of defeating them.
>An achievement, yes, in the same sense that a speedrun is an achievement, and improving it is also technically an achievement.
>But in my mind, the title of a competitive game are reserved strictly for games where the gameplay itself is performed against another player or a team.
Seems like a very arbitrary position to take. Competition is simply the exercise of comparison and raking against another human in any activity. Some games/activities are designed to foster and facilitate more competition than others.
Anything can become competitive, as it is a function of how people approach an activity, not what it is.
You can say that Slay the Spire is not a game designed for completion, but that doesn't negate the reality that some people clearly compete for records and leaderboards, and a competitive scene exists.
He isn't the most talkative player.
Other interesting people to look up are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEvDtGBqQFk .
Another good one is lifecoach1984 on twitch.