So... Triple Triad

I love Triple Triad. It was my favorite part of FFVIII, and it is one of my favorite pastimes in FFXIV. Having said that, I think that the game is in dire need of some fundamental changes in order to keep it relevant.

Rules
As any of you who play Triple Triad are aware, your deck is currently limited by the following rules:

• If you own less than 30 cards, your deck can contain four 1 star cards and one 1-5 stars card.
• If you own between 30 and 59 cards, your deck can contain four 1-2 stars cards and one 1-5 stars card.
• If you own more than 60 cards, your deck can contain four 1-3 stars cards and one 1-5 stars card.

These rules are extremely limiting in terms of the number of possible decks that players can create, which is in turn causing players to use the same decks (with some slight variations). Most of the decks currently involve four of the 8/8/1/4 cards and one 5-star card (the 5-star card is where you see the most variance, but the most common ones are corner A/A cards followed by Therion, Cloud, and Ardbert). For same/plus rules, I occasionally also see sets with the four lords cards (7/7/7/1) and Brute Justice (7/7/7/7).

The current deck limitations are effectively making 4-star cards worthless for the most part. There will occasionally be a situation (usually Ascension rules) where it makes sense to include them in your deck, but - for the most part - the only point of collecting these cards is for the sake of completion.

Accordingly, it would be nice if the limitations were changed to look at the sum of the number of stars in your deck instead of the number of {X}-star cards in your deck. For example:

• If you own less than 30 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 9 stars.
• If you own between 30 and 59 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 13 stars.
• If you own more than 60 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 17 stars.

Even just making the above changes would probably be enough to fix the current situation, but to make it even better, it would be nice to see an additional condition such as follows:

• If you own more than 200 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 21 stars.

It doesn't necessarily even need to be 21 - I just used that number because all of the other bumps increased the number of stars you can have by 4. Even if the current limitations were to be retained, something such as the following could even work (this would not allow for as much variation as the above but would still be better than the current situation):

• If you own more than 200 cards, your deck can contain three 1-3 stars cards, one 1-4 star card, and one 1-5 stars card.

I had to break this up into 2 posts due to length; here is the last part:

Incentives
Another issue with Triple Triad is that, after a very low threshold, the only reward for collecting more cards is more cards. There is the "Duelist" title (which you get from winning 100 Triple Triad tournament matches), "The Trinity" title (which you get from winning 1,000 Triple Triad roulette matches), and "Deck Hoarder" (which you get from obtaining 60 unique Triple Triad cards). However, the reward for obtaining any number of cards beyond 60 is just more cards. It would be nice if there was some sort of additional higher-end title, minion, mount, glamour, orchestrion roll, or something associated with Triple Triad like there is with Chocobo Racing, Lord of Verminion, and Mahjong. Having more cards is cool, but I don't think I will really ever use any of these given the current deck limitations and how that is causing people to play in tournaments. (I've come in 1st place in many of the tournaments that I've participated in and am saying this is someone who is disappointed by / getting bored with the Triple Triad scene as a result of these restrictions causing the PvP scene in particular to be too predictable.)


I'm sure someone else has probably raised this before, but I think it is worth raising again and worth revisiting in any event.

Man I hate that 4 star cards are basically useless. Would be nice to have 3 3 stars, 1 4 star and 1 5 star allowed in your deck at some point just to have a use for them.

I don’t think it necessarily needs to allow “stronger” decks, but just more cards gives more options, otherwise it just boils down to most cards likely gets the win.

Rather I would like to see more rules introduced on how to play.. More variation or even multi deck battles vs an opponent (say 3 decks back to back, with no duplicates across all 3 decks)...but then again it’s a super simple card game...so can’t go all magic the gathering with it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kaynide

I don’t think it necessarily needs to allow “stronger” decks, but just more cards gives more options, otherwise it just boils down to most cards likely gets the win.

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If that is truly a concern that SE has, perhaps they don't need to implement the "If you own more than 200 cards, ..." thing I suggested above (as that would indeed make your deck stronger); however, I do think that they should at least implement something like the baseline change that I proposed, which was:

• If you own less than 30 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 9 stars.
• If you own between 30 and 59 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 13 stars.
• If you own more than 60 cards, your deck can contain cards with an aggregate total of up to 17 stars.

This would give players the same number of aggregate stars to work with as the current rules, but it would allow for more flexibility. For example, with 17 stars total, you could have one 5-star card, one 4-star card, two 3-star cards and one 2-star card; you could even have three 5-star cards and two 1-star cards if that's how you wanted to play it. If this would create imbalance issues, they could limit the number of 5-star and 4-star cards you have. In any event, something really needs to be done to create situations where it actually makes sense to use a 4-star card. Otherwise they're just sitting there collecting dust because, under the current rules, you have to use a 4-star card instead of a 5-star card, which (in most situations) is an unfavorable trade-off.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoH

they're just sitting there collecting dust because,

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A perfect suggestion ruined by this 1 line! It's digital nothing collects dust!

*silliness aside*


Man, I'd love these changes. To be real, I just started trying triple triad and played a few rounds, now completely turned off from it. The rules in place now stifle any creativity, it is boring, and I don't enjoy it. I also don't like that I can acquire extremely powerful cards that I'll probably never use from a raid, the acquisition method probably is only there to get someone interested in the Triple Triad content as it is. If I want to play cards of any kind I'll be sure to do it else where tho. FFXIV triple triad about as exciting as remembering utility payment is due.

Yeah I don't see the point in 4-star cards, I never use them in any situation because the 5-star cards completely outclass the 4 star cards in every way possible.

The only time 5-star cards are useless if you have to use low-stat cards to win certain types of card battles.

It would be nice if they removed the silly restriction on 4-star cards and allow us the use of one 4-star card.

All i can hope is that the AI would not cheat so much xD

You're not the first to suggest this, and it's a really good suggestion since, not only it makes the 4-stars cards usable, it also adds a much needed depth to TT (it would also be possible to just allow 3+3+3+4+5, so we can use 4-stars, but we wouldn't earn anything gameplay-wise)
Sadly the devs don't care much about older content.

Importing TT nearly "as is" from FF8 was a pretty dumb move in the first place, because it's not that interesting but it was cool 20 years ago since it was "new", and its short-comings could be cancelled by the godly power of reloading a game saved just before playing.
(for example the "combo" from plus/same rules makes the game feel random)
The only accomplishment with FF14 TT is they found a way to make it even worse with dumb rule like Chaos.

I support the OP, we need more Updates to Triple Triad, because it's an excellent minigame.

I like the idea of the total star based system, rather then a hard limit on X rares, that will really open up deck design.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoH

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I don’t think it is unreasonable to have different levels of deck play (as you said with the 3 tiers). With the standard play being that 60 card/17 star variant.

I very much like the stars being counted towards deck design. Good idea there.

Otherwise, I would like to see more match types like I said above, or a “op deck battle” with only 4 and 5 star cards or some such.

In short, I think once you have about 60 cards you should be able to play all available content, but there should be some interesting twist matches available to keep it interesting.

Alternatively, a new kind of board which allows for drawing from your deck (so a 5x5 or even 7x7 board with 15-30 card “decks” that are drawn from randomly as you place from hand. )

...though yeah that starts to take away from the simplicity.

I might be talking out of my arse here, but I'm pretty sure I remember Yoshi-P explicitly stating in an interview that changes were coming to TT in patch 5.1.

Whatever happened to said changes is a mystery.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jin-

All i can hope is that the AI would not cheat so much xD

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NPC with 2 or even 3 4/5 star cards, and if swap is active they conveniently switch their single 3 star with your single 5 star
https://emoji.gg/assets/emoji/PepeHands.png

NPCs could also use an overhaul. Some matches like the Hien-card NPC feels completely random if you win or lose due to the power cards they have and the rules. Other NPCs have several 4/5 star cards and a fallen ace, but no A cards, so you can't even use the rule against the NPC. At least they got rid of random, totally busted rule that only hurt the player and never the NPC.

I have mixed feelings on TT.

I enjoy the base gameplay aspect of it, but once you get to the last set of cards you have to grind, it stops being fun, and turns into "have these cards, get first card, goad the ai into playing very badly (more than a few cannot lose if the game is played normally, i.e. they dont take your 3-1-2-1 by putting their A-9 into a corner where its two low values are exposed and instead stuff it in a corner where you have no ability to beat it, which they do if they get the first turn, and then take your sacrifice later on when you cant instantly re-cap it), win 6-4.

Unfortunately, I think that the NPCs' logic being so bad is why they have to give the NPCs overpowered cards that violate all of the rules that PCs have to adhere to / silly rulesets like Chaos or Roulette/Roulette (I think that with some local rules you can even get Roulette/Roulette/Roulette/Roulette if I'm remembering correctly). Even then, none of the PCs are very hard. The only "difficult" part is having the patience to play the same PC for hours on end until they drop the card you need because of the abysmal drop rate on some of these cards.

My main reason for suggesting these changes is to improve the PvP scene so that folks can create more innovative decks (instead of the same few card combinations that I mentioned in my original post). Combining that along with some more incentives to place well in tournaments would be a relatively easy way for SE to add some new "content" to the game while also making things a lot better for those of us who like Triple Triad.

From today's live letter:

https://i.imgur.com/FsnB4u2.png

Pretty excited about this!

Just wanted to add if you want to go over the character limit you can edit your post after posting it, so your steps would look something like:

1. write post
2. copy the entire post, be sure you've done so in a way that you wont loose all your writing (or else /ja "Mijin Gakure" <t>)
3. publish / post only a fraction of the content or simply write like /10char jibberish to get past the minimum word count
4. immediately edit your post, select all (to overwrite your fragment) and paste the content, save post
5. . . .?
6. Win at the miners guild

Also on a further aside turning on your copy paste history, if you use windows, can be nice so then if you did something silly it's still in the history clip board and can be retrieved.


For my final tangent act! I just wanted to openly wonder about if triple triad on the mog companion app would be played a lot. Like perhaps you get 5 games each day you can play to win MGP and compete in tournaments or whatever, you can continue to play after that you just wont get MGP or other tokens that would make botting a serious issue (botting on android apps even easier than PC). There could be no restrictions, but then you might have more open bots on said content.. so that's a concern. In terms of opponents you could play against any npc you've met before (doesn't have to be won) and naturally join the player queue.