Master Duel errata

[Kaulu]

Shower thought I had. What if they use MD as a testing ground for erratas. It would hopefully avoid IO situations where a card is changed, only to still be broken and rebanned after reprinting. They could also change things like the cannon soldier like cards that are banned, but when changed with a simple hard once per turn on their effect would see no real play. Since it's digital, they don't need to do a full reprint of the cards, meaning people who want to use them in their weakened state can, but also, if the "fix" ends up still being broken, they can simply reban until they tweak it again without having more dead physical cards in rotation.

They could even change the bug everyone loves to hate so that it can only be used while you have an empty field, or a max card draw, or both.

Basically, outside a few outliers that are broken by design, or simply too punishing to the other player(any cards that prevent drawing during the draw phase entirely, for example), I'd rather the ban list be as small as possible. If the problem is cards having different effects in MD compared to OCG/TCG, you could simply show clearly on the card that it is an MD errata, and let people see the OCG/TCG effect when inspecting a card in non-duel settings, alongside the MD effect.

[Merilirem]

Obviously this would be a logical thing for them to do but MD kinda has to catch up and get proper features for general gameplay before they can start adding testing modes. It would have to be a mode btw. You would test it in the mode then what worked would go live for awhile and then if it worked well enough they could put it in physical.

MD should absolutely be a testing ground for stuff if they want the game to be balanced. People already do it on the sims anyway so they lose nothing.

Personally I just want them to reverse some of those Errata's they already did. Some cards got powercrept so hard after an overdone Errata.

[JKArtorias]

You cannot fix the bug.

No matter what it is either unusable or overly strong. Ban it. That is the only fix. Any card advantage is good card advantage a limit won't change anything.
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Getting past that, yes erratas would be cool and genuinely interesting as it'd be an incentive for every modern Yugioh fan to play Master Duel. Creating a larger playerbase of Yugioh fans. As well as give Yugioh Youtubers something to do, lol.

But i'd say there's very few cards on the banlist that can get an errata and it be useful time for developers. Aka contribute something positive to the state of the game. I don't mean no negative impact i mean a net positive.

There's also cards that can be taken off the banlist and not impact the meta. I believe Knightmare Mermaid can literally be taken off today and not hurt anything.

[Papa Shekels]

It's not that simple. The biggest issues with erratas are not only the distribution of updated cards, but the inconsistency between formats. It's already bad enough we have to wait half a year to get cards in MD that we already have on physical store shelves (and closer to a year for OCG), and that the ban lists are different between each format, but having cards literally do different things between them would split that divide even further and ruin the connectivity within the game.

Speaking of ban lists, this is another problem with it. TCG and OCG differ greatly on what they value within the game, and the majority of ban list offenders are there for good reason, with many other cards that are out on parole but probably should have life sentences anyway. OCG thinks the bug is fine, so they have no reason to change it when it's already legal. Then they have absolutely toxic cards like block dragon, auroradon, or galaxy tomahawk legal that enable degenerate combos under the premise that they are kept in check. Or look at FTKs, TCG has cannon soldier and its variants legal but bans cards that enable infinite loops too easily, while OCG banned cannon soldier and is more lenient on the enablers. How would they decide which cards should be run for erratas and which shouldn't when they can't even agree on which cards are problematic? And if the trial run was successful, how would they push it out? Do we errata a card that is legal and not causing issues in a format just because it caused problems in a different format under a different ban list to make it pay for some other card's crimes? Or do they errata a card like archnemeses protos, which isn't even that big of a problem in MD but is absolutely broken in a bo3 format that master duel doesn't have? How do they test a fix for a card that isn't broken in the testing grounds?

Even with all the logistics problems aside, this would specifically mean that they start throwing out more erratas more liberally in an effort to manipulate the ban list. They have historically shown that it's something they don't take lightly and that is only really used as a last resort for something that otherwise can't be justified. And there's a good reason they don't want to step into that territory, it's a swamp of bad things waiting to happen. At best, they have a card that becomes legally playable at the cost of ruining its legacy, which many players get upset about. At worst, the card is ruined and also just becomes unplayable in the process, like with chaos emperor dragon. At that point, the problems of distributing updated cards is a secondary concern on top of the much bigger problems they risk creating when messing with the sensitive balance of such an enormous card pool

[Thain]

How do you know they have or don't have a developer version of MD? The issue is more like there are thousands of players vs that 20 30 members from the play testing department. Bound to have few individual creative players that can come up with insane deck. Also, it is not the department responsibility to come up with insane deck anyway. They are more like ruling and functional of the card.

I personally think errata should focus more on banned cards. I don't agree cards should be ban. Since Ancient Fairy and Firewall dragon can get off the list just by errata, why not all of them?

[C.C. 折オリ枝 の 夫]

Originally posted by Papa Shekels:

It's not that simple. The biggest issues with erratas are not only the distribution of updated cards, but the inconsistency between formats. It's already bad enough we have to wait half a year to get cards in MD that we already have on physical store shelves (and closer to a year for OCG), and that the ban lists are different between each format, but having cards literally do different things between them would split that divide even further and ruin the connectivity within the game.

Speaking of ban lists, this is another problem with it. TCG and OCG differ greatly on what they value within the game, and the majority of ban list offenders are there for good reason, with many other cards that are out on parole but probably should have life sentences anyway. OCG thinks the bug is fine, so they have no reason to change it when it's already legal. Then they have absolutely toxic cards like block dragon, auroradon, or galaxy tomahawk legal that enable degenerate combos under the premise that they are kept in check. Or look at FTKs, TCG has cannon soldier and its variants legal but bans cards that enable infinite loops too easily, while OCG banned cannon soldier and is more lenient on the enablers. How would they decide which cards should be run for erratas and which shouldn't when they can't even agree on which cards are problematic? And if the trial run was successful, how would they push it out? Do we errata a card that is legal and not causing issues in a format just because it caused problems in a different format under a different ban list to make it pay for some other card's crimes? Or do they errata a card like archnemeses protos, which isn't even that big of a problem in MD but is absolutely broken in a bo3 format that master duel doesn't have? How do they test a fix for a card that isn't broken in the testing grounds?

Even with all the logistics problems aside, this would specifically mean that they start throwing out more erratas more liberally in an effort to manipulate the ban list. They have historically shown that it's something they don't take lightly and that is only really used as a last resort for something that otherwise can't be justified. And there's a good reason they don't want to step into that territory, it's a swamp of bad things waiting to happen. At best, they have a card that becomes legally playable at the cost of ruining its legacy, which many players get upset about. At worst, the card is ruined and also just becomes unplayable in the process, like with chaos emperor dragon. At that point, the problems of distributing updated cards is a secondary concern on top of the much bigger problems they risk creating when messing with the sensitive balance of such an enormous card pool

To add to this, you also can't say "just errata cards that are banned in all 3 formats, since well, they're problems in all 3" because if a card is banned in 2 formats and legal in the 3rd, it's easy to see people from the other 2 formats try to pressure the 3rd to ban it as well so it can start getting an errata, and that's assuming it won't even be happening at corporate level where the teams handling the banlists will try to pressure the one that didn't ban the card to ban it so they can start making an errata to unban it.

Honestly, erratas shouldn't happen in the first place, just keep the card banned and keep it's legacy intact, rather than having the card either be a handicapped version of itself at best, or an empty shell of it's former self.