The Needle isn't bad, it's just horribly explained

[Islamisalami]

The needle's description in the menu and in the game just says "play only one hand". So the logical assumption is "oh I can only play one hand type" so you go for something safe like a three of a kind. Wrong, it actually means you only have one turn. I can't be the only person that's suffered from misunderstanding this.

[taggedjc]

There's another boss blind that lets you play only one hand type, and it's phrased differently.

So I think The Needle is worded perfectly fine. It says you play only one hand, and you do play only one hand.

If you play three or more hands that are the same type of hand, you've played more than one hand, after all!

[Winter Wolf]

I think the reason people dislike the Needle is that despite the slightly lower ante needed, it means if your average hand score is not able to hit it, you auto lose. It is a test of how good your line up is. Not as hard as the wall and Violet thing but still tough. It helps to discard down to the best hand but even then you are hoping your jokers can pull it out.

As to badly named: There IS a point to what you say but exactly how you mean it.

Hand is used several different ways in poker (and other card games) and even more so in Balatro where it refers to cards in hand, the hand you play and total hand size which all relate but are not the same. I suspect this blind's description is caused by a language barrier difficulty on your part rather than the confusion between different uses of hand because context should explain it properly to a native English speaker.

[BeautifulFlowerField]

this is a roguelike game where you go through runs quick with a fast restart, once you do it once you'd get it so it's not worth complaining about. nitpick

[Ricey, Professional 70's Pimp]

Originally posted by Islamisalami:

The needle's description in the menu and in the game just says "play only one hand". So the logical assumption is "oh I can only play one hand type" so you go for something safe like a three of a kind. Wrong, it actually means you only have one turn. I can't be the only person that's suffered from misunderstanding this.

agreed. if you don't pay attention to it you may mistaken it for the other boss, which is only 1 hand TYPE. I have made this mistake so many times up until recently. Now I watch like a hawk to make sure I read it right

[Harmonica]

There's a couple of bits of language the game uses maybe too interchangeably like hands, hand size and hand type, mult and... MULT. Also not fond of 'negative' since everyone I've ever watched play has assumed this is a downside and ignored those jokers for sometimes quite a few hours until they work out what its describing. 'Adding a joker slot is good right how is this a negative? Oh well I'll ignore it for now.' Could be called inverted or something instead but maybe that ship has sailed.

On the one hand I appreciate the desire to not add masses of jargon like most of these games, however maybe a few different keywords could be used. +mult and XMULT is the biggest offender, honestly, since the effects are both red, its both mult, and the only distinguishing part is + versus X. Even recolouring one of them would help a lot.

[Ronald Brain]

People need to slow down and actually SEE stuff on the screen for once lol. I'm half blind, sure, but I can read boss description AND see that the "Hand" number goes to 1 as soon as this boss is up, so I knew what's up.

"Negative: +1 Joker Slot"... Again, English isn't my natural language, but if I see something that increase my inventory capacity, I'd always assume "yeah that's a good thing, let's take it".

"+Mult vs. xMult"... really? Do we have to spell it out like "add X mult" or "multiple your Mult by X"? Again, never good at English, yet I could reasonably guess the Joker's function just by visually imagining it in my head. This game either badly need localization, or the general gamers are just bad at reading right now.

[Harmonica]

@Ronald
Negative is a piggybacking issue, something Balatro otherwise is very good at, where players bring the experience of mechanics or terms from all the games or other media. So seeing 'Negative' in a popup at the point in the game where you're not aware that those tags are positive, just tends to suggest that there's a negative downside to this effect. And yes they do read the "+1 joker slots" part, but these things fight each other and the only best assumption they can make is that adding a slot is a downside somehow. The whole part of it purely being a tag name tied to the visual effect is just not noticeable enough compared to holographic etc.

+/X is easy to miss because +mult is talked about in the tutorial but Xmult is not, so it's a reasonable assumption these are the same things, especially since they are both called mult, and not for example mult or super mult. Also +/X is not so easy to spot if you're new to the game and don't have perfect eye-sight and are playing on a display at some distance!

I would agree more with the 'do gamers just not read things anymore' part if I hadn't seen some of the most experienced and strongest players on the planet at other games - and who specifically are mechanics nerds - having made these mistakes/assumptions :)

[bastardmessiah]

The game does a good job of explaining itself through small blurbs of text.

Not perfect, just "good".

Some of the text-blurbs aren't 100% clear at first, but you eventually learn through trial and error.

I've played for 3-4 dozen hours, and now I don't think there's anything left for me to misunderstand.

However, if people can think of a better way to phrase some of the game's terms and mechanics, the developer(s) would probably be willing to listen.

It is an oddity that the cards you're holding AND the cards you're playing are both called a "hand". Normal poker doesn't have that problem because you're either holding cards or playing them -- not doing both at the same time.

Perhaps some new terminology can be introduced for Balatro, but it needs to be done in a way that is easy for players to understand. Otherwise, it's just trading one problem for another problem.

[Draco18s]

Originally posted by bastardmessiah:

It is an oddity that the cards you're holding AND the cards you're playing are both called a "hand".

The held cards are actually referred to as "held" most of the time.

[Ronald Brain]

Originally posted by Harmonica:

Negative is a piggybacking issue, something Balatro otherwise is very good at, where players bring the experience of mechanics or terms from all the games or other media. So seeing 'Negative' in a popup at the point in the game where you're not aware that those tags are positive, just tends to suggest that there's a negative downside to this effect. And yes they do read the "+1 joker slots" part, but these things fight each other and the only best assumption they can make is that adding a slot is a downside somehow. The whole part of it purely being a tag name tied to the visual effect is just not noticeable enough compared to holographic etc.

I've been gaming for ages but never in my life have I SEEN anything like "yeah this card increase your inventory but at the cost of something we won't tell you". This comes down to either people are being too serious, or reading too much detective novels that they're always on edge about ambiguous word.

Originally posted by Harmonica:

+/X is easy to miss because +mult is talked about in the tutorial but Xmult is not, so it's a reasonable assumption these are the same things, especially since they are both called mult, and not for example mult or super mult. Also +/X is not so easy to spot if you're new to the game and don't have perfect eye-sight and are playing on a display at some distance!

As I said, I'm half blind and literally HAVE to stare 10cm at the screen. I grew up during the time multiplication used both "x" and then transition to "." (so 4x3 vs. 4.3 are both multiplication to me). Again, I'm not sure if this is just reading issue or we're in an era where EVERYTHING needs a tutorial or literally hand-holding players through every single thing on the sopt.

Originally posted by Harmonica:

I would agree more with the 'do gamers just not read things anymore' part if I hadn't seen some of the most experienced and strongest players on the planet at other games - and who specifically are mechanics nerds - having made these mistakes/assumptions :)

The thing is, there's a first to everything. YouTube are full of Balatro videos and you see people making these kind of mistakes everywhere. Difference? They don't go to Steam forum whining, they just be like "oh, so this does this and this does that, I didn't read carefully, noted." I blundered on boss blind and loss a lot, but do I want more "safeguard" mechanic? Absolutely not.

[Zelakon]

Normally I'd agree that some descriptions in this game have been worded poorly, but in this case I'm not sure why you wouldn't be paying attention to the remaining plays/discards, and would then be able to see number of plays reduced to 1.

[Spukc]

Just lost 4 runs on this dumb ass blind

Oh well

[Pod]

I learnt this lesson very early on lol.
Nothing wrong with the wording imo