Possibility of "removing" jokers etc.

[Linio]

Balatro suffers a bit from the same "issues" than other roguelike games (Dead Cells e.g.) in that the more you unlock stuff (which should in a sense give a sense of progress and improve your future games) the less your games are efficient. You tend to have more and more possibilities of interaction and it boils down in the end to luck.

It's good to unlock new "better" stuff but the randomness of it all increase the situation where two "supposedly" good items don't really fit together. It boils down also to the way you "wish" to play.

In Dead Cells in the end they decided to give the player the leeway to remove "some" of the stuff to avoid having too much possibility in a run and have a more consistent gameplay rather than a "try and die" kind of approach.

I think Balatro could use such a system.

[Ronald Brain]

Yeah, no. If you want to win that badly, play a seed that gives you the best combination of Jokers and bulldoze through it. Otherwise, banning stuff from your collection just because it's "ineffective" simply destroy the nature of no two runs are the same.

In fact, I'd suggest Devs to make Custom Challenge a thing in the future (officially, people are already modding to have this) so the "I wanna win" folks can make their dream seed with all the best Negative Jokers with a deck that has 52 cards of the same suit and rank.

[goobie snoobert]

Originally posted by Ronald Brain:

Yeah, no. If you want to win that badly, play a seed that gives you the best combination of Jokers and bulldoze through it. Otherwise, banning stuff from your collection just because it's "ineffective" simply destroy the nature of no two runs are the same.

In fact, I'd suggest Devs to make Custom Challenge a thing in the future (officially, people are already modding to have this) so the "I wanna win" folks can make their dream seed with all the best Negative Jokers with a deck that has 52 cards of the same suit and rank.

good job completely disregarding everything the other person said just so you can spout some inane garbage like "being able to filter out genuinely useless jokers like the golden ticket would destroy the nature of no two runs being the same", and then constructing a strawman so you can smear anyone criticizing any part of the game as someone who just wants to cheat

feel free to actually respond to the point of the post, which is that the item pool becomes more bloated the more unlocks you get, which can result in the game being less fun.

[Goblin]

Originally posted by goobie snoobert:

Originally posted by Ronald Brain:

Yeah, no. If you want to win that badly, play a seed that gives you the best combination of Jokers and bulldoze through it. Otherwise, banning stuff from your collection just because it's "ineffective" simply destroy the nature of no two runs are the same.

In fact, I'd suggest Devs to make Custom Challenge a thing in the future (officially, people are already modding to have this) so the "I wanna win" folks can make their dream seed with all the best Negative Jokers with a deck that has 52 cards of the same suit and rank.

good job completely disregarding everything the other person said just so you can spout some inane garbage like "being able to filter out genuinely useless jokers like the golden ticket would destroy the nature of no two runs being the same", and then constructing a strawman so you can smear anyone criticizing any part of the game as someone who just wants to cheat

feel free to actually respond to the point of the post, which is that the item pool becomes more bloated the more unlocks you get, which can result in the game being less fun.

good job completely disregarding everything the other person said just so you can spout some inane garbage like "golden ticket is bad and this game with only 150 jokers is somehow bloated instead of exactly as big as it's intended to be", and then constructing a strawman so you can smear anyone who actually likes the game as it is intended by the developer as just someone who disregards people's posts.

feel free to actually respond to the point of the post, which is that challenges and seeded runs already provide the functionality OP requested and could be expanded to do it better.

[Dollop of Mayo]

Boneraiser Minions also has a limited lockout mechanic for various things and it makes the game so, so much better. Even being able to lock out a small handful of extremely specific or just generally bad Jokers would be great.

[Linio]

Originally posted by Dollop of Mayo:

Boneraiser Minions also has a limited lockout mechanic for various things and it makes the game so, so much better. Even being able to lock out a small handful of extremely specific or just generally bad Jokers would be great.

So yeah, I will discuss with people willing to discuss... :)
My point exactly, there are a lot of game with the same mechanic, I proposed Dead Cells, and it also allows better integration of DLCs etc.
The way Dead Cells did it if I remember correctly is to only allow for a certain amount of things to be "deactivated", basically actually to be like the situation where you haven't unlocked said item.

The issue is mostly there, you can "unlock" something inherently bad for your playstyle. You could argue to go to a fresh save but... what's the point? I'm not asking to change the core of randomness just the possibility to deactivate something that you could have never "won" in the first place.

[Shot_Trip]

Originally posted by Linio:

Originally posted by Dollop of Mayo:

Boneraiser Minions also has a limited lockout mechanic for various things and it makes the game so, so much better. Even being able to lock out a small handful of extremely specific or just generally bad Jokers would be great.

So yeah, I will discuss with people willing to discuss... :)
My point exactly, there are a lot of game with the same mechanic, I proposed Dead Cells, and it also allows better integration of DLCs etc.
The way Dead Cells did it if I remember correctly is to only allow for a certain amount of things to be "deactivated", basically actually to be like the situation where you haven't unlocked said item.

The issue is mostly there, you can "unlock" something inherently bad for your playstyle. You could argue to go to a fresh save but... what's the point? I'm not asking to change the core of randomness just the possibility to deactivate something that you could have never "won" in the first place.

Your playstyle isn't my playstyle, and the friction of the game giving you more tools (even if you, personally do not like them) is part of the design. You are asking to change the core randomness - you're asking to remove things you don't like from the pools, which is part of the randomness! That's why rerolls are so expensive, why Chaos is even a Joker (along with flash card!), why reroll surplus is a voucher, why you get x amount of slots in the shop, why Ceremonial Dagger and Madness can work well instead of being dead draws every time, why judgement is so cheap instead of costing as much as a Negative Rare -

All of these things and parts of the game's design are that you can pull Jokers that don't work for you or that you don't like! It's core to the game! Not even going into Crimson Heart, Leaf, and to some extent Amber Acorn, the game lives on the idea that no run is perfect and not every joker works for every run.

[lordatog]

Nobody here is trying to argue that the randomness in this game is bad, that you should always be able to find whatever you want, or that you should always win. The OP was just pointing out - correctly - that everything you unlock inherently waters down the card pool, and that this can feel bad. Any time you unlock a new joker, and it's something you're not interested in, you have just permanently nerfed your save file, just a little bit. Whether it actually has much practical effect is less important than how it feels to the player.

[malogoss]

Not a fan.

I played many, many games, with everything unlocked. The joker pool size is not an issue, so it does not need custom thinning by the players. There are many ways to make your search for a joker more efficient, and those ways work very well.

That said, suppose I'm wrong. That me having no problem with this is the result of dozens of games, back to back, where I got insanely lucky and I'm just a statistical anomaly. One in a million.

If so, there would be more elegant and simple ways to fix the problem in Balatro. Maybe other games couldn't, but this one could. Simply by making the existing ways to search for jokers more powerful.

But that's not needed.

[Meng]

A think a system like 'every colour stake beaten on a deck gives you a meta chip', and then you can use these chips to blacklist jokers/vouchers/tarots etc, maybe 2 or 3 chips for a joker, 5 or 6 for a voucher, etc

With the maximum being 120, that would only allow for 40-60 jokers to be blacklisted at a time assuming you've beaten everything on gold stake

[malogoss]

Originally posted by Meng:

[...] that would only allow for 40-60 jokers to be blacklisted at a time assuming you've beaten everything on gold stake

Do you know that when you pull a joker, the game first determines what rarity it is? Then from jokers of that rarity, it randomly picks one.

Do you know that there's around 20 rare jokers in the game?

Do you know that Blueprint and Invisible Joker happen to be rare jokers?

Do you see a problem in leaving only those 2 jokers as the available rare ones and then on top of that, removing near half the uncommon ones from the game too? Do you?

[JellyPuff]

I like what The Binding of Isaac did with it's Repentance-DLC. Despite it adding a ton more items, unlocking them all makes the game progressively more fun. Not only are many of the new items interestingly designed, that expansion also made item pools from specific sources (mostly those with DPS upgrades) way more consistent. You're also guaranteed at least one DPS upgrade, once you're past a certain unlock.

The second thing it did was to make more items interact in interesting and fun ways via synergies. That way, you capitalize even more on the prospect of "more unlocks = more replayability". Repentance added way more synergies or items with a broad range of different interactions, making even bad ones useful at times.

I think we can thank Enter the Gungeon and it's plethora of item synergies for that.

Counteracting item pool bloat by allowing players to disable those is just not very fun. Like what's even the point of unlocking them then?

I've only gotten a "sample" of this game so far, but i think the voucher upgrades in addition to the ability to re-roll cards in the shop already counteract the bloat naturally. Maybe in the future, they can add Joker-synergies if that's not a thing already, like having Greedy, Lusty, Wrathful and Gluttonous Joker at the same time give some kind of effect.

[Terratrox]

Originally posted by JellyPuff:

I like what The Binding of Isaac did with it's Repentance-DLC. Despite it adding a ton more items, unlocking them all makes the game progressively more fun. Not only are many of the new items interestingly designed, that expansion also made item pools from specific sources (mostly those with DPS upgrades) way more consistent. You're also guaranteed at least one DPS upgrade, once you're past a certain unlock.

The second thing it did was to make more items interact in interesting and fun ways via synergies. That way, you capitalize even more on the prospect of "more unlocks = more replayability". Repentance added way more synergies or items with a broad range of different interactions, making even bad ones useful at times.

I think we can thank Enter the Gungeon and it's plethora of item synergies for that.

Counteracting item pool bloat by allowing players to disable those is just not very fun. Like what's even the point of unlocking them then?

I've only gotten a "sample" of this game so far, but i think the voucher upgrades in addition to the ability to re-roll cards in the shop already counteract the bloat naturally. Maybe in the future, they can add Joker-synergies if that's not a thing already, like having Greedy, Lusty, Wrathful and Gluttonous Joker at the same time give some kind of effect.

The chances of you getting a particular joker without forcing it is VERY, VERY low. It's to the point that people playing high stakes games continuously restart the run until they get a seed with a favorable tag for skipping the first blind AND a favorable shop, because being able to beat the first boss is a toss up without both, and without either, many times it's just genuinely impossible to win.

The inherent difference between this game and The Binding of Isaac, Darkest Dungeon, ETG, etc is that those games give the player far more choice in how their run goes. In fact, ETG and The Binding of Isaac are designed such that the player can beat the game with nothing but what they started with, no RNG involved.

Even this game's most direct comparison, Slay the Spire, gives the player far more options outside the RNG, from the different paths, ability to alter your deck, and its own equivalent of Jokers: Relics.

The fact of the matter is, it's objectively better to not have many of the 150 jokers unlocked at all, than to have all the jokers unlocked. Since there is very, VERY little ability to choose which jokers you get, you ultimately have very little control over how successful your run is.

Even the vouchers, which are in theory quite powerful, are actually incredibly weak and require a great deal of investment to be useful in almost all cases.

"X4 chance for Tarot Cards to appear in the shop". COOL! I just spent my entire Ante's gold gain for a chance of something that has a CHANCE of being useful appearing in my shops. If you have the Joker that buffs your mult by tarot consumption, sure. But then again, you ALSO need a ton of money and a way to generate a ton of money too, in order to be able to afford those tarots in the first place. So we've spent another joker or two generating money, or had to get lucky and hit tarots that grant tons of money.

Some of them are helpful, but are still not good for price, like getting an extra discard, or upgrading your interest gain. But few of them are ultimately worth taking, so it's a mechanic that won't be used most of the time.

I'd actually compare this game more to Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate in that the upgrades in that game will make or break a run, but you have very little control over which upgrades you get. But in that game, at least your own ability to play chess will massively improve your success rate.

[Dollop of Mayo]

Originally posted by Shot_Trip:

Your playstyle isn't my playstyle, and the friction of the game giving you more tools (even if you, personally do not like them) is part of the design. You are asking to change the core randomness - you're asking to remove things you don't like from the pools, which is part of the randomness! That's why rerolls are so expensive, why Chaos is even a Joker (along with flash card!), why reroll surplus is a voucher, why you get x amount of slots in the shop, why Ceremonial Dagger and Madness can work well instead of being dead draws every time, why judgement is so cheap instead of costing as much as a Negative Rare -

All of these things and parts of the game's design are that you can pull Jokers that don't work for you or that you don't like! It's core to the game! Not even going into Crimson Heart, Leaf, and to some extent Amber Acorn, the game lives on the idea that no run is perfect and not every joker works for every run.

That's cool and all but I want the feature, and since our playstyles differ, you could, you know, just not use the feature

Besides, nobody's asking for every run to be perfect and every joker to work for every run, some of us are simply asking for an option that would make the game more enjoyable for us. Don't worry, the entire game won't fall apart if it's implemented and again, if you dislike it so much, don't use it

[JellyPuff]

Originally posted by Terratrox:

The fact of the matter is, it's objectively better to not have many of the 150 jokers unlocked at all, than to have all the jokers unlocked. Since there is very, VERY little ability to choose which jokers you get, you ultimately have very little control over how successful your run is.

Yeah but my point is that it would be more fun, if the Joker interactions can be diversified, if they really just bloat the pool. Though being Foil/Holo/Poly/Neg already does this some extend, i feel. I've had runs, where the joker's ability was pretty much never used, but it being Foil or Holo was still good enough to beat Ante 8 on standard difficulty.

Or go for the consistency angle, like more re-roll options as you unlock more stuff that apply to all decks. For example, an unlock that changes the shop re-roll to be "First shop re-roll is free if no card had been bought yet" or "Re-rolls are free, if cards offered only contain Jokers".

Disabling unlocks from showing up as an option wouldn't hurt and i'm not against this since it's just an option, but it'd just a boring way to go about it. So far, the only RNG-related issue i have is, that there's little incentive to not just re-start Ante 1 if you get bad rewards at the shop or just skip, until the first 2 blind skips do something good like "First shop is free"+"Next Joker is Holo".

Also, i get what you mean, since winning in Balatro without any Jokers or upgrades is statistically impossible, but Isaac or even the more skill-based EtG were definitely not designed to be beatable with no items.

[Ronald Brain]

Originally posted by Dollop of Mayo:

Besides, nobody's asking for every run to be perfect and every joker to work for every run, some of us are simply asking for an option that would make the game more enjoyable for us. Don't worry, the entire game won't fall apart if it's implemented and again, if you dislike it so much, don't use it

That option is seed & challenge. Want to run Jokerless? Challenge. Want Blueprint + Brainstorm + whatever Jokers you like? Enter a seed an boom. People literally found a seed that gives you 52 10s on Erratic Deck, you can plow through all Ante with just Flush Five and it's all good for a seeded run.

While we're on the topic, Custom Challenge is already a mod and people are trying to make many combinations they like and try to beat it. Maybe Dev would add the ability to mod it directly one day, but for now it's an option. Let LocalThunk worry about mobile version and Daily Challenge for now.