神河当時 - プレイテストの時間と見落とし

昨日の記事の続きです。

What We Learned
Design & development works hard. We knew this already, of course. But it was helpful to be able to begin to quantify. By my estimate, our project took quite a bit of time: an average of eight players times ten playtest sessions at about six hours per session equals 480 man-hours of actual play with the cards. This doesn’t count unscheduled "jam" sessions between just two or three of us, or the phone and email conversations we’d have with each other in between, or the filling out of surveys and other analysis we did.

Of course, we’re just one playtest group. We can only speculate on how many other playtest groups, in however many other formats, development uses. And all of that farmed-out playtesting is just a fraction of what development does to analyze and refine the cards themselves. And all of that doesn’t count the work design had already done, before we even got the stickers in hand.

And all of that doesn’t count whatever work any or all of these people have now done on the next couple of sets, which need to fit thematically and structurally with Champions.

Occasionally on the message boards, I see folks who blame individual Wizards employees for "missing" how good a specific card is. While I respect customers’ rights to give feedback, such criticism looks a whole lot more useful to me when it comes from someone who seems to grasp what these people do. Mirrodin block went by with something over 600 cards printed. Skullclamp’s power was apparently an oversight. There are certainly industries where 99.83% accuracy is not good enough; but collectible card games probably isn’t one of them. I’ll happily take partial credit if Kamigawa achieves the same rate.

引用元
DOWN TO EARTH Posted in Serious Fun on October 19, 2004
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/serious-fun/down-earth-2004-10-19

テストプレイにどれだけの人数や時間がかかったのか？という話です。

あくまでもこの著者の試算・推測ですが、平均8人のプレイヤーが、10回のプレイテストを6時間ずつ行った、とのことです。

また、特定のカードの強さについて見落としについても触れています。《頭蓋骨絞め/Skullclamp》については明らかな見落としと認めた上で、それはミラディン・ブロックの600枚以上のカードのうち、1/600=0.17%に過ぎない、とも述べています。トレーニングカードゲームとしては、充分な精度であり、『神河物語』ブロックでもそれと同程度でも達成できれば功績として誇るそうです。

もっとも、この後もミラディン・ブロックからは禁止カードが出てしまうのは周知の通りです。さすがにそれを含めてしまうと、充分な精度とは言えないでしょう。

昨今のスタンダードで禁止カードが過去最大級に連発していることもあり、なんとも複雑な気分です。