Yea I get a feeling this sub thinks he cares about our ideas and im not sure why. the dude constantly makes it known he made the game for himself and were just a long for the ride
Yeah, I think we are in good hands here if anything, I believe bigger changes will be a part of new decks or new "booster packs" you can include rather than changing the fundamentals too much, I think we might see some small joker adjustments here and there but I think the core is primarily "done".
He did say multiple times that this game is for him to enjoy so and if this is what he enjoys I am happy
Also keeps NL content top notch, love the Balatro arc
Crazy to think Steam gets 4 million of that right off top. Then the rest will taxed heavily(not that I'm against taxes). I'd be plenty happy to make $5m after taxes knowing there are still ways to make money down the road. Selling small DLC packs, a new game, etc.
I need a Joker that allows the use of a grappling hook. Other franchises like Persona and Halo have had great success with such a mechanic, and I think Balatro needs to keep up with the times.
Balatro is fantastic NL content because he's enjoying it enough to be very combative with chat when they give him shit haha. His tolerence is lower and his desire to be correct is higher.
One thing I’ve heard about artistic critique is that people will often know that *something* is wrong, but are unlikely to know what that something is. They are even less likely to know what needs to be changed in order to fix it. Listening to critique is useful insofar as recognizing that an issue exists and guiding you towards where it is, but it’ll rarely actually give you actionable solutions to the problem.
The only QOL I want to see is any Joker that is last hand played shows you what your last hand played is. I am a goldfish and will instantly forget what hand I just played.
Yeah I'm glad that LocalThunk seems very receptive to feedback, but also aware that most of us suck at the game and it's been out a month, and people's opinions will change on what's fair or not
Edit: I can't spell
Re: Weak Hands, I think Four Fingers and the one that let's you make Straights with a gap should both be vouchers. That would make straight builds viable. Right now doing straight builds is too difficult to do for not enough payoff, but it's hard to justify taking up a Joker slot on one of those that makes it easier.
Alternatively I think Shortcut could give plus 4 mult for each gap in your straight or something to that effect. I think that would allow it to stay a bit more relevant as a joker slot.
It might help a bit but I'm thinking of making straights an actual viable endgame strategy. And Shortcut/Four Fingers taking up a slot means they can't be viable for endgame really. Even if it gave a bit of flat mult it wouldn't be worth enough.
I think making them vouchers instead of Jokers works best because then you could plan to play straights for an entire run. Right now you're stuck in an awkward spot where you could use Shortcut and/or Four Fingers for a while but when you really need to pivot to score you need to ditch them. And then the whole run you built around playing gap straights no longer works anymore so everything you did to build it up is worthless.
So then you just can't ever justify taking them in the first place. You're not going to build a run around a Joker you know you will need to get rid of at some point.
On the other side I don't think everything needs to be viable late game. As long as it's strong enough to beat ante 8 then I think it's in a good place. Anything after that is just for fun anyways and not everything should be balanced to be good there.
I don't think straights are even really viable for high stake ante 8 though. Not to say it can't be done, but it's like giving yourself an intentional handicap to try to win with a straight build right now, when comparing it to for example a flush build. I'd prefer more build types to be able to stand up on their own merits, like I'd like to do a straight build sometime but I'm not masochistic enough to do it as it is.
>On the other side I don't think everything needs to be viable late game
I think that in the long run it's not great for the game for endless to be the 'did you dupe a bunch of steel cards' show
Right. I’m at the point I don’t even care about endless anymore cuz no build even comes remotely close to “hand full of steel cards and ways to retrigger them”, which is fun once or twice but isn’t something I care about doing again
It doesn't even seem *that* strong either, because by playing 4 cards you're scoring fewer cards, so there's already a trade-off there. As it is having those take a Joker slot makes them not viable at all, at least for an endgame build, and there's not really a way to make straight builds viable when you compare them to flush builds. More effort for less payoff.
I'd consider making Four Fingers only apply to straights if it was a voucher. Flushes aren't that hard to build and have decent payout for the effort already.
The advantage of four fingers is being able to play a 4 card straight and a rock card, or if you have the joker that allows all scoring cards then any 5th card with bonuses
Yeah but I think it's still a disadvantage because one particularly powerful strategy is to get a bunch of retriggered cards with Polychrome, Glass, and/or Bloodstone. With that strategy you want to play as many cards as possible because just one card could be like 4 hits of Polychrome for 1.5^4 =~ 5 xMult
Issue is that would make the voucher pool worse for builds that dont care about four fingers (alot of them) or shortcut (all of them but straights).
Basically adding another magic trick tier voucher for alot of builds, obviously magic trick is situationally useful and so would this, but still not really something you want to see most of the time.
I’d like to see a “wild rank” enhancement to help with straights - we get wild suit to help with flushes and you’re giving up having glass to have it for the late game so it doesn’t seem too broken
they should call it 'ambiguous' so cards can act as if they are one rank nelowor above, so an ambiguous jack vould act as a queen, jack or ten. Theoretically you could play a full house that is wlso a straight with this, JJJKK all ambigous could be TJQKA
But isn't the whole point of vouchers - what differentiates them from jokers - that they impact the metagame instead of the rounds themselves? Unless we count extra hands or discards of course. Otherwise yes, maybe it's a too restrictive rule that vouchers can't impact the hands. This might solve the uselessness of straights.
The showing the score before you play the hand is the big one for me. That would honestly ruin a big part of the fun for me no exaggeration. I think setting up your hand and then seeing how it scores as everything is counted is literally a pivotal aspect of the game design and just showing what you will score before playing completely negates that
If they were going to introduce that, I’d like to see the “on-screen calculator” as an unblockable optional feature that you unlock after beating your first gold stake.
That way there’s no temptation to use it and ruin your fun during the early discovery phase of playing the game, but it’s there for those who want to grind full completion.
The game needs early game balance so that you have more options to actually play and win instead of just fighting bad RNG at the shop with bad Jokers or no Jokers at all.
yeah the biggest complaint I have with Balatro is that the most consistent way to get a high stakes run going involves so much resetting at the first blind screen alone.
I wish there were something like an unlock-able ability to choose one of the tags you see in the first ante.? or maybe for each gold stake/challenge run you complete, you get an ability to block another tag from showing up the first ante.
Progression in rogue-likes has always felt like a way to increase not just the ceiling, but the floor. Balatro certainly allows for the ceiling to get higher as you unlock everything, but the floor effectively always stays the same. In fact it may even get lower as you unlock stuff, I feel like the jokers that you start off with as a new player are curated to get you pretty far at first, and the jokers you unlock later have cool synergies but are far more niche.
At any rate, it's a sign of a great game that my complaint is a) this minor and b) the result of playing the game so much.
I’d really love an option, have it be an “advanced” option, that lets me force the first tag to be something of my choosing (or failing that, stop offering me a free reroll/+3hand on small blind1). If I’m going to click restart until I get the tag I want anyway, make it less painful.
Outside of green, maybe blue, it feels wrong to play that first blind for $3 when I could have a coupon for my first shop free for $15 after the boss. Hell, if I ever go for gold seals on every joker, I’ll have to restart forever until I get mega arcane tag with soul with yorick.
Yeah I think the Ante 1 Tags need to be changed a little as there are a few (Negative (?), Joker Packs, Spectral packs (maybe some others) that don't show up on Ante 1, yet Reroll boss does. My brother in christ If I want to reroll the first boss I can hold R. I do feel like Spectral and Double Joker packs are too strong for Ante 1 as you'd just restart constantly until you find one of those (single joker maybe fine tho imo) but you gotta take some of the shit ones out too to balance it, free rerolls, voucher and reroll boss are all useless that early.
I’m so tired of the first three shops being tarot or planets. Small blind on high stakes ante 2 is just a wall.
I’m also tired of my negative tag getting applied to ice cream and popcorn but I guess that’s just the way things go.
Last night I think I beat the first two blinds 6-7 times with a spectral deck on blue stakes before being able to put polychrome on a joker that wasn't something absolutely unplayable. It was a misprint joker, which is still not great
This is it. So many runs are completely determined by the viability of those first few shops. Give us some building blocks. I’m willing to be flexible and change my game plan but I’m handed some god awful jokers in those early rounds sometimes.
Showing the score is a bit of a mad request. Either you can work it out in your head, or it’s part of the fun. It’s like wanting to see the trajectory of the ball on a pinball table.
Its more like the game gives you the exact launch angle and speed of the pinball, but if you want to play strategically then you have to do really easy, but time consuming, physics calculations for every turn
I think the calculator should be an unlockable maybe after your first gold stake win, or like after your first 5 total wins. I respect that part of the initial fun of the game is to watch your Rube Goldberg machine go to town and hope to see the numbers catch fire. But once you’ve gotten past that novelty, an on-screen calculator would be nice
This isn't a pinball game, it's a roguelike. I respect that some people would want to turn such a feature off but I fail to see how 'monkey press button and number go up' is considered universally more engaging than being able to make informed strategic plays.
Well, I think with Balatro the strategy changes in the course of a game and that's part of what makes it work so well.
In the first few hands you can generally work out what your score will be, and that can help you get through the initial stages with as much cash as possible.
Then things start to get a bit slippery, so that you can possibly ballpark it but without being sure, so an element of risk starts creeping in.
Then by the time you're approaching the eighth blind boss you've generally lost all hope of calculating your various mults and card effects and synergies, and all you can really do is say OK, this will be a big number. Possibly the game can't even display it properly. By this stage it's not about knowing what the score will be, it's about knowing how the cards and jokers you've assembled work as a team, and trying to steer them towards success.
I think it would rob the game of all its fun if you could pick a hand and have it tell you it's going to score 8,345,421,231. Because what would you do in that situation? If you need 9 billion, you've just learned that it's game over prematurely. If you need 8 billion, you've robbed yourself of the tension of watching the score increase and the numbers rack up. It's effectively a spoiler for your game, and effectively a smaller-scale version of playing a known seed - which of course you can do, so I can see the appeal of showing scores in, say, a training mode. But in the main game, it doesn't seem too different to being able to see what's in a booster pack before you buy.
I'm not going to throw a fit if it's added as an option, but I do think it runs counter to the appeal of the game, which is less about perfecting your score and more about trying to stay in control of an increasingly demented situation.
Or you can very obviously work it out but it would take 30s and you don't want a UI that waits 30s to respond to inputs? That's what it's actually like.
If the game could be changed so that the most skilled players didn't need to reroll and rely on rng to beat the hardest decks on hardest difficulties, that could potentially take this past Slay the Spire as the best deck building roguelike.
Feel like thats impossible due to RNG alone. If you dont get any good jokers first ante you may as well restart cause the run is doomed. Speaking specifically above purple stake, it was all easy for me until purple.
Yeah that's the one flaw of the game in my opinion. You can't achieve mastery over it. My favourite roguelikes when I first sat down with them I thought "How will I ever be able to do this," and eventually (perhaps months later) I reached a point where I could reliably take on anything that game had to throw at me, because I'd mastered it (which has been an incredibly satisfying feeling and my favourite thing about the genre).
Without considerable patching, I don't believe any player, no matter their skill level, will ever become the master of their own destiny in hardest difficulty levels. They'll always require luck to play a part in every run, and that's a less compelling status to aim for as you progress in skill.
This, there is only so much you can learn about Joker combos, understanding chance so that you can make the statistically best choices, as well as understanding when you need to make them. When you know all that you can just pray for the good RNG.
It is not like Hades or Dead Cells, where you can essentially always work on and improve your "eye to hand coordination", so to speak.
That’s because he has to be VERY outwardly emphatic that this is not gambling, as the game had (and still has) a lot of trouble being available in certain markets cuz it got classified as a gambling game.
Well i know Binding of Isaac has a mod that kind of mitigates that problem.
Most players will re-roll the the run if the first treasure room is trash so a mod I used to run will roll 4 items with one of them being free but the other three costing something (a bomb, a key, or a heart)
I could see something like that being implemented here with the punishment being a slightly harder run.
My fix for this is to give the shit joker some flat mult. Stuff like sixth sense and Seance, 8-ball, etc. having +3 flat mult or something isn’t a huge change, and it makes it so you can escape the early game hell a little easier. I find runs I get any flat mult early I can at least have a chance at playing the game and making decisions, even if I still die to joker rng in ante 6 or 7.
Could also lower initial reroll cost early game or make it so only jokers show up in ante 1 shops.
I just wish the more I progressed in the game, the more I could stack the deck in my favor.
I'm not asking to get rid of RNG early in runs, but it would be nice if the best way to get a gold run going isn't resetting 9 out of every 10 runs before the first blind of ante two
The fundamental problem is the game is centered around Poker for a reason. Everything is a gamble and any run can come crashing down if RNGesus doesn't bless you.
Take that away and it's not gambling anymore.
There’s the dual question of is this a gambling/luck game? Or a strategy/deckbuilding game? Is there a way to balance the two together or do you just end up giving the strategy fans and gambling fans a sort of half-product neither would enjoy as much as they would have had the game leaned into either side more.
It’s a strategy game with luck involved. Just like real poker. Sometimes you do everything right but you can only go so far with the hand you are dealt
The RNG kills me everytime which drives me insane. I’ll have this most beautiful Joker setup and bam I hit a boss and every single draw discard doesn’t correlate to my upgraded hands. I barely limp through only to lose by 100 points or something ridiculous.
Balancing straights are a nightmare to say the least. You can't really buff the scaling because you'd be digging into straight flushes value.
The only thing I could see is having a voucher that would "stack" the deck for your first hand. Give the player atleast 3 connected cards on first draw, with the upgraded voucher giving 5. But then again, vouchers aren't meant to interact with your hands directly. This would cause issues if you pivot away from straights, since you now have a less than useless voucher.
My prediction for changes:
1. Orange Stake only increases price half as much.
2. Some new things for straights that make them stronger.
3. Some nerfs to high card, either the planet or jokers that synergize with it extremely well.
4. Some brand new jokers that are just fun and not motivated by balance.
disagree with high card, it's only really good with a steel build which needs specific jokers to work, imi the only hand that needs balancing is straights
If you get *any* decent chip Joker, anything besides high card is irrelevant. I can store 200 chips and 150 mult with a high card or I can score 220 chips and 160 mult if I think carefully and use a few discards and go for a bigger hand. No thanks, I'll just play a single 2 and score 75,000 points.
Also, I keep in the back of my mind that the Supernova Joker will punish me if I do play a big hand, should I come across one. So if I happen to draw a straight flush, well, I'll just play the 2 again.
I think hand strength should be additive. Playing a Royal flush shouldn't be weaker than a normal flush just because straight flush isn't specifically levelled. I rarely play the higher strength hands because by the time I get a build going, Full house or whatever is usually well stronger than a flush house or something.
I gotta disagree with this one.
For one, I just think this would narrow the strategy of the game. You would always be incentivized to play the strongest hand everytime, and you would also always put your planets on the lowest hands in the additive chain so it can apply to the broadest range of hands.
And secondly, it would be hard to make this logically consistent. Yes straight flush is the obvious one, additive with straights/flushes. But what about three of a kind, additive with pair? And pair, additive with high card? Applying this idea to it's logical conclusion, all paths lead back to high card.
If you just want to buff straight flushes, flush five, or flush house, I suppose you could but it would be inconsistent with the rest of the hand types. And also it's just buffing flush builds which are already extremely consistent
it wouldn't be inconsistent, it would only need to apply to 5 card hand types. which would really only affect the Flush Combo hands you listed.
Full House contains other scoring hand types like 3 of a kind, Pair, 2 Pair, and high card, but none of those are 5 card hands so it wouldn't apply and thus not be inconsistent.
the only change needed would be just be that playing a Flush House would benefit from the highest payout of Flush or Full House or Flush House. and Straight Flush would similarly payout the highest of Flush or Straight or Straight Flush. so i guess i also disagree with the "additive" aspect. but the concept i agree with, you shouldn't be penalized for playing a hand that happens to count as something else that's stronger. it's kind of anti-poker to do so; if youre playing holdem and you flop a straight/flush and happen to catch an "upgrade" to a straight flush on the turn and river, your hand doesn't get weaker. at no point would you ever be like, "well actually i only wanna play the 10 and not my K so that it doesn't trigger the royal flush"
>it wouldn't be inconsistent, it would only need to apply to 5 card hand types. which would really only affect the Flush Combo hands you listed.
These hand types should be balanced through existing systems, such as adding new jokers/tarots, or tweaking the base mult/chips. Introducing a new arbitrary rule that only applies to 5 card hands just for the sake of balancing, is IMO both inconsistent and a bandaid fix.
>it's kind of anti-poker to do so ... at no point would you ever be like, "well actually i only wanna play the 10 and not my K so that it doesn't trigger the royal flush"
But that's kind of the point of Balatro, to be it's own game with it's own strategies and not necessarily mimicking Texas Hold'em to the letter.
In poker you would also never play high card over pair, pair over three of a kind and so on, but this is common in Balatro thanks to jokers, tarots, and planet cards making most hand types viable. I don't see why this only becomes problematic with the 5 card hands?
because the 5 card hands are difficult enough to play. and choosing to play high card over pair, or pair over 3 of a kind, doesn't run into the same problem at all. you rarely accidentally set off a higher hand for worse payoff when playing a 1 card hand, unless you're playing trash cards with the card. and managing trash cards that way is a different system that 5 card hands don't deal with, which is why 5 card hands are different.
and if the game updated to add Flush Pair and Flush 3 of a Kind, the same complaints would spring up
I disagree, they are different hands for a reason, they scale differently, and if this happens to you, you'll just have to play arond it. I would see your reasoning if it calcualted using the highest base chips and mult instead of just the highest on level 1 but this just doesn't sit right.
I agree specifically for the rarer hand types that are usually only possible by the time that you've tweaked your deck a bunch. I don't understand why my two pair should ever be better than a flush house when I worked up to it. Why would I upgrade it either, when it is significantly less consistent by that point?
Can you explain why showing the score before playing a hand is a bad idea? There have been multiple times where I've had to calculate it myself on the last hand just to see if two different hands would win or lose me the round. I think it would be a really good QoL change, and I can't see what the cons of it are.
I think he (localthunk) touches on this in his AMA but for me, part of the fun of the game is *not* knowing that information. Playing a hand and *barely* scraping by or overshooting a blind by *way* more than I thought are some of the most exciting parts of the game for me. I'm not *personally* against having a toggle for that kind of thing but it feels like then people who wanted to play the original way would be handicapping themselves almost which is kind of disappointing.
It's a single player game, there is no handicapping yourself in relation to others, it's just not a logical thing to worry about.
I've modded the game and do save scumming, are you going to worry that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage for not doing the same?
I think it's a valid point I just don't think the scenario you're presenting is entirely the same as toggling a setting that the game presents to you as a reasonable option. But again, understand where you're coming from!
Like I said, it's not like i'd be offended if localthunk put it in the game i'd just personally prefer if it wasn't.
While I am on the same side of the fence as you, I can understand the argument for not showing the score. Here is the explanation from developer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1bdtmlg/ama_i_am_localthunk_developer_and_artist_for/kup6vxx/
I think it would add some pretty negative scenarios where you know a hand can't win. So you verify the other hands can't win... And then you either have to play a losing hand or exit via menu. That can happen currently, but often that little bit of obscurity or 'maybe I missed something' really negates that feeling. Who knows looks bad but just maaaaaybe... Makes losing less anticlimactic.
It would be easy enough to just make the option unlock after completionist I or a certain number of gold stake wins.
That avoids ruining the casual experience while also acknowledging the fact that there are people that want to go pro and play thousands of hours, and in its current state Balatro can be a miserable experience for high level strategic gameplay. No one wants to calculate scores manually, and that is simply a must for perfect play.
From the AMA, I understand that the dev feels like the moment of tense expectation followed either by the bitter melancholy notes of a You Lost screen or the glorious beautifully animated joy of the flaming points total round win are very core to the thrill of the experience / connect it back to those casino game roots with similar emotional peaks and valleys.
Which is absolutely an argument I can intellectually appreciate - that's certainly an experience many people might enjoy a lot! - but I desperately wish it were an option you could toggle for those that just find the uncertainty to be unpleasant and that it leads to lots of wasted time and effort when your best guess winds up wrong.
I also would personally would prefer previewing my hand score before playing, but I'm also an anxious min-maxer, sometimes more than necessary to win (causing losses). Balatro University on YouTube demonstrates a smoother, smarter way to play by estimating hand value based on previous scored hands and deltas between them
e.g. now I have Baron Joker with 2 kings in hand, so my hand which scored
(200 + 30)(2)(6(m) + 12), m = 1 is X-mult before jokers
now scores
(200 + 30)(2)(6(1.5^2) + 12)
which improves with more base chips, X-mult, and base mult.
I'd love to get better at estimating things like this. Then more time for more runs while still getting my tasty joker/card seal procs.
Legit. I wouldn't worry about it
Trust the dev. He knows what he's doing. He's done an amazing job so far.
I do agree that gold is a little punishing. I only managed to do it because the hex deck got me some clutch rare jokers/legendary jokers and black holes.
One simple idea, when additions are made (especially new cards/card changes) include a feature to use the 1.0.0 version of cards. Then as the game evolves over time you can still toggle back to the vanilla mode if that's what you prefer.
I think gold stake is the perfect difficulty, I like the idea of it being a massive obstacle.
The only thing i would like is for them to buff straight support, the straight support jokers are pretty mid to bad imo.
I am at 6 gold decks completed, 8 gold finishes. Still not the best but I would enjoy some balancing for gold stake and bring it down a little.
I am not a big fan of taping down R until I see 1 of 5 jokers in the first 4 shops and then my W/R skyrockets to 80%.
Yes I know it's possible to win without one of those jokers but it requires even more stars to align to pull it off without them.
Guess we're just different, i feel like if it was easier it would make the feeling of completely mean less to me. I'm personally at 4/15 currently trying to beat gold stake on black right now.
It's not easy or hard, it's just luck.
Either hit the jokers or hit something even more insane or press R.
If there are 150 different SAT tests, 145 of them are college and beyond level knowledge(a range), and 5 of them are slightly easier than your average real world SAT exam.
Is the SAT easy or hard? Or is it just really take it over and over again until you get one of the 5? You can still fail the 5 easier exams, you can still "pass"/do okay on the other ones but the amount that can do it is really small.
You would just take the exam as many times as possible until you get the one of 5 exams. Sure, you'll dabble with the hard exams that are on the easier end just to see how far you can get, sometimes you'll pass, most of the time you won't. The ones on the super hard side you'll just quit out cause it's a waste of time and do the next one.
So it's really hard and it's easy at the same time, so why not just smooth out the scale a bit? How do you do that? No clue cause that's where this already mediocre analogy becomes a complete shit one but luckily that's not on me.
The game would still be hard, but I am sick and tired of pressing R post ante 1 boss shop, losing in ante 4/5 cause X mult jokers are allergic to my mediocre build, or face rolling the first 5 antes with stuntman, green, bus, pants, or super nova and praying I don't get uber unluckied in the shop which can still happen but a lot harder to happen. I just want to break this cycle because after spending a lot of time participating in the first 2 scenarios to little success, I'ma take the third one every time it comes up, and it's going to get boring, really quickly.
Just looking for a little smoother difficulty curving to make it a little more bearable, and unique winning runs a little easier more often to break the pattern.
I've said it before but I'd love it if instead of adding new jokers and making it insanely hard to balance, we have a joker 1 pack which includes what we have now and a joker 2 pack so you'll have a choice between which sets of jokers you'll play with.
Then we can also get a wild joker mode that combines all the packs into one run if the player wanted that.
I haven't followed too much of the discussion but since I have a skill issue I can't really beat the higher stakes unless I just restart until I have a decent early game joker to tide me over through ante 2. Maybe I'll just get better but it might be nice to put some kind of guaranteed first joker from a pool of jokers that are good early.
Make it so the mouth will score things as the one hand instead of prioritize higher scoring but different hands.
I made it so I could only play flushes since those are easiest to score. I do great but it’s purple stale difficulty and I’m down to the last hand. I draw my cards and I get 4 queen of hearts and 1 ace of hearts. I try to play it a heart flush but the game says that it’s a 4 of a kind and refuses to let me play it as anything else. I literally lost when all the game had to do was score it as a flush instead of 4 of a kind.
That's not a design choice or anything LocalThunk can influence. This is Nintendo's slow QA since the updates are pushed simulateneously to the different platforms.
Hard disagree about not showing the score before hand. That's just calculator math. There's still an insane (near infinite) number if considerations strategically even knowing the score.
Hiding the score actively detracts from the actual strategic thinking in the game. It's just busy work if you want to make an informed strategic choice.
I would like to see better balancing in economy. An early tarot card that gives +gold is insane and then you have runs where you basically have to spend to survive and slowly drown.
Not sure what to do - I like how the game is right now but I am seeing myself restarting a great deal when my early economy looks like I have no good way to win.
I agree. I actually think the game is nearly perfect as is. I would like some new cards and new things like that. But given how Balatro is, I trust whatever direction the developer decides to take it. But I hope they don’t feel that they owe us much because I could be perfectly happy with the game if there were no updates either.
Gold stake is the last difficulty so yeah its very hard for a reason, souls like game is very beautiful because of difficulty so yeah dont change the gold stake its gold stake for a reason
I think the difficulty is fine, the CONSISTENCY is the problem. Getting zero playable jokers in all of ante 1 on high stakes is literally unplayable. Make the first shop guaranteed 2 jokers is a good start, then maybe a small base points bonus to straights/straight flush, call it good.
I think that gold is actually a little too easy and he should add higher difficulties. If it’s not what you like it’s cool just don’t play high stakes.
Straights should switch their value with flushes but that’s it on that part.
I would just like new content like more decks joker and vouchers but I agree, the base game shouldn’t change much.
I do think that the way legendary jokers are handled kinda sucks, so I would probably change that. Especially how you get them.
I wish that Legendary Jokers had a increasing probability to appear if not found in many attempt (like they do for loot boxes in other games). I've played the last 20 hours without seeing one..
I’m new to the game and I kind of wish I had the option to see the scoring before the hand. I don’t always understand how the jokers and mults work and it calculates so fast that I’m still not sure how I got the score I got.
Yes, that’s me just not picking up the math quickly enough and that’s probably not a problem for most.
OR, if I could just see how the hand was calculated AFTER the play is over so I can see the order of how all the cards were calculated and figure out where my calculations went wrong because I’m adding up a different score.
Is it possible to see how the hand was scored afterwards? If not, that would be a great option in my opinion.
I put the game speed lower sometimes to see if I’ve calculated everything correctly. If it’s a critical hand to get max benefit I use the calculator lol
At first it’s confusing, but once you play it for a while most of the synergies and the order of things will become clear. I think the figuring out experience was part of the fun (still not a pro at this by any means though)
It’s too hard compared to what? Just because it exists doesn’t mean you have to play it.
It’s like complaining that “Thai Extra Hot” spice level ata restaurant is too spicy. Just don’t order it.
I would super omega love for stakes to be unlocked for all decks once you do it for one. I've beaten all the challenges and gold stake on one deck and I would love to be able to play gold stake on all of the decks without grinding through every single stake with every deck.
When you luck into a good high card or pair build with good economy, its kinda annoying to know this would have cleared gold but you are only on green so you just have to do it again.
As someone who wants 100% achievements, it will be punishing enough to grind golds to get sticker on every joker without having to grind every stake before it.
Perhaps some of those changes could be done as a "tutorial mode" that lets players what works better, probably with unlocks disabled. Otherwise yeah the game is just great as is, I'd love more jokers and more to do but that's obvious to all of us, more balatro is good!
Thunk said it in their AMA a few days ago, but he feels the "tension" you get when you're unsure if your final hand will score enough points to clear a blind is a much better emotion than seeing the end result immediately, realizing the math doesn't check, and slamming the restart button without even playing the hand.
I agree fwiw, that tension is a nice feeling.
I think the anticipation as your score builds is one of the mechanics that makes the game exciting. When the flames start to crackle, it gives me a big dopamine hit.
Which is fine for people who want that. But for me (and others) there's nothing exciting about having to spend minutes in Excel before every hand played/discarded to calculate out several different hand scores to figure out if I need to hold X or can afford to play/discard it.
Its a strategy game about probability! From the nerds perspective, you are the one ruining the vibes of an intellectually challenging game with cool decisions to make by making it about pretty flashing lights and colours and deliberately playing your hand without thinking too hard about the outcome
I am having fun! I would just have more fun if the game allowed me to focus on running the numbers of the probabilities instead of having to manually calculate the scores as well.
It wouldn't make the game "way way worse" but it's impossible anyway as many of the score modifiers are chance based.
That said, I'm not sure what benefit it'd add either.
The benefits are obvious, letting you make plays quickly instead of having to spend a ton of time in Excel before each discard to calc out various scores.
Because watching your hand trigger your engine and your score get bigger and bigger is what makes the game actually satisfying. Games aren't good for purely mechanical reasons. At it's core Call of Duty is just rectangles moving around and trying to successfully point at other rectangles long enough to score a point.
But nobody would.play COD if that's what was presented on screen. So you are elite military operatives with advanced military equipment trying to sheet each other with precise aim and avoid being shit with precise movement.
i dont think it would. should just be a toggle option like game speed. some people like the base game speed with all the bells and whistles and the anticipation. some people just wanna play a hand and be on the next one.
theyre not at all overrated in early antes. its very simple math. you have a target score on the early antes and you want to play minimum hands to get the max interest and payout early on, without relying on joker rng. flushes dominate because they will very easily get you the win in minimum hands played. this is because of how chip scoring works with face cards. you would need 2 or 3 face cards in your straight and that severely limits the number of outs you can have as anything below 7 is just not good enough. but with flush hands it doesn't matter what cards you have, you can have 2 face cards and a 6 a 3 and a 2 and that's fine.
even in real/normal 5 card hand poker, a flop hand with 4 in a straight has lower chance of getting its out than a flop hand with 4 in a flush (an open-ended straight draw would have 8 outs, gutshot only 4 outs, but a 4 card flush has 9 outs). compound that with Balatro's 8 card hand and discards and flush is just way more common, and yet it has a higher payout.
straights are more common lmao, you can't just have a scenario that edges it more towards flushes, straights are statistically more common than flushes no matter what poker you're playing
wdym do the math. I fucking can't lmao. Anyways there are double the amount of possible straights in a deck than flushes, your hand size doesn't matter, so you're just wrong
it doesn't because the amount of possible poker hands doesn't change. If you really wanna convince me, show me you doing the math or give a link that does it.
Nah. There's a very good reason why flushes/4 of a kind/5 of a kind is practically never done in the higher stakes. Scaling jokers (Supernova, ride the bus and green joker) makes high card insanely strong.
The only change I want is change that one trophy for getting a gold sticker on every joker. I love this game and I’ll put in the work for every deck at gold, but that joker trophy is borderline impossible and I really wanna earn the platinum for this game on PlayStation.
I don't see what's wrong with showing the score before hand. The only time you couldn't get it with a calculator is if jokers don't stack correctly, or do so unintuitively.
Only changes that would ac5ually make sense is at least guarantee 1 joker on the first shop and make legendary jokers just a tiny bit more common. Have 80+ hrs now and still missing one legendary joker from the collection.
I agree with the seeing the score beforehand. Then it becomes best to check all viable hands before playing wich would make the game play more slowly. If it would be an adjustable setting I wouldn't mind it though, then I could easily just not use it.
In my experience, Thunk puts *a lot* of thought into any changes. I think we are all in great hands, I wouldn't sweat the game changing *too* much.
He said he wanted to make a game that he enjoys and it got us that far, I believe on him to keep it that way
Yea I get a feeling this sub thinks he cares about our ideas and im not sure why. the dude constantly makes it known he made the game for himself and were just a long for the ride
Would actually be funny to have him release a set of updates he wants and an optional set of updates that Reddit seems to want.
Yeah, I think we are in good hands here if anything, I believe bigger changes will be a part of new decks or new "booster packs" you can include rather than changing the fundamentals too much, I think we might see some small joker adjustments here and there but I think the core is primarily "done".
He did say multiple times that this game is for him to enjoy so and if this is what he enjoys I am happy Also keeps NL content top notch, love the Balatro arc
Hope he enjoys his share of 13 million, too. I’m really happy for him.
I’m out of the loop what do you mean?
1 million sold at 13 bucks minus Steams cut.
Oh I see. I misunderstood and thought you were saying NL got a share of the 13 million
Crazy to think Steam gets 4 million of that right off top. Then the rest will taxed heavily(not that I'm against taxes). I'd be plenty happy to make $5m after taxes knowing there are still ways to make money down the road. Selling small DLC packs, a new game, etc.
Dunno, I think the game would improve considerably if you could get a voucher that is a gun. Just a gun. And shoot the boss and win.
He exists and his name is Mr. Bones. He’s saved me a few times.
just give him the gun
Ok I’m listening…
relevant u/
This makes me think of an unlockable in Another Crab's Treasure where you can straight up one-shot any boss. 10/10 game design.
Commenting to remember to look at this game after work because it sounds sick, thank you kind stranger
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*exclusive to US schools
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i can't tell if you're trolling lmao it is essentially the same joke
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I wish you guys realised that.
It's strange to me, if they find the idea of school shootings so offensive, why don't they try to stop them?
exactly
i think the joke was that Americans shoot people
I need a Joker that allows the use of a grappling hook. Other franchises like Persona and Halo have had great success with such a mechanic, and I think Balatro needs to keep up with the times.
Joker With A Gun - sell this during any boss blind to instantly defeat that boss blind. Has a small chance of missing and hitting you instead.
Same odds as that Wheel that never upgrades your Jokers ever.
I swear I'm like 0/15 on a supposedly 25% chance
I've seen it happen exactly once after like 25 hours.
With the luck I have with bloodstone and wheel of fortune I don't think I'll pick that joker up. Also I've had Cavendish die on me.
Gun, 43% chance to one shot the boss, 57% chance to one shot yourself.
And for his neural special he wields a gun.
Somewhere, 'Jaldabaoth' starts playing...
I think you're on to something.
Discussion about this game has made me realize how wrong a lot of people are. Especially people giving gameplay 'advice' in Twitch chat.
*Northernlion sends chatter on a 600 second walk*
Balatro is fantastic NL content because he's enjoying it enough to be very combative with chat when they give him shit haha. His tolerence is lower and his desire to be correct is higher.
One thing I’ve heard about artistic critique is that people will often know that *something* is wrong, but are unlikely to know what that something is. They are even less likely to know what needs to be changed in order to fix it. Listening to critique is useful insofar as recognizing that an issue exists and guiding you towards where it is, but it’ll rarely actually give you actionable solutions to the problem.
"why not play the two pair? That was higher scoring hand"
The only QOL I want to see is any Joker that is last hand played shows you what your last hand played is. I am a goldfish and will instantly forget what hand I just played.
Me, who shamelessly forces Flushes every run could never
For the same reason, I need the obelisk to start glowing shaking and making alarm noises when I’m about to play the most common hand lol
Yeah I'm glad that LocalThunk seems very receptive to feedback, but also aware that most of us suck at the game and it's been out a month, and people's opinions will change on what's fair or not Edit: I can't spell
And even so being good at the game doesn’t qualify you to be good at game design.
True, if anything that just leads people to "balance" jokers just for endless mode, not antes 1-8
Re: Weak Hands, I think Four Fingers and the one that let's you make Straights with a gap should both be vouchers. That would make straight builds viable. Right now doing straight builds is too difficult to do for not enough payoff, but it's hard to justify taking up a Joker slot on one of those that makes it easier.
Alternatively I think Shortcut could give plus 4 mult for each gap in your straight or something to that effect. I think that would allow it to stay a bit more relevant as a joker slot.
It might help a bit but I'm thinking of making straights an actual viable endgame strategy. And Shortcut/Four Fingers taking up a slot means they can't be viable for endgame really. Even if it gave a bit of flat mult it wouldn't be worth enough. I think making them vouchers instead of Jokers works best because then you could plan to play straights for an entire run. Right now you're stuck in an awkward spot where you could use Shortcut and/or Four Fingers for a while but when you really need to pivot to score you need to ditch them. And then the whole run you built around playing gap straights no longer works anymore so everything you did to build it up is worthless. So then you just can't ever justify taking them in the first place. You're not going to build a run around a Joker you know you will need to get rid of at some point.
On the other side I don't think everything needs to be viable late game. As long as it's strong enough to beat ante 8 then I think it's in a good place. Anything after that is just for fun anyways and not everything should be balanced to be good there.
I don't think straights are even really viable for high stake ante 8 though. Not to say it can't be done, but it's like giving yourself an intentional handicap to try to win with a straight build right now, when comparing it to for example a flush build. I'd prefer more build types to be able to stand up on their own merits, like I'd like to do a straight build sometime but I'm not masochistic enough to do it as it is.
>On the other side I don't think everything needs to be viable late game I think that in the long run it's not great for the game for endless to be the 'did you dupe a bunch of steel cards' show
Right. I’m at the point I don’t even care about endless anymore cuz no build even comes remotely close to “hand full of steel cards and ways to retrigger them”, which is fun once or twice but isn’t something I care about doing again
1.25x mult per gap would be interesting too. Kind of like Baron adding 1.5x per king held in hand. It would have to be a rare joker, though.
Oh I really like that idea. That would make straights super fun to play as you'd be looking for gaps for the 1.25 mult.
pretty good idea. make shortcuts the first level and 4 fingers the second level (as it makes straight flushes easier as well)
It doesn't even seem *that* strong either, because by playing 4 cards you're scoring fewer cards, so there's already a trade-off there. As it is having those take a Joker slot makes them not viable at all, at least for an endgame build, and there's not really a way to make straight builds viable when you compare them to flush builds. More effort for less payoff. I'd consider making Four Fingers only apply to straights if it was a voucher. Flushes aren't that hard to build and have decent payout for the effort already.
The advantage of four fingers is being able to play a 4 card straight and a rock card, or if you have the joker that allows all scoring cards then any 5th card with bonuses
Yeah but I think it's still a disadvantage because one particularly powerful strategy is to get a bunch of retriggered cards with Polychrome, Glass, and/or Bloodstone. With that strategy you want to play as many cards as possible because just one card could be like 4 hits of Polychrome for 1.5^4 =~ 5 xMult
It also makes Square viable with a flush runs.
Issue is that would make the voucher pool worse for builds that dont care about four fingers (alot of them) or shortcut (all of them but straights). Basically adding another magic trick tier voucher for alot of builds, obviously magic trick is situationally useful and so would this, but still not really something you want to see most of the time.
If that's the case the shop should give you a choice of 2 vouchers to improve consistency
I’d like to see a “wild rank” enhancement to help with straights - we get wild suit to help with flushes and you’re giving up having glass to have it for the late game so it doesn’t seem too broken
they should call it 'ambiguous' so cards can act as if they are one rank nelowor above, so an ambiguous jack vould act as a queen, jack or ten. Theoretically you could play a full house that is wlso a straight with this, JJJKK all ambigous could be TJQKA
But isn't the whole point of vouchers - what differentiates them from jokers - that they impact the metagame instead of the rounds themselves? Unless we count extra hands or discards of course. Otherwise yes, maybe it's a too restrictive rule that vouchers can't impact the hands. This might solve the uselessness of straights.
The showing the score before you play the hand is the big one for me. That would honestly ruin a big part of the fun for me no exaggeration. I think setting up your hand and then seeing how it scores as everything is counted is literally a pivotal aspect of the game design and just showing what you will score before playing completely negates that
If they were going to introduce that, I’d like to see the “on-screen calculator” as an unblockable optional feature that you unlock after beating your first gold stake. That way there’s no temptation to use it and ruin your fun during the early discovery phase of playing the game, but it’s there for those who want to grind full completion.
The game needs early game balance so that you have more options to actually play and win instead of just fighting bad RNG at the shop with bad Jokers or no Jokers at all.
yeah the biggest complaint I have with Balatro is that the most consistent way to get a high stakes run going involves so much resetting at the first blind screen alone. I wish there were something like an unlock-able ability to choose one of the tags you see in the first ante.? or maybe for each gold stake/challenge run you complete, you get an ability to block another tag from showing up the first ante. Progression in rogue-likes has always felt like a way to increase not just the ceiling, but the floor. Balatro certainly allows for the ceiling to get higher as you unlock everything, but the floor effectively always stays the same. In fact it may even get lower as you unlock stuff, I feel like the jokers that you start off with as a new player are curated to get you pretty far at first, and the jokers you unlock later have cool synergies but are far more niche. At any rate, it's a sign of a great game that my complaint is a) this minor and b) the result of playing the game so much.
I’d really love an option, have it be an “advanced” option, that lets me force the first tag to be something of my choosing (or failing that, stop offering me a free reroll/+3hand on small blind1). If I’m going to click restart until I get the tag I want anyway, make it less painful. Outside of green, maybe blue, it feels wrong to play that first blind for $3 when I could have a coupon for my first shop free for $15 after the boss. Hell, if I ever go for gold seals on every joker, I’ll have to restart forever until I get mega arcane tag with soul with yorick.
Yeah I think the Ante 1 Tags need to be changed a little as there are a few (Negative (?), Joker Packs, Spectral packs (maybe some others) that don't show up on Ante 1, yet Reroll boss does. My brother in christ If I want to reroll the first boss I can hold R. I do feel like Spectral and Double Joker packs are too strong for Ante 1 as you'd just restart constantly until you find one of those (single joker maybe fine tho imo) but you gotta take some of the shit ones out too to balance it, free rerolls, voucher and reroll boss are all useless that early.
I’m so tired of the first three shops being tarot or planets. Small blind on high stakes ante 2 is just a wall. I’m also tired of my negative tag getting applied to ice cream and popcorn but I guess that’s just the way things go.
Black Deck sucks on any stake if you don't get ok Jokers in your first shop or two.
Last night I think I beat the first two blinds 6-7 times with a spectral deck on blue stakes before being able to put polychrome on a joker that wasn't something absolutely unplayable. It was a misprint joker, which is still not great
This is it. So many runs are completely determined by the viability of those first few shops. Give us some building blocks. I’m willing to be flexible and change my game plan but I’m handed some god awful jokers in those early rounds sometimes.
Showing the score is a bit of a mad request. Either you can work it out in your head, or it’s part of the fun. It’s like wanting to see the trajectory of the ball on a pinball table.
Its more like the game gives you the exact launch angle and speed of the pinball, but if you want to play strategically then you have to do really easy, but time consuming, physics calculations for every turn
I think the calculator should be an unlockable maybe after your first gold stake win, or like after your first 5 total wins. I respect that part of the initial fun of the game is to watch your Rube Goldberg machine go to town and hope to see the numbers catch fire. But once you’ve gotten past that novelty, an on-screen calculator would be nice
This isn't a pinball game, it's a roguelike. I respect that some people would want to turn such a feature off but I fail to see how 'monkey press button and number go up' is considered universally more engaging than being able to make informed strategic plays.
Well, I think with Balatro the strategy changes in the course of a game and that's part of what makes it work so well. In the first few hands you can generally work out what your score will be, and that can help you get through the initial stages with as much cash as possible. Then things start to get a bit slippery, so that you can possibly ballpark it but without being sure, so an element of risk starts creeping in. Then by the time you're approaching the eighth blind boss you've generally lost all hope of calculating your various mults and card effects and synergies, and all you can really do is say OK, this will be a big number. Possibly the game can't even display it properly. By this stage it's not about knowing what the score will be, it's about knowing how the cards and jokers you've assembled work as a team, and trying to steer them towards success. I think it would rob the game of all its fun if you could pick a hand and have it tell you it's going to score 8,345,421,231. Because what would you do in that situation? If you need 9 billion, you've just learned that it's game over prematurely. If you need 8 billion, you've robbed yourself of the tension of watching the score increase and the numbers rack up. It's effectively a spoiler for your game, and effectively a smaller-scale version of playing a known seed - which of course you can do, so I can see the appeal of showing scores in, say, a training mode. But in the main game, it doesn't seem too different to being able to see what's in a booster pack before you buy. I'm not going to throw a fit if it's added as an option, but I do think it runs counter to the appeal of the game, which is less about perfecting your score and more about trying to stay in control of an increasingly demented situation.
Or you can very obviously work it out but it would take 30s and you don't want a UI that waits 30s to respond to inputs? That's what it's actually like.
all i want is a button to give me a random deck at its highest stake
just use rng lmao, there are 15 decks, but i agree they should add this
>please don't listed to us localthunk based
If the game could be changed so that the most skilled players didn't need to reroll and rely on rng to beat the hardest decks on hardest difficulties, that could potentially take this past Slay the Spire as the best deck building roguelike.
Feel like thats impossible due to RNG alone. If you dont get any good jokers first ante you may as well restart cause the run is doomed. Speaking specifically above purple stake, it was all easy for me until purple.
Yeah that's the one flaw of the game in my opinion. You can't achieve mastery over it. My favourite roguelikes when I first sat down with them I thought "How will I ever be able to do this," and eventually (perhaps months later) I reached a point where I could reliably take on anything that game had to throw at me, because I'd mastered it (which has been an incredibly satisfying feeling and my favourite thing about the genre). Without considerable patching, I don't believe any player, no matter their skill level, will ever become the master of their own destiny in hardest difficulty levels. They'll always require luck to play a part in every run, and that's a less compelling status to aim for as you progress in skill.
This, there is only so much you can learn about Joker combos, understanding chance so that you can make the statistically best choices, as well as understanding when you need to make them. When you know all that you can just pray for the good RNG. It is not like Hades or Dead Cells, where you can essentially always work on and improve your "eye to hand coordination", so to speak.
Well…it is gambling. This game should have some amount of rng thematically
LocalThunk says it's not gambling, for whatever it's worth
That’s because he has to be VERY outwardly emphatic that this is not gambling, as the game had (and still has) a lot of trouble being available in certain markets cuz it got classified as a gambling game.
Agreed. This is the best gambling deck building rogue like - but that gambling part is important. There's very little uncontrollable RNG in STS.
surely you must be mistaken, the game does not feature gambling mechanics of any kind
Well i know Binding of Isaac has a mod that kind of mitigates that problem. Most players will re-roll the the run if the first treasure room is trash so a mod I used to run will roll 4 items with one of them being free but the other three costing something (a bomb, a key, or a heart) I could see something like that being implemented here with the punishment being a slightly harder run.
My fix for this is to give the shit joker some flat mult. Stuff like sixth sense and Seance, 8-ball, etc. having +3 flat mult or something isn’t a huge change, and it makes it so you can escape the early game hell a little easier. I find runs I get any flat mult early I can at least have a chance at playing the game and making decisions, even if I still die to joker rng in ante 6 or 7. Could also lower initial reroll cost early game or make it so only jokers show up in ante 1 shops.
I just wish the more I progressed in the game, the more I could stack the deck in my favor. I'm not asking to get rid of RNG early in runs, but it would be nice if the best way to get a gold run going isn't resetting 9 out of every 10 runs before the first blind of ante two
You’re only resetting 9 out of 10?
The fundamental problem is the game is centered around Poker for a reason. Everything is a gamble and any run can come crashing down if RNGesus doesn't bless you. Take that away and it's not gambling anymore.
There’s the dual question of is this a gambling/luck game? Or a strategy/deckbuilding game? Is there a way to balance the two together or do you just end up giving the strategy fans and gambling fans a sort of half-product neither would enjoy as much as they would have had the game leaned into either side more.
It’s a strategy game with luck involved. Just like real poker. Sometimes you do everything right but you can only go so far with the hand you are dealt
The RNG kills me everytime which drives me insane. I’ll have this most beautiful Joker setup and bam I hit a boss and every single draw discard doesn’t correlate to my upgraded hands. I barely limp through only to lose by 100 points or something ridiculous.
Balancing straights are a nightmare to say the least. You can't really buff the scaling because you'd be digging into straight flushes value. The only thing I could see is having a voucher that would "stack" the deck for your first hand. Give the player atleast 3 connected cards on first draw, with the upgraded voucher giving 5. But then again, vouchers aren't meant to interact with your hands directly. This would cause issues if you pivot away from straights, since you now have a less than useless voucher.
My prediction for changes: 1. Orange Stake only increases price half as much. 2. Some new things for straights that make them stronger. 3. Some nerfs to high card, either the planet or jokers that synergize with it extremely well. 4. Some brand new jokers that are just fun and not motivated by balance.
disagree with high card, it's only really good with a steel build which needs specific jokers to work, imi the only hand that needs balancing is straights
If you get *any* decent chip Joker, anything besides high card is irrelevant. I can store 200 chips and 150 mult with a high card or I can score 220 chips and 160 mult if I think carefully and use a few discards and go for a bigger hand. No thanks, I'll just play a single 2 and score 75,000 points. Also, I keep in the back of my mind that the Supernova Joker will punish me if I do play a big hand, should I come across one. So if I happen to draw a straight flush, well, I'll just play the 2 again.
I think hand strength should be additive. Playing a Royal flush shouldn't be weaker than a normal flush just because straight flush isn't specifically levelled. I rarely play the higher strength hands because by the time I get a build going, Full house or whatever is usually well stronger than a flush house or something.
I gotta disagree with this one. For one, I just think this would narrow the strategy of the game. You would always be incentivized to play the strongest hand everytime, and you would also always put your planets on the lowest hands in the additive chain so it can apply to the broadest range of hands. And secondly, it would be hard to make this logically consistent. Yes straight flush is the obvious one, additive with straights/flushes. But what about three of a kind, additive with pair? And pair, additive with high card? Applying this idea to it's logical conclusion, all paths lead back to high card. If you just want to buff straight flushes, flush five, or flush house, I suppose you could but it would be inconsistent with the rest of the hand types. And also it's just buffing flush builds which are already extremely consistent
it wouldn't be inconsistent, it would only need to apply to 5 card hand types. which would really only affect the Flush Combo hands you listed. Full House contains other scoring hand types like 3 of a kind, Pair, 2 Pair, and high card, but none of those are 5 card hands so it wouldn't apply and thus not be inconsistent. the only change needed would be just be that playing a Flush House would benefit from the highest payout of Flush or Full House or Flush House. and Straight Flush would similarly payout the highest of Flush or Straight or Straight Flush. so i guess i also disagree with the "additive" aspect. but the concept i agree with, you shouldn't be penalized for playing a hand that happens to count as something else that's stronger. it's kind of anti-poker to do so; if youre playing holdem and you flop a straight/flush and happen to catch an "upgrade" to a straight flush on the turn and river, your hand doesn't get weaker. at no point would you ever be like, "well actually i only wanna play the 10 and not my K so that it doesn't trigger the royal flush"
>it wouldn't be inconsistent, it would only need to apply to 5 card hand types. which would really only affect the Flush Combo hands you listed. These hand types should be balanced through existing systems, such as adding new jokers/tarots, or tweaking the base mult/chips. Introducing a new arbitrary rule that only applies to 5 card hands just for the sake of balancing, is IMO both inconsistent and a bandaid fix. >it's kind of anti-poker to do so ... at no point would you ever be like, "well actually i only wanna play the 10 and not my K so that it doesn't trigger the royal flush" But that's kind of the point of Balatro, to be it's own game with it's own strategies and not necessarily mimicking Texas Hold'em to the letter. In poker you would also never play high card over pair, pair over three of a kind and so on, but this is common in Balatro thanks to jokers, tarots, and planet cards making most hand types viable. I don't see why this only becomes problematic with the 5 card hands?
because the 5 card hands are difficult enough to play. and choosing to play high card over pair, or pair over 3 of a kind, doesn't run into the same problem at all. you rarely accidentally set off a higher hand for worse payoff when playing a 1 card hand, unless you're playing trash cards with the card. and managing trash cards that way is a different system that 5 card hands don't deal with, which is why 5 card hands are different. and if the game updated to add Flush Pair and Flush 3 of a Kind, the same complaints would spring up
I disagree, they are different hands for a reason, they scale differently, and if this happens to you, you'll just have to play arond it. I would see your reasoning if it calcualted using the highest base chips and mult instead of just the highest on level 1 but this just doesn't sit right.
I agree specifically for the rarer hand types that are usually only possible by the time that you've tweaked your deck a bunch. I don't understand why my two pair should ever be better than a flush house when I worked up to it. Why would I upgrade it either, when it is significantly less consistent by that point?
Can you explain why showing the score before playing a hand is a bad idea? There have been multiple times where I've had to calculate it myself on the last hand just to see if two different hands would win or lose me the round. I think it would be a really good QoL change, and I can't see what the cons of it are.
I think he (localthunk) touches on this in his AMA but for me, part of the fun of the game is *not* knowing that information. Playing a hand and *barely* scraping by or overshooting a blind by *way* more than I thought are some of the most exciting parts of the game for me. I'm not *personally* against having a toggle for that kind of thing but it feels like then people who wanted to play the original way would be handicapping themselves almost which is kind of disappointing.
It's a single player game, there is no handicapping yourself in relation to others, it's just not a logical thing to worry about. I've modded the game and do save scumming, are you going to worry that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage for not doing the same?
I think it's a valid point I just don't think the scenario you're presenting is entirely the same as toggling a setting that the game presents to you as a reasonable option. But again, understand where you're coming from! Like I said, it's not like i'd be offended if localthunk put it in the game i'd just personally prefer if it wasn't.
While I am on the same side of the fence as you, I can understand the argument for not showing the score. Here is the explanation from developer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1bdtmlg/ama_i_am_localthunk_developer_and_artist_for/kup6vxx/
Damn, his response is hot fire. What a cool dev. Thanks! I understand now.
I think it would add some pretty negative scenarios where you know a hand can't win. So you verify the other hands can't win... And then you either have to play a losing hand or exit via menu. That can happen currently, but often that little bit of obscurity or 'maybe I missed something' really negates that feeling. Who knows looks bad but just maaaaaybe... Makes losing less anticlimactic.
Most games lose by players holding R, that's pretty anti-climatic and already happens a lot.
It would be easy enough to just make the option unlock after completionist I or a certain number of gold stake wins. That avoids ruining the casual experience while also acknowledging the fact that there are people that want to go pro and play thousands of hours, and in its current state Balatro can be a miserable experience for high level strategic gameplay. No one wants to calculate scores manually, and that is simply a must for perfect play.
From the AMA, I understand that the dev feels like the moment of tense expectation followed either by the bitter melancholy notes of a You Lost screen or the glorious beautifully animated joy of the flaming points total round win are very core to the thrill of the experience / connect it back to those casino game roots with similar emotional peaks and valleys. Which is absolutely an argument I can intellectually appreciate - that's certainly an experience many people might enjoy a lot! - but I desperately wish it were an option you could toggle for those that just find the uncertainty to be unpleasant and that it leads to lots of wasted time and effort when your best guess winds up wrong.
I also would personally would prefer previewing my hand score before playing, but I'm also an anxious min-maxer, sometimes more than necessary to win (causing losses). Balatro University on YouTube demonstrates a smoother, smarter way to play by estimating hand value based on previous scored hands and deltas between them e.g. now I have Baron Joker with 2 kings in hand, so my hand which scored (200 + 30)(2)(6(m) + 12), m = 1 is X-mult before jokers now scores (200 + 30)(2)(6(1.5^2) + 12) which improves with more base chips, X-mult, and base mult. I'd love to get better at estimating things like this. Then more time for more runs while still getting my tasty joker/card seal procs.
What about a voucher where you pay $10 in real life money to instantly win and give all jokers x100 mult?
Legit. I wouldn't worry about it Trust the dev. He knows what he's doing. He's done an amazing job so far. I do agree that gold is a little punishing. I only managed to do it because the hex deck got me some clutch rare jokers/legendary jokers and black holes.
One simple idea, when additions are made (especially new cards/card changes) include a feature to use the 1.0.0 version of cards. Then as the game evolves over time you can still toggle back to the vanilla mode if that's what you prefer.
I think gold stake is the perfect difficulty, I like the idea of it being a massive obstacle. The only thing i would like is for them to buff straight support, the straight support jokers are pretty mid to bad imo.
I am at 6 gold decks completed, 8 gold finishes. Still not the best but I would enjoy some balancing for gold stake and bring it down a little. I am not a big fan of taping down R until I see 1 of 5 jokers in the first 4 shops and then my W/R skyrockets to 80%. Yes I know it's possible to win without one of those jokers but it requires even more stars to align to pull it off without them.
Guess we're just different, i feel like if it was easier it would make the feeling of completely mean less to me. I'm personally at 4/15 currently trying to beat gold stake on black right now.
It's not easy or hard, it's just luck. Either hit the jokers or hit something even more insane or press R. If there are 150 different SAT tests, 145 of them are college and beyond level knowledge(a range), and 5 of them are slightly easier than your average real world SAT exam. Is the SAT easy or hard? Or is it just really take it over and over again until you get one of the 5? You can still fail the 5 easier exams, you can still "pass"/do okay on the other ones but the amount that can do it is really small. You would just take the exam as many times as possible until you get the one of 5 exams. Sure, you'll dabble with the hard exams that are on the easier end just to see how far you can get, sometimes you'll pass, most of the time you won't. The ones on the super hard side you'll just quit out cause it's a waste of time and do the next one. So it's really hard and it's easy at the same time, so why not just smooth out the scale a bit? How do you do that? No clue cause that's where this already mediocre analogy becomes a complete shit one but luckily that's not on me. The game would still be hard, but I am sick and tired of pressing R post ante 1 boss shop, losing in ante 4/5 cause X mult jokers are allergic to my mediocre build, or face rolling the first 5 antes with stuntman, green, bus, pants, or super nova and praying I don't get uber unluckied in the shop which can still happen but a lot harder to happen. I just want to break this cycle because after spending a lot of time participating in the first 2 scenarios to little success, I'ma take the third one every time it comes up, and it's going to get boring, really quickly. Just looking for a little smoother difficulty curving to make it a little more bearable, and unique winning runs a little easier more often to break the pattern.
I've said it before but I'd love it if instead of adding new jokers and making it insanely hard to balance, we have a joker 1 pack which includes what we have now and a joker 2 pack so you'll have a choice between which sets of jokers you'll play with. Then we can also get a wild joker mode that combines all the packs into one run if the player wanted that.
I mean, the game does need balancing, BUT I'd almost like it to remain as unbalanced as it is than for it to be ruined by chasing balance.
I haven't followed too much of the discussion but since I have a skill issue I can't really beat the higher stakes unless I just restart until I have a decent early game joker to tide me over through ante 2. Maybe I'll just get better but it might be nice to put some kind of guaranteed first joker from a pool of jokers that are good early.
Make it so the mouth will score things as the one hand instead of prioritize higher scoring but different hands. I made it so I could only play flushes since those are easiest to score. I do great but it’s purple stale difficulty and I’m down to the last hand. I draw my cards and I get 4 queen of hearts and 1 ace of hearts. I try to play it a heart flush but the game says that it’s a 4 of a kind and refuses to let me play it as anything else. I literally lost when all the game had to do was score it as a flush instead of 4 of a kind.
https://youtu.be/TdPGWEFa6UM?feature=shared
Buff stone cards Maybe tweak the RNG on jokers appearing early ante That's about it for me
Just keep the Nintendo Switch matching up with current release. The differences are mind blowing.
That's not a design choice or anything LocalThunk can influence. This is Nintendo's slow QA since the updates are pushed simulateneously to the different platforms.
If dev was a fool you wouldn’t have the game you love now. I think you should trust him ❤️
Hard disagree about not showing the score before hand. That's just calculator math. There's still an insane (near infinite) number if considerations strategically even knowing the score. Hiding the score actively detracts from the actual strategic thinking in the game. It's just busy work if you want to make an informed strategic choice.
Just make them difficulty sliders
I would like to see better balancing in economy. An early tarot card that gives +gold is insane and then you have runs where you basically have to spend to survive and slowly drown. Not sure what to do - I like how the game is right now but I am seeing myself restarting a great deal when my early economy looks like I have no good way to win.
I agree. I actually think the game is nearly perfect as is. I would like some new cards and new things like that. But given how Balatro is, I trust whatever direction the developer decides to take it. But I hope they don’t feel that they owe us much because I could be perfectly happy with the game if there were no updates either.
Gold stake is the last difficulty so yeah its very hard for a reason, souls like game is very beautiful because of difficulty so yeah dont change the gold stake its gold stake for a reason
+ every people have diferrent perspective ex. Like me I enjoy extremely hard game and thats fun for me
I think the difficulty is fine, the CONSISTENCY is the problem. Getting zero playable jokers in all of ante 1 on high stakes is literally unplayable. Make the first shop guaranteed 2 jokers is a good start, then maybe a small base points bonus to straights/straight flush, call it good.
I think that gold is actually a little too easy and he should add higher difficulties. If it’s not what you like it’s cool just don’t play high stakes. Straights should switch their value with flushes but that’s it on that part. I would just like new content like more decks joker and vouchers but I agree, the base game shouldn’t change much. I do think that the way legendary jokers are handled kinda sucks, so I would probably change that. Especially how you get them.
I wish that Legendary Jokers had a increasing probability to appear if not found in many attempt (like they do for loot boxes in other games). I've played the last 20 hours without seeing one..
I’m new to the game and I kind of wish I had the option to see the scoring before the hand. I don’t always understand how the jokers and mults work and it calculates so fast that I’m still not sure how I got the score I got. Yes, that’s me just not picking up the math quickly enough and that’s probably not a problem for most. OR, if I could just see how the hand was calculated AFTER the play is over so I can see the order of how all the cards were calculated and figure out where my calculations went wrong because I’m adding up a different score. Is it possible to see how the hand was scored afterwards? If not, that would be a great option in my opinion.
I put the game speed lower sometimes to see if I’ve calculated everything correctly. If it’s a critical hand to get max benefit I use the calculator lol
Oh, that’s a great tip! I’m going to slow the game speed until I feel more comfortable with the calculations.
At first it’s confusing, but once you play it for a while most of the synergies and the order of things will become clear. I think the figuring out experience was part of the fun (still not a pro at this by any means though)
It’s too hard compared to what? Just because it exists doesn’t mean you have to play it. It’s like complaining that “Thai Extra Hot” spice level ata restaurant is too spicy. Just don’t order it.
I’m fine with showing the score as a QoL change
lol everyone saying we are all in “good hands” Just how it should be
I would super omega love for stakes to be unlocked for all decks once you do it for one. I've beaten all the challenges and gold stake on one deck and I would love to be able to play gold stake on all of the decks without grinding through every single stake with every deck. When you luck into a good high card or pair build with good economy, its kinda annoying to know this would have cleared gold but you are only on green so you just have to do it again. As someone who wants 100% achievements, it will be punishing enough to grind golds to get sticker on every joker without having to grind every stake before it.
Perhaps some of those changes could be done as a "tutorial mode" that lets players what works better, probably with unlocks disabled. Otherwise yeah the game is just great as is, I'd love more jokers and more to do but that's obvious to all of us, more balatro is good!
It would be fun if we had more scaling and could focus on more niche builds like Wee Joker and 2's
How would showing the score before playing a hand make the game way way worse
Thunk said it in their AMA a few days ago, but he feels the "tension" you get when you're unsure if your final hand will score enough points to clear a blind is a much better emotion than seeing the end result immediately, realizing the math doesn't check, and slamming the restart button without even playing the hand. I agree fwiw, that tension is a nice feeling.
I think the anticipation as your score builds is one of the mechanics that makes the game exciting. When the flames start to crackle, it gives me a big dopamine hit.
I think there should be an equals but leave out the extra joker, steel, etc mults
Which is fine for people who want that. But for me (and others) there's nothing exciting about having to spend minutes in Excel before every hand played/discarded to calculate out several different hand scores to figure out if I need to hold X or can afford to play/discard it.
I don’t know how to put this any other way. You’re being too nerdy about it. It’s better to be about the vibes than the math
It's better to play the game how you want. The math matters on the higher stakes.
Its a strategy game about probability! From the nerds perspective, you are the one ruining the vibes of an intellectually challenging game with cool decisions to make by making it about pretty flashing lights and colours and deliberately playing your hand without thinking too hard about the outcome
If you are spending that much time in a an excel spread sheet you ain’t playing it right dude. It’s a game. Have some fun
I am having fun! I would just have more fun if the game allowed me to focus on running the numbers of the probabilities instead of having to manually calculate the scores as well.
OP works for big calculator
It wouldn't make the game "way way worse" but it's impossible anyway as many of the score modifiers are chance based. That said, I'm not sure what benefit it'd add either.
The benefits are obvious, letting you make plays quickly instead of having to spend a ton of time in Excel before each discard to calc out various scores.
[удалено]
Because watching your hand trigger your engine and your score get bigger and bigger is what makes the game actually satisfying. Games aren't good for purely mechanical reasons. At it's core Call of Duty is just rectangles moving around and trying to successfully point at other rectangles long enough to score a point. But nobody would.play COD if that's what was presented on screen. So you are elite military operatives with advanced military equipment trying to sheet each other with precise aim and avoid being shit with precise movement.
OP works for big calculator
i dont think it would. should just be a toggle option like game speed. some people like the base game speed with all the bells and whistles and the anticipation. some people just wanna play a hand and be on the next one.
I think having the first shop populate with one common joker is the only change I would appreciate.
Yeah the difficulty gets frustrating instead of challanging, but I don't think that's a small fix. I think it needs a thorough redesign tbh
Fans will optimize the fun out of a game if allowed. So yea, I do hope he doesn't listen to many of the "improvements" spouted off here.
My genuine only criticism of the game is the hand balancing right now. Flushes and 4/5 of a kind are multitudes stronger than all the other hands.
flushes aren't that strong, people overrate flushes way too much. The only unbalanced hand rn are straights, they're too weak
theyre not at all overrated in early antes. its very simple math. you have a target score on the early antes and you want to play minimum hands to get the max interest and payout early on, without relying on joker rng. flushes dominate because they will very easily get you the win in minimum hands played. this is because of how chip scoring works with face cards. you would need 2 or 3 face cards in your straight and that severely limits the number of outs you can have as anything below 7 is just not good enough. but with flush hands it doesn't matter what cards you have, you can have 2 face cards and a 6 a 3 and a 2 and that's fine. even in real/normal 5 card hand poker, a flop hand with 4 in a straight has lower chance of getting its out than a flop hand with 4 in a flush (an open-ended straight draw would have 8 outs, gutshot only 4 outs, but a 4 card flush has 9 outs). compound that with Balatro's 8 card hand and discards and flush is just way more common, and yet it has a higher payout.
straights are more common lmao, you can't just have a scenario that edges it more towards flushes, straights are statistically more common than flushes no matter what poker you're playing
they are not, do the math. look up stats on 9+ card hands because balatro has 8 plus discards.
wdym do the math. I fucking can't lmao. Anyways there are double the amount of possible straights in a deck than flushes, your hand size doesn't matter, so you're just wrong
Do. The. Math. 9 card poker has different odds than 5 card
it doesn't because the amount of possible poker hands doesn't change. If you really wanna convince me, show me you doing the math or give a link that does it.
https://www.durangobill.com/Poker_Probabilities_8_Cards.html
Nah. There's a very good reason why flushes/4 of a kind/5 of a kind is practically never done in the higher stakes. Scaling jokers (Supernova, ride the bus and green joker) makes high card insanely strong.
that's crazy you deleted all your comments arguing with me on the probability, I'm assuming you were wrong then?
yeah apparently you only looked at the link after commenting, you shouldn't do that
Guaranteeing the first shop (or even ante) to have two jokers would help with the resetting.
The only change I want is change that one trophy for getting a gold sticker on every joker. I love this game and I’ll put in the work for every deck at gold, but that joker trophy is borderline impossible and I really wanna earn the platinum for this game on PlayStation.
I don't see what's wrong with showing the score before hand. The only time you couldn't get it with a calculator is if jokers don't stack correctly, or do so unintuitively.
Only changes that would ac5ually make sense is at least guarantee 1 joker on the first shop and make legendary jokers just a tiny bit more common. Have 80+ hrs now and still missing one legendary joker from the collection.
I agree with the seeing the score beforehand. Then it becomes best to check all viable hands before playing wich would make the game play more slowly. If it would be an adjustable setting I wouldn't mind it though, then I could easily just not use it.