Small UI improvement (fire animation) to make undershooting calculations less frustrating

[timid rune]

Undershooting (deliberately choosing suboptimal hands to play more total hands in a blind) has many uses, and has had them even before the beta branch changes. Scaling jokers, econ jokers, or simply gold seal/lucky triggers may be reasons why you want to undershoot.

However, the difference is that most situations that benefit from undershooting before the patch punished you very mildly if you got it wrong. If you accidentally won the blind when trying to undershoot, in most cases you only lost a tiny bit of growth or econ, with little consequence.

However, rental jokers change this equation significantly. I think that, as they experiment with the patch, strong players will quickly realize that it's nearly universally optimal to buy rentals if:

• You have the spare space.
• You can benefit from them somehow during next blind.
• You can sell them during next blind, before winning.

Basic examples are mail-in rebate, to-do list or rough gem. If they're offered as rentals, they'll cost 1 to buy and return 1 when sold, so they're literally 100% upside if you manage to sell them before winning the next blind. However, the penalty for getting this wrong (3 dollars) can be huge early, potentially run-ending in ante 1.

I think this design space (rentals having an upside) is good. I also think that strong players tend to have good estimation skills and are less likely to be caught by surprise by a winning hand. However, I'm also fairly sure that no strong player enjoys having a calculator out and precalculating every hand to make sure it undershoots.

(Continues in next post)

I know that localthunk does not want to provide a point preview when selecting a hand during a blind. Even though I'm 100% on the Jorbs school of thought and believe this would make the game better, I understand the design ideas behind not having it. However, I think keeping things as is will eventually make the loop tedious for players who feel the need to calculate undershoots too frequently.

So I have a small proposal:

Change the meaning of the "fire" animation when previewing a hand, so that the fire appears if the hand will win, after modifiers.

Note I'm not talking about the fire animation that grows as effects occur. That one is past the decision point of pressing "play", and can stay as is. I'm talking about the fire animation that plays when you're selecting a hand that wins based on printed points alone.

I think that fire animation is not very useful currently: it only serves to identify a handful of insta-win hands in ante 1, and the game quickly scales past the point of that animation ever showing up again. If the animation is reframed so it previews whether you'll win the blind with that hand including jokers and other effects (that is, considering the final point value, not just the printed one), it achieves a few key things:

• It provides some QoL information, but not enough to dumb down the decisionmaking for weaker players that would just select random things in hand looking at point totals.
• It ensures that you aren't caught by surprise by a victory or an undershoot, reducing frustration in critical moments.
• It reuses an already existing asset (fire preview) that has little use in the current version of the game.

[edgy shuttle]

As much as I like this idea, probably won’t be executed because it would ruin the tension of not knowing how powerful a hand is.

[timid rune]

That's a valid concern. I wonder though how much of that tension is real after a certain point of experience. Sure, one hand out of a 100 you might not be sure if you're making it or not, but I feel like most of my gold stake runs are either "this hand will crush" or "I got outscaled, I can't make it". The few surprises in between feel frustrating more than anything, as they make me (correctly) think that I should've pulled out the calculator, which I'd rather not do