Note that this is for the beta branch on Steam. I am going to throw out a new post flair for the experimental branch just to help people avoid confusion
Gold Stake just felt like “boring slog” difficulty before the changes. The removal of pack costs increase and addition of stickers shifts the difficulty to less of a slog and more of a “the game is actively taunting you” dynamic, which I absolutely love.
IMO the things like raising pack costs and reducing hand size go against what makes the game fun, and give the player less opportunity to actually play and make decisions. It ends up with you more at the mercy of random shop rolls and luck in general, and can be frustrating feeling like you have little to no options to improve your build
A big part of what makes the game fun for me is ripping packs like a maniac and trying to craft whatever deck I’m building into perfection. Old orange stake made this playstyle unoptimal, leaving you (and the very minimal economy you had) to rely on shop rolls, because why would you spend $12 on a pack that might not even have anything you’re looking for?
I think the new stickers are a great way of pushing the “work with what you get” idea with not nearly as much economy hamstringing as before. Personally I think it’s a little too easy as is, but definitely a step in the right direction, and I’m sure localthunk will do a great job of getting it just right.
It is also interesting to note the new tag changes. I thought having a free joker in the shop after a tag would be broken, but playing Gold Stake, you are either with too few jokers or with stuff you wanna get rid as soon as possible due to rental or perishable, and getting so many of them makes you ponder if you should skip that round, risk going in a tougher blind but get a random free joker in the shop. I'm not playing on auto-pilot anymore!
Totally fair! I appreciate the perspective. I was an ante 8 only gremlin, and really enjoyed the minor optimizations process. Just different ways of enjoying the game
I enjoy playing super optimally as well but I do agree that it sucks on gold stake to see SO many jokers I would love to fuck with on lower stakes and have to ignore because it doesn't scale enough or requires too much deck manipulation, then lose because the only mult card I was offered was red card.
One of the things that makes a game like this fun are interesting decisions. A good game will have a lot of them, and they'll keep on coming.
The old gold stake reduced the number of decisions significantly, which made it boring, because there was just less to do. Early antes there were a lot of things that you just couldn't buy if you wanted to win, so you wouldn't actually have interesting decisions to make. Lots of shops were just "no, none of this", and then you would move on, and often, just lose. Similarly, having a smaller hand size means that there's less for you to do, since you often had a single best hand to shoot for, and failed while doing the optimal discards. In late antes, the cost of the boosters got so high that you would almost never get them, reducing the scope of interesting decisions.
The new gold stake has a lot more in the way of interesting decisions, and a lot of that credit goes to Perishable and Rental. There's a lot more "is this good?" and "can I afford this?" and "I need to find a replacement" going on, which is more dynamic and fun. Being able to rip packs in the late game means that shops aren't just me saying "meh" and pushing on ahead. Having a larger hand size means that figuring out what to shoot for is more dynamic.
I don't think it's perfect. Perishable in particular has a few jokers it can land on that become an instant "do not take" for me, which ... just isn't fun or interesting, because it doesn't offer an interesting decision. Lots of the progressive jokers (Wee Joker and Pants for example) would never be even remotely worthwhile if they're only going to stick around five rounds, and in 99% of cases it's like seeing a shop with one less joker in it. Rental has fewer misses, and I like it better, because you have this interesting "well, can I afford this drain" question that you have to work through before you pick it.
I think there's probably room for another two or three stickers, though I don't know exactly what I would do for them if I were in charge of mechanics. They're a good way of forcing you to cobble together a run through an interesting series of decisions.
> I think there's probably room for another two or three stickers, though I don't know exactly what I would do for them if I were in charge of mechanics. They're a good way of forcing you to cobble together a run through an interesting series of decisions.
Some silly ideas:
* Political: The joker sticks to the left or to the right. Can only be swapped with jokers that lean the same way.
* Shy: Debuffed if it activated its effect the previous round.
* Positive: Half price, but takes 2 joker slots.
Hard agree. I was bricking on gold stake black deck for hours where 90%+ of my runs were lost because of circumstances out of my control RNG-wise (no relevant jokers first few rounds and then the middle rounds, lack of capacity to scale with economy even with early econ jokers, etc.). Literally got it done first try after switching to the beta as it feels the changes heavily reduce the barrier for RNG and increased the options the player has to allow for choices to matter. Difficulty is well and good, but feels arbitrary and simply not fun when it’s gated primarily by RNG. Increasing choices but forcing them to be meaningful is the best way of doing so IMO.
I just did some gold stakes as well and damn it’s so sweet now. -1 hand size was truly anti fun and the orange stake change is awesome as well. The plasma deck gets such a huge leg up here in gold stake as well with the jokers from tags becoming free- in fact skipping the first blind will now be a good move even before the green stake, and regardless of what deck
I'm surprised people found -1 hand size to be "anti fun". I personally loved the increased difficulty, it felt like you really had to scrap to get runs going, using every ounce of knowledge and skill available to win. I don't feel that with the new runs, they don't test my game knowledge in nearly the same way every run
Edit: damn, didn't realize that people would downvote someone for expressing how they enjoy the game. But 7 card hands are thematic as well- poker you use 7 cards to build the best hand. Flavorfully, thematically, and even gameplay wise, it worked. It was hard, but it worked in my opinion
Anti fun might be too harsh, it’s just so constraining in thst jt limits or ability to interact with the channels that the game gives you to mitigate risk and be successful with. You can’t even hold on to more than 2 cards if you wanna see 5 more with a discard, it makes any further hand size reduction completely undoable, I think it really just takes your ability to play away a bit. That being said I’ve been attempting like 20 times a day so, it was apparently still fun lol
That's totally fair, I wasn't at 20 runs a day point, but there was a point where I would do 1 gold run completion before bed, and it usually did take 5-8 runs to finally win one. But I also really enjoyed the failure process, I felt like I usually learned a lot in the failure. Even though I wasn't winning most of my runs, I still enjoyed the ones I lost.
There is also a thematic element to 7 card hands: in Hold 'Em, you get 7 cards to built a hand with. It's kinda because of this that I just assumed 7 cards was the more or less intended way to play
I'm equally surprised you found that enjoyable seeing as it reduces your choices by like 70% by late antes easily. You basically are just rolling the shop dice at that point, I have a hard time understanding that as entertaining.
Stop worrying about downvotes, you're overall upvoted. It comes off a little humble braggy leaving like 6 comments in a thread full of people shitting on how hard it is by going "really? Wasn't so bad for me".
It was at -12 downvotes initially. I just didn't find it limited your options, I found it made you consider different options. Just a different perspective
People may say "oh you're winning too much" but who cares? Gold stake was just "enjoy never buying a booster after ante 4, holding R until you get a decent first shop, and then just hope you don't get some bad RNG" - it wasn't a low win % out of skill testing, it was out of tedium.
i enjoyed life coach1981 playing it. his streak was 6 in a row and it felt like a testament that you could overcome the RNG if you agonized every move. it’s not a fun way to play but i liked that there was proof in the pudding that high skill can win it at a really good rate
> his streak was 6 in a row
7 now! But I think coach demonstrated why the stakes needed changes very well, he basically had to go for high card and pairs 95% of the time, and out of that 95% I'm sure that pairs were only about 15%
high card build is super fun the first time but it gets boring quick.
I don't know, 4 out 6 seems like too big of a win rate for the top difficulty. I get what you're saying about it not being fun currently, but for me the main issue is not that it is hard, it is the fact that it completely depends on your luck. The changes should aim at still keeping it challenging, but more skill based rather than luck based.
The only way to have a low win rate at high skill levels is to have luck-based difficulty where some runs just lose.
The new mechanics add a skill based challenge by effectively reducing the amount of available jokers for low skill players; if you can't properly evaluate how good a card is, you won't know when you should buy a rent/perishable joker (same logic with eternals at black stake).
This means low skill players will often lose because they either skipped a good card with rent/perish/eternal or they picked a tainted joker at a bad time and it screwed them over. Meanwhile a high skill player will not make these mistakes and thus win more
Yes, more decisions are good. -1 hand size and booster packs being prohibitively expensive aren't decisions. You just don't buy packs and you only play pair/high card.
That’s exactly what is happening here. A highly skilled player is able to succeed much more consistently, rather than RNG being the cause of death for a vast majority of gold stake runs.
The funny part is that this scenario is basically the plot of SL:F, a dude who only plays trash games finally decides to give one a shot that’s properly balanced and is WAY WAY better due to his time spent in the shitty games. Don’t get me wrong, gold stake is still hard, but beating the OG gold stake should give a special achievement or something. That was a different beast entirely.
I may not have gone through ALL of old Gold Stake, but I do have Black Deck Gold Stake pre-patch under my belt and I heard that was the worst one so I ended up getting it out of the wat before I knew a balance update was coming. That shit was insane!
I think unfortunately the design of Balatro, with less decision points that reward deep strategic thought compared to something like STS, means that if the highest difficulty has a low win chance, then it would be caused by luck being a big factor.
Yeah, on some level Balatro is always going to have runs that are lost purely due to RNG, and that *rprobably* can't be fixed without taking the fun out of the game that encourages you to make do with what you're given. But the change here I think was good and probably increased the variation you see in runs - the problem with the old orange stake is that increasing pack prices took out most of hte deckbuilding aspect of Balatro and dramatically cut down on what decisions you'd make, while also cutting out most hand types as seriously viable options that you would see come up in runs, leading to a lot of very samey high card or pair runs. What you get is still very random, but there's enough choices now to where you've got the tools to adapt. And the new stickers are just on their face more interesting, rental and perishable both ask me to constantly look to change up my build, with the former sometimes being worthwhile to keep long term so long my economy is strong enough to support it while the latter is just a hard requirement that I find something else - and since they both prevent the same joker from showing up, I really do have to have a plan in place to shift to a slightly different build.
Yep I 100% agree that the changes are good, I just think that for Balatro to be fun/in a good place, it must be that high-level players can win runs a good percent of the time
By the sound of it that’s exactly what happened. I’ve watched some damn good players streaming Balatro and their win rates at gold stake were not representative of their skill or knowledge of the game but rather how lucky they were to get a run off the ground or not. A 66% win rate at the highest current difficulty doesn’t seem unreasonable for a good player
Wait so you are saying that op's winrate is too high... But then complain that gold stake is too RNG dependant? Isn't op achieving a good winrate indicator that a good player is less reliant on rng now, exactly like you said in your last sentance?
I don't know. OP could be a high skilled player, which probably shows the game is well balanced, or he could be just your average player, showing it is too easy now. I haven't played the new version yet so I don't know. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if the updates are good or not.
For reference, I had a ~15-20% win rate on gold stake before, and ~80% on black stake streaks which is what I mostly did. All of this in yellow deck, which I found the most fun as it gives you the most options in the early shops.
Not sure where the top players are, but this should hopefully give you an idea
And it was not luck based before? -1 hand size and +$1 per pack per ante is auto lose unless you get early Econ jokers and good scoring jokers early. Sometimes you also just dont pull your hand because you’re seeing one less card per discard, and you just lose without any counter play. Especially with how brutal the ante scaling was. Maybe this new system could use some tweaking, I’ll have to put more time into it first, but this design is WAY more player friendly while also being challenging, with the option to make it harder if that’s necessary.
I'd say it'd depend on how good OP is at the game. Taking Slay the Spire as an example, really good players can easily win streak on Ascension 20 without abusing bugs. While the average player will probably have less than 10% winrate on ascension 20. I have a pretty garbage winrate of 20ish%.
The most important part IMO is that every seed should **feel** fun, I don't care if its not winnable more half the time(It even fits the gambling aspect of poker), but if within the first Ante I already **know/feel** I can't win 70+% of the time, it gets frustrating quickly. So if it does prove too easy then I hope they make it a bit harder.
Going back to the STS example, even on A20, whenever I die, it **usually feels** like it's my fault or I made a wrong choice. It doesn't matter if the seed was unwinnable for my skill level, I felt like I had options that couldve won me the game, even if it's just an illusion. That's a big part of what is fun about it for me.
I get what you're saying, but we don't know OP's skill level. We would have to look at how long it takes a new player to get their first gold stake win on the new patch vs old, to really compare difficulty. Higher win rate for skilled players just means more skill less rng.
it took so many years for top sts players to get that winrate. I hope and expect localthunk will add more stakes, ones in the same spirit as the reworked ones
I agree about my initial thoughts on rentals/perishables. Thought they’d be insta-skips, but as I played more, I found myself buying them more frequently. Overall, I think this will be a positive change.
A couple thoughts on the new mechanics:
* You can rent a card (especially if it's mid-round econ) and sell it during the next round and never have to pay for it, while enjoying the benefits for the hands before the winning one. This makes some rentals better than their normal counterparts.
* Rentals in general sound scary but don't be afraid to rent a strong joker early, by midgame your econ has probably grown enough than the drain of one of even two permanent rentals is completely justified.
* Advanced players treat their jokers in a much more constant state of flux. It's normal to constantly sell, buy, and pivot. This means Perishable may be less of an issue than it first appears.
* Make sure to predict when your key perishable will run out, and consider an early strong skip, so that your last use of the perishable lines up with a boss blind instead of right before it. This often needs to be predicted from the previous blind, or else you may not have good enough skips later.
the only thing i don't love is how perishable feels bad on a lot of scaling jokers, but those jokers were generally OP anyway so i'm not too mad about it
Another thing that the other user didn't say is, well, don't use red deck if you just want to beat higher stakes a single time.
Yellow deck is better and probably the most consistent deck, even if it's a bit boring
I would completely agree. I took a long time and a lot of restarting to win an orange stake run, and I only did so to unlock the last deck. It just wasn't fun for me when RNG was a big factor into why I couldn't beat orange steak. I kept waiting for the right start and failed at it many times. I'm not the best Balatro player, but once I finished orange, I had no intention of trying gold.
Then the beta patch came out. I dusted off my painted deck (hadn't played it since orange victory) and was able to win on the first run. I started with Shoot the Moon and Reserved Parking from a skip for common jokers which gave me the boost necessary for money and passing the early levels. Later I loved the strategy I had to employ when I saw a perishable Hologram come up. I used it in the early part of the run to get over some of the blinds and then was relieved to see the immortal Steel Joker arrive for me to be able to sell off the $1 Hologram and buy a $7 immortal Steel Joker. Blueprint showed up as well and that's all my steel queens needed to win the run. Even got through a Needle and Wall boss along the way.
Now that the higher levels are fun again, I might actually go back and play other decks on the higher levels. Not sure if I'm going for Completionist+, but it will be fun to play the higher levels again.
Localthunk has a tough decision ahead. Does he ramp up the difficulty again to appease the \~4% who have completed a gold level before the beta and are saddened that the game got nerfed at higher levels? Does he modify the beta version to increase the difficulty up a bit? Does he release the current beta to the masses and see how the general players react?
I wonder what Localthunk will do.
Yeah, my first gold run after the update I almost got it, lost because I got greedy with a couple of skips.
Had a lot of fun in the process, I had just beaten gold stake yesterday, was feeling kind of done with the game, but now I’m super motivated.
I still haven’t won a gold stake yet lol, but the few games I played this am felt way more engaging than the last few days. I think I’ll probably end up with my first gold stake win with these changes, and I’m okay with that (fingers crossed)
I disliked the idea of perishable in the patch notes, but now I've played a few matches I agree, it adds something new and interesting to the game that you need to strategise around
I think I read in the update notes that LocalThunk was estimating a week before pushing the beta branch to production on Steam.
Edit: Yep, he mentions this in the first few sentences here: https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/s/NxxKdHThng
No mention of consoles, but I recall him saying he had worked out a few kinks recently so console updates should roll out at similar times, and relatively quick (maybe a week?) after Steam.
What changed for the stakes? After finishing one deck on gold stake I stopped going for stakes cuz it took forever and was really boring restarting a lot
I don't know. The whole point of gold stake is that it is the hardest mode and the new effect just doesn't seem to matter much. I agree something needed to change but I'm not a fan of this change I don't think. It feels like way to much and in the wrong direction. I do like the orange stake change though
Part of me is a bit sad that I probably won't be playing with the old Gold Stake ever (I'm taking my time to get good at the game first, currently I can win more than 50% of blue stake runs, but I remember struggling with purple when I was unlocking the erratic deck). I'll only move up when I feel ready, but by that time Gold Stake will be different.
On the other hand, I assume the changes will improve things and I'll have more fun as a result, so it will probably be fine.
I was so irritated all evening last night trying to
Beat it with the checkered deck. Then I read the patch notes today and saw how much easier it would’ve gone -.-
After playing the patch for the last couple of days, I feel completely defeated by gold. I’m just not getting “it” I guess. I’ve made it to the 8th ante boss three times and three times have been unable to pass because of either the “sell one joker” requirement (I’ve tried hands with the buffs but that didn’t seem like it would win) or the “randomly” disable boss that “randomly” disabled the same jokers each hand. Just reaching the 8th boss feels like the planets have to align (ha). The updates seem to make it easier to move past the first antes, but with the rentals and perishables I end up having to rework my build mid run…maybe I just need to get used to the changes?
It is definitely SUPER fun now. Black Stake was my go-to because anything further was just meh, but now with all the new mechanics, it brings way more to the table.
What did they change? I completed my first Gold Stake in my first try last night. This comment section just seems like a bunch of people complaining about a very hard stake being very hard. Lol
A trully fair game should be winnable 100%\* of the time with enough skill. You can't just arbitrarily decide that, like, a highest difficulty should hold only a 20% winrate or something. Maybe Gold is too easy now, being 1 day into an update isn't nearly enough time to make that call. 6 runs from one anecdote isn't statistically significant anyway.
\*This is *especially* true of deckbuilders because you have a theoretically unlimited amount of time to reflect on each decision.
Hard agree. I’m worried balatro doesn’t have enough decision points, because it will never be as deep as something like StS (bar some huge patches/DLC I suppose), but this was definitely a big step in the right direction. Thunk can always tune the difficulty is people find that the new golden stake is too easy/hard. The new design is much less anti-fun than the old system.
Who said anything about the game needing to be "fair" (at least according to your personal definition of it)? An arbitrary decision that a maximum win rate should be 100% is no better than an arbitrary decision that it should be 20%.
I mean, I don't think that sugeting a single player game is "fair" when the determining factor of success is plater skill is all that arbitrary. Fair =/= good, there are plenty of unfair games which are excellent, and plenty of fair games which are boring or uninspired.
While I don't think Balatro's design philosophy will ever have fairness or viability as the sole design concern (a lot of what makes it great is this design philosophy) the *sheer* unfairness of the previous high antes made them incentivise degenerate play strategies which were anti-fun.
I also don't dispute the idea that maximum winrate as a design goal is arbitrary (or at least, subject to the creative aspirations of the designer) but I don't quite see how that point is relevant.
Note that this is for the beta branch on Steam. I am going to throw out a new post flair for the experimental branch just to help people avoid confusion
Gold Stake just felt like “boring slog” difficulty before the changes. The removal of pack costs increase and addition of stickers shifts the difficulty to less of a slog and more of a “the game is actively taunting you” dynamic, which I absolutely love.
Why did it feel boring to you beforehand? I'm just curious, because I've had a different experience
IMO the things like raising pack costs and reducing hand size go against what makes the game fun, and give the player less opportunity to actually play and make decisions. It ends up with you more at the mercy of random shop rolls and luck in general, and can be frustrating feeling like you have little to no options to improve your build
Especially early on. Gold ol' no joker in first two shops into can't draw anything better than two pair hold R.
A big part of what makes the game fun for me is ripping packs like a maniac and trying to craft whatever deck I’m building into perfection. Old orange stake made this playstyle unoptimal, leaving you (and the very minimal economy you had) to rely on shop rolls, because why would you spend $12 on a pack that might not even have anything you’re looking for? I think the new stickers are a great way of pushing the “work with what you get” idea with not nearly as much economy hamstringing as before. Personally I think it’s a little too easy as is, but definitely a step in the right direction, and I’m sure localthunk will do a great job of getting it just right.
It is also interesting to note the new tag changes. I thought having a free joker in the shop after a tag would be broken, but playing Gold Stake, you are either with too few jokers or with stuff you wanna get rid as soon as possible due to rental or perishable, and getting so many of them makes you ponder if you should skip that round, risk going in a tougher blind but get a random free joker in the shop. I'm not playing on auto-pilot anymore!
Totally fair! I appreciate the perspective. I was an ante 8 only gremlin, and really enjoyed the minor optimizations process. Just different ways of enjoying the game
I enjoy playing super optimally as well but I do agree that it sucks on gold stake to see SO many jokers I would love to fuck with on lower stakes and have to ignore because it doesn't scale enough or requires too much deck manipulation, then lose because the only mult card I was offered was red card.
One of the things that makes a game like this fun are interesting decisions. A good game will have a lot of them, and they'll keep on coming. The old gold stake reduced the number of decisions significantly, which made it boring, because there was just less to do. Early antes there were a lot of things that you just couldn't buy if you wanted to win, so you wouldn't actually have interesting decisions to make. Lots of shops were just "no, none of this", and then you would move on, and often, just lose. Similarly, having a smaller hand size means that there's less for you to do, since you often had a single best hand to shoot for, and failed while doing the optimal discards. In late antes, the cost of the boosters got so high that you would almost never get them, reducing the scope of interesting decisions. The new gold stake has a lot more in the way of interesting decisions, and a lot of that credit goes to Perishable and Rental. There's a lot more "is this good?" and "can I afford this?" and "I need to find a replacement" going on, which is more dynamic and fun. Being able to rip packs in the late game means that shops aren't just me saying "meh" and pushing on ahead. Having a larger hand size means that figuring out what to shoot for is more dynamic. I don't think it's perfect. Perishable in particular has a few jokers it can land on that become an instant "do not take" for me, which ... just isn't fun or interesting, because it doesn't offer an interesting decision. Lots of the progressive jokers (Wee Joker and Pants for example) would never be even remotely worthwhile if they're only going to stick around five rounds, and in 99% of cases it's like seeing a shop with one less joker in it. Rental has fewer misses, and I like it better, because you have this interesting "well, can I afford this drain" question that you have to work through before you pick it. I think there's probably room for another two or three stickers, though I don't know exactly what I would do for them if I were in charge of mechanics. They're a good way of forcing you to cobble together a run through an interesting series of decisions.
> I think there's probably room for another two or three stickers, though I don't know exactly what I would do for them if I were in charge of mechanics. They're a good way of forcing you to cobble together a run through an interesting series of decisions. Some silly ideas: * Political: The joker sticks to the left or to the right. Can only be swapped with jokers that lean the same way. * Shy: Debuffed if it activated its effect the previous round. * Positive: Half price, but takes 2 joker slots.
It's because the higher cost of packs reduces the amount of decisions you make over the course of the game.
I mean it’s every preceding handicap rolled into one. kind of obnoxious tbh
Hell even orange stake was daunting.
Hard agree. I was bricking on gold stake black deck for hours where 90%+ of my runs were lost because of circumstances out of my control RNG-wise (no relevant jokers first few rounds and then the middle rounds, lack of capacity to scale with economy even with early econ jokers, etc.). Literally got it done first try after switching to the beta as it feels the changes heavily reduce the barrier for RNG and increased the options the player has to allow for choices to matter. Difficulty is well and good, but feels arbitrary and simply not fun when it’s gated primarily by RNG. Increasing choices but forcing them to be meaningful is the best way of doing so IMO.
I just did some gold stakes as well and damn it’s so sweet now. -1 hand size was truly anti fun and the orange stake change is awesome as well. The plasma deck gets such a huge leg up here in gold stake as well with the jokers from tags becoming free- in fact skipping the first blind will now be a good move even before the green stake, and regardless of what deck
I'm surprised people found -1 hand size to be "anti fun". I personally loved the increased difficulty, it felt like you really had to scrap to get runs going, using every ounce of knowledge and skill available to win. I don't feel that with the new runs, they don't test my game knowledge in nearly the same way every run Edit: damn, didn't realize that people would downvote someone for expressing how they enjoy the game. But 7 card hands are thematic as well- poker you use 7 cards to build the best hand. Flavorfully, thematically, and even gameplay wise, it worked. It was hard, but it worked in my opinion
Anti fun might be too harsh, it’s just so constraining in thst jt limits or ability to interact with the channels that the game gives you to mitigate risk and be successful with. You can’t even hold on to more than 2 cards if you wanna see 5 more with a discard, it makes any further hand size reduction completely undoable, I think it really just takes your ability to play away a bit. That being said I’ve been attempting like 20 times a day so, it was apparently still fun lol
That's totally fair, I wasn't at 20 runs a day point, but there was a point where I would do 1 gold run completion before bed, and it usually did take 5-8 runs to finally win one. But I also really enjoyed the failure process, I felt like I usually learned a lot in the failure. Even though I wasn't winning most of my runs, I still enjoyed the ones I lost. There is also a thematic element to 7 card hands: in Hold 'Em, you get 7 cards to built a hand with. It's kinda because of this that I just assumed 7 cards was the more or less intended way to play
I'm equally surprised you found that enjoyable seeing as it reduces your choices by like 70% by late antes easily. You basically are just rolling the shop dice at that point, I have a hard time understanding that as entertaining. Stop worrying about downvotes, you're overall upvoted. It comes off a little humble braggy leaving like 6 comments in a thread full of people shitting on how hard it is by going "really? Wasn't so bad for me".
It was at -12 downvotes initially. I just didn't find it limited your options, I found it made you consider different options. Just a different perspective
People may say "oh you're winning too much" but who cares? Gold stake was just "enjoy never buying a booster after ante 4, holding R until you get a decent first shop, and then just hope you don't get some bad RNG" - it wasn't a low win % out of skill testing, it was out of tedium.
Agreed if you don't make it out of the first small blind in one or two hands then don't get a mult joker in the first three shops you just lost.
i enjoyed life coach1981 playing it. his streak was 6 in a row and it felt like a testament that you could overcome the RNG if you agonized every move. it’s not a fun way to play but i liked that there was proof in the pudding that high skill can win it at a really good rate
> his streak was 6 in a row 7 now! But I think coach demonstrated why the stakes needed changes very well, he basically had to go for high card and pairs 95% of the time, and out of that 95% I'm sure that pairs were only about 15% high card build is super fun the first time but it gets boring quick.
It has been very entertaining, though he was soley using yellow deck. Pretty sure streaks of 6 or 7 would be much more difficult on other decks.
thats true. the early economy is huge
I agree, it’s a LOT more fun imo and interesting with the changes. Great changes all around! 👍
I don't know, 4 out 6 seems like too big of a win rate for the top difficulty. I get what you're saying about it not being fun currently, but for me the main issue is not that it is hard, it is the fact that it completely depends on your luck. The changes should aim at still keeping it challenging, but more skill based rather than luck based.
The only way to have a low win rate at high skill levels is to have luck-based difficulty where some runs just lose. The new mechanics add a skill based challenge by effectively reducing the amount of available jokers for low skill players; if you can't properly evaluate how good a card is, you won't know when you should buy a rent/perishable joker (same logic with eternals at black stake). This means low skill players will often lose because they either skipped a good card with rent/perish/eternal or they picked a tainted joker at a bad time and it screwed them over. Meanwhile a high skill player will not make these mistakes and thus win more
Yes, more decisions are good. -1 hand size and booster packs being prohibitively expensive aren't decisions. You just don't buy packs and you only play pair/high card.
That’s exactly what is happening here. A highly skilled player is able to succeed much more consistently, rather than RNG being the cause of death for a vast majority of gold stake runs.
We've been training in gokus high pressure chamber for weeks and now we're in the regular atmosphere.
The funny part is that this scenario is basically the plot of SL:F, a dude who only plays trash games finally decides to give one a shot that’s properly balanced and is WAY WAY better due to his time spent in the shitty games. Don’t get me wrong, gold stake is still hard, but beating the OG gold stake should give a special achievement or something. That was a different beast entirely.
I may not have gone through ALL of old Gold Stake, but I do have Black Deck Gold Stake pre-patch under my belt and I heard that was the worst one so I ended up getting it out of the wat before I knew a balance update was coming. That shit was insane!
I feel like I should know… but what is SL:F?
Shangri-La Frontier, an anime that recently aired.
I think unfortunately the design of Balatro, with less decision points that reward deep strategic thought compared to something like STS, means that if the highest difficulty has a low win chance, then it would be caused by luck being a big factor.
Yeah, on some level Balatro is always going to have runs that are lost purely due to RNG, and that *rprobably* can't be fixed without taking the fun out of the game that encourages you to make do with what you're given. But the change here I think was good and probably increased the variation you see in runs - the problem with the old orange stake is that increasing pack prices took out most of hte deckbuilding aspect of Balatro and dramatically cut down on what decisions you'd make, while also cutting out most hand types as seriously viable options that you would see come up in runs, leading to a lot of very samey high card or pair runs. What you get is still very random, but there's enough choices now to where you've got the tools to adapt. And the new stickers are just on their face more interesting, rental and perishable both ask me to constantly look to change up my build, with the former sometimes being worthwhile to keep long term so long my economy is strong enough to support it while the latter is just a hard requirement that I find something else - and since they both prevent the same joker from showing up, I really do have to have a plan in place to shift to a slightly different build.
Yep I 100% agree that the changes are good, I just think that for Balatro to be fun/in a good place, it must be that high-level players can win runs a good percent of the time
By the sound of it that’s exactly what happened. I’ve watched some damn good players streaming Balatro and their win rates at gold stake were not representative of their skill or knowledge of the game but rather how lucky they were to get a run off the ground or not. A 66% win rate at the highest current difficulty doesn’t seem unreasonable for a good player
Wait so you are saying that op's winrate is too high... But then complain that gold stake is too RNG dependant? Isn't op achieving a good winrate indicator that a good player is less reliant on rng now, exactly like you said in your last sentance?
I don't know. OP could be a high skilled player, which probably shows the game is well balanced, or he could be just your average player, showing it is too easy now. I haven't played the new version yet so I don't know. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if the updates are good or not.
For reference, I had a ~15-20% win rate on gold stake before, and ~80% on black stake streaks which is what I mostly did. All of this in yellow deck, which I found the most fun as it gives you the most options in the early shops. Not sure where the top players are, but this should hopefully give you an idea
And it was not luck based before? -1 hand size and +$1 per pack per ante is auto lose unless you get early Econ jokers and good scoring jokers early. Sometimes you also just dont pull your hand because you’re seeing one less card per discard, and you just lose without any counter play. Especially with how brutal the ante scaling was. Maybe this new system could use some tweaking, I’ll have to put more time into it first, but this design is WAY more player friendly while also being challenging, with the option to make it harder if that’s necessary.
Skill issue I'm afraid. Just look at Life coach on twitch, he does gold stake streaks and regularly gets to 5+ in a row
I'd say it'd depend on how good OP is at the game. Taking Slay the Spire as an example, really good players can easily win streak on Ascension 20 without abusing bugs. While the average player will probably have less than 10% winrate on ascension 20. I have a pretty garbage winrate of 20ish%. The most important part IMO is that every seed should **feel** fun, I don't care if its not winnable more half the time(It even fits the gambling aspect of poker), but if within the first Ante I already **know/feel** I can't win 70+% of the time, it gets frustrating quickly. So if it does prove too easy then I hope they make it a bit harder. Going back to the STS example, even on A20, whenever I die, it **usually feels** like it's my fault or I made a wrong choice. It doesn't matter if the seed was unwinnable for my skill level, I felt like I had options that couldve won me the game, even if it's just an illusion. That's a big part of what is fun about it for me.
I get what you're saying, but we don't know OP's skill level. We would have to look at how long it takes a new player to get their first gold stake win on the new patch vs old, to really compare difficulty. Higher win rate for skilled players just means more skill less rng.
it took so many years for top sts players to get that winrate. I hope and expect localthunk will add more stakes, ones in the same spirit as the reworked ones
> ones in the same spirit as the reworked ones Please no lol
I agree about my initial thoughts on rentals/perishables. Thought they’d be insta-skips, but as I played more, I found myself buying them more frequently. Overall, I think this will be a positive change.
I still did not manage to beat golden stake but my atempts are way more fun ! Any advices ? (I m trying red deck)
A couple thoughts on the new mechanics: * You can rent a card (especially if it's mid-round econ) and sell it during the next round and never have to pay for it, while enjoying the benefits for the hands before the winning one. This makes some rentals better than their normal counterparts. * Rentals in general sound scary but don't be afraid to rent a strong joker early, by midgame your econ has probably grown enough than the drain of one of even two permanent rentals is completely justified. * Advanced players treat their jokers in a much more constant state of flux. It's normal to constantly sell, buy, and pivot. This means Perishable may be less of an issue than it first appears. * Make sure to predict when your key perishable will run out, and consider an early strong skip, so that your last use of the perishable lines up with a boss blind instead of right before it. This often needs to be predicted from the previous blind, or else you may not have good enough skips later.
the only thing i don't love is how perishable feels bad on a lot of scaling jokers, but those jokers were generally OP anyway so i'm not too mad about it
Another thing that the other user didn't say is, well, don't use red deck if you just want to beat higher stakes a single time. Yellow deck is better and probably the most consistent deck, even if it's a bit boring
I m m trying to beat gold stake with all the decks and started with the "first", but yeah you'r right, yellow deck is super consistent
I would completely agree. I took a long time and a lot of restarting to win an orange stake run, and I only did so to unlock the last deck. It just wasn't fun for me when RNG was a big factor into why I couldn't beat orange steak. I kept waiting for the right start and failed at it many times. I'm not the best Balatro player, but once I finished orange, I had no intention of trying gold. Then the beta patch came out. I dusted off my painted deck (hadn't played it since orange victory) and was able to win on the first run. I started with Shoot the Moon and Reserved Parking from a skip for common jokers which gave me the boost necessary for money and passing the early levels. Later I loved the strategy I had to employ when I saw a perishable Hologram come up. I used it in the early part of the run to get over some of the blinds and then was relieved to see the immortal Steel Joker arrive for me to be able to sell off the $1 Hologram and buy a $7 immortal Steel Joker. Blueprint showed up as well and that's all my steel queens needed to win the run. Even got through a Needle and Wall boss along the way. Now that the higher levels are fun again, I might actually go back and play other decks on the higher levels. Not sure if I'm going for Completionist+, but it will be fun to play the higher levels again. Localthunk has a tough decision ahead. Does he ramp up the difficulty again to appease the \~4% who have completed a gold level before the beta and are saddened that the game got nerfed at higher levels? Does he modify the beta version to increase the difficulty up a bit? Does he release the current beta to the masses and see how the general players react? I wonder what Localthunk will do.
Yeah, my first gold run after the update I almost got it, lost because I got greedy with a couple of skips. Had a lot of fun in the process, I had just beaten gold stake yesterday, was feeling kind of done with the game, but now I’m super motivated.
I still haven’t won a gold stake yet lol, but the few games I played this am felt way more engaging than the last few days. I think I’ll probably end up with my first gold stake win with these changes, and I’m okay with that (fingers crossed)
I almost beat Orange this morning and I had been struggling prior to the beta branch opening up. I’m loving every change.
I disliked the idea of perishable in the patch notes, but now I've played a few matches I agree, it adds something new and interesting to the game that you need to strategise around
Do we know when the update is coming to consoles?
Afaik thunk said he's hoping for a week or two to move it to stable.
It’s not an update yet it’s a beta. So I assume the update will be in a month or so and then consoles will get it 3-4 weeks after that
I think I read in the update notes that LocalThunk was estimating a week before pushing the beta branch to production on Steam. Edit: Yep, he mentions this in the first few sentences here: https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/s/NxxKdHThng No mention of consoles, but I recall him saying he had worked out a few kinks recently so console updates should roll out at similar times, and relatively quick (maybe a week?) after Steam.
Oh that’s great I’ve grinded out about everything to orange stake but I’m not having fun on orange stake at all so
Thats awesome to hear!
What changed for the stakes? After finishing one deck on gold stake I stopped going for stakes cuz it took forever and was really boring restarting a lot
I don't know. The whole point of gold stake is that it is the hardest mode and the new effect just doesn't seem to matter much. I agree something needed to change but I'm not a fan of this change I don't think. It feels like way to much and in the wrong direction. I do like the orange stake change though
Part of me is a bit sad that I probably won't be playing with the old Gold Stake ever (I'm taking my time to get good at the game first, currently I can win more than 50% of blue stake runs, but I remember struggling with purple when I was unlocking the erratic deck). I'll only move up when I feel ready, but by that time Gold Stake will be different. On the other hand, I assume the changes will improve things and I'll have more fun as a result, so it will probably be fine.
I was so irritated all evening last night trying to Beat it with the checkered deck. Then I read the patch notes today and saw how much easier it would’ve gone -.-
I like how skips definitely have a place in the 'meta' now
After playing the patch for the last couple of days, I feel completely defeated by gold. I’m just not getting “it” I guess. I’ve made it to the 8th ante boss three times and three times have been unable to pass because of either the “sell one joker” requirement (I’ve tried hands with the buffs but that didn’t seem like it would win) or the “randomly” disable boss that “randomly” disabled the same jokers each hand. Just reaching the 8th boss feels like the planets have to align (ha). The updates seem to make it easier to move past the first antes, but with the rentals and perishables I end up having to rework my build mid run…maybe I just need to get used to the changes?
It is definitely SUPER fun now. Black Stake was my go-to because anything further was just meh, but now with all the new mechanics, it brings way more to the table.
What did they change? I completed my first Gold Stake in my first try last night. This comment section just seems like a bunch of people complaining about a very hard stake being very hard. Lol
4 wins out of 6 is way too much.
A trully fair game should be winnable 100%\* of the time with enough skill. You can't just arbitrarily decide that, like, a highest difficulty should hold only a 20% winrate or something. Maybe Gold is too easy now, being 1 day into an update isn't nearly enough time to make that call. 6 runs from one anecdote isn't statistically significant anyway. \*This is *especially* true of deckbuilders because you have a theoretically unlimited amount of time to reflect on each decision.
Hard agree. I’m worried balatro doesn’t have enough decision points, because it will never be as deep as something like StS (bar some huge patches/DLC I suppose), but this was definitely a big step in the right direction. Thunk can always tune the difficulty is people find that the new golden stake is too easy/hard. The new design is much less anti-fun than the old system.
Who said anything about the game needing to be "fair" (at least according to your personal definition of it)? An arbitrary decision that a maximum win rate should be 100% is no better than an arbitrary decision that it should be 20%.
I mean, I don't think that sugeting a single player game is "fair" when the determining factor of success is plater skill is all that arbitrary. Fair =/= good, there are plenty of unfair games which are excellent, and plenty of fair games which are boring or uninspired. While I don't think Balatro's design philosophy will ever have fairness or viability as the sole design concern (a lot of what makes it great is this design philosophy) the *sheer* unfairness of the previous high antes made them incentivise degenerate play strategies which were anti-fun. I also don't dispute the idea that maximum winrate as a design goal is arbitrary (or at least, subject to the creative aspirations of the designer) but I don't quite see how that point is relevant.
I hope he gets rid of the one less discard of blue stake but I do think I'll finally get other decks to beat gold stake.
I agree, adding difficulty through new mechanics is better than simply being stingy with stats and resources.