Submitting to the Subreddit
Each week, cards made by the community are added to the game. You can submit cards, too — but might want to read more about the specifics first.
Weekly timeline
At Wednesday Midnight PST (UTC-7) every week, a new week of card submissions begins. Until exactly one week later, all cards The top 10 voted cards of each week are accepted into the game. A query utilizing Reddit's API ensures that the ordering reflects actual upvote amounts and takes vote fluctuation into account as well as possible.
Categories of Submissions
Posts made to the Subreddit which add or change cards in Collective must begin with a tag, such as [Card], or they will be disqualified. We want it to be extremely clear when someone is voting on a post to be added to the game, and the reason to keep it in the title is so that we can be sure it wasn't changed midway through the week.
Feel free to post whatever else you want on the Subreddit as long as it’s related to Collective or tropical fruits.
Here are the tags and when to use them:
[Card]
New cards should be submitted with the [Card] tag and follow all the rules of any post in the Subreddit. The top 10 voted card submissions each week are accepted into the game.
If there are not at least 20 posts, we roll the current week's cards into the next week. (This has never happened.)
[Update]
Updates must be submitted with the [Update] tag, and should have a change in the card's effect visible in the card's stats, numbers and/or effect. The top 3 voted update submissions with more votes than the 10th normal submission each week are accepted. (The max 3 updates have been nicknamed "update slots" by the community.)
A fix to how a card works without changing the card's text itself, in order to match its function with its description, can be handled with a [Cosmetic Update] or a Dev Update instead.
[Cosmetic Update]
Cosmetic updates must be submitted with the [Cosmetic Update] tag, and should only change something that doesn't affect the card's gameplay significantly. For example, the art, the name of the card, its rarity, or its tribal type (even if there is a theoretical, minor change in gameplay significance). Minor bugfixes can also be Cosmetic Updates until (if) we start seeing bad actors who submit Cosmetic Updates to "sneak in" changes to cards.
Cosmetic updates with more votes than the 10th normal submission each week are accepted, with no slot limits.
[DCXX] / Design Competitions
Cards submitted for a Design Competition should be submitted with the [DCXX] tag, where XX is the number of the week, and follow all the rules in the announcement reddit post for that specific Design Competition.
Design Competitions are being rethought and are not likely to occur for a while.
Votes
- Votes on cards are combined from two sources:
- Reddit vote totals, collected by an automated script run Friday morning.
- The script is run a few times, 15 minutes apart, and the Reddit vote totals are calculated by taking the average from every time the script is run.
- In game vote totals
- In some modes, players will be shown a set of four cards out which haven't been added to the game yet. They can choose one of these cards, try it out in game to see how it feels, then provide an up or down vote.
- If a player has seen all cards visible on the Subreddit, they will see a set of four cards they have already voted on, along with their existing votes.
- Playing modes which don't have in-game voting will provide "voting tickets," which allow players to vote on cards in the game's main menu.
- We (the developers) have taken a page from Reddit and made a decision to keep the algorithms behind which cards are shown private.
- In game votes are counted up Friday morning, and votes in game are each worth two Reddit votes.
- In some modes, players will be shown a set of four cards out which haven't been added to the game yet. They can choose one of these cards, try it out in game to see how it feels, then provide an up or down vote.
- Reddit vote totals, collected by an automated script run Friday morning.
Deadlines
On Wednesday night at midnight Pacific Standard Time, a new week of submissions begins. Cards posted in the seven days before that are given a couple days to collect more votes on Reddit and in game, and the votes are tallied up on Friday morning PST.
Weekly Card Stream
At Friday 10:00 am PST, Alec and Nick review the top cards of the week. They test out the new cards and mechanical updates, looking for bugs and assigning rewards. You can find this stream on Alec's twitch channel.
Submission Rewards
When your post is accepted, if it is a [Card] or Design Competition submission, contributors to the card get:
- A reward of gold (an in-game currency) split evenly among all contributors to the card
- Cards which have bugs will receive 500 gold and not let into the game until their original creator fixes them
- Cards which work correctly will receive 2000 gold
- Cards with an especially impressive card logic ("blocks") will get 3000 gold
- The Blueprint of the card, which lets you include as many copies of the card as you want in any number of decks for any format where the card is valid.
- A special golden front for the card, and a unique animation which occurs when the card is played (and another unique animation when the card is played against the creator).
Updates and cosmetic updates which don't change the art significantly do not provide rewards.
Dev Updates and Limbo
Dev Updates
The developers reserve the right to change card text or effects should they break rules or otherwise surface problematic bugs, depend on new features, etc.
Cards that misrepresent their effects, rely on impossible effects, and/or have significantly faulty code may be disqualified. This has only happened once so far; often minor bugs in cards can be found and fixed.
Cards are voted on and accepted based on their visible text. In the case of understanding conflicts or rule consistencies, the code is usually changed to match the implications of the text.
Updates that don't change the text of a card generally can't be voted on, because the card text is supposed to be a direct representation of the effect the card has. Changes to how a card works are usually bugfixes which can be handled as a Cosmetic Update or a Dev Update.
If a player has a strong opinion about a dev change and has some support on the reddit or Discord, they can contact the developers and will be heard out.
The current list of cards which have been added to the game can be found at https://www.collective.gg/collection.
Limbo
If your card is accepted but cannot be added to the game yet, it may be put into "Limbo." Here are the reasons a card may be put in limbo:
- The card accidentally surfaces a bug or missing feature in the game. (One of the rules for new cards is that they cannot be intentionally designed around surfacing a bug or feature that you'd like us to make.) When the bug or missing feature is added, we will remove the card from Limbo.
- The card has a subtle, accidental bug in it which we don't have time to immediately fix. As soon as we fix the card, we will remove the card from Limbo.
- The card has a bug. When the original creator fixes the card, we will remove the card from Limbo.
- We also may fix it ourselves if the original creator never fixes the card. We will wait four weeks before doing this, and even then, probably only do it when reminded to by the players.
When a card is in Limbo, it will be visible at https://www.collective.gg/collection but hidden in a section labelled "Limbo." While in Limbo, the card cannot be used in game.