• Valve's Artifact launches on November 28 for $20. Will be playable at PAX
    123 replies, posted
To this day that reveal reaction is still the funniest shit in the world because what the fuck were they expecting
They wanted to expand into another genre. I seriously don't understand why FP has such a hate boner for this game. I understand if you don't like the genre, or think it's a bad business practice, but actively hating on other people for wanting to try it / people who think they'll like this game is just rude, imo.
Disliking the game is fine, but I meant to the extent that FP is flaming this game. I don't think blind fanboyism is healthy, but the other side of the spectrum is unhealthy too. I'm not saying the criticism is baseless, just the extent that some users are hating on it is a bit much
This is going to end up exactly like League and Dota. Its going to be big but not as big as the top free competitor.
I feel like 20$ price tag was made to avoid issues with bots. Think about it - there is no way Artifact won't have a progression system where you can grind up some packs with daily quests (because thats the only thing that keeps people playing those type of games these days). But if all you have to do in order to start that grind is to create a new steam account, economy will get ruined by botters instantly. Even HS was overrun by bots at some point. So its pretty obvious WHY there is an entry fee. I feel like people giving this game too much flak right now, we dont know much about it's economy yet to judge it so harsh.
Dota is free though, only cosmetics cost money.
Any fixed price-point to entry is simply a matter of "who has the resources to wait for their investment to become profitable?" It is not a fix.
Yeah, PUBG with chinese botters is a prime expample of that, but what is the solution then (assuming you want to keep "real" trading card game economy no mater what)? And imagine how bad PUBG situation would be if game was actually free.
EA puts out a $60 season pass on every $60 Battlefield game and assholes buy it
I like the 20$ entry price, reminds me of buying the starter pokemon packs back in the day for 15-20$.
I thought about this some more over night. This may actually end up being one of the cheapest TCG if two conditions are fulfilled: Cards are not consumed in play somehow Rare cards either aren't much better than common cards, or they are simply foil variants with no gameplay changes If those conditions are fulfilled, then after 2-3 months, the steam market will fill up with duplicate common cards for 3 cents a piece that people want to get rid of. That would make the game significantly cheaper than any other TCG. Make no mistake, it will still be an infinite money printer for Valve as whales keep buying more booster packs to get the rare cards, and because they get a 2 cent cut from every common card purchase still. Also, come to think of it, this is really the culmination of what has started in TF2. Lootboxes were inspired by card game booster packs, so it makes sense that in the end, Valve would just make a game based entirely around the concept of the lootbox.
I doubt. Given how card games like Magic work, meta-defining cards will be very, very expensive, and these cards will thus raise the price of cards in meta decks.
I never wanted anything to flop harder, but it probably wont.
IIRC there's going to be two modes, one where cards are rotated out and the characters "die" or leave whatever canon they're creating, and one where they stay in. I believe Hearthstone does something similar with its ranked play.
Is that really true? On another note, why is flagdog broken for you?
[quote][b]Rare cards either aren't much better than common cards, or they are simply foil variants with no gameplay changes[/b][/quote] Won't happen. Card Rarity is a fickle interesting thing that's been basically tainted by drooling greed goblins. Which is a fucking shame because it's such a good tool in balancing a game for deckbuilding. Let's say, you've got a 1/1 card that deals 3 damage when it dies, and a card that reanimates only 1/1 creatures. The first one is the "plan", the other is the enabler. Both cards are good on their own, better with each other, however the reanimator has a far lower floor for power level. Thus, you could make the 3-damager a common, and the reanimator a rare, so the ratios are sweet in drafting/arena. OR you can flip it to make the strategy harder to pull off. You can also put high-cost cards at high rarities and low-cost cards at low rarities, giving distinction and meaning to common cards while also helping new players make a good deck, encouraging a range of costs and not jamming only expensive flashy cards. You can put confusing/complicated effects on high rarity and clean simple effects on low rarity so new players have complexity stepping stones. Alternate art and shiny/foil cards are probably the best way to monetise rarity, as humanity fundamentally desire standing out from the crowd. If your game is both draftable and constructed playable then you'll have to juggle rarity being about % or $, but that can give a card nuance if you make a rare card good in draft, bad in constructed, or vice versa. This gives depth to your card pool. Most of the above are used by card game designers, give or take how much they're willing to delve into it. HOWEVER Special promo's for events having gameplay impact instead of being only shiny is the easiest sign of drooling greed goblins, as these cards enter a hyper-rare status and bottleneck into ludicrous price spikes if they have effects you can't get anywhere else. A good way to eventually coax players into spending more and more is to make sure there's a rare card that's straight-out better than a common card of the same cost, thus invalidating that common card from the logical card pool. ect= a 3-cost 3/3 common, a 3-cost 4/4 rare, or 3-cost 3/3 rare that has an effect. This is usually obfuscated in some way to make it not obvious, sometimes it's blatant. If this is done enough to cover the card pool, competitive play becomes obscenely expensive while also making ~60% of your card pool near pointless to obtain. This also completely obliterates most reasons for rarity in the first place apart from basic "this one better so it cost more money". Making sure your ingame currency is near opt-in slavery is a good way to recreate aristocracy vs proletariat within your game, using societal pressure to entice real money purchases. The crux is though, rarity is more often used as a financial tool than a way to craft balance, because it's the best way to simultaneously gouge money while defending that greed with said balance. Companies can do whatever they want, and consumers can do whatever they want, both are comprised of individuals, but it's getting to a point where not supporting scummy f2p practices means simply not playing card games while the overall fan-base is so conditioned into drip-fed dopamine loops and the "Hearthstone" effect that not designing scummy f2p games will lead to a dead player-base. I think this is what makes me mad at Valve. The best way to break such a cycle of development and cutthroat business is through massive cultural signposts (Publishers, Celebrities) or near-perfect quality+grassroots sharing (Slay the spire, for example, and even then that's a different beast to constructed card games), and Valve were in a perfect position to do so, and HAVE DONE SO BEFORE. Half Life 2 redefined what a story a fps could tell, Portal allowed cool shit that wasn't possible before, Steam and Source (historically tied together) as a platform enabled a style of community and modding that lead to this very fucking forum's existence. Shit that didn't exist before, that inspires people to fuck with it. And it's going to be another booster pack, microtransactional, rarity lop-sided excessively collectible card game, except now Valve get's a 30% cut everytime you make a trade. It's probably going to be a good game too, within the systems and stats. And you'll stare into the main menu, a rasp dragging across your brain about just powering up your deck a little, you've got so few legendaries, if only you swap this playset with another you'd get a few percentage points, don't you really want to build that outlandish ramp deck with that rare you found? If you skip lunch tomorrow and stop buying deoderant, you could afford a few packs, a bundle. Yet if you give in, the rasp will be back. It'll always be back, as long as your rare draw card is outclassed by a legendary draw card, that cool ramp strategy requires two playsets of mythics to actually work, your 100 gold a day paling in the face of the 1000 costs. "Man, I just really want to reanimate my entire deck with this disco ball while turning my opponent's hand into frogs." so uh yeah that flood of 3 cent commons will definitely happen but there's no way you'll be able to sit there comfortably for long until the rasp appears. maybe i'm being way too pessimistic but I'm sick of and burnt out of being optimistic when it comes Valve, and i'm sick of the card game genre being a reflection of human predation.
Can't believe theyre charging for the base game when their biggest rivals are free to play. Who does this appeal to? Dota fans aren't necessarily into card games and those that are already have stuff like Hearthstone which is free.
Even though its going to be another regular "card game" as usual. I'm more interested in their concept of how the AI will try to "Learn" while going against a human opponent.
It's not that one-sided since Hearthstone sucks ass hard. If this is any good, it might be a competition.
The 3 cents commons will probably be a thing, you will own 10 of thoses commons after opening a few packs. Rares will be more expensive, and we all know how good valve is at creating value from high demand of rare digital items. And for the first time, youll be able to pay to win through the SCM. I can see the >$500 meta decks frop here.
Never really understood why it's acceptable for physical card games.
I don't know about you guys (most clearly not fan of card games), but if you do the math it seems that it'll actually be cheaper to play than, per say, Hearthstone, given that it is possible to buy/sell singles and the packs are (presumably) quite generous. The no.1 issue with f2p CCG is that every player who wants the best decks are bare minimum dolphins, and free players are at the mercy of the constantly evolving meta. IF $20 is enough for a person to survive an expansion, I'd say it is a good deal by TCG standards. Hell, if someone wants to quit, at least they can sell off all their cards. This model is honestly quite attractive. I want to enjoy a good CCG yet not want to spend hundreds cracking card packs to build a deck I want. Of course, the best damn model would be upfront payment for ALL the cards, but I heard that there's some sort of (booster) draft mode, that'll be interesting. But, eh, that's fine, this isn't exactly the environment to discuss the game.
I'm also super interested in this, because while most card game AI are pretty decent, there's definitely still a massive gap between human ingenuity and AI decision trees. There's small stuff like "hold the kill card for a bigger creature unless you can present lethal next turn" vs "kill everything as fast as possible in order to snowball" that a bot usually can't pivot between correctly, let alone weird stuff like "sequence these cards this way because the card they've played implies they're on this deck, this sequence lines up good vs this deck, what other decks could they be based on that card, is the a sequence that lines up better against multiple possibilities or do I risk calling what they're on?" Having your AI opponent suddenly stop playing into a bait you make and never fall for it again in future matches would allow for some neat back and forth, learn your habits and deck choices. IMO like 45% of people who play magic online/hearthstone/pokemon tcg/eternal/shadowverse/gwent/faeria/tes:legends want a better alternative, it'll sorta appeal to people who still follow the cult of valve, it'll probably pique a few dota players interests due to the tie-in. I think the collective groan of Artifact's announcement is that mesh of "oh god valve's making another casino" "oh shit not another card game" "oh fuck hl3's never coming out" but a 3-lane card game designed by Garfield when the next biggest can be summed up by "random", with a safe cool aesthetic has appeal.
At worst this might only be a top 10 Steam game instead of top 4 in terms of CCU. This will do fine I think.
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