[DanHulton]

If the price was the only problem, you'd still expect to see people playing draft regularly, at least in the interim, especially since there are free drafts you can play. But there's more wrong with this game than just how they priced it.

It may be that RNG is actually less of a factor in Artifact than in other similar games, but boy does it FEEL stronger. Every turn in a CCG lets you draw cards, and maybe you don't get the card you need, but maybe your opponent didn't also, you don't know, but instantly. But in Artifact, every turn drops creeps in the lanes for both you and your opponent, so you can instantly see if RNG has blessed you or cursed you.

It doesn't even feel great to win when RNG is on your side sometimes. Your opponent has built a huge bruiser in an early lane that will just demolish you there and win the game, except a creep spawns in front of him, blocking all that damage. I mean, I didn't do that, that was just luck. I didn't make a good play or build a good deck to get that one extra turn, I just got lucky with creep spawns.

Sure, there's definitely more around it that got me to that point where I could get lucky, I understand that, but that other work doesn't feel emphasized, the last-second luck does.

And the biggest failure of the Artifact team isn't in the design of this, it's the hubris of not listening to the players complaining about it. It doesn't matter if you build the fairest CCG in the land, if it feels like swingy garbage, nobody's going to play it and it's going to fail. Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun.

[dx87]

The worst part about the in your face RNG of Artifact is that Richard Garfield knew players don't like that type of RNG, and it was one of the main factors that killed off the Star Wars TCG he developed [1]. He decided to try it again in Artifact, and to nobody's suprise, people still don't like super visible RNG affecting the outcome.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/k...

[bsder]

> people still don't like super visible RNG affecting the outcome.

Everybody says this, but the problem is that RNGs are friendlier to noobs.

The real problem is that any game like this has two markets--noobs and experts. And you have to win over both--that's a tall order.

You have to have a continuous influx of noobs or your game dies. However, the experts have to be able to fleece the noobs and gain enough money consistently or they will leave and you will have nobody encouraging the noobs.

[me_me_me]

In the artifact the RNG in baked into the game itself, there is on way to avoid it. In HS you can build deck that has none of it (or varying degrees). You still are at the mercy of a draw (but that's just the beauty of deck building).

[da_chicken]

> Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun.

Even Wizards of the Coast (WotC) struggles with this in Magic: the Gathering, and that game has been around for over 25 years and remains King of the paper TCGs. Counterspells, discard, and land destruction are all very balanced effects, but a plurality of the players hate them so much that WotC eventually made those effects more expensive or less reliable.

One of the keys of game design is that your first goal is not to build something that's balanced; it's to build something that's fun to play. Making something balanced and competitive, though necessary, are secondary to the enjoyment of the game.

[smallnamespace]

> Making something balanced and competitive, though necessary, are secondary to the enjoyment of the game.

That's generally not true today, where 'organic' marketing driven by professional streamers is a large part of potential players' initial exposure to a game. Streamers can easily kill a game in its infancy simply by providing negative feedback (as we're seeing here).

But the pro players will only commit if they think there will be a successful pro scene revolving around a balanced, relatively low RNG, high-skill-cap game.

So developers are forced to attempt to appeal to two very different markets and occasionally stumble badly.

[da_chicken]

If that were true, then chess and go would be the most streamed games on Twitch. If that were true, then Apex and PUBG would have beaten Fortnite for popularity.

Streamers are great advertisers, but players are your customers.

[asdjlkadsjklads]

> If the price was the only problem, you'd still expect to see people playing draft regularly, at least in the interim, especially since there are free drafts you can play. But there's more wrong with this game than just how they priced it.

Fwiw, price _was_ my only problem and i still stopped playing. Why? Because it felt the game's intentions differed from mine. It felt like the game was trying to be Magic, where as i just wanted to play a card-dota game - not invest in some market, continually buying packs, etc.

In addition to this, the drama and complaints surrounding the market also made me feel like the game was doomed for failure. And the type of game it was made me not want to play it if it died (unlike a single player game, where i'd happily play regardless of other people).

Just my 2c / context.

[DanHulton]

Yeah, I'm not saying it wasn't a problem for anyone, but that there should be a solid core of people playing drafts (free or otherwise) if the base game itself was legitimately great, since the pricing issue effectively goes away there. Maybe it would still keep you away, but it shouldn't have kept everyone away. The fact that only about a hundred people are playing means that the problems have to run deeper.

[rishav_sharan]

As someone who has put in over 10k hours into dota since 2004, price was my issue as well. I don't want to pay for the game and then pay for the cards.

I would have been the natural convert to artefact. Yet they missed on players like me