Vote with your wallet, if you hate what valve are doing with artifact and how it's monetized. Do NOT buy the game, wait until change their stance. If you pre-ordered it you can still refund, there's still time. If anything, a cancelled preordered speaks even louder to the discontent of the community.

Or you can just blindly buy it and endorse this kind of behaviour from a company that should know better. The company that gave us Dota 2.

Edit: To people saying stop complaining about the $20, i never did. If anything im fine with it. It’s how monetisation is set up in the game that is unacceptable. So here, the big question.

Can you buy the game and not spend any money?

Well here’s the thing. You can’t gain packs from playing casual at all. Here are the ways to get cards, pay 2 dollars for a card pack, pay for cards on the market, or play expert. Everytime you play expert you have to spend a ticket which is a dollar (2 tickets plus 5 packs cost in keepers draft) to have a chance of getting packs. If you win 3 games you get a ticket back, if you win 4 you get 1 pack, win 5 you get 2 packs. But here’s the catch, you can ONLY LOSE 2 TIMES. And you’re sure to lose quite a bit, this is a complicated game, and every time you win you face a harder opponent. You have to do this 5 times without losing 2. How much money do you think you’re going to have to spend after a good amount of time, it’s not like players are going to just play one draft a day. Nor can you go play draft casual or in lobbies either. So to that i say, good luck playing the game without spending money.

Everything about expert play, the section above is still the same

So to play constructed, NO MATTER WHAT, you will have to spend money (to get cards), to play draft NO MATTER WHAT, you have to spend money (for tickets). You can play casual draft online and play draft with your friends. Everything about expert mode is still the same.

Or you can choose to play preconstrcted decks only lol, have fun i guess

Edit 2: oh yh, also no in game currency to buy packs, valve’s technology just isnt there yet

Please valve, AT THE MINIMUM. Add a free way to gain cards by just PLAYING THE DAMN GAME

Edit 3: stop comparing this to a worse case, something being bad doesnt make another thing acceptable or better.

Edit 4: Valve listened and changed some stuff. Now you can play casual phantom draft, play draft with friends and recycle cards for tickets

If there’s one thing i still want, it’s to gain in game gold from playing casual to buy packs, but I highly doubt that’ll ever happen.

unpack six hunt dependent melodic zesty rinse salt enter beneficial

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

I can’t help but think that people complaining about the monetization model are complete ignorant concerning TCG games. Especially digital ones.

Every single other game forces you to grind for packs to build decks. They have a complete RNG loot box system that you have to throw your money at to be able to be competitive.

Artifact is not like this at all. You get to choose which card you want and buy it.

Axe is 14 bucks right now at launch. Most of the other cards are below 50 cents.

How in the world of TCG could you possibly be upset about how the game is monetized?

Unless you expect all of the cards to be given to you with your 20 dollar purchase? In this case rip for the longevity of the game and future expansions.

I honestly think this is a case of the Reddit/internet hive mind. Same thing happens with every game. As soon as the bozo with the loudest voice complains about something everyone jumps on board to rally with this idiot. I’m not saying these things are never justified because there are plenty of reasons to “rally” but there are just as many misplaced ones as there are justified ones.

The monetization is something that the TCG community has been waiting for for a long time.

On top of all this the most balanced way to play (drafting) is fucking free. Casual phantom draft allows you to use all of the cards in the set for free.

This coupled with tournaments with friends is revolutionary in the realm of online TCG games so before you start rallying along with the crowd that’s against the monetization please get informed because the way valve has chosen to launch this game is a giant step in the right direction for the TCG genre as a whole.

Edit: when you guys have played the game enough to feel good about a review please do so. Negative or positive. Based on a lot of these comments people who are complaining aren’t familiar with the TCG market and don’t see this as a huge step in the right direction as it should be seen.

That being said I do agree that the ticket system for expert play feels bad for a lot of players as you aren’t sure if you’re going to be able to win back your tickets and will thus have to buy more but these modes rotate out on 12/14/2018 and so I am left to believe that the “progression” that they are planning to add will be some sort of ranked ladder that will not rotate and will not cost tickets.

This is my assumption but I would be willing to bet that I am correct about this. If the ranked MMR system doesn’t happen then by all means point and laugh and say I told you so.

Perhaps the progression system will award tickets and packs and give incentive to play more casual modes to participate in these tournament like events.

I do hope that a ranked ladder happens and that it doesn’t cost tickets. I can’t see them adding MMR system to the current expert pool. I think that would be a huge mistake on valves part but I guess we will see.

Edit: thanks for the gold and silver boys!

Lol at people defending hearthstones dusting system.

Dust 4 of your legendaries to craft 1 for that meta deck that will rotate out in one season. Hearthstone is an absolute chore in my opinion. If you want to compete and you aren’t able to spend thousands of hours on the game you WILL spend money on gambling for legendaries. Artifact gives you far more bang for your buck as you know what you’re spending your money one. You want that card? Buy it for less than 10 cents!!

You want that card in hearthstone?! Buy ten packs and cross your fingers because pull probably get duplicates that may or may not = enough dust to craft an epic...great system let me tell you.

Yes Gwent is great I love Gwent I forgot about that. They need to promote their game more.

They're all incredibly delivered (the ones I've listened to anyway). They add a lot of insight into the world of the game and the comics. They even added some overwatch-esque interactions between cards. My Assassin's Shadow just asked my PA how she managed to pull off one her kills on deployment. It's really enriching my experience.

I am perfectly fine with the packs\cards economy. I'm not fine with finding starter heroes in packs. I'm not fine with no free practice draft. Artifact may have a better economy than other games (HS value for example). But that's not the point. They are doing unfair and scammy tactics.

Hey guys.

So this is going to be a little long, but I would really love it if you would read the entire thing before commenting. Thank you very much; I genuinely appreciate it.

This post isn't really about me, but I'll still start by quickly clarifying the clip of me here yesterday implying I was thinking about leaving Artifact. I was feeling pretty shitty yesterday; I almost didn't start streaming. I guess a lot of the negativity really just hit me on that day. I'm sure some of you guys know that I've always been pretty bad at letting things like that get to me. Honestly I was just thinking aloud in a depressed state of mind. I'm not actually leaving Artifact.

Every day in this sub I see people just turning on each other, and it makes me feel a bit...well, sick, really. A really large part of the reason I play video games, and what ultimately drove me to become a content creator fulltime, is that I really actively enjoy the communities. It's a really great feeling, becoming an active part in this group that bonds over sharing the same passions. I'm not undermining the criticism, in fact I think the criticism posts are very important to spur Valve to make necessary improvements to the game. But right now, we're all a little on edge. More than a little. We're becoming cynical and blaming each other. The blame has recently started moving onto beta testers and content creators, and I thought I'd try to bring some light to these discussions, because there's a lot about the beta process that not everybody knows.

At this point, I want to clear up some misinformation that I think has largely been exacerbated by the general emotional state of the community right now. I'm going to quote some comments here, made in the last 48 hours, and directly respond to them, to try to give a bit more background on the ongoings of the private beta.

"Like, seriously. Guys like Swim have been testing Artifact for like a year now. They must've known exactly what was coming. Yet still... pretty much every single Artifact player seemed to be surprised about what."

"Why were beta testers hyping the game up so much if they knew the problems it had?"

I can't speak for other testers, but I still love Artifact's gameplay fundamentals, and that hasn't changed. The reason my "tune" has changed in the past 3 weeks is because of the state of the community, and the same news that you guys got: lack of progression, specifics on economy, etc, which none of us beta testers knew about before that point. Luckily these are all solvable issues.

The last major remaining issue is design/balance of the base set cardpool, which I find leaves a lot to be desired but will still have no impact on the state of the game's future provided more divergent and diverse card design gets printed in future sets, which at this point I'm sure many of us have lost faith in, but regardless, design and balance of the current set is a much more solvable problem than I think many are making it out to be.

Lastly, it's important to understand was that it was a beta test client. It was very barebones, and none of the testers had any idea what it would look like at launch: all we were given was a deckbuilder and the ability to challenge others. And outside of a handful of cards that needed (and still need) nerfs, things were pretty great. I don't think that's changed. 90% of complaints get solved with a good progression system, 3 card nerfs (you know who you are), and maybe a toned down economy (I, like u/DisguisedToastHS, expect Artifact to go free to play in the next year or so).

This is the main point, though: almost nobody who was hyping the game up throughout the beta has had a change of opinion. Recently here there's been a really massive outcry towards streamers and beta testers for basically "flip-flopping", due to us talking the game up quite a bit in beta, and only now making public criticism. As far as I know, every single person who loves the game and was hyping it up (StanCifka, Joel Larsson, and Savjz to name a few) has had in no way a change of heart. Savjz has switched back to MtG for the time being, presumably because it looks more stable for viewership to him. It's been said by multiple of them that Artifact is the best card game. I don't even think this statement is untrue when you subtract the largely superficial launch issues that only currently persist in the game. I've never once claimed the game is without flaw, in fact I've mentioned many times throughout the beta that the game certainly has its flaws, even going so far as to say that I kind of hated Artifact for the first few weeks I played it until it grew on me but I guess everybody just really latched onto the hype parts instead. The point is, it's OK to like something that isn't perfect. I honestly think it's completely fair criticism that part of the reason people are disappointed right now is because of me and many others hyping the game up too much. And that's on us. But there's another post on the frontpage right now of me explaining design problems with heroes, and people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that me and the rest of the streamers and beta testers were blatantly lying to the public based on a perceived incongruity between praising aspects of a game while pointing out major issues of others. There's no incongruity there. The world is not so black and white. I still think Artifact is the best card game, at it's core. Let Valve solve some of Artifact's superficial issues before we all start crucifying each other.

"[Swim's and other streamers'] reaction to this games' less than stellar start is exactly why Valve should never had people who seeked to capitalise from the games success in their beta testing. It seems obvious that he and a lot of other beta testers got carried away about not only the possible success of this game but how they saw themselves apart of that success. How can you expect someone like that to truly give objective feedback?"

This is fairly backwards logic, although honestly I think it's very true that some of the beta testers did get carried away by this exact faulty reasoning. Content creators and streamers want the game to do well. I remember distinctly, 2 weeks after I got into the beta, I was very excited about the opportunity to give feedback on the game. I was sitting in my dad's kitchen, having an unrelated conversation with him, and I was scribbling down notes on feedback points on a scrap of paper as I would think of them. A week later, I sent Valve the first of many feedback writeups that I spent hours putting together. Here's a small sample of some of my feedback from April. Note I mention at the start that I skip over the more commonly received forms of feedback (Valve was already getting a lot of feedback about hero balancing and arrows that I didn't feel the need to reiterate). I'm not trying to demonize Valve here either...I hate that most discussions on this subreddit right now feels like it has to be an "us against them" in one way or another. I think the function of the beta was largely for data collection purposes and meta extrapolation. Do I personally think it was a mistake on their part to not make adjustments in this time? Yes. Is it too late for these adjustments to be made? No. The game has been out for 2 weeks, and our community feedback they're receiving now will force them to make changes in a way that feedback from a group of <100 people wasn't able to. If you think the game's future is 100% screwed because Valve has said in the past they weren't going to rebalance cards, let's at least first see how they respond in the coming days. The community feedback is at the point of being unignoreable.

"[The streamers that moved to Artifact at first] probably all viewed it as "This is my chance to get in on the ground floor of the next Dota!" It'd be hard to not get excited about the chance to become a millionaire game player."

So these types of claims are outright falsehoods that are nevertheless understandable from a viewer perspective. Streaming is a profession that I think is very counterintuitive.

I've been very upfront, many times in the past that I would almost certainly have fewer viewers in Artifact than Gwent, when I switched games. This proved to be true even before this last week when viewership dropped for everyone streaming Artifact on twitch.

Switching games is not something streamers do out of some twisted greedy inclination to make more money. There are exceptions to this but switching to bigger games is almost universally a bad idea to people that understand how this industry works. A loss in established viewer fidelity paired with significantly higher market competition means only a handful of streamers (the real whales) have a chance of switching games without MASSIVELY damaging themselves. I'm going to use a random example; I promise this isn't cherrypicked data, but somebody in one of the comments mentioned Fortnite (the epitome of a streamer chase game) so I'll pull up stats for u/LotharHS (a hearthstone streamer who switched to Fortnite), and...yup, looks like even after streaming 1400 hours of fortnite, his viewercount is still a fraction of what it used to be. In 2018 he even streamed Hearthstone a few times after he had officially moved onto Fortnite, and even in these short streams he averaged a higher viewercount than he was getting in Fortnite at the time. I guess it becomes easy to fall into the pattern of thinking that every Fortnite streamer is trying to be Ninja and every Hearthstone streamer is trying to be u/Kripparrian, and I'm sure there exist a few (often delusional) streamers who do actually have these goals, but largely this notion is completely backwards for how this profession actually works.

In 2017 I went from 0 average viewers to 2000. This is because I was streaming a relatively SMALL game. For 99.9% of streamers, you don't get bigger streaming big games, you get smaller. In an efficient market, the supply (competition) will always rise to meet demand (game popularity), and the oaks of the industry will always keep the ferns small given such direct competition. Streamers (perhaps with exceptions of some of these oaks) don't switch games because they see dollar signs, they do it because they find something else they enjoy, or sometimes because 2-4 years of playing the same game 10 hours a day starts demanding some novelty. I'm going to be perfectly candid: if I was particularly money-oriented, I wouldn't be trying to make a living playing video games, and this is true of almost every streamer out there. We're not all Ninja.

"[A high volume of feedback from beta testers isn't what] I remember from February/March. It must've changed along the way, because from memory everyone was defending the design of it, and the absurd hero imbalance was deemed inevitable because there's always a "worst/best hero", no one seemed to mind the sheer power level of late game finishers that devolve the game into a "first person to Time of Triumph", etc.

Most new people who joined seemed to silently quit after posting some comments in the Discord, while a core of players played all the time to test new features/min-max the game. As far as I'm concerned, this is a classic case of a game's potential being hindered by a desire to get on the right side of the developer by the people responsible for testing it. That, or they genuinely thought the whole was fine, which I find odd given the amount of backpedaling we see and the different tune sung since the release.

So yeah, I'm not privy to the inner workings of the Beta after my initial testing, but my recollection of it doesn't reflect the idea that "everyone told them about the problems"."

This one is from u/ProfessorNox. There's actually no single issue with this post, it's articulate and probably very true (I wasn't in the beta at this time, so I can't confirm). I think a lot of people referencing this are glossing over some really key aspects of it, though. He literally mentions specifically that feedback patterns must've changed along the way, and is only recounting his experience from the couple of weeks he played Artifact, when the beta was literally around 25 people. As mentioned previously, there are some beta participants who fell into the pattern of saying "the game is basically totally fine as is", but I don't think this group represented a broad majority as time went on. I've participated in and observed a LOT of discussion and feedback between beta testers and Valve over the last 8 months. It's true that some beta testers were fairly silent on feedback and just focused on playing the game, or possibly didn't want to rock the boat with Valve? Although I personally can't get myself to understand how giving critical feedback as a beta tester could possibly get you into a company's bad graces; this seems completely bizarre to me. That being said, it's entirely possible it was still genuinely some people's reasoning at the time.

Anyway, I guess that's it. As I mentioned above; I only want to see our community in a state where we're not all constantly attacking each other. We're disappointed and emotional, but give it some time to at least see how Valve responds. The future of the game is far from doomed, despite the frankly bad launch.

If you guys have any questions or points for discussion, I'll be in the comments responding to stuff. I probably won't stream today.

Remember that whenever you guys complain that the games costs 3 to 10 times more on poorer countries, as valve made the really smart decision of basing the cost of entire world by USA standards.

30 seconds until forced surrender

Edit - We did it reddit! Even if Richard Garfield never shows up, even if Valve never shows up, the interest is still there! We made a statement boys! We want Artifact! I have a feeling the long haul is almost over!!!

You do not need to treat the fact that the price of cards is going down like a stock market crash. This is unlikely to cause a slowdown in the economy of any major nation state.

If you look at any other TCG, you would expect the cost of cards to generally decrease after launch anyway.

Cards becoming more available and cheaper is only an issue if you mistakenly thought Artifact was a stock market, and not a video game, in which case, you probably deserve to lose money. But if this is the case, please do not presume that the game is ruined for the rest of us, who can now buy into constructed for a reasonable price and continue to play the game.

I'm trying to make something like /u/MTGCardFetcher, but reddit's rate limiter is pinging me.

EDIT: Thank you for the karma. It seems there's already a bot that does this, by ArtifactFire, that's backed by a big company. It'll probably update to use the new card set API (related cards, etc) soon.

I spend half my time just figuring out what the cards colors are. Can we please get some sort of symbol, color shift or color blind mode? (Sorry deleted my last post due to it being worded poorly and confusing)

One of the most frustrating things about playing this game is the forced/restricted movement of the camera. I want to be zoomed out 99% of the time but just in general I want control over the camera. The camera movement is great for newer players to help them follow the game but let us have the option to turn it off please.

When Artifact is released I can just spend my time playing the game instead of checking this sub for content, only to find a bunch of whiny bitches moaning the whole time.