Artifact - 20 Lessons from Artifcat Debacle. |  |
| 20 Lessons from Artifcat Debacle. Posted: 22 Mar 2021 07:46 AM PDT Hello folks, Now that the debacle of Artifact is finally over, the best we can do is try to learn from it. Here are the 20 lessons I have learned from Artifact debacle in chronological order: 1. Manage Expectation. The outcry against Artifact announcement during TI 2017 was not because the community hated the game (how could you hate something you don't know about) but rather a huge disappointment related to a very specific expectation. Valves fail to understand that, the community was dying for a new Half Life or Portal game and yet Valve drop a big announcement for a card game: a rather controversial genre within the industry. This resulted in a big embarrassment and bad buzz for Artifact which could have been avoided by managing the player's expectation with careful communication. 2. Balancing matters. Between TI announcement and the release of the game, Artifact was in close beta. Popular Streamers and Professional players from various card games got a chance to play the game extensively. Problem was, during that period Valve made very minimal changes to the game despite numerous feedbacks from the testers. As a result, the core set of Artifact had fundamental balance such as Monocolor decks being better than 2 colors and 3/4 colors deck being unplayable. Not even mentioning the obvious overpowered cards and countless unplayable cards... Metagame diversity is a huge factor of enjoyment for a card game, and by being over overconfident Valve missed an opportunity to make their game better. 3. Content creators are not community managers. After Pax West which we can all agree was a success, Valve relied almost exclusively on streamer to advertise the game for them. This led to multiple issues like: beta key dancing monkey and tournament with advanced commentary for people who didn't know anything about the game. This communication left the fans pretty salty and ended up having very little reach outside of the Valve community. Most of my friend who played MTG or Hearthstone didn't even know what Artifact was when it got release. As a card game published by Valve, designed by Richard Garfield with the Dota IP and 1-million-dollar tournament, the game had more than enough selling points to be advertised. Better communication would not have changed much considering how flawed the product was but there is still a lesson to be learn there: Communication is a real full-time job, take it seriously! 4. Open Beta test is essential for multiplayer game. After the close beta being just a week, (which was a pretty big middle finger to players who got a key) Valve never had an open beta. Open beta is an essential tool for game publisher to test on a large scale everything there is to test about the game before official release, it goes from bug fixing to balance but not only. It's also a great opportunity to test how people feel toward the game's economy, which is something Valve would have desperately needed since they made Phantom Draft free a few days after massive player protest. Moreover, a beta is a great communication tool which reassure the players that nothing is final, and developer are dedicated to work on the game even more regularly until its release. This once again shows how overconfident Valves was with this game. 5. Understand the industry. As poorly advised by Richard Garfield, Artifact was monetized the same way physical card games are, which is a MASSIVE misunderstanding of the video game market. No, people won't be willing to pay $20 upfront for a card game they have no idea they will like and having no F2P alternative for buying cards is a big "NO, NO!" for anyone who studied the market just a little bit. This was by far the biggest offenders, and not only did people not buy the game but they few who did also flee as soon as they could once they realized they will have to spend more money to get any card in the game. 6. Steam market does not make a good game, it's the good game which made the Steam market. Valves clearly overestimated the attractivity of the steam market. While it is a neat functionality, card value is directly linked to the number of players who play the game, which itself relates to the quality and accessibility of the game. It really feels like Valves made Artifact for the purpose of abusing the Steam market, not because they had a great game to publish, they made a game for the wrong reasons and it shows. Even if Artifact was successful, relying on the Steam market to monetize the game is extremely dangerous since Valve would have had very little control over the value of each card. The Steam market should have been used only to trade/sell cosmetics and implemented much later in the game lifespan as it is in other Valve Games. 7. There are features you should not be missing. Valve was missing tons of key features at release, while a lot of players complains about the lack of observer mode and replay, I feel like the biggest miss was the lack of automated tournament, ranking or ladder system which is crucial for any competitive game. The complete lack of social system at release was particularly ironic when you know that Artifact was pitched as "a game which made you feel like you were playing at your local game store". 8. Cosmetics are great, use them! If only there were a kind of content which required little work, didn't provide an unfair advantage, didn't split the community, was very attractive and widely accepted as paying content … Well it does exist, it's called cosmetic! Some people may argue that cosmetics are not a priority for a beta test, they are definitely a priority when the game is getting release. The fact that Artifact 1.0 was planned to be monetized solely on tickets, Steam market taxes and booster packs was once again a massive mistake. 9. Retention purely based on fun is utopic. Richard G. firmly believes that people play games only because they are fun and that "no retention mechanic should be used to make the player addicted". This vision while noble is completely delusional and shows a clear lack of understanding of the industry. Even old games such as Pacman have a score board, so players get competitive and try to beat their best records. Solo games are carried by the will of completing quests and collect everything… The idea that games keep their players solely because they are fun has never been true. Different players play for different reasons, and while having fun is essential it is far from being the only thing that keeps players playing. Because of this misconception Artifact was released without any reward/progression/ranking system, so essentially once you are passed the initial excitement of discovering the game, nothing keeps you from playing, and we all know how that went. 10. Teaching the game is essential. Artifact is a complicated game and there is nothing wrong with that, but it means that you have to put a lot of effort into teaching the game in the most fun way possible. Unfortunately, both versions of Artifact do a horrendous job at that. This game was begging for a solo campaign, it would have a been a great way to immerse player in the story and get comfortable with the mechanic before jumping into multiplayer. 11. When it comes to gameplay, players feelings are more important than stats. Let's talk about Artifact 1.0 gameplay. One of the biggest criticisms of Artifact was that it had too much RNG and was very frustrating. Richard G. responded saying that the game was less random than most other card games and he could demonstrate that by saying that win rates of the best players were very high compared to the one of the worst players. Not surprising for someone with a math background, Richard G. failed to understand that games are more than anything an emotional experience. If players "felt" that the game was too random despite the evidence, it means that the problem was not the amount of RNG but rather the way RNG was implemented in the game. Indeed, Artifact is a game with a high skill ceiling, but it does not contradict the fact that mechanics such as random arrow and random deployment, felt terrible on an emotional level. Richard G. only looking at his stats failed to recognize this issue which led to a bad design. 12. Create a system that rewards player for playing their cards! The other massive design flaw of Artifact 1.0 was the fact that the game often discouraged you or prevented you for playing your cards, which is fundamentally where the fun comes from in a card game. In the later part of the game, having initiative in the key lane is more important than playing your cards which make you lose initiative, even if you play "get initiative" cards you would only use them to counter the "get initiative" cards of your opponent. The reason why it is so important to get initiative is because when you play first you can prevent your opponent from playing any card by killing their heroes with a "Coup de Grace" or "Annihilation". So, in other words, you don't play cards, so you have the opportunity to prevent your opponent from playing cards. While some people might consider the initiative system as "interesting" it was fundamentally unfun, turned out people do not want to have giant hand of cards they will never play, they want to play their cards! 13. Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water. Once Valve realized that the game problems were not only related to monetization but also to gameplay, they made the drastic decision to go for a complete rework of the game. Back in those days nobody really knew how big the rework was and how long it was going to take. Turned out to be a complete rework of the gameplay which was definitely a fine example of "throwing the baby out with the Bath water". Many, many, many other things should have been done before going for such extreme measures. The big question at that time was to know on which proportion Artifact's failure was related to basic gameplay, monetization, imbalance or lack of progression. A very simple way to answer that question would have been to make Artifact free to play (at least free to get) and see how it influence acquisition. Then rework the economy, add a ladder system, implement a reward system while continuing to work on balance patch to see how it influence retention. Doing those things before going for a rework would have gave them precious insights to identify what was the biggest issue. Maybe if Valves would have gone through those steps they would have settle for more minor tweaks, instead of redoing everything. 14. Don't promise something you are not ready to commit at 100%. Of course, as they gave up on Artifact 1.0 we were promised that Valve was still in for a the long haul and that they were reworking the game for the best. Of course, they forgot to mention how little resources they would put in this new project. 1 year and half later, the only thing we had was a product which was just as flawed as Artifact 1.0 but in different ways with placeholder artworks. Of course, there is only so much you can do with a small team, and if I knew from the start that Artifact 2.0 development was going to be done by handful of devs without support nor direction, it would have spared me a lot of hope for the future. They worked on Artifact 2.0 because they made a promise they could not hold, not because they had a clear idea on how to turn the situation around. This was damaging from Valve brand's image, cost them money and gave a lot of false hopes to the community. 15. Relies on your community to point out issues not to solve them. Listening to your community is essential to perfect your product, they play your games more than your testing team will ever be able to and they are willing to share their feedback for free. However, it's not possible to design a new game with that many people. No matter how many people are involved, at the end of the day there should always be one person would has a clear vision on the game he wants to make. Despite his horrible advice on game publishing, Richard G. had a clear vision on what he wanted to do with Artifact, unfortunately the Artifact 2 team didn't. In the process of making Artifact 2.0 Valve relied way too much on player's feedback to make the game. Communities are great at identifying issues but not so much at solving them. Game designers should be able to come up with the design which answers players issue in a simple, coherent, elegant and fun way. As a result, the devs just implemented straight up what the community was asking no matter how contradictory it was, which would obviously create new problems. A good example of that was the lane system. The entire community was clear on the fact that Artifact needed to keep the 3 lane/board system one way or another, but on the other hand some players were also complaining that the game being hard to follow on stream because you only see one board at once. So, what did the dev do? They simply combined all 3 boards in one screen making it even harder to read and completely overload players with information. The way good games are made has always been: a designer comes up with an idea and a clear vision for a game, a team work together to perfect and accomplish this vision and then players test the game to perfect the game. 16. Aesthetic matters One of the biggest reasons while it was hard for me to pick up Artifact 2.0 was because it was far from a finished product in terms of aesthetic. Judging from the low popularity of the game I guess I was not the only one, yes Aesthetic matters even for a beta test. Professional QA testers play unfinished games because they are paid for that, but as you release the game to the public, no matter how good your game is if the art is inconsistent, unfinished and ugly it will drastically lower the enjoyment of the game. (more or less depending on the person and on the type of game) 17. Again… players want to play their cards A problem which was there in Artifact 1.0 but amplified with Artifact 2.0 was the complete disproportion between the amount of cards/abilities you have access to compared the amount of mana you have to play them. This can be seen as a good thing because it gives you a lot of possibility to choose from do but in this case the disproportion was so big that it just overload you with information and means that you will only play a small portions of the card in your hand. Once again, fun in card games come from playing your cards! 18. Information in games should be progressive. As it is the case in most games, the start of every game comes with a rather simple board state, that players will build progressively throughout the game. In this case you have the fun of building something and the complexity of the board is digestible because it comes progressively as the game progress. With Heroes having tons of abilities and with having to deal with the 3 board at once, Artifact 2.0 put a rather complex board state right from the start, overloading players and hindering the feel of progression. 19. Complexity is a tool not an end. Artifact 1 is a complex game but at least every element of complexity serves a clear purpose, and it would be hard to imagine the game without any of those elements (excepted maybe the item shop). Artifact 2.0 is loaded with unnecessary complexity which are either inelegant solutions of problems which don't really exist (ex: blink scrolls) or element of the previous of Artifact 1 or Dota 2 which are there just because? A good example of that are the creeps. Creeps in Artifact 1 represent an actual threat and are randomly placed in one of the three lanes to force a player to react to them as much as possible. The purpose of creeps in Artifact 2.0 is rather unclear (and that's being polite), sure there are ways to interact with them but it's an element of complexity which is absolutely not worth its inclusion. 20. Once again ... don't throw the baby out with the Bath water. Once again, Valves is guilty of repeating the exact same mistake as they did when they dropped Artifact in early 2019, they aborted the project before giving it a real chance. At that point Artifact 2.0 was unpopular but the reason was still unclear; after all it was still on early access with unfinished design and only limited player invited. Common sense would dictate that you should implement finished art and make the game available for everyone for free BEFORE calling it dead. This would have cost nothing to Valve and would have given Artifact 2.0 a little chance even so slim. And you what did you learn from all of this? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 09:06 PM PDT
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