Artifact - Not Like This

Not Like This
Damn, I had already forgotten how addictive this game is (for me).
can't believe I've played Foundry for 30 hours in 3 days
2.0 Fixed what wasn't broken
Anyone figured out how puzzle maker works??
Can valve revive artifact if enough players play?
LFNew DCG

Not Like This

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 08:58 PM PST

submitted by /u/therealkirbywizard
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Damn, I had already forgotten how addictive this game is (for me).

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 03:33 PM PST

I've played it for over 20 hours in the last days. But now the players are already drying up again.

Such a good Magic game for free with all the cards and without having to relearn and pay for it every few months and nobody playing? Hello Planet Earth, anyone at home? The meta is practically infinite. We played the hell out of the game in the tournaments. It's just so incredibly balanced.

The thing is I can't play any other card games since Artifact. I couldn't even bring myself to play Foundry. So I'll be playing something else again soon. Most likely Elite: Dangerous. No more card games. They are actually pointless anyway.

submitted by /u/1xok
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can't believe I've played Foundry for 30 hours in 3 days

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 10:05 AM PST

haven't tried vs HUMANS, so i wasn't spending that 30 hours on looking for matches. Why everybody around me said it's not a good game?

submitted by /u/WIDMOOORE
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2.0 Fixed what wasn't broken

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 02:24 PM PST

Now that Foundry has been released to the public I've had some time to get familiar with the new cards, strategies and new mechanics that were Valves last ditch efforts to appease the withering Artifact player base. As a big fan of Classic I don't consider most of the changes to be improvements as all the cards considered game breaking were nerfed into the ground or otherwise redesigned to be completely underwhelming. Card games by their nature need to have some luck involved to add suspense and chaos to the draw. Without it, the meta quickly becomes predictable, every match starts playing out the same despite having more cards to work with.

The same basic strategies began to quickly win games such as dropping Phantom Lancer into a lane and promptly ignoring him for the rest of the match or placing your control deck heros in a slot that never lines up with a more opposing hero. Both players starting out with free gold means you are always safe rounds 1 and 2 without any risk of losing more than one unit during these turns. The reduced mana limit per turn means you are often limited to one card a turn, any form of mana regen to play more was also nerfed into the ground, as were any ways to quickly draw new cards.

Nerfing creeps down to 1-1 and evening out all the hero stats has the undesirable effect of turning creeps into fodder for every card in the game and essentially serve no threat to placement until cards are applied to either buff or replace them. Limiting all lanes to a maximum of 5 units is also a massive disappointment as it seems to be there just to simplify board clearing tactics down to damage + cleave instead of more interesting plays like this:

https://youtu.be/kpZsXv5wPOY

Classic provides countless absurdly broken scenarios like this where the game can swing heavily into advantage for one player or the other. Saving critical counter-play cards for essential moments can be more rewarding than the win itself (Especially since most players surrender in both versions regardless). I get no such satisfaction in Foundry shooting water pistols at the enemy. Reaching those game breaking win conditions was part of the draw/tension and there were plenty of ways to counter the cards that drew the most complaints:

Controversial Cards in Classic:

• Cheating Death: Add a condemn card to your shop or deck. You could even simply play Pugna against green decks to guarantee a condemn every 3 turns. Even then, a 50% chance is not game breaking as they are left at 1HP to roll again on the next turn. Rebalancing the ability to be a free death shield every turn is arguably worse as it guarantees the survival of a hero in your lane without any risk involved. It intrudes on the end-game green win condition of permanent invulnerability which is meant to be far more mana expensive to reach.

Add +2 mana to cheating deaths cast cost and it's fine. That is plenty of setup time for any deck to get their own broken strats going.

• Bounty Hunter: 50% chance to be a hero killer added some risk to the hero. If you wanted guaranteed damage, pick Phantom Assassin. Gambling plays into the Heroes gimmick as you want to maximize your return from tracks and doubling your gold as fast as possible. Part of the fun is the amount of damage you can pull off in a single turn or adapting to a bad roll.

Guaranteed track on deployment in Foundry forces the hero into one playstyle that I don't really like. Most decks in Classic have ways to deal with high damage even on the first turn.

• Ogre Magi: 25% chance to duplicate a card meant you had a small chance to pull off combos that would be otherwise never seen in normal play. This again, plays into the chance mechanic of this hero that exists in Dota 2. The major appeal of this hero is to get a lucky draw on a big card and combo it with infinite mana as a turn 9/10 win condition (Which also got nerfed).

Changing it to a guaranteed effect once every 3 turns is incredibly boring. It again, makes matches too predictable as I'm always getting 1 free card turn 3 and 6. This gets stale quickly even after a few games.

• Arrows: Another RNG mechanic where you cannot guarantee the placement of your heros in each lane. Blue decks already have control of placement to protect their fragile heros and removing arrow RNG is a buff to Black and Red, who ofcourse got their stats heavily nerfed to counteract the huge imbalance this causes for the game. The amount of ways you can mitigate positioning in Foundry is honestly a joke as you can change it constantly via hero skills, new push items and free TP scrolls. This again, causes early rounds to lack any tension as damage is low, mobility is high and creeps pose no threat to any hero in the game.

If more than one of your heros dies from poor arrow placement on turn 1 in Classic it's really your own fault due to greed. You can balance your deck and roster out to have a stronger early game instead of just watering it down to be safe for every player. Part of the reason to pick Red or Siege decks was to bulldoze over the early game whereas chance decks offers a high risk/reward playstyle that isn't present in Foundry.

• Drow Ranger: At launch, the best support hero in the game. Her silence ability was a flat upgrade of another heroes silence and above average stats made her intentionally overpowered compared to starting heroes. I do like how Foundry buffed up these weaker Heroes so that more cards in the game are viable once you have unlocked most of the cast, however it came at the cost of nerfing these dominant strategies a little too hard. Drow does not have any of the menace she once had in Classic and is easily dealt with on turn 1-2 due to the lane control changes.

• Axe: Another straight upgrade and arguably the best hero card in the game, decked out with the best stats and triple slot duel that could board clear most of the roster in early turns. Both Axe and Drow received small nerfs in classic before it was abandoned which made them more manageable to play against without taking away what made them compelling threats. Meta shifts and strong/weak heroes keep the game from going stale, even if in this instance it was intentional.

These cards were not so powerful that they made Classic unfair, however they were clearly buffed to promote more micro-transactions. This pay-to-win approach from Valve further killed the game. There is a reason all 100+ heros and items in Dota are unlocked for free, as some strategies are critical for countering others. If you cannot condemn or otherwise board clear your at a severe handicap, likely leading to even more players quitting.

• Shop RNG: This makes no sense as you picked the cards that could show up in the shop just as you would your own deck. Getting upset that you receive an item you can't afford in the shop is the exact same thing as complaining about drawing a card you can't play due to lack of mana. There was already a mulligan option in Classic to roll for new items for a very safe cost should you have overloaded your shop deck with end-game items. Again, Foundry just nerfs the shop into 5 categories and you never get something you can't afford. There is no point to a shop mechanic if it's going to be this safe.

As a bi-product of making the shop too easy, they tried to make items cost mana to equip and reduce the item limit from 3 to 2. This broke the early turns so a hamfisted free courier once per turn that was guaranteed to be played every first turn by both players. Nothing about these changes is fun and only seems to exist to appease those complaining about RNG that likely do not like the random chance card games offer in the first place.

Identifying the problem:

I do not think the difficulty of Artifact or it's RNG lead to it's death. This mostly feels like a misdirection to warrant the continued development of Artifact by a limited team without actually addressing the core problems with the game, of which was never addressed or even attempted to remedy before it bled out it's audience entirely.

• Pay to play: This one is obvious to everyone but Valve, $20 as the price for entry and then anywhere from $200 - $1000 to be competitive at launch put an immediate bad taste in everyones mouth, especially Dota 2 fans who have seen the free to play model work to huge success with the IP Artifact draws from. It is an insult to the intelligence of anyone they are hoping to double-dip with, as many Dota 2 players do not spend a dollar on the game until months later when they trust the brand for it's constantly evolving gameplay, growing community and competitive incentive. All three of these major appeals do not exist for Artifact and it's as if it was developed in a Vacuum.

• Pay to win: Strong cards are okay, IF players have the tools available to deal with them. Each player should have a few Ace cards up their sleeve that can turn the tides of the game. At launch, nearly all of these game breaking cards were stuck behind micro-transactions. In Foundry, all cards are pea-shooters which takes all the fun out of playing broken combos.

Becoming absurdly powerful and broken also exists in Dota 2, that is part of the appeal. However, it should be something any player can achieve without needing to bust out their real wallet to do so.

• Leaning too hard into existing IPs: Valve wanted to fast-track Artifact into being Dota-lite, without building the same foundation of a core community and small-scale tournaments to build a competitive scene. They hoped to just throw a giant wad of cash at it's first official tournament to draw the attention of big name personalities to draw their existing fans to the game, rather than build it's own.

• Pandering and Exclusivity: Influencers in the e-sports and Dota2 scene were favored over many to both beta test and promote the game at launch, many of which would much rather bet on the safe horse that is Dota 2. They have no obligation/reason to take a risk for a new game and it makes complete sense for them all to abandon ship the moment the public perception of Artifact began to sour. More care was placed into whether the game was fun to watch, instead of letting the public play.

This lead to most opinions of the game being shared and circulated by those who didn't care for it to begin with, or were already upset that they were getting the short stick by a brand they trusted.

• Giving Up: One small balance update is all Artifact Classic received before being abandoned, somehow this warranted a complete overhaul which too was cancelled before anyone could even try it (Playing into the exclusivity issue above). They may have sent out a lot of invites to random steam users but why would they care? The core community signed up for the beta and never got a response, and then get blamed for it from Valve. While I do think the very small team of 2-3 employees that were trying to finish 2.0 wanted to finish the game, nobody else at Valve cared. We will likely see more effort placed behind the anime than spinoff games at this point, despite the IP originating as a community built mod from another game for over a decade before it was picked up by valve.

How to fix it:

I'm aware this will never happen as Valve has already thrown in the towel on this property, but if I were tasked to salvage what was left of the IP, this is what I would do:

• Scrap Foundry: Two competing versions of the same struggling game is only further dividing an already shrinking player-base. Commit to the original vision and simply balance/update the cards with the new heros and strategies present in Foundy, albeit buffed to match the absurdity of the card combos available in Classic. I would like to see what some of these new heros can do without the nerfs.

• Community Leadership: The face of Artifact should be those who actually like the game. There are plenty of voices left unheard on Steam, Reddit and hell even Sunsfan offered to help rebuild the game for free if it garnered modding support. Most who enjoy the game aren't attached enough to come out of the woodwork and support it after it's received so much negative attention, it's going to need genuinely passionate people to prove Valve can both pay attention and care to build a community.

• Regular Updates: This one is obvious, Classic players have been playing the same meta since release, imagine the Dota 2 beta with not a single new hero or change in 2 years. Hell, consider current dota with no patch or hero for 2 years. Leaving players with that original bad first impression has allowed it to fester from neglect, putting it's flaws under a permanent spotlight. The Call to Arms event where you could try new deck strategies was a great start, but that's all we ever got.

• Cosmetics: Giving both players there own avatar during game-play that emotes, taunts and draws your cards is genius in Classic. There are countless ways you could personalize your creature and board which has already been shown to be a great business model for Dota. Chests could contain unique art for your favorite hero cards, along with foiled versions and unique voice lines and effects, just like arcanas. Cosmetics have no gameplay impact beyond being interesting to look at and it is a huge bother that these fun animated characters are absent in Foundry, likely because it was too much work to adapt them to the zoomed out static board format.

• Small Tournaments: A million dollar cash prize sounds grandiose but realistically only the top 0.1% of players have a reasonable chance of winning that pot. If they instead stretched out that pot over the course of a couple of years, hosting weekly tournaments with cash prizes capping out at $500, it would attract more casual players into the scene. Repeat winners could then be invited to a larger scale tournament, but as a result can no longer attend the amateur league.

• Market the game: Valve seems content to pretend Artifact never happened at this point, despite the Anime being around the corner. They really haven't tried to make any kind of fanfare about the game beyond empty promises in a few sporadic tweets/blog posts. Players shouldn't have the comb the corners of Valves basement to even be aware that it even has a beta, let alone making it's access cryptic. Many players struggled to even find Artifact Foundry as it was unlisted.

Honestly if they had Dota 2 modders on the team who already make fantastic minigames for the Dota crowd, this would be a different story. They tried to chase trends by developing Underlords as a reaction to Dota Chess but that too seems to be abandoned as a flavor of the month endevour. I do think Underlords has had a much healthier life cycle compared to Artifact, but it was clear most of it's developers were poached after launch.

It's particularly upsetting to see that Valve as a company is capable of making smart decisions such as supporting the mod community for Left 2 Dead 2, TF2 and Dota 2 and then seemingly forgetting all of it for their new games. The mistreatment of Artifact gives it the reputation of a cash grab rather than a labor of love. Some may have genuinely wanted to give players the content cycle it deserved, but any potential good intentions are completely overshadowed by bad management. I honestly feel bad for the few who were working on Foundry instead of Classic, only to have the plug pulled that late anyway.

We will likely not see another effort at a card game from Valve for a very long time and it's honestly a shame, Artifact had a lot going for it beneath all the bad press. A lot of work would need to be done to undo the damage and I don't think Valve wants to put in the effort.

submitted by /u/Jasonafex
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Anyone figured out how puzzle maker works??

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 08:05 PM PST

There's a puzzle maker in the top right corner.. what is it and how does it work? Any clues?

submitted by /u/LoL_is_pepega_BIA
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Can valve revive artifact if enough players play?

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 01:09 PM PST

It's free now. Do you think they would continue the development if it got players?

submitted by /u/Velocity_15
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LFNew DCG

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 07:02 AM PST

Now that Artifact is officially done I´m looking for card games recommendation besides HS and LoR which I don´t really like.