[Feedback] Why I'm stopping playing Card Hunter

The thing I simply don't get is begrudging the need to spend 15 gold to continue after 3 failures. 15 gold is rounding error.

 

Good to know. Completely unintuitive, but good to know. Thanks.

 

Maybe it is later in the game or in multiplayer, but where I'm at in the campaign it's a lot of gold. When I sell an item, I get at most 2 gold from it, so I need to sell 7-10 items to retry. I don't think I've bought an item yet that cost more than 25 gold. When I stopped, I had 30 gold in my inventory -- paying to restart the mission would mean not having enough gold to purchase the gear I need to win the the dungeon.

If it was a rounding error, it would be even more ridiculous. What's the point of adding limited lives if the cost to get more lives is negligible? If it's just because I'm too early in the game, that means this is a feature who's entire purpose is to punish beginner player who are having difficulty with the game (since it's negligible to players who played a lot). I don't see how that can be in any way a good thing to have in the game.

 

I do somewhat agree. An early brick wall is frustrating for players since at these point, player never had enough item diversity to simply change tactics easily (that means you can only change a couple of items around, and rely on luck to draw the card from these 1-2 items). Just an additional information, the early brick wall around lvl 7-8 has already been toned down from beta.

The way it is encouraged is that players do not have to sell items to proceed (at least early in the game). Common items sells for very little gold there's no point doing it. The more items you have, the more strategy you can build around. (For example, wavering faith as people already mentioned, really weak early on, but worth the cost to remove some nasty armor card). From my experience, I have little trouble during beta, there are times which I did get stuck, but a simple trial and error to change strategy around makes these much easier. As people has mentioned, once you have the knowledege of beta, you can beat the campaign self-found without buying any items and little or no retry depends on the luck (and 0 grinding as well). Trial and error is a valid game mechanics, especially in strategy game, and kinda a required one for these game. Even with enough information before going into battle first time around, your chosen strategy will not be the best strategy for beating that map. It takes a few tries and death to tinker around, refine that strategy to the point of perfection, giving you as much chance of success as possible (since your life still depends on the luck of the draw).

From your post, you did not criticize the difficulty of the game, and I agree. calling out Candy Crush in here is just a joke, its not really being pointed at you. I even wished the game could be harder later on, where there are actual module which takes crazy legendary and perfect strategy to beat, not this frustrating quest system with additional restriction to de-power you. (You might not be aware of the end game quests system, which might emphasize your criticism even more. You can replay levels with additional quest condition that reward rares such as party cannot die, player characters has 1 HP, reduced character level ...)

All your other points come down to some inconvenience and the fact that trial-and-error system is too time consuming. If you still like the game, I encourage you to come back in a few months once some inconvenience has been fixed. If you are really not into MP and the end game SP (quests system) as described may not interest you, feel free to quit. But please do not ditch a strategy game simply because its trial and error is too time consuming. The process of learning is the best experience you can get out of a strategy game. I wish I could experience that from this game again

I don't have a look into your collection, but your problem may come down to the fact that you already sold too much items (and maybe buying too much item that did not diversify your collection). At this point, grinding is unfortunately the only method to keep up. Hiring a new party also require some grinding to get them back to where you are. Or you can try MP, it is introduced right before this brick wall and you have a starter party to try.

 

15 gold is selling a handful of crappy items, or 3 uncommon treasures, or .4 of a rare treasure. After you beat a mission and get 4 items, you could sell them to make 8 gold back, minimum, if all were low quality. It's not really that high a price.

I think it makes sense. It encourages you to rethink your plan instead of just bashing your head against the wall 50 times, but isn't so costly as to stop you from playing through.

 

While I disagree with many of your points, and agree with some of the others, other people have already replied in the same way I would so I'll just address these:

If you have access to "The Throne of Strench" then you should also have unlocked "The Compass of Xorr". This does not feature high armour opposition, but instead opposition who favour blocking your attacks. Why not try this and then come back to "The Throne of Strench" or "Forest of Souls"? If you haven't unlocked "The Compass of Xorr" then I think that is a bug.

I have not yet replayed any of the previous levels. If you want to to get better loot then you can, but I have not found it to ever be necessary.

The bare minimum available is surely the campaign and multiplayer, which is free. $10 gets you more adventures if you enjoy the game, or one month of extra loot if you feel you want it. And if you don't, because you don't enjoy the game, fair enough. At least you got to find this out without having to spend anything! Bad for the devs maybe, but good for you as a player. Will this game monetise well? Only time will tell, although I do share some of your concerns on this point.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to leave feedback. I'm sorry you feel that the game is currently too flawed to play.

 

Just get some Heirloom Assegai for your warrior which costs 5 gold for a level 4 character and you should be fine. And also get a Dueler's Buckler for 5 gold for a level 6 character. So maybe you have to check the shop several days in a row and play some other adventures to get some gold but compared to other titels i would't call that grinding. And the game is definitly not a pay to win title. Maybe the prices are a bit expensive but you can achieve anything without spending money, so where is the point? I have the feeling that you are just very frustrated but well the game is frustrating indeed because its fu++ing hard sometimes.

 

If you fail the 1st "zone" in a dungeon, then you know what you're up against through the dungeon. It may not be true for the whole game but my characters are level 14 now & it seems pretty consistent. If I deal with oozes in the 1st quest of a dungeon, I can most likely expect more oozes in later quests of that dungeon. If you lose the 1st quest (or even if you win but it was "by the skin of your teeth") go out, sideboard anti-whatever, and go back in better equipped. That way, it'll most likely be technique rather than equipment as to why you fail. For that, you'll be able to take full advantage of the 3 tries to fix what you did wrong and go at it again. If you still fail 3 times and you had the proper equipment, then well maybe Candy Crush isn't a bad option lol....

 

So much text, but i see only "i'm casual player game is too hard" and "i cant press buttons without mistakes from combat to even equipment". Well guess you got a problems, not this game.

 

Please... don't toss in "I'm an ____ and..." when giving feedback. It does nothing but REMOVE from the weight of your post. In any field, there are so many widely differing opinions and approaches, as well as incompetent people. The title alone means zilch, but it does make people want to "attack" you from that angle.

In answer to your assertion an experienced player should be able to clear any mission on the first attempt: I disagree. But beyond that, you CAN. The description for the module tells you what kind of enemies you will face, and those tokens aren't just to be cute. Each enemy has their own strengths and counters. Experienced players know what those are, and gear for it appropriately.

 

first off saying your game developer and hating some of the things that they put into the game makes me worry about what kind of games your making.

and i alway get a good laugh when read about how ppl would gladly pay money for game but cause its free to play they refuse to pay a cent and then complain cause you have pay some money in order to receive some items or advantages in the game. maybe if you just acted like you bought the game and payed the money you think it was worth you would find that your game experience may have changed.

 

I would like to respond to a couple of these points because I too find myself being more frustrated than enjoying myself.
Currently I'm level 15, so I've played through a bit of the game and through some of the annoying challenges the OP mentioned.

1. Personally I really disliked the missions with the mobs that had double armor that only required a 3 roll to prevent all or nearly all damage. I understand the mechanic was all about positioning on the board, but when the mob also has a ranged attack, it basically made it impossible to get a front/back position on them (because you couldn't draw them to a specific spot on most of the boards). Eventually I won the missions through RNG... IE when I got cards to remove the armor, I won... otherwise I lost. That's not fun. Fun isn't hoping that you'll get the right card draw at the right time. Fun isn't hoping that your armor cards are actually useful, rather than a waste of space. Now if I could choose my opening hand, or if there was some sort of rule set that always demanded the opening hand contained a certain blend of items that would be awesome. If there was some sort of bad luck streak prevention (I've watch mission after mission fail because of terrible die rolls). Instead I often found myself starting rounds with multiple move cards, multiple armor cards and no damage cards... the result was often a hand that was useless round after round and I'll did was kite my team around the board.

2. I agree that this is a problem. There needs to be an option to cancel move cards, or the game needs to show the correct movement preview (and take debuff cards into effect).

3. Limited retries are fine, but having to repeat the first 3 easy missions to get to a difficult mission is not... at least not when there is generally no reward for doing so (the gear rewards in this game are horrible 95% of the time).

4. That's fine. Finding the right gear to win is acceptable... assuming it's actually available at the level you're at... I encountered some issues where I would only get board wide AoE's... the mission after I finished missions with legions of low HP mobs.

6. I agree. I want to support this game, but $25 for the starter pack? I... just can't do it. It's too much. $10 a month for 1 extra item per mission when the majority are crap, no thanks.

In the end, I like the challenge this game offers, but the F2P model it offers is too steep an entry for too little (too much Real life money for too little of a reward). I could easily support the game if the Real life buy in was lower and the game itself wasn't so frustrating that I would often rather quit than retry a mission (and not because the missions are too hard, but because the RNG factor in the game makes them too annoying to bother with).

 

Problem is, of the 10 I have access to, only 2 have items that are worthwhile. So to make the treasure hunts have value, I also need to become a member of the card hunter club for a chance at RNG epic items that are worthwhile.

Again too little reward for too high of a cost all for a game that has serious mechanical issues (I have yet to beat a mission and think, damn that was hard... instead I always think, whew I got lucky).

 

As for the adventures... I have to ask. Honestly. What challenge?

I don't play for the items either, but these bonus missions are 1off adventures and I have yet encountered a mission that I could outplay/outskill... one in which I didn't just repeat until I got the right item/card/rng to win.

 

I have been enjoying the Story! I really like the different characters. I like the different levels and adventures, but it comes down to cost vs. value/enjoyment.
As for the challenge, again it's not easy, but it's not hard either... it's RNG. Many times I know that I simply did everything I could do (with the items available to me) and that until I get better rolls or better draws I simply won't beat certain levels. Again, not a challenge, just RNG annoyance.

A great solution would be a talent system that allows you to choose to help certain RNG elements like "increase your chance to draw a weapon by 50/100%" or "add +1 to all shield block rolls".

In the end, all the planning in the world is for naught when you have 1-6 die roll chance to fail at your given strategy (and that's assuming you even get the cards you needed).

 

I take it differently. Never goes into battle expecting RNG to win me over. Of course you can always win with mediocre gear and tactics if given enough RNG. For me its the essence of card game, work with what you had, instead of working with what you are expecting to have. For example, never engage in melee range even if you have a parry, unless your character can take the hit. Have a fail safe attack just in case his block works. If you draw 0 attack cards, hide and wait till next turn when you *will* draw them. For me, all the standard campaign can be beaten with mediocre gear of that level (nothing epic, crazy luck or the sort) with experienced strategy. What really grinds your RNG argument later on are going to be the quest system, where even with the most epic gear possible, still requires RNG to be heavily on your side. If you are really only winning "by the skin of your teeth" or "phew RNG saved me and win me this battle", it could means that your party is not well equipped, your strategy is not effective, etc... It is enough to win that level if we repeat it enough, but a more refined strategy could win it with less tries perhaps ?

Of course people have different perception of the RNG system, I'm just pointing out mine and what yours could be. I enjoy board game and card game much more than chess simply because of the beauty between strategy and RNG. Make your best out of a situation you have no control over feels a lot more "real life"-y to me.