bye bye

i thought this game had potential, but it seems that the top community is stalling it via using unfun builds, wich are noway near to get nerfed. since i obtained a bit of skill already and dont enjoy anymore competing with low players, and the skilled ones pretty much go the same way, im leaving. just wanted to say so

 

Hey, don't go so fast!
Try peasant.
Try custom scenarios.
Try casual matchmaking with people who run fun builds.
The game does have a lot of potential, and there's a lot of fun to be had even if you don't enjoy the top X00 ranked environment.

 

OMG!!! Please don't go!!!! Given that this is your only post, I can only assume that if you leave, we will be missing out on many more whiny, poorly-spelled posts with terrible grammar, adding nothing to the game community. Truly a terrible loss for all of us.

 

OP has a point, however poor his grammar and motivation may be. Flaxative has done a great job championing peasant PvP and should be applauded for doing so. The problem is that there is a need for it in the first place.

 

There would always be a place for new formats, even if the game were perfectly balanced. The devs are planning to add leagues, not because constructed is broken/unbalanced, but in order to offer more variety for people who enjoy different play styles. As Flaxative points out, there is plenty of variety out there if you go looking for it (and you don't have to look hard).

Of course the constructed metagame is not perfectly balanced; it is still evolving (and will continue to do so). This is true of any CCG - sometimes a deck is trendy and you start seeing a lot of it, but often people figure out how to beat that deck and it wanes in popularity. Every deck has vulnerability. That said, I do think the devs do need to keep evolving the game by adding new items and sometimes tweaking others (and they will, but we also shouldn't expect them to be too impulsive about it). But as a game, Card Hunter will never be "done" and it should be expected that things will continue to change continually over time.

But overall, I find posts like the OP's (and I've seen them in forums of EVERY game I've ever played) to be immature and pointless. If you want to complain, do so constructively. If you want to leave, just leave. But don't pretend that it's all about you and make a big show out of taking your ball and going home because, to paraphrase, "everyone else sucks and is ruining the game for you".

 

Enriching a more balanced game with different ideas and formats is not the same thing as a section of the player pool feeling forced to create a sub-game in order to counteract balance issues. No matter how close to perfect balance the game gets, there will always be something people complain about, but usually those complaints will not be wholly valid. With the current meta there is a clear and well-defined problem and this has been obvious for weeks now. While that might not matter if CH had the audience of a Hearthstone, it doesn't, the player pool is already dwindling - people quitting is a genuine problem.

 

The problem in this game for a lot of players and potential lost customers/players is that for a lot of people, to enjoy the game you have to avoid the ability to obtain more loot like in the matchmaking.

 

@Bluesage: Marketing 101 - If customers leave your business, find out why. You may not get the individual back but you get a clue as to how you can improve. That information is often hard to get, so even if the content may be unpleasant it pays to listen.

That said, it's Christmas so the place should be brimming with bored vacationers looking for something to pass the time. Instead it's awfully quiet. Not a good sign.

 

While I appreciate your kind words about my peasant efforts, I need to say a few things.

Peasant is NOT a sub-game developed to counteract balance issues. It is an alternate format that keeps things fresh. Peasant, much like normal PvP, has and will have balance issues. I do not recommend it in order to create a balanced playing field, though I admit that the decreased scale of plays makes the format seem more 'reasonable' than one rife with nimble strike, inspiring presence, firestorm, hard to pin down, etc.. The point of peasant is to diversify play experience, to increase the amount of game available to players. It is a supplement, not a replacement. And rather than being aimed at noobs who don't want to grind loot, I think the real main audience is veteran players who want a free expansion pack to the PvP experience.

My 2¢.

 

I agree 100%. I think topics like this are attention-seeking and rarely contain any useful information. I personally would either delete them or move them to off-topic. Goodbye topics only make sense when the person leaving is a veteran member of the community. In this case for example the person made a forum account just to post this, which is kind of like saying "Hello, you don't know I even existed, but I just wanted to say you guys suck and I'm leaving".

Every single online game I've ever played has been quiet at Christmas time. While some people have more time to play during the holidays, seems like casuals (who make up for the majority of playerbase) usually spend time with their family or do other stuff.

I think you are both right in a way, and the truth is somewhere in between. Like I've said before, I think that the huge success of Peasant is at least partly owed to the fact that there are certain overpowered cards and items that make the current meta a bit boring, especially in the top-100. I know your goal with Peasant was not to fix the balance issues, but it kind of has done something similar. If the game was balanced, I personally wouldn't be super excited about things like Peasant because they essentially limit deckbuilding. It might be ok as a one-time deal that mixes things up a bit, but it wouldn't be sustainable, and people would slowly go back to using their banned items. But the funny thing is that by limiting the numbers of items you can use, Peasant has actually increased the number of viable decks. By removing items like Vibrant Pain, and making control wizards much less powerful, the game becomes much more fun.

 

Oh, yeah, totally, the format feels more balanced as a result of a number of factors. And it might be more balanced. I am just clarifying my goal with it, and pointing out that like, there may be balance issues—it's not the holy grail of game balance or anything. And I do think that the gameplay experience is different enough that, say, people who don't like the existence of 17-damage attacks would enjoy peasant even if those attacks were "balanced" in normal PvP.

 

Not sure about that really, this is the sort of game I would not try until I had a bit of time and thought to spare. At Christmas if I'm playing games I want something more mindless.

 

You're all right, as much as a contradiction as that is.

As a new game, that has a growing population I feel that we should all try to limit our sarcasm at posts like ones written by the OP. However, maybe the best idea is for the forum moderators to create a section for players to say hello and goodbye. This could limit the sarcasm and actually allow the moderators to focus on those that don't feel like the game/community is for them.

 

Part of the problem is that BM are a virtually non-existent presence so people feel as though if they have a problem or grievance it's just being dropped into the abyss. This is in line with the poor community interaction ever since launch and at least partly responsible for the poor take-up of the game. A community rep who is actually part of the BM team needs to be making regular appearances.

 

Wow... O_O

Any idea if it was money, or just individual preference? I'll throw money at them more quickly if they need it.

 

I think that is a very doom and gloom way of describing the current situation. They are not shutting down the servers and the world is not going to explode. While there are of course things that need fixing, the game is doing just fine, considering the launch was just a couple of months ago.

I wouldn't call it "lack of presence" because they probably read most of the stuff posted here, but just don't respond to it, which is good because it means they are working on the game. If they started to respond to every single topic, more and more people would call them out and then get angry for not getting a response. While talking to the community is a good thing, too much open discussion can lead to a disaster. It's usually better for the devs to take a kind of omnipotent role and let us mortals have our endless nerd fights over how the card X should be nerfed.

Some kind of full-time community rep would be nice, but like pointed out earlier, the game is not big enough for that just yet. Maybe in the future.

 

First off, apologies to all if I was letting my snarky side show a bit too much earlier...

I definitely am happy to discuss the health of the game and whether players are leaving (and if so, why). I'm guessing that the devs have a lot more data on that than we do (although we might be able to get some hints with some targeted API queries, who knows). It's a fact though that the game will evolve as players get better and better gear, which is why I do feel like it's pretty important that the devs shake things up early and often by introducing new cards/classes/formats/etc regularly.

That said, different games are made for different reasons and with different sizes/scopes in mind. Maybe Card Hunter is never going to be a huge blockbuster with millions of players, but I'll be happy to keep playing as long as it is sustainable for its development team. I do feel like it's a great game, but then again I've also been a big fan of lots of some great games that had tiny loyal fan bases but died out due to lack of players (the original Netrunner CCG comes to mind, as well as Auto Assault).

Game designers creating a free-to-play game have a tough choice: either using a revenue model that encourages Pay To Win, or make a game with more integrity but less likely to generate big profits. Card Hunter's devs have definitely avoided a Pay To Win model, and it shows. You can enjoy the game thoroughly without ever paying a dime. Unfortunately, that does limit the upside of the game financially. The thing about Pay To Win is that it can be highly profitable, as a few "whale" customers open their wallets to outrank each other, and in the process those whales subsidize a big development team that builds a lot of new features and gameplay for the rest of us.

My hope is that Card Hunter will be more of a 'built to last' game in the long term, where they keep the games integrity and fairness high in the hopes of earning the long term loyalty of a strong player base, who continues to evangelize to expand and grow the game. But this may also mean that they must keep their dev team lean at this point, and rely partly on crowdsourcing for new content (like Mauve Manticore and Peasant format).

Anyway, we'll see what happens in the long term, but the best thing we could do for the game and the devs overall is to spread the word, and stick around, and have faith that the devs will continue to provide new challenges in the future if we do so.