Hey, started playing two days ago. Cardhunter wasn't on my radar at all and i didn't really dig the browser game nature and the art at first glance. But when i got in the game the art was actually really good with a minimalistic but very distinct and expressional touch to it. Gameplay had interesting ideas and the audio/ visual feedback you get for every action is fantastic ( That guy from PopCap did a fantastic job! ). The learning curve also flys quite high after the first few fights, which is a good thing. At level 5 the game officially introduces you to the MP part. You get thrown into an A.I battle, playing a max. level party which adds a lot of high level cards to your stash. In SP the greed for new cards/ items was what motivated me the most, getting all these free high level cards just for testing out the MP had me closing the game almost immediately. It also kinda put me off MP itself as i didn't have the " i accomplished that"-feeling. I get that levels mean much less than rarity grade or atleast that's what i assume after a couple of hours of gameplay but i can see that this maybe a problem for a lot of players. You probably had good reasons do design it like that and i can imagine that balancing the MP of a TCG while also making money in a F2P game is hell but it just feels wrong. I feel like for Cardhunters longevity a "good" MP and as another aspect the connection of MP/ SP is vital. It has to be rewarding and the feel of "building my card collection". Can only speak for myself and i'm sure that has been adressed already somewhere here but i feel like this can't be adressed too much in this case. Really neat game! Even the ingame GM brothers are not half bad, thought it would be another "hurr dev humor in videogames durrhurr" but i actually smirked a couple of times hehe.
I've heard this complaint before and I really want to understand it, because it's not making sense to me. You play campaign. You understand that you get new cards by getting new weapons and gear which you get by adventuring. You play multiplayer. You understand that you play with a high level party and get high level gear accordingly, which you can then use in campaign AT SOME POINT. Even though you may not be able to use the high level gear for 15 levels or so, it somehow becomes part of the equation by which you enjoy progressing through the single player campaign? Can you explain that part to me, because the high level gear you earned in MP has absolutely, positively, nothing to do with your campaign experience at all. It just sits there in your inventory. Or you can sell it for the gold.
It does affect the impression of the SP campaign. The whole style of the game is the nostalgic RPG PnP game feel. It no longer feels like a party slowing building their powerbase when something comes along and dumps a lot of higher level gear in your lap. It now becomes a pile of items rather than your hard won loot. It turns the feeling of an RPG into that of a tactical game and some people really would rather have the RPG feel. I totally understand that, even if I'm more inclined to lean towards the tactical side myself I really enjoyed the RPGish elements while they lasted.
That's what I don't understand. You cannot USE the gear. For all you know, by the time you get up to the appropriate levels all the gear you earned in the MP demo might be utter crap, in which case you were worried about nothing. Card Hunter IS a tactical game. It may have the flavor text of a D&D campaign but it so clearly is not D&D. There's no roleplaying whatsoever. It uses some RPG mechanics the same way that Borderlands 2 uses RPG mechanics, but Borderlands 2 is clearly a first person shooter at heart, not a role playing game. The RPG elements in Card Hunter don't change at all as a result of being given some high level gear. That high level gear is a way of explaining why you should try multiplayer, if you're the type of person who is normally inclined not to do so when you play video games, by showing you the kinds of rewards you could get. If the MP demo dumped a bunch of low level crap on you, would the multiplayer make any impression on you at all? It sure wouldn't for me. I'd just keep playing the campaign and ignore the multiplayer altogether if no appropriate rewards were offered to me. Especially when playing against other humans introduces all the problems you encounter when you try PvP in any other game that has PvE and PvP as choices, not requirements. Something has to outweigh the potential pain in the patookus of playing against humans. Good gear is a good incentive. I just don't understand the psychology of your complaint. I really, really do want to understand it, as again you're not the first person I've heard say this, but when I tried the MP demo and got the gear I couldn't use I just ignored it until such time as the gear became relevant. That's the same thing I do whenever I draw any sort of gear which I cannot use yet.
But one could argue that even most Pen & Paper RPGs don't have mechanics that enforce role playing at all either. It's the theater of the mind. It's the perception of your character(s) that matter here. The RPG mechanics don't, no, but it at this point that the game reveals itself to be a tactical game rather than a traditional RPG. This changes peoples outlook. Some find it much less engaging thereafter. The person who love the game because of the story they create about their party struggling through these adventures and improving base purely on player skill and the hard earned loot they have uncovered may not want multiplayer at all and having those items that AREN'T hard earned by the party does detract from the experience. It ruins the essence of the game for them, the feeling they got playing the game that they had before unlocking all of the MP items can never be recovered. The best simile I can make is that adding multiplayer gear to the single player game before you've completed the single player campaign is like taking away the childhood belief in the easter bunny and santa clause before they get the chance to actually have that childhood and enjoy it. It's no longer magical. Yeah it would do the almost the exact same thing -- suggest a way for your adventuring party to get a bunch of free items without earning them... ruins the experience. That's part of the difference, and a striking one at that, during SP you never get gear you can't use. (Not including items for classes/races you might not have.) To you, in the context of a tactics game that's about items showing you something to strive for in an incentive to play. It's not to someone who wants to guide an adventuring party through adventures and increase in experience and power. Their incentive is the challenge of the adventures and getting those incremental rewards along with the stories created in the mind of the player when their warrior survives that swarm of goblins with only 1 health and some battered armor because of some clever play and smart positioning. It's more than just a game, it's an escape, it's a whole world... All you need to do is allow yourself to understand that other people perceive things differently and value things differently than you do and you'll do alright.
This is the sword I got when we ambushed the the goblin's weapons wagon . This is the wand I got when we sealed the ruby demon portal. And this is the shield that simply appeared in my inventory for no reason when I first entered the multiplayer lobby. I wasn't really bothered by the way MP interacts with SP, but I can certainly see how it could be jarring and demotivating for some people. It could break the sense of progress and adventure. It could disrupt the sense of immersion. If the player was building some type of role-playing story in their imagination, the link to MP could spoil that story. -- In the long run, I think it's good that items from MP can be used in SP and vice versa. I think that's better than having two completely separate inventories. Also, I think it's good that players don't _have_ to go all the way through the SP campaign before they start playing MP. But perhaps there's some way we could have the best of both worlds. ... Maybe we could have something like a 'campaign stash', which is a set of items associated with a particular playthrough of the campaign. Players would have to option of playing through with only the items in this stash (and any items found along the way would be added to the stash), but if the player wanted to, they could choose to not use such a stash and instead have access to the full collection of items on their entire account. I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not. Maybe it would just cause confusion. But some kind of idea like that could solve this MP vs. SP issue, and also allow veteran players to have the fun of playing through the campaign again with a limited set of items, rather than always having access to all their super-strong gear and specialised builds that they've collected over many many hours of playing.
But you can use the gear if you just keep playing multi. You're going along and slowly growing in power and then suddenly it's revealed to you just how weak your guys are and how crappy their gear is. Unless you are the type of person who doesn't like pvp then you might be tempted to just ignore the campaign. Eventually you get to a higher ranking and realize that you need better gear to compete and one really fast and easy way of getting gear is by playing the campaign, but by then you're used to your level 18 party and leveling your little guys feels like a chore. If you don't want to start buying chests then you might just ditch the game all together. I think delaying the MP introduction a little longer would help. Let them get the intro the first time they click the multi button but don't have Gary push them into trying it until level...i don't know...10 or so?
Even then, I think a good idea would be, as someone else suggested in another thread, to have Gary explain that if you get the multiplayer deck you will have items added to your campaign stash so you may want to put it off until later...
Welcome! That's really encouraging feedback. It sounds like you weren't particularly interested in the game but you decided to give the game a try and ended up really enjoying it. If there are a lot of people like this then it bodes well for Card Hunter. I felt exactly the same way, although I'd been following the game for a long time so I knew it was coming. In fact I sold all the items I got for free in that starter pack immediately after finishing the multiplayer tutorial. The fact that you're just given all these high level items for doing nothing cheapens the ones you have gotten up to that point by adventuring. And you can't really get away from them, at that point your inventory is quite small and suddenly it's full of high level items. I do think it makes sense to introduce multiplayer early in the campaign and there's no question in my mind that items earned in each mode should be completely transferrable to the other. If only there were some way for Gary to, say, loan you the starter pack whenever you want to play multiplayer but take it back off you when you return to the campaign ("You can borrow these models so that we can play against each other. You'll have to give them back when you're done though, they're not your heroes!"). Alternatively, if these heroes could be added to your campaign roster and keep all their items equipped on their character sheets then the items wouldn't be cluttering up your inventory and I think it would feel less invasive.
Didn't we use Melvin's characters for one map at the VERY start of the game? Then he burst in, berated his brother, and we had to go buy our own first character and take out 2 goblins alone. If I didn't just dream that up... have Melvin lend us his characters one last time when we enter MP and you have Assussanni's idea. Though the simple idea of waiting until level 10 or so (when you already have tokens available), and maybe giving Pizza and encouraging us to buy a pack, rather than making the pack free, would help those who don't want to break immersion be more in position to choose to avoid things.
