It's a question I'm asking myself a lot lately, given that MP is effectively dead. Anyone who is regularly at 1500+ will notice that the entire player pool is just the same clique of Melvins that you are forced to play over and over again. If the game were a success this would rarely, if ever, happen. So we have to ask, why is no one playing Card Hunter when other, inferior card games, are thriving? It's not the complexity factor (i.e. why games like Candy Crush are so popular) as CH does not have a steep learning curve. Any ideas?
Yeah, it's a bit early for "Doom & Gloom" (Tm)? The recent fan run tournaments shows this isn't the case. Maybe the pool is stagnant at 1500 - but that's not the same as "Mp being dead".
My personal experience about this: -I found the game by accident and it's an awesome game. Tactical and card game at once, my two favorite kind of games. The more people will hear about it, the more players there will be. -I started to check the MP feature after I cleared the campain for the first time and did all the "no death" missions. This first day of MP fighting I made 20 wins for a disapointing epic chest in 22 battles (got dc during a game I would have won). This got me to 1100-1150 ranking points. On the second day, things were getting slower. Better opponants, who take more time to think for longer games and way less battles against bot opponants. I made it to 10 wins I think for 4 golden chests then went back to the single player campain. I made it then to 5 wins the two days after and since then it has been decreasing. Now I am around 1400 points, don't even play in MP everyday and if I do, I never go past 3 wins for two chests. Here are the some of the reasons why: -Single player campain is more rewarding in term of loot. -I don't own a single vibrant pain or lochabar and the only guys I get to play against that don't use those have a team of 3 firestorm/WWs wizs. I need more stuff to be competitive and I want more equips to try some build ideas I have in mind. Atm I have all common and uncommon equips, working on getting all rares now. Maybe when I'll need only epic and legendary items I'll get focused in MP. More competitive = more win% and faster battles = what you need to farm the MP. Also we are all competitive and prefer wining over losing. -Also the more points you have, the harder it is for the system to find you a suitable opponant. So if you wanna go for the epic chest, you can wait 4+ minutes each time for the last battles. If you are at the top of the ranking, don't get surprised if you only play against top players. Reduce your ranking to 1000 points and you'll get to see a LOT of new faces. --> a possible fix, grant half a chest to the loser if he doesn't give up. This would reward an epic chest for 20 wins, 40 loss or 10 wins and 20 loss (or any other possible combinations) and make the MP mode more attractive.
The league system will probably change the flow of MP games, since it seems to run on temporary rankings, rather than all time.
This is exactly why I drop my rating whenever MP gets boring by playing goofball builds. I would love to see a 10-minute or 5-minute mode, simply because a 30+ minute match can be agonizing, and takes up most of the time I would want to give to MP.
Other games have huge marketing budgets and tons of people working on it. Even if they're not "good," they get a lot more exposure and bodies thrown at them. And to say that we've failed is, as Pengw1n noted, a bit premature.
Some people use the test server for this. (I haven't, yet.) You can set up a "sandbox" PayPal account to buy tons of pizza, to buy tons of epic chests. Opening all the chests might be a grind, but you should be able to get plenty of toys for build ideas.
People will probably return when new content is added. I played Card Hunter pretty solid for 4 months after it came out. I enjoy PvE more than PvP, so I think I just burned out on running the adventures over and over. I probably took 5 or 6 full groups to level 19 doing the adventures, plus countless hours grinding the lower levels for no XP. When we get some new adventures, treasure hunts, and a level cap increase I'll probably return and join the Card Hunter club again. In the meantime, I'm having fun with Hearthstone!
The game hasn't failed, but it definitely hasn't reached it's potential, and its not solely because of a lack of investment of money etc. You cannot make a game that relies on multiplayer competition without caring about the multiplayer balance. There's only been 1 balance patch since release. A lot of players find that unacceptable.
Dead is a a relative term... but judging the game by the top 200 players is not really fair and 1500+ roughly relates to the top 200 players which is a small pool to start from. Then consider this is a global game so while most people tend to play at certain times, others sign in when you might never do so, so of the top 200 you might only come across half of the players in the top tier. Add to that people will stop playing or play other games etc. and you drop the number of people you might face even more. Finally the people who reach the top is going to be somewhat stable due to the fact that the amount of time needed to reach 1200+ is significant and the time to reach 1500+ is mildly obsessive. I think last I looked this game has only ~65,000 accounts (I would guess more now), which for a global game is small. I think the reasons are as follows. 1. Flash, which limits mobile access and shuts out a LOT of people who literally don't have a full computer. 1a. Requires a strong fairly stable internet connection, therefore almost impossible to play using 3g/4g. 2. Lack of advertising. If it wasn't for a review in Game Informer I never would have come across it. I have never seen it advertised or have anyone mention it to me. Advertising is a huge waste of money in the long run but in the short term it works. Since I've started I've seen multiple adds for Hearthstone. 3. Many people just want to play the SP campaign, so the game loses it's replay value without MP and removes any desire to get friends to play. 4. Brutal item value gaps. The value of the worst Legendary is nothing no one would spend a single gold piece to get many of the "legendary" or "Epic" items, whereas others in a free market would trade for 10,000 gp or more. So you feel like you are at a permanent disavantage if you don;t have certain items. Heck there was a long time where I had no items with Volcano for example. I am very curious to see how well this does as an app. I would guess it would exceed the current numbers in 4-6 months, people play a LOT more on mobile devices than anything else right now.
