So last month, I deleted the shortcut to Gwent from my desktop. I just got bored with seeing the same cards and mechanics. Completely lost all motivation to log in to complete the seasonal tree. Anyway, I got the notification about Journey, so I logged back in to see what has changed. Sadly, the only change for the better, it seems, was the new loading screen. The UI changes and Geralt trinket cosmetics just look like shit. Seriously, they're not that far removed from the visual appearence of the first Witcher game. The side scrolling for coin, board and leader skin doesn't seem to have done anything to declutter things. The plain, black background with green mist just emphasises the flaws in the visual design. FFS, CDPR, at least put a nice landscape picture as the background. Anyway, that already skewed me from going back in neutral to negative. The only thing left to do was play a few games.
And what a mistake that was. Everyone must have had the "Win X games as ST" quest, because that's was the majority of what I came up against in casual. That wouldn't have been so bad if there was something different. Sadly, it seems Harmony will enjoy a few more months in its long reign as a meta deck. Didn't even get a chance to see if row locked Steffan and Damien actually make a difference. I'm kind of leaning toward it being that NG just has to space it out if they don't have Bribery or some other way of cheating out a second defender. Realising that I just wasn't going to enjoy myself, I quit the game. By this point, I'd decided that a premium Journey pass was not something for me. The inability to sink time to get the next pass for free coupled with the fact that the meta hasn't really shaken up with the patch to freshen up the meta enough for me to play more frequently would have been a waste of money. That, and CDPR's level skip deal is not good value for money, considering MTGA includes a 10 level skip as a standard part of their season pass.
So I headed over to Reddit to see if anyone from CDPR had commented on why they felt this was a good way to move forward in their continuing HC beta but not a beta full release saga. I was quite surprised to see Burza had provided some statistics, and that something like 64% of the player base was not engaged enough with the game to gain any benefit under the previous Daily Crown system. That was about the point I realised Gwent and I have grown apart. I'm not sure we can reconcile at this point. I mean when the official thinking is that the monetization system is part of the reason people aren't playing enough, it seems there's no hope that they'll ever acknowledge that Gwent has some serious flaws in its dna that leads to the game being repietitive, boring and stale. On top of that, the UI and 3D asthetics of the game being completely at odds with the cards and 2D art. And finally, the abrupt departure from one monetisation strategy to another again feels like Gwent still hasn't figured out what it wants to be when it finally grows up. So that's it. I'm out. and this time, I'm not sure an expansion or overhaul of the rewards system will bring me back.
And what a mistake that was. Everyone must have had the "Win X games as ST" quest, because that's was the majority of what I came up against in casual. That wouldn't have been so bad if there was something different. Sadly, it seems Harmony will enjoy a few more months in its long reign as a meta deck. Didn't even get a chance to see if row locked Steffan and Damien actually make a difference. I'm kind of leaning toward it being that NG just has to space it out if they don't have Bribery or some other way of cheating out a second defender. Realising that I just wasn't going to enjoy myself, I quit the game. By this point, I'd decided that a premium Journey pass was not something for me. The inability to sink time to get the next pass for free coupled with the fact that the meta hasn't really shaken up with the patch to freshen up the meta enough for me to play more frequently would have been a waste of money. That, and CDPR's level skip deal is not good value for money, considering MTGA includes a 10 level skip as a standard part of their season pass.
So I headed over to Reddit to see if anyone from CDPR had commented on why they felt this was a good way to move forward in their continuing HC beta but not a beta full release saga. I was quite surprised to see Burza had provided some statistics, and that something like 64% of the player base was not engaged enough with the game to gain any benefit under the previous Daily Crown system. That was about the point I realised Gwent and I have grown apart. I'm not sure we can reconcile at this point. I mean when the official thinking is that the monetization system is part of the reason people aren't playing enough, it seems there's no hope that they'll ever acknowledge that Gwent has some serious flaws in its dna that leads to the game being repietitive, boring and stale. On top of that, the UI and 3D asthetics of the game being completely at odds with the cards and 2D art. And finally, the abrupt departure from one monetisation strategy to another again feels like Gwent still hasn't figured out what it wants to be when it finally grows up. So that's it. I'm out. and this time, I'm not sure an expansion or overhaul of the rewards system will bring me back.
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