It kind of says a lot that one of the most prolific streamers isn't even interested in playing with a new expansion coming out soon.
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Explain this to people who are demanding that this is not a big a deal.
The game is decent-ish right now. It does need more tuning and balancing among half of its cards, than new expansions (we had one just recently and another one even before that). Entering new mechanics that will potentially (and you know they WILL) brake the game again, new mechanics that some find familiar with other games that they do not want to have nothing with.
Quantitative accumulations lead to qualitative changes, is what we say here and this is what is happening with this game and its community for a year and a half now. And it's been downward spiral with slight bumps here or there.
Soo close to do the same after 1200+ hours to be more exact, i played alot during closed to midwinter. A little less after midwinter and then very little after Homecoming. For me homecoming ruined everything that made Gwent so good (i like the board and the resourcesystem and thats about it from HC). I really miss the tempoplays, powerful weather and that each faction felt unique and was challenging. Since we could craft premiums with scrap back then we had way more life on the battlefield, it feels dead now without animated/premium cards. Even ran Radovid armor back then for the looks and sounds, something that new players never will experience.
The new faction looks great (please let us craft premiums with scrap!) and the mechanic seems fun but it feels like the devs forgot about the old factions. Compare old Gwent monster weather, NR armor or NG spies with what we have now. No wonder people leave the game, i stick around in the hopes we get more of the old Gwent. However soon i will give up as well even though i spent around 200 euro (worth it because i had the pleasure to experience old Gwent).
The new faction looks great (please let us craft premiums with scrap!) and the mechanic seems fun but it feels like the devs forgot about the old factions. Compare old Gwent monster weather, NR armor or NG spies with what we have now. No wonder people leave the game, i stick around in the hopes we get more of the old Gwent. However soon i will give up as well even though i spent around 200 euro (worth it because i had the pleasure to experience old Gwent).
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Indeed.
From what I recall, Swim often talked about how creative deck-building was the thing that appealed to him most (something I value strongly too). With how constrained deck-building is in HC and how uninspiring many of the cards are, especially the cheap bronze filler cards, it's not really a surprise that he has apparently lost interest in the game.
Player numbers look like they have recovered somewhat from the early HC days, although they still appear much lower than in Beta (based solely on my leaderboard position after playing the odd ranked game each season and seeing where I end up). Twitch viewership is still a shadow of its former glories when there were several well-watched popular streamers. Now only a few diehard streamers remain.
I'd never heard of Lifecoach before he came to Gwent, and didn't know what all the fuss was about, but he brought a notable boost to the game. His enthusiasm was obvious (including hosting tournaments at his house, if I remember correctly), and he clearly enjoyed the game for its skill first approach. HC saw him depart along with many others.
I think the biggest issue for many of us that loved Beta Gwent was that it felt more like a game of skill than luck. HC isn't a bad game, it's just not "Gwent" any more - and based on the way things have played out over the 8 months since HC launched, it looks like it never will be again. CDPR have apparently decided to target the game at the more casual mobile gamer market, as they presumably see more profit there in the long run. Just a shame us Beta Gwent fans lost our game in the process.
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Yeah, but what streamer would even want to be associated with Gwent now?
The game has been in a competitive drought with only 1 tournament in the last 8 months.
It's not like this is Gwent's off season either, in this time frame last year (October 2017 - June 2018) there were 5 tournaments!
Twitch numbers are lower than they've ever been. Less than half of Open Beta.
There is no incentive or hype to stream Gwent. Homecoming game is so much slower and more predictable, personally i have a hard time watching others play it. I'm not saying there is no skill left, but you don't see such crazy outplays like this in Homecoming because cards just don't have multiple abilities (also cool abilities) like they used to.
The game is just less entertaining which makes it difficult for entertainers.
I used to enjoy watching Gwent streamers in Beta. There were at least half-a-dozen that I watched regularly (all gone now) - and I found it entertaining as well as educational. There are a handful of good streamers still going, but despite their best efforts to try to entertain, I just don't watch anymore. It's not them that are dull, it's the gameplay. Flashier visuals are ok, but ultimately a game lives and dies on how enjoyable it is to play (and watch).
In Beta, you could watch a match and see how the strategy and tactics evolved across the game. See how a player anticipated and adapted in order to deal with the evolving board state in front of them. It was rare that you couldn't at least compete for the win in most matches, especially if you didn't just go for an all-in win or lose strategy. A great move at the perfect moment could still be decisive, but was often the result of several carefully considered moves laying the groundwork leading up to it. It wasn't as obvious who was going to win until the final card was played. Things were less binary.
With HC, it seems like it's often just a case of going through the motions until one of you can get the final say to land your "wombo-combo" to take the win. The game seems now to be based more around landing broken mini-combos, rather than implementing a coherent strategy using your whole deck across the whole match. That feeling of slowly building and applying pressure isn't as prevalent.
In Beta, I rarely forfeit. I almost always felt like I still had a chance, usually by outplaying my opponent, rather than lucking into a solution via create or some other RNG. In HC, far too often I can tell I'm doomed no matter what I do, long before the final card is played. That makes this a much less compelling game for me.
I´m not sure I played same beta then. The beta I remember was full of crazy unbalanced combos (nekkers), minimal interactivity (greatswords), card advantage shenanigans (CA spies), absurd create RNGesus (slave drivers), oppresive weather and game decisive one-card swings you have exactly zero possibilities to counter (C:Nova, DJ Dijkstra). Was it more entertaining to watch? Propably yes. Playing it was different story though.
The game is more balanced and has healthy stable core now, with wide design space that doesn´t rely on powercreeping so much. If you play on autopilot, you´ll lose. If you dont think about every move, you´ll lose. If you don´t setup your power plays, you´ll lose. And most importantly, you have chance to counter every opponent move.
I dont really understand this whole wider design space thing, to be honest. Lots of cards now are damage dealers and buffs with little to none synergy across factions. And order mechanic being OP if not controlled by opponent really limits possibilities for decks to succeed. We haven't seen all new Syndicate cards yet, however i'm a bit worried about crowns mechanic there - it seems to be safe placed points uninteractible for your opponent, and hard removal again comes to mind as most obvious counter for a new faction. And we already got a lot of removal decks in the game. Time will tell, sure, but did HC really untied cdpr's hands for new diverse archetypes and builds?
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This. Exactly. I remember closed beta being a binary game - you had enough weather clears or the match was over before it began or you had enough removal to clear the dwarves or it was over before it began or you could stop them before they transmuted their cards to gold (and therefore immune) or it was over, etc.
Beta was full of stuff like this. It's very different now. That's not to say that many of the complaints made above don't have merit - I agree that the lower provision cards need looking at, that there are some cards that are auto-includes despite the flavour of your deck and that factions as a whole need looking at to make them unique rather than different coloured cards doing roughly the same things. I also miss the big swings that move you from a losing position to a winning one in one move (before, inevitably in my case, being crushed by an opposing big swing), tutor cards that allowed you to effectively thin your deck so that you could play the series of cards you needed to to win a game, etc.
The game is vastly improved visually, that can't be argued IMO. The menu systems, etc are much improved. It still feels a little slow, though. There's definitely more RNG. I generally like the provision system but it's let down by the paucity of lower provisioned cards. I love the seasonal modes (and wish some of them could be implemented permenantly as game modes) but have never liked Arena. It's a bit up and down - for every thing that I think is better about the game there's something that makes it not quite up to the standard of pre-Midwinter Gwent.
The kicker for me, though, is that Gwent is now a game that's become more about little tactical exchanges that give you the edge in a round rather than a broader strategy that played correctly wins you the game. I think that if I miss anything about pre-HC Gwent, it's that. Now we play mini-combos of 2-3 cards that give us a points advantage hoping to force a round win rather than a 3-round strategy that overwhelms the opponent in R3. I still like the game, I still play it most days but I don't play it as vociferously as I used to (I used to regularly hit 24 games and now most days I don't even do 6). I've almost 2000 hours invested in this game so I'm not going away any time soon but I am hoping that CDPR can address current issues (lower provision cards, number of e-sports events, same-y cards despite the faction) before I think of giving up on it.
I don't look at beta Gwent as some higher game. It had many flaws and many of the same flaws that Gwent has now. I mostly miss having better archtypes with more cards to use in those archtypes. Current Gwent has these glaring holes in it and cards that absolutely no sense. They need to fix the game before jamming a new faction in it.
Some good responses and very valid points in reply to my previous post. Perhaps I should have identified which era of Beta Gwent I was thinking of more specifically. I was mostly thinking of the period immediately prior to Midwinter.
Beta Gwent was indeed far from perfect. It had different issues at different times. Closed Beta, especially early on, was a bit wild, and yes, often very binary. Early Open Beta steadily improved until Midwinter (in my opinion - others may feel differently). Post-Midwinter was marred by all the newly introduced RNG, bugs, the spies fiasco, coinflip abuse and a few excessively binary cards. The pre-Homecoming content drought period wasn't terrible ironically (again, in my opinion), the game kind of balanced itself to a certain extent as people found ways to cope with many of the established Meta decks. It did get a bit stale though. The pre-Midwinter version had its faults too.
I guess ultimately, whether you found Beta Gwent more enjoyable than HC or vice versa probably has a lot to do with which style of game you prefer. Maybe you are fortunate and enjoy both. To me they seem to cater to slightly different target audiences. Both have good and bad points. Personally I found certain eras of Beta Gwent more enjoyable than I do HC. I'd be much happier if it was the other way round.
Beta Gwent was indeed far from perfect. It had different issues at different times. Closed Beta, especially early on, was a bit wild, and yes, often very binary. Early Open Beta steadily improved until Midwinter (in my opinion - others may feel differently). Post-Midwinter was marred by all the newly introduced RNG, bugs, the spies fiasco, coinflip abuse and a few excessively binary cards. The pre-Homecoming content drought period wasn't terrible ironically (again, in my opinion), the game kind of balanced itself to a certain extent as people found ways to cope with many of the established Meta decks. It did get a bit stale though. The pre-Midwinter version had its faults too.
I guess ultimately, whether you found Beta Gwent more enjoyable than HC or vice versa probably has a lot to do with which style of game you prefer. Maybe you are fortunate and enjoy both. To me they seem to cater to slightly different target audiences. Both have good and bad points. Personally I found certain eras of Beta Gwent more enjoyable than I do HC. I'd be much happier if it was the other way round.
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I like the idea of new factions but I agree with you that the priority should be improving the current factions. The dilemma that CDPR have is that impetus to games like this come about through big events like introducing a new faction. While many of us think that widening the card pool first and then introducing new factions is probably the sensible way to go they have to see things in terms of cash flow, and that means enticing new players in and getting existing players to spend money on vanity items. Having a new faction helps with both these things (shiny new cards, shiny new card back, shiny new keywords).
That's the great thing about 'design space'. You can maximize it by not having any synergies at all.
How is it different? Artifacts and Artifact removal are very binary, the whole orders thing is very binary as it can get out of hand quickly if you don't remove things immediately + their ability to stack makes it certainly more binary. Only a few days ago one of the more 'poular' streamers now (it seeems) posted this on reddit:
"CDPR have apparently decided to target the game at the more casual mobile gamer market, as they presumably see more profit there in the long run."
It looks that way on first sight, but their approach is inconsistent. Orders slow down the gameplay and you have to activate them manually, which could be a bit clunky on mobile.
I just want to add a few words about balancing:
A card game needs to have a certain degree of balancing, but if you focus too much on it, you won't get a fun game. During beta tons of things got removed (instead of tweaked) and cards got simplified, because it was the easiest way to balance things. And it lead to a pretty shallow game in the end (after midwinter, problems starting to occur earlier though). Weather used to be a fun, but broken mechanic during closed beta. Now you could just delete it and noone would even care as it doesn't have any significant impact on the game. Both doesn't seem desirable.
Indeed and I'll go the extra mile and write:
if all cards were perfectly balanced, there would be no purpose in deckbuilding. Small asymmetries is what make the game interesting in the first place. To me it is better to have a game a bit unbalanced, but with interesting gameplay, than one with perfectly balanced shallow cards.
I think you are bending the definition of "balanced" too much. Balanced cards can still have synergies and variance, even RNG, for that matter. Therein lies the challenge of finding reliable combos or ways to disrupt your opponent. So, when a card is balanced, it doesn't automatically mean it's a shallow card.
I think when people say "balanced" they mean at least adjust them accordingly with examples from other factions or Neutral cards. Cause now we have SK (and perhaps MO) that have extremely cheap, high value cards, which makes the other factions really hard to compete against them.
I'll also repeat this again - last season' Seasonal mode showed how the game will look with more Bleeding and Vitality mechanics than flat damage. The game felt thousand times better than what is the "pro" mode.
I certainly agree with you that the game needs some asymmetries. Remember Queensgard during closed beta? That deck used to be super slow, but you sometimes could come back being down 2 cards more, because it was extremely strong at the end. It was a fun experience, because its play pattern was completely different than the ones of other archetypes.
Very true, but looking ahead and spotting potential issues in advance doesn't seem to be a strong point, based on Gwent's development history to date...
Not uninstalled yet, but haven't played for weeks now and it really gave me rest since Gwent is actually triggering rage with it's...well, whatever it is, it is not there in Hearthstone, which I've been playing instead of Gwent. If Gwent had the same mechanics as Hearthstone cards and gets rid of the provisions I might return to it. But so far as I read on the forums things have not been changed.
Decks that are based almost entirely on RNG or abuse of Mana? It is the only thing that is currently seen in almost all HS games.
If there is something different than that in your HS you will be in an alternate universe, the level of skill that the game could have disappeared a long time ago.
Maybe the problem is not the game, simply you find it more interesting a game where a veteran can win by force of resources over the new players (which is what limits the system of provisions) and where despite making a lot of mistakes You can win with "random" mechanics.
My Jaina deck can make a combo to play an equivalent to 53 mana in turn 5 ............
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