This announcement is offending to be honest and it is atleast 3 months too late.
I totally believe that you - all members of the development team - are invested in this project especially emotionally; So are the players, you fucked up things left and right and stalled patience and attention of palyers over and over now, abusing their trust and good will. But this right here is the worst of them.
Just to mention three examples - relative quotes - You said
you are working on something for the rows to justify the flood of agility, your concept was to make everything agile and make rows irrelevant, but suggested something big for rows and importance for them just in another way than the row restriction, that took months without being honest and telling us that you either changed your mind or you are just awful and fooled your players on purpose; You proclaimed
you are sorry for the midwinter update and you'll learn from it and fix stuff several times and you did nothing; You finally admitted that
create is a problem and that you will ban it from the constructed modes (at least from ranked and pro ladder according to this announcement now),
Wardancer is an issue for you, CA spies are too - your solution is too keep everything of that like it is, that's the opposite of acknowledging and attacking an issue - After stating those things publicly the right move would've been to just do what you said you are about to asap - asap doesnt mean in may and in this case was already by far too late. If you don't have asolution for an issue you already acknowledged, than just take the card out of the game until you think you fixed it.
Your patch resistance is disgusting and always was. You restricted yourself with your esport calendar, which is totally fine but you just don't get how to work around that. If you would do this stuff right you would be able to use your PTR, then fix your planned changes, launch the patch afterwards and fix the rest with hotfixes not later than 2 weeks in your 2 months cycle. Your approach to that is not to react to the appearance of your patches, shortening ranked season to being 1 month long having 2 cycles of them in 1 pro ladder cycle; The proplem you created yourself now once more is that you don't want to patch/fix things while any of these seasons is running. This means 2 consecutive ranked season will always be the same gameplaywise in the best case of your system - that means you would actually do something. What you do is not to balance anything, if you do it it is far delayed and still crude; Teasing more updates which are either heavily delayed or not coming at all. Where are my dryades and vampires? Where is the new faction you talked about? I am totally fine with giving a longshot overview of things if you would handle it like this and would decide for one approach. I wouldn't ask those 2 questions if you wouldn't promise/announce more frequent updates and suggest that those things are part of that, shortly before that.
You didn't say anything to look forward with this. All what you said are truisms and are the base of developing this game anyways. There is no information about a concrete project you are working on. Altering the design, fine with me;
Lilayah;n10800231 said:
Currently, going second can give players a significant advantage. We heard you — we will ‘fix the coin flip’ and are already testing possible solutions [,]
if this is an issue now why wasn't it the last 18 months, you proclaimed you are working on a solution for the coin flip months ago and got nothing at all;
Lilayah;n10800231 said:
[...]That said, if we manage to find some cards interesting enough to include, but ‘too crazy for Ranked’, they will still have their place in Arena and Casual Mode [,]
the thing you needed to do from the beginning, that being said, Create is still part of the ranked mode;
Lilayah;n10800231 said:
We want GWENT to remain a deep game, where each faction has its identity and offers distinctive gameplay archetypes. We want rows to really matter in terms of gameplay, and gameplay itself needs to be engaging and rewarding.
What does that mean for me as a player? You already had faction identity - threw it away, you had row-relevance - straight into the dumpster, you had a deep and skillrewarding, a high-skill-capped game - and you turned it into the most random clown fiesta you could have.
The last response in the Ask a Dev thread is 3 weeks old, is anyone still at your department?
I don't care if you "work on something" or "figure something out" anymore, Gwents past evolvingwise is a pure disappointment and full of lies/misleadings. I care about an actual result and what we got is the same "meta"
for 3 months , you are telling us that the next stint will take 5 months after announcing
more frequent updates for 2018 and the future. What do you intend to tell us with this announcment?
"Come back in 6 months if you are that bored of anything else to let us disappoint you once more or keep drying out playing this game, because of your initial faith into it."
You are throwing so much words at us without any content behind them.
Lilayah;n10800231 said:
We saved the best for last. After Homecoming concludes, we will launch GWENT along with Thronebreaker — our single player campaign. A dedicated team has been hard at work to deliver you a great new story from the Witcher universe. Expect goodness!
This is the only thing that would've make me smile out of all what you announced to the players the last (close to) one year, if I wasn't so goddamn disgusted about this game, its evolution, your treatment and your developing. I wasn't bothered with the fact that Thronebreaker was clearly delayed without telling us and informing us in the end of december that it will be delayed - turns out to be almost a year. I was always of the opinion that Thronebreaker will be great - and I still am - that you got all the time of the world for Thronebreaker if I was to decide; Still I was looking forward since the first rumors about it, the announcment, the first sneak peeks, soo badly. Thus this is all what I needed to know, Thronebreaker this fall is good news!
To conclude things. I came back for the art contest - knowing that I can catch the announced roadmap - the vast majority of the submissions were beautiful, some of them estonishing and some would truly fit into the game as a card. Sadly I can't vote with my GoG/Gwent account, would've been too easy I suppose.
Taking this opportunity I want to thank everyone that participated, especially the artists, but also the players voting for the artworks, everyone that express the well-deserved appreciation for the artistsind some way and yes also CDPR for this project, it was a pleasure to see all of those artworks and inspect some of them, the details and motives were breathtaking in some cases.
What I got is the push-off. Finally, I was waiting for it at least 6-8 months now. I can't say that this 18 months were a pleasure for me. In fact it was a pretty bad torture, especially because of the - by now - few good, enjoyable moments and I am by far no player that played just a couple of games and didn't busy himself with Gwent even when not playing. If Gwent didn't evolve that badly - out of my persepective - I would probably still try to slip into a major tournament, most likely through a qualifier and even in the reality I was not far fom reaching it. I am sorry for every single player that experienced the same, or even worse, that I did.
Please do all of us, especially yourself a favour CDPR. Just concede. Stop trying to pretend you are able to take care of a multiplayer game, to take care of an esport game and the players involved in that.
You talk about your emotions and your humanity. You work with real human beings and furthermore with existences that don't work at you department. Far more lifes than those of the players one knows the name of. There are atleast dozens, most likely hundreds of human beings that invested much more than it would've been healthy and smart for them - talking about the esport.
And yes noone can argue with you if you just say that you are not responsible for mature persons and this is true, partially. You are responsible for what you do and suggest regarding those players I talk about. Your esport environment is irresponsible. Take the pro ladder as a basis, you demand that a player that isn't even in reach of the real business invests at least a full time job of time into the game. And I actaully think you perceive this as reasonable, because you want dedicated players. Except those who actually make it and those who earn some money through it by streaming their hustle, the players you build/built your esport environment on have nothing from it and invest/lose a lot.
Just leave it be. This experiment went too far and was definetly not only a misstep but a tremendous failure.
Close the multiplayer and give us single player campaigns for the future. I am still sure that Thronebreaker will be great, so will further single player campaigns be. Focus on them and give us something to forget this bad experience with your multiplayer fuck-up.
Strongly hoping that I can extend my 2 week+ break to eternity.
TV_JayArr
Ps. I didn't read the 14 pages, thus my post is mostlikely (partially) redundant, no need to tell me.