Open PTR feedback

[ortokot]

It is not clear why the mechanism of interaction with cards like real one was amputated.

1. Drag and drop for some reason replaced by “click the card - click the location”.
2. Removed cards just dissolves instead of actually moving to graveyard.
3. Graveyard pile size and deck size does not represent actual number of card in them.

I ask the developers:

1. Return drag and drop mechanism/animation. This is a very important component.
2. Return the animation of moving cards to graveyard, leave dissolving for removing card from the game.
3. Return the direct visual connection between graveyard pile /deck and the number of cards in them. Add a display of the card pile size in numbers.

 

[cutloose]

After ~17h of PTR I am absolutely in love with HC.
And Yes. I do like 2x3 draws and max 10 limit. Brings a whole new dimension to rounds play tactics.

 

[oOxhaosOo]

The HC ruined the rest of balance this game hade while filling it up with huge amounts of bugs.
It feels rushed out to get back to the original more darker tone, while the darker grim tone looks good and the avatars are nice it makes no fun to play because of the bad balance.

Specialy the sound problems huge, sometimes its just makes loud white nopise, i would say, but could be a problem with logitech drivers.

 

[Sablin]

Bug (probably it has been already reported):

Ivo (I think that's his name, the witcher with 1 charge which deals 2 damage and gets a new charge every time another witcher is played) can hit just units placed in the melee row, whereas he should be able to hit any unit. At least, the card text does not specify any range. It's just "damage a unit by 2", or something like that.

Besides, would it be possible to send messages directly to the developer team? Messages can get totally lost in this forum.

 

[yarchum]

I have a problem with music. When my opponent played "wild hunt hound" or the "wild hunt navigator", the music went really loud for a moment, also, this intense soundtrack which starts when you have little time before your turn will automatically finish, was lasting even after passing.

The same here. Makes you feel you didn't click the end turn/pass button properly.

 

[ProfJJ]

First of all, great job with HC so far. I really think this new direction of Gwent is the way forward! From playing PTR the whole weekend here is my 2 cents regarding constructive feedback:

1) It would be nice to see the number of cards in our deck/graveyard and this would be great if it could be visually correlated, i.e there should be no card placeholder for the graveyard if there are no cards in it etc.
2) Cards/abilities affecting entire rows (especially Golden Froth and Regis) feels really powerful, they should be toned down or their provisions should increase. This also goes for cards with and cards/abilities granting immunity.
3) Indicating more clearly at the start of a match who goes 1st/2nd would be great.
4) Don't know if this is in the works of if it is planned, but the click and drop card placement feels weird, may be one will get used to it? Still think drag and drop would be better?
5) Sometimes Leaders' voices are echoed during introduction of a match, presumed this will be fixed.
6) It's not a big deal, but I think a lot of people would prefer it if the camera during game play was locked. Again it probably will become less irritating when one get used to it.
7) Games feels sometimes to long due to always drawing 3 cards at the end of a round. This can potential be solved by drawing 2 cards then 1 with some added mulligans?
8) Lastly, although a personal preference, it feels really bad playing against cards like Viper Witcher and Traheaern Var Vdyffir which removes your cards from the game, it's such a bad feeling building a deck around certain cards that just get removed from your deck without being able to counter it in any way. I get it is disruptive abilities, but it would feel far better if these cards would move the cards to the bottom of a deck instead of removing them.

Thank you for all the great work.

 

[KenLBlack]

-We need a strength counter for each row. Yes, I can add, but in the heat of the battle it can be cumbersome. I already blew a Geralt:Igni because I mistook the TOTAL count on the side for a row count...which I realize is dumb, but it can be easy to do. And you wonder why people want deck-trackers....

-.

Allow me to correct myself on this post. I now see that you CAN see the row total on the far right. It's kind of odd to spot right away. That right side is quite crowded; may I suggest an unobtrusive row point counter planted near the icons for range/melee, perhaps?

Oh, and while I'm back, I'll join the crowd who don't like that coin on the right. U-G-L-Y! (Sorry to whomever designed it!)

And finally, thank you CDPR for all that you do, even if we sometimes have our disagreements!

 

[ProfJJ]

Also, you can't manualy discard cards anymore for some reason :unsure:.

You can, just click the card and then click on the graveyard, just fyi graveyard, is now on the left and not on the right as "old Gwent"

 

[Guest 4305932]

Incinerating trap seems a bit too strong. It can remove too much cards and basically stop the opponent from playing anything. I think it should be tuned down (3 damage instead of five). You could let the cards use deploy effect before being removed but i like that trap can deny deploy.


We should able to drag and drop cards.


When you activate an order ability for cards that have more than 1 charge "focus" should be removed from that cards so that you need to click it again to use another charge.


When you have more than 1 charge for different cards, and you have to use them in order, right-clicking every time to lose the "focus" is bad.

Blue Stripe scout tooltip doesn't say that he creates another copy of the card.

Banish should have a better animation and should be visible in the greveyard (maybe greyed out)

 

[pamplemousse_alpha]

Maybe these issues have been posted before, but to add weight to them:

- Game feels too dark, some mockup are circulating around with higher light effets, and it looks so much cleaner.
- Handsize at 10 and 6 draws feels limiting, the ideas are great but the number tweaking feels off. 11 hand size, 5 draws (3+2), +1 mulligan per round per leader would be my testing option.
- Music is missing or very dull
- Overall, actions are slow
- The button are very small (to confirm actions after matchs for example)
- Long names (above 14 characters) are not displayed correctly during a game
- The opponent name is often missing
- Voices during pre-match are doubled/echoed
- Symmetrical draw cards + Foltest are reversing coinflip while keeping the tactical advantage
- Deck visualisation in game is not empty even when there is no card left (no to change or to display card counter)
- Cards having wrong visuals in deckbuilder is still a bug (in ptr and outside ptr)
- Lock and spy token look very cheap. Resilience cue is very small.
- Reveal feels ... worse than it was. From interesting mechanic to RNG.
- No armor ?
- Points and coin on the right side feel a bit displaced. Not aligned with rows for example.
- Noise problem (white noise) when playing certain cards
- Row locked ability without any visual cue are going to be "hard" for beginners.
- You intuitively think that clicking on your hero does emote. The actual emote button is quite small.
- Wording for exactly same effects is different. There is still no unity. https://i.imgur.com/J7UAjhM.png

Thanks for your work, and good luck, the card art is still amazing and you already know you nailed the coinflip solution as almost no people complain about it (this thing alone gives me hope for the rest).

Point 2 might be game breaking though.

 

[HarambeIRL]

I don't get why CDPR wanted to make Gwent into a complete other game. The game has been in beta for a long time and all of the feedback and learning from it is just tossed away now? The HC feels clumpy, mushy and a bit confusing, at least for the visual perspective of things. I think that the simplicity and minimalistic graphics were way better. You could concentrate on the actual gameplay instead of constantly trying to figure out what and where to look at. The drop in strength-numbers is annoying to me. It might be a thing to just get used to, but as a many-hours-gwent-player i think the cards doesn't feel as powerful to drop anymore. The 24 Crach > Ciri: Nova (for example) is comparable to a 10-points worth of play now (i might be kind of wrong, but you get the picture).
Overall, I have to say that I do like some of the UI changes pre-playing, as in everything else but the actual matches, although there is some bugs here and there of course. But the gameplay itself now just feels slow, non-powerful and dull at times. The card-effect tranfers is just plain nonsense. It feels like it is just to make it seems like change, but it just confuses (at least for old players). Also many of the cards graphics doesn't fit the theme of their effects now. Hopefully some cards may get new layout or have their abilities changed or something. It might just be me about this one though. Also a thing i've been thinking about is the cost of crafting gold cards in HC. As we now can have almost half of our deck made of golds, are the crafting cost still gonna be 800? That seems a little Hearthstone-like (which is not a good thing).
I don't know if I will be continuing playing the game post HC. The hours i've invested in the PTR will not decide it for me, so ill just have to see i guess. But so far, I unfortunately aren't pleased with the overall change of the Gwent game.

 

[Norinoo]

This will be TLTR;

How i became from "cautiously optimistic" about CH to disheartened and disappointed the more hours i played it in PTR:

First, we have to compare the gameplay experience with the old Gwent. The first impressions, although not 100% accurate sometimes, are important. Let's start with the obvious things.

- The colors are not there anymore. Now everything seems to blend in into everything. Shades of grey. To me, it makes the game more depressing than adult/mature. Not to mention if they thought about the Colorblind gamer...

- Gameplay is slow as a turtle in sleep. It becomes frustrating too soon.

- Then one of the most important factors in CCG's is gone. That's diversity, having a multitude of options to at least try something and/or find solutions that differentiate from the norm. I heard (and thought about it) a well-known streamer of the community saying that HC has 5 (FIVE) distinct archetypes and i tend to disagree. Always compare it to old Gwent. First we need to think that this is PTR, not everyone will have access to these so-called archetypes on day 1 or even on week 2, with the exceptions of these streamers mind you. Then remember how most of these archetypes were completely irrelevant and absolutely inefficient and ineffective in old Gwent? Nothing changed in that regard in HC. Archetypes, even more so in HC, feel more blending in with everything, rather than being distinct. To me at least.

- Another important thing is how unintuitive in it's simplicity HC is. From tooltips to game mechanics everything is unnecessarily complex. I don't know if they consider the new player experience here because again, i think the well-known streamers miss that point all the time. If you have everything you don't really care about the bottom or struggling people.

I know many of it's issues will be refined and fixed come release and as time goes by, but at the same time i remain worried that the game will primarily revolve around damage & boost and the occasional OP card that people will abuse until it will get nerfed for some other element to get OP and all that vicious cycle we had in olf Gwent for so long. Also, on a personal level, i don't think i have the patience to wait for another year for the game to pick up where it left of.

Lastly, i'll tell you "where i'm coming from". I am a realist and pragmatic as they come. You can dismiss and "tag" this feedback as "negative" but ultimately it is exactly this kind of feedback that helps us get better and improve. You cannot, you just cannot deny that the game failed once. You can't. And i am worried and afraid exactly because i want this to work. Exactly because i respect at least what CDPR is trying to do overall and it hurts when something fails because to many people that know things just kiss their a$$. Nothing good comes out of it, nothing but decline.

But i do know i am the average Joe in terms of intelligence. Those streamers and the community overall is much intelligent than me. But i also know i was able to identify the failure of Gwent from it's Open Beta. It doesn't matter what i hopped for. It hurts me, again, it does because i loved the game. So, let's hope that my avg. intelligence is wrong here and they are right.

GL

 

[psysteel]

You can

Yes i see now, thanks. Just saw a video by Swim, he couldn't hit it from a first try. LUL

 

[Czyb]

voice of leaders is like... "arg" "Ugh" "eghm" its soooo bad.
between rounds its too many cards draw.
Hand size limit its very bad idea.

 

[Sablin]

For those claiming that there're not interesting cards, let me share a couple of Twitter threads by Molegion (member of Team Aretuza and quarter finalist in Gwent Open... 4?):

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1048604631025274881

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1048881468800487424

He enumerates several cards with cool and/or innovative mechanics: Keltullis, Ciri: Nova, Phoenix, Kambi, Ihuarraquax, Letho of Gulet, Ciri: Dash, Geralt: Professional, Roche: Merciless, and Frightener.

For those claiming that there are no more than archetypes 5 and no faction flavor, McBeard has recently twitted the different mechanics around the factions:

Skellige: Discard, Resurrection, Bloodthirst, Pirates, and Self-Wound
NR: Zeal, Charges, Machines, Specters, and Soldiers
Nilfgaard: Infiltration, Reveal, Diplomacy, Lock, and Tactics
Monsters: Deathwish, Consume, Swarm, Thrive, and Supremacy
Scoiat'ael: Handbuff, Tribal, Ambush, Artifacts, and Boosts

Yes, you probably can't build a deck entirely based on one mechanics, but you can just mix two or three. I'm having a lot of fun with a swarm+deathwish+consume monster list.

 

[caramanian]

Hi, I am having major issue matchmaking, just searches continuously. Restarting the game, reinstalling haven’t worked. Is there any known answer?

 

[Gen_Liu]

I'm gonna row against the current here and say that I'm really happy with a lot of things they did in Homecoming, even though there is still quiet some room for improvement, what I saw is very promissing.
Let's start with the things I don't like :

- The mulligan system is gonna be a problem pretty quickly since it gives an advantage to players with a good hand (if you have a good hand you don't have to use your mulligan and keep them for later, if you have a bad one you need to use your mulligans early on and basically get punished twice for having a bad hand...especially if you still can't find what you need).

- The faction identity, even though it's definitely there, is really different to what it used to be (and that's something a lot of people don't understand btw, that's why we have so many of them saying that there is no identity anymore). The thing is, identity is very much there but now every mechanics support each other, meaning that you won't make a reveal deck or a consume deck but you'll be focusing on a common strategy that benefits from different mechanics instead (mixing consume and deathwish for example).
While it's not a big deal to me and I guess it's just a matter of getting used to it, I also think that it's still a step back compared to what we currently have. I really liked the idea of having multiple separate archetypes for each faction.
I mentioned it's not a big deal, however, because it's easy to retrieve those archetypes with further updates in the future (the tools are still present but they don't have enough support to focus on one specific gameplan) and having different archetypes being compatible and benefiting from each other is a good thing because it allows for more diversity in deck building.

- Some cards has been changed to something either less interesting or less fitting. For example, Coral!
I was so disappointed when I saw they changed Coral's ability, she wasn't a problem for the game and her effect was so fitting with the lore. Now you replaced it for something completely different and really out of place imo.

-Certain effects of certain cards are very questionable and kinda worries me and there is still a few very RNG cards that I'm not a fan of...like at all.
About that, I know it's supposed to attract casual gamers on the game but I refuse to believe that casuals are just brainless idiots who like to play random cards that will give them huge effect when they have a favorable dice roll.
I'm sure there is enough decks that are easy to handle and thus would be attractive for casual gamers who don't want to spend tons of time learning everything about the game.

Now the good things, again, imo :

- Outsanding visuals, honestly I don't understand peoples complaining about how the game looks. I guess it's matter of taste but it's really hard for me to see how this game can be considered worst than what we have now, it's just hands down better for me.

- I love how the leaders functions (except for the mulligan system, as mentioned earlier). Some of them being really interesting and give room for some very nice strategy.
The only exception to that rule would be Usurper. Beyond the fact that he's very controversial in nature, I don't see the point of making a game revolving around your leaders and give them cool abilities if you have the ability to shut them down. It kinda feels like the "boring mode" of Gwent imo.

- Game mechanics and new effects are awesome. Order, even though it's a bit cluncky on it's application right now but that's not a huge deal, it's easy to fix, are a huge improvement tactic wise and all the new effects are on this vein. I really like what they did with that.

- The coinflip fix and the removal of certain problematic mechanics. The coinflip needed to be changed and they did it well. Now, I agree that the hand size limit is a problem but I don't think it's hard to fix at all (for example, split the mulligan across the rounds. If you have 5 mulligans you get 2 turn 1, turn 2 and 1 turn 3 and every mulligan not taken is lost in the future (pretty much as it worked before)).
I also like the removal of "strengthen". While I think they could have kept it if they brought back the "regressing" tag and it would probably have been better (because it gives more depth to the game), this effect was a problem and at the center of a lot of cancer decks so removing it is a way of fixing the issue.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the change and I'm looking forward for the official release.

 

[ffFoster12]

How to fix this issue?

 

[KapetanCvarak94]

Pros:
-Art department did a great job with the new boards,3D leaders,main menu,etc.
-New deck builder with the provision system is years ahead of the one we have in the ''live'' GWENT
-Game mechanics and effects are good

Cons
-Broken abilities like Viper Witchers and other NG cards that banish a card from opponents deck, Eredin giving immunity
-Board looks great but it's a too dark. I think a bit more light would make it perfect.

Overall I am positively surprised at what the GWENT team managed to accomplish in 6 months, I think that with ''Homecoming'' we finally have a solid foundation for GWENT.

 

[WafflesHS]

Hey guys,

I just cancelled deployment on a hand-boosted Sheldon Skaggs and the boosts got removed :/