Why Gwent is not popular?

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@ChoroQ_10yen I didnt mean that the same factions should be dominant always, but when CDPR makes balance changes and only ends up making another faction dominant, the problem still remains.

No faction (or deck) should be dominant, at least to the point other factions dont have a chance.
 
@ DRK3

I respect your opinion.

If CDPR wants to establish GWENT as e-sports, I think that a uniform balance adjustment is necessary. But that is a very difficult theme.

I can't see what you can see because I have less player skills than you do. So I keep playing GWENT and aim to improve my player skills.
 
Why Gwent is not popular? I can't speak for everyone but I'd like elaborate why the game cannot be popular with me.

I left the game after the launch of HC for a period of 10 months. A few days ago, a huge nostalgia hit me and for the first time in a long while, I logged into my GOG account and fired up Gwent. It was a pleasant surprise to see a new faction with the option to have Dijkstra as a leader. I always loved Dijkstra both from the Witcher games and Gwent Beta. That 4 power spy gold card was a go-to card in every single of my NR decks. Profit + fee combo seemed interesting and instantly built a DJ's syndicate deck. I mean I copied and pasted it from a meta snapshot I found online.

The more I played, the more I realized why I left in the first place. No matter what I played (whether it was a Meve midrange, Ardal tactic removals, DJ's profit/fee,) no matter how complicated a card ability was worded, no matter it was a gold or bronze, essentially I was setting them up to do +2 boost or -2 damage. Yes there were different cards doing a little different than other cards but it seems like they didn't escape much from the concept of +2 boost or -2 damage.

Going in a little technical, one other thing that discouraged is the hand limit. It just didn't seem right that a player wins round 1 with 2 cards down and still be able to start round 3 with an equal full hand. That just makes having rounds complete pointless. And as usual, playing second (not getting the blue coin) is still much better. Also having provision costs makes me feel like doing tedious algebra and takes away the joy of deck building around an archetype.

That being said, I do admit the current state of Gwent is much better than when it was launched Oct. last year, but it has lost that adictiveness it once had when it was in beta. I couldn't play more than 3 matches in one sitting after gaining sufficient knowledge to pilot a deck. Cards lack diversity. Different wordings but essentially the same ability.

To add my 2 cents on why the game isn't popular right now ... well in my opinion, currently, there are 2 huge online card games in the market, MTG arena and Hearthstone. MTGA is still in beta and has been growing substantially. I never played Hearthstone so can't say much about that game but MTGA doesn't lack diverse and fun cards. It is a draw dependent game but draw RNG is the only RNG the game has. I do get tired of MTGA by playing it daily something I have never experienced with Gwent beta but to me MTGA is the game that I am able to play more than 3 matches in one sitting.

I don't wanna divulge in too much of "my gwent beta" drama, but I just wanna say that I spent 400 dollars to support the game I loved more than any game and wanted to support and appreciate CDPR for making my favorite game in the world. It was a sad day to see it go and the news of Gwent isn't doing well right now doesn't make me happy either. I was genuinely shocked to see, at rank 25 on the leaderboard, I was placed at 45k. "I am sadness" describes perfectly on how I am feeling about the whole scenario.

I am ready to take another 10 months break. Perhaps a hit of nostalgia will come early this time around or perhaps it won't come at all. Until then, best of luck to everyone.
 
The question cloud be why is GWENT so resilient, like there have been tough times followed by tough times and the ammount of people that stuck around and genuinelly care is quite impressive.

Also no mobile :D ... whatdoyaknow ...
 
>Different wordings but essentially the same ability.

@flyhy

I accept. I have little experience playing GWENT, but I now feel that too.

However, I know a card game that has changed the game balance by adding new cards. One of them is Yu-Gi-Oh!

For now, I'm really looking forward to playing GWENT. Even if I lose, it ’s fun. The thought process of thinking how to win is fun. In fact, my grades are very bad.

In my opinion, GWENT will continue to add new cards. This is the fate of a card game. So, at some point, CDPR might adopt a standard system like Hearthstone?

By the way, I have little experience playing Hearthstone, just unlocking a few heroes. MTGA played for the first time yesterday. But I don't have much time to play. There is no time to play both GWENT and MTGA.

This sentence is also written by Google translation. I hope you can communicate correctly to everyone.
 
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I'll be as brutally honest as possible. For me gwent is not so popular, mainly for these 3 reasons:

1) Very poor balancing of cards and factions. Bad patches (most of the times the usual vicious cycle of overnerfing and overbuffing things). That's not something new, I mean not something new with just the latest patch.

2) Change of direction and overall identity of gwent. Closed beta, open beta, midwinter update beta, homecoming launch, homecoming now, are all totally different versions of the same game.

3) Very disappointing launch of the homecoming version of gwent. The game was so bad compared to beta, that it forced many popular streamers / youtubers and pro / casual players to abandon it for good.

PS Homecoming has improved a lot since its awful beginning but after intoducing tons of cards with every update / expansion and especially after adding a whole new faction, the balancing of the game should be even more chaotic than it used to be.
 
Well i was away since homecoming launch and came back 7-10 days ago or so to check if the game has improved. I played quite a lot games last days (over 200 on ranked) with 5 factions.

Game is definitely better then when HC launched but still needs a lot of balance tweaks. Having a faction like Syndicate with a leader like Dijkstra is just gamebreaking. I dislike the coin mechanic in general seems way to op compared to other faction synergies.

Ranking system is pretty weird. Does it really have to be this complicated?

In general for someone that was away for many months but still had the ability to craft pretty much every card i needed game was overwhelming. Way to many cards and some of them are pretty confusing. The description alone on some cards is like 7-8 lines of text long... Doesn't hurt to make it a bit simpler.

Its not a bad game atm but its still slow paced and personally i hate not being able to thin my deck as much as we did on beta. Deck consistency is pretty important for card games.
 
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However, I know a card game that has changed the game balance by adding new cards. One of them is Yu-Gi-Oh!

For now, I'm really looking forward to playing GWENT. Even if I lose, it ’s fun. The thought process of thinking how to win is fun. In fact, my grades are very bad.

See, Yu-Gi-Oh however just accepted a lot of things that CDPR did not. It accepted powercreeping the old cards and over time, making them useless by comparison. To those devs, that was ok. It accepted promoting so much synergy that anything that does not fit in the deck should make room for something that does. This latter bit is one of the OP's complaints, so I reckon that's not what they wanted. In that case, they should be happy with the current state of the game.

On the other hand, there's limitations everywhere. Despite the 10k+ more cards available in the game you mention, in comparison to Gwent, the meta is proportionally much more limited. The top decks are only a handful (at best 5) with the others being generally inferior but SOMETIMES capable of scoring a win against them.

So overall, the point is, you decide on an approach for your game, and stick to it. CDPR decided on this approach with Homecoming. Wildly different than the beta of course. I personally do not like it, but some others do. It just appeals to a different audience.
 
@Khreygond

Thank you for your reply. google translation can't translate your text so accurately and translates it into esoteric Japanese. I can read a little English, so I think you almost understand your claim, but I'm not confident.

However, I am very happy to exchange opinions with you.

Although the subject of the story is different, Yu-Gi-Oh is still very popular in Japan. In the card shop sales area, the area of Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon card games is just as popular. There are many other card games too.
 
I'll be as brutally honest as possible. For me gwent is not so popular, mainly for these 3 reasons:

1) Very poor balancing of cards and factions. Bad patches (most of the times the usual vicious cycle of overnerfing and overbuffing things). That's not something new, I mean not something new with just the latest patch.

2) Change of direction and overall identity of gwent. Closed beta, open beta, midwinter update beta, homecoming launch, homecoming now, are all totally different versions of the same game.

3) Very disappointing launch of the homecoming version of gwent. The game was so bad compared to beta, that it forced many popular streamers / youtubers and pro / casual players to abandon it for good.

PS Homecoming has improved a lot since its awful beginning but after intoducing tons of cards with every update / expansion and especially after adding a whole new faction, the balancing of the game should be even more chaotic than it used to be.

They also keep shooting themselves in the foot with bad design decisions like artifacts and Usurper. Then it takes forever to figure out that they are bad and take them out of the game.
 
If I can express my perception of the game as a fresh new player I'd say:
- there is a mechanics pool extremely wide and complex, so many new players are simply overwhelmed. I'd really suggest to add several more tutorials with different complexity. In particular using both player decks and pre-built decks to explore important mechanics, strong combo and experience some powerful cards.
- there is no global chat in-game where to make friends (you can add a friend, but is not exactly the same and there are global chat in almost every Android game they know).
- there is no support room channel after the match to ask for info or explanation (also with just few experienced players that can answer); I have seen card games where you can actually links cards in the chat, extremely useful and valuable.
- they feel mostly lost building their decks; I mean they have few resources to get cards they "suppose" will make a big difference in their play and clearly they are wrong most of the time, feeling then as they have wasted time. We could say adding a tutor feature for each given faction and/or given leader to really indicates the best cards or group of cards to gain synergy. In this way they could have a good general idea and a real improvement in deck effectiveness.
- the normal value returned by milling a card is too low for new players; I mean they have really few cards, almost no synergy, they tend to craft cards that don't really benefit their play, so having a limited full value return would be extremely valuable (until they get level 10, or for the first 30 mills). It's a small boost for newbie to improve their deck experimenting in a safe zone.
- also the global "dark/corrupted/abandoned" theme of the graphic elements is a little too heavy for many. I understand the origins of the characterization, but in practice I was going to buy the tavern board from the shop for the simplest idea of a lighted and warm location until in details I have seen broken things around and slipstreams of blood on the floor... It's not bad or good, just it's something most players won't like much around, in particular for a long period of time. It doesn't sell much, so it could be a good thing adding some graphic alternatives. I suppose we don't play this game for the graphic itself.
- there isn't a taunt to say "Hi" to your opponent
 
I think they are waiting for the mobile for a big explosion. I always think that card games are better to play on mobile. I always feel strange to sit down and play a card game on pc.
 
Imagine enjoying playing something on smartphone with tiny screen at home (that turns your smartphone into a heat generator after few minutes) when you can do the same on PC/console with monitor/TV.

For me it feels strange when someone plays game on smartphone in public places.
 
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A lot of young people, including students, are mac users. Despite mac's having smaller market share overall, it could have a larger market share in terms of relevant population. It is doubtfull that the students are a relevant population group as their propensity to spend is lower compared to low-income youth. However, as we are talking about popularity in general, in terms of number of players, it is without a doubt the biggest reason.

I'm perplexed about developers decision to not invest in a mac-platform. The only reason I could think of is the fact that developers think that their game is trash and can't compete with Hearthstone, which is why they decided to focus solely on console. Under the assumption that it gives them a larger audience compared to what they could have gotten by investing in a mac-platform, which is total BS.
 
@Mugen

I feel the same way. Maybe CDPR thinks that way.

However, there are already many mobile card games in Japan. Is it the same in the country where you live?

For example, Capcom recently released “TEPPEN”. (This naming is a parody of "TEKKEN")

I don't like playing card games on mobile. I want to play on a big screen. At my age, I'm hard to read small characters.
 
For me Gwent died with that update that made golden cards vulnerable.
Is it worth giving it another try, what's ya'all opinion?
 
I can only speak from my experience.

I've returned to the game after watching the witcher series on netflix; hopefully others do the same.
 
I wanted to write a long post but flyhy already wrote it for me. I played the game everyday for hours every day from Kill The Servers event until Midwinter update. My favorite version of the game was just before midwinter update but i still played daily until around Thronebreaker when I just got sick of this version of Gwent. I really want to see Classic Beta Gwent even if standalone offline game.
 
Gameplay quality is pretty low, devs was not able to fix removal slam meta for more than a year now.
 
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