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Comment by tobrien6 | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad Valve didn't properly support or listen to players of Garfield's digital card game Artifact (which he developed for Valve). It was a huge leap forward in digital card games, involving high-level strategic play not present in Magic. The 3-lane system inspired by DOTA and the Initiative system were great innovations in the genre.

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Valve listened to Garfield, who was telling them that the players not liking it were wrong because he had data to show that the game was fine. He treated players like computers and ignored that the game had a lot of feelsbad mechanics, but he ignored the feedback because statistically it was very balanced, therefore he thought the players shouldn't dislike it. A Star Wars TCG he made failed for the same reason, but apparently he didn't learn.

The Star Wars TCG failed so spectacularly and the original CCG from decipher is still going today....despite not having a release in almost 20 years.

Agreed! I think it kind of goes to show that a game often needs a nice cocktail of interesting game state changes (eg: "mechanics") mixed with nice feelings. Audiences vary in how they like the two (eg: Chess compared to Mario Kart), but the right fit is really important to a successful product.

Valve had a nice way of describing "player acknowledgement" [1][2] for cosmetic things like bullet holes or lighting affecting our lizard brains. On the other hand, a close friend of mine really enjoys the "Star Wars: Rebellion" board game. [3] The decisions and mechanics gives the sense of excitement he feels when he watches a Star Wars movie.

I don't blame Garfield for making the kinds of games he likes though. His clout probably helps makes new trails for other ideas to take shape and be improved on.

[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valv...

[2] https://youtu.be/Td_PGkfIdIQ?t=1634

[3] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/187645/star-wars-rebelli...

The feelsbad mechanics (like random creep placement) could be accounted for and the randomness mitigated, but it was highly skill-based and thus frustrating for beginners. The fact that the same guy won almost all the tournaments in the beta shows how skill-based the game was. Closer to Chess than to Magic in some ways, despite the elements of randomness. I think Garfield was right, but there were very real concerns about the player experience that still needed to be addressed. It also needed frequent new card releases imo.

There was a great Mark Rosewater blog ages and ages ago about how important it was for him to look holistically at a mechanic/theme/set/whatever and ask the most important question - is it fun.

Obviously different things are fun for different people, but some large segment of players need to find a thing fun or it shouldn't go in. Regardless of any other consideration (elegance, purity, cleverness etc etc)

The problem is that the more people you adhere to the more washed out the game-play will become. So you have to ask yourself if you want the game to be super fun for a few people, or a little fun for many people. An easy mistake new developers do is that they take something that is very fun, and make it less fun in order to attract more people.

What do you call a super fun game for few people?

A dead game.

Whether its online or physical. Game that doesn't have player-base is doomed to be forgotten.

Artifact didn't even took off and the playerbase tanked to 200-300 people weekly. Who is going to wait 30mins to find a match? And what are the chances of even match-up?

I was not referring to any game in particular. Once you have a very good solution to a real problem, or a game that a few people think is really fun, it's no longer a design/engineering problem it's a selling/marketing problem.

When you have few users it's not the time to water it down to suit the general public, you should only do that once you have the ship in motion. eg. million of users.

> What do you call a super fun game for few people

a niche game?

> What do you call a super fun game for few people? A dead game.

RIP tribes:ascend. Not fun for most people because not being able to move across the map properly for literal hours of learning the gameplay makes it incredibly unapproachable.

Fun as hell once you learn, but still a dead game very fast.

This is the problem I have with some cards and mechanics in MTG (particularly Arena). The white Ajani's Pridemate coupled with life-givers e.g. healing hawk/enchantments - you see it once, you shrug, say OK, but then every second or third match is Ajani and it's suddenly NOT FUN. You find yourself playing decks you don't like (like super-aggressive mono red, or decks tailored against Ajani) just to win a few matches. And eventually I wander off and play something else instead.

Statistics != fun.

Magic itself has a lot feelsbad mechanics, the biggest being land draw. I doubt if MTG was released today it would be anywhere close to as popular.

IDK, Magic Arena is quite popular, and I know a lot of people who got into it somewhat recently, so it's still a good game. Mana screw/flood is annoying, but it infrequent enough that it's not super frustrating.

I quit because I just don't have the time to keep up with the pace of expansions, and if you don't have top tier cards, you'll probably lose. I like the gameplay, but not the collection aspect, especially since the trading aspect is dead online.

The biggest for me was that everyone felt like they were all drinking the same coolaid, as in 95% of the player I met played type 2.

As a student at the time I couldn't afford to continue buying the new expansions to follow the meta and quickly saw type 2 as a brilliant mechanism to keep everyone buying new cards. As a person who'd played and collected cards from all sets for close to 10 years it felt like I had enough, duals lands, amazingly powerful cards that I couldn't use with anyone else I met... No one wanted to play their new modern competitive deck of the month VS my type 1 powerhouse.

And yes I get that type one was prohibitively expensive for new players to try, it's that disconnect between me and everyone else led me to quit. Sell all my cards on ebay for a grand at least and regret it later and the cards seems to only have skyrocketed in value since.

It appears that Artifact is not dead:

> "We ran an experiment, we got a negative result, and now we need to see if we’ve learned anything from that, so let’s try again. And that’s what [the Artifact team] have been doing and that’s what they’re getting ready to release. Based on the reaction to it, what was wrong with the product? How did we get there? Let’s fix those things and take another run at it."

https://www.pcgamer.com/a-surprise-message-from-valve-hints-...

It is dead in the sense that it failed miserably on release, has very few active players, and the upcoming changes have been reported as being called Artifact 2.0 internally

the high complexity is exactly why I and many other players did not play. compared to hearthstone and mtg the game mechanics felt forced and over complicated, not fun at all. I REALLY wanted to like it too.

And it's funny, because in this article he says that he doesn't like making digital card games because they end up being overly complicated, but that's exactly what he designed Artifact as, and even bragged about how it was going to be the most complex card game people ever played.

> compared to [...] mtg the game mechanics felt forced and over complicated

I honestly have never heard someone suggest any game was more complicated than mtg!

Funny, that's exactly why I don't play Hearthstone. I'm getting tired if games based more on owning top tier cards and following deck lists than actual strategy.

I'm sad that Android: Netrunner (also by Garfield) has been discontinued, since I'd really like something like that with a nice digital client since it's fairly easy to get a complete collection.

Have you seen https://www.jinteki.net/

I play with my dad at least once a week!

https://playartifact.com/news/1821083382556531528

Valve is working on it still.

Three lane strategy card games in that genre existed for quite awhile. There was a somewhat popular series called Dixie from the 90s which did civil war battles using three lanes (and I assume other Tom Dalgliesh games did similar).

I always assumed DotA/etc got that idea from elsewhere, but of course I have no idea.

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