The absurdity of Artifact and Dota2 (rant)
So, low and behold: Artifact has been released. The hotly anticipated card game has been released and the community's response has been ecstatic! Thousands and thousands of players have purchased the game and started playing it, as once again the world marvels in the new glorious Valve creation.
Except it is not a glorious Valve creation. The community's response has not been ecstatic. The game is.. irrelevant. If you compare the Dota2 viewers on twitch and Artifact's viewers on twitch you will see a stark contrast: Dota2 is clocking at 50k+ viewers at any moment during the day, while Artifact has not had anything above 5k viewers at any moment. Now, how is this related to Dota2? Well, the game (OUR game, Dota2) is filled with bugs, starting from Morphling-TB 2-hero-at-once bug (thank you, Gorgc) all the way to the most make-your-life-easier ones, like the quickbuy for multiple null talismans or wraith bands. And then you have people like Wykrhm, who are employed by Valve of course, who is publishing stuff about Artifact on a daily basis, desperate to kickstart the Artifact game, and if you go and look at his facebook profile, it is FILLED with raging comments because Dota2 is in a very bad state as of this moment. Valve should STOP trying to promote Artifact at the cost of Dota2 because Dota2 is the very best game that Valve has published, period. Yes, CS:GO is good, but the audience and audacity of the game does not come close to Dota2. Why is Valve ignoring the community's backlash about the current state of the game? Do you want to lose your community Valve? Dota+ is shit and has not been updated in ages, custom games are forgotten, game is filled with boosters and smurfs and abusers and scripters and Valve is shifting all of its attention to Artifact?
Bulldog was right. Fck Valve, Fck Gaben and Fck that stupid new Artifact game.
Rant and venting over.
Posted Dec 14, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC
Having a game with the greatest possible monetization strategy (Dota 2), for which I personally spend 50-100$ a year without any doubt (and many others do even more), Valve decided to create a game with the ugliest monetization strategy possible I won't ever spend a penny on.
It was evident that Artifact should not be considered as a game to buy when appeared that it's not just a card game, but a collectable card game. Collectable card games balance is centred about players different capability to pay, they greatly depend on new cards packs, addons etc in which naturally inflation happens - the cards for the same cost become more strong in average. A massive amount of new cards and inflation is something that completely diverges with Dota universe - since you'll never see 20 new heroes appearing in Dota in a year but in collectable card game it's a must-have.