
Artifact: What Went Wrong? - Ariarule
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/artifact-what-went-wrong/
======
dx87
Some things that weren't covered in this article.

The beta players said that Valve largely ignored their feedback, and only made
trivial changes. Richard Garfield said in an interview that people
consistently didn't like some aspects of Artifact, but that him and his team
knew what was best for the game, so they mostly disregarded complaints about
RNG and some cards being frustrating to play against.

There were unrealistic expectations about Artifact. Some of the people in the
beta couldn't stop singing its praises, calling it the best game ever made.
After launch, one of the other beta testers said that a lot of the people
publicly praising the game had privately said that they were trying to use the
hype around a new Valve game to launch a twitch/youtube career, and they
didn't actually like the game. There were also features present in the beta
that had been silently cut before release, and some game breaking bugs that
were present in the beta, and never got fixed.

~~~
Amelorate
A while ago, while talking to a friend about game design, I had the
realization:

Players will quit over issues they see in a game, even when in actuality those
are non -issues.

~~~
dx87
That's the thing, you can't ignore how a game feels to the players. In
Artifact's case, it has a lot of very up front RNG, but on paper, it's
balanced. It just feels unbalanced because people mainly remember when they
lost because of bad RNG, not when they won because of it. One of the designers
for MtG talked about it, and said that trying to fight human nature in game
never works. It doesn't matter how many stats and formulas the designers have
that shows that the game is balanced, if it makes players feel bad, they
overwhelmingly won't like it.

------
davemp
As a huge CCG buff (top 10-100 finishes in YGO, Hearthstone, MTGA), I tried to
get into Artifact for ~80hrs. There are some really great things buried in the
game:

1\. The heroes add a bit of consistency to draw RNG. The equipment to upgrade
them was also pretty cool.

2\. The three lanes set up can create some crazy mind gaming / outplay
comebacks.

3\. The draft experience was fantastic. The color restrictions of the heroes
was a bit less punishing than MTG but still required some thought.

\---

Unfortunately there were WAY too many issues for the game to survive:

1\. Expense was way too high to play constructed. No one is going to pay ~$60
for a single deck in an unproven game.

2\. The RNG was too obvious. It doesn't matter how skill based the game
actually was when a significant portion of games were decided by coin flip
attacks. The frustration will drive people away.

3\. Game length. 20 minutes is just too long to spend with Artifacts simple
mechanics and RNG losses.

4\. Progression. There was no meaningful rewards for playing. Keeper drafts
were prohibitively expensive. Getting packs naturally was just too slow to
feel like you'd ever be able to make a decent deck. Competitive ranking was
non-existent at release.

I actually think an Artifact re-launch could be successful.

------
new_user8675309
There’s something missing here. The insiders club created by the closed beta.
Only famous personalities were allowed access.

Enormous hype leading up to the launch was wasted by gating the majority of
players into watching streams.

This led to the creation and widespread awareness of a meta game before non-
casual players could even touch the game. Arguably, one of the most fun times
to play a game is during launch, before spikes know what to netdeck and most
are clowning around.

~~~
chrisseaton
> before spikes know what to netdeck and most are clowning around

What does this mean?

~~~
sornaensis
Spikes = players who are highly competitive and keep up with the current meta-
gaming ideas

Netdecking = pejorative term for creating a deck based on meta-game archetypes
researched online/from more experienced players instead of solely through
personal trial and error.

~~~
chii
why is it considered pejorative? Learning off better players is a smart
strategy imho.

~~~
noirbot
It's more of a "You're not good enough to do anything but copy others" sort of
thing. Tracing a Picasso will give you a pretty piece of art, but it doesn't
make you a legendary artist.

Most people don't care that much, but you can also see issues if the community
is mostly all copying the same 3-5 people's strategy, since that makes the
game feel samey and boring.

~~~
me_me_me
In chess the beginning of the game is called opening. Its a set of pre-
calculated/analyzed moves that lead game into different type of positions
(styles of play).

It would be madness to call people who use 'openings' lazy etc.

It's literally how the skill levels of given game are improved. If something
works, use it, then improve it/evolve it and lift the skill cap of the game
up.

------
Antimediary
The common comparison with Artifact is with Dota 2, as it's the IP that
Artifact was based off of.

They're also both 'complex' games. Complex in the sense of having lots of
intricate mechanics that make up the game state. Dota 2 has its reliable vs.
unreliable gold mechanics, while Artifact has its nuanced system of keywords
and three lanes.

However, I would argue that having high complexity in a game is fine. What's
more important in games like these is feedback on every individual decision.

In Dota 2, there are clear mini-success and mini-fail states that build up
over the course of a game. Destroy a tower, kill a hero, eliminate a Rax.
These are clear moments of feedback that unequivocally gives Players an
advantage.

But in Artifact, these same decisions all had to be interpreted. Only the
language between the games was the same. For instance, killing a Hero or a
Tower wouldn't necessarily be the correct decision. Even typically simple
decisions like 'buffing a Hero' or 'winning a combat trade' had to be weighed
against everything else happening in the game. Every board state resisted
simple answers.

This ambiguity was both Artifact's greatest strength and its greatest
downfall. At its best, Artifact was a game in its own class. No easy answers
and a high volume of meaningful decision making made for a really unique card
game. It was the game that ruined Hearthstone and MTG for me, as they started
to feel too 'slow' in comparison.

But, good luck introducing anyone to the game. Good luck trying to get better
at it either. If every decision has to be interpreted (especially when the
results of decisions can be delayed for multiple turns), how is any player
realistically going to get better at the game? It's no wonder that so many
people bounced off the game.

------
Ataraxic
I enjoyed the point about tutorials. As far as tutorials go, it was maybe the
best I've seen. At some point though, no matter if I know I can take 1 of 10
actions, I still have to make a decision and I had no idea which one to make
or how to model my thinking to help me.

I think if you look at a comparison like Dota or League, whenever a new player
is being given an explanation of the game, they are told to just "last-hit"
the minions for gold. This is sort of mini-game within the game and allows
players to feel like they are achieving something while also improving their
skills. It creates simple gameplay in a complex game. Without simple actions
or choices to improve at the game starts complex and remains that way
throughout. This creates a high barrier to an intuitive understanding of the
game, and I think intuitively people understand whether a game is fun or not.

------
kabacha
I recently started playing Mythgard - it seems a bit like artifact _done
right_. It has the same ups artifact: grid-like play, satisfying combinations
and outcomes, clever sacrifices and distractions, but doesn't rid the player
of control: you can select what to attack and when to attack, most cards don't
have any delays and the whole game feels like "you are playing" it.

The biggest issue with Artifact was that it wasn't an enjoyable game for big
majority - it felt that you're sitting in the back seat while the game unrolls
and often you don't get any useful feedback. The absurd amount of RNG,
eventhough managable, made people feel bad and unsatisfied.

At the end of the day no one wants to play a game which isn't satisfying and
Artifact was exactly that.

------
lacker
It seems like the common wisdom in Artifact is that the economic model was
bad. I think Zvi is correct in saying, Artifact was just not a good enough
game.

Personally, I enjoy fairly complex games, and I’m willing to spend money to
try games out. But I just found that Artifact was way too complicated to be
enjoyable. It is hard to follow what’s going on while watching a stream on
Twitch.

If Artifact was fun but expensive, it could have found a core that loved
playing it. But no, there are more people streaming and watching the indie
card game Slay the Spire (which isn’t free to play) nowadays on Twitch, than
there are people watching Artifact.

So I don’t think the biggest problem was the price; the biggest problem was
the gameplay.

~~~
tpxl
Worth noting that Slay the Spire is one of the best deck builder games and
arguably the one that started the recent craze.

~~~
XJ6
It's also a rogue-lite, which are the most streamable types of games.

Games where you're winning up until the point of losing (Slay the spire,
Fortnite) are easy for a person watching to answer, "Is this person winning?"
because they answer is always yes.

Tuning into someone playing Dota, CSGO or a cardgame that is harder to answer,
because they have to know enough about the current game-state (often both
visible and hidden) including past states to make that judgement.

Slay the spire has fun amounts of randomness with a seriously challenging top-
end difficulty. (The world's best have a ~30% win rate against A20 hearts).

But STS is also single player, and it's not really a card game in the pure
sense. The player is playing cards but critically, and this is key to the
balance and fun of STS, the opponent is not.

The computer never tries to play cards, which means it never tries and fails
to be good at playing cards. The enemies movesets have almost nothing to do
with card playing which has leant the developers the freedom to explore some
really unique and fun enemies such as the reptomancer which spawns more and
more minions or the spaghetti monster which can add curses (negative cards) to
the player deck permanently, or the transient smoke monster where you're not
supposed to kill it's 999hp because it runs away after a few turns anyway.

That wouldn't be possible in a game where the enemies were designed to use the
actual cards, because it would risk that power creeping into the player, which
would inevitably eventually win.

This form of deck-builder where it's only the player playing a card game is
the real breakthrough that STS made, it breaks all the rules of deck builders
but still works.

That combined with the streambility means that it supports a few streamers who
stream almost uniquely slay the spire.

------
eindiran
This article captures a lot of the issues that I had with Artifact. I ~really~
wanted to like it; I've very fond of other Garfield games like Magic, Android
Netrunner, and Keyforge and had a friend that was very excited about the game.
But in the end, it didn't hook me.

The issues that stuck out to me:

1\. The complexity, particularly when watching a stream/game where you're not
intimately familiar with the decks in use.

2\. Lack of a budget format.

3\. Valve failed to move in the right direction when there were problems.
Games have recovered from much worse launches, but Valve responded too little,
too late to the issues.

~~~
justicezyx
Valve habitually ignored needed update on dota2

There were bugs affecting game play in the 30mm TI9

Just a symbol of their lack of attention to basic staff.

~~~
fireattack
Dota 2 has hundreds if not thousands of bugs.

But the they (and this particular one you listed) are not as critical as you
make it sound.

~~~
justicezyx
Well it's 30MM on stake, and 3X more already in valves pocket. I don't think
it's tolerable to see bugs in this event.

~~~
fireattack
Any software has bugs, more so for games.

------
HeraldEmbar
> Artifact had in effect a perfectly reasonable economic model, but players
> did not see it that way.

CCG player stockholm syndrome is why we can't have nice things.

~~~
furi
>> Artifact had in effect a perfectly reasonable economic model, but players
did not see it that way.

I don't think it really did though. Artifact took Magic the Gathering's
payment model verbatim (pay for a starter set, pay for booster packs, pay for
entrance any activities where you might win more cards) but removed the thing
that makes that work for Magic the Gathering: face to face interaction with
other human beings at your Local Game Store. If we compare it vs. it's more
direct competition (digital CCGs) it's a worse proposition for the average
non/low spending player, but even if we do the kindest thing and compare it
against what it's directly copying it's still a strictly worse deal.

~~~
jandrese
It's easier to pay for a physical product, especially one where you can employ
the doctrine of first sale and reuse them in any way you choose.

With Artifact you couldn't even sell your deck without paying Valve again.
Fuck. That. Card games are already expensive, you didn't need to make it
worse.

------
motform
I think Reason 2 really hits the nail on the head. Very few multiplayer get
away with properly rewarding player skill. The new Quake seems to have the
same problem. Most of the population consists of veterans, which makes it so
that new players have a hard time getting opponents at their level, thus
creating a nasty feedback loop. Getting into Artifact today would probably be
a similar experience. I think it is a peculiar trend, as single player games
seems to be going in the opposite direction with titles like Dark Souls, the
plethoras of insanely difficult indie titles and speedrunning like practices
growing more popular by the day.

The most efficient way to adress this "problem", while still keeping the
qualities of a high skill ceiling, seems to be scale and strict matchmaking.
With that in mind, it is sad that Artifact never got off. The evenly matched
games that I had during the first week of release where some of the most
exciting experiences I have had.

~~~
georgeecollins
The world is full of games that properly reward skill and some people really
enjoy them. But the mass market (including me) prefer entertainment to
challenge. This is why gambling is much more popular than chess. The alchemy
is to create a game with enough luck that a casual / unskilled player is
occasionally rewarded, but skill ultimately dominates. Like poker for example.
Pure skill games tend to have small audiences.

~~~
reroute1
I would say in general I agree with your point, but there are many pure skill
games that have large audiences. Like most sports have incredibly low RNG
compared to something like poker, but have giant audiences.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Conflating audience with participant? There are a miniscule number of sports
participants compared to the sports audience.

~~~
reroute1
Professional players maybe, but how many millions and millions of recreational
players?

Most gamers aren't pros either.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'd bet civilian/recreational players are also a tiny minority. Depends upon
where you are of course. But hard to reconcile the 'obese American' with the
image of a nation of sportspeople, for instance.

~~~
reroute1
They probably are a minority, but how does that relate? There are still
millions of people participating in the game, having more spectators doesn't
negate the participants. If anything I think that would reinforce it being a
good game.

------
solidasparagus
> Dota 2 takes dozens of hours before one is able to play the game as anything
> other than a training exercise

Hundreds even before it is consistently fun. But people have been playing Dota
for well over a decade and it's pretty common for newbies to have fun because
they have someone good on their team that carries to the point where the new
player gets to feel the magic of being OP in Dota. I think that's a big part
of the complexity problem with Artifact - everyone I've ever seen get into
Dota 2 without having played Dota 1 had a friend who was good enough to make
the games fun.

~~~
p1necone
Personally I could never get into dota until it freed itself from the UX
restrictions of being a custom map for another game. With matchmaking you get
even games even at low skill levels, I certainly didn't find that I had to
sink 100s of hours into it before it got fun (I don't think I've played more
than 100 yet).

~~~
solidasparagus
That's good. Maybe matchmaking has improved because when I was starting out I
had a ton of games where I was against a duo-queue and the high skill player
just dominated the game.

~~~
p1necone
Oh it's definitely not perfect, you still get plenty of games where you're
poorly matched. But it's good enough to be fun if you're willing to take a
beating sometimes, and make judicious use of the ignore function.

------
ziroshima
I personally found the disparity between my individual opinion and the crowd
consensus was really interesting. It seemed to be a great game that fixed all
of my gripes with hearthstone and magic. There was just this tidal wave of
negative opinion that seemed to come in large part from people that didn't
understand or in some cases never played the game themselves.

~~~
empath75
I’m a magic and hearthstone player and it just didn’t look appealing to me at
all. I watched a couple of game play demos even Richard Garfield playing it,
and I struggled to find where the ‘fun’ was supposed to be. It just looked so
complicated and serious.

~~~
dx87
I liked Artifact quite a bit, but I'll admit that it wasn't "fun" at all to
me. I played it for the challenge, similar to how people will go to the gym,
do puzzles, or do difficult hikes. They marketed it as a fun game for
everyone, but in reality it was designed for people who wanted to play
competitively.

------
JauntTrooper
For me it was the economic model.

I play Magic the Gathering (Arena) regularly and own and enjoy Slay the Spire
as well. I was really interested in Artifact, but it seemed cost-prohibitive
to play it casually so I never tried it.

~~~
DylanDmitri
I played roughly 150 hours of Artifact, almost entirely the free draft mode.
Gameplay is more interactive and interesting than MTG or Netrunner, which are
in turn better than Hearthstone. Artifact automates the small stuff for you
leaving you to play this lovely resource-balancing bluffing game. For a
metaphor, playing MTG feels like writing code to spec, while playing Artifact
feels like architecturing a complex system. Same decisions but more
abstracted, with greater chances for failure or brilliance.

I'm sad the game died. I agree with this article's post-mortem, it's largely
Valve's failure to test the "outer loop". I hope we get a worthy successor
eventually. (STS is great but single-player only)

------
aranelsurion
For me the business model was the biggest turn-off.

If I wanted some big CCG company to take my lunch money, I could always invest
in an established platform already, like Hearthstone.

What I'd consider an interesting alternative, would be a less greedy game with
an initial AAA entry fee ($60), and then nothing else. Just, nothing else.
It's financially viable, if a giant production like The Witcher 3 can profit
this way, any card game can.

If they really wanted, they could introduce maybe some cosmetic card back
covers, announcers, avatars etc. in a silly gem shop I'll never visit anyway,
but the game loop and the outer loop of getting new cards and deck building
should be free. In fact, for such competitive games, it should offer no
pay2win option at all. Let me play the game, win and get stuff after every
match, feel that I'm progressing through the game without ever having to worry
about my IRL wallet. If I win, I win, if I lose, I know that I lost fair and
square and I must improve.

There are enough venues in this world for pissing contests over money already,
why would I ever want to concern myself over real money in a virtual world.
For most genres of games paywalling the progression is pretty much unheard of
(except for maybe (bi-)yearly expansion packs), yet for CCGs this is
considered normal, and no company ever tries to flip the table.

Maybe there was no demand for yet another money-grabbing CCG.

~~~
georgeecollins
>> if a giant production like The Witcher 3 can profit this way, any card game
can.

In theory yes, but in practice a CCG needs to be updated a lot and for years
to be viable, while a game like Witcher doesn't. Would you pay $60 for the CCG
game where you can't add new cards? Charging as you go seems to fit the model
of player activity and developer activity.

~~~
larrik
You can charge for expansions directly, though. Just pay and get all the new
cards.

------
tomc1985
What went wrong? Valve released a soulless cash-in trying to capitalize on the
card-game-with-kid-friendly-aesthetics trend, a day late and a dollar short.
The market responded accordingly.

~~~
dagw
_Valve released a soulless cash-in_

I haven't played it, but this what the author of the article wrote in his
review:

"Artifact is an amazing game. Artifact is gorgeous, immersive and flavorful,
hilarious, innovative, exciting, suspenseful, skill testing, strategically
complex and rewarding. The execution is bug-free and flawless. It is the most
fun I have had playing a game in a long time."

That certainly doesn't sound like soulless cash-in. It sounds more like the
designed a very lovingly crafted, very niche, game and then had no idea what
to do with it.

------
devit
The fundamental big mistake was having 3 boards at once.

I have no idea how they thought that would be an acceptable design given that
nowadays it's well known that mainstream people are unwilling to learn any
interface that is even slightly complex.

------
jandrese
IMHO there are some parallels to the MMO Wildstar here. Both are products
aimed directly at the most hardcore fans, but architected such that you need a
reasonably large playerbase to sustain the game. The developers refused to
water down the game mechanics for the filthy casuals, and as a result made a
game that was absolutely perfect for a niche of game players too tiny to
maintain multiplayer critical mass. Shortly after release the game implodes.

------
iamaelephant
That's a very long article without even a single sentence about what Artifact
is.

~~~
kgwxd
What is it?

~~~
dx87
A card game designed by Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering) and
Valve. It was super hyped up pre-release, then became a massive failure due to
Valve ignoring tons of negative feedback and thinking that they know better
than the people playing. They say they are still working on it, but the last
time it got an update was January 28th, 2 months after release.

~~~
Deimorz
That was the last actual update, but I think the last time they said
_anything_ about the game was this "Towards a Better Artifact" post on March
29:
[https://playartifact.com/news/1819924505115920089](https://playartifact.com/news/1819924505115920089)

It says they were going to focus on addressing the larger issues instead of
continuing to update it, but it's just been complete silence for over 6 months
since then. Like Zvi says at the end of the article, at this point there's no
longer any significant time pressure, because everyone's already given up on
it. If they do plan to try and re-launch it (and I don't think that's a
certainty), they might as well take as long as they need to make sure it's
done right the second time.

------
Agentlien
"Randy Buehler reported it took him about two weeks to start understanding
things well enough to begin having fun."

When someone like him has such trouble understanding and enjoying the game,
reaching and captivating a broad enough audience for profitability is a tall
order.

~~~
jandrese
Especially when you have a fairly steep up-front cost discouraging new players
from trying it out, plus the promise of a lot more cash sinks if you want to
keep playing.

IMHO Valve priced itself right out of the market. Multiplayer games require a
critical mass of players to stay alive but Valve was running it like a niche
hobby.

------
nxoxn
I hope that Artifact isn't abandoned by Valve and they spend time to update
(refactor?) the game to make it more enjoyable. I never even had the chance to
play because the narrative surrounding the game was so murky and then
everything fell apart.

I was and still am excited to play it but not until it's ready. On the other
hand Valve's team making Underlords is doing a very good job. Valve still has
passion and talent.

------
baq
almost off topic - i think every card game fan should take at least 15 minutes
to look at prismata: [https://prismata.net/](https://prismata.net/)

------
billfruit
An interesting perspective would have been to compare it with the relative
success of autochess, even though to my eye it looks also complex and
confusing.

------
numlock86
TBH I saw this coming at the reveal premiere when everyone was boo'ing at it.

~~~
de_watcher
They didn't know how to present and to what people.

~~~
numlock86
Yeah, but does it really matter? Blizzard in contrast knows very well how to
present their stuff and they (should at least) know their audience well. Well,
and then they presented Diablo Immortal ...

------
KaoruAoiShiho
I'm convinced that the problem is the economic model. F2P is just such an
overwhelmingly positive and casual friendly model that any other failures may
be attributed to that. It may be that the other points have some merit, but
there is no way to know if they do until the paywall is removed.

