In a pretty refreshing update from the Artifact team at Valve, they stated they're looking into the major issues with it.
In my original article posted at release for Artifact, I did mention how I enjoyed the actual gameplay. However, I also mentioned how it could end up costing you a lot of money even though it's not free to play and there was no progression system (at the time). I still think launching without any kind of progression was a huge mistake and the tickets you had to pay for were not good value for money either.
The game lost players at an alarming rate, something I also covered (#1, #2) and now it's struggling to even keep 400 players on it. Valve certainly aren't stupid though, they do have some incredibly smart developers and it seems they're going to attempt to bring it back to life but this could take a while.
In the blog post they mentioned how big the difference was between their expectations for their own game and how it was received, so it seems like they really didn't see any of this coming. However, in a very refreshing statement they clearly said they don't think it's an issue with the players misunderstanding it or playing it wrong. It's a very surprising and open admission that the game itself, is indeed the issue.
They're going to attempt to address the "deep-rooted issues with the game", which will be done instead of shipping any updates at the moment. Valve expect this to "take a significant amount of time".
See the full update here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Mountain Man Apr 1, 2019
Quoting: 1xokIt makes me sad, because Artifact has become my absolute favourite game with more than 500h playing time.One of the things that makes Hearthstone such a force to be reckoned with is that it embodies the classic "easy to learn, hard to master" design philosophy. Artifact basically kicks that to the curb and replaces it with "hard to learn, hard to master" along with a business model that inherently put it behind the competition before it was even released. I think it only sold as well as it did initially because of Valve's reputation, but reputation only goes so far when a game simply doesn't deliver.
I don't understand what Valve means by "deep-rooted issues with the game". Once you get deep into the game, it's probably the best online card game of all time. Only most don't get that far at all.
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