Item Survey
The results are in for the second item survey! The biggest losers were Hero’s Cape, Guardian Greaves, Holy Locket, Spirit Vessel, Vladimir’s Offering, and Radiance. Aside from Radiance, these items all have a very heavy protective angle that sometimes overshadows their other value, and they mostly don’t seem worth their gold cost overall. It seems like they could all be tweaked a bit to push their various specialties and blend less into the pack of items that keep you alive but don’t do much else. Radiance seems like it just doesn’t do enough for a 30 gold item, and should be made to have a more immediate and more intimidating presence when equipped.
The big winners were Sorla Khan’s Spear, Vesture of the Tyrant, and all the 30 gold items aside from Radiance. Vesture of the Tyrant is notable for being a big winner and a big loser simultaneously, as it was voted least fun to play against by a significant margin – it’s probably just in the wrong tier.
Roadmap and Priorities
Each time we invite a new wave of players, we receive a new wave of feedback. Sometimes we learn that we’ve successfully addressed a problem commonly reported in previous waves, other times we learn that there’s more that remains to be done to truly fix it. As we’ve been fixing bugs, for example, the feedback about specific card interactions not working as expected has died down a bit. There’s still a good amount of work left to do there, but things have gotten less chaotic.
However there are two pieces of feedback that we continue to receive with each new wave, and which have become our top priorities:
- Learning the definition of a keyword, or what a card in your hand is going to do, is challenging and sometimes impossible.
- We’re hearing from players that a fully-functioning tutorial (one that is more than a starter campaign) is highly desirable.
We are taking a two-pronged approach to the beta, which means that in addition to our primary focus of on-ramping new players, we’re hoping to also find ways to prioritize players already in the beta. We’d like to start adding in more of the game modes we have planned, especially for those happy playing with the current level of polish but looking for something meatier than hero draft. How would you like us to prioritize our focus for experienced players? Send us an email at [email protected] or use the in-game reporting tool to tell us what you would like to see first:
- A full-deck draft mode, similar to 1.0
- A ranked constructed queue
- An advanced hero draft mode that is somewhere in-between hero draft and full-deck draft
- A tournament system
- Something else?
As always, we look forward to hearing from you as we work together on making Artifact the best it can be!