I’ve already done repair install to no avail. There are 837 files in that folder though.
You might be surprised. Opinions on the official forums seem pretty fairly split on whether a bye is awesome or outrageous. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t drafted yet, because I haven’t had a lot of 3 hour blocks of time since the beta began. But if it really is not that big a deal, maybe I’ll jump in and play as long as I can.
Yeah, I guess I was taking a prize-centric approach by saying nobody would be upset. If someone’s time is more constrained than money, then they may have joined the draft tourney more to play competitively rather than to get prizes. In that case, I could see someone feeling robbed of the ability to play. So yeah, I take that back.
That said, I’ve drafted twice. Once I value drafted and dropped because I only had 15 min or so and my ticket was expiring. The other time, I had an unknown amount of time, so I mostly value drafted, but picked playable cards if there was no rare available or worth picking. I ended up getting to the finals of the draft tourney with that deck, even though I thought the deck was crap because I blew my best picks on off-color rares.
Separate topic – what are people feeling about the level of competition in draft tourneys? In the one tourney I played, the only player worth a damn was my final round opponent. His deck and play were both airtight – the kind of thing I’d expect from Hex backers. But I ripped through the other two players 2-0 in very fast time with a clearly sub-par deck. It’s almost a plus if the competition is pretty good, as I’d be more likely to be knocked out sooner, which would be good from a time commitment angle.
Yeah, I think for the most part it’s not a big deal. I won’t necessarily be thrilled by having a bye, but drafts have significant downtime no matter what you do, as often one match will take much longer than the rest, so I always have other things to do open in other tabs. Things come up, people get disconnections, and so on. And the guaranteed bump in winnings makes up for the inconvenience.
I’ve seen a few weak opponents making obvious misplays, and a fair number that seemed particularly sharp, but most of the time people have been somewhere in the middle, competent but not amazing. Subjectively, I haven’t felt like the quality of competition is too far off of what I’ve seen in local store drafts in other games. But on the other hand, I’m at close to an 80% match win ratio since beta started, and that’s a bit higher than I would normally expect based on my history. It’s certainly possible that there are a lot of people who may like TCGs but not be experienced drafters, playing right now because of the free tickets.
But I’ve had decks that I was really happy with exit in the first round (my mono-Blood packed with Murders, Terrible Transfers, and a High Tomb Lord didn’t have much to offer when the opponent went Gearsmith, Technical Genius, Droo’s Walker, Droo’s Walker). And today I felt kind of guilty for going 3-0 with a deck I was sure was doomed. I switched from Blood/Sapphire to mono-Wild at the very end of pack 1, took a half-dozen unplayable rares and legendaries, and had to scramble to barely make it to 40 playable cards by running 18 shards and crud like Shin’hare Militia.
The next big update is due in mid-June. In addition to the expected auction house and larger tournament system, there’s a new feature of PvE starter deck challenges that looks like it should really help ease in new players:
For every starter deck a player owns, they can enter a Starter Trial for free. This involves playing against the AI using their starter deck. The AI’s decks are thematically designed to be competitive with the specific starter deck they are using and get progressively harder throughout the Trial. After each victory, the player is rewarded with new cards to add to their existing starter deck and help them in their next challenge. At the end of the trial, the player gets to unlock an additional 15 cards to help their deck. A player does not have to play the games in succession and can come back to the Trial any time they want. A loss against the computer allows the player to replay that specific match until they win.
I am not very good at these types of games. I never was able to beat the AI during the Alpha. I look forward to some PVE match so I can learn something at my own pace.m
The forums are full of discussions I can not follow. :)
If you’re new to the genre, Hearthstone is a fabulous (and free) place to start. It’s a very gentle entry to the genre.
Hex is one of the more advanced games in the genre. And biding more time while they continue to polish and add functionality will only help you enjoy it more when you come back.
Holy crap, Hex is releasing Shattered Destiny—its second set of cards—in August. I haven’t wrapped my head around the first set yet!
Yeah, I feel like it’s premature for that. Many people are holding off on getting into the game until PvE is released, bugs are ironed out, and the game is fully ‘released’. It seems strange to be releasing a second set of cards when most potential players’ perception is that the game isn’t even ready to be played yet.
You’d think they’d only want to release a set of cards when they’ve saturated the existing set and huge swaths of their player base aren’t intentionally holding off.
Terrible idea. I really haven’t even started with it beyond some tryout games, since the game is still barely half-finished.
Yeah, it does seem like odd timing. Not sure why they’d even want to release a new set for a Beta game, but I’m also glad that they have the set development pipeline chugging along. I think once the AH is online, there will be a significant uptick in play, though.
Still waiting to redeem my reward codes because a lot of features are missing and all accounts say there are still plenty of bugs to work out, can’t say I agree with releasing set 2 already.
There are some comments on the boards to the effect that PvE is intended to be per-block, and that some of the races that exist in the first set are not fleshed out enough for PvE, so it makes sense to release one or even 2 more sets before putting the PvE live. I think I agree with that - the main thing that makes it feel unfinished at the moment is the lack of trading and AH, the difficulty of getting a collection started without spending a lot of money, and the lack of big tournaments. All of those things are slated to be fixed by August, and the stability of the game itself has been improving steadily, so this might make a lot of sense.
I do hope they plan to roll PvE out gradually instead of trying to just dump it out there with open beta and set 3, because I expect there will be lots of good to be had from player feedback on it. The game really needs players to succeed, and the big launch windows are Open Beta and Release. Better to have the kinks worked out before then.
When I bought into this, I thought Hex would be more like Hearthstone i.e. a simple CCG with focus on PvE and co-op PvE (since they were advertising as a MMO). I guess I was wrong. Now that I have tried Hearthstone, I really like the casual approach. I don’t have time to invest in matches that take too long. It’s still possible that PvE will be fleshed out enough to justify this game for casual players? I guess we will have to wait and see. What I tried in alpha/beta was too intimidating to get into.
poor Sky is getting old! ;) The last 9 years have shown a move away from complex and towards simpler
PvE is going to be a major component of the game - way more so than Hearthstone, from what I can tell. But it’s also a lot more work to implement so it’s not in yet. I’m hoping it won’t take much longer because although drafting on my free lifetime draft-a-week is okay, it’s not my primary interest in the game, just a source of cards.
I’m looking forward to the more complex MTG style complexity of HEX. But after playing Hearthstones Arena, I can’t imagine going back to a tournament format where I can’t just quit anytime I please between games or during/after drafting. That was a game changer and all other online card games need to match that as the new minimum standard.
It also desperately needs the ability to tab away from the app and have it notify you when the tournament finally frigging starts. Or tournaments that consistently fill inside 2-3 minutes, but that’s a much taller order.
That second set of cards thing certainly cools my interest. I was waiting for the game to be more finished before trying it, but now it seems like I’d be playing catch-up to all the players diving into the second set.
I keep watching this thread in hopes that the PvE will become a priority with the developers, but that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. Glad I didn’t buy into the Kickstarter.