I did find it some things interesting about the game in beta:
-No mana/resource system, yet still felt fairly balanced. Not sure if that’ll hold up in free-form deckbuilding, as I assume higher rarities = higher power, especially without mana costs to help balance.
-The leveling-up offered another layer of interesting decisions. Do I play this underpowered level 1 card to get it to its more powerful level 2 or 3 state? Or do I play a strong level 1 card that doesn’t benefit much from leveling?
I’m looking forward to giving the full game a try on PC and iOS.
I downloaded this and gave it a try. The game seems to be heavily oriented toward “he who has the most cards wins” since there’s very little that strategy can do to help an low-powered hand beat one with better cards. At least, with the starter deck that I have to play with, that seems to be the case. I’ve lost every game I attempted against a human opponent, getting beaten down by cards I haven’t seen before. I’m used to this with CCGs, but in this one I also see very little way forward. Other than the piddly one-card-and-a-little-silver daily log in reward, I have to win games to get cards, yes? (Assume I don’t intend to spend any real money, which is very much the case if I can’t win a single game with what I have.) I tried playing the computer and won about half the time but I got nothing in the way of rewards after spending almost an hour to win 3 games. How would one go about winning with no good cards to start?
From the release notes: “Every day, you’ll be able to earn three different rewards – for simply logging in, completing games, and winning your first game.”
And winning against the AI on easy should give you the win reward.
Ah, ok, I misread it…you just have to play 3, not win 3 to get the completed games reward. That makes it much less annoying. I didn’t get anything in my attempt yesterday because the 3 have to be non-AI games, which I discovered on the player FAQ on the forums.
The iPad version stills seems a bit laggy at times but I’m enjoying the overall game so far. Feel free to send me invites to get our daily rewards: Emos
Since I wasn’t able to get into the Hearthstone beta (yet), I was pleasantly surprised to see this go into open beta. I didn’t know what to expect going into it, but I’m really enjoying it so far. Beautiful artwork and some interesting gameplay elements (the card level up system reminds me of Thunderstone).
Fair warning: both the PC and iOS clients are slow as hell, and there still seems to be a lot of bugs. To be expected from a beta, but it can definitely be off putting to get kicked from the servers the moment before you win a game only to log back in and find that you lost for no discernible reason (three times now). It’s even difficult to get the Solforge forums to load at this point, so I don’t know what’s going on with their servers.
I don’t understand why the timed matches give 30 minutes to each player…that’s pointless! Untimed matches don’t even last that long. I was hoping for something that would speed up the turns. Like you get 15 seconds to do something on your turn or it’s over.
I think that timer is meant for asynch, but they need a lot more options than 30 minutes. Anybody interested in that time frame is likely going to play live.
I’d also like something similar to Ascension where you can see if the person is online in another match and when they’re “in” the room to actively play.
On the PC version am I missing where I can change the game’s resolution? The cards look nice zoomed in but everything, especially the menu’s, looks pretty low-res.
Argh. I can’t seem to finish games. Kicks me off around mid game, and every time I try to reconnect it kicks me out again. Infinite loop. My only option seems to be to concede.
Hopefully they can sort this out and get an app update out soon. It’s barely playable online for me as is.
I think most of the problems are server related, so hopefully they don’t need to push an app update out (which has to go through cert). But, yeah, I hope these problems are resolved soon.
I mostly just play against the (hard) AI though, which works just fine. It’s at least good enough for just playtesting and tweaking my decks.
Yeah, it does seem like a majority of the problems are still server side. Its seems I’m having better luck if I play asynchronously. My last few synchronous games have the problems mentioned above, but none of the async ones do yet (knock on wood).
