Friday Update – Difficult Dreams

Welcome to a round up of the week. We have an open letter to the HEX community, Merry Melee Portal Kombat returns, and more:

An Open Letter

Hello Hex Community,

This is Cory Jones. Today I’d like to take a moment and talk about what HEX was, where HEX is, and where HEX might be in the future.

As many of you out there are aware, HEX started out as a dream. We wanted to make an engaging, innovative TCG that pushed the digital envelop into a whole new zip-code. With the help of our Kickstarter backers and so many loyal, passionate people over the years, we managed to make something that I am truly proud of. I want to thank everyone that contributed to this dream – the community, the employees of HEX who worked countless hours, and our publishers. I want to specifically thank Gameforge, Square, Perfect World, Matt, Colin, Minch, and the many others who saw potential in HEX. Unfortunately, the dream we had for HEX has had to face the reality that HEX as it stood was not self-sustainable.

I have spent over a year thinking about what could have been done differently. There are plenty of moments I would have liked to change, but ultimately, we’ve walked the road we’ve taken. I take total responsibility for HEX not reaching its full potential. Could it have been different? I don’t know, maybe… but it didn’t and that’s on me. I will say it wasn’t for lack of trying. Everyone who believed in HEX gave it 110%, and we made the best decisions we could with the information we had as we tried to make this dream a reality. Sadly, it wasn’t enough.

As a player, I know hearing this is frustrating. For every path we might have taken, the forum had a hundred different answers. Maybe some combination of those answers would have worked. Heck, many of the decisions we made for the game WERE from someone in the community. Sadly, we couldn’t apply all the answers to our problems. We had to choose wisely and work quickly with the limited resources we had. I know it must feel frustrating to players who passionately believed they had the solution that could turn HEX around, but every step of the way we did what we thought was best for the game.

The good news is we’ve spent the last year working to build a future for what HEX could still be. We have not given up on HEX. As a matter of fact, I think we are in the best possible position to take the lessons we’ve gotten from the last 5 years and give ourselves a chance to make something amazing.

We have taken on side projects at HEX Entertainment to keep the HEX servers up and running. We’ve also slowly dug ourselves out of the hole, and we are very happy to have recently finished paying off our tournament winners. As we move forward, we will continue to build up the company with the goal of re-launching HEX, a new HEX with a focus on PVE and other dramatic changes we think would make the game a more complete and sustainable experience. This will not be in the near future, but it IS our goal, and we want to assure you that if and when we launch HEX 2, everyone’s collections and KS rewards will come with them to the new game. Even if we have to change the core gaming system, we will transmute your collection into its equivalent in HEX 2.

All that said, let’s talk about right now.

With our latest patch, we have added content that should keep things up and going for over a year. We’ve also been listening to the community and have implemented some changes that could make the experience in HEX right now more enjoyable. Those things include:

An Immortal Weekday event (starting in October)

PS+ members now get 2 evo drafts per month

We added all the packs for purchase in the HEX store (so people can get older cards)

We’ve made Merry Melee events free to enter

On top of these changes, some of the dev team (myself included) will be logging in on Monday evenings to play draft and any other format people want so we can get some of those queues firing and simply have some fun socializing and playing HEX.

I love HEX. It’s the best TCG I have ever played and the creative endeavor I am most proud of. When things got especially rough, I would play HEX well into the night. I would play to escape from the sadness of having things not go the way anyone wanted. I would play to escape the feelings of failing. To love something so much and be so absorbed by it while simultaneously feeling like you are letting everyone down without a clear way to fix it is pretty rough.

I want to close out this letter by apologizing for disengaging from the community. I often joked in the last KS update that if this didn’t work it would be because of me driving my car off a cliff. I was clearly joking (but just barely). I had reached a pretty dark place for a while there. I’m not here to make excuses – I take responsibly for my mistakes and shortcomings. For now, all I can do is apologize and promise I haven’t given up on HEX. Can we make it work? It’s unclear, but I am still trying.

-Cory

We also wanted to remind everyone that our latest Cosmic Crown Showdown qualifiers have the opportunity to square off this weekend in our latest Cosmic Crown Showdown. These players have clawed and fought their way to the top of our 2019 Season 4 constructed and limited ladders and earned their right to battle it out for our platinum prize pool! This capstone tournament will take place this weekend, so save the date, start your brews, and secure your spot among the stars.

Merry Melee Rotation

Merry Melee Portal Kombat returns for those who wish to test their might. Relive the wild RNG filled days of Dead of Winter by playing as Galaxtar and mastering all the portals you can muster.

In Portal Kombat, you’ll be provided with a deck of 25 standard shards and a bunch of portals. Don’t like your hand? Well, don’t worry! Next turn it will be completely different. Every turn your hand will be shifting and giving you new options on how to handle your opponent’s threats. And, if you happen to end up with a hand of useless portals, you can also use Galaxtar’s charge power to dig for more powerful options.

Merry Melee Portal Kombat

Format: Galaxtar

Cost: Free!

Length: Gauntlet (5 wins / 3 losses)

Match: Best of one

Prizes:

3 Wins – Random Standard Rare

4 Wins – Current Set Booster Pack

5 Wins – Current Set Booster Pack and Random Standard Rare

Furthermore, our cool new sleeve returns (freshly portaled!) for those of you who can fatality 10 opponents. You keep your record from last time, so be sure to dive in if it got away from you last time:

Portal Kombat is live now and will run for 1 week (ending Friday 9/27 at 10am PT). So, choose your fight, square off against your opponent, and finish him!

Our new Bash & Clash structure continues! Come join our short-form tournaments for your chance to win platinum, prizes, and exclusive alternate arts.

Here is the full prizing and schedule breakdown:

Schedule:

Saturdays at 8am PT – Bash

Saturdays at 4pm PT – Clash

Sundays at 8am PT – Clash

Sundays at 4pm PT – Bash

Bash:

Format: Standard Constructed

Cost: 700 Platinum

Length: 4 rounds, swiss pairings

Match: Best of three

Prizes:

1-0 Wins – n/a

2 Wins – 5 current set booster packs, AAA card

3 Wins – 12 current set booster packs, AAA card, AAA sleeve

4 Wins – 10,000 platinum, AAA card, AAA sleeve, Battleboard

Clash:

Format: Standard Sealed

Cost: 1500 Platinum (or packs + 300 Platinum entry fee)

Length: 4 rounds, swiss pairings

Match: Best of three

Prizes:

1-0 Wins – n/a

2 Wins – 5 current set booster packs, AAA card

3 Wins – 12 current set booster packs, AAA card, AAA sleeve

4 Wins – 10,000 platinum, AAA card, AAA sleeve, Battleboard

Door prizes will still be granted to a few lucky participants. We will be giving out a total of 2 random Battleboards to players without 4 wins, 4 random AAA sleeves to players without 3 wins, and 4 random AAA cards to those favored by Kismet.

See you in the Battlegrounds,

The HEX Team

Got any questions? Want to chat with other players? Then discuss this article in our Forums! You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, our YouTube channel, or enjoy regular streams on our official Twitch channel.