Friday Update – The Near Future

Hi this is Cory…

Will is out today, so that means I will be managing the Kickstarter Update!

Sound like a good time for OTHER PEOPLE to chime in…

First up, Chris Lena…

Chris Lena:

First off, sorry about the delay on the “quality of life” patch but it is coming early next week. This is our first full update since the launch of Closed Beta so there are some additional complexities we have to work through. Another reason why the big updates have been coming a bit slower is because we have been working on the next set of major features. There is a lot implementing and testing within the walls of HEX HQ to get these features ready for their debut. A few of them, mentioned below, are expected to be in our update on (we estimate!) June 18th.

Auction House

As we mentioned in last week’s update, we are cleaning up the Auction House. You will be able to put individual cards, booster packs, equipment, and chests up for auction for either gold or platinum. Hopefully, you took a peek at the screenshots in the previous update so you have some idea of how it looks. We are all incredibly excited to start opening up the game economy. The Auction House is just a first step, the next one will be a way for you to give cards to other players. Then, if you have a friend that you want to get into playing, you can send her over the extra dozen Rigid Buffalo that you have collected to get her started.

Big Tournaments

Right now our tournaments max out at 8 players. With the next feature update we will be able to offer large, scheduled tournaments that can have up to 128 players. We are still evaluating exactly how often we want them to happen. Since we are still in Closed Beta with a limited amount of people, we have to be careful not to split people among too many tournament types. One thing we do know is that, at first, they will be Swiss and give out rewards based on number of wins.

Starter Trials

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.

Alex is here to talk about why we did Starter Trials in the first place…

Alex Charsky:

Starter Trials started out with a very simple goal: how do we engage new players who just got into the game? These guys likely were not part of the Kickstarter and may not have any cards on their account beyond the initial free starter deck they received. They may or may not have experience with TCGs and they may or may not have anxiety playing against other players. They are also likely invested into making their initial starter deck better with cards they pick up for their collection.

If you are interested in our thought process and curious how we came up with this concept, we actually ran through a few iterations.

Our initial idea involved creating a 4-person starter deck queue. New player accounts would have 3 free entries into the tournament and would receive 1 free entry into the tournament for the first 2 months of their accounts. All players in the tournament would receive 1 booster pack and the person who won would receive 1 additional booster pack. When players joined the tournament they could select any starter deck to play with, but they would not get to keep the cards for that starter at the end of the tournament.

This idea let people build their collection and allowed new players to immediately get into the action. Unfortunately, it suffered from several different issues:

New players may be anxious to play against other players.

New players may not be familiar enough with their starter deck, or even TCGs at all.

There is no sense of progression for the new players—they can’t add new cards they get from the boosters into their deck.

Existing players may be incentivized to create new accounts to jump into these tournaments for free and farm 2 boosters.

There may not be a critical mass of new players wanting to join this queue at the same time.

We tried to fix the initial idea with a few tweaks:

The starter queue would also allow anyone to join for a platinum fee.

The decks you could take into the queue would have point values, so you could modify starters with new cards.

We would first pair you against an AI in round 1, then against other humans.

Ultimately even the refined concept was not addressing our goal for new players well enough. So we continued to iterate. The most interesting revision to the idea was the concept that players would play against the AI in some sort of tournament progression setting. So we went with that. What came of that is the iteration of Starter Trials that we hope to present to you in June!

In the end this format helps us achieve the goals we have for new players. It introduces them to the concepts of progression and gives them cards to improve their deck. This set up doesn’t punish players who are just learning and promotes playing at the player’s pace.

So that’s the plan, let me turn it back over to Cory…

Cory Jones:

Thanks Chris and Alex, great updates!

One of the things we have been discussing as Gen Con approaches is the promise I made last year about dropping the Con exclusives in the future. I know that in the past we talked about doing holiday and promotional rewards attached to the chests opened during that specific promotion or holiday. In retrospect, this method of distribution is not ideal, as it makes people feel bad for opening packs/chests outside of these promotional periods. I never want you to feel bad opening packs or chests, so we are reworking the way promotional rewards will drop.

We are going to create a new item that you can loot and call them Holiday Gifts or Gen Con Gifts (final names TBD). These items will drop from various activities in the game and won’t be tied to packs, Wheels of Fate, or Chests. Examples where you might see these drops will include (not all are going to be implemented immediately, and they may be subject to change):

Wins from matchmaking (not the challenge button—the blind matchmaking)

Completion of quests in the game

Progression through PvE content

This gives us a bit more flexibility for giving out seasonal loot. Of course anything tied to a convention promotion will still be available on site at the show via a redeemable code. We believe that between the codes and the drops in game we can get these items to almost anyone who wants them. In the end, the point was to make something fun and cool, not have people feel left out… except SLEEVES! Con exclusive sleeves will ONLY be available at the show; I think it’s a reasonably cool way to show you attended an event without having it impact gameplay.

That’s it for this update, I hope you enjoyed it! We’ve put dates on some upcoming features and made a change that I think benefits everyone. As always we appreciate your support more than you will ever know. I read the message boards every day, and I love the positive and supportive vibe our community has fostered. It really is the best community in gaming.

I will let Chis Lena sign us out…

Chris Lena:

Moving Forward

As we hope you have noticed by now we have a big appetite for features and we are trying to get them out to you as fast as we can while maintaining a high level of quality. Next up is the in-game tutorial! You might say that if features were shin’hare, HEX would be the Mushwocky.

That’s all from us this week. Thanks again for your continued support of HEX and patience while we work on the game. Please leave any questions or comments in the forums linked below, and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitch, register on our forums, and Follow us on Twitter.

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