Whoa, that's a hell of a title, hope this doesn't turn in to one of those long winded deals where I lose interest in typing it and stop halfway through...


Anyway, where to begin? Ah, right, the beginning.


Siege. What can I say about i that hasn't been said? It can safely be said that my opinion mirrors that of much of the hex community, that is to say it falls somewhere between "thumbs down emoji" and "question marks over the head emoji". I won't get in to specifics because I don't want this thread to get derailed by discussion about it. That being said I do have some things to say about the mode (even positive ones, shocking, I know.) but first! A bit of rambling backstory.

I, like many, have been playing hex since the alpha days, I backed it because I love TCGs but what made HEX stand out was the promise of a PVE environment (oh boy, a TCG with co-op and raids!) and that has always been my primary interest in the game. When the second adventure zone launched I set myself a goal: I would complete the campaign 4 times with each race to get all of their race unique cards and open enough boosters to get a full set of every single campaign card. A few legendaries aside, across a handful of packs I am very, very close to that goal. It's taken ages and it stopped being fun some time ago but this ritualistic grind is a goal I set for myself so it I can't fault the game for that. This goal also had a secondary purpose, it seems like something that would take ages and so would be an interesting way to kill time on PVE while I waited for the next adventure zone and/or raids to farm.

At one point it became obvious I may well complete my quest twice over before I saw more content that was actually interesting to me so I took a break for several months, knowing (at least I thought I knew that at the time) that after about half a year then there would be more to do in the PVE space. There wasn't and I was wrong but I didn't lose hope entirely because new sets meant new mercs and new mercs made the old campaign grind somewhat interesting again.

For a time.

Safe to say, HEX isn't fun for me right now but it is still somewhat interesting, grinding the campaign over and over is akin to solitaire for me, something I do it kill time, a handful of encounters here and there while I take a break or while I feign interest in a slowly moving conversation.


And then siege came along, I lost most of my interest in it in about a day, when it became obvious I would be a rather expensive standard legal deck to enjoy attacking and at the same time not be able to use my beloved mercs to defend (which was a real shame because I have many, many strange and thematic decks using merc mechanics I would like to see people play against). I also was upset that the rewards were un-tradeable AND you were required to wager to attack or defend (not even a fun mode? at least let me set my own prize).

But then, Lurker that I am, I stumbled across a thread on these very forums, a group of enterprising individuals were purposely losing games to keeps with suicidal decks to raise the value of keeps and then beating them to quickly gain rewards. My honest first thought was "way to go guys, fight the power" but didn't join in myself for fear of punishment... but that changed the more I thought about it, I was only vaguely interested in the rewards but I was very interested in the theory crafting...

Thoughts like "what is the fastest way a deck can kill itself?" and "what is the fastest way a standard legal deck can kill a champion that is not resisting..." eventually lead me to joining the SS channel to test my theories and then something amazing happened.


I started having fun. Like, actual fun, playing hex. A game that had been at best a distraction at worst a chore, was actually pretty fun in this strange, possibly illicit bastardization of a game mode I didn't like. It might have been the deck building or the collaborations with other people for once but I did enjoy my time doing it. Oddly, it was like there was finally co-op in hex and it was nice being on the team.


...


I won't go on to say that is how it should stay and all ethical debate is a topic for another thread. I won't be lament the passing of how it briefly was, no doubt over time it would become tedious as well if siege had stayed in that incarnation, I just want to say that I liked it, for a bit, even if that is not what it was meant to be.

There's your daily dose of positivity, some random lurker enjoyed a few hours of HEX.



So, now, serious question time:

Am I done here?

I like HEX, hell, I love parts of it and I really want to see what it will become but I have been having the feeling that the things I have been waiting for (raids, guilds, co-op, any mode that is more than just 1v1) are just never going to happen. I left the game for months and came back to see no progress toward those goals, I dug through past news updates for something, ANYTHING that discussed the progress and found nothing. When I can't even find teasers, it that tells me that either there is nothing to tease or there is zero interest in teasing because they don't believe there is audience who cares (for the record, I do, so tease me please) after all, what sane company wouldn't want to keep their customers interested, right?

So I am asking for anyone that knows anything, is nothing coming? Am I waiting for waiting for something that will never happen? Is it time to move on?




TL;DR: You didn't miss anything interesting.

I have given the idea of keeps a considerable amount of thought myself and one area I have always gotten stuck on is how to incentivize attacking them. It's actually fairly tricky without the ante system.

You want a couple things from keeps.

One, you want people to want to attack them, thus there must be a reward for them to earn for attacking.

Two, you have to reward people for defending them, so everyone does not simply make easy sieges to attack and get the rewards.


The ante system does this well, in fact it's an elegant solution, it makes it so losing either on attack or defense costs you, thus it is in no one's best interest to fail. It's not a bad idea.

However the mode does not exist in a vacuum, and there are other factors to consider. Thus, the ante... sucks. Currently, they are trying to incentivize people to play that mode by making certain things only available to those who do so. They are also trying to drive sales by making the attacking decks a standard format.


The rewarding of playing the mode will always be tricky, the ideal solution is that you create a situation where neither participant has to pay to play it but still be rewarded for doing so... and I just don't know how to do that without creating a system that could easily be gamed to the detriment of the game's economy, barring making the mode work something like the campaign.

However to drive sales there are already systems that exist to do this in play in other games. One simple solution is to make building a keep cost money. Either a lot of gold or a little platinum and to keep it accessible you make an initially small siege very cheap so anyone can put them up but then make upgrading them and increasing their size (and hopefully subsequent reward structures) more expensive.


But all these unknowns could be avoided entirely if the mode was simply playable without a cost or a reward and of course without so many restrictions. Just call it a beta, let people play it and listen to feedback while you work on integrating it in to the game's economy. complicated long-term solutions to those issues can be avoided until the gameplay is solid.



...and I think it goes without saying but I will say it anyway: there would not be so much vitriol and anger surrounding the mode if it WAS a beta version and you made it clear that it was. People are a lot more forgiving when something is a work in progress.