For around two years, players were stuck in limbo, with a frozen metagame and no new PVE adventures. The game simply was not making enough money, and new content eventually stopped coming altogether.
Payouts became delayed for both the artists creating the game's gorgeous card art as well as tournament winners.
Many players drifted away. A dwindling player count is bad news for a live service game, as Marvel's Avengers' recent numbers can attest. The game has a dedicated community, especially those who had backed it initially, but over time, new PVE content was less forthcoming and PVP remained basically inaccessible without substantial direct payment. It probably wouldn't have hurt for Hex to take a look at the failings of Diablo 3's auction houses. The auction house really needed to be mixed with another way to trade resources, because as the sole option available, it only made third party sites like HexPrimal look all the more inviting. Such a trading method might have worked fine in a straight MMO, but there simply wasn't enough MMO in Hex to warrant it. Essentially, the auction house made it a nightmare both to unload unwanted resources and obtain wanted ones. On top of that, just like how Magic: the Gathering deck lists can drive up the price of key, non-rare cards, the same happened in Hex's marketplace. When HexPrimal published a piece outlining a way to use the Ranger class to easily grind for gold, all the equipment and cards listed suddenly became expensive commodities. The problem ran the other way too, with very rare cards and pieces of equipment commanding very high prices, usually in platinum. In Hex, there was no way to unload unwanted cards or pieces of gear because no one would buy them, making them functionally useless. Here again Hex did not implement the crafting systems of games like Hearthstone, where players can melt down unwanted cards into material to make other cards. The only problem is it brought the worst aspects of both: the chase of a TCG and the grind of an MMO.Īdding to the problem of acquiring cards was Hex's auction house, which was the only way outside of a direct trade for players to acquire a specific card, resource, or indeed any specific thing they wanted. So, in a way, Hex lived up to its promise of an MMOTCG. This required grinding the PVE until it just wasn't fun anymore, and the transfer process was far from flawless. Without the in-game option, players' only choice was to use a third-party website called HexPrimal to trade gold for plat at a ridiculous rate. Compared to the numerous ways players can earn cards in something like MTG: Arena, and the level of restriction put on players in Hex becomes obvious.ĭespite innovating far beyond games like Hearthstone and Shadowverse in terms of gameplay and PVE content, Hex failed to emulate those games' most fundamental aspect: players should be rewarded for playing. Second, platinum was only paid out in meaningful amounts to players at the highest rank, and only at the end of a competitive season. One was that PVP was still gated off by requiring platinum to have any shot at building a competitive deck. While players could earn platinum by ranking high in PVP, there were two problems. RELATED: Hearthstone Developer Defends Rewards Overhaul After Fan Outcry
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