MArcomage

I have been wondering why our beloved arcomage is so unpopular.Games like Heartstone have a playerbase of ~70 MILION wheres arcomage barely have any players at all while arcomage has so much more depth and imo is superior.I have a personal dream of being a game developer and this really sets me off to see this

Maybe the problem is that arcomage has no marketing i for myself was redirected here by GreatEmerald on a another forum.I would play more of this game if i could actually even get more playtime and games that would be played from start to the finish with one sit down

So why? seriously why?Why is arcomage so underplayed?

Many of the games have gone to being able to play with a small time commitment. Arcomage, while it can be played very quickly, you need to find a partner with the same intention, which can be problematic. I avoid games where the turn timeout is short, because I play Arcomage when I have a few spare moments (and to limit myself from spending half a work day ... not working.), and therefore making a time commitment of a string of few minutes over a corse of weeks/months. I really do like this drawn out play though. So my first thought is, Arcomage appeals more to players that can spread their games out, instead of players that have time to focus on a game for a short amount of time.

I also appreciate the smaller player base because I don't feel like I'm constantly playing elitists. I'm terrible at deck making games, so it's nice to up my win percentage to about 40% vs 15%. :) (it gets demoralizing quickly)

I also like to buy my game once, instead of micro transactions. I feel it becomes a money sink and I try to watch my wallet closer than that. But this is more my preference where I'm making a conscious choice on how to respond to the trend of micro-transactions. From a company's stand point, it makes a ton of sense though. (speaking of money, is there a place to donate? I've enjoyed this service enough I should put something in.)

(P.S.: Apologies for the length; it seemed shorter when I was writing it. I can't think of anything I can cut out without breakage, though.)
(P.P.S.: I didn't get a length warning until trying to post, so this will be split between multiple posts. Don't know how many since it doesn't tell me what the limit is, either.)

Your perspective reminded me a lot of this xkcd comic, MeCho; specifically the first row of the table.

It sounds like the confusion stems from how you've become so familiar with the qualities you're comparing and the context of your own (likely nerdy) social circle that you've forgotten the vast majority of people don't care about anything you've mentioned.

The two things the vast majority of people care about for any service are:
1. Is it convenient?
2. Does it work?

They don't want to have to read anything to get started. They don't want to fiddle with settings from the beginning. They don't want the game to deviate from their expectations, however poorly preconceived those expectations may be. Whether its interface, rules, mechanics, or even interactions with other players, they want it all to "just work" without them having to do any significant problem-solving or even think about it at all.

Concerns like "is it cheap?" and "is it good?" come after that.

Which is in contrast to the tiny number of engineers, programmers, and scientists among the massive sprawling human population who usually actually like solving problems and thinking about things, and consider quality and efficiency (cheapness) sacrosanct. So it's quite possible that the exact things that make you opine Arcomage as superior to Hearthstone are also what make it something that will never be popular.

Of course, you might notice that still isn't enough to explain why Arcomage has around 1/1000000 as many active players as Hearthstone instead of around 1/10000 or even 1/1000, so here are three major reasons for the remaining discrepancy:
1. Advertising, recommendations, and addictive game design work; Blizzard corporation was good at ensnaring customers well before WoW, and with it they honed their ability to the point it could be considered a health hazard. They made a game capable of consuming all of someone's free time even when that person hates the game, and then they have all sorts of incentives, both subtle and not, to make that person recommend it to all their friends, and that's after the perpetual multi-million dollar international advertising campaign. People have to find arcomage.net; they couldn't avoid finding WoW or Hearthstone without avoiding most of the game stores and sites in the world.

Of course, that also really isn't enough; corporations spend on advertising because they make a profit from it, but in the end you can't attract someone who isn't interested in the first place, which leads us to:
2. Arcomage is far from the only alternative to Hearthstone, and isn't even the first one people are going to think of; that advantage belongs to Magic: The Gathering. Which, notably, has two major methods of being played online; the official Magic Online service, and the open-source Cockatrice software. After M:TG comes things like Yu-Gi-Oh, or even other strategic turn-based online games entirely.

Even then, you might think the distribution of players over these games should be more even, which leads us to:
3. Much like 3of0 said, the exact mechanics, interface, and attracted players of arcomage.net result in a very particular, narrow pattern of timing, time taken, and games played— equivalently limiting those it appeals to. Players can't reliably (or conveniently, natch) co-ordinate to play games at the same time, or to predict when their next turn will come up when they can't. When players are online at the same time, they can't easily predict how long a particular game is going to last, or when the other player might be interrupted. The lack of popularity is both a draw to some of the players, and also self-sustaining by ensuring a player can never be sure any other players are online when they want to play a game.



To summarize: popularity has a lot of things influencing it, most of them aren't fair or nice, and even accounting for all of them, this site appeals to a very thin slice of a very thin slice of the internet's population.

Edit: It only took two posts.

I did find your post satisfactionary.I had the urge to find the most popular rap song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVfcZ0ZcFM
and compare it with a song thats been one of my few favorites for a couple of years now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAp6M8Ln4Ug
(i dont usually listen to rap)

And i had the sense of not wanting to live in this F world anymore ....

EDIT:
A thought came into that has something to oppose your explanation...Have you ever played games Dota 2 or League of Legends?These games are very in depth with huge learning curve that you can and most likely will get completely stomped by more experienced players even after reading and practicing for 2 months. These are at the very top of player base and income.Also Dark Souls series are also very popular despite their reputation as notoriously hard

MeCho wrote:
A thought came into that has something to oppose your explanation...Have you ever played games Dota 2 or League of Legends?These games are very in depth with huge learning curve that you can and most likely will get completely stomped by more experienced players even after reading and practicing for 2 months. These are at the very top of player base and income.Also Dark Souls series are also very popular despite their reputation as notoriously hard

It's interesting; when I was writing my post(s), League of Legends was an example I considered using twice! Once for their different systems of matching players to other players instead of only letting people handle matching themselves, and once for how incredibly convenient the game is.
You see, however difficult both DS3 and LoL can be to win, playing them and losing in entertaining ways requires as little effort as possible. You install the game, you make your account, and then you can just start playing without any idea what you're doing and still be entertained. In fact, once LoL at least is set up, you don't even need to be able to read the language to play; you can get through the menus with little guesswork, and then the icons, graphics, and controller button hints combined with your own experimentation will handle the rest.

(There are lots of other things making those games popular of course, like how DotA was originally custom maps for Warcraft 3, and so it drew from and built on WC3's popularity, just like LoL drew from and built on the popularity of DotA. DS3 has in turn been building for a long time, with one commercial success after another, and with many of its mechanics and balance being draw from games before DS1.
...also, of course, like how MArcomage gets a lot of its players from people who liked it in the Might and Magic series.)

MeCho wrote:
And i had the sense of not wanting to live in this F world anymore ....

The answer to that is changing your current world into a different one; after all, you've already started on the first step— exercising the virtue of curiosity to get a better idea of which world is the one you live in. Once you have a clear idea of the world you have and the world you want, making the former more similar to the latter doesn't seem so hard anymore.

Getting stuck in a match you know you will lose and you MUST play for atleast another 20 mins is not that entertaining in mobas and the most interesting experience for me was before i memorized most the cards of arcomage

While i love Arcomage and this game concept. And have played HS from beginning. I always hated the game was played that it was so hard to find active player who would make his move in 30 secs and finish the game. I have had multiple times ideas that i will try to code and make this playable online without turn base but with time control what would make this more enjoyable and add animations and more graphics. Maybe i will try how much effort it would take soon with phaser3 + io and webgl.