Earlier this week, Valve launched the open beta for their own free-to-play digital card game Artifact. Though art and style of Artifact is mighty enticing, a number of community members were none too pleased with the studio’s method of implementing microtransactions. On a sensible level, any free-to-play game will have microtransactions otherwise it won’t live for future development, but there’s certainly a right and wrong way to go about it. At this time, Valve isn’t boding so well.

A post on Reddit shed light on Valve’s decision to create Artifact with a “pay-for-everything” model. This is a beta after all, so there’s bound to be opportunities for change. For a problem like this to arise right off the bat, players aren’t feeling too sure. Valve made a public announcement in response to the rising community unrest and since then, developers have implemented a number of new features and fixes to make Artifact more enjoyable.

• You can now recycle cards into event tickets at a rate of 20 cards to 1 ticket. There is a “Recycle Cards” tab accessible from the collection. Note that each card will currently show “N/A” where the market price would be until the market is open. Sort by market price will sort by mana cost until the market is open.
• You can now play bot matches and Call to Arms without claiming your starting package. This lets you try more of the game before you reach the point-of-no-return on refunds.
• Added an AI difficulty selector.
• Added some premade decks to the bot’s deck selection options to make it easy to quickly practice against various opponent color combinations.
• Added a new cursor and cursor size settings control.

• Leaving the deck editor by pressing the Artifact logo will now prompt to save changes.
• Fixed an issue where dragging an unowned hero into a deck that already contains that hero would remove the hero that was in the destination slot and then fail to add or arrange the new hero.
• Fixed a Card Collection crash on MacOS 10.14.1.

• Fixed some issues related to losing connection to the Artifact Network while drafting.
• Fixed an issue where closing the draft screen wouldn’t always take you back to the correct dashboard page.
• You can now abandon a draft gauntlet before you register a deck.
• Added additional sounds and effects to the draft screen.

• Fixed some issues and improved performance when summoning >300 units at a time.
• Improved the effects for Crippling Blow, Trebuchets, and Lucent Beam.
• Improved the voice-over quality for Jolixia, Meepo, and Kanna.
• Fixed an issue that would cause debris to persist in strange places when improvements are destroyed.
• Fixed Pick Off panning back to the previous lane too quickly after the spell’s damage resolved.
• Fixed some display issues when inspecting cards in a 16×10 aspect ratio.
• Fixed a missing sound during board destruction.
• Fixed a crash that would happen when you disconnect from a game while hovering a card.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes result in visual corruption of card and tower stats when in wide lanes in non-standard resolutions.
• Brightened the visibility of the heroes in the fountain display on the HUD.
• Updated the textures for pathing cards.

• Significant improvements to general UI performance and responsiveness.
• Fixed some crashes and bad behavior that would happen when mashing the keyboard in various parts of the UI.
• Fixed a crash that would happen while in the settings menu or the credits.
• Fixed the Global Matchmaking deck loader not showing the most recently-used deck on game launch.
• Fixed an issue where some players with lots and lots of Steam friends would experience massive performance degradation.
• Added new high-resolution menu backgrounds for players in 4K.
• Added new effects to claiming rewards from an event.
• Added a display for the number of unopened packs remaining to the pack opening screen.
• Pushing Find Next Match after a Gauntlet game will now take you to the correct Gauntlet page instead of the main menu.
• Improved visibility of the matchmaking cancel button.
• You can no longer restart the tutorial while opening a pack, or while matchmaking, or while in a private lobby, all of which caused crazy things to happen.
• Shared decks are now shown at the top of a deck loader’s listings.
• Updated the localization files.

Hotfix for game input bug after leaving ESC Menu

Well, that certainly helps out in some ways! Duplicate cards can now be recycled into event tickets. Now passing on a question to you, do you believe these changes will make the games better or do you think first impressions leave a lasting one? Are you enjoying the game so far? Let us know what you think in the comments section below or start a conversation on DFTG Facebook page. To stay up to date on gaming news as it happens, follow us on Twitter! Here’s some of the latest to catch up on:

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The open beta for Artifact is available to play now on Steam, and it officially arrives November 28th, 2018.