Hello everybody, Artifact started off shaky with its release in 2018, but Valve has made some huge changes to the game since, proving not only Valve's commitment to the game, but also the community. However, not unlike other card games, Artifact is not perfect, and there are many additions and changes that both we and the community would like to see. After evaluating community reception and their own personal wishes, we bring you the top 10 features we want Artifact to add in 2019. The Cult Arms featured event was a success thanks to its low barrier of entry and simplicity. What we would like to see is more exploration of different game modes that mess with the current rule set. Just by virtue of there being a featured event mode, we can see that this in some form is coming, but it's still important to bring up as these types of rotating modes are very good at keeping the game fresh and interesting as proven by other games' implementation of them. The fact with all of its intricacies has many rule sets they could explore. Unlimited heroes or cards perhaps, six ogre magiies to get all the multicasts in the world. Maybe a format where they introduce unique, powerful cards that can only be played in that format. What if every turn a random lane was annihilated? Again, the sky's the limit and a particularly fun rule set could bring people back and playing. When you want to play Artifact with one friend, you are currently limited to just constructed or finding two other people and making a tournament to play draft. A more rare request, one of your own drafts is a good feature that could get more people playing together. Finding one friend to play is certainly easier than finding three and since this is a comparably low effort feature request, it's something that we hope to see soon. Many players are not currently satisfied with the current pace of the game and have suggested a Blitz mode to remedy this. If you're not familiar with the format, it is primarily used in chess. Blitz mode traditionally means a very short time bank for both players, forcing them to play all of their turns quickly. It works very well in chess since you can queue up your moves as to not lose any precious time. Artifact would do well to have a similar queue up feature for cards since even in regular modes sometimes you need to play against the clock. A Blitz mode tests quick decision making and could even provide an interesting meta because decks like Mono Blue require a lot of planning that may not be possible in this mode. In its infancy, Artifact has implemented many key features that the current most successful digital card game, Hearthstone, has either neglected or passed on entirely, namely tournaments. However, a spectator system and by extension replays have strangely been missing. In almost basic necessity for a myriad of reasons, replays can enable sharing crazy games or self-improvement through the means of watching back your place. We know already that this feature is 100% coming in the future since it's referenced many times in the game files, but the sooner the better. Similarly, the spectator system is soft, implemented already, and can be used if you have the appropriate permissions in tournament mode. Unfortunately, it's currently only usable in tournaments and it would be great if you can spectate a friend playing to help them out or commentate. Many times in my experience, I find myself analyzing the non-active lane while my opponent is thinking about his play. While I'm taking in the information, the opponent playing a card lurches me to the active lane like someone grabbing your head and forcing it in a direction. The game taking over control for me feels more annoying than it's supposed to be helpful and forces me to click back to where I was before and restart my analysis. A possible solution to this problem is a pain that comes out whenever a card is played in the non-active lane. It would state what card is being played and where, without having to take over the camera controls from the player. The position that the pain comes from could be indicative of what lane the card is played from, providing additional visual language that can be interpreted quickly. Mobile implementation is something that Valve mentioned leading up to release last year but has since been silent about. It's probably an interesting challenge to shrink Artifacts' dense information rich layout to a 6-inch screen. Furthermore, Artifact isn't exactly the lightest of games when it comes to performance, so the team will have to optimize it greatly for mobile devices. This however, is another critical feature that could make or break the game. The mobile audience is huge and the convenience and novelty of playing a PC game on the go has shown proven success by heartstone, shadowverse, and many, many more. The notion of asking new players for mobile interested in Artifact to pony up $20 is intriguing. Few and far between are paid to download mobile games and Artifact might have to bend the rules or make significant changes if it views mobile as an avenue for new players. It's no secret that Artifact's Twitch viewership is comparably low to other digital card games. While this is the case for many reasons, Artifact's readability does not help it in this regard. Both new and experienced viewers can't immediately jump into a stream and get a good overview of what is going on in the game. This could be remedied by a stream overlay similar to what Heartstone has where you can mouse over the card in the stream and have a pop-up that lets you know what card is and what effects have been applied to it. There could also be a separate lane viewer where you could get a better view of the board state and the other non-active lanes. This problem is a bit trickier to find a solution to, but is nevertheless important as many people discover their games from Twitch. Currently the most competitive players have to turn to community tournaments for bigger payouts and to play with other similarly minded competitive players. One feature that we would like to see is a valve sponsored weekly tournament with possibly multiple tickets required to enter but also a bigger payout on success. This could be a weekly event that is only active one day out of the week. Your placement in this weekly tournament or gauntlet style mode could give you a number of points. Then at the end of each season there could be a more prestigious tournament comprised of the highest point earners from these tournaments. This league system has proven success from magic to gathering online and other digital card games and could provide a different kind of progression for more competitive players, while not detracting from other modes with its once a week availability. Another addition at the community's request, the player profile progression system is a bit too slow to be fun leveling. Obviously the solution should not just be increasing the rate of XP gains but some retuning to how each level scales and a more even spread of rewards across all levels would be appreciated. This is another feature seemingly hastily implemented that serves well as groundwork for something greater. Future cosmetics could serve as additional level rewards which would in turn make it more enjoyable to level up in the higher numbers. Alongside the weekly bonus there could also be achievements or feats of strength that grant one time bonus XP beyond the playstyle rewards. How about XP bonuses for perfect runs participating in a community tournament of a minimum number or winning at least once with every call to arms deck? The sky's the limit and it could incentivize more people playing and getting outside of the comfort zone of how they normally play artifact. The skill rating system is still a bit lackluster. An important feature a skill rating system should accurately reflect the skill of the player when compared to everyone else. The current implementation does not have any sort of current rating versus highest rating number and the skill rating displayed always shows the highest rank you've earned in the season. Skill rating should depend on your win rate and check if you're actually improving at the game instead of providing a seemingly ever increasing number. The update article talking about the SR system stated that you gain rank when you beat someone with a higher skill rating. This is not entirely true since it is possible to gain SR even if you beat someone lower. There is also currently way too much variance in the skill of the opponents that you can face. While this might be an indicator of the size of the player base at the moment, there should never the last be a higher priority in matchmaking to get you to a player that is within a reasonable skill range of view. There is strong evidence to suggest that this current ranking system was a bandaid solution to the community's requests. Ideally Valve takes the feedback and develops it into something more akin to how other games handle their ranks, possibly providing incentives beyond bragging rights. And those are our top 10 features that we would like to see in 2019. What would your number one feature request be? Let us know and subscribe for future videos. Thanks for watching and we will see you next time.