21.11.2018
Features
- 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.
Deck Editor Fixes
- 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.
Draft Fixes
- 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.
In-Game Fixes
- 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.
UI Fixes
- 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
- Hotfix for game input bug after leaving ESC Menu
18.11.2018
The Artifact public beta is starting later today. All attendees from this year’s International and everyone who redeemed a beta key will find the game activated in their Steam account.
Since lifting the NDA on the private beta yesterday, there’s been an overwhelming amount of feedback on all parts of the game. Much of that feedback has been a clear signal that we underestimated how much interest and excitement the community has around certain features that weren’t available in the initial beta build.
We want to take a few minutes to talk about some of those missing features now:
- There was no way to do a draft event with friends. We didn’t prioritize this play mode, and had planned to enable it sometime after release. We’ve heard your feedback: drafting with friends is a core part of what you want to spend your time doing in Artifact. In the next Artifact beta build, you can select Call To Arms Phantom Draft in any user-created tournament.
- There was no way to practice the draft modes without spending an event ticket. Drafting is incredibly fun, but can also be very intimidating. We agree that it’s important to have a way to practice before venturing into a more competitive mode. In the next Artifact beta build, everyone who has claimed their starting content will find a Casual Phantom Draft gauntlet available in the Casual Play section.
- There was nothing to do with duplicate starter heroes. We’re adding a system that allows extra, unwanted cards to be recycled into event tickets. This feature will ship before the end of the beta period.
The first two changes will be live for everyone when the public beta activates later today. We’ll ship the recycling system, as well as other improvements to the beta, over the next week and a half.