YMMV / Artifact

• Accidental Innuendo: Of a racist nature rather than sexual: a card called "Crack the Whip", which can only be used on Black heroes, was met with some derision due to the connotations of whipping black slaves. The card was quickly renamed to "Coordinated Assault" once this unfortunate connection was pointed out.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The game was immediately savaged upon announcement, and faded into obscurity a few weeks after release. There were a few reasons why the game failed so badly:
  • Valve is a company that is known for innovating the First-Person Shooter genre incrementally through their major titles such as Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead, and for helping popular modders to release their mods as standalone games such as Counter-Strike and Dota 2. Seeing Valve focusing development on a Hearthstone and Shadowverse play-alike Collectible Card Game (a genre that is niche and, as of the online era, dominated by free-to-play games except for collectors and serious gamers), with the only innovation being three-lane gameplay, left a lot of fans bitter and feeling that Valve was abandoning its other franchises.
  • The game is paid-for instead of being free-to-play, and new cards are bought via microtransactions, along with the ability to trade individual cards, to simulate real life Collectible Card Game values. This alienated both newcomers (who are more used to free-to-play CCG due to their accessibility) and serious gamers (who prefer physical CCG, since they don't rely on a central server to exist). The late 2010s also saw microtransactions face increasing backlash and controversy, so a game where you must pay upfront for the game itself and are then expected to buy more cards with more real money was doomed from the start.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Of all the Artifact-exclusive heroes currently known, Kanna and Prellex have been exceptionally well-received by the fanbase, receiving a steady amount of fanart and requests for them to be made into playable heroes in Dota 2.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Dancing Monkeys ^Explanation Prior to the game's release, Artifact had quite a lot of hype surrounding it. Some members of the community went to great lengths to obtain a key for the game's closed beta, whether by begging for one or participating in giveaways that a generous soul would hold, earning themselves the derogatory nickname "dancing monkeys"
  • Category: Artifact ^Explanation Due to the game's plummeting popularity less than a year after release, its section on Twitch became almost completely barren... except for some people who decided to put up streams for everything OTHER than Artifact. Indeed, after a few high-profile streamers made jokes at the expense of the state of Artifact on Twitch, its section turned into streams of unrelated games, movies, and even porn. Twitch would eventually put a stop to this. Nowadays, it's used primarily for streaming pirated movies and shows.
  • "We're in this for the long haul." ^Explanation Following the game's underwhelming launch and dire-looking future, Valve became worryingly quiet regarding a roadmap plan beyond a promise that they'd be "in this for the long haul." This immediately became fuel for mockery as many were skeptical of Valve's ability to commit long-term to an already-hemorrhaging game, then became an even bigger target once the game ended up being abandoned for good. The few players that stuck around were derisively nicknamed "long-haulers" and looked as being overly-ambitious in awaiting the salvaging of a sinking ship that never came.
  • "Valve screwed over the Artifact fanbase by cancelling the Artifact 2.0 beta" ^Explanation On /v/, if you make a thread about any Valve game, expect a reply like this to show up. Due to how little the board actually cares about Artifact, the Anon who tends to post this gets mocked for thinking canceling a game they dislike means Valve is a horrible company.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The original incarnation of "Cheating Death" was considered one of the worst-designed cards not only in the game, but in any card game ever made, as it basically turned the combat phase into a coin flip. If an allied green hero was present in the lane where this improvement was built, all allied units would have a 50% chance to survive a lethal attack with 1 HP. This effect could be triggered several times in a row for the same unit. Not only was it a huge Game-Breaker, but it was also very unfun: it was frustrating for the attacker when their opponent's units survived damage that should by all logic invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule, and frustrating for the defender when their strongest fighter failed to proc the effect, meaning that no matter what, frustration was guaranteed. This card's reception, among others, led to Valve changing their policy on balance patches and completely reworking the card.
  • In the original incarnation of the game, the inability to earn cards for free was horribly unpopular and likely contributed to the game's quick demise. The intention was to create a strong Player-Generated Economy where cards can keep value, but in practice, players just thought of it as an Allegedly Free Game minus the "free" part. This feature ended up scaring off many players. The game's rework tried to fix this by allowing cards to be earned for free, but it was too late to salvage Artifact's reputation.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The game's very announcement was met with a mixed-to-negative response. The teaser trailer shown at The International 2017 was met with a disappointed "awwww!" from the crowd, due to the game being perceived as chasing the trend set by Hearthstone. Half-Life fans in particular were not pleased to learn that Valve was pouring its resources into a Dota 2 Spin-Off instead of making a new Half-Life game.
  • The announcement that the game would not follow a Free-to-Play model, and that card packs cannot be earned in-game, only bought with real money, were the cause of much concern. Fans worried that the $20 upfront cost would harm the game's growth by scaring away new players, and the inability to earn card packs without paying real money was accused of enforcing Bribing Your Way to Victory. The true purpose of these costs is to preserve the value of cards since the game features a player-run marketplace where cards can be bought and sold, which would lead to deflation if they could be earned for free, but this explanation did little to reassure some fans.
  • Reception to the game's monetization model only got harsher when it was revealed that Draft mode would cost tickets to enter, which can only be bought with real money, or that card packs can contain starter heroes, which are useless and worthless (since you already have them, and so does everyone else). However, it was then somewhat diminished when a free-to-play casual Draft mode and the option to recycle duplicate cards into tickets were added.

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