A Sad State of Affairs

Yes, this is another rant post. I've been playing Gwent somewhat regularly since about mid to late 2020; this game was my way of escaping the tough reality of the pandemic, and I've been reaching Pro Rank consistently for about a year and a half now. Ever since Price of Power started, however, I have been seeing Gwent going progressively downhill nearly every single month.

There seems to be a weird philosophy within the development team that, in order for new cards to be playable or fun, they have to be so powerful that they dominate the meta for at least one season: I believe this comes from the fact that card drops are significantly smaller than they were with large expansions, like Way of the Witcher. This creates a vicious cycle of "stable meta -> introduce broken cards -> fix broken cards -> stable meta -> repeat".

Since a lot of their time seems to go into fixing mistakes they have themselves made, there are huge issues that go unaddressed for long stretches of time. It took them months to change Drill in a meaningful way, for instance. Also, just by looking at what people have been bringing to tournaments and their results, we can state with some objectivity that MO has consistently been the least competitive faction in the game since Harvest of Sorrow (more than a year ago), yet they still maintain that MO has decent results: I can see that it probably does at lower ranks, since it's the most beginner friendly faction in the game, but I highly doubt those results are as good or consistent in rank 1 or top mmr.

My main point is that winning games is progressively becaming more dependent on insanely powerful gold cards, which inevitably also makes matches much more draw dependent. This has gotten to a point where the game feels incredibly dull, since every single match plays exactly the same, even if the cards in play are themselves different. "Did you win round 1? Bleed round 2! Unless you didn't draw your golds, you just won the game!"

Golds play for such a dumb amount of points that huge pointswings (which normally even barely need any setup) are now the norm, instead of progressive, steady play. To give an exemple, just today I was winning a game by about 20-30 points, only for the Sigi-Drill combo to utterly annihilate me and for me to lose even though I was a card up and even though my opponent had a garbage hand other than Sigi. This happened because I didn't draw the cards I needed in round 1, so I lost it, my opponent bled me in round 2, and he ended up winning round 3 even though he had lost card advantage because he knew how broken that combo was. Just think about this for a second: is playing 29 provisions in a single turn really something the game should allow?

The amount of people that have gotten tired of the game and disappointed by it is also increasing significantly, and that is simply a fact. Every once in a while we see posts here about people leaving Gwent, as well as a lot of big names in the community abandoning the game (Trynet, PlaintalkJohn, Lifecoach, Bushy, Speci, Tailbot).

Once too I defended the game against those who criticised it. But now I genuinely believe that the game itself either simply doesn't have the necessary resources to properly thrive or that those in charge of it are simply stubborn. (And yes, "stubborn" would be the right word here if resources aren't an issue, since most of the stuff people tend to complain about here gets addressed eventually: it just takes them months to do so a lot of the time.)

I personally can no longer play more than a couple of matches now without wanting to uninstall the game, so I will no longer be playing for the forseeable future. I hope that some of you, should you be feeling the same way, can at least find some comfort knowing that not only are your feeling valid, but also highly justifiable.