Was It Worth My Time? Why I Quit Playing Gods Unchained

In this episode of Was it worth my time? I'm going to talk about the game that started it all for me - Gods Unchained. It was back in February of 2020. I had been playing a lot of Legends of Runeterra and watched a random Youtuber talk about other games he had played before. One of them was Gods Unchained. It took a couple of days to really take off but in the end, this was what set me on my path for blockchain gaming. Coming from Magic the Gathering and later Hex TCG, the advantages of truly owning your game assets were pretty obvious to me. I've made several thousand dollars during my time at Hex, selling cards I didn't even own. Needless to say, I was pretty thrilled for the outlook of earning even more money while playing.

I had timed my entrance to the game more or less perfectly with Gods Unchained launching their Play2Earn concept The Forge just a day or two prior to me installing it. If you ever played any of the mainstream CCGs you'd have no issue at all to pick it up and thus it only took me about two weeks to reach the top leagues without spending a single dollar on the game. My best moment in the game was probably when I opened a legendary I already owned a copy of. This allowed me to forge them, minting a NFT copy. I sold it on the market, making 0.25 ETH in the process. Even with the much lower price back then this was huge - looking at what ETH is worth now, it's simply ridiculous. Nevertheless, the game didn't last much longer and after about 4 months of playing it less and less, I moved on.

As I did with Rabona just a couple of days ago, I'm going to discuss the reasons I quit playing the game and try to provide some insight on what would need to be changed in order to get me back into the game. I don't intend to badmouth the game, I had a decent amout of fun while playing it and I'm sure others might still find it to be pretty entertaining so if you never played it, I'd still encourage you to give it a shot, maybe you find it more enjoyable than I do.

So what where the reasons I quit playing? Actually, there are a lot of different issues that annoyed me over time, but most of them would have been bearable on their own. So the following list only consists of key issues that really were a deal breaker for me.

• Running on Ethereum
• Pay2Win mechanics
• Lack of development
• Time consuming gameplay

Each of these 4 issues would have probably sufficed to drive me away eventually, but with them all coming together, my departure came a lot faster.

Running on Ethereum

Fun enough, this was the most annoying part of it all. Had they chosen Hive or WAX to run their game, it would be in a so much better position today. Gods Unchained is a trading card game, so one of it's core features, obviously, is the ability to trade cards. This went pretty well in the early days where Gas fees only amounted to a couple of cents. With gas fees going through the roof quickly, though, the trade feature got next to unusable and only high profile legendary cards really sold any longer. While you could buy most common cards for about 0.05$ - 0.1$, you'd have to pay a 10$+ Gas fee just to do so. Obviously, that's completely unfeasible. Consequently, my earnings from the game plummeted fast as nobody was buying my cards any more. At first, I decided to just keep on gathering cards, mint more NFTs and prepare to sell them once Gas fees would settle back in.

That didn't work either. They shut down The Forge (their Play2Earn mechanic) and it has been like that for more than 6 months now. Honestly, this is just baffling to me. Play2Earn is one of their core features, they actively advertise with it... and it's dysfunctional for half a year now! Fun enough, they also announced Immutable X - some kind of ETH sidechain that will supposedly allow them to do transactions without fees some time in the future. Meanwhile Splinterlands is moving thousand of cards between accounts every day with zero fees because they run on a superior chain - at least in terms of gaming.

If anything is to be learned from this whole mess, it's think about the blockchain you want to develop on first. Publishing on Ethereum is about the worst choice possible. Ethereum is not a gaming blockchain and any game using it will suffer from the same shortcomings!

Pay2Win mechanics

I've already touched this topic in an article last week. Gods Unchained is extremely new player friendly in the beginning. The starter decks you get are really good and quite competitive, even in higher leagues. You receive a lot of free boosters along the way and it really only took me like 2 weeks to have my first deck ready that could compete in the highest league. Up until then, I really was a fan of the way they crafted their cards. Rarer cards often weren't inherently more powerful, they just provided more complex effects or where more versatile. The issue is, that's not true for all of the cards.

Many games in Gods Unchained are a back and forth where both players counter each other threats until one manages to set up something the opponent can't counter any more. Consequently, most cards are either a counter or a threat. The player that manages to get a threat out that the opponent can't counter is going to win the game. Sadly, there are some cards in the game that are both a threat and a counter and that just kills the game's balance.

Echophon here will both kill your opponents threats in one go and pose a game ending threat at the same time. To add insult to injury, she also can't be removed with a single counter so dealing with here will require a multitude of cards. Even if you manage to remove her, you'll be so far behind afterwards that the game is as good as over. I don't know how many of my top tier games ended exactly this way. Sure, I could have bought one myself, she starts as low as 0.2 ETH, so just 250$ to even the odds... great!

There's not much fixing the situation afterwards in that case. You can't just nerf a card your players paid hundreds of dollars to acquire. Ultimately, this is just bad design and all you can do is learn from it for the future. Don't print cards that do everything on their own!

Lack of development

This one is kinda absurd, honestly. Gods Unchained is no small project. Quite the contrary, it's the only blockchain game I know of with a huge team and multi-million budget. They even advertised how they got 25,000,000$ (not sure about the sum but it was a lot) in backing from big investors. And yet... they didn't seem to get anything done. Oh they did add new stuff to the game. Like a new UI. And a new UI. Oh and they did an UI overhaul. I kid you not, since I follow the game there where more UI changes than anything else. The cards are now 3d objects instead of flat. But other than that? They added the Sanctum to the game and released one new set. Both had a lot of issues at release and honestly, it was simply not enough.

Now don't get me wrong here, I follow projects that already take longer and that delivered less. The thing is, they are either indie projects or they are better at communicating their progress or at least what they are working on. When I joined Gods Unchained their news read like their next set was right around the corner. 6 months later, their news still read like their next set was right around the corner. It's not that they didn't provide a lot of news, either. They just completely failed to build momentum. They kept talking about certain features for months without ever releasing them, just to suddenly release something completely different that they never even mentioned before and, quite frankly, nobody had asked for either.

This is something a lot of companies, especially in the crypto space, simply don't seem to understand. Your players will be content with almost everything as long as you take the time to explain it to them. But if you don't explain yourself, if you ignore glaring issues for months, people will start to wonder whether they time wouldn't better be spent elsewhere.

Time consuming gameplay

Another issue they didn't fix up until today. Playing the game simply takes too long. Not because it's too complex, but because they don't enforce faster playing. Every round, you have a set amount of time that's slowly decreasing and if you don't end your round before that time limit is reached, you end your round automatically. The issue is, that time is way way too long. Players have been reporting that issue ever since I joined the game but they never changed it for the better. So some opponents would purposely extend their turns for as long as possible, sometimes making a game last 30 minutes but only have 3 minutes worth of gameplay.

Now there are a lot of clever solutions to this. Legends of Runeterra has both players start with very low time counters. Every time you finish a turn with time left on the clock, you get more time to work with in the next round. This way you can't just use up all the time every turn but you actually have to manage the time you have remaining. I've played some way more complex trading card games (like Hex) online and in none of them have I spent so much time waiting for my opponents to do nothing at all.

Conclusion

As you can see, Gods Unchained is suffering from a host of issues and ever getting me back into the game would be pretty hard. They just made too many bad decisions in a too short amount of time. Publishing on Ethereum, flawed card design, these are things you can't just change mid project. Maybe if Immutable X really works. Maybe if future sets are better designed. Maybe if they up their communication. Ultimately, the game stil holds a lot of potential and it certainly is not too late to change things around. But doing so will take a lot of effort and an even higher amount of time.

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

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