Above image is edited from one of my personal screenshots in game and cobbled together with royalty free no attribution required images.
Hey everyone and welcome to another Gods unchained post. I'm still traveling about so I haven't been able to HIVE and game as much as I usually do but am having a wonderful time and am in fact ALIVE (perhaps I will actually get around to doing photo dumps and travel posts if I get a nice lull here who knows). Anyway, today we are talking about the infamous profile picture bug. This bug displays your profile image in place of your opponent's profile image, effectively making all profile pictures useless and moot (which is sort of sad considering we haven't had them for very long in the first place).
But rex does this even matter? Why get something stuck in your craw about this ?
The short answer is Yes, but let me elaborate. Profile pictures and player customization are important in whichever game you find that is a multiplayer game, whether it be for showing off your cards/items or just adding your personal touch to the gaming experience and expressing yourself. Removing this removes access to a universal customization that all profiles should have to visually express their personality to others during gameplay. Not to mention the utility it adds to normally non-viable meta cards with fun artwork that might be aesthetic but not playable in the slightest (this pool of cards gets larger and larger each set with the power creep ceiling being reached and nothing being able to be printed that doesn't make existing decks/archtypes more ludicrous, but the meta being cooked is another post).
I know the gods unchained team has a lot on their plate and are continuing to be downsized and destaffed as the migration of gods unchained assets trudges forward (zkevm is the name of the new chain I think), but this should be an easy solve to at least placate BASIC player interactions within the game. Having profile pictures be bugged is a really bad look optically for entering players, especially if they purchased a card to use as a profile picture expressly for that purpose. Not because it is of dire importance persay, but moreso because fucking this up makes the whole operation look like even more of a shitshow than typical gods unchained day to day operations do.
I've been traveling and playing gods unchained here and there for a few weeks, not daily grinding or even thinking about the meta etc. Ranked is full of blunt wincons that pilot themselves flipping coins against other archtypes to see "who does their thing first". Particular archtypes are ultra favored by whoever seems to test/balance the game (BE has been relevant since release years ago, Control nature keeps getting juiced, LITD love, Aggro light getting strong tools over and over again etc.) and playing anything that isn't one of the "dev favorites" feels like a fool's errand outside of formats. I also have been playing other card games, TCGs (that essentially don't rebalance cards like GU), and coding my own project (no spoilers, but I have a feeling you folks will like it when it's finished). What I've found is that it's not incredibly difficult to make card games that are balanced and have "cyclical powercreep" that resets every few sets to roughly the base powerlevel. It just requires actually thinking about it in advance and not "developing as you go by the seat of your pants", the games that I've noticed to "die on the vine" push the envelop too fast to get sales and then have nowhere to go. This isn't a unique issue to gods unchained and I'm going to talk about ALL of this in my next post, but I appreciate you folks still hanging around and supporting me. You all rock and are the reason I have kept streaming/creating content, I truly appreciate all of you. Anywho this is rex signing off until the next post, stay safe out there.
