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Originally Posted by bmon
All the major campaign misteps are being well covered by others, so I'm going to add some smaller things that I really did NOT like. I know the project team was open to feedback during the campaign, but I just never wanted to drop any negativity onto something I wanted others to endorse with me. Especially because what I'm about to say are not major setbacks to my appetite for the new content, but bothered me nonetheless...
I really disliked the new cards. I know they were trying to make things fresh and modern, but I don't think it was necessary or warranted at all. I prefer to have them all look identical to the old ones. I don't want new color tones. I don't want new general icons. I don't want a new layout. Mixing these with the old cards would be jarring and feel unnatural.
Then the worst offender with the new cards are the icons. The attack, defense, and life icons make sense to me and are at least intuitive, but I don't like them. Even the range icon makes sense, however, when it is paired with that move icon, I still get tripped up looking at them. Even though it was words on the old cards, I loved the color coding of green (move), gray (range), red (attack), and blue (defense). It is much more visually obvious than these icons that need to be deciphered. And please don't take away the skulls as attack symbols!!
I've seen a couple people mention these same quibbles, but I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this. I didn't let it bother me as I figured the community would just create cards that were uniform with the old ones anyway.
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To me, nothing better exemplifies the problems with Avalon Hill's approach to Heroscape than the whole card design fiasco. As I'm sure everyone in this conversation knows by now, when Avalon Hill actually polled the fans on this subject after the campaign's launch, the results were overwhelmingly lopsided in favor of retaining the OG card design. It wasn't particularly close, either: the OG card design got more votes than every other option combined! Yet, when Encarmine first broached the topic on the discord shortly after Heroscape's surprise Gencon appearance, here's what he had to say (credit to Caps for the quote):
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Originally Posted by Encarmine
I’m extremely curious, because the data on this one points in multiple directions. Couldn’t really have the larger fan community weigh-in earlier without blowing the lid off all this.
What we’re seeing currently there is almost four equal perspectives: 1. The OG multi-hex. 2. A standard size playing card that can be sleeved. 3. A hybrid that is original to HS but doesn’t have quite the potential to get damaged like the originals. 4. No opinion.
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Needless to say, this is an extremely curious claim. How, exactly, did Encarmine arrive at the conclusion that there were somehow "four equal perspectives" as to how the cards should be designed? He certainly wasn't talking to the fans; they voted for the OG card layout by overwhelming margins when they got the chance. Was he polling random people working at Hasbro/Avalon Hill? Did the design team want to switch to the hex-shaped cards, only to backtrack when they realized the campaign was floundering? For that matter, why change the cards at all? This last point is especially pertinent because the card layouts (which put the Species/Rarity/Class/Height information at the bottom of the cards) the design team showed during the poll actually exacerbated the problems they nominally wanted to fix, further cutting away at the usable space of a card design already starved for text space!
Ultimately, the whole card design fiasco is symptomatic of one of the AoA set's biggest problems. Hogg nailed it earlier in the thread when he noted that AoA was helmed by someone (read: Encarmine) without any nostalgia for Heroscape or any understanding as to why the game proved so popular at its height. Avalon Hill was not truly in touch with what the fans wanted in a new set, and the result was a set that only a portion of an already-somewhat small fandom actually wanted priced at a level that actively deterred new players from joining the game.
Actually, you can see this at work in how the set was structured around factions, too. SotM is remembered as a fine Master Set now, but at the time of its release, I distinctly remember Heroscapers generally (albeit not universally) agreeing that the RotV set was a better starter set precisely because of the greater variety of figures it offered compared to SotM. If Avalon Hill followed in a similar mold, offering a smaller set that provided a broader sampling of what Heroscape had to offer, I fully believe this campaign could have succeeded. None of this is to impugn the War Council; they did a phenomenal job with the unit mechanics, and I was extremely excited to pilot the Frostclaw Paladins and the Nemesis War Brood. What it is to say, however, is that Avalon Hill never understood what people wanted out of the property they were working with.