Thanks u/cat0ftheyear for his time, thanks every single ABL volunteer and Opsy for their effort hosting hourly tournaments, building leaderboard and wonderful main events.
— Do you plan to continue hosting events/hourly tournaments in near future? Outside of ABL.
— No such plan.
— Have Opsy contacted any admins after that message in #admin_talk? Did he hint at leaving before or was it completely unexpected?
— No, was completely unexpected. After his few words in admin chat I spammed him a bit with question marks and he told me in private that it was due to valve's post about the super extra long haul with no updates in near future. And yes, that thing happened like 6 weeks prior... So either a very very delayed reaction, or he just didn’t wanna say the real reason :D
— Was there a reason behind choosing crowdfunding within BTC over, say, Patreon? For example, Weekly Artifact Tournaments chose the last one and there are currently 3 subscribers providing $8/mo.
— There are legal issues with accepting these sums of money over Patreon. With 8$ it's fine, but with hundreds it isn't. I’ll have to fill tax forms for that and things like that, pay taxes in my country which would be a huge cut, etc
— That’s reasonable. Do you think complete lack of donations was because of people’s unfamiliarity with cryptocurrency or is it because no one is actually interested?
— Probably a mix of both, considering the huge player drop after Opsy's announcement... I think lots of players were just on the edge of quitting Artifact already and just needed a small nudge to topple off the edge. But umm, regarding donations.. We were depending mostly on a few select individuals that contacted us in the week after the closure and said they would be willing to put in a few 100s of dollars for some months, so we didn't really count on people to like.. buy 5$ in BTC and donate that
— Do you think what is happening is Valve’s fault at some extend?
— Fault is an odd word in this context. The game dying is a result of their decision to not release content in the near future, obviously. TCGs don’t survive without content updates, but specifically ABL's closure is obviously not their fault. We did not expect them to fund a community project or something along those lines.. Although I saw quite a few people on Reddit who for some reason thought they might. Take hope where u find it I guess :)
I’m pretty sure that if valve intends to get Artifact back up at some point in the future, they will focus on reworking the game, not on maintaining a competitive scene for a few hundred people and no interest, right? As much as it would be nice for us, it makes no sense for the long term benefit of the game (and more importantly, let's face it.. for it to be a worthy business investment for their company)
Source: PlayArtifact.ru
