I don’t think this is Artifact anymore, Toto…
In late 2018 Valve released Artifact, their attempt to cash in on Dota’s success even more and the world collectively groaned. Besides being an overly convoluted card game that poorly translated Dota’s mechanics into Collectable Card Game form, the game was plagued with an economy that many thought was unfair.
Unlike many other CCG’s, Artifact had to be purchased for money and that initial investment of R270 only netted you a fraction of the game’s content with new decks and game modes requiring further payment. Hell, even ranked play was blocked by a paywall. Following the…to be polite, less than positive feedback Valve decided to re-evaluate Artifact instead of shipping content updates and their latest game fell into silence.
It lay dormant for many years, restlessly shifting in its grave. It waited for months for someone to poke it, to reawaken the game that was buried deep inside its monetary prison. Yet no such help came. It thought of days past, the hype that had built around it by Valve’s devoted supporters. The good times, when things looked bright.
When Artifact was happy. It believed it could be happy once again, yet as time passed it slowly gave up on that hope. Excepting that it would never leave this dark place, it settled into its obscurity. Until one day, something changed. I light broke through the shadow and lit up the game. Twitch plunged its hand into the ground and offered Artifact a second chance. Hopeful for a brighter day, Artifact grabbed at the chance…only to discover a future of memes, porn and mass shootings.
Such is the case with Artifact’s Twitch channel which has recently regained a large following due to how empty the channels were. People clearly thought it would be fun to mock how dire and empty the game has become and set up new Twitch accounts to livestream on it. Except they haven’t been streaming Artifact. Instead, these trolls have been streaming everything from pirated versions of The Avengers: Endgame to videos of people physically harming themselves. There was even a prolonged video of the New Zealand Christchurch massacre which featured the shooter livestreaming the atrocity.
Twitch has responded to this wave of inappropriate content by suspending all new accounts from streaming and has been working to remove the videos already on the site, many of which are coming from automated channels. If anything this just goes to show how crappy the Internet can be. The whole thing could have actually been a pretty funny event if the stuff being shown wasn’t so violently horrific. A quick search of the Artifact Twitch channel seems to reveal that most of the offensive streams have been removed, but knowing the Internet, nothing is ever that simple.
Last Updated: May 30, 2019
Gloss