Shaneth said:

Maybe another reason the game got canceled...

no one was able ot keep their mouths shut and were unable to NOT violate some form of NDA which didn't allow playtesters t speak of these things, the liscencers got made, and bailed on them?

Well, a lot of ppl speculated the next set was going to be Street Fighter, since too many people disliked how there was no Street Fighter in the current block.

Either way, a lot of PTers pretty much knew that the game was gonna cancel because of no PT files after Quest for Souls. In the past, they were usually a couple sets ahead all the time.

Thus far, I have only played games that have been around for... ever. M:TG, Yuugiou, Pokemon. Now, sure, I have played a few others that didn't last, and that list is long and not all that interesting.

My problem is that, our first tournament, which had sixteen ( +1 who showed up late ) players show up, I had to announce to the players that UFS was being cancelled. The next tournament I already had those seventeen players, plus eleven or twelve more who were going to show up, they just hadn't had a chance to go card hunting yet for the legacy tournament.

I am thoroughly disheartened by this - UFS has quite literally everything I could ever want in a game. To the point where I was going to give up Pokemon all together so I could just play UFS. Finding out that all the work I'd put in to creating an established playerbase was for nothing is... grossly painful. I hate wasting my time.

-Flop- I don't know what to say. I was really excited for UFS to work. I've spent hundreds of dollars on boxes in the few months I've been playing, and setting up decks for others to play with when they didn't have the opportunity. Finding that the game has been cancelled does feel like a blow, even to us newer players. To think I'll never get to play in a nationals or a worlds? Absolutely depressing.

Hopefully UDE or WOTC will give UFS a once over and try to pick it up. While I don't condone either of those companies, I'd rather have the game than not.

Maybe there will actually be some marketing if they do - I'd never even heard of UFS until I stumbled on some people playing. How is a game expected to survive with no real publicity? Mrf. Good luck, all, with whatever you do.

anyone know how much it would cost to maybe buy the game from them??? lol

Braydox said:

I have no idea but someone has already proposed this and is currently trying to get the license from FFG...Email the guy in charge of this so we he can get the 500 people we need to relaunch the game the adress should be a few post back

armored_butterfly said:

What you said kinda hit home with me. Like you said, UFS is just another victim amonst a list of many other bad-ass CCGs that died due to a lack of heartless franchising like the likes of MtG and YGO!. But the game is alive as long as we keep playing it. (I since none of my close friends play it anymore I'll just have to hunt down former UFS players at the local hobby store. lol) Like you said, the game's cancelation means cheaper cards, so if you were to collect the majority of the whole series then it'll be a long time before you get bored with those cards. Meanwhile after what happened to UFS, I'm wary of investing in a game that isn't a major franchise. I hated saying that but it's how I feel at the moment. I'm very infatuated with the thought of converting to LCGs but I'm gonna wait a lil' longer until I'm confident I am making a good investment in something that I will enjoy.

There is a friend of mine looking into buying UFS licsensing and all just give time there is alot red tape to go through. He loves the and wants to bring it back we just have to be patient.

Well I hope something happens, because I'm personally tired of all the card games I play dying lol.

Shocking, but then again, it makes since you had to cancel UFS. FFG has made some horrible mistakes with the game.

The major mistake that ultimatly led to UFS' death is not relasing any more Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and SNK sets. Those three, IMHO, were what brought UFS to its prime, and I say Instead of a second set based on Soulcalibur IV, they should made a tenth set for Street Fighter, possibly making the debut of the SFIV newcomers to the UFS universe.

Another major mistake is ShadoWar. While most of the sets from UFS were based on licensed games, ShadoWar is an original franchise made by Sabertooth Games, who FFG bought the rights from. This probaly alienated players.

The final major mistake is Soulcalibur IV and Tekken 6. There are other games that could be licensed, like King of Fighters XII.

I say if FFG dosen't want UFS anymore, then they should sell it of to another company who would treat the game right. This is my recomendation. I do NOT want UFS to die, and I will resort to an online petition if I must.

I thought that tekkan 6 was a good idea, just they needed to add more sets to it also i think that they should of broaded their horizons instead of just limiting it to Capcom and Namco fighting games i mean even if they would have to go back to older fighting games like killer instinct or even adding new stuff to shadow war. We need to see if they will at least sell the liscensing to someone that would like to keep the game going.

Yeah, but they would've gotten a lot of sales if they did another Stret Fighter set aroudn the time SFIV was released. Instead, they neglected it due to it being nine sets where the other sets are lower.

spikeriley said:

I agree promoting the game when soul cal 4, street fighter 4, and tekken 6 came out would have been the way to go. But sadly FFG was too blind to see this or didnt care enough...one of those

Da_ghetto_gamer said:

Or it was too expensive / cost prohibitive for the return it would generate.

Antigoth said:

If they would have gotten more players and made the game as big as say yu-gi-oh or magic then the return would have been there as well

Do you realize that that was impossible?

Unifiedshoe said:

Do you realize that we were the 3rd best selling card game by the end of 2007?

What happened to that...oh right then game started to go downhill.....really really fast

Da_ghetto_gamer said:

Right - Third best, still not able to hold a candle to Yu-gi or Magic who have constantly held the top 2.

Do you realize how much money FFG threw into UFS last year?

Do you realize how many thousands of dollars worth of product they gave away to try and get people into the game?

Which was followed by two of the best sets the game had seen, but despite all the free product given away, it didn't translate into sales.

They tried advertising, they tried giving away free product.

At the cost of putting a card into a video game, it wasn't going to translate into sales.

The problem was they didn't have stores and new stores willing to carry the product.

How many players were posting on here that they wanted to play UFS, but their store wouldn't carry the game, or their local game shop closed.

There are still players on here, who want to get QFS, but their local shop refused to bring it in.

If shops won't carry the game, all the advertising falls on deaf ears, as there will be no where for the players to acquire the product.

Why doesn't somebody try to get upperdeck to buy the card game. i'm sure there probabbly looking for a new tcg!

I know about all that im just wondering why it worked back then...and things arent working now the sales were there before i mean look at DS2 it complelety sold out...regardless of whether the cards were broken or not

I have been waiting for this moment for a while, but I knew it would come nonetheless.

All I can say is 'I told you :D'

I told you that this game was going to fail. I told you the optic of making the game only target hardcore players was bad. I told you that the system this very game was based was going to kill the game. That and so many other things.

But first before I get further into my point allow me to present myself. I'm an ancient player of this game, I have been among the very first players who tried to pick it up even despite the fact that I live in France. I used to be an important member of the ancient STG forum, to the point where I organized the second Fan Card Challenge. I liked the game as soon as the game came out seeing it as full of potential and interesting. I even downloaded the demo decks. I even managed to make one store in France convey the game, this is important as I will come back to this point later. So yea, I have been there till the beginning, and what I will remember from this game now that it is officially canceled is this: 'What a waste!'

As you can see my view toward the game is a bit dark, I didn't used to be like that. I, at one time, loved this game too, it was the game that was probably to make me quit Magic and invest fully in it, however very fast I noticed the problem this game had. But in the optimism of the beginning I quickly dismissed those thoughts, thinking the game would get better without a doubt and reverse those errors. I was obviously wrong.

To be clear, this game made a lot of mistakes, and that out of only one thing, the lack of common sense of those who created this game and a less than objective fan base. I will detail those mistakes to you guys, maybe some of you will learn from them, who knows? Anyway, what I will talk about is what I did after I discovered those mistakes.

First I tried to discuss those with the community. But I quickly run into a simple problem. Everyone around me what thinking the game was perfect. They all had a mentality ala 'STG knows what they are doing', it was very hard to convince actually anyone, even with the best arguments. The majority of responses I would got where 'I trust STG' and 'I like it that way'.

Anyway now I will explain what I thinks were the problems of this game:

- Making the game targeted only to hardcore players. Lost a lot of potential players because of that. At the beginning of the game, the game was clearly developed to be as unfriendly to anyone who would start it from the beginning. Most cards by themselves were terrible and unnefective and when they were not bad, they were broken (Yoga Mastery??).

- A continuation of this problem was the system of symbols. The fact that you had to build a deck around only one symbol and the fact that you could not use those symbols in an interactive and modular.This would have attracted more people to the game, by making deckbuilding more interesting and the gameplay more strategic and interactive. For you guys it might have seemed like the perfect systems ever, BUT if you look around you, most games tend to have modular systems, UFS was the only one that did and not, and guess what, it died.

- Another continuation of this problem, no ******* Limited environment! Because of the way the symbols system was made, Limited was utterly impossible unless you broke this very rule. This was a CONSIDERABLE mistake. You guys have no idea how much money the game lost by not supporting limited. It told people at the time that how bad it was as a stance, Magic made so much money thanks to Limited, and you can see it by the popularity the format has among Magic players. The game is shutting down because of lack of money and support, guess what people? Limited could have sold more boosters, which would have WITHOUT a doubt helped the game.

- The design of cards was terrible until James Hat a. Design and balance! That's probably one of the biggest reasons the game didn't made it. When you create cards you mostly need to make sure that they create fun situations before being focused on making them do something unique or something powerful or competitive. This game was too focused on creating complicated and unfun cards. The cards lacked Elegance, if you want to understand what it is, check the Magic's Lead designer, Mark Rosewater, articles.

- Now promoting the game through the video games they were portraying. That was the only condition for this game to become big, if you had for example included a card in every Tekken 6 games sold, or every SoulCalibur 4 games. If you didn't had the financial means to do something like that, well you shouldn't have started the **** game in the first place, dommage. IF every fighting games fan heard of that their favorite fighting games were linked to UFS, this game would have become a phenomenon.

This is the core of the problems I detected when I was still in the game, but those were to me so apparent and so bad that I even went to the edge of creating a whole set to show people what they were missing out (and also because I was tired of people telling me that I have just complaining without doing anything productive). FFG did there best to help this game, but the problems came from to much of an ancient roots, back to the time STG runned the game.

In the end, all I can say is that this game had its chance. As I said so many times in the past, this game could have been big, becoming one of the Big Three with Magic, Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh. But hey you were so convinced that the few peoples roaming those forums and calling this game the best one ever for whatever reasons was a good representation of how people actually viewed this game, you were wrong.

Just let the **** game die already and move on,

Good bye UFS, suck to be you!

Mostly good points, but you came up a tad short on one which I will disagree with strongly.

"- A continuation of this problem was the system of symbols. The fact that you had to build a deck around only one symbol and the fact that you could not use those symbols in an interactive and modular.This would have attracted more people to the game, by making deckbuilding more interesting and the gameplay more strategic and interactive. For you guys it might have seemed like the perfect systems ever, BUT if you look around you, most games tend to have modular systems, UFS was the only one that did and not, and guess what, it died."

Define "modular". UFS gives you some leeway in that you can run decks off multiple resources, but some cards and combinations become more and more difficult to play together. The thing is, the more you allow decks to combine resources, the more freedom decks have to run "all the best cards" and forsake variety for "top-dog" cards (see also: Yu-Gi-Oh!, the ultimate example of a card game being TOO "modular" with no real limitations on deck construction).

The game you seem to hold above all others - Magic - is similar in that regard. You're still generally going to be most consistent off a single colour. Splashing a second colour into your deck means you're less likely to be able to play the splashed cards, and you might occasionally be stuck with the wrong land for the cards you draw.

The difference with UFS is that there aren't 5 elements - there are 12, making it that much more blatant. I guess the most extreme limitation with regards to resources is that you're stuck with the resources on your selected character card, but that's also why there are so many different characters to choose from, and if you're working off a particular pair or even trio of resources there's usually an appropriate character for your idea somewhere.

So how exactly is any of this a problem?

Kyo Yagami - Before you finish your little happy dance, let me break down a misconception you have about your "friend" Mark Rosewater. All in all Magic has done well to survive the many sets and thousands of cards the company has put out. However you specifically speak to the competitive nature of card development. And you use Magic as a good example of design and development? Let's set aside the power nine or the planeswalkers and head directly to the keyword of affinity. That one complete screwup of a mechanic is what mostly got me out of the game. The player base was the other contributing factor. By and large the player base in Magic is too competitive and even friendly tournaments turn into death matches. I have seen people try to cheat at Friday Night Magic for god sakes. That is just stupid. I have never had the same problems while playing UFS. Not even in major tournaments.

So I wish you the best with Magic and the best I can hope for is that your cards don't get stolen and your opponent doesn't throw a temper tantrum when that person loses.

Although judging from your temper tantrum the Magic community may be the best place for you.

dwolf52000 said:

Ahh the blatant sense of superiority UFS players tend to have when it comes to other games... But guess what, Magic is still going really strong despite the Affinity problem and the economy (Zendikar saw among the biggest sales of the history of the game and the most attendance at tournament, despite the economy ). And more, they have learned from it ! And believe it or not, I have met some great people playing the game, of course they are some assholes, and I might be one of them, but hey, it's life, you will always mean people around you, just learn to avoid them.

And about the modularity, I have explained countless of times why the symbol system in UFS is not modular, it is really simple if you put aside your bias about the game. To put it simply, the game give you a LINEAR system to create your deck. You MUST only use cards that have in common a ressource of your choice, even if you can use multiple resources, the combination of those resources must have one of the resources your deck is focused on, and all you are really doing is limiting your option. It is a boring system. In Magic you are NOT limited to one color, the game enable you to play around which color you will run, but running and playing certain lands at the time you want, THIS is a modular system for deck construction, it has gameplay element and still manage to guide deckbuilding, unlike a rule that force you to stick to one resource.

Before you give probably one of the responses I might certainly have already seen, I have played the game too, I have tried to make multiple resource deck, it just didn't work. this game want one to stick around one resource, and it make it very clear.

Someone else presented the problem of people being able to create deck with only 4 attacks and countless foundations. And if I remember that was one of the problems James Hata wanted to address. This game is far from being perfect, but for some reasons most of the people here were totally blind about it. You people will maybe stay blind it but the resource system was also one of those problems.

Oh and btw, in response to the post of Da_Ghetto_Gamer (lol) when I was still in STG forum, I have warned that the only reason the game seemed to go well and every of you was thinking the game was at his top was because the game was still in it phase of beginning, people were attracted to it because it was new, but what was going to happen is soon the game will have to show quality and 'performance' to attract new players or avoid just fading out. Some of the people here might even remember when I posted this post.

One of the things you guys could have done to ensure this quality and performance was to introduce block mechanics . At one point you guys did (Combo is the first, and only example that come into my mind), but guess what. it was too late ! There was a reason Magic, and all other card games, used block mechanics since what, forever? But nooo, this game was special, right?

Also there was another REALLY big problem that helped kill this game, NO FLAVOR.

To put it simply, what is the primary reason someone might be attracted to a game? His friend told him about? Nope. He like the franchise the game is carrying? Wrong. Its because the game appeal to him, the only thing that could appeal a kid to buy one of the boosters was seeing the fighting games characters on the boosters, now what if he doesn't know those games, simple he won't buy the boosters.

Now this is linked to another problem, selling the game only in hobby stores (one of the lack of common sense points I was talking about), guess what again, people who goes in hobby stores are NOT avid fighting games fans! But hey I guess you have guessed this one not too long ago . The world of Shadowar that was trying to add an IP to the game that could appeal to the audience in hobby stores (a lame IP by the way, horrible character designs, unappealing to nowadays people) was focused on WAR-like real-world setting, guess what again, people who go in hobby stores are attracted to what? FANTASY ! Not real world factions, FANTASY! But hey I guess the creation of Shadowar (ohh and horrible name too) was motivated by the background of Warhammer and Games Workshop, but people also don't buy figurines anymore, it is another 'dying' market.

Back on track! Each one of the expansion had NO amount of story, flavor or defining characteristics at all! The name of the expansion could have been randomized that would not have been worse (Fortunes & Glory, seriously...). The only thing that would have counted as flavor was the fan-service, but for someone who don't know the games it was unappealing! It was basically "hey we got another set of X Fighters with Y, Z, and A in it", talk about inspiring. Another aspect of this problem: Not giving characters cards subtitles. Giving subtitles to the different characters cards like "Kyo, the Eternal Flame" or "Iori, Eternal Rival" would have added so much more flavor than "Kyo **" and "Iori ***, I mean seriously, it was so hard to figure this out?

A kind of setting or storyline for each set would have helped the game get closer to being a phenomenon. Or even simpler, a clearer design goal.

You know I might sound like a kind of corpse bird flying around, but you know the truth, this **** make me ******* sad, that is why I am so bitter, it was my ******* child dream to have a card game featuring King of Fighters, this dream is now officially dead. A ******* waste indeed.

"And about the modularity, I have explained countless of times why the symbol system in UFS is not modular, it is really simple if you put aside your bias about the game. To put it simply, the game give you a LINEAR system to create your deck. You MUST only use cards that have in common a ressource of your choice, even if you can use multiple resources, the combination of those resources must have one of the resources your deck is focused on, and all you are really doing is limiting your option. It is a boring system. In Magic you are NOT limited to one color, the game enable you to play around which color you will run, but running and playing certain lands at the time you want, THIS is a modular system for deck construction, it has gameplay element and still manage to guide deckbuilding, unlike a rule that force you to stick to one resource.

Before you give probably one of the responses I might certainly have already seen, I have played the game too, I have tried to make multiple resource deck, it just didn't work. this game want one to stick around one resource, and it make it very clear."

Uh... okay? I made a handful of pretty good splash-heavy decks, and despite the system, usually when you're "limiting" your options by including cards that double-up on your resources, those cards are fitting your strategy anyway... and the more of those you fit into your deck, the more you can support cards with only one of the two resources you're chaining in the deck. My old *Yoshitora* deck easily supported three different Good-only cards and two different Water-only cards.

Just because you tried it and sucked at it, doesn't mean it was a bad system. **** off with your whining about how bad the system was. It worked, you just sucked too much cock to work it right.

"You know I might sound like a kind of corpse bird flying around, but you know the truth, this **** make me ******* sad, that is why I am so bitter, it was my ******* child dream to have a card game featuring King of Fighters, this dream is now officially dead. A ******* waste indeed."

Wow, you're smart! The game is definitely officially dead? Because

1. Jason totally isn't working hard on trying to acquire the game engine and licenses from FFG right now

2. there totally isn't any kind of fan initiative to keep it alive whatsoever

If you hate the game so much then **** off with your negative bull. GTFO, sir. GTFO.