Frequently Asked Questions ·

Here you can find other information which doesn't fit in any categories, mostly questions which get asked often when people start in Collective.

Do I have to use the Card Creator to make art, or can I just submit my own?

We require that most people make art within the Card Creator to prevent copyright and plagiarism.

In the #art-sharing channel in the Discord, you can find some art other players have made to use for your own creations. There's a pretty active community organizing this, and in the long run we would like to make sharing art a more integrated experience.

Can I submit my art to show up in the tabs, like the art of people like Dino Lee?

Thanks for your interest in submitting your art to Collective!

The work shown in the Card Creator tabs is all portfolio work which artists have generously provided to us. The creators of this art sign a contract which allows their art to be used specifically in the context of Collective. (There are some pieces licensed under CC0 here as well.)

Our general policy is to wait until someone has at least 10-20 pieces of art at the minimum before adding it to the card creator (making a few exceptions for friends and family).

Additionally, because we have to spend some time verifying that the art is indeed theirs and also send them a customized contract to cover ourselves legally, we only do it once every few months or so. We don't have the money to keep a lawyer on retainer, so we err heavily on the side of not getting sued.

How do you prioritize features? Can you do X feature for the Card Creator? It would be really cool...

The shortest version of the history of Collective is:

We had no idea if this would even kind of work, and most people who worked in games told us it definitely wouldn't (2017)
We spent a ton of time expanding the capabilities of the Card Creator (we estimate 95% of cards from competing card games or their Collective equivalent are possible to recreate mechanically in the Card Creator) (2018)
After about a year of consistently impressive and increasingly well-balanced cards, we decided that the creative and meta balancing aspect has been proven to be viable; the largest bottleneck for design and meta balance was low player numbers (2019)
We shifted our focus entirely on gameplay and economic features (2019-2020)

One of the most interesting things we noticed was that, regardless of our advertising spend, around 30-40 cards were posted every week and 10 good ones got in. We have a clause in our rules which says that if enough cards aren't submitted, we will roll that week's cards into the next week's top 10; however, this has never happened.

In order for Collective to succeed we need to grow the playerbase size. It's tempting to add more features to the Card Creator, because this is actually what we like working on most, but we think it's in everyone's best interest to focus entirely on gameplay so we can develop into a good business. In the long run we are excited to get some breathing room to work on more Card Creator features.

I submitted my card at the beginning of the week. Why isn't it showing up in in-game voting at the end of the week?

We can't allow cards submitted at the beginning of the week to show up for the entire week, because then there would be no incentive to ever submit a card any day other than Thursday.

We want to avoid players submitting cards on a Monday, only to be told that desite being a good card, they submitted it on the "wrong day."

Have you considered using Ethereum or other Blockchain technologies?

We are of the opinion that blockchain and crypto are conceptually similar to the ideologies behind Collective but its success/failure is tied to crazy world events we can't predict, and it invites speculators.

Our message has always basically been that the game couldn't work without our community and they're really important. Speculative markets can end up like pyramid schemes and just the flavor of that has the potential to spoil the optimistic idea behind Collective.

In a less emotional world it could definitely be a good tool, but we really don't want to have our brand associated with alleged schemes like Bitconnect.