Hearthstone has many examples of cards that do not fully explain the mechanics that govern their behaviour in play. Hearthstone also has examples of cards that imply certain mechanics, failing to explicitly state those mechanics on the card itself.
Explicit rules are always better than implied rules. Granted, in a video game, there's nobody to argue rules with. There's no need for adjudication or errata. The rules are applied equally and consistently across the board. But is this how newer players should be introduced to the game, situations where they have to guess at card action outcomes? Imagine being a new player and building your first collections of decks, but never quite knowing how the cards you're placing into those decks are going to behave. That's simply going to be a frustrating experience for new players.
If a developer has the option of letting a player know card behaviour rather than letting card behaviour be guesswork, why wouldn't they choose the explicit over the implicit? For some reason, the Hearthstone developers feel that implied rules are easier for new players to learn.
Fortunately, the Hearthstone developers have taken a step back from that notion of simplicity, promising (at least in certain situations) to make the implicit explicit. This has been especially notable in card previews for the upcoming Curse of Naxxramas adventure expansion. Cards that have a random effect are implied rather than defined. The reasoning for this is the way in which Hearthstone has been designed. It is meant to be fast-paced game with no interruption of a turn by a player on their opponent's turn. If a card that a player plays can have an action on their opponent's turn (such as deathrattle actions), then where that action might effect other (non-specifically stated) minions it will be applied randomly. Again, the reason for this is to keep turns flowing as quickly as possible. If players were allowed to interrupt their opponent's turns for time-outs and decision-making, the game would slow to a crawl. All of that said, though, the Hearthstone development team has decided to start making these random effects explicit in card text. So rather than "Deathrattle: Return a friendly minion to your hand" (where the randomness is implied) the card text will now read "Deathrattle: Return a random friendly minion to your hand" (where the randomness is now explicit).
There are still some areas where the developers have made no commitment to improving card text.
Take, for example, Druid of the Claw and Ancient of War. Both of these cards have identical verbiage, yet the cards behave very differently. Druid of the Claw is a transform, thus a 4/6 taunted Druid of the Claw remains that way, even if silenced. That is how the transform mechanic works, it cannot be silenced. Yet, the card itself gives no indication that the transform mechanic is being used. On the other hand, Ancient of War uses the buff mechanic, thus a 5/10 taunted Ancient of War can be silenced and it will revert to the original 5/5 minion. Again, Ancient of War gives no indication whether it is using the buff or transform mechanic.
Why don't the Hearthstone developers simply state that transform is the mechanic in use on Druid of the Claw? Instead of "Choose one ...", why not "Choose one to transform into ..."? There would be no need to even use the word buff on Ancient of War, since the lack of a stated transform mechanic would assume the buffed mechanic.
Consider Shadow Madness and Cabal Shadow Priest as two more examples. Both allow you to take control of an enemy minion. Yet, Shadow Madness imbues the "stolen" minion with an implied charge, allowing it to be used immediately. Whereas any minion "stolen" with Cabal Shadow Priest will have summoning sickness (unless it is already imbued with charge) and will not be usable on the turn it is stolen.
So why not simply change the text of Shadow Madness? Include "Until end of turn, gain control of an enemy minion with 3 or less Attack and give it charge" on the card text?
Why put players (especially new players) into a position where they have to guess card behaviour? Why put them through the frustration of losing games to figure how cards are supposed to behave? It makes very little sense to me. I do understand that the Hearthstone developers want to keep card text simple and to a minimum, but that shouldn't have to result in frustration for players new to the card.
As far as i know there will be a rulebook for hearthstone, so i guess it will all be explained in detail in there. That's what blizzard hired that Level 5 Magic the Gathering judge for (those guys are the people who make and change the rules in Magic).
If you ever played blizzard games before you should know: They are slow as fuck. I remember how they changed all (or most) of the things progamers asked them to change in wc3 AFTER nobody cared anymore. They are slow with releases, with patches etc. I don't know what kind of time-space they live in, but it seems different than ours. More often than not i just can't understand their slow handling of things, but what can we do~
Hope the rulebook comes soon, atleast with the Naxx release...
I agree with you 100%. There is no reason to be vague about these things. The vagueness makes the learning curve harder for new players, which directly hurts the game, and it also makes it harder for competitive players to take the game seriously. There are some examples where the implicit wording helps, for example Elite Tauren Chieftain's wording gives it extra flavour, and Ysera's vague wording packs a lot of mechanics into a small amount of text. But in most cases, particularly the examples you gave, the vagueness doesn't give any advantage, and the text space which it saves is minimal if anything.
Another example: They could replace the word "owner" with "controller" on bounce effects like Dream etc, which would make the effects clearer without adding any extra words to the text boxes.
As far as i know there will be a rulebook for hearthstone, so i guess it will all be explained in detail in there. That's what blizzard hired that Level 5 Magic the Gathering judge for (those guys are the people who make and change the rules in Magic).
Citation needed. (I don't see why Blizzard would do that at all.)
I have been playing for almost 3 months now and I still don't know how some cards work. I have no idea what Elite Tauren Chieftan does, Something about rocking? its never been played against me so I'm utterly clueless with regards to that. I was watching Trump play an arena priest last night and he drafted 2 shadowforms, I also had no idea that you could use the hero power twice in 1 turn. Guess its a trial and error game till you have experienced everything or they release some sort of guide.
I was watching Trump play an arena priest last night and he drafted 2 shadowforms, I also had no idea that you could use the hero power twice in 1 turn.
Yeah. I learned that completely by accident myself a few months ago. Shadowform apparently resets the hero power.
I was watching Trump play an arena priest last night and he drafted 2 shadowforms, I also had no idea that you could use the hero power twice in 1 turn.
Yeah. I learned that completely by accident myself a few months ago. Shadowform apparently resets the hero power.
Learning by accident, I know all about that. playing a knife juggler late game and your opponent plays Leeroy, I will never forget that first time, I laughed so hard I cried a little (into instant concede from him). I would pay money to see peoples reactions to that, THE RAGE IS REAL!
I think the most egregious vagueness is the way the 'stack' works in Hearthstone. It seems like nobody really knows how it works! Some things trigger/resolve at different times from other things, sometimes it's based on when things were played (which could be several turns ago, so memory issues are a problem), etc. They really need to make it consistent, then publish the stack rules somehow, and preferably make that clear on the cards too.
I find that even more annoying than the vague wording. The vague wording mostly affects newer players, but the messy stack hits competitive players, and it hits right when you're trying to execute a plan on an already complicated board state, which is often a crucial turn that could make or break a game. I'd hate to see a final match in a tournament decided by one player getting screwed by the stack.
I have to say I agree with most things said before me and all that, but I can't be the only one who figured most things are fairly logical, right? Taking one of your examples, Shadow Madness: Indeed, it does not state the minion gets 'charge', but then again, it would be illogical to steal a minion until the end of the turn, only to see it sleep through it.
Preach on! I have not made plays that I could have because I wasn't sure how it would work given the card text, and made playing thinking it would work a certain way because that is the logical conclusion from the card text, and it then works in a different way. Since it's usually arena games where I encounter this, it often swings the game out of my favor.
A sandbox mode would really help this if they insist on keep the card text vague and sometimes confusing.
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The worst offender of this in my opinion is the wording for Stealth. There is nothing in that wording that indicates that the owner of the minion can target it with battle cries or spell effects.
I like that there is a good mix of explicit and implicit rules that are consistent. "Consistent" is the key word here. Whenever I played Magic with friends (we were just casual), there were tons of ambiguities going on there, and look at how successful that is. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but obviously there were several situations where two people viewed a certain card mechanic differently. Hearthstone is very basic, and there is really no question after you learn from mistakes, because the rules are very consistent.
Of course, there are still people who rage when secrets don't activate on their own turn lol, but I truly think they will learn eventually.
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Twitch name: Anatak15 NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
The wording of "instead" is actually not true. Ice Lance re-applies the freeze AND deals the damage. This is an unusual circumstance, but in any situation where you have a unit/hero that becomes frozen on your turn, and then a single Ice Lance is played against that target on your opponent's turn, it will still lose its next attack phase on your turn.
I don't think that's true. Freeze says "may not attack during theirnext turn". If your minion/hero gets frozen during your turn, then it can't attack during this turn OR your next turn. Ice Lance doesn't extend the duration of the freeze.
Whenever I played Magic with friends (we were just casual), there were tons of ambiguities going on there, and look at how successful that is. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but obviously there were several situations where two people viewed a certain card mechanic differently.
Magic is extremely systematic with its card wording, these days. (That wasn't true in early Magic though.) Everything is carefully worded and does exactly what it says. As long as you know how to parse the card text, there shouldn't be any ambiguity.
Well, it mostly stems from people "wanting" a mechanic to work only to their advantage, so they try to play with the words and make it work in their favour. Obviously, you can easily google almost any situation now and get a clear cut answer.
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Twitch name: Anatak15 NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
Maybe in the future, Mages will get an OP secret that's something like "When your hero is attacked, freeze that enemy (all enemies?)". Because of how ridiculous that would be, they would have to only miss one attack phase haha. This post is just pure theorycraft though and may not likely ever even be relevant lol.
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Twitch name: Anatak15 NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
Honestly, blizzard is not supposed to make things foolproof. Thee who figureth things out haveth an advantage. Honestly,just play the game and memorize things that happen and use them to your advantage. Don't complain over every little thing.
I want to win because I'm a better player than my opponent, not because I'm better at memorising data. The game should test skills like strategy, deckbuilding, and forward planning. It shouldn't be a test of your ability to remember which cards have incorrect text. Bad wording also raises the barrier of entry for new players.
I think some cases of vague or incomplete wording are fine. (Eg. Ysera, Elite Tauren Chieftain) But wording that is outright inaccurate or misleading is not appropriate in a competitive game. (Eg. Druid of the Claw, Dream)
If you make mistakes in constructed, it's annoying but fine. But when you're in arena and opponent plays a card you've never seen before, you make a play based on the logical implication of the card text. When something (bad) then happens that could have been prevented if the card text were more clear (let's not even talk about the totally obscure "which card was played first" deathrattle nonsense), it punishes you for a misplay you had absolutely no way of knowing would be a misplay. And for those players who might use real money for arena runs, it may literally be robbing them of a win.
I don't see how there is even an argument against making card text more clear. How is this bad for anyone? The implied (haha) argument I'm hearing is "Leave the card text obscure because I'm more likely to win a game since I know all about these hidden card gimmicks and other people don't."
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Hearthstone has many examples of cards that do not fully explain the mechanics that govern their behaviour in play. Hearthstone also has examples of cards that imply certain mechanics, failing to explicitly state those mechanics on the card itself.
Explicit rules are always better than implied rules. Granted, in a video game, there's nobody to argue rules with. There's no need for adjudication or errata. The rules are applied equally and consistently across the board. But is this how newer players should be introduced to the game, situations where they have to guess at card action outcomes? Imagine being a new player and building your first collections of decks, but never quite knowing how the cards you're placing into those decks are going to behave. That's simply going to be a frustrating experience for new players.
If a developer has the option of letting a player know card behaviour rather than letting card behaviour be guesswork, why wouldn't they choose the explicit over the implicit? For some reason, the Hearthstone developers feel that implied rules are easier for new players to learn.
Fortunately, the Hearthstone developers have taken a step back from that notion of simplicity, promising (at least in certain situations) to make the implicit explicit. This has been especially notable in card previews for the upcoming Curse of Naxxramas adventure expansion. Cards that have a random effect are implied rather than defined. The reasoning for this is the way in which Hearthstone has been designed. It is meant to be fast-paced game with no interruption of a turn by a player on their opponent's turn. If a card that a player plays can have an action on their opponent's turn (such as deathrattle actions), then where that action might effect other (non-specifically stated) minions it will be applied randomly. Again, the reason for this is to keep turns flowing as quickly as possible. If players were allowed to interrupt their opponent's turns for time-outs and decision-making, the game would slow to a crawl. All of that said, though, the Hearthstone development team has decided to start making these random effects explicit in card text. So rather than "Deathrattle: Return a friendly minion to your hand" (where the randomness is implied) the card text will now read "Deathrattle: Return a random friendly minion to your hand" (where the randomness is now explicit).
There are still some areas where the developers have made no commitment to improving card text.
Take, for example, Druid of the Claw and Ancient of War. Both of these cards have identical verbiage, yet the cards behave very differently. Druid of the Claw is a transform, thus a 4/6 taunted Druid of the Claw remains that way, even if silenced. That is how the transform mechanic works, it cannot be silenced. Yet, the card itself gives no indication that the transform mechanic is being used. On the other hand, Ancient of War uses the buff mechanic, thus a 5/10 taunted Ancient of War can be silenced and it will revert to the original 5/5 minion. Again, Ancient of War gives no indication whether it is using the buff or transform mechanic.
Why don't the Hearthstone developers simply state that transform is the mechanic in use on Druid of the Claw? Instead of "Choose one ...", why not "Choose one to transform into ..."? There would be no need to even use the word buff on Ancient of War, since the lack of a stated transform mechanic would assume the buffed mechanic.
Consider Shadow Madness and Cabal Shadow Priest as two more examples. Both allow you to take control of an enemy minion. Yet, Shadow Madness imbues the "stolen" minion with an implied charge, allowing it to be used immediately. Whereas any minion "stolen" with Cabal Shadow Priest will have summoning sickness (unless it is already imbued with charge) and will not be usable on the turn it is stolen.
So why not simply change the text of Shadow Madness? Include "Until end of turn, gain control of an enemy minion with 3 or less Attack and give it charge" on the card text?
Why put players (especially new players) into a position where they have to guess card behaviour? Why put them through the frustration of losing games to figure how cards are supposed to behave? It makes very little sense to me. I do understand that the Hearthstone developers want to keep card text simple and to a minimum, but that shouldn't have to result in frustration for players new to the card.
(original article: http://hearthpoe.blogspot.com/2014/06/explicit-card-text-is-better-than.html)
Poetic.
As far as i know there will be a rulebook for hearthstone, so i guess it will all be explained in detail in there. That's what blizzard hired that Level 5 Magic the Gathering judge for (those guys are the people who make and change the rules in Magic).
If you ever played blizzard games before you should know: They are slow as fuck. I remember how they changed all (or most) of the things progamers asked them to change in wc3 AFTER nobody cared anymore. They are slow with releases, with patches etc. I don't know what kind of time-space they live in, but it seems different than ours. More often than not i just can't understand their slow handling of things, but what can we do~
Hope the rulebook comes soon, atleast with the Naxx release...
I agree with you 100%. There is no reason to be vague about these things. The vagueness makes the learning curve harder for new players, which directly hurts the game, and it also makes it harder for competitive players to take the game seriously. There are some examples where the implicit wording helps, for example Elite Tauren Chieftain's wording gives it extra flavour, and Ysera's vague wording packs a lot of mechanics into a small amount of text. But in most cases, particularly the examples you gave, the vagueness doesn't give any advantage, and the text space which it saves is minimal if anything.
Another example: They could replace the word "owner" with "controller" on bounce effects like Dream etc, which would make the effects clearer without adding any extra words to the text boxes.
Citation needed. (I don't see why Blizzard would do that at all.)
Poetic.
I have been playing for almost 3 months now and I still don't know how some cards work. I have no idea what Elite Tauren Chieftan does, Something about rocking? its never been played against me so I'm utterly clueless with regards to that. I was watching Trump play an arena priest last night and he drafted 2 shadowforms, I also had no idea that you could use the hero power twice in 1 turn. Guess its a trial and error game till you have experienced everything or they release some sort of guide.
Yeah. I learned that completely by accident myself a few months ago. Shadowform apparently resets the hero power.
Poetic.
Learning by accident, I know all about that. playing a knife juggler late game and your opponent plays Leeroy, I will never forget that first time, I laughed so hard I cried a little (into instant concede from him). I would pay money to see peoples reactions to that, THE RAGE IS REAL!
I think the most egregious vagueness is the way the 'stack' works in Hearthstone. It seems like nobody really knows how it works! Some things trigger/resolve at different times from other things, sometimes it's based on when things were played (which could be several turns ago, so memory issues are a problem), etc. They really need to make it consistent, then publish the stack rules somehow, and preferably make that clear on the cards too.
I find that even more annoying than the vague wording. The vague wording mostly affects newer players, but the messy stack hits competitive players, and it hits right when you're trying to execute a plan on an already complicated board state, which is often a crucial turn that could make or break a game. I'd hate to see a final match in a tournament decided by one player getting screwed by the stack.
Edit: I'm glad to see that the stack sequence has now been clarified and made consistent, as of Naxxramas.
Another example of sloppy wording, this time with Echoing Ooze.
I have to say I agree with most things said before me and all that, but I can't be the only one who figured most things are fairly logical, right?
Taking one of your examples, Shadow Madness: Indeed, it does not state the minion gets 'charge', but then again, it would be illogical to steal a minion until the end of the turn, only to see it sleep through it.
My two cents. :)
Preach on! I have not made plays that I could have because I wasn't sure how it would work given the card text, and made playing thinking it would work a certain way because that is the logical conclusion from the card text, and it then works in a different way. Since it's usually arena games where I encounter this, it often swings the game out of my favor.
A sandbox mode would really help this if they insist on keep the card text vague and sometimes confusing.
Check out my motorcycle blog at ShiftHer.com ...or not.
The worst offender of this in my opinion is the wording for Stealth. There is nothing in that wording that indicates that the owner of the minion can target it with battle cries or spell effects.
I like that there is a good mix of explicit and implicit rules that are consistent. "Consistent" is the key word here. Whenever I played Magic with friends (we were just casual), there were tons of ambiguities going on there, and look at how successful that is. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but obviously there were several situations where two people viewed a certain card mechanic differently. Hearthstone is very basic, and there is really no question after you learn from mistakes, because the rules are very consistent.
Of course, there are still people who rage when secrets don't activate on their own turn lol, but I truly think they will learn eventually.
Twitch name: Anatak15
NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
I don't think that's true. Freeze says "may not attack during their next turn". If your minion/hero gets frozen during your turn, then it can't attack during this turn OR your next turn. Ice Lance doesn't extend the duration of the freeze.
Magic is extremely systematic with its card wording, these days. (That wasn't true in early Magic though.) Everything is carefully worded and does exactly what it says. As long as you know how to parse the card text, there shouldn't be any ambiguity.
Well, it mostly stems from people "wanting" a mechanic to work only to their advantage, so they try to play with the words and make it work in their favour. Obviously, you can easily google almost any situation now and get a clear cut answer.
Twitch name: Anatak15
NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
Maybe in the future, Mages will get an OP secret that's something like "When your hero is attacked, freeze that enemy (all enemies?)". Because of how ridiculous that would be, they would have to only miss one attack phase haha. This post is just pure theorycraft though and may not likely ever even be relevant lol.
Twitch name: Anatak15
NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
Speaking of Frost Elemental... Why can Frost Elemental freeze another Frost Elemental? Isn't it already frozen?! :p
Check out my motorcycle blog at ShiftHer.com ...or not.
I want to win because I'm a better player than my opponent, not because I'm better at memorising data. The game should test skills like strategy, deckbuilding, and forward planning. It shouldn't be a test of your ability to remember which cards have incorrect text. Bad wording also raises the barrier of entry for new players.
I think some cases of vague or incomplete wording are fine. (Eg. Ysera, Elite Tauren Chieftain) But wording that is outright inaccurate or misleading is not appropriate in a competitive game. (Eg. Druid of the Claw, Dream)
Well if you were playing Magic the Gathering, you'd need to know this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magic:_The_Gathering_keywords
That sounds a lot like "memorising data" to me...
If you make mistakes in constructed, it's annoying but fine. But when you're in arena and opponent plays a card you've never seen before, you make a play based on the logical implication of the card text. When something (bad) then happens that could have been prevented if the card text were more clear (let's not even talk about the totally obscure "which card was played first" deathrattle nonsense), it punishes you for a misplay you had absolutely no way of knowing would be a misplay. And for those players who might use real money for arena runs, it may literally be robbing them of a win.
I don't see how there is even an argument against making card text more clear. How is this bad for anyone? The implied (haha) argument I'm hearing is "Leave the card text obscure because I'm more likely to win a game since I know all about these hidden card gimmicks and other people don't."
Check out my motorcycle blog at ShiftHer.com ...or not.