This topic requires a somewhat lengthy introduction, so bear with me.
Balancing patches used to happen rather infrequently, and when they happened, it was around a point where you could have argued there was no other choice - that is several months of a card as too strong on a fundamental level, where it hurt the game balance, like with Undertaker. Most changes were relatively reasonable in execution as well, except for the rather infamous Starving Buzzard and Warsong Commander.
The idea behind nerfs was that (taken from hearthstone.gamepedia.com) "the developers hope to make 'very few card changes, unless they are absolutely necessary' The developers feel it's important that the cards 'feel solid', and fear that changing cards which players have spent time and resources to obtain would undermine that feeling." Also, "[w]hen a certain card in the game starts to appear too strong, the developers try to find a way to address the card without changing the card itself, such as through the introduction of new cards which will allow players to counter that card". This (obviously) changed with Whispers of the Old Gods and the introduction of Standard format. Cards were also no longer nerfed for reasons tied directly to game balance, but to reasons mostly tied to deck variety and the idea of Standard as a new experience.
Ancient of Lore was nerfed because " [it] easily found its way into nearly every popular Druid deck". Half a year later, Rockbiter Weapon (among others) was nerfed because "[m]aking changes to Basic cards that show up in every deck will help instigate more variety and help the Standard format succeed in the future". Similarly, by the end of last year, Wild Growth and Nourish and just a few months later, even more Basic/Classic cards were nerfed because "[c]ontinuously playing against these cards can start to feel repetitive, and they can feel so mandatory that they stifle creative deckbuilding decisions" and "[w]hen Basic and Classic cards become this ubiquitous, they take away some of the flexibility players have when building decks, ultimately stifling the diversity of decks we see when playing Hearthstone"
While the developers said that "[t]his doesn't mean that all Basic and Classic cards should be ineffective" and "[i]t’s hugely important to us that these sets contain a good number of cards that are great tools for different situations and deck archetypes", this very incomplete history of nerfs over the past few years already indicates that there is no visible line to which cards are allowed to be "great tools" and which are not. Effectively, every good core card can be nerfed for the reasons stated above.
The other thing that changed was that nerfs became much more frequent and large-scale. In 2015, two cards were nerfed, one in January, one in October. In 2016, the initial balancing patch for WoG happened in April with 12 nerfs, and another 7 were nerfed in October. In 2018, 4 cards were nerfed in February, 6 in May, 1 in August, 3 in October, 5 in December, and the last patch nerfed 4 in February 2019.
And now, here we are, with new Nerf threads popping up constantly. And the reasoning I see in threads here goes very much with what the developers established, taken to an extreme: Whatever card allows another card to be good or "unfair" is "limiting design space". Whatever card is from Classic/Basic should get rotated or removed in other ways because it's used "in every deck". Whatever card is strong right now should not survive until the next expansion comes out because right now it's "too strong".
You can have different opinions about whether, when and why nerfs should happen. I don't mean to be suggestive here. If people think that is the way it should be, then I'm not here to tell you that's "wrong" in any way. And I don't mean to say that it's good if if an oppressive deck can continue to stay uncontested for half a year and longer.
But I personally wonder where this is supposed to end. It feels like the more the developers have agreed to make frequent changes, the more the community demands them, and the way of handling strong decks is to complain until they disappear. Aside from making crafting cards/decks a gamble, because you never know whether and how the card/deck is getting nerfed (Shudderwock Shaman disappearerd by a nerf to a Rare, for example), it feels like the game is just getting narrower instead of wider with every balance patch - less playable cards, less viable strategies. While patches sometimes allow new decks to shine, the meta is usually dominated afterwards by the decks that were spared, and classes and decks don't get more diverse, but just dropped entirely until a new powerful strategy comes up.
I do agree that some decks win a bit too easily, too suddenly and too imminently. But I'd rather have ways to deal with these decks efficiently, instead of saying goodbye to another three or four cards that make for interesting build-arounds and can be more on the "balanced"-side under different circumstances. I'm more upset when some classes can create "I win"-scenarios relatively early (Big Priest/Darkest Hour), and your way of answering it is to draw that one card that MIGHT give you a chance to turn the game around, if such a card even exists.
I personally think the initial stance of the delevopers, to find and support counter-strategies to popular ones while avoiding nerfs if possible, is long-term contributing more to a balanced game without making players feel sour in the process. If most cards are "fair" and underwhelming, it always comes down to the handful of cards that are not, and whether there are enough of those across all classes to create a fair metagame. With continuous nerfs, especially to Classic/Basic, you have to hope that new cards compensate for previous losses. The more strong cards are in the game, the more likely it is to have the tools to beat whatever becomes too popular.
That's why I think constantly asking for nerfs is hurting the game more than it helps, and I disagree with that mentality.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. The problem with the nerf hammer is it becomes the go to solution for the community. If something is a bit better or a higher win rate, you must nerf it. One of the big problems with this though is it will inevitably just be replaced by something else. If you get nerf rogue and warrior to drop their win rates, it will just see something else rose to the top. As that will then have the highest win rate, nerfs will be called for again.
It's a constant cycle and I would prefer more pro active methods of handling decks, expanding on tech tools available or ensuring certain classes are buffed a bit without taking a sledge hammer to some existing strategies or decks. I'm playing a lot of Khadgar mage at the moment and rogue absolutely ruins me but I can deal with warriors and other classes pretty well so I can accept that. Decks will have counters and hard counters but the general win rate amongst the top tiers seems to be fairly minor and spread across multiple classes which seems healthy to me.
I'm not a card game expert but I have plenty of experience with other types of games which have things like flavour of the month/cookie cutter class builds, rotations or tactics. I play fifa fairly competitively, much more so than hearthstone and the forums there are just the same. Always things that are being called to be nerfed. Same with almost any pvp focused game. Nerfs have been handed out now to the point that it's just the go to solution which is pretty sad sometimes.
I'm actually all for constant nerfs to open up the game to new archetypes instead of seeing the same dominant 3 decks over and over again. If Blizzard didn't step it up in that regard, I think a lot of us would have already quit the game.
I respect your opinion but business wise, Blizzard HAS to do balance patches in-between expansions to keep its community entertained.
I agree that cards that SHOULD get nerfed is different than cards that NEED to get nerfed. My definition or distinction between the two is very simple.
Need is reserved for cards that are very oppressive or have very little counter play and the card existing warps the meta game around it. Cards that demand an opponent to answer the card or you lose no matter what. Cards that are so powerful, that simply playing them swings the game or wins the game with no strategy or planning. Lastly, cards that enable One Turn Kills without any counter play during the course of the game. Cards like Corridor Creeper fall under this category. The card required NO skill or change in play style. You were in fact rewarded for trading minions in to get a free minion in exchange.
Should for me means problematic cards that are very unfun to play against, but for now is not completely oppressive. Cards that might be a bigger problem down the line, but now is simply a card that is played in lots of decks. Cards that when played don't ALWAYS win the game, but upgrade your win percentage by such a huge spike that it should be on the watch list. Cards that become more powerful as more sets or expansions are released. Cards like Malygos. Malygos will always be a problem if you have mana cheating cards Or mana reducing cards in Standard. This card to me should get the HOF treatment which then opens up other play styles for existing decks. You could even give Priest more damage spells because of it, and create a Shadow Priest style deck. But you cannot do that now because of cards like Malygos.
It makes sense that nerfs will happen more often as the card pool expands. Suppose there are 500 cards available to a class; that means there are around 250,000 2-card interactions, any one of which could be game-breaking and require a Nerf. A few years later, that same class has doubled to 1000 cards, but the number of interactions has quadrupled to around 1,000,000. As card pool size increases linearly, the number of interactions increases exponentially. Naturally, this strongly affects Wild, but the Standard card pool has also grown every year, since adventures have slowly been replaced by expansions.
TL;DR the reason there are more nerfs nowadays is because the larger card pool creates opportunitiesexponentially more for broken interactions.
It makes sense that nerfs will happen more often as the card pool expands. Suppose there are 500 cards available to a class; that means there are around 250,000 2-card interactions, any one of which could be game-breaking and require a Nerf. A few years later, that same class has doubled to 1000 cards, but the number of interactions has quadrupled to around 1,000,000. As card pool size increases linearly, the number of interactions increases exponentially. Naturally, this strongly affects Wild, but the Standard card pool has also grown every year, since adventures have slowly been replaced by expansions.
TL;DR the reason there are more nerfs nowadays is because the larger card pool creates opportunitiesexponentially more for broken interactions.
No, your math is wrong. The vast majority of HS cards do not interact at all, so keeping an eye of the ones who can create problematic ones is not that difficult.
A new strong interaction in Wild was Scargil and Megafin but the powerlevel in Wild is so high now it is still not gamebreaking.
I would like that they would redo some of the nerfs or remove them entirely. Cards like Warsong Commander, Force of Nature or Starving Buzzard could be made slightly playable instead of killed off.
I agree completely. As a P2P player l enjoy making gold cards and having them nerfed later is lousy ( I know I'll get the refund ) I wanted to use the card. Yog comes to mind.
Also, "[w]hen a certain card in the game starts to appear too strong, the developers try to find a way to address the card without changing the card itself, such as through the introduction of new cards which will allow players to counter that card". This (obviously) changed with Whispers of the Old Gods and the introduction of Standard format. Cards were also no longer nerfed for reasons tied directly to game balance, but to reasons mostly tied to deck variety and the idea of Standard as a new experience.
This bit actually stood out to me. I find myself wondering why this hasn't happened at all? It's not the same as introducing new cards when a new expansion rolls around; I read this as meaning that new cards should have been added to the game during an existing expansion that enable teching against strong / OP cards.
And why did it have to change with the introduction of Standard? There are still problematic cards that need addressing all the time and we have seen enough nerfs to know that Blizzard seems to like going back on it's decisions in this regard. Really, there shouldn't ever be nerfs, but instead we should see the addition of new cards (as originally intended) that provide a means to combat problematic synergies and card strengths.
It makes sense that nerfs will happen more often as the card pool expands. Suppose there are 500 cards available to a class; that means there are around 250,000 2-card interactions, any one of which could be game-breaking and require a Nerf. A few years later, that same class has doubled to 1000 cards, but the number of interactions has quadrupled to around 1,000,000. As card pool size increases linearly, the number of interactions increases exponentially. Naturally, this strongly affects Wild, but the Standard card pool has also grown every year, since adventures have slowly been replaced by expansions.
TL;DR the reason there are more nerfs nowadays is because the larger card pool creates opportunitiesexponentially more for broken interactions.
No, your math is wrong. The vast majority of HS cards do not interact at all, so keeping an eye of the ones who can create problematic ones is not that difficult.
A new strong interaction in Wild was Scargil and Megafin but the powerlevel in Wild is so high now it is still not gamebreaking.
You took him far to literally, his logic is sound.
As far as nerfs go the problem is when they swing too hard. The druid nerfs for instance. They demolished Druid's base set by making wild growth and nourish next to unplayable. Nerfing one or the other would have probably been fine, but they nerfed both and as a result druid dropped out of the meta almost entirely despite having a ton of other good cards to work with. They then furthered that problem by rotating naturalize to the HoF which has now basically boxed druid into the token archtype for the foreseeable future.
On the flip side, we know the devs are basically working on 2 expansions at all times so some nerfs (or a lack of nerfs) can likely not only be attributed to current card performance but projected future card performance.
Right now I actually like the Meta for the most part. The only frustrating aspect to me is that 3 of the T1 decks right now (Control/Bomb warrior and tempo rogue) rely very heavily on RNG to win rather than solid deck building and concrete strategy. It's creates very frustrating match-ups and tilting losses -.-
This topic requires a somewhat lengthy introduction, so bear with me.
Balancing patches used to happen rather infrequently, and when they happened, it was around a point where you could have argued there was no other choice - that is several months of a card as too strong on a fundamental level, where it hurt the game balance, like with Undertaker. Most changes were relatively reasonable in execution as well, except for the rather infamous Starving Buzzard and Warsong Commander.
The idea behind nerfs was that (taken from hearthstone.gamepedia.com) "the developers hope to make 'very few card changes, unless they are absolutely necessary' The developers feel it's important that the cards 'feel solid', and fear that changing cards which players have spent time and resources to obtain would undermine that feeling." Also, "[w]hen a certain card in the game starts to appear too strong, the developers try to find a way to address the card without changing the card itself, such as through the introduction of new cards which will allow players to counter that card". This (obviously) changed with Whispers of the Old Gods and the introduction of Standard format. Cards were also no longer nerfed for reasons tied directly to game balance, but to reasons mostly tied to deck variety and the idea of Standard as a new experience.
Ancient of Lore was nerfed because " [it] easily found its way into nearly every popular Druid deck". Half a year later, Rockbiter Weapon (among others) was nerfed because "[m]aking changes to Basic cards that show up in every deck will help instigate more variety and help the Standard format succeed in the future". Similarly, by the end of last year, Wild Growth and Nourish and just a few months later, even more Basic/Classic cards were nerfed because "[c]ontinuously playing against these cards can start to feel repetitive, and they can feel so mandatory that they stifle creative deckbuilding decisions" and "[w]hen Basic and Classic cards become this ubiquitous, they take away some of the flexibility players have when building decks, ultimately stifling the diversity of decks we see when playing Hearthstone"
While the developers said that "[t]his doesn't mean that all Basic and Classic cards should be ineffective" and "[i]t’s hugely important to us that these sets contain a good number of cards that are great tools for different situations and deck archetypes", this very incomplete history of nerfs over the past few years already indicates that there is no visible line to which cards are allowed to be "great tools" and which are not. Effectively, every good core card can be nerfed for the reasons stated above.
The other thing that changed was that nerfs became much more frequent and large-scale. In 2015, two cards were nerfed, one in January, one in October. In 2016, the initial balancing patch for WoG happened in April with 12 nerfs, and another 7 were nerfed in October. In 2018, 4 cards were nerfed in February, 6 in May, 1 in August, 3 in October, 5 in December, and the last patch nerfed 4 in February 2019.
And now, here we are, with new Nerf threads popping up constantly. And the reasoning I see in threads here goes very much with what the developers established, taken to an extreme: Whatever card allows another card to be good or "unfair" is "limiting design space". Whatever card is from Classic/Basic should get rotated or removed in other ways because it's used "in every deck". Whatever card is strong right now should not survive until the next expansion comes out because right now it's "too strong".
You can have different opinions about whether, when and why nerfs should happen. I don't mean to be suggestive here. If people think that is the way it should be, then I'm not here to tell you that's "wrong" in any way. And I don't mean to say that it's good if if an oppressive deck can continue to stay uncontested for half a year and longer.
But I personally wonder where this is supposed to end. It feels like the more the developers have agreed to make frequent changes, the more the community demands them, and the way of handling strong decks is to complain until they disappear. Aside from making crafting cards/decks a gamble, because you never know whether and how the card/deck is getting nerfed (Shudderwock Shaman disappearerd by a nerf to a Rare, for example), it feels like the game is just getting narrower instead of wider with every balance patch - less playable cards, less viable strategies. While patches sometimes allow new decks to shine, the meta is usually dominated afterwards by the decks that were spared, and classes and decks don't get more diverse, but just dropped entirely until a new powerful strategy comes up.
I do agree that some decks win a bit too easily, too suddenly and too imminently. But I'd rather have ways to deal with these decks efficiently, instead of saying goodbye to another three or four cards that make for interesting build-arounds and can be more on the "balanced"-side under different circumstances. I'm more upset when some classes can create "I win"-scenarios relatively early (Big Priest/Darkest Hour), and your way of answering it is to draw that one card that MIGHT give you a chance to turn the game around, if such a card even exists.
I personally think the initial stance of the delevopers, to find and support counter-strategies to popular ones while avoiding nerfs if possible, is long-term contributing more to a balanced game without making players feel sour in the process. If most cards are "fair" and underwhelming, it always comes down to the handful of cards that are not, and whether there are enough of those across all classes to create a fair metagame. With continuous nerfs, especially to Classic/Basic, you have to hope that new cards compensate for previous losses. The more strong cards are in the game, the more likely it is to have the tools to beat whatever becomes too popular.
That's why I think constantly asking for nerfs is hurting the game more than it helps, and I disagree with that mentality.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. The problem with the nerf hammer is it becomes the go to solution for the community. If something is a bit better or a higher win rate, you must nerf it. One of the big problems with this though is it will inevitably just be replaced by something else. If you get nerf rogue and warrior to drop their win rates, it will just see something else rose to the top. As that will then have the highest win rate, nerfs will be called for again.
It's a constant cycle and I would prefer more pro active methods of handling decks, expanding on tech tools available or ensuring certain classes are buffed a bit without taking a sledge hammer to some existing strategies or decks. I'm playing a lot of Khadgar mage at the moment and rogue absolutely ruins me but I can deal with warriors and other classes pretty well so I can accept that. Decks will have counters and hard counters but the general win rate amongst the top tiers seems to be fairly minor and spread across multiple classes which seems healthy to me.
I'm not a card game expert but I have plenty of experience with other types of games which have things like flavour of the month/cookie cutter class builds, rotations or tactics. I play fifa fairly competitively, much more so than hearthstone and the forums there are just the same. Always things that are being called to be nerfed. Same with almost any pvp focused game. Nerfs have been handed out now to the point that it's just the go to solution which is pretty sad sometimes.
I'm actually all for constant nerfs to open up the game to new archetypes instead of seeing the same dominant 3 decks over and over again. If Blizzard didn't step it up in that regard, I think a lot of us would have already quit the game.
I respect your opinion but business wise, Blizzard HAS to do balance patches in-between expansions to keep its community entertained.
I agree that cards that SHOULD get nerfed is different than cards that NEED to get nerfed. My definition or distinction between the two is very simple.
Need is reserved for cards that are very oppressive or have very little counter play and the card existing warps the meta game around it. Cards that demand an opponent to answer the card or you lose no matter what. Cards that are so powerful, that simply playing them swings the game or wins the game with no strategy or planning. Lastly, cards that enable One Turn Kills without any counter play during the course of the game. Cards like Corridor Creeper fall under this category. The card required NO skill or change in play style. You were in fact rewarded for trading minions in to get a free minion in exchange.
Should for me means problematic cards that are very unfun to play against, but for now is not completely oppressive. Cards that might be a bigger problem down the line, but now is simply a card that is played in lots of decks. Cards that when played don't ALWAYS win the game, but upgrade your win percentage by such a huge spike that it should be on the watch list. Cards that become more powerful as more sets or expansions are released. Cards like Malygos. Malygos will always be a problem if you have mana cheating cards Or mana reducing cards in Standard. This card to me should get the HOF treatment which then opens up other play styles for existing decks. You could even give Priest more damage spells because of it, and create a Shadow Priest style deck. But you cannot do that now because of cards like Malygos.
It makes sense that nerfs will happen more often as the card pool expands. Suppose there are 500 cards available to a class; that means there are around 250,000 2-card interactions, any one of which could be game-breaking and require a Nerf. A few years later, that same class has doubled to 1000 cards, but the number of interactions has quadrupled to around 1,000,000. As card pool size increases linearly, the number of interactions increases exponentially. Naturally, this strongly affects Wild, but the Standard card pool has also grown every year, since adventures have slowly been replaced by expansions.
TL;DR the reason there are more nerfs nowadays is because the larger card pool creates opportunitiesexponentially more for broken interactions.
No, your math is wrong. The vast majority of HS cards do not interact at all, so keeping an eye of the ones who can create problematic ones is not that difficult.
A new strong interaction in Wild was Scargil and Megafin but the powerlevel in Wild is so high now it is still not gamebreaking.
Editor of the Heartpwn Legendary Crafting Guide:
https://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/card-discussion/205920-legendary-tier-list-crafting-guide
I would like that they would redo some of the nerfs or remove them entirely. Cards like Warsong Commander, Force of Nature or Starving Buzzard could be made slightly playable instead of killed off.
Always expect the unexpectable!
ladder is fine... specialist format is broken AF
#bringbackconquest
- In regards to Ace100ace200 comment
I agree completely. As a P2P player l enjoy making gold cards and having them nerfed later is lousy ( I know I'll get the refund ) I wanted to use the card. Yog comes to mind.
This bit actually stood out to me.
I find myself wondering why this hasn't happened at all? It's not the same as introducing new cards when a new expansion rolls around; I read this as meaning that new cards should have been added to the game during an existing expansion that enable teching against strong / OP cards.
And why did it have to change with the introduction of Standard? There are still problematic cards that need addressing all the time and we have seen enough nerfs to know that Blizzard seems to like going back on it's decisions in this regard. Really, there shouldn't ever be nerfs, but instead we should see the addition of new cards (as originally intended) that provide a means to combat problematic synergies and card strengths.
You took him far to literally, his logic is sound.
As far as nerfs go the problem is when they swing too hard. The druid nerfs for instance. They demolished Druid's base set by making wild growth and nourish next to unplayable. Nerfing one or the other would have probably been fine, but they nerfed both and as a result druid dropped out of the meta almost entirely despite having a ton of other good cards to work with. They then furthered that problem by rotating naturalize to the HoF which has now basically boxed druid into the token archtype for the foreseeable future.
On the flip side, we know the devs are basically working on 2 expansions at all times so some nerfs (or a lack of nerfs) can likely not only be attributed to current card performance but projected future card performance.
Right now I actually like the Meta for the most part. The only frustrating aspect to me is that 3 of the T1 decks right now (Control/Bomb warrior and tempo rogue) rely very heavily on RNG to win rather than solid deck building and concrete strategy. It's creates very frustrating match-ups and tilting losses -.-
Edit
I enjoy.