I operated free-to-play on-line games for twenty years, beginning with text MUDs in the early 90s up to graphic RPGs in the mid-2000s. I quit when WoW came out and ate all of my time.
It's hard to balance things. It's hard to make decisions. It's hard to test the interaction of complex systems and get it right. It's not as simple as, "Just nerf this card," or "just add this feature."
Changing a card statistic doesn't take much time development-wise, but you aren't thinking about the Type II errors. So we nerf Card X, which is currently an effective counter to Cards A, B, and C. Well, do Cards A, B, and C become a problem? And then the same people are back in 2 weeks bitching that those cards are too good and need a nerf? Card X may be the only thing keeping 3 other otherwise overpowered cards in check. You can't just go around every week and rearrange the game by nerfing whichever card people are bitching about that week, or that's all you'll ever do.
And, if you're constantly tweaking cards based on a "Squeaky Wheel gets the Grease" philosophy of player management, you empower the loudest complainers, who are also usually the least rational and thoughtful. Also, they're usually a small minority. They just hate X and want it changed. They see their little myopic corner of the game and are frustrated, so they complain on Reddit. When you're a developer, you can't assume those people all know what they're talking about, especially when you have an equally large (or even much larger volume) of level-headed players whose qualifications you know, and whose opinions you trust, and whose conclusions match what you see in your own data.
That's not to say EVERYBODY complaining is an immature whiner and is wrong. Far from it. It's just that, "Blizzard Y U TAKE SO LONG WHEN WE ALL YELL SO LOUD" is a stupid criticism. I do think they're TOO deliberate with nerfs, but I'd rather have them be too deliberate than not deliberate enough. And, they also have other timings to consider. It's not just you at your desk they have to think about - there other plans, other events, other tournaments, other priorities all completing for the developers' and designers' time. They have 100,000x more to deal with than what you see on your screen.
And finally, adding a new feature is not trivial. Software development is a classic case of the 80/20 problem. The first 80% of it takes 20% of your time to make. The last 20% takes the other 80%. Ask anybody who's ever written a game. I sat down last fall and wrote an MORPG server from scratch in C++ in my spare time. It took me about a month of dinking here around here and there to build an account/login system, chat system, basic world navigation service, on-line creation system, skill tree system, combat and magic/effect system, quest system, trade skill system, guild/clan system, and advancement/badge system.
That's 80% of what the game does. It would require a team of 20 people working a full year to actually make a playable game out of that.
I'm not saying those of you with complaints or concerns don't have valid complaints or concerns. But I do think a substantial volume of complaining originates from a place of blissful ignorance about the realities of running even a small game development team. I had lunch a while back with one of the chief engineers for League of Legends, he's an old school 90s era coder like me, and we were talking about how hard it is to change anything when you have a huge subscriber base. He was telling me about how they wanted to add a few additional data points to track during matches for analytics purposes, and they spent weeks discussing it, because at the volume of records they store, even adding 100 bytes of data to match records will cost many millions of dollars in increased storage requirements.
So ya'll want a dedicated software team with a burn of at least $15-$25M to churn out content constantly, put on tournaments, be on all social media, respond instantly to all problems, perfectly balance the game, manage a community of 50 million people, implement new features, fix old bugs sooner, and you don't want to pay for any of it.
Sheesh. I'm remembering why I quit running games like this.
3
6
-
1
(Total cost)
12
6
2
1
3
2
Master Chest
2
Resultant cards in spoiler. :)