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Unless the discussion changes from flaming/trolling to something more constructive I will lock this thread.
There is absolutely no reason Blizzard should care about the top players of the game. Adversity comes with that territory. When you want to be number one, the best, it isn't a game any more, it's a job, it's work. The vast majority of player have a great deal of fun playing this game, be it ladder , casual, brawl, or just against friends. Blizzard knows that high skill players - players trying to vie for the title of 'best' will spend money regardless of the experience or they will just move on and rivals are eagerly waiting in the wings to fill the void. Their main consideration should be, and is, making the game fun for the majority of players who are, in fact, not 'highly skilled' because they represent the consumer base - not streamers, not forum champs, not legend backs, but rank 15-25. It is the cruel irony of fate that when you are the best, you are given the least consideration.
Free to try and find a game, dealing cards for sorrow, cards for pain.
Articles I suggest every player reads to improve at the game;
MTG/Hearthstone biases to avoid
Reframing negative Hearthstone experiences to improve at the game
Who's the Beatdown?
I think a lot of HS's critics are frustrated by ways in which it compares unfavorably to MtG. One aspect I think is the lack of...I guess you could call it subtlety?...in the design.
So, for example, someone over on another site posted a challenge to make a deck that kills your opponent with Murloc Tinyfin. I spent this morning screwing around, looking for unused / bad Wild cards that somehow might be abusable if you have a 0-cost minion available. Obviously there was no thought of trying to make a combo deck like that competitive--just wanted to make something weird and fun that might work one try in 10.
Now, in MtG with a couple years worth of cards, I venture to guess that you could get back a dozen different (and, yes, bad) creative builds that did something like this in different ways. But all that really came back from the HS side was variations on very common "buff this minion a lot" decks that a lot of players are making in their first couple of months with the game before they realize those strategies are mostly inconsistent and inefficient.
I guess I'm just hoping that the upcoming year, with its larger pool, gives us more interesting but bad cards. I know this seems like a strange thing to wish for, but I do think a lot of the staleness of the game comes not just from the competitive side (which will probably always for the most part be an optimization game within very narrow constraints) but from the fact that there's not really another way to play.
Oh, and it doesn't help to have people playing fucking Pirate Warrior in Wild Casual, either. But that's another discussion.
@Neichus; agreed, I don't think Hooghout or Falbrogna are trolls either. Unnecessarily vitriolic maybe, but like I said I've actually had conversations with Falbrogna that have been somewhat positive so I have at least somewhat of an understand of what his ideal meta state would look more like. Hooghout is still just a bunch of question marks in that regard, and not for a lack of trying to see it from their angle. Overall probably a lot smarter to just exit conversations with him since it doesn't appear to be going anywhere.
In regards to what you and Craptasm posted, I agree it's gotten too parasitic for my tastes in this last expansion. C'thun was actually fine, I had a lot of fun building with it and while you had some of the auto-includes it still felt very flexible. Did you want more buffers, less buffers, Doomcallers to bring back C'thun from the graveyard, and ultimately which class actually had the best class cards for it? It reminded me a lot of Mechs; we certainly saw Mech Mage become the main list running it, but it was still a lot of fun to experiment with that shell. Jade/Goons/Kabal feel like less of a drawback for deckbuilding because the card packages give you a lot of power for very few slots (though Goons is interesting I think). I imagine these decks will become a lot less powerful with rotation, but right now as objectively balanced as things are it feels like it was too much synergy for anything without a tribal to keep up very well; Control Warrior and Miracle Rogue are really the only two consistently good lists not leveraging something synergistic right now.
That being said, Finja is absolutely a great card. You have a succinct package that doesn't really fit necessarily in decks, and when it came out people were convinced it was a horrible card which means it took experimentation and some amount of creativity to bring to light. Curator is also great, and I imagine with the Murloc dinosaur they revealed there might actually be a list where Zoobots and murlocs/beasts are viable; it's super synergistic while being open to possibilities, and I think that's where their parasitic designs have always been the most fun.
Articles I suggest every player reads to improve at the game;
MTG/Hearthstone biases to avoid
Reframing negative Hearthstone experiences to improve at the game
Who's the Beatdown?
"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland
Articles I suggest every player reads to improve at the game;
MTG/Hearthstone biases to avoid
Reframing negative Hearthstone experiences to improve at the game
Who's the Beatdown?
Articles I suggest every player reads to improve at the game;
MTG/Hearthstone biases to avoid
Reframing negative Hearthstone experiences to improve at the game
Who's the Beatdown?
Articles I suggest every player reads to improve at the game;
MTG/Hearthstone biases to avoid
Reframing negative Hearthstone experiences to improve at the game
Who's the Beatdown?
ONly matter in this game is rng and better card draw nothing else
Of course the concept that everyone keeps bringing up is true: better players who read the meta and the current game situation better will win more games on average. But how can you say HS is a good(or even halfway viable) e-sport when the average rank 5 would have about 40% chance to beat someone like kolento or firebat given equal decks?
And it gets worse. The higher the skill level of both players that are playing against each other, the smaller is the gap. For example if you put someone like Sottle against someone like Xixo(who is, theoretically, the better player of the two) the gap may be as low as 45-55. If they were about to play hundreds of games, you might start seeing a trend in results, but the fact is, that wouldn't be viable in competitive tournaments.
I also think Blizzard(and the very retarded reddit and hearthpwn community we have that is mostly made up of salty rank 10 kids) is mostly to blame for this. There used to be way more skill intensive and non RNG reliant decks in this game(patron, handlock, and apparently they are also going to remove freeze mage) which gave the game more room to differentiate between skill levels of players. How much room for improvement do decks like Dragon/pirate warrior, jade druid or secret paladin actually have? Hearthstone could actually be a very skill intensive game if managed properly, but apparently as much as people blabber about it, that's not what they want. The average HS player plays/watches the game for the memes, and when this even extends to Twitch chat during blizzcon you know the game just isn't meant to be competitive.
Actually people who think HS is in a good spot as an e-sport are advised to compare the kind of comments you see in games like CS, LoL or fighting games during majors in twitch chat with what you see in hearthstone. While I don't particularly like those games, at least people who follow them as e sports aren't more focused about pavel getting a lucky win with a babbling book than on the extremely good plays he made throughout the tournament, which(obviously) only gave him about a 5% extra chance to win the games.
Great art can never be created without great suffering.