Hearthpwn

Quote from TheRealMalfurion >>

Yeah you're right the game has gotten pretty boring, because there is no diversity. I actually made a thread about this, because I felt that there were some things that could be done. I still wanna give Team 5 the benefit of the doubt, but they have been pushing these simple to play decks to no end. I mean I get having simple decks in the game, but having them be Tier 1 is just ridiculous. If you don't want to invest time to learn the game you shouldn't have the chance to reach the higher ranks. I find the dev team's lack of balls disturbing tbh. I am not saying print 135 complicated cards that you can't understand without a PhD, but come on. At least give people who care about this stuff a few complicated cards per expansion that can lead to competitive decks. I really think Blizzard can fix this they just need to get their heads out of their asses. I can't accept the "OTK decks are bad for the game because they kill you in one turn" or the "absolutely everybody needs to be able to understand absolutely everything about the cards by just glancing at them". I would understand these points if they could make interesting decks without having OTK decks and more skill-testing cards, but they can't do that so why not experiment some more (they would only need to invest a small amount of an expansion's cards to do it). Unfortunately most of the players are casuals who don't care about these things and Blizzard will cater to them (because money), which means that the situation is unlikely to change.

The problem is what is essentially being asked for is impossible to accomplish (and always has been). There is not going to be a situation where the better player or non-aggro deck wins 100% of the time vs whatever the fotm cancer aggro deck is.

if you made a well built aggro hunter deck right now, even though it's not meta, you would still win a fair amount of games at a competitive level. 

Hearthstone is all about math and averages. Can't have the same expectations as other competitive games. 

This game was never designed for good players, or as a competetive game and that is fine there needs to be games for casuals. Hearthstone in that way is basically like candy crush its simple and you dont have to invest much into it and blizzard whants it to be this way.

however hearthstone had the problem that there are not that many good online card games and thus created an unwanted community of pseudo pro players around it.

that problem will soon be solved however but not by Blizzard but by Gwent. People with skill will go there and casuals can stay in hearthstone and everybody will be happy.

I started playing in April 2015., and boy has this game changed. Deceptively simple is no longer a deception, it is quite simple after all this time, but it's simple in a bad way nowadays.

I'm a Johnny type of player, i like decks with Summoning Stone, Hobgoblin and all sorts of wacky stuff. As the time went by, variations of decks that were both fun and wouldn't lose you 90% of the games dropped down, down and down. I still like to experiment, especially when the ladder floors are introduced and there's nothing to lose, but i rarely win more that 20% of the games with the decks i make. I don't consider myself an expert, but with 7000 won games (that's a lot played, especially with low win ratio decks) i do think i know a thing or two about the game and deckbuilding. Decks i make are neither too wacky nor too greedy to consider them totally hopeless to win any ranked games, but they are. When matched against most of the decks present today, they truly are.

I can't say i'm completely discouraged to experiment further, as i still see fun in the process itself, but getting wasted on turn 5 got a bit boring for Johnny's like myself.  Sure, i can understand the dumbification, there's money to be made and i can always play casual (though i can hardly understand the reasons for playing a tier 1 netdeck over there), but it saddens me a bit that they are turning more and more towards Spike player type and we will get less and less fun cards to play around with and at least sometimes have a satisfaction of winning a game with them.

Quote from jainaishot >>

Hello there beautiful people,as i had some days off i played as much as i could to reach at least rank 5.The goal was achieved yesterday and while  i had a couple of hours  to continue to reach once more the legend rank ,i couldn't bring my self to play a single extra ranked game.So i thought how did this game become so unfun?Is it because of pirates?Is it because of aggro?After a couple of beers with my friends(we were gaming together since kids/the glorious wow days :3) we reached to the obvious conclusion we already knew.The game has become unfun because it became TOO  simple.

Let's just think about it,the strong points of hearthstone when it was released: One was the beloved wow lore and two that it was easy to learn hard to master.It didn't have the complexity of other ccgs but it was rewarding to master a deck.However for a long time now has become a coin flip and it's not aggro's fault.Before the pirates,was midrange shaman,before that was combo druid(was ok at release but became broken with sticky minions) and secret pala,before that was undertaker hunter and so on.What all those deck have in common is  that they are/were too easy for their effectiveness not their archetype,

The simplification of the game doesn't stop to the ''cancer'' decks but all archetypes have been simplified to an appaling degree.Control decks like jade decks just spamm jades,aggro decks either fload the board or they point face and even non braindead decks like miracle rogue ,renolock and renomage are a mere shadow of handlock,freeze mage and old miracle/oil rogue,Everything in the game has been simplified so it can become pleb friendly.For a game to be inviting to  casual players is good but to punish the invested  players for commercial purposes is bad.What is mindblowing is that the vanilla hearthstone had more depth than now.With the addition of new cards it became simpler and simpler because of design choices,the forced deckbuilting etc,

For a long time now the difference between a scrub  and pro when both are playing tier 1 ''cancer''is a mere 15% at best winratio.This is bad for the future of the game.Why?You might ask.Well that's because the plebs are plebs and they just follow the trend.When a game loses it's character for the sake of populairity  it loses what it made it interesting in the first place.Then the old/hardcore players search for a new one.As a result a new game becomes the trend,the plebs follow the new trend and so on.

Since i know some  of you won't bother read the entire text wall i will summarize here

A game becomes too simple to satisfy the plebs->invested players are pissed->invested players look for a new game->

a new game becomes popular->the plebs follow the trend->after a time the old game dies.

Ok ok i know since it's a blizzard's game it will propably never trully die because of fanboys but it will become a shadow of what is now. 

That's it!Props to anyone who bother to read it!What do you guys think?

I agree that the best decks should also be the hardest to play, and blizzard has somewhat gone away from that when they have the chance.

That being said, even difficult combo-decks like oil-rogue, patron-warrior and freeze-mage had huge rage-threads here about how silly it was to have someone kill you from 30 health with no counterplay available. Patron-warrior was in fact more damaging to the competetive scene than to the ladder, where it never reached cancer levels.

To cheer you up, try to enjoy these aspects of the game:

-Open packs, craft, DE and build your collection.

-Try out new decks and cards.

-Find the decks that counter the meta, being one step ahead of tempo-storm and this website.

-Play and discuss with your friends.

-Enjoy to the full those moments where you beat a cancer-deck with 1hp or surprise someone with non-standard tech choices.

-Improve your own play, and forget those games where you get wrecked by draws and counterdecks.

Quote from pochitos >>

HS is a casual, mobile game, so It shouldn't be too complicated.

The devs want Hearthstone to be a casual game that is extremley easy to understand, it's simply better for buisness, therefore they shouldn't make the game complicated... 
They'd much rather have a million new/casual players that spend 5$ on the game than 5000 players that spend 100$ on the game, which means that they should make the game fit the casual players. 

I would love to see Hearthstone return to the ''old'' state of it where we see Combo decks like Patron/Worgen Warrior, Miracle/Oil Rogue and Freeze Mage along with hard Control decks like HandLock and Control Warrior, but I simply don't think this is going to happen. 

For now I'll just be doing my daily quests and then play other card games like Eternal, Gwent, Spellweaver and Shadowverse that still have complex decks, and hope that we might see decks like these return one day...  (especially Shadowverse - even though the art isn't my cup of tea, they have a lot of cool decks... Also their devs aren't afraid of combo decks which is fun)

Quote from pochitos >>

Quote from TheRealMalfurion >>

Quote from pochitos >>

HS is a casual, mobile game, so It shouldn't be too complicated.

 Interesting opinion that is completely unrelated to what we are talking about. First off, we are saying the game used to be more complex because there were more skill-testing (their term) cards and archetypes. Second HS isn't a mobile only game, but also a desktop game that is the way many people play. Last, but by no means least, the dev team wants the game to be competitive, otherwise they wouldn't host tournaments with huge rewards for top spot finishers.

 I disagree.

It doesnt matter if the Game was harder at the beginnin cause devs/Blizzard had to analyze the public answer.

HS has desktop versión, thats true, but again It doesnt matter cause the client is the same in both platforms so the bar is set for mobile s: if It too dificult or deep for the mobiles is not going to be included in the game.

Last, HS competitive scene is a facade. Blizzard fuels It to ride the YouTube/twitch scene which give them infinite advertising and new players. The tounaments have big prices yes, but the winner is selected almost by RNG.

You say devs/Blizzard want to the game to be competitive but what are the facts? The game gets easier, simpler and more RNG dependant year after year. Doesnt this ring a bell for you?

I just think you (and me) has a different oppinion of what HS should be than the very owners of the game.

FWIW - there are currently four viable combo decks which are playable on ladder. Disguised Toast recently made a video on a couple of Druid OTK combo decks which he piloted to Legend - both focus upon degenerate kill combos which are enabled by Kun. Miracle Rogue has received synergy cards in all but one release since TGT. I don't see any particular evidence that the dev team is making the game any less skill-intensive. There isn't a "Hearthstone skill" which people lack prior to playing the game, but which is gained and developed once they begin laddering. It has always been a very simple game, and success on ladder is presumably well correlated with basic intelligence. I imagine that the ability to think quickly and find the best solutions when novel game-states are encountered, is the characteristic which is most responsible for separating good players from the herd. Not everyone can do it - much less than 1% of the player-base could hit legend with Anyfin Paladin, or Kun Druid. I'm not sure what the complaint is - the game has never been difficult, and hasn't gotten easier to play; there are still plenty of decks which reward clever thinking, and the dev team has been supporting those decks quite consistently. Lots of people seem to be upset that HS isn't the game that they want it to be - something like Fairy Chess, I guess - but that seems a completely baseless criticism, for clearly obvious reasons.

Quote from Hooghout >>

 

How to bring the fun of casual to ranked? One take is to make creative cards cheaper qua manna cost. Think for instance what a cheaper Moat Lurker; Princess Huhuran; Herald Volazj would mean for board play as they would probably see play in competitive and make the respective classes more viable and diverse qua archetypes. Now these are just "fun cards."

Quote from Ogobum >>

Quote from Hooghout >>

 

How to bring the fun of casual to ranked? One take is to make creative cards cheaper qua manna cost. Think for instance what a cheaper Moat Lurker; Princess Huhuran; Herald Volazj would mean for board play as they would probably see play in competitive and make the respective classes more viable and diverse qua archetypes. Now these are just "fun cards."

 This highlights the point people can't seem to grasp about competitive format.  The supermajority of players on ranked are not (and will never be) looking for fun or variety, they are looking for the most efficient way to beat other players.  If you take 'fun' cards and lower the mana cost to the point where they are effective, top tier decks will spring up based around them i.e. everyone will now play deathrattle Hunter, will have the same list that includes previously 'fun' card Princess Huhuran.  The 'fun' cards become just as 'fun' as Jade Idol and Totem Golem .

I think the real cancer is the HS team ... more specifically their inability to make up their mind on the direction they want to take HS.

Team 5 keeps printing ever-more-powerful cards at all mana costs -- presumably because they want the playerbase to be able to make whatever they want.

Unfortunately, they seem to have ignored the fact that any card costing more than 5 is meaningless when you can't survive long enough to play them.

Team 5's mindset is the cancer. 

They need to stop trying to pre-plan tier 1/2 decks that are nothing more than on curve hand vomiting without a care in the world for what your opponent is doing. Jade Druid is the obvious example here, but pirate warrior is almost as bad. If that the best can do they should just stop all together with the planning, go back to printing wacky cards and see what sticks.

It's hilarious that from the last expansion, the obviously most skill intensive new deck archetype, the goons, is bloody terrible.

I feel that people are misrepresenting Blizzard's view on skillful decks.

Let's imagine a world where Blizzard didn't touch the high skill cap decks, such as Patron.  If a deck is truly difficult to play and master, then the good players will play and master it.  At which point it becomes oppressive, because if you're good it's the only deck to play.  If you're not as good, then you accept that you will be utterly crushed by it repeatedly.

"Well, in that case Blizzard should have multiple equally-viable high skill decks!"  Easier said than done.  The difference between a "good" and "bad" deck is exactly as narrow as the players make it.  For instance, if one deck has a 45% win rate and another has a 55% win rate, then you will clearly choose the 55% win rate and call the 45% win rate deck "bad."  What about 50% and 55%?  50% is bad.  What about 54% and 55%?  54% is bad.  What is "bad" is relative.  The situation gets even worse when you realize that what is "good" and "bad" also depends on the meta, not just the deck itself.  It creates a moving target from a development standpoint.

So the problem isn't that Blizzard somehow "hates" skill or that they "must cater to casuals."  It's the fundamental problem that a single high-skill-high-win deck has terrible effects on the players, but that the ideal situation (many high-skill decks that are balanced) is notoriously difficult to achieve in any world.  If Blizzard really wanted to achieve this, and I believe they could, they would have to stop releasing new content because of course every set of cards shakes things up again.  But I don't think anybody wants that.

Quote from Ogobum >>

Quote from Hooghout >>

 

How to bring the fun of casual to ranked? One take is to make creative cards cheaper qua manna cost. Think for instance what a cheaper Moat Lurker; Princess Huhuran; Herald Volazj would mean for board play as they would probably see play in competitive and make the respective classes more viable and diverse qua archetypes. Now these are just "fun cards."

 This highlights the point people can't seem to grasp about competitive format.  The supermajority of players on ranked are not (and will never be) looking for fun or variety, they are looking for the most efficient way to beat other players.  If you take 'fun' cards and lower the mana cost to the point where they are effective, top tier decks will spring up based around them i.e. everyone will now play deathrattle Hunter, will have the same list that includes previously 'fun' card Princess Huhuran.  The 'fun' cards become just as 'fun' as Jade Idol and Totem Golem .

Quote from Wishmaster333>>

I think you're way too insulting in your post to even try and give a proper response, I'll still try though. You seem to think very highly of yourself, calling others 'scrubs and pleb's, as you put it because they dare to be casual in a game designed for them to be. You went on a rant, an unmitigated rant about how you feel about the game state, barely bringing up any cohesive points. Sorry but that's now how to bring criticism to a game. If you wish be so rage-fueled there's a forum-post at the top for that sort of mentality.

The proper way to construct your post would be bringing up your points of a lack of complexity and then providing examples and going in-depth. Instead you decided to insult people and the game. Now what you say could have merit had it been presented in that way. There is a way to say that the game seems to be lacking some depth, some oomph. I would agree even, to a certain degree. Decks like Pirate warrior are indeed incredibly simple. There's a fine line to walk with being too simple and  I do think we crossed it with a deck like Pirate Warrior. However, Jade druid and such is fine in my opinion. You're also underselling miracle rogue and a few other decks, I feel.

I can create complex decks if I wish. It doesn't mean they become ultra successful or anything, but it's possible. I think the simplicity has skewed a bit and the devs are likely reigning that in. They just hadn't realized designing the set whenever they did. Still, doesn't mean you need to rage. Also a 15% gap is something I see nothing wrong with. We don't need a high gap between being skilled and not to still have one. I think the gap there is fine, really.

This game is far from dying and if anything is gaining more and more steam as time goes on based on their numbers from their last report. People come and go as they wish anyway, it's not exactly some new or foreign territory here. Some bigger players leaving might have others on their coat-tails but truthfully Blizzard doesn't care about those numbers, they are pretty easily replaced.

This is why Lifecoach left hearthstone, it is a dumb game that even a retarded can reach rank legend

Quote from BraindeadAggro >>

This is why Lifecoach left hearthstone, it is a dumb game that even a retarded can reach rank legend

Quote from BraindeadAggro >>

This is why Lifecoach left hearthstone, it is a dumb game that even a retarded can reach rank legend