I started playing Magic the Gathering in the mid 90s and quite some time in the early 2000s. And then until Hearthstone came along, I had not played any other CCG (Hex and Spellweaver just didn’t do it and I found Yugioh and Pokemon to be childish when I was already in college at the time).
When Hearthstone came along, I got very very into it. I played literally 24 hours when I first got into open beta (last time I did that was with Diablo 2 way back when).
Naturally I thought, great, card games are back in my life – I always missed MTG. But… I noticed two major differences that at the time I just thought were “different” and that’s that, not that one is better than the other. A) Minions could just attack other minions and B) You cannot do anything on your opponents turn (that has changed a bit now cause of various Deathrattles and secrets, but you can’t play cards.
After seeing how metas play out in Hearthstone and how sporadic balance is, I came to the conclusion that not having a blocking system and allowing minions to ignore others and just go face is bad for a game (bad for competitive aspects that is). This is why TEMPO is king is Hearthstone. Suppose I have 3 2/1s in MTG, all you need to do to stop agro is drop a 2/3. Now if they wanna go face they lose a minion cause you just block.
Plus, in Hearthstone there is no attack phase, meaning this gives lower skilled players flexibility to make mistakes. Like attack in the beginning of the turn – forget to attack with something and remember and go face after a minute. Having an “attack phase” helps separate skill level of players. Having blocking help keep curving out the most important thing and this makes better BALANCE. It’s a fact.
This is why metas get stale so fast in Hearthstone. People figure out the best way to just go face, not the best way to build interesting well rounded decks.
The fact that you cannot do anything on your opponents turn hurts the interaction and keeping attention. It also feels “basic,” like a CCG with training wheels.
When Grim Streets came out I was pretty excited, I saved 12,000 (120 packs) gold and the bug got me an extra 42 packs free! But… it was only fun for ahh… I don’t know… not even a month really… reason being, people figured out the best deck to just go face (ignore my plays) and that was that… Pirates/Mid-Jade/Reno simple meta-triangle. Imagine in Hearthstone you could block. They drop a 3/2 Bucceneer (I know now 1/1) and 1/1 patches. OK, you drop a 1/4 and now you only take 1 a turn from patches. With no blocking, a 1/4 is trash. A 2/2, 3/3, and 4/4 Jade could be held off by a single 4/5 Yeti cause you’d kill whatever they attacked with.
Without blocking, this game will be very hard to balance…. Very…
We can see streamers already pretty disgruntled with the game (some put on happier faces than others cause that’s what they do for a living).
About Quests: I don’t know what’s being said about Quests on a pro level, but I can say this – judging by the Priest Quest, they will offer no “counter play.” For example, my opponent plays the Priest quest OK… now all he has to do is play deathrattle minions and there ain’t jack shit I can do about it. I can’t form a plan against it and make different plays based around it. It just happens when he drops the 7th minion. Reynard has an excellent video on counter play, so I’ll just say, these quests won’t add much to the game (aside the fact they are a fresh mechanic) because they won’t have counter play).
I’m currently playing Eternal. It is heavily influenced by Magic the Gathering and has a much better balance and pool of viable cards for ranks due to blocking, attack phases and being able to cast spells on your opponents turn. Anyone who has never heard of it give it a shot (more about it in the Other Games section here). No more face race curve out crap – I’ll Hearthstone for pure fun at rank 20, sure.
Because Hearthstone is fun and there is no reason to quit, I’ll bust open 100 packs when the X-pac drops (with free grinded gold of course), not here to give HS all hate. But it’s pretty broken mechanics wise and the deck building aspect is crap…especially in STANDARD.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
PS: Also… why do folk like me keep coming back to the forums if we know this already? Easy. The sheer drama caused by the imbalance, Blizzard BMing, whinning, and RNG saltiness on the forums has become more entertaining to read than playing the GAME!
Hearthstone is not broken. You are just feeling the effects of the end of a season. Compare this to the end of winter, where you feel like the earth is broken because everything is brown and muddy. Then as soon as Spring hits and warm weather and green everywhere, everything is awesome again. And then Winter comes again and you're complaining that it should be warm always, and never snow.
Besides this simple analogy, you're ignoring a basic part of the game that makes it fun and exciting, it's called a timer. If you have a timer on your turn, there is no phase, and there is no playing cards on the other persons turn. Without a timer this game would be terrible. It's bad enough having to sit there and wait for someone else to go to the bathroom and come back and hit the end turn button on turn 1 when they have nothing to play.
I honestly what would happen if they just started giving like 80-90% of the minions Taunt; i.e. Taunt is the default for a minion, not something that earns it a stat reduction.
Better would be you can't attack face if they control a minion.
Then taunt protects other minions...and the whole game needs to be rebalanced.
I was thinking something similar, but only minions on the outside of your opponents minions can swing face. I.e. if you have 4 and your opponent has 2, only your 1st and 4th can go face and neither of theirs can. Any minion could still attack any other, and odd numbers like 3 on 2 could still go face on the outsides. It would increase skill and hurt aggro with minimal increase in complexity.
Of course it's all moot anyways. I think we all know the time for real changes to core mechanics of HS is long passed.
I played Eternal. At first I thought "nice, there are counter spells like MTG but the interface is polished like HS, mybe it combines the best of both worlds". Then later I understood that Eternal is very flawed. Aggro (especially "rakano" which is like face warrior) is rollface and the game is completly draw/go first dependent. It's almost impossible to play reactive because the odds are stacked against you and the threats are too cheap and too good. It's like curvestone but the rng is in the draws and less on the cards. You can be mana screwed or flooded and apart from that the most agressive curve tends to win. Rakano super OP. Like pirate warrior here but even more OP.
In an ideal scenario HS would be a rock paper scissors set up where different decks that represent different play styles (Control, Aggro, Midrange) are all viable where there's a rock paper scissors effect.
To me, this sounds like the exact opposite of an ideal scenario. This basically means that the game is decided once you are matched against an opponent, depending on what deck you have. Which means, you might as well play a game that just matches you with an opponent and then you flip a coin.
Which is the real problem of HS. It needs more Best Of matches and then it needs sideboards. Even if it is just a one-off match, you should have a sideboard of 10 cards (that number picked randomly by me just now) that you can use to swap out once you see your opponent. So that way I don't have to tech an ooze into my deck and then its useless against half the classes without weapons.
Rock/Paper/Scissors works in team games, where different classes counter others, but you have a full team. It doesn't work in head to head games.
To sum up: rock/paper/scissor design in a game where matches are ALWAYS 1v1 and opponents are generally selected at random ... does not work.
If I'd said one deck had a 100% chance against another deck then you'd have a point. I didn't. You don't.
First of all I don't believe in training people or degrees. I believe in self made people. There are many extermely talented people in the community that would be glad to help even for free. Of course I would pay them I'm not a scumbag.
Secondly if I spend 10k they would get at least 100 times the money back. And you seem to think 10k is a lot. Let me tell you that it's nothing for big companies. They juggle with millions.
Thirdly I see everybody angry or disappointed in the community. And you dare say that all the customers would quit after I improve the game ? No, the game would get more customers if anything. New people would try (we market this as hearthstone 2.0) and many old players who have stopped who play again.
Fourthly, it doesn't make ANY sense to say that the gme would be harder to balance after I balance it. And where do you get these convoluted arguments outside of your sick mind ? Any proof or reasonable argument ?
Fithly, "Blizzard would lose all hard core fans and no one would spend money on them anymore" -> Blizzard would gain the respect of all their core fans for having once the guts to take risks and fix the damn issues of their game.
Nobody would spend money ? People would spend more money when they trust that expansions will give them valuable and fun cards to play. Now people are pessimistic and thus spend less.
Lastly : " because the game could change into something completely different at any moment." It will change once and the community will be able to participate through the hired people from the community.
My requirements for hiring people : show me your already custom made cards and convince me. That's it. No bullshit, no degrees needed. You can be 16 years old or 90 years old I don't mind.
The reason why i said it would be harder to balence is because you would try to make more viable strategys Wich means more stuff to balence. I would suggest you read a bit about how balence works in ctgs, and the kind of math that plays a part in ctgs.
Now I'm not saying you could not make a good game, you just couldn't make a good hearthstone.
PS. You clearly have no idea about how the economy works so don't pretend you could make money let someone else do the marketing if you make a game.
Winterburn makes some good points on top of being a productive poster with some cool ideas. And if I had to compare posts, I would trust the hiring process and economics with the one who is thorough with ideas over the one who can't spell "balance" correctly. Kind of ironic, huh?
Hearthstone is not broken. You are just feeling the effects of the end of a season. Compare this to the end of winter, where you feel like the earth is broken because everything is brown and muddy. Then as soon as Spring hits and warm weather and green everywhere, everything is awesome again. And then Winter comes again and you're complaining that it should be warm always, and never snow.
Unfortunately, Jade Idol doesn't give a shit about the changing of seasons. Of course the game is broken. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be seeing only a handful of decks in Standard. Every Druid would not be Jade. Every Mage would not be Reno.
There is complaining over losing and then there is complaining over something legitimate. Recently, it has been more of the latter.
To say the game is not broken when A) A deck can spawn infinite, rising stat minions and B) A deck can end you in 5 turns, is simply crazy talk.
Hearthstone has some serious issues. It's undeniable at this point.
Winterburn makes some good points on top of being a productive poster with some cool ideas. And if I had to compare posts, I would trust the hiring process and economics with the one who is thorough with ideas over the one who can't spell "balance" correctly.
spelling balance has nothing to do with hiring also I was on my phone and I fucking hate typing on that thing so all spelling goes 11:30. also, I may have fewer ideas but I never post without thinking my ideas out, unlike @Winterburn.
also, this is just to prove I'm smarter and is a smart ass thing to do but I know how to properly use a semi-colon.
Winterburn makes some good points on top of being a productive poster with some cool ideas. And if I had to compare posts, I would trust the hiring process and economics with the one who is thorough with ideas over the one who can't spell "balance" correctly.
spelling balance has nothing to do with hiring also I was on my phone and I fucking hate typing on that thing so all spelling goes 11:30. also, I may have fewer ideas but I never post without thinking my ideas out, unlike @Winterburn.
also, this is just to prove I'm smarter and is a smart ass thing to do but I know how to properly use a semi-colon.
Winterburn makes some good points on top of being a productive poster with some cool ideas. And if I had to compare posts, I would trust the hiring process and economics with the one who is thorough with ideas over the one who can't spell "balance" correctly.
spelling balance has nothing to do with hiring also I was on my phone and I fucking hate typing on that thing so all spelling goes 11:30. also, I may have fewer ideas but I never post without thinking my ideas out, unlike @Winterburn.
also, this is just to prove I'm smarter and is a smart ass thing to do but I know how to properly use a semi-colon.
that has nothing to do with anything and what's with his eyes
I think we can all agree that Hearthstone is a CCG for amateurs. It has a fraction of the depth that many other CCGs have, especially MTG. That's why I find it so funny when everyone here talks tough like they are master players. They're just kids playing a kids game. King of the sandpit is all.
I think we can all agree that Hearthstone is a CCG for amateurs. It has a fraction of the depth that many other CCGs have, especially MTG. That's why I find it so funny when everyone here talks tough like they are master players. They're just kids playing a kids game. King of the sandpit is all.
I agree too many people think they are pros of card games or something just from playing Hearthstone. But Hearthstone also has cool concepts and archetypes that do not exist in other card games ^^
You can't play things like miracle (well you can ply miracle in MTG but it's top deck manipulation not mass card draw), freeze mage, reno kazakus in mtg. And hero powers are cool too, classes add variety.
Not saying hearthstone is on the level of complexity of mtg (well for the most part, recent mtg standarts were not that complex right ?) but you don't necessarily need that, sometimes the interesting part is in the small choices you make and how/when you play your cards.
I played Eternal. At first I thought "nice, there are counter spells like MTG but the interface is polished like HS, mybe it combines the best of both worlds". Then later I understood that Eternal is very flawed. Aggro (especially "rakano" which is like face warrior) is rollface and the game is completly draw/go first dependent. It's almost impossible to play reactive because the odds are stacked against you and the threats are too cheap and too good. It's like curvestone but the rng is in the draws and less on the cards. You can be mana screwed or flooded and apart from that the most agressive curve tends to win. Rakano super OP. Like pirate warrior here but even more OP.
Needless to say I unistalled Eternal.
I just tried it, and I just don't think I can go back to drawing mana. It's a stupid hold out from MTG that HS was right to throw out.
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I played Eternal. At first I thought "nice, there are counter spells like MTG but the interface is polished like HS, mybe it combines the best of both worlds". Then later I understood that Eternal is very flawed. Aggro (especially "rakano" which is like face warrior) is rollface and the game is completly draw/go first dependent. It's almost impossible to play reactive because the odds are stacked against you and the threats are too cheap and too good. It's like curvestone but the rng is in the draws and less on the cards. You can be mana screwed or flooded and apart from that the most agressive curve tends to win. Rakano super OP. Like pirate warrior here but even more OP.
Needless to say I unistalled Eternal.
I like to make cards and discuss game balance.
I enjoy when "No similar decks were found."
My latest deck: http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/1366184-scholomance-charge-rez-priest-wild
playing wild
~nomad
playing wild
~nomad
playing wild
~nomad
I think we can all agree that Hearthstone is a CCG for amateurs. It has a fraction of the depth that many other CCGs have, especially MTG. That's why I find it so funny when everyone here talks tough like they are master players. They're just kids playing a kids game. King of the sandpit is all.
Blizzard logic:
That's a bold rant, ADXE