I mean it seems as if OP is trying to make a statement rather than ask a question, but the definition is fairly obvious.
The less a deck deviates its line of play over multiple different opposing decks, the more "uninteractive" it is.
Big spell mage is one of the most interactive decks out there, as most of its spells are only played responsively.
Contrary to popular belief, zoo and aggro paladin are in the middle, as they will prefer to go face but play for the board when appropriate.
Shudderwock tries to be uninteractive, but they have to react to threats.
Aggro mage is probably the closest to fully uninteractive in this current meta. Unless you put a taunt in their way, they often play exactly the same face line completely regardless of what the opponent does. Obviously they aren't completely unresponsive, but it's the closest we've got.
The real question is: Why do we assume this is a bad thing?
The object of the game is to reduce your opponent's life to zero (or activate mecha'thun or 4 horsemen, for the pedantically inclined). The puzzle of the game is how best to do it while preventing your opponent from doing it first.
One perfectly reasonable choice to solving this puzzle is to race to the finish line. There's no problem here.
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I think there's certainly some amount of "any deck I don't like is uninteractive, because I know Bliz might do something about that particular word."
IMHO, uninteractivity is best used to describe to Combo effects, but not entirely. To a certain extent, all burst is un-interactive.
Unlike something like MTG, there's literally no way to interact with your opponent's turns in Hearthstone. Kinda maybe sorta secrets, but not really. When they play Fireball-Fireball-Ping to go over the top of someone's taunts, or double Kill Command Hero Power. We will call "Toggwaggle swap decks and double Naturalize" a combo gameplan, but we won't call Mana Wyrm and early beats into burn spells a 'combo plan.' Both require drawing the cards, both require a bit of set-up and getting the opponent low enough in life that it'll work. Both Odd Rogue and Miracle Rogue can end games on Leeroy Jenkins and double Cold Blood--the same exact cards. Can we really say there is a difference between the interactivity of Odd and Miracle Rogues?
As to the Aggro "they just dump their hand" that seems more... un-thinking than un-interactive. Of course, "you don't have to think to play it" is something which also gets said by folks about any deck they don't like. "Oh, you don't have to think to play big spell mage, just throw board clears until the game ends." "Oh, you don't have to think to play Quest Rogue." "Oh, you don't have to think to play Mecha'thun priest, just assemble the combo and win." I mean. Maybe everyone is right and no one has to think to play Hearthstone at all. More likely, everyone is salty about something...
The real question is: Why do we assume this is a bad thing?
Because interactivity or lack thereof is one of the criteria that Blizzard uses to nerf cards/decks. So people think if they scream enough that a deck is uninteractive, Blizzard will nerf it.
Uninteractive is pretty self explanatory. For example Heal Zoo with Happy Ghoul is a good example of uninteractive because you can't really stop the opponent from activating Happy Ghoul and you can end up seeing a 0 mana 6/6 on Turn 1 and lose without you having any say in it.
Or most Combo Decks are uninteractive because they have match ups that are so polarized and their win condition is often impossible to disrupt without lowering the quality of your deck. For example Quest Rogue vs Control Warrior. Control Warrior loses that match up 100000000% of the time regardless of the skill of the Warrior player.
I consider non-interactive decks to be anything that holds it's win condition in hand. Mecha'thun/Togwaggle/Shudderwock are great examples. Basically, if your way of winning is something that I have no way of dealing with as your opponent, you are playing a non-interactive deck. This is the reason control players want more ways to disrupt the opponent's hand. We don't think we are better than everyone and we don't want your decks to go away, we just want more ways to interact with your cards in hand, and if you are afraid of that; you can at least concede that what you are playing is in fact non-interactive.
My own Individual opinion for what uninteractive is simple.
Does this deck's (your opponent's) game plan change AT ALL based on what I'm doing?
If the answer is yes, then the deck is interactive.
If the answer is no, then there's a good chance it's not.
Now where the OP's quotes come into play is that not EVERY TIME you play a certain deck will it be interactive.
Ex. You face an Aggro deck with godly draws, against your control deck with an awful hand/draw. During this game, your opponent plays out his deck with little / no interference from you, therefore that game was uninteractive.
There have been very few decks that are actually uninteractive and usually, Blizzard steps in and nerfs / Hall of Fames it so it's not an issue. I don't even consider most Combo Decks to be this way, because your win condition/pressure against them is to deny them draw and/or rush them down usually, which will change how your opponent plays and sometimes will cause them to adopt a wholly different strategy just to win instead of pulling off the combo.
Most of the time when people complain about interactivity, it's usually on a small scale, where they just had a bad game where it felt like they had no control....... Which will happen in a game with as much RNG as Hearthstone. But when speaking in terms of design, you have to look at the Macrosystem, such as:
In 1000 games of Shudderwock, how many times did the Shaman play the same cards in the same order despite the variety of opponents he faces? If the answer is large enough, that's an issue that needs to be addressed.
That's why there's an entire salt thread for upset people because this game will screw you sometimes with Bad RNG, and determining your actual skill at this game is much more complex than "Can I beat DisguisedToast or Savjz??" Because they'll admit themselves with enough games, anyone will beat them just because that's how much RNG is in this game.
TL;DR - UninteractiveDecks are very rare. People complain about bad games and RNG and get them confused.
Confusion is caused here by salty combo deck players jumping on the bandwagon and hijacking the phrase to refer to other types of decks - the phrase almost exclusively refers to combo decks. Face mage is possibly the only non combo deck it can apply to.
I consider non-interactive decks to be anything that holds it's win condition in hand. Mecha'thun/Togwaggle/Shudderwock are great examples. Basically, if your way of winning is something that I have no way of dealing with as your opponent, you are playing an non-interactive deck. This is the reason control players want more ways to disrupt the opponents hand. We don't think we are better than everyone and we don't want your decks to go away, we just want more ways to interact with your cards in hand, and if you are afraid of that; you can at least concede that what you are playing is in fact non-interactive.
But those conditions are very late game, what are you doing in the meantime? Throwing your hands up in despair? I think disruption is something that'll need to be super finely balanced if more is added to the game. Milling those win conditions are basically an Automatic Win in its own right and is not very interactive itself.
Now if we weaken our current options of disruption, which are outright destroying/discarding/transforming the cards, and bring in more unique options, like reshuffling, cost manipulation, adding junk cards etc. that still allow the win condition to exist but push it back, then I would say that would be a good idea. Right now we are sitting on extremes though, either No disruption and the Win Condition wins, or TOTAL Disruption and the combo is broken and you win outright.
best example for something uninteractive is a healing zoo with a very good opening or a tempo mage with double mana wyrm.
most of the time you can't do anything about it.
Keep seeing people saying this sort of thing in this thread - It seems blantantly incorrect to me. Decks that can potentially high roll into being unineractive are not the same as decks that are designed specifically to high roll and win based on this. For example, compare heal zoo to old big priest with barnes. heal zoo is consdierably more interactive, becasue it's designed, like all zoo decks, to fight for board control. Following on from that, big priest is considerably more interactive than any modern malygos combo druid or exxodia deck.
Why do people have such a hard time separating derogatory terms from decks they don't like? This stuff annoys the fuck out of me in RL as well...it's rife in politics.
"Uninteractive" is a term lifted directly from a Blizzard Quote on the nerf of Leeroy Jenkins.
Commentary: "Leeroy Jenkins created a strategy that revolved around trying to defeat your opponent in one turn without requiring any cards on the board. We like having a variety of deck types but taking 20+ damage in one turn is not very fun or interactive."
Players quote it to attempt to give their biting hearthstone game balance commentary the seal of approval(tm) from Blizzard. It once had a dictionary meaning, but that is no longer relevant.
Its new meaning is "game/matchup is decided regardless of decisions from me". As is, the game was decided in the deckbuilding screen, or by the matchmaker.
I pass no judgement on what percentage of games are uninteractive.
I only note that the community is sick of the meta decks being uninteractive when faced against each other.
Because it's been like that for years. That's what meta decks are designed to be.
Tempostorm snapshot info:
Tier 1: Well-optimized decks with extremely efficient and overwhelmingly powerful combos and card synergies that makes losing against these decks feel helpless and unfair.
Uninteractive is a deck that if they get their win condition there is absolutely NOTHING you can to stop it.
For example I was playing a mage this afternoon with my Spiteful Druid. I thought he was big spell so I was trying to to go face as much as possible because he was just playing delaying cards. Next thing I know he drops out 4 sorcer guys (bad with card names)...oh oh it's non quest quest mage! All my stuff was frozen every turn, I had him down to 6 health but then endless fireballs came out. THAT is uninteractive.
Yeah, I had it all in my first post. Uninteractive doesn't mean "deck you don't like".
Kingsbane, Shudderwock, and Quest Rogue are only "uninteractive" if you put up no resistance, in which case whatever you are playing is definitionally uninteractive as well.
I've played plenty of games with all 3 and the only games I managed to play a straight line to killing opponent were against Big Spell Mage.
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Uninteractive to me is something you obviously cannot in any way, shape or form stop from happening or disrupt.
obvious example is quest rogue, they get their quest turn 1, you can't stop that, them its just a matter of seeing if their little solitaire game ends before you kill them or not, if it does, welp youre dead, if you are aggro, you have a good chance to win, but other slower decks are pretty much screwed against quest rogue unless they draw really badly.
Florist is also kinda like that, drop it on field, suddenly your combo piece costs -7 and theres very little that can be done to disrupt it, but unlike quest rogue there are at least 2 cards that can do it...both of which are pretty gimmicky anyways, Snipe and demonic project, one relies on you playing a card you'd normally never play on your deck(so you'd need secret plan for it) on a perfect timing and the other is pretty much limited to very few warlock archetypes and can whiff.
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I mean it seems as if OP is trying to make a statement rather than ask a question, but the definition is fairly obvious.
The less a deck deviates its line of play over multiple different opposing decks, the more "uninteractive" it is.
Big spell mage is one of the most interactive decks out there, as most of its spells are only played responsively.
Contrary to popular belief, zoo and aggro paladin are in the middle, as they will prefer to go face but play for the board when appropriate.
Shudderwock tries to be uninteractive, but they have to react to threats.
Aggro mage is probably the closest to fully uninteractive in this current meta. Unless you put a taunt in their way, they often play exactly the same face line completely regardless of what the opponent does. Obviously they aren't completely unresponsive, but it's the closest we've got.
The real question is: Why do we assume this is a bad thing?
The object of the game is to reduce your opponent's life to zero (or activate mecha'thun or 4 horsemen, for the pedantically inclined). The puzzle of the game is how best to do it while preventing your opponent from doing it first.
One perfectly reasonable choice to solving this puzzle is to race to the finish line. There's no problem here.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I think there's certainly some amount of "any deck I don't like is uninteractive, because I know Bliz might do something about that particular word."
IMHO, uninteractivity is best used to describe to Combo effects, but not entirely. To a certain extent, all burst is un-interactive.
Unlike something like MTG, there's literally no way to interact with your opponent's turns in Hearthstone. Kinda maybe sorta secrets, but not really. When they play Fireball-Fireball-Ping to go over the top of someone's taunts, or double Kill Command Hero Power. We will call "Toggwaggle swap decks and double Naturalize" a combo gameplan, but we won't call Mana Wyrm and early beats into burn spells a 'combo plan.' Both require drawing the cards, both require a bit of set-up and getting the opponent low enough in life that it'll work. Both Odd Rogue and Miracle Rogue can end games on Leeroy Jenkins and double Cold Blood--the same exact cards. Can we really say there is a difference between the interactivity of Odd and Miracle Rogues?
As to the Aggro "they just dump their hand" that seems more... un-thinking than un-interactive. Of course, "you don't have to think to play it" is something which also gets said by folks about any deck they don't like. "Oh, you don't have to think to play big spell mage, just throw board clears until the game ends." "Oh, you don't have to think to play Quest Rogue." "Oh, you don't have to think to play Mecha'thun priest, just assemble the combo and win." I mean. Maybe everyone is right and no one has to think to play Hearthstone at all. More likely, everyone is salty about something...
Because interactivity or lack thereof is one of the criteria that Blizzard uses to nerf cards/decks. So people think if they scream enough that a deck is uninteractive, Blizzard will nerf it.
If you look up the term uninteractive in the dictionary you will see a picture of Crystal Core.
Legend with : S65 Freeze Mage, S57 Maly Gonk Druid, S57 "Okay" Shaman, S53 Boom-zooka Hunter, S53 Maly Tog Druid, S52 Wild Tog Druid ft.Blingtron, S50 Quest Rogue, S49 Dead Man's Warrior, S41 Wild Clown Fiesta Druid, S41 Hadronox Jade Druid, S40 Wild OTK Dragon Druid, S35 SMOrc Shaman, S33 Jade Druid, S22 Control Priest, S19 Control Priest
Uninteractive is pretty self explanatory. For example Heal Zoo with Happy Ghoul is a good example of uninteractive because you can't really stop the opponent from activating Happy Ghoul and you can end up seeing a 0 mana 6/6 on Turn 1 and lose without you having any say in it.
Or most Combo Decks are uninteractive because they have match ups that are so polarized and their win condition is often impossible to disrupt without lowering the quality of your deck. For example Quest Rogue vs Control Warrior. Control Warrior loses that match up 100000000% of the time regardless of the skill of the Warrior player.
I consider non-interactive decks to be anything that holds it's win condition in hand. Mecha'thun/Togwaggle/Shudderwock are great examples. Basically, if your way of winning is something that I have no way of dealing with as your opponent, you are playing a non-interactive deck. This is the reason control players want more ways to disrupt the opponent's hand. We don't think we are better than everyone and we don't want your decks to go away, we just want more ways to interact with your cards in hand, and if you are afraid of that; you can at least concede that what you are playing is in fact non-interactive.
EXODIA MAGE
My own Individual opinion for what uninteractive is simple.
Does this deck's (your opponent's) game plan change AT ALL based on what I'm doing?
If the answer is yes, then the deck is interactive.
If the answer is no, then there's a good chance it's not.
Now where the OP's quotes come into play is that not EVERY TIME you play a certain deck will it be interactive.
Ex. You face an Aggro deck with godly draws, against your control deck with an awful hand/draw. During this game, your opponent plays out his deck with little / no interference from you, therefore that game was uninteractive.
There have been very few decks that are actually uninteractive and usually, Blizzard steps in and nerfs / Hall of Fames it so it's not an issue. I don't even consider most Combo Decks to be this way, because your win condition/pressure against them is to deny them draw and/or rush them down usually, which will change how your opponent plays and sometimes will cause them to adopt a wholly different strategy just to win instead of pulling off the combo.
Most of the time when people complain about interactivity, it's usually on a small scale, where they just had a bad game where it felt like they had no control....... Which will happen in a game with as much RNG as Hearthstone. But when speaking in terms of design, you have to look at the Macrosystem, such as:
In 1000 games of Shudderwock, how many times did the Shaman play the same cards in the same order despite the variety of opponents he faces? If the answer is large enough, that's an issue that needs to be addressed.
That's why there's an entire salt thread for upset people because this game will screw you sometimes with Bad RNG, and determining your actual skill at this game is much more complex than "Can I beat DisguisedToast or Savjz??" Because they'll admit themselves with enough games, anyone will beat them just because that's how much RNG is in this game.
TL;DR - Uninteractive Decks are very rare. People complain about bad games and RNG and get them confused.
Confusion is caused here by salty combo deck players jumping on the bandwagon and hijacking the phrase to refer to other types of decks - the phrase almost exclusively refers to combo decks. Face mage is possibly the only non combo deck it can apply to.
But those conditions are very late game, what are you doing in the meantime? Throwing your hands up in despair? I think disruption is something that'll need to be super finely balanced if more is added to the game. Milling those win conditions are basically an Automatic Win in its own right and is not very interactive itself.
Now if we weaken our current options of disruption, which are outright destroying/discarding/transforming the cards, and bring in more unique options, like reshuffling, cost manipulation, adding junk cards etc. that still allow the win condition to exist but push it back, then I would say that would be a good idea. Right now we are sitting on extremes though, either No disruption and the Win Condition wins, or TOTAL Disruption and the combo is broken and you win outright.
Keep seeing people saying this sort of thing in this thread - It seems blantantly incorrect to me. Decks that can potentially high roll into being unineractive are not the same as decks that are designed specifically to high roll and win based on this. For example, compare heal zoo to old big priest with barnes. heal zoo is consdierably more interactive, becasue it's designed, like all zoo decks, to fight for board control. Following on from that, big priest is considerably more interactive than any modern malygos combo druid or exxodia deck.
Why do people have such a hard time separating derogatory terms from decks they don't like? This stuff annoys the fuck out of me in RL as well...it's rife in politics.
"Uninteractive" is a term lifted directly from a Blizzard Quote on the nerf of Leeroy Jenkins.
Commentary: "Leeroy Jenkins created a strategy that revolved around trying to defeat your opponent in one turn without requiring any cards on the board. We like having a variety of deck types but taking 20+ damage in one turn is not very fun or interactive."
Players quote it to attempt to give their biting hearthstone game balance commentary the seal of approval(tm) from Blizzard.
It once had a dictionary meaning, but that is no longer relevant.
Its new meaning is "game/matchup is decided regardless of decisions from me". As is, the game was decided in the deckbuilding screen, or by the matchmaker.
I pass no judgement on what percentage of games are uninteractive.
I only note that the community is sick of the meta decks being uninteractive when faced against each other.
Because it's been like that for years. That's what meta decks are designed to be.
Tempostorm snapshot info:
Tier 1: Well-optimized decks with extremely efficient and overwhelmingly powerful combos and card synergies that makes losing against these decks feel helpless and unfair.
Uninteractive is a deck that if they get their win condition there is absolutely NOTHING you can to stop it.
For example I was playing a mage this afternoon with my Spiteful Druid. I thought he was big spell so I was trying to to go face as much as possible because he was just playing delaying cards. Next thing I know he drops out 4 sorcer guys (bad with card names)...oh oh it's non quest quest mage! All my stuff was frozen every turn, I had him down to 6 health but then endless fireballs came out. THAT is uninteractive.
Yeah, I had it all in my first post. Uninteractive doesn't mean "deck you don't like".
Kingsbane, Shudderwock, and Quest Rogue are only "uninteractive" if you put up no resistance, in which case whatever you are playing is definitionally uninteractive as well.
I've played plenty of games with all 3 and the only games I managed to play a straight line to killing opponent were against Big Spell Mage.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
Uninteractive to me is something you obviously cannot in any way, shape or form stop from happening or disrupt.
obvious example is quest rogue, they get their quest turn 1, you can't stop that, them its just a matter of seeing if their little solitaire game ends before you kill them or not, if it does, welp youre dead, if you are aggro, you have a good chance to win, but other slower decks are pretty much screwed against quest rogue unless they draw really badly.
Florist is also kinda like that, drop it on field, suddenly your combo piece costs -7 and theres very little that can be done to disrupt it, but unlike quest rogue there are at least 2 cards that can do it...both of which are pretty gimmicky anyways, Snipe and demonic project, one relies on you playing a card you'd normally never play on your deck(so you'd need secret plan for it) on a perfect timing and the other is pretty much limited to very few warlock archetypes and can whiff.