Despite wild being broken, I really like the concept of this format. However, the meta just seems to swing from one ultra-broken-deck to another - currently Star Aligner Druid, was Naga Sea Witch Giants, etc. I started thinking about a third format that could regularly be refreshed and open up new areas of design space.
Call it Legacy or Limited (after MtG) or whatever (the name isn't important). In this format, rather than Wild, where everything is available, Blizzard could rotate what expansions are allowed to be played like current Hearthstone calendar years. I would image it being a mix and match of six expansions from across all available sets (you could start with fewer, but pretty soon, there should be enough sets to get a good mix) and have its own calendar - Legacy Year of the ________.
This could allow for also sorts of fresh designs without the all out insanity that Wild has become. Thoughts?
They just trashed Tournament Mode: I really don't see a new format coming in the near future...
Thank you Captain Obvious. If only your insightful comment hadn't spoiled it, I was thisssssssssss close to convincing them to add something new. I was trying to brainstorm, be imitative... dream even. I suppose you also post on all the fan created cards posts that Blizzard doesn't take fan feedback into consideration when coming up with cards?
Let me rephrase my question: Do you think the concept of this new format would be fun to play? DISCLAIMER: I don't expect Blizzard to add it (despite the fact I think it would keep the game from getting stale).
bro so many people have already mentioned this. Love the idea, post it on reddit so blizz can see. The more people that keep posting the idea the better chances of it actually happening.
They just trashed Tournament Mode: I really don't see a new format coming in the near future...
Thank you Captain Obvious. If only your insightful comment hadn't spoiled it, I was thisssssssssss close to convincing them to add something new. I was trying to brainstorm, be imitative... dream even. I suppose you also post on all the fan created cards posts that Blizzard doesn't take fan feedback into consideration when coming up with cards?
Let me rephrase my question: Do you think the concept of this new format would be fun to play? DISCLAIMER: I don't expect Blizzard to add it (despite the fact I think it would keep the game from getting stale).
Let me make it clear: my comment was lead by disappointment about the new format situation, not about "Captain Obvious" statements. I really like fanmade cards and I support most of Hearthpwn design competitions (even thought I know most of those ideas will remain what they are), so no need to use such cheap irony.
Every year had it's cancer/ oppressive deck. So reliving (resuffering) them by choice is not really something I fancy.
I have an idea, that could bring organic changes to the meta. At the end of every month Blizzard could publish the five most played cards and ban them for the next month. This would bring variety in the decks and you'd have to adjust and fine tune them continuously without having to wait for new content to refresh the meta.
I proposed that earlier in a thread with several format ideas (I'd love basic+classic+the most recent expansion format so much...) and I am fairly sure it was proposed before.
I think proper way to do it is changing meta randomly each month. Imagine this
Blackrock Mountain
Knights of the Frozen Throne
Goblins vs Gnomes
The Boomsday Project
The Witchwood
Curse of Naxxramas
followed by this
Classic Set
One Night in Karazhan
Goblins vs Gnomes
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
The Grand Tournament
Blackrock Mountain
For each of them you'll have very different tier 1 decks. First set looks like mech decks meta , Next we have "midrange dragon priest is there" meta and before we are getting totally sick of getting raped by Anduin and his dragons we move to the next meta. That would be so fun and fresh every month. As soon as meta is "solved" we move to another one. It is a dream of a deckbuilder. In some meta's we'll have Reno, in some we'll have odd\even. Optimized even shaman is boring? Sure. How about reinventing even shaman each time witchwood is in rotation? You'll have different cards to choose from. You'll have different opponents to defeat.
Some of the problems from Team 5's perspective are:
- each mode is less players to play in the pool. So queuing takes longer and matchmaking is less accurate (I know people are already not confident in this anyway :) )
- making rotated cards even more useful is counter to their overall wish for people to feel the need to buy packs of current/future standard cards
- required development time that won't make them any money (and potentially cost them some in perceived lost purchases)
- cluttered UI, making the game too hard for players to understand etc etc. Comments they've made before seems to indicate they view us as having very little in terms of IQ :) I personally am still struggling with having extra deck slots as I can't get my head around it.
Don't get me wrong - not against new modes and have suggested some myself in the past (dust cost of your deck must be within some percentage of your opponent, class bans etc). Just doubt it will happen.
A third mode would hardly be successful: it would split the population of players even further (and Wild is already niche atm).
So if anything, this Legacy mode should REPLACE Wild. A bold plan.
Possibly nasty, because you periodically make whole sets completely useless still, while forcing the players to still own those cards, for the future rotations. As a Wild player, I'd hate to have entire sets of cards I own made useless for long periods of time.
The above can be softened if rotations happen much more frequently than yearly. 3x could be a good measure, either together with each new expansion, or in the mid-terms (to try and mix up Standard and Legacy populations out of staleness).
The upside of a rotating Wild, that is Legacy, is obviously to shake up the meta, and having broken stuff only for limited periods of time. This upside reinforces the need of having frequent rotations, otherwise you still risk having OP decks warping the meta for too long.
Ofc rotations should also last enough for the meta to evolve a bit. Otherwise it's just a mess.
TL;DR: it is a fair solution if rotation happens often enough, but not too much. Bad otherwise.
Some of the problems from Team 5's perspective are:
- each mode is less players to play in the pool. So queuing takes longer and matchmaking is less accurate (I know people are already not confident in this anyway :) )
- making rotated cards even more useful is counter to their overall wish for people to feel the need to buy packs of current/future standard cards
- required development time that won't make them any money (and potentially cost them some in perceived lost purchases)
- cluttered UI, making the game too hard for players to understand etc etc. Comments they've made before seems to indicate they view us as having very little in terms of IQ :) I personally am still struggling with having extra deck slots as I can't get my head around it.
- Yes, but each mode does some job to attract people\keep them in the game
- Yes, but if rotated cards are more useful people will be tempted to craft them and less tempted to dust their wild cards. If someone doesn't give a shit about wild then it is much easier to be 100% FTP by dusting all wild cards each year.
- Look above. It does bring money by motivating players to craft old cards. If wild will exist in its current form, there will be a subset of decks worth crafting.
- Make third option open after something like 100 games in wild. Problem solved.
I do think that such format would be $+ for Blizzard.
I proposed that earlier in a thread with several format ideas (I'd love basic+classic+the most recent expansion format so much...) and I am fairly sure it was proposed before.
I think proper way to do it is changing meta randomly each month. Imagine this
Blackrock Mountain
Knights of the Frozen Throne
Goblins vs Gnomes
The Boomsday Project
The Witchwood
Curse of Naxxramas
followed by this
Classic Set
One Night in Karazhan
Goblins vs Gnomes
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
The Grand Tournament
Blackrock Mountain
For each of them you'll have very different tier 1 decks. First set looks like mech decks meta , Next we have "midrange dragon priest is there" meta and before we are getting totally sick of getting raped by Anduin and his dragons we move to the next meta. That would be so fun and fresh every month. As soon as meta is "solved" we move to another one. It is a dream of a deckbuilder. In some meta's we'll have Reno, in some we'll have odd\even. Optimized even shaman is boring? Sure. How about reinventing even shaman each time witchwood is in rotation? You'll have different cards to choose from. You'll have different opponents to defeat.
And new players get into this by paying how much? This solves nothing IMO, because the metas would be incredibly unstable in the first months, climbing would be more of a lottery than in standard. In the end you would again only repeat the same metas again and again. This basicly only appeals to serious standard players, but only when the standard meta gets stale, or the niche players that would prefer an ever changing meta up until even this meta gets boring.
I'd rather see a 4 month rotation of the years of mammoth, of the raven etc. + Basic and Classic sets, that would give out new metas, since it's only 5 sets instead of up to 8 for a standard rotation AND it wouldn't get too wild but also not too boring too soon.
I proposed that earlier in a thread with several format ideas (I'd love basic+classic+the most recent expansion format so much...) and I am fairly sure it was proposed before.
I think proper way to do it is changing meta randomly each month. Imagine this
Blackrock Mountain
Knights of the Frozen Throne
Goblins vs Gnomes
The Boomsday Project
The Witchwood
Curse of Naxxramas
followed by this
Classic Set
One Night in Karazhan
Goblins vs Gnomes
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
The Grand Tournament
Blackrock Mountain
For each of them you'll have very different tier 1 decks. First set looks like mech decks meta , Next we have "midrange dragon priest is there" meta and before we are getting totally sick of getting raped by Anduin and his dragons we move to the next meta. That would be so fun and fresh every month. As soon as meta is "solved" we move to another one. It is a dream of a deckbuilder. In some meta's we'll have Reno, in some we'll have odd\even. Optimized even shaman is boring? Sure. How about reinventing even shaman each time witchwood is in rotation? You'll have different cards to choose from. You'll have different opponents to defeat.
And new players get into this by paying how much? This solves nothing IMO, because the metas would be incredibly unstable in the first months, climbing would be more of a lottery than in standard. In the end you would again only repeat the same metas again and again. This basicly only appeals to serious standard players, but only when the standard meta gets stale, or the niche players that would prefer an ever changing meta up until even this meta gets boring.
I'd rather see a 4 month rotation of the years of mammoth, of the raven etc. + Basic and Classic sets, that would give out new metas, since it's only 5 sets instead of up to 8 for a standard rotation AND it wouldn't get too wild but also not too boring too soon.
1) Wild is not exactly a mode for new players anyway. 2) Playing in unstable meta isn't lottery, it is a different type of skill. Also, only standard is a true competitive mode. 3) There are huge amount of combinations and it will only grow with years so no, it won't repeat same metas again and again. Sure some archetypes will reappear constantly but they will be somewhat different. 4) Replaying metas from the past isn't exactly playing new metas. It has some nostalgia value but other than that it is boring as hell. You even take away first month of experimentation - just go to archives and dig out old decks (and adapt them to nerfed cards). Where is fun in that?
They just trashed Tournament Mode: I really don't see a new format coming in the near future...
Thank you Captain Obvious. If only your insightful comment hadn't spoiled it, I was thisssssssssss close to convincing them to add something new. I was trying to brainstorm, be imitative... dream even. I suppose you also post on all the fan created cards posts that Blizzard doesn't take fan feedback into consideration when coming up with cards?
Let me rephrase my question: Do you think the concept of this new format would be fun to play? DISCLAIMER: I don't expect Blizzard to add it (despite the fact I think it would keep the game from getting stale).
Let me make it clear: my comment was lead by disappointment about the new format situation, not about "Captain Obvious" statements. I really like fanmade cards and I support most of Hearthpwn design competitions (even thought I know most of those ideas will remain what they are), so no need to use such cheap irony.
Then my apologies. Your tone just felt so deflating. I 100% agree that it is along shot, I was just looking for feedback on the concept (not on 'faith in Blizzard'). As some have recommended, I'll post this on Blizzard's forum. The ONLY hope I have that something like this would happen faster than tournament mode is it's wouldn't require much investment in the back end, but provide a great deal of value to the end user. Please do accept my retraction of cheap irony. I will begin investing it so one day, should I need to use it again, it has greater value ;)
Presumably, one of the factors mitigating against the development of additional game modes is that most players ignore the additional game modes we already have. Looking at the play-rate data on HSReplays, for every 15 games of Standard ladder being played, one game of Wild, and two games of Arena are played. And that's data compiled from folks who take the game seriously enough that they bother tracking their stats - in other words, the kinds of folks like you and me, who regularly post here, or on the subreddit.
The fact that even we don't play those modes had to be an important consideration with respect to not implementing tournament mode - I've been an everyday HS player since the open beta, but I'm not a "spend 3+ hours every day" kind of player. While I would have loved a tournament mode, realistically, I would only have the time to play one or two tournaments every month. From Blizzard's POV, it likely doesn't make much sense to ever implement something more than "constructed Arena" - an asynchronous "tournament" mode where you can simply stop playing if you win a best-of-five round of Conquest, and resume your "tournament" run again in a week or two, queueing into another player who has won as many "rounds" as you. But given how much time would be involved in a tournament run, it seems very likely that even that sort of limited tournament mode would be less popular than Arena - hence, not worthwhile from Blizz POV.
Every year had it's cancer/ oppressive deck. So reliving (resuffering) them by choice is not really something I fancy.
I have an idea, that could bring organic changes to the meta. At the end of every month Blizzard could publish the five most played cards and ban them for the next month. This would bring variety in the decks and you'd have to adjust and fine tune them continuously without having to wait for new content to refresh the meta.
The idea would be that you would mix and match from sets that weren't in Standard play together. Sure, there would inevitably be powerful combos, but with a regular rotation, it could keep it fresh.
They just trashed Tournament Mode: I really don't see a new format coming in the near future...
Thank you Captain Obvious. If only your insightful comment hadn't spoiled it, I was thisssssssssss close to convincing them to add something new. I was trying to brainstorm, be imitative... dream even. I suppose you also post on all the fan created cards posts that Blizzard doesn't take fan feedback into consideration when coming up with cards?
Let me rephrase my question: Do you think the concept of this new format would be fun to play? DISCLAIMER: I don't expect Blizzard to add it (despite the fact I think it would keep the game from getting stale).
Let me make it clear: my comment was lead by disappointment about the new format situation, not about "Captain Obvious" statements. I really like fanmade cards and I support most of Hearthpwn design competitions (even thought I know most of those ideas will remain what they are), so no need to use such cheap irony.
Then my apologies. Your tone just felt so deflating. I 100% agree that it is along shot, I was just looking for feedback on the concept (not on 'faith in Blizzard'). As some have recommended, I'll post this on Blizzard's forum. The ONLY hope I have that something like this would happen faster than tournament mode is it's wouldn't require much investment in the back end, but provide a great deal of value to the end user. Please do accept my retraction of cheap irony. I will begin investing it so one day, should I need to use it again, it has greater value ;)
No problem. I'm also looking forward to new ways to play HS, and I think your idea is legit. I think Blizzard should take much more in consideration its community during the design decisions and also regarding stuff like this.
I was thinking about this too. The game mode that bring back past standard year format and rotate every season. Standard still be main and it is fun to play the old meta.
Some player took a break from HS for a while like 1 - 2 expansions to come back and found out that they can not compete in current meta anymore and stop playing.
Just give them a chance to play their beloved decks and collect gold and dust to craft current competative deck.
Presumably, one of the factors mitigating against the development of additional game modes is that most players ignore the additional game modes we already have. Looking at the play-rate data on HSReplays, for every 15 games of Standard ladder being played, one game of Wild, and two games of Arena are played. And that's data compiled from folks who take the game seriously enough that they bother tracking their stats - in other words, the kinds of folks like you and me, who regularly post here, or on the subreddit.
Arena is a special case because it isn't free... I am sure that alternative casual arena with no cost\no rewards would be quite popular.
As for wild... Well it is, by nature, accessible only to players with experience. Why it sees a drop in popularity? Well, I almost stopped playing it because:
a) I can't really go nostalgia and take old standard deck and play it there... unless I am willing to accept 10% winrate against even shamans and similar decks and\or play in 15- ranks b) It isn't a place to experiment with old obscure cards. For example, In the past I made many attempts o make a good Zoobot deck but I stopped doing that. Who cares that new murlocs\beasts\dragons appear in the game? Powerlevel of other decks grows much faster. c) It isn't a place to go for a balanced competitive meta with many different decks, either. d) Getting wild cards is too expensive. I always have some standard cards to craft instead. I only craft stuff there if I need it for a top deck and it is cheap (rare\common).
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Despite wild being broken, I really like the concept of this format. However, the meta just seems to swing from one ultra-broken-deck to another - currently Star Aligner Druid, was Naga Sea Witch Giants, etc. I started thinking about a third format that could regularly be refreshed and open up new areas of design space.
Call it Legacy or Limited (after MtG) or whatever (the name isn't important). In this format, rather than Wild, where everything is available, Blizzard could rotate what expansions are allowed to be played like current Hearthstone calendar years. I would image it being a mix and match of six expansions from across all available sets (you could start with fewer, but pretty soon, there should be enough sets to get a good mix) and have its own calendar - Legacy Year of the ________.
This could allow for also sorts of fresh designs without the all out insanity that Wild has become. Thoughts?
They just trashed Tournament Mode: I really don't see a new format coming in the near future...
Thank you Captain Obvious. If only your insightful comment hadn't spoiled it, I was thisssssssssss close to convincing them to add something new. I was trying to brainstorm, be imitative... dream even. I suppose you also post on all the fan created cards posts that Blizzard doesn't take fan feedback into consideration when coming up with cards?
Let me rephrase my question: Do you think the concept of this new format would be fun to play? DISCLAIMER: I don't expect Blizzard to add it (despite the fact I think it would keep the game from getting stale).
bro so many people have already mentioned this. Love the idea, post it on reddit so blizz can see. The more people that keep posting the idea the better chances of it actually happening.
I loved the idea, I just think the rotation of the sets could happen monthly, it'll help to keep things fresh.
Let me make it clear: my comment was lead by disappointment about the new format situation, not about "Captain Obvious" statements. I really like fanmade cards and I support most of Hearthpwn design competitions (even thought I know most of those ideas will remain what they are), so no need to use such cheap irony.
Every year had it's cancer/ oppressive deck. So reliving (resuffering) them by choice is not really something I fancy.
I have an idea, that could bring organic changes to the meta. At the end of every month Blizzard could publish the five most played cards and ban them for the next month. This would bring variety in the decks and you'd have to adjust and fine tune them continuously without having to wait for new content to refresh the meta.
I proposed that earlier in a thread with several format ideas (I'd love basic+classic+the most recent expansion format so much...) and I am fairly sure it was proposed before.
I think proper way to do it is changing meta randomly each month. Imagine this
followed by this
For each of them you'll have very different tier 1 decks. First set looks like mech decks meta , Next we have "midrange dragon priest is there" meta and before we are getting totally sick of getting raped by Anduin and his dragons we move to the next meta. That would be so fun and fresh every month. As soon as meta is "solved" we move to another one. It is a dream of a deckbuilder. In some meta's we'll have Reno, in some we'll have odd\even. Optimized even shaman is boring? Sure. How about reinventing even shaman each time witchwood is in rotation? You'll have different cards to choose from. You'll have different opponents to defeat.
I like the idea of additional formats.
Some of the problems from Team 5's perspective are:
- each mode is less players to play in the pool. So queuing takes longer and matchmaking is less accurate (I know people are already not confident in this anyway :) )
- making rotated cards even more useful is counter to their overall wish for people to feel the need to buy packs of current/future standard cards
- required development time that won't make them any money (and potentially cost them some in perceived lost purchases)
- cluttered UI, making the game too hard for players to understand etc etc. Comments they've made before seems to indicate they view us as having very little in terms of IQ :) I personally am still struggling with having extra deck slots as I can't get my head around it.
Don't get me wrong - not against new modes and have suggested some myself in the past (dust cost of your deck must be within some percentage of your opponent, class bans etc). Just doubt it will happen.
.
A third mode would hardly be successful: it would split the population of players even further (and Wild is already niche atm).
So if anything, this Legacy mode should REPLACE Wild. A bold plan.
Possibly nasty, because you periodically make whole sets completely useless still, while forcing the players to still own those cards, for the future rotations. As a Wild player, I'd hate to have entire sets of cards I own made useless for long periods of time.
The above can be softened if rotations happen much more frequently than yearly. 3x could be a good measure, either together with each new expansion, or in the mid-terms (to try and mix up Standard and Legacy populations out of staleness).
The upside of a rotating Wild, that is Legacy, is obviously to shake up the meta, and having broken stuff only for limited periods of time. This upside reinforces the need of having frequent rotations, otherwise you still risk having OP decks warping the meta for too long.
Ofc rotations should also last enough for the meta to evolve a bit. Otherwise it's just a mess.
TL;DR: it is a fair solution if rotation happens often enough, but not too much. Bad otherwise.
- Yes, but each mode does some job to attract people\keep them in the game
- Yes, but if rotated cards are more useful people will be tempted to craft them and less tempted to dust their wild cards. If someone doesn't give a shit about wild then it is much easier to be 100% FTP by dusting all wild cards each year.
- Look above. It does bring money by motivating players to craft old cards. If wild will exist in its current form, there will be a subset of decks worth crafting.
- Make third option open after something like 100 games in wild. Problem solved.
I do think that such format would be $+ for Blizzard.
And new players get into this by paying how much? This solves nothing IMO, because the metas would be incredibly unstable in the first months, climbing would be more of a lottery than in standard. In the end you would again only repeat the same metas again and again. This basicly only appeals to serious standard players, but only when the standard meta gets stale, or the niche players that would prefer an ever changing meta up until even this meta gets boring.
I'd rather see a 4 month rotation of the years of mammoth, of the raven etc. + Basic and Classic sets, that would give out new metas, since it's only 5 sets instead of up to 8 for a standard rotation AND it wouldn't get too wild but also not too boring too soon.
1) Wild is not exactly a mode for new players anyway.
2) Playing in unstable meta isn't lottery, it is a different type of skill. Also, only standard is a true competitive mode.
3) There are huge amount of combinations and it will only grow with years so no, it won't repeat same metas again and again. Sure some archetypes will reappear constantly but they will be somewhat different.
4) Replaying metas from the past isn't exactly playing new metas. It has some nostalgia value but other than that it is boring as hell. You even take away first month of experimentation - just go to archives and dig out old decks (and adapt them to nerfed cards). Where is fun in that?
Then my apologies. Your tone just felt so deflating. I 100% agree that it is along shot, I was just looking for feedback on the concept (not on 'faith in Blizzard'). As some have recommended, I'll post this on Blizzard's forum. The ONLY hope I have that something like this would happen faster than tournament mode is it's wouldn't require much investment in the back end, but provide a great deal of value to the end user. Please do accept my retraction of cheap irony. I will begin investing it so one day, should I need to use it again, it has greater value ;)
Presumably, one of the factors mitigating against the development of additional game modes is that most players ignore the additional game modes we already have. Looking at the play-rate data on HSReplays, for every 15 games of Standard ladder being played, one game of Wild, and two games of Arena are played. And that's data compiled from folks who take the game seriously enough that they bother tracking their stats - in other words, the kinds of folks like you and me, who regularly post here, or on the subreddit.
The fact that even we don't play those modes had to be an important consideration with respect to not implementing tournament mode - I've been an everyday HS player since the open beta, but I'm not a "spend 3+ hours every day" kind of player. While I would have loved a tournament mode, realistically, I would only have the time to play one or two tournaments every month. From Blizzard's POV, it likely doesn't make much sense to ever implement something more than "constructed Arena" - an asynchronous "tournament" mode where you can simply stop playing if you win a best-of-five round of Conquest, and resume your "tournament" run again in a week or two, queueing into another player who has won as many "rounds" as you. But given how much time would be involved in a tournament run, it seems very likely that even that sort of limited tournament mode would be less popular than Arena - hence, not worthwhile from Blizz POV.
The idea would be that you would mix and match from sets that weren't in Standard play together. Sure, there would inevitably be powerful combos, but with a regular rotation, it could keep it fresh.
No problem. I'm also looking forward to new ways to play HS, and I think your idea is legit. I think Blizzard should take much more in consideration its community during the design decisions and also regarding stuff like this.
I was thinking about this too. The game mode that bring back past standard year format and rotate every season. Standard still be main and it is fun to play the old meta.
Some player took a break from HS for a while like 1 - 2 expansions to come back and found out that they can not compete in current meta anymore and stop playing.
Just give them a chance to play their beloved decks and collect gold and dust to craft current competative deck.
I have read this idea before and it is still brilliant :) Blizzard get started!
Arena is a special case because it isn't free... I am sure that alternative casual arena with no cost\no rewards would be quite popular.
As for wild... Well it is, by nature, accessible only to players with experience. Why it sees a drop in popularity? Well, I almost stopped playing it because:
a) I can't really go nostalgia and take old standard deck and play it there... unless I am willing to accept 10% winrate against even shamans and similar decks and\or play in 15- ranks
b) It isn't a place to experiment with old obscure cards. For example, In the past I made many attempts o make a good Zoobot deck but I stopped doing that. Who cares that new murlocs\beasts\dragons appear in the game? Powerlevel of other decks grows much faster.
c) It isn't a place to go for a balanced competitive meta with many different decks, either.
d) Getting wild cards is too expensive. I always have some standard cards to craft instead. I only craft stuff there if I need it for a top deck and it is cheap (rare\common).