Can't you just admit that you are wrong and that you are just salty? Every expansions improves/changes gameplay, look at the two years of odd/even or the two years of Deathknights. The "problem" you see, will change at het first of April, when the Year of the Dragon will start.
Changing the game will cost a huge amount of money and then you changed your core game/game style, something that can kill a cardgame.
He’s not wrong. The problem isn’t the lack of expansions, the problem is the lack of things to do in the game. I’ve had all golden heroes for like 2+ years, many 12 wins arena and been Legend a few times when I felt like grinding. What am I supposed to do now ? Sure I still play for fun but aside from dailies I have a hard time justifying grinding the game for hours everyday like I used to back then.
Can't you just admit that you are wrong and that you are just salty? Every expansions improves/changes gameplay, look at the two years of odd/even or the two years of Deathknights. The "problem" you see, will change at het first of April, when the Year of the Dragon will start.
Changing the game will cost a huge amount of money and then you changed your core game/game style, something that can kill a cardgame.
Salty eh? Well mate have you ever tried to read the text I wrote? I am not talking about meta or the cards itself. Im talking about how the game has not been updated since the launch of tavern brawl. We need an update that unique and original, not a meta update as you are talking about.
But If i were to talk about the current meta and the impacts of the set, your text is laughable. As I mentioned in mine, since the Witchwood update only thing that they have added and had a great impact was Baku and Genn. And meta has been stable since their launch, you can't deny it. Both Rastakhan and Boomsday added literally nothing new to the ladder. The meta is the same, top tiers are full of aggro and paladin. Even after these nerfs. Thats another reason why there is a decline in the player base as they do not want to play the same game even after a new set. But again I am not here to talk about the meta, since I haven't been playing the game for a month or so.
Also I have never said anything about "changing the game". What I said was game NEEDS NEW THINGS. A new game mode / class / card type / system that is seperate from the Play mode and the Arena mode. Like trading, auction house, 2v2, new solo content etc. This game had a lot of potential to add new things, and still has the potential. The only guys that are stopping the game to grow is devs itself. Just look at any other online game and you can see that each of those had a time where they recieved a massive update.
Power creep in MtG has been pretty extreme. It's not visible in eternal formats like Vintage/Legacy that much because those formats rely on very old card sets that were just completely broken and were developed when MtG dev team was just a couple guys in a garage and there wasn't a lot of proper balancing and design / play testing going on. Cards on such high power level will probably never be printed again (Power 9 or even a card like Brainstorm / FoW).
But if you look at last 10 years or so in MtG history the power creep has been extreme, creatures from sets 15 years ago are basically unplayable, all green creatures before Tarmogoyf are just silly weak, equipments before Jitte and Swords are complete garbage. And then you had crazy mechanics like Affinity/Dredge that were so powerful they had to be nerfed several times and still are even strong enough to be viable in eternal formats (Dredge is a thing in Vintage, Affinity mostly in Modern but possible in Legacy).
OP, have you ever played any other CCGs competitively?
HS is in an odd spot as a mobile game that is modeled after traditional CCGs. It's release schedule is pretty comparable to the largest IRL CCGs (YGO and MTG). It's balance updates far exceed those of comparable IRL CCGS.
But as a competitive online/mobile game, people expect updates and changes with the same frequency of MOBAs and shooters.
Oh boy, think again. Really think again about casuals and the amount of content they want.
Casuals are those you have to feed an extended amount of content to make them satisfied. Casual gamers want quick matches, quick new updates, new content pretty fast. Casual gamers are those getting satisfied pretty fast.
You are right with the point that a casual player feels overwhelmed if everything changes really fast. But that rarely happens in the gaming industry. But something like new cards is not something like what you think you meant. If you would change the aspect of how the rules are in hearthstone every few weeks, that is what would kill casual gaming.
Then you have to differentiate between Pro players and Time investing non-Pro Players. Pro Players spend a great amount of time in games becoming good to make something out of it. The longer they are in a state they know very well, the more they are usually satisfied. The hardcore players just spend lot of time in the game and get to point they get exhausted, that is true.
Greets, a developer.
No, Casuals need content updates less regularly, since they take longer to go through content. If you release too much content, they become overwhelmed.
If Blizzard decided to release a ton of expansions a year, Casuals wouldn't even come close to having a chance of gathering a decent collection from each expansion they launched. This game has a very big focus on collecting as well as playing, if players feel like they cannot even acquire a reasonable chuck of collection because everything is moving too fast, and if they feel like there are constantly new cards they don't know coming out and are not familiar with, they will stop playing.
For casual players, you need to pace the content.
For engaged players, people who spend a lot of time in the game, Content is old very fast, they collect it fast, they play and experiment with things a whole lot more, these are the people that want constant and frequent supplies of content.
Competitive players do enjoy mastering each game state, but that doesn't prevent them from exhaustion. If you are constantly experiencing the same content over and over again, you get tired really fast, even if you become really good at it and winning constantly. Repetition always gets tiring.
You describe the casual from a perspective before mobile games came out. Now there is one thing casuals want: MORE AND FOR FREE.
There is a barrier for those in Hearthstone, because with new content you need new cards. But that's why most of the Hearthstone casuals stick to one deck and play it till they get bored until something new releases. There are a lot of threads in this forums showing this behaviour.
I don't know if you know the state of "casualism" in World of Warcraft, but there you can see what casuals really want now. Back then it was like you described it. Casual players couldn't clear the content as it was presented, one difficulty you have to clear, that's it.
Casuals went nuts because they couldn't see the whole content in their pace. What Blizz did was introducing new difficulty levels down to those you queue up into something and see the content in an "explorer mode"....friendly for the dumbest casual. And what happened?
"I have seen the content, I want NEW CONTENT!!!112121"
The people didn't care anymore that they theoretically haven't seen the content as they saw a pretty low version of that.
Since mobile games grew it became even worse...I can tell you from my daily work.
Trump could use someone like you, you sure built up a wall of text very effectively.
Anyway, I've stated this once before, but Blizzard can't win no matter what they do. They launched a casual game which they also want to appeal to a core, competitive audience, and they don't work together.
A Casual game is perfectly fine to have not so regular updates and content releases because it's casual and player playing it this way don't actually keep up with the content if it comes out too regularly. If everything keeps changing casual players will leave because every time they log in everything is different, and when that happens, when there is no continuity, it loses the appeal.
On the other hand, the competitive, hyper engaged audience will play the game far too much, which means the current pace of releases is not enough, they "chew" through it very fast, and will continually feel bored and waiting for more.
It is literally impossible to appeal, they are polar opposites. Blizzard should pick one and go with it. It seems to me they already picked the casual side, which is the vast majority of the player base. They just want to keep some of the engaged part, but it will eventually come to a point where it is not possible.
This.
Also i consider myself to be a fairly hardcore player most of the time but i find myself playing less the last month or so before each new expansion. But that still means i play the game alot for like 9 months of the year and still have fun with it. Of course i would like an expansion every two month but i see why that is not realistic.
Every 4 months an expansion should rotate, instead of 3 together once a year. The game will be always refreshed.
This i think might help a little bit because now there is a chance that a new expansion does not shake up the meta enough to keep it interesting for the coming month.
everyone is always saying "hearthstone was better in the old days!" they think blizzard is ruining the game, and making it worse. but they arent, they just arent making it better.
what they really want is more frequent updates. but they dont realize it, and so they think the reason they are getting bored of the game is because blizzard is ruining it. but really, they just arent updating fast enough.
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Rejoice, for even in death, you have become children of Thanos.
It's entirely possible that one of the factors which preclude the introduction of new game modes is that no one really plays the alternate modes we already have. Looking at the HSReplays stats, for every game tracked in the Wild format, about three are tracked in Arena, and sixteen in Standard. How likely is it that a new mode would be significantly more popular than Arena, for example? If the HSReplays numbers are more-or-less accurate, then nearly 80% of the player-base might be filthy casuals, dialled in on Standard.
I've been playing since the open beta, and would have loved a tournament mode - frankly, it's more than surprising that the devs haven't introduced one yet, or that the proposed tournament mode they shelved last year was so poorly adapted to the community's expectations. Giving us something which allows us to compete in the kinds of tournaments that Blizzard itself organizes seems like a pretty obvious mode that ought to have been added to the game years ago. But, again - if 80% of the player-base is going to screw around in Standard on their iPhones, no matter what, it might not be entirely surprising that the veteran player-base has received relatively little . . .
Casual players simply mean players that occasionally play, players that don't player very regularly and "religiously", or for very extended periods of time.
He's talking like someone who knows what they're talking about within the context of modern game design.
Oh, so in the context where words don't mean what their definition states? That's totally not going to go wrong somewhere down the line. Then again, this kind of nonsense has spread so widely, with stupidity like Man and Woman no longer having the same meaning as their definition, that I guess I'm just too old to keep up.
Jargon. It's not new. You should stop being disingenuous.
I always tell this: change the rules for ladder every season. Block some cards. Make some cards mandatory. Increase/decrease player health. Restrict spells to 5 etc
Just change a little tiny detail in the rules and all the meta and all the decks will change. Reset the rules to standard the first season of a new expansion. Change a rule for season 2-4.
He's talking like someone who knows what they're talking about within the context of modern game design.
Oh, so in the context where words don't mean what their definition states? That's totally not going to go wrong somewhere down the line. Then again, this kind of nonsense has spread so widely, with stupidity like Man and Woman no longer having the same meaning as their definition, that I guess I'm just too old to keep up.
No, you are not wrong, in fact you are right with the description of the casual. But you are not right with what casuals want these days.
Yes, casuals play less often. But the casuals these days don't want to see all the content anymore like it was. I can't say exact numbers for hearthstone of course, but I see colleagues playing the game casually. They are bored pretty fast, they don't want to play a lot of decks or want to achieve something big. Most casuals don't care for endgame content as they want quick and dirty fun. But everytime something new comes out they are back again, sometimes for some days, sometimes longer.
There are so many casual games out there now that casuals don't stick with games for so long as they simply play something different. There is a reason that stupid F2P market is worth more money than actual priced games. Those casuals are the wallets of the industry right now. Casuals spent way more money on games than those hardcore players do now. For example I've only bought the preorder for Boomsday because it was way too good. Beside that the last time I spent money on Hearthstone is when I bought One Night in Karazhan, because I play this game that much that I have enough gold and dust to survive every expansion without spending real money.
And you might have noticed have noticed that there are way more free things in Hearthstone now, more free packs, free adventures, shiny cardbacks...yep, this is they way to get more money from casual players. Give them something free and they are willing to spend more money.
Power creep in MtG has been pretty extreme. It's not visible in eternal formats like Vintage/Legacy that much because those formats rely on very old card sets that were just completely broken and were developed when MtG dev team was just a couple guys in a garage and there wasn't a lot of proper balancing and design / play testing going on. Cards on such high power level will probably never be printed again (Power 9 or even a card like Brainstorm / FoW).
But if you look at last 10 years or so in MtG history the power creep has been extreme, creatures from sets 15 years ago are basically unplayable, all green creatures before Tarmogoyf are just silly weak, equipments before Jitte and Swords are complete garbage. And then you had crazy mechanics like Affinity/Dredge that were so powerful they had to be nerfed several times and still are even strong enough to be viable in eternal formats (Dredge is a thing in Vintage, Affinity mostly in Modern but possible in Legacy).
That is not a powercreep. It is the natural evolution of game design.
Early sets are always going to be weaker when compared to the newer one because early design is untested. Then comes the ''powercreep'' where designers start to push the design and balance to see how far they can go. Also, due to an ever rotating format, there is nothing that is being powercreeped upon, and in order to powercreep you need to release better cards than the ones which are viable at the moment.
Power creep in MtG has been pretty extreme. It's not visible in eternal formats like Vintage/Legacy that much because those formats rely on very old card sets that were just completely broken and were developed when MtG dev team was just a couple guys in a garage and there wasn't a lot of proper balancing and design / play testing going on. Cards on such high power level will probably never be printed again (Power 9 or even a card like Brainstorm / FoW).
But if you look at last 10 years or so in MtG history the power creep has been extreme, creatures from sets 15 years ago are basically unplayable, all green creatures before Tarmogoyf are just silly weak, equipments before Jitte and Swords are complete garbage. And then you had crazy mechanics like Affinity/Dredge that were so powerful they had to be nerfed several times and still are even strong enough to be viable in eternal formats (Dredge is a thing in Vintage, Affinity mostly in Modern but possible in Legacy).
That is not a powercreep. It is the natural evolution of game design.
Early sets are always going to be weaker when compared to the newer one because early design is untested. Then comes the ''powercreep'' where designers start to push the design and balance to see how far they can go. Also, due to an ever rotating format, there is nothing that is being powercreeped upon, and in order to powercreep you need to release better cards than the ones which are viable at the moment.
Well not everybody plays just standard. In MtG there is Modern (before that Extended), Legacy and Vintage. You can see the power creep in modern quite well. In standard obviously it won't be visible as sets rotate frequently.
Power creep in MtG has been pretty extreme. It's not visible in eternal formats like Vintage/Legacy that much because those formats rely on very old card sets that were just completely broken and were developed when MtG dev team was just a couple guys in a garage and there wasn't a lot of proper balancing and design / play testing going on. Cards on such high power level will probably never be printed again (Power 9 or even a card like Brainstorm / FoW).
But if you look at last 10 years or so in MtG history the power creep has been extreme, creatures from sets 15 years ago are basically unplayable, all green creatures before Tarmogoyf are just silly weak, equipments before Jitte and Swords are complete garbage. And then you had crazy mechanics like Affinity/Dredge that were so powerful they had to be nerfed several times and still are even strong enough to be viable in eternal formats (Dredge is a thing in Vintage, Affinity mostly in Modern but possible in Legacy).
That is not a powercreep. It is the natural evolution of game design.
Early sets are always going to be weaker when compared to the newer one because early design is untested. Then comes the ''powercreep'' where designers start to push the design and balance to see how far they can go. Also, due to an ever rotating format, there is nothing that is being powercreeped upon, and in order to powercreep you need to release better cards than the ones which are viable at the moment.
Well not everybody plays just standard. In MtG there is Modern (before that Extended), Legacy and Vintage. You can see the power creep in modern quite well. In standard obviously it won't be visible as sets rotate frequently.
Modern is a format that barely shakes as new sets come out. It takes card bans to shake up the format and even then the top decks remain the same with around 1 new addition or so. It is always tron, grixis, jund, humans, burn and storm. The last time Legacy meta was shaken was when dredge came out in 2005. Vintage has remained unchanged since forever.
Eternal formats are not phased by new cards. You don't even see the powercreep in them at all because they have more powerful tools from way back in the day. If anything cards have been becoming weaker and weaker with each sets due to wotc being afraid of printing powerful cards (lighting bolt and counterspell are considered ''too powerful'' to ever be printed again ffs)
I actually am fine with most of the game. ATM. My issue is that everyone plays Hunter all the time. I haven't played against anything except Hunter since Saturday. There is plenty of variety in the game currently but the playerbase needs to be playing 52% win rate decks instead of 51.8%
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The thing wrong with Hearthstone is all these overpowered OTK decks that completely locks control decks out of the meta.
He’s not wrong. The problem isn’t the lack of expansions, the problem is the lack of things to do in the game. I’ve had all golden heroes for like 2+ years, many 12 wins arena and been Legend a few times when I felt like grinding. What am I supposed to do now ? Sure I still play for fun but aside from dailies I have a hard time justifying grinding the game for hours everyday like I used to back then.
Salty eh? Well mate have you ever tried to read the text I wrote? I am not talking about meta or the cards itself. Im talking about how the game has not been updated since the launch of tavern brawl. We need an update that unique and original, not a meta update as you are talking about.
But If i were to talk about the current meta and the impacts of the set, your text is laughable. As I mentioned in mine, since the Witchwood update only thing that they have added and had a great impact was Baku and Genn. And meta has been stable since their launch, you can't deny it. Both Rastakhan and Boomsday added literally nothing new to the ladder. The meta is the same, top tiers are full of aggro and paladin. Even after these nerfs. Thats another reason why there is a decline in the player base as they do not want to play the same game even after a new set. But again I am not here to talk about the meta, since I haven't been playing the game for a month or so.
Also I have never said anything about "changing the game". What I said was game NEEDS NEW THINGS. A new game mode / class / card type / system that is seperate from the Play mode and the Arena mode. Like trading, auction house, 2v2, new solo content etc. This game had a lot of potential to add new things, and still has the potential. The only guys that are stopping the game to grow is devs itself. Just look at any other online game and you can see that each of those had a time where they recieved a massive update.
Power creep in MtG has been pretty extreme. It's not visible in eternal formats like Vintage/Legacy that much because those formats rely on very old card sets that were just completely broken and were developed when MtG dev team was just a couple guys in a garage and there wasn't a lot of proper balancing and design / play testing going on. Cards on such high power level will probably never be printed again (Power 9 or even a card like Brainstorm / FoW).
But if you look at last 10 years or so in MtG history the power creep has been extreme, creatures from sets 15 years ago are basically unplayable, all green creatures before Tarmogoyf are just silly weak, equipments before Jitte and Swords are complete garbage. And then you had crazy mechanics like Affinity/Dredge that were so powerful they had to be nerfed several times and still are even strong enough to be viable in eternal formats (Dredge is a thing in Vintage, Affinity mostly in Modern but possible in Legacy).
OP, have you ever played any other CCGs competitively?
HS is in an odd spot as a mobile game that is modeled after traditional CCGs.
It's release schedule is pretty comparable to the largest IRL CCGs (YGO and MTG).
It's balance updates far exceed those of comparable IRL CCGS.
But as a competitive online/mobile game, people expect updates and changes with the same frequency of MOBAs and shooters.
You describe the casual from a perspective before mobile games came out. Now there is one thing casuals want: MORE AND FOR FREE.
There is a barrier for those in Hearthstone, because with new content you need new cards. But that's why most of the Hearthstone casuals stick to one deck and play it till they get bored until something new releases. There are a lot of threads in this forums showing this behaviour.
I don't know if you know the state of "casualism" in World of Warcraft, but there you can see what casuals really want now.
Back then it was like you described it. Casual players couldn't clear the content as it was presented, one difficulty you have to clear, that's it.
Casuals went nuts because they couldn't see the whole content in their pace. What Blizz did was introducing new difficulty levels down to those you queue up into something and see the content in an "explorer mode"....friendly for the dumbest casual. And what happened?
"I have seen the content, I want NEW CONTENT!!!112121"
The people didn't care anymore that they theoretically haven't seen the content as they saw a pretty low version of that.
Since mobile games grew it became even worse...I can tell you from my daily work.
This.
Also i consider myself to be a fairly hardcore player most of the time but i find myself playing less the last month or so before each new expansion. But that still means i play the game alot for like 9 months of the year and still have fun with it. Of course i would like an expansion every two month but i see why that is not realistic.
This i think might help a little bit because now there is a chance that a new expansion does not shake up the meta enough to keep it interesting for the coming month.
you know, this is very smart.
everyone is always saying "hearthstone was better in the old days!" they think blizzard is ruining the game, and making it worse. but they arent, they just arent making it better.
what they really want is more frequent updates. but they dont realize it, and so they think the reason they are getting bored of the game is because blizzard is ruining it. but really, they just arent updating fast enough.
Rejoice, for even in death, you have become children of Thanos.
It's entirely possible that one of the factors which preclude the introduction of new game modes is that no one really plays the alternate modes we already have. Looking at the HSReplays stats, for every game tracked in the Wild format, about three are tracked in Arena, and sixteen in Standard. How likely is it that a new mode would be significantly more popular than Arena, for example? If the HSReplays numbers are more-or-less accurate, then nearly 80% of the player-base might be filthy casuals, dialled in on Standard.
I've been playing since the open beta, and would have loved a tournament mode - frankly, it's more than surprising that the devs haven't introduced one yet, or that the proposed tournament mode they shelved last year was so poorly adapted to the community's expectations. Giving us something which allows us to compete in the kinds of tournaments that Blizzard itself organizes seems like a pretty obvious mode that ought to have been added to the game years ago. But, again - if 80% of the player-base is going to screw around in Standard on their iPhones, no matter what, it might not be entirely surprising that the veteran player-base has received relatively little . . .
He's talking like someone who knows what they're talking about within the context of modern game design.
Yeah, I want more updates. Also:
1) Mode with mixed expansions
2) Upgrade cards to golden for less dust
3) More updates
4) Events with rewards
5) Arena ranking (like wtf, where is it)
6) Game length to award with additional stars
7) List can go on
The goal of all life is death.
Jargon. It's not new. You should stop being disingenuous.
The main problem with hearthstone isn't updates.
It's that it's a patchwork on top of patchwork that needs to be refauled. But there is no impetus to rehaul because there's no major competition.
I always tell this: change the rules for ladder every season. Block some cards. Make some cards mandatory. Increase/decrease player health. Restrict spells to 5 etc
Just change a little tiny detail in the rules and all the meta and all the decks will change. Reset the rules to standard the first season of a new expansion. Change a rule for season 2-4.
No, you are not wrong, in fact you are right with the description of the casual. But you are not right with what casuals want these days.
Yes, casuals play less often. But the casuals these days don't want to see all the content anymore like it was.
I can't say exact numbers for hearthstone of course, but I see colleagues playing the game casually. They are bored pretty fast, they don't want to play a lot of decks or want to achieve something big. Most casuals don't care for endgame content as they want quick and dirty fun.
But everytime something new comes out they are back again, sometimes for some days, sometimes longer.
There are so many casual games out there now that casuals don't stick with games for so long as they simply play something different. There is a reason that stupid F2P market is worth more money than actual priced games. Those casuals are the wallets of the industry right now. Casuals spent way more money on games than those hardcore players do now. For example I've only bought the preorder for Boomsday because it was way too good. Beside that the last time I spent money on Hearthstone is when I bought One Night in Karazhan, because I play this game that much that I have enough gold and dust to survive every expansion without spending real money.
And you might have noticed have noticed that there are way more free things in Hearthstone now, more free packs, free adventures, shiny cardbacks...yep, this is they way to get more money from casual players. Give them something free and they are willing to spend more money.
It's stupid, but it is effective.
That is not a powercreep. It is the natural evolution of game design.
Early sets are always going to be weaker when compared to the newer one because early design is untested. Then comes the ''powercreep'' where designers start to push the design and balance to see how far they can go. Also, due to an ever rotating format, there is nothing that is being powercreeped upon, and in order to powercreep you need to release better cards than the ones which are viable at the moment.
Well not everybody plays just standard. In MtG there is Modern (before that Extended), Legacy and Vintage. You can see the power creep in modern quite well. In standard obviously it won't be visible as sets rotate frequently.
Modern is a format that barely shakes as new sets come out. It takes card bans to shake up the format and even then the top decks remain the same with around 1 new addition or so. It is always tron, grixis, jund, humans, burn and storm. The last time Legacy meta was shaken was when dredge came out in 2005. Vintage has remained unchanged since forever.
Eternal formats are not phased by new cards. You don't even see the powercreep in them at all because they have more powerful tools from way back in the day. If anything cards have been becoming weaker and weaker with each sets due to wotc being afraid of printing powerful cards (lighting bolt and counterspell are considered ''too powerful'' to ever be printed again ffs)
This will only happen if they decide Hearthstone isn't making enough money, sadly.
I actually am fine with most of the game. ATM. My issue is that everyone plays Hunter all the time. I haven't played against anything except Hunter since Saturday. There is plenty of variety in the game currently but the playerbase needs to be playing 52% win rate decks instead of 51.8%