Lets set the whole reward track fiasco and the abysmal monetization system aside for one post. There are dozens of other threads talking about this.
What I want to point out is that Blizzard is messing up on other things as well. If HS was fine tuned and polished game, maybe some of the sins of the marketing team could have been excused. But that is far from the reality...
Here is a short list of stuff I am personally angry about:
1. Bugs, bugs everywhere - the list of bugs is huge, most of it is due to the "spaghetti code" nature of HS. Weird card interactions, inconsistent behavior, take your pick. If you want more details, just search for HysteriA channel on Youtube and watch some of the mythbuster videos.
3. Pushing the card design towards more randomness and mana cheating. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out a wild deck using Insight or Free Admission that completely breaks the format. Not to mention that Palm Reading can basically be a three mana Emperor Thaurissan that you can have two copies of. Some cards that generate random stuff are ok. For instance cards like Steward of Scrolls, Mystery Winner or even something older like Stonehill Defender are decently balanced. The problem is when you start designing cards like Evocation, Mana Cyclone or Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate where the amount of randomness is off the charts.
4. Balancing and tuning of other game formats. Why is Junkbot still a 5* in battlegrounds? Why do we have Floating Watcher taking space in the demon tribe when the only way to utilize it in any way is when you pickup bunch of Wrath Weavers early. The discrepancy between the power level of treasures offered in Duels is horrendous. You can have one card with Small Pouches or infinite weapon value from Pillage the Fallen, take your pick. You can basically retire 50% of your Duel runs after the first game, when you dont get offered anything decent. And the adventure content has been kinda crap lately as well. Like for instance the Rexxar book of heroes, the Daelin Proudmoore fight is overtuned as hell. And why do Kul Tiran Footman have spell damage and deathrattle face damage? Why does Daelin use Shaman spells and minions? That doesnt fit the Warcraft lore at all. It screams laziness. It has just been cobbled together with zero thought put into it.
And finally the biggest sin of them all:
5. Not enough card changes / buffing. The whole point of digital medium is the amazing advantage of being able to change stuff "retroactively". If your card game is paper print like Magic the Gathering, once you print it, thats it. HS has had an amazing opportunity to change under-utilized cards, buff bad cards, adjust their functionality and so on. Yet they NEVER do this. We have arrived in a place where the cards that are supposed to be viable deck-filler evergreens from the Basic and Classic sets have long been outshined and out-powercreeped. My estimate is that roughly 80% of the Classic and Basic set hasnt seen any serious play in the past two or three years. Lets take druid for an example - when did you last see someone play Keeper of the Grove, or Force of Nature, or Ancient of Lore? Ancient of War? I guess it leads to the monetization issue Ive set aside at the beginning of the post. If Classic and Basic cards were decent, people wouldnt need to buy the new powercreeped expansion packs.
The reason that witches brew and the other card dont have echo is that echo as well as recruit have been mechanics made for specific sets and they arent used anymore for the same reason enrage was removed, it simply isnt worth having another keyword for just a few cards
I think one of the reasons nerfs/buffs don't happen more frequently is because it's too destabilizing. They don't want people to have to relearn cards every week, it takes some time for a meta to settle and that won't get to happen if they are changing cards too often. Not to mention the crap they'd take from people who built decks around recently nerfed cards. I personally would like to see more changes but I'd guess it's not as easy as that.
Time Out and Blur are different cards. Blur doesn't prevent you from being frozen for example. And, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Time Out also prevents Uther of the Ebon Blade type (non damage) kills.
It is an expensive game though, and should be of the highest quality to match that.
2) The keyword thing has always seemed strange to me. I guess they believe new players are too helpless to spend 3 seconds learning what a keyword does? I don't see why they don't support old ideas they had and instead leave them to obscurity.
3) I used to be a randomness apologist, but I think there is a line in the sand somewhere. For example, there is inherent randomness in drawing cards from a shuffled deck. There is controlled randomness in discover, that usually places limits on which cards you can discover from that let your opponent try and guess what you picked. This has been lost a bit when they changed discover to no longer favor class cards. Anyways, I think discovering a few cards throughout the game changed things up a lot and made games more interesting. Mages discovering spells ten times in a single match and gaining other random spells on top of that has clearly crossed that line.
4) As a 7500 rating BG player, I completely agree here. tavern tier 4 in particular is filled with overly specific cards that people never want. I think it says something when I would rather discover a T3 card over a T4 card. Also agree on the duels point 100%. I have been ranting to my buddies about small pouches an unhealthy amount. It makes the balance discrepancy blatantly apparent. Double deathrattles? Or a single card draw? LMAO
5) Been talking about this for years now. Its just sad how bad some old cards now. I cringe whenever I see them as a discover option. They have buffed cards a couple times now, and I was ecstatic to see it. But it wasn't nearly enough. Unfortunately, I believe they don't do it because there are a bunch of hoops they have to jump through whenever they need to update the game on phones. I'm talking red tape. Best thing they could do is buff a few cards whenever they do some other update. Just bundle them together so its easier to get them through.
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Don't let your memes be dreams.
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Lets set the whole reward track fiasco and the abysmal monetization system aside for one post. There are dozens of other threads talking about this.
What I want to point out is that Blizzard is messing up on other things as well. If HS was fine tuned and polished game, maybe some of the sins of the marketing team could have been excused. But that is far from the reality...
Here is a short list of stuff I am personally angry about:
1. Bugs, bugs everywhere - the list of bugs is huge, most of it is due to the "spaghetti code" nature of HS. Weird card interactions, inconsistent behavior, take your pick. If you want more details, just search for HysteriA channel on Youtube and watch some of the mythbuster videos.
2. Inconsistent card text - why dont Witch's Brew and Unstable Evolution have Echo? Why dont Commencement and Dimensional Ripper use the Recruit keyword? Why does Time Out! and Blur have completely different wording? You can watch Solem's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNmeSSyyOtg for more examples.
3. Pushing the card design towards more randomness and mana cheating. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out a wild deck using Insight or Free Admission that completely breaks the format. Not to mention that Palm Reading can basically be a three mana Emperor Thaurissan that you can have two copies of. Some cards that generate random stuff are ok. For instance cards like Steward of Scrolls, Mystery Winner or even something older like Stonehill Defender are decently balanced. The problem is when you start designing cards like Evocation, Mana Cyclone or Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate where the amount of randomness is off the charts.
4. Balancing and tuning of other game formats. Why is Junkbot still a 5* in battlegrounds? Why do we have Floating Watcher taking space in the demon tribe when the only way to utilize it in any way is when you pickup bunch of Wrath Weavers early. The discrepancy between the power level of treasures offered in Duels is horrendous. You can have one card with Small Pouches or infinite weapon value from Pillage the Fallen, take your pick. You can basically retire 50% of your Duel runs after the first game, when you dont get offered anything decent. And the adventure content has been kinda crap lately as well. Like for instance the Rexxar book of heroes, the Daelin Proudmoore fight is overtuned as hell. And why do Kul Tiran Footman have spell damage and deathrattle face damage? Why does Daelin use Shaman spells and minions? That doesnt fit the Warcraft lore at all. It screams laziness. It has just been cobbled together with zero thought put into it.
And finally the biggest sin of them all:
5. Not enough card changes / buffing. The whole point of digital medium is the amazing advantage of being able to change stuff "retroactively". If your card game is paper print like Magic the Gathering, once you print it, thats it. HS has had an amazing opportunity to change under-utilized cards, buff bad cards, adjust their functionality and so on. Yet they NEVER do this. We have arrived in a place where the cards that are supposed to be viable deck-filler evergreens from the Basic and Classic sets have long been outshined and out-powercreeped. My estimate is that roughly 80% of the Classic and Basic set hasnt seen any serious play in the past two or three years. Lets take druid for an example - when did you last see someone play Keeper of the Grove, or Force of Nature, or Ancient of Lore? Ancient of War? I guess it leads to the monetization issue Ive set aside at the beginning of the post. If Classic and Basic cards were decent, people wouldnt need to buy the new powercreeped expansion packs.
So what u gonna do? Blame Boar perhaps? xD
If you want to waste ur time conceed in duels e my guest. Just fix the match making I play a person 4x once and ur keeps happening.
I agree to an extent.
But I have one answer for you:
The reason that witches brew and the other card dont have echo is that echo as well as recruit have been mechanics made for specific sets and they arent used anymore for the same reason enrage was removed, it simply isnt worth having another keyword for just a few cards
I think one of the reasons nerfs/buffs don't happen more frequently is because it's too destabilizing. They don't want people to have to relearn cards every week, it takes some time for a meta to settle and that won't get to happen if they are changing cards too often. Not to mention the crap they'd take from people who built decks around recently nerfed cards. I personally would like to see more changes but I'd guess it's not as easy as that.
Time Out and Blur are different cards. Blur doesn't prevent you from being frozen for example. And, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Time Out also prevents Uther of the Ebon Blade type (non damage) kills.
It is an expensive game though, and should be of the highest quality to match that.
I agree with you on many of your points
1) I don't see many bugs honestly.
2) The keyword thing has always seemed strange to me. I guess they believe new players are too helpless to spend 3 seconds learning what a keyword does? I don't see why they don't support old ideas they had and instead leave them to obscurity.
3) I used to be a randomness apologist, but I think there is a line in the sand somewhere. For example, there is inherent randomness in drawing cards from a shuffled deck. There is controlled randomness in discover, that usually places limits on which cards you can discover from that let your opponent try and guess what you picked. This has been lost a bit when they changed discover to no longer favor class cards. Anyways, I think discovering a few cards throughout the game changed things up a lot and made games more interesting. Mages discovering spells ten times in a single match and gaining other random spells on top of that has clearly crossed that line.
4) As a 7500 rating BG player, I completely agree here. tavern tier 4 in particular is filled with overly specific cards that people never want. I think it says something when I would rather discover a T3 card over a T4 card. Also agree on the duels point 100%. I have been ranting to my buddies about small pouches an unhealthy amount. It makes the balance discrepancy blatantly apparent. Double deathrattles? Or a single card draw? LMAO
5) Been talking about this for years now. Its just sad how bad some old cards now. I cringe whenever I see them as a discover option. They have buffed cards a couple times now, and I was ecstatic to see it. But it wasn't nearly enough. Unfortunately, I believe they don't do it because there are a bunch of hoops they have to jump through whenever they need to update the game on phones. I'm talking red tape. Best thing they could do is buff a few cards whenever they do some other update. Just bundle them together so its easier to get them through.
Don't let your memes be dreams.