I was thinking about the state of the HS community and it feels (to me) like over the previous year or so the community have became very whiny and self centred. It feels like a lot of people are constantly complaining about stuff that aren't really an issue. It almost feels like people will just complain and complain for their own selfish reasons - its like a large majority of the community won't be happy unless they get their own way and its so annoying. Everyone takes everything personally as well - you critique someone statement about a card/deck etc.. and even if you make valid points etc.. they will just attack you personally.
Tickatus is a good example of this. People constantly complain about the card - yet the stats would indicate it isn't OP. So why are people complaining about it? Is it because the deck they want to play doesn't perform well against it so it feels OP to them but they will happily ignore a hard counter to it (probably because that's not the class they want to play). But try to tell someone that and it becomes an insult trading ground.
I just feel like so many are ignorant to the fact that this is a meta based game and not every deck archetype is going to be viable at any given time but people aren't happy with that, they want to play their favourite decks all of the time and they want to be able to wreck every other deck with it (stupidity).
Its like with the DoL stuff, everyone was complaining about the card (and rightly so), yet you would still have a barrage of people defending it (despite statistical evidence proving that it is OP) and most likely defending it only because they like playing the deck and don't want to see it nerfed. Its just stupid because we all know and use Hsreplay - we can all check stats of the cards to see how strong they are etc.. but some people will just ignore those things out of selfishness really.
People just take things way too personally. Its like I'm criticising a point you've made, I'm not insulting your identity. Half of this community are just a bunch of self entitled pussies who cant take any criticism and won't ever be happy until everything goes there way. What happened to the days when the whole community felt like we all together? Yeah, we used to fight like cat and dog over whether cards were good or not etc.. but it was always in good fun, no one took personal offence to things and in the end we could generally all agree on what cards should be nerfed/buffed etc.. These days we couldn't be any further from that.
Just curious what other peoples thoughts on this are, do you agree that the community is in a poor state?
I think Tickatus winratio statistics is not proper data to decide if it balnaced or not.
I propose the assumption, that card game is great, when the variance of decks actually played is very high. Unfortunatelly, I have no idea how to measure variance of decks played, except tryig to play the game for 2 hours.
Tickatus decrease the variance of decks played, because so many control decks has no chance vs it. People just stop playing decks, which has no chance vs tickatus, so you are not seeing it in winatio statistics how OP tickatus is.
In case of anything, I like hearthstone. Complaining is good, because it helps developers to focus ont he right target. I hope blizzard hire people who read game forums and give developers feedback in kind way, so they are not sad due to all negative bullshit on forums.
Well, the group insisting that Blizzard rigs matchmaking, the group whining about balance, the "every meta is the worst/most boring/least interactive meta" crowd . . . they've all been around since day one, so nothing has changed there.
The one thing that has changed is Shudderwock.
Now I realize that sentence may make no sense, but if you look at the history of nerfs, HoF, etc., the nerf to Saronite Chain Gang targeting the Shudderwock combo deck was the first nerf I can remember that had absolutely zero to do with balance consideration and everything to do with this nebulous concept of "not fun to play against". Since that nerf, folks have turned the individual card complaints up to 12 because they know that enough bitching and complaining actually has a chance to get results where before, they actually had to have some evidence of balance problems.
The current iteration of that phenomenon is Tickatus, and while I'm happy Blizzard didn't include the Tick in its latest round of changes, it may be a short-lived omission judging by the continued outrage posting.
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I think Tickatus winratio statistics is not proper data to decide if it balnaced or not.
I propose the assumption, that card game is great, when the variance of decks actually played is very high. Unfortunatelly, I have no idea how to measure variance of decks played, except tryig to play the game for 2 hours.
Tickatus decrease the variance of decks played, because so many control decks has no chance vs it. People just stop playing decks, which has no chance vs tickatus, so you are not seeing it in winatio statistics how OP tickatus is.
In case of anything, I like hearthstone. Complaining is good, because it helps developers to focus ont he right target. I hope blizzard hire people who read game forums and give developers feedback in kind way, so they are not sad due to all negative bullshit on forums.
I didn't want to turn this thread into a tickatus debate lol but you have made a good point and I want to address. Tickatus definitely keeps some other control decks out of the game (to a certain extent) but that doesn't make it OP in itself and let me explain why, because this also leads directly into one of my main points and its simple - just because someone wants to play control warrior/preist or whatever doesn't mean it has to be able to beat warlock, other control decks can still be viable because of other matchups. There is always going to be a control deck that is the strongest control deck, same for aggro and tempo. Its like you cant have it all ways, every matchup cant be 50/50 because then the whole concept of the game ceases to exist. Baring in mind we still don't know what is the strongest control deck yet.
The fact of the matter is - Tickatus is just an annoying card, it sucks getting your cards burned. But it also sucks when you cant clear a watch post or when miracle priest generates a bunch of cards or when your whole board dies to brawl or any other number of cards that can be annoying.
I think its almost a pointless debate at this stage because no matter how much people complain blizzard aren't going to nerf tickatus, I'd like to think he would have been hit with the recent if he was gonna be nerfed. The stats would indicate that it isn't OP and the devs should be basing all their nerfs/buffs directly from in game stats.
Well, the group insisting that Blizzard rigs matchmaking, the group whining about balance, the "every meta is the worst/most boring/least interactive meta" crowd . . . they've all been around since day one, so nothing has changed there.
The one thing that has changed is Shudderwock.
Now I realize that sentence may make no sense, but if you look at the history of nerfs, HoF, etc., the nerf to Saronite Chain Gang targeting the Shudderwock combo deck was the first nerf I can remember that had absolutely zero to do with balance consideration and everything to do with this nebulous concept of "not fun to play against". Since that nerf, folks have turned the individual card complaints up to 12 because they know that enough bitching and complaining actually has a chance to get results where before, they actually had to have some evidence of balance problems.
The current iteration of that phenomenon is Tickatus, and while I'm happy Blizzard didn't include the Tick in its latest round of changes, it may be a short-lived omission judging by the continued outrage posting.
Fantastic comment and sums up a lot of how I feel. You're right about the matchfixing people and constant whining and as you say they've always been around (and always will). But the core community and people who genuinely love the game were for the most part very civil with one another and at least to me felt we could put our differences aside for our love for the game. That mentality has gone, everyone is against each other.
I wasn't around for the shudder nerf - was travelling and not playing during that period. But this is exactly the issue - people want things nerfed not because they are OP but because they don't like or find them unfun to play against. The devs are folding a lot lately and just adhering to fans demands (Kargal refund today shouldn't have happened!) and its really annoying because this game will die if they keep down this path. The devs needs to stand firm on stuff like this - if the card was OP then nerf it, fair enough - but it isn't so it shouldn't be nerfed no matter how many people are crying about it.
It probably stems from the fact that people lost faith to Blizzard as a whole.
Hearthstone came out in an age where we still believed in the company, when they showed that they care about the product first. Now Activision Blizzard is a company that is very clearly out of touch with the players, developers come and go, so we don't really know them or how much they love the game and there is a general sense of scepticism about anything and everything.
The fact that their communication skills are abysmal doesn't help either. Just look at the rewards track fiasco. A new reward system that was definitely better than the previous one caused such uproar simply because it was vague, unclear. People would go on and on about comparisons of the lvl50 rewards vs the total rewards of 4 months of grinding like that mattered because noone made it clear that it didn't.
The playerbase hasn't changed that much. Blizzard has.
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
On the topic of balance/design "whining", people figured the game becomes more enjoyable once blizzard takes the game like any other multiplayer game - where things that aren't right get balance patched fast enough to not ruin the game for too long.
And of course a lot of people see this as an opportunity to shit on others and try to feel intellectually superior by calling them whiners. Whining about people whining is still whining
It probably stems from the fact that people lost faith to Blizzard as a whole.
Hearthstone came out in an age where we still believed in the company, when they showed that they care about the product first. Now Activision Blizzard is a company that is very clearly out of touch with the players, developers come and go, so we don't really know them or how much they love the game and there is a general sense of scepticism about anything and everything.
The fact that their communication skills are abysmal doesn't hurt either. Just look at the rewards track fiasco. A new reward system that was definitely better than the previous one caused such uproar simply because it was vague, unclear. People would go on and on about comparisons of the lvl50 rewards vs the total rewards of 4 months of grinding like that mattered because noone made it clear that it didn't.
The playerbase hasn't changed that much. Blizzard has.
I strongly disagree. Blizzard as a developer may have lost a lot of its old respect (the Warcraft 3 fiasco, that mobile Diablo game, heck even stuff as far back as the launch of Diablo 3 has really tarnished the company's reputation as putting out highly polished top tier games), but the Hearthstone team has improved dramatically. People like to point to Ben Brode leaving as this big turning point where Team 5 fell apart, but the truth is since then there's been massive changes for the better. We get regular and fast nerfs, constant AMAs with the team, blog posts detailing their insights and card design philosophy, and even straight-up admissions that they struggle with certain parts of game design. I was shocked last week when in an AMA they admitted they had trouble printing high-cost cards that don't instantly win the game because they'd pushed the power level of lower cost cards too high. They were straight up pointing out the problems with their own design philosophy, which was unthinkable before Year of the Dragon. There is some stuff that could be communicated better, like just how much better the reward track system is (though frankly, people were just upset to be upset, plenty of people did math early on proving the reward track was better for most players), but overall Team 5 has moved in a massively positive direction. Used to be you'd get an announcement of an expansion every 4 months, one set of nerfs halfway through an expansion cycle, and complete radio silence for the rest of the time.
"Golden age" Team 5 let Naxx Undertaker Hunter, statistically the most powerful deck of all time, go unnerfed until after the next expansion came out. Can you imagine the shitstorm that would've been stirred up if we'd had to wait for Lunacy Mage nerfs for two whole months, let alone until the next expansion came out? This community threw more of a fit over a deck being broken for two weeks than the Naxx-era HS community threw over a deck being more broken for four months. I'm not even mad at this - Lunacy Mage deserved the outcry, and Undertaker should've had more pushback - but it definitely goes to show that the HS community has become quicker to anger.
This is a good thing to some extent, like getting the Kargal refund, and even making the reward track even more generous (which wasn't necessary at all, but it was definitely nice), but it also means there's people causing a lot of noise over a lot of dumb shit. The outrage over the reward track was misguided, the outrage over Tickatus risks causing a nerf to a card that doesn't deserve it, and the early outrage about Watchpost Rogue caused one of the dumbest nerfs the game's ever seen. The community's constant outrage can get changes for the better, but when it's over dumb things it risks making changes for the worse. If Blizzard had caved in and removed the reward track entirely, as a not small contingent of the community wanted, I'd have gone into Barrens with 3k less gold than I did.
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
Well said. If ops post hadn't been laden with thinly veiled insults pointed towards the people and issues that obviously annoy him it may have been an interesting topic.
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
First of all you've missed the point entirely.
Second, I'm not complaining about people complaining - I'm complaining about the state of the community. I'm perfectly fine with people complaining about stuff - its good for everyone to voice their opinion and I encourage that. My point is that people constantly complain about stupid things - not to make the game better but to suit their own agendas.
Never complained about personal insults either - I said that people take such great offence to any criticism on their statements that they immediately resort to personal insults. It's just toxic and wasn't how the core community used to be. So yeah, I'll stand by my statement of 'self entitled pussies' because I cant think of another term to describe them.
And sure I complain about things - a lot of things but the difference between me and the self entitled crew - is that I will concede on a point I've made if there is a good enough argument against it. I don't complain about cards unless I have statistical evidence to back up that the card is OP and rarely (if ever) resort to personal insults unless someone personally attacks me first.
You response ignored all of the points I made and responded with a non sensical statement to attempt to portray me as a hippocrit - I feel like only one of us is part of the problem here and it isn't me!
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
Yep, it’s an embarrassing outburst. Most people love to complain, we all take up sides when we care bout something. Some people are just smart enough to play nice and hide their agenda, the OP clearly isn’t.
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
Well said. If ops post hadn't been laden with poorly hidden insults pointed towards the people and issues that obviously annoy him it may have been an interesting topic.
I'd agree with both of these.
I actually don't have an issue with people airing grievances, the game isn't perfect, far from it. For me though, it's the way it's done. Your criticism might be correct but if you surround it in personal attacks, insults and hyperbole then your entire point is lost. I've worked in managing and coaching for 15 years now and there are productive ways of relaying concerns or feedback that don't have to involve insulting anybody who doesn't agree with you and personal jibes at a dev team who can't defend themselves.
If your point or argument is good then let it do its job.
This community also doesn't problem solve and I thin its a shame as well as a missed opportunity. I've been involved in other games where the community pull together, share strategies, guides, builds and even have open dialogue with the dev team and get brought on to help with bug fixes etc. Not a chance this community can be trusted with this sort of thing.
If someone is getting stressed because of Tickatus, you're far, far more likely to see "git good scrub" than a conversation whcih develops into general tips on how to play against the deck, where they are going wrong etc.
You won't get that though because the majority seem absolutely hell bent on everything being someone else's fault. It's very snide and blame centric.
Someone like Regis is a good example of raising issues within the game in a respectful way which encourages dialogue. I don't watch much yohtubd content but he's been very vocal about the game being too expensive, problems with metas and cards etc but he doesn't feel the need to sling around insults whilst he's doing it.
I think with the free to play nature of the game, coupled with it being pretty casual and games generally not lasting very long and there being no real player profile system, it doesn't really have a 'community' feel. The standard of posting on this site is possibly the worst I've ever seen, that doesn't help. There are some really good posters and the site is a great source of information but it is let down by a good amount of the people who visit it.
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
And if I'm not mistaken, I've read a similar thread every week or so since the release of the game.
I strongly disagree. Blizzard as a developer may have lost a lot of its old respect (the Warcraft 3 fiasco, that mobile Diablo game, heck even stuff as far back as the launch of Diablo 3 has really tarnished the company's reputation as putting out highly polished top tier games), but the Hearthstone team has improved dramatically.
I don't disagree with you. However you misunderstood my point.
Even though Hearthstone is better than ever which means it's design team is better, people do not see that. They see Activision Blizzard as a whole instead. One key reason for that is that the PR department is terrible.
People believed that the new progression system will be terrible because noone made it clear that it wasn't.
People thought that the tavern pass would make the game pay to play because noone made it clear that it was about cosmetics.
People are still mad at them for the way they handled issues with China because they dropped the ball repeatedly.
These are only a few examples of bad communication. Having the lead developer do Q&A while at the same time allowing announcements to be vague, poorly constructed and leaving room for doubters to thrive is a problem, especially for a company that has lost all of it's credibility.
I don't think Ben Brode is some kind of demigod, but it’s clear the game was developed with a lot of love and care, year's of balancing and tweaking went into getting the game to match Team 5’s vision. That has gone now, 3 expansions and 3 mini sets per year with an ever expanding list of balancing problems added each time, all the time ignoring the fundamentals of the original game. All the AMA's in the world won’t change that.
I could write something about Pizza complaining about OP complaining about people complaining, but I am not complaining.
I understand that cards like Tickatus are annoying to some people, but you can't really do anything about it. Blizzard should release cards that are not just basic HS stuff to make for a less boring/curvestone meta imo. People have been complaining about cards and metas forever.
Or in a nutshell, here my winrates in standard this season:
Lunacy Mage pre-nerf: 72%
Controllock post-nerf: 60%
I guess this says enough about what deck was/is more broken.
I don't think Ben Brode is some kind of demigod, but it’s clear the game was developed with a lot of love and care, year's of balancing and tweaking went into getting the game to match Team 5’s vision. That has gone now, 3 expansions and 3 mini sets per year with an ever expanding list of balancing problems added each time, all the time ignoring the fundamentals of the original game. All the AMA's in the world won’t change that.
Yeah, undertaker meta, patron meta, grand tournament being a useless expansion barring from 3 cards, etc..
There was surely a lot of love and care and years of balancing and tweaking, sure
Well, the group insisting that Blizzard rigs matchmaking, the group whining about balance, the "every meta is the worst/most boring/least interactive meta" crowd . . . they've all been around since day one, so nothing has changed there.
The one thing that has changed is Shudderwock.
Now I realize that sentence may make no sense, but if you look at the history of nerfs, HoF, etc., the nerf to Saronite Chain Gang targeting the Shudderwock combo deck was the first nerf I can remember that had absolutely zero to do with balance consideration and everything to do with this nebulous concept of "not fun to play against". Since that nerf, folks have turned the individual card complaints up to 12 because they know that enough bitching and complaining actually has a chance to get results where before, they actually had to have some evidence of balance problems.
The current iteration of that phenomenon is Tickatus, and while I'm happy Blizzard didn't include the Tick in its latest round of changes, it may be a short-lived omission judging by the continued outrage posting.
I think it all comes down to: Tickatus keeps every other control deck out of the question in standard, it has no counter except playing agressive enough, I actually played Archivist Elysiana before the rotation and was fine with it. Simple as that, don't need to make a speech to defend myself here, Cards that make an entire archetype disappear are not ideal in any person's mind, and devs should strive for the optimal. A meta where every archetype has some variety and representation like some of the metas we had.
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I was thinking about the state of the HS community and it feels (to me) like over the previous year or so the community have became very whiny and self centred. It feels like a lot of people are constantly complaining about stuff that aren't really an issue. It almost feels like people will just complain and complain for their own selfish reasons - its like a large majority of the community won't be happy unless they get their own way and its so annoying. Everyone takes everything personally as well - you critique someone statement about a card/deck etc.. and even if you make valid points etc.. they will just attack you personally.
Tickatus is a good example of this. People constantly complain about the card - yet the stats would indicate it isn't OP. So why are people complaining about it? Is it because the deck they want to play doesn't perform well against it so it feels OP to them but they will happily ignore a hard counter to it (probably because that's not the class they want to play). But try to tell someone that and it becomes an insult trading ground.
I just feel like so many are ignorant to the fact that this is a meta based game and not every deck archetype is going to be viable at any given time but people aren't happy with that, they want to play their favourite decks all of the time and they want to be able to wreck every other deck with it (stupidity).
Its like with the DoL stuff, everyone was complaining about the card (and rightly so), yet you would still have a barrage of people defending it (despite statistical evidence proving that it is OP) and most likely defending it only because they like playing the deck and don't want to see it nerfed. Its just stupid because we all know and use Hsreplay - we can all check stats of the cards to see how strong they are etc.. but some people will just ignore those things out of selfishness really.
People just take things way too personally. Its like I'm criticising a point you've made, I'm not insulting your identity. Half of this community are just a bunch of self entitled pussies who cant take any criticism and won't ever be happy until everything goes there way. What happened to the days when the whole community felt like we all together? Yeah, we used to fight like cat and dog over whether cards were good or not etc.. but it was always in good fun, no one took personal offence to things and in the end we could generally all agree on what cards should be nerfed/buffed etc.. These days we couldn't be any further from that.
Just curious what other peoples thoughts on this are, do you agree that the community is in a poor state?
I think Tickatus winratio statistics is not proper data to decide if it balnaced or not.
I propose the assumption, that card game is great, when the variance of decks actually played is very high. Unfortunatelly, I have no idea how to measure variance of decks played, except tryig to play the game for 2 hours.
Tickatus decrease the variance of decks played, because so many control decks has no chance vs it. People just stop playing decks, which has no chance vs tickatus, so you are not seeing it in winatio statistics how OP tickatus is.
In case of anything, I like hearthstone. Complaining is good, because it helps developers to focus ont he right target. I hope blizzard hire people who read game forums and give developers feedback in kind way, so they are not sad due to all negative bullshit on forums.
Well, the group insisting that Blizzard rigs matchmaking, the group whining about balance, the "every meta is the worst/most boring/least interactive meta" crowd . . . they've all been around since day one, so nothing has changed there.
The one thing that has changed is Shudderwock.
Now I realize that sentence may make no sense, but if you look at the history of nerfs, HoF, etc., the nerf to Saronite Chain Gang targeting the Shudderwock combo deck was the first nerf I can remember that had absolutely zero to do with balance consideration and everything to do with this nebulous concept of "not fun to play against". Since that nerf, folks have turned the individual card complaints up to 12 because they know that enough bitching and complaining actually has a chance to get results where before, they actually had to have some evidence of balance problems.
The current iteration of that phenomenon is Tickatus, and while I'm happy Blizzard didn't include the Tick in its latest round of changes, it may be a short-lived omission judging by the continued outrage posting.
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 didn't want to turn this thread into a tickatus debate lol but you have made a good point and I want to address. Tickatus definitely keeps some other control decks out of the game (to a certain extent) but that doesn't make it OP in itself and let me explain why, because this also leads directly into one of my main points and its simple - just because someone wants to play control warrior/preist or whatever doesn't mean it has to be able to beat warlock, other control decks can still be viable because of other matchups. There is always going to be a control deck that is the strongest control deck, same for aggro and tempo. Its like you cant have it all ways, every matchup cant be 50/50 because then the whole concept of the game ceases to exist. Baring in mind we still don't know what is the strongest control deck yet.
The fact of the matter is - Tickatus is just an annoying card, it sucks getting your cards burned. But it also sucks when you cant clear a watch post or when miracle priest generates a bunch of cards or when your whole board dies to brawl or any other number of cards that can be annoying.
I think its almost a pointless debate at this stage because no matter how much people complain blizzard aren't going to nerf tickatus, I'd like to think he would have been hit with the recent if he was gonna be nerfed. The stats would indicate that it isn't OP and the devs should be basing all their nerfs/buffs directly from in game stats.
Fantastic comment and sums up a lot of how I feel. You're right about the matchfixing people and constant whining and as you say they've always been around (and always will). But the core community and people who genuinely love the game were for the most part very civil with one another and at least to me felt we could put our differences aside for our love for the game. That mentality has gone, everyone is against each other.
I wasn't around for the shudder nerf - was travelling and not playing during that period. But this is exactly the issue - people want things nerfed not because they are OP but because they don't like or find them unfun to play against. The devs are folding a lot lately and just adhering to fans demands (Kargal refund today shouldn't have happened!) and its really annoying because this game will die if they keep down this path. The devs needs to stand firm on stuff like this - if the card was OP then nerf it, fair enough - but it isn't so it shouldn't be nerfed no matter how many people are crying about it.
It probably stems from the fact that people lost faith to Blizzard as a whole.
Hearthstone came out in an age where we still believed in the company, when they showed that they care about the product first. Now Activision Blizzard is a company that is very clearly out of touch with the players, developers come and go, so we don't really know them or how much they love the game and there is a general sense of scepticism about anything and everything.
The fact that their communication skills are abysmal doesn't help either. Just look at the rewards track fiasco. A new reward system that was definitely better than the previous one caused such uproar simply because it was vague, unclear. People would go on and on about comparisons of the lvl50 rewards vs the total rewards of 4 months of grinding like that mattered because noone made it clear that it didn't.
The playerbase hasn't changed that much. Blizzard has.
A post which is complaining about people complaining and attacking people personally (calling them pussies) who attack people personally. Sounds like you are part of the problem.
On the topic of balance/design "whining", people figured the game becomes more enjoyable once blizzard takes the game like any other multiplayer game - where things that aren't right get balance patched fast enough to not ruin the game for too long.
And of course a lot of people see this as an opportunity to shit on others and try to feel intellectually superior by calling them whiners. Whining about people whining is still whining
I strongly disagree. Blizzard as a developer may have lost a lot of its old respect (the Warcraft 3 fiasco, that mobile Diablo game, heck even stuff as far back as the launch of Diablo 3 has really tarnished the company's reputation as putting out highly polished top tier games), but the Hearthstone team has improved dramatically. People like to point to Ben Brode leaving as this big turning point where Team 5 fell apart, but the truth is since then there's been massive changes for the better. We get regular and fast nerfs, constant AMAs with the team, blog posts detailing their insights and card design philosophy, and even straight-up admissions that they struggle with certain parts of game design. I was shocked last week when in an AMA they admitted they had trouble printing high-cost cards that don't instantly win the game because they'd pushed the power level of lower cost cards too high. They were straight up pointing out the problems with their own design philosophy, which was unthinkable before Year of the Dragon. There is some stuff that could be communicated better, like just how much better the reward track system is (though frankly, people were just upset to be upset, plenty of people did math early on proving the reward track was better for most players), but overall Team 5 has moved in a massively positive direction. Used to be you'd get an announcement of an expansion every 4 months, one set of nerfs halfway through an expansion cycle, and complete radio silence for the rest of the time.
"Golden age" Team 5 let Naxx Undertaker Hunter, statistically the most powerful deck of all time, go unnerfed until after the next expansion came out. Can you imagine the shitstorm that would've been stirred up if we'd had to wait for Lunacy Mage nerfs for two whole months, let alone until the next expansion came out? This community threw more of a fit over a deck being broken for two weeks than the Naxx-era HS community threw over a deck being more broken for four months. I'm not even mad at this - Lunacy Mage deserved the outcry, and Undertaker should've had more pushback - but it definitely goes to show that the HS community has become quicker to anger.
This is a good thing to some extent, like getting the Kargal refund, and even making the reward track even more generous (which wasn't necessary at all, but it was definitely nice), but it also means there's people causing a lot of noise over a lot of dumb shit. The outrage over the reward track was misguided, the outrage over Tickatus risks causing a nerf to a card that doesn't deserve it, and the early outrage about Watchpost Rogue caused one of the dumbest nerfs the game's ever seen. The community's constant outrage can get changes for the better, but when it's over dumb things it risks making changes for the worse. If Blizzard had caved in and removed the reward track entirely, as a not small contingent of the community wanted, I'd have gone into Barrens with 3k less gold than I did.
Well said. If ops post hadn't been laden with thinly veiled insults pointed towards the people and issues that obviously annoy him it may have been an interesting topic.
First of all you've missed the point entirely.
Second, I'm not complaining about people complaining - I'm complaining about the state of the community. I'm perfectly fine with people complaining about stuff - its good for everyone to voice their opinion and I encourage that. My point is that people constantly complain about stupid things - not to make the game better but to suit their own agendas.
Never complained about personal insults either - I said that people take such great offence to any criticism on their statements that they immediately resort to personal insults. It's just toxic and wasn't how the core community used to be. So yeah, I'll stand by my statement of 'self entitled pussies' because I cant think of another term to describe them.
And sure I complain about things - a lot of things but the difference between me and the self entitled crew - is that I will concede on a point I've made if there is a good enough argument against it. I don't complain about cards unless I have statistical evidence to back up that the card is OP and rarely (if ever) resort to personal insults unless someone personally attacks me first.
You response ignored all of the points I made and responded with a non sensical statement to attempt to portray me as a hippocrit - I feel like only one of us is part of the problem here and it isn't me!
Yep, it’s an embarrassing outburst. Most people love to complain, we all take up sides when we care bout something. Some people are just smart enough to play nice and hide their agenda, the OP clearly isn’t.
I'd agree with both of these.
I actually don't have an issue with people airing grievances, the game isn't perfect, far from it. For me though, it's the way it's done. Your criticism might be correct but if you surround it in personal attacks, insults and hyperbole then your entire point is lost. I've worked in managing and coaching for 15 years now and there are productive ways of relaying concerns or feedback that don't have to involve insulting anybody who doesn't agree with you and personal jibes at a dev team who can't defend themselves.
If your point or argument is good then let it do its job.
This community also doesn't problem solve and I thin its a shame as well as a missed opportunity. I've been involved in other games where the community pull together, share strategies, guides, builds and even have open dialogue with the dev team and get brought on to help with bug fixes etc. Not a chance this community can be trusted with this sort of thing.
If someone is getting stressed because of Tickatus, you're far, far more likely to see "git good scrub" than a conversation whcih develops into general tips on how to play against the deck, where they are going wrong etc.
You won't get that though because the majority seem absolutely hell bent on everything being someone else's fault. It's very snide and blame centric.
Someone like Regis is a good example of raising issues within the game in a respectful way which encourages dialogue. I don't watch much yohtubd content but he's been very vocal about the game being too expensive, problems with metas and cards etc but he doesn't feel the need to sling around insults whilst he's doing it.
I think with the free to play nature of the game, coupled with it being pretty casual and games generally not lasting very long and there being no real player profile system, it doesn't really have a 'community' feel. The standard of posting on this site is possibly the worst I've ever seen, that doesn't help. There are some really good posters and the site is a great source of information but it is let down by a good amount of the people who visit it.
And if I'm not mistaken, I've read a similar thread every week or so since the release of the game.
Take a walk on the wild side...
I don't disagree with you. However you misunderstood my point.
Even though Hearthstone is better than ever which means it's design team is better, people do not see that. They see Activision Blizzard as a whole instead. One key reason for that is that the PR department is terrible.
People believed that the new progression system will be terrible because noone made it clear that it wasn't.
People thought that the tavern pass would make the game pay to play because noone made it clear that it was about cosmetics.
People are still mad at them for the way they handled issues with China because they dropped the ball repeatedly.
These are only a few examples of bad communication. Having the lead developer do Q&A while at the same time allowing announcements to be vague, poorly constructed and leaving room for doubters to thrive is a problem, especially for a company that has lost all of it's credibility.
I don't think Ben Brode is some kind of demigod, but it’s clear the game was developed with a lot of love and care, year's of balancing and tweaking went into getting the game to match Team 5’s vision. That has gone now, 3 expansions and 3 mini sets per year with an ever expanding list of balancing problems added each time, all the time ignoring the fundamentals of the original game. All the AMA's in the world won’t change that.
I could write something about Pizza complaining about OP complaining about people complaining, but I am not complaining.
I understand that cards like Tickatus are annoying to some people, but you can't really do anything about it. Blizzard should release cards that are not just basic HS stuff to make for a less boring/curvestone meta imo. People have been complaining about cards and metas forever.
Or in a nutshell, here my winrates in standard this season:
Lunacy Mage pre-nerf: 72%
Controllock post-nerf: 60%
I guess this says enough about what deck was/is more broken.
The community follows the nature of the game.
The game is designed to be annoying and the community follows its steps. same as all blizzard games.
Yeah, undertaker meta, patron meta, grand tournament being a useless expansion barring from 3 cards, etc..
There was surely a lot of love and care and years of balancing and tweaking, sure
I think it all comes down to:
Tickatus keeps every other control deck out of the question in standard, it has no counter except playing agressive enough, I actually played Archivist Elysiana before the rotation and was fine with it. Simple as that, don't need to make a speech to defend myself here, Cards that make an entire archetype disappear are not ideal in any person's mind, and devs should strive for the optimal. A meta where every archetype has some variety and representation like some of the metas we had.