I've seen in response to nerf suggestions people say something like that card isn't even good. But people request nerfs because the card causes them to not have as much fun. Most of the time what causes people to not have fun is losing, because no one likes to lose, which is why powerful cards are often called on to be nerfed. But on the rarer occasions where people consistently request a nerf on relatively weak card, that tends to show that something is off with the design of the card, rather than the power level. While there will always be people complaining about some card being too good, what should be avoided if possible are cards that upset players even when they win.
I've seen in response to nerf suggestions people say something like that card isn't even good. But people request nerfs because the card causes them to not have as much fun. Most of the time what causes people to not have fun is losing, because no one likes to lose, which is why powerful cards are often called on to be nerfed. But on the rarer occasions where people consistently request a nerf on relatively weak card, that tends to show that something is off with the design of the card, rather than the power level. While there will always be people complaining about some card being too good, what should be avoided if possible are cards that upset players even when they win.
This is true, but you still have to be careful since just because some people make a lot of noise, that does not mean their views represent the majority of players.
Happy players ussually dont write on this forum. So you read all these crying people how this and that is too powerful, nerf that asap, just cause they lost few times to that card...
Yeah, I'm actually grateful they haven't bent to more of these whine campaigns.
A lot of folks have zero perspective regarding their own play and whether or not it was the card that caused them to lose or their own errors.
I don't want balance to become something that is done by vote.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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'll just note here that back in the day, Yogg-Saron, Hope's End was nerfed only because of public outcry. It had absolutely nothing to do with power level or win rate, and everything to do with the fact that it happened to win a game in a major tournament. The argument was that the card was too random and had no place in a competitive environment.
Flash forward to 2020 -- not only was the original Yogg reverted in Wild, but they added a new Yogg to the game. Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate is, if anything, even more random than Hope's End, and can result in an actual coin toss to see who wins the game if the players have similar life totals. And this time, no one batted an eye.
My point is that players' perceptions of "fun" tends to shift over time, and these decisions have a lot more to do with PR image than with an actual concern for the well-being of the game or the "fun factor," which is mercurial at best.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland
Specifically on the Tickatus issue, there is an interesting opinion in the latest VS meta report.
They state that it is the first time that an underperforming deck is played so much and warping the meta to such an extent for a prolonged period. Apparently Tickatus is keeping at bay every deck that could possibly counter current tier1 decks.
I'll just note here that back in the day, Yogg-Saron, Hope's End was nerfed only because of public outcry. It had absolutely nothing to do with power level or win rate, and everything to do with the fact that it happened to win a game in a major tournament. The argument was that the card was too random and had no place in a competitive environment.
Flash forward to 2020 -- not only was the original Yogg reverted in Wild, but they added a new Yogg to the game. Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate is, if anything, even more random than Hope's End, and can result in an actual coin toss to see who wins the game if the players have similar life totals. And this time, no one batted an eye.
My point is that players' perceptions of "fun" tends to shift over time, and these decisions have a lot more to do with PR image than with an actual concern for the well-being of the game or the "fun factor," which is mercurial at best.
The funny thing is that post-nerf Yogg-Saron, Hope's End was a lot more random than pre-nerf Yogg. When Yogg stopped casting spells after being transformed or removed, he was a lot less consistent at clearing the board, drawing cards, and summoning random stuff. Post-nerf, the end-state of having played a Yogg wasn't as reliable. The fact that the "LOL RNG Casual" card that folks thought Yogg was supposed to be was instead a fairly consistent neutral board clear was the problem that Blizz felt they had to fix.
There's certainly a gap between actual randomness and what players hate. It's like Galakrond Lackey Rogue. Folks hated it, complained about RNG, but really the complaint was about power level and consistency. Most of the lackeys had controllable effects, and the card-generating ones were all discover, which was also pretty controllable.
The biggest indicator of folks complaining about excessive RNG cards is their power level. Cost-inefficient randomness rarely has folks yelling about nerfs.
//
As to the premise of the OP, there are some few cards which aren't OP that folks still complain about them, and they tend to be cards which aren't OP in general, but can be OP in really narrow circumstances. Tickatus isn't too powerful, but can have a polarizing amount of strength in limited match-ups. Easy one-card hardcounters to archetypes are just super FeelsBadMan.
That said, players aren't always the best judge of health for the game. There are plenty of folks who hate aggro. But some degree of aggro is vital for a healthy game. Intense player complain is probably usually worth investigation, but it isn't proof that changes are needed.
You do realise that a card that some players don't find fun an equal (or higher) number of other players do find fun? On these boards everyone whines about any card that caused them to lose the """rigged rng matchup thanks blizzturd""" which is basically almost any relevant card in the meta. And as soon as some of these cards are nerfed, you'll see a new crusade against another class or another card. For reference, when tickatus will eventually be nerfed (even though it's a bad card in a godawful tier 4 deck) and priests will lose basically their only really bad matchup on ladder, we'll probably witness a neverending stream of people whining about how there's no interaction against priests and their cute little decks can't do anything against infinite card generation and so on and so forth.
At some point, players have to learn to A) play around cards and adapt their play to different matchups and B) realise that even in perfect metas (which never have and never will exist) there are awful matchups, suck it the fuck up and move on or play another deck. If all cards people on this minuscule board alone wanted nerfed actually were, we'd basically have "core set hearthstone" (but without alex because she's immensely OP and must be nerfed to 11 mana 1/1 deal 2 damage, as I've recently read).
As someone who has to face quest rogue, quest mage and mill rogue every now and then in wild, my belief is that if a deck isn't good, there's no point in nerfing it, no matter how infuriating you find it to play against.
What we see here, in this thread, in this game, even if it is just a game is the total eclips of the human psyche, the fundamental contingency, vulgarity and repulsive nature of human existence.
Oppressive cards, a profound lack of balance serving Blizzards love babies as a target audience, deride the most fundamental values of human existence... all those humanitarian values you arrogant little boys seem to no nothing about: balance, fairness, diversity.
Claiming people who complain are bad at the game and don't see their own mistakes just reveal your own short-sightedness that if you win you have nothing to wish for.
Card designers are authoritarian in nature. They just print cards and you have to deal with it. You can't say designers did something wrong because if you do that you are a 'whiner,' weak etc. Such a vulgarity. In real live we see what authoritarian people do to others. Or states do to their citizens. Well tell the Uyghurs to 'deal' with the human rights abuses of the authoritarian government.
And don't come and tell me that this is just a game. Card designers violate the human rights of players on a grant scale. People have the right to play a fair and balanced game where skill is of importance and cards are not oppressive. It's appaling to see that you can concede at start of the game just because RPS is too steep. And you kids think that is ok?
Yes, absolutely brilliant. Compare the mass extermination of millions of innocent people to a card game. Declare playing a balanced game a "human right" in a world where people are being wrongfully imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered in the name of one vile ideology or another.
And your posts are a better example of the "repulsive nature of human existence" than anything else said in this thread.
Every time you post, you set a new standard of stark, raving lunacy.
The question is if a rule-based order is possible in Hearthstone, instead of arbitrary card design thrown in as red meat to see what happens.
Lol, I kind of agree with you for once. The most obvious example is probably the first version of Demonhunter.
Powerful AI simulations could probably calculate both the best decks and aim for a reasonable rotational balance and then leave it to the players, but maybe such an approach would lead to a boring game??
The question is if a rule-based order is possible in Hearthstone, instead of arbitrary card design thrown in as red meat to see what happens.
Lol, I kind of agree with you for once. The most obvious example is probably the first version of Demonhunter.
Powerful AI simulations could probably calculate both the best decks and aim for a reasonable rotational balance and then leave it to the players, but maybe such an approach would lead to a boring game??
Your Idea is a possible solution and I don't see anything boring in the notions that you outwit, outmaneuver and outclass your opponent instead of winning based on the better match up. The latter is extremely boring as it eventually emanates in meta's where small subset of classes dominate ( in the case of barrens Mage and Paladin). Pretty boring. Just stop printing oppressive cards which after a tsunami of complains are nerfed (what's the deal, haven't you seen that coming Blizzard?).
Have you btw noticed that the nerf-rate has gone up over the years? I would like to see some stats about that, but that is off subject.
It's impossible to perfectly balance any competitive game. There will always be a "best deck", a "best class", or a "best strategy". Dominant strategy has been a factor in games forever, a concept that more or less says that players will generally lean towards doing whatever it is makes them win the easiest.
CCG's make that trickier because of their monetization, typically. You can't always just do the best thing, since that could be out of reach. Then you do the next best thing. That's why aggro tends to be popular and good. It's accessible, devs know that, so they make aggro work well.
Painting the game developers as this sinister cabal of people out to violate the rights of their players is outright fascist rhetoric, by the way. They're just people who love Hearthstone and happen to make the game. They're not perfect, robotic people who are even capable of designing a perfectly balanced game (which is impossible to do). I generally support anti-corporate sentiment; corporations are actively destroying the planet and they only exist to make a profit. However, individual designers on the Hearthstone team cannot be burdened with the responsibility for the way their parent companies demand they monetize and otherwise create the game. Hate Blizzard-Activision all you want, you can also blame Devs for releasing overpowered cards - it's their job - but to imply that they're evil or otherwise anything sinister is bad faith, and practically insane.
I've seen in response to nerf suggestions people say something like that card isn't even good. But people request nerfs because the card causes them to not have as much fun. Most of the time what causes people to not have fun is losing, because no one likes to lose, which is why powerful cards are often called on to be nerfed. But on the rarer occasions where people consistently request a nerf on relatively weak card, that tends to show that something is off with the design of the card, rather than the power level. While there will always be people complaining about some card being too good, what should be avoided if possible are cards that upset players even when they win.
This is true, but you still have to be careful since just because some people make a lot of noise, that does not mean their views represent the majority of players.
Happy players ussually dont write on this forum. So you read all these crying people how this and that is too powerful, nerf that asap, just cause they lost few times to that card...
In all honesty, there should be a stickied thread which explains the concept of recency bias and echo chambers.
Yeah, I'm actually grateful they haven't bent to more of these whine campaigns.
A lot of folks have zero perspective regarding their own play and whether or not it was the card that caused them to lose or their own errors.
I don't want balance to become something that is done by vote.
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.
You are absolutely right, tho totally weak cards that never see play are safe.
I'll just note here that back in the day, Yogg-Saron, Hope's End was nerfed only because of public outcry. It had absolutely nothing to do with power level or win rate, and everything to do with the fact that it happened to win a game in a major tournament. The argument was that the card was too random and had no place in a competitive environment.
Flash forward to 2020 -- not only was the original Yogg reverted in Wild, but they added a new Yogg to the game. Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate is, if anything, even more random than Hope's End, and can result in an actual coin toss to see who wins the game if the players have similar life totals. And this time, no one batted an eye.
My point is that players' perceptions of "fun" tends to shift over time, and these decisions have a lot more to do with PR image than with an actual concern for the well-being of the game or the "fun factor," which is mercurial at best.
"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland
Specifically on the Tickatus issue, there is an interesting opinion in the latest VS meta report.
They state that it is the first time that an underperforming deck is played so much and warping the meta to such an extent for a prolonged period. Apparently Tickatus is keeping at bay every deck that could possibly counter current tier1 decks.
Less nerfing, more learning people.
Nobody likes losing. But asking to change the tough parts of a game to win...well, does not sound like winning at all.
Perhaps switching Hearthstone for Candy Crush would be less demanding for some of them? Just a thought
The funny thing is that post-nerf Yogg-Saron, Hope's End was a lot more random than pre-nerf Yogg. When Yogg stopped casting spells after being transformed or removed, he was a lot less consistent at clearing the board, drawing cards, and summoning random stuff. Post-nerf, the end-state of having played a Yogg wasn't as reliable. The fact that the "LOL RNG Casual" card that folks thought Yogg was supposed to be was instead a fairly consistent neutral board clear was the problem that Blizz felt they had to fix.
There's certainly a gap between actual randomness and what players hate. It's like Galakrond Lackey Rogue. Folks hated it, complained about RNG, but really the complaint was about power level and consistency. Most of the lackeys had controllable effects, and the card-generating ones were all discover, which was also pretty controllable.
The biggest indicator of folks complaining about excessive RNG cards is their power level. Cost-inefficient randomness rarely has folks yelling about nerfs.
//
As to the premise of the OP, there are some few cards which aren't OP that folks still complain about them, and they tend to be cards which aren't OP in general, but can be OP in really narrow circumstances. Tickatus isn't too powerful, but can have a polarizing amount of strength in limited match-ups. Easy one-card hardcounters to archetypes are just super FeelsBadMan.
That said, players aren't always the best judge of health for the game. There are plenty of folks who hate aggro. But some degree of aggro is vital for a healthy game. Intense player complain is probably usually worth investigation, but it isn't proof that changes are needed.
watch one guy make a point and other guys commenting some random bullshit barely about the topic in responds
You do realise that a card that some players don't find fun an equal (or higher) number of other players do find fun? On these boards everyone whines about any card that caused them to lose the """rigged rng matchup thanks blizzturd""" which is basically almost any relevant card in the meta. And as soon as some of these cards are nerfed, you'll see a new crusade against another class or another card. For reference, when tickatus will eventually be nerfed (even though it's a bad card in a godawful tier 4 deck) and priests will lose basically their only really bad matchup on ladder, we'll probably witness a neverending stream of people whining about how there's no interaction against priests and their cute little decks can't do anything against infinite card generation and so on and so forth.
At some point, players have to learn to A) play around cards and adapt their play to different matchups and B) realise that even in perfect metas (which never have and never will exist) there are awful matchups, suck it the fuck up and move on or play another deck. If all cards people on this minuscule board alone wanted nerfed actually were, we'd basically have "core set hearthstone" (but without alex because she's immensely OP and must be nerfed to 11 mana 1/1 deal 2 damage, as I've recently read).
As someone who has to face quest rogue, quest mage and mill rogue every now and then in wild, my belief is that if a deck isn't good, there's no point in nerfing it, no matter how infuriating you find it to play against.
What we see here, in this thread, in this game, even if it is just a game is the total eclips of the human psyche, the fundamental contingency, vulgarity and repulsive nature of human existence.
Oppressive cards, a profound lack of balance serving Blizzards love babies as a target audience, deride the most fundamental values of human existence... all those humanitarian values you arrogant little boys seem to no nothing about: balance, fairness, diversity.
Claiming people who complain are bad at the game and don't see their own mistakes just reveal your own short-sightedness that if you win you have nothing to wish for.
Card designers are authoritarian in nature. They just print cards and you have to deal with it. You can't say designers did something wrong because if you do that you are a 'whiner,' weak etc. Such a vulgarity. In real live we see what authoritarian people do to others. Or states do to their citizens. Well tell the Uyghurs to 'deal' with the human rights abuses of the authoritarian government.
And don't come and tell me that this is just a game. Card designers violate the human rights of players on a grant scale. People have the right to play a fair and balanced game where skill is of importance and cards are not oppressive. It's appaling to see that you can concede at start of the game just because RPS is too steep. And you kids think that is ok?
We make our world significant through the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
Yes, absolutely brilliant. Compare the mass extermination of millions of innocent people to a card game. Declare playing a balanced game a "human right" in a world where people are being wrongfully imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered in the name of one vile ideology or another.
And your posts are a better example of the "repulsive nature of human existence" than anything else said in this thread.
Every time you post, you set a new standard of stark, raving lunacy.
I think there are plenty of situations where nerf discussion is warranted:
-A standard archetype has a 60% overall winrate and 57%+ in top 2k legend.
-A card non legendary has a 65% mulligan winrate.
-A class is played 20% or more.
-A class class has a <45% overall winrate with no strong archetype.
All of this happens fairly frequently. I do not think it is worth complaining about:
-Polarized matchups, even when "fair" decks are at a heavy disadvantage.
-Unlikely highrolls, even when they can't be countered. Get on with it.
Editor of the Heartpwn Legendary Crafting Guide:
https://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/card-discussion/205920-legendary-tier-list-crafting-guide
The question is if a rule-based order is possible in Hearthstone, instead of arbitrary card design thrown in as red meat to see what happens.
We make our world significant through the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
Lol, I kind of agree with you for once. The most obvious example is probably the first version of Demonhunter.
Powerful AI simulations could probably calculate both the best decks and aim for a reasonable rotational balance and then leave it to the players, but maybe such an approach would lead to a boring game??
Editor of the Heartpwn Legendary Crafting Guide:
https://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/card-discussion/205920-legendary-tier-list-crafting-guide
Your Idea is a possible solution and I don't see anything boring in the notions that you outwit, outmaneuver and outclass your opponent instead of winning based on the better match up. The latter is extremely boring as it eventually emanates in meta's where small subset of classes dominate ( in the case of barrens Mage and Paladin). Pretty boring. Just stop printing oppressive cards which after a tsunami of complains are nerfed (what's the deal, haven't you seen that coming Blizzard?).
Have you btw noticed that the nerf-rate has gone up over the years? I would like to see some stats about that, but that is off subject.
We make our world significant through the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
It's impossible to perfectly balance any competitive game. There will always be a "best deck", a "best class", or a "best strategy".
Dominant strategy has been a factor in games forever, a concept that more or less says that players will generally lean towards doing whatever it is makes them win the easiest.
CCG's make that trickier because of their monetization, typically. You can't always just do the best thing, since that could be out of reach. Then you do the next best thing. That's why aggro tends to be popular and good. It's accessible, devs know that, so they make aggro work well.
Painting the game developers as this sinister cabal of people out to violate the rights of their players is outright fascist rhetoric, by the way. They're just people who love Hearthstone and happen to make the game. They're not perfect, robotic people who are even capable of designing a perfectly balanced game (which is impossible to do). I generally support anti-corporate sentiment; corporations are actively destroying the planet and they only exist to make a profit. However, individual designers on the Hearthstone team cannot be burdened with the responsibility for the way their parent companies demand they monetize and otherwise create the game. Hate Blizzard-Activision all you want, you can also blame Devs for releasing overpowered cards - it's their job - but to imply that they're evil or otherwise anything sinister is bad faith, and practically insane.
please don't bully my son
Or just switch to BG, the Candy Crush of the Hearthstone world.