The amout of hate and rage on this platform is astonishing. I understand that people are forever complaining the meta as there are always hate for certain cards/decks/playstyle. However, with the announcement of mercenaries mode, things get crazy. People hate the mode that they haven't played yet! They are not forced to play and even can play it for free if they want to. Ofcourse Blizz wants to earn money, but who do not? Cross-sale is a very popular technique to sale more products to an existing set of customer. It is well-known that getting new customers is much harder to retain the same one. And as a customer, if you don't like the product, you can just ignore it. A game is not like food or other necessities. Not play this game does not cause any degradation in our life whatsoever (well, except if you are a pro).
For people who love the game and complaining that the game has degraded in term of quality due to not focus on the core mode (well, the card game), I would say it is more complicated than that. Yes, the current meta kills any control decks, but in term of diversity it is definitely not too bad. Sometimes you have to be in the shoes of the people who create the game. You have to deliver 3 patches of release every year, and each of them must have special flavour. How can any teams achieve that without breaking things? Also, their internal testers can't be compare with the massive amount of players while many of them are either pros or very innovative in term of exploiting combos. With the range of few thousand cards in Standard and tens of thousand cards in Wild, it is impossible for any teams to play test everything before releasing. I can see that they release changes much more frequently in comparison to years before, which is a very good move to cope with the complicated meta. Yes, not everything they changed is good, but who is perfect? Also, since Mercenaries has its own monetary system, thus it is very likely to be manage by a different team. Then the losing of focus on the main card game seems to be just a speculation.
And we also have complains regarding gold to be used in Mercenaries, which in turn forcing us to spend on Mercenary and having less for buying packs. Though the logic is correct, but the critics seem quite weird to me. If you don't like the mode then don't spend gold. If you like the mode, is it natural to pay something to the developers? In opinion, expecting something free with good quality is the definition of "cash grab" that everyone keeps using. I find that the shared resource between mode helps you to play the game more casual. Also, since Mercenaries uses gold, may be there will be plans to help players to get more gold (just speculating)? Hs nowadays gives you much more gold than when it was first release (yes, I understand the problem of "double" legendaries). But the cost of building a deck does not increase as much. Building an aggro deck is just marginally more expensive than before. If you want more decks or more diversified playstyles, you can play arena which has been the main mode for farming for ages, or just pay! Use amazon coin and buy the pre-purchase bundles (not the mega one) or bundles with legendaries (usually appear a bit after each expansion release). In overall, they have good values if you have cash to spare. But I must stress that Hs can be played for free, albeit quite challenging for new F2P players.
My last note is that creating a good product is hard no matter what it is. I still find Hs fun and very casual even though I played from the second released many years ago. I did stop playing it occasionally when I found the meta is bored or got busy with works. I play rank just to complete quest (climbing ladders are too stressful for enjoying the game, especially for rng involved), or play duels as a mean to use old cards and use crazy combos. I do not play battleground as one game is a bit too long for my own flexibility. But I know many people like it. Now we have a new mode coming, which looks actually okay in the teaser despite all the hate. Hs has evolved from just a card game to kind of a game hub. I see nothing wrong with it. In the old time, people played customed modes in Warcraft all the time. I know that it is always very easy to criticize and it sometimes even feel good as it kind of expressing our power over some matter. But it is toxic without trying to think about the positivity or the difficulty the people in charged has to overcome. Just try the mode, if it is not for you, skip it. If you just hate Blizz, then stop using Blizz products. Then you don't have to hold all the rage for just a trivial game. There are things much more important than this game or Blizz.
It is not about kiss anyone ass. It just about the attitude in life. I even don't care if this game is released by Blizz or not. This is just a game that fits my way of entertaining.
Because the mode confirms everything we have dreaded blizzard becoming. I have been a blizzard fan for more than 20 years. I was a top 500 star craft player in a former lifetime and looked forward to every blizzard product.
The decline started with their purchase by Vivendi, but still Blizzard put out great products that were well worth the money. Even if MMORPG were not your thing, they certainly did it well with WOW. Blizzard was known for not releasing games until their ready and were not known as money grubbing scumbags like EA.
Even Overwatch was a good game on release. Well polished, solidly balanced and fun to play. Only the matchmaker was aids.
But in Hearthstone, you see every cynical trick. Every change is designed to extract more dollars from their player base. The rigging is so disgusting it is absurd, it is like you are not even playing a game, just something meant to feel like a game that attempts to get you to spend money. I was overjoyed when I found hearthstone, I was a former ranked magic player (the physical card game over 20 years ago) and had given it up when my kids were born (too much time, too much money) so hearthstone was a god send. A digital way for me to play an old gamestyle I thought I could never return to from a company that I then respected and trusted.
Then I saw the rigging....and then I came here to ask about it, what people thought and was met with such a ridiculous response of derision and gaslighting that I was taken aback and decided to re-evaluate my stance. i looked into blizzards game design philosophies, I watched videos, read articles and found that no, I am right, the game is rigged. But I could not understand why so many bright, articulate people on this site were so absolutely sure that hearthstone was not rigged. Then when you laid out the case for why you believe it is.....the response says everything.
The response was well, that is not proof and you are stupid tinfoil hat, confirmation bias dumbass if you think it is rigged without definative proof......and I thought...what a bizarre response......then I learned what a community manager was.
See I started on the internet in a different age, when people had open and honest conversation and looked to learn from each other. The various boards were not filled with shills and plants hammering their talking points and brigading anyone who dared stray from the corporate script. But now the internet is filled with people with agendas, be they corporate or political, and to think that some innocent kid comes to a site like this to find out more about a game they like and are met by a bunch of goons trying to make sure he spends the most he can is disgusting to me.
So I come by from time to time to tweak the shills and point out the obvious about the game. Things like team 5 sucks and the quests are all overpowered, things like merenaries and duels are cynical stupid products that people should avoid. I will give the occaisional positive shout when they do something good like fix the terrible reward track or release classic mode. But it general my stance toward blizzard has changed quite a bit in the last 5 years. Mercenaries is just one more step down the EA path.
To excel with this game, you either need - MORE TIME (to grind) - or MORE MONEY (to skip the grinding)
So people without the privilege of having both resources, will naturally feel a bit disadvantaged. It's no one's fault - we all know developers can't work for free, and stockholders need to see increase value in their investments.
But whining is easy. And it's the easy way out to call names, and say those who can make more money is "greedy, selfish, exploiting".
It's an endless debate where no one wins. So just ignore the politics, and focus on having fun (with the limitations).
I mean yeah most games are F2P if you play enough problem is time vs gain. Stuff like LoR gives you stuff on the dot so you barely have to grind to meet requirements. Hell they even made singleplayer free there. Shadowverse is a bit grindy but overall its a reasonable amount of time to play. HS if you want something it's gonna cost a hellva lot, with no compensation. So far we don't know how exactly Mercenaries mode rewards are gonna go but judging from the prepurchase already a lot of people are understandably worried. I've played since GT meta, and slowly HS literally requires you to get the prepurchase bundle to get anywhere with multiple decks. Sure with enough grinding you can get one meta deck, but the fun of card games is experimenting with the meta and playing with unique combinations. It isn't fun to grind out 20+ hours a week to get one meta deck everyone is playing just to repeat the process again.
Thank you for all the comment. It seems like the problem is in the time needed to enjoy the game without paying. I agree that Hs is quite expensive either in term of time or money if you want a relatively diversified collection. I tried a few different CCG before and find HS is indeed expensive but not the most expensive (imo, Yugioh Duelist is more expensive as there is no easy way to get the cards you want and you can put 3 same UR cards in one decks). Maybe that's also the reason they introduce new modes (ofcourse with monetary incentive as well) so players can have more "non-grinding" options. But it seems like a dilema to me. More modes means more time spend and the resources are stretching. Let's see if Mercenaries is good enough to make Hs a great "game platform" or just stresses the players to the point that they give up spending time/money.
The answer is that people are spoiled. They expect Hearthstone to be exactly what they personally imagined and they expect it to cost exactly as much as they are willing to spend, in both time and money.
People do not want to understand that games like this with constant content generation need to monetize that content, nor that in a game that had existed that long, new ideas need to be tried to avoid becoming stale.
On top of that add some content creators that attempt to make money off of outrage by lying to the playerbase, like the whole reward track shenanigans, and you get a recipe for toxicity.
The new gamemode was described as a "slay the spire" -esque rogue like, but what they now presented is raid shadow legends, but just with the cards slapped on a background and then some ugly abilities.
What I had pictured was a sort of side scroller, where you play the mercenaries and battle all the creatures from HS: kobolds, gelatinous cubes, dragons,... using the abilities of HS as cards: fireball, sinister strike, swipe, shield block,...
There is a gameplay video of the combat on reddit and it just looks boring for the five minutes I watched. It was select three of six cards, those would then face three other cards and you select one of three abilities and a target per card. Then automated battle starts. If one of your cards die, you replace it with one of the remaining three.
It didn't look interactive, the cards had no animation and the spell effects were plain HS effects.
I think what annoys people even more, is that it is pack based and they are selling high priced preorder packs - before people could even play it.
The problem, ultimately, is that Blizzard has promised some dozen features and additional game modes in the past (stuff which could be used to drive monetization in other ways), and they've all been sidelined for... what honestly seems kind of mediocre, and obvious cash grab.
Pair that with a meta where something like 75% of Blizzards own advertising team (streamers) are contemplating quitting the game because the meta for standard is just unfun for them... and the whole thing comes off as seeming like Blizzard is throwing Standard and Wild under the bus for a quick cash grab, instead of making a game people want to spend money on for its own sake.
Because they added a new game mode while standard and wild format suck ass for most players. So its like "yeah we know you don't like how to game is going to look now, but anyway, we're not donna do anything about it and btw, here is a new game mode"
Because they added a new game mode while standard and wild format suck ass for most players. So its like "yeah we know you don't like how to game is going to look now, but anyway, we're not donna do anything about it and btw, here is a new game mode"
Lol. This is a permanent situation. "Most players" (aka vocal internet minority) always whine how bad the game is
Because they added a new game mode while standard and wild format suck ass for most players. So its like "yeah we know you don't like how to game is going to look now, but anyway, we're not donna do anything about it and btw, here is a new game mode"
Lol. This is a permanent situation. "Most players" (aka vocal internet minority) always whine how bad the game is
Well if everyone complains about how bad a game is even pro players and streamers that play 8 hours a day Maybe IT IS.
And the rest of us are just bored of seeing the same shit over and over again for years.
The new gamemode was described as a "slay the spire" -esque rogue like, but what they now presented is raid shadow legends, but just with the cards slapped on a background and then some ugly abilities.
What I had pictured was a sort of side scroller, where you play the mercenaries and battle all the creatures from HS: kobolds, gelatinous cubes, dragons,... using the abilities of HS as cards: fireball, sinister strike, swipe, shield block,...
There is a gameplay video of the combat on reddit and it just looks boring for the five minutes I watched. It was select three of six cards, those would then face three other cards and you select one of three abilities and a target per card. Then automated battle starts. If one of your cards die, you replace it with one of the remaining three.
It didn't look interactive, the cards had no animation and the spell effects were plain HS effects.
I think what annoys people even more, is that it is pack based and they are selling high priced preorder packs - before people could even play it.
This right here is spot on. I also can’t agree more on how it visually looks like junk.
The amout of hate and rage on this platform is astonishing. I understand that people are forever complaining the meta as there are always hate for certain cards/decks/playstyle. However, with the announcement of mercenaries mode, things get crazy. People hate the mode that they haven't played yet! They are not forced to play and even can play it for free if they want to. Ofcourse Blizz wants to earn money, but who do not? Cross-sale is a very popular technique to sale more products to an existing set of customer. It is well-known that getting new customers is much harder to retain the same one. And as a customer, if you don't like the product, you can just ignore it. A game is not like food or other necessities. Not play this game does not cause any degradation in our life whatsoever (well, except if you are a pro).
For people who love the game and complaining that the game has degraded in term of quality due to not focus on the core mode (well, the card game), I would say it is more complicated than that. Yes, the current meta kills any control decks, but in term of diversity it is definitely not too bad. Sometimes you have to be in the shoes of the people who create the game. You have to deliver 3 patches of release every year, and each of them must have special flavour. How can any teams achieve that without breaking things? Also, their internal testers can't be compare with the massive amount of players while many of them are either pros or very innovative in term of exploiting combos. With the range of few thousand cards in Standard and tens of thousand cards in Wild, it is impossible for any teams to play test everything before releasing. I can see that they release changes much more frequently in comparison to years before, which is a very good move to cope with the complicated meta. Yes, not everything they changed is good, but who is perfect? Also, since Mercenaries has its own monetary system, thus it is very likely to be manage by a different team. Then the losing of focus on the main card game seems to be just a speculation.
And we also have complains regarding gold to be used in Mercenaries, which in turn forcing us to spend on Mercenary and having less for buying packs. Though the logic is correct, but the critics seem quite weird to me. If you don't like the mode then don't spend gold. If you like the mode, is it natural to pay something to the developers? In opinion, expecting something free with good quality is the definition of "cash grab" that everyone keeps using. I find that the shared resource between mode helps you to play the game more casual. Also, since Mercenaries uses gold, may be there will be plans to help players to get more gold (just speculating)? Hs nowadays gives you much more gold than when it was first release (yes, I understand the problem of "double" legendaries). But the cost of building a deck does not increase as much. Building an aggro deck is just marginally more expensive than before. If you want more decks or more diversified playstyles, you can play arena which has been the main mode for farming for ages, or just pay! Use amazon coin and buy the pre-purchase bundles (not the mega one) or bundles with legendaries (usually appear a bit after each expansion release). In overall, they have good values if you have cash to spare. But I must stress that Hs can be played for free, albeit quite challenging for new F2P players.
My last note is that creating a good product is hard no matter what it is. I still find Hs fun and very casual even though I played from the second released many years ago. I did stop playing it occasionally when I found the meta is bored or got busy with works. I play rank just to complete quest (climbing ladders are too stressful for enjoying the game, especially for rng involved), or play duels as a mean to use old cards and use crazy combos. I do not play battleground as one game is a bit too long for my own flexibility. But I know many people like it. Now we have a new mode coming, which looks actually okay in the teaser despite all the hate. Hs has evolved from just a card game to kind of a game hub. I see nothing wrong with it. In the old time, people played customed modes in Warcraft all the time. I know that it is always very easy to criticize and it sometimes even feel good as it kind of expressing our power over some matter. But it is toxic without trying to think about the positivity or the difficulty the people in charged has to overcome. Just try the mode, if it is not for you, skip it. If you just hate Blizz, then stop using Blizz products. Then you don't have to hold all the rage for just a trivial game. There are things much more important than this game or Blizz.
I think you should go back to reddit, with the rest of the Blizzard shills and apologists.
It is not about kiss anyone ass. It just about the attitude in life. I even don't care if this game is released by Blizz or not. This is just a game that fits my way of entertaining.
That wall of text did more damage that an aggro hunter in a rogue meta.
Because the mode confirms everything we have dreaded blizzard becoming. I have been a blizzard fan for more than 20 years. I was a top 500 star craft player in a former lifetime and looked forward to every blizzard product.
The decline started with their purchase by Vivendi, but still Blizzard put out great products that were well worth the money. Even if MMORPG were not your thing, they certainly did it well with WOW. Blizzard was known for not releasing games until their ready and were not known as money grubbing scumbags like EA.
Even Overwatch was a good game on release. Well polished, solidly balanced and fun to play. Only the matchmaker was aids.
But in Hearthstone, you see every cynical trick. Every change is designed to extract more dollars from their player base. The rigging is so disgusting it is absurd, it is like you are not even playing a game, just something meant to feel like a game that attempts to get you to spend money. I was overjoyed when I found hearthstone, I was a former ranked magic player (the physical card game over 20 years ago) and had given it up when my kids were born (too much time, too much money) so hearthstone was a god send. A digital way for me to play an old gamestyle I thought I could never return to from a company that I then respected and trusted.
Then I saw the rigging....and then I came here to ask about it, what people thought and was met with such a ridiculous response of derision and gaslighting that I was taken aback and decided to re-evaluate my stance. i looked into blizzards game design philosophies, I watched videos, read articles and found that no, I am right, the game is rigged. But I could not understand why so many bright, articulate people on this site were so absolutely sure that hearthstone was not rigged. Then when you laid out the case for why you believe it is.....the response says everything.
The response was well, that is not proof and you are stupid tinfoil hat, confirmation bias dumbass if you think it is rigged without definative proof......and I thought...what a bizarre response......then I learned what a community manager was.
See I started on the internet in a different age, when people had open and honest conversation and looked to learn from each other. The various boards were not filled with shills and plants hammering their talking points and brigading anyone who dared stray from the corporate script. But now the internet is filled with people with agendas, be they corporate or political, and to think that some innocent kid comes to a site like this to find out more about a game they like and are met by a bunch of goons trying to make sure he spends the most he can is disgusting to me.
So I come by from time to time to tweak the shills and point out the obvious about the game. Things like team 5 sucks and the quests are all overpowered, things like merenaries and duels are cynical stupid products that people should avoid. I will give the occaisional positive shout when they do something good like fix the terrible reward track or release classic mode. But it general my stance toward blizzard has changed quite a bit in the last 5 years. Mercenaries is just one more step down the EA path.
To excel with this game, you either need
- MORE TIME (to grind)
- or MORE MONEY (to skip the grinding)
So people without the privilege of having both resources, will naturally feel a bit disadvantaged.
It's no one's fault - we all know developers can't work for free, and stockholders need to see increase value in their investments.
But whining is easy. And it's the easy way out to call names, and say those who can make more money is "greedy, selfish, exploiting".
It's an endless debate where no one wins.
So just ignore the politics, and focus on having fun (with the limitations).
or more than one account
I mean yeah most games are F2P if you play enough problem is time vs gain. Stuff like LoR gives you stuff on the dot so you barely have to grind to meet requirements. Hell they even made singleplayer free there. Shadowverse is a bit grindy but overall its a reasonable amount of time to play. HS if you want something it's gonna cost a hellva lot, with no compensation. So far we don't know how exactly Mercenaries mode rewards are gonna go but judging from the prepurchase already a lot of people are understandably worried. I've played since GT meta, and slowly HS literally requires you to get the prepurchase bundle to get anywhere with multiple decks. Sure with enough grinding you can get one meta deck, but the fun of card games is experimenting with the meta and playing with unique combinations. It isn't fun to grind out 20+ hours a week to get one meta deck everyone is playing just to repeat the process again.
Stupid people always tend to hate something they don't understand.
Thank you for all the comment. It seems like the problem is in the time needed to enjoy the game without paying. I agree that Hs is quite expensive either in term of time or money if you want a relatively diversified collection. I tried a few different CCG before and find HS is indeed expensive but not the most expensive (imo, Yugioh Duelist is more expensive as there is no easy way to get the cards you want and you can put 3 same UR cards in one decks). Maybe that's also the reason they introduce new modes (ofcourse with monetary incentive as well) so players can have more "non-grinding" options. But it seems like a dilema to me. More modes means more time spend and the resources are stretching. Let's see if Mercenaries is good enough to make Hs a great "game platform" or just stresses the players to the point that they give up spending time/money.
The answer is that people are spoiled. They expect Hearthstone to be exactly what they personally imagined and they expect it to cost exactly as much as they are willing to spend, in both time and money.
People do not want to understand that games like this with constant content generation need to monetize that content, nor that in a game that had existed that long, new ideas need to be tried to avoid becoming stale.
On top of that add some content creators that attempt to make money off of outrage by lying to the playerbase, like the whole reward track shenanigans, and you get a recipe for toxicity.
The new gamemode was described as a "slay the spire" -esque rogue like, but what they now presented is raid shadow legends, but just with the cards slapped on a background and then some ugly abilities.
What I had pictured was a sort of side scroller, where you play the mercenaries and battle all the creatures from HS: kobolds, gelatinous cubes, dragons,... using the abilities of HS as cards: fireball, sinister strike, swipe, shield block,...
There is a gameplay video of the combat on reddit and it just looks boring for the five minutes I watched. It was select three of six cards, those would then face three other cards and you select one of three abilities and a target per card. Then automated battle starts. If one of your cards die, you replace it with one of the remaining three.
It didn't look interactive, the cards had no animation and the spell effects were plain HS effects.
I think what annoys people even more, is that it is pack based and they are selling high priced preorder packs - before people could even play it.
The problem, ultimately, is that Blizzard has promised some dozen features and additional game modes in the past (stuff which could be used to drive monetization in other ways), and they've all been sidelined for... what honestly seems kind of mediocre, and obvious cash grab.
Pair that with a meta where something like 75% of Blizzards own advertising team (streamers) are contemplating quitting the game because the meta for standard is just unfun for them... and the whole thing comes off as seeming like Blizzard is throwing Standard and Wild under the bus for a quick cash grab, instead of making a game people want to spend money on for its own sake.
Because they added a new game mode while standard and wild format suck ass for most players. So its like "yeah we know you don't like how to game is going to look now, but anyway, we're not donna do anything about it and btw, here is a new game mode"
Lol. This is a permanent situation. "Most players" (aka vocal internet minority) always whine how bad the game is
Well if everyone complains about how bad a game is even pro players and streamers that play 8 hours a day Maybe IT IS.
And the rest of us are just bored of seeing the same shit over and over again for years.
Again, some pro players and some streamers.
Are you from Zeddy's flock?
because it looks like a mobile game. it literally looks that bad. Its like HS has devolved or would have looked like in 2008.
its just hard to watch, even on a laptop. truly the epitome of lazy moneygrab.
even if the gameplay doesn't suck like in BG its still hardly playable outside my phone.
This right here is spot on. I also can’t agree more on how it visually looks like junk.
LOL you obviously haven't seen r/hearthstone since the Mercenaries announcement stream.