Hearthpwn

Still not sure why I bother playing this game.

Over the years I have become convinced that this game is not random in any way. From your matchup, to your card draws, to your pack openings, to the RNG within your games, all of them are weighted by blizzard towards achieving their goals of a 50 percent win rate and to inspire/reward spending.

In todays episode I decided to ladder a bit with Keleseth Rogue. I win two games then match up 3 straight games with exodia mage (ok that could be random). Each game it starts me with swashburgler (ok, we know it likes to give you a one cost in your opening hand and that is a fine enough opening) but the capper is hilarious. In all 3 games, it generates a frost nova........Now can a math guy run the odds on that? lol, how about the odds that the algorithim has decided that giving keleseth rogue a frost nova against exodia mage keeps the game interesting interesting.....far more likely.

Anyone who plays this game for a fair bit of time knows exactly what I am talking about. How many times you mulligan away your hand and get the exact same cards back? How many times after a win streak do you get the same losing matchup, even the same card order game after game? Anyone with 3 or more gold heroes actually think this game is random at all?

Quote from BeaWolf >>

All collecting card games are pay to win, HS included. You Think you would have had any chance in Magic The Gathering with only your friends hans over (free cards) . Well you wouldnt. To play on a competive level you had to buy alot of cards or trade smart. As you cant Trade in HS your other option is to buy. Ofc you can get really good cards for free in HA bit that reauires alot of time. So basicly it comes Down to having alot of money or alot of time to play HS on any competive level. Some have neither, and those of us with family and work only have money to spare.

HS is a P2W game, but that is not a bad thing, most games are.

Secret mage pretty much poops on dragon priest, too much tempo, too much burn. 

Quote from Velrun >>

Quote from FakeNorwegian >>

Just quoting a guy i found on the bnet forum.

 

I personally use this definition: "If a game has a PvP element of any sort, and if you can use real money to buy any kind of advantage, then the game is P2W".

DOTA2 for example is not P2W, as nothing you buy has any actual impact on the gameplay. 

HS is P2W, because people who pay money can get good cards more easily and thus have an advantage. For example, I have the priest DK but no Raza, I have the evo Shaman but no Doppelgangster, I have no other DKs nor a LK. All those are disadvantages, that result in worse decks. If I would pay money, I could acquire all these cards one way or another instantly right now, improve my decks and thus my chances of winning.

 

So for me i think its p2w. Just met a guy in rank 19 with 7 legendaries completly destroyed my jade golem that took me 2 weeks to make with dust and opening packs.

 You misunderstood what he said.

You cannot pay to gain any kind of advantage in Hearthstone that you cannot also get by grinding. If you want all the cards, play more.

It has been proven time and time again that HS is not P2W. A really strong player can take a brand new account and only play without paying anything and take it to Legend in 2 months.

Everyone has a different experience. The game matches you up with counter decks to keep you buying new packs. 

The algorithim may think it will get you to buy packs to get certain cards you don't have.

Activision is so happy with their result that they patented the process

http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/how-activision-uses-matchmaking-tricks-to-sell-in-game-items-w509288

The funny thing is try playing 10 games with a deck, after a while you will see the same counters over and over. Then you will move to counter what you are seeing, and the game will give you completely different counters. It is becoming nearly unplayable, because between the matchmaking, the card draw and the 'weighted' rng mechanics, it feels like the game is playing itself. 

I went free to play when blizzard got rid of the adventures to make hearthstone more expensive. Before the change you could spend 40 a year on hearthstone and basically make any deck you wanted. Now you can spend 150 bucks a year and still come up short. No thanks. 

bad cuz priest will be everywhere running this into your biggest minion on the board, killing it or stealing it altogether. 

The problem is that control does not pay off because of all the ridiculous RNG. Real control is grinding to a lock down position. There is so much RNG in the game (and there may even be a catch up mechanism in the RNG), that you can be punished for achieving a dominant position by the game itself. That is why Raza priest is so effective, it is actually a combo deck, not a control deck. 

It relies on the blizz RNG in the card draw to answer each play until it achieves it's combo and then it is GG. Because there is not forcing discard from the other player, you cant punish a player for drawing or for holding combo pieces, so until discard is a thing, you are stuck playing aggro or combo.

The game becomes more and more luck based, perhaps the average player does find that fun, I am finding it less so. 

Quote from banstylejbo >>

Arguing that something is true because it has yet to be proven false is a logical fallacy. If you believe Blizzard uses bots, it is not a logical conclusion to assume they do just because there is no evidence to refute that assertation. That's like me saying that I believe Donald Trump colluded with the Brazilians to corner the market on Brazil nuts. I have no factual evidence to backup that claim, but because I have not been given data to refute it, I believe it is so and will argue its veracity. This is essentially conspiracy theory 101.

just what hearthstone needs, more RNG. 

New players: Having to buy 5 sets at any given time instead of everything that has ever been released is definitely a step in the right direction. We are not currently standing on a lot of sets, but a few more expansions would make the game completely inaccessibe to anyone not wishing to spend a month's wages on digital cards.

Old players: If you consider Wild to be irrelevant, then great! You can disenchant a bunch of cards and be ready to craft everything useful from the next expansion without spending a single $ on card packs, win-win!

All players: The Standard format brings advantages for everyone.
The format will be shifting more than it is right now with cards rotating out, continuing to feel like a living organism, as it is now. If sets never rotated, then when we got to the 10th, 15th, 20th set of cards, how many decks would be moved out of the meta with every release? one? none?
Power creep will not need to be a thing. In the current form of Hearhstone, if you want people to replace the "best X-drop" you have to either nerf it regardless of it being or not being OP, or create something even stronger. Power creep would make old cards obsolete in a much more problematic way than a rotation does.
Cost! If you're only interested in the Standard format, you can just dust all the rotating cards constantly! That means you can't keep your favorite card forever, but it also means you'll have some thousands extra dust to use with every new set release. Right now, whenever a new set comes i usually have around 8k gold saved and it still aint enough to get every card i want, but if i also had 10-15k dust from disenchating the previous set then you bet i'd be ready to go on day 1!

I understand the pessimism, since it's in human nature to fear change but i'm absolutely certain that the format seperation's positive effects will greatly outweigh any disadvantages.

I've already posted how to perform a test whether the matchups are random or not, including a case where the very limited data provided looked interesting (0.76% chance to occur by chance, although the sample size was far too small for the results to be meaningful or accurate).

You would do a chi-squared test on the matchups using the vicious syndicate class play rate for the period the data was collected.

Note that the vicious syndicate data is being reset today since the nerfs arrived and the next report won't be for 2 weeks I believe to let the meta settle, so there is no data about expected class play rates available at the moment.

Chi-squared test is explained here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson's_chi-squared_test

The section entitled: "Fairness of Dice" is the same situation as Hearthstone matchmaking, except you wouldn't use 1/6 as the expected amount of occurences for each number as you would for a die, you'd use the data from Vicious Syndicate for each of the 9 classes. The test would have 8 degrees of freedom (9 classes - 1. 1 row is redundant since it depends on the values in the previous 8).

Chi-squared test calculator here: https://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/chisquared1.cfm

Be sure to read the instructions carefully before using that.

I know that there is more topics related with the price of HS, but as I said I just want to give a bit more voice to this problem. I don't believe that hearthpwn forum will change the HS price, but if this topic become more and more popular around all forums, Blizzard (not developers, make difference) will finally saw it.

What is my opinion. I am not crying that I can't afford card packs and game is not fun for me. Actually I can afford getting cards and somehow game is still fun to me, but since last few months I saw very disturbing trend, that actually more and more people are raging against hearthstone. In the internet there is always troll, raging that before was better, than now. Normally I don't pay attention to this problem, but with hearthstone, part of the problems are real. Problem of the HS cost is not only to the one who can't afford it, but to the whole community even the one who can collect all cards and pay for them. The problem for me is that right now HS is much more oriented towards earning money. This is ok, everyone try to earn more money. But because of this, the game is hurted by its quality. Often we see how in every new expansion we receive 65% of extremely trash cards, 30% of medicore not fun cards and 5% of extremely overpowered cards. OK, balancing cards without beta server is extremely hard, I understand that. But doing set of fun and usefull cards, is that so hard? They receive budget bigger than most of the AAA games and in the end their "indie" developers can't manage do set of goods cards, but not recycled 10 times mechanics? Come on... this is not a dev problem. Problem is that if you make only 40 card (which normally is the reallity), player will buy only pre order and no packs. This is bad from marketing perspective. So here we see how , because of marketing persperctive, we very often receive some trash content only, to be forced to buy more packs. This is bullshit that it should be always exciting to receive legendary, and thats why we receive them rarely. This is marketing. But marketing shouldn't affect gameplay so badly.

Ok lets say that I buy all cards (200+ packs + 10/15k dust is enough). But not everyone will do it. Most of the players can craft maximum 1 deck of 15k dust or even worse 1 agro deck for 3k dust. So what happen, instead I to have fun with all new cards I play against people who can afford 1 deck and they just crafted the most meta deck, which is the most toxic. Than players as me, cry to nerf this or other extremely over powered card and blizzard think for 10 months in order to decide to fix 1 card. Why? You think that they don't know what is broken and what is not? No, they just can't fix the ultimate combo made from 3 legendary, because ppl who paid their last money for this combo, will stop playing it. And again we see how marketing and money driven game is breaking gameplay.

I really like Hearthstone and all its randomness, but I don't like the fact that because of its price there are so much bad gameplay decisions, which are pushing away a lot of people. A lot of streamers/people leaving or start raging about this, and than everytime when I go to watch my favourite streamer how he play HS I am watching how he is blaming blizzard, how shity and imbalanced is this game (not only streamers, but whole chat as well with them). Of course there are example for a lot of people who like the game as me, but with time I think that this problem will become bigger and bigger. This of course create toxic environment in which even the people who like the game start quiting, because it is not fun for them anymore.

Otherwise if we just take in consideration HS as mechanics, randomness, cards (if we count only this 40 packs per expansion, which actually matter), this is really good and fun game. I just want and hope that in the HS future I will see more mechanics driven by gameplay and players (Death knight class for example), not how to take more money (two legendaries per class for example). If I see that everything is HS is done in order to have top possible gameplay it will be fine. But I don't agree to have compromise with gameplay, in order to earn more from it. For example WoW, I keep playing it, because dev team do everything possible to do game interesting for us (sometimes they have bad ideas, sometimes not). But WoW model is drivven around bringing more and more people to pay monthly (and this is cheaper) and they PUT EFFORT IN GAMEPLAY IN ORDER TO DO THIS!

#KeepHearthstoneFunNotMoneyDrivven :)

And I don't even ask, why this game became more and more expensive with time (they rise prices before ungoro). I doubt that they started to put much more effort in it and it became more costly to develop.

People like cheerleading for their corporate overlords, tho.

"Bots get legend every season with broken decks. If that's what you like to do fine - but paying them money is buying in to their dipshit con."

Another thanks to the person that mentioned this. *Massive Blizz-Activision megacorp,* gaining a ton of cash and publicity off all their ESports/Twitch streaming, *cannot even be bothered to police the freaking bots infesting their RANKED MODE.

And the poor ladder design, relying on grinding to avoid any effort on the devs' part, *actively encourages botting.*

But if we say anything about self-evident poor design to ask for improvements...from the people whose *paid job is to work on this game (FFS)*...most of the toxic community goes into corporate-cheerlead mode, and victim-blames customers who want to see a good product not go completely to s**t, because it has abusive parents...

I don't know how this game is even played seriously at a competitive level... I bet I can have a 50% win percentage against those guys. They all play the same decks we play, they just happen to have nothing else to do than to play this kid's game all day. HS sucks, this game is getting worse and worse each expansion. A pure form of rng fiesta

Its just that "technical problems" is hard to believe when the whole idea is showing a picture.  Cynically, I feel like this was a decision to farm clicks all day. 

"No, you haven't"

Keep burying your head in the sand and corporate cheerleading moar bro.

And gaslighting people, telling them they haven't seen things they *have, in fact, seen*...and other people have also reported seeing. The CEO of Blizz-Act and Dear Leader Trump thank you for your service...

all blizzard games cater to casuals, if u play casually then it rewards you. if you try to play competitively you will be punished. so ive decided to only make decks that look fun, and only play in wild/pve content because then you dont need to buy every new card that comes out

"But against who you wanna play longterm, Blizzard meta deck bots on the ladder to fill up and guarantee an opponent in a sec to every night and day time?"

Thank you, as well. Competitive ladder is an illusion in this game now. Blizzard is too lazy to develop an actual competitive system, so they create an artificial grind, and then pair you up against bots, when there are 10+ people on the friends list alone also laddering at the same time...