Hearthpwn

https://www.hearthpwn.com/members/zibilol/posts

57 posts in 4 years 7 months, most are dedicated to quest trading. Doesn't look like a bot to me, I think he just copied posts from reddit to try to get some upvotes or whatever reason

I don't know where you got an idea that Hearthstone was slower in the good old days. Did you guys use to play Control Warrior mirrors all the time?

The game was designed to be over by turn 7-8 on average. The goal (in general) for aggro was to kill the opponent by turn 5-6, for midrange and combo it was turn 7-9, for control it was to survive until turn 10.

Not only is Hearthstone not getting faster, it's become significantly slower to the point the decks that would be midrange at the time now are considered aggro and people are complaining about the games that are over when it was intended as way too fast. Just look at the mechanics: charge was mostly reduced to the finishers, taunt is a free bonus now, rush and lifesteal that were not there are all over the place now.

Quote from D_Lord >>

You don't need more cards in the pool, you need no additional legendaries discoverable during games and more focus on older, weaker synergies. If you increased the card pool, it would only reduce the likelihood for synergistic options and make many cards a lot less reliable. Plus drafting would be less exciting and interesting because the safe option is always your best bet. HS has developed into too much of a synergy game overall recently. Standlaone good on-curve cards are much rarer these days.

It's also kinda stupid that the latest set is included. We see these cards in standard all the time and they are more powerful than older synergistic card options. And I still can't believe they added hero cards and Harth Stonebrew to that mode. They can literally crap on an entire game and just win out of nowhere.

 Yeah, you're right. But they need to promote new cards so the latest set is always there.

I understand your perspective and I'm not thinking you want constructed, I'm just saying that your ideal Arena is still closer to constructed than the current one.

You want to craft better decks, I want players to be punished (myself included) for taking risks. You want higher power level and working synergies, I want lower power level and synergies not working. You want to have control over your deck, I want to damage control my deck. You want to have space for maneuver, I want to adapt the best to what I got. You want to have an advantage of being more creative than your opponent during the draft, I want to have an advantage of being more disciplined than my opponent during the draft (since I'm usually not enjoying deckbuilding anyway). Basically, the charm and fun of Arena for me was always in playing bad decks against other bad decks. That's why I miss old Arena when decks often were truly garbage.

Card diversity... Yeah, that's fair, I would prefer to see way more cards, but only if there would be a ton of bad ones so people will have to pick them and play them. The biggest fun during the draft for me was always in choosing between three horrible cards and trying to understand which one will hurt the deck the least. For me Arena was the best when it was wild. Sadly, power creep went too far so now newer card would often win games by itself so even I would agree that wild would be bad and too RNG now. Anyway, seeing more cards by improving decks even slightly is definitely not what I would want either.

Quote from Nzaru13 >>

Sorry for late reply. But I %100 disagree with all of your thoughts and that’s why I felt like it wouldn’t be wise to keep discussing.

I think you and I want a total different arena format. I am talking about giving chance to synergetic cards to see play rather than being end up “unlucky picks” and also decrease the effect of RNG chance by allowing users to make their actual draft, rather than only following tier lists (and yeah, curve). Considering curve is the only aspect that player input their experience in drafting (if you have good tier list open in your second monitor). You like that I see. I don’t. With what you are saying, I see you want more of a constructed-style arena. I want to reward skill and experience with giving more maneuver capability to the players when making deck. 

I appreciate your thoughts. 

I agree that we want completely different formats, but I totally disagree that I want constructed-style Arena, I think it's totally opposite. I want Arena as it was 9 years ago, but even current one is further from constructed than if there were more options to make a better deck. Constructed is 0% RNG in terms of deckbuilding, so less RNG during draft = more constructed. I mean, what if you had complete control over all 30 cards? That would be literally constructed.

Every class will have a chance at some point. Some classes rarely have good decks of a certain playstyle, but it still happens. I.e. I prefer board-centric midrange decks. My current legend count: Hunter 26, Paladin 13, Druid, Warlock 8, Shaman 7, Mage 6, Warrior, Priest 2, DK, DH, Rogue 1.

Right now Zarimi Priest is very powerful, it's a tier 1 deck and shopper DH is still okay.

Quote from Nzaru13 >>

I understand the 'limited' format. This change won't turn Arena into constructed; it will simply reward skill and perspective more than pure luck in the drafting system.

It's not pure luck vs skill, it's one set of skills vs another set of skills. This change will reward more risky style of drafting, with a more synergistic approach. We already had "synergy picks" at Arena, and it was horrible. It's much better when the amount of combos is minimal.

Currently, success heavily depends on luck rather than creating a deck based on your card pool. With the current three-card pick system, you can encounter random, nonsensical cards, and there's little you can do but play them.

Ideally, random, nonsensical cards should always be in the deck. Wasn't it amazing when your opponents had to play Silverback Patriarch and whatnot? Saving your own extremely shitty draft to 2-3 or 3-3 is also quite rewarding.

 It doesn't feel like you're truly crafting a deck in the limited format. As a former competitive MTG player, what I loved about limited was that, with experience, you could build better decks even with average cards.

What a horrible experience it must be to play against such decks! Luckily, in HS instead of truly crafting a deck you are often picking cards that will hurt it the least. Unfortunately, the power level is way higher than it used to be, but still.

This idea isn't untested; it won't turn Arena into constructed. Instead, it will give average cards a chance to shine and increase diversity.

Average cards are shining in Arena already. For Chillwind Yeti the road from above average to below average took many years. Cards like Mothership rarely see play in constructed, but in Arena? It was a meta tyrant and still a very good card. If by "average cards" you mean "average constructed cards", than no, and I doubt it will create diversity, it will just shift meta in another direction, will make it closer to a shitty constructed (as it was with a "synergy picks") and actually average cards will be less playable.

Players who pick legendaries/epics will still likely end up with better decks, but not solely due to luck.

Epics were historically weird and mostly weak. If there would be enough synergies so players who pick epics every time they see them will end up with better decks, that's bad. Currently they are not. Some legendaries are too powerful (emphasis on some, in general they are not far from average, Prince Malchezaar can confirm, he was about as good as Yeti because of that), but this problem was solved by 1 legendary per draft limitation.

Currently, luck creates a significant gap between decks. I want to reduce this gap and increase consistency by emphasizing player skill and experience. To simplify, now you can end up with either a 9/10 or a 2/10 deck and retire without playing.

The solution is to change your approach to drafting and consistently draft 5/10 or 6/10 decks instead of go for 9/10 or 2/10. This way sometimes you end up with 9/10 deck anyway and you almost never will have to play (or retire) a 2/10 deck unless you picked an unplayable class (currently it's Priest).

This change aims to narrow the gap caused by luck, giving players with average decks a chance to beat any opponent through skill. I dislike having to pick a bad card and hope not to draw it. I'm not suggesting every card should be a powerhouse; many average cards can shine with the right deck.

It's not really about luck, at least on distance. Making bad cards to damage your deck as less as possible is another skill. I.e. Murloc Tinyfin and Faceless Behemoth are both terrible cards, but in different situations you may go for one or another, and it would be an impactful choice. If there would be an ability to just remove shitty cards, such cards will be gone forever.

The current system rewards strong cards individually and forces you to pick meta cards while considering your curve. There's room for significant improvement in this regard.

Yes, individual power level vs curve considerations all the time. I think it's perfect.

Lacking of archetypes / synergies is exactly what I like about Arena. And low power level + safe drafting. And no Dragon decks with some heals as a Paladin. And having 12-0 as one of the hardest and iconic HS challenges.

The idea of Duels was too ambitious from beginning. I see three main reasons why this mode died:
1) The amount of info required to play it seriously was too overwhelming for most of the players, so people quickly gave up.
2) It requires a lot of effort to balance and Blizzard isn't that good at balancing.
3) It was incorrectly promoted. It was never an Arena killer, it was another constructed mode, but they thought for some reason that Arena players instead of building new deck every time without opening packs will start to buy packs to play 20-cards super-constructed decks at 0-0. That didn't happen, and rightfully so, even Battlegrounds is more similar mode to Arena in its spirit than Duels. If they want to kill Arena they need to introduce another limited mode instead, like Cube or something, not constructed one.
It was attractive mostly for specific part of Ranked players, but turns out the part is too specific. So I feel sad for players who enjoyed the mode, but not for Blizzard. It's their big failure to put a lot of resources into a mode that was doomed from day 1. They could have easily predicted it would happen.

So you think there is a plot against Duels and it was secretly not extremely unpopular to the point they decided to close it? They definitely had enough data about Duels for a long time. The only reason why they didn't add new cards is obviously to do less work since it's gonna be removed anyway.

Yep, shop is also disabled, including purchasing tickets at the Arena

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of calling for nerfs in a new meta too early, but the deck seems too strong and has no real counters. Grasp and/or Shopper should be nerfed. People have been too focused on hating its most reliable counter, Handbuff Paladin (understandable, but the deck was less OP and kept in check by Hunters), so now there is no one to stop DH anymore.

Extra info from Ridiculous Hat: you need to watch for 4 hours in total to get all of these.

xskarma, since it's only 12 hours and quite a lot of rewards, would you be so kind to put the article on top the day before so it doesn't get buried under card reveals? People tend to forget about such things, myself included. Thanks in advance.

upd: oh, it's both Monday and Wednesday, I missed that initially.

Slow aggro, also known as fast control, actually has a name: midrange. It's an ok anti-aggro deck, but far from 58%, it's somewhere around 50% most likely. Choosing Rainbow Mage over it is a good idea. According to Vicious Syndicate's report, Rainbow Mage is a better deck right now, and the higher you are, the better it would be in comparison to Druid. At top legend it's the most popular deck and only Secret and Excavate Rogues are better.

Quote from Legend_Entomber >>

Dragon Druid is not an Aggro deck… you are playing it wrong if you just gonna go face and ignore the opponent’s board…

Aggro decks don't work like that in general in most of the matchups, but yes, it's definitely not aggro.

Quote from Zizka >>

I wouldn’t mind making the game cost something every month. I think the fact that it’s free is very appealing to leech from in the form of bots.

This way you will destroy a huge part of the player base just for fixing a minor inconvenience. It would not even solve that, someone would need to take F2P players place and this would lead to more official Blizzard's bots. F2P players are basically more skillful official bots in that sense, we are paying by giving our time to make servers populated. Ideally for Blizzard, F2P players would spend some money at some point, but most of us will never do it and they know it. If they wanted only paying players, they would not make a free to play game. Idk if the game would be better or worse, but definitely much less popular.

Quote from InfinityRocketPlastics >>

Having fun is more important than getting a high rank. 

Can't argue with that, fun is the main reason why any game exists. Or should exist, there is a sad trend of more and more games become total crap because the developers started to pursue other goals like push their agenda or make player emotional, I don't know or care, there are enough cozy and fun games for me.

Anyway, I think getting a high rank is fun for most of the people, so they don't have to choose. I don't even care too muсh about my rank, I just want to win some games and get my dose of dopamine. Bot, noob, experienced player, doesn't matter (well, playing against top pros is more exciting, not gonna lie, but high rank is basically required for that so I take that aside). My task is try to win (without too much effort, hopefully) and I don't care about what my opponent is doing. Even if I cared about the challenge, it's impossible to not face it naturally at some point.

The imaginary situation when the player is playing only against bots is also a fair point, but let's be real, if player's MMR is that low, maybe the player needs some training and beat those bots instead of complaining about the game being not challenging enough? I mean, if someone will claim that he is facing bots 100 times in a row, that would probably mean he is extremely bad and can't beat them, lies or delusional and calls real people bots.

The only situation where bots are problematic for me is that weird Chinese thing when they are made to went through arena drafts until they find a nuts deck (so their owner/buyer can destroy everybody) or if they will become better than humans at some point (huge problem in chess). As long as bots are losing, I think it's not a big deal.