1. Genn and Baku rotation
I applaud this excellent decision. They had to deal with an unexpected situation that was hurting the Standard gaming experience making it stale and limiting by card design. Look into the nerfs that have been done and how they had to consider how impactful and annoying the odd/even mechanic aspect had to with it. F2p players can rejoice as they are getting 3200 free dust out of it + the epics that rotate that they might have had in the collection and that they were not using. Let's say you had 2 of them. You get 1000 extra free dust as you will disenchant them safely. (I doubt cards like Glitter Moth will work in Wild).
Design space gets to breathe again in the Standard format, and we will get an even more diverse experience because of it along with the rotation of the power-creep expansions. I expect the new Standard format to be a very refreshing experience for a while, we will see.
2. Single player experience.
"Greed". It is a company with people on a pay-roll, the content they create and the people that work on it represent a cost. IT HAS TO BE WORTH. People were buying the old adventures mostly because the content for PvP was worth the cost and was needed to have a fulfilling PvP experience. They were a more P2W oriented model than this. As long as it was entertaining, the replayability factor was really low on those. Dungeon runs are an insane improvement on that obsolete model.
Dungeon runs DO NOT REQUIRE YOU TO HAVE CARDS SPECIFICALLY TO PROGRESS IN THE ADVENTURE, like old adventures. Old adventures were "netdeck the winning strategy to win" for most people probably. They are their own game and it is not taking toll on your personal collection, it actually gives you the chance to enjoy playing cards that you do not own in your collection in the first place, which is amazing.
Old adventures PvE content was not worth the money, that is why they cut them to get new expansions. People wanted to pay for cards.
They want to get money out of people that might be interested in buying PvE content as well, it is perfectly legit.
You want them? You buy them. You don't want to pay for them? You are free to get them f2p with gold for a reasonable trade-off.
You do not give a fuck about PvE content? Enjoy free stuff anyways that you would not receive if the PvE content was not created.
You want everything for free because of unmotivated sense of entitlement? Get lost, if a company would listen and adapt to requests like yours it would fail within a week.
3. Quality of life changes.
They are welcome. Should they have been implemented before? Probably. They put them now? Good.
Also, for how hypocritical it may sound it is actually scientifically convenient for them to mention them as improvements rather than small things. Marketing wise unluckily it is better to not release everything you can at your best, but to always have room for improvements. It is significantly harder to improve Perfect quality content and this creates all the time higher expectations and harder work. Not making everything perfect makes it easier to work. Can this be considered lazy? Yes. Did they have to fix these things because it was what it was chasing people away from the game? No. Better to invest time on other things first, meanwhile you can pop up effortless improvements here and there. A company has to maximise income and good feedback from their playerbase as much as possible in order to be successful. This does not mean to make them happy.
Look at Heroes of the Storm. It was basically the MOBA based on the complaints on League of Legends. They put in the game everything was "wrong" with LoL. Different maps,took away item building, different playstyles within the same hero, they made it much more team oriented, they made it much more easy to access cosmetic content for free, possibility to have an AFK player be commanded as a bot, always adding new things... did it work? Nope.
Free to play games are not deisgned to be perfect if they want to generate income. Deal with the facts. People always want more. To earn more you have to give less. It's the same in lots of human social aspects, even fuckin relationships. You don't have to the best, you have to be good enough with room to get better and close to the best. But if you get to be the best too soon, then you become boring as any further change if you are the best will make you worse. Boredom's a pain in the ass and one of the most detestable human aspects. Yet it exists and has to be dealt with accordingly.
Very interesting read, thank you for sharing. I guess you are kinda right.
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I'm realy relieved to read all those positive comments here. In the past i got the feeling that people complain way to often.
Maybe the tides are turning for HS again!
They put great effort into the new content and the recent powerdrop will most probably be greatly rewarded soon. Rotating Genn and Baku is only the cherry on the cream.
Ps: Arena will be a blast! It'll be a new gamemode every two months!