• 0

    posted a message on Mike Donais Talks Frozen Throne - Undead Tribe, Hero Powers, Build-a-Beast as a Spell?

    Release date pls?

    Posted in: News
  • 1

    posted a message on Rope every turn, is it BM?

    Depends.  If it's turn 1 and your choice is to play a Mana Wyrm or not, then yes it's BM.  Play your frickin' Mana Wyrm and pass the frickin' turn.  If it's like turn 15 and your opponent is at 23 life and if you sequence your cards perfectly you have lethal in 3 turns but if you make a single mistake you die on the spot, then no it's not BM, take your time.

    Posted in: The Arena
  • 5

    posted a message on 8 Awesome Hearthstone Card and Hero Interactions

    I played so much Control Warrior and C'Thun Warrior that I thought the Garrosh interactions were just the defaults XD

    Posted in: News
  • 1

    posted a message on Is it even worth to start playing hs (f2p)?

    I would say no, unless you're ok with spending a lot of time below rank 15 and losing a lot for about a year.  When I started (vanilla), there were decks like Zoolock and...ok, just Zoolock...that were cheap and easy to build with only commons and rares, but were powerful enough to win games.  Nowadays every deck needs at least 1 Legendary pretty much, and most decks need multiples, and those Legendaries aren't replaceable (Zoolock needed Leeroy, but could be replaced with the 4/2 Charge Divine Shield for 6 rare, or with Reckless Rocketeer without much trouble).

    Also back in vanilla, the metagame was way less defined than it is today, so you could pick up free wins even at rank 12-13 just by facing people playing bad decks.  Today you see top meta decks even at rank 17-18, so it's really hard to rank up unless you have all the cards.

    In short, if you want to start HS today, do not try F2P, it's not doable for most people.  I say this as someone who has been F2P for about 3 years.

    FWIW, a couple months ago I was tired of the stale meta and was considering switching games, so I tried out Shadowverse.  I was able to build a couple of top meta decks in about 2 weeks of playing Shadowverse without much difficulty.  If you want to start a new digital CCG and play F2P and not get completely smoked, I'd recommend that one.

    Posted in: General Discussion
  • 3

    posted a message on New Features Coming to Hearthstone - Quest with Friends & Deck List Importing

    So, deck importing uses very long strings and a copy-paste function.  Will this functionality be available on mobile?  I haven't played desktop HS in about a year and a half.

    Posted in: News
  • 2

    posted a message on Is it even worth to start playing hs (f2p)?

    Much as I agree with everything you said (s2mikey), I feel like you don't give Blizzard enough slack.  Here's the problem:

    1) Software QA (what you do) is not the same as game balance.  From a software QA perspective, Blizzard is actually very good with Hearthstone.  Compare to Shadowverse, which, until about 3 weeks ago, had a mobile client that was literally unusable because of constant crashing, and even today still experiences some crashing issues, and also eats RAM like nothing else.  None of the cards work in ways not prescribed by the game rules, and the client runs awesome.  A lot of other games do not run this nicely.  Hell, I once quit Candy Crush Saga for about 6 months because I got to a level which wasn't programmed properly and got into an infinite loop that I couldn't escape from if I made the wrong move, and that's freaking Candy Crush Saga, probably the easiest game ever to program the logic engine for.

    2) Team 5 has like 15 people, probably like 4 of whom work on game balance.  They're not going to catch everything, and they shouldn't be expected to.  Aside from the fact that they're woefully understaffed (not saying it's not their own fault, but still), they hire people from the video game industry, not the esports industry, to balance their game.  I'm sure Ben Brode and Dean Ayala and Yong Woo are great people and really awesome at game design, but they probably couldn't break rank 10 on Ladder on a good day and I wouldn't trust them to know what's good for the balance of Hearthstone.  They need to get some people who actually know their stuff in there, like (not saying these are good people, just throwing out names) Reynad and Firebat and Kripp and Hafu.

    3) Even if they had a great balance team, they couldn't possibly balance everything perfectly.  They could say everything is balanced because their own internal inbred metagame is balanced, but in the real world the metagame might evolve a different way and break.  They can't test for that with any reasonable size of team without drastically reducing the strategic depth (such as it is) of the game.  Which is not to say that HS today has more-than-zero strategic depth, because it doesn't, but rather that the strategic depth that Hearthstone theoretically has and is promised to us, would be out the window completely if they made cards that could be fully explored, evaluated, and balanced, by a team of 4 guys working for 4 months on a 130-card expansion.

    Which is to say, the solution for balance is to balance after the fact.  The advantage of a digital card game rather than a paper card game like Magic or Yugioh (Yugioh being the most blatant for this) is that you can't balance after the fact: The cards are printed, they're in production, that's it, done.  In Hearthstone you can change what cards do or say, and you can take risks like making cards that are probably OP but they don't know how OP exactly until they hit the real world.  In a game like Magic, they would not be able to print a card like that, but in HS they can, because if the shit hits the fan, they can nerf it with the click of a button.  But they're not willing to take the nerf hammer to the cards as much as they should be, for whatever reason, and that's killing the game.

    Posted in: General Discussion
  • -8

    posted a message on HearthPwn Exclusive Interview with Dean Ayala - Un'Goro, Common Cards, Archetypes & More!

    Wow, reading this transcript actually actively makes me want to quit Hearthstone.  It's patently obvious that the people designing the game have absolutely no clue what they're doing, and I've lost all hope that the game will get better.  At least when Zac Hill started talking nonsense publicly, WotC had the good sense to can him shortly thereafter, but this guy seems here to stay.  Yogg help us.  Or you guys, cause I won't be here much lomger.

    Posted in: News
  • -6

    posted a message on Our Journey to Un'Goro Card Predictions

    Funnel Drogg - Shaman - 1

    Overload 2

    9/9

    Unsure if sarcastic.

    Posted in: News
  • 14

    posted a message on Ben Brode Spits Straight Fire

    This is actually amazing.  Also needs to be watched at 1.5x speed, much better experience.

    Posted in: News
  • 1

    posted a message on New Mage Legendary Card - Pyros

    Dust it.  A 6/6 without Taunt for 6 mana is basically not a card in Pirates Dot Metagame, which makes this a Legendary 2 mana 2/2 vanilla, strictly worse than River Crokolisk or Bloodfen Raptor.  Heck, a 6/6 for 6 with taunt is probably crap too.  If Pirates go away then maybe I can imagine it, but I can't imagine Pirates are going anywhere anytime soon.

    Posted in: Card Discussion
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