Hearthpwn

I enjoyed quite a few decks last year. Too bad the experience was outweighed by all the fun-killing cards and decks that were extremely popular, compounded by Team 5's refusal to nerf the obvious problem children. The upcoming year looks like it will have just as many problems, and we haven't even seen all the cards yet.

If last year hadn't been such a soul-sucking combofest, I might have been more willing to give this new stuff a chance, even though the theme doesn't appeal to me. But looking back, I'm pretty sure I have better things to do with my time and money.

I feel the exact opposite from OP. I think the theme is too silly (even for Hearthstone), the humor is 100% pop culture references (i.e., the lowest of low-hanging fruit), and the cards themselves are going to be extremely annoying. I know a lot of people enjoy this kind of thing, and more power to them, but it's not for me in any way.

If you have been playing for a while, you do not need to buy both bundles. You can just get the bigger one. If you have been saving your Standard packs from Brawls (open them first!), you'll have plenty of gold and dust to complete the entire set.

Full disclosure: I'm not buying this set because the theme does not interest me at all, the cards seem unpleasant, and too many of last year's cards were unpleasant. But if you're into it, one bundle will do the trick.

Wrong. Control Warrior will have no trouble finding time to play this.

This doesn't prove that the mode wasn't making money. You just don't *think* it could be making any money, based on pretty baseless intuition.

And you think this doesn't apply to literally everything you've said?

When a company discontinues a product, the most common, most logical reason is lack of revenue. Believe what you want, but I'm going to go with Occam's Razor on this.

Again, there were thousands of people looking up how to complete the event challenges, so obviously people were playing. I'm sorry it's so painful for you to be wrong that you have to lash out like a child.

With Guff rotating out soon, this makes me wonder what kind of extra-mana foolishness they have in store for Druid in the coming HS year. Surely they don't expect this card to see play if Innervate is the only way to use it.

Letting Druid reliably go above 10 mana was one of the more unpleasant features of the past 14 months, and it looks like that's going to continue to some degree.

It may not have been to your taste, but there's no need to insult the people who enjoyed it. It didn't fail because no one played it. (Mercenaries content always received a reasonable number of views.) It failed because the monetization was stupid.

If you play traditional HS, the tavern pass pays for itself. You do not need the additional "incentive" of Mercs cosmetics to entice you. Those portraits are tiny and static and unappealing. The diamond versions are actually so annoying that many players wouldn't use them due to the additional voice lines. That's why they gave everyone the gold version of the diamond skins so soon after release. Bottom line, no one ever cared enough about portraits to spend money on them.

I believe it was one guy based on the fact that they introduced him sometime last year as someone who would improve the direction of the game. I believe he did make Mercs a better game, so kudos to him, but he is not a native speaker of English. (He's from Eastern Europe, iirc.) Every update after that announcement was full of super-weird grammatical errors that never would have made it live if a native English speaker had glanced at the cards for even a second. Obviously he had support in terms of art and coding, but he was definitely the only game designer on the project.

As for "not good enough for Activision," I'll just say that no company ever shuts down a viable stream of revenue -- emphasis on "viable." It's possible that Mercs was providing a small trickle of profit, but my guess is that even that small trickle was trending steadily downward. It is the correct decision -- not just a "greedy Activision" decision -- to shut it down before it starts losing money. Mercenaries has been a PR nightmare from day one, so the "holistic" argument holds no water. If anything, it has had an overall negative impact on the Hearthstone brand throughout its existence, and I'm saying this as someone who did enjoy the mode while it lasted.

Magic Spellslingers got zero hype when it was released, so it flew under my radar for quite a while. I knew there was a new Magic product, but I didn't bother to investigate ... until recently. I knew I didn't want to suffer another year of Astalor (and honestly, some of the new mini-set cards promise to be almost as annoying), so I was looking for HS alternatives.

I noticed Spellslingers again, and I read that it's a blend of the best parts of MtG and Hearthstone. Of course it's free to try, so I did. I've always liked Magic lore but disliked the land system and the pace of the game, with creatures regenerating every round. Much to my surprise, both of my biggest complaints are answered in Spellslingers! It uses Hearthstone-style mana and has permanent creature damage. Of course, that means they have to modify a lot of the old favorite MtG cards, but they've done a great job of that so far. They also have a Team system where you can chat, share decks, and trade crafting resources with friends.

Basically, this game that is only a few months into release has a ton of stuff HS should have had ages ago, plus an IP that is more interesting to me personally. I had already decided to take a break from HS after finishing the current reward track, and now it's very hard to imagine ever going back.

Quote from CampinTheHut >>

If the game vanished today I wouldn't care.

 The fact that you are posting on a Hearthstone fansite proves that you would care at least a little bit. Even if you tell yourself you are only here to kill time, with HS gone, that's one less website for you to visit when you're bored.

I can't imagine how. There was very little reason for a long-term player to buy packs, and the prices on the cosmetic bundles were a ridiculous joke.

For the past year or more, I'm pretty sure the Mercs design "team" consisted of exactly one guy.

It will also be the last major update to the Mercenaries mode as we align our goals and focus on continuing to make Hearthstone the best digital card game in the world.

TRANSLATION: "We never figured out how to monetize this thing in a way that made any sense whatsoever."

Quote from sahtradoog >>

I think it is helpful to setup a clear consensus of what is believed to be good and bad design for the game so i don't agree with you at all. it all fits together in a holistic manner so keeping them separate don't make sense 

 You don't have to agree with me. I'm just explaining to you why your thread will go nowhere productive.

Quote from sahtradoog >>

Hearthstone as a game needs to grow in order to continue to make profit and for this reason it needs to print new cards, there are some issues with this when it comes to completive play, especially when it comes to some card design choices which I will attempt to clarify below, this post has the goal of setting the ground rules for a format of hearthstone which I believe will be what old school hearthstone players like myself, who is often unsatisfied with the game seek from the game. The format will consist of a selection of cards where certain card design choices will be banned while others may not even if they consist of the same keyword.

Every single one of your complaints has appeared in this and other forums multiple times over many years. Bundling together your personal list of peeves isn't helpful, and it won't really grab the attention of Blizzard. It's more productive to discuss one topic at a time ... but it still won't change anything.

Take mana cheat, for instance. Everyone knows it's a problem, and some very lengthy, very well-thought-out essays have been offered on the subject, but Team 5 keeps on designing those mana cheat cards! Why? Because Team 5 sucks at differentiating between what people like and what people play.

It works like this: They design a card with mana cheat, knowing it will be too strong. People use that card because it helps them win (despite the fact that it makes the game overall less fun). Team 5 assumes that if we are using a card a lot, we must really like that card, so they design more cards like it in the future. You can't argue with a self-fulfilling prophecy.