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Member for 8 years, 3 months, and 22 days
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xxRattyZxx posted a message on New Druid Card Reveal - Juicy PsychmelonPosted in: News -
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Archaelicos posted a message on Hearthstone's Tournament Mode Will Be A True Beta & What We Know So FarPosted in: NewsI operated free-to-play on-line games for twenty years, beginning with text MUDs in the early 90s up to graphic RPGs in the mid-2000s. I quit when WoW came out and ate all of my time.
It's hard to balance things. It's hard to make decisions. It's hard to test the interaction of complex systems and get it right. It's not as simple as, "Just nerf this card," or "just add this feature."
Changing a card statistic doesn't take much time development-wise, but you aren't thinking about the Type II errors. So we nerf Card X, which is currently an effective counter to Cards A, B, and C. Well, do Cards A, B, and C become a problem? And then the same people are back in 2 weeks bitching that those cards are too good and need a nerf? Card X may be the only thing keeping 3 other otherwise overpowered cards in check. You can't just go around every week and rearrange the game by nerfing whichever card people are bitching about that week, or that's all you'll ever do.
And, if you're constantly tweaking cards based on a "Squeaky Wheel gets the Grease" philosophy of player management, you empower the loudest complainers, who are also usually the least rational and thoughtful. Also, they're usually a small minority. They just hate X and want it changed. They see their little myopic corner of the game and are frustrated, so they complain on Reddit. When you're a developer, you can't assume those people all know what they're talking about, especially when you have an equally large (or even much larger volume) of level-headed players whose qualifications you know, and whose opinions you trust, and whose conclusions match what you see in your own data.
That's not to say EVERYBODY complaining is an immature whiner and is wrong. Far from it. It's just that, "Blizzard Y U TAKE SO LONG WHEN WE ALL YELL SO LOUD" is a stupid criticism. I do think they're TOO deliberate with nerfs, but I'd rather have them be too deliberate than not deliberate enough. And, they also have other timings to consider. It's not just you at your desk they have to think about - there other plans, other events, other tournaments, other priorities all completing for the developers' and designers' time. They have 100,000x more to deal with than what you see on your screen.
And finally, adding a new feature is not trivial. Software development is a classic case of the 80/20 problem. The first 80% of it takes 20% of your time to make. The last 20% takes the other 80%. Ask anybody who's ever written a game. I sat down last fall and wrote an MORPG server from scratch in C++ in my spare time. It took me about a month of dinking here around here and there to build an account/login system, chat system, basic world navigation service, on-line creation system, skill tree system, combat and magic/effect system, quest system, trade skill system, guild/clan system, and advancement/badge system.
That's 80% of what the game does. It would require a team of 20 people working a full year to actually make a playable game out of that.
I'm not saying those of you with complaints or concerns don't have valid complaints or concerns. But I do think a substantial volume of complaining originates from a place of blissful ignorance about the realities of running even a small game development team. I had lunch a while back with one of the chief engineers for League of Legends, he's an old school 90s era coder like me, and we were talking about how hard it is to change anything when you have a huge subscriber base. He was telling me about how they wanted to add a few additional data points to track during matches for analytics purposes, and they spent weeks discussing it, because at the volume of records they store, even adding 100 bytes of data to match records will cost many millions of dollars in increased storage requirements.
So ya'll want a dedicated software team with a burn of at least $15-$25M to churn out content constantly, put on tournaments, be on all social media, respond instantly to all problems, perfectly balance the game, manage a community of 50 million people, implement new features, fix old bugs sooner, and you don't want to pay for any of it.
Sheesh. I'm remembering why I quit running games like this.
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Tore_dArc posted a message on Patch 11.1: Shudderwock & Lifedrinker Animation Speed Up, Arena Card RatesPosted in: NewsWe did it, boys! My irresponsible Shudderwocking last night forced them to finally drop the patch!
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ScaryFishman posted a message on Patch 11.1: Shudderwock & Lifedrinker Animation Speed Up, Arena Card RatesPosted in: NewsGonna reply to you, cause I dont care what you want.
#thuglife
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lMarcusl posted a message on Patch 11.1: Shudderwock & Lifedrinker Animation Speed Up, Arena Card RatesPosted in: NewsFor a mode that essentially lives and dies by appearance rates of cards for the dedicated players, they sure as hell have been taking a dump on information availability in the last few months. First we had nebulous information like "Flamestrike and Abyssal Enforcer are 50 % less likely to appear" which meant...what exactly? That instead of queueing against a guy with 3 Flamestrikes they'll instead only have 1-2? Or does it mean that Flamestrike is just not worth playing around anymore cause you won't see it? You don't know. Every Mage might just happen to have at least 1 and you might walk right into it. Before, it was a safe bet to play like they had it, after that it was a...50 % of a safe bet? How does that help me play?
But now. Lol. Drafting by rarities goes out the window. So now that Flamestrike can just as easily be a Primordial Glyph because of the power level? I guess? So essentially play around nothing because you cannot play around turn 4 Meteor? Spells are now more likely to appear... Ok so now I can see at least some removal as a Priest for once. But what does that tell me about the likelihood of my opponent having Polymorph? What is its power level to determine appearance rate in draft? Medium? High? It's a spell, so I guess it's pretty likely to appear. But Mage has a ton of spells so they push each other out...I guess? So maybe slightly less than "pretty likely". But it's not from the recent set, so it doesn't get a bonus, so I guess it's quite a bit less than "pretty likely". Which means that each Mage has at least 1? Or what? "You know what. FUCK IT, I'll go play Constructed. I can play around all the cards in my opponent's deck cause I know them just by what class they're playing." That's pretty much the answer I've arrived at with Arena.
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KingSevault posted a message on Shudderwock and Lifedrinker Battlecry Animation UpdatePosted in: NewsQuote from Boss_of_this_Gym >>>Frustrating
Look at that shit condescending tone. Is not that the game is functioning incorrectly or being unfair for one player, is that the player is "frustrated"
I mean, the Shudderwock animations aren't functioning incorrectly, and they're not being unfair to one player, and they are frustrating, and they're fixing it. Not sure what has your knickers in a knot. -
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Battenberg posted a message on Hearthstone Hotfixes for April 16 - Buggy Witchwood Card InteractionsPosted in: NewsI have a bug to report - when my opponent plays this card called Shudderwock I lose the rest of my evening, not sure if you're aware of it.
Blizz pls fix. -
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Loretime posted a message on Vote for Your Favourite Community Created Cards That can be Even Slightly OddPosted in: NewsCan all these just be released with duskwood
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ur2ezchaos posted a message on Odds and Evens - New Legendary Minions Encourage Creativity in WitchwoodPosted in: Newsi dont see why we need to regurgitate thoughts from the first day or 2 after these cards were shown with no new developments until tomorrow. this article should have waited until the reveal then talked about possible new synergies instead of a rehash of information
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Frejjo posted a message on Patches the Pirate Loses Charge - Four Card Nerfs Coming in FebruaryPosted in: News#wildlivesmatter
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Dude you seem like you had a very bad day, if you need someone to talk to I'm avalaible!
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Don't care about the hate, bro people are just dumb in the internet
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Pass 1: Put 2 Shadow Visions in your deck
Pass 2: Put 2 [card]Radiant Elemental[/card] in your deck
Pass 3: Put Shadowreaper Anduin in your deck
Pass 4: Put Raza the Chained in your deck
Pass 5: Pray to BlessRNG to draw 2 [card]Radiant Elemental[/card] and the Shadowreaper Anduin before you draw 2 shadow visions
Pass 5²: Play Raza the Chained and enable your 0 mana hero power
Pass 6: you play Shadowreaper Anduin any turn before
Pass 7: You need less than 4 spells in your deck, including one of this spells must be a Shadow Visions
Pass 8: play both [card]Radiant Elemental[/card] and play a Shadow Visions to discover another Shadow Visions Ping face and Shadow Visions another Shadow Visions Ping Face and another...
Pass 9: Trolden Video
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Because of Ship's Cannon reasons
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You are new to this game right?