Hearthpwn

OP you put together a well constructed post that wasn't talking about anything to do with card nerfs and Blizzard not listening to their nerf demands.

For that alone you get an upvote from me.

In general many aggro decks actually have less card draw in standard than in past metas. Ever wonder why aggro paladin finally FINALLY kicked the bucket in standard for the moment? It lost the single card that carried the entire playstyle for years, Divine Favor (ie their crutch refill/reload mechanic).

And honestly I wouldn't say aggro really got that much more better at making tokens (aside from maybe lackeys in rogue). Soul of the Forest has always existed for druid and in the past Token Druid was close to as good at making small things as it is now. The main thing that really changed is that warlock can no longer Defile its way to victory. However, Pyromancer is still a thing, Warpath is still a thing, & Hysteria + something else is still a thing in the late game with more mana. You just got classes that had broken undercosted board clears getting rotated or nerfed.

Ice Cream Shaman, but my Spectral Pillager OTK Rogue will always be the soft spot in the my heart.

Quote from DSchu102285 >>

Nerfing a card because its way more powerful in Wild over Standard sounds very reasonable... haha, no.

 

Personally I'm against the nef. However, to play devil's advocate why wouldn't nerfing something in standard due to a power level be reasonable? The opposite happens all of the time when a card that is not a problem in wild gets nerfed because something broke in standard yet again.

I completely agree with you OP. A big reason I am against most nerfs is because they are often not needed for the wild format and instead (for some odd reason) are just tacked onto standard meta complaint nerfs. Wild should never be nerfed for the sake of standard, especially considering that the standard pool is so pitiful when compared to wild. 

Standard is an extremely flawed format and more often than wild the smallest thing in standard can completely break their competitive play. This is much less the case considering that new cards have to dethrone DKs, jades, Even Shaman/Odd Pally, Mecha'Thun, etc. Wild decks should not be nerfed to address a flawed standard card pool unless there is the same or a similar serious problem also in wild. It would almost be like nerfing standard basic/classic cards in standard because an old wild card was causing chaos in wild.

Quote from Elfensilber >>

So back to topic: How could a tournament mode be implemented? I'd say a screen where people can choose some options - presented by "paper"-signs: like wild/standard, fast/normal, 4/8/16/32 Players, ban/no-ban&1Deck/3 Decks, deck restrictions/free decks. So after one choose that, you'd have to pay some small amount of Gold, choose your deck(s)- just enough that you will come back to the actual tournament, like 10,20- and you'd have to wait for a bit, since tournaments start at every half/full hour.

Then the actual tournament: you'd get an invite like if a friend tries to play with you, if you agree, you'll either get into a special tournament screen, where you could ban one of the 3 decks of your opponent-in a ban mode- or directly into your first game. One opponent one game. If you don not show up- disconnect for to long autowin for your opponent.

Between games- which either would be every 20min/or T5 knows when- all the players who don't have a game could chat, or spectate the current games.

In the end, the larger the tournament the higher the price for the better half of the players would be. Like:(-,-,15,25), (-,-,-,-,15,15, 30, 50), (8*0, 4*25, 50, 1Pack)...

For deck restrictions: here there would be quite a lot of possibilitys, probably a good reason why this game mode never happened: Budget: Only 3000/6000/9000 Dust/Deck; Expansions: Only decks that were in standard in the year of the Mammoth/Raven/Kraken...; One class only; all classes expect one; only players from a certain rank up... Since there are so many possible deck restrictions, maybe only budget/all decks would be normal, the other restrictions would possible rotate into play one each week.

If there aren't enough players, everyone gets an invite to a similar tournament, or people can choose to drop out with their Gold- or the group plays a tournament with a smaller number of participants.

So, would people be interested in this kind of tournaments?

It could be interesting but there are still a lot of problems with it.

First and foremost is the whole ban or decks w/ restrictions concept. Unlike the other deck specifications/customization this one has the complexity to be it's own entire feature. For example, if you do more with it than just the standard HCT class bans then we are taking an entire UI function that pulls up dozens to hundreds of cards for you to possibly ban. If you'd have to sit around in a tourney queue waiting for people to sift through specific cards to ban it would get tiresome really fast. Nobody wants to sit around for 5-10 minutes, or more, while somebody decides what exactly they are going to ban. And we aren't even talking about the whole separate issue of people banning precisely the cards that counter their deck/playstyle.

There is also an issue of how are you going to proactively work around griefing in a tourney/custom group format. Say you allow people to create groups, but you don't create your own non-automated mechanism to remove players, then you can theoretically end up with someone purposefully dragging their turns out til they rope every single turn just because they are bored and want to troll your group. If you then allow group leaders to remove people instead, to avoid the previously mentioned trolling, then how is the system going to prevent a group leader from removing you if you beat one of their friends or brought a playstyle/deck they didn't like and you started winning too much? On either end there is potential for abuse in the system. You can't just create such a mode until you have an exact process for how griefing/trolling is going to be minimized as much as possible.

And since you lightly touched on rewards for tourney play it should also be mentioned how you are going to prevent friends from gaming the tourney mode and win trading so that much more competent players continually win tourneys by inviting less experienced players?

^ There are plenty of subtle intricacies that need to be considered before ever just creating a tourney mode.

Casual is casual because you are not competing for anything in particular and as a result do not have to sweat winning or losing.

It is not casual because you are only supposed to play certain things.

I swear when HS first started there were an incredibly small amount of you players in the game that thought you should be able to dictate what other people can or can't play.

I don't care what I'm playing. Whether I'm playing my Spectral Pillager Rogue OTK, Druid of the Saber OTK Druid, Weasel Priest, Spiteful Mech Mage, Ice Cream Shaman, Dragon Patron Warrior, Quest Mage, or Reno Mage I'll still be happy to get you to break your keyboard and allow yourself to feel offended by a video game. 

Quote from Sherman1986 >>

Quote from iWatchUSleep >>

I'm actually quite glad there's no chat option. If I faced a big priest and had the option to chat with him I'm pretty sure I'd lose my account within a day.

Wouldn't that be awesome? Face an opponent, annoy him to death without saying a word, receive all kind of insults and threats from his part, then report him at the end of the match (a report feature in-game would be obligatory after implementing a chat) and pray to god for Blizzard to ban his account.

Beautiful!!! :D :D :D

If their report system was anything like WoW's they probably wouldn't even get temp banned 90% of the time.

Install WoW and go to trade chat, or alternatively start up a random MOBA and look at chat.

On a smaller scale that is what a chat option in HS would end up looking like.

Spamming the opponent with copy pasta walls of text just to troll them during their turn, confiding intimate things about their mother, sexual preference, or a suggestion about when would be the ideal time to end their life would all also swamp HS matches if chat was available.

I for on would pass on that.

Quote from Zion7 >>

Just from your title and first paragraph you sound like a pompous ass. You sling hash at an entire community because of what a small percentage of members are suggesting, that automatically makes you look short sighted. Also, it is clear that at least a few cards need tuning, the statistics have said it, the meta snapshots have said it, the professional players have said it and you're just being a fanboy if you want to ignore all that and pretend Blizzard got it 100% correct and nothing needs balance. You can't shame players for suggesting balance. This is a complex game, it will forever need more balancing.

The thing is that not all of the nerfs demanded by players are as legitimate as other suggestions.

I mean pick ax is a very common one I see, despite everyone and their brother having access to 2 common quality 2 mana oozes (oh no! the 2 mana 'tempo loss'!). Not to mention the really dumb idea to nerf practically every single rogue card at once as opposed to nerfing one card and testing how the change does at tuning the deck.

Blizzard sure doesn't get things 100% right, but if you think the players do any better you are certainly wrong.

Now before you just call these types of plays run-of-the-mill BM emote spam hear me out.

Quite often when playing games in ranked or casual you run into players that end up making some form of big play, whether a huge tempo swing, a complicated combo to wipe all or most of your board, or a crazy value generation turn. While you're staring at the screen thinking of what just happened, after promptly considering your next complicated move, the emote comes. It is not a spam of emoting, usually, but often the single emote. This emote is also usually not sent right after their turn, but maybe a third to halfway into your turn before the rope has appeared. My proposal, while probably steeped in both lighthearted 'tinfoil-hatness' and casual analysis, is that these single emotes are not only just for random BMing, but are intended to interrupt your train of thought and attempt to lead you towards a sloppy inefficient turn.

One of the other recent threads on our forums, the one about bluffers specifically, reminded me about this casual 'for fun' theory. I recently posted in the bluffer thread commenting about how mind games show an often underutilized skill possible to shift games if you are not aware of how such mind games in HS can work (or you are too aware and paranoid because of them). Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure many players that do send an odd single emote after a good turn aren't purposefully thinking that they necessarily want to get in your head are are more akin to a middle finger, lul, a friendly jab, or a 'ball in your court' scenario, but I think it is interesting to consider that perhaps there are quite an odd handful of 'mind game aware' players that do send out that emote after a power turn while you are thinking just to try to get into your head, get under your skin, or otherwise attempt to interrupt your train of thought to cause you to throw.

Or perhaps my funny little wondering is just an amused over-reading of the situation. Who knows? ;)

Feel free to disagree, agree, and discuss below. Share your thoughts with us.

Personally I find bluffers to be evident of a higher skilled player, at least in theory, because they are aware of how mind games can actually influence the course of a game, which I find is something that is subtle yet crucial for the game.

Interestingly enough, you have to be semi-aware of how these mind games work to allow yourself to become victim of them (such as those players who concede to a supposed Leeroy of Fireball in hand without seeing them actually played).

Quote from Kaladin >>

WE ARE NOT THE GAME DESIGNERS, WE ARE THE PLAYERS.

IT IS NOT OUR JOB TO COME UP WITH THE NEXT THING.

how can you not understand this?

You're glossing over an important aspect of game designers/devs just simply coming up with a tournament mode and that is will the subjective end product of such a mode bring in the adequate amount of players long term for all of the work, money, and time committed to it, or will the mode be too far from what 'most' players wanted from it and thus repel more people from using the mode long term (thus wasting money, time, and resources that couldn't been spent elsewhere to improve the game).

Long term WoW players should understand this type of problem. WoW, which has many more active players than HS and thus louder vocal minorities/mixes of niche players, often has struggled with taking risks about whether to produce a certain requested content, or making various requested changes to components of their game. Many times adding said content/changes have rewarded Blizzard for the risks they took, but plenty of times it bit them in the ass because what they introduced/changed really didn't end up being all too desirable for [insert vocal minority of playerbase here], which resulted in mass player complaints. In some those cases the players thought they knew what they wanted for particular content, class design, pvp/pve content, mounts/mount changes, etc, but plenty of times when Blizzard delivered on what they thought those players wanted it then blew up in their face.

Tournament mode is very much the above mentioned obstacle, just restricted to HS this time. I won't side track myself for too long on all of the theoretical results for implementing all sorts of various incarnations of "Tournament Mode", but I'll list a view (and briefly comment on how players could theoretically be repelled from the game, or at least future attempts of tournament mode, should T5's attempts at making such a game format fail). For example, say T5 decided that they thought more players wanted a tourney mode where you can implement class/card bans. Say then that players dive right in, but eventually start finding out that *Tah-dah!* optimized lists, or netdecks, simply start popping up in the pool of cards that are left over after initial card/class bans. Say then that players request a raise on the cap of card/class bans to try to impossibly prevent this and players eventually become disenchanted with tourney mode & class/card bans because optimized lists continue to pop up in the remaining pool of cards/cards after each successive cap raise is delivered to ban more & more cards in such a mode. 

Other theoretical examples that could end up causing players to complain more about problems caused to the game as a result of implementing a subjective version of the tourney mode could result from the game format making the game less social, rather than more social. If you don't have to go to real face-to-face tourneys at your local conventions, game/hobby stores, or even at small scale fireside gatherings then the potential for anonymous gaming toxicity increases if disgruntled players join your random online tourney (WoW has seen plenty of this since the implementation of LFD, LFG, & LFR). Another example. T5 makes tourney mode where it it simply a HS themed LFG tool where players can browse group listings, activity descriptions in said groups, and then request to join. On paper that could work beautifully. However, what if players start using it to grief others (such as a tourney group kicking a person out of the tourney when they were about to win a match simply to spite them for bringing a particular class, card, deck, or playstyle). If such a tourney mode was created by devs and the players found it to be used for griefing as much as doing tourney activities would players still celebrate T5's attempt at creating the mode?

The point I'm getting at is that T5 could simply take their 'game design prerogative' and just design the tourney mode despite there not being a solid enough or unified enough vision of what it should be, but if they take that risk and it ends up not paying off due to vocal complaints arising en mass then was it worth creating it in the first place, especially if their attempt at creating a mode to please enough of the playerbase instead leads to repelling new and/or old players instead? Some risks pay off, while others should never have been made in the first place.

Quote from Dendroid >>

No one plays Betrayal...make Betrayal 1 mana.  Seemslegit.

 Betrayal is actually very powerful in slow control games when combined with Valeera, particularly when you are facing an opponent that can insta spam a board in wild via Gul'Dan, N'Zoth, or jades ;)

Very underrated card in the right circumstances.

Quote from onceupop >>

I had a guy who added me postgame a few weeks ago.

He said he would strangle me with a pianowire in my sleep and cut my body into 14 pieces with a bonesaw. Then he would send my head in the mail to my mother inside a box labeled "Cupcakes". As a final insult to injury he said he would contact my mother, convincing her he was a friend on mine and that he owned a catering business. And it would mean a lot to him if he was allowed to provide the food for the funeral, as a token of our friendship. At the right moment he would reveal that the roastbeef everyone was eating was actually selected pieces of my dead body.

I guess some people really hate to loose to discolock..

 

 

That is amazing! xD I would actually applaud them for their creativity.

I actually find it exciting when people add me to BM. Why you ask? I get to challenge myself to see how many lines of lyrics I can spam my opponent with from my HS themed "Single Ladies" parody I created and see if I can end up line spamming them the whole song before they delete me.

I've actually achieved this once already ^_-