Hearthpwn

This is getting old, honestly.

There's plenty of proof that with the current system players do get more gold, get it easier and earlier in the season.

Well I gotta say Im pretty shocked you guys said that.

The only thing I manage to get are like 50 quest points. Do you guys have a special way to grind you want to share with me perhaps?

What do you mean by 50 quest points?

And the best way to grind (apart from completing "play X class" quests by conceding in tavern brawl) is playing ranked constructed, in which you get about 8 XP per minute, if you win the match, and 6 XP when you lose. So you'd get about 420~430 XP per hour.
The second best way to grind XP is playing Battlegrounds. There you get the second best XP rate, if I'm not mistaken, and it's relatively easier to get a win, since you just need to finish top 4.

Well you're missing the point here. Apart from the legendaries, packs and other rewards along the track, you have the oportunity to get 14,500 XP per week from quests alone, as stated by DysprosiumDy. Also, you just have to login 3 times per week to complete all quests. On top of that, you can get 50 gold for about every 4 hours of gameplay (even less for constructed), that's a daily quest in the old system and a big daily in this current system.

Yes you could win 100g daily before, but that means 30 WINS. Assuming you play a face deck, average win would take 6~7 minutes. That's 6 to 7 hours every day for 30 wins. If you play this much in the current system, whether you're lucky to win or not, you can get 100g every day aswell.

This is not me talking what you might call bs, this are actual collected and analyzed data that you can easily find on reddit.

So the point is: players can get more gold per week and is also easier to get it.

The following is probably an unpopular opinion but I feel like most of that "can't wait to play vanilla HS again" talk comes from pure nostalgia. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong about nostalgia, but it shadows the bad aspects of that time.
I think the first 1 or 2 months of vanilla classic will have a very positive feedback. And then, players might just forget about classic due to lack of diversity.
Again, my unpopular opinion. And I agree with you. Although, it's always nice to have a new ranked mode to play.

Welp, better forfeitting instead of playing against Mother Sharaz. The most boring match i've had so far in this game mode.

Regis would be perfect. The guy has probably more charisma than Ben Brode himself and would be able to give us some insights about the cards in wild.

I know Rogue is playing it, also Druid and Warrior. Maybe the forth is some kinda Spell Damage Mage.

Sonya Shadowdancer is quite the opposite point of the deck. Here you want less minions as possible in your deck, for the consistency of drawing the combo. Moreover, there is really no benefit from killing your own Malygos.

Yes, that is said in the blizzard store's description page.

No living soul knows.

Is it really a plot twist if this is exactly what this post is predicting?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the old versions of the classic dragons will not be usable in wild anymore and will be replaced with these new versions? Isn't that effectively removing cards you own that you can use on wild, since these new dragons are completely different cards and are even named different? Will we get a dust refund for Malygos for example since we can no longer play any of the wild Malygos decks?

This expension, horde based -> forged in the barrens.

Next expension, allianced based, something like -> blessed in Elwynn.

3rd expension, a clash between in horde and the alliance in Alterac valley. The image is one of the defense towers in that area seen from above. It'll be something like -> Clash of Alterac

You get 7 normal quests and 3 weekly quests. That's 14,500 XP per week. For every 1500 XP, you get 50 Gold. That means a total of almost 500 Gold per week. That's more than I got with the old quest system. Less transparent, yes. Less Gold, no.

He isn't though. Unless you exclusively netdecked the fastest aggro deck you can find, the new system reaps same-more gold for you.

Hearthstone Mathematics video on that

Neat.

Can't say I'm too interested in Classic Mode, but I guess a lot of people will be. I'll have to give it a spin, just to see how it feels.

I guess the new core set, that will be rotating every year, will allow the devs to have further control over the interactions between the "basic/classic" cards and newly released cards with each expansion.

This way we won't see issues like Edwin Vancleef suddenly needing a nerf just because they released one foxy boi.

I love that there's an option to play vanilla Hearthstone again, since in my opinion it was the best the game's ever been, but it seems really odd to have it as a full, permanent, game mode. If you don't evolve it it's going to get solved fast (what with an exponentially smaller card pool and having already existed) and it's going to get old, and if you do evolve it then... well, you've not really created a classic mode, have you? Oh well, I'm sure I'll climb to legend in it in the first month out of nostalgia and probably only touch it very rarely.

I don't want to be too judgmental. I want to be cynical and say that many of the answers here sound like excuses, but I'd rather not. It's not easy though. 

I don't want to hate the guy. He seems generally pretty reasonable and open when he does these AMAs or shows up on official streams. I'm sure he's intelligent and nice. Then again, when I let him have the benefit of the doubt, many of the answers feel so "out-of-touch", that it's hard to take them for real. I won't go into every single point, just a few that feel particularly weird to me.

Current expansion achievements rewarding XP don't carry over to the next expansion reward track, because they think players would be forced to complete older achievements in order to level up optimally.

 Aside from forcing Achievements only in Ranked and Duels, thus discouraging players to do them already, as low winrates can potentially be punished with a lower star bonus, and only because it would otherwise "hurt the experience", I would think most players would be happier having something they can do with old cards they got from events or bundles, than feeling forced to play only the new stuff. Especially when you feel under a time limit for no good reason. It feels like "get all your achievements done before the next expansion rolls out!", which is not exactly fun with achievements that are meant to take a long time, like Greybough, (0-cost) Corrupt cards, etc. 

 If you place it at the forefront of your game and force everyone through it, those that aren't competitive might have to engage in something that makes them not want to play anymore. Having quests in Hearthstone to go play single-player content or BG is an example of this I think about. If a player doesn't like that content but we say hey here is a reward you better do it.... it toes the line.

You can reroll every Battlegrounds-related quest, and some are not even exclusive to it (like winning 5 games in BG, Duels or Tavern Brawl).

The "5 ranked wins" that you get every week, on the other hand, is the single most rewarding quest and the only one that can't get rerolled, even if you wanted to. So, "forcing" players into Battlegrounds is problematic, but actually forcing players into Ranked, the most competitive mode in Hearthstone, is fine? And that's before considering that Achievements are easiest to complete in Ranked, and that Ranked gains you more Exp than any other mode, and that the monthly Ranked rewards are about the only source of additional rewards in the game, infinite Arena aside. And for the record, it actually does make me want to play less. When I don't like the meta, or my collection just sucks (or both, usually) it is a whole lot less fun to feel forced to play Ranked, because a large portion of the rewards is tied to it.

I know some people will say that Ranked is supposed to be the "real" Hearthstone and the mode that should get the most support, but how does that go with "don't force people to play the game a certain way"? Again, doesn't really sound like an honest answer.

Discover adds a lot to the game even though it's relatively high gameplay complexity. [...] Generally, they are moving away from having too many resources in one card. When control matchups devolve into one infinite generator and 29 removal cards the game gets less fun.

Well... it's nice that Control decks are supposed to change again, because that was (in less extreme forms) basically the identity of Control decks for a long time now. Like Control Warrior in Rise of Shadows with Archivist Elysiana, Galakrond Priest, Kobolds Control Mage with Frost Lich Jaina, more recent Highlander Mages with Dragonqueen Alexstrasza, and many others. 

But I don't really see that happening when Discover and Random are treated like the swiss-army-knife of Hearthstone, both in design and gameplay. Especially control decks like Discover for generating answers that you wouldn't want to commit to in initial deckbuilding. Maybe he's talking of future expansions only, but with cards like Palm Reading, Renew, Keywarden Ivory or Envoy Rustwix, just to name a few of the latest additions, I struggle to see anything changing anytime soon.

The original question was, whether "the design team [is] working on moving away from the multiple degrees of random deviation" as "[p]laying against decks that are more created by than not isnt fun". Even if the next expansions should feature close to no random value generators, for a drastic change, it's not going away.

I know that some people will disagree with me here because they really love Discover and Random, and "if you want consistency, play chess". I'm not saying that these things need to get toned down. I mean, I would, but that's not my point here. What I mean to say, is that adding another dozen Discover effects every expansion, because you like this element, will generally push Control decks (or in case of Mage, an entire class) in the direction you apparently want to avoid. I guess you could limit the range of Discover-effects...

"Sounds a lot like I'm blaming players for not getting it, but it really is on us. Players shouldn't have to break out their excel sheets to understand something. It should just be clear right away."

Again... how am I supposed to believe this? The system was (and technically still is) highly intransparent. Where it is transparent, it's still needlessly complicated. And with all the statements about how long they've worked on it to "get it right", this was never, once, noticed during development?

If it wasn't for the (probably not even legal) datamining done by a few, people wouldn't have known what they get (or not get) out of the new system until many weeks and months later. I'm not suggesting that they need to redesign everything, and I will just wait and see how the next reward track looks like. I'm mostly over the whole issue, and I won't be like "never forget the betrayal" or something like that here. But excel sheets are sadly necessary in Hearthstone, because nothing is done straight and few things are ever clear right away. And while it might take a while between realizing that things need to be clear, and making things clear, I wonder what he thinks "clear" actually means.

The bit about expiring exp rewards for achievements is another one of those examples. It isn't mentioned in the game, wasn't mentioned in official blogposts or anything, but only mentioned in these semi-official AMAs, that few people outside of fansites will even take notice of. Is the same true for Duels achievements? Are they going to expire, or are they going to reset with a new rotation? Clear as mud.

You need Excel to keep track of everything, if only to check if made promises are kept and circulated "facts" like "300 exp per hour" are actually true, as trust is easily lost when things seem off. In the current Tavern Brawl, I've had multiple games, even those that I won, just give me 7 or 12 exp. Granted, the games were rather short, but it isn't that much fun to do exp-per-minute (or even seconds) calculations when single games just seem ridiculously undervalued (and on that note, I disagree that we are in a "reasonable place"). But also, because questions like "How much dust will you make in a month?" or "Can you affort to craft a deck if it might drop out of the meta?" or "How many packs do you need from the next expansion and when would you get them?" can only be properly answered if you keep track of everything, make crafting lists, and reevaluate everything on a regular basis. Those are simple questions that I think people should be able to answer without too much effort, but are never really easy to answer.

On that note, Iksar has also said in another tweet that he feels unhappy when players are just sitting on resources because they either can't spend them or decision making is too hard (Source). And I really don't see how latest efforts have contributed to make decisions easier. Just as another example, because of the very unclear future of Classic, that was already hinted at a while ago, I'm sitting on maybe 45 Classic packs, unsure whether I should open them, save them for new additions, or if they expire entirely, because they introduce a new "Classic" (or "Modern"?) set. All I can do is wait, until everything is "clear right away" once again.

Again, I know I will come across as nit-picky and overly critical. I'm a horrible critic that way. Which is why I want to stress once more that I'm not doing this just for the sake of it, or for upsetting people. I'm honestly glad that he chooses to do these things, because any kind of engagement and the will to communicate is an improvement and hopefully makes things go a little easier in the future. When people have a better idea about what is going on and why certain decisions are made, it might prevent another fallout like the one we've seen not too long ago.

But at the same time, it's not so much that I merely disagree with some statements, I struggle to comprehend them. Like, the game clearly coerces you to play Ranked in three different ways, and he's talking about not forcing people to go do things they don't like doing...

Should I ever get the chance to talk to him in person, I'll have to make sure to buy drinks. Both to not be too much of a hard-ass, and because he'd derserve more than one if he would actually sit through my hour-long ramblings.