I need to take a moment and respond to two different videos made by the creator Zeddy Hearthstone. These videos are unrelated, except in that they are both remarkably dishonest.
To the mod(s) who review this post, I realize that one of the two videos deals with race and gender, two subjects that are not favorites of forum moderators in general. I would encourage you, however, to take a quick peek at my post history. You will notice that in most of my posts, and 100% of the threads I start, I do not treat these or any other topics as trivial or worthy of trolling. I am taking this as seriously as one can, given the flaws in the video to which I reference.
Now, the two videos in question are 1) "I should've made this video a long time ago. Please hear me out." Posted 20 Nov 2020, and 2) "Why Hearthstone is GETTING EVEN MORE expensive! |Darkmoon Faire | Hearthstone" Posted 27 Nov 2020. If you have not watched these videos, I can't in good conscience recommend them, but I would respectfully request you don't respond to this by only commenting on the general topics. I am very specifically responding to these videos and their particulars.
Taking them in order, the first video is centered around the streamer-invite-only duel tournament which, at the time of this video's posting, had not yet occurred. Zeddy laments the lack of diversity in the 16 invitees, specifically mentioning "only 2 women" and "no persons of color". He goes on to mention Pathra as his first example of a woman who should have been invited, and names two streamers, apparently of color, of whom I have never heard.
Two major and one minor issue occur to me with this video.
First, Pathra as a person who deserved an invite. This deserves to be called out for the ridiculous suggestion it is. If we proceed from the notion that we should invite based on audience and popularity, there are certainly more popular and more diverse female candidates. Moreover though, some part of the invite process should have SOMETHING to do with the ability to play the game. Pathra was given a position in the premiere GM league season. She was chosen over MANY professional players with far more accomplishments in the game. It was no secret, at the time, that her gender played a huge roll in her selection, and I actually have no particular problem with that. The hosts of the league have the prerogative to choose who they think will make the tournament successful.
She did not make the GM league successful. She made it a laughingstock, to the point where many in the community were calling for special moderation of the chat in her matches. The stated reason was "sexism", but I always had a serious issue with this. Pathra won very few games, to say nothing of matches, during her time in GM. The VODs of those games contain many comments pointing out her blatant, objective errors in EVERY game she played (I do not exaggerate). It was some of the most inept tournament play I've ever seen. So knowing that her play will cause adverse events in chat, whatever the reason, one cannot legitimately fault the hosts of the duel tournament for leaving her off the roster, or if you think you can fault them, you CERTAINLY can't chalk it up to her gender alone. There are clearly other issues with selecting her.
The second major issue with Zeddy's video was the claim that no persons of color were included. There were several streamers of Asian descent invited, and here we have to be brutally honest. The objective, inarguable racism of excluding Asians from the category "persons of color" is disgusting. It smacks of one's personal attitudes toward a race of people substituting for the factual minority status of Asian people in America. This has been done many times, basically from the reasoning that since Asians don't fit into certain narratives of victimhood as easily as other minorities might (which, btw, is an asinine belief. Anyone ever heard of internment camps?), they should occupy some nebulous space between whiteness and "of color". That is a truly revolting practice, and it deserves to be called out to his face.
The final, and by far LEAST important, of the three problems with this video is the open and notorious positioning of such statements as "brave" and even funnier . . . "daring". We live in the year 2020. No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall under, no one who is engaged in the modern world has avoided numerous . . . countless, even . . . instances of gender and race diversity consciousness. At one point in the video he suggests that he doesn't get invited to such tournaments because he makes videos like this. I suspect he is correct, though not for the reasons he believes. I hope I have illustrated the flaws and bigotry inherent in this message to the point where I fully understand why no company would want to associate with this creator.
The second video is more familiar territory to the forum right now. After making several videos calling specific Blizzard employees liars regarding the reward track, and referring to "false promises" of future xp-earning opportunities (despite him having no way of knowing whether said promises are false), he uses the above-named video to tackle the more general notion of the game getting more expensive as a whole. He claims that his accounting degree gives him the expertise needed to give "a more data driven approach" to answering this question.
For the record, I have a Master of Accountancy, a Juris Doctorate with a specialty in corporate finance, and a current CPA license, so if any such things matter, I have quite a bit more expertise. The reality, of course, is it only takes an attention to detail and the ability to multiply and add to answer this question, so all of this dick-wagging over credentials is completely meaningless, but to forestall the appeal to authority fallacies, I include my own.
It should be acknowledged that in one respect, the game has obviously gotten more expensive. That is, we used to have smaller expansions in the form of adventures like Naxxramas, Blackrock Mountain, etc. Those were cheaper than an entirely new traditionally-sized set of cards. For the past several years, we've had 3 expansions instead of 2 expansions and 1 adventure per year, and that is certainly more expensive.
However, a heavy counterbalance to that change is the introduction of duplicate protections in opening packs. The inability to get duplicate legendaries before you have one of each in a set cut the price of purchasing an entire set via packs by HUNDREDS of dollars, and I know this to be true because I bought every set that way. After duplicate protection was installed in game, the number of packs necessary for a full set was reduced by up to 70% depending on luck with the old sets.
My beef with Zeddy on this video is not his conclusion that yes, Hearthstone is (somewhat) more expensive than in the time of adventures. No, my issue is that he prepared a very large spreadsheet, but he zooms in on one area that lists "cost of required packs" and has values in the thousands of dollars. Now, let's be clear, I have bought enough packs to finish every set in this game, and at NO time ever did I spend more than $220 before I had a full set. So any suggestion that a set requires over a thousand dollars to complete is not only a deliberate lie, it is so out of the realm of reality as to be reasonably deemed a deliberately misleading propaganda. And yet, his spreadsheet lists values ranging all over the $1-2k range.
Now those of you who watch his video and are inclined to defend him will comment that Zeddy himself admitted the numbers were not "perfectly accurate". In that, he is CERTAINLY truthful. The problem is, by including the numbers at all, there is a tacit suggestion that they are at least in the ballpark of accurate, which they absolutely are not. Furthermore, the would-be Zeddy defenders are indulging in his brand of dishonesty if they only tell half the story. Sure, he protests that these numbers aren't adequate, until later in the video when he makes two statements that begin, "As you can see from the numbers . . .", doubling down on the implied dishonesty of including those numbers in the first place.
Now, for those of you who have actually read this far, I want to be clear. Topics like diversity in gaming, costs to consumers, and misleading advertising can be worthy of discussion. I say "CAN BE" because they are not universally and constantly a problem in every gaming community. Diversity based on race and gender has always been the laziest, lowest-IQ proxy of true diversity of thought, but since some people value it so highly, I have always encouraged companies I support to take the easy way and make sure they give some lip service to this rather than be caught up in political squabbles they could otherwise easily avoid. But, just because someone dubs themself a champion of the little people, the downtrodden, the underdogs, does not mean that person is morally pure. In this case, I think Zeddy is FAR from it with his own messed up views on race.
More generally, this constant insistence of "I'm thinking about you. I'm fighting for you!" is generally either a gaslight for efame, and one has to actually show some good one does for "you" in order to substantiate those claims. In one of his videos calling Blizzard liars for the reward track stuff, he refers to Brian Kibler (a person who has been active in bettering gaming communities for nearly 25 years) as a "spineless streamer" who falls in the category of folks too rich to care about such things, before quickly reminding his audience that Zeddy himself is rich enough not to care, "but I'm looking out for my viewers . . . for you!"
Personally, I'm not convinced.
-5
when is the next nerfs? I got 18,000 golds to buy the m golden packs just cant sit for the nerfs fren..
1
still whinning every tweets
5
printable p2w card
1
im a old viewer since 2019, the only thing I dont like is that he's copying kripp salt attitude more recently (Kripp Salt Chronicles) and saying staying safe staying healthy and staying salty, alot sounds actually very cringe.
2
another 3760 games of mercenary farms, I guess