Hearthpwn

Good stats for its mana cost (so it's playable even against non-weapon opponents), destroys opponent's weapon, and is tradable. How would this NOT see play? If you're playing a control deck against a non-weapon opponent, paying 1 mana to swap it for a random card in your deck is totally worth it.

Yeah, I doubt there's any way to discount the 1 mana cost. If sending it back into your deck were considered a spell, Sorcerer's Apprentice could turn this card into a 0 mana draw, which is pretty much the last thing I want to see in mage.

Don't know if it'll be any good, but if that Darkbishop Benedictus card creates a Priest archetype that ISN'T control, I'd be pretty happy. Don't mind playing (or playing against) control priest, but a change of pace would be nice.

Quote from Thanatos2k >>

I'll add on that similar to the last few expansions, they will announce a card that everyone will know is so obviously broken, yet it will be released anyways and break the game for a week until it is hastily nerfed, indicating yet again they do not test their game.

 I'll likewise add that, similar to the last many expansions, Blizzard will also unveil a card that the entire community will utterly freak out about and insist is going to break the game. A bunch of posters will announce "I'm quitting the game because of this card," only to post idiotic nonsense for the next several months about how screwed up the new expansion is. Once the expansion goes live, said card will be played for about a week until everyone realizes how crappy the card actually is. Those who freaked out will, of course, never admit that they were wrong and will move on to some other complaint.

Agreed. It depends entirely on what deck you're playing, who your opponent is, what the board/ health state is, how much mana you have, and what other plays you could make. There is no "best time" to play one.

Quote from Leaga >>

"To really understand what is going on, you need to do some research. I can give you a couple of links to get you started so you know what you are dealing with."

 

Let's go ahead and take a look at the smoking gun evidence that is so strong 3nnu1 thinks it will entice us down the rabbit hole.

 

https://kotaku.com/activision-patents-matchmaking-that-encourages-players-1819630937

 

This was reporting on an exploratory patent done by an Activision R&D team, not affiliated with any particular studio. At the time. it had not actually been implemented any where. I've not seen any confirmation of it used in any game. If they do actually do something like this, then he **does** have a point imo. This system is pretty scummy, but the way the patent is structured, the system couldn't possibly be used in Hearthstone.

It rewards users who buy items by placing them in scenarios that the item is good. IE: You buy a sniper rifle, your next game is on a map where sniper rifles are very effective. End result: you feel good about your purchase and might want to buy more. It also puts people who it thinks might want the sniper rifle in that game with you so that they see how awesome you do with it and they want to buy it too. Since we dont directly buy items this system wouldn't work in Hearthstone. We also dont have variables like maps that it can use to highlight the new item so the only way this could be adapted for Hearthstone is to have better RNG when you first play with a card and then normal RNG after. But then that directly conflicts with the claim in this post so its a weird thing to use to try to agree with the OP that the game is rigged.

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/apr/01/candy-crush-saga-app-brain

This being in the "Science" section is pretty laughable. There is barely any actual science and its basically is just someone bitching about how they got sucked into the Candy Crush craze. I just can't take seriously people who act like there's some nefarious purpose to a game being easy at first and harder as it goes. That's just good game design. Seriously, that's something I use as a milestone when trying new games on my phone. Too hard at first? Uninstalled. Too easy after more than 30 minutes of play? Uninstalled. Its not some conspiracy. Its basic logic. If a game is too hard at first then it's not fun and difficult to learn. Then if its too easy once you've learned it then you never have to overcome any challenges and it gets boring very quickly. 

The only bit of science that it actually references is when it goes into the bit about how Candy Crush locks you out of the game for a while. I will admit that this is a mechanic that instantly turns me off of a game and I think is completely annoying. But trying to link it to evil intentions because of hedonistic adaptation is a bit of a stretch. That's just their monetization model. Hedonistic adaptation is one of the reasons that the business model can work but if the game wasn't engaging without the break then users would get scared off once they made the mistake of spending that money and got very little satisfaction out of their purchase. 

Regardless, I'm not really sure how this relates to Blizzard rigging things. King was also known for being highly successful in the mobile space which Blizzard was looking to expand in to. Acquiring a company like King brings in a lot of employees with experience that they were missing, a bunch of technical data and code that they could use to optimize their entries into the market, and multiple highly-profitable IPs which they have to invest very little time and money in to. I'm not sure why anyone would think there needs to be hidden motives on this one.

 

"Here is a seminar provided by a blizzard employee which illustrates everything is on the table in terms of rigging matchmaking and other parts of the game to promote player engagement."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-pglxege-gU

Thats just a talk about the concepts behind Skill systems, Matchmaking systems, and Ranking systems. I've seen it before but I rewatched it just to confirm: Absolutely nothing about rigging matchmaking, for player engagement or otherwise, is mentioned. There is nothing nefarious there at all. I'm not sure what 3nnu1 is trying to prove linking a presentation about the work that goes into quantifying player skill so that they can have players of the same skill level play against each other. Doesn't seem to support the idea that the game is rigged at all.

 

"The overall practices have had an interesting effect on blizzard as a whole, blizzard has become more profitable while losing players. This means their practices have extracted more money from some players while driving away another part of their player base. 

amespot.com/articles/blizzard-loses-millions-of-monthly-players-but-is-making-more-money/1100-6491037/#:~:text=Login%2FSign%20Up-,Blizzard%20Loses%20Millions%20Of%20Monthly%20Players%20But%20Is%20Making%20More,fewer%20players%20in%20Q1%202021.&text=Blizzard%20had%2027%20million%20monthly,38%20million%20in%20Q1%202018."

This link is broken but I'm pretty sure its meant to go to the article on gamespot. I'm just going to go ahead and quote from the article itself "While Blizzard's total number of players might be down year-over-year, it's not altogether very surprising. Q1 2020 marked the beginning of the pandemic, which led to a surge in people playing games, so a comparison to that quarter was always going to be difficult to match." The article itself basically says don't jump to the conclusion 3nnu1 jumped to. Yikes. 

 

 

 These same points have been brought up with him before. Multiple times. He's either incapable of comprehending what he reads/ hears, or (much more likely) he's trying to mislead people. He knows the vast majority of people following this thread won't both to read the articles or watch the video, so he deliberately misrepresents what they say in order to manipulate them. Pretty scuzzy, TBH.

Quote from Ach_Phoenix >>

To people mocking other people for saying blizzard rigs the code to favour paying customers:

There are literally enacted pattents for systems in games where the game will give you favourable RNG if you have spent money, and even matchmake you against someone who you are favourable to win against with what you have just purchased.

There is no need for tinfoil hats, when the people in the games industry are literally and publically availably declaring that they have made systems for this exact purpose.

 If that's the case, it's absurdly easy to prove. For the "favorable RNG" claim, find someone on the forum who spends a sizable amount of money on the game every year and another person who's f2p. Each of you use the same deck, play 50 games with it, and track the cards you draw. (I presume by "favorable RNG" you mean that the chance you have of drawing your better cards increases.) See if there's a statistically significant difference between your card draw rates. Similarly, for the latter claim, play 100 games or so, tracking the deck archetype of your opponent. Then craft a good legendary and repeat. See if the decks you face are significantly different. (This is somewhat harder to prove, since your MMR, and hence the decks you'll be matched against, will change during this period. But if there is such an system, it should easily overwhelm these confounding variables.)

I and others have said it repeatedly: we're not saying it doesn't exist, what we're saying is there is no evidence that such a system exist in Hearthstone. What other companies do or don't do is irrelevant. What Activision does or does not do in other games is irrelevant. What is technically possible is irrelevant. All that matters is HS-based evidence.

I just did a Google search on this, and apparently a former Activision has come out and revealed details about the matchmaking for Warzone. (I don't follow or play this game, so forgive me if this is inaccurate.) Why is this important? Because, to the best of my knowledge, no former employee who has worked on HS has ever come forward making a similar claim about HS. That does not, of course, prove anything but it is certainly evidence against your position.

It's no use: the dude shows up every chance he gets, spouts off the same idiocy, and tries to mislead the gullible. I used to think he was well-meaning, but wrong. But the fact that he continues to offer no evidence for his claims and use debunked/ misleading/ irrelevant "evidence" demonstrates that he's either a troll or delusional. In either case, he's not worth listening to.

Quote from formulas666 >>

Blizz doesnt care about Wild so it is fine.

 That's actually not true, as the most recent interview with Dean Ayala showed. Blizzard just has a much higher threshold for taking action there. It was interesting that he acknowledged the danger of 0-cost cards in Wild and suggested a nerf to Sorcerer's Apprentice was possible.

I can promise you that's not going to happen. A sizable majority of their revenue comes from card packs, not skins and other cosmetics. The demand for these cosmetics is tiny compared to card packs, battle passes, etc. Not only that, I can doubly promise you that, if card pack prices go down, there is no way in hell the dust ratio is going to improve. You're essentially asking Blizzard to take a massive financial hit, for no compelling reason. HS is, in my view, a pretty reasonably priced game if you're willing to play regularly.

Speaking personally, I find the whole skins market funny. I would never even consider spending a nickle on that stuff, in part because none of these characters mean anything to me. I've never played WoW and don't know the first thing about any of these people. (Nor do I care.) I'm just interested in the game. I genuinely don't even notice the skin of my opponent. 

Not that I played against this deck or play wild: but people like you whose favorite deck is mill rogue should have left the game for good.

Mill rogue is literally the most cancerous deck there ever was and will be.