Hearthpwn

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Because the game caters to aggro decks and prints cards that punish anyone silly enough to want to play control. Hence why the game has become worse and worse since jade idol and now crystal rogue.

 That's pretty much the answer.

 

People play fast decks because it's very frustrating and not fun to lose on turn four because your deck is built on late-game threats you don't have time to play because you can't fight off the early-game rush. 

 I understand it may be tiresome to read 12 pages of posts, can't really blame if you didn't. Not to mention other threads that touch this same topic...

 

But if you did, you might have discovered that the reasons are hardly that trivial. Several people have explained them at length already, multiple times. Frankly I'm too tired to repeat all that once again, but felt compelled to say at least this.

 

@GrandPatzer; so in the case of driving (it doesn't really matter what, but sure let's just continue with F1 as an example), you're still essentially progressing through the phases of "you start to play the game -> you suck -> you learn -> you become good -> that's it". I don't think anyone in their right mind is trying to argue that Hearthstone's skill cap and F1 racing are even remotely in the same league though, nor would they argue that most physical sports are remotely in the same league; but we could argue that for any game where motor skills aren't in high demand (see: chess, other card games, etc.). It's kind of a shitty comparison, but regardless of what you're doing competitors are always going to progress through that list of steps. You suck at something until you get better.

Top1000 being in the same general skill level, though I don't think that's the case, really doesn't bother me all that much considering the fact we're playing a game with tens of millions of players. And even in the Top1000 we still have people setting themselves apart like Thijs, Pavel, Muzzy, etc, not unlike something like Magic. If people have an issue with that scenario, then competitive games susceptible to variance in general are likely not going to make them happy; but the reality is that Hearthstone's competitive scene, for all its issues, is not showing behavior any differently from well-respected scenes like Magic or Poker.

Keep in mind, if you have been Top100 multiple times on ladder then you're already a tiny percentage of players in this game. It doesn't really mean much that you can identify plays while you're watching tournaments, especially because you're a) seeing more information than the competitors are capable of seeing, and b) already at a skill level where you quite honestly should see most or all of the viable plays in a situation. The same would be the case for Magic. The same will be the case for Gwent.

@scout515; from my understanding, they don't really mind Freeze Mage as much as they minded a perennial deck with a majority of Classic cards existing from meta to meta. Kind of like how Handlock died for our sins, except this rotation they took a better approach to that issue (fingers crossed we see FoN and Molten Giant rotated to Wild and reverted). I also think Freeze/Burn Mage in its current state is a little more in line with what they want to see happening; classes running heavy healing can all generally outpace the amount of burn now, meaning instead of your only option to tech against burn being "play Control Warrior" you can rock Priest/Paladin/Shaman/Druid to respond to their Alex turn and get back to a safe health total. If it remains like this, I don't see them touching any portions of Burn Mage outside of Glyph (which is problematic for other reasons).

Quest Mage seems like a crazy card to have printed, but based on its performance it seems unreliable enough to not really be a concern. I recall an interview/reddit post/tweet/whatever where they went more into detail of what they like and dislike seeing in combo decks, and their dislike was less to do with OTKs and more to do with goldfishing until you just burst down your opponent; playing 6 spells generated from outside your deck while ALSO running a combo win condition while ALSO packing enough reactive tools to handle aggression means it's pretty hard to get away with goldfishing all game and complete your quest in a timely manner. I expect this to be a lot more broken in Wild down the road, but fine in Standard.

Personally I think Quest Rogue probably gets the axe, but I could be wrong. I don't really even dislike the card, and I think it's actually a sweet deck in how unique it feels... but I feel like it's too fast to be comfortable, and at the very least the burst potential feels too high for Standard.

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@Wellingt0n; that mirrors a lot of what some of the Magic pros that had migrated to the Hearthstone scene have basically said. Granted, I do think there are some merits to complaints with things that have a very wide variance in impact (Swashburglar for instance is pretty damn broad, so I'm not sure it's technically correct to factor in what your opponent may or may not have gotten from it)... but even those cases aren't necessarily ones I think instantly win games. But it seems like the conclusion for a lot of people arguing RNG is a problem is that it jumps straight into the argument that "Lots of RNG means there isn't skill in Hearthstone". People are kind of awful when it comes to nuance.

So glad someone finally agrees with me on that one :D ty man! u made my evening! And you are also right - that one kind of missed in my pro-RNG-monologue: Sure cards with a too big variance are a problem even with all this stuff being said. When variance is so high that you have no realistic way of playing around all the potentiell outcomes, skill will be reduced. Best example is ofc Yogg, which in many cased just comes down to a general risk estimation and not a real gameplan.  

 

But also sort of high-outcome-variance cards with a more limited number of outcomes like implosion or tinkmaster overspark can be problematic when there is very little middle ground and the difference in the potentiell outcomes is too big. So y it's a matter of nuance when looking at the issue. Nicely put!

@Wellingt0n; that mirrors a lot of what some of the Magic pros that had migrated to the Hearthstone scene have basically said. Granted, I do think there are some merits to complaints with things that have a very wide variance in impact (Swashburglar for instance is pretty damn broad, so I'm not sure it's technically correct to factor in what your opponent may or may not have gotten from it)... but even those cases aren't necessarily ones I think instantly win games. But it seems like the conclusion for a lot of people arguing RNG is a problem is that it jumps straight into the argument that "Lots of RNG means there isn't skill in Hearthstone". People are kind of awful when it comes to nuance.

@ScaryKoolaid; I think the issue with just saying "these players are consistent because they can grind to Legend every month" is that it's not incorrect, but that it's not the sole reason they're there. Similar to literally any competitive scene, I doubt you're really going to see the top echelon of players consist of people who aren't sinking a ton of time improving or experimenting in a game so they can perform better in tournaments. Based on your second sentence, I think you're conflating Legend with actually being competitive; Top Legend is the only portion of ladder that actually matters to competitive players, and it's not as simple as spamming games as a mediocre player. And with your third sentence it seems you're forgetting that while invitationals still exist, they're outside the HCT circuit (and have been I believe since late 2015); we're seeing consistent performance in HCT and major tournaments like Dreamhack, where they qualified just like anyone else would. So while I completely agree that these players clearly have more time than most people and that gives them a competitive advantage over other people, I think it's a false equivalency to say that's the entire reason they're performing well.

MTG being more or less skill intensive genuinely doesn't matter to this conversation for the most part, because when you're evaluating Hearthstone's skill floor/ceiling you don't exactly need a measuring stick to do it. There are some pros that maintain that Hearthstone is harder than Magic (I believe Stancifka is in that camp), and there are some pros that believe Magic is a lot harder; all that really matters is that Hearthstone continues to reward excellent play, remains enjoyable, and continues to have solid support for the competitive scene. The winrates of tournament players in Hearthstone lining up similarly with those of Pro Tour winners is the indicator that Hearthstone and Magic both reward excellent play at about the same level, regardless of mechanical complexities.

@Cogito_Ergo_Sum; that's very flattering, but I'm definitely not one of the best members. :P

I do think it's cool to see this kind of topic though, even if people have opinions that are a bit out there. Hopefully there's more demand for analytical content down the road too, I think really that's one of the big issues right now; someone like Firebat can make a video where he's breaking down a thought process and thinking competitively... or he can make a video with a meme deck. The latter just tends to be more appealing to most people, and you can't blame a guy for wanting to make more money (content creation is his job, after all).

There's a lot of room for content creation that focuses on putting a spotlight on the competitive aspect of the game, but it just doesn't tend to be very lucrative. Once it gets lucrative we'll see something more similar to Magic's ecosystem I imagine.

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I think there is one argument here that no one is addressing: Isn't it a problem that a card game and its random elements have more control over the players' emotions then their own minds?

@SnowWhiteOo; Oh, I certainly think for the most part we're on the same page (I was just chiming in on where I saw some value to the video); luck is a big deal, as are things like preparation. I'd also agree that just saying "negativity" is pretty vague, and I'm sure the video could have been titled more accurately to indicate that this was regarding the competitive scene specifically.

And I also don't think he was trying to argue for a cure or anything like that, as much as saying that the general dismissal of the fact there is skill in the game is a relatively toxic behavior to continue to nurture. Part of that is curable in the sense that the primary difference between Magic and Hearthstone's competitive culture has very little to do with the mechanics, but with the mindset of the people who are playing at high levels and have a ton of exposure. If Magic Pros were writing paragraphs of text about how lucky their opponents got, they'd be in the same boat; but because their content is focusing on strategy and theory, we have a general perception that there's actually something substantial to the competitive scene. There's a power to that kind of narrative (look at Gwent, its a game that basically got a reasonable boost from the Lifecoach "this game is so skillful" narrative), and right now Hearthstone's narrative that people are sticking to is that it's all about luck and memes.

At the very least, having Pros who acknowledge the work they put into performing well is a pretty big deal. 

@SnowWhiteOo; I'd disagree on the idea there isn't value to the video, I think it does hit on one of the most bizarre topics in competitive Hearthstone in that (unlike similar games of luck, Magic included) it has developed a culture that's more than happy to disregard competitive merits. Part of that is that it definitely is a game that's a lot less serious than Magic or Poker, but a larger part of that falls on the community continuing to perpetuate the idea that if you toss out 30 cards in a Tier 1 deck and get lucky enough then you're doing as well as you can; and the bigger problem is that many of the loudest voices with that opinion are influential streamers who aren't even remotely competitive.

Kibler isn't failing to acknowledge that RNG does some insane stuff, or that every winner of every tournament didn't get there by being lucky; it's that the people you're seeing in the tournaments themselves worked hard to get there, and they need to start owning it. People who want the game to be competitive need to start owning the portions of the game that do require work to get good at. Content creators who want to be respected for how good they are at the game need to stop trying to pass success off as "getting lucky". We have consistent performers in the competitive scene, we have people like Stancifka who have spent hundreds of hours improving and competing, instead of taking a dump on the competitive aspects we should be celebrating them.

I think Hearthstone's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness in this regard; people who wouldn't normally play card games are playing Hearthstone, which means that all of a sudden they're having to re-learn what people in competitive card games have basically accepted for years. Sometimes luck isn't on your side, sometimes it is, but where you have control (deckbuilding and piloting) is what's going to truly define how successful you are in the competitive scene overall.

To be honest, I really can't think of anything design-wise that's really been super problematic. There are flaws with Un'Goro, like with any set, but at this point stuff is in a pretty good spot and if they do this most expansions I think they're doing well.

I do think there's a lack of options outside of the established game modes, and for a long time I've wanted them to implement something like a custom game lobby. I also think the one area design is slowly getting more and more problematic is really just that as more and more interesting designs (see: Living Mana) become viable, the cost of crafting decks slowly rises. Un'Goro has Midrange Hunter which is really budget-friendly, but for the most part there isn't a wide variety of cheap decks to counterbalance that you need be obtaining class-specific epics and legendaries from the new set to have an optimal list.

If you're looking to avoid pain points from past designs though, it seems like the community really doesn't like an overabundance of pushed themes (Jade, Dragons, Reno/Kazakus decks being the bulk of MSoG was one reason it was kind of awful). High variance RNG is certainly no good; Discover in a small pool is popular when it comes to something like Adapt or Rafaam, and something like Ysera is apparently just fine because it's got a small pool of cards to randomly chuck into your hand. Keep in mind I think neither of these are as rampant or terrible as the people in this thread probably do, but if you're building sets to show off to fansites the general opinion is still probably going to reflect those two points more than the people that do appreciate them existing.

Personally I think one thing I'd like to see is more interesting ways of forcing your opponent to play in a certain way. Something that isn't Loatheb levels of insane or Bolf levels of useless, but still with that same kind of effect where your opponent has to re-evaluate how they spend their turn and how they win through that kind of interruption. Dirty Rat is a little basic, but it kind of achieves that sort of approach.

@WraithM; there are a couple of archetypes that are under the radar for Rogue I think. Water is one of them, and then there's a lot of buzz about Tempo Rogue as well. The main issue I think is just that Miracle/Quest are just head and shoulders better as it is so that's what people would rather be playing with. It's kind of like Control Shaman, where it tends to just not get played even if it's perfectly fine as a deck.

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The problems are Quest Rogues in Casual and somewhat good non meta decks that would have success in Ranked without Quest Rogue.

@brilliant_gnome; Classic Control should actually be better vs Aggro than the more modern lists (because they're sacrificing slots for more removal/stall and that's literally all you have to do against Aggro), the meta just isn't flat enough to really allow them to thrive outside of those matchups. I'd be interested to know which "old" Control lists are able to hold their own against the current Midrange and Control variants, since those are genuinely why there are such diminishing returns on running a Control list without a win Condition.

@swen_245; fair enough, I haven't kept up much with competitive Wild for the most part but I had heard Quest Rogue was seeing some adjustment. Brann is decent in Jade Druid, but it's not as big of a deal as it was in Shaman for the most part (though I don't doubt you'd still run it in Druid).

Either way to address OP's point, by all means it seems like a solid idea to test the waters before crafting anything for Wild specifically. Higher up might be punishing to Standard builds, but lower in the ranks I don't believe there are too many issues.