Hearthpwn

It is surprising to me how many people have not played against a bot. I remember back when bots were everywhere, and not just at the bottom of the ladder. Back in the secret paladin days there were bots getting legend. The daily gold cap almost wiped them out, but I still see one every few hundred games. 

Quote from batterystaple >>

That sounds like a bad idea to me: the skills you need to interact with people and with computers are quite different and there are few people who excel at both.

 It is rare to find people that excel at both, but they are out there. When you do find someone who is good at both, should you not utilize them in that way? On my team we have two developers who are also BSAs (business systems analysts). Instead of dedicated one position to all development and the other to all BSA work the two people split the duties and it allows for a lot of flexibility and consistency that we wouldn't have if we only had rigid roles.

Quote from user-100394506 >>

Ah yes. But this calculation is very difficult  and probably pointless because there are the nerfs. Once you have even a stupid card nerfed you can throw away an entire deck. Example Saronite Chain Gang for Shudderwock. 

So you can build a competitive deck but is it useful if you have it nerfed after 3 months? You will not have it. 

And it is also very difficult because if you build an aggro is cheap and a combo and/or control is very expensive. 

This is very difficult to estimate. 

 It is difficult, but it becomes a lot less difficult if you can make some logical assumptions. As long as you are up front about your assumptions and why you made them then your calculations will be useful to a degree. Assumptions were made in this video so it can be done. No calculations on this subject will be perfect, but imperfect calculations on what it costs to play the game with competitive decks is arguably a lot more useful than more complete calculations of what it costs to have a complete collection.

The calculations they did are useful, but don't show the whole picture. It would be interesting to see how much it cost per year to build the top 3-5 competitive decks as that changes from year to year, and having a complete collection isn't necessary to enjoying the game.

Quote from endlesstides >>

Net Profit last year of $7.5billion. But they still had to lay of damn near 10% of thier work force.

 Because $7.5billion is not enough... 

 Where did you get that information? From what I can tell their net profit is a whole lot less than that. According to the information I found their revenue is about $7.2billion, but only $270 million of that was profit in 2017, and that is actually way down from the four years prior to that when their profit averaged about $900million.

Quote from Hooghout >>

Why is there banning in tournament mode? Why would Blizzard even want that? I guess to prevent an oppressive archetype to be played all the time that can handle multiple other archetypes. So the more people ban the same archetype the more oppressive it is. Banning in tournaments depends on your own lineup. But what would happen if there was no banning? 

 

 There's actually several reasons for bans, one of which you touched on one with oppressive decks. Another is that the top players on ladder will play 300+ games per season and that allows for the skill of better players to eventually prevail over random luck. In a tournament you only get a handful of games per round and more skillful decisions need to be added outside of games to try and cut down on the randomness. This also forces players to bring one more deck than if there was no ban, which means they need to be proficient with one extra deck which adds a little more skill in itself. They also allow for interesting strategy when building your lineup like iandakar mentioned where you can build your lineup around what you plan to ban or what you expect your opponent to ban. Without bans the top table would be even more random than they already are.

As for as what would happen if they remove bans would depend on the tournament format. If the format is Last Hero Standing then oppressive decks would have a chance to sweep so lineups might have to change drastically based on the fact that you couldn't ban an oppressive deck that your whole lineup would be weak too. In Conquest it lowers your opponent's lineup to one less deck, which means they may be less likely to have a deck in their lineup that would be weak specifically against your lineup. In both formats it also lowers your decision making when creating your lineup.

Bans add a very challenging element to the strategy of choosing a lineup than you would not have without bans, and in a game where randomness has a significant impact on a single game it is important to add as much skill outside of the gameplay as you can for tournaments.

Quote from Hooghout >>

 True, but what I signal is the fact that on ladder this is now not possible. Either you don't allow  bans in tournaments, or you organize it in a certain way on ladder too. That is a matter of fairness. So I guess you ban OTK- style or something else you don't want to meet upfront. 

 Bans play a role in tournaments because it takes skill to look at your opponent's lineup and decide which to ban based on your lineup, that would not be true for the ranked ladder where you would just simply ban the deck or class that you have the worst matchup against. There are many other reasons as well, but that one in particular shows why tournaments have bans and why ladder doesn't need them.

Quote from Velrun >>

Quote from kizlyar >>

Lean towards free to play.... means you don't spend much.  Anyone who's never spent a dime on Hearthstone but buys the $5 Welcome bundle only, for example, leans more towards being f2p.  Too difficult to understand?  I shouldn't be surprised considering you think 'f2p' is a "word".

 You misunderstand your own words :)

You can’t ‘learn towards’ a zero sum. Look it up dummy.

(Or repeat your mistake again and again and be laughed at. I would look it up if I were you.)

 If you spent $1.50 in 2014 to buy an arena run and haven't spent anything since, does that really make you significantly different than a ftp player? Not really. Can you claim to be a ftp player? No. Can you say you are practically one? Yes.

Quote from TheWamts >>

Quote from maroon5five >>

 That would make for a very boring game. If every matchup is aggro vs aggro the game gets stale after a day or two, just like the game would get stale if only control existed and every matchup was control vs control.

 No it wouldn't? Aggro vs Aggro is the only matchup that isn't a foregone conclusion.

 Flipping a coin isn't a forgone conclusion, that doesn't make it fun to do over and over and over again. The gameplay matters a lot more than the conclusion to most people.

Quote from Smitty11 >>

 

 I want to try and bust the meta with something fast and viable but it feels like it doesnt exist.

 So your problem with control is it beats off meta decks? So does any top tier deck, that's why they are top tier. If you want to beat control decks reliably you should start by playing a top tier deck.

Quote from TheWamts >>

Quote from maroon5five >>

 I guess in your world that control decks and combo decks shouldn't exist at all? 

 Correct.

 That would make for a very boring game. If every matchup is aggro vs aggro the game gets stale after a day or two, just like the game would get stale if only control existed and every matchup was control vs control.

Quote from kiingpurp >>

watching legend #8 America vs #23 , control druid vs cubelock …… 

 I guess in your world that control decks and combo decks shouldn't exist at all? Regardless of how fast or slow the meta is you will still see games like that, unless you get rid of control and combo decks completely. Even if 99% of the game is aggro these matchups will still happen at some point.

It sounds like you just need to find the right deck. There are several competitive decks whose average game length right now is around 6 minutes.

Decks like Shudderwock and Quest Rogue weren't nerfed because they were "too powerful". It's not like they had super high winrates. They were nerfed because of their effect on the meta which suppressed certain deck types because of their highly polarized matchups. Don't worry, there will always be cards that are a higher power level than the rest. If you like high power level cards there will always be a deck for you.

I've always seen Wild as a format where I can go and play any old deck that I want to play just like it was played before, but if you start getting aggressive with nerfs to wild then that won't be possible.  If cards are truly "broken" they need to be dealt with, but in the Wild format I don't consider just any card that is overpowered to be necessarily "broken".