In a surprise turn at the start of the new year, Blizzard announces that the Duels game mode will be removed from the client in April. Read on for the details!
Quote from BlizzardAs we think about the future of Hearthstone and where the team can best focus their efforts, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue support for the Duels Mode. We do not have plans for any further scheduled updates for Duels, and the Mode itself is scheduled to be removed from the Hearthstone client in April 2024.
This change will allow us to shift our resources to where we feel they will have the most impact, including Traditional Hearthstone, Battlegrounds, and more. To that end, Battlegrounds Duos is scheduled for an upcoming Battlegrounds patch, and we’re trying out some Duels Treasures in our next Arena season—more details soon.
We want to thank all our passionate Duels fans for every pile of loot, treasure, and hard-fought victory you’ve collected along the way. It’s been a heroic run, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Blizzard Comments
duels requires a LOT of maintenance - it's not a sealed pool. we release new cards all the time that impact the balance of the mode, make new buckets, and have to change interactions between old treasures and new cards. mercs is static.
— Ridiculous Hat (@RidiculousHat) January 4, 2024
Only menu should be left IMO.
I stopped playing when they changed the buckets but I'm still sad to see it go. Before the bucket change I had been playing duels basically exclusively, it was so much fun.
Goodnight sweet prince.
I stopped playing when they changed the buckets but I'm still sad to see it go. Before the bucket change I had been playing duels basically exclusively, it was so much fun.
Goodnight sweet prince.
I stopped playing when they changed the buckets but I'm still sad to see it go. Before the bucket change I had been playing duels basically exclusively, it was so much fun.
Goodnight sweet prince.
The Search for More Money continues.
That’s how you run a business. Cut down branches, that don’t profit.
Nothing new, nothing special.
Just a pity for all duel enthusiasts.
There really was any necesity to remove the mode? The game has enough content on its own to don't need any more updates (and lets be real, it barely had any updates anyway), even if the game stays exactly as it is now, and they don't add more new expansions to the pool (Tho its hard to believe that takes that much effort to do).
I'm almost sure that there is more people that play Duels that the people that plays Arena. And for what it sounds they are going to turn Arena into Duels, but without the free to play option and without the custom deckbuilding.
Big disappointment. Duels is the only mode that I really play, and it's upsetting to see it go. The bucket changes a while back were a big mistake from a design standpoint, and it's a real shame that the current Hearthstone team has little interest in anything outside of standard and battlegrounds. Dungeon Runs worked really well as the replacement for Adventures, requiring far less work for more player engagment. The next few iterations eventually gave birth to duels, which seems to have kept a fairly dedicated playerbase. Removing it doesn't just remove a gamemode enjoyed by many, it removes a cumulative product of Hearthstone's history.
I'm gonna guess that the dev team has changed so much that no one who was involved with Solo Adventures is still present, and as the team has gotten smaller over the years, they've had less variety on what the developers like. As a result, internal support for alternate gamemodes has diminished, making internal duels upkeep be too much of a chore. Although it seems like it really shouldn't be that much work. It reminds me a lot of the bright mind who hard-coded every Zombeast with Deathstalker Rexxar, announcing that future beasts wouldn't be in the pool only to have community backlash encourage the team to automate zombeast creation. There is little reason that duels buckets shouldn't have been automated from the start, instead of requiring such a large amount of dev commitment by design.
Why did they remove classic mode then? That needed literally 0 maintenance just like Mercenaries. Nice consistency in their logic.
And yet that ill-conceived and unsupported Mercenaries mode remains, clogging up the UI and bloating the install size.
Even if its not getting new stuff, I imagine it still has enough people paying money for it to exist on life support. Otherwise it would have been killed too.
Duels was really fun, this sucks. Yeah there are some massive balance issues (early run aggression is just too vicious, you die on turn 3-4 against some decks so that a lot of interesting deck building is pointless, some passives like mummy magic/black ice are too good), but it was refreshing to play something different. The fact that your runs were never quite the same made the game not an endlessly repeating grindfest.
The biggest mistake they ever made with duels was the bucket system changes "because they were too lazy". It made it too easy to manipulate your passives and bucket offerings by creating your initial deck from a small expansion size. The ability to heavily weight the buckets you get offered is bullshit. Not only that, tons of deck strategies just got eliminated because they used cards from too many expansions. Examples: you can't play murloc decks because there is no murloc bucket, can't play pirate decks because there is no pirate bucket, and so on.
I legitimately think that if they put some effort into the previous bucket system duels would be far more popular than it is. I also don't get how bucket maintenance was time-consuming or took a lot of developer time, you literally just take existing buckets and add the new cards of expansions to them, sounds like a one-day job. But I'm not an indie developer I suppose.
Plot twist Bobby kotick was the only reason duels lasted this long
what will happen with the achievements?
Not surprising, the game mode requires a lot of maintenance and isn't very popular.
like what? they changed the bucket system awhile back to be 100% more boring because they didn't want to keep having to manually add cards to buckets, so at this point isn't the maintenance just "change static variable PLAYABLE_SETS to include the new expansion each rotation"?
like some people talk about balancing, but I find that balance has never been duels strong point anyways, and they've never catered to it.
too bad, it was a good end-of-season option for constructed when you were bored with the ladder.
Whats going to get cut next I wonder, Brawl?
Does anyone play Arena?
enough to continue its existence I guess. Its kinda got a monetization in by being the pay-to-play game mode.
I tried Arena at start of season actually just to get rid of some tickets and get at least a free pack and it was more fun than I expected. I just wanted to craft a deck and lose my games. But then I thaught I could give it a chance and see how good the deck is. I won a few games and it was more fun than wild and standard to be honest.
I want to play it more next season. I like it more than duels. I never liked this mode and hated the time you where forced to play this mode for events. I hope they won‘t ruin Arena by combine it with duels. I don‘t like the bracket thing as you most of time get useless stuff imo (f.e. cards to draw a secret while no secret is in the bracket…)
Bevor they combine Arena with duels they better should leave duels at the current state.