Ben Brode on Evergreen Cards in Standard, Hall of Fame, Player Accessibility to the Meta
With the earlier announcement of incoming card nerfs, Ben Brode has been on reddit this afternoon responding to community questions. View the source below for the full comments or our quick recap.
- The goal with the nerfs was to reduce the ratio of Basic/Classic cards in Standard decks. It's too high.
- Ben thinks 10-ish cards is about right for what Standard decks should include when it comes to Basic/Classic cards.
- It was never the plan to not make changes to Basic and Classic cards.
- Hall of Fame is there to act kind of like a rotating core set that other games have.
- They are hoping to have something to announce early next year to talk about better player accessibility to meta decks.
Source Posts
Quote from Ben Brodewhen reading the justification for the change to Fiery War Axe (and, by extension, the Murloc Warleader change).
I just want to make it clear that those are meant to cover some of the thinking behind why we went with option A over option B - not why we decided to make a change to begin with.
In a world where we are looking at making a change, we felt like these changes are slightly less disruptive and that is upside, in a vacuum.
It's not a vacuum, obviously, but the goal here was to reduce power level because the ratio of basic/classic cards in Standard decks is still too high (they represent the biggest percentage of played cards, still).
Commonly, when we mention that we think about a wide variety of players, it can come off like we are focusing on new players at the expense of currently engaged players. That isn't the way we think about it. Usually we look for win-win solutions, where a change is good for the ongoing fun of playing Hearthstone and is also not disruptive to loosely engaged players. We've definitely made changes that are quite disruptive because it's very important to keep Hearthstone fun for engaged players. Just because we prefer non-disruptive changes doesn't mean we are trying to do that at the expense of other types of players.
Specifically, we made these changes for engaged players who are most affected by imbalance (deck diversity goes down the higher rank you are), and who are most likely to want to see the meta change when new sets come out or during the yearly set rotation. (Source)
isn't that the whole point why classic set is evergreen? not only that, basic cards solidify class identity. not a big fan of war axe, innervate, and warleader changes mr brode.
What do you think the right percentage of evergreen cards in decks should be?
I tend to think 10-ish cards might be right. We're way above that right now, and I think it would be better if it were closer to 10. (Source)
I mean remember when Kibler and a lot of people said that it's gonna be a mistake that you keep Basic and Classic in Standard forever?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUupMooIJYo&feature=youtu.be&t=4m17s
I really do want to believe that you want the best for this game yet so many times we have this "we said you so" moment. I love this game but honestly the evergreen sets policy is the biggest problem that holding back the whole design of the game. A rotating core set with reprints would make much more sense. But whatever, our opinion doesn't mean anything in the end.
Keeping Basic and Classic around with no changes was never the plan. We launched rotation with twelve nerfs, specifically because we knew we couldn't just have evergreen sets as-is. There is value in having evergreen sets, but there is a balance to it. Our Hall of Fame system is similar in some ways to a rotating core set. (Source)
bbrode how will you make the game accessible for new players if they cant build matadecks for even longer than now?
Hoping to have something to announce that will help with these problems early next year. We have a lot of work to do on the new player experience, but some of these problems can be mitigated by matchmaking, to some extent. (Source)
I think the hall of fame cards should be made uncraftable and be put in the wild decks ... those cards would be a great source for new comers ... they could actually play something before they start playing standard .. my friend has recently joined but he hardly find any interest into it .. until when he starts winning and playing arena etc ..
Yes this will cause new comers to find it difficult to "Adapt" to current setup.
Well, glad that he explained few things, but IMO he didn't have to. Those nerfs are good. They can now print new win axe that will rotate after 2 years and everyone will be happy. The others are great, I even kinda regret that they didn't go through and nerfed plague just by 1 mana cost when they planned add 2.
No more UI on turn 4 is always great news.
Well. . . . .ive been playing for like 8 months now and every deck i currently play on ladder just took a major hit. priest is by far my worse class and idk how this will shake the meta up but i doubt i will have enough resources to build a competitive deck after they hit. so tell me what the actual fuck should i do because i don't want to got back to barely hitting rank 15 every month for a few months until i have enough dust to craft a an archetype type for the next expansion that will probably get nerfted as well. Guess i should just dust enough shit out of these deck that wont be viable to craft murloc pali becuase it seems to look like the only viable aggro deck that will be around after other than evole shaman but still it out paces that deck.
Im interested to see how these nerfs turn out, they look alright. Druid with jades will still be strong I think. I am happy they want to try and make new expension have more impact!
Can't wait to face the 8th Machinegun Priest in a row. :(
Benny mah boy,maybe you should stick to rapping.
Overall I like these nerfs. Muloc Warleader adding to Murloc health made them hard to deal with and makes Murlocs a consistent power deck in each meta. It also feels like a bug when Finja hits somethings and should be dead, but stays alive because he summons a warleader.
Fiery waraxe makes aggro warrior a consistent threat in every meta.
The innervate nerf I'm not sure of. I felt like the larger problem was the infinite Jade for Druid. I like the jade shard idea that people had to nerf that. I don't mind that infinte Jade beats mill, but the problem in the latest meta was they use spreading plague etc just to stall till they can inevitably overrun their opponents with Jade Golems as long as they can stay alive long enough. It's better to be able to have control v control matchups where its unknown who will have the better end-game.
Hex is pretty strong, but does that mean polymorph should get the same nerf?
So the solution to the overpriced game that new players cannot find accessible is... drum roll please... to build a matchmaking system that pits their shitty, boring decks against other shitty, boring decks? Do the developers not realize how frustrating it is to not be able to tinker with deck ideas or have access to several cards? The real solution is simple as fuck and implemented in other games: Give all the cards for free. Charge for golden versions of the cards. Charge for other cosmetics like new Hero costumes, card backs, et cetera.
The competitive scene is a joke. You need most of the cards in order to play in tournaments. This means that competent players would need to fork over an unreasonable amount of cash to participate. I'm still F2P and I remember back in beta when I had Firebat on my friends list and the only thing that differentiated us was that he invested in cards which meant he could play control warrior while I was stuck crushing it in legend ranks with face hunter. It means I didn't get to play handlock until way down the road. You're fucking over many of the most skilled players simply by putting a massive paywall in front of them.
How much would it cost for a player starting a fresh account to build all four of Pavel's recent tournament decks? Answer that and realize how fucked up the economy of this game is. It is a sad time for gaming when these "F2P" games can cost significantly more than incredible games that take way more development time to make.
Also fuck the recent nerf announcement. Anyone can see that Ultimate Infestation is way too overpowered. 10 mana for 17 mana worth of spells is absolutely retarded even in a vacuum, but it is especially absurd when combined with Jade Idol and ramp. 17 mana calculation comes from adding up Sprint, Shield Block, and Firelands Portal (averages out to about a 5/5 minion for simplicity).
Why not spend money then. The game is free itself. Also the most recent change that you can't open duplicate legendaries was really nice and a step in the right direction.
So you want to play 1hr a day and be F2P and be competitive? Okay then.
As much as I find other card games more fair for f2p, you can still have all the playable HS cards every expansion after buying like 50-70 packs, which is easily achievable if you save your gold beforehand, play 1 arena run a day and do all the dailies with proper rerolling. Then with the new legendary rolling system, you just craft must-have competitive legendaries without fear of opening them again.
I play 2 hrs a day on average and have everything I want/need. If I were to become tournament competitive,then I'd dump 50$ once every 4 months, is that such a problem? Some people just want everything completely free without any effort.
How much revenue does Hearthstone generate? ~$20 million monthly.
How much does it cost to get ~90% of the cards released in 2017? ~$670.
You people arguing that Blizzard needs to make more money or that it is affordable or that it is reasonably priced or that people should just fork over money to gamble on card packs are out of your fucking minds.
A new player would have to pay way more than the typical ~$60 price tag of a video game in order to build the competitive lineup that Pavel just used in the latest big tournament.
Once again I ask: Do you know how much it would actually cost for a new player to enter the game and build all four of Pavel's Standard decks in order to actually compete with real tournament decks? Now imagine if someone wanted to play Wild decks...
I'm a software engineer so please stop with the "Get a job" nonsense. I'm simply not forking over that much money for a insanely overpriced game.
No one has made a real counter to my argument that a better system would exist if all players get all the cards and the pay wall only exists on cosmetics. This would allow anyone to test decks, play with a variety of decks, enter competitive tournaments in an effective manner, and ultimately would increase the overall competition level as the competitive player pool would expand. Lots of benefits and the monetization model of selling cosmetics could work here considering most of the whales want fully golden decks and anything that is shiny.
Have they taken some steps towards helping people get cards? Yes. Is it enough? Not even close. It's great that the changed it so that you can't get duplicate legendaries. It's great that they put a free adventure with decent rewards out with this expansion. The positives don't even come close to outweighing the negatives.
He he Ben he he Brode he he - new announcement:
Buy more new packs, because classic/basic set will be nerfed.
So they are basically admiting they nerf basic and classic set because they wanna sell more packs .
They also believe that new players enjoy the game playing tier 6 decks against other tier 6 decks in casual . Let me tell when I was a new player the first thing I did was to disenchant my only legendary and some epics to make a viable aggro hunter that took me to rank 15, then 5 the next month . Now that wouldn't be even possible anymore and many players are quiting the game because being stuck at rank 20 - 15 with some home made decks is actually not fun .
#Rage