Ostkaka and Powder Leave Alliance, Rethinking Their Hearthstone Involvement
Hearthstone pros Sebastian "Ostkaka" Engwall and Harald "Powder" Gimre are taking a break from the game and have left their team for the past year, Alliance. Both players are taking a break and are going to rethink their involvement in the game. Reasons cited for their breaks include the way the Hearthstone Championship Tour was structured and being unable to find the passion to grind. Good luck out there Ostkaka and Powder!
In what ways do you get tired of Hearthstone? What do you think Blizzard could do to improve fatigue?
You can view the press release here, or down below.
Quote from AllianceGothenburg, Sweden – December 18th, 2017 – Going into 2018 Alliance is sad to say farewell to two of our Hearthstone players, Sebastian “Ostkaka” Engwall and Harald “Powder” Gimre. Both Sebastian and Harald have decided to take a break from playing Hearthstone professionally for the near future.
After our venture into Hearthstone in 2016 with Jon “Orange” Westberg we followed it up by signing Sebastian and Harald at the end of that year. Subsequently all three of them competed together in ESL’s Trinity Series (don’t mention the murlocs please) as well as recently coming back from China after placing 4th in the Gold Club World Championship.
Alliance COO, Erik Barge had the following to say as Alliance parts with Sebastian and Harald: “We here at Alliance have thoroughly enjoyed having Sebastian and Harald on the team for the past year. Both of them are stellar competitors and I will definitely miss having them on the team. With that said I completely respect their decision to take a break and wish them the best of luck in the future, whether it is in Hearthstone or outside of it.”
Ostkaka:
“In the past few months I have taken a step back from the Hearthstone grind, I have not had the passion to stream or ladder for hours every day. I do still enjoy competing and I will see how I feel in 2018 with the new HCT tour but for now I am taking a break and re-evaluating. Alliance has been a great team to be a part of and I am thankful for their support during my time with them.”
Powder:
“It has been a great experience with Alliance over the past year, unfortunately with the way the HCT system was structured I could not really find the passion to grind and stream over the last few months. I have decided to focus more on my life outside of Hearthstone and I will be going back to studying. I hope all the best for Alliance in the future and as for what I will be doing with Hearthstone next year I am not sure, but I still love competing and I might try to get back to the grind when the new season starts.”
Alliance wish Sebastian and Harald best of luck in their future endeavours. Next up for Alliance Hearthstone will be in January where Jon is competing in the HCT World Championship in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
It is easy to over-react to these sorts of announcements. People get tired of what they are doing and switch jobs in all sorts of fields, and being a professional gamer is particularly demanding. I hope they find something to do that they enjoy, but a couple of players leaving doesn't mean hearthstone is in trouble.
Competitive hs in 2017 lul. Look tournament winners,there is everytime different person champion. tournaments just coin flip. Hs need fundamental changes if wanna be a competitive game.
Arena is the only way to not get as fatigued. When you feel fatigue from ladder just switch to arena for a while. Other than that I'd say fatigue is inevitable after reaching legend and testing out all the cards and decks that interest you. A way to make it less fatiguing could be to add a new mode that removes certain powerful key cards each month from previous sets to create new fresh metas more often, obviously there are flaws with this but there isn't much else they can do. People enjoy new metas that require more deck building skills and the acheivment for reaching legend each month would be much more rewarding than just reaching it every month with the same powerful deck.
Basically create a mode which lets players vote on 20 Blizzard selected cards each month and the 10 most voted will get banned for a month. They don't even need to let people vote if they don't want but it would make it more community interactive. The reward for reaching legend will feel much better and create more deck building competition and more interesting metas, allowing barely used cards a chance to see play.
Rag: Hitting the worst or best targets on the opponent's board with a coin flip.
Thoughtsteal: Copying random cards from opponent's deck.
Arcane MIssles: Pew, pew, go go random missiles.
Lightning Storm: High rolling vs low rolling.
Mad Bomber: Does it all go face for the person who dropped him in arena, all hit perfect minion targets on the opponent's board, kill your own minions?
Random will always be in the game, as it was always there from the beginning.
I think its not just about the pros, everyone feels that way to some degree, the game is in not such a good place rn, you either get rolled over by turn 4-5 by any sort of aggresive deck or you play a 20 minute game that you kinda felt from the beginning was almost impossible to win but conceding turn 3-4 when you are not in the losing position yet just feels like being a coward. Also this being the last expansion before rotation, specially with almost all the powerful decks being defined by cards that will rotate out and the others needing awfully specific combos (cubelock) is just terrible, decks are probably at te peak of cost as they can be, and honestly grinding all day to save up gold to buy packs to get cards and dust for cards that are rotating in 4 months and are absolutely needed for a deck to work is garbage.
Things to improve Fatigue?
Clearly, more Coldlight Oracle and Vanish!
Other than that, a more steady grind system, with lesser variations, once a position is reached.
Up&Downs is what kills any grinding.
If you wnt to be a pro and get payed for playing hs,you have to do more.
Like Trump or D.Toast.Videos,deck guides and stuff.
You have described two of the most retarded players of hearthstone in a singe sentence.Straight A's!!
Maybe activate the winning streaks from rank 5 to legend? You know, that thing that everyone's been asking about since launch?
There were some talks about another ladder revamp, and honestly, it's already long overdue.
I think it's kind of weird to ask what Blizzard could do to improve fatigue. Fatigue is inevitable when you do something as often and with as much intensity as these guys have. It's not Blizzard's job to manage that.
However, I do think some of the biggest problems can be traced back to Karazhan and Gadgetzan. it will be interesting to see what things look like next spring.
It's not just pros that experience fatigue with the game, you see plenty of discussion throughout the community about it and there are different types of fatigue for different people.
For example, the meta becoming stale is a common source of fatigue for many different types of players. A way to combat this could be to see more card changes in the middle of expansions or wanting to see the release of a few extra cards mid-expansion that both could have some pretty crazy changes and energize people again.
These are important topics to bring up and try to generate constructive discussion on. To dismiss it because the source of the discussion is from pros makes me sad.
Also, what people don't seem to realize is that by nerfing decks frequently the game actually becomes less F2P friendly because F2P players are limited in the amount of decks they can craft and play in a new meta. If they choose to craft a strong deck archtype, after the meta settles, and then after a month or two the deck is nerfed to the ground that player may not be able to build new decks with constant nerfing of cards/decks.
Who?