Mike Donais Slams Nonsense, Talks About Cubelock Power and Nerfs
Yesterday afternoon, Hearthstone's Principal Game Designer, Mike Donais, responded to a post on reddit which claimed they fought 17 Cubelock decks in a row and proved them wrong. Through internal statistics, Donais discovered that no one in all of Hearthstone fought that many Cubelock decks in a row that day and that there are indeed better decks than Cubelock.
Here's what Mike had to say about Cubelock's power level and nerfs in Hearthstone.
- Cubelock is currently ranked as the 12th best deck in their system.
- The deck will be stronger after the card nerfs arrive due to no cards within the deck being nerfed.
- Cubelock is challenging to play so it may improve more as players get better at it, though it may also get countered more if popularity increases.
- If Warlock is a big problem post-patch and players have had time to adjust to it, they'll evaluate it then.
- Win rate is not the only factor in deciding when cards get nerfed. How players feel about cards matters too.
Here are Mike's full posts which the above points were taken from.
Quote from Mike DonaisI just checked the data, and no one played 17 cubelocks in a row today.
If you are indeed having trouble with Cubelock there are several decks that beat it consistently right now. It is currently the 12th best deck.
I did enjoy the title of your post though. (Source)
A couple people asked why the stats I mentioned don't metch VS power ranking so I looked up VS 79 and across all rankings Control Warlock is the 10th best deck. I assume they mix control and cube warlock in their stats. We have decks broken out a bit more but 10th gives you the general idea.
Obviously after the nurfs it will be stronger since none of the cards in cubelock are being nurfed and that concerns me but it is a pretty challenging deck with a lot of opportunities to show off player skill. People will eventually get better at playing it, but people will also put in more weapon destruction or silence cards if it gets more popular.
I am excited to see what people figure out after the patch. If Warlock is a big problem after people have some time to adjust and tune the new decks then we will look into it. I have said many times before that win rate is not the most important factor in our nurf decisions. How people feel matters more, so we will listen to players and make decisions based on that, just like we did in the past with Quest Rogue and Patron Warrior. (Source)
It helps when you have moderators that are willing to enforce rules and sanity though there's definitely still areas we could do better in!
No kidding. But while you guys "could do better", I view that in a similar vein to Kibler's (and all good pros') response to the game.
"Yeah, I won. Yeah, I did a lot well. I should still think about how I can do better."
You guys give a damn. It shows. We appreciate it.
<3
Just watch any of mikes statements. He lives in a completely different reality.
Citation needed.
Excuse me if i will not go trough around 2 years or articles where he said something stupid then later on it turned out to be stupid and they ended up changing things because they had to, despite everyone saying they should but he refused.
In this case not changing cubelock despite all reputable players and persons in the community stating they should have because it is and will be a problem, however he comes out with the deck being at their 12th place.
Well first of all i will just say i do not belive that - but that is purely my own opinion so you can dismiss that if you want - second of all they have no data and as you stated will not provide any to back that up (or any information for that matter) to not just say he just pulled it out of his ass, when all evidence in terms of daily ladder play and tournament performance prooving otherwise.
About citation from previous one: you post articles on this site regulalry so as a result you your self can remember all the times they defended thir stubburn stupidity and then later own needed to backtrack on it.
The most noteable being that they always refer to undertker hunter that how broken that was and no deck hs came close to it ever since, but they refused to change it for a year even though the clearly had the data to show that.
What is the top 10 deck in their database?
It's unfortunately not likely something they'll end up sharing. They despise giving us details like that due to being a small indy company. Nah, for real though, I vaguely recall moments in time where they stated they didn't want to give out info like that as to not themselves be an influence on the meta. Letting players figure things out together as a community > Blizzard telling you what deck to play.
Yeah, cubelock is so hard. Remove everything first four turns, get out a voidlord or doomguard turn 5 and smorc. Such skill wows.
Let's assume for a moment someone has never played the deck; It's still going to be harder than Face Hunter.
Cubelock is full of skill-testing cards. Removal itself is actually a pretty big part of testing skill level in Hearthstone. Although it initially seems like a very easy thing, you want to always make sure you're making the right call instead of blindly removing. People that hurt the win rate of control decks are, at baseline, those who make poor removal decisions.
After 600 wins with old freeze mage I would say that cubelock isn't hard for me.
yes, 60% WR at rank 15 after 20 games. It wins vs aggro and control, so bs.