Hearthpwn

Quote from SoloSnacks >>

Quote from Tarious >>

1)Can we all agree that Sorcerer's Apprentice needs to go during rotation?

2)Juicy Psychmelon  was a core card for Malygos decks for a while. Glide is just waiting for the right time to be played. Meta is too fast atm and using it on your opponent could help them.

3)Discover does NOT add a lot to the game. Blizz has gotten into the habit of both overusing and undervaluing it. Most of the time, the mechanic is pretty much "Discover an answer". There's WAY Too much card generation in the last 2 years added to the game. It's hard to run someone out of resources nowadays.

I don't think Glide is "just waiting" for the meta-game to slow down. Judging by the HSReplays numbers, the card has among the lowest played win-rates in Standard at 31%. Magma Rager is 34%. Nor is it much better against the slow decks it is presumably meant to punish (39% against Highlander Mage and Ticklock.) Presumably, aggressive decks are better off simply playing cards that kill their opponent, rather than cards that try to mess up their hand. In most cases, Glide is like a 4-mana Secret Passage in a class that already has plenty of much better card draw options.

 Glide is a tech card like Ooze, in a meta full of weapons Ooze (or maybe the 5 manas cards with advantages) is excellent, when the meta almost don't have any weapon is a dead card, glide is awful now where Tickatus put the last nail in the control coffin and is a dead archetype, if glide exists when CW have 70% winrate and was 1 of each 2 matchs will be the best tech card in the game with 80% win-rate when played but since release of glide when we have a massive control meta? Never, then glide is crap.

Quote from Tarious >>

1)Can we all agree that Sorcerer's Apprentice needs to go during rotation?

2)Juicy Psychmelon  was a core card for Malygos decks for a while. Glide is just waiting for the right time to be played. Meta is too fast atm and using it on your opponent could help them.

3)Discover does NOT add a lot to the game. Blizz has gotten into the habit of both overusing and undervaluing it. Most of the time, the mechanic is pretty much "Discover an answer". There's WAY Too much card generation in the last 2 years added to the game. It's hard to run someone out of resources nowadays.

I don't think Glide is "just waiting" for the meta-game to slow down. Judging by the HSReplays numbers, the card has among the lowest played win-rates in Standard at 31%. Magma Rager is 34%. Nor is it much better against the slow decks it is presumably meant to punish (39% against Highlander Mage and Ticklock.) Presumably, aggressive decks are better off simply playing cards that kill their opponent, rather than cards that try to mess up their hand. In most cases, Glide is like a 4-mana Secret Passage in a class that already has plenty of much better card draw options. As it is, 1-mana Secret Passage only has a 50% played win-rate.

Could not read the whole thing, cause I got a bit mad. Why would players feel forced to play certain cards to gain the old exp achievements? Didn't they feel forced right now then? It sounds like a bad accuse of "you are not allowed this exp in the future if you didn't play the cards we wanted in this expansion".

And when I saw his comment about Jade druid I snapped! Jade druid was true cancer - up there with quest mage. 

I don't want to be too judgmental. I want to be cynical and say that many of the answers here sound like excuses, but I'd rather not. It's not easy though. 

I don't want to hate the guy. He seems generally pretty reasonable and open when he does these AMAs or shows up on official streams. I'm sure he's intelligent and nice. Then again, when I let him have the benefit of the doubt, many of the answers feel so "out-of-touch", that it's hard to take them for real. I won't go into every single point, just a few that feel particularly weird to me.

Current expansion achievements rewarding XP don't carry over to the next expansion reward track, because they think players would be forced to complete older achievements in order to level up optimally.

 Aside from forcing Achievements only in Ranked and Duels, thus discouraging players to do them already, as low winrates can potentially be punished with a lower star bonus, and only because it would otherwise "hurt the experience", I would think most players would be happier having something they can do with old cards they got from events or bundles, than feeling forced to play only the new stuff. Especially when you feel under a time limit for no good reason. It feels like "get all your achievements done before the next expansion rolls out!", which is not exactly fun with achievements that are meant to take a long time, like Greybough, (0-cost) Corrupt cards, etc. 

 If you place it at the forefront of your game and force everyone through it, those that aren't competitive might have to engage in something that makes them not want to play anymore. Having quests in Hearthstone to go play single-player content or BG is an example of this I think about. If a player doesn't like that content but we say hey here is a reward you better do it.... it toes the line.

You can reroll every Battlegrounds-related quest, and some are not even exclusive to it (like winning 5 games in BG, Duels or Tavern Brawl).

The "5 ranked wins" that you get every week, on the other hand, is the single most rewarding quest and the only one that can't get rerolled, even if you wanted to. So, "forcing" players into Battlegrounds is problematic, but actually forcing players into Ranked, the most competitive mode in Hearthstone, is fine? And that's before considering that Achievements are easiest to complete in Ranked, and that Ranked gains you more Exp than any other mode, and that the monthly Ranked rewards are about the only source of additional rewards in the game, infinite Arena aside. And for the record, it actually does make me want to play less. When I don't like the meta, or my collection just sucks (or both, usually) it is a whole lot less fun to feel forced to play Ranked, because a large portion of the rewards is tied to it.

I know some people will say that Ranked is supposed to be the "real" Hearthstone and the mode that should get the most support, but how does that go with "don't force people to play the game a certain way"? Again, doesn't really sound like an honest answer.

Discover adds a lot to the game even though it's relatively high gameplay complexity. [...] Generally, they are moving away from having too many resources in one card. When control matchups devolve into one infinite generator and 29 removal cards the game gets less fun.

Well... it's nice that Control decks are supposed to change again, because that was (in less extreme forms) basically the identity of Control decks for a long time now. Like Control Warrior in Rise of Shadows with Archivist Elysiana, Galakrond Priest, Kobolds Control Mage with Frost Lich Jaina, more recent Highlander Mages with Dragonqueen Alexstrasza, and many others. 

But I don't really see that happening when Discover and Random are treated like the swiss-army-knife of Hearthstone, both in design and gameplay. Especially control decks like Discover for generating answers that you wouldn't want to commit to in initial deckbuilding. Maybe he's talking of future expansions only, but with cards like Palm Reading, Renew, Keywarden Ivory or Envoy Rustwix, just to name a few of the latest additions, I struggle to see anything changing anytime soon.

The original question was, whether "the design team [is] working on moving away from the multiple degrees of random deviation" as "[p]laying against decks that are more created by than not isnt fun". Even if the next expansions should feature close to no random value generators, for a drastic change, it's not going away.

I know that some people will disagree with me here because they really love Discover and Random, and "if you want consistency, play chess". I'm not saying that these things need to get toned down. I mean, I would, but that's not my point here. What I mean to say, is that adding another dozen Discover effects every expansion, because you like this element, will generally push Control decks (or in case of Mage, an entire class) in the direction you apparently want to avoid. I guess you could limit the range of Discover-effects...

"Sounds a lot like I'm blaming players for not getting it, but it really is on us. Players shouldn't have to break out their excel sheets to understand something. It should just be clear right away."

Again... how am I supposed to believe this? The system was (and technically still is) highly intransparent. Where it is transparent, it's still needlessly complicated. And with all the statements about how long they've worked on it to "get it right", this was never, once, noticed during development?

If it wasn't for the (probably not even legal) datamining done by a few, people wouldn't have known what they get (or not get) out of the new system until many weeks and months later. I'm not suggesting that they need to redesign everything, and I will just wait and see how the next reward track looks like. I'm mostly over the whole issue, and I won't be like "never forget the betrayal" or something like that here. But excel sheets are sadly necessary in Hearthstone, because nothing is done straight and few things are ever clear right away. And while it might take a while between realizing that things need to be clear, and making things clear, I wonder what he thinks "clear" actually means.

The bit about expiring exp rewards for achievements is another one of those examples. It isn't mentioned in the game, wasn't mentioned in official blogposts or anything, but only mentioned in these semi-official AMAs, that few people outside of fansites will even take notice of. Is the same true for Duels achievements? Are they going to expire, or are they going to reset with a new rotation? Clear as mud.

You need Excel to keep track of everything, if only to check if made promises are kept and circulated "facts" like "300 exp per hour" are actually true, as trust is easily lost when things seem off. In the current Tavern Brawl, I've had multiple games, even those that I won, just give me 7 or 12 exp. Granted, the games were rather short, but it isn't that much fun to do exp-per-minute (or even seconds) calculations when single games just seem ridiculously undervalued (and on that note, I disagree that we are in a "reasonable place"). But also, because questions like "How much dust will you make in a month?" or "Can you affort to craft a deck if it might drop out of the meta?" or "How many packs do you need from the next expansion and when would you get them?" can only be properly answered if you keep track of everything, make crafting lists, and reevaluate everything on a regular basis. Those are simple questions that I think people should be able to answer without too much effort, but are never really easy to answer.

On that note, Iksar has also said in another tweet that he feels unhappy when players are just sitting on resources because they either can't spend them or decision making is too hard (Source). And I really don't see how latest efforts have contributed to make decisions easier. Just as another example, because of the very unclear future of Classic, that was already hinted at a while ago, I'm sitting on maybe 45 Classic packs, unsure whether I should open them, save them for new additions, or if they expire entirely, because they introduce a new "Classic" (or "Modern"?) set. All I can do is wait, until everything is "clear right away" once again.

 

Again, I know I will come across as nit-picky and overly critical. I'm a horrible critic that way. Which is why I want to stress once more that I'm not doing this just for the sake of it, or for upsetting people. I'm honestly glad that he chooses to do these things, because any kind of engagement and the will to communicate is an improvement and hopefully makes things go a little easier in the future. When people have a better idea about what is going on and why certain decisions are made, it might prevent another fallout like the one we've seen not too long ago.

But at the same time, it's not so much that I merely disagree with some statements, I struggle to comprehend them. Like, the game clearly coerces you to play Ranked in three different ways, and he's talking about not forcing people to go do things they don't like doing...

Should I ever get the chance to talk to him in person, I'll have to make sure to buy drinks. Both to not be too much of a hard-ass, and because he'd derserve more than one if he would actually sit through my hour-long ramblings.

Everything is so abstracted on purpose now.  They don't WANT you to be able to plan ahead.  They don't want you to know how much gold you will have at the start of the next expansion, how much buying power you will have, how many cards you will start with, and so on. 

They want you to spend your gold, run out, and go "I can't play with this, I better buy some packs."  That's been the goal since they've gone to 3 expansions a year and been creeping up the amount of gold sinks between expansions, and the number of legendaries per expansion.

How dumb to see another stupid comment from you.

I too want more dogs and dog-related cards blizzard

So he says they don't plan to bring back Barnes nor Naga Sea Witch which means they will bring back some wild cards with the classic set rework. Hopefully dirty rat will be one of them.

I agree. Tech cards like Dirty rat and the 4/3 secret stealing goblin belong in standard, forever.

Don't brainstorm 2v2 modes, brainstorm something that doesn't make 99,9% of my wild card collection be useless!

Being a Mage main for the past 5 years I actually kinda second this. The card is extremely powerful in some tempo situations, and preventing cards from going to free cast could actually be a balance change the class will need at some point.

 

I would make this a general approach to every single card in the game that features some form of mana cost reduction.

probably they didn't remember Jade meta. 

He touched on the Achievement system but didn't acknowledge it's currently broken?

He's surprised about the backlash to the reward track?  Wow I dunno, it's not like they sent out a survey about it beforehand and received near universal backlash to it.  There's no way they could have known!

I get what he's saying about Glide, people seem extremely dumb over Demon Hunter cards, but Juicy Psychmelon being low to medium power?  It was broken when it was first introduced, so much so that they nerfed a different card to salvage it.  If Druid has a combo deck it's used because of how powerful and consistent it is.

Ah, I see you are a Blizzard representative and know exactly what the answers were for every person who took that survey