My question relates to a recent AMA which Iksar responds (link at end of post) with an image of the top decks (all of which are aggro mid) with a meme about going face.
Whether you see this as a good troll or generating a laugh among the community, it does highlight an issue at it’s core that is wrong with Heartstone.
The game only has (well had) one control deck (Priest) that was able to stand up to the relentless amount of aggro in the game.
The issue of looking at why priest needed to run combos which offer burst healing is not being addressed, which is games not being able to go past turn 5/6 because your opponent can smash button, smash your face for 10-20 damage with a weapon or burn you with targeted damage.
It wasn’t all that long ago that northshire cleric was removed from the game, because a 1 drop 1/3 that could draw when healing was bad or even mana wyrm for that matter, but a 1 drop 1/3 that scales infinitely when you you play an elemental is good?
The changes to even the watch posts which forced a slower game state, were hit with the nerf bat. WHY?
It frustrates me that the game is being pushed towards people with the attention span of a plastic spoon and not being able to play a game longer than 5 turns.
This is my theory. I believe that developers are incentivised by the requirements placed on them. Therefore:
The developers’ KPI is to get as many games played as possible.
There aren’t many ways of doing this. To reduce animation timings (which has been long requested, considering some animations take over 5 secs to resolve) only helps for certain cards.
Therefore, the most obvious way is to change the meta to be more aggressive. More aggro means faster games means more games played. It will definitely look great on your monthly / quarterly reports to have X no. of games played (an increment of X% month over month or quarter over quarter).
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This is also seen in many of the company’s moves to focus more on $:
- No genuinely fresh content across all IPs.
- Death of SC2 with no SC3 in sights.
- Death of HOTS.
- D3 only being focused on after the D:I scandal.
- The sudden focus on refreshing old contents rather than create new ones.
They weren’t kidding when they said that Blizzard is dead. Activision is just trying to milk as much money as they can before the company can no longer do so. The upper management will walk away with a boat load of cash in their bank accounts, while the leftover of the company (and brand) suffers the wrath of their fans. People need to pay for being this irresponsible.
This year, the only Blizzard title to get more patches than HotS is Hearthstone.
The rumors of the death of HotS are massively exaggerated, even if ActiBlizz cut funding for official tournaments.
Balance patches don’t equal playable content sorry. Blizzard will keep doing as little as they can to get the few players still playing to buy more stuff in the game before they just stop updating it. If that means putting out a small balance patch to make non-played characters played so people buy them then they will do that.
If you guys are so incredibly stupid to get hit by a weapon for 20 damage even though a 2 Mana card exists that was always the bane of weapons is fact enough for me that your opinions are simply worthless.
new account, complains about the devs and face damage. anyone want to take a guess on who got their main account timed out?
A dead game would not receive patches.
did anyone else find that link ? been staring at the end of the psot for several seconds i couldnt find it !
sorry all, thought hit paste. Below link of twiter
are you all trying to tell me you are on that 1% of the players ???
Well, guess which game made loot boxes popular? 
Team Fortress 2 is the game that put lootboxes on the map.
The concept of loot boxes was popularised by Hearthstone. The rest just followed the wave.
Team Fortress 2 introduced lootboxes in 2010. It was for quite a while one of the most popular F2P games.
Hearthstone entered public beta in 2014 and borrowed it’s entire concept from the already established TCG genre. Magic the Gathering created the modern TCG genre in 1993. The concept of “pack containing one or more randomized cards” is a lot older and goes back to before 1900.
The years are not an accurate indication of when it became popular. From 2010 to 2014, lootboxes were still not very prevalent in gaming. Hearthstone is the cause.
TF2 was still the first big digital game to normalize lootboxes, EA’s FIFA franchise followed with their own version the next year. Both TF2 and EA’s FIFA franchise are still riding high on the lootbox train and have been for longer than Hearthstone existed. FIFA’s Ultimate Team mode (spend currency to open packs with players) has consistently earned EA more than $1 billion/year for nearly a decade. Valve does not publish their earnings since they’re privately owned, but anyone watching their marketplace should not be surprised at higher yearly earnings.
That you didn’t know about either makes no difference. Hearthstone didn’t popularize lootboxes.
if see priest questline you can stop asking your self this info
“A dead game” Not mean dead business model 
simle dead FUN gamen now is only P2W
Short answer: yes. Need I say more?
you forgot Easy Free money from new players part of the answer