I am back to playing Arena as I continue to unlock The Underground on 12 different HS collections, and I am currently feeling rather unhappy about the mode. Here are some of the problems as I see them:
1). The abundance of barcodes in Arena is quite high right now. About 80 percent of my opponents were barcoders last night and this afternoon. I can only speculate as to why there are so many more barcoders in Arena during my last play sessions—maybe, normal players are being excluded from the format, because they exhausted their gold why exploring the new changes. Many barcoders are still using superdrafts. I know it’s a highly curated pool, but there is still a gigantic variance in bucket qualities and deck qualities being played that goes way beyond what can be accounted for by draft skill alone. I deduced that barcoding and super-drafting were prevalent in Arena during year one, so it’s a problem that has been on my mind for over ten years.
2). The buckets and classes are incredibly imbalanced. Do not be deceived into thinking that the draft pool is so heavily curated that everyone should be playing a good deck with a fair chance to win. There are some incredibly broken buckets, drafts, and classes, which an average draft will stand very little chance of beating. Out my last six runs, I faced three Warlocks with the Escape the Underfel quest. I have yet beat a Warlock with this quest, evenI playing a good, but not equally broken deck.
3). The Arena or mini-arena as it’s nicknamed suffers horribly from the two-loss elimination rule and the horrible gold economy. Even a great draft can be quickly eliminated by some bad luck. Too much time and effort goes into drafting only to have to go through the process quickly again. I see no reason for why The Arena should not be better option than it is to playing The Underground. Unlocking The Underground should not be such a gold sink. I don’t mind difference between The Arena and The Underground, but both mode should have attractive elements to them, which The Arena currently lacks.
4). Given what I said above, I feel that Arena is less friendly to new or inexperienced players than it has been. That’s a big problem for the mode.
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It’s essentially been turned into a mode to bleed suckers out of their gold and keep everyone else paying to play. It’s nothing like it used to be sadly. The buckets are essentially the lottery part of the mode. You either hit the right Class and the right opening bucket or you need to get lucky and claw back your entry fee.
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This ^ describes most of Hearthstone these days.
Yep, the game is now more about random outcomes and less about skill or player agency. Basically, Blizzard’s top-down approach to making money is to try to scam as much money as they can from a shrinking pool of gambling addicts before sending modes or games into Long maintenance mode before shelved or recycled.
I played some Underground runs after I started this thread, and I came to the conclusion that the quality differential between what was offered between buckets varied way too much. I came to Arena to exercise some skill, not to gamble, so I am mostly done with Arena until improvements are made.
Nine out of ten of my last runs were against Druid or Warlock. I faced one Mage. Think about what that implies.
a) that at the time when you were playing, most people had win games with Druid, Warlock or X class which is currently unplayable in the arena, or
b) that at the time when you were playing, most people had those 2 classes offered, together with some X class which is currently unplayable, or
c) that those two classes have significantly higher winrates than the rest of the meta, or
d) any combination of the above?
xD It could be many things, and yes, c) appears to be the most obvious one, but not always
finally all hearthstone users are understanding, it’s all structured exclusively to make people who play frustrated, eager to spend more money to win, which they will inevitably lose. The amazing thing is that this also works like this in a casino but blizzard has managed to create the same mechanism by disguising it as a video game without having to undergo all the controls and taxes of a casino… incredible!
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MY only 12 win run before the recent rewards changes was with Warlock and i started with Symphony of Sin. It’s a broken bucket to start with. Most of my opponents i just kept them off the board and pushed a little damage then burned 6 cards out of their deck and put them into immediate fatigue.
I did two 10 win runs with another Warlock and one with Druid. There’s basically 4 classes that you will get 7+ wins with and the rest it is a huge struggle because their card pools are very bad.
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