Ayala directly addresses autosquelch

I’m not doing this to start a war, but I know some people on here are often lookijg for updated responses regarding the implementation of autosquelch.

Iksar (Dean Ayala) had a Twitter Q&A last night and was asked about the feature and he gave his response in the Tweet(s) below:

His response is over several tweets, so hit the link because the first one isn’t all of it.

Here’s his full response quoted:

People hate this answer, but we take adding buttons extremely seriously. If we added a button every time someone on the team asked for it Hearthstone would be nothing but buttons and menus.
When we think about adding something new we always ask if it’s absolutely necessary and in this case the idea of squelching someone is such an easy action it has never felt necessary to implement.
You have to be a player that hates emotes, and have been in a game where someone would have emoted you and you had a worse experience because of it. How big is that audience? I sympathize that the audience in this circumstance includes you, but that is the train of thought.

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LoL honestly >_< that is very weak argument so silly

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makes sense
months pass between each emote spammer

they arent that many of them

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It has to tell something about Ayala himself when he constantly treats his audience like a bunch of peanut brains.

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maybe he reads the bug forums …after all this time some people still think skull not decreasing mana costs on cards drawn by other card effects is a bug !!!

at least the "why cards that do something when i play from my hand (battlecry tag description) dont do anything when summoned by other cards (like murozond ) "threads stopped for now

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“How big is that audience?”

Pretty big seeing as they have been asking for it for years now.

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Considering it’s the same handful of posters, is it really that big?

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i think is really small because the ones making those threads are always the same posters

and i havent seen a reddit thread about it
whenever there is something many players want it always pop up on reddit

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Well there is the rub, I forgot that blizzard puts almost no attention to their own forums and spend all day on reddit!

If the autosqwelchers want something to happen they got to go to reddit to complain!

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Let me put it this way, I hate emotes so much I try to squelch the AI in the single player sections of the game and am disappointed when I can’t. I just want to play a card game, not engage is silly voice line spam. It’s very easy to add a checkbox to an options menu

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He’s right though, it takes one second to squelch? It’s not the devs fault if that’s too much work for you, the issue is within you I’m afraid.

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The fact that people complain about there not having AutoSquelch, really? It takes a fraction of a second to squelch a player. I mean how LAYZ can someone get?

This is when I have to say FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.

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My precious seconds though! I demand a refund!

In all seriousness though. It’s not a big deal either way. Adding one button wont make the game a menu overload and there’s not much effort involved in squelching.

I’m someone who squelches often, but I really don’t care if they don’t add a checkbox. It’s not a huge deal. It would just be more convenient.

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yeah imagine what hearthstone (or any application/ any anything) would look like if they added every feature like auto-squelch.

A sensible response from blizzard on this one.

To the people saying Ayala’s argument is silly, your reasons for wanting auto-squelch are equally silly.

You can’t handle emotes happening once or twice a game? And for the odd spammer, you can squelch the second you come across them.

It’s not a desperately needed feature.

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why are you trying to make it about blizzard ?
the ones making threads on reddit to ask or complain are the players!!
didnt you notice that whenever players are really upset about something you can find the same complains on reddit first page ?

While the people who support this are vocal, it’s the same few people.

I have literally never squelched anyone in HS in the entire time the feature has been available. I rarely see emote spammers, if ever.

If one would recall, people came out of the woodwork to make their displeasure known about the rewards track, and blizzard responded to overwhelming feedback with swift changes. There’s just not that level of interest, or even close, in this feature.

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People asking for emote should start to get out of their house first. You cant be a normal humanbeing if you avoid interaction with other humanbeing.

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Hey Dean… Sorry, but that’s a load of crap. There aren’t millions of people asking for millions of buttons. It’s one button. ONE! It would fit cleanly right beneath the Allow Friends to Spectate button. Where are the myriad of on-going thread topics for other button requests that have been out there for years like the autosquelch requests?

Hey Dean… nobody ever said it wasn’t easy. We’ve said it’s tedious. We’ve said it’s annoying. We’ve said it’s a nuisance. Once again, you are intentionally misrepresenting those who are asking for this simple QoL improvement in order to justify a misguided decision.

Hey Dean… once again, you misunderstand the issue. It isn’t about the occasional time that someone obnoxiously emotes at us. It’s that when it happens, it’s so extremely upsetting that it sours the whole game experience. And so, to avoid all possible instances of that happening in the future, we squelch every match. That repeated action is tedious.

Hey Dean… so you don’t even know how big that audience is? You are just trying to throw out the notion that the audience might be small to justify a decision you’ve already made. You sound like republicans who say that many people are upset about election fraud allegations when it was those same republicans who made up and spread the false rumors in the first place.

And Dean… what about squelch continuing to fall off on mobile devices? Those of us who squelch every match are forced sometimes to squelch multiple times per match. The toggle button solves that problem too.

It’s not the emote spamming. It’s the obnoxious negative emotes that are so off-putting that we choose to simply squelch every single match to avoid the possibility of seeing them.

Nobody said it was too much work. We do it every match. It’s TEDIOUS. That’s why we are requesting this simple QoL improvement. How would you like it if you had to change the language every single match? Or the screen resolution? Or the sound settings? It would only take a second. But it would become pretty annoying after a while.

Ahh… so you’ve gone the path of insulting people. Nice. We are not lazy. We are squelching every match. It’s an annoying burden that could be easily remedied to offer an improved game experience for many players without any impact whatsoever on other players.

Exactly. It’s just a simple QoL improvement.

It would look EXACTLY THE SAME. Autosquelch would change absolutely nothing about your game experience. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada.

You, like Dean, are completely misrepresenting the request. It is not a desperately needed feature. Nor was more deck slots. Nor was automatically opening card packs. They are QoL improvements.

Irrelevant. This QoL improvement would have absolutely no impact on your gameplay. Your choice not to use the emote system doesn’t mean that improving it should be dismissed. That fact that I don’t use up all my deckslots doesn’t mean that requests by others to increase the number of deckslots should be dismissed.

Aahh… more insults. Pretty common from that side of the discussion.

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