Old Guardian just did a post today emphasizing two of my biggest complaints about Hearthstone: Bad Balance and the pushing of overdeveloped archetypes.
“I believe Blizzard is more incompetent than Evil.” —Old Guardian
https://youtu.be/itpaw3ICrqk?si=R1TsQhuuaebGB_2z
Thanks god players not give a damm about old guardian’s opnion.
How much do they pay you to be a Blizzard shill? Is it enough to sell your soul to a company that only cares about profit margins and sexually harassing its own employees?
Guy gets less views on his YouTube videos than I get likes on my LinkedIn posts.
Sad times.
Actually they don’t care about profit that much or otherwise stuff would be better.
Still it still funny to clarify that media opnion nowadays is usually so out of touch with people opnions that it should not be taken serious unless they actually quote someone relevant.
Right, I’m sure that’s why they’re constantly selling overpriced bundles in the shop, like the time they charged $50 for Diamond Helya and 2 RANDOM signature cards. Oh, and let’s not pretend that Hearthstone is Blizzard’s only product. You’ve seen what they’ve done to Diablo and Overwatch. Can you really tell me with a straight face that they aren’t horrendously greedy?
Hearthstone is the most F2P friendly than it ever has been
Even you, sat in your mums basement can play enough that you can afford pretty much every card in each expansion including the mini set by just playing the game.
Why do you care what’s in the store? Leave the store to people with jobs that can afford it.
You don’t have to spend a single penny in hearthstone these days.
Because it’s the model nowadays.
You don’t really care for your daily player that maybe sometime buy something.
Most of your money really come from that guy without any self control that buy almost everything you put in the store.
It’s really nothing personal against people. Just what we would call as “the meta” for F2P games monetization.
With that said those people pay for others to be able to play the game for free. So it’s not that bad for anyone except maybe the guy spending hundreds of dollars on the game.
Still he isn’t being forced to.
If blizzard really cared that much about profit we would have had stuff like twist atleast 5 years early because the demmand for it is here for a long time.
Blizzard really take things slow at a point that they either are really bad at reading it’s playerbase or overthinks products(probably a mix of both).
Again, you make no argument against the fact the bundles are overpriced. Wouldn’t it be more pro-consumer to offer the bundles at a value that’s more affordable for the average player, leading to more sales overall? After all, it’s not like they can run out of 1s and 0s to sell.
Just because it’s the model for most freemium games doesn’t make it any less scummy. Blizzard used to be raised to a higher standard than this, and that’s why I absolutely hate it when people excuse their actions because it lowers the community’s standards as a whole.
They for sure were. Still the standard for this community was lowered a long time ago.
It’s complicated but in general for you to even have standards you have to believe in something in first place and atleast for hearthstone the decisions were more based on stuff like:
“Oh no. People are bashing us on twitter.Let’s nerf whatever they want”.
So while blizzard used to have higher standards the hearthstone community in general did not live during those times.
So you can’t expect it here.
I mentioned this in another thread about a similar subject but I still remember buying bundles of 60 packs for £80 with absolutely no duplicate protection in Ungoro and racking up a bill of £350+ and STILL not being able to play every deck in the meta.
I’m not saying the monetisation is “good” but holy hell, it’s 10000x better than it was.
Even the free battlepass is better.
I honestly think the bundles (outside of the golden ones) are decent value, but maybe that’s because I remember how expensive it used to be.
You can disrespect Old Guarian’s opinion from that post now, but when Celestial Shot or Sanitize—or Arcane Hunter or Enrage Warrior gets nerfed— because of the new cards, then it will prove his comments were more relevant than some brown-noser’s.
Old Guardians is right to point out that the dev’s processes suffer from being inflexible and poorly thought out. I said as much during Hearthstone’s first years.
An advantage Hearthstone has had as a digital game over paper card games like MTG was that balance changes could be made plainly and swiftly to cards without players having to memorize errata, and yet the devs were extremely slow at fixing balance issues, stating that changes would be too confusing for players, which then resulted in certain archetypes dominating metas for years in a row, stagnating the game.
Now they unnecessarily buff cards, un-nerf cards, and they have even had cards with different stats in different formats—so much for being afraid to confuse players unnecessarily. And so much for addressing powercreep in a healthy way.
So many dev ideas are poorly thought out and executed these days that it does smack of incompetence. Throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks rather than play-testing stuff (to ensure the new content does not break the game) is a poor design process for a strategy game like Hearthstone.
Strongly overdeveloping and pushing archetypes, along with having events with professional players showcasing new archetypes before the new cards are even released really robs a lot of the fun that comes from experimenting with the new cards and the process of building new decks,
Why not both? -funny commercial quote
From the company with a track record of doing scummy things to maximize their profit margins while already posting record profits: like firing a good number of their customer support staff during a record profit quarter, employees having to choose between making rent and eating because of the poor pay rate and high cost of living there, etc.
I mean, wild already exists. There was no need for them to create a fake hate campaign to kill classic.
This. One twist deck costs more than an entire adventure. And that’s before you get into the insanely priced gold versions. Even more expensive the gold minisets, of which they deliberately held back older ones, and the adventures (including the regular versions people have been asking to get added back for some time now), just for this scummy move.
Also, this. “EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT!” Stopped being a legitimate excuse in primary/grade school.
The sad part is, OG is actually one of the most inoffensive and helpful streamers out there, he was one of the most prolific mercstone content creators, and I don’t recall him ever saying a bad word about the mode, even when it was clear it was sinking faster than a lead boat with a hole in it. When twist dropped, he was actually defending team 5, and explaining how they were technically not dishonest based on how they worded everything.
So if someone who is generally an easygoing, go with the flow kind of person is taking the time to tell you that you are screwing up…it’s bad.
And the fact that the usual crowd is going to troll, flame, and harass people just for discussing issues with the game (which of course will get ignored by the mods again) only shows the issue isn’t with the community, it’s with the company and those who defend it, no matter how wrong they are.
And again anyone who disagree with you is a troll.
The thing about classic is simple.
It is better played as an event than a mode. They even said already that classic is planned to be a twist format someday.
What also can’t be ignored is the lack of people playing while the mode had so many bots that they were running almost the entire superdraft arena Blackmarket.
Direct quote, or admit you’ re being dishonest. We’ll wait.
I’d have to heavily edit your first entry here, because it’s a coc violating, profanity posting (which of course we’ll never see a mod “LANGUAGE!” edit on) post trolling about how “no one cares” about OG’s opinion (the irony, as always being one of you always manages to show up telling us how much “NO ONE CARES!”)
Disagreement is one thing, but the type of posting that goes full company defense that I’m referring to:
Shows that bad faith actors aren’t here to discuss the issue, they’re here to derail the thread in an attempt to get it 404d. Which of course the mods won’t action them for, because it’s gone on for years…and will most liekly continue for years more.
A description that now applies to pretty much every mode, courtesy of actiblizz’s own bots.
I’d like to see the entire dev team, swear under oath under penalty of perjury (and do so in a format that showed the binding nature of the statement) that they didn’t flood the mode with their own bots, AND that they were making good faith efforts to get rid of the alleged bots in classic. Interesting how they “muh bots” about classic, then came out and lied about botting only being a problem “for months” when it was supposedly filled an entire mode.
Which is it:
or it was a huge problem then.
“Hearthstone is the most F2P friendly it ever was” is like saying “Mussolini was the least bloody of the WWII dictators” 
This game has a serious balancing problem and Old Guardian is pointing out the problems with mini set that would make the game worse. If Blizzard refuses to address these problems, more people will be turned off and will start leaving.
Hey, I heard you got a new corner office at Blizzard HQ! Congrats!
Just a quick aside on the “mods will ignore it” comment; this space only seems to be unmoderated. It most definitely is, and the flag button, and not responding to toxic/passive aggressive comments, are your friends. Unless something is particularly egregious, like outright bigotry, they let the flag and review system handle it. It may not seem like it, but think of all the particularly unpleasant folks who tend to “take a break” from the forum; that aint of their own accord.
Do you really think that the people who don’t want to buy anything from the store are all broke?
People who don’t want to waste their money on garbage exist. Mind-blowing but true