Blizzard Has A Huge Problem…

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,

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