I think I missed this news. My bet is Mech will be next!
In case you did too, here it is the usual sad notice:
As we think about the future of Hearthstone and where the team can best focus their efforts, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue support for the Duels Mode. We do not have plans for any further scheduled updates for Duels, and the Mode itself is scheduled to be removed from the Hearthstone client in April 2024.
This change will allow us to shift our resources to where we feel they will have the most impact, including Traditional Hearthstone, Battlegrounds, and more. To that end, Battlegrounds Duos is scheduled for an upcoming Battlegrounds patch, and we’re trying out some Duels Treasures in our next Arena season—more details soon.
We want to thank all our passionate Duels fans for every pile of loot, treasure, and hard-fought victory you’ve collected along the way. It’s been a heroic run, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Mercenaries are not TOTALLY bad, but they require specific changes to not be ANNOYING,
1: Just make the switches of rounds practically INSTANT; it’s so annoying that we spend like 50% of the time on loading screens(!); you can even make the whole field a single-scrolling screen!111111 (one)
2: Give some more XP; I know you admitted defeat by nerfing it implying to us “don’t even play that crap sub-game”; but improve the game first and then return it.
3: You can probably enrich it as a real “walking card game”; think of the Paper Mario games; if you haven’t checked it: the “The Thousand-Year Door” is a masterpiece.
if they remove duels sure will play way less than before 90% less if its not more will find other game maybe tft i hope they dont do that its very fun mode for me
People could hack their duels decks to include cards from any mode, which included cards that were normally banned in Duels, as well as cards from Battlegrounds, Mercenaries and single player adventures. People did get banned for doing so, but people with legitimate decks got their runs ended by cheated decks.
Also, as noted above, balancing after every new expansion is not free. And apparently the mode did not bring in enough money to justify paying developers to balance the mode. Especially since Duels does not require special packs or other payments, which makes it harder to see whether a player spent money on the mode. Unless they purchase additional tickets to start Heroic runs.
Mercenaries can stick around for now because it doesn’t require constant rebalancing, especially now that they’ve finished adding content (both mercenaries and bounties) to the mode. It does also have its own separate type of packs as well as bundles, so monetization for specifically Mercenaries is easier to quantify. It also isn’t likely to break from new content or balance changes for other modes, which is actually a concern for regular single player stuff (Boomsday Puzzles have seen individual puzzles become unsolveable several times due to nerfs and buffs).
All they need to do is ban all cards that have to do with hero powers. Twist is just as awful to balance and with it roting monthly, even if something is OP for a month, that’s it. That’s all.
