Hello Blizzard,
As a relatively new player (I’ve been in the game about 1 year) I have found your system for card reveals just before a set hits to be clunky and confusing. On the playhearthstone site you have posted pictures of the cards to be revealed each day with the local date/time. This is good.
But, at the appointed hour when you click the card it takes you to either a Twitch site that isn’t always playing the card reveal or a youtube site streaming completely in Chinese or Russian. Now, I’m not an idiot. I get it, you have a close relationship with Twitch, also you have a huge fan base in China and Russia. So you allow the cards to be revealed based upon tournaments in other countries and the initial content to be revealed on strategic partner’s streams/sites etc.
What I don’t get is why you don’t have the cards available on your site the moment they are revealed. You could literally get them up there within the minute through an automatic process (no man hours required). I often find myself at the allotted time checking other non-official hearthstone web-sites such as Hearthpwn to see the cards you reveal because your own site won’t be updated for hours. By the way, I took me far too long to realize that if I wanted to actually watch a reveal I had to sit through whatever the twitch stream was playing until the card was actually shown at the end. You really could do your fans a solid and either make the system work better or at least explain the process a bit better.
Thanks.
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Yes it is true, that the variety of card reveals from the community spans across all sorts of languages and countries, from quick reveals to very long drawn-out reveals. The Blizzard website is slow to update, and the third-party websites such as Hearthpwn and Outof.cards don’t always have much concern as to where exactly the reveal came from (they usually just list the revealer).
If you want a trip into history, I documented how all 135 cards of the Kobolds & Catacombs expansion were revealed. It was too much effort for something hardly anyone seems to care about, and I got discouraged many times on copyright concerns or whatever so I decided not to do it again since.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6fLhNPk_1TxmgnrbUVmuUUvPdVUz26lf
I appreciate the link but the problem still remains. This is a terrible system that doesn’t have to be.
I think the real and final answer is that theses other sites pay significant money for the right to reveal cards, essentially paying for site traffic because they know thousands and thousands of Hearthstone players will be clicking through in the hopes of seeing the card reveal.
I guess the real problem is the annoying bate and switch that Blizzard keeps doing to it’s fans. If they just came out and said, “Hey, you can see the card but it will be up on our site after our “sponsor” has had a chance to make his money with the link to his/her site” I would respect the hell out of them… but that would cause people not to click through and in effect kill the purpose of the reveal links. It’s just frustrating.
I think you answered your own question as to why the card isn’t shown in the gallery at the time the reveal is set to start wherever else it’s supposed to happen on the internet. Nobody would actually go watch the community reveals if they were on the site immediately.
But nobody is paying Blizzard for the right to reveal cards. The exchange of views is mutually beneficial already. For large press outlets, card reveals means free press feeding back into Hearthstone. For streamers who play the game, it’s an opportunity for them to bolster their viewer base, which means more eyes on the game. The more streamers with substantial audiences playing the game, the better for Blizzard.
Things are better this release (Darkmoon). I’ve noticed that most of the links are intact. I’ve also noticed that they have a “reveal” banner on the video/stream where the card will be revealed at the link destination. Things are certainly moving in the right direction.