too much hate or too much tolerance?
too much expectation or simply don’t care?
Bonus: where is the dev-players interactions/communications 
2 Likes
Look at any post about Zarimi Priest, you’ll get the idea
It is said regularly, the devs don’t respond in these forums, they are on reddit. r/hearthstone is significantly less toxic than these forums too, IMO.
Similarly, WoW devs exclusively post on twitter. Blizzard, for whatever reason, avoids their own forums like its going to actually kill them IRL. There aren’t even any community managers anymore. You know, like, some guy who just runs interference (a blue) on the forums to keep the peace and give an extremely thin veil of
“see look, we’re communicating, we’re listening!”
Even though said guy doesn’t play the game, never has, never speaks to the devs, and no amount of communication with him will change anything ever. Nope, even THAT is part of a bygone era. This forum is radio silence, so nobody cares what you think here. Posters may as well not have opinions. We may as well all post with Chat GPT posts because who the hell is gonna read these anyway?
I’ve had the same, but much more extreme experience with Lost Ark and their western publisher, Amazon, on that game’s forums
Since the beginning of my engagement there, community managers have acted the same way as the ones here, only posting official updates and 6-months roadmaps, until crap literally hit the fan and they screwed up, badly, so they decided to “improve the communication and nurture the community to work on the game’s perfecting together”
Weird thing is, the first step towards that consisted of shutting down the forums for good. Apparently, it was too much negativity and toxicity, and too little constructive discussions and definitely not a place for nurturing community.
I think the newer generations quite obviously shunned forums and accepted other modes of communication (Discord, Twitch). Reddit is the only that gets a pass because it contains basically the whole Internet of forum users, so it allows for diversity of thought and knowledge, which prevents the chance of echo chambers forming there and poisoning the community.
When you look at things from that perspective, a lot of things begin to make sense. We are an incredible bunch over here, and we can be grateful we even have this chance to communicate the way we’re used to, because apparently, that mode of communication is no longer accepted as a valid method of communing.
xD
EDIT: toxicity is not the only thing to blame. Just one of the main things. There are other reasons, including:
a) newer generations don’t like reading too much, their attention spans are non-existant,
b) they’re much too sensitive for the type of communication usually dominant on the forums,
c) some other reasons I couldn’t think of rn, but probably exist and make up a significant portion of the effect.
EDIT2:
d) Oh yeah, how could I forget this? Forums are much too slow for the sheer quantity of people making posts, let alone posts, it would be very hard to follow up on a topic from A to Z and reach a common conclusion that satisfies everyone. Probably a big part of the reason why the most successful of the forums, Reddit, consists of Subreddits, so you at least get to choose the ones you find worth the pain and the time it takes to digest and participate in a discussion.
2 Likes
I can vouch personally for the CM team no longer being involved here, as I was one of the forum MVPs who had their direct emails. The last one was Jesse, and he was laid off when Bobby Kotick decided that the record profit and revenue they had gotten that year wasn’t enough, and so fired nearly 900 people.
There hasn’t been any attention paid here ever since.
And it was a shame too, because Jesse had plans to make this place better, and I think it may have worked.
4 Likes
im 100% covinced they are making some cards just for me to enjoy
1 Like
Mand, I remember you being a “green” or MVP during year one, and you were one of the better ones. I remember you answering some of my questions when I was new to HS.
Both are true at various times, and perhaps at all times. Most of us are here talking about the game because we already like HS. One hopes the devs like and care about the game more than most players, but it really does not feel that way these days.
I mostly try to give feedback to help the devs to identify problems and to help them improve the game, but it often feels like I am beating a dead horse. I want acknowledge the good works done by the devs, but I also want to hold them accountable for a lot of crappy designs, and for how the game performs on devices. Unfortunately, I often find myself with more criticism than congratulations for the devs.
Hearthstone had developmental issues from the beginning. I can remember constantly campaigning for more than 9 deck slots, only to have Ben essentially say it was not a priority the devs and more slots would likely only confuse players, which triggered me to posting comments like: “Ben thinks we are too stupid to handle more deck slots. “ “If Ben Brode doesn’t understand the importance or demand for more deck slots as team leader, then he should be fired and replaced.”
I was a lot less diplomatic about my comments in the early days.
I used to post and update a wish list of 10 to 20 things that I wanted improved or incorporated into Hearthstone, and I would remove the items as they were slowly fulfilled, while slowly adding new wishes as they occurred to me.
There was a period in the early days when the devs tended to talk to players in the forums like they were children, and a percentage of the criticism or negative PR subjects would get deleted, which felt like censorship, and this escalated a lot of players to write a lot of negative stuff about the devs and the company. A few angry players began using bots to bombard the forums with all kinds messages. Some days, it was hard to pick out the real player threads among all the spammed bot threads. Anyways, these kinda of issues eventually led to the devs abandoning the official forums. In fact, they killed the forums twice, which involved removing all the old threads and resetting forum post counts to zero. The climate of toxicity that exists in the forums and in the game started with how some disgruntle players were responded too in the early days. There used to be a small army of fanboys in the forums that attack any criticism of HS.
2 Likes
Just because Developers put in zero effort whatsoever to improve their game, zero effort whatsoever to have any community presence, and zero effort to actually listen to and work out solutions to player found issues, does NOT mean it is difficult for them to read a topic and come up with possible solutions to such issues. They can. It is possible. It happens on smaller size games but, well, Blizzard over the past 10 years has shown no interest in making such an effort.
Yup. The game might not be as dead as people claim, but these forums sure are.
…oh who am I kidding, the game’s dead too.
1 Like
Reaver, the past year (or has it been two by now?!) I find myself seeing any posts bashing the Dev’s, the state of the game, certain cards, I give those posts 
's lmao.
2 Likes
Ew, suggesting wokeness? Gross.
And yeah, reddit is just a positivity echo chamber. In other words, the devs go there to hear how great they are doing, and ignore actual criticism. Been that way for like 10 years now right?
1 Like
Game being rigged is just a conspiracy theory. No surprise, developers delete such comments
1 Like
I do believe they’re scanning through the posts for feedback in one way or another
If not, then it’s possible we’re still a representative sample, a smaller version of reddit or X, if you will, so things we talk about sometimes do get addressed, one way or another
It’s the only way to explain eerie changes happening which aligned with what the majority of the forum wanted, multiple times in the last few years
1 Like
Not here they aren’t.
1 Like
They are barely active on reddit anymore. They show up more on the BG reddit than the constructed. At this point i wouldn’t be shocked if balance is at the back of the line. Feels more like the game is the meta they want through careful card decisions so that the Shop can chase the meta for maximum profits.
2 Likes
Its also reddit. And subreddits are built around cultures - upon some are built around not talking negative about their chosen subject, or you get downvoted to hell, thus people dont attempt. Not a good source of feedback when the method of delivering the feedback relies on NOT posting unpopular stuff
2 Likes
Reddit in general? Sure.
Subreddits? Hell no, they are built with cultures around chosen subjects, and if said culture doesnt specifically involve encouraging constant oppositional debate, then people avoid posting unpopular takes - automatically leading to echochambers forming.
Do NOT forget reddit users have an incentive to following whatever meta is on whatever subreddit exists, reddit karma lol
3 Likes
As long as those are contained to a subreddit, that’s fine, I think
That karma mechanism which leads to the formation of those mini eco chambers should, if things align that way, also prevent them from escalating
There’s always a part of people who are simply contrarian, which means that even when they’re in a minority they’ll push against the currents, and when the majority is wrong, the contrarians will prove it and people won’t be able to delude themselves anymore
That’s how it usually works
Some things are just universal in people - logic and how it works. Don’t ask me why, but it’s universal. So you basically just use logic and your personal experience, and enough people will know you’re right (those whose experience aligns with yours, in the beginning, and everyone else afterwards, because by then, the momentum will be built)
Exactly. Thats why its a poor form of system for feedback, as that is even needed to begin with. As that was the point you brought up here;
Additionally
this makes no sense, as the entire point of the formation of the echo chambers, originate in that karma system, incentivizing people in forming them for points. Hence why new subreddits, unofficial ones, constantly appear to break out of those echochambers, as it is extremely difficult to break them from within with posts not aligning.
You brought up reddit in the same breath as discord, yet even claimed reddit was the one above the rest here. its not even remotely on the same field of integrity when it comes to feedback. Discord has systems for feedback where you can submit specific feedback threads (if the server owner sets this up) that are contained in a feedback section, enabling a clean view of this without overtaking the rest of the platform.
Reddit has all in the same system, with barely flairs to seperate the posts - with a system that incentivizes following the flow, which counteracts the point of feedback to the Dev; Its a scientific study, not a popularity contest.
And thats not even mentioning how people view low karma accounts, new accounts or even negative karma accounts on reddit. The contrarian point just doesnt make sense here.
1 Like
I’m afraid I don’t understand this part of the argument, but then again, maybe I would if I actually used reddit
I even seldom use Discord, it’s way too aggressive for my taste.
But I’m glad at least a part of my message went through. If even reddit is a bad choice for Blizzard to be collecting feedback from, then I guess it’s really the end of an era of the forums, and we’re just now enjoying some of its last days.
1 Like