Kick rocks Blizzard. This was my favourite of the game modes I play, and an excellent place to get creative. Your mismanagement in everything that isn’t BG’s or Standard, has exceeded even your levels of crap. This had every bit of potential as any other mode, HAD you directed the right resources.
Monetize it like you did with BG’s. Make it so you have to pay for extra character choices, create class specific skins to purchase, make a flippin battlepass for christ sakes.
Colossal let down to see my favourite game mode get switched off. Sit on a tack Blizzard suits.
I reached my first 1000 win class (warrior) because of duels. It was my favorite mode. But I understand it was never popular or monetized (I never even bought arena tickets for it,) so while their decision makes business sense it’s still kinda disappointing to see it go.
When Duels is gone, I will be done with the game. Duels has been the only mode I played for the last 2 years. Maybe a year ago I casually ranked to legend a few times but could never get back into the grind like I had prior to that.
I am hoping that it’s an April fools joke (see my 10/10 thread on that) and rather than be deleted, it actually moves out of beta.
I have been reading reddit and there has been a ton of backlash there. The question is, does any of it make a difference or will players just accept it and keep on?
I, for one, will be absolutely done when duels is out. No hard feelings, no regerts, just won’t have any desire to play the other modes.
LoL duels was always a terrible game mode, it’s even worse than arena which is already almost unplayable nowadays. No wonder its being deleted, the mode had like less than 10% of the playerbase during the last couple of years.
It would be better if they just focused on making arena a good game mode again like it was back until 2019, instead of making a mode that is a different version of arena but even worse…
Yeah this mode had 100 percent of my playtime. Wild is basically 80 percent bots at this point which is what I played before getting into duels, so when duels goes I’ll be finding another game to play unless blizzard fixes the bot problem (yeah right).
It’s sad to see anything removed from a game, especially when there are player who are playing it
There never really seemed to be any promotion for the mode at all. No seasons or cosmetics or BPs etc etc. Not that it’s NEEDED of course, but these days, you can tell a company’s attention on something a lot with monetization, especially HS. Not every game, btw, sometimes it’s the passion and fun gameplay such BG3 or TOTK.
As much as I loved duels (the fact that I have 19,000+ wins in heroic duels is an indication), I completely abandoned it about 3 months ago. It was clear there was zero interest in properly maintaining it.
They had the opportunity to do something twist-like in terms of keeping it a fairly curated set of cards (which makes balancing actually viable). Instead they kept adding heroes and sets which made balancing utterly impossible. Too many heroes, hero powers, signature treasures, discoverable treasures… they set themselves up to fail.
I get this and agree. Too bad really. That was the last thing keeping me in the game. I told you I was going to get into Buldars but never had the time to really get it and get going. That was always what pulled me back to stones… I enjoyed duels and already had it set up so could just bash out some games, slam some beers and call it a night.
When duels is gone, I am gone. I enjoyed my time and have no complaints but it does feel like they really crapped the bed on that one.
The big draw for me was being able to truly homebrew. I played a homebrew deck 9/10 times and truly loved it and felt competitive. Some of my decks were very close to net decks. That was ok. I truly felt like I personally built bomb warrior up and won a 12 win round before it got huge buffs (while it was still very weak past game 3 and got worse from there.) I also spent loads of time on quest spell hunter before the version we see now… (this is in no way an attack on “net decks” just about my enjoyment of being able to build anything and everything)
Point being that I always felt I had the creative license to experiment with new decks all the time without penalties that ruined the fun. The change in buckets definitely worsened that but still.
I just think it’s a shame that it was never even given a chance. It’s been hidden away in the menu and been stuck with a “beta” tag for years.
Personally for me it probably means the end of Hearthstone. I do play battlegrounds as well, but events and quests are often what lures me back to the game after a break and now that I no longer have any need for the packs they give or the tavern pass rewards (I couldn’t care less about cosmetics) there will be no need to even check for them.
I hate to see Duels get its support removed, but it was clear from the getgo the Blizz wasn’t 100% invested into the mode. I was a fan when it first came out, but stopped when my runs kept ending to OTK DH or Priest.
Its clearly a mode that needs constant balance updates, especially if they wanted to add in a ton of unique cards and hero powers. Not to mention it was gatekept by players needing cards from prior expansions in order to get the best possible decks.
To all the big brains in this thread hating on duels for being a dead game mode despite not playing it, here’s a quick anecdote that I have heard from several others and I myself have experienced almost literally every time (except on the Asia server).
On constructed ladder, the queue times are no shorter than they are on duels. Even at 10+ wins. The only difference is that on ladder I have a fairly significant chance of fighting, at best, yet another cookie cutter deck whose entire list could be divined by their playing of a single card, or at worst a blizzard bot which is kind of the same as the former hypothetical except the class variety reduces from eight-ish to about three.
There’s your lol.
There is no and will never be a good enough acceptable reason for REMOVING CONTENT from this game under such ridiculous premises as a lack of manpower to maintain it. If that were the case, it’d just be frozen in time as Mercenaries is now. I speculate it’s really because they haven’t thought of a way to easily and effectively monetize duels. What they may not be considering is that for a portion of their playerbase, whether its 10% or 1%, is solely motivated to continue playing Hearthstone and therefore continue to be potential customers due to their love for the content available in the game, whether its duels or arena or whatever. Speaking personally, I would have virtually no wild collection in game whatsoever were it not for the Duels mode, and maintaining a competitive collection in multiple modes puts a strain on my dust and encourages me to consider making purchases.
