It’s a bit of a wild one, but I genuinely think it would be quite an interesting feature to have in Standard.
The idea would go something like this: every weekly reset (same moment weekly quests are reset), the game automatically identifies the 3 individual cards that have the highest playrate and the 3 individual cards with the lowest playrate over the previous week:
The 3 most-played cards become ‘Exhausted’ and will cost 1 more mana during the coming week.
The 3 least played cards become ‘Rested’ and will cost 1 less mana during the week.
If a card continues to be in the top 3 or bottom 3 over consecutive weeks, it gets an extra 1 mana adjustment for each consecutive week it has been chosen.
If a selected card does not repeat in the top or bottom 3 after a week, it returns to its original cost (or loses 1 penalty if it had accumulated more than 1).
This system would start from the second week after a new set is released and the second week after a miniset is released. And this would be apart from balance changes. Competitive events like e-sports and casual modes would dismiss this system and the stamina picks would be different and independent for Standard and Wild modes. Full refund on nerfed cards would be in place over the week they become exhausted
Now, don’t take this suggestion all too seriously, it’s not like I have given this that deep of a thought but… I actually think it is an interesting idea. I have no idea if this system has ever been implemented in some other TCG, it might not be an original idea, but personally I could be sold. What do people think?
Do you have any idea how much of a coding and balance problem this would be? They would have to patch the whole game once a week (compare this to the usual frequency of updates).
Also have to try balance patching long term something they already fail miserably at.
I never said this would be done through balance patches. It would be a coding effort to have a recurring system that does this automatically but mana changes can be done server side, this is just a fixed mana buff or debuff that would be notified ingame and in collection at the start of each week. Coding new features is kinda their job isn’t it.
I actually think this would substantially reduce the amount of balance patches and general dissatisfaction with the game, since you’d have a decent shakeup every week and you’d directly address the real problem people have with the meta (How often you see something and things becoming stale over time). The playerbase doesn’t actually complain about balance. They want novelty. The meta this year has been more balanced than ever before and dissatisfaction is rocket high.
That sounds extreme and isn’t really the issue I’d try to address with this feature haha
That is not a question. Valve and all the other digital service providers have proved yeaes ago that nothing you buy from them is “yours”. You just buy the licence to use digital products for as long as the provider deems fit.
Gwent has a really good system where cards have a weighted value. You build a deck, but cards are weighted based on their power so you cant just jam every high end legendary into one deck.
Your deck has to add up the values of all the cards and be equal to or less than 100 based on the weight# ratings of the cards combined
I really think Hearthstone would benifit from something like that
Yeah no less than 1 and no more than 10 exceptions would be the most reasonable. Anyways, I obviously haven’t given it that much thought, but I do think a flexible and temporary adjustment like this based off popularity would make the game a lot more tolerable for players and far more engaging over time. This game gets boring really really fast as it is.
I have two more considerations. Some cards work well together only because their sum fits well in the max 10 mana of the game and this would either break them or make them OP.
Another big one (and probably systemically the most important) is that 1 mana on cheap cards is a bigger impact than 1 mana on an expensive card.
Think of it this way, a card was 1 mana and now it has 200% the cost but if it was 9 mana now it only has ~111% the cost.
It’s not. Nothing is yours in this game to begin with, except your pride and joy.
I think it’s a beautiful idea for a different game mode, maybe for the next twist or something
Like, I could imagine playing this, because it sounds like it relies on creativity and adaptability, which is basically what fun means to me (except winning, of course, winning is mostly fun, but getting there, a bit less)
And I also think majority of the people would enjoy it for a little while, before learning how bad they are (or giving up, for those who’d rather do that than learn) at those skills.
Also, when you remove the weeks impacted by the MTs in Standard, you don’t got much left to enjoy playing that, especially with their own troll ideas right before new expansions (Renathal and other nonsense)
This would literally automate most of what they do, anyway xDD
That’s literally the only type of changes they do, mana nerfs of most played cards, and buffs of the least
I would love to have Renathal be gone from the game every other week, because that’s the most played card in Wild by a huge margin. Increasing his cost by 1 doesn’t do anything because the minion isn’t the point. We need to ban the most common cards to shake the meta!!
This seems very flawed… does it only apply to neutral cards? If not then look forward to certain classes being dead for a week… Some classes have a single card holding all the decks together (think sonya for rogue) and if you end up ‘adjusting’ that you’ll dead end the class for the adjustment period.
I mean I guess in some respects that rebalances class play %, but I strongly doubt it would be received well by people who main classes.
It would probably also make a bunch of 1 drops 2 cost for a week… then 0? cost for the next week… then 2 drops for…and so on and so forth. Although with like 95% of all cards seeing 0 play how would it choose 3 of the least played cards from that pool?
I think a better idea is the card design team go back to having a fundamental design structure for making cards rather than “this seems cool lets nerf it later if its a problem” which is how they seem to be making cards in hearthstone present.
Which is just another reason to make it a separate game mode, for sure
However, it’s also just another reason why adaptability would be a necessary skill to master it
People who value that can play it the whole time, people who don’t, can return back to their main game modes of choice for a week
Which is enough to make all the other negatives disappear, except
Luckily, there’s not that many of them.
Pick a more specific, useful metric, such as playability*drawn winrate, so that those minions that literally never saw play don’t enter the equation, and out of those that do, the best and the worst ones will be easily shown by the metric
They use all sorts of tactics, and that one is the least of my concerns
The amount of copy-pastes done lately from other classes (and eras) is frightening. I’d much rather them be playfully creative and expedient the way you described
In overall, such a game mode can even be viewed as a preview of what the meta would look like with X card nerfed or Y card buffed. In my book, that’s a huge potential W.
That’s true, I guess the more I think about the feature in practical terms the more exceptions and ‘ifs’ would have to apply, as one would expect.
Edit: that said, by strict ‘times played’ stats, Renathal is surely not in the top at all, since Renathal is included in decks but rarely actually played. The intention would be to strike the cards players more often actually see played, rather than things often in decks.
Could just be a system devs easily choose manually server-side by the end of a given week to make sure no weird picks happen. Dealing with things like renathal could only happen thru a balance patch tho.
There’s actually a clearly defined ‘least played card’ in Standard, either by number of times played in a week or by percentage of decks it’s in. By times played, I think the least played right now is Tony followed by DJ Manastorm and the most played is Oracle.
Cards at the top would often be neutrals, but not necessarily. And while cards being 1 mana and having a -1 buff is theoretically possible if no restrictions apply, 1-mana cost cards are almost never the least played cards in the game. 1-drops are pretty much always ever played by someone somewhere.
If you check HSReplay card ‘times played’ stats over the last week right now in Standard, the system would actually hit some pretty decent targets, both topside and downside. I think this would be the case the majority of times.
In any case, I did warn not to take the feature too seriously, it’d need more thought than this. But I do think it strikes a cord worth thinking about.
I don’t really disagree with that but I think the philosophy behind balance patches needs to change a lot.
Standard needs novelty to be engaging, not only balance. How many cards pile up in the dumpster because they suck and they never do something about them? Balance patches need to actively try to make new cards work, not just kill everything that does work so they stop working.
That’s where I agree, nerfing obsession and powercreep talk needs to die.