As it pertains just to Hearthstone they have already explained how this works. They only internally test HS expansions within their own card pool and the base set(some). They do not test with any of the previous expansion cards. It was explained that they basically didn’t have the resources to do that much testing internally. It was also a big reason why they started doing those pre launch streamer events allowing streamers to build and play decks before they released the sets.
Okay… it’s on Blizzard (I won’t accuse anyone specifically for anything). If they’re testing without incorporating past expansions that will be played alongside their new expansion, they’re doing it wrong. We shouldn’t be both customers and, essentially, playtesters.
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Don’t get me wrong i am not saying it’s a good system at all. I understand not testing sets for wild but they should be tested at the standard level at minimum. As someone who has been a CCG tester before that was always the approach i was told to focus on.
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well
bugs are always unforseen
I’m starting to think this is completely intended.
The nerf was just to make it so turn 2 12/12 isn’t possible, but a turn 3 12/12 is totally ok apparently.
By giving it a 1 mana nerf, the impression they are giving off is that the interaction is ok, they just want it to be 1 turn slower.
This should really open your eyes as to what they want this game to look like.
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I don’t believe, as a business decision, that it’s a good idea to alienate their player-base. And I don’t believe making this game faster will result in new customers. It just is bizarre to me.
I belive the desired effect of the nerf was to slow down how quickly Gnoll was able to be played and upgraded. Considering there are only 3 minions in standard that are above 10 mana, only giving options to be upgraded to one of those three cards would limit the general idea of evolving. There have been plenty of times where I have evolved into another Gnoll which I think shouldn’t happen, but meh.
This just slows down someone’s ability to pull off a Sir Denathrius on turn 2.
So we don’t have any hard data yet to show the numbers with the loss of China included but with China included HS revenue is somewhere in the ball park of 75/25 with mobile being the majority. Mobile players on average play on breaks not long periods of time. Their data has shown faster games target those players better and get them to use micro transactions more.
It’s basically coming down to the psycholoy and how much revenue they get by keeping the games shorter.
I wager that it has always come down to psychology. That is why these companies test their advertisements on volunteers. They’re trying to get a better perspective at what way psychologically they should promote their product.
The idea of a studio making a game to make a game everyone can have fun with may be somewhat true, but it has always come down to money.
random evolve effects does evolve gnoll into itself. Plus a 10 drop will evolved into a gnoll, not a brand new 10 drop
So, somehow, the deck is (slightly) nerfed, not killed. Perhaps it’s for the best.
But it’s not an intuitive mechanic.
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It’s as if Blazing Transmutation was coded separately from other cards’ Evolve effects…
It’s 100% a bug.
Blazing was lazily programmed to not follow regular evolve rules.
That’s why colossals were accidentally in the pool (it was just a generic discover), and it’s why it caps at 10 instead of current minion cost like evolve.
Give it a few days a gnoll will be patched to be the only outcome for blazing, like it is for every other evolve effect now.
Evolve doesn’t round down to 10. Blazing shouldn’t.
It doesn’t cap at 10. If you play it in wild on an 11 mana minion, you get offered a 12 mana minion. if you play it on a 12 mana minion, you get offered a 13 cost minion. If you play it on the 13 cost minion, you get offered 10 mana minions.
So, yes, it’s bugged…but it’s always been bugged and they never touched it. Thus, it was safe to assume that it was the intended purpose.
Now that it’s happening in the “public’s eye” and everyone is seeing how it was working before, it’s suddenly getting attention.
So it’s not bugged “now”, it’s always been bugged…but I can guarantee you that if more people knew how it worked 3 days ago, no one would have called that a bug and would have said it was intended…just as VS stated.
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Thank you, sincerely. I appreciate it. 
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Cap is the wrong word, round down to 10 is better.
Evolve doesn’t do that.
Yep, but it was a wild only bug until now (because standard didn’t have any 11 drops to trigger it), so likely given exactly zero attention.
It only became more obvious as a bug when the nerf designed to keep gnoll from becoming a 10 drop failed to work with that one evolve effect.
It was just an evolve card programmed with none of the evolve rules, and has been fixed as they were relevant to standard (because wild gets no love)
Yeah, it’s just a problem with how they’ve coded the entire thing.
There are 3 specific effects:
Evolve
Revolve
Devolve
Evolve goes up, Revolve stays the same, Devolve goes down.
But for whatever reason, they decided to recode things awhile back to make the Evolve and Devolves do a Revolve if nothing is above or below the current mana…which was a terrible change imo. You can’t “evolve” or “devolve” into something that’s the same…it’s like saying “add” and “subtract” can change into “equals”.
So when they recoded everything to make Evolves Revolve, they really screwed the code at the 10 mana level.
BT just sort of exposed that coding. No one really cared until it started affecting more play now.
Personally, I think they should just do to Evolves the same thing they did to Sense Demons when there is “nothing left”…transform into a dud of a minion.
After all, if something “evolves” and then gets to a point where it can no longer “evolve”, isn’t that an extinction?
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Yeah, a dud minion would be nice for when there aren’t things above 10 in standard…
But I’ll take the correct evolve behavior of the same cost of nothing is higher (lower in the case of devolve).
It’s pretty obvious blizz never bothered to check if blazing transmutation worked like evolve before launching it, given that it didn’t do so in two different ways (despite being an evolve card).
And now it will get it’s second bug fix.
What was the first bug fix?
FTFY
20characters***
They had to remove its ability to discover colossals, which are not valid evolve targets.
From the start the card lacked the mechanics of true evolves, it isn’t surprising that if they missed the colossal minions rule that they’d also mess up how evolves handle not having a target above the current Mana cost.