I guess what frustrates me about this whole thought process right now is:
These boards constantly complain about the tyranny of certain character classes such as Paladin.
Warrior, up to now, has had limited options, which Brann clearly was created to try and fix. The huge elemental booster minion Therazane was created to boost elemental-focused decks. In other words, Blizzard seems to have noticed your general feedback and are trying to give other, relatively-neglected classes more options. Just like you asked.
These new options clearly need fine-tuning – which has happened on many other occasions – but it seems to me like you guys wanted more class options, they’re trying to give you those options, and yeah, these options need tweaking, but you guys are complaining that tweaking is needed, rather than being grateful that Bliz is trying to give you more options like you asked. And that’s not nice.
Try to be more constructive with your criticism and try to brainstorm how these cards can be changed a bit to still give Warrior and elemental decks the boosts they need but to not be this OP. Changes are made to cards, and these cards can be toned down without being deleted or whatever.
The purpose of these boards is not feedback. The purpose of these boards is the illusion of feedback. Nobody on the dev team will ever read anything here. The devs did not create Therazane, or any other card, in response to what this forum said it wants.
This, by the way, is the correct policy. People are good about saying what they liked or didn’t like, past tense, but absolutely deluded about what they will like or won’t like, future tense. Feedback can be valuable. Suggestions are almost entirely garbage. Any game developer that takes suggestions from their playerbase is doomed to failure. Much like a doctor who allows patients to diagnose themselves and determine their own medical treatment. It replaces expertise with a neglectful indifference.
The actual audience here is the people who come here. Not devs. Most of this audience are, dare I say, salty. So it’s mostly content by the salty for the salty and that’s probably as good as it’s going to get.
Well, I asked for more skins to be offered on a few occasions, and pretty soon, the mini-set comes out, with a bunch of new skins – Scarlet Sally and the Legendary Jaina being two of them. Scarlet Sally is one of the very best female Priest Alternate Hero Skins, with Kyrian Tyrande probably the only one that’s quite as good.
I know the devs need to take forums with a grain of salt, but it really does seem like they took the general feedback into account. I was interested in Warrior from the beginning, but there have not been a lot of good options for Warrior.
Suddenly, after a bunch of feedback to this end, they come out with Brann. Now, Warrior is not only viable, but in need of mitigation because it’s become OP.
The Therazine card makes elemental decks much more powerful – it could, again, be argued that it’s OP as-is.
But I just can’t look at these deck-defining cards, and a forum basically screaming for such cards, and yeah, it was all a coincidence.
I guess, it’s possible that it’s just coincidence, but it’s probable that they take us with a grain of salt but still take our feedback into account. What’s the point of having community forums if they never look at them?
If the later is the case, maybe people should suggest feedback, rather than telling the devs that they’re drugged up and/or mentally ill (there was a guy that made such a thread this week.)
Hmm. I guess that depends on whether you consider it a “coincidence” that the posts here often bear a striking resemblance to the posts on X or Reddit. I do suspect that the devs pay some attention to those.
I agree. But to be honest…we aren’t paid/trained game designers. We aren’t the ones with the solutions to the spaghetti web mess they’ve created. Only the devs can untruck themselves from the corner they’ve backed into.
Players are the consumers and the people actually using the cards. Right, we aren’t the ones doing math wizardry and attempting to keep card balance, but it’s the same thing as car manufacturers paying attention to the people driving the cars. For example, Cadillac was for a long time a luxury car tailored to rich old people, they fairly recently started marketing to a much younger demographic, and the Cadillacs now look sleeker and “cooler.” The consumer matters.
I am pretty sure they’d rather pay attention to their official forums than Reddit or X, which they don’t control. Or – at the very least – look at them all but not ignore what is said on their official forums.
Don’t forget that Blizzard got bought by Microsoft. It’s not owned by Activision anymore, thankfully. Microsoft is taking a year to look at things as-is and only then will they start making policy. In Hearthstone’s case, I think the game is good enough and interesting enough that they’re not going to bomb from orbit.
Took me a while to get the hang of it, but it’s fun for me. Battlegrounds, not so much, because, to me, the comparative lack of control over what happens is not so great.
Sorry about replying out of chronological order, but I just thought of something.
I think you have the incentives backwards. If you’re stirring up negative sentiment on a platform that I personally own, and have the legal right to censor (per the terms of service) however I see fit, I’m probably not going to be terribly worried about that. Perhaps a little, if it got a lot of attention.
But it you’re stirring up negative sentiment on a platform where I’m merely a user, with no administrative control whatsoever, AND it’s a platform with orders of magnitudes more traffic than the platform that I happen to own, yeah, I’m going to be more worried about that.
I think the traffic angle is actually a lot bigger than the control angle, but they’re probably both relevant factors.
Honestly, I think their general strategy is they want to please their fans and run a good game so the happy gamers spend money on what they’re offering. It’s the general good business model in any business, gaming or otherwise: happy customers spend more. There are businesses who make the mistake of deliberately antagonizing their customers, but I think Hearthstone is solid enough and has existed for long enough that they’re not doing that. Though, admittedly, reading the forums might make one think otherwise.
Also, it is true that most of the time, if somebody is a happy customer, they say nothing, but the unhappy customer is the one that takes the time to complain. This is also true of business in general, not just gaming.
Also, keep in mind that most people who play Hearthstone (and other Blizzard games) are not on the official forums, Reddit, and X. This is certainly true of Overwatch, where the official forums are fairly small but the game itself has so many players that if the forums had to have them all for just one day, we would all quite certainly notice. Millions of people spilling onto a Blizzard-style forum would make things hard to follow due the sheer traffic.
I strongly agree, but I still think that they use psychologically manipulative techniques to do so.
The common conspiracy theory is that Hearthstone rigs games to make the complainer lose when they shouldn’t. That, of course, doesn’t make much sense. But notice how the subject in this case believes irrationally in their worthiness as a player. Notice also how the Innkeeper (or Bob, in Battlegrounds) is continuously bombarding you with assurances and congratulations. I believe that Hearthstone is rather deliberately designed to make bad players feel like they’re much better players than they actually are. This both aligns with your common-sense model of what sells product, and it explains the behavior of complainers when their perception of themselves as deserving to win comes crashing into the reality of them not. The bitter irony is that the frustration that they feel is not so much the effect of intricate manipulation, but actually from the manipulation wearing off and reality setting back in.
In short, it’s not rigging, it’s voice line hypnotism. Doesn’t work on everyone, but really works when it works.
To your last point, I personally wouldn’t know about voice lines because people are so horribly rude with emotes and voice lines that I squelch each and every match on the start of Round 1. I also keep the music off, so I can listen to other music or watch TV while playing. I don’t mean to be ignorant to what you’re saying, I am simply saying I lack perspective to this point.
I’d have to argue that telling the player things to encourage them is not being manipulative, that’s self-preservation. Defecating all over the customer is not going to be effective in keeping them around. Few people are good right away, and getting better takes time and patience to learn things. You also have to find the class that you really like, which takes a bunch of trial and error.
Improvement in games IS a thing. I am a Mercy one-trick in Overwatch, I went from perma-Bronze, (the worst rank,) now I can keep up with Diamond players. 961 hours on one character in Overwatch is a LOT. But it does end up making the player better with that character.
So yeah. If Hearthstone didn’t encourage us, I don’t think most of us would STAY to become truly good. The internet is fickle and there’s so many things tugging us for our attention, the game people have to do something to try and keep that attention.
In the end, I have to wonder what even is the point of Legendary rank. Let’s say you make Diamond 10, like I usually do before I can’t advance anymore. Compare the rewards of Diamond 10 to Legendary. The differences are there, but they aren’t THAT huge. But the stress and frustration in climbing those last ten levels is pretty severe. If you buy the BP and concentrate on doing dailies and weeklies to get all the goodies out of the BP, I would argue that’s a ton more rewards than if you tried to get to Legend and quit because it’s stressful and frustrating.
Yes yes in the meantime all the war brann that I meet all play brann turn 6, in wild you meet too many Rogue kingsbane just add the weapon thief pirates and you no longer meet a single Rogue kingsbane, you remove the thief pirates weapon and big return of rogue kingsbane, you change deck the meta changes.
We have to stop taking players for idiots (100% rigged game).
It is at most 2% rigged. That’s approximately the amount that could actually fly under the radar of data aggregators like Vicious Syndicate and HSReplay.
No 100% rigged, you have on one side the accounts of the big whales (and big streamers) which are advantaged and on the other the f2p accounts which are at a disadvantage and the mixture of the 2 gives a semblance of non-rigging (you also have many players who play without software).
So like 5% of all players, roughly. On the high side.
The other 95%.
20 of them just queued. Let’s match them up.
Paid vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
Free vs free
You aren’t losing to paid players, you’re losing to other free to play players. There are not enough paid players in existence for your theory to work.
You are conflating me calling your ideas stupid with me defending the game. Earlier in this very thread I accused Hearthstone of using psychological manipulation that borders on hypnotism, and I said that Ranked is probably dying. I am not a “Blizzard defender.”
What’s actually going on here is: the only way for you to cope is to imagine that the people who disagree with you are part of some grand conspiracy. Pathetic.
We don’t write to feedback here [Scr0tieMcB] is totally right about that. the developers they don’t give af about the forums.
But We try to create publicity by complaining about the problems of the game so developers can atleast get aware of the player dissatisfaction by amount of complaining voices.