Hearthstone feels awful to come back to

Multiplayer Discussion
1

I’m someone that played the beta for this game when they killed the WoW TCG in favor of a digital card game. I played for YEARS under the original design team, and saw the changes and the growth over time. A design that favored powerful combos and planning to one that favored proper navigation and usage of cards with more RNG that you can’t play around, to the mess we have now.

Everytime I come back I feel less and less invested in this game. And it’s not the monetization issues, the card access, or anything. In fact I love the trial decks, the mini packs, and all of that.

It’s the gameplay. It’s absolutely abhorrent and just feels bad all of the time. Top down this game feels like it is in the worst state that it has ever been in. My experience so far has been:

Play a deck into an unwinnable matchup from the start that I cannot possibly deal with because they drew their 1 of legendary that is a 80% winrate when drawn.

Play against 3 bots that are farming this game for who knows what reason.

Play against another unwinnable RNG matchup.

Play more bots.

It’s boring, unfun, and feels extremely bad. I don’t want to sit here and lose to Odyn because my opponent coined it out on turn 7. Especially not when they had to deal over 100 damage to me during that game. What exactly is the counter there? I did the ONE thing I could possibly do against on curve Odyn and I had zero chance to win.

RNG dragon druid that hits their highlander legendary twice because of another RNG random hit simply because they had both in their opening hand.

Looking through the game stats and seeing 70%+ winrates if you have a certain card in hand just feels awful. It tells you as a player that nothing you do in that game will matter if your opponent randomly gets a good opener. And it tells you that if you don’t get that opener your game will be a struggle.

And this isn’t really about the balance honestly. Balance is always going to be something that means something different to everyone. But it is about something subjective, and that subjectivity is fun. And Hearthstone just isn’t fun to play anymore. And it’s being reflected in the content creation space too. I used to watch a LOT of content creators just play the game, now I watch content creators make content about the older versions of the game and talk to the people I used to watch that retired from this game, and listen to them talk about how little fun it is now.

6 Likes
2

Sounds like skill issue, honestly

3 Likes
3

Welcome back to Hearthstone where coming to the forums is more toxic than actually playing the game. LOL

Normal mode is a joke to play and actually now that I think about it all the modes are a joke.

4

Have you played the OP? How would you know?

5

These are fair points, but your experience is not unique. Whether you are coming back or played the entire time, I think it’s the same terrible gameplay experience you are shoehorned into.

6

weve been having fun with whizbang random deck since the expansion release

and here come sOP to tell us we arent supposed to

7

I wasn’t aware that not enjoying the gameplay is a “skill” issue. Weird that the subjective enjoyment of gameplay is now about “skill”. It can’t be that I won a ton of games playing warrior too, and still feel bad about the gameplay even when I win.

Sure, these points could be made by someone that never left. But I imagine that bringing back lost players and retaining the current players to grow the population size of this game would be a an add to my particular feedback.

8

this is kind of a side comment but I heard you were part of the old time wowtcg community so it would be cool if you were ever able to check out this thread if you got the time Anyone involved with WoWTCG/youtube way back in the day?

with regards to the state of the game now, one thing I would mention is that powerful combos are certainly sill a part of the game now, although now they have too much of an impact probably and all too often seem to break the fundamentals of the game, there certainly feels like there’s less planning/navigation now also