Great, let’s do it—let’s make Hearthstone better—let’s fix the game by:
Well, let me first interrupt what I was about say by pointing out something that only impacts part of the player base—let’s improve the mobile play experience!
Prior to everything falling apart between Blizzard and NetEase (China) there was a common belief that Hearthstone was preparing to capture and to cater to as much of the Chinese mobile player market as they could as an easy way to generate more profit.
But Hearthstone’s plan to expand its mobile player-base was haphazard at best, since the devs were not not really doing any serious work to improve how the game played on mobile devices. Hearthstone mobile players have been plagued for years with slow rollouts of patches, bugged patches, and subpar game performance issues. For years now, mobile players have been forced to constantly close and reload the game to work around numerous bugs and problems, which interfere with just trying to reliably playing the game without wasting time.
And then there’s the turn-time, which is wasted as mobile players wait for animations and actions to resolve, which severely reduces what can be accomplished in a turn as compared to the much greater number of actions that can be performed per turn on a computer. This is a nuisance in all modes, but it’s especially a big handicap for battlegrounds.
Solutions to mobile problems could easily be accomplished, and the fact that years have gone by without adequately addressing these issues just smacks of laziness or incompetence.
OK, so what are the other big problems that need addressing to make Hearthstone more enjoyable to play again? Well, all constructed modes suffer issues that make these modes much less fun than they used to be, and here is a summary of the key factors that are hurting constructed modes:
1). Poor Balance
Poor balance exists when there is little or no counter play available against an opponent’s cards or deck strategy. Poor balance is also demonstrated by metas that revolve around who gets to draw and play their broken cards or combos first without allowing for very much interactive play or counter play.
Remember when the devs promised they would keep Wild balanced? How good of a job have they done that? Maybe it’s time to make some changes to Wild with a gigantic (and long overdue) balancing patch. Wouldn’t it be fun to explore a completely updated and improved Wild mode?
Unfortunately, even Standard needs significant improvement these days when it comes to balancing. The fact that Standard is in constant need of balancing is proof that the devs have done a poor job designing cards and sets during recent years.
2). Power-creep: Power-creep often happens
accidentally via poor card design (such as it was with Piloted Shredder) or it can happen intentionally, with the purpose of driving pack sales, such was done with Dr. Boom or recently with done with Astalor. A telling clue for when power-creep occurs because it’s intentional is when a Legendary card is way too impactful for it’s mana cost, and the devs refuse to nerf the card to bring it in alignment with the game’s current “power curve.”
Often the cards that are intentionally power-creeped to drives sales are difficult to obtain cards Legendary or Epic cards, which means they take the resources of many packs to obtain or to create, and due to the overpowered nature of these cards they become an “auto-include” in every deck if they are a neutral card or nearly an auto-include for a particular class, if it’s a class card.
While the intentional power-creep of cards may increase short term sales, they are bad for player enjoyment and the longevity of the game—such cards also create negative design constraints on futures cards.
3). Overdeveloped Archetypes are a problem, because they take away the fun of exploring new card pools and the whole deck building process even before the new cards are released.
When Archetypes are overdeveloped, overturned, and they represent a large number of the 30 cards that will go into a deck, it leaves very little room for player creativity and innovation for designing competitive decks. Players simple place the archetype’s designed package of cards into a deck for a class and then they plug the remaining card slots (and mana curve) with the best (most powerful or synergistic) cards that remain from the rest of the card pool, which allows for very little variation between decks of a particular archetype. This causes the meta to quickly feel stale and boring to play, since so many players are running nearly the same deck for a particular class and archetype.
4). Non-interactive gameplay: This goes back to problem #1 of poor balance, but it also relates to problem # 3 of badly designed archetypes, and both these problems contribute to decks that lack an interactive gameplay as they just go about setting up their win conditions while hoping to draw and play their broken cards or combos first. These are the kind of bad design elements, which make CCGs like Hearthstone no longer fun to play.
5). RNG: There is way too much RNG in Hearthstone. Are we building a strategy game or a slot machine? Not only is RNG too abundant, so much RNG is overly-powerful. In past, we have even had broken cards that can add copies of themselves to a players’ hand, while performing other effects on the game state—again more examples of bad design.
6). Miscellaneous: Other bad design issues, like hand disruption effects can be too impactful, and they can rob the game of fun.
The next mini set is about introduce a new way to win—what are chances that this new win condition is badly thought out and designed? Will there be counter play available to negate this new win condition? I hope this new win condition has been well-tested, and that it’s not another example of “ throwing mud at the wall to see if it sticks” or breaks the game.
I have not gone to the trouble of writing the above to just complain about Hearthstone, but rather I am trying to point the devs to areas where they can make improvements so that
Hearthstone can become the “best digital card game in the world.” 