I posted the following thread in 2022:
And HS has only gotten worse since then. Despite many players touting the mini set as one of the best ones to come out in years, I have the opposite opinion, because it just continues to amp up the bad design trends of years past with:
1). More outrageous Powercreep
2). A plethora of badly balanced cards
3). Increased mana cheat for powerful cards.
4). Decreased player agency
5) Increased amounts of uninteractive gameplay
6). Spells on a stick. So many minions now have powerful effects built into them that they out-value the impact of many spells. Why play a spell when I can get even better results from playing a minion?
7). Class identities have becoming increasingly blurred.
8). Skill continues to become less and less of an important factor as luck, RNG, and broken cards or combos played first are all more likely to determine the outcome of a match.
I have watched the Blizzard devs repeatedly, slowly destroy what was good about their best games over and over again. I left Diablo, StarCraft, and WoW for these reasons, and HS will probably be next. A cultivated lack of faith in Blizzard has caused me to not even try Overwatch, Rumble, or the last couple of Diablo games. As a result, my current mindset is that I do not want to spend a single penny another Blizzard game, because I am weary of the constant disappointment. microsoft started spamming me with advertisements this week for their new game, Avowed, which I am not even sure if I a want to even bother with taking a look at the game —that’s how low my confidence in Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard is.
I gave early, good feedback on problems with Mercenaries and Duels, which was ignored, and both those modes are now gone.
I jumped into playing Standard today, and what a crappy mode it has become. Everyone that I personally know, who had played HS has left the game, and they show no signs of ever wanting to return to it.
I do not begrudge players who are still enjoying the game, but I wonder how many of these people will still be playing HS two years from now.
It’s becoming increasingly harder for me to hope that HS will improve any more, and I am down to playing a handful of games each day, since as the mini-set has had a terrible impact on Arena. It’s possible that I need to take a break from the game or should abandon it (and Blizzard) altogether—and I feel close to doing so.
I think there are a lot of great players that provide fantastic insight and feedback about HS, and I think they should be even more vocal about the direction of the game’s development, because I do not thinks the devs have what it takes to improve the game in light of the patterns that continually make the game worse. They need all the help they can get.
I currently believe HS is not worth spending money on, and I expect buyer’s remorse to become a huge problem for Hearthstone’s future over the next few years.
