So ill start off saying ive been playing Blizzard games for almost 20 years and have played Hearthstone since day 1. I have always loved Hearthstone as it felt like an alternative way to play cards while aligning with my passion for WoW. The feeling of the game back then was i could play any character but cards would be based around their unique abilities only to their class. I always felt like i could win playing any Class if i played my cards right. Fast forward to Whizbang and the feeling now that any Class can discover any classes ability making it not unique to them. You can be a mage with no minions in-hand but that can summon more minions then their opponent. Rogues that can have every classes Legendarys, steal your opponents this take mana from that. Whats happened? Instead of it being a fun game to sit down and play your friends, opponents while enjoying your time its turned into people conceding, hating their opponents and spamming the emotes and overall player anxiety. Is anything unique to classes anymore? Is the design meant to have 5min or less games instead of fun chess style matches? Classes have lost their uniqueness maybe mirroring changes in society? I have so many questions about the overall direction and intended market. Please can someone explain?
It’s pretty simple, blizzard wants to sell packs aka profit. Team 5 has beed tasked to print insane power cards that everybody wants to have ( buy packs untill you get them ). That strategy makes gameplay become a circus, classes lose their identity, players lose their agency and the whole thing becomes a clown fiesta … discovers,rng and full blown powercreeping … thats where we’re at, in my opinion.
Blizzard lost all the people that had passion for the game…All that is left is a full grown money grabbing shell of a company.
What the dude above said is true, what was left of the team now has been task to have a sole purpose, profit while keeping the overall appearance that the game is pointed to every audience even free to play players.
Since Broden left ( probably because he didn’t liked the vision Blizzard or whatever they were called then were heading) hearthstone succumbed to a biblical decaying, like it was rotten from the core and when Broden left it exploded into that mutant we all knew it had pottential to be…
Let’s put some examples were this statement stand.
Prices went up.
Introduction of rune stones.
Introduction of new modes who’s sole purpose are to cycle old cards that if you do not have you can buy for like some month’s until Blizzard deletes the mode and moves on with a new cyclic mode…
P2w battlegrounds were the sole purpose is make you invest money to get 2 more hero choices…
Removal of modes that were not doing well mostly because they were not bringing any kind of revenue.
Cards that you can pre-purchase and play before everyone else can because you paid. And yea right now that card was like sub-par but it’s a first.
Modifications to quests ( they did revert that because it was too obvious and everyone cried) with the only purpose to keep you more in game , why you would ask ? Blizzard knows that keeping people into their games, they more they stay the more they are incentives to buy something from the shop…It’s the mentality of, they just don’t know what they want until they see it, so keep them as long as you can in the game so that they buy something.
The fact that the matchmaking is rigged behind a hidden mmr of some kind, the power creep whose purpose is just to show you how other decks do better so that you buy the cards to make that deck, until they hit you with another deck that beats you and yea the cycle repeats, the lack of transparency and so on…
Hope this answers your question of the overall direction and intended market…To put it bluntly the overall direction is people to spend more considering the fact that the overall state of the game becomes worse…Everyone that pays money to buy packs or anything from the shop is just keeping alive a team of people handling a game that currently is in a coma and struggles to live.
Matchmaking is my biggest complaint. When your in Diamond you should never be matching against people in Legendary. It might make sense for Legendary ranks that are bad and lose to face lower opponents but what about the player in Diamond trying to climb and facing Legendary players every-time they get close to Diamond 1. Dumb design imo
The matching is the least of the problems. There’s a hidden rating, points based, similar with BG rating that isnt shown and the matching works with that. The star system is just a reward.
If you want some more detail, the hidden MMR has priority over rank (i.e. Legend / Diamond etc. ) … which means that if 2 players have similar / close MMR (priority 1) and the rank difference is 1 rank ( i.e. L - D / D - G ), it will select those 2 players to match.
Another story is the auto balancing of win rates which is a fairly long post and it’s much more complicated and the reason why so many people are upset ( some of them dont even know it ) 
Please do explain, I welcome intellectual responses. Thanks for taking the time!
We did explain…
If you want to remove that stressful feeling while playing just start the morning by conceding 5-6 games, then play 3 games try to have fun, then repeat.
one of the really fun things of an electronic game is the ability to have a “discover” mechanic. you don’t need the physical card on hand to play it in the game. at its base, that is interesting to me.
HOWEVER, there is a tremendous difference between discovering something useful in your deck when you need it, versus discovering something that discovers something that discovers something that discovers something that wins the game.
the game started out as a contest on the board. minions fought minions. sure, you had removal cards and board clears, etc.
you also had to manage mana. it was an actual resource constraint in the game.
today, there are mage decks that with as little as 6 mana can fill their board with a mana reducing minion, allowing them to complete their quest, draw their entire deck, take the extra turn, then otk you in at least two ways.
and the reno hero card is the worst designed card they ever made.
I have played since the second month out. there was a time I spent pretty serious money to get cards. the RNGFESTLOLYOULOSE version of this game makes it feel bad.
today, I am a F2P wild player. when you can’t reliably acquire the impactful cards even when you buy bundles, and if you are missing key cards, you just aren’t competitive, it makes no sense to me to spend money on the game. in wild, the number of truly new impactful cards is less than standard, so I can sort of keep up.
now, the huge irony in all I wrote is that I have hit legend twice this year not really trying. i had previously hit legend three times over the years. I did it once with the DK plague deck and once with hyper aggro decks (both shadow priest and pirate rogue). I am in the diamond 5+ range right now.
i really would like a game that feels like a competition against an opponent. those games are few and far between nowadays.
I used to love this game, but I lost all enthusiasm with all the different card packs they keep pushing out. It feels like a huge cash grab nowadays.
I wish we could see Rank in Ranked mode, I guess it would be New Technology required and difficult to implement but I feel like they can achieve it
Im sure they can but don’t for some reason. Does anyone know why it’s set up that way?
The devs are employing psychology and math to get people to spend more money.
That’s literally it. In one single sentence. Math + Science = $$
If you want a more in-depth explanation, read what everyone else said in this entire thread. Bottom line, they want your money and are surprisingly adept at getting you to give it to them.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, Cuddles was being sardonic because they literally USED to have ranks displayed, thousands of years ago when Jesus was in diapers and I was playing this game back in vanilla. Why’d it change? See above.