As I’ve said, I’m going to be stopping by these forums a lot less due to concerns I have over completely inappropriate forum moderation.
That said, I realize this tends to be an isolated bubble where there are many fiercely loyal (to Blizzard) members who jump at every opportunity to report dissenting opinions, and somehow moderators back these extreme people and censure information.
There’s a number of consistent long time posters who’s opinion I value and actually enjoy reading, and you likely know who you are based on my constant upvotes.
So to be clear, this post is about the game, and is merely a cross link with the most popular and upvoted Reddit post, link below.
One thing I wanted to point out to interested readers, which I was oblivious to, was the state the game is in is actually not an accident. The devs, in their most recent interview say that they actually encourage turn over turn churn, because they want a puzzle like experience each turn. That is mind blowing to me, because that seems like a complete 180 from the direction they claimed they wanted to establish earlier, which was to tone down the massive swing turns.
At this point, I have no idea what’s going on in their dev circle, but it seems what the game is right now, is by design.
Considering I just got back from a two month forced vacation, it feels to me like it’s exactly the opposite of what you’re saying.
Not that I even consider myself to be loyal to Blizzard. I actually think that I have a lower opinion of the game than most people here. I just don’t believe in rigging so people associate that with “defending Blizzard.”
For the record, raw randomness is WORSE than rigging.
These days I often dont even complete the weekly quests. Game annoys me more and more. 2-3 games per day is max I can tolerate during breakfast.
In past that was enough to get weekly quests done but its not enough now. As I dont play HS on weekends.
If this continues it will end like my wow after 9 years I ask myself why am I even playing this and was not able to answer. So we shall see how long I can answer that question.
You just happen to glance over threads about rigging, hating the design, hating the gameplay, and most anti-Blizzard threads being constantly deleted, and your feeling tells you it’s actually the other way around?
Yes, feels. Because it’s a very tricky thing to know which opinions have been removed. This is because you can’t see them.
But I should have qualified that I meant civil opinions being removed. If we remove the “civil” qualifier, I am very confident that the majority of posts that are removed are anti-Blizzard posts. That’s because many of those posts contain crude language, spam and/or real life threats.
Gaming is a facsimile of real life; children naturally play to train themselves for adulthood even if they don’t know that’s what they’re doing; adults continue toying sometimes because it sharpens their skills.
WoW is relatively good training for adults on team building and maintenance; it’s the first time that many young adults were part of a tight team; it gets thin after a point or the tensions aren’t worth it.
Hearthstone is good training for logical thinking; it avoids the massive waste of time of team maintenance if you don’t require that; but you could also find what hs has in other aspects of life.
Mainly because it’s for those without much teaming in their out of game lives (I don’t like the phrase “real life” (even when you game you’re in your real life)).
I doubt WoW was ever interesting to those with very rich team building in their lives already since they do it with much more depth there.
Since the highest level experience of WoW requires being part of teams that it’s a waste of time for a lot of people who don’t need that.
I’ve seen pretty polarized opinions - from classically frustrated and unhappy posters claiming this is the worst expansion ever to the ones claiming it’s the best one ever
I don’t know about the numbers, but the game feels pretty well to me
Social media is not a representative sample. It’s well known in statistics that polling is not accurate if the respondents are self-selected; that is, the results are nonsense if they volunteer themselves.
Knowing public opinion is hard. Everyone wants to just believe that they are part of the majority, that other people think the way that they do. Most of the time, they are wrong. (Even with something that seems like only two choices, like favoring a presidential candidate, it’ll be something like 27% vote for one, 26% vote for the other and 47% vote third party or don’t vote at all.)
It’s a question that costs too much effort to answer for what the answer is worth. So it won’t be answered.
And if I ever do opine on this subject, please remember that I’m guessing. It’s like a fun bet, just speculation, and it’s just for fun.
I think the problem is they hired a bunch of inexpensive “artistic types” for their card design team. The balance team is constantly behind the curve fixing the mess they produce because of their rigid adherence to their flawed patch cycle.
It’s always “well the next expansion/ mini set is in a couple weeks anyway, we’ll hold off fixing anything until then”.
Then a bunch of low effort power creep unfun cards get dropped. Then the cycle repeats.
No idea. i don’t let other peoples’ opinions on a thing determine my enjoyment of a thing so if people wanna enjoy or not enjoy something that’s on them.
The theory “the Devs are stupid” is flawed or at least if there are mistakes involved it’s way deeper than that level; these are some of the most qualified people in the industry; they definitely don’t have an inability to balance cards if they wanted to (the limited collection of Standard at least) and they definitely aren’t worse at doing it than the average forum user.
I think what most often happens that gives gamers the impression they do balancing mistakes is that they often ON PURPOSE kept some cards imbalanced; e.g. badlands’ Reno was brutally obvious that is OP; I don’t believe it when they reported in a recent notes “now we realize it’s OP” (it was pretty obvious at the card’s launch without much effort).
And they most probably do it because they believe “exciting is good”; that’s where the mistake is; imbalance can be worse so any short-term excitement can make people annoyed in the long-term to the point of eventually quitting so the right course of action is “make more interesting cards usable but at the same time balance the total”.