I wanted to comment on some parts of Nathan’s post from a few days ago, and here is a link to the post for those who want to read it, entirely:
First, it’s about time that dev leadership did more to putout forth a face and a dialogue with the player base.
“We are doing meaningful research and development for the future of Hearthstone to ensure that the Tavern will be a home for you for another decade and beyond.”
I gave warnings during year one, based on starting design strategies, that HS would face serious problems by year 10, if changes were not made. I also predicted that if the changes were not made that HS shelf-life might limited to 15-20 years.
I think HS can be fixed, but it would take understanding how the game got in such a poor state and a lot of revision to do it, and since the devs have clearly never understood the big picture, it seems unlikely that they are capable of doing what needs to be done.
“We didn’t do a good job communicating our strategy around those changes. I apologize for that. Going forward, it is my goal to be more open. We should proactively share changes we are making with our community, alongside context around why we’re making these changes. I will start addressing that now.”
Official communication has been so horrible for so long that it’s just another reason why I don’t trust the company or have much confidence in the devs. A lot of crap gets promised without those promises being kept, but this post does give me hope that the devs will understand the games has issues, and that they are more likely to engage with players in order to make improvements. One can only hope.
“Our strategy for Hearthstone is based around three words: Fun, Focus, and Fearless.”
This ^ sounds like “lip-service,” because constructed and Arena continually get worse as the game gets more random and more heavily monetized. To be frank, HS is in this state because the main focus during the last few years has been on monetization and not on how to make game better or more fun to play. I would love to see a renewed emphasis on fun, which for me, would be to improve balance, interactive gameplay, and player agency.
“Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena are the modes that our community plays the most, and where you see us making the largest updates—like you saw with Battlegrounds Duos earlier this year. Focusing on these modes allows us to make more meaningful improvements to areas that impact the vast majority of our community.”
The game has problems, and I agree that its foundation of constructed and Arena needs to be fixed and improved, and I don’t think HS has much chance of earning good profits again until the game becomes a lot better to play.
“We want to be fearless in the pursuit of discovering more fun experiences and strive to move beyond the status quo to do so.”
Why do I get from this ^ that devs are just going to do what they want as they continue to march to the best of their own drums. I guess I have become very pessimistic about the ability the devs to make players happier or or actually improve the game.
“Over the last eight months, the Arena community has been energized by some small-yet-impactful design changes. Early access to expansion cards, new draft rules, and curated card pools have had a profound impact on the game mode. This has worked out great – the popularity of Arena has shot way up, and so we want to do more. We are now working on a substantial and very cool update for Arena, and we are aiming to release it at the beginning of next year.”
Ya, many of us flocked to Arena for two main reasons:
1). To check out the changes and the new meta only to find out that Arena provides a worse playing experience than it did before the changes. Don’t get me wrong, I like aspects of Legend-synergy buckets and the ability to draft better cards after a loss, but these improvements are completely undermined by poor gold economy, by a lot of really crappy buckets and bad cards in the format, and by a lot of broken cards that should not be in Arena. And then there is the problem of barcoders, which may be getting worse as regular players run out of gold, which is slowly turning Arena into the barcode mode.
I notice a giant drop off of friends who play Arena over the last week.
2). Constructed sucks, which just leaves BGs and Arena as the modes to explore in order to have fun.
“…our promise is that we will listen and react as quickly as possible.”
I call BS on this ^, because that’s not the way it has been, and I am very skeptical about anything that is not about monetization will be addressed quickly. As it’s said, “the proof is in the pudding.”
“…also doubling down and pushing further when we find something great.”
I sense something ominous in these ^ words.
