How to kill a beloved game!

Community Discussion
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First of all, what is going on with Hearstone.

The game i loved is turning into an unlikable game. Everything seems to be affected…

Years and years ago, there was no such things as card bans or patching cards. Now it’s like every 2 weeks. Meta don’t last long and the creativity behind the expansions and mini sets is just lackluster.

Back in the day, Blizzard would create powerful decks but also powerful counter cards to counter those decks. It seems like that ideology has disappeared and has made some decks simply insane. What i am noticing now thats even worse and i believe to be the most infuriating mecanic in all of the game is ‘’ DISCOVER’'. At first, discovery was used as a Hail Mary to perhaps live another turn ot turn the tables in some small sense. If you were super lucky, you could perhaps turn the game around, and if you had a 4 leaf clover…well, you could go as far as winning the game in certain circumstances.

But then later on, Blizzard introduced mechanics like Zephyrus the Great. A hidden mechanic in which the game would scan what you had versus what your opponent had to turn the tides. That was 1 single card capable of this. What i am seeing now versus when that card came out…is that a lot of Discover card use that same mechanics. Ive had games where the person always discovers the best card to counter my board and deck. This of course, started gradualy…with certain sneak cards and then built up to what it is today. For players to reach legend every month, a lot of us have noticed how often it happens and it’s not luck anymore, it’s built in.

Ive had games where i had a super well layed out complex board to counter many plays the class cards could permit. To find myself losing because the person got 1 , 2 ,3 + perfect discover cards to destroy my board, and even as far as destroying cards in my hand or deck. This is insane, the goal to a card game is to measure 2 people’s skills and decks to show who’s best. But whenever a mechanic like the new mage quest summons full boards with giant minion turn 7 and slam 2 fire ball in your face and clear your board… that’s not skill thats just horrible game design. The game is based on small, medium, big, and huge turn arounds…but when it discovers proc destroy’s your board perfectly using cards that counter your deathrattles, removes cards from your hand, summons a full board of its own, cast spells to your face. IT’s not RNG anymore, the game is picking spells specificaly based what’s left on board, in hand ,etc…

Even the demons that jaraxus gives from the portal can, most of the time…counter boards. I play hearstone to have fun and enjoy myself. Not waste 30 minutes per game, to have someone pull discover cards or random RNG mechanics that always give the perfect counter card to the person. Thats what deck building skills is for… I have nothing against some RNG to stall 1 turn … to kill 1 monster on the board… to get an amazing card for next turn. But having your board fully cleared when you have 6/6 minions up to 10 /10 + and then having himself load his board with minions even better then yours and cast 2 fireball to face in the same turn… thats where the limit is drawn. The hearstone team design needs to go back to the drawing board.

In the last year hearstone has lost a lot of players and many popular streamers, if this keeps going down the same direction… you can be sure a lot more players will quit. I used to buy every expansion…but due to the low quality of the latest expansions. Ive been farming coins to buy packs and the mini sets. The expansions are definitely not worth my money. Im at the point that i don’t even care if I’m legend every month anymore. Because it doesn’t mean anything.

Very disapointed, but i have hopes that it will change. Please , remove the zephyr discover mecanics on most RNG and discover mecanics pls! This is why you removed YOGG remember?!

5 Likes
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Unfortunately, you’ve hit on some issues that will lead to the demise of at least some game modes. You just don’t understand the purpose of the randomized controlled game (RNG), which Hearthstone is increasingly based on. In a normal card game, RNG makes events unpredictable, like poker, if the deck isn’t rigged, but the game of poker is well-balanced and each player has the same chance of winning as the other, mathematically speaking. In a game like Hearthstone, which is extremely unbalanced, RNG has been exploited by Blizzard not as a way to entertain people, but as a control system. Imagine a random event that isn’t actually random. It would allow you to control every aspect of the game, including who wins and who loses, simply by controlling the random events. For example, on YouTube, I can tell you 8 times out of 10, after the first 2-3 games, who will win (if both players are good at playing). This is because RNG is controlled and established before the start of each game. As mentioned, it also helps balance Hearthstone, which otherwise wouldn’t work at all. We tried creating a “paper” Hearthstone with homemade cards, but the result: nothing works, it becomes incredibly unbalanced and doesn’t work unless it’s controlled by random results, which aren’t actually random. Try it if you don’t believe me.

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I know it doesnt work , i played hearstone vanila… decks were build on best ramp cards rather than fun cards. Thats why if you play the old HS, you have the same decks. But you’re confusing something… it’s one thing that HS feeds you a 2 cost card when you draw when you have 2 mana and its another that you have a full board and you played flawlessly and some random card wipes your board, fills the board of your opponent when he had ZERO monsters and hits you in face for 12 damage because he just wipped your monsters and theres only face left to hit.

You’re confused between playability and every freaking Discover cards or RNG card becoming a zephyr. That’s why they removed yogg … if you didn’t know this then im teaching this to you. Also you’re confused between the responsibility of having good game creators with creating lazy mechanics that compensate for the lack of creativity or understanding of game mechanics. That’s like adding auto aim in 3d shooters to compensate for players having skills to aim saying it’s not fun because some people are not as good. Hearstone didin’t have 15 patches in 1 expansions 2 years ago … you implying that the game designers are not to blame and those mechanics are to prevent somethings thats not fixable in other way’s… thats total nonsense. And it’s nonsense because i can see the same mentality in world of warcraft and every other game they make. Proove me wrong!

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World of Warcraft has had constant mini patches since the start of the game in 2004, some of those patches completely changed up some classes and I love it. (waiting each patch for shaman and warrior changes for the first 10 years of the game was fun IMO). That’s not a good example to use nor is it on the same level of Hearthstone for the same usage. Hearthstone only got worse with the addition of mini sets and moving to three expansions a year.

You say two years ago, but its been more like 4+ years of this nonsense. The Starcraft miniset being the worse offender.

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i was referring to SOD when talking about WOW and retail. All the top players ans streamers agree with me so…

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Because this person (in most cases; I understand that people can be just lucky sometimes) knew what cards he or she could discover and took into account many situations and weighed the chances and found the best solution. And it definitely requires skills. Higher skills than just looking at what your decktracker shows and deciding what you should play right now and what you should save for next turns.

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Not gonna lie this sounds ignorant. I’ve played a ton of this game and I cannot testify to the fact that Discover is always pulling perfect cards for you. It does seem evident to me that RNG being in your favor or not in general does seem to be decided at the beginning of the match. The pattern that I have noticed is that on any given match, you’re typically going to be gifted by RNG the whole match, or it’s going to be against you the whole match. THAT BEING SAID, I have also noticed the weaknesses in my own deck during the matches that RNG is not favoring me at which point I will tweak my deck, and those situations happen a lot less to counter the possible weaknesses of bad RNG. This wouldn’t really work if you’re running around with a deck with tons of Discover cards and randomize stuff. But honestly, this is kind of the way that blizzard balances RNG by making it clear that if you’re willing to put a lot of RNG in your deck, you’re definitely going to be playing more of a coin flip match every game and it’s your decision if you wanna put up with that or not. Most all powerful and consistent decks have very little RNG included in them. However, the actual upside to RNG being in the game is that basically discover cards will be balanced to help you win about 50% of the time, so you can either choose consistency or a fun roller coaster type deck. Completely removing Discover cards would remove more fun from the game. Not to mention one of the best benefits of playing a mobile game is being able to use factors like Discover that would be essentially impossible IRL. You’d be removing the biggest benefit to playing this kind of game on a computer instead of real life also. It’s a gimmick, but a good one. Sounds more like you just have an unfortunate string of being faced against people on their good RNG games. Maybe if you don’t like it so much you should just put some more RNG in your own decks so you can have some fun too, or what the game is basically trying to tell you is that your deck has a particular weakness that you need to fix…. Ultimately whether you like it or not, you’re just going to lose sometimes no matter how good you are, or your deck. I don’t care what blizzard says. There is definitely an algorithm in place to put you against somebody that you’re more likely going to lose against if you’re on a strong win streak, even if it’s at the hand of multiple cases of the opponent having great RNG. Blizzards algorithms will control your win rate one way or another artificially to some degree. They basically could never admit that because I’m pretty sure that’s like basically illegal, but I’m pretty sure they’re not the only card game doing that either. They do it to give the game, an artificial sense of health because otherwise people could go on terrifically disastrous unhealthy, losing streaks, completely unmitigated, technically speaking if it were true random. And the same for winning. The best for blizzards pocketbook is to make sure everyone gets as close to a even win loss ratio as possible so I don’t care what they say. The “matching you against the player of your skill level” excuse is there a way of wording what I just said… what it should say is “matching you against the player that will either likely stop your win streak or lose streak.”. That being said, I don’t necessarily think that that is unhealthy for the game, but that’s just what’s happening. With that in mind, the means of how you win or lose are interchangeable and will happen regardless (with little fluctuation based on your deck building skill, and playing skill, but ultimately you’re fighting an algorithm whether you like it or not), but If you don’t like the mechanics here, then just play a different card game. But I’ll warn you pretty much every electronic card game has this in practice on some level under the name “competitive balancing”. You just have to get used to losing.