Let's talk about quest hunter

[autosquelch-11655]

@Selwynn-1560

The one that nets the most engagement and cash, obviously.

I disagree. They both matter. One person’s experience is no more important than another’s.

@Selwynn-1560

But how do you explain people who play perennially bad decks in excess? Something about their experiences, how they feel when they play the deck, keeps them playing. If they wanted only winning, then they would play something else.

I’m with you here, although I’m not sure I’d use the term “bad decks”. But people like different decks for different reasons. I also play what I find fun, even if it’s not a top tier deck.

@Selwynn-1560

This idea that blizzard doesn’t know what they are doing is the problem

I’m not saying that they don’t know what they are doing. I’m saying that, in my opinion, some of their balancing decisions have been misguided.

@Selwynn-1560

The assumption that the winrates you see are all the information that blizzard uses is false.

I never made this claim. I said that win rates is what they ought to use as the primary driver of card/deck balance decisions.

@Selwynn-1560

“feels bad” is incredibly relevant to balance decisions

And I think it ought to be less relevant.

I’ll reiterate my case for the original Quest Rogue. The strength of the deck was that it could complete it’s quest and create a sustained dominant position in the mid game long before slow control decks could get going. The weakness, of course, was that hyper aggro decks would destroy it so quickly that it never got a chance to do it’s thing. Now that’s not to say that a control deck could never beat QR; it just was a very unfavored matchup. And aggro decks didn’t always beat QR; it was just a very favorable matchup. With an overall win rate of about 50%, the deck would seem to be ok… overall. So any nerf implemented was entirely based on “feels bad man” with zero consideration given to the many players who loved the deck.

The best overall solution would have been to make the deck weaker against control AND more resilient to aggro, ideally maintaining that 50% win rate. Nerfing the post-quest stats from 5/5 to 4/4 (or even 4/3) might have been a better approach. This would allow control decks to withstand the damage (reduced by 20%) AND have a better chance to remove the lower health minions. And on the other side, maybe give some armor/heal component to some of the core cards of the deck to improve it’s resilience to aggro.

Instead they simply bumped the bounce requirement from 4 to 5. This slowed quest completion by roughly 1-2 turns. This made the deck only a tiny bit weaker against control, since QR could still get there against the slowest decks. But the deck became much, much weaker against aggro, because now any aggro deck (even a slower one) could easily burn the Rogue down with those two extra turns. This is what effectively destroyed the deck.

So their decision to make a balancing adjustment entirely based on “feels” resulted in a completely misguided change that just destroyed a deck (that many, many players loved) rather than coming up with a solution to make it better overall. That’s why win rate ought to be the primary driver of these changes.