I agree! But the thing is: you don’t lose that because one deck is 20% of the meta. You lose that when nine decks are 90% of the meta. Your disproportionate focus on the most popular deck of the moment reveals that your concern for diversity is disingenuous.
The only thing that is disingenuous is your entire position on this topic.
You picked a side because you like to argue and have clung to it like “rigged” crowd clings to their narrative.
Dean could join in this thread, show the internal metrics that prove you wrong, and you would argue with him that he doesn’t understand the problem because the whole point is for you to feel smart.
You can throw your pedantry elsewhere, though. I’m done with it.
1 Like
That’d be the day.
There’s no proof that the metrics you’re imagining exist.
I think it’s very likely that this would be how my likely reaction would be perceived, especially by you but kinda generally as well. At one point I went to the VS Discord to get clarification on how they do things, because it seemed wrong to me. Ridiculous Hat had answers, answers the ultimately were quite satisfactory, but I had many questions about them to clarify. This was generally interpreted by the Discord audience as arguing with him, and I could clearly see how it could test his patience.
But ultimately, I was satisfied, and changed my mind. I would suspect that, in your hypothetical situation where Dean has the evidence to refute me, whether or not I would change my mind would be a function of Dean’s patience and eloquence. I’m stubborn, but not to a point that cannot be overcome with evidence.
I try diligently to be stubborn to the point that cannot be overcome without evidence.
One point is for me to feel smart, I guess. But it’s not the whole point. Another point is not to lie to myself. Feeling smart is hollow to me if I am feeling smart believing something I know to be false. Because I’m not trying to just feel it; I’m trying to be it.
First, it’s not exactly pedantry. Nerf policy isn’t exactly a minor topic, at least in the context of these forums. Second, aww, you’re no fun (as usual).
Because he plays it better. Skill is still a factor in this game, and more specifically, skill and experience with a particular deck can absolutely allow a player to beat the overall win rate of the playerbase at large. And if you can do that, you can climb. I used to love the old quest warlock where you discarded cards to get the pod that summons imps and also used Priestess Jellykek. It was not a high tier deck. But I played it a lot and got really good at it and was able to win at a higher rate than the overall win rate from HSReplay. I’m a very mediocre player, but I was better than most with that particular deck, because I played it a lot and experience helped me make better decisions.
Wait… whaaaaaaaaaaaa??? I really thought you were Mage only.
I think his point (or part of it anyway) is that “feels” shouldn’t drive nerfs unless there is also a corresponding excessive win rate. I agree. And that’s certainly not the case with Quest Hunter, nor was it the case with Quest Mage. I don’t think people are leaving the game in droves because there are a lot of people playing Quest Hunter.
1 Like
The thing is that nothing is quantified. Do some players stop playing because they don’t like playing against a popular deck? Yes. Would some players stop playing because their deck was nerfed? Also yes. But there’s no hard numbers, and a completely baseless assumption that the first group is larger than the second, even though we can reasonably assume that the more popular the nerfed deck, the more people turned off by its nerf.
In short, we have access to empirical evidence for approval ratings for decks, as expressed by the degree people play as them (particularly when the deck doesn’t have a high winrate). We’re in the dark as far as disapproval rating, and burden of proof is on the affirmative. But the people who disapprove always assume that it’s high because they assume most people are like them.
True.
But I will speculate that it’s far less that what some posters are trying to imply. I hated playing against Freeze/Exodia Mage. I didn’t quit. There’s my sample size of one for you. Lol. On this side of it though, I’m struggling to recall anyone actually quitting the game because they felt bad about a deck. I know the forum population is a small subset of the player base, but I’d like to see at least few proven cases where a player actually quit the game because they felt bad about a deck. For all we know, the answer to your question could actually be no.
Similarly, I’d speculate that it’s probably far less than what some might suggest. I loved OG Quest Rogue. I hated that nerf. It was horribly misguided and really pissed me off. I even unsubscribed from Kibler over all his ridiculous whining about it. But I never quit the game. I found another deck to play.
I think that’s a radically naive and stupid.
I have said why and won’t rehash here.
The experience of the game is the only thing that matters.
I disagree. Your experience and my experience are not necessarily the same. Which one matters more? And furthermore, our experience is completely subjective. Win rate is completely objective.
Never said they were.
The one that nets the most engagement and cash, obviously.
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 play a deck in casual that is really fun for me to play but I know it infuriates my opponents. It’s not a viable deck on the ladder because it is ground to dust in the standard ladder meta.
This idea that blizzard doesn’t know what they are doing is the problem. The assumption that the winrates you see are all the information that blizzard uses is false. Winning is one piece of what a deck feels like, but the overall experience of playing the game, the part that makes you want to do it more, is the only thing that is important.
So “feels bad” is incredibly relevant to balance decisions.
Btw thinking about it, there were quite huge shifts over time.
Currently - Druid, Hunter, Shaman (and I see some of the other classes)
Previously - Rogue, Paladin, Druid
Previous expansion - Mage, Warlock, Warrior
I think only classes that were not Meta (i.e. among most played decks) are priest and DH. So there were quite a big changes within past 6 months and previously Priest being quite decent during Barens and DH having as well some time with the deathrattle.
So yeah, I would say meta there were ton of changes. Did every class have T1 deck? Probably not, Priest havent have T1 deck since I joined HS and Rogue did not have any T1 deck except of aggro, which I dont play. So for me, no T1 Rogue deck.
Hunter has not been less than tier 2 in years. check for yourself.
It’s always good.
So you agree with Right then?
Or is it that touting the supremacy of individual experience is the desperate cope of someone with no argument who refuses to accept that they don’t have an argument?
It’s not necessarily false. It’s unproven. But this idea that Blizzard uses metrics of when people log out of Hearthstone, etc, to make balance decisions is also unproven. Blizzard devs have even directly said they made certain recent balance decisions (nerfing Pirate Warrior and Quest Mage) for subjective reasons that aren’t driven by data, so it would seem to me that would have been a good time to employ these engagement statistics you imagine — but that’s just me.
You desperately need a statistics class.
The 50% win rate is an average of all the players playing it over that time period. There’s obviously quite a lot of variance, cause it’s a card game with random draw and matchups, so individual’s winrates with the decks will vary from that 50% average substantially, even absent the effects of piloting.
Just Google normal distribution, plz.
Its just little thought from Blizzard its just Raza Priest recycled and easier to pull off…
quest hunter doesnt have ignite lol the only reason quest mage had to be nerfed was because of ignite they kind of shot themselves in the foot on that one.
Quest hunter started out pretty bad and honestly would have stayed bad blizz is giving it insane support for some reason and I don’t know why.
lol, you’re in a twist.
You know that right is arguing that the game is rigged because he says it is and I am not.
But that’s the point of pedantry, isn’t it? To know the answer but point out something else just to feel smarter?
Sure, they would never track player engagement metrics because they have no interest in maximizing engagement with their product.
Things like
- DAU (Daily Active Users) - how many distinct users play in a single day?
- MAU (Monthly Active Users) - how many distinct users play at least once over a month?
- Stickiness (DAU ÷ MAU) - what fraction of your players are coming back daily?
- Churn - what fraction of players who were active last month don’t return this month?
- Duration (1 ÷ Churn) - how long does the average player keep playing the game?
would never be interesting to video game companies because it is too expensive and time consuming to parse the data and analyze it with all the giant computers that video game companies already have. Never.
I also have a bridge to sell you, but you need to hurry.
1 Like
Oh, I think it’s extremely likely they have metrics like those. But those metrics aren’t tied to any individual deck archetype. In no instance are any of those metrics ever a justification for nerf, because while they might indicate a problem, they give no indication as to where the problem is.
Unless you think flailing around blindly is a valid strategy for fixing problems. If you’re desperate enough, perhaps.
You’re arguing for different positions using the exact same rhetorical technique. An invalid technique.
“Kills on turn 7 normally” is stretching it. They have to have abundant spells in hand to pull that off. It’s moderately dependent on having the coin as well.