When nerfs are kept to a minimum and more buffs are given the metas become more interesting IMO.
I mentioned it because thats how it actually happened. Scarab is not important, but Partner is, its another coin, another mana cheat, the thing that ruins this game.
Its not just the novelty. While in general i agree with you, this time the ability to cheat 30 spell damage and god knows how many stats by turn 5-6 is not balanced. Meta is adapting thats true, but few classes can handle this huge amount of dmg and stats by turn 5, and survive to maybe, maybe win.
What would that make Demon Hunter? Demon Hunter is only 1.2% behind Mage in winrate according to hsreplay.
Also Mage has been nerfed into being unplayable in Wild.
I consider you thoroughly wrong and I will not discuss it further.
I’ve come to realize that there really isn’t such a thing as nerfing on sentiment alone.
It’s important to understand that power is overall winrate, and that overall winrate is the sum of the products of matchup winrate and opponent deck popularity. In other words, if a deck is 32% of the meta, then your deck’s matchup winrate against that deck is 32% of your overall winrate.
What this means is that power, while being objectively measurable, is determined in a subjective way. For example, if 80% of the people you could be matched against are playing rock, then it’s a bad time to play scissors. Should 80% of them be playing rock? Probably not; seems like a good time for paper. But what they are running is not under your control, and they can be as irrational as they want to be.
So what this means is that sentiment controls power. If the 80% rock players are stubborn and refuse to change, then power and balance are directly and empirically effected. It’s a WAAAGH, truly, and you and I not wanting it to be one will not change the facts.
If people choose to adapt, then it is proper for the game developer to anticipate recent and predicted future adaptation, and balance around that instead of the more distant past performance. But if people refuse to adapt, then it is proper for the developer to anticipate stagnation and balance around the situation as it is and has been.
I at least agree with this. Sentiment only matters to the effect that it impacts winrates — the problem is, it DOES impact winrates.
I’ve long stated that I don’t much care about people who complain about what they play against, and I continue to believe that. For the most part the people who complain about what they play against will ALWAYS complain about it, because the core of their frustration is a lack of agency over what they play against, and they will never have that agency — it belongs by right to their opponent. They don’t understand that there is no reciprocal way to give them that agency without it in turn being taken from them; their freedom on that front is maximized.
However, I do believe in nerfs, because I know that when a strategy is too powerful it makes players feel forced to play as a particular deck. If a deck is to be nerfed, it should be nerfed because excessive power corrupts agency, the real form of what strategies players choose for themselves, and players should feel like they have multiple viable choices. Nerfs by winrate are justified because it is winrate that draws players towards decks they don’t actually enjoy.
It doesn’t matter if it’s dumb or not. It can be dumb as rocks, and often is, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is correcting power imbalance, and if the playerbase can fix this but won’t, then the devs should fix it for them, because otherwise it won’t get fixed at all.
Expecting these bozos to nerf it any time soon or even be aware of it, is like asking your dog do to quant physics. You want to believe in him but you also know, he’s just a dumb dog that will run after the stick if you throw it.
Based upon their prior “expertise” and “balancing” I wouldn’t put my hopes too high that they have any clue or whatsoever. Rather make another scam of mini set and hope people buy it.
Make the rogue tourist unable to swap the spell’s cost with a 0 mana spell and rework the repeat a card guy.
That’s honestly a fair rebuttal. I main Druid and occasionally dabble in either Control Warrior or Handbuff Pally, which basically means I’m piloting decks that tend to have the best odds against this type of mage deck innately. I hadn’t thought of that side of things.
Fun fact, we’ve recently (I think it might actually literally be within the last few months) proven Schrodinger to be close-minded.
You see, Quantum Superposition would dictate micro sate of the cat is alive, and it is dead, until it is macro-observed in a specific state. This is NOT the same as being BOTH states at once, and it isn’t the same as being NEITHER state at once, and it isn’t the same thing as being EITHER state at once. It is alive, AND it is dead.
In programming we have a similar concept for this, an “overloaded operator” like the % sign. It could mean percent, but it might also mean “MOD” which is essentially the remainder left over when you divide something. So, 9 % 3 = 0 and 5 % 3 = 2 and 4 % = undefined (Calculus would tell us the result is either positive or negative infinity, but try telling that to your compiler).
Which simply put, means if you see % you can’t be sure what it’s referring to without observation of some sort. Contextual meaning. Clues. Clues which often come from beyond the operand itself. Clues that are found in the macro, that influence the micro, which in turn influences the macro. Once you know % means percent, versus mod, then the calculation shifts and the expected answer changes.
Quantum Superposition breaks down at the micro level upon being observed at the macro level. When we open the box, we observe the cat. Its state is now ONE or the OTHER. Defined. It is no longer “overloaded” or Superpositioned. But, while it is UNobserved, it IS superpositioned.
Perception literally IS reality, but only once actively put to use. Which means, Schrodinger was a moron and your dog probably is smarter than Pavlov.
It’s unclear what you think the Devs should do in that scenario and it’s interesting that it’s unclear if they will do the OPPOSITE of the initial option; should they NERF that deck so that it’s not so much played or should they BUFF it so they please the players who find it hard (which doesn’t violate your need you mentioned later to have player agency since it’s already hard to them); you will probably say “nerf” because that’s what they do and it’s the most logical to avoid increasing its play rate even more but that’s not a clear solution either.
The Mathematics of the situation say you are wrong at the end of the day; that’s because EQUILIBRIUM will be reached on its own: if they play rock with a lot of papers around then they will start playing scissors more: if the Lore of the Mage is extremely enticing to the point of people making extremely irrational decisions and are fixated to playing only Mage then you have an ART issue so fix your art/lore of the game to not harm the gameplay of it; the gameplay should have integrity that does not clash with irrationalities of Lore.
In case you wonder if there is a practical SOLUTION to wrap this up: there is. Just run formulations/simulations of the entire card collection and ASSUME EACH AUTOGENERATED DECK IS PLAYED EQUALLY (basically balance it on a theoretical meta that people aren’t fixated on psychological/lore reasons to overplay decks); you may ask why when they don’t always do that: because it’s BETTER TO WAIT FOR THEM TO LEARN in the long term than damage the gameplay design for the short term gratification of their fixations/whining.
You somehow missed when he said this, in spite of directly quoting it:
You can’t “math” your way to an optimal equation when my selected inputs are “cucumbre” even though you’re expecting numerics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdjqZGzMGtE
1 Like
You missed the spirit of my post. In essence I know they will be SLOW to adapt. I’m saying it’s bad for the long term health of the game to damage the gameplay design in order to accommodate their fixations and whining in the short-term; if you nerf and buff based on their irrationalities: the gameplay will remain damaged even when the players adjust to not overplaying a deck; the best course of action is to balance the game on a theoretical meta of no overplaying so the gamers reach equilibrium on their own in the long term because at least in that case there will be good balance eventually and not always a damaged gameplay either when they stop overplaying or not.
Blizz doesn’t care about any of this. Or any of us.
They want to make money. Simple as.
Prove that your math would make them money, and maybe they’ll hire you. Elsewise, they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing irrespective of how much “logical sense” it makes towards touchy feelies.
1 Like
And I implied it’s bad even for their profits in the long term. The short-term is easy to show profits; but the long-term might have the most profits; damaging the gameplay in the long term in order to satisfy the irrationality of people fixated to overplaying a deck will just make the game worse perpetually.
It’s also a matter of impatience and underestimating the players way too much; yes they may be very dumb sometimes and they may be very stubborn sometimes and overplay a deck; but most of them eventually get it in the long term because information of better ways reaches their radar slowly.
You speak of “long term” as if HS hasn’t already been here for over an entire decade. Most gacha-level games only dream to have such longevity. Brave Exvius is shutting down I think the end of this October.
Those are literal gambling. Like, predatory gambling. The thing all these laws are actually about. And even THEY routinely shut down well before reaching a decade plus. Sometimes, things end. It’s not always a bad thing.
In the context of HS, you either have fun or you move on. There’s not much debate to be had.
1 Like
That’s not necessarily true. You’re assuming how people will react when the truth is that they could choose another path — for example, instead of switching from rock to scissors in order to beat paper, they could instead keep playing rock and petition the developer to change the rock vs paper matchup to be more in rock’s favor.
I mean, consider this except from a recent opening post of another thread:
This guy will stop playing rock when you pry it from his cold, dead hands.
I see you generally as a person who worships equality. You spend a disproportionate amount of your attention accusing people on this forum of being ageist or bigoted or whatever ism seems appropriate. Maybe it’s something like a religious belief to you that the universe likes equilibriums and tries to move towards them. But that is the opposite of the truth. The truth is that naturally occurring equilibriums are usually extremely fragile and unlikely to survive, and that almost all equilibriums are artificial. Inequality is the rule, not the exception. Equality is not some inevitability like gravity, but to the extent it exists, it exists through the diligent efforts of people to maintain it.
That’s silly. There’s no mechanism to make them equally popular in practice. Therefore they aren’t equally popular and never will be.
No, it’s not a slowness. It’s a complete and utter rejection. Given infinite time, they will never adapt, unless they choose to.
↑ This is what you need to understand, Carn. They’re not worshipping at the altar of equality like you are. They might appeal to equality briefly, but only because they want the customer to give them money.
3 Likes
Two major mistakes here from the two you; I don’t think there’s a reason to keep going on on them; it’s in essence social issues that we won’t conclude here if you don’t do your own research/experience/application outside of a gaming forum.
One (towards Dimlhugion): you assume Blizzard are infallible by that logic; so what that the game is up for years; yes it may be up for years and the Developers may be doing dumb things for years: in fact I’m not surprised at all: it’s a WoW practice too (yo-yo-ing though nerfs and buffs for years based on user sentiment (why should I believe it did good to the game in the long term? (it has fewer players now when the potential internet gamers are multiple times more))).
Two (Scr0tieMcB) for mentioning accusations of “-isms” you sure lack self-awareness: your views against the quality of the average gamer are EXTREME; you practically put them next to beasts from a video game; the problem with your reasoning is that the extreme (such as that person with “8 different ways to autoconcede”(a very dumb methodology if you want to rank)) is that they are a MINORITY; there is actually PROOF: with a minor nerf or even no nerf at all: people often flock away from “flavor of the patch netdeck” so you don’t give them any credit at all that they can handle “paper rock scissors” shenanigans (after all: the “fast(“aggro”)/mid-range(”““combo””“)/slow(“control”)” methodologies regarding the paper/scissors/rock’ing that they cause are VERY common knowledge among a lot of gamers (even if the methodologies are imperfect (better than being totally irational as if they are beasts from a video game))).
Symmetry is a nice assumption to gravitate towards, especially in science. I share this one with Carn
Enter the chaos theory.
Yes, I like the pendulum analogy to view that through (although I do know a lot more about the theory, and even some applications in social sciences)
A body dropped from a pendulum will “gravitate” towards the equillibrium - rest point, where its’ kinetic energy is max, and potential is 0. However, in order to reach that point, he has to transform its’ potential energy into kinetic, so the same thing that makes him approach the equillibrium, is the very thing which causes it to fly pass it without stopping.
Such is the curse of equillibrium.
Fortunately, things don’t behave so simplistically in nature. Lots of smaller, temporary “equillibriums” exist (attractors) in which bodies can fall and stay until some external force large enough moves them away from it.
Which is why the best current theory holds that the optimal state to be in is on the “edge of chaos”, flirting with each of the local attractor states, ready to adapt and fit in when neccessary, but never quite fall into one and stay.
TL;DR - it’s all about the movement. Eppur si muove.
I don’t “assume” anything. HS is an established product and they certainly don’t need Carnivore-2587’s armchair expertise to “figure out” what to do next.
But again, you can feel free to email Blizz your resume and get hired as head of their Balance & Design team. Wouldn’t that be something? You could come back here and gloat all over me.
Blizzard playbook. They want people to buy the xpac. They could’ve nerfed it but they wanna make that $$$
1 Like
That’s textbook ad hominem (which is a non-argument), pure anti-science, and an instant-ignore on anything you’re supposed to say; i.e. personal attacks of that sort don’t strengthen your argument; instead they vent any credibility you may have had.
The main problem with Scr0tieMcB’s position, is that he extremely underestimates the average player; he called them equivalent to beasts in a video game incapable of rational thinking; he takes the extreme minorities that do dumb things and assigns them to the average player.
We have very good evidence the player base is not COMPLETELY helpless when left to their own devices; it may not be seen in the very short term but the long term shows they do rational decisions; e.g. if a deck is now extremely played and it starts being farmed they WILL switch.