You live in a fantasy world. You probably think of it as theory, not fantasy, but the point is that it doesn’t involve evidence. You look at a card, you do some “thinking,” and you think that you know.
I like evidence. And the evidence was so obvious that Blizzard took action to nerf the deck that a quarter of the meta was playing because they buffed Tsunami. Everyone knows that the mana cost in the corner didn’t really matter. You know it too. But you won’t accept it.
If they made it cost 10 and didn’t add a elemental, it would have been a nerf
Yeah, it’s a card that wasn’t meant to be cast at full cost even when it cost 8 Mana.
The card has always been pretty bad when played at full cost. The new one is much stronger when accelerated.
Is this actually happening? Where did you get this information? Did you conduct a poll of all players who quit the game? What was the sample size? Or are you just making this up?
It has? Who told you that? Was there a Blizzard post stating this? From what I’ve seen, deck popularity actually takes a back seat to win rate. That said, I believe deck popularity should take NO seat, front or back. Overall, there are certainly more nerfs associated with win rate and power level than with deck popularity (or player’s feelings). I just don’t think popularity or feelings should drive balance decisions.
As I always do, I go back to OG Quest Rogue. It was a 50% WR deck (at best). But people whined and complained about it. Kibler did a whole video whining about it. So they nerfed it into the ground. It was, in my opinion, an awful misguided decision.
Only Blizzard knows.
It’s an obvious cause and effect that it would create a loss in revenue that people stop playing.
The most common game experiences are the ones that generate the most hate. This is why big spell mage was by far the most complained about thing even though it was only like, the 5th best deck.
Every time a new overly popular deck shows up, it generates hate, almost regardless of the win rate.
The history of card nerfs have greatly leaned toward the most popular decks at the time. They generate the most complaints and have the most attention placed on them. This is why mage players joke (mostly correctly) that any deck they get that breaks tier 2 will get nerfed because the popularity of them tends to spike hard.
It’s fine that you don’t think deck popularity should be used to determine balance changes, but that would mean that big spell mage should have received 0 nerfs because it never had the power level to demand one, nevermind two.
Game experience just trumps win rate for balance changes, and it kind of always has.
First off…lol
Secondly, the evidence is already provided. The question was abundantly simple. And yet you still could not (or refused to) answer it correctly. That says a lot about your fantasy world, not mine.
Lastly, since mana doesn’t matter, I request for Chillwind Yeti to become a 1 mana 4/5.
Exactly. Because it didn’t need one. It was a tier 2 deck. I tried it but didn’t play it all that much. It got nerfed because people whined incessantly about it. That’s a terrible way to make design decisions because it becomes mob rule. If enough people complain, they’ll get what they want, even if it’s not good for the game. And that’s bad for the game.
Oh boy the fallacy of youth.
As you get older you realize the the correct ordering is
time >>> money
Don’t let capitalism suck you in and convince you are reduced to your “net worth”. If previous generations thought this way, we would of never seen progress as a human race.
That’s never gonna happen, I’m way too emotional and spiritual for that.
But I’m not gonna let that influence my rational thinking. In the context above, time really was interchangeable with money, since it was about spending money you earn by working on a game vs playing the game more to compensate.
It’s just a good analogy/rule of thumb.
Also, what is this xD
I’m way too old to be hearing this xD
Aye, but the complaints are the only measure of player sentiment, and people DO stop playing when they get frustrated. When one deck is 30% of your games, and what you are doing loses to it, or it wins in a really frustrating way, people do just stop after a while.
Deck popularity is far more effective at creating that problem than a deck that has a 2% higher aggregate win rate, but is only 1% of the meta. The game doesn’t feel any better if that 1% of decks is brought more in line.
Not really…
You can Just look How many are still active and many other metrics.
With that said. Blizzard not outright murdered the deck this time so i actually satisfied with the post nerf even if it sucks to have a deck nerf out of sheer popularity.
Other thing i practicing is to not talk about mage decks as much because they’re kinda a celebrity in this game.
If they get any attention It usually will be too much forcing the decks to cease from existing.
Still blizzard should atleast try to make the mage cards playable from start.
The number of mage cards needing buffs and actually getting because of how bad It gets is insane.
BSM had more than 5 cards from buffed cards list If we count rogue ones.
While I don’t disagree with not letting the mob make the decisions, they are expressing their frustrations about things they are not having fun with and those views do need to be taken into account as the game is supposed to be fun.
I personally don’t have fun with the game when a lot of games end up being who cheats the most mana fastest. I also believe cards like Boomboss aren’t fun to play against. I have the most fun when I’m in a good back and forth game where I’m not sure who is going to win. But some people like OTKs, mana cheats and game ending combos and their opinions matter too.
What apparently isn’t obvious to most of the people is the fact that you can’t really have fun without some frustration being involved, as well
Without frustration, there would only be boredom
That’s not capitalism doing that. It’s mortality. And you cannot escape it. Your consciousness and your memories WILL be destroyed, and all that will remain is what you’ve built.
Aye, but it doesn’t need to be fully zero sum. I get a lot of enjoyment out of close games, even when I fall short of the win. The back and forth is amazingly fun, and I had a great game with nohandsgamer yesterday where he found a win with 5 HP left after I hit him with triple orbs. (Even though it was Marin that gave him the win -_-)
What’s far, FAR less enjoyable is when on turn 4 a Dorian + draw into Dungar 1 cost which drops Eonar, an assembly bot, and a beached whale into play. That’s fun only for the person doing it.
Same deal with the turn 4 Norgannon that got me back into legend today, which stopped my opponent from doing anything with turn 4, then dropped counterspell and the minion duplicator to block his turn 5 and set up 40 damage for me.
That kind of stuff doesn’t need to be in the game. Mana cheating can be fun, it can make for more interesting gameplay, but there should be much harder limits on how far that gets pushed than currently exists.
This is not as clear cut as you think. Blowouts might need to be in the game.
Social mammals have a need to win a certain minimum amount of the time to have continued interest in playing. Historically, this was done through the medium of physical games, like play fighting, and regulated by the superior player, who would have a 95%+ winrate if they really tried but would deliberately NOT really try as a hard as they could, such that the little one could feel good about winning sometimes. The exact ratio reaches an equilibrium somewhere between winning a quarter and a third of games; less than that, and the weaker player loses interest, and refuses to rematch the stronger player.
Sauce: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5074863/
So the question, from a game developer perspective, is: do we trust our player base to self-regulate this and have good sportsmanship, keeping player retention up, or do we assume that they’ll generally be terrible people if given the chance? Personally, I come down hard on the latter. Gamers have been raised, often from birth, to ignore the conditions of having a human opponent. So if you don’t trust your playerbase to voluntarily lose 25-33% of the time, then they have to involuntarily lose that percentage of the time. By what method? Randomly generated inescapable blowouts.
Yeah, I think that to an extent, it’s fine if they do exist. I just think that they’ve gotten more than a little too common, and more than a bit too over the top.
It makes for good replays and screenshots, but that’s about it from my perspective.
I mean I lose a great deal because I have way more fun experimenting with cards and building decks than playing the mechanics of the actual game. The game itself is barely playable as is. Every turn is a blow out or a swing turn, and the only way to see “incremental value” do anything is to play a very aggressive aggro deck.
On the other hand I could whip out my pain lock and cruise to top 100 legend as there’s probably few people who can pilot it as well as me at this point, especially when I tune the deck for a particular meta. But I find that incredibly boring. Ive played the deck ad nauseum, several times to the aforementioned top 100.
So, I think this is the “voluntary” loss that is likely to occur, not so much throwing games for the sake of it. I gladly play inferior decks (read leave 15 to 20 percent raw winrate on the table) due to having way more fun building something that beats all the trash net deck players out there.
Well I can respect the position that forcing it might be unnecessary. After all, for literally millions of years of mammalian evolution, social mammals didn’t have anything forcing it. Some of the top competitors would let their opponent win 25+% of the time and maintain good relationships with the lesser competitors, and some of the top competitors wouldn’t, they destroy those relationships, and sometimes that still worked out. Perhaps in part because some relationships can endure more stress than others.
There are some games that have a particular charm in the way that they don’t care about retaining weaker players — such “hardcore” games often attract an audience that resonates with that aesthetic, as we can see in franchises like Dark Souls, Fear and Hunger, and Path of Exile. I happen to personally find that aesthetic very appealing. But I do think it’s worth pointing out that certain corporate perspectives might have a strong bias towards maintaining a larger playerbase, rather than trying to attract a niche “cult” audience. This is probably a case where both options deserve to exist on the market, and may the customer choose which appeals to them.
Personally while i don’t think that let weaker players Win sometimes is bad the game could just do that in a more subtle way.
Like…
Some decks are literally easier to play than checkers.
Pull the yogg BS and that late game stuff everyone hates because atleast they’re fun to hate.
When you create cards so one dimensional as surfalopod things get Just dumb.
Like…
Can you atleast try to incentivize your players to get better ?
They would even win a little more if you tried you know ?