Seriously, this is abysmal. It’s like quests but you have 0 control over which one you get. It’s back to high roll or get rolled. Some of them create absolutely disgusting advantages for certain heroes.
I’m the total opposite. I hated the quests feature last season. However, I love the anomaly feature this season.
I agree entirely. All these gimmicks do, whether it be quests or buddies or anomalies, is stir in additional orders of randomization. It’s cute in the Tavern Brawl, but smearing it across the rest of the games is madness.
I appreciate a desire to offer high-level players an “upset” mechanic to break them from the potential boredom of applying and re-applying well honed strategies. But applying additional layers of randomness is the absolute laziest way of attempting to accomplish it.
The upper-tier players might get a new dimension against which to develop new sets of strategies – if any strategies can be developed at all. While the lower-tier and middle-tier players are left completely adrift in a sea of randomness without any ability to discover even basic strategies.
No one can improve. To continue the struggling-against-drowning metaphor, it is the feeling of being perpetually thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool that has a different assortment toys each time. That it’s a duck or an alligator floating past is immaterial to your desperately trying to tread water.
This inability to get better is, frankly, why I stopped playing Hearthstone proper. It took me a ridiculous amount of time to finally assemble a Classic deck with which I could have a decent win percentage and bubble my way up to more challenging ranks. And then whole new seasons of cards started appearing. I couldn’t go two games without seeing something I have literally never seen before. “I’m done.” There was a brief reprieve when the “Classic Only” mode showed up. I greatly enjoyed being part of what felt like a little community. But that’s been wiped out, too.
I get it. You want to keep the upper-tier players happy and stop them from getting bored. And serve content to pro-series and streamers to keep things “fresh.” I also imagine that you just want to feel personal accomplishment at work. And shepherding a new card or mechanic through design and code and art and shipment is an achievement. I also understand that things like design and balance are super hard. Much harder than throwing a new hero or card back or skin or season out there. “Throw it out there and let the players figure it out. That’s fun, right?”
But if you keep stomping on your core design concepts and loops, you’re going to lose people – at least me.
I’ve wound up on Battlegrounds for that core:
- A level playing field, where your success is not predetermined by your deck
- Reasonably predictable session times
- A straight-forward cycle of acquire/deploy/encounter/refine
- Minion upgrade paths, especially through Goldens and stats upgrades
Everyone one of those – except the level playing field going in … right? – has been complicated by new mechanics.
Really. If you’re committed to lazy expansion by way of random bull!@#$, mask it for the new players. Give them the opportunity to learn and grow. When they get to the top of their cadre’s ranking and break into a new tier, then you can unlock the additional weirdness. Or just give me a basic game back that I can play when I’ve got twenty minutes and want a way to reset my focus.
You, similarly, deserve to relax a bit. There’s a great game here! Rather than constantly screwing with it, why not support it? Literally the best feature I’ve seen come to Battlegrounds is highlighting the “duplicate available” in addition to the “golden available.” Is it a flashy feature (unintended pun)? No. But it’s made me so much happier.
Timers are great, but how about a turn “committed” button to move things along more quickly when everyone’s done? Does the interface really have to be so full-screen heavy, or can it be windowed and more casual, e.g. the phone experience on a PC. Or if you are going to demand all that real-estate, maybe find a way to surface the opponent stats that are otherwise hoverable in a more direct way. (Heck, you want to monetize? Sell an upgraded client experience which tracks previously seen minions and stats for opponents in a matter-of-fact way.) Anyway, I’m not a developer. I don’t have good ideas. I’m just encouraging you to work on the experience and not the
game.
Agreed. Anomalies were a good idea in theory, but in practice, it has ruined Battlegrounds. Oh well, more time I can spend playing BG3.