Returning player

[Zee-1630]

@BAIBARS-1627

The game lost its magic for lots of reasons.

@Zee-1630

Hearthstone problems were obvious early on, in light of a design philosophy that said “we want turns to feel powerful.”

My earlier immersion into Magic the Gathering had made me aware of how the new HS devs were making some “rookie” design mistakes as they embraced two starting tenets for a game that was basically their simplified, digital version of MtG:

1). “We want turns to feel powerful.”
2). We want the Classic set to be an “evergreen” set

We want turns to feel powerful translated into packing more power into early new cards than was typical for similarly designed games. This meant as a brand new game it was already suffering from powercreep. Powercreep attacks the heath and interactive gameplay of a CCG—and it places design constraints on the development of new product.

If Hearthstone’s powercreep got dialed back all the way back to what it was during it’s early vanilla period, the game would be too boring and stagnant for most players who have played the game for many years. That being said, HS has been slowly coming of the rails due to an unnecessary abondance of:

1). Powercreep
2). Badly designed cards
3). Broken cards
4). Powerful auto-include neutral cards
5). A decrease in interactive play and player agency
6). Mana cheat
7). Erosion of class identities
8). Poor balance
9). Rampant amounts of RNG

I think the recent attempt to dial back powercreep and to improve player agency is a move in the right direction, provided that the devs maintain such a commitment while improving their competency at addressing the negative past design philosophy issues. Such attempts to reduce powercreep in the past were handled in a lazy and incompetent manner, which does not bode well, but one can hope it will be different this time as they create the next couple of expansions.

@Carnivore-2587

Was it ultra conservative to release WoW with dozens of zones?

WoW just took what games like UO, EQ and DAoC (Dark Ages of Camelot) were already doing and improved it with better graphics, art, storyline, interface, class balance and PvP balance. EQ and DAoC had lots of zones, which meant that WoW also had to start with many zones, if they wanted to pull players from other similar games.

The early WoW devs also understood the importance of battlegrounds even though BGs were not in place when WoW was released, but they announced a commitment to quickly develop BGs even before WoW’s release, which was essential to lure a player like myself to the WoW. Prior to WoW, doing PvP in DAoC’s Thidranki Battleground was my favorite online gaming pastime.