Ten year old concerns and predictions reaching fruition:

Multiplayer Discussion
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Recently, in another players’s thread, I discussed how HS problems are completely on track for predictions that I made for the game nearly 10 years ago. That thread was taken down.

https://imgur.com/a/mO8Q8tL

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.

Since Classic already contained a lot of powerful cards, and they were designed to always be available in the game’s card pool, it also created major design constraints. For instance, if the game already had several strong 6 through 10 cost cards, newly designed cards of those costs were only likely to see play only if they were more powerful or provided better synergies than the older cards did. The Classic set created a kind of stranglehold on HS, which made HS feel repetitive and boring early on, while making it very difficult for the devs to create fresh new feeling or exciting metas.

These two tenets made it very easy for me to quickly predict things like:

1). A need to nerf or to remove existing cards from the pool (to Hall of Fame some cards) would be necessary to free up design space.

2). The need for the creation of Wild and Standard modes, which even came quicker by 6 months to one year sooner than even I expected.

3). It was easy to predict that if the initial rate of powercreep remained unchecked, in 10 years time, HS would become such a broken, un-interactive game that it would financially start to die. In year one, I referred to that impending moment as “jumping the shark,” a Happy Days reference, which means:

“a term that is used to argue that a creative work or entity has reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with, or an extreme exaggeration of, its original purpose. —Wikipedia”

In that recent post that got removed, I stated that with the release of so many broken cards in Whizbang’s Workshop—especially with such badly designed cards ad Wheel of Death, Zarimi, and Reno Lone Ranger—the game had finally jumped the shark.

Anyways, Hearthstone’s current problems are nearly exactly what I predicted they would be almost ten years ago.

Despite this situation, I would like to point out that HS is as a digital card game and it can always be overhauled and fixed. And this is what I am waiting for the devs to realize and for them to do before I am willing to once again invest money into the game. I think it important for players to vocalize their expectations for a game so that developers are encouraged to create a product that players are willing to pay for.

I really believe that HS has reached a crossroads and what direction the devs decide to take during the next couple of years will decide its fate.

I want to point out another negative consequence of Classic’s design constraints. With Classic representing a large portion of the card pool, in order to create different feeling metas, the devs began to heavily develop archetypes. Overtime, this approach resulted in archetype packages being so overdeveloped and overturned that decks began to feel largely premade. The downside of this approach is that it takes away from the fun and discovery process of building new decks from a new pool of cards as players try to solve a new meta.

Instead reducing the number of cards for new archetype packages when Standard was created (and the design constraints for that new format had decreased with the removal of the Classic set), the devs instead continued increased the size and to over-tune the archetype packages. This is too bad, because in general, powerful premade decks are not a lot of fun to play with, and they greatly limit what will work in new meta.

Got any insights of your own to help the devs make HS better?

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If you predict something 10 years before than it actually starts to happen, and in the end doesn’t even happen completely, were you truly right?

But other than that, I like the optimism in this post. Let’s see if they fix the game again.

Personally, I believe they will. The job’s not that hard. You brainstorm a little based on card winrates and with enough attempts, you balance the game to the good old rock-paper-scissor meta, and then you do it again after every mini-set, expansion and again at the beginning of a new rotation.

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I believe the dev(or should I say company) are more aware than any of us.

Eventually, HS will not be able to sustain in future due to many reasons. The main few being releasing of other newer better games, technology advances that the current system is incompatible with, and the point where design space has reached critical mass.

As such, thier probably have very short plans for design. Longest being the declared 3 expansion design phases.

On top of that, each new game lead/director may give different design directions.

As players, the power we have is the choice to play or not to play.

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You are going to use MTG as your basis of good CCG design? Give me a break. That game has design flaws large enough to drive 5 tractor trailers through side by side. You don’t even have to go further than…You don’t draw lands you just straight up lose.

There are easily a dozen CCG’s that have better and more elegant designs.

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One would think that newer, better games would be the demise of an older, successful game like HS or any older game, but that has not really proven true for a lot of successful games. I recently watched a video on this topic, where a person demonstrated that many of the most played online games have been around for 6 to 10 years.

If HS was better developed and managed, it would have taken 20 years or more before it started to run into design space issues. Look at MtG, it came out 1993 and it’s still the most successful CCG. Blizzard has never fully understood what it had with HS, and I cannot even imagine the amount of money that HS could have made if it had been developed and marketed better.

Sure, why not? Most of what works for HS was straight up taken from MtG, and MtG still makes about a billion dollars in revenue annually. How about a list of all those better card games, which are so good that they make more money than MtG?

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The difference between newer games and HS is that newer games can take advantage of newer technologies. Looking back at HS, while there is still design space, e.g. 10-14 card hand size, 7-8 minion slot, etc but once that limitation is hit, they can’t grow anymore. Taking example of the graphical repucussion affecting players turns from history, yogg, shutterwock, etc we can slightly experience that problem.

True. But big corp usually have a lot of red tapes and politics. Evidently from the change of the OG design team to the newer design team, they base design much more on people rather than systems. That’s we we never see consistency in HS, except consistently in. :sweat_smile:

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I predicted all this in 1996 :ok_hand:

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In 1990 I predicted that you would predict all this in 1996

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As a gamer, I wholly disagree.

I enjoy games. I’ll play just about anything as long as it’s fun. There are several games which fall within what you’re saying here (old outshined by the new), but if a game is good/great enough, I will find myself going back to it, even more so than the newest release.

One of the biggest examples I can pull out of my pocket for this argument would be Chrono Trigger. A game released for the SNES March/August in 1995. I find myself going back to it probably once a year or so. I’ve played several, SEVERAL RPGs in my gaming career, and I would argue I’ve played CT the most and I would say a lot of the new games using the newest technology these days can’t hold a candle to it.

We are steps away if anything on this one. I mean, this is the second time they’ve announced (soon released) such a patch in two? years. I sincerely hope they’ve listened to players on this one and not just themselves. I also hope they don’t just touch the text/stats/cost of cards; hopefully we’re surprised with the internal way things work, such as never letting a reduction reduce anything beyond 1 mana, for example.

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Yes. Alot of old games have replayability. But in context if reference to HS… had player return once a year just for a few months, the player base cannot sustain in terms of having adequate pool for matching.

Some players had diligently played HS almost everyday for the last 10 years, and had that been Chrono trigger? That same game would feel just like HS.

Thus, the point I am driving at.

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i hope they never listen to this one, applying something like this is a terrible idea

doing it depending on the card is a better one

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Yes. HS is the point of discussion, however, HS, to your point, has constant updates, whether it be full blown expansions or mini-set or a small adjustment. The only update CT has ever received is the anime and naturally some graphical updates per the systems it was mastered for.

I have it on my phone, actually. Guess which app it sits next to within my “games” box right now.

Anyway, HS has a good amount going for it at the moment as far as getting player’s attention with three expansions a year and a mini-set; not to mention BGs. I think we are seeing the plans being laid out for that with the unfortunate shut down of Duels and now this patch supposedly shaking up the game we know to a degree.

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Yes. and that was why HS has managed 10years. and the same reason why the OP had concerns about the “powercreep” over the same 10years. An alternative way of asking is how would HS look like in another 10years? considering all the technology advances, it is reasonable to say it can’t sustain.

But not to say that HS cannot developed into HS2 using that new technology. As how FF7 remake from the original FF7. HS thus is meant to ‘die’ someday, overtaken by another game.

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Oh, absolutely. They have said themselves they believe power creep is one of the biggest selling points of their expansions.

I’ve been saying the same thing about WoW the last few years. I even thought we were actually going to be given “WoW 2” this last BlizzCon before they introduced us to the next 8-10 years of the same thing. Hopeful thinking, I suppose. But, I will agree, to your point, HS could eventually fade away if there were a well done HS 2.

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