The Current State of Hearthstone

Community Discussion
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Let’s face it, when Hearthstone’s long standing design philosophy inevitably arrives at a place where it’s hard to have fun playing in most of it’s game modes, it’s certainly going to be a long while before any serious fix is done to improve matters, since so much of what will be released over the next year has already been previously developed.

MotLk is out now, and my question is: Did MotLK make Hearthstone better or more fun to play? Are players having more fun now as compared to a year ago? Two years ago? When was Hearthstone the most fun to play and why?

Personally, I have not played much constructed for reasons I will list later, but I did play some Standard during the last expansion in order to do a “check up” on the mode, and I reaffirmed that constructed modes were still plagued with enough problems that I no longer wanted to invest much time or other resources into playing those modes.

Are players enjoying Standard right now? Or is Standard more frustrating or boring to play? Personally, I have looked at deck lists for the best new decks, and I can say that I am not interested in playing with or against those decks.

A while back, I created a list of what I perceived to be Hearthstone’s biggest problems:

1). Powercreep

2). Poor balance

3). Overdeveloped and over-tuned Archetypes that make decks feel mostly pre-made, even before new cards are released, which takes away the fun of exploring new card pools and the whole deck building process.

4). Abundant and too many overly-powerful RNG effects.

5). Too many decks lack an interactive feel to gameplay as they just go about setting up their win conditions or hoping to draw their broken cards or combos.

6). Hand Disruption. At least Theotar has been Nerfed twice. Hand disruption was a very un-fun and overly impactful game mechanic in Magic the Gathering, and I had cautioned the devs against including it Hearthstone.

If I am correct that Hearthstone has arrived at a place where the game is broken enough that many players are going to stop spending money on the game, then I expect some leaner profit margins in Hearthstone’s near future as players watch to see if there is going to be an attempt made to fix the game or to see if the problems just continue to become exasperated.

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And they ignored you?!

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I agree - especially with:
3) Over developed archtypes: The power level / creep of specific cards means whoever plays them first wins, and Min/maxing implies that decks are always built around these cards as well.
5) Decks lack interactive feel: This is tough to describe but instead of building up minions and fighting for boards, it feels like classes have the ability to remove/generate boards via spells/battecries/swing turns. “board state doesn’t matter” is a common quote I hear from streamers for awhile now. Furthermore, their is a crazy amount of Discover & draw cards which make some decks a chore to play against.

Other thoughts:

  • Power creep is insane but manageable given the amount of gold/dust we get (assuming you play quite frequently). I have enough to craft a few competitive decks each rollout
  • Balance is awful but I don’t see how they could balance across so many classess without contributing to the #3 forced arch type problem. (p.s. Deathknight exasperates the problem with 3 diff runes to balance),
  • Hand disruption is awful and nothing feels worse to playing for 20 minutes, and having the ~10% scenario happen where your key card gets sniped. I think this can be solved by #3 & #5 though as if power level was more evenly distributed across a deck and board state mattered then hand disruption wouldn’t feel as bad.
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I agree that hand disruption is the most un-fun game mechanic for me. Having a card traded, deleted, eaten, reshuffled, etc. is a big loser for the game imo.

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when you have to start banning cards you fd up somewhere but hey what do I know.

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I agree with you. I have played magic for decades, and followed its tournament format of standard and modern since the financial crisis. In general I have seen that there are two mechanics that are so good that if ever included, everyone automatically plays it, and for good reason. And I feel like these mechanics are finding their way into Hearthstone now too:

  1. spells on a body, known as “Enter The Battlefield” / “Battlecry”. If spells on a stick are better than spells, why would you play spells? Spells on a stick become a 2for1 and as we know in TCGs, cards is king, so if you make a 2for1 mechanic, everyone will autoplay that. And this is what is happening to Hearthstone as well, I see more and more creatures being played that are not about the body you are putting on the battlefield, but by the effect you wanted and it just happens to have a body with it.

  2. Hand disruption. I can’t stress this enough; hand disruption is insanely good. It’s so good that Thoughtseize has been a staple in Modern MTG for so long I can’t even remember. The problem with Hand disruption is that it is very hard, game mechanically, to make a good counter-play to hand disruption. And if you make a mechanic that you cannot develop a counter-play to, then you have made it the top pick forever. This is exactly what has happened in Modern MTG, nothing dwarfs the impact of Thoughtseize, so it is still a dominating key component to 9/10 Modern decks.

Unfortunately, I have to say; MTG is a better game than Hearthstone for what MTG does. This is important to state that Hearthstone WAS a better game than MTG for what Hearthstone did before, but the more MTGish mechanics we see hit the standard format of Hearthstone, the more I am drawn to play MTG Arena instead. One has to remember that with MTG, you are fighting 3 centuries worth of development, over 20.000 different cards and MTG is THE ONLY TCG that currently is Turing Complete. It is impossible to win vs MTG unless you do things differently, so thus I beg the HS Devs to consider if it is really going in the right direction currently. Please consider it. Please.

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It really is sad just how far this game has fallen. I’m currently at Diamond 5 playing DK and it seems I’ll be stuck there until the meta changes. It’s no longer a contest of who can build the best deck and play their cards correctly. It’s now just a question of which player is playing the more busted archetype, or which player can get their OTK combo off first.

You know, I’m sure the community wouldn’t be nearly as outraged about the poor state of the game if the developers actually took the time to publicly address these issues instead of hiding in their echo chambers.

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I believe that we are witnessing a collapse of hs, people are realizing that they are all algorithms structured to maximize profits and avoid excessive wins in paid modes

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An announcement on HearthPwn:

“Climb the Ladder with Hearthstone Esports in 2023! - 10th Year of Hearthstone Esports
Although in reduced capacity, Hearthstone Esports is back in 2023. 6 Events in total are on the calendar this year (3 constructed, 3 battlegrounds) plus the World Championship for constructed. Read about how to qualify and more below!”

Considering Hearthstone’s broken, badly balanced state, the game is really not much of an Esport anymore, so it’s not surprising that the company is trimming events and prizes—a trend that will likely only get worse as Hearthstone gets worse. The announcement triggered these early responses:

“If anything, hearthstone is dying cause the lack of balance when there are some obvious problems right now in the meta. It’s way more tragic and dramatic the fact that after a long time they just announce the announcement regarding nerfs than this whole esports fiesta. The vast majority of players don’t even care about esports, but they are directly influenced by the lack of balance, and this matters way more than the 1-5% of the player base that had a chance to touch the esports scene.”
—BogdanM

“How about balancing the meta? It’s not fun watching a game of solitaire where players are competing to OTK each other from hand with 0 counterplay. And who can forget every single evolve meta. Get random [stuff] and hope you win!” —Tarious

The devs should really “bite the bullet,” and do a massive balancing patch across Wild and Standard to fix the game, and then implement a plan to avoid returning the game to such a terrible state in period of only 2-5 years after such a fix is made.

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The fact no one played DK in their last tourney tells us all we need to know about the current state of the game.

Now watch the forced DK decks going forward and the anouceers going “LOOK HOW POPULAR DK IS!” to try and cover for it.

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That’s what they did to cover for DH. It was so OP on release it took 13 nerfs (and a twin slice buff disguised as a nerf) to fix it, and iksar’s response was “everyone loves DH, look at its playrate”.

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current state of hearthstone - more entertaining to be in the forums than to play the game.

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Yes yes, we all know heartstone is bad and unbalanced, nothing will change I still get OTK by hunters midd game…

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Current state: Plagued by bots and there are 2 types: Intelligent (IE: hearth ranger) and Stupid roping bots (IE: Autohotkeys)

“Report” feature does absolutely nothing (proven by use of a network sniffer IE: wireshark, fire it up, check for yourself). It’s just there for cosmetics.

The only entertainment that HS offers is this here forum.

Not a single real person actually plays this anymore. Nuff said.

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Congratulations, this is the stupidest thing I have ever read here.

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Ouch, interesting how that’s actual fraud.

Congratulations, another coc violating cut/paste troll post the mods will ignore.

Stay classy mods, team 5, actiblizz, and microsoft!

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As though anyone actually expected the report feature to actually do anything. It never did in any other blizzard games.

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You’d be amazed at the plebz who whined about it when I posted it as a bug in the bugs section (which it is since it doesnt actually do anything). “O they are probably just collecting data”, “It works I’ve used it!”, yada yada yada. Yet it’s easily proven to do absolutely NOTHING by sniffing the network traffic with wireshark. It’s literally there for cosmetics and absolutely nothing else. Something I predicted would happen the 1st week they announced they’d be adding a “report” feature. Roping bots still plague Diamond 5/10 in both wild and standard, Ranger exp farming Bots are everywhere in wild, I dont think I’ve seen an actual real player in wild in months. Their own leader board was the laughing stock of the planet when it was proven the top 7 accounts were all bots and the remaining 80-85% were as well. LMFAO.

The shlt these clowns will believe just because HS Devs say it is unbelievable. Take for instance the “MMR”. While the term MMR is real, as far as HS is concerned there is no such thing in HS. It doesnt even exist in HS at all. If it DID exist, it would be displayed for both players to see. The only “matching” going on is the the “tier” that you’re in and that’s not an MMR. Thats just a grinding achievement level that resets every month.

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