The vast majority of Hearthstone players are under the effect of a particular delusion. They think that they can see everything they need to know just from the perspective of their deck queuing up against random opponents, but the truth is that this doesn’t even come close to being the case unless you have a giant collection and play with a wide variety of archetypes and play a lot. Unless you’re no-life AF you can’t know what’s overpowered by just playing the game.
Data aggregator websites are a much better indicator, because they look at thousands of games from the perspective of almost all deck archetypes.
So what do players do instead of realizing they can’t know? They presume that players gravitate towards the decks that win the most (completely disregarding whether they themselves gravitate towards those decks) and thus presume that the most popular decks are the most powerful ones. Of course, the truth is that some people gravitate towards decks because those decks win, some players gravitate towards decks for completely different reasons, and most players do a little bit of both.
Imagine, hypothetically, the best designed archetype ever. It would have two qualities:
- it would be appropriately powered, that is, having a winrate very close to 50% against the field as a whole, and
- players would love to build it and play as it, that is, it would be very popular.
Right now, according to those sensible standards, the best designed deck in the meta is Kazakusan Druid. It does fun things so players love it despite a winrate within 1% of 50%. But because of delusional thinking, players post replays of single games acting as if it’s proof that a deck is broken because your opponent had the joy of doing something awesome this one time.
The better designed a deck is, the more certain it is to have several threads complaining about it on these forums. Because of three reasons:
- the delusion that popularity means overpowered, and
- fun designs let decks do awesome things, which because of
- confirmation bias is interpreted as further evidence that the popular deck is overpowered when awesome happens.
There is an inmate psychological truth for humans: a single negative experience has as much impact as 5 positive experiences. Without self-awareness, players would need to have five times as much fun as their opponents to feel like they’re having as much fun as their opponents. As overall fun increases, this perceived inequality increases. It’s literally the case that the funner the game becomes, the more unfair it feels relative to how unfair it actually is.
There is no design solution to this problem that fits the business model of a trading card game. Enthusiasm for particular cards is rooted in how fun they are to play, not in how fun they are to play against. That enthusiasm for cards is what drives sales. I’m not trying to say that every fun design is appropriately powered — sometimes those cards actually cause decks to win too often. But if a design is both appropriately powered and fun, it’s going to both drive sales and cause a massive outcry on social media demanding it be nerfed.
Currently, Blizzard’s strategy is mostly to listen to that outcry. But this is ultimately a bait and switch sales tactic. It’s punishing players for being attracted to fun cards.
What’s the alternative? Ultimately, it’s not one that Blizzard can implement. If the community doesn’t change, this kind of bait and switch is the best and only way to sell packs — they have no other option given the market. But if the customer base developed some good sportsmanship, things would be different. By “develop good sportsmanship” I mean: be aware of the natural inclination to view one negative experience with equal weight as five positive experiences, understand how selfish this inate desire is, and endeavor to fight this inclination to find inner peace with a balanced one positive experience per one negative experience. Part of the way you can do this is to share in your opponent’s fun when they have a spectacular win. That’s being a good sport.
Nothing is forcing you to be a good sport. I certainly can’t. But as a community, we can’t blame Blizzard for designing like this if are going to keep acting the way we have been acting.