I really hope they don’t follow that insanely bogus advice that just landed from the most famous podcast of the game by far. One of the worst things that game development ever did was to yo-yo between OP and nerfed stuff to “make people excited”; this is the first time that I see glimpses of that improving; it’s easy to say “I’ll have more customers if some of them are at least excited” but in the LONG TERM it harms the game because annoyed people don’t stay forever.
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Who or what is Vicious Syndicate?
I feel like that is all this game has left. The designers only seem interested in cards that provide buyers a sugar high, instead of concerning themselves with the overall product health.
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To make it clear, I do not mean that BORED is good. You have to do both: improve the cards so that more are PLAYABLE: keep it BALANCED so it’s not too annoying.
I think We will be lucky if the game survives in any form.
I believe that the design team has been hit really hard in terms of manpower, and is under strict guidelines as far as billable hours are concerned.
Cutting overhead is now the top priority for this corporation.
And when they can no longer cut, they will kill the product.
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The worst expansion by far for Blizzard was Rastakhan Rumble, and that was because they listened to the masses about making a low power level expansion that ended boring and no one bought packs for it.
People love to bash Blizzard about OP cards/expansions but those are the ones that make them money.
So VS advise makes sense not only monetarily but it terms of player engagement.
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No matter how stupid and broken they are, and no matter what it does to the quality of the game.
Well that might be so but thats not the point, unlike what the OP says VS is giving solid advise based on the games history.
If we want things to change we cant just make noise, it needs to reflect on sales and player engagement.
Hypocritical content creators such as Zeddy say expansions like United in Stormwind kill the game but then their own stats and metrics show its one of the top played expansions and also one that they got the most packs for…
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Yeah those are the Vicious Syndicate arguments (I guess you follow them),
it’s bogus since there’s a better approach.
Do BOTH balance and support the interesting cards (don’t just make OP and nerfed cards because you annoy people and in the long term they end up quitting anyway (you may see some short term sales of the OP cards but why do you think that the majority liked the game being in that direction?)).
I think it could be done far better, but I doubt it can be done better as cheaply as the corporation insists upon.
They refuse to invest even a dime.
They are too busy with stock buybacks.
I hate modern capitalism.
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I don’t think it’s even that profitable in the long term. If you annoy the majority of people then some short term sales are probably still a negative in total.
You can BOTH support the interesting cards being playable and not have annoying OP cards (i.e. balance it properly so all cards can be played).
idk. I do know that corporate will never invest any more than the bare minimum into this game.
I doubt it’s that expensive to balance. It probably needs only a very small team who are very good at probability and statistics.
I’m almost certain that “make it OP to make it interesting” has been POLICY in the past (a self-harming policy in the long term).
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There really isn’t a different way to deal with this.
People are different so of course what someone likes the other player can and will hate.
It only feels bogus to you because having to deal with this working in practice goes against with everything told to you so far.
What can be done and blizzard don’t do is to make sure that people are atleast thinking during the process of play a match.
Gonna articulate this post better later.
That’s not the only reason that annoys people. Some cards are GENUINELY overpowered and that makes them annoying to a large part of the player base; e.g. especially the first version of badlands’ Reno; the developers admitted it in writing that it was overpowered a couple of patches ago in the patch notes and announcements so you can’t say I made that up unless you accuse the developers of making it up.
I’m not saying that all people will stop being annoyed illogically. I’m saying that some people are annoyed even more if they have a genuine reason; there’s no reason to only make OP and nerfed cards to make it interesting; it’s better to make it balanced so unplayed cards which are interesting become playable.
I dislike that they have any influence on the game at all given how off their analysis / predictions are.
They should stick to providing user game data / graphs that is ‘presented without comment’.
Also they should really be going on a crusade to temper the mana cheat… practically all the decks now are mana cheat deck
Warrior - Hydration
Druid - concierge
Rogue - sonya/shadowstep
Shaman - Nostalgia/evolve giant
Not to mention marin
Its these cards that make the game less interesting… because they lead to people not being able to play the game unless of course they’re running the same mana cheat engine decks and then it just because who can cheat faster.
At least the game is more board based now than in OTK/stall metas past so I won’t complain that much.
There are two fundamental ways to try to please people.
One is the one size fits all method. This way focuses on giving everyone a consistent, equal experience for everyone. Everyone plays the same game. Because it’s just one experience being crafted, it receives a lot of developer attention and tends to become finely honed. In practice, this way draws a small but fiercely loyal audience.
The other way is the 31 flavors method. This way focuses on giving everyone diverse and individualized experiences. No one plays the same game because options allow everyone to customize their experience. Because there’s an entire buffet of experiences being crafted, each “flavor” receives a relatively small amount of developer attention, and it can take multiple patches to even halfway hone the experience. In practice, this way draws a much larger but less enthusiastic audience.
I don’t want to give the impression that these are a strict dichotomy. It’s more like a spectrum. For example, a ARPG developer might create exactly four playable classes, striking a balance between just having one class and having twenty, with a corresponding balance between developer attention per class and class diversity.
It’s important to understand that Hearthstone, like any digital CCG, by its design must cater to both of these ways simultaneously. What deck you choose to play as is inherently of the “31 flavors” way, while what you play against is inherently of the “one size fits all” way. There is randomness in what you play against, in the same way that there’s randomness in who’s in front of you in line when you go to the grocery store, but the point is that deck power has significant influence upon the popularity of various decks within the meta, and that popularity determines what you’ll play against over the long term.
The failure state for the “31 flavors” way is boredom. The failure state for the “one size fits all” way is anger. So really, what bored vs angry boils down to, is whether the “31 flavors” way of a digital CCG is or is not more important than the “one size fits all” way.
Everything above this point in the post is objective and factual. Now for subjective opinion…
I’ve long said that the “31 flavors” way is and always will be more important. When it comes to what you play against, you will always be angry, and nothing will ever fix that. Something that you have agency over (your own deck) will always bring more satisfaction than something that you inherently do not have any agency over. I fully understand that seeking a larger audience comes with the tradeoff of a less enthusiastic audience, but games like this need a lot of free to play players to log in to entertain the whales who are the actual revenue stream. I don’t know if I’d go so far (these days) as to say that the anger element is irrelevant, but at best it’s like friction: maybe some lubricant can reduce it, but it cannot be fully eliminated.
I think we need to separate some points here:
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Things that are truly overpowered have room to be weakened without needing changes equivalent to banning the card. So, this isn’t actually a big problem. The Lamplighter, for example, would be fine with a simple nerf to 4 mana.
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People themselves are against really interesting cards, and I can prove it. When you have cards like, for example, Infinitize the Maxitude, it’s precisely the people who are always asking for different gameplay who don’t even take 5 minutes to understand the cards and start with outdated criticisms like ‘infinite value’.
To make an honest critique of something, the minimum a person should do is understand the proposal instead of criticizing the reward. In this case, it’s about discovering cards at the end of the turn, trying to predict what you might need in the future.
It’s not that the person can’t give her opinion on something, but rather that she should try to understand what is being proposed before doing so.
That said, I really wish Blizzard would be more steadfast in enforcing cards that promote this type of challenge to players, even if it is at the expense of some people. In the long run, it is the proposed challenges that create long-term competitiveness among players.
There is no reason to talk about individual adjustments in this type of discussion because they have to consider more than just the design, such as the current state of game balance. However, debating the pace of matches as if slower games are necessarily better is really not something that should be done.
As an final observation, I can say that it would be interesting to nerf the Druid location to affect only the next spell, considerably reducing the burst that can be caused on turn 6 without needing major changes to other decks using concierge.
Also, there’s really no such thing as “truly overpowered” outside of the context of popularity. Power is winrate, and overall winrate = sigma (matchup winrate × popularity). Popularity, while influenced by rational considerations like deck power, is also influenced by irrational and fundamentally unpredictable considerations. It’s not at all reasonable to just presume that a CCG developer can predict how powerful cards are going to be.
There are, of course, situations where developers really want particular cards to be powerful, but in such cases they can easily overestimate the popularity of counters. It’s not uncommon for metas to have strong meta breakers in existence that are massively underplayed simply because the playerbase doesn’t like them very much.
Annoyed people do stay around forever. Just look at all the people that “quit” Hearthstone only to be right back the next day.
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