I don’t deny the game has lost players. However, that’s par for the course for any game that’s been around as long as Hearthstone. Its death is inevitable, but I’m not sure if we’re witnessing it just yet. I was hoping there was a website monitoring the current and past amounts of players, so as we could compare and get a better idea. All I’ve seen is ActivePlayer, but those numbers are outdated, alas.
I think the decline in Hearthstone’s eSports is likely due to them leaving Twitch for Youtube. The viewership is quite pathetic.
If you had to speculate: how much longer do you think we have until Hearthstone dies completely?
The sentence that follows after the one you quoted indicates that I have looked. If you do have a site that can paint a clearer picture, please do share.
It seems they finally updated their numbers? Thanks for making me check and see. It’s near impossible for a game this old not to lose players, but that depends on the dates we’re looking at. For instance, there are certainly fewer players now than when Hearthstone was released. I remain somewhat skeptical (these numbers are estimations, albeit probably accurate) because as others have stated, Blizzard has added bots to the ladder. If the game isn’t losing players, I don’t understand why they’d possibly do that.
As an aside, you can include links by adding ` around them.
https://activeplayer.io/hearthstone/
Edit: I never said the game was dying or that this is the end, to be clear. I don’t think that’s true, and this is evidence contrary to those assertions. I’m on the fence, honestly, as to player gains/losses.
Come to think of it, Blizzard doesn’t release player-count anymore. That seems telling as well.
I can’t speak to this, I don’t play the game anymore lol.
What I will say is there are plenty of complaints of imbalance, more so than in other metas (I’m accounting for the typical baseline of complaints listed on these forums.)
In any case, I can’t confirm or deny how bad the state of the game is as I don’t play. I posted that message many weeks/months ago when I played last more recently, now I haven’t touched the game in months. However, I know there were absolutely broken secitons of the meta where mech rogue was dominating low ranks, etc. Even when I played, the game felt largely broken in terms of balance.
What I wrote there specifically talked about paladin auras and how the devs explicitly wrote they don’t want to deal with “is-balanced” constraints anymore in the design process. Alls I wanted to do with my comments was highlight how bad an idea that was overall. They already struggle to keep balance in the game as is, if they throw what little caution they have to the wind, hearthstone players are in for even more imbalance.
Its not imbalanced its just boring. The whole game is just combo combo combo. Either warrior playing odin, druid playing drum circle, priest playing 40 amanthuls, shaman otking, mage otking, paladin/priest/dh just making guys that gain +1/+1 every time. Rogue playing a mech and then turning it into a bigger and bigger mech. Warlock playing sargeas. Yawn.
Theres no creativity to anything in the game anymore. Its bad enough that after a day no one experiments with anything at all but the ‘settled’ decks are all just one dimensional boring decks
The biggest problem to me is that spells have outpaced regular minions being viable.
Well when almost every deck revolves around 1 singular ‘good’ card the game gets stale pretty fast. Or mabye you like that simple gameplay. Thats fair too.
“how dare my opponent have the audacity to choose to play cards!!! I won’t stand for this!!!”
Not sure I see what you mean here. There are certain decks that revolve around strong cards, but most of them have a host of tools to get to that card or the deck sucks.
“Odin” warrior, “Drum circle” druid, “Sif” Mage, “Bio” shaman, “Sargeras” warlock. Theres a bunch of decks named after the singular card they revolve around. Sure theres 30-40 cards in a deck but when the deck wins or loses by that one singular card I find that game play simple and boring.
I am not saying I am the center of the universe. I am saying that the game is getting stale so it psychologically drives me away. I believe it happens with other people to because we are not so different from each other.
HS is not at peak players now, at the start of 2019 had more players. It slowly lost players during 2019 and 2020. When it comes to active players you can see it had almost 500k in october 2019 and even more before that. Still the game has been steadily growing since 2020, so saying it’s dying is very wrong.