You love to have terrible takes on this kinda thing.
You also say “people should play the decks that win (even if they dont like playing those decks) instead of the decks they want to play”
A game is supposed to be fun for the people who play it. They should give support to decks people enjoy playing instead of everyone playing something like pirate DH because it wins.
There was a great example in a vs podcast a few weeks back talking about LoL. Riot saw a lot of players enjoyed playing burst ap Katarina more than the sustained ad damage Katarina build(which was better)
They didnt curse the playerbase for playing suboptimal… they just buffed the AP burst builds and lowered the power of the AD builds. Because they care about the playerbase and understand people should enjoy playing the game.
In terms of what is good and right, players emphatically should NOT play decks that win instead of the decks they want to play. That’s why we nerf. We do NOT nerf because of players playing against decks they don’t like, but because of players playing AS decks they don’t like. So I literally could not be more ideologically opposed to what you say I am.
I have previously discussed how I used to believe that the meta is rational. I used to expect people, as a collective group, to drift away from decks that lose and towards decks that win, because that makes certain assumptions about how to balance the game easier. But first, the type of “should” there is like predicting gravity “should” make something fall, not the “should” that indicates that I think something is actually good; and second, I was wrong, people don’t do that very much anyway so that “gravity” doesn’t really exist.
True. But you’re never going to make it fun by balancing what people play against. Only by balancing what they play as. People will never derive significant satisfaction from things they have no agency over, and you will never have agency over what you play against because that would violate your agency over what you play as.
Something the Hearthstone online communities would hate and want to cancel devs over, because the Hearthstone community is on average terrible, and viciously jealous of anything popular. The Hearthstone community literally doesn’t understand the difference between being beloved and being powerful, they’d see a lot of players going burst Katrina and determine that it has to be nuked from orbit because it’s warping the meta.
Why are you defending people who would take what you see as good, and deliberately and unapologetically smash it to pieces if they were ever given the chance?
I didnt say all your takes were terrible, just on this topic they can be
Well your profile is hidden so i cant pull the quote where you talk about how players continue to force playing decks that are bad instead of switching to whatever counters x deck. Maybe you could change my mind about the context of how you meant that quote.
I agree with you that nerfs should not be based off of animosity.
I agree 100% about how they did combo rogue dirty and that it was skill intensive and not just memorizing 1 combo. That is a reductive take by people who dont really know how to Rogue
More often than not I agree with you. I think im just more optimistic about the community than you are. There are a lot of players that dont interact with the forum that are probably pretty reasonable.
Oh okay I think I see where the communication breakdown is, and it seems to be my fault.
I think in economics terms quite a bit. And in economics, “rational” has a specialist meaning that is in no way synonymous with reasonable. It doesn’t mean the same thing as the “normal” word rational.
In economics, a rational decision is one based on an analysis of costs and benefits to maximize self-interest, usually assuming something like perfect information, and usually assuming some numerical measurement of self-interest, like currency or winrate. In Hearthstone, there is not perfect but pretty good information (via VS, etc), so if everyone only cared about winrate, meta shifts would be very predictable. Rational economic models could be made.
When I say that players are behaving “irrationally,” I don’t mean that in a derogatory way; I believe that the point is to have fun, fun is subjective, and that from a development perspective good game design actually wants players to behave irrationally, in the economic sense of the term.
Carnivore has previously argued with me that it’s silly for developers to nerf when a “rational path” to balance already exists. For example, let’s say A is the most popular deck, but it’s in Tier 2, while B is the highest winrate deck, has a favorable matchup against A, and is not popular at all. People are complaining about playing against A all the time, and if you knew those facts, you might get angry at the playerbase for not fixing those problems on their own, because they could if they wanted to by shifting towards B. But they don’t want to, probably because it wouldn’t be fun, and even though that’s “irrational” of them, I consider it reasonable for them to focus on fun over winrate.
I still think its harsh to say “the community is bad” when it is the developers responsibility to balance in a way that benefits the most players possible
I think there is a vocal minority that will complain no matter what happens.
There is validity in the frustration that other players have when it comes to some of the balancing decisions the devs make. Sure jealousy can create bias, but the devs released the mini-set in the state that caused the frustration towards mage. They made a mini-set with 1 new powerful deck and everyone flocked to it. Its popularity was the result of the design decisions they made and people being frustrated with that (even if some didnt understand exactly why they were frustrated) is a reasonable response.
Maybe there would be no need to try and tamper the popularity of mage if they would have released the mini-set with a handful of other cards that were powerful enough to shake up the meta
On the one hand, I don’t really think it’s a maybe that caused high Mage popularity. Playing with new cards is more fun than playing with old cards, and there wasn’t good balance within the miniset itself.
On the other hand, people make entirely too big of a deal about what they play against. Popularity doesn’t matter that much; what matters is what YOU play AS.
If a deck is 20% of the meta and if the decks you consider fun lose to it, You will become frustrated. Especially if there is no effort to put the decks you enjoy on more equal ground in power level as the other decks that are at the top.
Off topic, but worth sharing
Sometimes your contempt for other people reminds me of this quote. I do think that your frustration with others comes from a place where you want to help them grow… most of the time anyway xD
"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves."
The problem with talking about community is that it is like talking with a door.
It has problems and some are really bad like the ones involving integrity going into trash bin to praise anything they’re feeling at the momment.
In fact this is Far worse for the competitive HS scenario than anything blizzard could do.
But the instant you point that you’re grouped with people that are literal blizzard chills instead of anyone even considering the content of the mensage.
I believe that every person should have a love-hate relationship with themselves. It is important to simultaneously love the good within yourself, and hate the bad within yourself. I don’t believe that it’s possible to truly love someone without hating the demon on their back.
I don’t know if being poor qualifies as a demon. But a lot of the things that make people poor, do. Addiction first and foremost among them. I imagine some causes of being poor aren’t a problem.
I hope that meme is not indicative. I might have to rethink your honorary Governorship of the Lollipop Guild.
Also? I just raised over 3k for the other side.
Addiction is a symptom not a cause. Does it make things worse? Absolutely
I dont really want to get into this any more on here though doesnt seem like the right place
Im more into the Picard line of thinking of valuing personal growth over material gains
No one says WRONG better than me. I’ve been told my WRONG is the best WRONG they’ve ever seen. People love my WRONG. There’s never been a better WRONG in the history of WRONG. I invented it. People tell me that all the time.
It’s a very good brain, the best the doctor’s have ever seen. They tell me it has the most wrinkles they have ever seen. Lots of compliments. And it heals at an incredible rate. They’ve never seen anything like it.
I dont want to simply copy paste the same exact thing in all these identical threads… but Mage wasnt nerfed in a significant way for me. Like, At all. lol. But here’s my longer response from another thread.
This is likely to get deleted since the OP was reported
As predicted. Because everyone knew the nerf wouldn’t kill Mage like you doomsday predicted. You’re constantly complaining about a new card every single day, many of which are really bad takes and yet when Mage gets a nerf that is barely a nerf, you roleplay this guy:
Can you please calm it down a bit on the constant requests for nerfs when you’re constantly so off base? Can we keep it to like 1 a week at most?
