Is it win rates? play rates? complaints? personal feelings?
I have seen nerfs that made absolutely no sense to me, while other cards that I find unbelievable, pass without ever being touched, so I just wondered if there is a definite criteria for nerfs, or does team 5 just choose what they disapprove of? I have never read anything from a dev member addressing the subject, but I thought that others may have.
The company records all games. They spell out every single balance patch that they looked at that data.
Popularity probably plays an extra role though the strongest factor is probably “what’s profitable”.
Well; I personally wish they would show their work, explaining in detail why a nerf was necessary or not… I think a great many players might feel this way.
From the last few balance patches and their notes I got the impression they did a combination of “statistics + popular opinion”. That’s because they did things like “we nefed the AOE of paladin because it was too strong” but at the same time I knew most people were unreasonable considering paladin OP because it was not even a Tier 3 deck at that time (e.g. they left at that patch the exca rogue untouched when it was already Tier S at that point lol…).
I believe a lot of those things would be clearer with a well developed (by the community) “SimulationCraft for Hearthstone”; it would run billions of permutations of all cards in the game against various scenariors of popularities of opponents etc.; then the players themselves would be able to derive through robust simulation what is best and what is best nerfed.
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Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
Nerfs are based on play experience, or data, or their design objectives.
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Nerfs are based on how much streamers complain and how many people join the bandwagon on redit or twitter. Then they throw some random nerfs in that they decides by throwing darts blindfolded at a board.
They could also preemptively nerf some cards because of card to be released in future set.
But yeah, some cards are nerfed based on their power, other cards are nerfed based on unhealthy play pattern.
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All of the above, and more.
If I had to rank them, I’d say deck popularity ends up as number one. The more often you see a deck, the more it will frustrate the player base. This is especially true if the most popular deck has a fairly polarized matchup spread, where it can feel like you can’t play X because this deck is too popular.
Following popularity, it’s cards that create a viscerally negative play experience. This is where cards like Theotar get nerfed, because even though that card statistically never made sense to be in every deck, he was put in every deck and his effect felt purely negative to the opponent. OTK style decks usually eventually get nerfed due to this if they stick around for too long without a clear counter.
Sometimes they do go based on complaints/personal feelings on their card changes. This has been part of why they lean into the hearthstone creators program folks for balancing ideas now.
And lastly, sometimes it is just the data showing a card is too strong, but those are somewhat rare, because people get annoyed when blizzard nerfs the good cards in a bad deck, even if the cards are legitimately too strong.
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If the company is that petty, it would be in their best interest to not do that but to maximize profits. Maximizing profits does not necessarily follow popular opinion because:
1 ) In the long term a better game is better than a bad game that was more profitable short term (not that they follow that motto but still)
2 ) People don’t want easy mode always even if they have the delusion they do because too easy is also too boring
Also I think Blizzard has a culture in general of “shaking things up” even if they do it in a stupid way because it appears they think it makes it “exciting and interesting” (it’s probably a bad idea because it makes the game look worse long term).