I left HS some odd years ago when the power creep started to get silly (I believe it was when we started replacing all the heroes with upgraded versions) and I return after a few years to find that the game has long since passed the line between it and the absurd.
Most decks I see have infinite cards and never run out. Nobody ever plays all the cards in their hands. Everyone’s hand is constantly refreshed.
I can’t make sense of value at all. Idk if it is like MTG where you have two drops that need to be removed instantly or you lose almost certainly, but we are getting there.
I can’t believe how much stuff, and by stuff I mean legendaries, that either board wipe and lay a huge minion, or do a trillion damage. AND WORSE! Everyone I see with legendaries seems to have devised ways to play multiples of those legendaries. If a person has 3 copies of a super powerful legendary then it is not a legendary, its just a ridiculously imbalance card.
The game is just absolutely exploding everything until you play your big thing. I hate the interactions so bad. I used to love HS because it was scrappy. Now its just nuclear war. Feels outrageous every time I see anything of consequence happen.
Be thankful you didn’t see the previous season then… Every board based decks were killed by too flexible AOE, OTK and removers… it was horrible… Since the rotation… from these only OTK left atleast… but the mindless design is real… I have returned 4 years ago but I can say more and more unfair designs showed up since that this game has ever seen… If the game will go into that direction again… I will quit too… I just won’t suffer for another year because of the incompetent developers behind the game… I had enough.
Unfortunately even if every hearthstone player never spends money on the game again they still wouldn’t care, Blizzard has other games they can milk money from the mindless masses
Whales happened. When there are idiots that spend 10% of their income on buying every new legendary each content release, and that is 80% of the income for Hearthstone, you end up with this set of half legendarys. Enjoy, its only going to get worse.
Everyone who was any good at game design moved on a long time ago. I think Blizzard was a lot of people’s dream job 20 plus years ago but not anymore. This crew just keeps repackaging the same ideas and selling them back to us. Everything feels like solitaire no matter what you play. It’s all just stale
I think OP laid it out already. They came back after a while and are talking of a comparison between then and now. Essentially, they are saying the power creep from whenever they stopped playing, which sounds like only a couple years ago maybe three, is large when you consider only so much time has passed.
Yeah but I wanted to get to an answer on why big power is bad in the OP’s opinion because big power is not necessarily bad. The main reason is that after you play a lot of games inside the same month then the randomness approximately cancels out because of the Law of Large numbers (basically your win rate will converge to the “expected real win rate for your skill”).
It’s however a huge issue in tournament because I really don’t trust in a final who was 1st or 2nd if they only played 3 games (the skewness in this game is huge so you need at least 60 to 80 matches to start seeing the win rates stabilizing for a deck).
I get it that it can feel bad to see a lot of big power swinging games - and hence randomness playing a big role on win rate (“who randomly got their big power out first”) - but that’s not a winrate issue if you play a lot of matches.