I’m would really like to see people answer to this because after thinking a little i’m got the suspection that people have a Ton of different answers.
For example:
How much player agency exists in discover effects?
Or a even better question:
Player agency should also be important to someone playing against you or Just for your execution of strategy alone?
Or plague DK:
Is there really any player agency in playing against It or in the end of the day you’re just on mercy of draw RNG?
While hearthstone is in fact simple.
Discuss “player agency” on hearthstone matches have so many gray areas that read the last insight about the next balance patch made me have more questions than answers.
I’d say a fair amount. There’s RNG involved and there can be good and bad ways of doing discover effects in terms of them involving more agency. Good discover effects need to be a little targeted so you know what the pool is and what the odds are of a desired outcome and use it in your favor. If discover is a shot in the dark, then it is badly designed and doesn’t involve much player agency at all.
I would say lately, they have been designing discover effects well and with sufficient moderation.
100% yes. I think this is the key actually, when agency is most important in gameplay experience is when you feel like whatever is thrown at you, you could have come out of it if you had done X instead of Y, or if at the very least you would have had access to Z. When you opponent does something and you’re just left staring at the screen like: ‘welp, I guess there’s no point in me trying anymore’, that’s a poor experience.
There is in the sense that you want to kill them faster than you are drawing plagues. Aside from that, without steamcleaner there is very very low player agency imo. The most relevant decisions involve whether you should risk it and draw more or not or trying to disrupt their plague generation. Overall, very little agency aside from the fact they are easy to kill.
Yeah, some people just don’t understand how much agency we actually have, which is why they aren’t playing on a higher level.
Knowing the pool of possible discoveries, calculating the odds of hitting your outs and comparing those odds with alternative play are a skill which get honed with practice and hard thinking on the spot, and it’s comparable to poker players and chess grandmasters.
No tilting also proves to be a way to get agency where average player doesn’t find it, but just insta-concedes and opens a thread to whine.
I took it to mean the abrupt ending of a game due to massive damage where nothing really mattered because you just ended up dead from cards contained in hand or some effect like wheel that just immediately ends the game.
Which then would bring up the question… what is an ok amount of damage from hand? 18 damage in a turn… 29?
To have agency you need to have a choice. Not merely a theoretical choice but a real choise between several more or less viable options. A choice that matters.
In constructed you have zero agency during your opponents turn. The agency comes from your own turn. Its not about the plays the opponent is making,hs never was because you cant interupt those plays. It is about the plays that you can make.
And this is where i am woried a bit that blizzard doesnt really understand player agency. Blizzard seems to think:if the opponent plays otk then the other player has no agency.
Balance is one aspect of agency. Since having something very op pretty much removes any viable option for the opponent. But it is not the only aspect of agency.
You need have agency during your own turns. You need have agency while making your deck.
However much is neccessary to win the game. Seriously, OTK is not THE problem. The problem is all the removal and card draw enabling those OTK-s to come before they get run down by aggro decks in more than 50% of the games.
That’s THE problem of agency in this game. The problem where you have 5 cards as an aggro or midrange deck, and whichever one you play won’t make a difference because the opponent has an answer to it. That’s the agency problem we have.
OTK Shaman, Reno Warrior - they are the problems.
Zarimi priest, too, but in a different way - it’s way too strong so when it snowballs it also removes agency, and it’s too versatile because it can also be a combo/OTK deck. Once toned down, however, it won’t be a problem anymore, at least not one of agency.
As it stands, if you queue up into Warrior with a perfect curve with any deck whatsoever, you just don’t have any agency. Your hand is just useless rubbish which gets dealt with continuously while Warrior keeps getting armor so in case he misses one turn removal, he won’t even feel it. That’s the lack of agency.
And the response is to bring your A-game hyper-aggro, hyper-broken decks like Zarimi and Nature Shaman.
This is saying that skill is a poor experience if you don’t have it. Gameplay skill is having that way out technically there, but hiding it from you like a puzzle and denying it to you if you’re not smart enough. Personally I am 100% for creating exactly these “poor experiences” for players who can’t solve piloting puzzles, and their experience SHOULD be to come to the forums and whine that “they couldn’t do anything.” Them blaming their failure on something other than themselves is part of the plan.
In other words:
^ this.
Overall, when I read the Blizzpost saying that they care about “agency,” what I read that as is them saying that this is a low skill meta, but using a different word so as not to offend people. And then in the list of targets they heavily imply Burn Shaman, which is by far the highest skill factor deck in the current format, as well as (explicitly) Zarimi Priest, which is also very high up there. Blizzard wouldn’t know skill if it bit them in the derriere, and what they seem to be doing instead is believing the whiners and aiming to deny wins to actually skilled players because it “feels bad” to lose to someone who solves a puzzle for lethal.
In short what I expect is not an agency patch, but an anti-skill patch.
I dont mind OTKs and only think they’re a problem when they require little investment. For something like Sif where its sif + 2 cards I think that sort of OTK is a problem (the damage bonus on sif can be increased through just playing the game and doesn’t really require substantial investment to obtain). Far too many games were fun 8 turn back and forths then all of a sudden sif + a few spells and whoops the game was over.
Something like the old shaman rag OTK which required reducing the cost of the summon 3 copies spells, and charging up the weapon and playing azshara to get the 1 cost spell is ok because it requires substantial investment to complete. The entire deck was built around trying to get to the combo rather than the combo being mabye 5 cards in a deck like Odyn / Sif
Also I think they need to be very careful about the removal. You dont want to get to the point where hunter plays that 5 mana card and gets 4 4/4s or shaman goes hagatha into the 6 mana nature spell that summons a giant board and that all of a sudden is the game over combo because removal has been scaled so far back.
Striking that sort of balance is what blizzard presumably is paid for so I wish them luck.
Is literally the opposite, judging by the deck winrates.
First of all, it’s not even theoretically possible that you drop down dead turn 7 against Sif Mage. Turn 8 is a highroll. She needs a lot of preparation, and yes, it sometimes mean doing suboptimal plays as you have to spend your combo cards to stack spell schools early so your draws cost less and so you don’t fall behind. It means you sometimes have to choose a mediocre spell because it has spell school you need. It means a lot of sacrifice and a lot of trade-off and a lot of practise to work in this meta.
3x Rag Shaman, however, is the most broken deck on the ladder currently and you can theoretically play that combo turn 4 already (if you use the coin to double flash on turn 3). It’s toxic gameplay which doesn’t give you any counterplay whatsoever.
Speak about player agency. You make a huge board and stick to 30 hp just to see your whole board removed by 0 mana crash of thunders which also hit you face to bring you down to 24 and then see 3x ragnaroses from what used to be an empty board to bring you down - what kind of decisions could you have done to avoid this?
Please tell me, what agency do I have while playing against that deck? How am I supposed to intervene in their card draw and discoveries? How do I avoid the inevitable?
I wasn’t talking about the current rag shaman, thats an example that falls under sif / odyn where its a minimal card investment (frog taunt spell + flash for discount + conduct + rag card)
I was speaking about the old rag shaman that put up 7 rags on the board and required cost reduction though inzah, queen azshara, weapon charges on the 3 cost weapon.
Far too many OTKs today are just a few cards… Odyn + mabye 4 or 5 supporting armor gain cards. Sif + that 1 mana discover spell + a few burn spells
A good example of an ‘ok’ OTK today would be that priest card that deals 5 damage everytime its overhealed. You have to sort of build your deck around it and it takes a lot of investment to make it go off (that deathrattle thing that gives bandages has to die) and so forth.
You can literally put Odyn or Sif in almost any deck you want. You dont have to build aroudn those OTKs as they’re laid out on a platter for you. Cast a few spells during the game and OTK with sif… or play odyn on turn 9 and then play a bunch of armor spells on turn 10. Theres no prep to get to that end as there is in other OTK decks
Well, I disagree with this part of your posts, because both my experience playing that deck, experience playing against that deck and that deck’s winrate all disagree with it.
And that’s why it’s crucial to understand that how many pieces a combo needs is not what makes it broken. It’s how often can you find those combo pieces!
Take for example the less broken, but still broken, OTK shaman version where you need anywhere from 6 to 15 spells to OTK someone, but it’s doable more than 55% of the times.
Even though you need a lot of cards to make the combo, your whole deck and more than half of your discovery pool are all parts of your combo.
So it’s not the amount of cards the combo requires, it’s how often you get it by turn X that’s important for lack of agency and interaction. You propose basically removing / nerfing tier 2 or even tier 3 decks and leaving a tier 1 broken deck.
When that’s your suggestion, you have to know something with your assumptions isn’t working properly.
I think the issue here is you’re thinking about the game as it exists now while I’m talking about future balance considerations in terms of what the game will trend towards in the future.
Its like Mechathun vs. Denathirus. Mechathun was an OTK that required substantial investment and an entire deck devoted to the OTK. Denathrius required playing denathrius (I know it wasn’t a literal OTK most of the time but this is for illustrative purposes). Player agency against mechathun OK, player agency vs denathrius not as ok.
Fighting this one was hard for me, but one day I was like, “I’ll just play until my face explodes outside my own means.” I found myself winning A LOT more games not JUST because I played all my games out but because I found strategies I didn’t realize until I had to find them and actually put the effort into doing so. I, of course, did not always win, but it made me a better player for sure.
I played against a lot of Mecha’thun warlock decks back in the day and it felt a whole lot like playing against warrior now, and the pieces weren’t hard to put together. The difference IMO is the quality of disruption. Dirty rat vs Mecha’thun was a whole lot like Theotar vs Denathrius but it cost 2 and you pretty much knew when to drop it. The Theotar sentiment nerf was a terrible idea for this very reason.
So from my perspective, if agency is the issue, more/better disruption is a good way to fix that. Losing steamcleaner is one of the reasons I think we’ve seen a solitaire-ish meta develop. Dirty rat just isn’t enough right now.
To be clear, I hated Theotar with a passion but at least I respected why it needed to exist, and boy did it.
I’m not clear on exactly what it is the devs are trying to fix but I’m curious to see how it plays out.
Discover is one my favorite aspects of Hearthstone precisely because it enables player agency. The corpse system and the cards that use them are another good example.
Basically to me, player agency is anything that increases the complexity and meaningfulness of the players’ decisions relative to the random features of the game.
I would like to point out that that neither of those two decks is any harder to play than Ilgynoth OTK was back in the day. They are all decks players say are “high Skill” but in reality they are just decks that you get better at playing through repetition.
In fact i would say Ilgynoth OTK was a much harder deck to play than either of these “high skill” decks. These newer decks pop off on a single card while older OTK style decks required multiple key cards in hand. Of course we know why this is. A one card OTK is easier for the general player to understand.
Most players just never realize that when they are stuck in a certain spot on ladder and lose to the same decks over and over. There’s almost something they can change in their deck to increase their chances of winning those matchups.
Maybe i am too old school with CCG’s but i never stop evolving the decks i play and switch up cards in decks all the time. I could never play the same deck card for card for long periods of time.
Um, this isn’t a thing. Burn Shaman is clearly a multi card OTK. Odyn needs a lot of armor cards to OTK. With Sif you’re starting to get into four or five cards but it’s not one either.
Combo decks tend towards higher skill factor, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. What I think IS a pretty good rule of thumb is that if an OTK deck can be in a situation where it doesn’t have lethal currently, but drawing cards can be committed to and if hit then lethal, if miss then concede, those decks are very high skill factor to the degree that that situation actually comes up.
On this one we’re going to have to agree to disagree. I absolutely consider Odyn a one card combo killer. We saw the Masters tour where somebody pulled off over 30 damage with just two mana playing at Odyn deck. Sif is the same kind of card. It’s an all-in-one combo card that you only need that copy of to win the game. The burn from an otk is already a given. You’re going to have that because that’s what your deck is trying to do.
What I’m talking about is where you need more than one piece for the combo damage to actually create lethal. There can be also other factors that require the lethal. All in one cards that just produce lethal are poor design in my opinion.
I’ll give you the shaman is the outlier in this and that you need multiple combo pieces to pull it off. The problem is that all of their combo pieces are free cards that cost nothing so in effect they’re not really paying anything for the combo. We already know what the effect of that is. It creates a turn 5/6 otk.
Now we have to see if these nerfs do anything to significantly curb the nature shaman deck. I have a feeling all it’s going to do is make the deck a turn 7 otk now.