I’d like some outside insight to what some of the more prominent forum members think that T5 is doing wrong.
We went from a relatively healthy meta - with a little extra rogue and cheese - to a piss poor meta of waiting out the expansion to solve our current meta issues.
Setting aside the topics like greed, rigging - etc, etc.
Are the mini-sets to blame? Is lack of testing to blame? Where is the fault?
Are we - the consumers - too expectant?
i think it still goes back to UiS when they decided to basically outlaw value as a wincondition, leaving only variations of tempo and burn viable.
So there´s one less lever for deckbuilding and patterns to add variety and everything just got more consistent and polarizing.
Atm, I feel T5 is being too ambitious.
They are trying to provide things beyond what they are reasonably able to handle.
You can’t please everyone.
Take as an example those that miss decks that relied on abundance of value. And then remember the hate decks like lackey rogue, barrens priest, or even jade druid (all of which are value decks) received.
The tricky part is trying to please the most of your customers while realising that there will be a portion of your plsyerbase that absolutely hates something.
I say that in the case of UiS they probably failed, the players that liked the meta were less than those that didn’t. They did try to reign the scale in subsequent expansions though and I honestly think that the meta did get better with those.
Also keep in mind that those displeased with something will always shout louder than those pleased with it. So forum yelling is not the best indicator to judge if something is successful or not.
my biggest gripe is everything was put on hold to push out mercenaries. now that it’s been released it feels no effort has been made to fix the game. it never used to crash multiple times a day. i didn’t used to have to restart every other game. alot of the frustrations i’ve had are losing games because the devs can’t make the game run properly. the meta will fix itself after rotation, but when will the game fix itself??
Their balance philosophy is wrong. Case and point. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice nerf. Sorcerer’s Apprentice was used in very few decks, now I’d be surprised if she’s being used in any. That means the nerf was literally the worst nerf in the history of Hearthstone.
I hate to break it to you, but killing the card was their intention.
As a player who is between 1000 and 1300 wins with all classes, that’s absolutely fine by me.
Rampant power inflation beyond any sense of control. It’s not power creep, it’s way faster and way stronger.
Harvest Golem used to be a good card. Now, if your 3-mana card doesn’t add what old Hearthstone would call 7 or 8 mana worth of value, it’s unplayable.
I miss games where it was a back-and-forth, not just who got luckier in assembling their blowout play first. Aggro, control, otk, doesn’t matter: all decks are too explosive, too strong.
They may be balanced against each other, but that’s not the only balance that matters.
I agree. Team five has allowed the power creep to go completely off the scale.
They haven’t allowed power creep, they blatantly do it. I think every recent expansion/mini-set has at least 1 clearly OP card from the start, if not more.
What is even funnier is that there are lots of really powercrept cards that barely see any play, because their classes can’t keep up with the whole race.
The most broken combo of powercrept cards makes all the other ones look weak, despite being miles stronger than average cards in prior expansions.
Balance now is like shooting nukes at each other.
The result for me is that the game lacks interaction, win or lose it just ain’t fun.
This. The only deck that kinda still does this atm is Control Warrior, and even then it’s much faster than classical variants.
They want big bonuses and the more new powerful cards people need to make useful (competitive or even just fun) decks, the more sales they will make.
Things are often unbalanced, but they have recently done more rapid changes so the dominant decks stay there for a lower amount of time and rotate. Another twelve months of quest warlock would be puke.
They turned the power creep dial up until it broke off. So now the dial is stuck at power overwhelming with no way to turn it back down to normal.
Their entire design vision.
They have refused to push the game into a route that’s not childishly simple. To reduce randomness? Discover, discover, discover, a seemingly good mechanic printed every set to “reduce RNG” that is actually terrible. There is no searching decks or damage targeting on non-random targets after EIGHT years because why let players search decks or choose targets when they can gamble on random cards? And no, there has already been a precedent set that they can, and maybe even will let us choose targets for these effects. The 8 mana 8/8 mech from Deadmines lets us deal 2 damage FOUR times to enemy minions, but each time we CHOOSE the targets. Now that’s a step in the right direction cards really need to go.
And yes, maybe power creep is actually necessary for the game. But they’re not increasing the power the right way. Instead of making cards that are more reliable or better situationally, they decided to make power creep based on random mechanics, because maybe they somehow thought that makes it weaker, but in fact it makes it even more frustrating. Many of the cards printed, especially for Mage, is just an outright slot machine. They are basically “When you play this card, you have 50% chance to immediately lose or win.” Damage targeting when the spell deals more damage than normal? Random. Minions with stronger effects? Random or discover. Don’t make cards RANDOMLY strong if you get the right high roll, make them SITUATIONALLY strong and reward you for playing certain cards and strategies. If Kazkusan discovered a treasure for every Dragon you played and had a build-around strategy, and actually gave you more treasure choices and counterplay, most people wouldn’t have complained.
I disagree that this is always true. I have seen many a successful movie franchise survive, not by constantly trying to up the ante, but; by leveling the playing field and rebuilding to a seemingly bigger payoff
Card games and movies are two different things. And what I’m saying is that even if they need to increase the power level, they still increased it the wrong way through random mechanics instead of cards that are situationally better to reward certain strategies.
I think they could dial the power back and simply give more flash to every class and accomplish the same sales goals as always.
They have proven the strategy works with Mage for years.
The old problems back then was that most cards were too weak because the team was too afraid to print anything that remotely generated slightly more value than its mana cost paid for. I think they tried to balance that but went too much in the other direction and made some cards way too good and added random mechanics to “balance” them when in fact it made them more frustrating.
Well; I agree that the product is frustrating. If that was the goal, then kudos to the design team.