Why bother giving cards a mana cost or conditions for using them if you also print ways to bypass those conditions entirely?
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The point is to have fun
then make everything 0 mana
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A balanced game is fun Hearthstone isn’t fun.
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They already made half of them cost 0, we’re on our way there.
I don’t see a lot of demand for paper rock scissors Twitch streamers. A lot of balanced games are decidedly not fun. I care about balance quite a lot, I’m not saying that balance isn’t important, but balance is not so all-important that it is the sole ingredient in fun. And ultimately fun is what’s most important, more important than balance.
TLDR: if balance is at the top of your value hierarchy, your priorities are messed up.
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I disagree with your assumption that most balanced games are not fun. The funnest times ive had are when both sides are sweating it and the game hangs in the balance by the next draw. I get almost no satisfaction from lop sided games winning or losing. This game got me years ago when most of the games were nail biters. The nail biters are way more fun and most the time those games make me wanna reach through the screen to shake hands or chat about choices we both made. I hate the 5-7 turn no chance games were there is no strategy and the result is based on luck of the draw.
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That’s not what I said, so it’s not my assumption.
First off, there’s normally no difference between these two things.
Second, neither of them have anything to do with balance. In the context of game design, balance is the appearance that multiple mutually exclusive player choices are simultaneously optimal. Choices like that or that class, or including this or that card. In general, balance is in the deck builder. Balance is barely a part of piloting at all.
The term you are looking for is polarization, not balance. Polarization is how far matchups are from coin flip. Low polarization means close matches are more common.
To use these two terms properly: paper rock scissors is both as balanced AND as polarizing as a game can be. It doesn’t get more polarizing than a 100-0 match up win rate.
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Maybe if they stopped listening to twitch streamers the game would be fun. { and Legend and diamond tier players} The majority of your player base isn’t high diamond/ high legend tier
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Heck not even balance but just having to make meaningful decisions { and actually think }is fun. It’s why Disguised Toast left.
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The game just gets more and more ridiculous with every expansion. It was hard to imagine it could get worse after the last one, but good job Blizzard, you F’n nailed it.
I don’t want to say I’m not gonna play anymore, but the truth of the matter is, I find myself consistently saying “nah” when I think about launching the game. Maybe it’s just best to put Hearthstone out of my mind for a month or two, checking back later to see if it’s improved.
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I think opportunities for skill seem a lot less frequent when you get better at the game — and this goes for pretty much any game, btw. Tic tac toe feels a lot more fun when you’re a little kid who’s just been introduced to it, and right around the time you’ve figured out how to never lose willingly the game becomes F tier. It’s actually less fun to git gud.
The flip side of this is that people will look at the “classic” version of the game with nostalgia goggles, remembering all the fun they had when they were less skilled. But if they went back in a time machine it wouldn’t be fun because they’re too skilled now. It’s a little bit less the game that’s changed, and a little bit more the PLAYER who has changed. But they don’t want to accept that they’ve changed.
So if all you really cared about was having fun, you should probably play the game “no spoilers,” not letting anyone tell you anything, not watching Twitch streamers or YouTubers, homebrew all your decks, and definitely not visiting these forums. You would stretch out into the future as far as possible the enlightenment moment of having the game figured out and playing better than everyone else, because as soon as you reach that apex you have nowhere left to go. And having nowhere left to go is hella boring.
But that doesn’t bring in the viewers if you’re a content creator. And Disguised Toast really speedran that process, IMHO. If you’re at the apex then the next step is a different mountain.
In conclusion, “forever games” are inherently unnatural and sooner or later everyone should move on from Hearthstone.
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I’ll give you an example. {Deck of Lunacy mage} Some of the times when the meta is around rotation time and the card pool is small the forums are most toxic is when the game isn’t balanced. Yeah balance might not get the streamers/ content creators excited but it is crucial.
Heck just look at Azurite snake and how fast that got nerfed. Do this one mechanic that gives you a benefit anyway {4 times}and get a card that would automatically be nerfed in most classes {not counting rouge}
The point is never really balance the point is releasing new, exciting and powerful cards so people will be enticed to come back for the new expansions and spend money. Then once people get frustrated they will try to balance the game and the cycle will repeat itself. If you always assume that everything they do in this game is to maximize profit in the short term then you will better understand the state and direction of the game.
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Cards that lower the cost usually have a drawback.
Shadowstep: Returns a minion to your hand which removes one threat you have from the board.
Sorcerer’s 'Apprentice: Is a 3/2, so was only useful in decks it was used in, then in one of Blizzard’s lowest moments they unnecessarily and foolishly nerfed it making it completely useless.
To a certain extent this cycle is inevitable. People don’t buy packs without power creep. The problem i have is the not the existence of the cycle but the speed of it. The bargain back when Wild was created was that there would be an annual rotation, done the right way with an actual rotation. This to me made a lot more sense than zero rotations; I could and can see how it’s necessary. But what the playerbase has acquiesced to at this point is a pseudorotation six times a year, if not more, following every single expansion and miniset. You know that there are going to be overpowered cards at release and you know that they’re going to nerf them shortly afterwards. It’s powercreep sevenfold for sevenfold pressure to buy packs. Blizzard’s behavior here is exploitative and the playerbase’s behavior is enabling.
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The really “unbalanced” thing is how Blizzard cherry picks which classes get the benefits of cheating on mana costs. Can you imagine the outcry if Priest had ways of reducing the mana costs of their big minions down to negligible numbers…or even 0? Yet, this is what Priests and the classes that don’t have any huge mana reducing mechanics have to deal with from other classes. DH was essentially built as a mana-reducing class. Druid has ramp. And now we have more cards being printed that provide huge discounts, but only for specific classes. Yeah, that priest may be clearing your board several times a game, but chances are they’re not putting any big threatening minion down after that. Hearthstone is a cluster****. It just is. And it isn’t fixable.
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Problem is they listen to low tier players too much, that’s why they nerfed snake after 2 days and why the game is aggro fest mode right now.
These are the same thing actually. If you’re a Twitch streamer and your opinions can’t be described as a politically correct version of your Twitch chat’s opinions, you’re going to have a bad time. When I say that Zeddy is the high priest of the church of salt, I do not mean that he decides what is and isn’t gospel with impunity. Like all priests, he must answer to his congregation, or they’ll find a new priest. (In this particular case one might consider YouTube commenters to be the “inner circle.”)
That said, I do think that top Legend is too much of a focus. More of a Platinum player take on top Legend play than a top Legend take — and even that might be too much credit, assuming that watchers are players at all — but still, that’s what they’re watching so that’s what Tweets they’re liking.
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