For the past year and two months I have seen Blizzard release sets and then have to play whack-o-mole on all of the broken things they just created. This happens because the design philosophy that is baked into the game is trash to begin with.
Rogue can draw their entire deck by turn 4-5 while having 20+ mana worth of value hitting the board in 1 turn. Oh, let’s make 1 card cost 1 mana more like that matters.
Druid has been cheating out 25+ mana of minions by turn 5 for literally over a year now.
Oh, look, warrior pooped out a 2/25 elusive taunt for the 20th game in a row.
Hunter making 2x 17/13 on turn 4.
I could go on an on about how this game has become solitaire and fighting for board is simply a thing of the past.
People like to throw around terms like power creep. There is 100% power creep and it is a real problem. I would say that the problem is far more insidious. The dev team is trying TOO hard to make things synergize. A huge example of this is how insane draw and tutoring has become. A 1/2 draw a card where the downside doesn’t matter 99% of the time. Low cost tutors that make every single game exactly the same. When you have this many draw/tutor effects in the game it will always cause horrible problems.
At this point the dev team needs to throw the past year’s design philosophy in the trash and start from square one. Stop printing cheap draw/tutor. Stop printing mana reduction/cheating minions into play. Make removal less powerful. Go back to an actually minion based game where making smart trades and fighting for board control matter.
Imagine defending a meta where turn 5 OTKs and numerous decks like cycle rogue exist. I honestly do not get it. Do people actually think the game is good in this state? Every game being scam decks?
The meta we have today is a direct outcome of all of the nerfs over the last two years, most of which were sentiment driven. For most of the game’s history we did not get such frequent, sentiment driven adjustments and most all of you tell me the game was better then.
Seems like the mistake is listening to players instead of just making a good game and letting people who like it just play it and the rest of you can find another card game that is better.
I am convinced that most of the people that post here will never be happy with the game until they can put any cards in a deck and win like it is versus a bad AI.
Yes, and even switch it’s stats to 25/2 by Alchemist… very “clever” design… I don’t even care anymore really… I have lost my trust in this developer team already… Another expansion came out and nothing is working as it should because of the old crap sets again… But they are not try to balance the things… no… Blizzard focus on sale hell expensive cosmetics instead and made the most disguting step they just could again… put it into a slotmachine system… They are just pathetic… Incompetent developer team is killing the game for years now… and still only money that matters… nothing else anymore… really sad…
Can you still see his posts? I put him on my ignore/ban list already a month ago I think… I just had enough of his nonsense talk… can’t see any of his posts anymore fortunately.
Not really. I have been to top 500 multiple time and as high as 239. Games being decided by turn 5 is boring.
I have been playing some cycle rogue today because I don’t feel like testing homebrews. Numerous games I have double giants, double elementals, some other minions, 9 asteroids shuffled in and more than half my deck drawn and it is turn 4. It is dumb.
The solution is to hire Analysts and Programmers who know how to code formulation and simulation tools. You are not solving it by having the fuzzy ideas of those Artists be replaced by your different fuzzy ideas. The game reeks that is created by Artists with fuzzy ideas who never simulate anything about the future of the meta.
And they have convinced most players too because most players are not educated on balancing games; “you must see the meta play out before you balance it”; that’s just absolute nonsense spread by Artists who never did the job property.
You first create a model of the entire game; you create virtual decks that play with each other; there is an error in results even if done properly but it’s better than nothing (what they do now).
You do not need to create models and simulations. Just pay a decent testing and QA team. I have literally done testing for a card game before. We would just deck test and deck build for hours. Keep notes on win rates, what cards are warping the meta, and making tweaks to the cards. I honestly do not think the devs have many people testing new sets.
They have players act as the (main) QA, and fail to balance it even after doing 2 or 3 nerf/buff cycles, so a (bigger) internal QA would not achieve to balance it either.
What you are describing is essentially running painstaking manual simulations which is not scalable.
A proper simulation infrastructure could let a dev team run millions if not billions of games in a matter of minutes to evaluate balance, which would be more effective than hand taken notes.
As far as I am aware Magic the Gathering does not use simulations and they have been going strong for over 30 years. They make mistakes sometimes, but rarely as egregious as Hearthstone.
MTG does best of 3 with sideboards and that helps a ton to balance out matchups because if you went in the match starting 20% to win you can take your game 1 loss and sideboard to flip the matchup the over way. Sideboard lets tech cards actually be useful too. Hearthstone is a best of 1 and that makes use tech cards mostly useless because they lose you too many points against the deck that don’t have the thing you teched for.
I did not dispute that such simulations exist. Has reading comprehension really gotten this bad? My dispute is about whether having play testers is viable and scalable. MTG existing and being pretty well balanced without using sims supports that having a solid testing and QA team IS viable for a card game. After some preliminary research it seems that neither does Yugioh or Pokemon.
