Nerfs might take longer due to a few serious or not-so-serious points:
They had to wait for vs report, why hire people for data analysis when you can get it for free.
or
They try to find a way to nerf DK so it doesn’t drop in popularity. so that they can still sell the expansion.
or
They intentionally wait extra long for whales to get frustrated, then they change it in a way to shift the meta to another deck, so that whales come back and have fun for a little while, then the cycle repeats.
but less likely they actually try to do the best possible changes.
who knows.
None of these answers are getting down to why nerfs actually take so long. Part of the reason that balance changes take so long is that Hearthstone is also a game on Apple devices, Samsung devices, Huawei devices and other Android devices. Unless its an extremely urgent patch because the game isn’t working then it can take weeks or a month to get through all the corporate bureaucracy of Apple, Samsung, Huawei and Android. They have said this before in interviews about this same question, as have other game devs in the same scenario. Can’t just release patch notes every time you feel like it, they have to be scheduled, coordinated across multiple platforms and secured weeks in advance with apple and everything.
Because the employees of this company think that any extra effort at all is not warranted for the money they receive.
And the corporation intentionally pays the very least to them they possibly can, as well as runs the company with the smallest staff that is mathematically possible.
Welcome to modern Capitalism, where corporations only exist to bleed you dry, and further enrich the investors, who sit on their Calvin Klein covered behinds, and rake in your money, then refuse to pay their fair share of taxes in order to support the Nation.
I do it every release. As a Senior Engineer it is my job to get the release notes in order to go to the PM who then takes that to our Tech writer and then out to be translated / distributed. The whole process, including my time to write the notes takes less than two weeks. We usually get the translations back with in a day or two depending on the size of the release.
Every hotfix goes out gets translated and sent to the customers. The PM usually handles that as it usually isn’t more than just 1 JIRA ticket. Depending on the severity, hotfixes can go out immediately or could take a sprint or 2. If hotfixes go out immediately we contact our partners who do the transaltion and ask for a translation asap. We deploy the fix and then send out the updates notes. Again, that is a massive severity that needs to get fixed, most items are not of that level. If you get an immediate fix, C-Suite team is usually involved and it is all fubar.
So lets use your premise of how everything takes time to translate. How could they hotfix the quests giving too many rewards a few hours after patch was release with out providing translations… Or did they.
The changes today are much faster than they were historically. They used to leave stacked cards for months (or longer) due to some fear that changes would upset players who had crafted those cards.
What we have today are wild swings in power, with cards being in a class above everything only to never see play again after some big change.
The deathknight overpowered period is what they intended, and probably had intended on the intial launch, but it didn’t happen so they bumped up the miniset boost.
They need to make people spend their resources before they nerf stuff away. Its all a part of their scam. Make stuff OP on purpose so you spend resources to make the broken deck. Nerf 1-2 cards to render the deck completely useless and come out ahead because decks are 30 cards and you are only refunded the nerfed cards and not the other 20+ cards that you spend resources on to complete the busted deck. So they have to give you enough play time with the unerfed cards in the deck.