In all the discussions on auto-squelch I have never seen an answer as to why squelch works different than every other setting in Hearthstone.
I don’t have to turn off music every game.
I don’t have to reset my volume every game.
I don’t have to select ‘full screen’ every game.
I don’t have to select my screen resolution every game.
Every other setting stays where I put it until I change it. Why is squelch different? Why can’t it just stay on until I turn it off? No extra buttons needed.
If any other setting had to be constantly reset, even once per session much less every single game, the entire community would be in an uproar. So why is it OK that squelch has to be reset over and over and over.
The only possible reason I can see is Blizzard is worried people will forget they have squelch on. If this is a real concern it can easily be remedied by putting an indicator on the screen. I suggest a talk bubble with a red circle and diagonal line in it somewhere on the hero portrait.
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I believe that Blizzard wants emotes to be a feature of the game. They want people to be able to BM basically.
In case you’re wondering why Blizzard would want such a thing, look at the cards they print. They print cards like Tickatus and make classes like Demon Hunter. They enable people’s evil and base desires. They printed death knights for every class, even paladin. Their priest class is full of evil themes. How do you play a good priest? You can’t. Priest in this game is basically a thief who sometimes deals with evil (shadow) forces to gain advantage. Paladin is the closest to a purely good class but even paladin got polluted by a death knight and other evil cards.
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Sometimes i think team 5 doesn’t understand the meaning of Quality of Life, which would explain many MANY decisions and the lack of good reception in those.
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The official reason is that they don’t want to add more UI.
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I think this is part of the reason you don’t know if you are squelched or not. BMers won’t get upset that their opponent isn’t seeing their ranting. But as long as squelch exists and your opponent doesn’t know if it is on or not why add the extra code (it has to be more work to turn it off every game then have it act like every other setting) just to annoy the people who want it off? It just doesn’t make any sense. I can’t imagine anyone being upset if auto-squelch were added or if squelch worked like a normal setting that stayed on until you turned if off.
And that’s why they decided to add 3 nested menus for BG’s, Duels and Arena
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But having it work like every other setting would not add to the UI.
I can only go by what Iksar said in the Q&A earlier this week.
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Idk, maybe it is so people will make multiple threads about the same topic to make it look like more people actually care.
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Bring something to the table next time you talk please.
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Iksars full answer and explaination regarding buttons and squelch:
" We can’t get excited about low ranks on Asian servers because there are a lot of players who use unpleasant aggravating emotes and I have to silence them every time. Can you tell me why you’ve decided not to implement the ability to silence in Hearthstone’s default settings?
People hate this answer, but we take adding buttons extremely seriously. If we added a button every time someone on the team asked for it Hearthstone would be nothing but buttons and menus. (Source)
When we think about adding something new we always ask if it’s absolutely necessary and in this case the idea of squelching someone is such an easy action it has never felt necessary to implement. (Source)
You have to be a player that hates emotes, and have been in a game where someone would have emoted you and you had a worse experience because of it. How big is that audience? I sympathize that the audience in this circumstance includes you, but that is the train of thought. (Source)"
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I really want the function to behave like this but I am pretty sure at this point it’s more work to set it to stay on continuously than it was to originally make it reset each match let alone to make a change.
Without seeing the code I can’t say this is definitely how the feature is coded but the way it is likely done at the moment in layman’s terms would be as follows:
Squelch would be a variable that is local to the match scene so that if you’re in a match the and it’s true then the emotes for the opponent don’t appear and if it’s false they do appear. Match scene variables get deleted each time the match ends to not take up extra memory and to not cause conflicts with future matches. It makes sense from a coding perspective to have squelch be one of those variables since it is only relevant in the match.
To make squelch behave like the other settings then the variable would need to be stored with the other variables that apply throughout the entire application then make the match scene reference a variable from the game settings rather than the match ones. There’s nothing that would make this impossible or even difficult but it is bad coding practice to do that as it adds bloat to the main settings and spreads out the coding for emotes. This makes the code harder to understand and maintain in the long run. When coding you want to keep files as narrow and specific as possible so when someone has to make changes they know exactly where to start looking and end up with fewer bugs. This means that things that only apply in one scene should be contained to that scene.
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Because squelch emotes isn’t a setting. It’s an action you take within a game. There is no setting for emotes.
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MTGA begs to differ.
It’s not so hard to fathom guys.
I mean you can argue emotes SHOULD be a setting, which is what some people are arguing. But in Hearthstone they aren’t. Squelching them is an action you take within a game.
Which is the answer to the question this guy asked.
To Blizzard, getting BM’ed by your opponent is part of the “experience” and gameplay… because it breaks your concentration… at least thats what they say - apart from the usual reason of “omg if we added this button, THEN the world would end”…
The first thing i do is respond to someone who says hello at the start of the game with a hello back, immediately followed by a squelch.
I mean, they ARE contradicting themselves with this attitude anyway, because if the emotes are part of the game experience and what not, then WHY add the squelch in the first place? Their constant refusal to give the customer what they want will eventually break them - i mean… i’ll never forget J. Allan Bracks’ remark during Blizzcon 2016 “you think you do, but you don’t” - yeah no dude, we KNOW WHY WE WANT certain quality of life changes. We aren’t asking for the ability to just buy cards for money, we are asking something that will actually GAIN you players in the long…
we’re talking about emotes, they have no impact on your quality of life
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just someone with more xp
to put things in perspective: writing these posts and posting them in this forum about you not being able to auto-squelch opponents takes way more time and energy from you than manually squelching the few annoying players you might face.
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