Designers are the ones that should design and balance a game. Not players.
The entire “player feelings” discourse turned into an excuse to let players do it instead and know what?
We not have knowedge to do it. We can at max point for things we are having a bad experience with.
No excuse, no but. It’s simple and straight as that.
Stop hearing to twitter/reedit complaints and start to work.
Because if it was for players to balance the game hire a dev team to balance it would be unnecessary.
A designer also made E.T. for Atari…
Yeah. If things feel bad enough to nerf things on that basis alone, it needs to be applied across the board. But then we’d have no decks left.
I can’t stand sweeping statements like ‘unhealthy gameplay’ when that terminology is vague enough that it could be applied to any meta deck (and a lot of meme ones). No amount of pandering will make people not terrible at the game, so let’s dispense with this failed philosophy.
Personally I think the meta is a lot better after the patch. Still has some ways to go but the nerfs did more right than wrong.
I completely disagree with that.
This patch was bad because it was poorly thought out by the developers.
We don’t have knowedge to do it. We can at max point for things we are having a bad experience with.
My impression with the last patch is that the decisions were made by someone who doesn’t even play the game.
But for sure that person read reedit.
Part of the work is to play your game so you know what people are talking about.
They skipped that and did Go directly to whatever people were whinning about without any consideration.
You don’t disagree with me. You just not linked consequence and cause.
If you ignore player feelings, the game dies.
It’s a more important factor than numerical balance in keeping the game alive.
They just built in bad feeling high rolls in every deck, and aren’t removing them or weakening them evenly.
You cant please the whole player base, you just need to please the majority of the player base.
Say that all you want.
It did bring this and things will only get worse.
First you focus on objective things and after that you Go for “what i can do for people to feel better”.
Not the opposite. Result is here.
Feelings can be objective.
You can see data on player behaviors shifting, and link them to the decks they are facing.
It’s not just made up.
You can objectively measure most things if you put your mind to it.
No they aren’t.
The same behavior can be triggered for many different reasons and even if you directly ask there is a high chance of people lying.
People don’t usually lie about things that are bothering them.
And there are a lot of measures that you can look at, such as “what was the log off rate when X was their last match?” And then look at what is going on in those matches that cause it to happen.
Blizzard has access to way, way deeper data collection than what we have access to. There’s more to game design than just surface level win rate balance.
Things can be balanced but not fun.
Things can be unbalanced, but still fun.
When your goal is to keep people playing your game, fun is the goal, balance is secondary.
But they can’t be not balanced and fun.
And i not talking about a perfect 50/50 balance.
I talking about having the tendency to be balanced.
You can only threw balance by the window until a certain point before it stops being fun.
Play experience is a valid criteria on which to base the adjustment of cards, but there should be some empirical determination behind it. As you say, listening to the loudest whiners is unlikely to produce good results. Unclear to me if that is what they do, tho
Imho, I think players should be able to balance the game for themselves through the use of strong tech cards. There should be permanent, strong additions to the core to fight spell spamming, early highroll aggro, and do nothing control.
That would also mean tamping down synergy in the sets so that there is room in decks to incorporate tech cards. Which, imho would be a good thing
They can easily be not balanced and fun.
Last year ping mage was frequently listed by VS as being overplayed based on it’s power level.
It was an underpowered deck that was still fun enough that people engaged with it at all levels of play.
If it had been powered up, it would have become an issue.
Balance doesn’t mean fun.
Coin flips are relatively balanced. They aren’t anyone’s prime choice of entertainment.
i read a tweet listing the cards they changed …based on hurt feeling
is waaay too long
You not got it do you?
I said there is a certain point and you can’t flex it eternally.
I also not denied the existence of Fun.
It’s different from only 50/50 balance is fun.
Actually if we take a objective look the winrate range from tier 1 to tier 4 isn’t that big of a range data wise.
It’s around what? 10%? Not looking right now.
Even for a deck crazy overplayed deck i would not call that a really big range winrate wise unless you’re a competitive player going to tournaments.
I fundamentally disagree that it was just “hurt feelings” that caused those nerfs.
Spitelash effectively ending games on turn 5 is not just a hurt feelings situation. It’s bad game balance as there’s very few ways to deal with that on that turn. Sure, the deck win rate didn’t call of the nerf, but the card certainly did.
They detailed why they nerfed Earthen scales. It wasn’t because of hurt feelings, it was because it made the druid too resilient to reach finishers in the mid game.
Just because a deck isn’t top tier doesn’t mean it isn’t doing things that cause bad play experiences, or aren’t overpowered within an individual game.
There’s still a dozen other things that should be nerfed harshly for those reasons, but Blizz is stubborn about it, so we just cycle through them all as the top meta decks until they all slowly get nerfed.
And by the time it all does get hit, we will have a new expansion with even more pushed uninteractive toxic gameplay patterns that were set even stronger to displace the old ones!
ClarkHellscream was mad about the Naga Mage nerf because he felt that the deck mostly didn’t high roll on 5 and even if it did, the deck could still fall apart, but he misses the point that there should never be the existence of the potential for a deck to build a full board, clear an opponent’s board and draw through most of their deck on turn 4/5. That’s just grossly imbalanced, even if the person had to chant naga, spell, naga, spell, and do simple math in their head to get there.
Again you’re confusing maybe feelings should not be above everything with:
Winrate should be above everything.
I don’t know about you but the consequence for me and for many under this patch was try it for a few days and then outright get out of the game.
And It isn’t big spell mage being “unfun” fault.
People playing big spell mage is a sympton of overnerfing Control warrior.
It is both trying to fill the Control Warrior role and also getting people that are bored with this direction of the game but not bored enough to quit yet.
Go by feelings again and nerf it that they lose around 10% of the active playerbase easily.