Back in 1998, Blizzard was an up and coming Developer.
After that, they had proven their expertise and skill. Today they are nothing but corporate bloat. Chasing the “How can we get our customers to spend more”.
The patterns in their RND opponent match ups, card draws, and how players usually seem to reach one win needed for a plateau, and suddenly the next 4-5 games their decks/matches win rate plummets to 40% below what it was just minutes ago. Again, and again, season after season.
Not to mention that the fact they’ve been doing this for 26+ years, but are unable to cope/combat/prevent hackers and bots. Gee lets open up our apps to China. It’s a whole new market to make money from, and… NA users might actually be incentivized to spend more trying win vs the hackers that now have access to our platform. Brilliant idea from a business perspective. Not so much from a non-corporate bloat company that doesn’t sacrifice it’s moral compass to chase a buck.
I had respect for Blizzard in 2000. It diminished in 2010. It completely disappeared in 2020. and four almost 5 years later, they’ve done nothing to try and make it return, and have actually pushed the possibility further away.
I just went down the rabbit hole that was looking up Blizzard’s wiki to see its history and games released timeline… and had no idea they made the most difficult SNES Superman title I ever owned “The Death and Return of Superman” lol. I dont think I ever beat the first level. But I did find my old gem I did know was their making, Rock N Roll Racing. to this day I can;t help but hear the Black Sabbath song in my head and it not be the version heard in that 16-bit game lol. The actual song itself when i hear it on the radio just doesnt sound right to me.
But for OP’s position, meh. Today’s market doesnt bring in a high enough return on investment for completed non-microtransaction infused games. its unfortunate but its few and far between nowadays to encounter anything like the way games were made in the past decades. And when someone’s career is tethered and beholden to share holders any decision that isnt one that leads to increasing earnings each quarter for said share holders… every decision is weighed thru the lens of “not getting fired and blacklisted from ever working in the same industry again” (outside of starting your own from the ground up)
So if your career had a reevaluation with your boss every 4 months to see how much your decisions have generated more income compared to the previous 4 months, you might have a different outlook on whats important compared to how the average player of their games look at things. especially if the only acceptable outcome where you get to remain employed is being able to show a sizeable increase in revenue and even remaining stable and having no changes up or down still results in a firing… that lens becomes a lot more warped or fisheyed compared to how you or I see things.
Its unfortunate the way publicly traded companies have to function nowadays but it just the world we live in.
My favorite SNES game was Blackthorne. Wouldn’t mind seeing an updated version of that for nowadays consoles/PCs. Or a flat out rocking sequel
This is true but I also have to give us, the players, some blame for paying into these heavily micro-transactioned games. If we, the players, would have refused/not bought the garbage that was offered at the time; perhaps things for the industry would have been different.
Speaking of the gaming industry, was chatting with a friend and he’s convinced that within the next 5 or less years; there’s going to be another crash. Thoughts? Opinions?
They released Blackthorne for PC. its in the blizzard store. I own it, another game I havent beaten the first level of lol. Blizz is notorious for making incredibly difficult games for me.
Edit: recommend a gamepad to play it, using the default keyboard controls is super painful and not very good at translating the natural button press sequences for the game that a controller can provide.
This (quote top right) explains it better than I care to spend time formulating it. TY!
For those that don’t understand what you wrote; If I was to make a game and market it, the base design and target functionality would be:
I want to keep my job, and make money for the shareholders
Make players spend more money
Create plateaus that could not be passed until X number of hours played and/or Y number of losses accumulated, such as lvl 1 - 3 stars, and lvl 4 - 3 stars
Utilize AI and code to select existing players (and in this case their decks) that far out perform the player in a given match so as to prevent them from surpassing the plateau until #2 is met, furthering #1, while maintaining a degree of undetectability as they are real player names, decks, stats. skew the RND draw in a match to help insure #2 performs true.
Like I don’t know who they think they are fooling. It’s basic pattern recognition. Maybe some players are fooled by it but I’m not. Season after season, plateau after plateau, bronze, silver, gold, (after the previous seasons times some number boost) plat, diamond, you bounce back and forth from 1 - 3 stars and 4 - 3 stars, until some hidden criteria is reached, and then magically you make it past, repeat for 4 - 3 stars, repeat for each rank. Your deck doesn’t change. Your skill and play style doesn’t change over a few days at each plateau, it’s win/loss percentage doesn’t change more than a few points over all match history, but over games in just that plateau it drops 40% then rises 40% etc.
And then we get into incentivized progress. It seems kind of easy to detect if true, but in all my history of HS, I’ve NEVER been able to reach Diamond 10 - 0 stars. Until THIS season, which just happened to magically coincide with my spending on:
Perils in Paradise Mega Bundle (Pre-Purchase) CA$99.99
Go Figure. I bought a pack and now I reach diamond… pffft.
Well i’ve spent money in the game more than a few times in the past (bought Naxx when it launched and not with gold if i recall correctly, and more recently have bought the BG perks passes at least 4 times in the last few years its been a thing.
Ive never come close to what you achieved. Highest Ive reached I think is Platinum 10. ever. and that was only once. Currently I’ve reached Bronze 7 this new season, last season i was able to climb to a healthy silver 5. Soi dont think spending IRL money affects the ranks you can reach… I just think on a long enough timeline, there;s gonna be stretches where you reach your normal plateau rank and eventually along this long enough timeline you happen to get the correct coin flips that coincide with right opponents and the best possible discovers and the time of day you queued up for a match lines up with the most opportune opponents you can climb over. Essentially what im saying is on a long enough timeline, you encounter a perfect storm scenario. all the different variables possible just happen to result in a way that allows you to do the most you can do. any other month you wouldnt have been able to play the times you did that month, and the players you got matched with could say the same of themselves, as well as the luck of your draws and discovers and so forth happen in that same timeline segment where your maximum potential each round is made more maximum than in previous months. And so on for every other possible variable there is. There may never be another stretch on your entire life’s timeline that can reproduce the same circumstances you did that one perfect storm month you had, and so the idea that your purchase in that same part of the timeline may FEEL like it was part of why that was, but its just not supported by any actual evidence that can’t also occur without it using all the different variables explained already.
You need to spend $50 - $100 on the current cards set/expansion packs, not the coin versions, Arena tickets etc.
And that’s what they want you to think, or believe.
Though this is true, it doesn’t justify the short timeline of the repetitive results I’ve encountered occur.
EDIT:
Granted I get what you’re saying statistically. It could be reasoned statistically, that the next 1 billion games I play are all losses. Over 1x10E146, it would be a drop in the bucket and a reasonable average would occur. But they certainly wouldn’t make money off of me if that was the case. I might spend once or twice, maybe even 3-4 times over the course of the 1 billion games, but eventually I would say F this, shelve, avoid. etc.
It’s not in their interest to let natural random statistics play out from a business money making perspective. It’s more in their interest to skew the statistics in their favor to promote sales, while trying to hide or obscure the fact they have done so.
And hence we run into the skill of the coders, of how well can they hide the skews. What amount of time needs to be played before a progression. What amount of losses needs to occur before progression. Either one leads to an observable pattern in far less than 1 billion games. There is a reason why some features are ‘SERVER SIDE’. We don’t want potential customers from parsing the code to see we have skewed things to incentivize them to spend more. Just look for the patterns. It is very apparent.
EDIT 2, I’m at 1 - 0 stars. Can’t have me drop below my given plateau. 80% chance of win.
I’ll let you know. but the current player seems to be playing like a moron. Been here 5-6x now.
EDIT 3: God, I just need to kill his highest atk minion and it’s a win. pfft
EDIT 4: Here’s the match, but compared to the miniscule amount of matches I’ve played in the 1 Billion matches for a reasonable reflection of statistics, it pales in comparison to the matches at 3 stars (instead of 0 stars), which time and again, season over season, plateau after plateau, 0 star matches resemble this one, and if I was incentivized enough I would post the link to many 3 star matches (if I could figure out which were which) a pattern emerges. Again, and again, and again.
hsreplay .DOT. net SLASH replay SLASH da5SUUj92mgcReRYUSctaJ
…and yes I won. wouldn’t want me to drop below 0 stars and to the lower rank
It’s simple really. Like Bliz would ever do this even if they were granted permission from each and every player involved via binding contract.
List the top 100 ranked players
List their lifetime expenditures on HS
List their current expenditures on HS this expansion
List the bottom 100 (active- not unused/inactive accounts) ranked players
List their lifetime expenditures on HS
List their current expenditures on HS this expansion
OH! lets cite anonymity and privacy for not doing this! Not like they could replace the names from XYzPlayername to Player 1, Player 2, etc to preserve anonymity and privacy.
top/bottom 100, 1000, 10000, it don’t matter. The pattern will be the same.
Dead serious about that. The game is incredibly difficult and players even more so. It doesnt help I can’t memorize like most people can, so most of the time I dont know what is in my deck without the aid of HSreplay showing it to me as the sidebar. But most matches are a loss because I dont own all the rares/epics/legendaries that i encounter so frequently. Nor do I have all the low cost stuff that people seem to be able to play at least 2 to sometimes more than 5 or 6 cards ina single turn. Im lucky if I can play anything ive drawn before turn 3 or 4…
Blizzard has always been a company that would put impossibly difficult AI enemies for me in their titles, from Rock n Roll Racing and Death and Return of Superman (both on SNES) to Starcraft 1 and WC3, sc2 even more so, I cant even beat the skill assessment matches ai for entry into the ladder system they have. Hearthstone isnt any different. and even when it isnt the ai but another player, its just the way games have always been. Many a games Ive owned and never beat their first levels. (Blackthorne, Mario anything, Overwatch 1, ETC).
This game aint easy.
Also, Im not putting a tin foil hat on for all the conspiracy theory coming from Duke here. None of what they going into is how it works
I wonder if you have some serious “dust conservation” issues; I had that problem a lot at the start; I was disenchanting too fast and I would often craft too fast and then be stuck in only 1 deck (e.g. for a couple of months I had ONLY 1 paladin deck or 2 maybe).
The biggest secret I know about how to be efficient with collecting a lot of dust is, a) buy and open only regular expansion packs on a new expansion release and stop when you get duplicated rares b) start opening the goldens and stop on the first leggo.
Entirely possible depending on how long ago that was.
Of course it’s unprovable or verifiable by the community, is 100% reliant on our knowledge of how much of a trustworthy and honest person you are. To me, it sounds more like boasting, rather than truthful fact, since I don’t know you very well.
Yeah I can only keep 1-2 solid decks in head. I usually find a deck make up that works well and play it incessantly. 50-100 games. That helps with memory but yes HSreplay is a must.
Always good to know things like cards left, plagues in deck, at a glance.
I was stuck in diamond 5 forever, and I was bullied massively for it from a certain forum narcissist (“you will never get unstuck from there” the works); I don’t even think they were too far off; but they were still narcissistic.
I wasn’t trying to boast so sorry if it felt that way; I just wanted to show it’s nonsense to say the game is rigged to that point; I currently feel I don’t do well either (I mainly try to optimize how I play by not losing much).
And if so, did you just think the entire time that Fletcher was fake and that his methods never produced results?
Using your own ego for motivation shouldn’t be seen as taboo, it should be seen as a tool. A potentially dangerous tool, like a chainsaw, but a tool nevertheless. Some problems, like a tree blocking a road, are chainsaw problems.
And in that sense, not necessarily the Legend sense but in the chainsaw sense, you WILL be permastuck as long as you see such people merely as bullies, not to be taken seriously.
That’s just dumb. First of all abusive morbid narcissism is not just ego; that person literally called the entire forum potatoes because they “dared” to speak in a conversation between you and him; they are by textbook definition in need of therapy.
Second you can teach children nowdays without abusing them; e.g. the currently accepted method is to do positive reinforcement by withholding rewards without personally attacking them; is that how you treat your kids?
I dont dust anything until the number of a card owned reaches x3 and so i’ll dust one of them down to x2 so it disappears from my search for “extra” and I can normally finish the reward tracks each expansion and purchase the minisets each expansion.
Probably not the most optimal. E.g. sometimes they nerf cards so they are double the dust value at disenchanting for 2 weeks; dust those IMMEDIATELY (unless you really play them); that’s because even if you create them again you still have the same dust needed banked when you dusted them!
A big one is that if you don’t play Wild seriously just dust everything from there; when Standard rotates into wild just dust everything from there again; the probability nerfs happen there is low and it’s generally a benefit for Standard f2p to just dust it all.
I dont get rid of my collection beyond bringing it down to x2 owned. And I dont typically get cards soon enough when something gets nerfed soon after its release. outside of the xp track we are currently on, i havent bought any packs yet, the only ones I tend to open tend to come from the xp tracks or tavern brawls. and if im lucky the end of month prizes. so by the time I even obtain a card that has been nerfed and its dust adjusted, its probably almost the next expansion release.
The movie glorifies obsession, pushing the idea that mindless repetition can achieve something significant. In reality, anyone can do the same thing endlessly without stopping, but that doesn’t mean they’ll create anything of value.
A movie clearly designed to cater to teenage boys.
That’s just dumb. The movie is brilliant; the message is ambiguous; it shows being pushed but also showing the destruction caused by the push. Scr0tieMcB does the mistake to not see that ambiguity.
