Zee’s Current List of Rants (in no particular order):
1). The perpetual list of mobile bugs over the last four years, such as the app crashing whenever a player attempts to change accounts or the latest bug where my unfinished decks are now becoming auto-filled, along with changing their deck names and hero portrait choices.
A lot of players who have authentictor have become locked out of being able to play multiple HS accounts on a mobile device. What’s been done to fix this for them?
Why does the HS mobile experience feel so Indie from such a big company? It’s not just the bugs, because this also includes things like card displays and effects constantly covering up the history bar, so that I can’t read what’s been played till it’s my turn. How hard is to make it so that play actions don’t display so far to theft of the screen, so as to cover up the history/action bar during my opponent’s turn?
Hearthstone’s attempts to dramatically grow its mobile player base is laughable due to the above and how limited the number of actions a mobile player can complete per turn as compared to what a computer player can. Improvements to the mobile play experience are way way overdue.
2). Balance balance balance! I feel so let down by Mike Donais, who I had high hopes for with him bringing better balance and direction to HS, since I knew him and he was a great MTG judge, but alas not! Dean, Ben, and other game directors have also fell way short of expectations.
Five years ago, when someone asked who is the current HS director, an early commenter said, “Seems pretty clear the game has no direction at this point.”
Dean once posed the question, “If Hearthstone used to be your main game but isn’t anymore, what would get you back?” And the first response on HearthPwn was “Some sense in balancing cards will be awesome for this game.”
https://twitter.com/IksarHS/status/1097392849589481472
If you ask players for a list of good expansions, you get answers like The League of Explorers, Journey to Un’Goro, Whispers of the Old Gods, Knights of the Fozen Throne, and maybe more recently, Voyage to the Sunken City. Better balance between classes and cards in these sets were a likely factor in their popularity.
3). Powercreep! This has been out of control for so long, I am not even going to go into detail yet again on this topic. It so clear that for years now the devs have had a poor handle on both powercreep and broken card design issues. Come on devs, do better!!! Play test more! Anticipate future card interactions better! It’s your responsibility to do so!
The Grand Tournament was one of Hearthstone’s first attempts at reducing powercreep and it was one of the worst expansions, because it was also one the laziest and poorly designed sets, with boring, poorly thought out cards and interactions, with badly designed and utilized set mechanics of Inspire and Joust.
4). Overdeveloped archetypes! Come on, quit trying to get me to buy the resources needed to make a couple of premade decks till you nerf them, so that I have buy more resources to make the other mostly premade decks, which now have a chance post-nerfs to be the best decks. How about making the “archetype packages“ with fewer cards, leaving more room for player experimentation in the deck design process, which can then lead to and allow for more variation of cards between decks of the same archetype.
5). Trust! I am keenly aware that I do not really own anything that I have purchased in HS, and I no longer trust the devs to be good stewards of HS, which means I no longer want to spend money on HS until it improves and my trust is once again earned back. In the meantime, my only support for HS will be to provide some occasional feedback, while I casually play the few modes or events, which still provide some amount of fun.
