Hearthstone
A short story
Submitted 3 years, 11 months ago by
DoubleSummon
A man goes to the doctor to complain about a pain he had for years.
The doctor suggests: "You should get a goat".
The man goes and buys a goat, and after a week he returns to the doctor.
he tells him: "This is horrible! the goat destroyed everything in the house".
Then the doctor suggests:"Well you should get rid of the goat".
After a week the man returns to the doctor and tell him:"Thanks a lot! now everything is fine you solved the problem".
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A man goes to the doctor to complain about a pain he had for years.
The doctor suggests: "You should get a goat".
The man goes and buys a goat, and after a week he returns to the doctor.
he tells him: "This is horrible! the goat destroyed everything in the house".
Then the doctor suggests:"Well you should get rid of the goat".
After a week the man returns to the doctor and tell him:"Thanks a lot! now everything is fine you solved the problem".
That's great, except if the analogy held up the man's house would be completely fine at the end of it, and maybe even benefited a little.
What I find most amusing about your stance is that your central point is that the man is oblivious to having moved the goalposts, while not-so-subtly referring to a debacle where the still-angry community has moved its goalposts, and it is the now-content members who are consistent with their original stance (namely that the Rewards Track is fine so long as players aren't worse off than they were before).
You can still fault the cost of the game, but that's a separate issue from the introduction of the Rewards Track.
Mmy central point is that they solved mostly problems they introduced instead of solving the main issue (long lasting pain), they do this a lot of times introducing issues then FINALLY solving them.. like with Patches the Pirate and Baku the Mooneater they introduced so many problems with those that were complained for ages.. and then getting the praise for solving them.
sure you can also get the other analogy from this tale which is also a legit one that people complain about stuff that are not so bad, I like this tale cause it can got both ways:
the doctor is introduced a problem that didn't exist and solved it and then got the praise.
OR
The person is complaining about pain but it's not so bad in the end.
Which are both stances about the battle pass, that's why I posted it.
Of course I am on the patient side but I am also looking at the other side of the coin, did Blizzard did this kind of thing just to get praises about them fixing the problem and making us forget about the long time pain?
If they were aiming for that they clearly didn't reckon on the scale of the anger it triggered, and there is no way the frankly limited praise they are getting now overturns those effects.
I'm leaning towards not thinking that was their plan. If it was they wouldn't have spent 3 weeks being silent about it. They would have put out the improvements much sooner to both stem the bleeding and probably get more praise out of it. No, the timescale screams of the issues big corporations face when having to work out changes, agree on them, pass them by other departments, agree on when to implement them, and finally make an announcement about it. This was likely compounded by the challenges of the pandemic.
There is absolutely no doubt Blizz could have handled this whole thing much better, but I don't think their stated intent is quite as far from the truth as many believe.
The first interpretation you've offered - that the doctor has caused harm simply to later get praise for it - is a misinterpretation of the "get rid of the goat" parable. This is made plain by the historical context of the story. It is a traditional Jewish story in which a poor (but faithful) man calls on God to alleviate his misery, and God (depending on the retelling) either tells him to get a goat or gives him a goat, and then the story proceeds basically as you've written it. Over time, God would be replaced in the story with a rabbi, or a wiseman, or (today) with a doctor.
Given that God is the original adviser in the story, and that God is good in the Abrahamic traditions, the point was never to suggest that God has maliciously ruined the man's life for the sake of praise. In fact, he already has the man's praise, as he is faithful when he originally calls on God. God in the story is teaching the man perspective and gratitude for what he has. So, the second interpretation has always been the actual meaning of the story. That's plain to see even in the modern, secular retelling of the story you're offering. Doctors swear a Hippocratic Oath, which first says to do no harm. The purpose of replacing God or a rabbi with a doctor is to make the story connect more effectively to secular audiences while maintaining the notion that the adviser in the story has the man's best interests at heart. That the secular version is now open to such misinterpretations as you've offered today is probably a reflection of a broader, modern distrust in institutions. But at this point I've probably spent more time than necessary on religion, history, and politics, as this is a space for discussing CCGs.
So, to go back to the argument about Hearthstone, Blizzard does not benefit from alienating its fans, and it was clear from the start that they weren't trying to. Looking back to the earliest announcements of this new system in August, Dean Ayala was quoted on Reddit as saying "Our intent with the system is for it to be upside for all players. We've done many checks on different player segments to try and make sure that is the case no matter how you play. Despite all this, we're making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions were incorrect. We can push legendary quests or give out additional rewards during events as well." As I argued in a separate forum post, we have seen these good faith efforts to make the game better for everyone over the course of the entire year.
There's no question that they were wrong in their assumptions, but it seems clear that they acted in good faith, and that they have made major changes to address the cases where they missed the mark. You can feel that the system doesn't go far enough to address the cost of the game, but that really has nothing to do with whether or not Blizzard is trying to make the game more rewarding than it has been in the past.
And frankly, I think the arguments about slow fixes to cards like Patches the Pirate and Baku the Mooneater are an unreasonable comparison to the rewards track. There were (and still are) a lot of players who enjoyed both of those cards in their original states. For that reason, any change would inevitably have a negative impact on some player segments, and therefore required a lot more consideration before they could proceed. But the rewards track change was intended from the start to simply offer more stuff to everyone. Again, you can say it's not enough, but by the end of the adjustments no one will be getting less, making these changes easier to roll out from a community PR standpoint.
I'll wait it out and see how it goes. but making the levels 20% better sounds like an executive move
"They make the system originally, some exec says "Looks good but make the xp 50% grindier to get" They do it, people complain, the team shows the exec they say "Ehh, make it 20% better, they'll stop""
Sorry i'm not supposed to complain about this obvious ploy that corporations use because POTENTIALLY i will receive more gold?
It will still take about 4-5 quests to receive a level up to receive gold, wheras before you would get twice as much for half as many quests.
if blizzard came out and said they released a deadly disease as a plague on humanity, claimed they did it on accident and then released a vaccine for that plague people would forgive them too.
People talk about the "We're sorry" clip from south park:
but they don't remember what it was about. BP knew they disaster could happen they knew there was a chance for it, but they kept going anyway. This is the battlepass(in a less destructive manner) How many controversies does activision blizzard need for people to realize they're not "accidentally" screwing their playerbase over.
I am not "quitting the game", it's still fun to me, despite the meta being pure aggro forever, this isn't a reddit report. You people and your goat analogy. It would be a much better analogy if it was a different kind of grazing animal, because the community is full of sheep.
Living like that.
It makes more sense as a biblical tale than a doctor (I mean why would a man get a goat suddenly cause a doctor told him). I think I read/studied about the original story rather than this version I heard somewhere else.probably cause I didn't listen much during Bible classes(fell as sleep every class :D) , this was quite interesting backstory though, thank you.
Anyway, yes They made a lot of good changes this year before this progress changes but so many decisions in this progress track (which I won't go into detail you know what went wrong in it and some stuff didn't get fixed yet/won't get fixed) are really making people distrust those statements when they don't happen.
Shukie mentioned the pandemic and I didn't thought about that being a slowing factor and a problem with testing the game if people work from home and don't test as well it as normally (that explains the insane amount of bugs), but you are being too forgiving...
They did this thing of ruining the meta and then solve it to get praise a lot of times making blatantly overpowered cards (KOFT druid, DoD shaman, AOO demon hunter) and also they nerfed classic cards for cards they introduced in those expansions making the game even more expensive...
I assume when you say that they nerfed classic cards, you're referring to Innervate, Nourish, and Wild Growth, which were nerfed during Knights of the Frozen Throne and Rastakhan's Rumble. It's true that they nerfed these basic and classic cards to make room for expansion cards, but again, I think your conclusion that this was done intentionally to drive up the cost of the game isn't really right. All of those classic cards were too good, and therefore saw play in every Druid deck. In a game where you can only put 30 cards in a deck, having three cards be automatic two-of inclusions in every Druid deck meant far less room for any new cards to see play. Deck building and game play both get very boring when the game looks like that.
Brian Kibler has talked about this a lot - there are real risks to game health when you have an evergreen set, because new cards only get to see play when they're stronger than the evergreen cards. In classes like Druid, that was often not the case, and in classes like Priest, that was too often the case (meaning that Priest could be great or trash based entirely on the strength of its expansion cards). Over time we've seen them address the power level of numerous evergreen cards, but that risk is always there. This is why Kibler advocates for having no evergreen set. That would allow these current evergreen cards to keep their high power levels because they'd rotate out (and perhaps back in) over time.
The MTG approach, by comparison, doesn't use evergreen sets. Instead, they introduce a core set every year to act as the thematic backbone for each color, and typically include lots of reprints in each core set. The result of having lots of familiar building blocks for each color is very similar, but it lets them take cards out that are too good, or limit the overlap of cards which are uniquely powerful together. There are a lot of upsides to this approach, but it has had issues mapping onto the digital formats of the game, and MTGA has had to introduce a "reprint protection" because fans were so mad about constantly opening reprints (which was driving up the cost for anyone with a large collection).
Ultimately, I think this problem of "set balance" is much harder than you're treating it. You need collecting cards to feel like it matters, but you can't just let people play with every old card or you'd end up with rampant powercreep or a horrible new player experience because new players would be punished for having fledgling collections. (This is why the Wild format is such a shitshow.) MTG attempts to solve some of this with different game formats that limit the number of legal sets, and Blizzard is trying the same thing (that's why Duels offers a subset of old and new sets - to give players how have lots of old cards a chance to see them shine).