Hearthstone
What's Up With Out Of Cards? [Staff Responses]
Submitted 1Â year, 9Â months ago by
Caro
This is just my opinion secretly living on this site for a couple years. Also just a disclaimer that I'm not complaining about these issues, just highlighting them and my concern as I really want to see this site succeed as the place to go for all Hearthstone news.
Here are some rough concerns I've recently noticed but I can definitely understand real life gets in the way at times.
- The current Tavern Brawl is showing as closed at the time of writing
- The new expansion announcement of the announcement was hidden in this buddies update but neither have been covered at the time of writing
- Since Avalon's departure, I've sorely missed the Achievement guides and duels meta updates (these things happen though so it's understandable)
- In general I've felt the number of HS articles have declined to a point where the main page shows more Marvel Snap articles than HS đ
I can totally understand things get in the way of this awesome site. Just hope things pick up and maybe we get more staff to add some more guides/meta updates etc.
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This is just my opinion secretly living on this site for a couple years. Also just a disclaimer that I'm not complaining about these issues, just highlighting them and my concern as I really want to see this site succeed as the place to go for all Hearthstone news.
Here are some rough concerns I've recently noticed but I can definitely understand real life gets in the way at times.
I can totally understand things get in the way of this awesome site. Just hope things pick up and maybe we get more staff to add some more guides/meta updates etc.
ââ€đ
TREMBLE before.... the most legendary dragon that ever existed!
Fully agree. I am disappointed as well about the lack of HS support. Even weekly brawls are forgotten ...
I am 69 years old and still reach Legend
Yes, guys, I'm totally with you.
This amazing home page is my "feeling home" page and my browser opening page since years.
Most likely because there were always the newest issues directly, specially the issues for "duels", I loved the most
I agree. But I'm also willing to help if I can and maybe other people are, too.Â
@Flux: What would you expect from a potential new staff member? How much time should one be able to invest per day / per week? Are there any tasks that don't require specific knowledge? Like I'd have a hard time writing guides for achievement decks cause I'm a bad deck builder, but I can easily write news articles about stuff like the mentioned announcement of the announcement. Other people will have other skills, but we need a better understanding of what you need. Maybe you can put out job descriptions with your next recruiting form?
I notice I am confused. Something I believe isn't true. How do I know what I think I know?
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, hpmor.com
I agree Hearthstone content is nowadays posted fewer and farther between compared than before indeed.
By the way, why did Avalon leave OoC? Does anybody know? I will miss his achievements guides and other things.Â
I think its mostly a response to the lack of viewers and discussion amongst members. I come here mostly for banter and news, and unfortunately that's been far and few in between now.
But I feel any long time member of this site already saw this coming years ago. Hearthstone is a declining game, although still very much on the top. So it makes sense that the associated websites of hearthstone content has also steadily declined over the years. OoC has made the correct move by diversifying away from hearthstone but that is still what most of its base come here for. And with its decline, OoC naturally suffers to raise enough funds to justify its existence.
Without funds, the site cant do as many cool stuff as it would like. But without the cool stuff, it wont get as many funds in as well. A vicious cycle business is indeed.
I think the bigger issue on this site is how few people partake in the riddle game. I mean, have you guys even given it a shot? It's the main reason this site exists (imo) so stop on by and help us out, we need it : D
The Only Constructed Deck Worth Playing:
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/decks/43506-the-only-constructed-deck-worth-playing
Probably diversifying away from card games is the next move. Maybe into some Steam games.
You must not be aware of OutOf.Games
Not sure how long that site has existed, but itâs been a while.
Quick! Someone give me something clever to write here.
I have also noted the lack of updates on the site lately. Â Iâve also been guilty of being less active over the last year or more.
This is mostly because I like to play fun Wild decks, and Wild hasnât had much room for that lately. Â So my time spent building fun Wild decks has decreased. Â Leading to less engagement on community sites like OoC.
Quick! Someone give me something clever to write here.
Card games are going down. Gwent is going away.
Runeterra, Magic Arena, Marvel, and Hearthstone are the big players. Let's see which one goes down first.
Oh wow, February 1st breaking news!
I'll address the elephant in the room. Yes, our updates regarding Hearthstone on Out of Cards are not as great as they have been in the past. There are several factors right now that are at play here:
At the start of the year, more than half the staff was let go. There are numerous reasons why certain people are no longer here. Having less people on the team has in turn harmed our coverage. Shit, having people take an assignment for an article that should go up quickly and then dick around for 4-5 hours before getting it up has harmed coverage too. I've always been someone that takes pride in the fast lane, and over the past year we've been sitting in some rough traffic.
I like to think that over the years I set us up for success by telling people what kind of content needed to be created to give us an edge. Breaking news is one thing, but the bread and butter of any site covering a card game is talking about decks, which not many were ever particularly enthusiastic about covering. The number of times people were hesitant to posting decks on our homepage because "the meta hasn't changed" or similar stupid remarks has been severely disappointing. Â
On Specific Content
Tavern Brawl is a big oops. Though, these typically provide very minimal traffic anyway because the mode isn't all that interesting so it wasn't the worst thing that has happened. Not to say that was okay, because covering everything possible is still important, but a couple of slip ups with late brawl posts or the one completely missing one definitely isn't the end of the world.
Regarding us not covering the fact an expansion announcement was coming, I agree, this should have been headlined and this is really bad that we missed this or if someone did see it, no one made an article for it. It would have been some great views and organic search traffic too!
Achievement guides. Yeah. I'm not impressed by what happened with those for the last expansion. I get it, they take a lot of work to put together and Avalon did a pretty good job at it. The monetary incentive though was clearly not worth powering through them in a quick fashion.
Revenue Decline
Man, ads fucking suck. It's a rough situation because the more ads you ad to your site to boost revenue, the less people want to visit or the more people that put on adblock which then means you want to find more places to put advertisements and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
This, plus the decline of Hearthstone, the game we put the majority of our dedication to, results in poor traffic and even worse revenue. Spending a few hours on an article to make a couple of dollars doesn't exactly pay for your time. Moving into this year we had to decrease the amount of revenue share on staff for ad impressions to pay for our server costs.
Hearthstone is so beyond dead, it's actually hilarious. Card games as a whole have been on a decline -Â
Which leads me into something people probably don't want to hear but we were going to announce it at some point anyway so here goes make that transition less jarring.
"Shutting Down" Out of Cards
But, we're not. Thonson above linked to Out of Games and previous to that, Crusader2010 pointed out about diversification. Out of Cards failed to gain any big traction because the original site our staff came from, HearthPwn, didn't shut down. We were supposed to end up with a banner at the top of the site after it was shut down and put into read-only mode which would redirect the community over to "the new site" (Out of Cards) which would have been huge. We would have immediately been able to have a budget through some ads and that would have given us solid momentum to build the site out. Instead, we've always been behind. We've had some incredible content created throughout our years that never took off (a point dapperdog made prior).
Now, we're not going anywhere but we're giving ourselves a better chance at making this all work. Nox and Nirast stopped posting on Out of Games at the start of February because it was decided that we'd be merging the two sites. It doesn't make sense for us to have two properties when having one solid one will allow us to, hopefully, gain a bit more traction on the card game side of things since we'll be able to boost our overall website impact by talking about more than just card games.
The end game right now is to rebrand Out of Cards into Out of Games. There's still stuff being figured out behind the scenes to make that actually happen, so with myself being more dedicated to that and us having fewer staff members than before, it puts us in a "fun" situation of fewer updates on the site. If I spend more time towards updates, which aren't getting much traction anyway, it further delays the move.
None of this has been a particularly fun situation.Â
May 15, 2019 is when I purchased the domain name, when we decided to move away from the HearthStation beta. We're just under 2 months away from that anniversary and seeing Out of Cards as a brand, one of my favourite brand names I've been a part of, going away is quite sad.
I still want to keep Out of Cards around in some form on Out of Games because I want there to be familiarity there for people that only care about Hearthstone or only care about card games (we will have a way for people to effectively have an "Out of Cards experience" on Out of Games). We made this site to fit a niche and it's important we keep that around - it'll just be on a different domain name.
Once we get closer to moving the domain, I'm going to be doing a round of staff recruiting. There's still a lot of stuff to figure out for staff, because I want people that are all going to be on the same page and I want people that are willing to cooperate. I want to find people that want to create content unlike the big gaming sites (who all just write really bad super-SEO-driven nonsense). I want to rebuild the community aspect of the site. We've got a solid chance at making a community interested in general gaming work unlike what we were able to do with Out of Cards, and that's big because it should, in theory, only help the card game side of it.
And then if Blizzard finally kills Hearthstone, we're also not completely fucked.
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
Well, this has to be the saddest Hearthstone related news I have seen this year, so far. Though not entirely unexpected as some of us were wondering what the heck was going on, it was still heavy news to read when the announcement of the announcement dropped.
I sincerely hope that the OoC community (members and experience) is kept alive in whatever shape or form, because I have had a blast since arriving on this wonderful site from the very start and I think it would be a terrible shame if this would disappear altogether.
Seeing a 20-minute video essay on that Nerdslayer channel for Hearthstone will be hilarious.
Â
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Ah yes, Out of Card Games would then be the best title.
Thank you Flux for sharing this detailed insight about the site. It saddens me that this awesome site isn't getting the traffic is deserves but I do understand this game is almost 10 years old and things are not what they used to be. I do look forward to the OoC experience on OoG and look forward to how we can keep the HS content and this community alive going forward.
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TREMBLE before.... the most legendary dragon that ever existed!
I actually wasn't. Never found a link to it or something obvious to make me take a look.
@Flux: i hope everything will work out ok and that out.of.everything will take off :D
What's the next big trend to chase?
We had digital card games. Battle Royales. VR's ramping up. Movie games?
Maybe diamonds in the rough like Pizza Tower.
Agreed.
Yeah, aging games kinda sucks. It was very difficult to gain any traction due to the age of the space plus Hearthstone as a whole doesn't give you many things to talk about. Cards, decks... that's about it. Mercenaries gave us a huge traffic boost since we were able to put a database together for it (even with its flaws) and unfortunately the mode just had zero staying power. Battlegrounds, we never really gave a huge push into but I don't think we'd have been able to do much with it anyway since we don't have a way to collect stats and Auto Chess games really need that stats push. Duels always gave us some decent traffic too though, but lack of staff members playing at a decent level harmed content potential.
Same!
I don't think VR will ever really be at a point where it truly blows up. We're still primarily only seeing experiences out of it rather than full games and the cost is just so high to get into it. Sure, the Quest series from Meta/Oculus has been a great way to do budget VR, but they are quite far behind what is available on PC and Playstation. Cost will come down overtime, but you also need a lot of AAA games to push into the realm of VR to have a chance at it working out. People can't as easily play a VR title for hours on end though, and accessibility with VR is kinda trash too which further limits the interest. It's a shame because I love VR. I'd kill for a GOOD VR MMO. I'm also totally just content with VR Racing though because that be fun as hell when you got a nice wheel.
I wish I had a crystal ball to know what would be the next big thing though. Riot's MMO will definitely be up there but I don't see that bringing forth a new wave of MMOs like we saw with the FPS boom thanks to the birth of Battle Royale.
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
I think space mmos are getting traction lately. Spacebourne 2, star citizen etc. But it depends how many people actually play them on this site.
Right now, the best bang-for-the-buck is PSVR2. The console + headset is about 1100-1200 EUR, which isn't cheap, but is only marginally more expensive than the Valve Index (and that's just the headset, no console). The biggest issue right now is the game library, which is tiny compare to PC VR, so it'll be a while.
Yeah, PSVR2 is incredible value. I'm hopefully going to pick-up a headset soon to play Gran Turismo 7 with my wheel.
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
A word of note to a common complaint of fans of beloved 'dead' games out there: There's a difference between games that die at the start and those that die after years.
If it failed to take off from the start, yeah maybe the devs didn't advertise that much. But word-of-mouth is advertisement too.
Either the game just sucks ass or it's too generic to care about. No amount of 'advertising' is gonna make people spend their time.
Hey Flux, sorry to hear about the site "shutting down" (i.e. merging into Out of Games). I left HearthPwn when you created Out of Cards and for awhile OOC was my home for Hearthstone related news, banter, and discussion. (Reddit has been and will always be a hot mess with any large traction game, too much background noise and bias to have any effective discussion)
As you probably have noticed this is the first time I've posted in quite awhile (over a year at least if I recall). I stopped playing Hearthstone after the Alterac Valley exansion. The Sunken City expansion just didn't hit home for me and I felt like the set expansions were getting redundant. Â
Blizzard scandals aside, I do think the main issue with all Blizzard game is just a lack of vision AND direction for each game. They have no long term plans for any of their games, including their latest pet project Diablo 4.  Their communication is extremely lackluster, their only way to limp along is just be re-hashing the same IP's over and over again (Diablo expansion, Overwatch 2 Re-brand/re-release, WoW Classic)
Anyhow Blizzard rants aside, I'll give OOG a shot. Though you mentioned something that always did confuse me. Why *didn't* HearthPwn shut down? I don't remember the specifics, but I remember that the reason you and others left HearthPwn was âŠ.somewhat political. And I don't know if you have either the patience or the ability to clarify that here. And that's ok if you can't. Â
But them not shutting down did put a hamper in this site's ability to gain more traction than it did. Anyhow I'm glad to see the site won't completely go away and even if most my time is no longer spent playing card games, I hope OOG will see more coverage of popular upcoming titles soon!
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Oh, it was quite a drama. When Fandom acquired Curse they announced that they will close (or rather put to read-only) a lot of Curse's sites including Hearthpwn. I think Flux offered to buy hearthpwn, but they refused. So everyone expected that hearthpwn will be gone but then out of the blue it was announced that it'd been sold to some company no one heard about before.
The same happened to mtgsalvation, i.e. Fandom promised to close it but then suddenly sold it to the same folks.
It wasn't even sold, they gave the properties away to Magic Find. The deal was that they'd run Curse/Fandom ads on the sites for 3 years so Fandom would get a cut of the revenue. That was never an option for us.
And then Magic Find sold the whole company to Mobafire for 12 million USD.
The folks who founded Magic Find are slimy and people I distanced myself from long ago.Â
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
Itâs too expensive period, even for a whale like myself. With rumors (and pretty much a downright confirmation) that Hearthstone will go from three expansions a year to four, Iâd imagine a good chunk of us will jump ship and be done with it. The expansions, more importantly the cards, are worthless since Team 5 limits us on how we can play with them. So why buy more of them?
Twitch for those of you who care.
Yeah, honestly, I haven't played Hearthstone at all in like 2 years. The last expansion pre-order I bought was Sunken City and I still haven't opened the card packs for it. I was hoping to get back into it, but nothing really intrigued me. The year before that, there were a few games played during expansion launched, but hardly what I'd consider playing the game to be.
And I know I'm not alone in that. My close friend group, everyone played Hearthstone for years. Everyone slowly dropped out of the game though and people that did return would do so for at most a week during a new set. It took Blizzard too much time to figure out a decent cadence for game updates. I think 4 expansions will be a net positive for the game, provided that they keep the overall cost the same.
Bonus points for Bobby Kotick in that scenario because when they announce cheaper pack bundle prices, people that aren't clued into why that is happening (4 sets vs 3) they'll come back and buy cards.Â
I still think one of the worst things they ever did was give classes 2 legendaries each expansion. The power level of them due to them being unique to classes is just disgusting. The neutrals they were at least forced to tame them down a bit so they weren't all instant includes for all classes.
^ Though I'm sure someone can find me saying otherwise, because there was a point in time where I thought it was a positive from the "they'll be able to push at least two archetypes per class per expansion now", but I still viewed the cost increase as the big downfall.
Digital card games fucking suck. Riot has a pretty decent model but the game itself feels too jank to me. Give me a Hearthstone, minus 70% of the RNG, and a model closer to what Riot is doing with Legends of Runeterra, and I think that would make a solid card game. I'd make it myself if I had the time! True story, there was a point in time where it was planned to have a card game on Out of Cards itself.
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
Iâm going to disagree, mainly because itâll cost more money on a yearly basis. That wouldnât bother me if Hearthstone had more ways to play with the cards I have (I know youâve heard this from me before), but we donât. Standard, Wild, Duels which I consider a waste of dev time, Tavern Brawl which only stays around because players would have a meltdown if they couldnât get their weekly free pack, are the only modes in which our cards matter.
Standard rotates every year and Wild where broken decks exist (sometimes) are the main two formats. There are literally thousands of cards in the collection manager but the devs waste time on Mercenaries, Duels, and yet another forgettable Tavern Brawl, instead of giving us formats that fully utilize our collections. Not to mention I donât think it has dawned on some of them that if they gave actual reasons for players to buy more packs, theyâd buy more packs because they wanted to, not just to keep up with expansions/metas
I also canât say Hearthstone is actively dying but rather itâs almost to the point where the majority of players who call it their âmain gameâ are the people fully invested, similar to the players who kept WoW alive when it had a few bad expansions (Iâve only heard good things about Dragonflight).
Edit: I mean hell, Tournament mode, formats, guilds. Basic things they can add within a year each and they choose not to do it but instead try to sell us more cards
Twitch for those of you who care.
That is why I said provided they don't increase the overall cost the same. If they effectively increase the price of playing by 33% with the additional set, that's a super hard pass from me.
They really do just need to stick another format in the game. Rotate the sets in it every couple of months and it'll be a breath of fresh air. I suspect they are too afraid to do it because it might end up making Standard look like a joke and we certainly can't have that happen! The best part is if they rotate content on a good enough schedule, you never need to balance anything! You could do card bans to keep the super annoying stuff out but that's fairly low effort.
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
I've been asking for a rotating sets format since the very first tavern brawl block, with my favorite being https://outof.cards/hearthstone/tavern-brawls/117-brawl-block-gods-gadgetzan-gurubashi
Really am hoping they change classic into this format and soon...
TREMBLE before.... the most legendary dragon that ever existed!
A rotating set format is in theory amazing. The issue is that it will be just like when duels first came out and make people mad and not wanna play. Those rich enough to afford buying pre order bundles each expansion and keep their old cards intact will dominate and have an immediate advantage. Most players disenchant the vast majority of cards when they rotate to wild and only keep the really powerful stuff. Even wild players only have around 5 to 20 cards from each expansion, the most powerful and broken shit.
If they make a block mode where it's Grand Tournament, Witchwood and one night in Karazan... who the hell has those cards? The game mode won't be played by anyone because no one wants to buy a bunch of packs and only be able to play with them for 3 months this year, then maybe again in another year and a half when the set rotates back in.
You need to give people a ton of freebie temporary cards, at which point you make buying packs worthless.
I'll boop youÂ
That is true, but that doesnât stop them from playing Standard, Wild, and BGâs. Why not throw the players who pay to play the game a bone and give them something that makes them keep playing?
Like I said Iâm a whale, what Iâm about to say will come off as crass; (you= F2P/players with little to no monetary investment into the game) If youâre not putting money into the game, I donât care what you can or canât play in it because you have no investment. Keeping people who donât spend money on the game happy while not keeping those who do pay happy is a recipe for disaster. If you have criticisms on balance thatâs fine but donât expect the whales to keep paying for a subpar product.
Again, I hate to sound crass, but if you didnât bring your nerf gun to the nerf war, you canât play. Sure we can play tag or hide and go seek while youâre here, but you canât expect us to keep you happy when we want to play with nerf
Freebie Temporary cards would just be the rotating standard set.
Twitch for those of you who care.
I'm inclined to agree. It may sound heartless, but the people who decide to dust their cards as they rotate are making a choice. They could have kept their investment and held onto those cards, but they did not; those of us who maintained their collection should not be punished because a subset of people only play Standard. You can say "that's what Wild is for", but that would require Wild to not be such a shit-show :/
So...yeah. I say 'bring on the rotating block'; you can even fold Classic into it, letting it reappear on occasion for those who want that.
Yeah that's my thing with a rotating format. Every format doesn't have to be for every person; Wild certainly doesn't cut it for most and Duels is in the same boat. Standard is there to keep players engaged without a huge investment so give old cards a chance to shine again in a rotating format.
Hell, I'd even be okay if they wanted to make a format where you could optionally rent the card pool for the rotation. $10 or 1000 gold gets you access to all the cards in that season's pool. It lets people who have huge collections take advantage of them but newer players can go try something new too. Maybe they dump a pass for it in the pre-order too. So many ways they could go about boosting engagement, but I believe that no matter what, they're going to be super concerned about standard queues declining so we'll get nothing.
Blizzard will half-ass it like they did with the release of Classic (they had zero plan outside of make Classic a thing again) and then cite poor engagement as a reason to stop updating it. All they had to do was push Naxx into Classic 2 months in, and then Goblins vs Gnomes a couple months after that and they could have had repeated engagement.Â
Expansions launch, 2 months later a mini-set launches. The perfect time to do something like a Classic swap is between those two events and between a mini-set and the next expansion. Why they don't rotate Duels even on a more regular basis blows my mind. They've made so many improvements and they finally figured out their cosmetics pipeline (which took an embarrassing amount of time) so what's up with the part that matters - playing the game.
Also, no new Tavern Brawls ever when it is probably one of the easiest modes to do shit with is beyond hilarious.
Push out Brawl Blocks once a month. There's a rotating format every 4-5 weeks and the engagement potential is huge. It requires minimal effort to think of the theme too.
Founder, Out of Games
Follow me on Twitch and Twitter.
If you are planning on playing WoW on US realms, consider using my recruit link =)
Itâs crazy how many good ideas are scattered within OoC, almost like the devs donât know what theyâre doing
Twitch for those of you who care.
Just a quick question:Â are the loading issues with the pages gonna be fixed on this site, or should we expect/wait for a transition to out of games?
Before the lifeboats get full, I just wanted to say that this site is unique because:
The other sites don't have easy 5-star rating systems for each card and when they DO, it's slow as shit.
Also the site runs smooth in general.
Except for the first 10-15 seconds of every page/section load. Which everyone seems to avoid talking about for whatever reason.
Other than that, yea, it's awesome.
The only thing that doesn't load instantly - at least for me- are the adds.
How's your internet connection?
Struggle with Heroic Galakrond's Awakening? I got your back :Â
It's very good. Also, it's not that it doesn't load instantly. There's a hugely delayed response (and wrong too) on almost any action you do during those first 15 seconds (e.g. clicking a link opens up something else, and after 10 seconds). There are posts in the site feedback forums, by me and other people, regarding this. No responses, no acknowledgements, nothing. It's like this issue is invisible and we are morons talking to the wind.
I can confirm this issue, once again. But it only happens on my phone, laptop browser works just fine. Lags both on mobile internet and on wifi, and i have a Galaxy A53, so not an old phone either.
I'll boop youÂ
Same here, but I think the problem might have been solved with the last update.
I notice I am confused. Something I believe isn't true. How do I know what I think I know?
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, hpmor.com
I also had these same experiences with a decent internet connection on multiple devices. The issue was like "Voldemort", one does not speak his name đ€ I have to agree with anchorm4n, today the lagging does seem to be gone, but I still have some reservations. I will check back in after a few more days.
Very sad to hear as I transitioned from Hearthpwn because of you and your staff (and I don't look back). I will still follow to OoG, but OoC will still be missed! :(
Lag issues really seem to be part of history now, I have not encountered them for the past couple of days.