Really do appreciate the time and effort spent on explaining the fine details of datamining and the business model for the site, very interesting read!
But just to point out the lack of communication on Blizzard's part. I do believe the ongoing lawsuits had a major impact on the minute amount of information we received about mercenaries. Even the live stream where they intentionally had a female presenter was quite obvious. We can't know for sure if their communication would have been better if there weren't any lawsuits but at the end of the day, it was a slip up from the marketing team. The game mode itself is shallow in some aspects yes, but lets hope they build upon it as we've seen with the datamined training hall
Keep up all the good work Flux and co, won't get tired of saying it. Your community appreciates all the datamining coz at least you care about us.... while Blizzard may not...
At this point, I am convinced we will eventually see a class ban system. I hope if it does get implemented, they are willing to remove it if it is not as successful as Dean imagines it to be.
Clearly Blizzard's biggest mistake here was to send Flux that much hot sauce since it lead to this significantly spicier piece than your average "look at all the cool stuff Blizz sent me"-post.
Not sure if anyone heard of this yet, but there seem to be a new way to farm for xp. Start a game in mercs, then leave it hanging. No bots, no mods, no macros. Just leave it while the virtual pinwheel turns and the tumbleweed tumble. Apparently this works, but I have too much self respect to test it out.
On the subject of botting. Its still somewhat rife down in bronze wild, but I'd argue that in a way that's good for most people. Its certainly easy to farm out the achievements if nothing else. Somewhat annoying because you can take a 10 second move and then proceed to wait out a minute but that's just an easy way to grind out achievements without dying by turn 6.
And I hope that they do something about the tasks grinding in mercs. No one likes grinding up that poor air elemental for tasks but the requirements for a maxed out character - or indeed, to upgrade an ability at all - requires so many coins that we're really forced to do it to get anything progressed at all. Just make it easier to get the coins we need. Here's a suggestion: How about to guarantee the coins received from boss chest so when I beat a boss I get exactly what I want: instead of getting yet another marvelous 20 coins for Cariel because the random generators for coins are completely, and utterly whacked.
Its amazing how many characters I maxed out on even as I completely ignore them from day 1. Old Cornelius got so much for doing so little its almost like he has a mandated government pension cut from every boss chest I open.
Or just make strangers a guaranteed deal at higher difficulties. I know some players likes the potato, but its obvious that this along with sabotage and portal are mere fillers that frustrates rather than excite.
You can try snowclaw. Its three battles to one mystery wheel, minimum of 2 battles if you get lucky. Since regular snowclaw is earliest for the recommended level 30, the stranger still works there. Its just that winterspring's enemies aren't very conducive to completing the tasks, so you still have to waste some time at some lower level run to finish them up.
It's going to take forever just to get the tasks now. I really dislike this change. They should've added an alternative instead of just making it worse across the board.
I think the hotfix is up Im afraid. Tried out air elemental heroic for 10 games, 0 strangers but lots of potatos. Then tried out snowclaw, 3 so far with 2 strangers
If anyone else have bigger sample sizes, please share. Because Im certain the percentages for higher difficulties have not been tweaked.
I still think we could have done a better job at dropping more content for everyone since we clearly can't rely on Blizzard to paint the real picture. Is it actually our problem? No, not at all. But whenever we have the data, I believe we should do the absolute most with it.
I absolutely agree, I don't like the way they phrased the change here nor in the tweet. The whole point of the "grind" is that you're working towards something; it's not inherently enjoyable or "engaging", the most "engaging" part is the speed at which you grind, and the faster it is, the faster you're going to be able to play the actually "engaging" content at an optimal level (i.e. PvP, more challenging Heroic PvEs). In essence, then, you're not making the experience anymore "engaging" when you slow down the grind, so there is no benefit to the change whatsoever, just more costs. The way they've framed the change is what leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Iksar already twitted explaining this: "Intention of the change was to stop players from feeling like they have to farm the same low-level content over and over again to play optimally. Paul (lead design) and Ben (game director) will be mulling the feedback of the recent change over the weekend."
this is a blatant lie, because the option players have now is to farm higher lvl longer duration bounties in order to play optimally.
i mean the devs can be straight dumb but since thats not the case i think, then they are straight up lying. sad
Ah well, I guess I won't be playing the mode until someone figures out some other optimal strategy to grind or the team does something to make tasks/coins more readily available, because I certainly didn't max my team before the fix went live.
I think your whole approach and reasoning was reasonable, except:
I blame myself for not better communicating to the community more about Mercenaries in a timely manner.
Surely you are the person who in the entire debacle that was the pre-release who did the most with a view to trying to do what was the right thing?
And Hearthstone does have a reputation for treating some people very badly. A community team person I shall not name that I do not hold in high regard.
Heya! Its certainly interesting but not something that needed to be covered for the launch. There's tons of stuff to sift through in the original patch of Mercenaries data, I recommend looking through it if its something that interests you!
It is something we'll report on on the coming week or two when things calm down and we do some more cleanup on all the Mercenaries stuff across the site. I wish I had infinite time in the day (and the audience had an infinite attention span) to make good use of it all.
There was a comment someone left on a previous article about similar stuff with Mercs datamining and I had responded to it as well but I just wanted to make it clear - us not covering something was not done because of Blizzard asking us not to. Just a time or scheduling thing! You might actually be surprised to know how often we just schedule stuff in advance, but that's another bag of worms for another day, lol.
They were pissed because they didn't get to control something they wanted control over. And, yeah, that's shitty.
Though, looking at the messaging they did put out, I don't really feel that bad for them. Folks would have gone into Mercenaries with even less information. I especially "enjoyed" the part where they, on launch day, decided to push out info on freebies, twitch drops, and login bonuses in a big mega post right when the game went live.
I fail to comprehend how that was a good idea. You offered not much in the run up, why not drum up some excitement and hour or two before the launch so people could focus on, you know, the big launch. Instead, you've put content out that is going to get missed by people. You could have prior communicated the questline to folks so they got to be excited about the free packs they'd soon open. Gaaaah!
Yeah, streamers aren't very critical of the game and it's kinda sad. I'm not saying people should be causing unrest for the sake of drumming up toxic mobs, but you know so many people are too afraid to comment on anything remotely negative. Everything is perfect in Hearthstone! And hey, not every audience needs to be aware of stuff thats bad with the game, not everyone needs to be like the Kripp and Zeddys, but it really feels like some people have their noses so brown that it gives the community team a power over the rest of the bunch. I'd just love to see people not pretending everything is so perfect. Social media is such a shit show. Everyone protects themselves in their own bubble and forgets about the rest of it. Watching the "Hearthstone is perfect" echo chambers is sad. Great game, but far, far from it.
Although I am disappointed by how bad Blizzard is at managing the public part, I'll never let them get me down. We're in it for the long haul with a community I'm happy to be a part of and if they continue to make blunders, I'll make sure we're there to hold them accountable.
Gaming overall does need less negativity, but damn there's something important about telling it like it is sometimes.
Thank’s for sharing your experience, mate. I had similar experience. The dude put a 1 mana card in the 1st round (used his only mana) and after I skipped the turn he put another 1 mana card and made an unreseanble dmg. I was like wtf, and I looked back the move list and nothing idicated to generate more mana. Other things costed free for him during the game. The incident got more suspecious after he was taunting through the whole game with emotes. In a previous game that I played randomly a spell didn’t take effect on the oponent, but that can be considered as a bug.
Yeah, there's definitely a ton that is involved. I am incredibly thankful that we have so many other wonderful people on the team that help with the coverage and great content that gets pushed out. I'm proud that my name isn't attached to everything anymore because I know alone, I simply couldn't do it. We've been getting better, more regular, and in general stronger as time goes on at figuring out exactly what we want to be and that's great. With others on the team focusing more than ever before on content, it has allowed me to fix some of our tech debt, work on new features, and most importantly, give the business side of the site more attention.
I appreciate you not running adblock. I know how bad the experience can be at times and I wish it didn't have to be. I don't regret adding our video unit to the site because it doubled the amount of money the site brings in, which in turn made it much more viable for folks to work on content, but damn was that tough from a "pain in the ass" standpoint. I find ads insufferable and wish we didn't have to run them but at the end of the day, I think folks understand that and if they don't, they join the adblock party anyway and are somewhat oblivious to it all. Though, I do sometimes wonder how much better we could be doing if it wasn't for adblock.
As far as growth on the Hearthstone team goes though, yeah, they've been doing a ton of it. I know they've had a lot of problems over the years just because they grew so fast. There was also some hesitation to touch the game, see little to no balance changes for so long when it was very clearly needed. I don't know if that came from papa Blizz that wanted stuff to stay the same because it was still consistently bringing in money or if it really was the developers at the time feeling like things were fine and they really truly believed in the "digital but we want it to feel like paper" aspect of Hearthstone. Or, maybe something else entirely.
They've done a great job at growing with the game and having modes like Battlegrounds and Mercenaries is absolutely fantastic. Before Battlegrounds, there was little reason to login, at least for myself on the rare chance I get to play something in Hearthstone, when the meta was stale (which is like 2 weeks after an expac drops, or at least that was typically the case). Now Mercenaries makes it even harder to avoid Hearthstone since in theory, there is always something to do for everyone. Watching the platform mature has been a bit of a treat, even though it has been filled with frustration in seeing stuff one might consider to be a simple change or fix completely avoided (nothing is every truly simple).
I don't feel like I've been mistreated though and definitely do not feel like I've ever been in the wrong. When stuff be public, you got no one to blame but yourself! Though as I did say, I do regret not posting more datamined stuff and much earlier.
Speaking about it Flux.. Where's the Valeera mercenary coverage? How is it that I heard from it 1st from a youtuber instead of you guys? Ironic that he is using your database. Isn't it interesting stuff for an article?
Damnit, I was hoping they wouldn't change this. Welp, better finish my grind for the 1 PvP team (haven't PvP'd yet) I want to be able to play at max before they "fix" the Stranger. For the F2P grinder like me, this change absolutely blows. The grind already took forever spamming Heroic Air Elemental, it's probably only going to get way longer from here.
I dont get why blizz was so pissed that mercs got datamined off the client because what exactly did that do that adversely affected their business in any way? Mercs was being spoiled anyway, because as mentioned, as few lucky streamers got to access it early, and they subsequently shared the details with everyone else.
In any case, the bad publicity for mercs came from the mothership themselves: with that fairly poor 30 min stream, and the massive three preorders before launch that really soured the taste of the game before any details were even provided.
On the subject of streamers being scared to report data. Im sure this is only a small minority of cases. Many streamers in hearthstone aren't critical of the game, like at all. In most cases, they make small comments in their twitch streams and that's about it. I think the last and perhaps only time I see streamers actually came up on topics beyond simply playing the game was during that farce that was the first iteration of the new rewards track.
That's not to say that many aren't worried about their relationship with blizz. There's plenty of examples of streamers who simply didn't want to talk about 'sensitive' subjects, which is fair play to them, but I think that's weak. On top of my head, there's only botmathematician, Zeddy and Kibler that makes dedicated videos talking about the state of the game, etc. Better some than none, I guess.
We appreciate the hard work you put on the site. Dont let blizz's poor community management put you down; you're doing a public service to the hearthstone community. And whether blizz would like to admit it or not, they have much to gain from sites drumming up buzz for their game, because god knows they aren't very good at doing this themselves.
Ah, it's funny because the community found a way to be relatively competitive while being f2p and they've immediately went to the trouble of removing it rather than addressing many of the complaints regarding frustration with coin colecting or the release of what is clearly an unfinished product.
They better make tasks more available or a lot of players will just start ignoring Mercenaries altogether. I know I will if something better isn't introduced.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
Really do appreciate the time and effort spent on explaining the fine details of datamining and the business model for the site, very interesting read!
But just to point out the lack of communication on Blizzard's part. I do believe the ongoing lawsuits had a major impact on the minute amount of information we received about mercenaries. Even the live stream where they intentionally had a female presenter was quite obvious. We can't know for sure if their communication would have been better if there weren't any lawsuits but at the end of the day, it was a slip up from the marketing team. The game mode itself is shallow in some aspects yes, but lets hope they build upon it as we've seen with the datamined training hall
Keep up all the good work Flux and co, won't get tired of saying it. Your community appreciates all the datamining coz at least you care about us.... while Blizzard may not...
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
…Am I the only one who had no idea how this worked?
Dean Ayala's Hearthstone Q&A #34 - Balance, Pandaren Ninjas, Mercenaries, Datamining, & More
At this point, I am convinced we will eventually see a class ban system. I hope if it does get implemented, they are willing to remove it if it is not as successful as Dean imagines it to be.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
Clearly Blizzard's biggest mistake here was to send Flux that much hot sauce since it lead to this significantly spicier piece than your average "look at all the cool stuff Blizz sent me"-post.
Dean Ayala's Hearthstone Q&A #34 - Balance, Pandaren Ninjas, Mercenaries, Datamining, & More
Not sure if anyone heard of this yet, but there seem to be a new way to farm for xp. Start a game in mercs, then leave it hanging. No bots, no mods, no macros. Just leave it while the virtual pinwheel turns and the tumbleweed tumble. Apparently this works, but I have too much self respect to test it out.
On the subject of botting. Its still somewhat rife down in bronze wild, but I'd argue that in a way that's good for most people. Its certainly easy to farm out the achievements if nothing else. Somewhat annoying because you can take a 10 second move and then proceed to wait out a minute but that's just an easy way to grind out achievements without dying by turn 6.
And I hope that they do something about the tasks grinding in mercs. No one likes grinding up that poor air elemental for tasks but the requirements for a maxed out character - or indeed, to upgrade an ability at all - requires so many coins that we're really forced to do it to get anything progressed at all. Just make it easier to get the coins we need. Here's a suggestion: How about to guarantee the coins received from boss chest so when I beat a boss I get exactly what I want: instead of getting yet another marvelous 20 coins for Cariel because the random generators for coins are completely, and utterly whacked.
Its amazing how many characters I maxed out on even as I completely ignore them from day 1. Old Cornelius got so much for doing so little its almost like he has a mandated government pension cut from every boss chest I open.
Or just make strangers a guaranteed deal at higher difficulties. I know some players likes the potato, but its obvious that this along with sabotage and portal are mere fillers that frustrates rather than excite.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
You can try snowclaw. Its three battles to one mystery wheel, minimum of 2 battles if you get lucky. Since regular snowclaw is earliest for the recommended level 30, the stranger still works there. Its just that winterspring's enemies aren't very conducive to completing the tasks, so you still have to waste some time at some lower level run to finish them up.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
It's going to take forever just to get the tasks now. I really dislike this change. They should've added an alternative instead of just making it worse across the board.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
I think the hotfix is up Im afraid. Tried out air elemental heroic for 10 games, 0 strangers but lots of potatos. Then tried out snowclaw, 3 so far with 2 strangers
If anyone else have bigger sample sizes, please share. Because Im certain the percentages for higher difficulties have not been tweaked.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
I still think we could have done a better job at dropping more content for everyone since we clearly can't rely on Blizzard to paint the real picture. Is it actually our problem? No, not at all. But whenever we have the data, I believe we should do the absolute most with it.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
I absolutely agree, I don't like the way they phrased the change here nor in the tweet. The whole point of the "grind" is that you're working towards something; it's not inherently enjoyable or "engaging", the most "engaging" part is the speed at which you grind, and the faster it is, the faster you're going to be able to play the actually "engaging" content at an optimal level (i.e. PvP, more challenging Heroic PvEs). In essence, then, you're not making the experience anymore "engaging" when you slow down the grind, so there is no benefit to the change whatsoever, just more costs. The way they've framed the change is what leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
Iksar already twitted explaining this: "Intention of the change was to stop players from feeling like they have to farm the same low-level content over and over again to play optimally. Paul (lead design) and Ben (game director) will be mulling the feedback of the recent change over the weekend."
this is a blatant lie, because the option players have now is to farm higher lvl longer duration bounties in order to play optimally.
i mean the devs can be straight dumb but since thats not the case i think, then they are straight up lying. sad
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
So... Out of all the criticism and problems mercercenaries has, they decide to "fix" the easiest way F2P people had of getting resources...
How Blizzard of them.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
Ah well, I guess I won't be playing the mode until someone figures out some other optimal strategy to grind or the team does something to make tasks/coins more readily available, because I certainly didn't max my team before the fix went live.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
I think your whole approach and reasoning was reasonable, except:
I blame myself for not better communicating to the community more about Mercenaries in a timely manner.
Surely you are the person who in the entire debacle that was the pre-release who did the most with a view to trying to do what was the right thing?
And Hearthstone does have a reputation for treating some people very badly. A community team person I shall not name that I do not hold in high regard.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
i hope you grinded it already. cause they fixed it like they were running from the plague. god forbid f2p have a slight benefit
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
welp. whoever at blizzard is the little weasel that is still personally trying to ruin savjz (+his wife), is about to turn is attention onto you.
sorry; i think you did the right thing.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
Heya! Its certainly interesting but not something that needed to be covered for the launch. There's tons of stuff to sift through in the original patch of Mercenaries data, I recommend looking through it if its something that interests you!
Here is a link to our card database (everything in Hearthstone is basically just a card object) with the proper patch filter.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/cards/?added_in_patch=179
It is something we'll report on on the coming week or two when things calm down and we do some more cleanup on all the Mercenaries stuff across the site. I wish I had infinite time in the day (and the audience had an infinite attention span) to make good use of it all.
There was a comment someone left on a previous article about similar stuff with Mercs datamining and I had responded to it as well but I just wanted to make it clear - us not covering something was not done because of Blizzard asking us not to. Just a time or scheduling thing! You might actually be surprised to know how often we just schedule stuff in advance, but that's another bag of worms for another day, lol.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
They were pissed because they didn't get to control something they wanted control over. And, yeah, that's shitty.
Though, looking at the messaging they did put out, I don't really feel that bad for them. Folks would have gone into Mercenaries with even less information. I especially "enjoyed" the part where they, on launch day, decided to push out info on freebies, twitch drops, and login bonuses in a big mega post right when the game went live.
I fail to comprehend how that was a good idea. You offered not much in the run up, why not drum up some excitement and hour or two before the launch so people could focus on, you know, the big launch. Instead, you've put content out that is going to get missed by people. You could have prior communicated the questline to folks so they got to be excited about the free packs they'd soon open. Gaaaah!
Yeah, streamers aren't very critical of the game and it's kinda sad. I'm not saying people should be causing unrest for the sake of drumming up toxic mobs, but you know so many people are too afraid to comment on anything remotely negative. Everything is perfect in Hearthstone! And hey, not every audience needs to be aware of stuff thats bad with the game, not everyone needs to be like the Kripp and Zeddys, but it really feels like some people have their noses so brown that it gives the community team a power over the rest of the bunch. I'd just love to see people not pretending everything is so perfect. Social media is such a shit show. Everyone protects themselves in their own bubble and forgets about the rest of it. Watching the "Hearthstone is perfect" echo chambers is sad. Great game, but far, far from it.
Although I am disappointed by how bad Blizzard is at managing the public part, I'll never let them get me down. We're in it for the long haul with a community I'm happy to be a part of and if they continue to make blunders, I'll make sure we're there to hold them accountable.
Gaming overall does need less negativity, but damn there's something important about telling it like it is sometimes.
Thanks!
How common is it to find hackers?
Thank’s for sharing your experience, mate. I had similar experience. The dude put a 1 mana card in the 1st round (used his only mana) and after I skipped the turn he put another 1 mana card and made an unreseanble dmg. I was like wtf, and I looked back the move list and nothing idicated to generate more mana. Other things costed free for him during the game. The incident got more suspecious after he was taunting through the whole game with emotes. In a previous game that I played randomly a spell didn’t take effect on the oponent, but that can be considered as a bug.
Regards
T. D. Law
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
I appreciate your kind words =)
Yeah, there's definitely a ton that is involved. I am incredibly thankful that we have so many other wonderful people on the team that help with the coverage and great content that gets pushed out. I'm proud that my name isn't attached to everything anymore because I know alone, I simply couldn't do it. We've been getting better, more regular, and in general stronger as time goes on at figuring out exactly what we want to be and that's great. With others on the team focusing more than ever before on content, it has allowed me to fix some of our tech debt, work on new features, and most importantly, give the business side of the site more attention.
I appreciate you not running adblock. I know how bad the experience can be at times and I wish it didn't have to be. I don't regret adding our video unit to the site because it doubled the amount of money the site brings in, which in turn made it much more viable for folks to work on content, but damn was that tough from a "pain in the ass" standpoint. I find ads insufferable and wish we didn't have to run them but at the end of the day, I think folks understand that and if they don't, they join the adblock party anyway and are somewhat oblivious to it all. Though, I do sometimes wonder how much better we could be doing if it wasn't for adblock.
As far as growth on the Hearthstone team goes though, yeah, they've been doing a ton of it. I know they've had a lot of problems over the years just because they grew so fast. There was also some hesitation to touch the game, see little to no balance changes for so long when it was very clearly needed. I don't know if that came from papa Blizz that wanted stuff to stay the same because it was still consistently bringing in money or if it really was the developers at the time feeling like things were fine and they really truly believed in the "digital but we want it to feel like paper" aspect of Hearthstone. Or, maybe something else entirely.
They've done a great job at growing with the game and having modes like Battlegrounds and Mercenaries is absolutely fantastic. Before Battlegrounds, there was little reason to login, at least for myself on the rare chance I get to play something in Hearthstone, when the meta was stale (which is like 2 weeks after an expac drops, or at least that was typically the case). Now Mercenaries makes it even harder to avoid Hearthstone since in theory, there is always something to do for everyone. Watching the platform mature has been a bit of a treat, even though it has been filled with frustration in seeing stuff one might consider to be a simple change or fix completely avoided (nothing is every truly simple).
I don't feel like I've been mistreated though and definitely do not feel like I've ever been in the wrong. When stuff be public, you got no one to blame but yourself! Though as I did say, I do regret not posting more datamined stuff and much earlier.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
Glad you enjoyed it, and thank you!
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
Speaking about it Flux.. Where's the Valeera mercenary coverage? How is it that I heard from it 1st from a youtuber instead of you guys? Ironic that he is using your database. Isn't it interesting stuff for an article?
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
Damnit, I was hoping they wouldn't change this. Welp, better finish my grind for the 1 PvP team (haven't PvP'd yet) I want to be able to play at max before they "fix" the Stranger. For the F2P grinder like me, this change absolutely blows. The grind already took forever spamming Heroic Air Elemental, it's probably only going to get way longer from here.
Blizzard Sent Me a Hearthstone Mercenaries Care Package, Let's Talk Public Datamining!
I dont get why blizz was so pissed that mercs got datamined off the client because what exactly did that do that adversely affected their business in any way? Mercs was being spoiled anyway, because as mentioned, as few lucky streamers got to access it early, and they subsequently shared the details with everyone else.
In any case, the bad publicity for mercs came from the mothership themselves: with that fairly poor 30 min stream, and the massive three preorders before launch that really soured the taste of the game before any details were even provided.
On the subject of streamers being scared to report data. Im sure this is only a small minority of cases. Many streamers in hearthstone aren't critical of the game, like at all. In most cases, they make small comments in their twitch streams and that's about it. I think the last and perhaps only time I see streamers actually came up on topics beyond simply playing the game was during that farce that was the first iteration of the new rewards track.
That's not to say that many aren't worried about their relationship with blizz. There's plenty of examples of streamers who simply didn't want to talk about 'sensitive' subjects, which is fair play to them, but I think that's weak. On top of my head, there's only botmathematician, Zeddy and Kibler that makes dedicated videos talking about the state of the game, etc. Better some than none, I guess.
We appreciate the hard work you put on the site. Dont let blizz's poor community management put you down; you're doing a public service to the hearthstone community. And whether blizz would like to admit it or not, they have much to gain from sites drumming up buzz for their game, because god knows they aren't very good at doing this themselves.
Blizzard is Rebalancing the Mysterious Stranger in Mercenaries, Fixes to Tasks Coming
Ah, it's funny because the community found a way to be relatively competitive while being f2p and they've immediately went to the trouble of removing it rather than addressing many of the complaints regarding frustration with coin colecting or the release of what is clearly an unfinished product.
They better make tasks more available or a lot of players will just start ignoring Mercenaries altogether. I know I will if something better isn't introduced.